The Light of the World

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I’m going to ask you to turn with me this morning to John chapter 9. I want to talk to you a little bit about light and sight and blindness this morning. You know, I’ve seen a few different documentaries that have been put out where Western doctors will go to third world countries to do operations.

And they’ll talk about the work that they do and the people that they treat and the difference they make in their lives. And one that stands out to me is a documentary that came out several years ago about these doctors who were going to some country to do eye operations on people who had never, many of them had been born blind and had never been able to see in their whole lives. And so they would go and do these operations.

And when they were completed, a lot of them were successful. A lot of them, in spite of the fact that these people were born blind We think it must have been some incredibly complex problem. It ended up being, in some cases, a fairly simple procedure for these doctors, as long as they had the equipment and the access to doctors.

And so many of these operations were successful and ended up with people being able to see for the first time in their lives. And these people were just overwhelmed, some of them in tears. And I think we can kind of understand what it would, we have a little bit of a grasp of what it would mean to us if we woke up one morning, and all of a sudden we couldn’t see, and how devastating that would be to us.

And then to get that sight back, I think we have some concept of how life-changing that would be. But these people were just so incredibly overwhelmed because they’d been in this circumstance for so long, for many of them, again, all their lives, they’d been in this circumstance where not only were they missing sight, but they didn’t even know what they were missing because they were born that way. They were not only blind, but they didn’t even understand what it was to see.

And so the first time that they’re able to experience this, it just totally turns their world upside down. And I think it’s impossible really for us, if you’ve ever been able to see, to fully appreciate exactly what that means to them. I mean, I’ll watch some of these people and the tears of joy.

And I’ve had some good moments in life, but I don’t think I’ve ever been that overwhelmed by being able to see. I take it for granted. But for them, for something so totally new, it was life-changing.

And again, it’s hard for us to appreciate how remarkable the change was. But we see in John chapter 9 that Jesus offers a spiritual change that’s even more life-changing. He offers something to us that’s even more remarkable than this.

And so if you would this with me to John chapter 9, if you haven’t already. And if you would, if you’re able to, stand with me while we read. We’re not going to read, the story takes the whole chapter, but we’re not going to read the whole chapter for the sake of time this morning.

We’re going to skip ahead through the middle and just kind of talk about the middle part of the chapter. But we’re going to start in verse 1, and it says, Now as Jesus passed by, he saw a man who was blind from birth, and his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him.

I must work the works of him who sent me while it is day. The night is coming when no man can work, no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.

And when he had said these things, he spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. And he said to him, Go wash in the pool of Siloam, which is translated scent. So he went and washed and came back seeing.

Therefore the neighbors and those who previously had seen that he was blind said, Is not this he who sat and begged? Some said, This is he. Others said, He is like him.

He said, I am he. Therefore they said to him, How were your eyes opened? And he answered and said, A man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes and said to me, Go to the pool of Siloam and wash.

So I went and washed and I received my sight. Then they said to him, Where is he? He said, I do not know.

So what’s happened? Jesus has seen this man who’s been blind all of his life, sees him sitting there. The disciples say, Did he sin or did somebody else sin so that he was born blind?

And Jesus said, This all happened so that the glory of God could be shown. And he spits in the dirt. This has been one of those miracles that has fascinated me my whole life, and as a germaphobe, has kind of disturbed me my whole life.

But I guess it’s Jesus. His spit is perfect. So he spits in the dirt.

He makes mud. He puts it on the man’s eyes and says, go wash it off. And even if you’re not in the habit of obeying Jesus, go wash the spit mud off your face.

Yes, sir. All right. So he goes, and then other people who know him said, Wait, weren’t you blind and sat there and begged?

And other people said, no, it can’t be him. It just looks like him. So we’re going to skip ahead to verse 35.

After the Pharisees had gotten involved, and we’ll talk a little bit about that, and the Pharisees had thrown him out of the synagogue for what happened. Verse 35 says, Jesus heard that they had cast him out. And when he had found him, he said to him, do you believe in the Son of God?

He answered and said, who is he, Lord, that I may believe in him? And Jesus said to him, You have both seen him, and it is he who is talking with you. Then he said, Lord, I believe.

And he worshipped him. And Jesus said, For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind. Then some of the Pharisees who were with him heard these words and said to him, Are we blind also?

Jesus said to them, If you were blind, you would have no sin. But now you say, We see, therefore your sin remains. and you may be seated.

So we see here what happened, just to recap, is that Jesus healed a blind man in order to show the power and glory of God. The man had been blind since birth, and there was a tradition among the rabbis that it was assumed that if you were born with some kind of condition like that, some kind of thing that you’d had from birth, maybe you were somebody who had what they would have called a deformed leg from birth and you couldn’t walk right, you were blind from birth, maybe you were like Carly Jo and had a heart defect that’s been there since you were born. It was assumed that it was there because either your parents had sinned or your grandparents had sinned, or even that you had, I read in one of the commentaries this week, that even you had sinned somehow in the womb.

Now the Bible teaches that we are sinners by nature in the womb, but assuming that somebody committed an act of sin, I don’t know how they get to that point that a baby makes that choice. but all right. And so the disciples, based on that, based on what they had been taught by the rabbis their whole life, they said, okay, is this man guilty of something or was it his parents?

And that’s where Jesus said it wasn’t either of those things. He said the man’s blindness served a purpose, and that purpose was to show people what God could do, what God was capable of doing. And Jesus added to that, he said that was the purpose of it in verse 3, but he added in verse 4 that he had come to show what God could do.

So to them, this might look like a chance encounter. Jesus just happened past the blind man one day. He said that man’s condition has been there for years to show what God could do.

And I’ve shown up here on this day to show what God can do. You can see pretty quickly, it’s the plan of God for a long time to orchestrate these things to show his own power and glory. And it’s then that in verse 5, Jesus called himself the light of the world.

He said, this man needs to see, and God can make him see again. I’ve come to do the works of my Father. I am the light of the world.

He came to bring light, literally, into the eyes of this man who had been blind from birth. It demonstrates the power and the glory of God clearly, because I can’t do that. You can’t do that.

We might have a surgeon in the room at some point who says, I could do that with a simple operation. Yeah, but you can’t do it with spit and dirt. Jesus didn’t even need a scalpel and a medical degree.

No, he called himself the light of the world, and he was sent by the Father as the one and only source of spiritual light to men who are stumbling around in the darkness of sin. And he talks about that. Later on at the end of the chapter, as we get to the Pharisees, he talks about them being in darkness and being in blindness because of their sin.

So he spits in the dirt and he makes a compress of mud in verse 6 to put on the man’s eyes. And I told you, this has puzzled me my whole life. Jesus could have touched the man and healed him.

For that matter, Jesus could have spoken a word and healed him. Jesus could have thought it and not said a word and healed him. And so I thought, why of all things would he spit in the dirt and put mud on the man’s face?

I did some research on this and there are people who say, well, some of the pagan religions they used magic rituals and they would involve mud. Okay, I don’t think Jesus was taking his cue from pagan rituals. That sounds nothing like the Jesus we read about in the Gospels.

But think about what happened in the earliest chapters of Genesis. Day six of creation. God gets ready to make his crowning work the pinnacle of all creation.

He decides to create you and me in his own image. and he could have started with just his word, although he did that. But the book of Genesis records that he took the dust of the earth and formed it into person and he breathed his life into it.

He was able to create from the dirt. And when I started thinking about that, it occurred to me that there’s a very real possibility here. This is just speculation on my part, but there’s a very real possibility here that Jesus was showing himself, was demonstrating the power of God by him as God the Son doing again what he and God the Father had done the first time.

Taking dirt and using it in an act of creation to bring new life to this man. You study that out for yourself, see what you think. But that’s the conclusion I came to about why I think he used the dirt.

And I sent the man to wash. Again, he could have just said, you’re healed. Sometimes he did that.

Sometimes he did that when the people came to him and said, would you heal me? because they’ve already demonstrated some faith, some belief in him. But Jesus approached this man.

Jesus could have healed him with a word, but Jesus, I believe, wanted him to understand the importance of faith. So there was going to be a requirement here for obedience. Go and wash in the pool of Siloam.

And sometimes we get hung up on the details when God tells us, do this, do that. I think that’s part of why the gospel is so difficult for some people. You mean I’ve just got to believe?

There’s got to be more to it than that. And I had a friend who said one time, If you told some people that what they had to do was get down on their hands and knees and crawl down I-40 all the way to Oklahoma City in order to be saved, if God said do that, they would have no problem doing that. But tell them they’ve just got to believe they can’t wrap their minds around it.

What God is really looking for is for us to have faith in what He says and believe what He says. Wait a minute, you’re telling me I’ve got to go wash in the pool of Siloam? What’s the pool of Siloam going to do for me?

Nothing. It was the faith, him believing that what Jesus said would happen, would happen. So he sent the man in verse 7 to go and wash.

And when the neighbors asked in verses 8 through 12 how the man had gained his sight, he didn’t hesitate to tell them what had happened. Now at this point, he’s not necessarily a believer in Jesus, a follower of Jesus yet, but he knows what Jesus has told him and he’s gone and done it and he’s seen the results. So he didn’t hesitate to tell them that Jesus had healed him and here’s how.

And so in the intervening verses that we didn’t read because of time’s sake, verses 13 through 34, the Pharisees got involved, as they tended to do, and they looked at this and they couldn’t just say, oh, cool miracle, and go on with their day. No, they had to get involved and start casting aspersions at Jesus. They had to accuse Him of sin.

Number one, they didn’t like that He was healing people on the Sabbath. Oh, He made mud. It’s work.

He’s God. It’s not that difficult, all right? but they didn’t believe that.

So they didn’t like him, and they didn’t like that he was healing on the Sabbath, so they tried to accuse him of sinning. They tried to intimidate the man, the blind man and his parents, into going along with their accusations. When they couldn’t make it stick, they tried to enlist this family to back up what they had to say with the threat of, you’re going to be thrown out of the synagogue.

Now for us, we might say, oh, you’re going to throw me out of the church? Big deal, there’s another one right down the street. there’s literally another one right down the street you could go there but for them the synagogue was not just a place of worship it was the center of the community you’re basically being turned into an outcast in your own community and so the parents the parents are sort of chicken out I believe he’s an adult at this point but his his parents sort of chicken out and say ask him don’t ask us about jesus ask him they put it back on the son and so the people at the pharisees asked the other man, the blind man, about Jesus being a sinner.

And he answered this way. He said in verse 25, one thing I know. He says, I don’t know whether he’s a sinner or not, but one thing I know that though I was blind, now I see.

He says, I can’t tell you everything about Jesus. I can’t tell you everything he’s ever done. I can’t answer every question that you could ask me about Jesus.

I just know this is what Jesus has done for me. By the way, keep that in mind. Keep that in your back pocket, if you’re ever worried about telling somebody about Jesus, sometimes we think, I can’t tell other people about Jesus because I don’t have all the answers.

I don’t have a fancy degree. I’m not the pastor. I haven’t studied all these things.

Let me tell you, I have some degrees, and I’m the pastor, and I’ve studied these things. I do not have all the answers. You are not expected to have all the answers before you go tell somebody about Jesus.

Just like this man, I can’t tell you everything about Jesus and everything he’s ever done, but I know what he’s done for me. That I can tell you. Keep that in your back pocket and just tell people what you know Jesus has done for you.

And so as a result of him saying this, I was blind and now I see. They threw him out of the synagogue. They cast him right out of there.

Jesus heard about it and he came back to the man where we pick back up in verse 35. And he said, do you believe in the son of God? And the man said, if I knew who he was, I would believe in him.

And Jesus said, the son of God is right here in not only do you see him, I don’t know if you picked up on that, but he said, you’ve seen him. You’ve seen him because he healed you. He says, you’ve seen him and he stands right here talking to you.

He said, buddy, you’re face to face with the son of God. And that was all it took for the man because he’d seen the evidence of what Jesus could do. And so in verse 38, we see that he believed and he worshiped Jesus.

Now, Jesus said, for judgment, I have come into this world that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind. And the Pharisees then asked, well, are we blind too? I don’t know why the Pharisees always had to ask these ridiculous questions.

Jesus, do you think we’re spiritually blind too? It’s like, haven’t you been hurt enough already? I don’t know how many times you’re going to tilt at this particular windmill before you just give up and realize you’re not going to outfox Jesus here.

Are we blind too? And Jesus told them that they were indeed blind because they considered themselves righteous in spite of their sin. He talks about that in verses 40 and 41.

He said, you’ve got this sin here that you don’t even see right in front of you. And the effect of this story is that Jesus brought sight to the blind, and he revealed the blindness of those who thought they could see. That’s what he did.

That’s what he was doing when he said, I came to show what the Father could do. Because there were people who were blind who needed sight. And I’m not just talking physically, but spiritually.

There were people who blind who needed sight, but there were also some people who were blind and thought they could see who needed to realize their blindness before they could have true sight. You know what I mean by that? They didn’t realize their need, and so they weren’t going to do anything about it.

It’s like if I have cancer and don’t know I have cancer, I’m not going to go get treatment, am I? They didn’t recognize their blindness, and until they did, they were stuck in it. But Jesus brought the man physical sight, But he also brought the man’s spiritual sight later on in this chapter when he revealed himself to be the Son of God who could save this man from his sins.

He wasn’t just a magician who healed the man. He said, look at what I did with healing you. Look at the power I demonstrated and understand who I really am.

He told the man he was the Son of God. The man’s eyes were open and he believed. Jesus revealed the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees.

And you know, a lot of times I was thinking about this phrase spiritual blindness this week. A lot of times if we talk about somebody being spiritually blind, we think of people that are openly walking in darkness. We think of people out there who are living wrong.

People who’ve embraced the world. That’s what we think of when we say somebody spiritually blind. We think, oh, they’re living in some kind of ongoing sinful habits and practices.

They’re not doing the right thing. They’re not going to church. We think of that as spiritual blindness.

That’s what the Pharisees thought too. The Pharisees thought the spiritually blind are those out there. They’re those who are not doing the right things, that are not attending the right services, not performing the right rituals.

It’s those people out there. But Jesus showed them that those who think they’re righteous on their own are blind. You can be doing the right things.

You can be acting religious. You can be going to church. You can be giving money.

You the best of your ability. You can be doing all these things. But if you’re thinking you are righteous on your own, if you’re thinking that you are on good terms with God because of anything you’ve done, if you’re thinking I’m living in such a way that God’s going to be happy with me and I’m giving him my best and that’s good enough.

If you’re walking around thinking I am good enough for God on my own, that’s the real spiritual blindness. And it’s an even more dangerous spiritual blindness because it masquerades as sight. We think we’re right with God because we’re doing all these things.

So we don’t even realize, kind of like the man born blind, we don’t even realize that we’re blind. We don’t even realize any difference. We don’t recognize what sight would be to compare it to.

It all boils down to the fact that the Pharisees were so stinking blind, they couldn’t even see their own sin. They couldn’t even see their own sin. So what they needed, which consequently is what they rejected, was they needed Jesus because Jesus is the only source of true spiritual light to us.

People think they can find the light their own way. They think they can find the light. They think they can find the right path on their own.

Don’t confuse that, especially if you’re new here. Don’t be confused about what I’m saying. I’m not saying, when I say, oh, you can’t find the right path on your own, I’m not saying you need me and you need this church and you need what I’m telling you.

I’m saying we all need Jesus to show us the right way. It’s not that I’ve got all the answers and you listen to what I say and you do what I say and you’ll be on the right path. It’s me saying we all start out blind and we need Jesus to put us on the right path.

See, what I’m telling you, not just today, but any day, has no more authority and no more importance than anything else if it deviates from what Jesus has said. It’s just words. The authority and the importance of what I tell you is tied directly to what Jesus said.

And if what I say doesn’t match up with it, then I’m wrong. Understand that. I want to be very clear about that.

This is not me saying, you’ve got to do it my way. This is me saying, we’ve got to do it Jesus’ way. He is the source of spiritual light.

They think they can find God on their own through religion. If I just do enough of the right stuff, if I get baptized, I can’t tell you the number of people that have come to me at a service or through the week, over the years, and have said, I need to be baptized. I said, great, why?

Because I need to get right with God. That’s not going to do it. You’ve got to get right with God first. Otherwise, that’s just an empty religious ritual. Well, if I observe the Lord’s Supper, if I take the juice and the cracker, no, those are just rituals.

You’re not going to get closer to God that way. They think they can find God through philosophy. If I just think about it and reason about it, enough.

I think it’s important to think and reason and use critical reasoning, not just blindly follow everything you hear, but at the same time, Human philosophy is not going to get us closer to God. Sometimes we think we can find God through feelings. Well, I feel like this will make me closer to God.

Or I feel like God would be okay with this. Forget what God’s Word says. I feel like the God I worship would be okay with this.

We are never going to feel our way to God. Have your feelings ever lied to you? Have you ever been a teenager?

I think most of us were at one point. Your feelings will lie to you. Because you can feel something, by the way, that’s not just true of teenagers.

It happens to adults too. But our feelings change, and they mislead us. We think we can find our way to God through good works.

Let me tell you, there’s no amount of good things we can do that are going to be good enough to move us any closer to God. Jesus said He was the only way. He said He was the only source of light that can pierce the darkness within us.

That He’s the only source of light that can illuminate every darkened corner of our hearts. He’s the only source of light that can shine on the path that leads us back to God. He’s the only one who can do that.

He said, I am the light of the world. Later on in John, he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. I think that’s pretty clear that he’s saying, I am exclusively the way to God.

And some people say, well, you’re taking that out of context. It’s hard to take that out of context when the very next breath he says, no man comes to the Father but by me. He’s the only way.

In the previous chapter that we looked at a couple weeks ago, he said, I am the light of the world. Remember me telling you about him standing in front of the lanterns, the lamps at the Feast of Tabernacles? These things were supposed to light up the temple, but he’s the light that gives light to the whole world.

He said, I am the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life. He said, he is able to bring us the light we need.

He said in John 12, I have come as a light into the world that whoever believes in me should not abide in darkness. Jesus brought light into the eyes, into the perception of this blind man to demonstrate that he could bring light into the hearts of darkened sinners and show us the way back to God. Not only show us, but bring us back to God.

And so through this, Jesus calls us to stop trusting in our own sight, where we think we can see, where we think we can get there on our own. He says, stop trusting in that. That’s what the Pharisees were doing.

They walked in the false light of their own goodness. and if anybody could have been the children of light based on their own good works or their own wisdom, it would have been the Pharisees. They were the super religious people of their day.

If anybody was going to get there by being good and religious, it was the Pharisees. But it wasn’t enough. He said they were full of sin.

They were blind to how sinful and needy they really were. They were doubly in trouble here. And he said in Matthew chapter 5, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.

He told people, look at the best, most religious people you know, the ones who are out there working their tails off every day, trying to do things, trying to get extra credit, and do things so that God will be pleased with them. Look at them. Got a picture of them in your mind?

Now realize that if you’re not better than they are, you won’t get into the kingdom. There goes my hope for getting in on my own. I look at the best godliest people I know and realize that I’ve got to be better than that.

That’s a tall order. It’s not enough. Our own sight, our own light, our own goodness is not enough.

Instead, we have to turn to Jesus to open our eyes and give us light. We all walk in darkness. We’re all stuck in darkness.

That’s how we start out. That’s our default position. we are born sinners.

This darkness we’re stuck in is called sin and it separates us from God and it condemns us to an eternity separated from him. Not just this feeling of separation where we walk through this world and we feel like God is distant, but also the realization that one day we will be separated from him for eternity in a place called hell. And I believe what Jesus said about the literal fires and the literal suffering of hell, but I believe the worst part of hell is the separation from God’s love.

As bad as all of the rest of that is, to have to go one day separated from the love of God is bad enough, but to know you get up the next day and it’s the same thing over and over again. And that’s not because God enjoys that. God said our sin has separated us from Him.

God is holy. God is just. He can’t just let our sin go any more than a judge could say, well, I know you’ve been convicted of murder of all those people, but you know what? We’ll let it go this time.

We’d look at that judge and say, are you kidding? How do we get this guy off the bench? And yet that’s what we want God to do.

God’s holy and our sin has to be punished. But at the same time, God is loving and said, we didn’t have to take the punishment. And so that’s why he sent Jesus Christ to take responsibility for our sins.

He had no sin of his own. So when he was put through the agony of the cross, it wasn’t Himself, it was for us. He took responsibility for our sins.

And He was nailed to that cross and He shed His blood and He died to pay for our sins in full. So that that slate could be wiped clean, so that we could be forgiven. So that God could look on us and instead of seeing our sin, He could see the righteousness of Christ. And this morning, God offers you forgiveness.

God offers you a clean slate. God offers you light and a relationship with Him. God offers to bring you into His family.

He offers you eternal life. All the things that Jesus promised, He offers to you this morning. And you’re not going to get it by relying on your own sight and your own goodness.

But by realizing you’ve sinned and you’ve fallen short of God’s standards and you’re separated from Him. And that your only hope is that Jesus suffered, bled, and died for you. And rose again to prove it.

This morning, if you understand that you’ve sinned and need a Savior. And you believe that Jesus Christ died for you. Pay for your sin in full.

And all that’s left for you to do is to acknowledge that to God. And ask Him for the forgiveness and the salvation that He promised.