Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.
When you're lost in the dark, you need a source of light. Jesus proclaimed, I am the light of the world. At Christmas, we celebrate that light and rejoice in the salvation He makes possible for all who believe. Stay with us for more of a series on The Light Has Come. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, today you turn to John chapters 7 and 8 and teach us how the light leads us. Those in the dark might appreciate a light showing them the way out. You know, Dave, when I stop to think of it, we take so many things for granted, don't we? We very easily tell people that Jesus is the light of the world, but just imagine a person saying that. If you had a friend who said, I am the light of the world, you'd know that that friend was walking in very deep darkness and confusion. Yet Jesus said that, and He had a right to because He had the qualifications to save us, and that's what Christmas is all about. I'm so excited about a resource we're making available for you.
And remember, the New Year is just around the corner. This book entitled Without Excuse is really based on the doctrine of creation. It contains 65 color photographs that instruct you regarding botany, design, history, creation science, genetics. Spend 10 minutes a day in the New Year in this book, and you will learn so much about so many different things and even learn to defend the faith. Now, we've never offered this book before. For a gift of any amount, it can be yours.
Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. The title of the book is Without Excuse. Why? Compelling Evidence for Creation.
Hope to hear from you, and let us listen now as we hear from God's word, the uniqueness of Christ. Well, as all of us know, it's Christmas. The question is, what do we buy one another? I have no idea what to buy Rebecca at Christmas. She has everything, and then besides that, she has me.
It's what you call a fringe benefit. It was a man who bought his wife a gift certificate, and immediately, she wanted to take it to the store and exchange it for a bigger size. Things are so hard, even up at the North Pole, I'm told.
Money's in short supply, and things are rather desperate. Somebody phoned Santa and said, how's old Rudolph doing? Santa said, delicious.
Yep, it's come to that. What is Christmas all about? Can be very easily summarized when it says, the people who sat in darkness saw a great light. In the Bible, what you find is this motif between darkness and light is very clear, and it runs from the first chapter of Genesis all the way to the book of Revelation.
The Bible teaches that there are two paths. There is the path of darkness, and there is the path of light, and you and I today are on one or the other. May I read to you what the path of darkness really is like. This is what it's like. It says, regarding those who are in darkness, they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardness of heart.
They have become calloused, have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy practices, every kind of impurity. That's the dark path. The dark path is the path where you lack understanding, but you think that you have light. It's the path in which there is seeking, but there is never finding.
There is desire, but never real fulfillment. Sometimes God helps me make up a sermon. I hope that he helps me all the time, actually, but he'll give me an illustration in the middle of the week. Yesterday, I met someone who gave me his testimony who knows all about the darkness. He began to pursue darkness in rebellion against his religious training, and one of the things he said is that darkness is incremental. You begin at one point, and then you end up going where you never thought that you would go. He said he pursued the big three.
The big three were money, some fame and power, which he had, and lots of sex. That's the path to happiness, right? It brought him into such deep darkness, he said, that he didn't know whether or not he could make it, and he cried up to God and finally received Jesus and received the gift of light. That's what darkness is like. It's terrible, and so that's the path of darkness.
Now, that's moral darkness, but there is also such a thing in scripture as religious darkness. Now, I am going somewhere with this, but I want you to turn in your Bibles to the seventh chapter of John. John chapter seven, because I want to look at a text today, but I want to see it in context. John chapter seven, Jesus goes to a feast in Jerusalem. It is the Feast of Booths, the Feast of Tabernacles sometimes called, which pious Jews still celebrate today, where for a week they live in a tent, they live in a hut to symbolize the fact that they came through the desert and God took care of them even when they didn't have permanent houses. And so there they are at the Feast of Booths, and when they are there, Jesus said in verse 37 of John seven, on the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried, says, if anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink whoever believes in me.
As the scripture said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. Now, needless to say, that caused some real division among the people. When you think of the Pharisees, they were not necessarily bad people in a sense, but they were addicted to their rules and to them religion was their rules. And so they say later on in these verses that if you believe in Jesus, you are deceived.
That's where they were at. Now when you come to chapter eight, you have a story that we have frequently known and read and I've preached on. It's the story of the woman caught in adultery where Jesus is confronted by these people and they want to trip them up and they say, well, this woman was caught in the very act of adultery. What do you want us to do to her? Because in the law it said you should stone her. And Jesus said, fine, you stone her. Fulfill the law, but let's begin with first of all, you men who have come here.
First of all, we may ask where was the man in all this? But at any rate, Jesus said, go ahead and stone her. But you who have not committed a similar sin, you throw the first stone. And the Bible says that beginning at the eldest, even onto the last, they all walked away.
Wow. You know, sometimes this is caused, in fact, in my Bible, it says in chapter eight, the woman caught in adultery. It could be the men caught in adultery.
They were the ones who are really caught in adultery, their hypocrisy. But you know, I mentioned that because here you see two different forms of darkness. You see moral darkness and then you see religious darkness. And this religious darkness is a kind of self-righteousness and hypocrisy, which Jesus really spoke against. And I think I could say he hated, he hated that kind of religiosity.
He may have loved the people, but he hated what their religion was doing to him. So that's the context in which we get to our text today, which is in verse 12. Again, Jesus spoke to them. Now you have to connect that with him being at the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles.
This story is not found. The story of the woman is not found in many of the early manuscripts, but it was apparently inserted in later manuscripts, but nobody I read doubts that it happened. It's just that it was not part of the original text. So if we think of Jesus being at the Feast of Booths, we think of him there and he's saying, I'm the living water. And he's also saying, I'm the light of the world. Now at this feast, at the end of it, they had candelabra. They had candles that were so powerful that these four candles were lit. It is said that it lighted up all the courtyards in Jerusalem. These candles represented the light by which God led the people of Israel through the desert, you remember, and it was light during the day and the cloud, I should say, during the day and fire by night.
That's what they were trying to illustrate. And so now in the middle of this, Jesus says, I am the light of the world. Undoubtedly, he said this to astonish. He said this also because he wanted to show that he was the supreme light.
He eclipsed all the other lights. We all know what that is like, don't we, when we have a power shortage or an outage. We sit there in our condos and in our houses, and Rebecca and I have been through this in UF, too, where I think to myself where I know exactly where the flashlight is.
And then I discover that it's not where I was absolutely confident it was. Rebecca might light a candle. But when the lights come back on, you extinguish the candle, you turn the flashlight off.
Why? Light has come. Jesus is saying, I am the light, and all other lights go into oblivion. Today I want you to understand that if you are interested in knowing God, if that's your desire, and it must be if you're here or if you're watching online or listening by radio or any other means, it must be because in your heart, you'd like to know God.
You have to come to Jesus. You know, light in the Bible is used frequently for God. For example, in the Old Testament, the Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? In Isaiah 60, it says that God is your everlasting light. Light is God. Jesus, the light of the world.
Now here's what we're going to do. We're going to go on a journey, and we're going to see how Jesus is at the beginning of the journey and how he is at the end of the journey. Thank you so much for joining me on this exploration of who Jesus is. First of all, Jesus is at the beginning of our journey. He is called the light of the world, and you can't begin the journey without believing on Jesus. And when you begin that journey, what happens is a light comes into your soul.
First of all, conversion is instantaneous. Listen to these words from the Apostle Paul. God who said, let light shine out of darkness has shone in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ. There's an analogy between creation, Genesis chapter one, and the recreation of light in our hearts. And that's what happened when you were converted, or we sometimes call it the new birth.
We're talking about the same thing. First of all, it is instantaneous. One moment you are in the kingdom of darkness, and in a moment of time you are transformed, translated into the kingdom of God's dear son. Now the man to whom I was speaking yesterday told me all of the things that preceded his conversion.
So it's not as if this just happens without any context. It happens when we are convicted of our sins. Now in his case, God had to bring him so low that he didn't think he was going to make it. It was a point of desperation. Now you don't have to get to that point to receive Christ as your savior.
Children can if their hearts are not hard, and children's hearts are usually very tender. But you find some who are rebellious, some who hold out, some who will not give in, some whose minds are made up, and they need to be brought to a great point of humiliation before they cry out to God. But the actual transfer is instantaneous from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. Furthermore, it is miraculous. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. It is a miracle that happens in the heart that you cannot do. It's not a matter of determining that you are going to do better and you're done with your old life and you're going to start to go to church and begin a new life. No, this is something that God does.
It is miraculous and it is instantaneous. And it has to do with the giving of light and the transference from one kingdom to another. Do you remember the words of Charles Wesley? Dark my imprisoned spirit lay.
This is his testimony. Dark my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and darkest night. Thine eye diffused the quickening ray. I woke. My dungeon was flaming with light. My chains fell off. My heart was free. I rose, went forth and followed thee.
I want to speak to you candidly today. If you cannot pinpoint a time when you received Christ as savior, almost certainly you are not converted. You've not received God's light. And don't tell me it happened when you were baptized or when you went through some ritual.
It must be the receiving of light. As many as received him. Now there are some people who are genuinely saved who can't remember the exact day, but most people can.
I can 50, 55 years ago. I remember it with clarity. And so Jesus is there at the beginning of our journey, at the beginning of our experience. Secondly, Jesus is there also as he leads us during our journey. As many as are led by the spirit of God, they are the sons of God.
Those who follow me, Jesus said, will not walk in darkness, but you'll have the light of life. How do we understand that? You know, about 25 years ago, and I can just throw out those numbers without a problem. 25 years ago, 30 years ago, I met with some college students in my study here at the church. You know, college students, the reason it's so wonderful to be with them is oftentimes they are so idealistic and so committed, but maybe sometimes they're just maybe even over saved.
If I can put it that way. These students felt called of God to do ministry in Chicago, but they wanted to know the leading of the Holy Spirit, the leading of Christ in such a way that they would not need a map. So they deliberately came to Chicago without a map.
Of course, it was long before the days of GPS and all those other things. And they thought that if they're sensitive to the spirit, the Holy Spirit is going to say, turn left here, turn right here. I would think that the Holy Spirit would always say, stop at red lights. I mean, that would be my assumption. And I told them, you know, you don't have to do that.
Invest a couple of bucks, get a map. Now, on the other hand, maybe the Holy Spirit knew what he was doing. Well, the Holy Spirit always knows what he's doing, of course, but isn't it interesting that they were led to the Moody Church, which is where I think the spirit should take most people. So when we talk about following Jesus and sensing the leadership of the spirit, that that's not what we're talking about. We are talking about, first of all, Jesus gives light as to who we are.
Jesus by his Holy Spirit, you know, it says in the book of Romans very clearly. It says that if we are led to by the spirit of God, we are the sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you've received the spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry, have a father. The spirit himself bears witness within us that we are the children of God. That's what happens when we receive the light. We have the assurance that we belong to God, not only because of his word, but the witness of the spirit of God within us.
And as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we cry Abba Father, because one of the proofs of being born again is you begin to call God Father. And so that's the assurance of the spirit of God. Jesus also comes along and gives us the light in terms of leadership, moral leadership.
You know, even after we received the light, we sometimes go into darkness, don't we? Haven't we all had the experience of crossing the line? In other words, we know for sure that we are going across the line and we are sinning now.
How do we know that? It's because the spirit of God, the spirit of Jesus is the one who tells us through conviction, you have crossed the line. So he leads us in many different ways. Spiritually, yes, he also leads us morally. And the Bible says this, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. I've given you the example before, but when I was out on the farm in Canada as a little boy, we used to go from the, that was before electricity even, we used to go from the house to the barn at night and we had a lantern. The lantern didn't shine very far, but it showed you what you needed to do to take the next sure step.
What amazed me was that if the lantern wasn't working or you're without one, no matter how well you knew the farm yard in the midst of darkness, you'd go wrong. So the word of God leads us. It enables us to be able to be led even as we follow Jesus spiritually and morally. So Jesus is with us during the journey.
He's also there at the end of the journey. You know, Jesus says this, now let's look at the text again. I am the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but notice the phrase now, we'll have the light of life. The light that leads to life, to leads to life with a capital L. And Jesus said that if you follow me, you'll have the wisdom, you'll have the insight, and furthermore, the permanence of the work of the Holy Spirit of God within your heart so that you will be led to life the way in which it should be lived. Everyone wants a life of fulfillment, a life of joy, a life of purpose, and Jesus gives that to us here.
And the good news is that beyond that, of course, is to be with him. And so we don't go into the darkness alone. King George the sixth, when he was giving a speech, I think in 1939 regarding England needing to go to war, said, he quotes this, I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, give me a light that I might tread safely into the unknown. And he replied, go out into the darkness and put your hand in the hand of God that shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way. I would change that just a little bit and say, put your hand into the hand of Jesus and it will be to you better than your own light and safer than a known way. So Jesus is at the beginning of the journey. He's at the end of the journey.
And that's why running to win exists to point people to Jesus Christ, the light of the world. I'm so excited about a book that I'm holding in my hands. It's a resource we want to make available for you.
It's entitled without excuse. And the reason for that title is God says in the book of Romans that because of creation, people are without excuse. This is a book on creation, 365 readings with color photos of birds, plants.
I just looking through and I see some mice, bear, donkeys, horses, all showing the uniqueness of how God in wisdom and power created this world and created nature. If you were to have this book, you would have an education in so many different fields. For a gift of any amount we're making it available for you. Here's what you do. Go to RTWoffer.com. That's RTWoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. I want to clarify that we have never offered this book before.
What an opportunity it would be for you to begin the new year spending 10 minutes a day learning so much about our great creator, God. And thanks in advance for helping us even as we continue this ministry around the world. Once again, that contact info, go to RTWoffer.com.
That's RTWoffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. Running to Win comes to you from the Moody Church in Chicago to help you understand God's roadmap for your race of life. Next time, more about how the light of Christ is a beacon for all who are lost in darkness. Plan to join us. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
