The Fifth Sunday After Easter
Light of Christ Anglican Church
The Reverend Michael J. Moffitt
May 3, 2026
No Other Way
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Text: John 14:1–14
Our son Ben once told us about a time when he was heading somewhere but realized that he was going in the wrong direction. I’ve had that happen before and I remember the frustration of that. I asked him how much out of the way he had gone, and he laughed as he told us that it was a lot. So I asked, “So what did you do?” He surprised me as he said, “I just decided to change where I wanted to go.” We laughed because his solution changed how he felt and prevented him from the anxiety of being late and mad that he had gone so far out of his way.
I was reminded about that incident this week as I focused on how things changed for the disciples as they went from total darkness in their grief, the response to their guilt and shame for abandoning the Lord Jesus when he was arrested. That along with the absolute disaster of Jesus being brutally murdered through crucifixion and they were helpless to stop it.
The truth of the matter is that Jesus could have stopped it if He wanted to but didn’t out of complete love for His Father and those who the Father had given Him. What the disciples were experiencing was also a part of the divine plan for the redemption of their souls. They were just totally unable to comprehend how any good could come out of Jesus’ crucifixion.
But then suddenly they had the incredible joy at the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Even though Matthew 16:21 says that Jesus told His disciples that He would be killed but would also be raised up on the third day. I’m thinking they had no concept of what Jesus meant by “raised up” but it likely didn’t include being brought back from the dead.
In John 20:19–22 Jesus initially appeared to them that same day by just walking through the door or wall and declared to them “Peace be with you” twice. I’m thinking they needed to hear those words twice because the first time they were so stunned that peace was not the first thing they felt. They went from being holed up in hiding as they grieved the death of their Savior and living in fear of the religious leaders coming after them because of their relationship with Jesus. Suddenly a joy not thought possible again stunned them.
Have you ever tried to imagine that scene? Have you ever had an occasion where you experienced such a dramatic turnaround as that? Darkness to light or fear to hope and courage?
Today we continue on the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead on our way to the feast of the Day of Pentecost. This time from Easter Pentecost is the high point on the church calendar as we joyfully remember that Jesus Christ was raised victorious over sin and death so that those of us who follow him as Savior and Lord are released from our bondage to the same.
Last week was a reminder that Jesus revealed to his disciples that He is the “Good Shepherd” who lays down His life for His sheep. I want to make a further observation about that before we move on to today’s scripture.
I pointed out that this was a case of the Lord of all creation, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the eternal God, and as Isaiah 9:6 reveals “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” I feel confident that I could continue to give many descriptions of who Jesus is in His divinity and His humanity, but I’ll restrain myself for now.
Remember in Genesis 1 when God created the heavens and the earth He declared that it was good. He said it was good because it was perfect in every way, no flaws just a holy reflection of God’s power and glory. There was nothing else to compare it too. There was no ranking between poor, good, better, or best. Yet oddly enough after God created man He looked back at all that he created and in verse 31 says, God saw all that He had made, and it was very good. In the Hebrew it was exceedingly Good.
Mankind was the pinnacle of creation, and it was very good. Think about that for just a moment. Because oddly enough it was the creation of man and woman who were commanded to have dominion of all that God created and with their image bearers that they would raise up (their children) to make the earth a place for God to dwell with them. Then in a surprising turn of events the pinnacle in a very short period of time sinned against the command of the one who created them. Suddenly, their lives would create a need for different distinctions: poor, average, good, better, and best.
Jesus as the Good Shepherd was the perfect example of what a shepherd should be. As Israel considered the shepherds who were their religious leaders it would soon be clear that they were anything but good. This good Shepherd would lay down His life for His sheep so their sins could be atoned for. These sheep, (humanity) willfully turned away from God’s command. I believe in all the things that God revealed in the law and the prophets about how we were to live before Him, Jesus is the model and standard of covenant faithfulness that guides us in our journey in this life. To say that He is the “Good Shepherd” is to see Him as the perfect Shepherd in every way.
God’s word shows us that we were heading in the wrong direction when we sought to live for our own glory. In Christ we change where it is we should go by following Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.
In today’s gospel reading Jesus is the model and the guide of how we should live before God. Once again Jesus claimed that there is only one way to the Father. Not just the best way but the ONLY WAY. No back door and no compromises. Without Him there is no way to return to the Father because our sin remains the barrier, the great chasm between us and the promising life once offered to Adam and Eve before the Fall. What Jesus accomplished was an extraordinary act of love, so to turn that down, to reject it became a mockery of this unheard-of gift.
Each of our passages this morning have the same overall theme of the importance of keeping God’s commands and faithfully teaching them to our children and their children and to future generations. We will briefly see how our passage from Deuteronomy 6, 2 Peter 2, and John 14 merge on the importance of the commands of God as our response to the gift of life.
God knew the heart of the people and so Moses repeatedly declared to them that the highest priority of the covenant was loving and obeying the Lord in the present and passing on that love and the importance of obedience to future generations. These were not suggestions of how to live but commands on the way we must live according to the Lord. If Israel would do what God commanded, He promised that they would prosper as a nation and be at peace with their enemies. God would go before them in protection and blessing if they lived up to the commands of the covenant. The foundational part of this exhortation was built upon whether or not God’s covenant people loved the Lord their God. If they didn’t then the law would seem restrictive and burdensome. If they genuinely loved Him they would obey out of appreciation of the love, mercy, and grace that God had lavished upon them. Mark Batterson in his book, All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life, writes,
The gospel costs nothing. We cannot buy it or earn it. It can only be received as a free gift, compliments of God’s grace. So it costs nothing, but it demands everything. And that is where most of us get stuck — spiritual no-man’s land. We’re too Christian to enjoy sin and too sinful to enjoy Christ. We’ve got just enough Jesus to be informed, but not enough to be transformed.
In our Epistle reading from 1 Peter 2:1–2 he writes that it’s important that if we are to build a house then it’s vital that we build upon a foundation that will hold up as the weight of the house presses down upon it. Listen again to 1 Peter 2: 4–6,
As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in
Scripture: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.
As you know many if not most of the founding fathers of this nation believed that the laws of God to be found in his holy word were the best foundation to build this nation upon. History reveals that they had seen that God’s word was not only instructive concerning the commands of God, but life-giving as it drew them closer to the intimacy to be found through a relationship with Jesus Christ. They knew that freedom was not free but must be fought for and they knew there would be a sacrifice of lives and resources if they were to be free from tyranny and the right to pursue God according to his word. The same is true for those who will follow Jesus Christ.
The battle is raging, and we see the evidence every day in our country and around the world. If we expect to see a turn-around in this country each of us who proclaim that we have submitted our lives to Jesus Christ must decide whether or not we are willing to both live and die for the building of God’s kingdom here on earth. This has always been the truth but we have found ways to water it down until it has no real power in our lives. In 1 Peter 2: 1–12 he is writing through the Holy Spirit’s power and influence but that doesn’t mean that he is taking dictation from the Spirit. Who Peter had become as a disciple of Christ influenced his writing because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within him. John Stott wrote in his commentary of the Book of Acts,
Anti-intellectualism and the fullness of the Spirit are mutually incompatible, because the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth.
Peter wanted those who were reading or listening to his letter being read to see themselves through the lens of these words. Peter wanted them to understand that following Christ was not just believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus but to give their lives to the worship of God and the proclamation of the gospel message. Peter wanted those who professed their faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord to see themselves differently because of it. In order to resist the influence of the enemy, who would much prefer that they remained humble and only be around those who believed like they did. We call them holy huddles.
The Holy Spirit wanted them to see that the benefit of being adopted into the family of God was not only about the assurance that they would avoid Hell but that they should see themselves as God did. Because of Jesus Christ and the anointing presence of the Holy Spirit they now were
…a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Peter, the disciple in the stories within the gospels, was not the same man who wrote 1 Peter under the anointing of the Holy Spirit. He was an Apostle sent by Jesus his Lord and Master and he was a man chosen by God before the foundation of the earth. He was a royal priest of the Lord of the universe, a man possessed by God and enabled to proclaim the excellencies of him who had called him away from being a fisherman to an ambassador for Jesus Christ the Lord of Heaven and earth. Peter writes that there is no way to ignore or go around Jesus Christ as the cornerstone. The choice is to follow him as a living stone placed upon Jesus as cornerstone or to stumble over it and perish.
For Peter to come to the place where he was as an Apostle in the writing of his epistle a lot of things had happened. For all the years after the Day of Pentecost that closely followed Jesus’ ascension back to the Father, Peter had seen probably tens of thousands of people come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. Some persevered others didn’t.
At the end of John’s gospel, the words that Jesus spoke to Peter that morning on the shore letting him know that all was forgiven, and he was to feed and tend to the flock of sheep that was comprised of those who followed after the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ. What an honor. What a joy! He had been beaten, imprisoned, rejected, mocked, and there was no way of knowing what would happen next. It didn’t matter because he had understood what it meant to take up his cross and follow after Jesus. He now knew how the building of God’s kingdom was built one living stone at a time. He would be found faithful because Jesus had become his reason for living or dying. He is believed to have been crucified upside down at his own request around 64 AD. He didn’t feel worthy to be crucified in the same way as his Lord.
There is a considerable amount of uncertainty about what the future holds and if the truth be known that has always been the case. But the question that is always before us is will you follow after the Master laying down your agenda and picking up His? Will you walk out of the darkness into his marvelous light?
One of the clearest and best-known examples of what Jesus taught about why we should faithfully follow Him actually is so clear that it is the very definition of why we follow Him and not a counterfeit. John 14:6,
“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me.”
Do you believe that? Will you pray into that inviting the Holy Spirit to raise you up to be the man or woman he intends you to be. Actually, it’s very simple. The answer is Yes or No.
Let’s Pray.
