I AM - The Way, The Truth and The Life
Happy Palm Sunday! Today marks our sixth and final Lenten Feast Day!! On this Lord’s Day, enjoy worshiping with your church family through songs and hymns, through the reading and teaching of God’s Word, through giving cheerfully, through waving those palm branches and enjoying the blessed gift of food, chocolate, social media, or anything you may have set aside for your Lenten promise.
Palm Sunday officially kicks off what Christians all over the world refer to as Holy Week or Passion Week. Passion Week includes the seven days between Palm Sunday and the Saturday before Easter, or Resurrection Sunday. Before we move into the sixth I AM statement Jesus made in the gospel of John, let’s dig into the meaning of Passion Week:
* The first records of the term Passion Week come from the 1300s.
* It commemorates the seven days leading up to Easter:
* Beginning with the commemoration of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday
* Climaxing with the commemoration of the Last Supper and
* The Passion of Jesus on Good Friday
* Holy Week concludes with Christ’s death and descent into hell on Saturday
* In this context, the word Passion is used to refer to the period of trials and suffering that Jesus experienced before his death.
* Suffering means passio in Latin, thus the suffering of Christ is referred to as His Passion.
Now on to Jesus’ I AM Statement for the day!
The Seven I AM’s
Each Sunday of #LentenDaily 2026 we have focused on a specific I AMstatement made by Jesus to His followers. Jesus’ I AM statements would have particular significance to the first-century Jewish listener. Just as God had revealed Himself to Moses as the “I AM” when calling him to return to Egypt and lead His people out of slavery, Jesus used the same words to describe Himself throughout His ministry, as recorded by John.More specifically, “I AM WHO I AM”(Hebrew: Ehyeh asher ehyeh) is a profound declaration from Exodus 3:14, where God reveals His name to Moses as the self-existent, eternal, and faithful Deliverer. Signifying that God is not dependent on anything else for existence and is present with His people, this name represents an immutable, self-sufficient, and ever-present being. When “God replied to Moses, “‘I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.’” (Ex 3:14), He was revealing Himself as the eternal, invincible, covenant-keeping God that He was, is and always will be.
Today we will take a look at the sixth of Jesus’ I AM claims, I AM the Way, the Truth and the Life.
Read John 14:1-14
How did we live without GPS, or Global Positioning Systems? I certainly didn’t grow up with GPS. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that GPS became accessible and reliable for everyday use. Before GPS, navigation relied on physical paper maps, road atlases, compasses, and asking locals for directions, often requiring pre-trip planning and manual tracking of locations. I remember before our young family would go on a road trip, Dale would print out detailed directions to our destination, but even then, sometimes the roads would have changed, requiring frequent stops to check signs or ask for help.
In today’s reading, Jesus is continuing His Farewell Discourse, sharing more details about where He is heading next. He is preparing the disciples for His imminent departure, and they are obviously confused and troubled by this news. Jesus encourages them to remember that they do believe in God; therefore they can believe also in Him. Throughout history, God’s people have learned, at varying rates, that God is faithful and true. They could trust Him to provide for and protect them, to fulfill all of His promises to them. While this new turn in the directions didn’t seem to make sense, the disciples knew and trusted God and could now trust Jesus.
He then begins to fill in some details about where He is going - His Father’s house, or heaven, in which there is plenty of room for all of them to come and live forever. Jesus is going ahead of them, to ready their rooms, but will come again and take them there. His next statement sends shock waves through the group, “You know the way to where I am going.” (v 4) What? How could they know the way to heaven, to Father God’s house? Up until that point, God’s presence had only existed in the Holy of Holies, in the temple. He stayed behind the heavy curtain and only the Jewish priests were allowed to enter into that holy space. And even if they knew how to get there, it wasn’t accessible to them.
Thomas expressed what everyone was thinking, “Lord, we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” (v 5) to which Jesus replied, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (v 6) Jesus was definitively claiming to be the exclusive, essential pathway to God - “the way.” There are no shortcuts or detours. He is also the ultimate revelation of reality - “the truth,” and the only source of eternal life - “the life.” He was and is the new GPS System!
This profound statement was a pivotal claim of Jesus’ divinity and should be interpreted as a declaration that the path to, knowledge of and life with God is found solely through a personal, relational connection with Him through Christ.
Interestingly, “The Way” (Greek: hē hodos) was the original, 1st-century name for the early Christian movement, as seen throughout the Book of Acts, describing a radical, alternative way of life rather than just a set of beliefs and featuring communal sharing, equality across social classes, and daily devotion to Jesus’ teachings before the term “Christian” became common.
Finally, enjoy this beautiful worship song from CityAlight, The Way, the Truth and the Life. Pay close attention to the lyrics of the chorus:
I will follow the Son, He goes before me
Through death into glory, preparing the way
Till the day He returns, I walk with assurance
For I know the Way, and the Truth, and the Life
