Yesterday you heard three questions. Maybe one of them was yours.

Does my life matter? Is there anything worth believing in? Is Jesus really who everyone says He is?

John wrote his Gospel for people asking exactly those questions. He was an old man when he wrote it - the last of the twelve still alive, fifty years after the events. He had no one left who could say "I was there" with him. So he wrote it down, and he told us why.

This week is not about covering ground. It's about deciding whether you're going to be in the room for the next year.

Two verses. Read them slowly, twice. This is the only place in any of the four Gospels where the writer stops and tells you exactly why he wrote.

Notice the two things John says he is trying to prove: who Jesus is, and what happens to the person who believes. Everything in the next twenty-one chapters serves one of those two claims.

Notice, too, what he says in verse 30: there was far more he could have written. John chose. Every story you'll read this year is here on purpose.

Don't rush these. Give yourself a few minutes with each one before moving on.

You might want to write your answers down before moving to the closing prayer. You'll come back to them on Friday.

Come back tomorrow - Tuesday you'll meet the man who wrote this book, and find out why you can trust him.

• John 1:14 - "we have seen his glory"
• 1 John 1:1-3 - what John heard, saw, and touched

John was not a scholar writing from a library. He was a fisherman who was there - at the table, at the cross, at the empty tomb, on the shore. When he says "we have seen his glory," he isn't being poetic. He's giving testimony.

And "his glory" means this: when John watched Jesus - touching lepers, weeping at a tomb, forgiving the men driving the nails - he was watching God Himself. Not a hint of God. Not a messenger from God. God, living in front of him.

So you never have to guess what God is like. Look at Jesus. However He treated people is how God feels about you - gracious enough to love you as you are, truthful enough not to leave you that way.

• Exodus 3:13-14 - God gives Moses His name
• John 8:56-59 - Jesus takes that name

Fifty years of reflection led John to one conclusion, and he puts it in his first sentence: Jesus is God. Then he shows you how Jesus said it Himself - seven times, with two words no Jewish listener could miss. I AM. The name from the burning bush.

The crowd understood Him perfectly. When He said "before Abraham was, I am," they picked up stones. Jesus was not misunderstood. He was heard exactly right, and it nearly got Him killed.

And here is what He did with that name - He attached it to your need. When nothing satisfies, I AM the Bread of Life. When you can't see the way, I AM the Light. When you've been shut out, I AM the Door. When you're lost, I AM the Good Shepherd. When death comes, I AM the Resurrection. When you can't get to God, I AM the Way. When you're running dry, I AM the Vine.

• John 3:16-17 - why God sent His Son
• John 10:10 - why Jesus came

John never uses his own name in his Gospel. Five times he calls himself "the disciple whom Jesus loved." After fifty years, that was the only thing about himself he thought was worth writing down.

His motive was God's motive: a love that gives. Not a love that waits until you clean up. God loved a world that was rejecting Him, and He gave His Son to it - not to condemn it, but to save it.

Jesus didn't come to fix your life. He came to give you His. And His life never ends. It never fails. It starts the moment you believe. So this isn't about a better life. It's about His life. And it isn't for later. It's for now.

• John 1:1-5 - read it three times, slowly

This is where John begins. Not with a birth, not with a baptism - with eternity. Before anything else existed, the Word was. And the Word was God. And in Him was life, and the life was the light of men.

Verse five is the one to hold onto: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Whatever darkness you wrote down on Monday - the question, the doubt, the thing you're carrying alone - it has not overcome the light. It can't.

Sunday is not the beginning of something. It's the next step in something that started this week.