"I am the Way," said Jesus, "the true and living way."

Asked Thomas, "Where to?"

God be thanked for Thomas! The Gospels do not record much of what he said, but the little he did say was always blunt and to the point. What use is it to be told Christ is the Way if you are not told what He is the way to ...?

Where do we aim to get?

Some years ago when I was living in the U.K. I read of a youth who had made up his mind to join the British Army in India. Asked why, he said, "I hear that in the Army in India they pay you quite a lot for doing very little; when you get on a bit they pay you more for doing less; when you retire they pay you quite a lot for doing nothing." He knew where he wanted to get ... and the way to get there, so he thought.

Where do you want to get in life? For life is a journey. The apostle Paul, you will have noticed, always referred to our daily life as a "walk", because we are always going somewhere, moving forward into our tomorrows. We are travellers all, and we most of us invest a good deal of time and energy organising our tomorrows. Where do we plan to be in them?

THE GOALS WE PURSUE

The goals in life folk pursue can be summed up under five general headings: Prosperity, Prestige, Power, Peace and Pleasure ...

Prosperity promises security and freedom - desirable goals.
Prestige promises status and worth - desirable goals.
Power promises achievement competence - desirable goals.
Peace promises contentment and well-being - desirable goals.
Pleasure promises happiness and delight - desirable goals.

Desiring our own good is not what is wrong with us; it is in where we conceive our good to lie that we go wrong. We grow up believing that all these desirable ends are to be got by our own endeavour out of life and the world around us, so we look to the world for it all ... instead of to God.

God is the only source of true prosperity.

What gives us final worth is that God has regard for us. What I am truly worth is what I am worth to God.

God is the only Giver of strength and ability. God, and being rightly related to Him, is the ground of true well-being. Just to say that sounds obvious. But we do not live like it - it is not the way we are motivated. And because we misconceive where the answers lie, we mismanage the whole progress of our lives.

i. Many folk make prosperity their one great goal.
And achieve it; they come to their journey's end supported by wealth. And then you open your morning paper and read, "Mr On-The -Make left $150,000 in his will." Left it! Where did he go then? Wherever he went, he had to go on without it. In the light of life's final destination, it seems a foolish expenditure of one's resources.

The Prosperity Seekers are like a man travelling on a train who spends the journey moving about energetically among the passengers, bargaining for their baggage, trading for this and that, filling his compartment with goodies and making it comfortable ... only to have the whole lot heaved out on to a station platform somewhere along the journey while the train speeds him on without them!

It is hardly surprising that in the Lord's estimation he is a fool!

ii. Others choose prestige for their goal.
They want to be known ... recognised for this or that.

I read once of a girl who spoke glowingly to her family of a man she had met at a party. "Mr O-So-Shrewd was wonderful. He knew every card in my hand at last night's bridge game." He did, too: he was good. Said her brother, "Has it occurred to you that Mr O-So-Shrewd is 45 years of age, and the game of bridge is all he knows?"

The prestige seekers are like the passenger who must get everyone's attention in the compartment while he shows his tricks and tells his tales. The compartment keeps on filling up with strangers with whom he goes through the old routines again and again. Perhaps one day they put his name-plate on the compartment door! But by then, someone else is in his seat, doing the old tricks and telling the old tales.

iii. Then there are those who live to gain power.
They organise some part of the world to their own desire and gain control over it; a store's department it may be, an office, a firm, a trades union, an international combine ... their family maybe, or a town ... even a nation. There are not many of us who do not try to get some bit of the world under our control and make it serve our wishes, even if it is only a model train layout!

The power seekers are like the passenger who imposes himself on a compartment - even the whole carriage - on a long distance train ... gets the buffet car and sleeping car attendants going for him. Sooner or later, though, he is put off the train, and he is left alone in a waste place where there is no-one to serve him.

iv. Others just want peace.
Peace for most of us means the absence of pressure and anxiety ... if we stopped to think about it, release from responsibility. You can achieve this by avoiding all possibility of conflict. You just withdraw. "All I ever wanted was to be left alone." Such a person lives to keep himself to himself, and grows to reject everything in the end that is not just ... himself. Such a person is given his wish - he spends eternity alone.

The Peace seekers are like the passenger who wants the compartment to himself - pulls down the blinds and keeps the door shut from the inside so he is not disturbed. He comes to journey's end, and does not know the train has stopped and everyone has got off.

v. Finally there are those who live for pleasure.
Those who live for pleasure fall for the oldest lie of all, for the pursuit of pleasure, far from bringing us fulfilment, makes us so totally self-absorbed that we lose sight of all worthy purpose in life at all.

The Pleasure Seekers are like the passenger who is for ever creating diversions on the journey, organising a game of cards, drinking endless beers or chatting up a woman in the refreshment car, and becomes so obsessed with his little adventures that he forgets in the end why he is on the train at all.

The ends for which men live are legion and they fashion a myriad ways to pursue them.

THE GOALS REALISED

But what is "man's chief end"? "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever."

At the end of everyone's journey stands God. To whatever end we live our lives, the end to which we all come anyway is just ... God.

What was it Jesus said? "I am the true and living way; no-one comes to the Father, but by me." Jesus is the true and living way to God. It is to the eternal Father we are all "homing" ... to recognise, when that meeting occurs, that He is indeed our Father, or to find that He is a total Stranger.

"Ah!" folk say, "It sounds right, yes. God, no doubt, should be our goal. But there's so much a man can miss by going that way."

Miss what? We are prone to think we shall "miss out" if we devote ourselves to the pursuit of God. But miss out on what? Hear the things Jesus goes on to promise:

i. John 16:15 "All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take what is mine and make it yours." (John 14:12)
Isn't that prosperity ... beyond our wildest dreams? "All that the Father has!" "All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or the world, or life or death, or the present or the future - all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's." (1 Cor. 3:22) Again:

ii. John 14:23 "If anyone loves me ... My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him."
Isn't that prestige? ... to be noticed, regarded, attended to, by God. Again:

iii. John 14.12 "I tell you the truth, anyone who believes in me will do the works I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father."
Isn't that power? Again:

iv. John 14:27 "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid."
Isn't that the peace we seek?

As to pleasure, listen again:
v. John 15:11 "I have told you all this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full to overflowing."
That is pleasure - pleasure that will never cloy.

All we ever set our heart on is waiting for us ... in God - and Christ is the Way to Him, the true and living way to God.

THE GOAL IS GOD

We are so deceived. We think - we really think - that if we make God the goal of our life we shall miss out on almost everything that makes life desirable, satisfying and fulfilling; whereas the opposite is the truth. Lose God and you end up with nothing. But find Him, and with Him you end up having all things.

Have we really made God - God Himself - the goal of all our striving?

Why did you come to church today?
To hear a preacher? I am sorry for you!
To quieten your conscience, because it will nag you if you don't?
To be reassured that everything's all right?
To get a "pick-me-up"?
Or because, perhaps, in Emerson's lovely phrase, "You have in your heart a little flower called 'Reverence', and you come to water it once a week."

These are not necessarily bad reasons for coming. For these reasons - indeed, for any reason - you are welcome in the Father's house. But do we see, I wonder, that when we come for this, that or the other, however worthy this, that and the other may be, we have got it all the wrong way round? We have come looking for God to be the means to some end of our own. It is a trap we fall into that we think of God as being the means to the ends we seek. But He is not the means to our ends ... He is the end. God is the end, and we the means to His end! Until God is the end and we the means, whatever we offer here is less than worship.

Did you come to glorify God, to do Him honour, to give Him praise?

Let me put it to you quite bluntly: The end of life is not even your salvation, to which God is the means. The end of life is God Himself, to which your salvation is the means.

You will say to me, "But surely the aim of religion is to get things done: to get rid of poverty, to banish ignorance, to cure unemployment, to end war, to befriend the lonely and feed the hungry."

And the answer is "No."

None of these things represents the aim of religion. The aim of religion is to glorify God. O to be sure, God is glorified in the doing of them all. The point is that unless God Himself is our goal in the doing of them, we do none of them rightly.

There must be something more than even the best of these crusading passions that take hold of us, something higher, something deeper, something truer, something more enduring.

What will we do when all the slums are cleared, and all the cancers cured, and all the unemployed happily at work, and all the lonely drawn into universal brotherhood, and all the hungry fed, and all the ignorant enlightened, and every man is secure in his own place? The Kingdom of God will have come at last ... and what will you do then if you haven't learned to enjoy God?

Does our religion need evil before it has any purpose to fulfil, any place to go? ... like the Moslems who believe that the poor are a necessity because without them there is no way for the benevolent to gain merit by relieving their necessity?

No aim, however worthy, can be as worthy as the pursuit of God, and the setting forth by thought and word and deed and desire of His glory. God first ... first, last and always.

CONCLUSION

Do you have a childhood memory of a time when you were lost?
Perhaps with another family you set out for a picnic on a summer's day. Inevitably the time came when the grown-ups needed to rest. Do you remember? And we were told to play, but we mustn't wander beyond that hedge, or cross that stream.
Of course the moment we were out of sight we peered through the hedge, and there was a little bridge over the stream - and there were bluebells on the other side. How dull and boring of the grown-ups to forbid such an innocent pleasure when it was all so safely near at hand!
So we found a hole in the hedge and we crossed the stream, to gather wild flowers. The grown-ups in any case would like that; what worthier motive could there be?
And we were happy ... until to our dismay the darkness came down, and our gay pursuit of this and that had brought us to a place where there were no paths. We quarrelled over the way back. And we knew we were lost, quite lost. We had to be looked for, and led back in tears.
The only way home was hand in hand with father.

It is a true picture of our lives.

We have lost our Father somewhere along the way.

O our lives are full of worthy pursuits; we are gathering bluebells while we may. But now we are lost. And unless we are looked for, and found by someone who knows the way, who can take us by the hand and lead us, we shall remain for ever lost. Jesus is the Way, the true and living way. There is no way but hand in hand with Him.

It is my business to say to you: "The Son of God is at your side, has come to you because He knows and loves you, and knows that you are lost. Reach out your hand to His. Take it. Say to Him, 'I trust You to lead me. I will trust you now and all the way.'"

Do that. You will not, then, be at the end of your journey. But you will be at the end of your wandering.

He knows the way. He is the way.

With Him there is always a way. I do not know your circumstances. It may be you came in feeling at the end of your tether. You feel you cannot go on; there is nowhere to go; there are no moves left.

There is a famous painting of Faust and the devil. Faust you remember gambled with the devil and played his own soul as the stake. The artist shows them facing each other over a chess-board. Dismay is written all over Faust's face, and malevolent glee on the devil's. The painting is titled, "Check Mate."
One day a master of the game came into the gallery where the painting hung. He pondered it a long while. Then the silence of the gallery was shattered with his shout, "It's a lie! The King and the Knight can move."

Christ is the King, and you His Knight: the King and the Knight can move.

A poor man hung once upon a cross. For him it was the end. He had used up all his moves. But on a cross beside him hung Jesus. Yes, He had come for him there - even there; and He said, "Today you shall be with Me, in Paradise."

The King and the Knight could move.

However trapped you feel, however despairingly you believe you have come to the end of the road, I say to you on the authority of the Word God Himself has spoken, "You have believed a lie. There is a way. You do not know it, but He does. He is the true and living way; and He will lead you from this day forward, through rough paths and smooth into an open country of such delight as you have never dreamed.