In Him is Life
Notes
Transcript
If you have your bibles we are going to begin at John 1:1-2
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Today we are beginning our new expository series with Gospel of John. We are going to look at the Gospel of John for a number of different reasons. Our goal as a ministry is grow in our faith, and to the best of our ability come to understand our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Jesus is the most written about man that has ever walked the earth. There is no other person in the history of this whole world that has been written about more than Jesus.
Jesus is the one source of salvation and healing in this world and of course He paves the way for reconciliation with the father and eternity awaits for those that are believers in Him. There are 4 gospels, 3 of them are called the Synoptics Gospels, those are Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is because there are a vast number of similarities between those three Gospels. John’s Gospel was distinct however, it is written much different than the other three and contains different areas of Jesus’s ministry. John’s gospel stresses the divine nature of Jesus. John focused on Jesus’s ministry, his contacts with individuals in private conversations and His ministry to His disciples.
John wanted to ensure that when you finished reading His Gospel , there could only be one conclusion, that Jesus is the Son of God and the Messiah.
So we begin with In the Beginning was the word. John starts his Gospel by actually putting more light on the creation story. The word in Greek for Word is Logos, it meant “speaking, a message or words”. The Logos was with the God from the very beginning, In this first two verses John is establishing the trinity and confirming for us that Jesus has always been there and was there from the creation of the world. He did not come into existence at another time or begin a relationship with the Father at a different time. For all eternity He was there.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.
All things were made through Him, again the Logos. God spoke everything into existence. If we go back to the Genesis story, each time God created. It starts with
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
And God said. , it can be found in verses 3 ,6, 9, 14, 20, 24, and 26. God said and each time a creation was brought forth. Jesus was there and In Jesus is there only the true life for in Jesus is the light.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
This verse is the thesis statement for the entire Gospel of John. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. There is only one thing that can defeat darkness, and this is any kind of darkness. The Lord provided a way out of sin, the Lord provided a way to defeat the devil and his minions and a way to overcome the world. The light that shines is Jesus Christ. Of all the verses that we will cover, this is the one to remember because it encompasses everything. Whenever you encounter darkness, the answer is Jesus. Whether it is in your own life, and your own struggles. We all have struggles, we all have a sinful nature that we will continue to wrestle with. The answer isn’t ourselves though, the answer is Him. If it is our families, towns, state or country. The answer is still Jesus, where ever darkness is spreading those are the moments in which we have to hit our knees in prayer that we need the light of Christ. Because there is nothing that can overcome that light.
Whatever your story is of how you came to be a follower of Jesus, think back to that moment when His light truly shined on you! There is nothing else like it, the darkness and the fog moves away and only His love can be felt. That is what He does all the time.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
John the Baptist came to pave the way for Jesus. He laid down the groundwork for Jesus as a witness to who Jesus was. We looked at this prophecy in Malachi. There are no coincidences or chance encounters, there is only the sovereignty of the Lord. We will get to more of john the baptist in the next sermon.
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.
Jesus is the true light of this world. The light that does shine on every person, this does not mean universal salvation. We need to go to the Greek word, photizo which means to enlighten or to illuminate. Jesus enlightens or illuminates who you are. When we looked at Revelation we know that every knee will bow when He returns. Photizo, Jesus illuminates your standing, if you follow Him, or you are still ensnared in sin.
Even though the world was created through Him, it did not recognize Him. The world who was in disobedience to God, that was blinded by sin.
Hear me, you heavens! Listen, earth! For the Lord has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.”
This is what happens when we are blinded by sin and live in disobedience to the Lord. We miss what God is doing, we reject the coming King and we fail to understand.
Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
The first verse, Who has believed our message? Verses 10 and 11 in the Gospel of John are some of the saddest verses in all of scripture. The world rejected Jesus and Israel rejected Jesus. Blindness and disobedience causes this. Who has believed? Unfortunately the normalization of sin has caused many to miss the Lord.
Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
Just as salvation is not universal, neither is the unbelief in Jesus. If you put your faith in Jesus as your Lord and Savior as the sacrifice for all mankind’s sin. Then you become a child of God. This is done through the supernatural work of God in the regeneration of your heart. You are reborn through that regeneration.
He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.
Through the Word of truth, through that logos, through Jesus Christ, you can become a child of God, you can move from sin to salvation , from wandering in the dark to walking in the light. I don’t want to speak for everyone but when I gave my life to Jesus, just prior to that. I was so tired of walking aimlessly through the dark. I spent far to much time just wandering, always thinking to myself that I knew what was best. I look out into the world now, and truly my heart breaks because so many people are just doing the same thing I was, they are wandering. They need the light of Jesus, our world desperately needs Jesus, and only through Jesus do you find that power to walk out of the darkness.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
The logos became flesh and lived among us. God came to us. We haven’t even gotten to the cross and look what Jesus did for us. He came down from heaven, He left the glory of the Father to dwell with us.
rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!
Paul tells us here that Jesus took the very nature of a servant, He humbled Himself before the Father. You know everyday we should be more like Jesus, this is the goal that we have as Christians. I wanted to go through this Gospel with you all , so that we can all be reminded of who Jesus was on earth and what He did for us. We are to give everything we have to Jesus precisely because He did that first and gave more than we can ever imagine.
Here is how C.S. Lewis Explained it
"Christ says, 'Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good... Hand over the whole natural self... I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.'"
There cannot be any half-measures. Jesus was never about them. Therefore when we come before the Lord, we do so with humility , and preparation to give everything.
John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ ”
John the Baptist cried out in the wilderness to anyone that would listen and confirms what the apostle John is telling us, Jesus comes after him and Jesus is the messiah.
Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
The Lord gave Moses the law starting with the 10 commandments in Exodus 20. Out of His grace through Jesus Christ, there we find our salvation. Do not mistake that I have said many times, that we live in an age of grace, it is only because of the work of Jesus that we have this grace. This grace that we do not deserve nor have earned or can even begin to earn. He loves us so much that He left heaven and dwelled with us and then proceeds to give us that grace that we all desperately need.
No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
John ends this section of his gospel by going back to the beginning. The Son of God has always been with Father. If you want to know the Father, then you must learn from the Son. If you want to know about the character and nature of God we only need to look at Jesus.
This morning, whether you have already given your life to Christ or not. As we move to a time of prayer, I want you to pray on this, are you wandering in some sort of darkness? Because if you are, please come to the front during the closing hymn and let us pray the light of Jesus on that darkness.
Let us pray
