Jesus, the Source of Life

This is our second week in the gospel of John and our second of three weeks in the prologue of the gospel of John. In these first 18 verses, John’s trying to answer one question—it’s the most important question in the history of the world: Who is Jesus? Every religion has an answer to this question, and Jesus’ own teaching requires us to have an opinion on him.

If I told you this theatre we use on Sundays was used as a boarding house for workers during the construction of the causeway in the 50s and 60s, chances are that wouldn’t affect much of your day (even though it is a true story). But if I told you this theatre is secretly a spaceship that’ll be transporting us to our new colony on Mars at the end of my sermon, now you’re listening much more closely.

You might have been on the fence with a “new church” meeting in a building that has a disco ball and doesn’t look like a church, but now you’re wondering, “Is this a church or a cult?” Maybe I’m telling the truth, and this is a spaceship. But if it’s true, then you have to decide pretty quickly if you’d like a change of scenery in your life. (It’s not true, by the way.)

Incredible claims create urgency, not apathy. They force us to respond. Because of how the Bible answers the question, “Who is Jesus”?—because of how Jesus talked about himself—if we really look at what’s being said here in these first 18 verses in John’s gospel, we won’t be able to turn a blind eye. We can’t simply say, “Jesus was a good teacher, and I respect him.” No, we have to make the choice whether we despise him, pity him, or worship him.

In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis popularized the argument that Jesus had to be either a liar, lunatic, or Lord, saying the Bible doesn’t leave us with any other options. This is a longer quote from Lewis, so I’m going to put it on the screen as I read:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. . . . Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God. (Mere Christianity, 55-56)

John’s not making casual claims about a good man here in verses 1-18. He’s saying Jesus is God, and if you believe that’s true, then it’ll change and re-orient the way you view every aspect of your life. Last week, we looked in the first 5 verses how Jesus as the Word of God both makes sense of your life and gives shape to your life. Even going to back to the very beginning of the book of Genesis, John claims in verse 3 that “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

This week, John’s going deeper into the idea he first introduced in verse 4: “In Jesus was life, and the life was the light of men.” Why is Jesus the source of life? John’s already made the claim that Jesus is the source of all physical life. He created everything. But now, he’s going further. Jesus is also the source of our spiritual life. And this is different. Not just what makes us breathe, but what makes us a unique person created in the image of God.

So, in verses 6-13 this morning, we’re going to see four reasons why Jesus is the source of life. And even though we’re going to jump around a little bit in our passage, all four reasons logically flow from one to the next. And here they are:

1. Apart from Jesus, we are spiritually dead.

2. But through Jesus, we are given a new birth.

3. Now by believing in Jesus, we experience this new life.

4. So that, in Jesus, we are children of God.

Let’s start with the first reason—that apart from Jesus, we are spiritually dead. I’m sure that was the exact note of encouragement you were looking for this morning. Dead is such a strong term. And yet the Bible regularly uses it to describe our condition apart from Christ. Ephesians 2:1–2: “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked.”

How do we see that in our passage here in John? We already mentioned back in verse 3 how all things were made through Christ and in verse 4 that in him was life and the life was the light of men. But now jump down to verses 9-11.

John 1:9–11 ESV

⁹ The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. ¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

So, the creator of all things—the source of all life that gives light to everyone—literally meaning his light shines upon every individual, whether they see it or not—the source of all life was rejected. He came to the world, and the world said, “Nah, we’re good.”

If I offered you a burger and you said, “Nah, I’m good”, would you have a burger? No, of course not. So, if the one who created everything and offers the light of his life to you, and you reject it, do you have his light? Do you have the source of life? No, and without life, what are you? Dead.

You see, the Bible isn’t trying to make a condescending judgment on you that you have no redeemable qualities. The same Bible says back in the very first chapter of Genesis that we were created in the image of God. The Bible isn’t trying to say you’re worthless, and that’s where I think people can often reject an understanding of Christianity that doesn’t actually line up with what it really is.

The reason we’re spiritually dead isn’t because of our lack of value; it’s because of our rejection of our Creator—the one who gives life. In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve rejected God’s rule in their hearts. Internally, they wanted to be Lord over their own lives, and that’s something that been passed down ever since.

I’m a big proponent of fake plants. Macie’s not a fan. But I think it’s easier to dust a fake plant than to have to remember to water a real one. If you take the water away from the plant, it’s not going to be able to survive.

When humanity turned it’s heart from God, we shut off our spiritual source of life. So, it’s no wonder the Israelites, even though they were waiting for their promised Messiah for hundreds of years, when Jesus showed up on the scene teaching about the kingdom of God, like verses 10 and 11 says, they didn’t know who he really was, and they didn’t receive him.

You might be thinking, “Maybe Jesus should have communicated a little more clearly. Yeah, there were the miracles and holy living, but the parables felt confusing. If people knew Jesus was supposed to be their Messiah, they would have accepted him.” That’s why John gives us verses 6-8.

John 1:6–8 ESV

⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John (you might know him as “John the Baptist”). ⁷ He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. ⁸ He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

We’re going to learn more about John the Baptist’s ministry starting in verse 19, but why mention him here in this whole section that’s focused on who Jesus is? Because John the Baptist told people who he was! Before we get to the end of chapter 1, he’s going to tell the crowds, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” “I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

That’s pretty clear. So, you’ve got teaching that speaks to the heart, you have miracles that provide the evidence, you have prophesies being fulfilled, and you even have a witness clearly proclaiming Jesus as the Son of God, and yet, by and large, the people reject him. More than that, they crucify him. That’s not a communications problem; that’s a heart problem.

This projector screen behind me came with a remote, which is super convenient, right? No one wants to crawl up in that attic space and climb around the various storage bins and things up there to manually lower and raise the screen every week. And if only we could get that remote to work, then we wouldn’t have to!
Early on, we’d try—every week. You’d find me or Charles standing over there or over there, I think maybe one time upstairs directly touching the sensor with the remote. And I have seen it work 4 or 5 times, so I know it can. If you hold it just right, at just the right spot, and you ask it really nicely, it’s worked before.

But at some point, after spending 5 minutes every Sunday trying to point that thing at the screen and pressing the button over and over again with no success, we finally had to stop kidding ourselves. It’s not just a bad battery or the wrong situation. It’s broken hardware. It doesn’t work the way it was intended, and it can’t do what it was created to.

Christianity presents a problem and offers a solution. There’s bad news and there’s good news. The bad news? Our desires to rule our own lives rather than submitting to God’s reign over our lives have left us spiritually dead in our sins and not just separated from God, but unable to come to him. Dead things don’t move. Dead things can’t see. Death things can’t receive.

But then there’s the good news. Apart from Jesus, we are spiritually dead. But through Jesus, we are given a new birth. Look with me again at verse 13.

John 1:13 ESV

¹³ [those] who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

So, what’s God’s solution for creating a people who are spiritually dead? He gives them new life. If you’ve heard the phrase “born again Christian”—it’s kinda redundant since you can’t have one without the other—but the book of John is where that expression comes from. In chapter 3, Jesus is going to have a conversation with a Pharisee named Nicodemus where he’s going to go into much more detail on this idea of the new birth, but here in chapter 1 John only gives us one sentence about it.

John 1:13 ESV

¹³ [those] who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

There’s more that John’s going to say, but right now his primary concern is to tell us where the new birth comes from. First, he says it doesn’t come from blood, meaning it doesn’t come from our background. Maybe that doesn’t hit you very hard this morning, but for the original Jewish audience reading this letter, that was an atom bomb into their cultural heritage.

“You’re telling me that we’ve been waiting hundreds of years for the Messiah, but we can’t actually receive the Messiah because our hearts are spiritually dead to the good news of the Messiah, unless we experience this new birth, and whether or not we’re born again has nothing to do with the fact that we’re Jewish?

The new birth is not of blood and, secondly, it’s not of the will of the flesh. It’s not something we can do on our own. And this is kinda just logical. Humans give birth to other humans, dogs give birth to other dogs—natural gives birth to natural. Natural cannot give birth to spiritual.

We can’t produce the new birth on our own, and we can’t choose the new birth on our own, which we see in that third phrase: “nor of the will of man”. It’s not based on our own decision. If that feels confusing or concerning for you, the gospel of John is going to give us plenty of opportunities to dive into this topic more in the coming weeks and months.

But here, John’s keeping the point simple: dead things don’t decide to come alive. He’s already demonstrated in these verses that we don’t receive Jesus on our own, so it makes sense that he’d also say we can’t choose to come alive on our own.

But this doesn’t leave us without hope. Because even though dead things can’t make themselves come alive, the source of all life can, which we see John confirm at the end of verse 13. God provides the new birth. And this is good news. Because even though those three statements in the verse tell us what we can’t do to save ourselves, they also free us from the weight of feeling like we have to do those things to earn our salvation.

That’s not the point of the gospel. It’s not about our self-improvement. Jesus didn’t come to make you better. He came to make you new. And no matter what your background is, no matter what you’ve done in your past, no matter how much you’re struggling with sin now, there is a good and loving God who is mighty to save and able to do what you cannot. He alone gives new birth—But to who? The start of verse 12 gives us our answer:

John 1:12 ESV

¹² But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name,

Trusting in Jesus comes with new life in Jesus. But I want to be clear here because I think too often we water down this invitation to “receive Christ”. This isn’t like a delivery you have to sign for in order to get.

I shared a couple weeks ago that our church’s ministry is expanding and the building to the left outside those lobby doors that’s currently a med spa will be the new 24/7 home of some additional ministry space for us that’s going to allow us to invest more in a safe and thoughtful setup for our kids ministry, create an office, and even have a flexible meeting room that can be a classroom for events or groups during the week. We love that we’re becoming more a part of the old Mandeville community.

As we get ready to move into that building, this past week we started buying several pieces of furniture and things we found on sale, but we didn’t know exactly when the med spa was moving out, so we had everything delivered to our house. Which means there is currently boxes with a sofa, a lamp, a credenza, a rug, a side table, two chairs, and a desk filling up the entire front room of our home. Taking all those boxes into our house felt like moving day.

Receiving Christ isn’t like that. It’s not this big gift of eternal life sitting outside your door that you just have to choose to accept and bring in. That makes you the hero because it was dependent on you to see its value and to do something with it. But what you’re receiving in the gospel isn’t a thing that you lead; it’s a person who leads you. And believing in his name doesn’t just mean believing he’s real, it means believing in who he is and what he’s done.

It’s everything we’re reading in these first 18 verses of John: that Jesus is the Word of God, that he is God, that’s he’s always existed and created everything that has existed, that he took on flesh and dwelt among us as a person like we’ll read next week, and that only through what’s he’s done for us by his perfect life, atoning death, and victorious resurrection can we be forgiven of our sin,  reconciled to God the Father, and experience new life—new birth.

If Christianity was just the transaction of a gift, then it would be entirely upon you to accept it. You’d be the decisive factor, and that would give you room to pridefully boast about your salvation as you looked down on others, because you’ve figured out something they haven’t.

But there’s no boasting at the cross. We are not the decisive factor. Since our salvation is about a person and not just a gift, then there’s two sides involved in a relationship. Yes, you must believe in who Jesus is and what he’s done for you, trusting in him to make you right with God rather than anything you could do yourself. But that’s just one side of the coin.

Because, remember, apart from Christ, we’re dead. It’s not in our nature to come to the light. John’s giving us examples here in our passage about how we don’t know him. We don’t have eyes to see him. Even the people who heard from John the Baptist and saw Jesus’ miracles with their own eyes still rejected him. The Apostle Paul backs that up in 1 Corinthians 2:14.

1 Corinthians 2:14 ESV

¹⁴ The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

So then, if we have to receive him but we can’t even understand him, then how do we ever spiritually desire him? Paul goes on in the next verse giving us a contrast from the natural person. He says,

1 Corinthians 2:15 ESV

¹⁵ The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one.

So, how do we move from being the natural person to the spiritual person? We need a new birth. I don’t know if you caught that earlier, but John 1:13 describes the people who have believed in Jesus as having been born of God in the past tense. It’s not one and then the other; both have happened together.

Like fire and heat. The second you have fire, you have heat. There’s no gap in the timing. And yet, it’s also the fire that causes the heat. Again, John’s going to get into this much more in chapter 3 and then again in chapter 6, but what we’re seeing in our passage this morning is that apart from Christ, we are spiritually dead. However, through God’s grace, undeserved by who we are, where we’re from, or what we have done or could ever do, God draws us to himself and gives us new birth to see Jesus for who he is, as we freely choose to believe in him.

That removes our grounds for boasting as Christians and instead lays a foundation for humility as we gratefully live out of the truth that we are saved by God purely by his grace and not a result of our character or our intelligence or our background or anything else.

But we don’t just get new birth in Christ; we also get a new life. One final point, and then some application, and we’ll be done. Look with me again at verse 12; this time we’ll focus on the back half of the verse.

John 1:12 ESV

¹² But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God,

The Christian life is exactly that: it’s a life. Not just a new start, but a new life. And not just adding a religious layer on top of your old life. It’s a new understanding of your identity, of who you are. To those who have believed in Jesus, he has given you the right, or the privilege, of being a child of God.

Who our parents are is a big part of shaping who we are. Whether it’s how they treated you well, or how they didn’t, how they were present or how they weren’t, much of how we think, feel, and act is impacted by our family.

John’s telling us here that, in Jesus, because we’ve been born of God, we now are children of God. And so the expectation is that this new identity from our new birth will lead to a new understanding, purpose, and approach to our daily life. Following Jesus should not only affect the way you think about the afterlife or the way you spend your Sundays. It should fundamentally and increasingly change how you see yourself and how you see the world around you. It doesn’t replace who you are; it gives you a new understanding of who you are and what you do.

If you got a call this afternoon and found out a distant relative just left you an inheritance of $10 million, a couple things would happen. One, you weren’t prepared for it, and so it’s going to  take a while to let that reality sink in and start to adjust to your new found wealth. But two, there will be an adjustment. This is going to change the way you think about your job, about where you live, no more sharing a single dessert at dinner, and say goodbye student loan debt. It’s going to have a real impact on most parts of your life.

When we become a Christian, when we go from spiritual death to life, when we repent of our sin against God and place our faith in the person and work of Jesus for us rather than in our performance—we become a child of God with all the inheritance that comes with being a co-heir with Christ. And that doesn’t just take a minute to let it sink it. It takes the rest of our lives continuing to go back to the gospel, studying what Jesus has done for you to understand more and more what that means for your life.

But believing in Jesus will bring an adjustment to your life. You cannot follow the creator of all things and not see him increasingly shape your life in all things. Jesus isn’t just our Savior; he’s our Lord. If you’re a Christian here this morning, when your sense of self and your sense of worth found a new foundation in what Christ has done for you and who he says you are in him, then every other part of what makes you you found a new purpose. He doesn’t replace those things about you; he fills them and fulfills our deepest longings in them.

What John’s portrayed for us here in verses 6-13 is relevant both for the person considering Jesus and the person who believes in Jesus. If you’re not a Christian here this morning, but you’re searching, I think the Bible aligns with your experience: something’s missing. The world isn’t how it should be. It feels like things are broken.

But there’s hope. Though we’ve been separated from God, we have also been pursued by God. Though we are spiritually dead, the source of all life has drawn near and defeated death so that we can experience new life in him. You can believe in who Jesus is and what he’s done to pay for your sin against God today and experience a new sense of purpose and peace in life as a child of God. That’s something you can pray to God about right now.

For those of us who are Christians this morning, we are still learning to live out the identity that Christ has worked in us. And we can only do this through regularly studying, reminding, and applying the good news of Jesus in all of life.  That’s why we gather as a church. We don’t need Jesus any less than when we were dead in our trespasses and sins, and he is still just as faithful to shape and grow us to be increasingly more like him.

What in your job or your family or your friends or your hobbies have you kept separate from who Jesus has made you as a child of God? In every day and in every part of who you are, the invitation of the gospel is to believe in Jesus, and he gives new life that increasingly shapes ours.

Let’s pray.