John 1:1-18
Please remain standing and turn
in your copy of God’s Word to the Gospel of John. We’ll read
one last time this Advent season, the first 18 verses since the
end of November through Christmas Eve. And now today we’ve looked
at these 18 verses, some of them a little out of order, but mostly
in order. Today we go back to verses four
and five, I do believe. But we’ll read the whole thing
for context. Next week, we’ll get back into Luke’s gospel.
We have plans to end Luke maybe by the end of summer. If you’re
attending our Wednesday study in Colossians, we’ll finish that
in about a month’s time. And I believe, if the Lord’s
willing, and I’m not chickening out, we’ll begin a study of the
book of Genesis. So that’s your diet of God’s
word, at least a portion of it. Let’s give our attention now
to the reading of the Word of the Living God, John chapter
one, beginning at verse one. In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the
beginning with God. All things were made through
him, and without him was not anything made that was made.
In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light
shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came
as a witness to bear witness about the light that all might
believe through him. He was not the light that came
to bear witness about the light. The true light, which enlightens
everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world and
the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.
He came to his own and his own people did not receive him. But
to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave
the right to become children of God, who were born not of
blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man,
but of God. 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. 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. And from his fullness, we have
all received grace upon grace. For the law was given through
Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever
seen God, but the only God who is at the Father’s side, he has
made him known. Pray with me. Lord, we give you
thanks that you show yourself to us through your creation,
through the beauty and splendor of all that is around us, even
though it is bent and broken and marred by sin, we can still
see and wonder at your wisdom, your power, and your majesty
to make all things by the word of your great power. Lord, we
know that you speak to us by your word and spirit. And we
thank you for the ministry of the word. We thank you for preachers
in church. We thank you for our copies of
your word, which we hold in our hands and can sit at table with
and bring them to church. We thank you for these faithful
copies that are accurate and true. And we thank you that you
have revealed yourself to us through your son. Your only begotten
God-man son who was in your bosom has now come into this world
and we have seen him and we have seen you. And we pray now that
as we spend a few moments in your word that we would see you
very clearly, know the way of salvation and know the way of
growth and grace. We ask for your help. And we
pray for it in the name of Jesus. Amen. You may be seated. One of the great blessings I
hope many of you will take advantage of in the coming weeks is to
read through the Bible in a year. And if you Choose that path and
journey for 2020. I trust you’ll begin at the very
beginning in the book of Genesis, where you will read how God made
the heavens and the earth. And he took what was formless
and void. And we see over the six days
of creation, he took what was formless and void and he formed
it and he filled it. And he formed and filled this
creation to be what one great theologian says is a theater
for his glory. This creation was made by God
so that he could put on display his majesty, his splendor, his
power, and his goodness. And because of sin, he would
put on his wonderful display of love, mercy, forgiveness,
and redemption. And we know that when God made
the garden, when he made the world and everything in it, he
made a light to rule the day. Now, some people will say, how
come that light didn’t come until several days later? You know,
we look at creation kind of critically sometimes. We look at it through
our scientific lenses. It didn’t come for a few days.
And here’s the easy answer for you. God is light. God is life, and we don’t need
the sun. He just gave us one. In fact,
here’s how you know this is true. Read the book of Revelation,
come to the very end. And when you read of the new
heavens and the new earth, and when you read of the new Jerusalem,
come down from heaven, you read these words. There is no day,
there is no night, and there is no sun, for Jesus himself
is that light. And so, dear brothers and sisters,
as we consider our last study in the first chapter of John,
I want us to think today about, in verses four and five, light
and life. Light and life, we’ve read of
it in Psalm 36, we’ve read of it now in John, and we want to
think about this wonderful light that God is in this world. pick
back up our story of creation. When God took what was formless
and void and he formed it and filled it, he made a garden.
He filled it with marvelous light and he put Adam in the middle
of that garden. And Adam’s task was to work the
garden, to keep the garden. He was supposed to make it productive
and protect it. His job was to be fruitful along with his wife
and to multiply and to fill the earth and to subdue the earth
and to make it work well. And that was so until the borders
of Eden extended over the entire earth and the glory of God filled
this entire planet. That was God’s plan. But as we
know, Satan came into the picture. Some of you are readers or followers
of the Babylon Bee. It’s a real fake news site. It’s a satirical news site. But occasionally they will put
a post up that’s not fake. It’s not satirical. And a couple
of years ago they had this beautiful painting of Adam and Eve in the
garden. They were hiding and they were munching on a piece
of fruit. And they were making a play on the American way of
living, which is follow your heart, right? Follow your heart,
that’s what you’re supposed to do. Follow your dreams, follow
your heart. It says, husband and wife follow their hearts,
billions dead. That wasn’t satire. That wasn’t
a joke. That wasn’t meant to be funny.
It was meant to be a sober reminder of what Satan has done in this
world. Some of you were forced to read
in your literature classes, the blind poet, John Milton’s paradise
lost and paradise regained. I remember that task as a freshman
in college. I was not up for it, but I do
remember a thing or two about it because I had the Cliffs notes
and there’s a, powerful phrase that Milton puts in there about
Satan himself. And Satan says something like
this. It is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. And that’s what he tempted Adam
and Eve with. They were deceived and they fell for it. You see,
God put them in the garden and said, you can eat of all the
fruit, all the provision I give you, except of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. Do not eat from it for in the
day you eat of it, you will surely die. And it was a test of faithfulness. It was a test of fidelity and
they proved to be infidels. And the curses that came upon
Adam and Eve and hence upon us are both spiritual and physical.
Our spiritual curses are alienation from God, banishment from his
presence. We don’t have spiritual life. We’re dead men walking. We just
sang of Jesus born to give the second birth. Unless we’re born
again. Unless we’re born from above,
unless we are born not from the will of man, nor from the will
of the flesh, nor from flesh and blood, unless we are born
from the spirit, we cannot have spiritual life. But the curses
were also, in addition to spiritual, they were physical. Not only
were Adam and Eve cast out of the garden, but they would bear
children in pain. They would work the ground which
previously had flourished and given them plenty to eat and
gave them great joy. But they would go to pain in
bearing children, pain in raising children, pain in their marriage
and other relationships, pain between their sibling rivalries. But they would also hit their
thumbs with the hammer. They would rake and they would
hoe and they would plow and they would toil and the ground would
give forth nothing but thorns and thistles. And this is the
dark world into which Jesus comes to redeem and to save and to
give his great light. The darkness we see, the darkness
we experience is because of Adam and Eve and their infidelity.
It’s because of Satan and his desire at some point in eternity
past to say, I’d rather rule and reign in hell than serve
in heaven. And so as we live life in this
world, as we live life in paradise lost with pain and suffering
and injustice and hatred and sickness, we see people all around
us attempting to make up for what has been lost. We see people
all around us attempting to create paradise. This morning I woke
up to 21 degrees, and every morning the dog has to go out. Whether
it’s 21 degrees or 64 degrees or 98 degrees, the dog’s gotta
go out, and overgrown me, who overate at Christmas, needs to
go for a walk. But those TV commercials that’ll
come on in the next weeks about the Bahamas, sandals, all those
places, don’t they look good about this time of year when
you walk outside and your nostrils freeze? Those commercials look
really good. And don’t they paint a wonderful
picture? They’re skinny you. And there’s y’all in paradise
without the kids. And there’s all the food you
can eat. There’s all the sliding into that blue water and there’s
the little huts and all the rest. And don’t we think that we can
create paradise on earth? But people forget there are storms
in the Bahamas. There are hurricanes. There’s
still crime in the Bahamas and on and on. And we think that
science and medicine isn’t amazing just in this year that a vaccine
has been created to combat COVID. It’s rather remarkable, I do
think. But the vaccines and modern medicine
can’t create paradise. All the surgeries and facelifts
and heart valve fixes and on and on. can’t fix what is broken
by sin and replace paradise lost with a new paradise. Oh, we try
to cover over sin and hardship. We try to do it through sex or
through chemicals and drugs and alcohol. We are mesmerized by
our technology. We love our amenities here in
America. We love our prosperity. And friends,
these are all fig leaves. These are all attempts to cover
over the sin, the shame, the curse, the brokenness, and the
hardships of life in this world until Jesus makes all things
new. None of these things will fix, mend, or repair. The curse
still controls. And oh, we do have a good life.
We all slept in a warm bed last night. We all slept in a home
where the furnace probably kept it at a balmy 60 some 70 some
degrees depending on your. Your taste and likes and ability
to afford natural gas and those things. We drove here in an automobile,
no horse and buggy. We didn’t have to leave the horse
out with a bag of oats. We’ve got these things in our
pockets that communicate with all over the world. We don’t
pay long distance bills anymore. All these wonderful amenities
and things that we have are wonderful gifts of man having dominion
over the earth. But these gifts and graces are
still tainted by sin. You see sin original through
Adam’s first unrighteous act. Sin, all our actual sins, which
proceed from our rotten hearts, they have spread like wildfire
through the earth. You only have to read through
the book of Genesis. Pick up at chapter four after
the fall. Cain kills Abel. And then there’s Lamech and then
there’s the generation of Noah who was righteous in God’s sight,
but he built an ark for a hundred years before a generation of
drunks. before a generation of rabble
rousers, before a generation of people who are violent, godless
idolaters. And there was Noah hammering
and sawing and building an ark for his family, a preacher of
righteousness and no one to listen. And sin spread like wildfire,
rebellion and autonomy. and idolatry and broken relationships
and futility spread through the ends of the earth. Instead of
the glory of God spreading as God originally intended for Adam
and Eve, sin spread like wildfire through the earth. We can think
of some modern events in our day and age. Do you remember
a couple of years ago, things to reflect how sin is spread
by wildfire? Maybe it was two years ago, the
New York General Assembly passed a late-term abortion law, and
it received a standing ovation in their state house. If that
doesn’t show you how far our culture has gone, and just a
year or two before that we had the landmark 2015 Ogreville decision
which sanctioned homosexual marriage. We don’t have to look very far,
but see other nations, other countries, their rogue ways of
leadership, their rogue ways of living, their human atrocities. We think back 40 some years to
Roe versus Wade. All these things reflect how
dark this world is. It is a supremely evil world. That’s why our pastoral prayer
every Sunday. I know that’s sleepy time for
some of you. It’s, oh, the preacher’s going
on again. I had a guy in one church tell me my pastoral prayers
were too long. And I said, well, I know one surefire way to shorten
it. I’ll leave your family out. He didn’t think too much of that,
so he didn’t mind. But what do we pray for? We pray
for God’s help and blessing, because we are pilgrims and strangers
living in a dark and dying world in the midst of a crooked and
depraved generation. We need God’s help when we go out these
doors. This is the foxhole. This is the safe place. Out there
is wild, crazy, dark, and evil. And it is a supremely evil world
where people fall short of God’s glory. They transgress his laws. They are rebellious against his
ways and his will. They are unfaithful to him. They
are iniquitous and they are self serving. And it is a dark world,
people living as if there is no God. And when Jesus did come
into this world to bring his light and to give life, they
said, no, thank you. Go back to where you came from.
And that is the response that we often see to Jesus. But Christmas
has come. And into a little obscure place
called Bethlehem, a poor woman named Mary gave birth to the
Christ child. And the word of God says he brought
to this dark world light and life. I want to think of these
two things, light and life. First, life. We’ve got to think
of it as supernatural life, not just your heart beating, not
just the blood pumping through your veins, not just the oxygen
getting into you, not that your pancreas is working, your liver
is working, your brain is functioning and all the chemicals are doing
what they’re supposed to do. Not that kind of life, but super
natural life. Life that comes as we receive
the second birth. Life that comes because we are
born again from above. Life that comes because we receive
the gift of faith. And Jesus gives us every spiritual
blessing that is his. I say it from time to time that
we’ve got a really low view of evangelism. We say to people
in our evangelistic method it’s Hey, buddy, you don’t want to
go to hell, do you? And hopefully they say no. Some
people do. Hopefully they say no. And so we say, pray this
sinner’s prayer and you won’t go to hell. And we treat salvation
is just that. It’s fire insurance. It’s life
insurance. It’s get out of hell free card. Like it’s a game of Monopoly.
But the Christian life is so much more. We who are dead in
our sins and trespasses, we who are living in darkness, we who
were chained to the wall and imprisoned by Satan, living under
his power and under his ways have been made alive in Christ
Jesus. We have been raised up with Jesus and seated in the
heavenly places according to the book of Ephesians. And we
have been given every spiritual blessing by God in Christ Jesus. Just read through the rest of
John’s gospel and you’ll see what Jesus does as he brings
light and life. There’ll be a time when he stands
in the temple and says, I am the light of the world. No longer
do you live in darkness. I am the bread of life. And he’ll
say, I give you water, water of which if you drink, you will
never thirst again. And so Jesus, the little Christ
child, the God man brings supernatural life to all who come to him by
faith. But he also brings light. Some of you had holiday pictures
taken and you get those pictures on your phone and you begin to
examine it and say, I don’t look good in the light. Your wrinkles,
your, Crows feet, whatever you call them, you know, your teeth
are yellow and a piece of corn in there because somebody snapped
the picture right after dinner. We say we don’t look good in
the light. Take a picture of me in the dark. What does light
do? It reveals. It shines and all
the crevices, all the imperfections, all the sin, all the darkness,
all the shame, all the wickedness, all of that comes to light by
the truth of almighty God. And so Jesus is not just life,
he is light. And his light shines in the darkness,
his light illumines the whole atmosphere. A couple weeks ago,
maybe a month and a half ago, we got all our Christmas decorations
out of the attic and put those things out. And I found a tub
up in the attic I hadn’t seen in a while. I brought it down.
And it’s my old deer hunting box. And in that was a spotlight.
And that spotlight brought back fond memories. of doing illegal
things as a teenager in my father’s car, which would have been taken
by the game warden. But we used to go spotlight deer,
which is not something you should do. But we also used to go fox
hunting. We’d put a little red film on it and do those sorts
of things. But that light has something
like 1.5 million lumens or whatever. It’s bright. And that’s before
HD. But you could turn that thing
on, plug it into your cigarette lighter, and it would light up
the landscape as if the sun was out, and Jesus has come into
the world and he has illumined everything. You see it all. You
see everything. He exposes what is false. But
remember, he gives light to our path. He gives a lamp to our
feet. And the way we have faith, the
way we know Jesus is the way of salvation is his light shows
us the way in darkness. In Jesus, the life of God has
come into this world. In Jesus, the life of God, which
exists in eternity and is in and of God himself, God does
not have or receive light or energy or need to be plugged
in and recharged. He himself is light and life.
And that is displayed to us through the person of the Lord Jesus
Christ. And notice what our passage says, it cannot, be snuffed out. And so you’re thinking of what
all is going on outside these doors in our culture, and you
think, oh, it’s dark. Oh, I’m sad. I’m depressed. The
person I voted for didn’t win, or the person I voted for did,
and it’s all going to be great, whatever. It doesn’t matter how bad this
world gets. It doesn’t matter how dark it gets. It doesn’t
matter how much sin spreads by wildfire. It cannot snuff out
Jesus. It cannot snuff out the gospel.
The light of Jesus cannot be extinguished. And so until the
Lord Jesus comes, his resurrection power, the brightness of the
new Sabbath day, when Jesus was raised from the dead is on display
as the church is faithful. Remember Jesus, when he walks
among the lampstands in the book of Revelation, the seven letters
to the seven churches, a faithful church will shine brightly in
darkness. And we can get unfaithful. We
can try to be like the world and attract all kinds of people,
all kinds of ways, except through the Bible. And Jesus says, I’ll
remove your lampstand. So if we want to be faithful,
we want to preach and proclaim the light and light of Jesus.
But also each and every one of you, you as families, are a bright
spot in this world. Jesus says, you are the light
of the world. You’re not to put your light
under a basket. You’re to set it up on a pedestal.
And so hopefully your house is the brightest spot in the neighborhood,
not because of your exterior illumination at Christmas, but
because of your life. Right? Because your way of living,
your children are obedient. It’s a happy home. You know,
you don’t walk out and kick the cat and cuss the dog, but you
keep your yard nice. You take care of things. And
there’s a happy, obedient, holy and helpful home. And so we want
to be a faithful witness to the light and life of Jesus through
the church and through preaching, but through our Christian living.
And we long for the day. as people of old would say, when
the day breaks, and the shadows flee, and the Lord himself comes
down from heaven, and that new Jerusalem, which is from above,
lands upon this new created order, and God’s glory, again, fills
the earth as was originally intended. Dear friends, it’s a dark world
out there. I was thinking this morning of two ways that I see
this darkness in particular. These are personal ways. You remember in the book of Genesis
when God lines up Adam and Eve and Satan after they have sinned
against him. And he says to each of them,
these are your punishments. These are your curses. This is
how it’s gonna go for you. And he promises to Satan, you
will fight against the seed of this woman. You will nip at his
heels, but he one day is going to crush your head. And we long
for the day when Jesus does come and he crushes the serpent’s
head fully and finally. But until then, we live in a
daily battle where Satan is nipping at our heels. He is nip, nip,
nipping. And we long for the day, as Paul
says at the end of Romans, Christ will soon come and crush Satan
under his feet. But until then, we’ve got these
wounds, these sores on our ankles because nip, nip, nip, Satan
is hard at work attempting to do what he did to Adam and Eve
in the garden and say, don’t be faithful. Don’t be true. Don’t
be righteous. It’s not worth it. And this comes
to us every day in our struggle with sin, doesn’t it? This comes
to us every day in our struggle to live by the flesh and not
the spirit. It comes to us every day when we want to be guided
by the world instead of the word. And it comes to us every day
as we struggle to listen to the voice of Christ and to push out
the voice of Satan. And dear friends, every single
day as you wage this battle in your life and in your home and
in your family and in your church work, your church ministry, Satan
wants nothing other than to destroy what would put Jesus’ honor and
glory and light on display in this world. And so you strike
out to be a Christian who’s married. You strike out to be a Christian
family, a parent. You strike out to be a Christian
in this world, a Christian in the university, a Christian in
the marketplace, a Christian in this world. Satan hates every
moment of it. And every single day, his darkness
is trying to snuff out the light of Jesus in you. Don’t let it
happen. Be disciplined. Serve the Lord
with fear and with great diligence. But remember this, Jesus always
shines through your weakness, through David’s weakness, Solomon’s
weakness, through the apostle Paul’s weakness, through this
church’s weakness. He always shines through. There’s another
way we see this darkness. And we see this darkness in the
temptation of the church in the world. Oh, we’re not making inroads.
The church is little. The church isn’t big. It’s not
American. It’s not producing numbers. And so what do we say?
Well, people aren’t interested in the word anymore. So let’s
have good coffee. People aren’t interested in singing
the songs and hymns and, uh, whatever of the faith. So let’s,
let’s, let’s make worship like a Led Zeppelin concert or whoever
your favorite is, that kind of thing. And so we try to win the
world. in the world’s ways. And darkness
will not win darkness. Well, we’re looking at 2021,
hoping for a better year. Maybe things will be worse. Who
knows? Evil will continue to spread
like wildfire. We’re facing a nation probably
to be ruled in my generation by totalitarianism. But we remember
the words we’ve sung just a few moments ago. Hark the herald
angels sing. Glory to the newborn king. Light
and life to all he brings risen with healing in his wings. Dear
friends, we have hope and we have our marching orders. Do
not be discouraged. Go and be light in life for the
risen King. Pray with me. Lord, we give you
thanks for the reminders this day, this hour of what is good,
what is right, what is true, what is beautiful and what is
precious. Lord, let us not be forgetful as we make our way
through the doors, but may we be faithful and may we live by
faith on these precious truths and promises so that the light
which goes forth from our lives may be the light of Christ who
gives light and life to all men. We ask for your help and blessing.
In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.