Come and See Jesus the Light of the World

Introduction

Please be seated. Good job. Well, good morning church. I’m glad to see all of you.

Glad to be here to talk about our theme that we’ve got this month. As Greg mentioned in the announcements, come and see Jesus, uh, the light in the dark world. And there’s a lot of ways to just really apply what we’re going to see there. And I was thinking a lot about this.

You know, we’ve if you’ve been in the church for quite some time, especially in the settings of Bible class and this particular idea of Jesus and the light, it really gets brought into a lot of good application, a lot of good discussion. We think back of when we had an encounter with light that taught us a very applicable lesson. And there’s a lot of ways to take this, I guess, is what I’m getting at. And so one of the things that really stuck out this time in prepping this lesson was how all of the gospel writers use the idea of light and Jesus being that light.

And what you start to find out and I’m just kind of going to share the study with you. All of the gospel writers with the exception of Mark mention the idea of light. Matthew starts his gospel with what Greg had read from Isaiah 9. Matthew 4:16 about the people dwelling in darkness.

They’ve seen this great light. Matthew gets to the end of his gospel and he’s the only one to talk about when Jesus raised from the dead that it was dawn that it was the break of day. As soon as light begins to rise on the horizon, that’s when Mary encountered Jesus. And that’s kind of the idea that you’ll see tie in in just a moment.

that in the beginning there was light. You move into other texts like Luke. Luke also references the idea that Isaiah mentions a light for revelation to the Gentiles. He describes him as the sunrise visiting those in the darkness.

So you can kind of see what Matthew and Luke do. Mark, nothing. But then John chapter 1, chapter 3, chapter 5, chapter 8, chapter 10 and 11 all mention Jesus and light. And so what that then does is have well in the study you kind of gravitate more to that and see well what else can be had about this idea of light.

And I want to share that with you today and hopefully bring about the application that we would tend to bring out when we talk about this subject because there’s so many good things to consider. John chapter 20. If you would go ahead and get into your Bible there, I want to share this with you. And this just kind of brings about the direction we’re going to take this because we’re going to use John throughout our time together.

And what John says, as you see explicitly on the screen, John 8:12, where Jesus declares, “I am the light of the world.” So, we’re going to hit that in just a moment. But John 20, John explains why he wrote his gospel in the first place. You get that in verse 30 and verse 31.

John says, “Many other signs.” Therefore, Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book. But these these signs have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name. So by the time John writes his gospel, Matthew, Mark, and Luke have already had theirs in circulation.

And whenever John presents his gospel, he’s not trying to go for this approach to do this biography that tells all and everything about Jesus. He’s not going to give this uncut version, if you will, of this complete biography. He instead selects seven signs. Of all the signs he said that were there, he only chose seven.

And then his gospel begins to tell the story of who Jesus is. And notice he said that he did many more things. He admitted that. But these signs were plenty enough for the reader, you and I, to come into contact with what’s been shared and bring about this faith.

We’ve got all we need, he says. In fact, the final line of John, look at chapter 21, the very the very final section, the final piece, he says, now there are also many other things that Jesus did. So he’s talking about many other signs, actions, miracles, encounters, all of it’s there. Many things he did, but if every one of them were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would have been written.

It’s just insurmountable, incredible. And one of the most eyeopening signs that John records about Jesus, he does in the very beginning of his gospel. You think about Matthew. Matthew goes into establishing Jesus in chapter 1 as the son of Abraham and then he goes to the son of David like he’s establishing the connection of who Jesus is and why we need to listen to him because he is the me Messiah.

Jews would understand that well you go to Luke look at chapter 1. How does he introduce Jesus? He traces him all the way back to Adam. So further than David, further than Abraham, he goes to Adam.

Mark, nothing again on Mark. But then John, John goes even further in John 1 verse one. He says, “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.” There is no prior moment in creation that you can go to say that Jesus was there than that one.

That’s Genesis 1:1. And so John kicks off the news of what he knows Jesus is in this biography, if you will, to establish that Jesus is the son of God. And he’s going to present it through all of these different signs. So you start to get some of these things unfold that like whenever the Jews were in the wilderness, they had mana fall from heaven.

And Jesus says one of the seven things,”I am the bread of life.” And so they all, “Oh, that’s who he is.” And hopefully make the connection. There’s even another scene that John connects Jesus as Israel had this shepherd and it led them through the wilderness.

Jesus is the good shepherd, he says, that knows his sheep and his sheep follow him. So you start to see what John’s doing. And then John gets to this as we see on the screen. Another I am statement.

He says, and this verse keeps going here. And here’s all of it. John 8:12. I am the light of the world.

He who follows me shall not walk in the darkness, but have shall have the light of life. So where is that connecting to these Jews? Well, in the wilderness, there was no light to have at nighttime. So God brought about this pillar of fire by night that was always there to establish his presence for them to have this well-aware fact that he is among his people at all times.

So Jesus isn’t just this light that comes along and the one among many that you can look to. He is a light for Jerusalem and Israel. He’s also a light for the whole world. And that’s why answering Greg’s question, we rejoice because he came for all of us Gentiles in this room too.

1. Light Brings Life

And he saved us by way of what he came here to do. But above all things, I want us to see how all of this comes together with this concept of light. I am the light of the world. And the first big idea that we can talk about when it comes to light, we get this is that light brings life.

without life there is no light or without light there is no life. You get to John chapter 7 and here’s where things kind of get pretty interesting. Before Jesus presents himself as I am the light of the world, you’ve got this celebration going on in Israel called the feast of tabernacles, the feast of booths. All this was is a time where seven days of that year God’s people would remember their time in the wilderness when they lived in tents.

They had really no home and they were going place to place. And this was to always be remembered so that you don’t forget what God has done to bring you into these new houses with these vineyards. God’s done all of this. So each day of the festival, you had this offering by fire that was done to recall the pillar of fire that led the Israelites by night.

And you get in chapter 8, now if you’d like to see this, this is great. Verse 20, you see that Jesus is in the treasury of the temple. And history teaches us that there’s an enormous candalabbras. These lights that you would have hanging with a bunch of them assembled together.

The candalabbras were erected and lit during this feast in that particular place of the temple. And Jesus was in that part of the temple. And against that setting, Jesus says those words, I am the light of the world. How do you think folks would react to that name if they’re cluing into what he’s actually saying?

He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. And here’s the thing about that festival. Again, after seven days, all of those lights were extinguished. All the candles out.

But Jesus is the light of the world that never goes out. For the other days of the year, there’s no reminder. Seven days, you’ve got this reminder. So imagine living in a cave with no light.

Once a year, a candle is lit, reminding you of what light is like. But then life resumes in the dark. After seven days, you go 358 days without any light. Year after year, this is your custom.

Now, imagine when you have those seven days of light of what you get to discover about life that’s so different than the other 358 days a year. And take it a step further. Imagine the same cave with this constant everlit source that you could make and hold on to day after day, rely on year after year, and it never goes away. But not everyone in the cave has it?

What’s that going to do? How different will will your world be? And imagine that you could have all of this, still living in that cave, not able to see everything all at once, but everywhere you go, like the psalm teaches, Psalm 119:107, “Your light is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” And that’s what we get here.

Jesus is the light that never goes out. And whenever we come to him and follow him, we don’t have to stay in the dark. And as the light, Jesus is the source of spiritual and eternal life. John says that all things came into being.

This is John chapter 1, the very beginning of what he’s going to go on to say about Jesus. He says in verse three, that in him was life and the life was the light of men. So Jesus who is God’s word made alive. Everything that God made known in the flesh, he’s there making the father known.

So of all the descriptions that John could have chosen, he calls him the word. A word expresses thought. Words express feeling. Words communicate ideas and bring about imaginations that you can’t have unless you think upon those words.

We sometimes say, “I just can’t put it into words.” And even though we have up here what we would like to say, we can see the scene clearly, we just can’t express it. Well, that’s the idea here is that Jesus put the mind and the character and the person of God into motion and it was a living exhibit of who God was as a human or who God is. And Jesus brought that and John said he did so many more things on top of that and he became the source of both life and light.

Now think about how light is essential to our physical life. We need it everywhere we go. Plants depend on light to grow and provide that food. We then depend on the animals that depend on those plants.

And you see how it just it’s cyclical. But all of this what light is doing, it does more than help us see. It helps sustain life. We depend on that.

We get that physically. But Jesus came to give more than physical life. The life he gives is this spiritual life, this eternal life, a life that begins whenever we come to know God through Jesus. And that’s where the scriptures help us see a lot.

So the spiritual life that Jesus brings allows us to get close to God. The eternal life that Jesus brings enables us to be with God for all of eternity. Without him, there’s no way to the father. I am the way, the truth, the life.

You see, it all starts to begin to connect. And Jesus is that source. And it is his light that awakens us to know as it was read in Isaiah 9:2, “The people who walked in darkness have seen this great light. Those who dwell in a place of deep darkness, on them a light has shone.

We have a constant light in that cave now. And it cast out all the darkness of those who decide to stay in darkness. But all we got to do is come to that light.” So now that we have an understanding of his will through Jesus, we receive this life because darkness will not overcome that light for those who believe.

2. The Light Reveals Sin and Blindness

And so there we’ve got light leads to life. The light does some other big things, critical things. And one of the big ones to talk about in this text or this context is the light revealing sin and blindness. Oh boy.

Without Jesus, we wouldn’t have the awareness any other than any different than the Pharisees would have perhaps had it. Well, we just had the law to look at. The law just kind of reveals sin. And it’s hard to get away from sin.

Like Paul talks about in Romans 7, the things that I do, I hate the things that I do. It’s the sin that’s in me. Oh, who’s going to help me with this? It’s like the idea that you can’t get away from it until Jesus comes and brings about what it is that we need.

We say st we say this idea all the time when something comes to light and we get that concept. We mean that something was uncovered or something finally revealed itself. We lose money and we start to look at the bank statement and the ledger tells us, oh that’s where that’s where the missing money is at. It came to light.

Or you ask your kid what happened and two things you must do. You can’t lie and you can’t say, “I don’t know.” Some things will come to light. They’ll tell you things you need to know.

Or much like my 3:00 a.m. disorientation I experienced just not too long ago, we have decided to get our room completely black with dark shades. You name it. And I’m telling you guys, on it once it is dark, it you can’t see anything.

And so having to get up in the middle of the night is a challenge. And there was one night particularly I was completely disoriented. I don’t know. It doesn’t happen often, but I don’t know.

I didn’t know where I was. And all of a sudden, I’m looking and I still am just totally out of it until I saw this very small red light on the air filter that’s in our room. And I realize I’m in my room. I realized the door is right there because the air filter’s there.

And I started to come too. I started to see things. And in all of that, we start to recognize that light reveals everything we need. Things come to reveal themselves.

In Genesis chapter 1, we have this scene just like that room that night. There’s no light whatsoever. The spirit of God is hovering over the face of the deep. It’s totally dark.

And all of a sudden, the very first thing that you get, God says, “Let there be light.” God saw that the light was good, separated that from the darkness. And in the beginning, there you’ve got it. The very first thing God does is bring light to a dark world.

And what does John do in John chapter 1? He introduces right off the bat who Jesus is and says that he is the light that shines in the darkness and darkness can’t overcome it. In other words, it’s separated. And there’s not going to be anything that changes that.

The true light, he says, that gives light to everyone. And that’s the thing. Jesus reveals truth that darkness hides. You can’t see it unless he’s there to provide that.

Jesus is the one that brings about the clarity of folly in our lives. He reveals error in many ways that we might be holding on to hypocrisy or self-righteousness and teaches us that through the encounters of other men such as the Pharisees who are seeing things that they ought not to about other people. And Jesus says, “Don’t you remember what the law taught?” Well, I didn’t come here to say that’s wrong.

I came here to show you the way that you should see it. And that’s what Jesus does. He reveals every bit of that uncertainty, that deception, that confusion, that disorientation, that sense of being full of fear because of what Satan does in the domain of darkness, which is blind us to the light. And so, we don’t have the truth in us whenever we have ourselves abide in darkness.

But Satan wants people to continue seeing in the dark or at least thinking that they can see in the dark. Even if your life is just a little shuffling, going to and fro in that very dark place that you’re in, Satan has you believe that you’re alive and well. That he wants people to continue having this go on because the light of God reveals sin. It has you turn.

It has you go in the direction where that light is so that you can expose all these things. But those are the things that we would prefer in the dark to just keep ignoring. And so those as Jesus said who are in sin remain in darkness. But when Jesus comes into our life, when the light of the world enters in, we listen to the words such as when Paul says, “Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead expose them.”

Do what Jesus would do. Why would we do this? Well, Jesus is the one that exposes the same stuff. He’s the one that doesn’t participate with the things that others would rather hide.

Things like self-righteousness, things like a judgmental attitude that we keep hidden and in the dark, or how about sins that we know that we’re being quite hypocritical with? If we were asked, we would just kind of give a front so that others would think we’re fine. But all this needs to be revealed in order for things to be made right. In John chapter nine, the religious leaders should have been absolutely thrilled and rejoicing at what took place.

And this is where we see Jesus encounter this guy who’s been blind from birth. The idea is he’s been in darkness since day one. And so off the backside of saying, “I am the light of the world,” Jesus comes to prove something that’s not been done to any other human before, which is to give a man who’s been born blind sight. And that’s exactly what he does.

But those who were there that day, the religious leaders, they were upset. They were blinded because on the Sabbath day, Jesus had gotten spit, put it on the dirt, made some mud, rubbed it on the guy’s eyes, and the religious leaders said, “See, he’s working on the Sabbath.” They had this tradition. It wasn’t in the law of Moses that they hung on to to say that, see, Jesus, he’s a sinner.

He’s not to be listened to. Even after the interrogation with the guy who was blind and they find out the truth and light brings all this to the surface, they still say all these things were not right. They claimed that Jesus, even the man himself, were not legitimate. And whenever they asked Jesus about all of this, Jesus said that if you were blind, you have no sin.

But since you say that you see, your sin remains in you. All that to say, there are often times where Jesus’s light brings about the sin in our life that we need to address and get honest with. But how often do we just wink at that and walk away as if nothing’s going on in our life? Time and time again, whether they be through the sermons or through the classes or just through the personal reading that we have, we encounter God’s word in such a way that it exposes and it reveals and it gently calls out our hypocrisy at times and it brings about this sense of I know what Jesus is doing.

He’s the one that’s allowing me to see and expose all of this so that I don’t remain spiritually blind. But in many cases, many cases, it’s just like whenever I was young and my brother would come in the room and flip the light on and say, “Get up.” And I would cover my eyes immediately and I’d say, “Turn the light off.” And that tends to be how we get with truth whenever we prefer to live in darkness.

But Jesus exposes this because he is the light of the world. And how am I reacting to him in my own life when I encounter truth that he reveals to me? Because ultimately we see that when it’s light in our life and those who love the light and come to it, they follow. They remain in the light.

3. His Light Shines on Us and We Reflect

Again, this is the I am statement in which Jesus also tells the disciples that they too are lights in the world. And so as we start to think about that, his light shines on us and then we reflect in this very dark world. We’re not to isolate ourselves from the darkness and to just keep our light on all by ourselves. We also don’t just think, well, I’m a light, so I’m just going to gather around all of the other lights and keep my light on.

I mean, imagine what the advantage is of shining a spotlight at 100 p.m. today. How many people will see us from hundreds of yards away? Nobody will.

But you do it at 3:00 in the morning. You do it when the sun sets and it’s a completely different environment. And just to say how often those of us who are reflections of him tend to only reflect whenever there’s other lights around us to do so. The challenge of doing it when all things are dark.

Whenever every situation around us is most challenging but the dark is when we shine. I went hunting years ago. Never been to where I had gone. And on the way there, it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere.

And so the evening before we take the vehicles out to go show where the blind was that I’ll be going to at like 4:30 or 5 in the morning and got kind of a feel for where I was going to be. And I’m just dropped off early in the morning all by myself and I’m looking around and I thought I was the only one out there until you start to see lights everywhere. Hundreds. there’s people everywhere and I had no idea until the lights were gone that there are people all around me that have and and that’s kind of the idea I think is that whenever you see light that tends to indicate one thing that there’s life and so you look around and what you thought to be a place where you’re all alone only to realize there are others that have their lights on light proves life in the sermon on the mount after saying, “You are the salt of the earth and you are the light of the world.”

That’s Matthew 5. Jesus explains that no one lights a lamp and then hides it because it serve no purpose. That’s like saying, “I’m going to turn the radio on, but then turn the volume all the way down.” That’s that you just don’t do that.

4. Out of Blindness to Glorify God

And so, we don’t become a reflection of him only to then just defeat the purpose and hide it. There’s something much larger at stake here and it’s the idea that Jesus does this for us. He brings us out of blindness and into sight so that we can glorify God through all of it. John chapter nine when the blind man received his sight.

Jesus teaches his disciples that it’s not the man’s fault that he was born like this. It’s not the parents fault. It’s not sin. It was to bring glory to God so others would hear about it and God would meet be made known.

There’s not a Christian in this room who was once blind but now sees that is not in a position to give God all that glory. Now you could take it yourself, you can hide it, but the ultimate idea is for you to make God known, to give him glory. the progression of what Jesus had with this blind man. The encounter of what this blind man found.

He first called Jesus the man. He then calls Jesus a prophet and then he calls Jesus the son of God. As this encounter grew with Jesus and the man’s eyes were opened up and everything started to come to light, he started to make more sense of who Jesus was. And every time he did, he declared it.

He shared it. He told others the truth. That’s exactly what you and I are all about doing. We say that we don’t know what to say, but then you get this guy who’s been healed and all he was saying, “I was blind and now I see.”

I mean, can you imagine just telling your friends that, “Hey, I don’t know how else to say it, but I was blind and now I see.” And you know what the implications of that is? Oftentimes, they’re going to be wondering, “What does that mean? And in all of those instances, we get to recognize that I was once lost, now I’m found, was blind, but now I see.

We let others see our good works to give glory to our father who is in heaven. We reflect that light back to our father who is in heaven. Why? Because that’s the object.

Conclusion

That’s what we’re here to do. Just like a flower blossoms and withers away, gives God that radiant glory, we too do the same. So Jesus as the light. Those who follow him, he promises they won’t remain in darkness, but they’ll have this light of life.

You’ll get to shine in ways you’ve never done ever in your life, nor could you do by yourself. But you could be the only one in the family who comes to know Jesus and you’ll feel like kind of the black sheep in that sense. I’ve been there. But by coming to him with that honesty, by recognizing who he is and you know that there’s no other source but him, that is a big deal when you consider the fact that everyone is living in a cave that’s dark and you come about with this source that no one else has.

And that’s why this is so important. If we have our lights dimmed, there’s not going to be as much use for that. There’s not going to be as many who will recognize. But ultimately, if we have our lamps run dry, just like the virgins without the oil, who weren’t prepared for whenever the bridegroom came.

If you’re running low on oil or you’re doubt, you know who the source is. And that’s God himself. Having ourselves be in line with God and abiding him with him is the very thing that we need in order to have ourselves on the right path. Again, the psalm says he is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path, but only when we draw to him.

So the invitation is there to encourage you that if you’re living in darkness, make the change. If you’ve got yourself living in such a life where you need to repent and have your sins washed away and become a Christian, I hope you’ll accept the invitation. We welcome you to make that known this morning if you need any help with that. And we’ll assist you in any way as we stand and as we sing.