Have you ever gotten unwanted advice? If you’re like me, you’re not much up for getting advice you didn’t seek. Unless, that is, the advice comes from an expert.
Imagine that you were at a park somewhere cooking some hamburgers when suddenly you heard a voice from behind you say, “You know, if you would only turn those burgers once they would taste a lot better,” and when you turned to remind this busybody that you aren’t feeding him, Bobby Flay was standing there. This would cause our natural gut reaction of cynicism to stop short because Flay is a recognized grilling expert. Indeed, when busybodies turn out to be experts, we generally try and listen.
In the first couple of parts of this series we saw that when the world was broken, God moved into the neighborhood to transform it in the person of Jesus Christ and that this by-itself remarkable truth is rendered all the more so when we understand that Jesus left behind glory to do it. So what came next? Well, when you are going to tackle the challenge of transforming a system that isn’t working, one of the first things you need to do is to shed some light on the problems.
Appropriately then, when God the Son came to earth he is described as bringing with him light. This light was intended to help us see the difference between death and life so that we can choose life. In doing this, though, he was necessarily commenting negatively on the way we are currently doing things.
This, then, is where we encounter a problem: Jesus wasn’t dealing with some mindless machine. He was and is working with people. As you might expect, people are infinitely more complex than machines. Unless we are absolutely convinced someone is an expert we really don’t want to hear what they have to say.
So then, who is this Jesus to tell us how to run our lives? It may seem like the answer to that question is pretty simple, but only if you’re thinking like a church person. There are a lot of folks today for whom Jesus is just another religious leader who has about as much credibility as the rest of them for dispensing with life advice. So then: Who was he to say what he did?
The answer actually comes to us by way of the apostle John. In the opening lines of his Gospel John begins by making the case that Jesus was and is somebody whose advice we should heed. Remember how this goes? “The Word was first, the Word present to God, God present to the Word. The Word was God, in readiness for God from day one.”
Jesus was God. That uniquely qualifies him to offer life advice we’re expected to heed. But, just in case your cynicism meter is working extra hard and you’re still thinking, “Okay, so he’s God. Big deal. It’s not like he knows how everything works.” Well, actually — yeah, he does. And in case that doesn’t seem totally explicit yet, John goes on to make it more so in the next verse. “Everything was created through him; nothing — not one thing! — came into being without him.” God the Father may have spoken creation, but it was God the Son, the Word, who did the actual creating. So yeah, Jesus knows how everything works because he made it.
All of this, then, allows John to bring us back around to where we started. When God moved into the neighborhood, one of the first tasks before him was to shed light on the ways and places where the system was broken in order that the solution might be made clearer. And the solution was life. Thus, when God moved into the neighborhood, “what came into existence was Life, and the Life was Light to live by.” Indeed, Jesus brings light to live by.
Jesus brought light through his words. And with our church-tuned ears we hear these and shout “Hear, hear!” But what if you find yourself in his crosshairs? All of a sudden, Jesus sounds a little less like a dispenser of heavenly wisdom and a lot more like one of those busybodies telling you how to run your life. Jesus brings light to live by, but if you feel you’re pretty content in the dark, the light hurts. And yet it shines on. “The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness; the darkness couldn’t put it out.” Jesus brings light to live by and in spite of our best efforts his light won’t be put out. He may come across as an unwanted busybody when he’s shining light into the dark places in our lives that we’d prefer to stay a little dark so we can comfortably indulge our sin fetishes, but he’s still not going away.
So here’s what we need to do. We need to walk in the light. We need to take the advice. When we feel our cynicism meter starting to fire up because something Jesus said is hitting close to home we need to turn it off. Here’s why: He created the world. Remember? Not one thing came into being without him. When he shines light into darkness it’s because he knows the darkness isn’t supposed to be there. There is no life in those places and he wants us to live at every place in our lives. He wants for us to be transformed fully into our God-created selves. Jesus brings light to live by.
Immerse yourselves in the words of Jesus in order that you might see the light and start to live. Let his words reveal the dark places still inside of you in order that they may be illuminated and purged of death so that life can flourish there. Walk in the light of Christ in order that you might live. Jesus brings light to live by. I hope you will.