The True Light

John 1.6-13

Light changes us.

We’ve all heard of seasonal affective disorder, that thing many people have that makes them depressed and exhausted during the dark winter months. If you know someone like that—first of all—give them a gift and buy them one of those lamps that simulate UV light, to help trick their brains into thinking the sun is out for longer. (I got one for Loanne a few years ago, they really do help.) And secondly, watch what happens to them when spring rolls into summer, and the days get longer, and the weather gets clearer.

The change that comes over them is often staggering. They’re happier, they’ve got more energy, there’s a spring in their step…

Light doesn’t just help us see; it actually does change us.

This year during Advent we’re focusing on John’s prologue to his gospel, where he introduces us to Jesus Christ. If you remember last week, we saw the first five verses of John 1, where John presented Jesus first as “the Word”, God himself, the perfect expression of God’s person and character. He told us that Jesus is the Creator of all things. He told us that in him was life, and that life was the light of men. The “life” he was talking about is physical life (because Christ is the Creator of all things), but most especially spiritual life; and the “light” is light that does two things—it exposes, and it illuminates. We’ll get back into that again today.

The Herald of the Light (v. 6-9)

Let’s pick up where we left off, in v. 6. We start with a bit of an aside, but John has a reason for it. (In today’s English manuscript I’m using the Christian Standard Bible.)

6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify about the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He was not the light, but he came to testify about the light. 9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.

So this may be confusing, but the “John” mentioned in v. 6 is not the “John” who is writing this gospel. The man writing this gospel is the apostle John, and in v. 6 he’s talking about John the Baptist.

John the Baptist was actually Jesus’s second cousin, the son of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth. John was the last of the great prophets, whose job it was to proclaim God’s will to his people.

This was actually a very big deal, because there had been no prophets in Israel for four hundred years. So John’s coming made massive waves. He was a bit of a weirdo (as the prophets often were): he lived in the desert, wore animal skins and ate bugs—he was the kind of guy you’d avoid if you passed him on the street.

But God sent John with a purpose, and gave him the power to accomplish that purpose—when John spoke, people listened. What he spoke of was repentance: that is, God’s call that people turn away from their rebellion against God, their sin, and obey God. John baptized those who repented for the forgiveness of their sins.

That often struck me as odd when I read about John as a young man. I’d been told that Jesus came to save us from our sins, by taking those sins away. But it seemed to me like, before Jesus even got a chance to do that, John was already there offering repentance—as if it was another, different way of being saved from sin.

Of course, that’s not what was happening. John was preaching a baptism of repentance because he was getting the people ready for Jesus—as he says in v. 23, “I am a voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Make straight the way of the Lord,—just as Isaiah the prophet said.” Before anyone will accept the salvation Christ offers, they have to believe they need saving. John was putting their sin in front of their eyes, showing them that it is not possible to continue in that sin, but that God is willing to forgive. And how would that forgiveness come, once and for all? Through Jesus Christ.

All this is to say that John the Baptist was pointing to the light, but he wasn’t the light himself. As we see in v. 9: The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.

There’s one more important thing to note in v. 9: John says that this “true light” that is in Christ “gives light to everyone.” Everyone. Light shines indiscriminately. If you turn on a light in a dark room, anything it comes into contact with is illuminated. Unless you’re a black hole, you can’t not be affected by light.

Every time someone shares the good news of Jesus Christ, his light shines on the people who hear it, whether they want it to or not. The question isn’t whether or not the light shines on you; it does. The question is rather, how do you respond to that light?

The Rejection of the Light (v. 10-11)

There are only two possible ways, two possible responses. The first of those responses is rejection.

V. 10:

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

Usually when the Bible talks about “the world” in the sense of “the people of the world,” it’s referring to those people who don’t belong to God, who aren’t members of his own people—and that’s what John’s doing here too. Although the world was created by Christ, the people of the world don’t recognize their Creator.

But John is saying this, not just to say how bad the world is, but also to accentuate an even more surprising point: the world rejected him, but that’s not all. Members of his own people rejected him too.

Jesus was born a Jew, to a Jewish family. And by and large—with the exception of a small handful of people before his death—the Jews rejected Jesus. They called out for his death. Now thankfully this didn’t remain the case (the first several thousand people to believe in him were mostly Jews), but you would think that the one group likely to accept the Jewish Messiah would be the Jews themselves.

But no. The world rejected him, and his own people rejected him. The question is, why?

We briefly talked about it last week. We see it a little later, in chapter 3, verse 20, when Jesus says that everyone who does evil hates the light and avoids it, so that his deeds may not be exposed. The light shows us what we really are, so we naturally reject it. We saw this multiple times when we were in the book of Romans: we are all sinners, we all naturally reject God, so we all naturally stay away from the light. We don’t naturally like to hear someone share the message of the gospel, because the first thing we find out in that message is that we’re guilty before God, and no one wants to hear that.

You can see this happening if you keep reading Jesus’s story. Nearly every time Jesus taught, you had some people who were interested, and some who believed (we’ll get to them in a second). But you also had plenty of people in the crowds who were going, “Nope—sorry, I’m out.” His teaching was shedding light on their own sin and their own inconsistencies, and they didn’t like it. So they called him a blasphemer, and ultimately they killed him for it.

Anyone who has shared the gospel with several people knows this is the case. You’ll get as many rejections as you do interested conversations—sometimes even more. Even when you just try to talk about what the Bible says about other things, people reject it. As long as you just talk about the love of God and the grace of God, people can usually get on board with that, or at least appreciate that you’re saying something nice. But if you’re going to be faithful to the Bible, that can’t be all you talk about. And the second you start putting your finger on more specific issues—issues of what God says is best for us, what he calls sin and what he calls righteousness—that conversation often gets shut down pretty quickly.

He was in the world, and the world was created through him, and yet the world did not recognize him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

The Transformation of the Light (v. 12-13)

Naturally, this is the response every one of us have. So v. 10-11 shouldn’t be surprising.

What should surprise us is that some people did receive him. Some people do. Many people, in fact. And I’d suggest that the real question we should be asking is not, Why don’t more people receive Christ? but rather, why does anyone receive Christ? If we are all naturally sinners who resist the light, what makes someone want to go towards Christ, rather than run away from him?

That is the question John answers in v. 12-13.

12 But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, 13 who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.

We’ll need to do a bit of work here, because this part of the passage is tricky.

I said before that the light that shines through Christ exposes. It exposes us for what we really are, it exposes sin for what it really is.

But that’s not all it does. The light also illuminates, and those whom it illuminates are transformed. They become children of God.

How does this happen? What are the steps in this process?

We see the first two in v. 12: to all who did receive him; to those who believe in his name. That’s what we need to do to be declared children of God.

But why do we believe in him and receive him, rather than reject him? We see that in v. 13: because we were born of God. Not because we were born into a certain family, not because we were born into a certain culture, not because our parents decided they wanted to have kids. If we believe in him and receive him, it’s because we were born of God.

Now if that sounds confusing to you, you’re not alone. Just a couple chapters later, in chapter 3, we see Jesus speaking with a religious leader named Nicodemus, and he’s talking about this very subject. The first thing we see Jesus say, in John 3.3, is:

“Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus’s response is excellent, because it’s so human—it’s exactly the kind of thing any normal person would ask. He says (v. 4):

“How can anyone be born when he is old?… Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born?”

Gold star for Nicodemus—that’s a great question. So Jesus goes on to explain that he’s not talking about physical birth, but spiritual birth. He says (3.8):

The wind blows where it pleases, and you hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.

In other words, babies who are born don’t understand how they were born, and they certainly don’t decide to be born. The decisive element of our birth escapes us; it’s something that happens to us, not something we participate in.

In the same way, being born of God is his work, not ours. We don’t understand it, we can’t predict it, we can’t make it happen—it’s something he does in us. We hear the truth of the gospel—the light of Jesus “shines” on us—and that light changes us. It transforms us from the inside out. We might even try to resist it, but if God chooses to shine that light on us, we can’t help but be changed. We may not understand it, we may not even be comfortable with it, but once it happens, we can’t deny it.

That was my experience. I realized that I believed in God at work one day. I had a job when I was nineteen, silk-screening t-shirts, and I worked in an old barn in the middle of the woods. I was out there all by myself one day, listening to music, and suddenly I just realized: I can’t deny that I believe in God. I’d tried to deny it for a long while, but I realized that I couldn’t—although I couldn’t wrap my brain around it, I believed this was true.

But I wasn’t happy about it. Not at first. So I tried to just ignore it—to go about my life, to ignore that little voice in my head saying that I needed God and Jesus really had done all this for me. I did that for almost two years. But finally, I couldn’t do it any more. So finally, I did what I should have done years earlier and I started to read my Bible. I started to take it seriously. And I realized that not only I couldn’t resist the life he was calling me to, I wanted to live that life. I wanted to be his child.

So finally, I gave in, and I accepted him.

When God causes us to be born again, when the Holy Spirit gives us new life in him, we may try to find a million ways around it, but sooner or later we’ll realize we’ve only got one possibility that will satisfy us, only one option that seems remotely plausible. And that is to believe in him and receive him.

If God gives us life in Christ, it always ends that way. It’s what we refer to as irresistible grace. If God shines his light in our hearts, we will believe in him, and we will receive him.

And those who believe in him, those who receive him, are given the right to be called children of God. And in case you’re wondering, the formal way this happens is through baptism: those who are born again place their faith in Christ and receive his salvation, and they say it. They profess their faith in Christ. At that point, the church baptizes them, as a symbol and a seal of that truth. Baptism doesn’t save, but it formalizes the truth that this person has been saved. Baptism is the moment at which the new believer declares before the church, and the church officially recognizes, that this new birth has happened to them.

What’s The Point?

Now, you might be wondering what the point of all this theological rigamarole is.

Here’s the point—here’s the big thing John wants us to see, and it is absolutely vital to understand. John wants it to be crystal clear that if we are saved, if we have been forgiven for our sins, if we belong to God and look forward to eternal life in him, that is entirely God’s doing.

We don’t think often enough about how incredible this is. Nothing that we’ve seen today was an obligation for God. He didn’t have to send John the Baptist to prepare the people for Christ’s coming. He didn’t have to send Jesus Christ: the true light that gives light to everyone. Christ didn’t have to come into the world; he didn’t have to come to his own people, only to be rejected by them. He didn’t have to cause us to be born of God, to be born again.

God owes us absolutely nothing.

Christ didn’t have to give us the perfect life he lived.

He didn’t have to take our sins on himself and be punished in our place.

He doesn’t have to be our advocate before the Father.

He doesn’t have to intercede for us, he doesn’t have to care for us, he doesn’t have to live in us by his Spirit, he doesn’t have to grant us a single spiritual blessing. None of that is an obligation.

God did this, and he still does this, because he is just that good.

The point of this entire prologue, which we’ll conclude next week, is to use very simple and beautiful language to overwhelm us with God’s goodness.

Conclusion

Preachers usually like to end sermons with what’s called an application—it’s the part where we talk about how we as people are called to respond to the text we’ve read, because all Scripture drives us to a response.

In short, after reading the Bible, people want to know, Okay—so what do I do?

The thing is, sometimes we don’t do anything. Sometimes the Bible simply calls us to sit under its weight, to see, to realize the immensity of what God has told us. In those cases, the only proper response is to pray that God would help us do that. And how we pray will depend on who we are.

Some of you here haven’t yet been born again; you haven’t been born of God. You don’t believe in him, you haven’t received him. And this might be the first time some of you have been exposed to these things.

But if you’re here today, if you’ve spend the last few minutes listening, that probably means that at the very least, you’re looking for something. So here’s what I’d invite you to do. We’re going to put a prayer up on the screen; it’s a prayer for those who are still asking questions. We’ll leave it up for a few minutes; I’d invite you to just read that prayer, and make it your own—actually speak to God, and ask him to convince you of the truth that he really is as good as he says he is. Ask him to change your heart, and to convince you.

Some of you—and what I’m going to say may come as a bit of a shock—have been born again, some of you have been born of God…but you don’t know it yet. You might suspect that something is going on in you, but you haven’t yet recognized that God has done something in you that you can’t undo. You haven’t yet admitted to yourselves and to God that you actually do believe. You haven’t verbally professed faith in him, you haven’t actively received him.

If this is you, the second prayer is for you: it’s a prayer of faith. I’d invite you to do the same thing I said before: if you want to receive him, pray this prayer and make it your own. Place your trust in Christ, and tell him you’re doing it. Ask him to forgive you for your sin, to help you turn away from that sin and follow him. There’s nothing else we must do to be saved.

But a lot of us here are probably in a slightly different situation. You believe in him, and you have received him…but you’ve spent so much time in church that these realities don’t really do anything to you anymore. You’re used to the truth of the gospel, to the point where you’ve almost become hardened to it.

Over the next few moments, I’d invite you to keep your Bibles open and read over John 1.1-13 again. Ask God to stir your heart again, that you might not take for granted his incredible goodness to you.

And still others here are absolutely overwhelmed by God’s goodness. You’ve read these words and you can hardly contain yourselves.

If that’s you, spend some time simply thanking God for his goodness, and for the fact that you feel the weight of it. Then I’d encourage you to ask him to help you—to keep seeing it, to keep feeling it, and then to help others see and feel the weight of his goodness for us as well.

We’re going to spend the next few moments in silence before God, after which we’ll pray and take Communion.