John 1:3-18

³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. ⁴ In him was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. ⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. ⁸ He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light. ⁹ The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. ¹² But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.'”) ¹⁶ And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

 

When I was in college, I became aware of something in my own life that really began to bother me.  I had noticed even in high school that, during the winter months of the year, I became very sad and melancholy.  Not overly so or dangerously so, but evidently so, to me, anyway.  In college during the grey months of fall and winter (which, ironically, I otherwise loved), I would find myself increasingly brooding.  Strangely enough, there were times when I would be alone and I felt like crying.  I felt like I was walking around with a lump in my throat all the time.  But in the spring and summer, it would leave me.  Again, I do not want to overplay this:  I was never dangerously depressed or self-destructive.  Had you talked with me likely you would not have even noticed that anything was wrong.  But I noticed, and it bothered me.

After graduating from college, Roni and I were married and we moved to Ft. Worth, Texas, to attend Southwestern Seminary.  I carried this kind of seasonal sadness with me.  In fact, since we moved to Ft. Worth in the winter, I was very aware of it.

As it turns out, part of being enrolled in seminary is having a mandatory visit with the campus psychologist.  All students had to do this, and, though I was not particularly keen on it, and though I even tried to get out of doing it, I visited with him as well.  He was a wonderfully insightful and helpful man, and I appreciated our visit.

Shortly after meeting with him I began to feel this sadness again, this creeping seasonal melancholy, and, having enjoyed my earlier meeting with him, I thought, “Why not?” and scheduled a meeting with him.

When I laid out my situation and explained my sadness, he told me that there was actually a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder (acronym – SAD, of course), in which some people found the decreased amount of sunlight in the days of fall and winter to be particularly oppressive and mood altering.

Then he gave me some advice that I’ve never forgotten.  This is what he told me to do:  “In the fall and winter months, you need to find those brief moments in each day when the sun is shining and get yourself in the light.”

I have never forgotten that, and I’ve tried to obey it:  “Find where the light is shining, and get in it.”

It is not bad advice for those who find the darkness oppressive, is it?

This morning many of you have come into this sanctuary and are deeply affected by SAD – Spiritual Affective Disorder.  The darkness seems too present and the light seems to dim.

Some of you are overwhelmed by the darkness of the world order.  You are inundated by news of local and foreign chaos, crime, and disorder.  You feel that you are sinking in darkness.

Some of you are overwhelmed by a darkness of your own making.  You have fallen into or actively embraced some sin or rebellion against God.  Maybe it is some act from the past that even now casts its long and oppressive shadow over you.

Some of you feel that you live in darkness.  Darkness has overtaken your marriage, your relationships with your children, your relationship with your friends.  You do not know how it got there, but you cannot deny it is there, and you despair of finding a way out.

If you find yourself in this position, you will likely be thrilled to know that John calls Jesus “the light.”  Jesus is light.  He is the light of the world.

The first eighteen verses of John 1 are known as “the prologue” to John, for they lay the foundation for the rest of the entire book by expressing in beautiful and power ways the riches and depths of the person of Jesus Christ.  That prologue is dominated by two fascinating images for Jesus:  the Word and the light.

We have seen that Jesus is the eternal logos, or Word, who was in the beginning, who was with God, and who was God.  But this morning we see that Jesus is not only the logos, He is the light.

Christ, the Light That Reveals.

The fundamental and essential property of light is revelation.  It reveals that which was previously obscured or hidden.  So when John calls Jesus light, He is speaking of Christ as the revealing light of God.

We would do well to remember that before “revelation” was a book, it was, and is, a person.  Christ is revelation.  He is revealing light.

Consider John 1:3-9:

³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. ⁴ In him was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. ⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. ⁸ He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light. ⁹ The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

You will remember, I trust, that John’s gospel begins by applying the words of Genesis 1 to Jesus.  “In the beginning, God…” Genesis 1 tells us.  “In the beginning was the Word…” John 1 tells us.  This, of course, was an intentional and provocative declaration of the person and nature of Jesus Christ.  He is none other than Yahweh, Creator God.

But John 4 carries this even further.  Remember the first act of creation from Genesis 1:

¹ In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ² The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.  ³And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴ And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Imagine with me:  the Spirit of God is hovering over primordial blackness and nothingness.  There is nothing there.  God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing.  And then, into and over and under and around the dark void, the utter nothingness, the voice of God Almighty speaks:  “Let there be light!”  I love the sound of the Latin here:  Fiat lux!

And then, whoosh!, a brilliant, incomprehensible, immeasurable, uncontainable explosion of blinding iridescent light blasts through the black void.  Nothing is no more, for light has been spoken into the darkness.  The inky black absence of anything has been made alive with light, for the light of God means life!  It is a staggering thought.  It would have been an amazing thing to behold, except for the fact that we would have been instantaneously incinerated in the beholding of it.

In Genesis, God speaks light into darkness, and creation is born.  With that in mind, consider again the amazing implications of John 1: “In the beginning was the Word…In Him was light, and the life was the light of men.”

John is appealing again to Genesis and depicting once more Christ as not only Creator, but also as the agent of creation, as the life-giving light without which creation cannot be sustained.

It is a flabbergasting thought.  But what is even more flabbergasting is the fact that Christ is the revealing light not only on the grand cosmic scale of creation, but also on the smaller scale of your own life.  He shined in the darkness at the beginning of all things, and He shines even now in your own life.

Christ is light, and, as light, Christ reveals.  He reveals many things.  He reveals the nature of God.  Did you notice verse 18?  “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”  Christ makes God known.  He reveals the person and nature of God.  He reveals what God is like.  “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9)

He reveals the truth.  “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6)  Christ is truth and Christ reveals, in His person, the truth.

But that is not all.  He also reveals the truth about us, and this can be painful to see.

Christ, the Light That Convicts.

Christ is not only the light that reveals, He is the light that convicts.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “an unflattering light?”  That phrase is used to describe light that is too revealing.  Some light shows more than we want it to show, does it not?  This is why men take women on romantic dates to candlelit restaurants and not to places where you sit under fluorescent lights.  When you are dating, you do not want the person to get too good a look at you!

In all seriousness, though, some light flatters while other light does not.  We prefer the dim light that keeps us from utter darkness but that, on the other hand, does not reveal too much.  But Jesus is the light that reveals everything about who we are:

¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

One of the reasons the world rejected Jesus was that He revealed too much.  He stills reveals too much as far as our carnal natures are concerned.

He revealed not only the love and grace of a holy God.  He also revealed the deep depravity of our own sinfulness and selfishness.  For the light that reveals, reveals everything.

This is why many of us prefer the night-light Jesus to the full-fledged, burning-bright, revealing, convicting Jesus.  We want just enough of Him to know that He is there keeping the darkness from overwhelming us, but not enough of Him to reveal all that we really are.

But you cannot have it both ways.  You cannot have “a little bit” of Jesus.  Light has no fellowship with darkness.  If light is to do its job, it must be allowed to shine.

Have you ever seen an operating room in a hospital?  Hovering over the operating table is a massive, intrusive, powerful light.  It looks like one of those old science fiction UFOs hovering up there.  No surgeon worth his salt would say, “Ah, it’s time for open heart surgery. Somebody light a candle and put on some Yanni.”  No!  If he is to do what he must do to save us, the light must shine.

Our sins envelope us in darkness, and they demand the intrusive properties of the light of Jesus Christ to be seen, uprooted, and abolished.

I once pastored a church in which there was an elderly couple who would ask me on occasion to drive them on day trips here and there.  They were unable to drive themselves, so my wife and, at the time, our very young daughter, would drive them to various places, usually the mountains of western Tennessee.

They once asked me to drive them to a place where we toured a deep underground cavern.  We paid the entry fee and then were guided through a tour deep into this underground tavern.  Dim lights were placed along the path to keep us from going awry.  I was less than encouraged when the guide revealed to us that it would actually be quite dangerous to go off the path as the cavern contained deep and seemingly bottomless pits into which you could fall.  Once such cavern, he revealed, contained the skeleton of a long-dead sabertooth tiger at the bottom!

At the bottom of one descent our little group gathered together in the middle of a large chamber.  The tour guide asked us if we wanted to experience true darkness.  I suppose enough people agreed to warrant the demonstration. So we all came in close together and, at the count of three, he cut off all the lights.

To this day, I have never seen (for lack of a better word) such absolute darkness.  I literally could see nothing.  I saw less than nothing.  It was an utter absence of any light.

This is what our sin is like, and this is our condition outside of Christ.  Thus, John contrasts the light of Christ with the darkness of the world:  ^“The light shines in the darkness…”(v.5)

The darkness is the world order that is hostile to the grace of God.  We all prefer the darkness and hate the light by nature. We are, by nature, children of wrath.  How else can we understand the chilling words of verse 11:  “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”

How about you?  Have you received Christ the light?  Or do you prefer the darkness?

Have you submitted yourself to the searching, revealing, probing, uncovering light of the gospel of Christ?

The light does indeed shine in the darkness.  But that is not at all.  It must be understood that “the darkness has not overcome it.”

Christ, the Light That Saves.

There is no darkness of sin, death, and hell that the light cannot penetrate and destroy.  Christ is the light that saves:

¹² But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. ¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.'”) ¹⁶ And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.

It is not necessary to resign yourself to the darkness that kills.  You may come to the light that gives life.  It is true that the revealing light of Christ burns us as it searches us, but it burns us only to heal us.  It searches us, painfully at times, only so that Christ may reveal to us that which is destroying us.

The light is not meant for our pain, it is meant for our salvation.  In fact, “to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” (v.12)

There is a two-fold need here:  the need to believe and the need to receive.

Many try to believe without receiving.  “Yes,” they say, “I believe that He is the Christ, the Son of the living God.” But they do not receive Him. They do not say, “I believe He is my Christ, my Savior, my Lord, and I give Him everything.”

There is a legal note sounded here in this proclamation of salvation as well:  “he gave the right to become children of God.”

We speak today of “forensic justification,” or the idea that when you are justified through the blood of Christ there is an affected legal change of status.  You were dead, but now you live.  You were blind, but now you see.  You were lost, but now you are found.  You were guilty, but now you are righteous.  You were in darkness, but now you live in the light of the grace of God.

“And from his fullness,” John writes in verse 16, “we have all received, grace upon grace.”  To which we can only respond, “Hallelujah!  Hallelujah to the lamb that was slain!”

Christ is the light who reveals, who convicts, and who saves.

Rudyard Kipling, the author of the Jungle Book, used to sit as a little boy with his nose pressed to his bedroom window, watching the man walk down the dark street lighting the street lamps.  This enthralled the young boy.  It so enthralled him that he once cried out to his mother, “Momma!  Come watch this man punching holes in the darkness.”

This is what Jesus came to do.  He came to punch holes in the darkness.  But He came to do even more.  He came to overwhelm and abolish and drive out the darkness.  Just as He did in the act of creation, so He does even today.

Step into the light.  Step into Christ.

The light is shining in the darkness.