Morning, brothers and sisters.
Let’s go ahead and read a couple of Scriptures.
John 8:12.
Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world:
he that followeth Me shall not walk in the darkness,
but shall have the light of life.
And then 1 Peter 2:9.
But ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,
a people for God’s own possession,
that ye may show forth the excellencies of Him Who called you
out of darkness into His marvellous light.
Our Father, we do stand to give You thanks, as we were exhorted this morning, to give You thanks for Your great grace to us. How grateful we are, Lord, that You did not leave us in darkness, but You came to us to redeem us out of that darkness and bring us into the light of Your Son.
And Lord, in that light of Your Son, we see that You love us. You have redeemed us to Yourself for Your own purposes, that we might know You, walk with You, and have the joy of serving You.
Lord, we come to Your Word today. We ask for Your Holy Spirit to open it up to us and show us Jesus Christ, Your Son; and that, in seeing Him, we might turn from the things that have our hearts and turn to Him completely, finding in Him all that we need for life. We ask this in Jesus’ name.
This morning, I’m continuing on with John. I’m not going to give a recap of everything, except to say that, due to time constraints, I’m not speaking on John until the Lord comes, if He tarries for a long time. We try to go a chapter a week—not even verse by verse—but to consider the things that I think the Lord has touched me with concerning these things.
As we come to John 8, we find Jesus still in Jerusalem after the Feast of Tabernacles, where we found Him the last time. In this chapter, we have the woman caught in adultery; we have Jesus speaking of Himself as the light of the world; and we have that famous statement, “Before Abraham was, I am,” to which the Pharisees and scribes sought to stone Him.
But everything is wrapped around this one verse in John 8:12, where Jesus said:
I am the light of the world:
he that followeth Me shall not walk in the darkness,
but shall have the light of life.
Everything centers around this. So, we want to deal with this idea: Jesus being the light of the world.
This is one of the statements of Jesus—the “I am” statements. There are seven or eight “I am” statements in John. We have covered, “I am the bread of life.” We have yet to cover some of the others. But here He says, “I am the light.”
There have been countless sermons on this, and I’m not going to repeat any sermons. But in looking at this, I want to look at what light is, and then ask: What is the Lord trying to show us by saying that He is the light? What is the light?
Now, you can get really technical definitions about light—what creates light, all this electromagnetic stuff—which, I’m not a science person, so it’s all Greek to me. God bless you.
But I found a couple of definitions that I really liked. One was this: Light is that which enables the eye to discern form and color.
Without light, we cannot discern shapes or colors. It is completely dark. I have two friends who are blind, and it has always really struck me. You guys know Ernie; he used to come to the conference. Another friend is Tom Whaling.
I’m always curious; I like to ask questions. I asked Ernie, “How do you dream?” Because when we dream, we see things. How does a blind man dream? He told me, “Well, I hear sounds, and I feel things, and stuff like that.” That is really interesting.
Here is someone who has no light and has no idea what shapes, forms, and colors are. He used to tell us that he could hear colors, but we pooh-poohed that. “Does this sound green, Ernie?”
The other definition is this: Light is the agent through which objects are rendered visible. The agent through which objects are rendered visible.
Both of these are really good definitions, because without this agent we cannot see. We cannot tell what is real. Really, that is what light does: light reveals.
Light does not reveal darkness; it dispels darkness. I cannot say, “Oh, that’s darkness.” No—darkness is the absence of light. When light comes in, darkness goes.
If we came in here in the morning or in the evening and turned on the lights, you would not see one corner remaining dark while all the rest was lit up. Once the light comes on, that corner is lit.
So light reveals. What does it reveal? It reveals truth. It reveals the real—what really is, the way things really are.
What did our Lord Jesus Christ mean when He said, “I am the light of the world”? What was His life—His Person—revealing to us? What was it that His Person was the agent through which objects were rendered visible?
I have three things that I would like to say that He was revealing. First, He revealed what man was meant to be.
We can say that is a very generic thing: “Jesus shows us what man was meant to be.” But when we look at Jesus Christ, what do we see? A lot of times, we see Someone who is pure and holy, and we say that is because He was God. He had something over us that we could never have. He was sinless.
But we have to understand: He came in humanity—humanity untouched by sin, what man was supposed to be. Man was never supposed to be touched by sin.
He was a display to us of what man was supposed to be.
When you study to do something like this, you read a lot of things. I was thumbing through some volumes of G. Campbell Morgan’s sermons, and one was called Life in the Light. It talked about Jesus in this very way. So I’m not going to say I had this big revelation, but I read this and said, “Wow. This is true.”
When you look at the life of the Man, Jesus Christ, you may say, “Well, man was supposed to do miracles.” No, no, no. When you look at His life, what do you see?
The first thing you see is a Man who is not mastered. He is not mastered by anything.
I’m not talking about governments and those things. Some of us are mastered by riches or by the lack of riches. Because we have riches, we want more; we are trying to keep what we have. That masters us. It takes control of us, so that all we are thinking about is, “How can I protect my money?” or “How can I make more money?”
Jesus was not mastered by poverty, even though He was born into a poor family. His poverty was not such that He was out begging on the streets, but He was of meager means. That did not master Him. He was not saying, “Oh my gosh, how am I going to make the payments for next week? I need more jobs. I need more work.” He was not mastered by those things.
I was talking to a brother the other day who said, “I’m trying to get to the place where those things don’t master me, and I just have peace in the Lord, knowing that the Lord is going to take care of me.”
Even the Lord Himself, when He preached, said not to be so worried about what we will eat or what we will wear, but to seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added to us.
The Lord was not mastered by these things. He was not mastered by His work. Yes, He was a carpenter, but He was not mastered by it. He was not mastered by His family—the cares of His family, the needs of His family. Those things did not master Him.
He was not mastered by pleasure. He was simply a Man who was not mastered. He was free—unmastered.
What does Genesis say about when man was created? God said to subdue and have dominion. Jesus Christ—that is the Man, Jesus Christ. He was not mastered at all.
Another thing about Him: mentally, when you think about what He thought about, you may think He only thought about preaching or doing miracles. But the Lord Jesus was aware of all the material surroundings. He was aware of nature, cities, and people. He was aware of the material world.
Yet He did not shun the material world. He was not an ascetic who said that the things of the world were evil and had to be avoided. No. He saw the material world as something God had created—something good.
We see this in His teaching. In the Sermon on the Mount, He said, “Consider the lilies of the field.” Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
When He looked at the material world, He did not shun it as something evil. He looked at it for what it was: the creation of God, something to be appreciated—not something to go overboard with, but something to appreciate for what it was and for what it showed Him.
At the same time, while being aware of this material world, He was also conscious of the spiritual. He was never unconscious of the eternal. He saw everything in the light of eternity.
Not only that, He always acted as though He was in the presence of the eternal, because He was. He saw that as the true, the real. He was living in eternity, although He lived in this present world.
Socially, Jesus was not a hermit. He was not antisocial. He was not a recluse. He did not go into a house, hole up, and say, “I’ve got sermons to prepare. I’ve got things to think about.”
He lived in community. Whether He lived with His brothers and His mother, or within the fellowship of His disciples, He lived in community.
And living in community, He enjoyed community. He never said to children, “Hey, go away from Me, you kids. You bother Me.” Remember, He said, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me.” He enjoyed community.
That is why you find Him at the feast in the house of Levi. He did not shun community as though it were something unspiritual. Socially, He lived in community.
Didn’t God say, “It is not good that the man should be alone”?
Fourth, spiritually, He was in fellowship with God. That was His whole life. There was no vacation from His fellowship. He was in constant communion.
He spoke out of that communion. He acted out of that communion. He seized every opportunity to do the will of God as the opportunity presented itself.
In other words, He did not say, “Well, I can do that tomorrow,” or, “I’ve got my agenda.” No. As the Lord, out of that communion, showed Him, “This is an opportunity,” He took it. He took it right then. He took it quickly. And because of that, there was blessing.
He was perceptive, spiritually discerning. He knew the hearts and thoughts of men.
This is what man is. This is what man is to be. This is what God made man for—all these things that we see in the Lord Jesus.
Finally, He was sinless. Because He was sinless, there was no break in communication with the Father—complete transparency between Him and the Father.
The second thing we find in Christ as light is that He revealed man as he is: a fallen creature.
If we look through John 8, we see several things that are said about man.
In the first eleven verses, where they find the woman caught in adultery and bring her before the Lord Jesus, we find man bound to law and under law. “According to Moses, this is what should happen.”
Yet, even though man is bound to law, we find that man is either unwilling or unable to keep it. When they brought this woman before Jesus, caught in adultery, that was breaking the law right there. They should have brought her to the Sanhedrin, not to Jesus Himself.
Or consider the idea: “Whatever could help my mother and father, I gave it to the Lord.” That is a way of getting around the law. Lawbreakers.
Or consider Paul’s dilemma in Romans 7: “I find that I sin, I sin, I sin. I cannot get away from this. Who is going to help me?” Unable to keep the law.
So man is bound to the law.
Secondly, if you read John 8:13-20, we find that man is spiritually dead. He looks only to the physical witness of things. They said, “Thou bearest witness of Thyself.” Jesus said that His witness was true because His Father also bore witness of Him. They said, “Where is Thy Father?”
In other words, we are always looking for the physical, ignoring that witness in our spirit that comes from God.
They could see all the works that came from God, yet they kept asking for another word, another sign, another proof. They did not see that the Father was bearing witness to His Son.
Peter said this in his sermon in Acts 2: Jesus was a Man attested of God through mighty works. God was behind all these works. God was witnessing that Jesus Christ was the Christ.
Yet they did not understand because their spirits were dead. They could not get through there. They were spiritually dead.
Third, men are slaves to sin. Further on in the chapter, Jesus says that the Son will set you free. They said, “We have never been under bondage to anything.” But He said that everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.
We are mastered by the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. We could give all sorts of testimonies about that, couldn’t we—about how we have been mastered by sin in our own lives?
You might say, like Paul, “Well, gee whiz, according to the law, I’m blameless.” Well, let’s go a little deeper than that. What is sin?
Sin is really the enthronement of self and the taking of God off His rightful place. That is really the base of sin: “I will no longer be ruled.”
That is what Psalm 2 is about: “Let us break their bonds asunder, and cast away their cords from us.” Let us be free for ourselves. We will decide what we will do for ourselves.
Sin goes further than just the obvious physical act. Read the Sermon on the Mount. “Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you, that every one that looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”
Sin is not merely physical action; it is spiritual. We are slaves to sin.
Even Wesley wrote in “And Can It Be”:
Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night.
In other words, my own reasoning and ability cannot get me out of this. I cannot reason my way out of it.
Finally, Jesus says that fallen man is a child of the devil. They said, “We have God as our Father.” He said, “If God were your Father, ye would love Me.” But they sought to kill Him, doing the will of their father, who was a murderer and a liar—the father of lies.
If you look at man today—boy—lying is nothing today. It used to be, “Well, it’s a little white lie.” But lying is normal. You lie to get ahead. It is second nature to us now.
It used to be that if you were caught in a lie, you thought, “Oh, this is terrible.” Now it is more like, “Oh well, caught me. Oops.” But it means nothing.
Lying, murdering—look at the murder rate in our country. This is man. And if we look at murder not only in the physical sense, what about character assassination? What about how we murder with our words?
This is what man is today. All of these things—this is what man is today.
The third thing the Lord revealed is God. How does He reveal God? First of all, what does He reveal about God? God is full of grace and truth.
God came with light in order to save. He did not come with light merely to say, “You’re condemned,” and leave us there. He came with light to show us things so that we might turn to Him.
Take the woman caught in adultery in the first eleven verses. We find sin uncovered and sin revealed.
When God comes before us, He does not come saying everything is okay. When He comes in His light, sin is uncovered and sin is revealed.
She was caught in the very act. I do not think she was very happy when she was pulled before Jesus. I think she came kicking and yelling, myself. I should not say screaming, but yelling.
I want to couple this with the hymn “Hallelujah, What a Savior!” When we look at the woman, her sin is uncovered and revealed, and we find that we are guilty:
Guilty, vile, and helpless we;
Spotless Lamb of God was He.
But the grace and truth we see is this: when they brought her before Jesus and set her down, they said, “What do You say?” Now, we can discuss the trap, but I am not here to discuss the trap. I want to discuss the light.
Jesus said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” A better rendition is, “He who is sinless among you, let him cast the first stone.”
According to God’s law, the sinless must judge. The sinless are in the position of judge.
So He said, “He who is sinless, let him cast the first stone.” Then we see everybody leaving.
When Jesus was left alone with her, He said, “Where are they? Did no man condemn thee?” She said, “No man, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn thee: go thy way; from henceforth sin no more.”
Later in the chapter, Jesus says, “Which of you convicteth Me of sin?” They had no answer for that. He was the spotless Lamb of God.
We might think that He let the woman off easy. He said, “Neither do I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more.” How could He say that? She was caught; she was guilty. Was He just sweeping things under the rug?
No, He was not. In John 8:28, He says, “When ye have lifted up the Son of man.” The Lord Jesus knew what His mission was. His mission was that He was to be lifted up on a cross.
So when He said to the woman, “I do not condemn you,” what He was saying was, “I do not condemn you because I am going to be condemned for you.”
When you lift up the Son of Man, you lift Him up so that He can be condemned for you. You lift Him up on that cross.
The hymn says:
Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood;
Sealed my pardon with His blood.
And the final verse says:
Lifted up was He to die.
That is what He was for. This is grace and truth to us: the One Who was sinless became our sin so that He could die on our behalf.
Then He said, “It is finished.” The condemnation that was ours was poured out upon Him. This is grace, and this is truth.
Jerry read a verse during the table—Romans 4:5: God “justifieth the ungodly.”
You cannot say that this woman was a godly woman. She was caught in adultery. Yet we find the Lord Jesus here justifying the ungodly.
Oh, brothers and sisters, are you in that position where you say, “I’m ungodly”? There is good news for you. There is grace for you.
He justifies the ungodly, not by merely saying a word, but by doing a deed—by taking your place on the cross. He has justified you.
Finally, grace and truth show us how much God loves us and desires to save us. He calls the lost to Himself.
That is what we find in John 8:12: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth Me.” This is His call: “Come and follow Me. Come and follow Me.”
“I know all about you. I know everything you are. I know man as he is today. That does not stop Me from calling him.” That is grace. That is grace to us.
How do these things apply to me? Christ is the light of the world, and these are the things He is showing me. How does this apply?
Let us read our key verse again:
And Jesus spake unto them, saying, I am the light of the world:
he that followeth Me shall not walk in the darkness,
but shall have the light of life.
The application is not, “Okay, from now on, don’t walk in darkness.” The idea of not walking in darkness is not a command; it is a result.
It results from following Him. He is not saying, “Don’t walk in darkness.” He is saying, “If you follow Me, you will no longer walk in darkness.”
The word follow is a Greek word that I cannot pronounce, so I am not going to try. But the idea in that word is coming to union with Him. “Come into union with Me. Join Me.”
That is a better way of looking at it: “Join Me, and I will take you, really, to where you want to go.”
Following means walking with Him. If you are following someone, you are walking with him. He is saying, “Join with Me. Come with Me. Walk with Me.”
You take walks with your children, your spouse, your girlfriend, or your boyfriend. There is a difference between walking with a person and walking a pet.
I walk my pet twice a day, and we do not have fellowship. Usually, I am tugging at her—“Come on, let’s keep going”—or I am waiting for her. We have no fellowship. When we get home, she expects me to feed her.
But when I walk with my daughters, my friends, or my wife, we talk with one another. We share with one another.
It is interesting: I know I have shared this before, but as I have gotten older, and Barb and I have now been married twenty-four years, I find that I start to say something and she says, “Yeah, I was thinking that.” Or I say, “I’ve been feeling this way,” and she says, “Yeah, I’ve been feeling that way too.”
It is really interesting that there is a union. We are finding out that our lives are really becoming one. It is kind of spooky in a good way—not weird, but kind of like, “Wow, we’re on the same wavelength.” That is so cool.
A lot of times, what ruins marriage is that people are simply not on the same wavelength. But we find ourselves on the same wavelength. This whole idea about walking—that is what it is.
Micah 6:8 says:
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good;
and what doth the Lord require of thee,
but to do justly, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with thy God?
This is what God requires of you. He does not say, “Don’t walk in darkness.” That is not His requirement. His requirement is, “Come and walk with Me.”
That is what He created you for. When we see Jesus as the Man God wants, we see a Man Who walks with God—unbroken fellowship.
I know we find breaks in our fellowship, but isn’t it wonderful that He is always there for us? He is always waiting for fellowship with us.
I do not know if you have ever done this, but what about the times when you are doing something mindless?
I used to work in the summer, before I got on twelve-month pay. I was on ten-month pay, so for two months we did not get any money. I used to work for Dan Lindbergh, a guy from Pony Valley who makes great barbecue spices.
I would bottle barbecue sauce and fill little containers with spices. All I would be doing was this. Pretty mindless.
After teaching for ten months, it was great to do something mindless. But if you do not convert mindlessness into something, it gets really, really boring.
So what do you do when you are doing something mindless, like raking leaves or washing your car? Do you ever turn that time into fellowshipping with the Lord?
Do you share with the Lord the things that are on your heart? Do you praise Him for Who He is and for what you are seeing of Him? This is walking with God.
It is being conscious of Him all the time—being conscious of the eternal all the time.
He says, “When you follow Me, you will not walk in darkness, because you will have the light.” Actually, the saying is not merely “the light of life,” but “the light of the life.”
To be in union with Him is to have His life living in you and His life guiding you.
This is the whole thing. This is where we have trouble: we exchange the life of Christ for behavior. We say, “This is what I think God expects of me,” and we take that instead of taking the life of Christ.
That is what Stephen was really talking about when he gave those four messages on spiritual exercise. We exchange doing something for actual communion.
What the Lord wants is this: “If you follow Me, if you come into union with Me, you are going to find the life I put in you.”
That is the wonder of eternal life: eternal life is in us. That eternal life is the very thing that leads us into more light.
As we find ourselves responding to this life in us, we find other things opening up to us. This is the wonder of it.
Being a Christian, we should be full of wonder—not saying, “Oh yeah, I’ve got to do this. Oh, this is what Christians do.” No. We are led by the life in us.
There are two other things, really quickly. This is why Jesus could say to His disciples in Matthew 5:14-16, “Ye are the light of the world.”
Why? Is it because of something we are doing? No. It is because of the life that is in us. “I have given you life that is light.” His life was the light of men.
So that people can see your good works and glorify your Father Who is in heaven. This is what the life is: it is light.
We can say, “Well, Jesus is not in the world anymore, so there is no more light.” Oh, brothers and sisters, we are to be the light because the life of Christ is in us.
It is not because we are being righteous on our own, but because we are following that life in us. That life has the same effect: it shows people what man should be, what God desires; it shows people what they are; and it shows people grace and truth.
Finally, in John 8:31-32, Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him:
If ye abide in My word, then are ye truly My disciples;
and ye shall know the truth,
and the truth shall make you free.
I am not going to talk about the truth making you free. I just want to deal with this one word: continue.
This is what, in our natural man, we lack most of all: we lack the will to continue.
We relax. We say, “I’ve done enough here, so I can relax. I’ve done so much; now it’s time for me to rest.” No. He says, “If you continue.”
If you continue in the light that I am giving you—if you continue in that light—you will find out what freedom really is, because you will be free to serve Me.
You will be free to serve Him, not out of duty, not because it is the right thing to do, not because it is the religious thing to do.
You will be free to serve Him willingly. It is not Him twisting your arm and saying, “You’ve got to do these things.” You are free.
It is like the bondservant. After seven years, the master says, “You have been my servant for seven years. You can go out free.” But the bondservant, out of his own free will, says, “I do not want to go. I want to continue serving you.”
“I want to freely serve you.” I can freely serve because I am not thinking that He is keeping score and I have to watch my P’s and Q’s. I am free to serve Him. Everything else has been taken care of. Now I am free to serve Him.
So often, we look at our service to Him as winning us points or getting us somewhere. That is not the case. He does not want us serving Him like that.
He does not want us compelled to serve Him because He is going to punish us. That is not God. God wants a freewill offering. That is what He is after.
If you continue. If you continue.
One reason I do not chew gum—one reason is because my wife does not like the way I chew—is that it loses its flavor so fast.
You ever notice that? You get a piece of Juicy Fruit, and five minutes later you are just chewing tree sap, because that is what it is made of, incidentally—tree sap with sugar. It loses its flavor so fast.
I wonder if that is the same way with us as far as the Lord goes—our relationship with the Lord. Do we continue in the relationship, or do we get sidetracked?
Do we get mastered by our work, by our poverty, our riches, our family, or our jobs?
The Lord says, “If you continue.” There is an if there. “If you continue, you are My disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Brothers and sisters, I want to encourage us. The Lord has extended His hand to us and said, “Walk with Me.”
Some of us have begun to walk with Him, and praise the Lord. I just encourage you: let’s continue. Let’s ask the Lord for that grace to be so ravished by Who He is that we continue.
As I said, I have been married twenty-four years now, and I am going to continue being married. I am going to continue in that relationship because I have found in that relationship great fulfillment.
It is the same for us. Continue in the relationship, and find the fulfillment that He has for you in Christ.
Let’s pray.
Lord, how thankful we are that when You come with light, You do not come to destroy us. You come to reveal how much You want to have us in Your presence, even to the point that You would send Your only Son to take our condemnation so that we would not have that holding us back from You.
Then You would say, “Come and follow Me. Come and walk with Me.”
Lord, we ask today that this might be the thing that speaks to our hearts: You are calling us just to walk with You, in a way that You will give us Your life and we will find real fulfillment.
We will find ourselves becoming that very man that You want, because that very man whom You want, You have put in us through the Holy Spirit.
Lord, help us in seeing these things. Bring these things to light, we pray, and give us grace, Lord, to follow You. We ask in Christ’s name.