-Transcript-
00:37 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:41 Glad to have you here today. It’s a wonderful day at the cafe. Today we’re studying God’s Word.
00:47 We are looking at the characteristics of God and it’s been going on the last few episodes here, looking at characteristics of God and how he has characteristics. He is all-knowing. He is omnipresent.
01:03 He is love and there’s so many other ones. In fact, if I were to continue this series, I probably could continue on for months, if not even longer, years talking about the characteristics of God because they are so great, magnificent, and so broad in a way, yet so detailed. Today we’re talking about God is light.
01:23 You know what light is, right? I mean, you know, turn the light on. You see the light when the sun comes up. Amen.
01:30 You understand the concept of light and we understand that God is light. 1 John 1:5. 1 John 1:5. This then is the message which we have heard of him and declare unto you that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. Isn’t that marvelous? God is light and in him is no darkness.
01:50 None. None whatsoever. So if we look at light and the idea of good, moral, holy, sweet, love, everything that is right, that’s God.
01:58 And if we look at darkness as sin, evil, bad things, God has none of it. There’s none of it in him. Amen.
02:08 It’s a reproach to him. It’s disgusting to him. It’s a perversion to him.
02:17 He is holy upon holy. What is the purpose of light? Think about it. When do you most need light? Do you need light on a really sunny day? A lot of times you don’t.
02:31 I mean, if you have a lot of windows in your house or in your car or in your apartment, you don’t need too much light on on a sunny day. Amen. You let that sun take care of it.
02:39 Amen. And at night you would need light often, especially if it was a cloudy night or dark night. You would need light for what? To see, to illuminate.
02:50 And so imagine being in a dark room with no windows and the door closed and you need to walk around that room and find a way to go to where you need to go in that room. Let’s say there’s a seat on the other side. You were looking to go sit down.
03:04 Now to get to that seat would be awfully hard if it was pitch black. You may never even get there if you’re directionally challenged like some of us are. But if you turn a light on, then you can see the seat.
03:16 You understand where the seat is. You can walk on over to it and you can sit down. The light there illuminates.
03:25 It has a purpose. It shows us our path. It allows us to see where we need to go to avoid problems, destruction, traps and so forth.
03:32 And darkness conversely is the opposite. It darkens the light. It makes it difficult to see and navigate.
03:44 It becomes murky. It can be scary because we don’t know what’s going on. It is a challenge to drive in complete darkness if you don’t have headlights, especially out here in the country, amen, if you don’t have headlights.
03:55 And there’s no street lights out here. And who knows what critters crawling around on that road or prancing around on that road. It’s difficult to drive in darkness, to walk in darkness, to walk on a path in darkness.
04:05 And so we can understand the purpose of light is to illuminate. And the purpose of darkness is to confuse or distress. And we see that God is light.
04:15 He is illumination. He is the idea, the revealing. In fact, I’ve heard this said before, that the purpose of life as a Christian, when we study the Bible, is the progressive understanding of who God is, amen, the progressive growing in the knowledge of the Lord.
04:35 And as a Christian, if you look at your own walk, you’re saved. You understand some things enough to know that you’re a sinner in need of a savior.
04:43 And then as you’re saved by the blood of Jesus Christ, and as you put your faith in Christ, you learn so much.
04:51 You realize that your works don’t save you. It’s by grace alone, through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. You learn about his commands.
04:54 You learn about the ministry of Jesus, his earthly ministry, and now how he’s a mediator now in heaven to those that believe on him and that he’s a brother and a friend, amen. And he’s also our master and Lord. And you learn all these things.
05:07 How do you learn it? You learn it by the light, amen. You learn it by the light. And those that are in spiritual darkness, think about those that are spiritually dead, those that have never been born again.
05:17 They have no light there. There’s no way to see. They don’t understand the things of God.
05:23 Have you ever told a lost person a very deep spiritual truth? They probably look at you cross-eyed. They wouldn’t understand it. And they’re not supposed to understand it.
05:29 The only way that they can understand it is to be saved. How do we understand it? How do we have light? That’s by the Holy Spirit. Once we’re saved, we have the Holy Spirit, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit living within us.
05:40 That’s part of the three-in-one Godhead, the fullness of God living within us. And that Holy Spirit allows us to discern the Bible, his word, amen. I remember being a child and my parents would drag me to church.
05:55 And being real young, my mom and my grandma, I should say, would say, let’s go to church. And I’d be in those itchy clothes. And I would say, what book are you carrying?
06:07 And I’d look at it and it just all looked, I couldn’t understand a word in there.
06:12 Now, if you showed me a comic book or a cookbook or anything else, I probably could decipher a few words. I may be intrigued by it, but that Bible, I didn’t want anything to do with it. You want to know why? Because spiritually, I was dead.
06:16 Spiritually, I had darkness. I had not been born again. But once I got saved and once I dedicated my life to Christ and I got serious and my belief was really there that I really believed God is who he says he is and a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
06:30 Oh, how the word just illuminated, how it just lit up. The words almost jumped off the page, amen. I was like, I got to tell someone about this.
06:34 I got to make a recording. I got to go on the radio. I got to preach.
06:38 I got to do something. There was a fire in my bones, as Jeremiah says, because the Holy Spirit illuminates the text. Where else do we see light in the Bible? We see it in John 8:12.
06:51 Then Jesus again, then spake Jesus again unto them saying, I am the light of the world. He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. John 8:12 tells us Jesus is the light of the world.
07:06 He himself says, I am the light of the world. A characteristic of God, he is light. It says it in 1 John 1:5. It says it again here in John 8:12.
07:15 Then spake Jesus again unto them saying, I am the light of the world. He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. What is that life? That’s that life in Christ alone.
07:27 That’s the only way that we can have spiritual life, that we can be saved and born again. We realize that when we’re born again, we never truly die. We live for an eternity with Christ in heaven.
07:36 Amen. Our place is already there. Our name’s already written in the Lamb’s book of life.
07:42 John 1:5. The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. And it’s kind of what I was speaking about earlier. The idea here is that God is light, and sinful darkness that is a lost person here in this world, they can’t comprehend it.
08:01 When we pray for souls to be saved, we need to pray for hearts to be pricked, for man to be convicted of their sin, and for God to illuminate himself to them. And we understand that God controls that power. Amen.
08:15 There is an actual example of this in the New Testament, where Jesus didn’t commit himself to some people in the village, because he knew who they were. He knew their hearts, and he didn’t want them to understand the truth and be saved. Amen.
08:30 Think about it. If an evil man understands the truth of God’s word, that they’re going to hell, they’ll accept Christ for all the wrong reasons just to get off the hook. But a repentant man, a contrite man, a broken man will be in the right state.
08:42 That’s the idea behind the Beatitudes in Matthew, when Jesus talks about blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those that mourn. Amen. The idea, how can you be blessed by those things?
08:53 The idea is you’re blessed because you realize your need, you realize your spiritual poverty, you realize your need for Jesus.
09:00 Amen. And when you realize your need for Jesus, you are then in the right mode. Another example, they’re all just coming to me here, was the example of the parable given in the New Testament scriptures about how two men came to an altar, and one was saying, thank you, God, that I’m not like so-and-so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so.
09:16 And the other one just said, Lord, I’m a sinner, please forgive me, please help me. And that one that said, I’m a sinner was justified before God, and the one that was prideful was not.
09:23 And you see here that we have to be in the right mind frame when we come to the Lord of understanding our sin nature, and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.
09:34 I’ve heard people say that they won’t be saved, they won’t go to the altar, because they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. Now, how can they say that?
09:40 Well, clearly, I think the idea is they don’t fear God, they’re not in his word, he won’t illuminate himself to them because they’re prideful. 1 John 1:7, but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanseth us from all sin.
10:01 So we realize that God is the light, that Jesus is the light, that when we follow Jesus, we walk in the light, and we realize through 1 John 1:7, which is just a few verses from our text verse here, that as we walk in the light, we will have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanseth us from all sin.
10:21 We’re cleansed from all sin, not some sin, not a few sins. Devil wants you to make you think that you’re only cleansed from a couple.
10:27 Devil doesn’t want you to know that you’re cleansed from all sins when you walk in the light, when you believe on Christ, when you repent of your sins, you ask for forgiveness, he’ll forgive you of every single one, and his work on the cross forgave us past, present, and future of our sin debt, amen.
10:44 So it’s already been paid for, we just need to go ahead to God and give it to him, amen, in full. And you’re saying, Brother Clark, you need to repent to be saved? Well, the Bible says that God desires all to come to repentance.
10:55 The idea is all should understand their need, understand that they have a darkness in them that they cannot resolve on their own, that it’s only through the light, which is Jesus Christ, that they can be saved, amen.
11:08 Matthew 5:16, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father, which is in heaven. So we are called, once we understand what this light is, once we are living for God, holy, fully, we’re called to share that light, to be a light that is not hid, like a city on a hill that can’t be hid, amen.
11:30 Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father, which is in heaven. And so as we let our light shine, what is that?
11:42 That’s Christ living through us. It’s not anything that we do other than believing on Christ, being obedient to Christ, allowing the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and what I mean by that is not grieving the Holy Spirit, living for him fully and holy, then we let our light shine before men.
11:54 They see our good works. They say, that can’t be that person. That must be God.
12:02 Anything good I’ve ever done in my life, God gets the glory, amen. I’ll point to God all day long. I’ll say, it’s him, it’s him, it’s him.
12:07 He is the light. We realize our sinful nature, our limitations, our problems, and we see what God does with us, amen, through the ministry, in the sports world, or business world, or at school, or however else God wants to use us. Let’s give him the glory as we let our light shine.
12:26 We are not supposed to be bashful Christians, hidden somewhere, not telling anyone about Christ. Quite the opposite. We are to let our light shine.
12:35 We are to be bold for Christ in these last days. Now, that does not mean being obnoxious. That does not mean constantly being controversial.
12:41 It does not mean being so crazy in the sense of our behavior getting out of control that we’re a poor witness. Look at the scriptures. We see a pattern.
12:53 Look at how Christ lived. Look at how Paul lived. He was steadfast in the faith, but he was obedient.
12:58 He didn’t leave the jail when the door opened, amen, and he could have left. He stayed there because the Lord wanted him to save the jailer, amen, and he won the jailer to the Lord. Jesus Christ was obedient unto death to the Father.
13:08 We are to be obedient to God, but we don’t compromise. Jesus was very bold in his words, and so was Paul. And those are some examples we get from scripture that we need to be bold for the Lord, and we need to let our light shine, understanding that he is light.
13:21 And so when we call ourselves Christians, we are then the light bearers, amen. We are mirrors of Christ. We should exhibit that light.
13:31 How can we have a bright light if we’re living in sin? We cannot. How can we have a bright light if we’re living in darkness? We cannot.
13:38 We need to repent of that, get right with God, go to him in prayer, give it to him fully and holy, and get on fire for him, and be that light, amen.
13:46 Be that light. Be that one person that people say, I can’t figure them out, but I want what they’ve got, amen. And that way, they’ll go and seek the Lord, and they’ll give him glory because you were used by him mightily, and it wasn’t anything that you did other than believe and submit and be obedient to him.
14:02 That is the idea that he is the light. He is a wonderful light. Thank God for the light.
14:08 We need light in these last days. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Thank you for listening. Take care. God bless and amen.