THE LORD JESUS IS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

Light is a peculiar thing. It is both tangible and abstract at the same time.

It is tangible in the sense that we can manipulate its activity. We can direct light where we wish by positioning a lamp. We can also cover it and hide it from showing. 

As well, light  is abstract. To say that light is illuminating something is almost identical in the sense that we mean that a matter is illuminated to our minds. In fact, very often, it is exactly the same event.  Light, bringing illumination to a subject also illuminates that subject to our minds.

Jesus is the Light of the world. His absolute moral supremacy is a guiding light that all human should use as a beacon.

Jesus, in sacrificing himself for us, engineered the way by which the powers of darkness would be conquered and brought into subjection of His light.

As the bible says, "those who sat in darkness saw a great light." This terrifying scenario describes people who are helplessly stagnated in pitch darkness. They have no means of helping themselves.They may have tried to feel their way to an exit from the darkness but by the time of the narration, they just sat down in the darkness and despaired. 

It was now when the true hidden power of Jesus becomes evident. While on earth, Jesus was indistinguishable by appearance from other men.  The only difference He displayed were how He  spoke and how He conducted Himself. He was absolutely perfect. After Jesus died on the cross, the cosmic impossibility of a perfectly innocent man being executed  like a criminal played out. 

Jesus, having been admitted into hell, suddenly manifests the light of God. This piercing and brilliant light exposed the powers of the kingdom off darkness exposing them and making a public spectacle of them.

It was then that Jesus moved into the pitch darkness shining as a great light and all who sat in darkness saw it. This light is the same light that awakens us out of spiritual darkness and brings us into His marvelous light.

Believe in Jesus  for God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ. 

                                        2 Corinthians 4:6

Amen

THE LORD JESUS IS THE LIFE

Our Lord said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me".

Having touched on the "Way" and the "Truth" over the last two evenings, let us look at the last existential attribute Jesus mentioned of Himself; the "Life".

What is life?

As obvious a property as life seems to be, ( at least in a biological sense ), it is a truly undefinable quality.

At first glance, life seems to be related to the undisturbed continuum of biological functions. If you leave living things alone, they tend to continue  living while if, on the other hand,  you disturb them to the point of interfering with their ecological and internal processes, the living things can sometimes stop living.

By this standard, life can be said to be a biological continuity. 

This answer does not really cover the question properly because it uses a characteristic of life ( namely biological continuity) to define life itself. If biology is continuing and thus sustaining life, what exactly is being sustained within the functioning system?

If I have a car engine that I am able to keep running indefinitely by ensuring  all its requirements are supplied, could it be said that the car is a living thing? Probably not.

To us, living things have to also have a far more complex property and that is the ability propagate themselves by reproduction. My car does not propagate its own "carness" by reproduction or any other means, therefore we cannot consider it a living thing.

So, when Jesus says He is the Life, does He mean "life" in the biological sense?

I would say yes, in part.

Jesus, the creator of all things, is Himself living. He is Life itself. By His own Devine will, He imbued that property of life on sentient and non-sentient entities whether they are biological or not.

In the case of biological beings, the mechanisms of sustaining continuous processes in systems made of physical matter is the requirement life needs to find expression in this physical universe.

In a non-physical realm, the same life of God would be sustained in entities by different mechanisms other than biology. What those mechanisms are may not be easily studied by us humans but I would hazard a guess that the mechanisms are metabolic at some level because the bible describes angels as having bread to eat. 

Any living thing whether angelic or human or animal, derives  life from the initial spark of life that was in Jesus. In the case of biological beings, this life was dispensed  to the progenitors of all species and life cascaded down to us in our time.

Jesus, being the Life, can make the dead to live. As with the famous story of Lazarus who was dead and returned to life at the command of Jesus, we too, though once dead in our sins, can be made alive by Jesus through His Holy Spirit.

When we are cleansed of our sins by the sacrificial blood of Jesus, we are made alive by His spirit and we are born again. We emerge as new living things and now can share in the Life of Christ our saviour.

To reach this position, we are cleansed from our sins when we believe in Jesus and then humble ourselves before Him and then acknowledge our sins and then repent of them.

The great salvation given to us by our Lord Jesus Christ is the only hope we have of being filled with the Life of God because no comes to the Father but by Jesus.

Amen.

THE LORD JESUS IS THE TRUTH

The Lord Jesus said He is 'the Truth'. By asserting this,  He is ranking himself as 'Truth' itself rather than a correct or accurate rendering of an event or reality.

He is conflating Himself with the source and origin of all things which confers on Him the title of 'ultimate Truth'. This means that everything in existence can only gets its actualization from its position on a framework that is established relative to Him.

'The Truth' is different from what is true in a quantitative sense.

What is true about us humans is that we are mammals who use complex language for communication and that we live on a planet near a yellow sun. These are true things about human beings. 

The architecture of our societies and our roles in them may also have some true prescriptions for us but these can only give partial or temporal answers to our inquiries about what we humans are.

However, Truth, as far as what is ultimately going on with us humans,  is what the  actual position and status of our species is on the framework relative to Jesus Himself. 

Knowledge of this would give us the correct coordinates so that we could ( at the very least ), understand what we actually are and perhaps what we are actually supposed to be doing here.

The One who is the Truth, Jesus, is the only provision that is given to the human race for gaining the proper understanding of our  status as humans. 

That status is that we are hereditarily enjoined to a kingdom of darkness  to which we would be eternally committed except for the intervention by the Truth Himself, Jesus. He, the Truth, stooped into our fallen world to redeem any who would hear His offer of salvation and willingly accept it.

This great salvation was paid for by the pain and agony of Jesus on the cross and  by the blood He shed to pay the ransom to extricate us from darkness.

Whatever else you do, don't overlook so great an offer of salvation. There is no other route provided to get to the ultimate truth and to our God.

Amen.

THE LORD JESUS IS THE WAY

An early name for Christians was 'People of the Way'.

This is what Christianity was understood to be at its onset: 'The Way'. The definite artical indicated the exclusivity of the path that Christianity was  presented as. It is not that it was reserved for an elite few but rather that it was the only way a person might be saved from their sins.

Other world views of the time had elaborate patterns of religious activity to atone for the sins of their adherents while others required sacrifices of different kinds to appease the capricious  gods who ruled over them.

Christianity alone pointed to an ultimate God who gave Himself as a sacrifice to redeem those who responded to His offer of salvation.

With the ultimate God so recently on ground in the presence of witnesses, the confidence of Christians was game-changing. 'The Way' swept through every corridor of society from the slave quarters to soldier's barracks. It eventually percolated up to the higher echelons of the prevailing cultures.

Jesus Himself said that He was the way.   He did not say that He knew 'the way'. He said that He was the Way and that no one could reach the Father except through Him.

This is the extraordinary thing about Christianity.  The God of all creation was Himself the way out of our sinful quagmire and up to the destiny our creator intended  for us.

By sacrificing His own life and dying on a cross for us, the Lord Jesus became the Way through whom we might be saved by believing in Him. 

Amen.

THE LORD IS OUR HIDING PLACE

The Lord is inaccessible to all beings. He dwells in unapproachable light that is blinding and infinitely unbreachable.

The Lord can take us and put us under His pinions ( or wings ) and while we are there, we are beyond finding or discovery by our enemies.

He can cloak us by His power so that we cannot be localized and detected as He did for Jesus when the elders tried to push him off a cliff. He can also disguise us so that we are not recognized like He did for Jesus on the road to Emmaus. Jesus was disguised beyond recognition so that people discussing Jesus could not recognize Him as He walked and talked with them. This also happened on the sea of Galilee when Jesus walked on the water and the disciples had to be persuaded that it was Jesus.

The Lord our God is our hiding place whenever we are in need of refuge.

Amen.

THE LORD OUR FRIEND

Abraham was the first in the bible to be called a friend of God. Abraham shared time with God and welcomed God into His home to have a meal.

The Lord called Abraham His  friend and conferred with Him over important matters. The description of their relationship as a friendship elevated Abraham and indeed all of mankind into the rarified position of being a species that could be counted on to be a friend of the eternal and majestic God of creation.

Jesus, soon before He died, also called His disciples friends and in doing so,  ascribed to them an astonishing ranking of being able to conduct a friendship with the King of kings and Lord of lords.

What is a friendship in familiar terms? When we have a network of people we know, we tend to categorize them into three groups.

 The most distant from us are those we know and recognize but we are barely aware of their existence and have only occasional contact with them. We are generally friendly towards them and they towards us but if we never saw them again, we would not notice their absence right away. Maybe an event would remind us of them but other than that, only faint recollections exist.

The next level in are those we are well aquainted with. We enjoy their company and we talk to them comfortably. We generally share knowledge of the same people and sometimes, we can detect that closer ties with them are possible as time passes. In this group, people both drift outwards to the outer circle while others draw into the inner circle.

That brings us to the closest group: Our  friends. These are people we think about a lot and interact with all the time. We have learned to trust them as we have experienced their sensibilities and personalities. We have counted on them and they have come through for us even at great cost to themselves. We would do anything to help them.  We gladly overlook their mistakes and readily forgive them. We divulge our vulnerabilities to them and they to us. We keep their confidence and they keep ours.

A friendship with God would share all the characteristics that our natural human friendships have. 

Over time, we learn to trust Him and He gains trust in us as we grow in the ability to hear him and adhere to His guidance. As we mature in our friendship with Him,  He begins to rely on us more and more to care about the things He cares about.

A friendship with God also includes keeping things in confidence. He gives us access to His thoughts and plans and we cherish them and  store them away in the secret places of our hearts like Mary did when she was given the news of God's plan for Jesus. Likewise, God  keeps our confidence and He shields us from humiliation and He himself keeps no record of wrongs.  

A friendship with God comes with a  level of contact with Him. As we think of Him and seek his company often, He too thinks of us frequently. In fact, Psalms 139 says that the number of God's thoughts towards us outnumber the  grains of sand.

He draws near to us and seeks our company as we draw near to Him and seek His company. 

Friendship with God is a wonderful thing and it must be cherished in the same way great friendships are treasured. Take nothing for granted and love the Lord our God with all our hearts.

Amen.

THE LORD IS OUR ADVOCATE

The Lord Jesus was confronted by the leaders of the city concerning the woman caught in adultery.

They brought her before Jesus and asked Him whether she should be stoned as the law of Moses required.

This question before Jesus was a serious legal question and a woman's life was at stake. Her life depended on whether He  could make a just rebuttal to the judgement and sentence that would be pronounced on her.

Famously, Jesus countered her accusers by saying, "He who is without sin, cast the first stone". This is a powerful argument against the woman's accusers that required that they could only carry out the sentence if they themselves had the legal standing to do so by being morally pure themselves.

Of course, each person there, in their imbalanced judgement ( that somehow excluded the adulterous man in the case ), knew that their own lives were full of the kind of sins that would have subjected them to the same punishment had the sins been known and charges pressed.

Jesus demonstrated His role as our advocate. Even as we live before Him, Jesus acts as our legal defender before the courts of the spirit. Here, He defends us and makes unanswerable defences in our favour and we are released from our accusers to return to our lives as justified citizens of His kingdom.

Honor the great Lord who continually defends us. 

Amen.