John 8:2-20
Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, sir.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’]]
Jesus the Light of the World
Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.’ Then the Pharisees said to him, ‘You are testifying on your own behalf; your testimony is not valid.’ Jesus answered, ‘Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid because I know where I have come from and where I am going, but you do not know where I come from or where I am going. You judge by human standards; I judge no one. Yet even if I do judge, my judgement is valid; for it is not I alone who judge, but I and the Father who sent me. In your law it is written that the testimony of two witnesses is valid. I testify on my own behalf, and the Father who sent me testifies on my behalf.’ Then they said to him, ‘Where is your Father?’ Jesus answered, ‘You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also.’ He spoke these words while he was teaching in the treasury of the temple, but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.
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I’ve been to a number of Cincinnati
Reds games, both at night and during the day.
Every time someone hits a homerun, they shoot off fireworks—it doesn’t
matter if it’s noon or midnight, they’ll fire them off, and I’ve seen them at
both. They’re a lot clearer at night—when
it’s broad daylight, you hear them more than you see them. If it wasn’t for the noise, it would be hard
to even know they had gone off. But at
night, you can see them from miles away.
When we talk about Christ as the
light of the world, this is a similar feeling—when all is well and the sun is
shining and the birds are singing, it’s sometimes hard to recognize Christ’s
grace shining. We have a tendency to
forget that the sun is shining and all is well because we have a generous God
who pours out his gifts upon us. When it’s
dark, though, and the world is falling apart and we are in the valley of the
shadow of death, we seek out the light—then the love of God seems so much more
visceral. In our darkest hours, the love
of God working through a friend or the church seems much more real, much more
present. The nature of God’s love doesn’t
change, but our ability to experience it often does, depending on our lives.
So what does it mean for Christ to
be the light of the world? And how do we
live by this light?
Most importantly, it’s where we are
going. To give you the brief overview of
this, turn to Genesis 1. How does it
describe the world before creation?
Darkness covers the face of the deep, it reads. From there, flip to Revelation 22. How will the world be after its final
redemption? There will be no more night;
they need no light, for the Lord God will be their light. From darkness to light—we’ve just summarized
the Bible. One big movement—where we are
going, they would say in Back to the
Future, we don’t need lights. Christ
alone is our light.
What does this mean? Think of all the bad things going on in the
world, of all the darkness present.
How many of you have cancer, have
had cancer, or know someone battling cancer?
How many of you have been depressed
for any reason?
How many of you have spent weeks,
months, years searching for a job, trying to find meaning in your life?
How many of you have had
relationships fall apart with spouses, family, children, parents?
How many of you read the news, see
the chaos and shooting in Colorado, Tuscaloosa, and here in Chattanooga?
How many of you know about the
economic chaos in Europe, the war in Afghanistan, the slaughter in Syria, the
constant struggle in Africa?
It’s all darkness. It’s the evidence of human sin in the world—the
shadowy worlds. When we’re walking down
a street at night and one side has lights and the other doesn’t, which side do
you choose? It probably depends on your
intentions—if you’re searching for a dark place to do something you know is
wrong, you choose the dark side. If you’re
just trying to make it home, you walk in the light. Darkness is a scary world.
But it’s all going to be conquered,
destroyed, beaten by God. Jesus has
promised us that in him we will dwell in eternal light, because he has come to
bring the light—he IS the light! The
light shines in the darkness, the prologue to John’s Gospel says, but the
darkness has not understood it. Christ
shines, and he has defeated the darkness, but he has not yet destroyed it. It still lurks in the world, but in him we
have hope. The darkness cannot win! The light wins, and we get to join in the
victory song! Our eternal destiny is
light, and there will be no darkness there.
Cancer? Gone! Violence?
Gone! Chaos? Gone!
All evil? Gone!! Christ is the light—and the darkness will be
defeated by the light. We know how this
works every time we flip a light switch in a dark room, every time we light a
candle in the night—one light can beat back the darkness, and while shadows
still remain by our own human light, in Christ’s light, even the shadows are
gone!
This means we get to be a people of
hope. We have no need to fear. Death cannot defeat us! Evil cannot destroy us! We get to win! Anxieties and stomach-churning problems will
all perish! We have hope, as long as it
is properly rooted in Christ alone, who is the true light.
So Christ as the light of the world
means that we get to live as a people of hope.
What is the practical application of this?
How many of you have ever seen a
car driving in the night without headlights?
What’s your first thought?
It’s dangerous, right? You could kill someone! You could kill yourself! Every once in a while I’ll see a car driving
down the freeway at high speeds without headlights and I panic. I also check to see if my own headlights are
on.
In a car, we don’t power the
headlights. There’s no crank we turn to
keep the headlights going. We don’t have
to figure them out when we get into the car.
They are there. We don’t invent
them.
The same is true of faith. We don’t invent faith or create faith. We accept Christ’s gift of faith. We can’t create the light of Christ—we can
merely let it guide us. We need it
always—just as they’ve discovered that cars are safer when they drive with
their headlights on in the middle of the day, life is wise when we always let
Christ guide us. We think we can get by
when times are good, when things feel like they’re all going our way, but then
we discover that we end up lost because we stopped following Christ. So we always need Christ’s light, even when
the lights of the world all seem to be shining for us.
Nighttime is a good reminder for
us. These are the valleys, when we’re
surrounded by darkness. Only then do we
realize how much we need Christ.
And those other people, driving
around without their headlights on—what about them?
I figure there are two types of
people who drive without headlights on.
Those who know their headlights are off, and those who have no
idea. Those who know the headlights are
off are simply out to prove something, I suppose, while those who have no idea
have fallen prey to some type of lie.
There is enough light inside the car, or they turned the car on in a
bright place and just haven’t yet realized that the world is lying to them,
that they need those headlights.
The Devil is often called the
Father of lies as well as the Prince of Darkness. He lies to us. The world lies to us. It convinces us that we are following the
light, that the headlights are on, when the reality is that we’re rushing
towards destruction. When our headlights
aren’t on, when Christ isn’t guiding us, we need someone to point out that
these aren’t on. We may figure it out on
our own, but it may be too late. We’ve
all done this—we’ve driven along without realizing that the lights aren’t on,
convinced that we are fine, that we don’t know they aren’t on, when suddenly we
realize that we are driving in the dark without a light to guide us. It’s embarrassing. The same thing happens with faith sometimes—we
fall prey to a lie. We believe we are on
the right track, that we’re doing everything right, but in reality we’ve
stopped relying on the light, we’ve stopped paying attention because there is
some lie that is whispering that everything is ok, and we’re just going along,
straight to the path that will damage us, until we realize what a fool we’ve
been and we turn on the light of Christ and let him guide us, putting away
those other voices that lie to us.
For those who don’t yet realize it,
we need to be a light for them. We need
to help shine the light of Christ into their lives, to help them realize that their
own light is not shining as well as to shine it for them, to help them see the
proper way. This is to be our role in
the world—not to let our own light shine, but rather to let Christ’s shine in
and through us. Our hope should be
transparent. The light should shine
through us, so that everyone else can see our headlights. Some may have brighter headlights, while some
may be driving along with one headlight out, barely making it, but still led by
Christ.
To close, I want to tell a story
about what this looks like.
Once, there was a time in my life
when I was the cool kid. People envied
me. I'm going to admit here today that I
enjoyed it a little too much. There was
some sin there.
When, you ask? It was my junior year of high school, and I
had just begun to drive. This alone was
a bit of a status upgrade, but there was something else that made it even
better. I was driving a 13 year old
diesel suburban, a beast of a car that could seat everyone I knew and then
some. It was loud and huge, and so my
mother warned me to be careful where I went, because everyone would know I was
there.
If any of you have owned, or
currently own, a car that old, you know that they are less than reliable. This was the reason for my coolness—my
parents bought me a cell phone to go with the car. It was to be used when the car broke down on
the side of the road, and the car gave me the occasion to use it for that.
But I also carried it around to
school because, well, I wanted to be cool.
I remember at one point a friend asked if he could borrow it to pretend
to talk on it when other people were around.
These were exciting times in which we lived. Back then everyone didn't have a smartphone.
There was one particular occasion
in which several of us had ventured out for the day and were returning home in
the evening. I had driven, and I noticed
the car began to act strange on the way home.
For instance, the blinker was going very slowly, the radio didn't come
on, and when I tried to roll down the window it took thirty seconds to move
three inches. Odd, I thought... but I
kept driving, having no knowledge of the problem. As I was nearing our exit on the freeway, I
turned on the headlights because it had grown dark and I noticed that the
dashboard lights didn't turn on. From
the look of the road in front of me, the headlights weren't shining,
either.
By the time I reached my exit, it
was completely dark, and I had four miles of country road to get home. No streetlights out here. I thought there would be enough ambient light
to get me home, but I made it about 1/8 of a mile off the freeway before I
realized this was not the case. There's
something scary about driving down a dark road when you can't see two feet in
front of the car.
So the cell phone came out and I
called dad, who happened to be not far away at the time. After explaining the problem, he asked the
normal questions a parent would ask, like “Why did you ever drive it in the
first place?” The alternator was out, so
all the electricity in the car wasn't working.
So no hope of headlights. So what
we decided would be the best course of action was for him to follow me home in
his car, his headlights illuminating enough of the road in front of me so for
me to see by. I would have been in the
dark, off the road, except for the lights behind me piercing the darkness ahead
of me, guiding me home.
May the light of Christ shine
through each of us in such a way that others may see by it, piercing the
darkness and guiding us all to our eternal home, where there will be no more
night.
Let us pray
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