“The Case for Christ - Christ the Light of Life”

Before we proceed with this evening’s message, I would personally like to thank all who have so faithfully and prayerfully shared during these past number of weeks.

We have enjoyed the Lord’s feast of spiritual and satisfying food - ‘food’ that was centered in Christ, the One Person Who is the focus of the ages and the eternities.

He was rightfully acknowledged as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords and He Himself as the Kingdom of Heaven. He is present both as the King and the Kingdom.

That was made abundantly clear in all of the messages - a fact that did my heart good and - I hope - blessed you as well. So, again, thank you to each of you who shared and to all who so faithfully prayed for, stood with, and supported with your presence those who so graciously spoke. 

And, I thank the Lord for His faithfulness in giving us His mind and His Word.

Tonight, I would like to follow onward in our inexhaustible study of the Lord Jesus Christ and try to point out two things needful to remember in regard to what was ministered these past few weeks.

The first has to do with the understanding we have in the way in which we receive God’s Word and the second deals with the means that His Word serves in nurturing us toward God’s ultimate reason for life.    

The two main Scriptures in regard to these points are found in John 8:12 and 1 Corinthians 10:1-13.

As you may be well aware, we are living in a day in which the world’s big question is: ‘Why Jesus?’ What is so important about Him that we need to have anything to do with Him?’

Even Christians are unsettled about how Jesus actually fits into their present spiritual state and progress.

And that is not so unusual for - if you look at the letter to the Corinthians - you will find the same condition there.

Let us quickly read those verses in 1 Corinthians 10:1-13. 

These were believers who, positionally, were in Christ by the sheer grace of God on the ground of their justification by faith in Christ.

However, inwardly in ways that showed outwardly, they were building on anything and everything except upon Jesus Christ.

So, although Paul dealt with problems, such as eating meat sacrificed to idols and other such matters that are part of our modern way of living, yet the life Christ is would always remain the same.

The Corinthians were missing the significance of the Christ-filled and the Christ-operated life so Paul put up a ‘red flag’ to drive that point home. (v 21)

He used the illustration of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt - of their great deliverance from bondage. They were fed and refreshed along the way by heavenly means. And Paul even went so far as spiritualizing this deliverance by identifying Christ as the Rock.

The first point we want to see in this illustration is that every single one of the Israelites was a partaker of God’s divine favor. Each one equally shared in God’s blessings, each equally received the mercies and grace of God, each had the same opportunities to feed from His supply. (vs 1-4)

Why did God do this for them?

The answer is found in Deut 8:3. There, Moses explained it to them by saying: ‘And He [God] humbled thee, (or ‘made you feel your need of Him’ - Moffatt translation) and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna which thou knewest not of...(or ‘food unknown to you)’.

Why did He do this? because it goes on ‘...that He might make thee know that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word (or ‘everything’) that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live.’

What was the Lord’s intention here? 

God’s intention was to establish them in that consciousness of His love for them, that it consisted of more than just their daily physical provisions.

It was to show them the origin of their being as His people, to demonstrate to them the source of their existence, to bring them ‘home’, so to speak, to Himself, to the place of rest, of settling down in Him.

Let us put ourselves where the Corinthians were for just a moment - we have no written record, no Bible, to refer to - we have only the word God spoke and commanded to the Israelites for going on.

What would we know by this time?

We would know, as the Corinthians did, that God spoke His word through the prophets to the Israelites. 

And, since Jesus had completed His earthly ministry at this point, we would know that God had spoken His last word through Christ.

And we would know that He promised that, under His new covenant, He would write His Word into His people’s hearts.

Since those were the facts we would know for certain, how, then, were we to go on in a straight course?

Read on into the verses 5 and 6 of that tenth chapter in Corinthians and you will see that Paul listed generally the effects of Israel’s rebellion against God that precipitated His displeasure with them.

The four main areas were their idolatry, their sexual immorality, their tempting Christ, as Paul put it, and their murmuring, complaining. 

In their ‘tempting Christ’, as Paul said, they, of course, were tempting God. How? It was by ‘loathing’ the heavenly manna He gave them. You can see that in Numbers 21:5-6.

‘Loathing’ has the idea of ‘severing oneself from’ or ‘to clip off’. To them, it was the same ‘poor food’ God was providing for them so, in their rebellion toward Him, they ‘clipped Him off’, ‘severed themselves from’ by lessening the worth of God’s provision of manna for them.

Listen to some of the translations of their descriptions of the manna: ‘...this contemptible, unsubstantial, wretched, inferior, insipid, miserable fare, unsatisfying food..’. 

Does that sound as though they were appreciating the value of what God had given them?

And, we know, of course, that this Old Testament manna is a type of Christ, do we not?

Thus, Paul issued a warning after giving this illustration about the Israelites to the Corinthians: these Corinthians were embarking on the same course. They received Christ yet were pushing His message and His mission out of the heavenly, spiritual place He was to have.  

Christ was their ‘manna’ - they were ‘loathing’ Him by severing themselves from His present mission: that is, by not functioning in the power of His resurrected life; they were lessening His significance.

They knew the facts about God’s intention, they knew about Christ, they knew about God writing His word in their hearts.

But the Corinthians were not ‘getting it’!

They needed to see that God had graciously given them Christ and by Him, had written His Word in their hearts. 

What happened to the Israelites in their rebellion toward God? Look at the progression. 

It started with whoring after other gods; then, the passions and lusts of life took control. Then, the importance of God’s heavenly provision of manna was diminished. And, finally, the murmuring and complaining, the blaming followed.

And this is exactly the course that this Corinthian church was beginning to travel on.

But Paul gave them the antidote to this: he told them in v 12: ‘Therefore, let him that thinketh he standeth take heed, lest he fall’

Or, we could say: ‘So, then, if you imagine that you are standing so securely, take heed lest you do not see the significance of the inwrought power of Christ that God gave you through Christ as your manna.’

This was how they were to go on. And that meant that there would be no temptation that would come to them that could not be met in the power of Christ and be overcome, even the temptation of missing the significance of Christ’s present ministry.

Why would this be so?

And, now, hear me carefully here: the actuality of this would bring them to the place in which their lives would match what the Scriptures teach, just as all of the New Testament writers learned - as their inspired writings testify.

Now - does this mean that we can neglect reading the Scriptures, just ignore it altogether? It certainly does not! 

But, one of the points in bringing this to our attention is this: we may hear the Lord’s spoken word and may ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ of His heavenly manna and yet miss the significance of Christ’s work in the heart - of the ‘why’, the ‘how’, and His mission to complete the work started in each of His own.

And, because of this fact, I would now like to take you over to the other Scripture found in John 8:12 that links itself with this living Word that Christ is.

This is a very important verse to every Christian - let me read it to you - John 8:12.

Jesus said of Himself: ‘I am the Light of the world: he who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the Light of Life’ or ‘...no follower of Mine need ever to walk in darkness’.

This is the answer to the constant unrest and uncertainty, to the constant struggle to find fulfillment. This is the answer to ‘why Jesus? what, after all, is so important about Him that we need Him?’

Let us look at two of the features of John 8:12 that links this verse to the Corinthian passage.

First, Jesus, when He declared Himself to be the Light of the world in John 8:12, also said that those who follow Him would have the ‘Light of Life’ in them.

The Scripture speaks of ‘light’ in many ways but the main meaning, as it relates here, is ‘true spiritual knowledge’, or the true revelation of Christ, of what His mission was when on earth and what His mission now is.

Light and Life are the two ways in which the Word expresses itself in the world. They are the signs of the Word’s relationship to the Christian, as Paul was trying to explain it to the Corinthians.

They are the ways in which the Incarnate Word is experienced.

Light is that ‘seeing’, that true spiritual ‘seeing’ through the eyes of Christ Himself. ‘Light’ is what Christ is essentially in His own Person.

Life is that true dynamic of that real Person of Christ, the embodiment of He Who is ‘Light’ and so He called Himself the ‘Light of Life’ that each follower of His shall have.

In other words, ‘Light’ is Jesus Christ; ‘Life’ is Jesus Christ.

And what is His function as the Light of Life within His own people? 

To ‘follow’ is the language of discipleship which involves, first, seeing the ‘Light’ and then, being carried onward and forward in a new creative, life-expanding ‘Agent’ and ‘Environment’, one being of Christ and the other in Christ.

It is not the Lord’s desire for the follower of Christ following the Person of Light to be groping about in darkness anymore, to be in doubt, in uncertainty. He is to be walking always in broad daylight, so to speak. 

The Israelites were ‘groping’ when they resorted to those rebellious acts listed by Paul. 

But the Corinthians were to see how God provided Christ for them in an inward way so that their course can be kept straight on.

He is the only One Who has the power, even the patience and the ability, to give and to sustain life in His life-giving character as the ‘Light of the world’.

So the hidden Word in the heart is that which Christ has already fulfilled, which He is, and which He will continue to be as that Word is drawn out in behavior, attitude, and action as man goes on in life.

So, (and I am going to use a rather simple illustration of what this means) we realize that when God looks into our hearts, He is reading this Bible.

How is this so?

It is so because His Son, Who is living there, has fulfilled everything contained in this Bible for ‘as He is, so are we in this world’. (1 John 4:17)  

That is, what is written in the Scripture is already in the heart when Christ was given to the heart. 

And as we read in the Scripture such admonitions as ‘shun this’, ‘abstain from that’, ‘flee from this’, and how to deal with all evils, there is that in us that wants to ‘shun’ them, ‘abstain’ from them, and so on. The desire for all the old foolishness is taken from us and we desire to walk only on new ground always.

For the Corinthians, Paul told them, this would make the difference in the course of their walk because they would meet no temptation that had more power than Christ had in them to overcome it.

They had the same ‘Light of Life’ that Jesus was to Paul and it was the same ‘Light of Life’ that Jesus was in all of the other New Testament writers!

That is the first, practical sense of Jesus as the ‘Light of Life’: the immediate way in which we receive the Word. It would read like the Bible to the heart of God.

Now - let us look quickly at the phrase ‘Light of Life’ in a long term sense, and I use that phrase carefully. 

It was mentioned earlier that what God was wanting was to bring His people to a settled spiritual place of rest in Him - to be ‘at home’, to ‘feel at home’ with Himself throughout their life’s journeys.

Let us go over to the story of the prodigal son and when we look at him, we can easily fit him into 2 Thess 2:10-12 that reads: ‘...they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause, God sent them a strong delusion, that they should believe a lie; that they all might be damned who believed not the truth (or who did not receive the light) but had pleasure in darkness.’

Fortunately for the prodigal son, there came that moment when the light turned his thinking around and he thought of how much better his father’s servants had it than he was having it now.

You see, his story is the story of man’s own actions and thoughts, the same history of independence and wantonness demonstrated by the Israelites and the same history the Corinthians were about to repeat. 

In man on his own course, we see the groping about toward fulfillment of life.

But, then, we also see his return to his original ground and the cordial ‘welcome home’ that was always waiting there for him.

So - when Jesus declared Himself as the ‘Light of Life’, He was giving us the course toward ‘feeling at home’ in the consciousness of God’s love toward us.

His mission as the ‘Light of Life’ would bring us ‘home’, so to speak, to live in His Father’s house forever, to live life in a supernaturally natural way.

So - this is the second feature of the ‘Light of Life’: Christ bringing us ‘home’ to enjoy God His Father now.

There are many Scriptures you can read in this regard. Let me just read Psalm 36:8-9 which is very rich in meaning: 

It reads: ‘They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house; and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures. For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.’ (Ps 36:8-9)

Let me close here with just a brief statement to say this:

When we can come more and more to know how unnatural man is without Christ, and how natural he is only in Christ, if we dwell and live in and through Him and it becomes as natural as breathing to us, and if we can see how He is constraining us to see through falsehood and find the deepest fellowship in the ‘Light’ of His Life, then we can know the reason for Jesus, how truly important He is!

This is why His significance should never be underestimated nor misunderstood - why He is so important and why we just cannot do without Him!

With this in mind, let us each one be encouraged to lay hold of eternal life and understand more fully what a priceless possession we have in the ‘Light of Life’ in Christ.

Amen! So be it!

Let us pray!