Jesus, the Light of Men

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in John chapter 1 this morning. John chapter 1. About two months ago, my wife asked me to block off yesterday in my calendar, block off the whole day, because we were going to spend the whole day together as a family for my birthday.

And so we ended up yesterday, and she’d planned for us to go on a road trip, because she knows that my favorite activity in the whole world is exploring. And so yesterday early, we loaded up the kids and the dogs, and we went out to Red Rock and hiked around for a while for my birthday. And I love my wife.

She is an excellent wife and mother and faithful and hardworking, but she’s what you’d call indoorsy. She does not care for the outdoors so much. I’m not telling them anything you wouldn’t tell them.

And I looked at her yesterday about the end of the trail, and I said, here’s proof right here that you love me if I ever doubt it, because you’re spending your Saturday out, you know, rolling around in red dirt and climbing down red rocks, and I know you’d rather be at home in your pajamas. So it was a great day, great day with my family, and what Brother Ken said about turning 20, I’m serious. I wouldn’t want to go back and do that again.

Some of you have asked me this morning already if I felt any older. No. No older than I usually feel.

But I never feel any older on a birthday, on a particular day. I remember when I turned 18, I didn’t feel any older. And what’s more, people around me didn’t look at me as being any older.

And from the time you turn 18, I don’t know if your experience was any different from mine, but I know a lot of people in my generation feel the same way. From the time you’re 18, you spend a decade or more trying to figure out how to get people to look at you as an adult, to break out of this mold where they look at you as an 18-year-old kid or even a baby. I’ve run into people with my mother that she knew from years ago, and they’ve said, oh, I used to babysit you.

Oh, that’s nice. Good to meet you again. I used to change your diapers.

Lady, I’m 24 years old. Do you think that’s appropriate to say to me? Anyway, or people who I run into with my dad, oh, you look just like your dad did at that age and pinch my cheeks.

I’m 16. People want to freeze you as a baby or they want to freeze you as a teenager. And I spent the whole decade of my 20s thinking, how do I just get people to see me as an adult?

I mean, for crying out loud, I had kids. I had a career. I was married.

I owned a house. At one point, I owned two houses. Not both to live in, but I owned property.

I had run for office. What do I have to do for you not to see me as a child anymore? And the reality is get gray hair, I guess.

Some people who knew you as a child will always just see you in that role. And it’s frustrating because I think of all the things that I’ve done and accomplished in my life, there are still people who see me as this little kid. And as I began to talk to you about last week, we do the same thing with Jesus.

A lot of the world does the same thing with Jesus. When we talk about Jesus, when the world hears about Jesus, a lot of times the mind goes to that baby in the manger. Especially if you haven’t spent much time in church and aren’t familiar with all the other stories of what he did.

You may be familiar with Easter and Christmas. The stories of Easter and Christmas and really not much in between. He walked on water.

He healed somebody. I don’t know how we got from the baby in the manger to the empty tomb. But if people know anything, they usually know the baby in the manger.

I was talking to you last week about setting up the nativity scene in my yard. It’s finally lit, although the bulbs keep burning out. But most of them, Jesus is still lit in my front yard.

And I love that manger scene. And I love the Christmas story. But if we get so fixated on the Christmas story that that’s all we ever see of Jesus and that’s all we ever know of Jesus, then we are missing the bulk of who Jesus is.

We’re missing out on the vast majority of the story. The Christmas story is incredibly important because without the Christmas story, there’s none of the miracles, there’s none of the healings, there’s none of the raisings, there’s also not the death, burial, and resurrection. The Christmas story is where it all begins as far as on this earth.

But too many times in our minds we freeze Jesus in the manger. He’s just the sweet little baby in that Christmas card picture. And as I told you last week, to have a proper biblical perspective on who Jesus is, we’ve got to take the baby out of the manger and let him grow up.

And this Christmas season, or Advent as we’ve called it this morning, this Christmas season I could take you through Matthew and I could take you through Luke. And I may do that other years. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But this season I wanted to take you through the book of John. See, Matthew and Luke talk about how Jesus was born, and John talks about who he was born to be. John talks about the reason why he was born.

John talks about the reason why he came in the first place. And we saw last week how he was born in Bethlehem, but that wasn’t his beginning. As a matter of fact, there was no beginning of Jesus, because Jesus, as part of the Trinity, is eternal God.

He always has been and always will be. There was no point where God the Father said, hmm, I think I’ll create Jesus, and then I’ll create everything else. Now, John says, in the beginning was the Word, meaning Jesus, and the Word was with God, meaning there in the beginning, When God created everything, Jesus was there.

When God said, let us make man in our own image, Jesus was part of the us and the our that made man in their image. The Word was God because Jesus is the second person in the Trinity. He’s every bit as much God as God the Father.

And he said the same was in the beginning with God. He repeats it so we know that it wasn’t just, I got so excited, I threw out this rhetorical statement that I really didn’t mean and now I need to walk it back. No, I really meant that.

All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made. Everything that was created by God was created by Jesus Christ. And so what we looked at last week, John begins to walk us through the fact that Jesus is God and he has no beginning and he has no end. And so as important as the Christmas story is, that’s not where Jesus started.

That’s where his earthly ministry started. But Jesus was around long, long before Bethlehem. And when we start looking at it as, yes, he was born as a tiny baby, but in the body of that tiny baby was God in the human flesh.

When we start thinking of him in those terms, it puts everything else in the right perspective. And you may think, why does it matter? Why does it matter whether we understand that, whether we know that?

Jesus is the very heart of the gospel, I told you last week. And if we don’t understand who Jesus is, then we don’t really understand what he came to do. We really don’t understand the reason why God sent him.

See, if he wasn’t God in the flesh, he couldn’t die for our sins. He just couldn’t. He couldn’t be that perfect sacrifice.

It matters immensely who Jesus Christ is. It matters to our theology. It matters to our understanding of God.

But it has a much more pressing importance for you and me in that it matters to our salvation. now if I’m confused about Jesus can I not be saved if some of this is confusing and hard to understand that’s not what I’m saying but I’m saying if Jesus is not the eternal God that it undermines the entire plan of salvation it undermines our entire understanding of the gospel Jesus is the very foundation of the gospel and without him there was no plan by God to reconcile men unto himself he is the plan ladies and gentlemen he is the plan for God in human flesh to dwell among us live a sinless life, take responsibility for our sins, and die in our place. That was the plan.

And if he’s not exactly who the Bible claims him to be, then that plan doesn’t work. But we move on today into verse 4. We’re going to look at verses 4 and 5.

And we see that after he created us, those first three verses talk about him creating us and being part of that. We see that once Jesus created us, his mission became to redeem his creation after it was damaged by sin. His mission became to redeem his creation after it was damaged by sin.

His mission being the thing that drove him. The whole reason for his being here. And you see this at the end of his earthly ministry when everybody’s trying to talk him out of going back to Jerusalem.

They know it’s going to be dangerous and all this. And the Bible says he had set his face to go to Jerusalem. He was determined.

He knew that he was going to die there. He knew that he was going to die for our sins, but it was the culmination of everything that God had sent him for. And so he was determined.

I am going to go do this. He spelled out his mission in Luke when he said, I’ve come to seek and to save that which was lost. He was here for a very specific purpose, and he knew why. I don’t know what he knew as a baby or when he remembered it, if he didn’t remember it the whole time.

I don’t know how all that works. But I know that when Jesus came to earth, he knew what he was coming for. And by the time the mission was complete, he knew what he was coming for.

Throughout his entire earthly ministry, he knew why he had come. He had a mission, which was to redeem his creation after it was damaged by sin. He had to redeem us.

That word redeem, we don’t use a lot these days. But it’s a good word, and it tells so much of the story. I really didn’t understand the word redeem until I was studying French at OU.

I know you’re probably thinking, what does French have to do with the word redeem? There’s a verb in French that says, rachete, which means buy. It’s to buy back.

And the teacher was talking about that word, and she said, what is the translation of the word in English? And I’m not going to try to mimic her accent, but what is the translation of that word in English? And we all just kind of sat there staring at the board, and then I thought, okay, I’ve heard that in some French Christian songs.

And my teacher was from France, and she was a scary woman. I was afraid of being wrong, so it was kind of a tentative. Does it mean redeem?

She got very excited that I knew the word, or at least guessed it correctly. And in French, that word for redeem literally means to buy back. And I got to thinking, we use the word redeem in English.

I don’t really know what it means. So I started studying the word in English, and it means the same thing in English. I wouldn’t have known that if it hadn’t been for that nervousness in French class going, I’m not even sure what this word means in English, but I’ll throw it out here.

It means to buy back. The only time I hear us use it in English is with coupons. You look at your coupon, how much is that thing usually worth, cash value?

It says on there. 120th of a cent. Okay, so you get, what, 2,000 of those, and you get a dollar back?

I don’t even know if you can exchange them, but they have to put something on there. That coupon by itself isn’t even worth the paper that it’s printed on. and yet you take it and you go buy tomato soup with it or soap or whatever’s on it, and suddenly it’s worth 80 cents back, or it’s worth two for one.

See, they have redeemed the coupon at the grocery store, and they’ve given it value when it didn’t have any before. And that became the mission of Jesus Christ. After he created all of this with his Father, it became his mission. After it became damaged by sin, and make no mistake, sin damages everything it touches.

When we sin, it does damage. When I have a sinful attitude, my relationships get messed up. And I have to go back and apologize to Charla and say, I’m sorry, I was so snarky today.

There was no excuse for it. Whether it’s a sin like that or it’s a sin like, I’m coming home drunk all the time and my family’s afraid for their, I’m not, by the way, but my family’s afraid for their lives, or whatever it is, you name the sin, there is damage that is done to something or someone because of it. And when Adam and Eve fell in rebellion against God, And creation, all of creation, mankind included, was damaged by sin.

Death and sickness, disease, poverty, all these things entered into the world because of sin. Now that doesn’t mean that, oh, I got sick, I must be being punished for something. No, there’s just sin in the world.

And sometimes we bear the consequences even if it’s not for our own actions. All of creation became damaged. Our relationship with God, above all, became damaged because of sin.

and it became Christ’s mission to redeem that. It became his mission to buy us back. It became his mission to give value, to put value on us, even though we had damaged ourselves with sin.

And so we see the transition between the first three verses and verse 4 and 5 where he goes from the creator to the one who redeems that creation. And it says in verse 4, In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.

When it says in him was life, folks, he’s the very essence of life. He’s the giver of all life. We would not be alive today.

Creation would not exist without him. He gave life to everything that exists. He created Adam and Eve.

He created the first animals. And you know what? He created in them the potential for life, for life to spread, to be reproduced, and on down to us.

There is life in the universe because he is. and because he’s given life to everything. Even his name in Hebrew.

We don’t know exactly how it sounded because the Jews were very nervous about using his name incorrectly. And so they quit pronouncing it. The nearest we can come by the Old Testament letterings is that his name was Yahweh.

That word is connected to the verb in Hebrew that means to be, being, existence. All these things are tied up in the name of God. That’s why he told Moses, you tell the people I am has sent you.

That’s why Jesus said to the people in his day, I’m telling you that before Abraham was, I am. Now to us on the surface of it, that sounds like a confusing sentence. What does that even mean, grammar wise?

Before he was, I am. Are you confused about what time you’re in? They would have understood it as him identifying himself with the God of the Old Testament.

And Yahweh being someone who is, someone who exists, someone who has life in and of himself, whose life is not dependent on anyone or anything else. He just is life. He just is.

And always has been and always will be. So Jesus told them, before Abraham was, I am. And Paul was talking to the pagan Greeks in Acts 17, and he says that it’s in him that we live and move and have our being.

He is the source. He’s the giver of all life because He Himself is life. But the life He gives is not simply physical life.

God created us not just to live physically here on this earth, but God created us to live spiritually forever. When we die and these bodies go into the ground, or these bodies get cremated, or these bodies get lost at sea, or whatever happens to them, there is a part of us that lives on forever. And that part of us was created to live with God forever.

Now we through sin damage that relationship where we deserve separation from God. Make no mistake, everybody, as far as I understand the Bible, everybody gets eternal life. It’s just a matter of where you spend it and who you spend it with.

Do we spend our life, the part of us that lives on after this body is gone, do we spend that eternally separated from God? Or do we spend it with Him in His heaven as He designed us to do? He designed us to have life and not just life that lasts here on earth, but life that lasts forever in His presence.

God designed us for that kind of life. He created us in His image. He created us to know Him and to follow Him freely in the path of righteousness.

And yet we messed that up through sin. It became His mission to redeem us. It says that life, verse 4, was the light of men.

The life was the light of men. Folks, we don’t know God because of our own efforts. I study my Bible and I pray, so surely there’s some effort to it.

I get what you’re saying. But folks, the only reason we know anything about God is because he’s revealed it. Now, the Bible teaches that we can look at creation and see that there’s a God.

We can see the light of conscience, that little voice inside of us that says, no, no, don’t do that. And we can know something about what he expects from us. We can know something of his law.

but to really understand who He is and to really understand what He wants from us. We see that through the light of Christ and we see that through His revealed scriptures where He’s told us everything that He wants us to know. We didn’t create the world for us to look at the glory of the rocks and trees and the stars and the skies and know there’s a God.

God did that. God created those things to shout out to us that He’s here. We didn’t put the conscience in ourselves.

God did. We didn’t send Jesus Christ, God did. We didn’t go looking for His Word, He sent it to us.

Even though we all like sheep had gone astray. So we don’t know God because of our own efforts. The Bible paints a picture many times of us going through life, groping around in the darkness.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in parts of this building after dark when there’s not a light on in this back hallway. You can’t see anything. I mean, literally, you cannot see anything.

I will be back there. I might as well have my eyes closed, save the energy of holding them open because I can’t see anything anyway. Trying to feel out for walls, trying to get to where there’s a switch.

That’s how we are spiritually apart from God. We don’t find our way to God because there’s something righteous in us. There’s no spiritual life in us.

The Bible paints the picture that we are dead men and that we are groping around in the darkness. Generally, dead people don’t find stuff. And generally people groping around in the darkness can’t see anything.

We’ve got both those strikes against us. But it’s Christ who shines the light in the world. It’s Christ who enables us to see.

His life is the light of men. The life that he gives us. The illumination that he gives us.

The example that he gave us and came right down in front of us. Where no man, the Bible says, had seen God at any time. No man sees the Father.

But if we want to know what He’s like, the only begotten Son has declared Him. We know what God’s like because we see Jesus Christ. He points us back to God. He opens our eyes so that we can see the things of God.

He opens our ears so that we can hear the voice of God. His coming brought light to us, shone the light on the darkness for centuries. For centuries, what had passed for spirituality and still does today was the idea that if we could just be good enough, maybe He’ll be okay with us.

and say that passed for centuries, but that’s still the idea of most people today, even in a lot of our churches. And sadly enough, sometimes from the pulpit. Hey, just be good enough.

God will accept you. God will love you. You just got to try harder.

You’re not going to hear that here. Because that’s not what the Bible teaches. People struggle to obey rules and go through rituals that they could give their whole lives to these things and still remain strangers from God.

Because we’re spiritually dead. Because we’re lost in the dark. And what we needed was for Jesus to shine the light to where we could see him and find our way.

It says the light shineth in darkness. That’s why the light was such a game changer, because the world was so dark. And this light shone into the darkness.

Without God’s holiness, the world is utterly dark. If you don’t believe me, look at the direction that society goes, or the direction that a person goes, when we reject God. Things get darker and darker and darker.

I submit to you that the further societies get from God, the more violent they become. The less we treat other people like human beings. We look at all the sin and all the evil that there is, and it’s all tied to getting further and further and further from God and His holiness.

And you look at Noah’s day and how awful things were. Those people had rejected God thoroughly. And the Bible says that every thought of everyone’s heart was only evil all the time.

We’re not there. As bad as things are now, we’re not there. It’s because there are still people who fear the Lord.

But you look in their day, you look in Jesus’ day, and things were pretty dark. There were still people who feared God. But look at what most of the people around were doing.

You’re surrounded by pagan countries who were worshiping these powerless imaginary gods. They’re praying to rocks and trees. Seriously, that’s not an exaggeration.

They are praying to rocks and trees. And then you’ve got the Jews who worship the true God, or at least say they do, but you’ve got the Pharisees and Sadducees. You’ve got the leaders of them.

You’ve got the people who work in the temple, and what they really worship is their own pitiful self-righteousness. Look at how good I am. Look at how long and how many words I can pray with.

Look at all the fringes on my garment. Look how long I stand in the temple. Look at how much money I gave.

Look at me. La, la, la, la, la. That was what they worshipped.

And by and large, not that many people were really all that concerned with what God had told them to do for following God. And it’s into this world that had utterly rejected God and for the most part was worshipping everything but God, that Jesus came and into a world that had embraced the darkness, he’s shown that great beam of light that revealed everything, that made all the sin clear, that showed people where they were wrong before God. There’s a reason why a lot of times we don’t like fluorescent lights, especially as we get older.

We see all the lines, and I’m not making fun of anybody. I’ve started noticing lines around my eyes that weren’t there just a couple years ago. I call these Benjamin, and I call these Madeline.

And I realize, hey, those lines aren’t there in candlelight. But you get under the brightness of the fluorescence and you see everything. God’s light is like that.

We can hide in the dimness and the shadows, but God’s light comes down like a spotlight. And in light of His holiness, we see how unholy we are and where we need to deal with Him. See, God’s light doesn’t shine on us to show the imperfections just so we can feel bad.

God doesn’t care. I really don’t think God’s goal is to make us feel bad. God’s goal is to point out what needs to be fixed and what needs to be dealt with before him.

And that light shone into a very dark place. And Jesus began to open people’s eyes. And it says, in the darkness, comprehended it not.

Now you’re going to hear me say something I don’t like to say, but I was wrong. I’ve been teaching this passage wrong for years. Until I noticed what it really says.

Please don’t be scared. Anytime I hear somebody say, well, I found this new teaching, that makes me very nervous. The difference between what I’ve taught and what I’m going to teach you today doesn’t affect anybody’s salvation or really any doctrine.

But I’ve been reading it for years. The darkness couldn’t even understand it, that word comprehend it. The light and the darkness were so different.

The darkness couldn’t even comprehend what he was doing. And I got to looking at that word, and I thought, that doesn’t really, it’s not contradictory, but it doesn’t really fit with where it seems like this passage is going. And so I began to look at that word comprehend.

And in the Greek, I don’t remember what the Greek word was, but I was looking at Greek words this week. That word comprehend can mean multiple things. It can also mean overcome.

It can mean surrounded and overcome. And I thought, well, which one is it? And I started looking at other places in the New Testament where it’s used, and more often than not, it means surrounded and overcome.

And I thought, well, that really fits in better with what this passage seems to be saying. it’s not that the light and darkness were so different that the darkness couldn’t understand the light now the darkness is still darkness and the light is still light but I think when the light comes streaming through and conquers the darkness I think the darkness knows exactly what’s happening now I understand this to mean that what he’s saying here is the light shone in the darkness and the darkness could not overcome the light the darkness could not stop the light and that’s true there’s no such thing as darkness it’s just the absence of light. I mean, I tease about it when Charlie flips the switches or Luana or whoever is in here helping when we’re getting ready to go home on Sundays.

If I’m still in here and the lights go out I say, who turned on the dark? See, y’all don’t even think that’s funny. I do, but we know that there’s no such thing, let me go turn on the dark.

There just is dark until we turn on the light. And you know what? When the light bulb comes on, it’s not like the dark and the light, duke it out, and we’re unsure for a few minutes who’s going to be the winner.

We’re not waiting until the next morning for the results of the electoral college. Who’s going to win, the light or the dark? We know that light comes on, and the dark, it’s gone.

There’s nothing the dark can do about it, as long as that light is there. So when it says here that the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not, he’s saying there was nothing the darkness could do to overcome the light. The light of Jesus Christ shone into that world, and the world was forever changed.

You know what? I think that’s a word we need to hear today. Because we sit here and we know that Jesus Christ and his light have come into the world, but we look at the world around us and we see how dark it is.

And I think sometimes we feel like we’re losing. I feel like we think sometimes that the cause of Christ is losing because there’s so much darkness in the world. No, the darkness can do nothing to overcome the light.

If there’s too much darkness, we just need to shine more light because the light shines in darkness and the darkness can do nothing to overcome it. And when Jesus Christ shone His light into the world of the pagans and the Pharisees and the Sadducees, you know what, there was still darkness in corners of that world, but there were also men who found their way back to God and were reconciled through Jesus Christ. And it didn’t stop there. It’s going on even to our day.

There are people today who will give their lives to Jesus Christ who will be reconciled to God because of what He did and because of the light that He’s shown on this world. Folks, He didn’t come to just stay a baby. He came to change everything.

He came to shine a light into a very dark world. He came to radically change and redeem his creation. We no longer have to sit here and worry about the darkness and fear that the darkness is going to win.

The light has already come. And by its very presence, it has changed everything. It’s changed lives.

It’s changed people’s eternities. It’s changed families. Folks, it has changed nations.

And it still can do those things today. The light of Jesus Christ. He gives us life because we’re spiritually dead. That’s.

. . Folks, we can’t make it back to God on our own.

We are spiritually dead. And yet He comes to give us life. He brings us light because we’re lost in darkness.

We can’t find our way back to God because we’re so lost in darkness we don’t even know that we’re separated from God. And yet He’s come to radically change everything. He shook up the entire world and he made it possible for men to be reconciled to God in a way that we hadn’t been for 4,000 years by the time he came.

And because of it, his coming has forever changed our relationship with God. We’re no longer stuck groping in the darkness. We have the light of Jesus Christ to lead us back to God.

That light shines in darkness. That light lights men and shines in the darkness and there’s nothing that the darkness can do to overcome it. And where we were strangers from God, separated from his love, outside of his family, Jesus came in all of his light and all of his glory, and he paid for our sins so that that relationship with God could be changed, so that our sins could be forgiven, so that he would be our father, and we would have the hope of eternal life with him, and that while we’re here, we can walk in his light and in his love.

Jesus forever changed our Relationship with God the Father.

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