16th December 2024

16th December 2024


Pray (ACts)


Read (John 1:4-5)


Message (Alan Burke) 


I’m going to utterly mess with your heads this week. The reason is that this we were are going to focus on a passage that doesn’t likely spring to mind when we think of this time of year. What will mess with your heads more is that last week we were looking at Luke’s gospel account of the birth of Jesus foretold, Mary’s visit to Elizabeth and Mary’s song and those are some of those passage that most likely come to peoples minds when they think of Christmas. This week though we are in the prologue of John’s gospel. For John grounds the coming of Jesus the incarnation in the beginning. John wants us to understand the incarnation in terms of eternity. The one who was God and was with God was coming into the world, the one through whom all things were made, the one in whom was life and that life was the light of men (Jn 1:1-3). 


John wants us to see the fullness of who Jesus was and is, and he wants us not only to recall what happened in the beginning, how the word, Jesus Christ was with God and was God, how he was with God in the beginning, that all things were made through him but John also wants us to understand how the one who has come is also the one whom God had promised to his people in the midst of the fall, the hope of the Christ, the Messiah the serpent crusher of Genesis 3:15. For from the fall, ever since God preached the gospel to Satan in the form of a serpent God had been pointing his people to the hope in the one to come. Look to what John tells us in v5, how “In him was life and that life was the light of men” (v5).


To understand what that means that in him was life and that life was the light of men we need to understand what the darkness is. It is not the lack of a means illumination in our homes as I heard some of my neighbours were struggling with on the 1st of December. To grasps the significance of what we are told here we need to flick on a few pages to read from John 3:19-20. Jesus when was teaching Nicodemus the Pharisee he said; 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.” Jn 3:19–21.


What is the darkness well the darkness is evil, the darkness is unbelief, the darkness is those who do not come to the light. Darkness does not speak of night when the sun sets, no darkness speaks of the natural fallen condition of this world. While Adam and Eve knew what it was to walk in the light, to have communion with God, dwelling in his presence with the fall spiritual darkness came into the world. 


Darkness is the state of this world estranged from God. We by our very nature are children not of the light but children of darkness, we are those who live in the darkness not the light (1 Thes 5:5). For all those who are outside of Christ they may have life in the biological sense but they do not have life for they live in the darkness, they are spiritually dead, sinners who face the wrath of God for their darkness. Yet light had come into the world, Jesus Christ who was God and was with God in the beginning, the light had come. The wonder of what this means for us is that although by our nature we walk in the darkness, we are can become the children of light, for John goes on to say in v12-13 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. The coming of the light into the world, the one who was with God and was God, the reason for his coming was that for all who receive him the they might become the children of God. If you have received him if we have come into the light, that we are light. 


Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC
Q62 What are the reasons annexed to the fourth commandment?
A. The reasons annexed to the fourth commandment are, God’s allowing us six days of the week for our own employments, his challenging a special propriety in the seventh, his own example, and his blessing the Sabbath day.
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