The Light Shines in Darkness - John 1:1-18 (01.11.2026)

Good morning. Glad you're all here. Go ahead and take out your Bibles,

if you brought one, and open up to John chapter 1. That's where we're going to be, what we just read.

John 1 · chapter mention

You didn't bring a Bible today, and that's okay. We're going to have it on the

screen, and also it's in your bulletin, the scripture that we're looking at this morning.

As you're finding your way to John chapter 1, let me pray for us one more time.

John 1 · chapter mention

Father, thank you so much for today and the opportunity to now open your word

and to see what you have to say to us today in.

Alpharetta, Johns Creek in 2026.

Lord, I pray that you would speak to us.

And I pray, Father, that as you speak, that we would have ears to hear what you have to say.

So please be in my mouth, speak through me, Lord.

I pray and help me to say what I need to say. In Jesus' name, amen.

So we are beginning a brand new series in the Gospel of John today.

And so if you're a guest with us this morning, it's a good time to be here because

we're starting a brand new series, and we're going to work our way through the book of John.

And today we are looking at the prologue. That's what this section of verses

is called, the prologue to the gospel of John.

And you may have noticed some interesting words there in the beginning of that reading.

The word was with God. In the beginning was the word.

Think with me just for a moment about God.

What a word is. A word is a symbol of some kind written or verbalized that communicates a thought or an idea.

Our words are our clearest communication of who we are.

So I go to Crunch Fitness in Johns Creek and kind of go about the same time every time.

And there are a lot of the same people in there, right?

And I see them, you know, all the time.

I kind of run into the same people all the time. And I'm a people watcher.

And, and so I, I, I kind of observe, I, you know, the age, the clothes they

wear, do they flex in the mirror or not? Are they socializers?

And I kind of have in my mind, like these, I've sort, you know, I'm not judging them.

I just have like ideas about what, what the, who these people are.

And so there's a meticulous mustache and tattoos guy.

There is eccentric tennis trainer guy.

I don't know if he's a tennis trainer, but he looks like one.

There's like angry MMA guy.

And I don't know if he's actually angry. There's something about the way he carries himself.

But if you came in to the gym at any given point and you said,

hey, do you know any of these people? I would say, no, I don't.

No, I don't actually know them.

But if I'd had a conversation with one of them, right?

If I went up to eccentric tennis trainer guy and I had a conversation with him,

I found out actually he doesn't even play tennis or whatever, right?

And I find out about who he is and where he comes from and his family.

And then you came and you asked me, do you know any of these people?

I'd say, well, yeah, I know this guy.

Why? Because we've had a conversation. We've exchanged words.

And that's just how things work. Until we've exchanged words with someone,

we don't claim to know them.

And the same is true in our relations with God.

So until there is an exchange of words, we don't know God.

And so, we can learn some things about God by observing the world that He made.

We can actually learn a lot of things.

But we need His Word to actually know who He is.

And His Word is the clearest revelation of who He is.

It is His self-disclosure.

His Word is His communication to us about Himself. and it's the only way that we know who he truly is.

From eternity past, God has been communicating to us.

He has communicated through creation. And by creation, he reveals truths about

his power, his goodness, his provision, his sovereignty.

He's also communicated to us through the prophets.

He's spoken to prophets directly and they have then taken those messages and

declared those messages to others.

He's spoken to us through his scriptures, the written word, as men have been

inspired by the Holy Spirit of God to write down exactly what God desired for them to write.

The main idea of my sermon this morning and of the passage that we're studying

is that God has spoken to us most clearly and definitively by sending his son, Jesus.

That's the point of what we just heard read, these first 18 verses in John.

And it's the point of the message today. Hebrews, another book in the New Testament,

chapter 1, verses 1 through 2.

Say the same thing. Long ago, at many times and in many ways,

God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days,

he has spoken to us by his son.

So before we dig into the specifics of this text today, let me give you a brief

introduction to this book that we're going to be studying for the next several months.

The Gospel of John is the fourth gospel in our Bibles.

It was written by the Apostle John, one of Jesus' 12 disciples.

He wrote this gospel after Matthew, Mark, and Luke, probably in the 80s to 90s range, AD.

And this is the same guy that wrote 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, shorter letters

later on in our New Testament. He also wrote the book of Revelation.

The most important thing that you need to know about the gospel of John is that it is a gospel.

And I'm not trying to patronize you, but this is what I mean.

It's a gospel, so the point of it is that we know Jesus.

That's what we have gospels for. The gospels are given to us so that we can see who Jesus is.

And so that is the point of this passage, and it will be the point of every

passage in the gospel of John that we study from here on out,

is that we would know who Jesus is.

John tells us explicitly why he wrote his gospel in John 20, verse 31.

John 20:31

He says, these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,

the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

So John writes his gospel so that we, anyone who reads it might believe that

Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah,

the Son of God, and that by believing in him, we would have life in his name.

And we would be restored to a right relationship with God.

Anytime that the Bible talks about having life or eternal life,

that's what it's talking about, being restored to right relationship with God.

So, as I said, we're looking at these first 18 verses, the prologue,

and I'm only going to be able to scratch the surface of all that's here.

I cannot dig into every verse. I wish I could, but it's okay because this is

like a roadmap to the rest of the book.

It's like a table of contents to the rest of the book.

Every single thing that he covers

in here theologically is going to be revisited later on in the book.

So I don't feel bad that we're kind of doing a flyover and we're skimming the

surface because we'll dig into every bit of it as we study through.

So here's a basic outline of these verses and the basic outline of my sermon.

First, John makes a claim about Jesus's origins, and he uses fascinating language there.

Then he talks about this idea of light coming into this dark world,

the fact that many people, most people rejected the light.

And then finally, we're going to look at how you and I should respond to this today.

So let's dive in. Point number one, the word of God became flesh.

Look at verse one. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

When John talks about the word here in these first few verses,

we can know that he is referring to Jesus because of verse 14.

So look over at verse 14. And the word became flesh and dwelled among us.

And we have seen his glory, glory as of the only son from the father. Okay.

So he wants us to know that Jesus is the incarnation, the enfleshing of God's word.

Remember our words are our clearest communication of who we are.

They are the outward expression of our inward thoughts and ideas.

So when John says that Jesus is the word, he means that Jesus is the self-expression of God.

This is the theme that's gonna run throughout John's gospel.

The other gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they focus on Jesus's human origins,

his earthly lineage dating back to Abraham or even Adam.

And they tell of his birth story, how he came into the world.

But John comes at us from a different angle. He wants us to see that his origins

go back before he was born, before he was conceived in the Virgin Mary.

His origins go back to eternity past.

And in fact, he has no beginning.

This is an incredible statement. I want us to see in this very first couple

of verses, three things that we see about Jesus that are mind blowing.

Look at the verse again, in the beginning was the word.

The first thing we learn about Jesus is his relationship to time.

Jesus is eternal. There was never a time when the Son of God was not.

There was never a time when the Son of God began existing.

John is telling us that Jesus doesn't have an origin because he has always been.

He was when the world was made.

He is making a clear statement that this is the eternal preexistent now incarnate word.

It means Jesus is the uncreated one. He is the alpha and the omega.

He is the beginning and the end. He has existed outside of time for eternity past.

But he entered into time and he became a man.

So that's the first thing he wants us to see, his relationship to time.

The second thing that we learn about Jesus is his relationship to God.

Look at verse one again, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

As the early church sought to understand and articulate its Christology, its theology of Christ.

The gospel of John was absolutely crucial to their understanding of who Jesus is.

There can be no mistaking it. John, who was closer to Jesus than any of the

12 disciples, is claiming that Jesus is God.

But he also uses very peculiar language. He says he was with God. And here's why that is.

The Bible teaches that there is one God who exists in three persons.

The theological term we use to describe this is Trinity.

And that means that from eternity past, God has existed in three persons.

Maybe you've read Genesis 1 before, or you've heard the verse that says,

let us make man in our image.

What's that talking about? Are there multiple gods there speaking? No.

All through the Old Testament, the theology is very clear.

There is but one God who exists in three persons.

So when the world was made, the Trinity was there.

One being who is God, but that one being exists in perfect unity as the Father,

the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The Father is God. The Son is God. The Holy Spirit is God.

But there are not three gods. There is one God who exists in three persons.

Jesus is the second person of the Trinity.

And that is the clear claim that John, his closest disciple,

is making about who Jesus is.

It's crucial that we are convinced of the divinity of Christ because it is just

at this point that cults attack his identity.

It's just at this point that Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and many other

cults will attack Jesus.

And they'll say, well, he was a God, but not God, right? He became a God or

whatever else they may claim.

But it is crucial that he is God because if he is not God, then we do not have

forgiveness of our sins.

We had to have a God-man, one who was fully God, fully man, to be the mediator between God and man.

We had to have one who was infinite and holy and infinite in his holiness to

die, to be able to make satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.

If he is not God, then our sins are not forgiven. And so friends, this is crucial.

So we learn that he is eternal. We learn that he is God.

And then the third thing we learn about Jesus' relationship to creation. Look at verse 3.

All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made.

In other words, Jesus is Lord over

creation. He is the agent through whom everything that exists was made.

Everything that we can see, everything that we cannot see. land animals and

ocean creatures and stars and galaxies and black holes. It was all made by Jesus.

He made every human being cell

by cell, and he holds every molecule together by the word of his power.

Colossians 1.16 tells us, for by him all things were created in heaven and on

earth, visible and invisible,

whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him.

These are glorious, wonderful truths.

Friend of mine on preaching this passage, he said, we are like children with

paper solo cups trying to scoop up the ocean when we read these truths.

There are no more glorious truths in the world than those that are true about Jesus Christ.

So, John begins his gospel by showing us that Jesus is God's word, his self-disclosure.

Then he shows us Jesus is eternal. He has no beginning and no end.

We see that he is God, specifically the second person of the Trinity.

And finally, we see that he is the one who created everything that exists.

So, right out of the gate, as we begin this wonderful gospel,

we learn enormous truths about Jesus, let's look at the second section of the prologue.

Point number two, the light came into our darkness.

Maybe you caught it. If you didn't, that's okay.

He talks a lot about light in this prologue.

In fact, if you're a circler, you might circle the word light in your Bible.

It appears seven times in this little section.

Verse four, Jesus's life is the light of mankind.

Verse five, the light shines in the darkness. And depending on your translation,

you may say the darkness has not overcome it. That's the ESV that I have here.

But your translation may say has not understood it, or it may say has not comprehended it.

I think the King James might say like, comprehendeth it not.

So what is it? Is it that the darkness didn't comprehend the light or did it not overcome it?

Well, it's a word that could mean anything in that semantic range, right?

We use the same kind of language. We talk about like the word mastered.

So you could say if you were a wrestler, you could say that you mastered someone,

that meant you pinned them or you mastered a subject, that meant you conquered it, right?

There's a wide semantic range for our words as well. And this is one of those words.

But I think that John, inspired by the Holy Spirit, intentionally uses a word

that has a wide semantic range here, because I think it can mean any and all of this.

The darkness didn't comprehend it. The darkness didn't overcome it, right?

And we're going to see both of those kind of ideas play out in his gospel.

So verse six through nine, he talks about John the Baptist who came.

God sent someone because he wants so badly for the world to see the truth,

to understand the truth. So he sends John the Baptist.

He's not the light. He's like a flashlight trying to point people to the sun,

but he's saying, Jesus is coming, so get ready.

Pointing people to the true light. Verses 10 through 11 are telling us that

the maker of the world came into the world and the world didn't recognize him.

He came to his own people and his own people rejected him.

So here in this section, we have light and we have darkness,

sometimes referred to as the world.

We have good news and we have bad news. Here's the bad news.

There's a problem with this world that we live in. We know there's wonderful

things, good things in the world that we live in, right?

We can look at a sunset, we can look at a mountain view or the face of a child,

and we know this world is beautiful and wonderful beyond our comprehension,

and yet we also know this world is broken, like really broken.

All we have to do is turn on the news for just a minute to know that,

or to even look around at our own lives, our own families, and know that it's broken.

There's something in John's gospel he refers to as darkness that keeps people

from recognizing their maker.

And it isn't merely an absence of light.

When the Bible speaks of darkness, it's referring to a moral and intellectual blindness to truth.

If the darkness were merely an absence of light or of illumination or of knowledge,

then simply shining the light into it would fix it.

But this darkness is more than that. It can't comprehend the light.

It's even resistant to it.

This inability to comprehend truth is what John later and in other books of

the Bible as well are going to refer to as blindness.

It's a blindness to reality. And this blindness produces a rebellious spirit

within mankind that characterizes all of Satan's regime.

And it infects every single one of us since Adam and Eve first rebelled in the garden.

1 John 1.3 says that Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil.

What are his works? Well, we're going to find out later in this book,

in chapter 8, that Satan is the father of lies, and he's been lying from the very beginning.

His work is to deceive, to tell lies and to hold people in bondage to sin through lies.

Jesus came to destroy that. So this darkness or blindness is connected to Satan's work in the world.

I have to establish that because you have to understand this darkness is dangerous.

It's deadly. If we are not rescued from it, we will die eternally separated from God in our sin.

That's the bad news. The good news is John's telling us that God has done something about it.

He hasn't left us to deal with the darkness on our own.

He has come to us. That's what we just celebrated at Christmas time, isn't it?

And we celebrate Christmas with lights, right?

Because we're celebrating light has shown in the darkness.

Light is one of those things we don't appreciate until we don't have it.

Have you ever tried making your way across a room or your house in a power outage

in pitch black darkness?

It is very difficult no matter how familiar you are with the room.

So I was a firefighter long ago in a previous life in my 20s.

And the thing that I was shocked by as I went through the training was how much

of being a firefighter is learning how to operate blind.

Most of what it seemed like we did was learning how to do your job completely blind.

Because contrary to what the movies show, if you're in a house fire, you can't see anything.

It's just utter black darkness.

So you train, you spend hours and hours in your gear doing different tasks completely

blind so that you can get comfortable with that.

And here's what any firefighter will tell you about the experience of fighting a house fire.

Darkness has a way of creating chaos.

Darkness has a way of making you feel incredibly disoriented.

It's amazing how quickly you can become confused about where you are.

It can create panic in people. And that is the very thing that oftentimes gets firefighters killed.

But there's a way to get some visibility if a house is engulfed in smoke.

I remember the very first big house fire that I was in.

And I was trying to do my job. It was very, very dark, very disorienting.

And I began to hear the breaking of glass.

And I heard it. there was someone on the outside and I heard it get closer and I heard again.

And then I heard again, someone was going around and busting the windows to

begin to let the house release the smoke.

And suddenly light starts flooding into the room and you could see and you could do your job.

And there was no longer disorienting. And the point is this,

you just don't realize how precious light is until you've tried to live in the darkness for a while.

Here's what's so tricky about the darkness that's in our world.

We're all born into it. It's all we know.

Just as in the days of Jesus, all around us, people are living and working and

raising families and going to work and trying to build lives in moral and spiritual darkness.

But they don't know it because it's the norm.

We can't find our way out of this darkness, no matter how hard we try.

The world has all kinds of ideas for how to fix our darkness.

We look to ancient Eastern religions that have been repackaged to modern Westerners.

We try yoga and meditation and other New Age practices.

We look to technology, and we think that maybe technology will be our savior,

and maybe that will bring us out of our darkness, and we find that it only seems

to enhance it somehow. now.

We try philosophy and counseling and medication to save us, and it might help

us and give us some relief for a bit, but it doesn't save us.

Can't solve the problem of our darkness. And since it seems nothing can make

a difference, we finally throw up our hands and we say,

there's nothing left to do but distract ourselves to death with our career or

with screens or with the next weekend trip.

The problem is that we're blind and we can't fix our own blindness.

We can't see ourselves rightly. We can't see our world rightly and we certainly can't see God rightly.

The problem is the darkness isn't just around us, it's in us.

That's what verses 10 and 11 in this passage are telling us.

The world that he made said, we don't want you.

How should we respond? That's my third point. How should we respond?

We need true light to shine into our darkened minds.

We need to see. And here's the truth. truth. The light is shining.

The light is shining. God, that's what John is saying. The light is shining.

God has spoken definitively.

He has spoken clearly. So how can we be healed from our blindness?

There are a few different ways we might respond to this light that is shining right now.

I want to tell you those different ways that we might respond.

First is we could reject Jesus.

That's what 10 and 11 are saying that the world has mostly done.

We could decide that it doesn't matter what you're saying about Jesus.

It doesn't matter what God is saying about himself and who he is and how he's come to save me.

I'm not going to accept that. That's one option.

We'll see in the gospel of John that when Jesus taught about the way that we

were intended to live, the way that God created us to live, people at times

picked up stones and wanted to kill him on the spot.

And of course, you know the story, they do end up killing him.

But the ultimate rejection. So that's one way that you could respond to the

revelation of God in Jesus.

You could reject him. The second way is very, very similar, and it's to run away.

I'll never forget a time I was at a condo at the beach. I got up in the middle

of the night, You go to the bathroom, turn on the light in the bathroom and cockroaches.

Not fun. But that's what they do, right?

They hide from the light and they are a pretty accurate picture of us.

We're also going to see that in John, that people don't know what to do.

They're not sure about rejecting him.

So they run, they put it off. But at the end of the day, that's just another

way of rejecting him, right?

If you avoid a decision, you say, I'm not going to think about this right now.

There's a game on. I'll just turn on the TV.

That is a rejection.

Or the third way, the way that I hope that you'll respond this morning, that is to receive him.

Look at verse 12 and 13, to all who did receive him, who believed in his name,

he gave the right to become children of God.

That's where real life is found. Real life is found in receiving Jesus and knowing

God and becoming a child of God.

We might say, well, we're all children of God. That's not what the Bible says.

There's a sense in which every single person is His creation,

but there's another sense in which only those who are adopted by Him are His children.

And only those who receive Jesus, believe in Jesus, are adopted and become a part of His family.

If you want to receive Him, I'll tell you how to do that. Number one,

you have to admit you're in darkness.

You have to admit, first of all, that you need saving, that you can't save yourself.

You can't make yourself not blind.

Admit that your life has been lived without much consideration to the one that made you.

And after you admit that you're in the dark, you need to look to the light.

John says in verse 14, look at it with me. The word became flesh and dwelt among

us and we have seen his glory.

Really another way of saying what the gospel of John is about is to say it's about seeing his glory.

Disciples saw his glory. John up close and personal saw his glory.

And this is why the gospels are written is so that other people can too.

That's why he's writing John so that you too can see his glory.

And even this morning, you are, I hope, seeing his glory, that he is the self-expression of God.

He is God's communication to us finally, clearly, definitively.

I hope that you're seeing that he is the uncreated eternal one,

the alpha and the omega who has no beginning and no end.

I hope you see he's the one who created the cosmos, both the visible and invisible worlds.

I hope you see that he is the true light that shines into the prison of our

darkness to show us what is true about ourselves, about the world and about God.

But do you know where his glory is most clearly seen, at the cross,

where Jesus died to free us from our sins.

At the cross, we learn that he is not just our creator.

He's not just our life giver. He is our redeemer.

He gave himself for sinners like us.

That's why John says, from his fullness, verse 16, we've all received grace upon grace.

For those that believe in him, those that receive him, what do you receive? Grace upon grace.

It's like waves overcoming our sin constantly.

Grace upon grace upon grace upon grace.

Look to Jesus, who hung on a cross for those who rejected him,

who took all of our darkness upon himself, all of the sins that we have committed against the holy God.

He took that darkness to the grave, but the darkness did not defeat him.

Death could not keep him in the grave. Sometimes people say,

I wish God would just appear to me. Then I would know that he was real.

Friends, God has appeared to us.

And we looked at him and we said, how do we deal with this? We've got to kill him.

You see what fools sin makes of us.

John ends his prologue with this, verse 18.

No one has ever seen God, the only God, who is at the Father's side.

He has made him known. Do you see what great lengths God has gone to to make

himself known to us and to save us from our darkness?

To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.

If you will receive him this morning, if you will believe in him this morning,

you will become a child of God.

So admit you've been in the darkness. Look to the light of Christ and trust

him and live according to the light.

And if you've done that, listen, if you've done that, then be a type of John the Baptist.

Go around with your little flashlight to your neighbors in the darkness and

tell them to get ready because the sun is about to rise.

That's our job. Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, thank you for coming into our darkness, for showing us who God is, who the Father is.

Thank you that we can see you clearly through your word.

We don't have to wonder who you are or what you want from us or what you've done to save us.

I pray that you would grant us faith this morning. Help us to live.

Help us to live according to the light, to look to the light,

and to point others to the light. In Jesus' name, amen.

Stand with us as we sing in response this morning.