I Am! Series

Steve Brown talked about a man who asked a mail-order company to send plans for a birdhouse. Instead of sending him the plans for a birdhouse, they sent him plans for a sailboat. He tried to put it together, but it just wouldn't work. He couldn't figure what kind of bird was going to live in this dumb birdhouse. So he wrote a letter and sent the parts back to the company. They wrote a letter of apology and added this postscript: “If you think it was difficult for you, you should have seen the man who got your plans trying to sail a birdhouse.”

Steve Brown comments: “A lot of people are trying to operate on the plans of Christ when they aren't even Christians. So a word of caution: make sure you know Him before you apply the principles” (Steve Brown, “Forgiven and Forgotten,” Preaching Today, Tape No. 139; www. PreachingToday.com).

If you want your life to work, you have to know Jesus. So who is this Jesus? Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to John 8, John 8, where Jesus tells us who He is.

John 8:12 Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (ESV).

Jesus makes it very clear.

HE IS LIGHT.

He is the light of the World. He is the light which gives life.

At the end of his seven-volume history of the expansion of Christianity, Kenneth Latourette's says this of Jesus:

“No life ever lived on this planet has been so influential in the affairs of men as that of Christ. From that brief life and its apparent frustration has flowed a more powerful force for the triumphal waging of man's long battle than any other ever known by the human race.

“Through it, millions of people have had their inner conflicts resolved. Through it, hundreds of millions have been lifted from illiteracy and ignorance and have been placed upon the road of growing intellectual freedom and control over the physical environment. It has done more to allay the physical ills of disease and famine than any other impulse, and it has emancipated millions from chattel slavery and millions of others from thralldom to vice. It has protected tens of millions from exploitation by their fellows, and it has been the most fruitful source of movements to lessen the horrors of war and to put the relations of men and nations on the basis of justice and peace” (John Stott, “Christians: Salt and Light,” Preaching Today, Tape No. 109; www.PreachingToday.com).

Jesus is indeed the Light of the World, which brings life!

Historian Leonard Griffith, in his history of France under Napoleon, writes about a political prisoner by the name of Charnet. French authorities threw Charnet into prison simply because he had accidentally, by a remark, offended the emperor, Napoleon. They cast him into a dungeon cell and left him to die. As the days and weeks and months passed by, Charnet became embittered at his fate. Slowly but surely, he began to lose his faith in God. And one day, in a moment of anger, he scratched on the wall of his cell, “All things come by chance,” which reflected the injustice that had come his way by chance. He sat in the darkness of that cell growing more bitter by the day.

However, there was one spot in the cell where a single ray of sunlight came every day and remained for a little while. Then one morning, to Charnet’s absolute amazement, he noticed that in the hard, earthen floor of that cell a tiny, green blade was breaking through. It was something living, struggling up toward that shaft of sunlight. It was his only living companion, and his heart went out in joy toward it. He nurtured it with his tiny ration of water, cultivated it, and encouraged its growth. That green blade became his friend. It became his teacher in a sense, and finally it burst through until one day there bloomed from the little plant a beautiful, purple and white flower. Once again Charnet found himself thinking thoughts about God. He scratched off the thing he had scribbled on the wall of his dungeon and in its place wrote, “He who made all things is God.”

Somehow through the guards and their wives and the gossip of the community, this little story reached the ears of Josephine, Napoleon's wife. The story moved her and convinced her that a man who loved a flower that way could not possibly be a dangerous criminal. So she persuaded Napoleon to release him, which he did (David A. Seamands, “Instruction for Thanksgiving,” Preaching Today, Tape No. 62; www.Preaching Today.com).