The Light of Christ - John 3:17-21

We’re at the end of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus. And by way of reminder, Jesus explained what it means to be “born again” in verses 1-15, described the depth of God’s love in verse 16, and is now moving into why people don’t put their trust in Him.

It’s still a relevant question, isn’t it? Why don’t more people come to Christ? What exactly is the barrier that prevents people from putting their trust in Him?

Typically, we have a litany of practical answers to that question: their family dynamics, their vices, poor friendships, etc. But rarely do you ever hear someone couch the conversation in spiritual terms. There’s always a spiritual dimension.

But even though there is a spiritual dimension, it doesn’t necessarily explain why people get weird and awkward when you bring up the Lord? Ignoring the fact that religion and politics are two notoriously off limit topics.

We all know those two topics are often conversation killers.

Just imagine meeting someone for the first time, and 30 seconds into the conversation you ask who they voted for in 2020 or what they think will happen after death.

And some of us have the uncanny ability to ruin a conversation without mentioning religion and politics! I just tell people that I’m a pastor and that will usually do the trick.

In all seriousness though, you can literally see people get uncomfortable when you bring up Jesus Christ.

Could it be that people feel uncomfortable because they know, in the core of their being, they prefer “darkness rather than light” or wickedness rather than righteousness or sin rather than holiness? Maybe a clearer way of saying it is in the conscience they know they’re not living right.

People are more attracted and enticed by sin than the gospel of Jesus Christ. The bottom line is, folks just know that faith in Jesus Christ may require them to change their ways.

And they don’t want to! They prefer their lifestyle. They enjoy the way they’ve chosen to live and know that Jesus Christ would disrupt it.

They might even acknowledge that there are elements of truth to the gospel, but they don’t want to change.

And this is exactly what Jesus tells us in our passage. That many would rather persist in darkness than live in the light.

Jesus came to save, not condemn.

I had a conversation a few years ago with a friend who, in essence, said this to me. We were talking about the gospel, and I challenged many of his surface level objections, and finally I was like, what do you have to lose? And he told me Christianity would require him to change his lifestyle and he didn’t want to do it.

I appreciated his honesty, but what do you say to that?

I think this helps us understand why atheism or functional atheism is so prevalent. I don’t think most people are atheists because they spent a lot of time contemplating the meaning of life and God’s existence, and that journey led them into atheism. Rather, I think people are atheists because it’s convenient. It requires no self-reflection because there’s no standard by which you will be judged. You can do whatever you want. Atheism at its core is self-worship. You’re the god.

It’s a worldview that bows to you and what you want. It’s just you pursuing whatever gratifies your flesh. And an atheistic worldview permits it, because there is no objective morality. In an atheistic worldview how can anyone say that anything is either good or bad? Everyone can do what is right in their own eyes.

And it’s the atheists and functional atheists that don’t want to hear the dogma from the angry, narrow minded Christians. They don’t want to hear self-righteousness. They don’t want to hear the condemnation.

But this is what’s so interesting about what Jesus tells Nicodemus in verse 17. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

Jesus didn’t come to condemn you in your sin, he came to save you from it!

The gospel message isn’t one of shame, guilt, condemnation. Rather it’s a message of love, optimism, and salvation.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is a glorious message of hope.

And yet, what do we hear? Don’t judge me! You don’t know what I’ve been through! The Christian shouldn’t judge you. The Christian doesn’t know what you’ve been through.

But none of that addresses the relevance of the message.

Your unbelief is what condemns you.

But what do we know about people? People reject Christ because they’d rather remain enslaved to their sin.

It’s equivalent to a prisoner with a life sentence getting out of jail and instead of celebrating their undeserved freedom, choosing to go back behind bars. Why would you ever do that?

Because naturally, we love sin and unbelief. That’s why Jesus tells Nicodemus, “whoever does not believe is condemned already.”

Our sin condemns us before a holy, righteous God but it’s not like the unbeliever doesn’t like sin. It’s not like anyone sins against their will. There’s no outside force compelling you to sin. There was no mysterious power that grabbed your hand and forced you to steal the candy bar at the gas station. At no time, in the act of sin have you or I thought, “I really don’t want to sin here, but I have to do it.” We choose to do it. God isn’t responsible for our sin, we are.

God in his perfect holiness is neither the author nor creator of sin and yet, he sovereignly controls and sustains all things. His sovereignty stands in mysterious tension with our responsibility.

In other words, God cannot compel anyone to sin. He didn’t force you to steal the candy bar. You chose to do it and you will be held responsible for your sin.

And quickly, we can get swept away by the philosophical tension between God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility and forget a key component to this whole conversation.

Nonchristians prefer unbelief to belief. They prefer sin to righteousness.

The early church father Augustine relays an interesting story in His Confessions. In it, he tells about stealing pears as a teenager. Which on the surface, sounds pretty benign, right?

But what makes it so fascinating is his explanation over why he did it.

He was with a group of teenagers, but he admits none of them were hungry. They simply stole the pears because they knew it was wrong and wanted to see if they could get away with it. So they shook the tree, gathered up all the pears, and fed them to hogs.

People have dark desires but sin manifests itself into the smallest things: stealing pears.

Augustine’s story illustrates well the natural depravity of man. It’s not that we’re all as evil as we could be, but rather, have an insatiable hunger for sin that’s been baked into our DNA.

We’d rather live in sin than live for Jesus Christ.

And this is the backdrop to what the writer of Hebrews refers to as “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” or more commonly referred to as the unforgivable sin. Jesus makes reference to it in verses 18-19.

Jesus doesn’t use the words, “unforgivable sin,” instead he explains it. The unforgivable sin is the wholesale rejection of Jesus Christ in pursuit of sin. This is what ultimately condemns people.

It’s not that those who are condemned are bigger sinners or worse people in the eyes of God. They’re condemned because they’ve rejected Jesus Christ.

Look at verses 18-19 with me.

“Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.”

Why do people reject Christ? Because they love the darkness rather than the light. Jesus gives us a spiritual explanation and understanding to why someone might get uncomfortable when you mention His name.

People typically know they’re not living in accordance with God’s standards and Jesus exposes that.

“For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.”

The words of Jesus help us understand the spiritual dynamics on the individual level, but it also helps us understand what’s happening on the macro, cultural level.

The world hates the Christian teaching that all people bear the image of God. Instead, the world wants to look at people through intersections: what’s your race, sexual preference, socio-economic status.

Or the world hates the Christian definition of marriage, that it’s exclusive to one man and one woman.

Or that life begins at conception. And that’s really the tip of the iceberg.

Fundamentally, Christianity stands in opposition to sin, which is why the world hates it.

Have you ever wandered into an abandoned house or into your attic, and it’s creepy and dark and so you shine your flashlight into the corner and a bunch of big nasty bugs scatter?

That’s why people get awkward, weird, and angry at the name of Jesus. The light of Christ is panning around in the attic of their heart. And they’d just rather keep the light off. No flashlights. You’re not supposed to be in the attic anyway. You just need to get out of there and quit poking around.

And to keep the analogy going, the light of Christ isn’t a flickering little match that you must protect from the faintest breeze. No, the light of Christ is a massive spotlight, one of the ones that if you shine it into the sky it would blind an airplane pilot.

It’s unbelief and the rejection of Christ that condemns you. This is something that most people fail to consider: people condemn themselves.

There is no just balance to measure your life! There’s no hope that the good will outweigh the bad in your life, when we naturally enjoy the bad more than the good.

Wickedness hates the light.

But notice the words of Jesus, “For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light…”

Those that do evil do not want anything to do with Jesus Christ because Jesus is literally the opposite of wickedness. He is the epitome of peace, truth, and love.

Which is interesting to consider when you look at when you look at his conversation with Nicodemus as a whole. You might even question some of Jesus’ evangelistic methods. Someone forgot to remind Jesus to avoid words like, “darkness,” “wickedness,” and “evil.”

It’s with this sort of language that he ends his conversation with Nicodemus! He forgot to end on a positive note. You’re supposed to do all the bad stuff at the beginning so you can save all the good stuff for the end! This is not how you effectively share the gospel!

But of course Jesus knows what he’s doing. In fact, Jesus’ love and compassion for Nicodemus is on full display because he’s willing to tell him the unvarnished truth. He’s not sugar coating or softening the message. He’s speaking the truth to him. The truth is love.

In the same vein, avoiding the truth is unloving. We’re ignoring reality if we deny the existence of “darkness,” “wickedness,” and “evil.”

But notice what Jesus does in verse 21. He draws a parallel between “doing what is true” and “coming to the light.” A rather ironic connection when you think about how Nicodemus’s shame compelled him to meet Jesus under the cover of night.

The message that Jesus wants to get across to Nicodemus is that a person, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, a person living in humble submission to God, doesn’t despise scrutiny but actually invites it because he or she wants to turn more of himself or herself over to the Lord.

You see, their aim is to please the Lord. That’s not to say, Christians no longer sin. Rather, it simply means that they seek to live a life of integrity before God and man. The man or woman of God seeks to please Him in all they do. And when they sin and they hate it.

Which stands in contrast to the unbeliever who sins and enjoys it.

And herein lies one of the greatest differences between believers and unbelievers: their response to sin. We all sin. We all fall short of the glory of God.

But do you hate your sin? Do you hate the fact that you fail and disappoint the living God who has redeemed you? This is what it means to “do what is true” and “live in the light.”

Or do you enjoy your pet sins? Do you look forward to them? Do you run headlong into it?

Eventually, a lifestyle will begin to take shape. By and large, people can tell. And here’s the kicker: most people can get a sense of your personal beliefs simply by your lifestyle.

This isn’t “preach the gospel and only use words if necessary” kind of thing. Rather, this is a call to live faithfully, to be a man or woman of Christian integrity.

Jesus tells Nicodemus, “But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”

If you're in Christ you’ll want to live in the light. That is to say, your lifestyle reflects what you believe. If you're an atheist, your lifestyle is probably going to reflect that. But if you’re a Christian and the Spirit of God is alive and at work in your eternal soul, your lifestyle is going to reflect that. Because your life is a testimony for what Christ has done in you.

Many people dismiss Christianity simply because they don’t want to change, but for the Christian it’s the exact opposite. The Christian should desire spirit empowered, gospel conforming change.

To revisit the analogy I used earlier, the Christian should give the flashlight to Jesus so that he may search the attic of hearts for nasty little critters.

As long as we live in this life we should have a holy discontentment never satisfied with the spiritual status quo. For the Christian there are no immutable aspects of our character. We should lay everything bare before the Lord because we are no longer slaves to sin, but rather slaves to righteousness.