"Word Made Flesh," John 1:1-18, Andrew Evans

Well, good morning and Merry Christmas It is yet still

Christmas. It always saddens my heart when

the day after Christmas people stop saying Merry Christmas.

It's just like it's not over yet, guys.

It's the fourth day of Christmas.

It's great to be with you. My name is Andrew Evans, I'm one

of the pastors here at Church of the Resurrection.

We will be looking at John chapter one, our gospel lessons.

Let me encourage you to turn in your Bibles there.

You can find that on page 833 of the Black Pew Bible.

Before we get started, let me pray for us.

Father, I praise you. We praise you for the gift of

Christmas and for all that you give us in Your Son.

Would you meet us this morning? Would you help us to see both

Your truth and Your grace? I pray all of this in the name

of your Son Jesus, Amen. So think about it.

What is the darkest place you have ever been in your life?

The darkest place. I remember I once went hiking

with a group of friends and we were going to a cave and we went

into The Cave and the entrance of The Cave or the the sort of

body of The Cave was sort of sufficiently, you know, curves

such that when you got to the main chamber, there was number

light at all coming in from outside.

And so if you turn off all the flashlights and all the cell

phones, it was completely and perfectly pitch black.

You could put your hand in front of your face and not see it.

It was that dark. A very, very dark.

I think it's the darkest, darkest environment I've ever

been in. And that that perfect darkness

was really jarring. In fact, people kept turning on

their flashlights. It was really annoying.

It was jarring because in that darkness, you could just feel

how profoundly vulnerable you were, that 11 misstep, and you

could fall and you couldn't see it where you were going.

But it's also a jarring even more simply because we are just

so used to having light in our lives.

Even in the darkest places in our homes, there typically is a

little bit of light coming in. And, and even if there isn't

enough light, you can turn on a switch or pull out a flashlight

or your cell phone. In order to illuminate things.

We need light in order to see what's there, to see where we're

going, to see what dangers are there because light by its

nature reveals and illuminates. This is what light does.

Light because of that is essential for our lives.

Now our gospel lesson here in in John chapter one, this

incredibly famous, incredibly rich passage tells us that

Christ is the light that came into the world.

And this is one of the big themes of Christmas, isn't it?

That's why we have lights everywhere.

We are celebrating that this light came into the world.

But this metaphor of Christ as the light poses the question for

us. But what exactly this mean?

If light reveals, what does Christ as the light reveal?

What does Christ reveal? And the first thing that it

reveals is a world in darkness. Look at me at verse 4, if you

would. The light shines in the darkness

and the darkness has not overcome it.

I imagine you've probably been in a room, maybe your office.

It has a window, and you're working late in the afternoon

and you're working and you're just so engrossed in your work

that you don't notice that the sun is going down and it's just

getting darker and darker and darker.

And you don't have the lights on because in the middle of the day

you don't need it. But then somebody opens the

door, they look in and they're like you're in the dark and they

turn on the light and boom, all of a sudden you realize how how

dark it actually was there. The light reveals just how dark

the room was before. And something similar is going

on here with Jesus. Because ever since our first

parents disobeyed God, the world has been cast Into Darkness.

It's not perfect darkness. The light of God was still

shining, His word has shown, but humanity as a whole has been

living in darkness. And, and you could describe that

darkness in a couple ways. One would be a kind of moral

darkness. Moral darkness.

We get confused, we get mixed up about what is right and what is

wrong. You could say that politics is

fundamentally about prioritization of moral goods

and both sides. There's a long tradition of both

sides claiming that the other side is morally mixed up right.

Both are probably right in just in different ways.

But this isn't a new phenomenon. People have been mixing up good

and evil for generations. All the way back to the Garden

of Eden, Adam and Eve decided that it was good to do what God

told them was bad. We are morally in the darkness,

but this moral darkness belies an even deeper darkness.

We don't know where we're going. We don't know what the purpose

of our life is. Theologians will call this

teleology. What is the end or the tell us

of our life? God made us to move toward him,

to live in his light. But when we turned away from God

in our sin, we lost that, that direction, that orientation.

And instead of moving through life with a sense of we're

moving toward God, that God provides the purpose and the

orientation of our life, we, we start moving toward much

smaller, prioritizing much smaller and lesser goals.

So we'll prioritize our jobs, our fitness, our happiness,

maybe even our family. Now, none of these are bad in

themselves, right? But when they become the

ultimate goal of our lives, the ultimate purpose, the thing that

gives us meaning, our lives become misdirected.

It's like we're trying to navigate through the woods at

night without, without any stars, without any moon, without

a flashlight. You can't see anything.

Even if you have a map, you can't read it.

It's just it's dark and you're sort of lost.

You're adrift. We don't know where we're going.

We're in the teleological darkness.

And I think that this confusion actually breeds a lot of the

moral darkness that we encounter so much of the time.

And Christ, when he came into the world, he exposed this

darkness. He was the first person to live

a perfectly upright life. And his teaching, with its

striking precision and penetration, showed just how

mixed up the world had become. His life radiated with a beauty

that showed us just how dark and ugly the world had become.

Isn't it striking how non Christians will say so much?

You know, I don't really know what I think about Paul, but

Jesus, he is so compelling. There's something that's that's

true about that. You don't need to dismiss Paul,

but there's something about Jesus that just radiates with

this, this compelling beauty. And that's Jesus coming into the

world, exposing the darkness. He showed moral perfection in

the the fullness of a life that's oriented toward God.

He's exposing how dark the world was.

The challenge for us, though, is just how easily we can become

satisfied with living in the darkness.

We have these little lights, light of reason, the light of

tradition, but without the light of Christ revealed in God's

Word. These other lights are just like

candles in our house. When the power goes off, they

don't cast very much light. They really are insufficient for

properly illuminating. But let it go on long enough and

we will learn to make do. We think it's enough.

We are all too easily satisfied. And so this light of Christ,

when it comes, it confronts us with the reality of the darkness

of our lives, and it provokes a kind of crisis, a kind of

crisis. Will we be satisfied with the

darkness and will we continue to live in it, or will we walk in

the light? We see this confrontation here

in verses 9 through 11. Look there with me.

We have Christ, the true light. He comes into the world, the

world that He himself has made, that He has been giving light to

for all time. He came to His own people, the

recipients of God's promises through the centuries, and yet

his people rejected him. They rejected the light in a

real sense. They wanted to remain in the

darkness. Now, this reaction might strike

us as odd, right? We need light.

We know that we need light. Why would you reject the light?

Well, simply, we reject the light because it reveals some

very inconvenient truths about it, about us.

The light doesn't just reveal the reality of the darkness.

By contrast, the light reveals the reality of what the darkness

was hiding, the light exposes. So my wife and I seem to have

this tradition of every day or two, we we spend time looking

for a milk bottle because one of our sons loses the milk bottle

every every every day, it seems. And that means invariably

getting down on our hands and knees and looking underneath the

couch. Now, excuse me during, during

the day, it's not a big deal. There's, there's enough light to

be able to look in there and see if there's a bottle.

But if it's if it's the evening or early morning and I need to

grab a flashlight and look under there, I can see if there's a

bottle. But you also see so much more

when that light starts shining underneath there.

You see the little specks of dirt and dust just sort of

gleaming at you, mocking me, the dust bunnies, flecks of dirt

balls, and the books that have gathered underneath.

There the light comes and exposes everything that the

darkness was hiding. And this is what the light of

Christ does to our lives. It shows us all the dirt, all

the grime, all the problems that the darkness was concealing, and

it provokes a crisis. Do I accept the light or do I

reject it? Now I know I've had a glimpse of

the dirt. Am I going to deal with it, or

am I going to pretend that it never existed?

And it provokes a crisis, fundamentally, because the

darkness isn't just out there in the world.

It's not just the culture that's lost and depraved.

It's not just that other party that's so, so lost.

It's not just other people. It's a Christmas where we've

been spending time with family, right?

It's not just your family where the darkness is.

It's you. It's me.

The darkness is in every one of us.

We all so easily mix up good and evil.

We all get the purpose of our life wrong.

We're all lost. The darkness is in all of our

hearts. And so it just isn't surprising

that many of us would reject the light.

We've done that from the very beginning.

The light is painful. It's even offensive.

How dare you say that I'm in the darkness.

I am enlightened. Look at what people say about

me. Look at the recommendations on

my LinkedIn, look at my resume, look at my influence, look at my

success, look at my family. All of these prove that I they

prove that I am not in the darkness.

How dare you say that? It's drawing to hear that maybe.

But honestly, in a in a sense, this reaction, this rejection of

the light could perhaps be the most rational response to the

light. If all that the light does, if

the only thing that it does is reveal the darkness and the dirt

in each of us and provoke a crisis in us, the light will

crush us. We will never be able to clean

up all the dirt, all the mess that the light exposes.

We cannot bear the terrible brightness of the light.

And that's why it's so important that this light not just reveal

what's true about us, not what's just what's true about the

world. This light reveals the truth

about the source of the light itself.

This light shows us God's character.

There's this phrase that's repeated twice in the last

paragraph of our passage. Look with me at verse 14.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen

His glory. Glory is of the only Son from

the Father, full of grace and truth.

Grace and truth. This pair, this combination is

so important that John actually looped back to it in verse 17.

For the law was given through Moses.

Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

God has come before in history with glory, but it was a glory

that was terrifying. He came with glory on Mount

Sinai with dark clouds and crashing Thunder and piercing

lightning. The glory was so overwhelming

that the people of Israel were terrified, absolutely terrified.

This glory was not a glory that we could handle.

And in that way, it's like the law.

The law came through Moses, but the law itself, just like God's

glory on its own will crush us. But Christ here reveals the

fullness of God's character. God is a God of truth.

Yes, he would sees everything about us.

Yes. He calls to us to a higher

standard, yes. And he points us to where we

fall short. Yes, all these are true, but

but, but God is also a God of grace.

In fact. Notice what He says first in

this pair reveals grace and truth.

It is grace that we encounter even before His truth.

Christ has been giving light to the world from the very

beginning. And the light of Christ came not

in a blinding flash, not in judgement and overwhelming

glory, but it came as a child in weakness and innocence and

vulnerability. Christ laid aside the royal

robes of heaven and put on our mortal flesh, becoming like us

in our weakness. He came and dwelt among us,

walking with us, knowing our condition and revealing His

guiding light with patience and with love.

He did this because this, my friends, is God's character.

God longs for us not just to know right from wrong, but for

us to be oriented toward Him, for us to see in Him the whole

point, the whole goal of our lives.

He wants us to draw toward Him, to be near Him.

He wants to make us like Him, even to make us His children.

And in this grace, this unmerited favor, we see God's

character. A character that is so full of

patience, so full of love, so full of kindness and generosity

that he sent his own light, his own Son, to guide us out of

darkness, to redeem even the most painful parts of our lives

and to set us free so that we can live new and full and joyful

lives. And it's this light that we

celebrate at Christmas. This is a light that exposes the

darkness. And it it, it causes a crisis,

forces a crisis for every person.

But this crisis is fundamentally an invitation.

Come, come and follow the light. Come and receive life.

Come and become a child of God by putting your trust in Christ

and believing in His name. Accepting this invitation may be

the hardest thing we ever do. Nobody likes to be exposed.

Nobody likes to have the light shine into the dark corners of

our lives. That's humbling, maybe even

humiliating, but it is the best thing because it means that all

of those things that we know are wrong can be and will be put

right. We don't have to be trapped by

our sin. All those places that are broken

don't have to define us. My friends, the light did not

come to condemn you. The Light came to save you.

So my friends, this Christmas, this New Year, let us receive

the light now and for the rest of our lives.

In the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.