[0:00] You may not recognize me, and there's a good reason for that. It's the first time I've been able to preach here at First Press. I am not on staff here. My name is Benji Slayton.
[0:11] I'm a pastor that has just moved to Chattanooga from Texas, and I'm going to be planting a church over on the northeast side of town. I'd like to tell people it's to the mall and beyond, out through Udawah and the neighborhoods on that part of town.
[0:28] And so I've known Chris Bowen for years. He invited me to preach to you this morning. So we're just going to be looking at one verse this morning. So give your attention to God's Word from John 8.
[0:40] This is just verse 12. And 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.
[0:57] Amen. This is the Word of the Lord. Let me pray for us. Father, we pray that You might bestow upon us the light of Your Spirit, that we might know Your Word, that we might see Christ and be known in Him.
[1:10] We pray it in Christ's name. Amen. Please be seated. It is a delight to be here. My wife and I and our children have been worshiping with you all a few times since we moved this summer.
[1:22] And we're planting a church which is really fun and really exciting, but it can be really challenging as well. You know, like starting any new organization or new business, there's a ton of strategic decisions that you're trying to figure out.
[1:37] Who should I talk to? And when should I talk to them? And what should we talk about? And where are the funds going to come from? And how should I go about hiring staff? And tons of decisions. In fact, if I'm honest, there's a lot of days that I wake up and I'm not 100% sure what the next thing to do is.
[1:55] But our family has moved from Texas to Chattanooga, and so all of us are experiencing these new things. I've got a 16-year-old daughter. She just turned 16. So I don't know if you have ever gone through that, trying to figure out insurance.
[2:09] They like quadruple your insurance rates when you add a 16-year-old on. It's amazing. We're trying to figure out what to do with a 16-year-old, and I've got two other children, two boys who are in middle school and elementary school.
[2:21] It's a new school for them, a new city, a new home. My wife and I are... Everything seems new, and it's confusing, and it's challenging. We lack a certain amount of clarity about what we ought to be doing.
[2:35] I'm sure you can relate to that. I'm sure most of you have that experience. Whether it's challenging job situations that you're not really sure what to do about, or kids, you know, if you're raising children, most of the time you go to bed and think, Did I do that well?
[2:51] I'm not sure that I did. And then if ever you get something like a cancer diagnosis, that can be incredibly bewildering. What do I do now? Or if you've got children that are older and are wayward.
[3:04] I mean, even you children, even you kids experience this, right? At school, you're trying to figure out, Who are the friends that I can actually count on? It can be really confusing and difficult. And most of us, we think, Shouldn't the Christian life be something that makes things less complicated?
[3:23] Shouldn't it be clearer? Shouldn't coming to Jesus solve most of those complicating things? But the reality is that it doesn't oftentimes. Just this week, if you've been watching the news at all, it's incredibly complicated and confusing to figure out how we are supposed to be living out our lives in this complicated religious and social time that we live in.
[3:50] And so, if you are somebody that desires a little bit greater clarity in your life, this passage is for you. So, in this passage, Jesus is speaking in the midst of His own complicated and social and religious world that He's living in.
[4:07] And He speaks about clarity that can be found in Him. He declares that in Him we can see things rightly. And how?
[4:18] Well, He does a couple of things. Number one, He's going to kind of retell the people of Israel's story to them. And then He's going to use this imagery, a bunch of imagery that He wants to kind of show what it's all about.
[4:30] And then He's going to talk about why it matters. So, that's what we're going to look at. Look at the story and the imagery and why that matters. So, it's a simple passage. Jesus stands up and He proclaims, I am the light of the world.
[4:45] Now, but this one verse comes in the midst of kind of a long but really fascinating passage. Jesus is in the very middle of His public ministry and He's come to Jerusalem for a major feast celebration.
[4:57] It's the Feast of Sukkot or the Feast of Tabernacles. It's also called the Feast of Booths. This would have been a week-long festival in Jerusalem celebrating primarily looking back at God's provision for His people during the wilderness wanderings.
[5:13] So, Jesus, Jews in fact, in our day have just finished celebrating the Feast of Booths. I said that I was, we came from Texas.
[5:26] We were most recently in San Antonio, but we were in Austin for a long time. In fact, that's how I got to know Chris Bowen. We were both RUF campus ministers. I was working at the University of Texas. And I was there for six years.
[5:38] And so I worked, I officed and spent most of my time in this area next to campus called West Campus. I'm sure most universities have this kind of an area. It's, there's dorms and there's student housing and there's fraternity and sorority houses.
[5:52] And it's that kind of an area. And there were three Jewish student houses. And every September, those three Jewish student houses were transformed.
[6:02] The students would move out of their rooms in the house and build these temporary shelters or booths. They were just kind of lean-tos with kind of thatched roofs and kind of put together with Home Depot materials.
[6:16] And they would spend a week cooking, living, studying, and sleeping in these booths. And the reason they did that was as a reminder for what their ancestors, for what the people of Israel went through as they were wandering in the wilderness.
[6:34] They were literally reliving the faith journey of the people who had come before them. It was fascinating. I'd never been around kind of faithful Jewish folks before, so it was a learning experience for me to watch them do that.
[6:49] But the Feast of Booths focuses on the three great provisions of God in the wilderness. You remember those? The first one was that God sent manna, right? He fed them.
[7:00] He provided food for them. The bread of heaven came down. The second one was they thought that they were going to die of thirst in the wilderness. And so God provided a rock.
[7:11] And Moses hit the rock. And what came out of it? Fresh water. God provided bread. He provided water. And the third great provision in the wilderness was the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire at night which provided them both light as well as it led them in the way that they were supposed to go.
[7:32] And so as these students would go out onto the lawn and the festival that Jesus was celebrating here, the people of Israel were celebrating that God was their provider.
[7:45] He provided food. He was their satisfier. He gave them water to drink. He was their clarifier. He gave them and led them where they were to go. And so at the time of Jesus, this festival would have been an absolutely huge celebration.
[8:03] People would have come from all over to Jerusalem to celebrate together. And the entire festival was centered around those three provisions. Bread. Water. Light. Light, however, was probably the most, was the major feature.
[8:20] It was probably the most pronounced feature. So on the last day of the feast, in the evening time, the priests would all hold torches and they would walk through the city up to the temple singing praises to God.
[8:34] And then when they got there, they had these four big candlesticks that they would put torches on. They were like menorahs that they would light and light the city from the temple mount.
[8:47] In fact, the legend says, I don't know if this is true or not, but legend says that those candlesticks were 50 feet tall. What it says, the legends say that the temple mount with the priests and with these candlesticks would illumine the entire city of Jerusalem.
[9:03] You can imagine how powerful an image that would be for a culture that didn't have any electric light at all. That it was lighting the city.
[9:15] And in the midst of the festival, with those lights illuminating the city, Jesus stands up in the crowd and proclaims, I am the light of the world.
[9:27] Wow. I mean, you can imagine that he's probably got the attention of everybody at this point. But that's actually just the culmination.
[9:37] You actually have to back up in John's gospel because Jesus has been leading up to this moment. If you go back to chapter six, which y'all have been looking at at John chapter six, Jesus feeds the 5000.
[9:49] It's about it's about Pentecost time. It's late spring and he feeds them with bread and fish. And then as the Pharisees are asking him about it, he stands up before them and he says, I am the bread of life.
[10:02] I'm the bread that has come down from heaven. I'm God's provision. And then he the John in chapter seven, he tells us that Jesus goes to Jerusalem for the feast of booths.
[10:15] And just a few hours before the passage we're looking at, Jesus goes into the temple that same day and he stands up and he says, if anyone thirsts, he can come to me and drink.
[10:29] And out of his soul will spring rivers of living water. Jesus is playing off of these three great provisions of God. He's already done two of them and then he stands up and he proclaims that he is the light of the world.
[10:47] He's clearly saying, look, the story of Israel that you are celebrating is God's provision that you have been looking back to, that you have faith that God is the kind of God who provides and satisfies and clarifies for his people.
[11:01] I'm the culmination of that. I'm the center point of your history. What Jesus is doing is he's retelling Israel's story to them. He's reframing their story so that they would see that Jesus is at the very center of it.
[11:17] It's really remarkable what he's doing here. He's saying, I am God's provision for you. He's retelling their story. But he does so in a very in a way that gets at a ton of imagery and actually deepens the understanding.
[11:33] So look at that just simple statement. I am the light of the world. Look at it simply. I am the light of the world. I am.
[11:44] Why does he use that? You may or you may not know that John records Jesus using that construction. I am seven times in his gospel. Starts off with I am the bread of life.
[11:55] And then I am the light of the world and I am the door for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the way, the truth and the life. I am the true vine connected to the father.
[12:08] Jesus is self-consciously using this idea of I am to hearken back in Israel's history to the burning bush. When God called Moses at the burning bush and Moses said, who are you?
[12:23] And God said, I'm going to give you my divine name. Yahweh, which roughly translated is I am who I am. I am. I am preexistent.
[12:34] I am the one who is not determined by anyone else. I am before you. I created you. I am. Without you, I am. I am God Almighty.
[12:46] And Jesus in doing this is saying, not only am I God's provision for you. I'm not just God's tool. I'm not just physical bread or physical light or physical water.
[12:59] I am God himself come into the world to provide for you. To satisfy you. To clarify the world for you.
[13:11] I am. I am the light of the world. What does he mean by the light? Light? Well, he's claiming that if we see.
[13:25] Well, he's using this image of light and light, of course, is a powerful image. Right. When you think of the sun rising or setting, you think of beauty. Right.
[13:36] You think of it in the light. You can see things. It provides clarity. It provides warmth, as every cat knows. It provides life.
[13:51] Light is synonymous with life. Do you remember the first words that God spoke in Genesis chapter 1? Let there be light. Light was fundamental.
[14:03] Nothing grows in the darkness. Well, I don't know. I'm sure there's some bacteria at the bottom of the ocean that grows in darkness. But for the most part, nothing grows where it's dark.
[14:13] It needs light. Light is fundamental to life. In fact, but it's light is redemptive as well. When you look at the end of the Bible in Revelation chapter 21, do you know what John says about the new Jerusalem?
[14:27] Here's how he describes it. And I saw no temple in the city for its temple is the Lord God, the Almighty and the Lamb. There's no you don't go to a place to worship.
[14:38] God is there to be worshiped. He's present. And then he says this. This city has no need of sun or moon to shine in it for the glory of God gives it light and its lamp is the Lamb.
[14:52] That the glory of God shining forth is stronger than the sun. It gives more life and more clarity and more warmth than the very sun that we are so used to.
[15:04] Jesus is claiming that he is the light, the exclusive light. He's the only way to find life, the only way to find clarity, the only way to know God.
[15:17] It's really remarkable what he's claiming. Paul says something similar. He says this for God, who said light, let light shine out of darkness, has shown in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
[15:35] He's saying when you see Jesus, you see God. The only way to know who God is, is to see Jesus. Jesus is the light of God's glory.
[15:48] So I am the light of the world. Jesus is claiming that only in him can we see everything else. I'm a YouTube fan.
[16:02] You may not like YouTube. That's your problem. And I got to see them, the Vertigo Tour. You know, I think it was 2008, 2009. It was in Dallas, the American Airlines Center.
[16:14] It was this huge arena show. And it was a wonderful concert. I was really excited. I've only seen them this one time. And there was, I've never seen this before, but after the opening act, they turned off all the lights in the stadium.
[16:26] And it was dark for probably like 30 minutes. It wasn't like people setting up the stage. It was just dark. The only light in the whole place was cell phones, people holding up cell phones. And this went on for probably 30 minutes.
[16:38] It was a long time. People were stomping. People were yelling. They were singing YouTube songs by themselves. I mean, it was, there was an anticipation growing. And in that dim cell phone light, at some point, you could see this one little silhouette of a person walk out onto stage.
[16:55] It was the Edge. He's the guitar player. And he came and he picked up a guitar and he just, he just started to play. No lights on. It was like he was just playing for his own enjoyment.
[17:06] Just playing. It wasn't a song in particular. He was just strumming. And he did that for probably five minutes. And then another little silhouette came on.
[17:17] It was Adam Clayton, who's the bassist. And he came and he kind of joined in. Same thing. No recognizable song. Just playing for the pure enjoyment of it. And after about five more minutes, Larry Mullins walked out.
[17:31] He's the drummer. And he started kind of going along and joining them. And everybody's waiting for Bono, right? Everybody, the anticipation is growing. And you know that he's the next one.
[17:41] But it seemed like it just took forever. And finally, Bono came out. And the music has just this building nature. And so the lights came on, but just a little bit.
[17:53] They just had spotlights on each of the four band members. And finally, the music kind of coalesced into a song. And it was that song. I don't know if you know this one.
[18:04] City of Blinding Lights. It's a song that is a love song. And it's a metaphor. He's talking about the radiance of New York City at night. Is likened to the beauty of a woman.
[18:18] And the chorus goes like this. It says, oh, you look so beautiful tonight in a city of blinding lights. And as the music kind of built, everybody's singing along.
[18:31] And when they got to the chorus, all of a sudden, these floodlights behind the stage just shone out into the audience. And all of a sudden, this place that was full of darkness became so bright and illuminated.
[18:46] You could see every face in the place. From the nosebleeds down to the floor, you could see everybody. Some people were like, you know, hands up. Some people are screaming. Some people are singing out.
[18:58] Everybody was smiling. Because all of a sudden, the whole dynamic of the room changed. This was no longer just four guys up on a stage performing for everybody else.
[19:08] What became apparent was that every single person in the room had been brought into this moment. Every single person's presence was important and valuable.
[19:20] They had all been brought in. There was this strange connection that began to develop because it was like the presence of the audience made the performance real.
[19:39] The light illuminated the reality of the dynamic that was going on. C.S. Lewis articulated this idea well when he wrote, I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen.
[19:53] Not only because I see the sun, but because by it, I see everything else. I think what Jesus, this is exactly what Jesus is talking about.
[20:05] I think what he's saying, in saying that he is the light of the world, what Jesus is saying is, look, I reveal the reality of everything in this world. And not only do I show the reality, but I'm drawing you in to be a part of the story that I am weaving in the world.
[20:24] I'm retelling Israel's story, and now I'm inviting all of you into what it means to be connected to God, to see God as you should see him.
[20:34] So you can't know the world unless you see it the way that I see it. You can't you can't live in it unless you live in the way that that I am living in it.
[20:47] Yeah, I mean, it's really amazing. Jesus is saying that you can't understand the world unless you see it through him. How can he say that? I mean, that's really a remarkable claim.
[20:58] And actually, if you keep reading past verse 12 that we're looking at, that's the same question that the Pharisees are going to ask. They ask him, how can you say that? On whose authority are you doing this?
[21:10] How can you make a claim that is so dramatic that you, Jesus, are the center of everything? I think that's a good question for us.
[21:20] How can Jesus say that? How can he say that if you follow him, you will live a clear and illumined life? Can you really believe that?
[21:32] Here's how we know it's true. We know it's true because Jesus entered the darkness, right? Jesus went to the cross. Do you remember what happened at the cross?
[21:42] From noon until three o'clock, the sky turned as dark as night. We could say it this way, that on the cross, Jesus intentionally entered the darkness of rejection from God the Father.
[22:00] Do you remember what Jesus said when he was on the cross? He looked at his disciples and he said, I thirst. The one from whom flows rivers of living water could not provide for his own thirst on the cross.
[22:15] Jesus willingly went to the place of alienation, of judgment, of deprivation. The one who was with the Father and was the one through whom the Father provided all things for all people, chose to go to a place of deprivation and alienation and rejection to be stripped of God's provision.
[22:38] And the reason why he did that? Well, so that you wouldn't have to. You see, you will never understand the message of Jesus until you get past seeing Jesus as this, you know, great teacher who has wisdom.
[22:57] Or a great moral example that you should just follow his example. Or Jesus as the one who can make you a winner in life. Until you see that what the message of Jesus is, is a message, it's a message of Jesus taking your place.
[23:17] You will never understand the power of the cross. That Jesus entered the darkness so that by faith and by the power of the Holy Spirit, you would be able to live in the light of life.
[23:29] This is why Isaiah, this is so profound when he says, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light upon those who dwell in the land of deep darkness.
[23:40] On them the light has shined. Jesus has shined the light into this world for us. Now, does that mean that you're going to live a life that is totally free of any confusing and difficult things?
[23:57] No, of course not. We still are affected at all times by the powers of the world and the flesh and the devil. But remember this. The people of Israel, they wandered in the desert for 40 years.
[24:09] But God was with them. God provided for them. He satisfied them. He clarified things for them. You see, it was in the wilderness place that God provided his deepest satisfaction for his people.
[24:28] And so the message for you and for me is not how do we get away from the confusing things of life, but how do we see God at work providing clarity in the very midst of them?
[24:41] What would it be like for you if you saw the challenges that you are currently facing with family, with work, finances, spiritual life, your emotional life?
[24:56] What if you saw those challenges the way that Jesus sees them? What would Jesus say looking at those challenges? That's really the question here.
[25:09] Do you think that Jesus might retell your story differently than the way you think about it? See, he is the light of the world that has come to bring clarity and to bring life.
[25:23] And this clarity has the power to equip you to do that. The very last thing that Jesus says is, I am the light of the world. Anyone who follows me will have in them the light of life.
[25:39] That's what following Jesus will give you. The light of life. Okay, we need to stop. We've gone over today. So I'm going to stop and pray for us. And then I'm going to send us off with God's blessing and we'll be dismissed.
[25:53] So let me pray. Heavenly Father, we live lives that are confusing. We live in a world and a culture that is confusing. It's difficult to understand.
[26:04] And yet you have promised that you are the light of this world. And we beg of you that you would help us to see this world through your eyes. The eyes of redemption.
[26:15] The eyes of grace. The eyes of victory. Grant your Holy Spirit to us in such measure that we would see it. Help us, we pray.
[26:26] In Christ's name. Amen. Amen.