Jesus: The Light of the World

If we’re honest, we all have addictions…addictions to success, to comfort, to being liked. We want to not care so much about our social media presence, but we spend copious amounts of time checking our likes and follows and curating our image. We want a more balanced life, but we can’t help but say yes to every new opportunity presented at work for fear of missing out. We want to be able to deal with pain and heartache, but we find ourselves resorting to binge eating or lust or intoxication when we start to feel too overwhelmed.

Patrick Carnes is one of the leading voices on sexual addiction in America, and he explains in his book “Out of the Shadows” that sexual addiction is an “intimacy disorder.” At its core, he says, this struggle stems from feeling unloved and unlovable. And when you think about it, really all our addictions, our struggles with sin, are intimacy disorders in relation to God. We wind up captive to certain struggles because we’ve forgotten the love of God and gone looking to be filled elsewhere.

Sin entices us by suggesting it can give us something God can’t. In John 8, we see that Jesus enables us to choose him over our sin by giving us eyes to see that only he can provide what we’re seeking! The light of the world, Jesus frees us from our sin by enlightening us to behold him and his love.

In John 8:22, Jesus says to a crowd of Pharisees and observers, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Of those who walk in his light, Jesus says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free (John 8:32).”

Those whose eyes have been opened by the light of Jesus see that he is the Son of God, the only source of truth for the world. They see that his salvation is an offer of sonship, of becoming a loved child of God, unconditionally belonging to him forever. In beholding Jesus and his love, they are freed to choose him over their sin.

In John 9, Jesus helps the crowd to understand the spiritual claims he has just made about himself as the light through a physical miracle. Jesus and his disciples pass by a man who has been blind since birth. Jesus spits on the ground and anoints the man’s eyes with the mud he has made, and then he tells the man to go wash in the pool of Siloam. The man obeys and miraculously comes back with his sight restored!

This miracle reaffirms that Jesus’s light is the source of freedom from sin. The Pharisees do not accept Jesus as the light of the world, and so Jesus says of them in John 9:41, “Your guilt remains.” The formerly blind man, on the other hand, after seeing by Jesus’s light, confesses Jesus to be the savior of the world. “Lord, I believe,” he says in John 9:38. And then, we are told, he worships Jesus.

Just as with the blind man, those of us who believe in Jesus have been enlightened so that we might worship God in our freedom from sin and darkness! And while Jesus has fully freed us from condemnation, this life is a process of being untangled from our sin struggles. Our calling is to continually redirect our sight to Christ, keeping our vision centered on his love. This looks like -

Surrounding ourselves with friends who can remind us of truth when we’re struggling;

Renewing our hearts and minds each day with time meditating on God’s Word; and

Asking the Lord in prayer to make himself and his love more deeply known to our hearts.

As the Gospel of John proclaims, Jesus has come to give us abundant life, and one aspect of that life is liberation from our sin! As we press on in the fight, let’s fix our eyes on Jesus, the light of the world who transforms our battlefields of despair into altars of worship.

RESPOND: Take a moment to reflect on an area in your life where you feel the hold of sin. Ask God to give you a deeper vision of Jesus and his love, that you might walk in freedom.