I Am the Light of the World

12 Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” John 8:12 Every one of us is living in darkness. But yet, I still feel alone at times in my life. I still feel the weight of depression and anxiety overwhelm me. We live in a world that can sometimes feel shrouded in darkness, a world that mirrors the formless and empty state of creation that we find in the book of Genesis.

I sometimes wonder, if the creation story, represents my story and mu life. On one hand I know I can experience loneliness, isolation, and a lack of direction or purpose. And it can become very easy for me to become trapped in my own anxiety and fear. But on the other hand I need to also remind myself of the possibilities that come with being empty, and formless as darkness blankets my life.

Being without form can also represent new beginnings, perhaps a fresh start. Just as the lump of clay on the potter’s wheel does not take shape until the hands of the creator begins to form it into whatever it’s purpose would become of it, my life as well can be formless, shapeless but yet surrendered to the Holy Spirit who works and hovers to dwell within me so that I can be formed and changed into the very image of the Fathers Son, Jesus.

But there is one thing before we choose a path that we will take in the darkness, and we need to be reminded of this one truth. No matter how dark your life may seem…. God’s presence is always present within our darkness. Before light has dawned on the earth. Before the heavens and the earth were formed. Before time and every living thing, ……..God was there. Even in my own life, Before I even knew of God, before I knew of my sin, before any knowledge of my need for Christ as my savior, before the Spirit of God came into my heart to give birth and life to my soul, he was hovering over the darkness of my life., extension grace to me.

We call it prevenient grace. And in God's grace, we are reminded that, God’s presence is always present within our darkness. "Recently, I watched testimonial videos of people's experiences spending 24 to 100 hours in a pitch-black cave in Oregon. These individuals ventured into a small, secluded tiny house built within the cave, equipped with a bed, toilet, and bathtub. Their meals would be delivered once a day in a tiny box.

And During their stay, they would simply eat, sleep, and exist in the complete absence of light. After thier time in the darkness they would come out into the light of the world and for what may have been like the first time, they begin to see how the clarity that light gives, shows us how the world is formed around us. One testimony caught my attention. It was a young man that had said, “I've realized in my pursuit of God that I was trying to find him, but yet in the darkness, I realized that I was infinity surrounded by him.

It was like, without knowing it, I was swimming in His presence.” God’s presence is always present within our darkness. No matter who you are, where you are, or where you’re at in your present state of mind. When you and I experience darkness in this life, we are still surrounded by God’s presence. He blankets us in his love, grace and mercy each and ever day of our lives. Psalm 125 verse 2 reminds us that, “As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds His people, from this time forth and forevermore.

God’s presence is always present within our darkness. But why do we struggle within our darkness to realize God’s presence is present with us? And, when I am in darkness how can I find God? Well first we need to understand that within the darkness that we experience, fear is the enemy of our faith. Fear is the enemy of our faith. What is fear? Fear is an emotion caused by the belief that something or someone poses a threat to us.

God as a threat to my way of life. When I was in college I was invited to a church by a girl. I didn’t want to be there. God was a threat to my way of life, and how he wanted me to live my life. We hear things like, God wants to bring to light your sin, and he wants to invade your hearts. When I am the Lord of my own heart, that’s the kind of language that’s threatening.

You want to expose my sin? But yet, here’s the reality I never realized… I was living my life in darkness and sin. And I loved it. Jesus put it like this when he was describing his own coming : “This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed” Our problem is not that we don’t have light, but that we love the darkness.

We love it. We love it because we believe it protects us. It shrouds our life in mystery and hides our wrongs. I often wonder, would even my own darkness hide my sin if there was a final judgment? And we choose it often over living in the light of Christ. What kind of fears do you struggle with? Because we have access to so many fears in our life. Are they healthy fears that draw you closer to God, or harmful fears that pull you away from Him.

There’s two fears I believe we need to examine today that are not healthy, The first one is that we can have the fear of intimacy. Intimacy is what we call the experience of really knowing and being known by God and by another person. It’s us knowing God and others on a deeper level. When I think of intimacy I always think of Alicia. We’ve been married for 18 years and I am in love with her more today than I ever was 18 years ago, and that’s because intimacy takes time.

It; takes effort. It takes understanding, and trust me, it takes a whole lot of grace and forgiveness. But our love has grown because her and I have made heart filled intentions on knowing one another deeper. I want to love my wife with all that I am. I want my mind to be filled with visions of her. I want my heart to yearn to be near her. Even when I am sick, and exhausted, and tired, there is a strength within me to keep going, to keep working, to push through the hardships to care for her and my family.

All because, I am in absolute head over heals, in love with her. Think of the command, to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love others as you would love yourself. That’s intimacy. To love God with all of your being. And to love others the same way you would want to be loved. It’s a love that is vertical and horizontal. And notice, it’s never a love that lowers God or others from where they belong.

It’s never a love where you see someone lower than you. You love vertically first, where love originates, and then love flows from that intimacy horizontally where others are. No relationship ever becomes healthy by trying to love people from above them. From lording over them. Because For love to be real, it can’t be forced or coerced. There’s an equality to the love we experience between one another, when we love others as we would love ourselves.

People around us are not greater or worse than us, but there becomes a uniformity in our intimacy. This reminds me, that there’s not one person we can’t love in this world. Even when Jesus says love your enemy, it’s a call for us to stop trying to make others lower than ourselves, and to love them as equal to ourselves. When we have a fear of intimacy, every time in this fear we will push God and others away.

And in the midst of pushing God and others away, we tend to create unhealthy boundaries for relationships. We struggle in our faith because we distance ourselves from God, and from others. In Psalm 63 David begins with these words, he says, “God, my God, you are my God. I earnestly seek you. That means David sought God with a sincere but also intense conviction to find God. When we are hurt, we distance ourselves, we put up boundaries to keep hurt and others from hurting us again.

But when we have a healthy love for God and others, when there is healthy intimacy that leaves room fro grace, We find ways to seek to be in God’s presence and we find ways to lift others up. There’s another fear. And if you can imagine, it’s the opposite of intimacy. We fear being close to others, but we also fear of being rejected by others. I wrote in my journal a couple years ago and I keep this truth near because I too at times fear rejection…

I fear not being loved by others, and I am learning that it’s an unhealthy fear. Here’s what I wrote: The hardest part of living a life of rejection is when you begin to believe that the addiction to mans acceptance and approval, is normal. Let me read that again, The hardest part of living a life of rejection is when you begin to believe that the addiction to mans acceptance and approval, is normal.

You and I can become very easily starved for acceptance and approval. We find ourselves seeking to see how many people show up to events that we put on. We look at all of our likes and comments and interactions on social media. We look to see who’s interacting with who and why are they not interacting with me. We count our friends and then the friends of others to see who’s more loved but believing the more we have the better we are.

That’s an unhealthy way of living. And if left unchecked, approval of others can become a drug that we become addicted to. And Otis a hard addiction to break just as much as nicotine and others drugs we encounter, all because it becomes a prison for our minds. At some point the acceptance you had form someone else, will wear off and then we try even harder to win the approval of others.

King Saul started out wonderful as a king to the jewish people. He had such a wonderful potential to be a great king. But He always wondered, “What are the people going to think? Are they going to like me?” And at one point, because of his fear rejection and the fear of what people thought, he rejected God’s commands, and so, the prophet Samuel confronted him. This is what King Saul said in I Samuel 15:24, he repented and confessed.

He said, “Yes, I have sinned. I have disobeyed your instructions and the Lord’s command, But listen to why he rejected God’s command… “I was afraid of the people, so I gave in to them.” why did God chose David to be the next king? Because he was a Shepard boy after the heart of God. Saul ran after the heart of the people, but David ran after the heart of God.

Humans are the only beings on this planet that seek out and long for the approval of others. And we fear being rejected by others. Fear is the enemy of our faith. It’s a snare. Fear’s aim is to keep us where we are… think of it like this.. fear paralyses us. It keeps us in a the rote of daily life. Proverbs teaches us that, Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is kept safe.

(Pro. 29:25) There are so many others fears I could talk about, but I hope you get where I am going, fear is what keeps us in the darkness of our life and prevents us from moving forward in the light of our faith. Jesus tells us, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. What Jesus is teaching, is that darkness can only overcome us, and overwhelm us when we choose to love our darkness more than we love God.

Even in fearful moments, we can choose to love wrongly, and to wrongly love. And the worlds kind of fear prevents People from loving God in a right way, and walking with him. Think of the life of Moses. Moses was an amazing man walking with God. If you recall last week, the jewish people loved Moses. Here’s another example of an unhealthy habit we have in our life, when we aim to lift others up above God.

They questioned Jesus as the bread of life, because Moses had fed the Israelites manna from heaven, and then Jesus had to correct them by saying, No, It wasn’t Moses that fed you, but my Father in heaven was who fed you. And that moment of Manna falling down was a depiction of the son of man coming down, to fed the people the real manna from heaven to give and sustain life.

However, the life of Moses is one that we should study and admire because he desired to be, Always, In God presence. There’s a Scripture that blows my mind, and it reminds me that when we are in darkness, God is always there. When we are at our lowest, God is always there. When we fail, God always is there. When we’re struggling to understand, God’s presence is always present within our darkness.

There is no darkness to which, God is never present, and this Scripture is found in Exodus 20. Exodus 20:20-21 says, 20 Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.” 21 The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was. Here we read about fear.

But do you know what Moses meant in this moment? Too, not be afraid, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning? Think how this links to the New Testament. What we realize that none of us is able to obey the law, that we need Jesus to cover over our sin and our disobedience, and that’s what Jesus did at the cross. He paid the price of sin for us.

He went as a substitute for us to the cross, died in our place, and then rose from the dead in victory over sin and death, so that we can be saved from our sins, not by our obedience but by our faith, by our trust in Jesus. Now get this, when we trust in Jesus, by faith, to forgive us from our sins, we no longer need to fear the judgment of God.

This verse Calls our Relationship with God to Be Marked With Love. And when we are marked by love, we no longer want to sin in our lives. The best way I can explain it is like this…. My Mother is the closest thing to a father that I have ever had. The most simplest parallel I can come to, with what Moses was teaching and by our faith in Jesus is this…

My love for my mother is so deep that I never want to see her hurt. I never wanted to see her disappointed. And there are times in our relationship that I did not want to tell her of things, not because of what she might do, like whip me, or make me sleep on her bedroom floor for months because I snuck out, but because I loved her so much I didn’t want to see her hurt.

I don’t want to dishonor her in anyway. She’s means a lot to me. And so then I think about my relationship with God. It’s marked by that kind of love. Moses said, the fear of God that will keep you from sinning, is his way of saying, I want to fear not that I will be casted away into a fiery hell for eternity, but the fact that in hell, for temerity, your very presence wouldn’t be there, that is what I fear.

To be away from your presence, to be casted away from your presence. But yet, in God the fathers sufficient and always giving grace, he offers us His son, that although we sin, we miss the mark, we fail, we come up short, in Jesus Christ, we can have the light of life, that guides us to see, and witness God the fathers, ultimate and amazing glory. Paul tells the Corinthians, 6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.

Jesus is the personified, incarnated “radiance of the glory of God” (Hebrews 1:3) He is the “true light” of this world, and he will be the true light of the world to come. And here’s some good news, Jesus said if you turn to me in your darkness you will not walk in darkness, but in light. Ezekiel tells us, that God will will put his Spirit in us. (36:27) Paul tells us in Galatians that the Father desires to put the Spirit of His son, in us to cry out, Abba Father.

My question is this… Have you tuned to Jesus yet? What darkness are you carrying right now? Turn to Jesus. I’m going to lead you to make a decision this morning.… are you going to be a Moses or the people of Israel? You see, Moses and Israel stood in the very presence of God. But did you ever notice what verse 21 says, The people remained at a distance, but Moses approached the thick darkness of where God was.

Listen, Church, ”The darkness is not so deep that the light of love cannot penetrate it.” Jesus took upon himself, on the cross, he took our sin, and went to the deepest that death could take him, before the love of the Father who was already there int he depths of the darkness of death and h resurrected Jesu to glory and honor and now he offers you and me, eternal life through Jesus.

Moses stepped into darkness because, by faith he knew God’s presence was there. The people stood behind because they feared their sin more than they feared God’s loving presence. What sin, or darkness are you fearing more than Gods love this morning? Every one of us is living in darkness. But yet, God’s presence is always present within our darkness, because love is present in Jesus, and he reminds us of this…

, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” *