Jesus, the Savior of God’s People

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For all the focus of this season on the baby in the manger, and that is important, Jesus came as more than just a baby. And on Sunday mornings for the last several weeks, we’ve been looking at the Gospel of John 1 where John writes about the coming of Jesus. And I’ve told you this many, many times.

Some of you may not have been here until today, so bear with me as I repeat this again. If you’ve been with us, bear with me as I repeat it for those who haven’t been here. As we’re looking at John and his account of the coming of Christ, he doesn’t spend time going over the details the way Matthew and Luke do of what happened in Bethlehem, but he explains why what happened in Bethlehem was so important.

He goes into the significance of what happened in Bethlehem. And that’s what we’re going to look at this morning. We’ve gone through John chapter 1 looking at several of the things that John says about the importance of this event.

And as we get to the part we’re going to look at today, John really hits heavily the idea of Jesus being our Savior, of having come to save us. We’ve looked at Him being God. We’ve looked at Him being Creator.

We’ve looked at Him being the light of the world and bringing spiritual life. Now John gets to the idea of Him being our Savior and bringing us into the family of God. And it reminds me of a couple that I know that took in a foster child years ago and didn’t know how long they’d have him.

Sometimes in foster care you never know if you’re going to have him for years and years or just a night. So they took this boy in and he ended up being with them for quite a while. One day the social worker called him and said circumstances had worked in such a way that they had the option to adopt this boy if they wanted to.

And so they asked him, would you like us to adopt you? You’ve been here all these months. Would you like this to be your home?

Would you like us to be your family? And the boy said, yes, but I have a brother who’s also in foster care. And I don’t want to be adopted unless he is too.

And so they ended up with two children. They ended up adopting both brothers. But it was because the older brother had said, no, no, you’ve got to take my little brother.

And that’s in a way similar to what Jesus has done for us. Now, Jesus didn’t need to be adopted by his very nature. He is God.

He’s God the Son, as John is abundantly clear about in the first three verses of this chapter. So I don’t want to get too hung up on the analogy, but in the sense that Jesus is the one saying, we’ve got to bring them along too. See, just as the older brother in the story is the one that got the younger brother adopted and brought into the family because they didn’t even know he existed.

He was in foster care in another part of the state. But just as that older brother said, no, no, they need to come too. It’s what Jesus did for us.

He’s the one that got us our adoption into God’s family. He’s the one that had us brought into the household. And that’s what John’s going to talk about in the passage we look at this morning.

We’re going to be in John 1, and we’re going to start in verse 9. If you have your Bibles, if you would turn there with me, please. If you’re using a device, and there’s a link in our bulletin that will get you right where you need to be, or it’s up on the screen if you don’t have either of those.

And once you find it in some form, if you would stand with us as we read together from God’s Word. Starting in verse 9, and we’re going to read through to verse 13. It says, That was the true light which gives light to every man coming into the world.

This is right after the verse we looked at last week, talking about John the Baptist where he said he was not the light. He was just sent to be a witness of the light. He goes back to talking about Jesus and says that was the true light which gives light to every man coming into the world.

He was in the world and the world was made through him, but the world did not know him. He came to his own and his own did not receive him. But as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become the children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And you may be seated. So this portion of the text continues with what we’ve been looking at. This idea that Jesus invaded the darkness of our world.

And so many of the Christmas songs that we’ve been singing for weeks talk about this idea that there was just darkness. Spiritually speaking, there was just darkness. And then Jesus burst onto the scene with His light that we have never experienced before and would never experience otherwise.

Jesus invaded the darkness around us in our world and He rescued us from it. He rescued us from it and brought us an eternal home with the Father. And what we need to understand and what hopefully you understood if you were with us last week when we talked about John being the last of the prophets before Jesus and him being just the latest in a long line.

If you go throughout the Old Testament, There’s picture after picture and promise after promise and prophecy after prophecy, all pointing forward to Jesus Christ, that His coming was not an accident of history. It was not God making lemonade out of lemons. You know, I told you last week about the lady I knew that said, well, I don’t think it was God’s plan.

I think it happened. And God said, I’ll use this. And I thought, I don’t know what translation we’re looking at here.

But it’s pretty clear in not only the Old Testament, but the Apostle Peter said in Acts chapter 2 that it was by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God. It was God’s plan all along that Jesus would go to the cross. But hopefully you understand, not only from what John says, but from what the rest of Scripture says, that Jesus came to fulfill God’s promises.

This didn’t happen as an accident. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not just one day Jesus showed up and God said, I bet I can do something with this.

This was God’s plan because God had been making promises to mankind since the Garden of Eden about our salvation and about sending Jesus Christ. And so he says in verse 9, that was the true light which gives light to every man coming into the world. Now this, as I said a minute ago, this contrasts with John the Baptist. He was not the light. John reflected the light.

And that’s what we’re called to be as Christians, just like John the Baptist was. We’re called to be sort of like the moon. I was so disappointed as a child to realize the moon doesn’t actually glow.

It doesn’t produce any light of its own. I don’t know why I was disappointed by that. I was kind of disappointed in the moon.

The moon just reflects the light of the sun. The sun is the source of the light, and the moon is a mirror that reflects that light. And that’s what we’re called to do.

We are not the light. Just like John the Baptist was not the light, just like John the Apostle who wrote this was not the light, We’re only the light insofar as we reflect the one who is the source of the light. We’re just mirrors.

And hopefully we’re good mirrors. But that’s all we are is reflecting His light. And so to put verse 9 here, that He was not that light, right after verse 8 talking about John the Baptist, is trying to make it clear that Jesus is the source of spiritual light.

And that idea of light in the previous passages we’ve looked at is tied to the idea of spiritual life. That for us to have any spiritual life, for us to have any goodness in us, for us to have any relationship with the Father at all, it has to come through Jesus Christ. To the extent that any of us have anything good in us is because of Jesus Christ. Now, I know there’s immediately an objection in some people’s minds. You’re saying if you don’t know Jesus Christ, they can’t do good things.

That’s not what I’m saying. By human standards, there are lots of good people around that are not Christians. But by God’s standards, by God’s standards, none of us are good.

By God’s standards, I’m a sinner. And let me tell you, I’ve lived a pretty boring life. I didn’t go out and get into lots of trouble.

As a matter of fact, one time I went to buy a new shotgun for hunting season. And I went to the Walmart there in Seminole and went to get my background check and they put in all my information. And they said, well, you know, sometimes the system, it can take as much as eight minutes, you’re done.

The guy said, I’ve never seen a background check come back that quickly. I said, I’ve lived a really boring life. All right.

I’ve lived a pretty boring life, but even by God’s standards, I’m a sinner. We all are. Any goodness by God’s standard is because of Jesus Christ and what He’s given us.

Even the Bible talks about the light of conscience. And we all have consciences. We all have, unless there’s something really, really wrong with us, we all have a conscience, that voice within us that tells us, that reminds us right and wrong.

The Bible even says that is the result of God’s law being written on our hearts. That’s not just because we’re good enough to figure it out. God has put something in us that recognizes right and wrong.

So as Christians, the goodness and the light that’s in us, we don’t get to boast about it. We don’t get to look down our noses at non-believers and act like we’re better than they are because any goodness that’s in us comes from Jesus Christ. But even in the lost world that does not know Him, any goodness that’s there, really even by human standards, is just a reflection of us being His creation. He is the source of all spiritual light, and He shines out in the darkness for all people to see.

Now that doesn’t mean, when it says the light is given to all men, it does not mean that everyone will be saved. Jesus said there is a broad way that leads to destruction and many there would be that find it. But this is not a contradiction with those verses because for it to say Jesus gives light to all men, He does, but it also says in this passage that not all men receive it.

He shines in the darkness, but many of us who dwell in darkness reject that light, recoil from that light. Sort of like on the rare occasion that I’ve ever been pulled over. Usually for a tag light out.

I’m not going to go there. I was going to say my. .

. No, I will. I don’t get pulled over for speeding usually because I drive like an old person.

And some of you say, I drive fast. I’m just telling you what other people have said. I drive like an old person. So the rare occasions I’ve been pulled over, it’s usually been for a tag light out.

They come up to you with that blinding light in your eyes and you kind of recoil like that. That’s what the darkness does. So He gives light to all men.

It doesn’t mean that all men receive it. Because we have an unfortunate tendency to overlook the salvation of the Lord when it’s right in front of us. Jesus came as this light that was promised and it was right there in front of us, but so many people rejected it.

So many people passed it up when it was right in front of them. And not just in Jesus’ day, but in our day too it still happens. That the light, the truth, the answer is right there in front of people.

And still they’d rather reject it and go another way. it says in verses 10 and 11, He was in the world and the world was made through Him and the world did not know Him. Do you notice that connection there?

It says the world didn’t know Him and we normally pick up on that. But there at the beginning of the verse, He’s going back to the earliest verses of the chapter talking about Jesus being the Creator. He made our world and the world still didn’t understand Him or know Him.

It’s not as though Jesus showed up as a stranger to the world and here He is and the world is saying, I don’t know about you. He’s our creator. And we still said, no, thank you.

We still didn’t understand. We still didn’t get it. And then he focuses in a little bit on Israel here.

He came to his own. It’s one thing that he created man and man in general rejected him, but he came to his own. That’s talking about Israel.

That’s talking about the people that God had specifically spent 2,000 years, 3,000 years, something like that, up to that point, revealing that He was going to send the Messiah. All throughout the Old Testament, His fingerprints are all over the place. All these signs pointing to Jesus Christ, they were there.

And when Jesus came, most of Israel at that time said, no, the Pharisees, the authorities, the religious leaders, the mocking crowds, it was all right there in front of them in the Scriptures who the Messiah was going to be. The only way God could have made it any clearer was to send a bright neon blinking sign down saying that here He is. And they still said no. The people who were best equipped to understand God’s plans about the Messiah were some of the ones that most vehemently rejected Him.

He came to the world He had created. They didn’t see Him for who He was. He came to His own people, Israel.

They rejected Him. Salvation can be right in front of us. And we can miss it.

For some of these people, I think it was deliberate. We talked about on a Sunday night, I can’t even remember how long ago it was. But I want to say one of the last couple of times we met on Sunday night and I taught on the book of Mark, the Pharisees and scribes committed blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, which was to be eyewitness to the miracles of Jesus and all that He had come to do and to attribute that to Satan.

And Jonathan made an important point to me afterwards that I don’t think I clarified that night that for many of them it was a knowing rejection. It wasn’t just that they were so hard-hearted they didn’t see it. Many of them saw who He was and still rejected Him.

In some cases, people reject Jesus even though they know deep in their hearts what God said is true. Even though they know who He is and they know what He promised, sometimes people will reject Him anyway. Sometimes the world just rejects Him out of ignorance as well because they don’t see it or haven’t seen it.

This makes me think of a story that I heard a while back. a group of men called the Yuba County Five. One of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard.

And I’m going to go ahead and let you know there’s not a happy ending to the story, Janie, because I gave you false hope last time. In the winter of 1978, there was a group of five men, young men, and most of them were in their late teens or early 20s, and they had gone out to watch a basketball game late one night in a neighboring town in California. All five of these men had some kind of intellectual disability that affected their reasoning, their ability to prioritize.

They could function, but it just made life more difficult for them. These five men drove off to the basketball game, and on their way back, somehow or another, they disappeared on the way back from the basketball game. It was discovered months later that somehow or another they had driven this car a wrong turn.

We don’t know if they did it on purpose. But they ended up on this mountain road high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and they had gotten the car stuck in a snowbank. They abandoned the car, apparently set out on foot, and months later, four of the five were found.

One of the five was never found, but four of the five were found, and they were all found near a cabin, an emergency shelter that was maintained by the Forest Service. some of them appear to have been in it at one point or another one of the men even died inside of the cabin now the reason I’m telling you this and what makes this story so sad is that inside this cabin there was enough food and water and winter clothing and propane heat that they could have survived for months and months and months in that cabin but these men died of starvation and hypothermia for reasons we don’t know don’t understand they didn’t take advantage of any of what was in front of them. They all succumbed to the elements.

One of the men is believed to have lived for weeks. And what makes that story grip at my heartstrings so much is their salvation was right there in front of them. This food, this clothing, this heat, it was all right there.

And I wish I could go back into it was before I was born even, but I wish I could go back in time and find these men and tell them, hey, right here, just open these cans. There’s out there if you just turn the switch on. I wish that I could go and plead with them.

Just use what’s in front of you. Folks, so much of the world around us does that with Jesus Christ. They’re looking for an answer to the problem of sin, of feeling distant from God. They’re looking for the solution to the trouble that they find in their lives.

They’re looking for the solution of the problem of hopelessness. They’re searching, they’re searching, they’re searching, and God has put the answer right in front of us and still we reject it. And that’s what the world’s been doing with him since day one.

And the answer to that, by the way, is not for us to look at the world and say, well, shame on you. If anything, we ought to look at it as a tragedy. It ought to drive us to our knees to pray for them that God would open their eyes.

It ought to lead us in the words of the Puritan writer Richard Baxter to plead with them as dying men to dying men. The answer is right there in front of us. The salvation that God has provided is right there in front of us.

Sometimes we just can’t see it or we just don’t want to see it. We have this tendency, as John outlines, to neglect the salvation that’s right in front of us. So then the natural question becomes, how do we take advantage of this salvation?

How do we get it? And John gives us the answer in the same text. We receive His salvation by believing in Jesus.

He says in verses 12 and 13, But as many as received Him, to them gave He the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Now receiving Him, as it describes in verse 12, it means to acknowledge Him for who He is. Receiving Him here is not necessarily some mystical experience.

Oh, I felt like He came into my life. When John’s talking about they did not receive Him, He’s talking about these people rejected him and his claims. He came and said, I am the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. And they said, no, you are not.

So to receive him, to do the opposite of what they did is to say, yes, you are God’s Son and my Savior. And that’s what it means to believe in him. But it’s not just an up here kind of belief.

Because we all the time believe things up here and then don’t do anything about it. I believe if I keep eating these Christmas goodies, my scale’s going to be mad at me in a few weeks. I believe it, but something’s got to change down here.

We believe all the time the police are going to pull us over for speeding, but do the rest of your feet get heavy? You already know I’m not in that category, but how about the rest of you? We know we’re not supposed to speed, but we do it anyway.

This idea of belief. By the way, the rich young ruler came to Jesus, called him a good teacher, said, what do I need to do to have eternal life? He recognized Jesus as somebody who could point him in the right direction.

Somebody who had authority on this subject. And yet, despite that belief, he went away sad because he wasn’t willing to listen to Jesus. He believed, but he didn’t believe in the sense that it’s talking about here.

To believe in Jesus, to receive him, It means to put our faith entirely in Him. To say that I believe He is God’s Son, I believe He is my Savior, and I believe it so much I’m going to stake my eternity on it. I don’t have a plan B.

I don’t have a backup. I don’t have a net. I’m not trying to work out a side bet with Allah, in case the Jesus thing doesn’t pan out.

I’m not looking at the Bhagavad Gita and saying, what can the Hindu gods do for me just in case? some kind of insurance policy here. Now, I am convinced that Jesus Christ, first of all, that He really existed as a historical figure.

I’m convinced that He claimed to be God, and I’m convinced that He backed those claims up by miracles and by His teaching. I’m convinced that He was crucified on a Roman cross at the behest of the Jewish authorities. I believe that He was buried, and I believe that three days later that tomb was found empty, that the disciples did not steal the body because they were more surprised than anybody.

that Jesus Christ appeared to hundreds of people over the next 40 days alive again when He should have been dead, that many of those saw Him received up into heaven in front of their very eyes, and that those who witnessed these things were so convinced and so shaken by what they had seen that it turned their lives upside down. I am as convinced that Jesus is who He says He is and that He can do what He says He can do as I am of any other fact I know. And folks, that’s not preacher hyperbole.

That’s not me exaggerating because that’s what you pay me to do. I’ve done the research and I’m convinced. I don’t need a backup plan.

I believe Jesus died to pay for my sins and rose again to prove it. And because He did that and because I believe it and because I ask for His forgiveness, I know that I have it. And I know that I’ll be with Him one day.

That’s the kind of belief we’re talking about. Not just belief that says, oh yeah, I believe that’s true. But that says I’m willing to put all my eggs in that basket.

I’m willing to put all my faith in Him. And when we receive Him, it says in verse 12, we receive the right to become children of God. We are adopted into God’s family.

We’re not born there by flesh. We’re not there because some human being, that’s what He’s talking about, being born of blood or the flesh or the will of man. It’s not because some human being came up with the plan and said, you know what, I think it’d be great to be part of God’s family.

Let’s see what we can do to make that happen. It’s because Jesus Christ did all the work. It’s because God from first to last devised the plan and made it happen.

God decided to save us and to adopt us into His family. I’ve said before, I look at the story of the prodigal son and how His greatest hope was that He could come back to the Father and maybe just be a servant. And for the Scriptures to call us God’s children once we come to Him through Jesus Christ, it would be incredible enough for God to look at us as the rebels that we are and the enemies of God that we’ve made ourselves, that Scripture says we’ve made ourselves.

For God to take those enemies and make us His servants, let us be in His household as servants would be incredible enough. But He goes a step further and says, you’re not just coming in as my servants, you’re coming in as my children. And He throws the doors wide open for us to be in His family, not because of any good that we’ve done, but because of what Jesus Christ did.

And how can you receive Him this morning? By believing in His name. By putting your trust completely in Him.

By recognizing that you’ve sinned, just as I have, just as every other human that’s ever lived has, other than Jesus Christ. Recognizing that you’ve sinned and that that sin separates us from God. It leaves us in darkness, as John talks about. That’s not my opinion.

And that’s what the Apostle John said, that we are separated from God and that we are in darkness, but believe Jesus Christ paid for your sins when He suffered and bled and died on the cross, and that He rose again three days later to prove it. And then believe that God means what He says when He offers salvation as a free gift. Not because we earn it or deserve it, we can’t, but simply because He is good enough and kind enough to offer the salvation that we don’t deserve.

And He says all we have to do is put our trust in Him to receive it. This morning, that’s how you receive that salvation. That’s how you are brought into the family of God.

That’s how you’re adopted as His child and enter into this relationship with Him. That’s how you receive the hope and the promise of eternal life. It’s the recognition that Jesus paid for it.

You could not do enough good to undo the wrong that you’ve done. I don’t say that to be mean to you. It’s true of me too.

Couldn’t do enough good. Going to church doesn’t get me into a relationship with God. Now once I have the relationship, it’s helpful to strengthen that relationship, but it doesn’t get me the relationship.

Going to church doesn’t get me a relationship with God. Giving money, being a nice person, being kind to others, religious rituals, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, these things do not get me a relationship with God. It comes one way.

I’m His child one way by believing in His name, putting my faith and my trust in Jesus Christ. That little baby was born to grow up and to die and to rise again. to be our king and to be the only one who can bring us into the family of God.