In Pastor Jerry Zepnick's sermon titled 'The Witness of Light,' he explores John 8:12-21, where Jesus declares himself as 'the light of the world' during a discourse in the temple. Pastor Zepnick emphasizes the significance of Jesus' statement, highlighting the contrast between Jesus as the fulfillment of the new covenant and the rituals of the Old Testament law. The Pharisees challenge Jesus' testimony, questioning his authority and origin, yet Jesus confidently asserts his divine identity and mission, supported by the Father. Pastor Zepnick stresses the importance of understanding Jesus as the light that reveals truth and dispels the darkness of sin in one's life. He also discusses the transformative power of accepting Jesus, as believers become living testimonies of Christ's saving grace. The sermon underscores the urgency of accepting Jesus now and the eternal consequences of rejection, urging believers to live boldly for Christ and share the gospel.

Music We continue in the book of John chapter 8. I'm going to be in verses 12 through 21. So let's read through these verses, and then I'll open up the paragraph. John chapter 8, verses 12 through 21. Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, I am the light of the world.

He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life. The Pharisees therefore said to him, You bear witness of yourself, your witness is not true. Jesus answered and said to them, even if I bear witness of myself my witness is true for I know Where I came from and where I'm going, but you do not know where I come from And where I'm going you judge according to the flesh I judge no one yet I do judge my judgment is true for I'm not alone But I am like the father who sent me is also written in your law that testimony of two men is true I am one who bears witness of myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness of me." Then they said to him, where is your father? Jesus answered, you know neither me nor my father. If you had known me, you would have known my father also.

These words Jesus spoke in the treasury as he taught in the temple, and no one laid hands on him. First hour I did not get come. Then Jesus said to them again, I'm going away, and you will seek me and will die in your sin. Where I'm going, where I go, you cannot come." A lot of this morning we thank you for your word. We thank you for the bountiful blessings that it carries with it, Lord God.

As we go through it, as we exposit this, Lord, just pray for our hearts to be open and that your Holy Spirit will do a work in us this morning, Lord God, to the power of your word as you work us Lord I pray in Jesus name, Amen. And so today's text we find Jesus in the temple again. I know I'm overlapping. Why? And so we're backtracking just a little bit onto what Pastor Rick preached on last week.

And that is Jesus declaring that he is the light of the world. And this is, I think, is very important for us in this context to carry it through. This week's message, and it's going to be an ongoing theme. But in today's text, we find it's in the Temple of the Treasury. And it's located in the court of the women.

And so why do they call it the court of the women? I had to know, I did some research, and I knew it wasn't just the court that only women could go in, but it was the court that was as far as women could go within the temple. And so there's many different courts that go into and then that end one, the final chamber is the Holy of Holies. And so that's where they had a tightrope ministry, somebody went in in case there was any sin and we'd fall over again, they'd have to drag him out. And so that's where we are today.

The Temple Treasury located in Williamsburg. The Temple Treasury had 13 horns on them, like a brass or metal type of a horn opening where they would show their offerings and they would go into the box below. And there were just that many different offerings that they they collected for besides the temple caps and and then to pay for the wood for the offerings and things like that. There were just 13 different ones that had containers underneath. And this place, I believe, really helped to contrast what we see with the physical well and the ritual of the Old Testament law versus Jesus standing there and proclaiming, I am the light of the world and I am living water and what the new covenant in Christ did and with Jesus the real treasure of the world and Jesus the real light of the world versus what what was the the law and the old covenant which was commanded by God and it was good, but they had changed it and twisted it and perverted it in many ways.

So we go back to verse 12 and it picks right up from where John 7 52 left off and so we have this this interruption in between of this woman caught in adultery and So this has been ended and we picture this temple scene. And it's important for me sometimes when I'm preparing a message to put myself in that location at that time and try to see what it actually was like if I were there. And I'm going to try to portray that today to some degree, and I wish that you'd help to understand it the same way, that atmosphere that was there, how hostile it was to Christ with the religious leaders, and yet how welcoming it was at times to the rest of the people that were there to actually hear. And So what we have is that we picture this scene, we find Jesus in debate with the Jewish leadership as he teaches the multitude there, and what does he teach? What does he teach there?

He teaches 2031, which we have gone through in multiple times he teaches john one one through five that that lorenzo read this morning and so Jesus is at the feast of the Tabernacles. It's a celebration of when they were kept by God in the wilderness for 40 years. It's about, and this feast, It's about sacrifices, it's about rituals, and that's exactly what is on people's minds when Jesus declares what he did in verse 12. Jesus spoke to them saying, I am the light of the world he follows me shall not walk in darkness but have a light of life he he shouted this out in this atmosphere where it was hostile to him, where there's all this Old Testament, where there's all this ritual and all of these, just the stone, the pillars, the curtains, the people dressed in their religious garb, and He shouts us out, which is saying to them, everything that you believe is wrong. What you're standing on is your own works.

I am the light of life, Jesus is telling you. And this is opening people's eyes that are there that know Him, that have been following His ministry, that want to follow Him. And to the religious leaders, they are not happy at all. And so the main topic of Jesus' teaching in this whole discourse and many other places is himself. He teaches about himself, which is either like ginormous, egotistical, or he is the Messiah, right?

It's gotta be one or the other. And as we listen to this, and we study and understand this today, we have come to the same conclusion. Is he a crazy guy that was just unlandishly egotistical, or is he the Messiah of the world? And if he is the Savior then we need to do something about it. And so he is the most important thing he could tell himself about or tell us about if he is the Messiah.

Then there's nothing more important that he can tell us. And it's the same thing when we talk to other people. If He truly has transformed and saved us in that way, there's nothing more important that we can tell other people than Jesus saves. Jesus saved. That's it.

And so that's exactly what he does. Jesus already declared earlier, I am the bread of light, I am the living water. Now he says, I am the light of the world. See, we all know what light is. You don't need to prove light.

You don't need to declare light. We didn't come in here this morning and say, hey, look, light. There's light in here. I can see things now because there's light. You don't need to declare the light.

It makes itself evident. We don't need to prove it. It proves itself. It shows that other things are present. I could see the light and so I could see that that Jess and Sarah were here and Rex and Noah and Judd and so I know that they're here.

I didn't have to guess. I know that that's the case. And so, we, like, like proof itself, it shows that other things are present. Walking into a dark room, you don't know what's there. And you can stumble around in the dark.

I had a friend I just talked to the other day. He got up at night and he stumbled across a room into a chair and he broke two of his toes. Yeah, and so one was in line, but the last little piggy was pointing light the wrong way and so he had to go to the doctor get it fixed and that's what we get for stumbling around in the dark right and so that's that's the importance of light and so when Jesus appears he reveals himself and And not only does Jesus reveal himself as the light of the world, but he helps us understand everything around us. So when we think we can understand things around us, we don't. Why?

Because we're in the dark. We are in the darkness of this culture, of this world, and so you really can't understand your own life Until you can understand Jesus. You don't know who you are until you know the gospel of Jesus Christ. We are blinded to what we really are. We are blinded to the plan that God has for our life.

We're blinded to the Bible. We can't fully understand the Bible. Church is stale and boring. The Lord's Supper means nothing to us. The Bible means nothing.

Love. We don't build love until we know Jesus Christ. We don't know forgiveness. We don't know fulfillment. And it goes on, on, on, not till we have the light of Jesus shining in our life.

That it does show us what this is. And God has Jesus give us these analogies of himself. Why does he do that? Constantly. It's because of our simple minds.

Because of who we are as human beings, we have simple minds and how kindly and merciful God is to lay it out, to draw in big bold letters with crayons so that we can understand and see it and know what it is. Psalm 116 verse 5 says, Gracious is the Lord and righteous. Yes, our God is merciful. That's His mercy in seeing us and loving us and desiring a relationship with us and putting us through a fire so that we get drawn nearer to Him. That's His grace and His love to us.

That's His mercy to us. We know the listeners of Jesus are those that want to hear Him in this text today, but there are those that really want to silence Him. And the thing is, the silencers are blind. It's like the guy across the street. He's got to wave his incried flag, and he's got to reject everything that we have to give him or witness to him.

He's blind. He's blind. Pray for him. Keep on witnessing. Don't write him off.

The the scientists are blind. And in verse 12b it says, He who follows me shall not walk in darkness but have the light of life. If you can't recognize the light, then you're walking in darkness. And we have to come to an understanding that that's where the world is that we live in. So we all live in darkness at times and we need the light to dispel that darkness.

And Pastor Rick said that last Sunday. And some of the darkness in our life is that the light and what the light dispels. Well, what about, we can say, what about the darkness in life? What does the light that just shines on Jesus, right? It shines on me, it shines on other people.

It dispels things in our life. It exposes sin in our lives that we need to identify and that we find dark and ugly and we want to expel it from our lives and that darkness in our life it dispells this pride the pride in us that anger unbelief Temptation lust I Think my wife typed this one in on me it says impatience. I know that's not my problem, but there's this endless thing that God in His love and mercy, that that light exposes and separates us from Christ. In His love, He shines that light and we see them and they're ugly and cruel to us and we want to dispel. We want to get rid of them.

Why do we want to get rid of them? Because God hates them. As Christians, we love the things that God loves and we hate the things that God hates. See, the light of Jesus in a Christian's life keeps sanctifying and he changes our lives. Ephesians 5, 8, 3, 11 says, For you were once darkness.

I got this from Pastor Rick on Wednesday night classes. I hadn't read it though, I'll use it. For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. For the fruit of the Spirit is all goodness, righteousness, and truth.

Finding out what is acceptable to the Lord and have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. Expose them. That is the work of the light and in verse 13 we have the Pharisees there for sending them you bear witness of yourself your witness is not true these guys are just so angry they're sitting in a crowd and he's preaching that he is the light of the world and they're just, their faces are twisted, they can't stand it. And he keeps answering them and telling them things that really get them worked up. There were those who were excited to hear Jesus, yet the angry religious leaders were hating every word that he had to say.

They're trying to just, they just want him quiet. That's all they want. Every word that he speaks is like a grain of sand in their eye ball. They just cannot take it. They do not want it.

And it's at this time that verse 13 is, is shouting from the crowd by a Pharisee, While we don't trust, and this goes to the Old Testament law, which says you need at least two or more witnesses. And while we don't trust what just any person, one person says of themselves when God speaks, that's a trump card right there. And so we should listen and believe but these leaders are trying to they're trying to discredit Jesus they're going back to their own law in their own house and they're saying hey wait you're just talking about yourself. That doesn't count. You're your only witness.

Well, that wasn't really true, but they wanna cast doubt on this testimony. They brought up various slanderous things to try and quiet them down. But just because they didn't believe, that's why. They didn't believe. They saw.

They heard. But they just didn't believe. Their unbelief does not invalidate Christ's claim of who He is. And that's the same with us today. You could say, I don't believe that Jesus is the Savior of the world.

Or I don't believe that that you take that stand on this or on that. Well, God's Word says, yeah, well, I don't think so. I don't believe that. It doesn't make it. It doesn't make it untrue.

Just because you believe something doesn't make it right. It says in the Word of God, in the end, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Right? That's those who have received Him now and those who have rejected Him now, their knees will bow too, from damnation. And so we might as well confess it now, right?

But it doesn't matter what we believe. The truth is the truth. The truth is not movable. The truth is not mobile. It does not go from place to place.

There are not 48 truths out there, one for each person in this room. There's one truth and it's in the Word of God. And so we need to realize So we need to realize that it doesn't matter what we believe. The truth is the truth. And it's our responsibility to preach the truth and to live that truth.

Had a good talk with a couple of youngsters that had been part of a cult that believed that they lived a life without sin. And so they disagreed with one of my messages, and as we talked about it after, he said, well, it all depends on what your definition of sin is. Okay? Well, that's true. What your definition...what about the Bible's definition of sin?

What about God's definition of sin? That's something altogether different. And so these these leaders are trying to cast doubt on Christ's testimony and they've brought up all these different slanders to try to quiet them. And when others try to discredit the gospel of Christ or the word of God, when we share it, we're a good company because that's going to be the case. They set up the rule that affairs and people come and they read a tract and they disagree with and we talk to them about the gospel of Jesus Christ and they disagree with it.

Okay well it doesn't make you right. We're a good company. They disagreed with Christ as well. Verse 14. Verse 14 reads, then he said to them, even if I bear witness of myself, my witness is true, for I know where I came from and where I am going.

But you do not know where I come from and where I'm going. This is powerful. This is strong stuff. John 3.13, no one has ascended to heaven, but he who came down from heaven, that is the Son of Man who is in heaven. This is what he's saying.

I came from heaven. I'm going to heaven And so Jesus said that that he is uniquely qualified to give testimony about himself Because two things he came from heaven and he's going to heaven He knew he know where He knows where he came from and he knows where he's going. And the religious leaders knew the Old Testament. They knew the scriptures better than anybody. It was their job.

And yet they rejected the Christ when He came in their midst. And Daniel 2.22, he reveals, he has secret things. He knows what is in the darkness and light dwells with them. When he said, I'm the light of the world, They knew exactly what he was proclaiming to be. And so verse verse 15, as we go further, you judge according to the flesh.

I judge no one. He's telling them that their judgment was only what they see. They judge according to the flesh. It's easy for us to do that too, isn't it? We judge according to what we see on the outside.

The way a person is dressed, the way they walk, the way they talk, the way they drive, the way they wear. It's super easy to judge somebody from the outside. And then we get somebody that's dressed nice, they drive a big fancy car, they this and that and whatnot, big house, and it's easy to treat them with more respect, right? Well that guy's got a big piece of huttin' land and he tells me, well I'm gonna treat that guy with a lot of respect, right? See that's wrong.

But that's what these guys were doing. And these verses, they are trying to, they are trying to jump from the outward appearance. And so we see that that's what they're doing. As far as they were concerned, Jesus came from Bethlehem, or came from Galilee, not Bethlehem. And they also claim to know who his father and mother are.

And basically the age-old same familiarity, reach, contempt, they think, well, he's from, he's from Nazareth. His dad's a carpenter, his mom is whatnot a housewife. And so we, we know where he came from. We know who he is. This guy can't be the Messiah But but Jesus doesn't engage in their slurring remark.

You notice he doesn't he doesn't come down to their level. He came to seek and to save the lost because he came as a savior. He said he judges no law And so he says he judges no law. That's a question I have everywhere. I'm like, wait a second.

Jesus, you know what? The first time he came, he did it. The second time He's coming, He came first as the Lamb of God, right? The second time He's coming as the Lion of Judah. Yes.

And He will judge. And so that only ties to His first coming. When Christ returns to earth, He comes as a judge when He returns. And in verse 16, it says, and yet if I do judge, my judgment is true, for I am not alone, but I am with the Father who sent me. See, in this verse, Jesus states that he is not alone.

God the father is with him and backs up every word he said, backs up his entire testimony. Jesus has no self doubt of who he is and who sent him. He doesn't stumble over his words. When the Pharisees ask him, who do you think you are? He wasn't intimidated.

He wasn't like, oh man, I've got to go to my notes and bite this fingernail, trying to figure out who he is. He wasn't anxious, he wasn't nervous, he was settled. He was secure in his identity. This is an example for us. This can be an example for us.

We are children of God. We've been grafted into the family of God. This is what God wants us to see. God wants us settled and secure in our own salvation. He doesn't want us stumbling around and questioning who we are.

We have sin in our lives, everyone else, and so I understand that that can happen. But he does desire for us to understand we are children of God and that we are strong in Him. We're superior in who we are in Christ. So to be able to say in my heart, in your heart, I know who I am in Jesus is important. And I know how he has rescued me from my sin and he has rescued me from hell.

He has saved my soul. He has changed who I am. And those that are redeemed, those that are born again, those that have been saved by the grace of God are living examples of this transforming power of Jesus Christ. And so when the Pharisees would look across, they would see the man from the pool That that was blind and now he can see And they rejected they these naysayers they look across and they say there's Lorenzo Roman I remember when that guy used to live for the devil. Vick's thread grew.

I remember when that guy was a piece of work. That guy lives for Jesus now. He is a living testimony of what God can do in a person's life. Amen, brother. The transforming power of God, Romans 8-16.

The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. See, I'm secure in that. I know that. I get that. I hope everyone here is as well.

Yet, I sometimes sin. I sin. And I even struggle with sin at times. And that can cause me to wonder or to doubt different things in my life, my relationship. Where were I standing with God?

I ask, am I a sinner transformed? Or am I a sinner that is sometimes transformed? You get doubt in your mind because The devil wants to work in your heart and in your life. And that's not unusual. But for the answer for those questions, the first place I need to run is to the word of God.

I need to be on my knees praying. And I need to give this to Christ. Where the answer, I need to look to God's word where I'm told that Christian is forgiven. Psalm 103, 11 and 12. For as the heavens are high above the earth so bring his mercy toward those who fear him As far as the east is from the west so far has he removed our transgressions from us I also looked up a verse in Colossians 2 verses 13 and 14 where it says, and you, begetting your trespasses, and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us, and he has taken it out of the way having nailed it to the cross.

See, we need to go back to these verses. We need to cling to them. Because The devil wants to drag us out. The devil wanted Jesus in the wilderness. The Pharisees wanted to drag him away as a work of the devil within the temple.

And He wants to do the same thing in your life today. He wants to cast doubt on you. We need to cling to this Word of God. It is dreadfully important for us. A person who was born again is a new creation, justified before God, adopted, received into God's family.

It's got a glorious destiny. That final goal is going to be unbelievable. And the bodily resurrection awaiting us As a new person, not this old thing. A new one. The real you is made to pattern after Jesus Christ.

See, realizing the perfecting won't be complete until heaven is reached. We are all works in progress. Is anybody where they need to be right here, right now? Have you gotten there yet? Not me.

Not me. We're getting progress in a big way. And we all will be until they put us in a hole in the ground. But God is faithful to keep on transforming us and keep on moving. We're called to run this race, right?

We're called to fight this fight, Put on the armor. See, we need to put on the armor of God. We need to run this race. Fight this fight. That goes to the end.

That goes right to the very end. God is faithful to keep on transforming us. Philippians 1 says, it reads, Be confident in this very thing, that he who has become good work in you will complete until the day of Jesus Christ, until your faith becomes sight. It will be worked on. See, sometimes I don't see it in myself or even in some Christian but I really in God's work.

We will be even discouraged by other people that even profess to be Christians. But we need to cling to Christ. Scripture becomes more clear as I grow in Christ, as to who I really am. See, we can see a parallel here. Our enemy tries to get to me and who I really am.

Not unlike enemies of Jesus who are trying to get to Him too. We have that, and it's very real. So the importance of believing God, believing Scripture, and knowing Jesus Christ and who He says He is in the Word is so important it cannot be over-emphasized. That trust can keep us settled, it can keep us secure just like Jesus wants. Maybe not that, but I'll never be close to that.

But you know what I mean. So when we're faced with questioning doubters who refuse to believe it now, Jesus rested in the security of who the Father and His Word proclaim Him to be. And we go back to the Word. And we lay hold of those promises. We grip them.

And we profess them to those who are doubters. Verses 17 and 18 is also written in your law that testimony in two minutes true. I am one who bears witness of Myself and the Father who sent Me bears witness of Me." The Mosaic law required that there be two witnesses. Jesus gave them to Himself and the Father. Jesus is uniquely qualified to bear witness to Himself.

Being perfect, being God, Himself, Jesus could count Himself as a witness to Himself. And also His Father, that's two witnesses. See, they didn't want to hear that. Jesus could have used Ohio and other witnesses, but he did not. He wanted to show them and display and proclaim to them that He is God, that He is the Christ, that He is God Almighty.

And so, Jesus could count himself as a witness, but God only, especially by the miracles he had Jesus perform, were witnesses. But besides these, There's two competent witnesses. There were literally thousands who could, or even did, bear witness to who Jesus was. There was John the Baptist, the voice priming the wilderness. The first one, right?

Well, not the first one. The first one were the Scriptures that proclaimed that He was coming. The whole Old Testament. When Jesus came and He started talking, He should have gotten ten words out of His mouth and they should have said, he's the Christ. Let's follow him.

They knew, but they rejected because their hearts were dark. The Samaritan woman had a well. They healed paralytic at the Pool of Sloke, thousands who ate the food, the miracle, the five meals and two fish, and even God the Holy Spirit as he descended upon Jesus at his baptism. And yet the religious leaders of that day, they refused to believe Jesus and they refused to believe all the witnesses. And we can't expect people in our day because it was the majority that rejected him, even though this was their life at the time.

But that was incredible. And people today, we can't expect them to believe either. So Ephesians 4.18 said, having their understanding darken, being alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart. It's the blindness of their heart. They can't see.

The blinders are on. They don't want to see. They don't want to know. They want to reject it at all costs. Hey, if you're looking for some reason to not believe that Jesus is the Christ, You'll find it.

You'll find it. I know that there's churches that will even go that far. If you want a little life that's not pleasing to God, that had holes all over it, it's doctrine, just go somewhere else. You'll find a church somewhere. I know a guy that wanted to get married for the third time and he didn't find anybody that he knew to stand behind him.

Had no reason to divorce the first two times and the third time. He looked long and hard enough, he found a guy. He had to go the other side of the stage. He found a guy that said, yeah sure, you got it. And so he went over there.

Just change your doctrine, Just change your belief a little bit. You get all kinds of people to follow you. So that's the case. If you're looking, it is easy to find a way to not believe. After all, the Pharisees, the Sadducees did, and they did because they couldn't, their minds were gummed up with what they wanted to believe, but it takes childlike faith to believe in Jesus.

And they didn't have that. And so the Pharisees, the Sadducees did, and so have many others over the last 2, 000 plus years of the people, the religions that have been formed, who just need not be the witness and the evidence. But the purpose of John the Baptist S20 of Jesus was to produce faith in Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world. That's what his purpose was. And we also know that this is John, the disciples purpose of having written the gospel that he's in, this is 20 31, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that believing, believing, You might have life in His name.

And in verse 19, then they said to him, where is your father? Jesus answered, do you not? You know neither me nor my father. Do you know me? You would have known my father also.

They're asking this question, who Jesus' father is. See, this is an attempt to start a scandal and it's wrote down on Jesus' name. And they're like okay Mr. Light of the World if I don't know your father then where is your father who is he Mr. Parkett I could just see him just thinking they got this trump card.

Thinking, okay, we got enough. Here it is. Who is your father? The question nobody else is bold enough to ask. I'm gonna ask it.

I mean, here it is. All right. They ask it And they ended up getting the answer from Jesus that they didn't want to hear. You see this? The virgin birth could be known from scripture and they should have known.

Isaiah 7, 14. Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign, and you will hold a virgin, and shall have her seat, and bear her son, and shall call his name Emmanuel." Their minds, their blinders were on. They wanted to know nothing about what's going on around them. They wanted to know nothing about what... They were looking for reasons to not believe instead of looking for reasons to believe.

They were looking for reasons to walk away and to doubt Him. They were looking for reasons to hate Him. And they were stretching. They were trying to this scandalous situation. Now you see the leaders cast an insult on Jesus by implying that he's a illegitimate child of sorts.

There was a rumor in the day and it's written in the ancients that his father was a Roman soldier and so this is just scandal that had slipped across trying to discredit Jesus. They were basically asking Jesus what rank do you have And you can only imagine that the smug look on their faces when they put that card on. And They say this, thinking they have a beat now. The Lord Jesus does not insult them back. He doesn't insult them back.

And Jesus, you know what he could have done? The same thing that he did with the adulteress that was caught? He could have been down and he could have started writing their sins. He could have pointed at them and said, You, you've lost after your neighbor's wife, and you, you do this, and you, you do that. And he could have run across all of them, and he could have shot them out of the lifetime.

And he didn't. He didn't. He answers with a remark that must have just shocked them. And we can only imagine 1919 B.D. Santa, you know neither me nor my father.

If you had known me, you would know my father also. And so he was not surprised by their question. And His answer turns their confidence that they have into shame, into embarrassment. And this can be similar with us. People remind us of our past.

And I'm sure that we... You've been born again and you're living that life, I'm sure you had people question your present, right? It's like, yeah, I don't think so. I remember you did this and you used to do that. Well, maybe not people that are perfect, but there there are people who can take our past and they can throw it at us and they can say, yeah well I remember when you did this and I remember when you did that.

You used to be like this, you used to be like that. We have a different answer for that now. The person that they're talking about has died, that person is no longer around. We tell them that Jesus saved, that 2nd Corinthians 5 17, therefore if anyone is in crisis, new creation, Old things have passed away, behold all things have become new. See here Jesus tells the leaders they have no understanding of spiritual things.

That they're little babies spiritually. They need to go back to their scriptures and they need to tell you that the Messiah, they'll tell you that the Messiah is a foreign virgin, comes from Bethlehem, that's where Jesus came from. See this is a powerful truth for Jesus to diffuse this situation. We also can be confident in our identity. You and I, we can be confident in our identity.

When the devil uses something to shape our world and try to tell us that we're not, we cling to the Word of God. We tell the enemy that he doesn't know me or the transforming power of Christ. That he has no way of moving what God has done in us. And so even though I have sinned greatly before God, we have a great Savior, right? Ephesians 1, 7, in Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace.

And verse 20 says these words Jesus spoke in the treasury as he taught the temple, no one laid hands on him. No one could lay hands on him. And even six months later when they did lay hands on him and crucify him, they didn't catch him. He laid down his life, remember? No one takes my life, I lay it down.

And so this is his voluntarily laying it down. And then in verse 21, Jesus warns the crowd. This is powerful. And I'm gonna probably the next time I preach, I'll pick up here and go forward. But it says that he said to them, again, I am going away, you will seek me and will die in your sin, where I go you cannot come.

It's the first time that he condones them in saying so. He said again that in verse in John 7 33 and 34, he says again that he would go away from where he's going and they could not come. This is a reference actually to his death, his resurrection and ascension to the Father. And Jesus said, and die in your sin. This is to all those that were shouting, yelling at him in front of the crowd, all those that would reject him.

And that goes to everyone today. See, this text doesn't stop right here. There's not a line drawn boldly on the bottom of the text that stops this at this point. This transfers for the last 2, 000 years, and it'll go until Christ returns. You follow Him here or you go to hell.

You follow Him while you can and then you follow Him right to heaven or it's too late. This is to all those who reject Christ. And he repeats this even stronger in verse 24, but that's death for another time. So you ask yourself, if I have no interest in following Jesus now, if my life doesn't belong to Jesus right now if my heart and my drive My passion my affection don't go after Jesus right now Why would I want to go after him and follow him to heaven? Why do I want to do that?

It makes no sense at all. I want nothing to do with it here. Why would I want it in heaven? 2 Corinthians 6.2 For he says, In an acceptable time I have heard you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you. Behold, now is the day of salvation if you do not know Jesus now is the time and today is the day you receive him now and you can have your eternity known and you can follow Him right to glory someday.

You reject Him now, there's no guarantees. I'll put that off until I need to. Doesn't work that way. The reality of this truth is that those who reject Christ are going to suffer the consequences of sin. Eternal damnation.

And so do we follow Jesus just for fire insurance then? Or do we follow Jesus because he is worthy of all the glory and honor and worship and praise that we can give Him. That's why we follow Jesus. See, by refusing the light of the world, they doom themselves to everlasting darkness. The question is, are we in Jesus?

Are we bringing others to Jesus? What does this mean to us? There is this song that kept coming into my head as I was Going through this test And I put it I couldn't get rid of it. So I wrote it down I printed it off and it was written by Philip Bliss in 1875 and it is the light of the world is Jesus. It says the whole world was lost in the darkness of sin the light of the world is Jesus.

Like sunshine that new day his glory shone in the light of the world is Jesus. Like sunshine that no day is glory shone in, the light of the world is Jesus. And then it says in the chorus, come to the light, to shining for thee. Sweetly the light has gone upon me. Once I was blind but now I can see the light of the world is Jesus.

Jesus. Father, thank you for your word today. Thank you for the truth that it holds. I pray father God for our hearts and our lives to be transformed by the power of it, to be sold out for you, to love you more, to live for you, Lord God. To be bold witnesses unto what you have done for us, Lord.

I thank you for this day. I just pray that you