Sons of Light

In advent we remember together that we are waiting in a land of deep darkness. 

Let me begin by introducing you to a people who know something about darkness. 

If you were to travel to the very Northern tip of Alaska you would eventually arrive at the town of Barrow Home to about 4,000 residents. This is the northernmost town in the united sates. And every single year, beginning in mid-November and ending in mid-January, the residents of Barrow experience what is known as the polar night. What that means is that when the Sun goes down in mid-November it won’t be seen again until the middle of January. No sunrise for 65 days. 

Can you just imagine that? What kind of toll would that take on you? Cold short days in Minnesota can bad enough, but imagine no sunrise at all for two months. 

In an interview about what it’s like to live through the polar night one woman from Barrow said this.

“One winter, in the middle of the polar night my body seemed to go into complete hibernation, My mind stopped accepting information and my body stopped accepting commands. I just wanted to stay in bed all day with the covers over my head, and for a good part of one winter, that's just what I did.”

And it’s easy to see how a deep gloom could set over a person in this kind of deep darkness. And so to prepare for this residents of Barrow do whatever they can to combat the effects of the lack of sunlight. Some buy special light fixtures that are meant to simulate the light of dawn. Tanning booth usage skyrockets during these months.  And one source I found said that flights from Anchorage, Alaska to Honolulu, Hawaii sell out nearly a year in advance because people are so desperate to soak in as much light as the they possibly can before the onset of darkness.

And I tell you all of this because as we turn to John chapter 12 we find Jesus warning the crowds that another kind of polar night is about to descend. And they too need to get ready. 

This morning we are going to zero in on verse 35 and 36 of John chapter 12. 

And here we are going to find three things. 

1. First the time is short. 

2. Second, the danger is real. 

3. And third, the offer stands. 

1) The time is short

Look at verse 35, so Jesus said to them, 

“The light is among you for a little while longer.”

To understand what is happening in this verse, we must start back in verse 27. And here we find Jesus praying to His Father, much like he prays in the garden of gethsemane in the other three gospels. 

And this verse beings with a rather startling statement. Jesus says,

“now is my soul troubled.”

As we open this section the soul of the Son of God is disturbed. Unsettled. There is turmoil within himself. And if we keep reading we learn why.

He prays to his heavenly Father and he says,

“what shall I say, Father, save me from this hour? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”

Jesus is unsettled because of what is about to come. He knows that his hour is now here. 

And in the Gospel of John, all along Jesus has used this phrase “my hour” to refer to his coming crucifixion. He knows it’s coming. 

In fact just a few verses before he said, 

“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

And now the hour is so close, and his death is so imminent that Jesus is troubled. Troubled because of the cup of wrath and sorrow and the pain that he is about to drink for you and I on the cross. 

And yet remarkably, this dread of what’s to come does not control him. Stronger than his dread of what’s to come is his desire to do what is pleasing to His Father. 

He says, Father, glorify your name. 

And the Father answers back from the heavens, I have glorified it and I will glorify it. 

And then Jesus turns to the crowds and he explains to them what is about to happen. 

He tells them in verse 32,

“‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself.’”

He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die. So the crowd answered him, 

“We have heard from the law that the Christ remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?”

And here finally we arrive back at verse 35, Jesus answers their question saying,

“The light is among you for a little while longer.”

And if we were paying attention last week we should say whoa whoa whoa, hold up. We read last week in John 1 that, 

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

And now Jesus says, the light is about to go away and polar night is about to come. 

And what we can say here for certain is that for the next week of Jesus’ life it’s sure going to looks like the darkness has won here. And in less than a week he’s going to betrayed, arrested, beaten, and crucified. And in the end he will lie in the grave for three days. And it will seem that the light of the world has been extinguished forever. Which would be a polar night without end. 

Now, praise God that we know the end of the story. Praise God that Christ burst from the grave scorching the darkness that could not swallow him. 

But I don’t want to move on too quickly here. I want us to feel the fact that as we wait in a land of deep darkness, so too did Christ. He waited for his own death. And he felt in his own soul the bitterness and the sadness and the trouble of this world. Truly he was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. He himself suffered when tempted, and he his able to help those who are being tempted. 

Here in verse 35 Jesus knows that his time is short. The light is about to go away. 

But you might be saying to yourself: what does this have to do with us? We are not standing here.

And this brings us to our second point in verse 36. 

2) The danger is real 

Verse 35,

“Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going.”

In point one Jesus says, my time is short, and he tells them how they should respond to this. 

And Jesus gives a very specific command here. He says, walk. Walk while you have the light. To walk is to conduct one’s life in a certain way. To behave in a particular fashion. It refers to the way in which you are leading your life. 

And Jesus says here, don’t go on living as you have always lived. The light is here, right now. Examine yourself while you can see. 

I mean have you ever tried to find your way in the dark? I remember one time as a kid waking up in the dead of the night and it was pitch black in my bedroom and I needed to get to the bathroom. And when I got up from my bed I veered too far to the left and rather than walking out my door to the living room I instead ended up in my closet which I had apparently left open. I stood there groping at the back wall for what seemed like minutes and wondering how my bedroom door has suddenly vanished. It’s not pretty when we try and walk without light.

That’s exactly what Jesus is saying here. Walk while you have the light. Let the teaching and life of Christ illuminate the way that you view reality. Let it change the way that you view God. And transform the way that you view self. And then live in light of these realities. 

And this command to walk comes with a warning. Jesus says walk in the light, lest the darkness overtake you. 

Here Jesus reminds us that this world is fraught with danger. It’s not neutral, what we’re up against. There is a darkness that desires to overtake us.

And what’s interesting is that this word translated overtake here is the same word that John used back in John 1:5, remember this? Here he said,

“the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Overcome and overtake are the same word in the greek. 

In other words although the darkness has not and will not overtake Christ, make no mistake, it can overtake us! It can blind us to God and his glory. It can darken our minds to the beauty of Christ. Apart from the light of the world we will indeed be swallowed by the darkness. 

But Jesus doesn’t stop there, he adds at the end of this verse, 

“the one who walks in darkness does not know where he is going.”

Part of what makes darkness so dangerous is it’s ability to blind us to reality. It’s not just that we are walking in darkness it’s that we are walking in darkness and we don’t know it. 

That’s the reality that Christ is describing here. Apart from him you are lost in the dark and you don’t even know it. 

Here’s the thing, darkness is not a bold warrior that hails you from far off and challenges you to armed combat. Darkness is a rogue that stabs you in the back.

How does it do this? John 3:19,

“the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.”

The danger of sin and darkness is that the things that our darkened hearts enjoy are the very things that will kill us in the end. 

Tim Keller said it this way,

“If you worship anything other than God your worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things then you will never feel you have enough. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. . . .”

And more terrifying still is that in the end, once the world has sucked us dry of all of our true joy, we will indeed be overtaken by darkness forever, away from the presence of God. 

Walk in the light while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you.

And this brings us to our third point.

3) The offer stands

Verse 36,

“While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.”

In verse 35, in light of the coming polar night Jesus gave the command to walk in the light, and he grounded it with a warning.

Now here he gives a second command, and he grounds this command with a promise. Believe in the light… why? so that you may become sons of light. 

And what’s fascinating is that John 12 marks the end of the public ministry of Jesus. And in fact, verse 36 is the final command that he gives to the crowds in this fourth gospel.

These are the final instructions to the crowds before his death. 

And this is in fact the express purpose for which John wrote this gospel. John 20:31 gives us the purpose statement of the whole book. 

“these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

This command to believe is of utmost importance.

John 3:36,

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”

To believe is the difference between life and death. It’s the difference between being swallowed up by the darkness or being engulfed by the light. 

Jesus says believe in the light. Entrust yourself to Christ. Put your life in his hands. Put your confidence here and be saved. 

And this all sounds wonderful. And it is wonderful. But if we are paying attention to the context here, we know that there is a problem. There is a barrier that stands between us and Christ that makes this command impossible for us to obey. 

In verse 40 it says,

“He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them.”

Because of our spiritual blindness and because of the hardness of our hearts and our preference for other things we cannot believe. Why? Because to believe in the light is not simply to give intellectual assent. It’s not simply to believe some facts about Christ. That’s part of it no doubt, but it goes deeper than that. 

To believe in the light is to make Christ our treasure and our delight. It’s to turn from loving the world and loving the darkness and to instead choose to delight in Jesus. To savor the goodness of his light and his glory. 

To believe in the light necessitates an enjoyment of the light. And therein lies the problem. Our hearts are so bent that they are incapable of seeing that Christ is more delightful than sin. 

We are meant to love the light and hate the darkness. But the problem is that our wanters are broken. We want other things than God. On our own, we love the glory and the approval of man more than the glory and the approval of God.

And so where does this leave us? 

For anyone who has not believed in the light this leaves you in a very precarious place. To believe in the light is the only way to escape from the darkness and now I’ve just told you that this escape hatch is blocked. 

And so what do you do? Answer: you humble yourself before a God who is sovereign even over your heart. And you cry out for him to do for you what you could never do on your own. You ask for a new heart. A heart that is soft to the Lord. Alive to Christ. One that is able to believe. The bible calls this the miracle of regeneration. When God reaches down and removes our stubborn hearts of stone and replaces them with hearts of flesh. 

Hearts that can see. Hearts that can savor the beauty of Jesus Christ and trust him forever. 

The offer stands, cry out to God to make this a reality. 

And now we return to the promise. Jesus says, believe in the light that you might become sons of light.

In John 1:12-13 it says that,

“to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”

And here in John 12 we see that there is a very real sense that as believers we are not only born of God but born of the light. Sons of the light. 

Our very nature is transformed so radically that we are transferred from the domain of darkness to the domain of light. Sons of light are no longer suited for the darkness. They are meant to live in the light. 

Nature gives us a potent picture here through the metamorphosis of a caterpillar. Before its transformation a caterpillar makes its dwelling on the ground. Its nature is such that it is suited for life in the dirt. But the moment that the metamorphosis is complete that all changes. That exact same insect is suddenly meant to soar in the sky. It’s fitting with its new nature. 

So too with all who believe in the light. In a moment we go from creatures of darkness, dwelling in the darkness, loving the darkness — to sons of light. Living in the light. Enjoying its brilliance. Delighting daily in the glory of Christ in whom there is no darkness at all. 

But that’s not all. We are not meant simply to enjoy this light for ourselves, as Sons of light we are meant to illuminate the goodness and beauty of Christ to a world that is plunged into darkness. 

Peter says it this way, 1 Peter 2:9,

“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

Brothers and sisters, this is why I want to plant a church. It’s to testify to the goodness of God before a dying world. It’s to tell the story of transformation. That I was dead in my sins. Delighting in the dark. And yet Christ shone on me. And I’m telling you that he is more beautiful and more satisfying than anything you will stumble upon in the dark. 

We go in just a few days to a new place to proclaim these realities praying that God would illuminate hearts and wake people up to the reality that true joy is found in him alone. 

Conclusion

And so my final word to all the sons and daughters of light here at Cities church is this: torch the darkness.

I pray that some of you would come with us. That the Lord would sovereignly call and compel you to come with us, that together we might torch the darkness and the unbelief that is descending over the city of Mankato. 

And for the rest of you I pray that you would stay. And that the Lord would sovereignly call and compel you to torch the darkness and the unbelief that is descending over the Twin Cities. 

Let each of us, no matter where we are, wage war against the unbelief in our own hearts that cares more about offending your neighbors than to testifying to the grace of God. 

Brothers and sisters you are sons and daughters of the light. Keep running further into marvelous light of Christ. And as you do so compel others to come along with you. 

The time is short. The danger is real. But the offer stands. So live as sons of light. 

Let’s pray.