John 8:12 | Jesus is the Light of the World
We were talking near the end of VBS this last week about how it would be great to create continuity and connection in our body by preaching on the same VBS topic each year during the Sunday service at the end of VBS. It would give us a chance not only to honor the time our volunteers spent teaching these ideas to our kids, but also to encourage our kids that their content is not just “Jesus Lite,” but something adults should think about as well. Kids, what you learned matters. It wasn’t just kid lessons, but they are lessons your parents and the other adults in the room should hear as well.
The initial thought was, “Great, let’s put that on the list for next year.” But then I got to thinking, “I’m already way behind in my sermon prep this week because of VBS. Why not pivot on Thursday to content we have been talking about THIS year?!”
So, here you go. This Sunday is all about our VBS content from a curriculum called “Illumination Station.” And, in case you need some encouragement, Jesus commends us to think this way more often than we really do:
Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:3–4 ESV
We need to humble ourselves and, more often than we do, find wonder, joy, and amazement at God’s word like a child would. That is the humility he is asking us to have: To come to him in wonder and awe, putting our faith in the simple but amazing story of God each day. Kids, if you know some of the answers before I say them, be sure to lean over to your parents and share with them what is coming up!
Jesus the Light of the World
Let me start with this question: What is one of the main images that Jesus uses to describe himself? It’s a hard question to answer because there are so many! We have the bread of life, the water of life, and a tree that we abide in. He is the cornerstone of the building we are being made into. There are really a lot of images that Jesus speaks about. But probably one of the most widely used images is about light. Jesus is the light of the world and the light of life.
Our VBS was centered around Jesus’s statement in John 8:12:
Jesus spoke to them [the Pharisees] again, saying, “I am the light of the world. Anyone who follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
John 8:12 CSB
The Light of the World. The Light of Life. Jesus says he is the light “of” life, meaning he provides, he gives, he is the source of life BECAUSE he is the light. That is an interesting idea. Because Jesus is light, illumination, we receive life from God.
We also often think about John 1 when we think about this image of light and Jesus:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:1–5 ESV
But this image of light is found in many other places in Scripture as well. You may not have thought about it, but Jesus is mentioned this way even in the Old Testament. Look at Psalm 27:
The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid
Psalm 27:1 ESV
Yahweh is my light and salvation! Or, similarly, in Isaiah 60:
Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.”
Isaiah 60:1–3 ESV
God as light is not just a New Testament phrase or something Jesus says about himself. The light that brings salvation and life is an image God has taken for himself throughout Scripture.
And one of the things we should be asking ourselves is, “What is he illuminating if he is the light?” It sounds like a simple question, but I bet many of us haven’t asked that question. We think of Jesus being light, shiny, bringing clarity and vision. God, who is just too bright to look at! But I don’t know how often we ask and wonder what EXACTLY he is trying to illuminate? What is it we should be seeing BECAUSE OF Jesus’s illumination?
There is the easy VBS and Sunday School answer that we actually didn’t talk about this week. The simple answer is: God! Jesus is illuminating God better for us. Hebrews 1:3 says it well:
He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.
Hebrews 1:3 ESV
I love how the writer to the Hebrews uses “light-like” language to convey the idea of Jesus being radiance. Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God. That is a beautiful image. It is clear that the writer to the Hebrews knows his Old Testament well, and I think he is trying to help us see how this “light” of God is JESUS, the God-Man, who shows us the very nature of God in himself.
This is the idea BEHIND the lessons in our VBS series this year. We all want to look at Jesus, the light of life, the light of the world, the radiance of God, and see what he wants us to see and know. To see what is necessary for life and faith in him, as Peter says in 2 Peter 1:3.
Five ‘P’s
And what we find when we look at all Jesus illuminates is that one of the most important things we can know is simply Jesus himself. Jesus, the light, is shining and showing himself to us! If he is the radiance of God, we need to look at him, know him, and find that, in knowing him, we will paradoxically know and love the Father more. As Jesus said himself:
Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
John 14:9 ESV
Our goal throughout VBS was to look at five aspects of Jesus and see in each of them how Jesus is more than we may have thought. I think this is a view of Jesus that many of us need to come to again this morning. To have Jesus illuminated by Scripture, and through him, to see God better. I think VBS may be for us more than we think—to come back to a simple vision of Jesus, like a child.
As any good teaching does (so it seems), they used five ‘p’s to describe Jesus:
Jesus is God’s Promised Son
Jesus is God’s Perfect Son
Jesus is the Powerful Son of God
Jesus is the Proven Son of God
Jesus is God’s Plan for Forgiveness
As our curriculum explained:
“Culture claims to know about Jesus, but many people are in the dark about who He really is. Some might see Jesus as just a person from history or a good man or a good teacher—but He is more than that!... Kids will explore all the ways light brightens, illuminates, reflects, and reveals while discovering that Jesus is the light who brings hope to a dark world.”
Let me pause here to note that finding awe and wonder in God again, with childlike faith, does not mean being shallow. These five ideas are nothing less than the core message of the gospel—something you and I should not only cherish, but something we should be able to explain THIS simply. I would encourage you not only to treasure this again this morning in a simple, childlike presentation, but also to consider how this presentation of the gospel would work for most anyone you know. These points are largely painting the picture of God’s plan for us through His people, place, presence, and purpose (our four p’s!) that we have been talking about in Genesis!
Jesus is the Promised Son of God
Jesus is the Promised Son of God. We started the week pondering how to tell what a person does in life. Some jobs, like firefighting and police work, are fairly easy to tell right away by their uniforms. Some jobs, like lawyers, teachers, engineers, and sometimes even doctors, and moms and dads, are much harder. We don’t always know what people do just by looking at them.
When Jesus comes into his full-time ministry, people begin to talk. They notice him and instantly form an opinion about who he is. So, Jesus asks his disciples about what they have heard:
Now, when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Then he strictly charged the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Christ.
Matthew 16:13–20 ESV
Some think Jesus is a prophet. Some say John the Baptist, perhaps in disguise, was killed by Herod. Or perhaps a resurrected John, as some seem to think when they say, "Elijah" or "Jeremiah." Yet when Jesus asks his disciples who he is, Peter says he is the Son of the living God.
You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.
Messiah, or Christ, is who Peter says Jesus is. That is not Jesus' last name (Jesus Christ, like Ryan Eagy), but his title. The ‘anointed one.’ Peter rightly sees who Jesus is. Jesus blesses Peter after he says this because this is a dangerous thing for a Jew to say. Peter is identifying Jesus as the promised messiah, the savior of the world. And he is also saying he is God’s own son. Jesus forbids them to tell anyone this because he is not ready for his crucifixion yet.
Application
One of the first things we all need to think about regarding Jesus is, Who is Jesus? We will have a very different experience with God depending on that answer. If Jesus is not the anointed one of our lives, our savior, the Son of God himself, we will not give him the rightful place he alone deserves on the throne of our lives.
I hope you notice this is no flannel-graph start to VBS. Right from the start, we were asking our children to consider THE most consequential questions they will ever ask themselves, the question we all must answer in our lives: Who is Jesus? And the answer we taught them is the answer Jesus gives himself: he is the Promised Son of God.
That phrase should resonate with us as we have been going through Genesis. The promised seed of the woman, THE SON, has come in Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, God himself enjoined to flesh. I don’t think I can say this enough: this is one of the grand storylines of Scripture. Starting with the first major story of the sin and fall of Adam and Eve, we are waiting for this son who will come to save his people. The tragedy of Cain and Abel is that Abel, the son, is killed. And as each successive son lives and then dies, we realize God’s plan may take a little longer than we would have thought.
Stop and marvel again like a child at the revelation of who Jesus is! This tops finding out who Darth Vader is. This is more astonishing than why Harry Potter has a scar on his head or can speak parcel-tongue, the language of snakes. THE long-awaited son of God has come. He is here! He has come to his people, we have known him, and in knowing him, we have seen God himself.
That changes everything about my life! That changes everything about your life! If Jesus is who he claims to be, who the disciples say he is, we owe him everything. We owe him our lives. Our allegiance. Our faith. Jesus is God’s Promised Son.
Jesus is God’s Perfect Son
But Jesus is even more than that! He is also God’s Perfect Son. Everyone expected that God’s Messiah, Jesus, would be good, amazing, wonderful—none of that was ever in question. But if we had been reading Scripture all along through the Old Testament, we would not expect that anyone born of a woman would be able to elude the seductive siren’s call of sin completely. Everyone up to the point of Jesus has sinned—some spectacularly! Noah gets drunk right after getting off the Ark and having just seen God’s provision and protection firsthand. Abraham offers his wife off as his sister to a ruler twice! Jacob cheats his brother out of his birthright. Joseph taunts his brothers and flaunts his father’s love. David kills Uriah and sleeps with Bathsheba. We might have expected the Messiah to be great, but perfect?!
That was the second question we asked at VBS:
Was Jesus just an ordinary man?
There are many ordinary things we all do. Almost everyone has played a sport, even if only for fun. We have been in school. But there are things we would never expect from a person. That (flying) would not be ordinary! Yet Jesus did something very “unordinary.” Maybe more unexpected than Jesus flying (I guess he could have, if we count moving through walls and into the upper room as “flying”). Jesus was not ordinary because Jesus was PERFECT!
Stop and consider that for a moment. We expect perfection of Jesus, but perfection is amazing. More amazing than we give credit for. I think we are so used to the story that we don’t think often about what being perfect meant for Jesus. Jesus never thought wrongly. Jesus never felt wrong.
Jesus never spoke wrongly. Jesus never DID ANYTHING wrong, he never failed to do what he SHOULD do, AND he never failed to flee the things he should flee from. He never needed discipline. Jesus never had to sit in the corner!
And we see God’s pleasure in Jesus’s perfection at his baptism. As Jesus goes to be baptized, we see God come and speak not only IN a miraculous way, but he says the most miraculous thing:
A voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased.”
Mark 1:11, CSB
We have previously seen how God called each day good in creation, but at the end, after creating people, he said all of creation was “very good” in Genesis 1. It is similar here. We see God say throughout Scripture that many people found favor in his eyes. Noah found favor, Moses found favor, Mary, Joseph, David, and many other saints found God’s favor. But in Jesus, God is “very” or “well” pleased. This is a son like no other! Jesus is God’s Perfect Son!
And his perfection was not just for himself. Rather, Jesus lived as the Perfect Son of God that he might give that perfection to us. As Paul says to the Philippians:
For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith…
Philippians 3:8–9 ESV
Jesus’s righteousness was not only a righteousness that showed he truly IS the Promised Son of God, but his righteousness was also FOR US! Through faith, we receive Jesus righteousness when he takes our sin upon himself at the cross. It really is a grand exchange! An unimaginable exchange from the perfect son to us.
Jesus is the Powerful Son of God
In addition to being the promised son and the perfect son, Jesus was also the powerful son of God. Power brings up so many images for all of us. When we think about power, we often think of strength, but there is always someone stronger than us. And often, true strength looks very different from what we might expect.
Jesus’s power looked different from what most expected. He didn’t come his first time riding on his white horse, sword in hand, ready to conquer through power and might. Rather, he came to serve (Mark 10:45). He performed miracles, but to serve the people. In Matthew 15, we see just that:
Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And I am unwilling to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way.”
Matthew 15:32 ESV
Jesus had compassion on them and then performed a miracle to feed 4000 men, plus women and children. Jesus does this again and again. He heals the Centurion’s servant. He heals the woman who has been bleeding for years. He heals the man born blind. Again and again, Jesus uses his power to serve and love his people. And we see this in his greatest act of power—going to the cross that he might defeat sin and death. In an upside-down display of strength, Jesus conquers through sacrifice. What looked like failure to the world was actually his greatest act of power and success as our good, promised, perfect, and powerful king.
This is why Jesus can say after his resurrection:
“All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.”
Matthew 28:18 CSB
His death and resurrection were the greatest signs of his power!
Jesus the Proven Son of God
In fact, it is in this power that Jesus does something else. He proves he is the son of God.
I think if we are honest, we all feel like we have something to prove, often in life. When you are younger, it seems like the big deals to prove are how good you are through your chore chart or how athletic you are through your third-grade race. As we get older, it feels like every core aspect of our lives needs to be proved: our parenting abilities, our job.
Many people have questioned:
Was Jesus just a teacher?
Was that what Jesus proved? That he knew scripture well and could explain it to others? Yes, but it was much more! Through that moment on the cross, Jesus proved he truly was the Son of God. His willingness to die a sinner's death that he might save his people was the ultimate proof that he was God. And death couldn’t hold him! The tomb was empty that Sunday morning.
[Jesus] was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead…
Romans 1:4 ESV
Declared, or proven. It was in his death and resurrection that many saw Jesus prove who he really was. So much so, that even non-Jewish people in his presence saw in his death that he indeed proved he was the son of God!
When the centurion…saw the way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”
Mark 15:39, CSB
Jesus is God’s Promised Son
Jesus is God’s Perfect Son
Jesus is the Powerful Son of God
Jesus is the Proven Son of God
Father’s Day Excursion
Let me take a moment to take a quick excursion that wasn’t in VBS. Happy Father’s Day to the fathers here, to men who would like to be fathers, to the men who weren’t able to be fathers, and to the men who could be fathers but haven’t done that yet, and every other man here.
There is a funny habit in church of preaching sermons for women on Mother’s Day that are uplifting, encouraging, and reminders of what makes women and moms so wonderful. Yet on the flip side, Father’s Day sermons are often about how men could do better. How could we strive more to be sure to demonstrate God’s love as we work to please our families? It is an odd dichotomy!
That is what I love about going to our VBS passages today for Father’s Day. Look at these points and note what you see in bold:
Jesus is God’s Promised Son
Jesus is God’s Perfect Son
Jesus is the Powerful Son of God
Jesus is the Proven Son of God
Jesus is defined by his Father, and the Father is happy to be known by his Son. There is a beautiful deference here, one to another, that makes the Son happy to show others the Father in his life, and the Father is completely satisfied in being known through his Son.
Men, it isn’t hard to be like THE Father in this way. We want to be known through the Son. What more could any father, any man who strives to be a father, or any man in general want than to be seen and known mostly through Jesus Christ? What better legacy, what better life could we live than to give others God by praying that they can see Jesus through us.
There is no striving here, simply letting Jesus be the one who illuminates our life and therefore the one who shines brightest in the eyes of those around us. We simply have to let Jesus do what HE does and allow him to be seen more than us. And, I think, much like the Son and Father’s relationship, the more people see Jesus, the more they may really see us as well.
We want to be God’s sons—adopted into the family, though we rebelled—and find that we also are rightly reflecting the beauty of OUR Father, the most glorious and magnificent God. I would encourage you today to just rest. Rest in knowing that what your kids need, your family needs, is your simple faith. Your simple presentation of the God you love in your life daily.
Jesus is God’s Plan for Forgiveness
In fact, I think that is part of the climax of VBS for the kids, for you, and for me today. What is the point of seeing all of this about Jesus? It’s to see that he is God’s Plan for Forgiveness.
If someone presented you with all these facts about Jesus and his life, what his illuminating majesty is pointing us towards, and perhaps many, many more beautiful aspects of his life, you may still be asking yourself, “Why do I need to respond to Jesus?”
We must respond to Jesus because he IS God’s plan for our forgiveness. He is the culmination of all God has done or will do. He is the POINT! In him, the fullness of God is being revealed to us. In part today, as through a dim glass, but tomorrow, in the new heavens and the new earth, completely and fully as we walk with him again face to face and see and know our God! Today, he is God’s plan for forgiveness, and he has been revealed sufficiently for our faith.
It is only through this promised son, the perfect one of God, who served us powerfully and through that power raised himself from the grave and proved he was the son of God, that you and I have hope. It is through him that we see how God’s plan has come to fruition through the God-Man, Jesus. Jesus, the light of the world.
Jesus spoke to them [the Pharisees] again, saying, “I am the light of the world. Anyone who follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
John 8:12 CSB
It is because THIS is the Jesus that the Apostles encountered that their main message in every town they went to throughout the book of Acts records them saying:
Repent and be baptized, each of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Acts 2:38
Conclusion
Do you ever wonder whether you and I need to go back to VBS? A week of snacks, simple Bible stories, and a reminder of the beauty of the gospel. Crafts! Games together! Sounds a little like the church campout this next weekend (if you are still interested, I’m sure you can go)!
At the very least, I wonder if you and I need to come back to this story. This simple story of who Jesus is, God’s plan, and how it has been summed up in Jesus Christ!
Jesus is God’s Promised Son
Jesus is God’s Perfect Son
Jesus is the Powerful Son of God
Jesus is the Proven Son of God
Jesus is God’s Plan for Forgiveness
I think that may be part of what our fall looks like after finishing the first part of Genesis. Coming back to the simplicity of child-like faith in knowing and being able to explain the story of God in Jesus Christ.
This morning, come back to this simple story as our children did. Let Jesus illuminate for you the beauty of what he has done as the very Son of God. He was the long-awaited promised answer to the problem of sin and death. He was the perfectly obedient son that none of us could be. He came in power, but used it to serve us, all the way through his death. Jesus PROVED sufficiently for all our faith, that he IS the Son of God, and God’s plan for you and me to be forgiven if we would only put our faith in him.
Stop and consider these five P’s this morning for you and your own life, but also consider the simplicity of the gospel that we often struggle to share. If it is simple enough to communicate through these five points, it might be simple enough for you and me to present in child-like wonder and awe more often!
