(John - Part 33): The Result of Rejected Light — A.W. Tozer

Again tonight from the book of John, and I am going to talk about the results of rejected life. John 8, verse 12, these words,. Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world. He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

Then in the 12th chapter, verse 46, the same book, Then come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness. And I want to support this by reading a passage from the 6th chapter of the book of Matthew, spoken by the same Lord, but recorded by a different evangelist.

Verse 23, our Lord says,. But, oh, we'll read verse 22,. The light of the body is the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.

Scripture as the Only Authoritative Light

If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness. The staid and straight-laced King James Version, to avoid punctuation, an exclamation point following the word darkness. We know that millions of words are printed, millions of words.

There is not one authoritative word ever published unless it comes from the sacred scripture. There is not one word published on the North American continent that I want to die by. If I knew that my evening, this was to be my last, and that I'd never preach another sermon or see another sunrise, there hasn't been a newspaper published anywhere in the world today that I'd want to see, a book published in 1954 that I'd want to read, there hasn't been a word uttered in the League for the United Nations that I would want to hear.

Everybody's writing, everybody's talking, but for dying men, there is not one word. Except in a sure, true, clarifying words stances, they're true words, true, they're clarifying words, they appear straight.

The word is not only true, it doesn't have anything to interfere, it doesn't have anybody whose favor he's courting. Completely frank is not the cynical language of one who, from his vantage point of safety, speaks with contempt to those who are not supporting him.

These are the loving, loyal words of one who backed them up. And now this one tells us authoritatively that we are in our by nature darkness. Then he tells us that he has come to be their light. He doesn't apologize, nor water it down, nor put any notes in the margins saying, I didn't quite mean that.

He tells us authoritatively that we are in darkness, and you are yourselves darkness, but I am the light of the world. We're not going to try to prove that. Faith doesn't prove anything. Faith believes or doubt rejects.

And he that hath not faith, I have nothing to say to him. But he that has faith will hear the words of God. And Jesus says, I am he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

The Darkness of Rejected Light

Now, that's what he tells us. He tells us that the light will not always have the light, because the time will come when there will be no light. Then it's possible to reject the light and shut it out.

And then he says, when that time comes. Now, that's not a question. It's put in the form of a question followed by a lightning flash. There are two degrees of darkness, according to our Lord. There is the darkness that has never had any light.

There is darkness that is the result of no light available. Behold them in their darkness, we sing. And we sing it correctly. They are in darkness because there has never been a sun to shine upon them.

And then there is another degree of darkness more intense than that, and that is the darkness that follows rejected light. The darkness of the night before the sun comes up is one thing. The darkness of the hermit who hides in his cave among the cobwebs and bats and who will not come to the light is something else again.

The man can see the dim silver star shining above, and he says, it is night and I fear to move lest I fall over a precipice or into a river or trample on a snake. I am afraid. I stand still. I have no light.

But there is hope for him because giving him a little time, the sun will arise. That's the darkness of the heathen. But the darkness of those to whom Jesus spoke was not the darkness of the man in the night who was waiting for the sunrise.

It was the darkness of the man who had fled from the sun up and was hiding in a moral cave, refusing to come out where the light could get to him. Look at Israel before the coming of the law. It was a nation before Moses' time and before that memorable and dramatic moment when the man of God went on to the mount among fire and smoke and cloud and the sound of a trumpet.

God had appeared to Abraham and the patriarchs had some light. There was the light of tradition handed down and God's requirements accorded with that dim light. And that is why some of the old patriarchs did things we wouldn't do today and that our Lord would not have them do, because God always takes into consideration the intensity of the darkness or the degree of the light.

And Israel before Moses' time. Jacob did some strange things. Jacob with his four wives. They knew from God about it. That was before the coming of the law. Abraham and the rest of them. They did not live the kind of lives that enlightened Christians would live, but they lived in faith and trust and obedience to the light they had.

Sinai, the Moral Law, and Human Accountability

Then came Moses and the law. Then came a sunburst of revelation on Sinai's mountain. And God told them about himself and about man and about man's relationship to God and the moral requirements of God and told them of the origin and the destiny of man and that man was made in the image of God and that he fell and that there must be a sacrifice.

They took that light and they had light such light as no nation had. Certain lights, surely. And the Greeks and the Romans and the Egyptians had light of an intensity and pureness of quality that no other nation had.

It was the very light of God revealed in the law. As soon as Israel received that light, they were responsible for it. Now, let me tell you this, my brother. If you imagine that going to church is something you can do with a shrug of your shoulders and a snap of your finger, let me correct that.

It isn't anything of the sort. When you expose yourself to moral light, you become responsible for that light and you become responsible to obey it. Therefore, going to church is not the casual thing it's supposed to be.

All these ads tell us, go to church. We see the ads here and there and some radio programs now close and say, go to church Sunday or synagogue or temple. And they want somebody to go to church. It's supposed to be a very casual thing.

My brother, it's not a casual thing. When Moses got the law on Sinai's mountain, they became instantly morally responsible for that law. It used to be in ancient days when I was for a short time in the Army of the United States, a high-ranking buck private, it used to be something they did that I don't know whether they do it now.

So if this doesn't fit what you know about the services, men, just remember that they would take a bunch of green fellows in there and they would listen through the works. And I remember when you pulled your hands down, everybody slapped these thighs until it sounded like thunder.

And immediately we were corrected and told to bring our hands down with a snap that never touched. I can still do it after all these years. But among other things that they told us to do was to listen to what they called the reading of the articles of war.

So you took a green rookie in there and he could knock a sergeant down if he got mad and there wasn't much said about him. He could disobey orders and they didn't do too much to him. But one day they lined them up and they read the articles of war.

And as soon as the articles of war were read, immediately they became responsible to military law. And any disobedience in wartime could have brought upon them not only the guardhouse and the military court-martial, but death itself.

Instantly. It only took a few minutes to read the articles of law. But they said, Now you're no rookies anymore. Now you're not innocent civilians anymore. Now you're responsible to the military. And from here on you're soldiers responsible to the military law, which in time of war is strict and rigorous in exactly the same way Israel could wander and sin.

And God winced in those days. But the moment God took Moses on the mountain and read to him the articles of morals, the moral law, they became instantly accountable to God and accountable to that law.

Israel’s Rejection of Revelation

I could tell you that the result was a nation of supermen got to attention and said, Yes, sir. And began to walk in obedience to the law. But I can't. I can tell you they did nothing of the sort. I can tell you that they followed their own lusts and affections.

And they broke that law time and time again until God rose up early in the morning and stretched forth his hands to them. And they would not hear. And God sent punishment upon them and scattered them like chaff to the ends of the world.

Look at the nations before the coming of our Lord. And if you can look at an old map, you'll see them there. Idumea, Achaia. Religions. One God. They got out of their own thinking. The light that lighteth.

In the sense that Jesus meant when he said, I am the light of the world. The very best they had was inadequate in the very worst. Welter of vice and superstition that took them as men and made beasts out of them.

And then came Christ and the light was shining. In the world, the light that lighteth every man. The light that gives a certain moral responsibility to every man. And to it the shining light from above.

Jesus Christ was that light. And for 200 years that light shined and shined during that time on all the civilized world. And men became responsible for what they saw. And men were responsible for what that light revealed.

And men are now responsible for what that light revealed. Think not of dispensations and changes of years in the passing of centuries. The light that will rise tomorrow morning to give light to the city of Chicago.

Shone on Abraham when he came out of Ur of the Chaldees. Yes, it had been old when Abraham took his family and left Ur of the Chaldees to go into a land which I will show unto thee, said God. And that light was old when it shone down on the bowers and flower gardens of the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve walked in sinless purity hand in hand.

Before they committed the tragic act that plunged the world into moral night. And it was old that the light that lights us to tomorrow or now and tomorrow out of that there. And a thousand years from now at the end of some millennium that light will still be the same light shining in the minds of men.

A pull of light through the eye, a photosynthesis causing the flowers to grow and the plants to behold the passing of the years and the change of history and the change of the maps. The rise and fall of kings and the fall and rise of empires hasn't changed the light that came when Mary gave birth to the son who was called Jesus.

He's shown back there and he shines now. Just as the sun as it moves round the earth may shine upon the roofs, the tile roofs of the homes of the rich or may shine upon the grass roofs of the home of the poor.

Shine on purity or shine on filth, may shine on poverty or shine on wealth. It is the same sun in continuum from the beginning since God set it in the heaven and said light the day. So there is a light that has come into the world.

Christ’s Light Remains Unchanged

In the passing of time and the new inventions penetrating the minds of man into change anything at all, the light still shines. The light shines on a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal.

A nation that is not very old in the long sweep of history. We call it America. We stand stiff at attention with our hands in front of us and our hat in our hand. The nation whose flag flies over every post office and schoolhouse before America was the light shone.

And after America has been dissolved in the flux of nations, the light will be shining. God forbid that any of us should live to see it. The heel of the oppressor tramps on the eastern seaboard and starts west to conquer our land.

The light will still shine. I am the light. The light is here. He is the light and there is no other light. Men called for other religions. Wells, before he died, called for another religion and said we ought to have another Bible.

And bought Bibles that were supposed to be a synthesis of all good things. I have held and tempted to buy and didn't. Bibles that were compounded out of all the high, fine, lofty parts of mankind from the beginning.

That doesn't change it. The light is still shining. And men can compile their little Bibles and die and the worms can crawl into their brains. That one time compiled a Bible that had no God in it. Come on, Palestine shines on Chicago tonight without diminution.

Dimming down of that light. I am the light of the world, he said. He that follows me shall not walk in darkness. He said it not to them there only, but said it to us here also. Says it not only in Hindu lands, but says it in America.

Says it not only among the Indians of South America, but says it among the white people of Chicago, Illinois. We're responsible. There is no avoiding it. Put ourselves down in argument all we want to.

The preacher, because he is a little too straight-laced, I take a beating all the time. I get letters as if they're not in print with stickers on me. I've got so I can grin and read them to brother magazine and say, listen to this one.

So I get letters, not from around here. I don't get letters from our people, I don't mean that. You don't write me letters, you call me up. But I mean, I mean I get letters from all over. Most of them, most of them, thank God, are good, favorable, warm-hearted letters telling me they're praying for me.

But once in a while there will be one that will really take the hide off. But I can't help it and I don't care. We're responsible for the light. And you can't hide behind differences of opinion. You can't hide behind modes of baptism.

You can't hide behind church politics. You can't hide behind philosophies. You can't hide behind this crazy relativity of morals or teaching in the schools. Now, you can't hide. He said, I am the light of the world.

Moral Rejection Rather Than Intellectual Doubt

And the light shineth in the darkness. And the darkness comprehends it not. He that follows me shall not walk in darkness. But if you quench the darkness and dim it down, how great are the light, how great will be the darkness.

It shines as the light from heaven from God. It is the light in the face of Jesus. You don't have to know a world of theology. When he gets up in the morning he can find his way to school with the light.

He doesn't have to be able to know the speed of light. He couldn't remember it until he got to school anyhow. He doesn't have to know how many millions of miles the sun is away. He doesn't have to know the size of the sun or how far the flames of light go from its surface.

He can tell us that, but he doesn't need to know it. He only needs to get up and in the light of it, walk to school. In the light of it, stay out from under trucks and cars. In the light of it, walk to school.

A farmer doesn't need to know much about the starry heavens above. When the weather's right and the season's right, he can plow and plant and then when nature moves on a little later, he can reap and store.

He only needs to know that. There is a light that shines upon the world and there's a light that shines on the hearts of men. He doesn't have to know all that can be known. Israel did not reject. They rejected the Lord for moral reasons.

Some of me say this. This has become one of the kind of things people attack me for saying. They write me in and say, Why don't you modify your statement? Wow, wow, wow. Oh, he's making flat statements.

Of course I am. And I'm telling you this, I'm making this statement. I don't believe there's anybody that ever rejects Jesus on philosophical grounds. He rejects Jesus on moral grounds. He rejects Jesus on philosophical grounds.

He's got a patent in equity. And he calls me or some other pastor up and says, I want an appointment. So we give him an appointment and says, I have intellectual difficulties about the Pentateuch. I have intellectual difficulties about Jomanius Quayle.

I cannot believe that the world is created in seven days. If he was an honest man, God in heaven would respect him. But my Bible tells me that when you preach Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost will take Jesus and bring conviction on man and convict them of sin and righteousness and judgment.

And I believe that every one of these that are hiding behind intellectual difficulties, hiding because they're morally unwilling to admit our sin, we can imagine and manufacture 10 ,000 syllogisms to keep us away from the cross.

When a person gives up his sin and puts his pride under his feet and looks to the light, the whole body and mind is flooded with light. The people that have come out of rationalism and unbelief and they smile at you with clear eyes and say, Oh, wonderful now, the light has flooded in.

Man can argue there is no sunshine, but when he gets his sight, the sunshine floods in. So Israel did not reject our Lord on doctrinal grounds, nor on philosophical grounds, really. And men reject him today.

In case any of you would want a bit of support further for what I've been saying, in John 3, verse 19, notice this. And this is the condemnation that light has come into the world, and men love darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.

For everyone that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest that they are wrought in God.

Now, if that means anything, it means that our Lord teaches that people who reject him, reject him for moral reasons. This is the condemnation that light has come into the world, and men love darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.

They didn't want to follow him. Israel not only disregarded the light, but Israel rejected the light. God called them stiff-necked and hard of heart. They had a perverse antipathy to the light because it interfered with their iniquity.

The Church Cannot Be Destroyed from Outside

And that is our difficulty today. ...more dangerous than communism to Christianity. I don't think communism is dangerous to Christianity. I don't think it is. I don't believe that communism can ever destroy Christianity.

If Christians lived like Christians, they couldn't destroy Christianity at all. Every time they killed ten, a hundred more came forward and said, kill me too. They did. History tells us that. When they were killing Christians, there were hundreds and thousands going into the land with a great Roman architect, who planned and built an amphitheater.

Beautiful, wonderful thing. He was the big architect of the day, Christopher Wren, that he signed, if you please. And the Lord decided that they would have kind of a dedication of the thing, so he said, get a lot of hungry lions and bring them in to the pit and loose them into the runways and we'll lead the Christians down and we'll have a gorgeous time looking at them kill these heretics.

So, they did. And they killed them one after the other. Of course, they were making a great deal out of this architect. And the architect was present and he walked down after they had slain the lions and chewed up a few Christians and the Christians had praised God and sang and died in their floods.

This architect walked up to the man, they always called him Sire, I never know where, but he said, Sire, I have a request. Give an order to have me thrown into the pit. The emperor said, are you kidding?

He said, I suppose you use other language, but he said, are you kidding about it? He said, no, I mean it. He said, why? He said, I belong to that despised cloud you're trying to wipe out. I am a Christian.

The famous architect was picked up and hurled into the arena and soon his genius was torn apart and released to God that gave it. And that kind of thing went on until the emperor began to get embarrassed and he said, what are you going to do with these fools?

You kill ten and a hundred more stand up. And they were rushing like flies and so they had to call it off. And he said, shush it down. Let's try to stay safe, but don't kill too many or the place is getting too bloody.

Christian blood was the seed that made the church grow. So I don't believe that communism can ever destroy the church of Christ. She can only destroy herself. We worry about the church behind the iron curtain.

My brothers and sisters, there have been periods down through the years when Christians met in damp basements among the flatworms and cobwebs and worshipped their God and then sneaked out to their job and that night like hidden again went to some hiding place and prayed and sang in a low voice and read what portions of scripture they could get and they kept the fire alive in the midst of the fiercest and most brutal persecution.

The fire of God can't be damped out by the waters of man's persecution. When the church is rotten inside, then she can die. If the church in Russia is dead today, it's dead not because of communism, though communism is from hell without any question about it.

But hell can't destroy the church. The gates of hell cannot prevail against it. I say if the church is dead, and I don't think it is, but if it is dead in Russia, it's because the Russian church, which is the Greek Orthodox church, had died from within.

The tree that's blown down in the storm is rotten in its heart or it wouldn't be blown down. And the church that falls because of persecution is a church that was dead before it fell. So I haven't much worry about communism.

Neither have I any worry about liberalism. Some of my poor, tired, brethren, faint yet pursuing, are still running after liberals. They've taken a pot shot at them wherever they can see them, out of the white of an eye, they're giving it to them.

I don't bother because they're dead anyhow, the liberals and modernists. And they can't kill Christianity. Liberalism can't kill Christianity. It tries it, but it can't. The liberal schools and seminaries and colleges always got a pest or two coming in to the registrar and saying, I'm a Christian.

I'm an evangelical. I believe the whole Bible. And they try to frown in a very cultured way, but they are very mad inside. And they say, well, you go on and get your classes and you may change your mind.

And he goes through and takes it all and comes out with his mind unchanged and goes out still a Christian. They don't like it because they don't know about it. And all we find everywhere, somebody that believes in God, somebody that's still true to God.

And the membership here this morning, young men who went through the fires of liberalism and modernism and has come out disgusted and stands up and says, I believe God. What are you going to do with a man like that?

You can't stop him. Liberalism can't destroy that kind of faith. I hate it. The atheists, the unbelievers, the pagan, I can go along with. He doesn't know any better. But the liberal, he's the man who has put his own eyes out.

And I have a much sympathy for him. But he can't destroy the church. For the faith of our fathers is an eternal fire that blazes in the bosom to believe in men. And whether they can ever get to a church or not it still blazes there.

How the Church Destroys Itself

Where does Christianity destroy itself in a given generation? It destroys itself by not living in the light, by professing a truth that it does not obey, by destroying the clutch between, the connection between their theology and their religion life.

I say that I believe that makes me a Christian. Oh, certainly I move in the direction of what I believe. So it is rottenness within. And it's well in refusing to walk in the light, refusing to let the light of God find and change my dirty little mess of iniquity where I lie.

Destroying the church. Love of money. Love of the world. Unconfessed iniquity. Private sins that nobody dreams we have. That's what's destroying the church of Christ. What the combined forces of hell can't do, the church can do.

It says that if we walk in the light, we have fellowship. And I am come a light into the world. Whosoever believes in me should not abide in darkness. Those are the words of our Savior. In the other text I read, I am the light of the world.

He that follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. But when the light that is in you turns to darkness, how great is that darkness. How great was the darkness when Adolf Hitler, who was raised in a Christian country, turned to the destruction of Europe and said, we'll conquer Europe or you won't know it.

And they didn't know it. You and I are still paying high taxes today and spending over food and money today to help to try to straighten up a continent that one devil-possessed man who had rejected the light brought upon the world of devastation and night and darkness.

And that slow-eyed little pot of color with the enigmatic monolithous smile they call Stalin, the man of steel. How much blood, how many gallons, how many seas and rivers of blood is he being boiled in tonight?

He was a Georgian and heard the gospel and studied for the ministry. Did you know that? Joseph Stalin. Vassal of Yugoslavia or something, was he named one? First I ever get to write the name. But that was his name when he called himself the man of steel, Stalin.

And he trampled the light of God under his feet and the blood of the Lamb under his right hand. Boom! He became the murderer of me. How great. Most sinners are not put in history where they can be so dramatic.

The darkness is just the same. And I tell you, there are many that are trampling under feet the truth that the heathen yonder are starving for the opportunity for deliverance. His closing words, it is, watch what you do with personal light, the light God has given you for your own guidance.

Personal Light and the Call to Obedience

Many there are in bitterness tonight, but sometime in a happier moment had life they didn't want to. Beaten and defeated and old before their time. Exhausted and betrothed, yet trying to live for Christ, but showing poor examples of what a Christian ought to be, yet hanging around the church, giving a little to the Lord's work and doing the best they can.

Back there, five years, ten years, twenty years ago, the clear light of God shined on them. Now things are whole, and have been. Both wish they weren't. They never say so. Babies, deaths, sickness, defeat, scourge.

Both trying to struggle along and be Christians. Thank God they are, and I hope they make it through, and I believe they will to be Christians. But back there, they disobeyed personal life, habits, relationships.

God has rebuked. The light has shone in and rebuked. You haven't done anything about it. If you ever try this, next summer try this. You'll remember it. You're in the country somewhere on a picnic or tramping around.

Roll a stone over it. A stone that's sticking up above the ground and you can handle it. Roll it over. Flatworms. And every kind of leggy and weird-looking insect. Miniature dragons. They'll dash in all directions.

Afraid of you? No, sir. Afraid of the light. They are the dwarfs in darkness. They are the vermin of night. They belong under the stone. When you turn the stone over, you panic them. They don't see you.

They're not afraid of you. They're afraid of the light. You ever have an old pageant house that has a basement in it? You go down in your basement sometimes. Big athletes and dancers. You'll find them down there.

Weird-looking little miniature devils. And as soon as you throw the light in, they duck for under the nearest place to hide. They're dwellers in the night. Always with a conscience that has learned to love its iniquity.

Every new flash of light panics them. But instead of coming out to the light and saying, here I am, my star, do as you see what you will, they hide under the nearest rock. Oh, I hear these optimists. Boy, man, are we filled with optimism the day in which we live.

We've got more people publishing statistics to show that we ought to immediately begin to make beliefs for we, for the largest percentage of our inhabitants, and make speeches in which they tell us statistically that there are more Christians in America than there ever have been, more people in the churches, more monks in the churches, and all that.

Can't fool me with statistics, brother. As soon as the light shines, ninety percent of those statistics run for under a rock. They hide under a rock because they're not going to obey Jesus Christ. They don't answer.

They reject his gospel for moral reasons, so they go to his church for social reasons. So what? The light. I mean that for me, too. I've got that to think about. You've got it to think about. He's given me the light.

He says, I'm the light of the world. If anybody follows me, he has the light of life. The light will go brighter underneath every last few days. You'll be my disciples. Where I am, there will my servants be, and my Father will honor him.

He says elsewhere, if you'll come along, if you've got to have your neck disfigured, and the pattern of your sins destroyed, and come into the light, he that loveth the light, he cometh to the light. He that doeth truth, he cometh to the light.

What about you tonight? That's all. Are you obeying the light that God has given us, too? Is there any unobeyed light? How dare you ask God for more light tomorrow morning, or tonight before you go to bed?

How dare you say, oh, God, lead me? How can God lead a stubborn man? Don't pray. Dare not pray. Oh, God, give me light. How can God give light to a man that hasn't walked in the light he has? I hope you're walking in it.

I have reason to know that many of you are. For those of you that aren't, I've been very bold tonight. I like that past, which is tended to be humorous, but it has a smile in it, because Isaiah writes it very bold, and says, except a remnant had been left, God would have destroyed his world.

So I've written very bold tonight, and I dare to tell you, there is a light that shines on us all. We're responsible for that light. That light gives itself up in Jesus Christ, who is the light of the world.

He calls us to walk in that light at our own expense, the expense of our sins and our nickel. He puts them away, and comes, and follows the Lamb.