Do You See Him?
We are continuing through our Advent series “Light in the Darkness”
The sermon title this morning is “Do you see Him?”
Do you see Him?
There was a man, named John Newton, who was a former slave trader who God got a hold of who later became a pastor and the story goes that on his deathbed John Newton said,
“My memory is nearly gone. But I remember two things: that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Savior.”
He wrote in a famous hymn:
“Amazing grace,
how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me,
I once was lost
But now am found,
Was blind but now I see.”
Do you see Him?
Let us pray before we continue.
Father, help me in the proclaiming of your Word. May the light of Christ shine in the darkness. Help us to see your Son. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
If you surveyed this letter from the apostle Paul to the Corinthian church what you would see throughout is that along with encouraging the church in their faith he also keeps addressing a conflict between him and a group of teachers that are clearly in opposition to him. We don’t know if they came up within the church there or whether they were traveling evangelists but Paul calls them “false apostles” in chapter 11. They have been sowing seeds of doubt to the Corinthian church about the apostle Paul and his companions. They’ve been questioning his authority. They've been pointing to his suffering saying that it shows he isn’t truly from God. They’ve been questioning his motives saying that he is insincere, that he is just using them, that he is being deceptive. They take shots at the gospel message he preaches. And they say that his message is veiled, maybe for lack of conversions or because Paul’s message didn’t get a certain response from his hearers.
And so the church at Corinth are hearing all these things. And Paul is in the middle of responding to some of these accusations while also trying to point the church to Christ.
Here in 2nd Corinthians chapter 4 verse 1 Paul says,
“Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart.”
This ministry that Paul speaks of is what he was writing about in the previous chapter in chapter 3 verse 6 when he wrote that God had made Paul to be a “minister of a new covenant.”
Paul has been given this ministry, it was given to him by God’s mercy, in fact the new covenant is received completely through mercy. It is the Gospel message of Christ and Him crucified on our behalf. And because it is all God’s mercy, not because of any strength that’s in Paul, he can say we do not lose heart.
If God is sufficient then He will be sufficient even in the midst of Paul’s circumstances. The false teachers have been trying to point at the sufferings that Paul has gone through to discredit him and yet Paul uses those things to show that he goes through them and God is still being merciful to him. Paul is an example to the Corinthian church showing how every affliction which would include the attacks against him is a means of mercy and comfort in God through Christ.
That's why he started the letter in chapter 1 verses 3-6 by saying,
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”
He continues saying:
“For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer.”
2 Corinthians 3:4-5,
“Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God”
Everything Paul has, including the ministry of the new covenant has been all by God’s mercy and his sufficient grace and so matter what he goes through he won’t lose heart. He won’t lose hope.
This life can be crazy. This life can be painful. Affliction comes for all of us in one way or another. Life will hit you, catch you unexpected like a Mike Tyson uppercut. If there is one thing we’re promised it’s that in one way or another we’re going to go through suffering. Sooner or later you will go through enough things that you wrestle with God and be like Jacob, walking with a limp.
But in the midst of it all we can’t forget that it’s still God’s mercy and because of that we don’t lose hope.
We know that even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, We shall fear no evil, for He is with us; His rod and His staff, they comfort us. We know hat even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, He prepares a table before us in the presence of our enemies; He anoints our head with oil; And makes our cup overflow. We know, that even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our life, and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever (Psalm 23:4).
By the mercy of God, we do not lose heart.
Do you see Him?
But Paul continues by responding to another allegation against him in verse 2 of our passage. He says that him and his companions have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. Paul and his team refuse to work in any corrupt and dishonest fashion. Their motivation is not suspect, they’re not sly, they’re not scheming for shameful gain like some do as he mentions in Titus 1:11. That’s not the manner in which they do things.
That’s why in verse 5 of our passage Paul tells the Corinthians that they are servants.
He isn’t coming to be served, but he is coming as their servant. Paul models his ministry after Jesus who said,
“For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve , and to give His life as a ransom for many.”
He continues saying, we refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word. Paul and his team are not trying to deceive anyone; they don’t manipulate their hearers with their message and they don’t manipulate God’s word.
Earlier in 2nd Corinthians chapter 2 verse 17 Paul said,
“For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.”
And that’s similar to what he’s saying here. That they don’t tamper with God’s word, they don’t alter it. So what do they do? In the middle of verse 2 Paul says,
“By the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.”
That instead of messing with what God has said instead of distorting His Word, that Paul commends himself not by self-promotion but by openly proclaiming the truth of God and doing so plainly knowing that everything he does and everything he says is in the sight of God.
Paul won't dilute or water down the message. Paul is not motivated by money, he is not motivated by human approval. He is not going to compromise the message for anyone or anything.
Paul is preaching Christ clearly so that if they reject his message they aren’t rejecting Paul but they are actually rejecting Christ.
That’s also why Paul says in verse 5 that he doesn't proclaim himself, but he proclaims Christ and Proclaims Him as Lord.
Notice Paul doesn’t ask anyone to make Christ their Lord, why?
Because Christ is Lord.
We don’t proclaim Christ and ask people to make him Lord. We are making an announcement. We have been given a message that is not our own. We proclaim that Christ is Lord.
You will either confess that Jesus is Lord in this life or you will confess that he is Lord when you stand before him.
In Philippians 2 it says,
"Jesus has been given the name that is above every name and that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord."
You can’t make Jesus the Lord of your life. You can acknowledge that he is Lord. You can live in light of His Lordship.
But Telling you to make him Lord would be like me telling you to turn gravity off. You don’t control the laws of gravity. There is gravity.
And in the same way, Jesus is Lord.
Gardner Taylor once said that,
“Jesus was born contrary to the laws of birth, and he died triumphant over the laws of death.”
Jesus is Lord.
Do you see Him?
And so acknowledge His Lordship.
It’s not about merely professing the Lordship of Christ, it's about living in light of the Lordship of Christ.
It’s not merely just having a “relationship with Jesus.”
Listen, Satan has a relationship with Jesus.
Judas had a relationship with Jesus.
Jesus in Matthew 7 says,
“You will know them by their fruit.”
That,
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
In John 15:10, Jesus says the one who obeys His commands is the one who shows he is abiding in Jesus’ love.
You will either submit to God and His Word or you will end up trying to be god over His Word.
In verse 3, it is implied that false teachers are accusing Paul of having a veiled Gospel, but Paul says that the gospel message is only veiled to those who are perishing.
In verse 4, it says that the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers,
Before Christ We were blind. Outside of Christ you are blind.
The Bible uses a variety of sensory language to describe the person who trusts in the Lord and the one who doesn’t trust in the Lord.
The one who believes in the Lord and the one who doesn’t.
Jesus in his ministry and teaching would constantly say,
“he who has ears let him hear.”
Meaning that though everyone in the crowd could hear him, the one who hears and trusts and obeys him is the one who actually hears and believes.
Physical Sight also is often used as a metaphor for spiritual sight.
In Jesus’ ministry there were plenty of people who were blind who Jesus healed. But it’s interesting that many who were blind of physical sight, God had given them spiritual sight even before they were healed physically. An example is blind Bartimaeus at the end of Mark 10 where he is on the side of the road begging and he hears a crowd come by and he hears that Jesus is in the crowd and he begins to cry out saying,
“Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me.”
And people are getting angry with him and are telling him to be quiet. But He knows that Jesus, is the promised Son of David. He is the promised one from God, the messiah. And so he is not worried about pleasing peoples preferred expectations of a blind beggar in that situation. He doesn’t care because even though he is blind he’s seen the light of Jesus.
He has seen who Jesus truly is and so he continues to cry out,
“Son of David have mercy on me.”
And Jesus, stops, and calls him forward and he he talks with him and heals him, and tells the man,
“your faith has made you well.”
The irony is that many who were blind saw Jesus. And many who could physically see Jesus were blind to him.
Do you see Him?
1 Corinthians 1:26–29:
“For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.”
What blinds us?
In verse 4, Paul says that what is causing people to be blind isn’t the messenger and it’s not the message.
We see explicitly in this passage that unbelievers have been blinded by the god of this world, or the god of this age, and we know from other passages that he is referring to Satan or the devil.
3 times in the gospel of John, Jesus refers to the Satan as the “ruler of this world.”
1 John 5:19 says that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.
In Ephesians 2:2 it gives this satanic description of how we once were, how we followed the prince of the power of the air and how this Spirit is what is at work in unbelievers.
In our naturalistic time, where we believe all that we see is all there is, and we can be formed by this view of the world that is devoid of any spiritual reality. A lot of other cultures and societies around the globe have a more biblical understanding of the spiritual world than we do here in America.
We were blind.
What else blinds us?
Our sin blinds us. In Ephesians 2:1 it says we were dead in the trespasses and sins in which we once walked.
Adam’s sinful nature has been passed down to all his descendants, to all humanity across the world.
As Psalm 51:5 says, we were conceived in sin.
We were born in our sin.
B.I.G. once said,
“Born sinner, the opposite of a winner.”
A pastor once put it like this:
“We’re not sinners because we sin, but we sin because we’re sinners.”
We were dead in our sin and though we loved our sin we were blind to the true nature of it. We lived in the night. We lived in the darkness.
Before Christ we were perishing and we were blinded.
We had the wrath of God remaining on us as John 3:36 says. We were by nature children of wrath, as Ephesians 2:3 says.
That can be hard to hear. Nobody wants to hear that we deserve wrath. Or that we’re lost outside of Christ. That we’re blind apart from him. Nobody wants to think that in our sin we are perishing and headed for eternal destruction in hell.
In our current day and age that’s a hard truth.
There are a lot of hard truths in the Bible. Hell is one of them.
Hebrews 10:31 says,
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
Someone once said,
“Hell is not separation from God, it is separation from God's grace.”
In our current American context, we think we’re owed God’s grace, but if you deserve it then it’s not grace. You can’t earn grace.
We take God for granted, presume on the riches of his grace and love but no human is even owed God’s love.
Charles Spurgeon was once preaching on the passage where God said,
“Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
A woman after the service said to Charles Spurgeon,
“I cannot understand why God should say that He hated Esau.”
Spurgeon replied,
“That is not my difficulty, madam. My trouble is to understand how God could love Jacob.”
RC Sproul once said,
“The question is not ‘Why is there only one way to God?’ But ‘Why is there even one way?’”
There is even one way because of what is referenced in verse 4 of our passage.
The gospel of the glory of Christ.
The minds of unbelievers have been blinded to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ,
Do you see Him?
Some people talk about the gospel as if we were drowning in the ocean and were just struggling to swim and then Jesus throws us one of those life preserver rings and we’re hanging on and then we are saved.
But nah, that’s not how it was, we were dead in the bottom of the ocean, lifeless without a pulse.
And Christ came into the world and lived a perfect life, he came and took us and died the death we deserved. And then he was raised from the dead and gives us life in his life and he takes and sits us with him him in the heavenly places.
Do you See Him?
The gospel of the glory of Christ
Ephesians 2:4–6,
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus”
Ephesians 2:8–9,
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
We were blinded from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
But then in verse 6 God, who said,
“Let light shine out of darkness,”
has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Satan wants to keep people from seeing the light of the glory of Christ. But when we proclaim Christ, the Father by the Spirit shines his light to illuminate eyes to see the glory of the Son.
In the beginning, God by His Word created light and all of creation and by His Word he creates life into people dead in their sin and makes them into a new Creation.
2 Corinthians 5:17,
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come."
Just as the Lord spoke creation into existence and declared into the darkness, let there be light, and there was light. So God looked at the darkness of our hearts and deadness of our souls and he declared let there be life, and there was life.
Do you see Him?
The Father, by the Spirit declared that light would shine into the darkness and the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God, shines in our hearts, His sovereign power breaks through our blindness and our minds are illuminated to the knowledge of Christ and his gospel, the good news of his life, death and resurrection, and the reality of sin is unveiled to us and we see how we have rebelled against God and his ways and we see how Christ took our sin and took the consequences of our sin upon himself.
We were blind to Christ but we now see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ — it’s a light that cannot be dimmed. It’s a light that cannot be turned off. A light that cannot be extinguished. A light that shines like the glory of a thousand suns. The light of Jesus Christ. The glorious one. The one who is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. He’s the one who is all glorious, he is all mighty, he is all good, he is majestic in all his ways.
In John 12:46, Jesus proclaimed:
“I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness.”
Do you see Him?
When the light of the gospel of the Glory of Christ shone into our hearts,
Eyes that were once blind began to see the goodness of Christ.
Eyes that were once blind began to see the glory of Christ.
Eyes that were once blind began to see the grace of Christ.
Eyes that were once blind began to see the vile nature of our sin, the wickedness of our hearts before God, the despair of life outside of Christ, the hopeless nature of chasing after the things of this world.
Eyes that were once blind began to see that turning from ourselves and turning to Christ is the only hope in life and death.
Do you see Him?
We were blind but we now see the beauty of Christ.
We were blind but we now see the tender mercies of Christ.
We were blind but we now see the steadfast love and faithfulness of Christ.
We were blind but we now see the gentleness and patience of Christ.
We were blind but we now see the joy and satisfaction of Christ.
We were blind but we now see the fullness of our debt that was paid on the cross.
We were blind but we now see that though our sins are many, his mercy is more.
That his mercy outweighs all of our sin.
His mercy is as sure as water is wet.
His mercy is constant like a waterfall.
His mercy is deeper than the ocean,
His mercy covers our sin the way the ocean covers a single grain of sand.
Lamentations 3:22–23,
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning…”
We were blind to Christ but we now see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Do you see Him?
Brothers and Sisters, if you want to know Jesus more, pray and read the scriptures.
Someone once asked Spurgeon,
“what is more important, praying or reading the Bible?”
Spurgeon replied saying,
“let me ask you, what is more important, breathing in or breathing out?”
Let us go to him in prayer and in the reading of His word.
Thomas Watson once said Christ went more willingly to the cross then we go to the throne of grace.
The face of Jesus Christ is the light of the knowledge of the glory of God revealed throughout the Scriptures. Jesus, the Son of God is revealed perfectly in the Word of God. All of the scriptures bear witness about Him. In fact He is revealed in the Word of God, as the Word of God.
Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the radiance of the glory of God, the exact imprint of nature of God, the very likeness of God.
Jesus said if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.
And so let us draw near to the throne of grace by reading and praying the Scriptures asking God, in faith, by the Spirit, for the grace to behold wondrous things in his Word, knowing that the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Let us be transformed by the renewing of our minds by the grace of the Spirit as we behold the glory that is in the face of Jesus Christ throughout all of the Bible.
In this dark and broken world, where death and suffering are a daily reminder. Where the afflictions and sorrows of life can be an ever present reality, Let us earnestly pray to him, meditating on His Word, soaking in His mercy and receiving the unsearchable riches of his grace, that by the Spirit we would daily put on the new self in Christ, contemplating the goodness of Christ, studying the glories of the cross, and delighting in all the works of God, constantly giving Him thanks in all things, all while finding our joy and satisfaction in the light of the knowledge of the glory of the gospel of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the light in the darkness.
Do you see Him?
Father God, you have given us this treasure of the light of your glory in the face of Jesus Christ in the new covenant.
2 Corinthians 4:7–10,
“But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.”