Thomas asked the question everyone else in the room was too polite to say out loud.

Jesus had just told his disciples he was leaving. Going somewhere they couldn’t follow yet. Preparing a place. And Thomas cut through all of it: “We don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way?”

It’s a fair question. It’s the kind of thing most of us are thinking and have learned not to say in church.

And Jesus answers in a way that stops the room: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

He doesn’t say he’ll give them a map. He doesn’t say he knows the best route. He says he is the way. The destination and the path are the same person. To follow Jesus isn’t to travel toward something; it’s the destination.

While that’s a beautiful idea, it’s also an extremely inconvenient one.

Because if Jesus himself is the way, then following him means actually following him. His life. His words. His posture toward the world. Which brings us to a man named Stephen, and one of the most uncomfortable scenes in the entire New Testament.

What the Way Actually Looks Like

Stephen wasn’t famous. He wasn’t even one of the twelve. He was chosen for the unglamorous job of making sure widows in the early church got their food distributed fairly. He was, essentially, a church volunteer.

But Acts 7 tells us he was full of faith and the Holy Spirit, and eventually he’s standing before the most powerful religious institution of his day saying things powerful people really didn’t want to hear. He told them plainly: you’ve consistently resisted God throughout your entire history, and you’re doing it right now.

They don’t take that well.

They drag him outside the city and start throwing rocks. And in the middle of it all, Stephen looks up and sees heaven opened, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

Everywhere else in the New Testament, Jesus is seated at the right hand of God. But here, for Stephen, he stands. As if heaven itself rises to meet one ordinary man who walked the way all the way to its end.

Stephen’s last words echo the cross: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

He forgives the people who are killing him.

That is what it looks like to follow someone who said “love your enemies.” It turns out Jesus meant it.

 Two Ways to Avoid the Way

The earliest Christians didn’t call themselves Christians. They called themselves followers of the Way. A way of life. A path you actually walked, not a label you wore.

Today, we’ve found two ways to avoid it.

The first is wanting Jesus’s ethics without Jesus himself. A lot of people find the Sermon on the Mount genuinely admirable. Love your neighbor, care for the poor, practice compassion, but confessing that Jesus is actually Lord, that his life makes a real claim on your life is where many people prefer to keep things vague.

The second is more commonly seen these days, especially in American politics. Confessing Jesus as Savior while keeping your actual life untouched by what he teaches. Saying the right things on Sunday, posting the right verses, carrying the right cultural identity, while your actual treatment of people who are poor, different, or inconvenient bears no resemblance to anything Jesus did or said.

One group wants the teachings without the Teacher. The other wants the Teacher without the transformation. Both get to call themselves something Christian while avoiding the part where it costs anything. Jesus is simply a mascot for them both.

The Cost Is Mostly Social — And We’re Still Avoiding It

We’re not Stephen. Nobody is throwing rocks at us in the parking lot. Following Jesus in America in 2026 carries considerably lower stakes than Acts 7.

But the cost is still there. It’s just mostly social.

The cost is being willing to be misunderstood. To live in a way that doesn’t fit neatly into either political tribe and makes people on both sides a little suspicious of you. To care about the poor without asterisks, to welcome the stranger without fine print, to actually forgive people who have wronged you, and to do it all while the entire cultural moment is screaming at you to pick a side and fight.

Research consistently shows that the primary reason Christians don’t talk about their faith is fear of perception. Fear of looking naive. Fear of saying the wrong thing. Fear of being labeled.

Despite dwindling church attendance, Christianity is still the cultural majority in this country, and yet the main reason people don’t say anything about Jesus is that they’re worried what others will think.

Meanwhile, a significant and very loud portion of American Christianity has spent enormous energy on acquiring power, winning culture war arguments, and defeating enemies. Churches have traded the Sermon on the Mount for influence in Washington, and seem genuinely confused about why people on the outside are skeptical.

Those people on the outside can read. They’ve read what Jesus said. They can also watch the news. They’re not confused about the gap between the two. They’re just drawing the obvious conclusion.

 What a Real Witness Actually Is

The Greek word for witness is martys. It’s where we get the word martyr. But originally it meant one thing: someone who tells the truth about what they have seen.

A witness doesn’t win arguments. A witness doesn’t bludgeon people with doctrine or shame them into agreement. A witness says: here is what happened to me. Here is what I have seen.

If you’ve walked with Jesus at all, if grace has met you somewhere real, if forgiveness has lifted something off you that you couldn’t carry alone, if hope has held you through something that had no business working out, you already have a testimony. You don’t need more credentials. You need more honesty.

Stephen didn’t die delivering a philosophical treatise on the existence of God. He told the story of what God had done, said what he saw with his own eyes, and forgave the people who were killing him. His words and his death pointed to the same person.

The world doesn’t need more Christians who are louder or angrier or more certain they’re right. There’s no shortage of loud, angry certainty. What people are actually looking for, and what many of them will tell you directly if you ask, is someone who lives as if what they believe is actually true. Someone whose life is recognizably shaped by something other than self-interest.

That kind of witness costs something. Not our lives, most likely. But our comfort, our reputation, our carefully managed image. The willingness to actually love the people who are inconvenient to love. The willingness to forgive when you’re technically owed an apology. The willingness to show up for people nobody else is showing up for.

Jesus said “I am the way.” Stephen showed us what walking that way looks like in the real world. The early church called themselves followers of the Way and meant it every day of the week.

The question sitting in front of us is whether we do.

REFLECTION QUESTION

If the people who know you best, your coworkers, your neighbors, your family, were asked to describe what actually shapes how you live, would they say it’s your faith? What’s one specific way following Jesus is costing you something right now?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord Jesus, you said you are the Way, and then you showed us a way that leads through things we would rather go around.

We confess that we’ve gotten good at calling ourselves your followers without letting that following actually cost us anything.

We’ve made peace with a version of faith that fits more comfortably than it calls. We’ve chosen silence when honesty would have helped someone. We’ve stayed in our lane when crossing lanes is exactly what you did your whole life.

Give us the nerve to tell the truth about what we’ve seen. Give us the grace to live as though we mean what we say on Sunday. Give us the courage to follow you, actually follow you, even when the way leads through hard places.

Stephen forgave the people who were killing him. We can probably manage to forgive the people who merely annoy us.

Walk with us. We want to be people who are recognizably yours.

Amen.