Light and Life to All He Brings
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A story is told about a group of school children who got together and decided to write their own Nativity play. It has all the familiar cast of characters; it had the three wise men, it had all the animals, but Mary was no where to be seen. Suddenly, from behind some bales of hay there could be heard moans and groans. Evidently, Mary was in labor. Mary was moaning and groaning and Joseph was exceptionally worried. But then a doctor shows up dressed in a white coat and stethoscope and all that kind of thing and Joseph welcomes him in and he takes him back to Mary. He is pacing back and forth. Then you hear a baby crying and the doctor comes out with a big smile and he says, “Congratulations, Joseph, it’s a God!”
Well as you know, we have been traveling through John over the last several months and I have gone back to Chapter 1. Chapter 1 is about just that. John is about telling us that God has come to earth, that God has visited earth, or pitched a tent, on earth. We have talked about some of the words that we find in the first chapter of John, in particularly, the Word, or in Greek it is the logos. We learned that that word applied to both Greeks and Jews. In the Greek culture logos was in fact considered to be a principle of God, or the idea of God, which he used to create the world, whatever their conception was; but for the Hebrews the word of God was something that went out and did things. So “Let there be light,” and there was light. But there are several other words that we find, in particularly four in this chapter that I would like to talk about. So as we go through the first chapter of John, I want you to notice these words. They are light and life and grace and truth. Follow along as I read the word.
(John 1:1-17) Just listen what he is trying to say:
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was with God in the beginning.
3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
6There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. 7He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. 8He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. 9The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.
10He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
14The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
15John testifies concerning him. He cries out, saying, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ ” 16From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. 17For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
Would you pray with me?
Lord God, thank you for Jesus our Savior and the fabulous incite about who he is, and not who we are. We read this word that God has given us. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
These four words, these four incredible words, and as we read John we find that they say something about God and Jesus, and about us, as well. The first one that we see is light. Light we find everywhere in John. Jesus makes a remarkable comment that he is light. Elsewhere in John we see him where he says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Light is the perfect image for God. If you read a Physics book or listen to people talk about it, light is unchangeable. It doesn’t change. It is constant at 186,000 miles per second. Light is also invisible. Yes, it is invisible, believe it or not. We might say, “Well I see the light in those lights.” But what you see is the filament burning, but as the light travels from there to there we don’t see it. It is completely invisible. Just like God. Even more, light contains all the colors that we see.
I remember many, many years ago, in one of my first churches, when my kids were young, we used to take them on Friday night to get videos; I’m talking about the old kind, cassette type videos. It is amazing how things change. But at the library, you didn’t go and rent these things, the library had all kinds of videos and we would go get some of the old musicals every Friday night and play them for our kids. I remember, we got our videos; we walked out; it had been raining and in this city, called Martinsburg, we were on the main street and I looked to the left, and down the main street a rainbow literally covered the street. It looked like it came smack down in the middle of the street. It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen. I will never forget it. Of course, we all got in the car and said, “Let’s go find it.” And of course, it didn’t work – you can never find the rainbow, because as we kept traveling toward it, it kept moving away. But, all the colors were there. Did you know that this carpet really isn’t red? Rather its chemical makeup reflects light of a red spectrum. It is hard to believe, but the color is in the light. Just like everything else is in God. God is unchangeable and you can’t see him and yet he illuminates everything, gives warmth to everything. His presence is all around us. We may say that God is not here, but God is most definitely here. The wonder and the message of the Christmas is that God has been made visible to us for a while. It is almost as though John is saying, “Congratulations, world, it’s God!”
But of course, there is another side to this. The light also says something about us and John hints at that. He says, “The darkness has not understood it.” He is talking of course about spiritual darkness. It is better to read this really “The darkness could not handle it.”
James Boice talks about how when he was a kid he would go to camp and he and his friends would stay up all night. They would play games with their flashlights. They would shine it in their faces and all that kind of thing. Usually the one that had the most batteries won the game. A flashlight is great at night, it is great at night. But if you would take your flashlight in the sunshine out here, it would mean nothing because you know it is on but it wouldn’t flash anything. But if I were to turn the lights down— I was going to do that, but I don’t have my flashlight with me. So never mind— the sunlight overwhelms it. But you know we are so used to comparing ourselves with everybody else, other flashlights, that we don’t know how great the other light is. Our righteousness seems righteous, but it is not—compared to God and his righteousness. That is what Jesus comes to tell us. He comes to tell us about who God is and he comes to tell us about who we are. There are two reactions to this. One, we could hate it, because, you know what? We do hate people who seem better than we are, don’t we? We see it all the time on television, or even in politics, someone comes and stands up and says, “This is wrong, we should do something about it.” And what do people do? They don’t say, “Yea, you’re right we need to do something about it.” What they do is they try to destroy the person speaking. They try to find some dirt on him or her and destroy them because we hate it. We hate being exposed. Or, we can repent and say, “Yea, you’re right. My life is dark, I need light.”
The second word is truth. Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” Jesus says, “I am truth.” He comes to tell us the truth about who God is and about who we are.
I read a story that Bill Hybels tells. He is the pastor over at Willow Creek Community Church, a huge church over in Chicago. He writes this. He says, “I met a man who was deeply involved in the New Age movement for over five years. ‘What caused you to second guess what you were involved in?’ he said.
‘It was moral anarchy,’ the man replied. ‘I became part of a group and we used to sit around and talk about what might truth was. One person would say, ‘My truth is doing, saying, feeling, acting out this form of morality’ and someone would say, ‘Oh, that’s nice, that is your truth’.
‘Well this is my truth.’ He had gotten the idea that the wife he had been married to for many years was not as beautiful or wonderful as another person in the group who said that her truth was that they ought to get married. He said ‘I thought about it more and after awhile I decided that was my truth too. So we got our truth together. I divorced my wife. She was very upset about that. But I told her, ‘honey, this is my truth.’ And how are you going to argue with that?’ he said.
It was only a short time after that, you’ll like this, that someone told me ‘There is a new age church in Barrington Illinois.’
Well it was Willow Creek, and it is not a new age church, so he went. He said, ‘That day you gave a message about human beings standing morally accountable before a holy God. While you were talking, I became conscious for the first time of my sin. I knew I was playing games. I was just making up the truth. That is all I was doing, manufacturing the truth I wanted for myself so I could live the way I wanted to live. Well the next morning I fell on my knees and I received Christ and I received forgiveness.’”
And it is so, and many in our day, there is no such thing as something that can be true for everyone for all time. Truths are changeable, things that we take or leave according to what make our lives feel better. Did you hear the story? There are consequences to that kind of thinking. If we are all making up our truths, it is easy to hurt others, it becomes dangerous.
One of my favorite preachers is Steve Brown and I quote him liberally. One of the things I am fond of quoting from Steve Brown is that when he talks about things being a lie, and especially spiritual lies, he will say something like, “that is a lie from the pit of hell and it smells like smoke.” Well truthfully, my friends, the idea that we all can make up our own truths is a lie from the pit of hell and it smells like smoke, because in that thinking we all become gods, our own gods; and then it really doesn’t matter what we do to others. Jesus came to tell us the truth about God, that God is the one who tells us what we should do, that God is the one who is the truth, and that Jesus is the truth.
I think it is very important for us to see that spiritual truth is very much like mathematics. The fact that Jesus is God is no different than two plus two equals four. It is not an opinion, it is truth. The fact that we are sinners before God: It is not an opinion, it is the truth. John is saying to us, “Congratulations, world, it is God.”
The third word is grace. Now the word grace doesn’t appear as much as truth and life but it certainly is there. What exactly is grace? Well grace is God’s unearned and undeserved favor, or blessing. I often like to say we get our first example of grace from life itself. Not one of us had anything to do about being here. It is a gift. As Will Willimon puts it, “if you have a belly button, you have parents.” Our parents are constant reminders that we are not here by our own efforts. Then, one of them began changing our diapers which is another form of grace. And those of you who have done it know what we are talking about. Our parents are a visible, ever present reminder of grace, unearned and undeserved. What it says about God is that God is a giver. “For God so loved the world that he gave…” God is constantly giving. He gave us the world, he gave us our lives. When we fell, he also gives us salvation and that is why we say that “salvation is by grace.” Indeed, my friends, it must be by grace.
There is another lie out there from the pit of hell that smells like smoke. That is the lie or the myth of self-improvement. Over the last couple of centuries a very popular idea that we all could improve and can become better morally and the argument goes something like this. If we just educate ourselves a little better, or if we take people out of poverty, we will make them better; or if we put them in a situation where we take care of them, they will become better. It is a lie from the pit of hell and smells like smoke.
I have a phrase that I like to say and it is “just do the math.” Well, what’s the math of the twentieth century? The twentieth century proves what I say. Countless, and I am sure we can count them, but many, many, many wars, fourteen instances of documented instances of genocide, that’s when you don’t kill just a few people you kill hundreds of thousands. Fourteen. Fourteen. The math of the twentieth century, the most educated century that has ever been seen, and there has been more killing in it than any. “Oh, wait a minute. Can’t we improve things by education?” Certainly. I believe in education. Certainly we need to do things for people. But it is a myth to say we are going to get better, and better, and better.
I used that illustration of the comparison of the flashlights, well I have another one. You know, in Afghanistan, I did find time for some recreation. I had a priest friend that I used to play ping pong with. I didn’t know the ping pong table was there. It was in some building. He invited me over, and he thought he was really pretty good. Well, he invites me over like a lamb to the slaughter, and then I beat him four out of five times. It was so much fun. Like I said, we are all sinners, but….. Now really as we played together he got used to me, we were pretty even, evenly matched. A lot of people we played with each other, we were pretty evenly matched. We all thought we were pretty good. Then one day another guy shows up. He beat me 21 to 2. The two I won were the kind when the ball hits the edge of the table and he can’t get to them; otherwise it would have been zip.
You know, when we compare ourselves to others we all seem pretty good, like we are getting better. I am sure that I can improve at ping pong, but I will never be as good as Forest Gump is. I will never be as good as Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson at golf. I am never going to be as good as God or Jesus because I know what my righteousness is and it is not very good. That is why salvation is by grace. It has to be by grace, because none of us earned it or deserved it. There is no such thing as trying so hard that you are going to get that good. It is O.K. to try hard. No amount of positive thinking is going to make our self-image any better. And no amount of self-improvement is going to make us that good. All those things have their place and are not bad, but with regard to God and salvation, we need that message, “Congratulations! It is a God!” “For God so loved the world that he gave…” and “it is by grace you have been saved through faith, not of yourselves” because you don’t need to boast about it. You can’t.
Last but not least there is this word life which appears again and again and again in John. “In him was life and that life was the light of men.” In him was life… that word is an incredible word. God is the source of life, of course; but you know, I really do, it may not sound like it sometimes, I love science. It is so much fun to see the world and watch the shows, and read the books and see what God has done, if you look at it in that way. I was watching one of those shows where they sent this deep sea submarine down to Lord knows how deep, the deepest place you can go. And you know what, if that submarine leaked even that much, those people in the submarine would be squashed like a bug on a sidewalk, literally. Yet, when they looked out the window, there were little tracks of little things. There were creatures down there. There is life everywhere. Go to the highest mountain, you go to the lowest sea you will find life because God has touched this planet. I do not know if there is life on other planets but what is pretty obvious is that there is no life on the planets around us and I think that is just a contrast. I think that is God saying, “Guess what? You have been touched.” Some of you are old enough to remember when the guys went up to the moon and looked back at the earth for the first time and what it looked like. And everybody went, “Ohhhhh, Wow! It looks like that.” It is full of life and such variety of life. It is amazing what God thinks of, things that are just odd. He has a sense of humor, too. This is funny. I was thinking about this the other day. We have a new little cat and the cat crawls up on me and just purrs and I am going, “Only God would think of a little fur ball that purrs.” I know some of you are dog lovers, but… but you have another fur ball that wags its tail when it sees you, and other kinds of things. Those are just two. It is just amazing. But God is full of life. Of course, what Jesus is talking about is spiritual life. And again, the message for us is we have a need.
I have talked before that the bible teaches that we have a three-part nature. We have our physical selves and we have our soul selves, which is our mental processes, our emotions; and then we have a spiritual selves, which is our connection with God. The bible says that piece is dead. “As for you, you were dead in your trespasses and sins.” So when Jesus says something like “you must be born again” that is the piece he is talking about. A lot of people aren’t aware that they are spiritually dead. But that is the piece he is talking about. “You must be born again.” I think a lot of times in mainline churches we sort of turn our nose up at the phrase “born again.” “Oh that is what the Baptist talk about,” or, “those are the fundamentalist that talk about being born again.” We should be careful. Those are Jesus’ words, actually. But the issue is what does it mean? Well it isn’t always a bright light experience, but what it is is turning around. It is as though we are walking down a dark tunnel and we don’t know if it is dark or not because we live there. But then, God takes us and goes “Walk the other way. There is a light in that tunnel and just walk toward the light.” That is what being born again is, turning around and going in a different direction.
There is a wonderful story out of Our Daily Bread about a young girl who accepted Christ as her Savior and applied for membership in the local church. “Were you a sinner before you received the Lord Jesus in your life?” inquired the old deacon. “Yes, sir,” she replied. “Well, are you still a sinner?” “Well, to tell you the truth, I feel like I am a greater sinner than ever.” “Then what real change have you experienced?” She said, “I don’t know how to explain it, except I used to be a sinner running after sin, but now that I am saved, I am a sinner running from sin!” Exactly, exactly. It is not that we don’t stumble and fall, but we are going in a different direction and that is the difference. It is a huge difference. We are alive in Christ and only he can make us alive. That is what John is trying to tell us. Congratulations! It’s a God! …Because you couldn’t do it yourself. You couldn’t have light by yourself. You couldn’t have grace by yourself. You couldn’t have truth by yourself. And you certainly can’t have life; but God brings those things in his grace, in his love for us. It is through his power we are made whole.
So as we think about Christmas, think about those four words and what they mean to you. If you have never given your life to Christ, receive him because he is standing at your door and knocking and asking. Ask for his help, because you will need it this Christmas.
Let us pray together.
Lord God, familiar words to us all. We have heard them before about who Jesus is and what he has done. Yet, we need reminding. We need reminding of the glory of who you are and your power in giving us all these things and you offer them freely. Forgive us for trusting in ourselves. We are tempted to that daily. Forgive us for thinking we are hot stuff, or that we are pretty good, because we are not. Help us to remember these things as we give and receive presents and remember the greatest present of all. In His name. Amen.