THE LORD JESUS IS THE LIFE

Our Lord said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me".

Having touched on the "Way" and the "Truth" over the last two evenings, let us look at the last existential attribute Jesus mentioned of Himself; the "Life".

What is life?

As obvious a property as life seems to be, ( at least in a biological sense ), it is a truly undefinable quality.

At first glance, life seems to be related to the undisturbed continuum of biological functions. If you leave living things alone, they tend to continue  living while if, on the other hand,  you disturb them to the point of interfering with their ecological and internal processes, the living things can sometimes stop living.

By this standard, life can be said to be a biological continuity. 

This answer does not really cover the question properly because it uses a characteristic of life ( namely biological continuity) to define life itself. If biology is continuing and thus sustaining life, what exactly is being sustained within the functioning system?

If I have a car engine that I am able to keep running indefinitely by ensuring  all its requirements are supplied, could it be said that the car is a living thing? Probably not.

To us, living things have to also have a far more complex property and that is the ability propagate themselves by reproduction. My car does not propagate its own "carness" by reproduction or any other means, therefore we cannot consider it a living thing.

So, when Jesus says He is the Life, does He mean "life" in the biological sense?

I would say yes, in part.

Jesus, the creator of all things, is Himself living. He is Life itself. By His own Devine will, He imbued that property of life on sentient and non-sentient entities whether they are biological or not.

In the case of biological beings, the mechanisms of sustaining continuous processes in systems made of physical matter is the requirement life needs to find expression in this physical universe.

In a non-physical realm, the same life of God would be sustained in entities by different mechanisms other than biology. What those mechanisms are may not be easily studied by us humans but I would hazard a guess that the mechanisms are metabolic at some level because the bible describes angels as having bread to eat. 

Any living thing whether angelic or human or animal, derives  life from the initial spark of life that was in Jesus. In the case of biological beings, this life was dispensed  to the progenitors of all species and life cascaded down to us in our time.

Jesus, being the Life, can make the dead to live. As with the famous story of Lazarus who was dead and returned to life at the command of Jesus, we too, though once dead in our sins, can be made alive by Jesus through His Holy Spirit.

When we are cleansed of our sins by the sacrificial blood of Jesus, we are made alive by His spirit and we are born again. We emerge as new living things and now can share in the Life of Christ our saviour.

To reach this position, we are cleansed from our sins when we believe in Jesus and then humble ourselves before Him and then acknowledge our sins and then repent of them.

The great salvation given to us by our Lord Jesus Christ is the only hope we have of being filled with the Life of God because no comes to the Father but by Jesus.

Amen.