Don’t Look at Me, Look at Him
John 1:1-18
Pastor Jim Luthy
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.
He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to those who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children not born of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father full of grace and truth.
John testifies concerning him. He cries out, saying, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’” From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.
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We have to understand the life of Jesus. In that life we find light. For this purpose, we will begin “A Long Walk with Jesus,” a fifteen month journey through the gospels studying the life of Christ. As we walk with him, closely examining his life, I trust that we will understand his life and not only receive his light, but understand it.
John said that the light shined into the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. The darkness to which John referred was not a godless or atheistic culture. It was the Jewish culture, a religious people, God’s chosen ones, who were in the dark and unable to receive or understand the light.
Could it be that the life of Jesus is shining into the church but darkness in the church has made us unable to understand him? When I visit other churches, I am like to hear the teachings of Jesus that make people feel better—“there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ,” “blessed are the peacemakers,” and “God so loved the world…” These things are true, but they are not the whole gospel. The light of Christ makes demands on our lives, just as the glory of Jesus Paul encountered demanded change in him. Either we do not understand those demands or we shape them to fit our desires or dismiss them altogether. Very seldom can you walk into a church that is contemplating Jesus’ teaching that we must lose our lives to find them or that those who are not faithful with what they have been entrusted will be cast aside to where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. How can we, in our limited thinking, understand such hard sayings authored by a God who loves us so much? Our best answer requires us to avoid such difficult passages altogether. I think it is entirely possible that Jesus is the light who has come into the world and we have not understood him much better than the religious people who were in the dark in Jesus’ day.
This is why darkness remains. Jesus comes full of grace and truth. If we understand Jesus’ grace but neglect the truth, then we remain in the dark with a love-oriented, feel good Christianity that is filled with lies about the demands of the cross. If we focus on truth but have no grace, however, we are just a clanging symbol or a resounding gong. Again, we remain in the dark with a condemning tone that is absent of the expression of the love and grace of God.
When Tammie and I first moved to Gresham, I was all about grace. I had just had my eyes opened to the legalistic teaching we had been embracing and was deeply impacted by Philip Yancey’s “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” Yancey hit the nail on the head in the manner by which he brought to light the Scriptures and the love-hate relationship between the church and the world. He pointed out that many people don’t want anything to do with the church because of the judgment and condemnation that is expressed to the world. Too often we fail to communicate the message of grace. When I came to Gresham, I was convinced that we would make that message of grace clear to the people we were reaching out to.
Along with that desire for grace came a loosening of my standards. Years ago, God had once led me to give up drinking so that I would always be ready to give an account for the hope I have in Christ. With my leanings toward grace, I took the liberty to begin drinking lightly and socially again. My lips began to loosen a bit, coarsely joking and allowing myself reasons to curse. I let my guard down in regards to the amount and the wholesomeness of what I watched on television and movies. These are just a few examples of different ways that I sought to practice my liberty, all in the name of trying to identify with spiritually lost people.
Not long after moving here, though, I read another life-changing book. The book gave brief biographies of men and women of the past who came to know the fullness of Christ’s power through absolute surrender. Their stories became, to me, a testimony of the hard teachings of Christ that, quite frankly, I am hard pressed to see lived out in the American church. They were stories of men and women who sparked revivals and led many people to trust in Christ. I developed a hunger to know Christ like they knew him, like never before. I realized I could not lead a church with the half-heartedness I had developed. I began a deep search of my soul. It struck me that I was basing my decisions on what was permissible rather than what was beneficial, or even what God’s will was. “Everything is permissible,” Paul said, “but not everything is beneficial.” I vowed to set aside my liberty and identify those areas of my life that had not been submitted to the lordship of Christ. I wanted to see the glory of God and know the power of the resurrection. I still do.
Tommy Tenney, in The God Chasers, explains how he encountered the same emotions, describing them as “divine discontentment.”
“I somehow sensed that destiny was waiting…a hunger had been birthed in my heart that just wouldn’t go away. The gnawing vacuum of emptiness in the midst of my accomplishments just got worse. I was in a frustrating funk, a divine depression of destiny…I just sensed that something awaited us from God.”
That divine discontentment has plagued me ever since. As I sought to commit myself completely to the Lord, I felt more and more alone in my Christian walk. Even in my own home I felt the enormous strain that Paul predicted, torn between pleasing my wife and pleasing God. While Tammie and I shared the desire to build a God-honoring, moral family, we differed on what that looked like. I became dissatisfied with the contemporary “Focus on the Family” approach to family-building. She didn’t share with me the same convictions over our liberties. We agreed that too many times we have seen children grow up in Christian homes only to leave the church or, just as bad, staying in the church and perpetuating the church-in-the-dark problems. I feared that we would pass on the pious, judgmental, graceless Christianity that shaped me early on or we would train our children up with the same half-heartedness they had been exposed to for years. I thought that something more, for my family, would require a life of service and sacrifice. With little consideration of the weight on Tammie, I forged ahead with new ideals, without regard to whether Tammie shared my convictions. In doing so, I managed to give her the impression that she needed to either share my convictions or be made to feel she was a lesser Christian. I had thrown grace and acceptance out the window.
Before you become too alarmed about my marriage, understand that we have the same issues happening in the church. We are a community of people who are each led individually by the Spirit of God. We have different convictions, different callings, different backgrounds, and differing levels of maturity and hunger. Yet with all these differences, we have to learn to not only get along, but to love one another for the glory of God. It’s not easy!
I recognize my contribution to the difficulty. I confess I have been beating on the church with the same graceless passion that I have insisted on in our home. Like John the Baptist, I’ve come into the wasteland of the church preaching a message of repentance for the forgiveness of our sins. My hope has been that I would be a part of a family and a church that is completely given over to God so that he could have his way in our willing hearts to bring revival to the church and our land. Now, of course, there is still a need for repentance, but I lost sight of the grace that leads us to the Father. Yes, the power of God and revival tarries, but he gives that grace to the humble, not the religiously or spiritually proud. Will you forgive me?
I went from a focus on grace that lacked the truth about our need to be set apart as God is set apart to a pursuit of God that lacked love and compassion to those around me. In home and here at church, I’ve slipped away from the grace that once gripped me. Here’s both the problem and the good news: Just as John was not the light and came only as a witness to the light, I too am not the light.
Isn’t that a relief? I came here ready to share grace with the world and gave you little example of the holiness of God in my own life. More recently, I’ve come asking you to join me in offering yourselves as living sacrifices to extend the grace of God into the world, but I’ve ceased to extend that same grace to you. I’ve been pounding you with the hard truths of Jesus’ teaching but only making myself out to be more like your adversary than your friend. There have been times when you could look at me and say, “He sure is full of grace.” And there have been times when you could listen to what I say and agree, “Yep, he’s full of the truth today.” Most of the time, though, you probably thought, “He is just plain full of it!”
It is my sincere desire to be full of grace and truth. I just know I’m not. The more I focus on Jesus, the more I realize just how short I fall from his glory. Like John, I am not the light, I only come to testify to the light. I like to think that light is leading me to be more like him every day.
Stacy Orrico has a popular song out on Christian radio that says, “Don’t look at me, look at him.” That’s what I want to ask you to do today and the months ahead. Don’t look at me, look at Jesus. God has me in the process of growing in grace and truth, but Jesus embodied it. He was full of grace. He was full of truth. The Contemporary English Version of the Bible translates John 1:14 as “We saw his true glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father. From him all the kindness and all the truth of God have come down to us.” Let us look to him together to understand how grace has freely provided our salvation and how patient he is with our shortcomings. Let us also learn from him the truth about just how demanding that gift is.
I can only hope you can catch glimpses of truth and grace in me. I also can only plead that you will forgive me when I fall short. I need that grace from you and you need the same from me. I don’t know what kind of a mess I would be if Jesus didn’t forgive me for falling short of his glory. I don’t know what kind of a church we would be if we didn’t strive to have his life in us to be the light of men.
But what an example he is! Over the next 15 months, let us look carefully at his life and let him be our light. He loves you. From the fullness of his grace he wants us all to receive one blessing after another. May his light shine in the darkness and be our light. May his light in us be the light of all men, making us the light of the world.
