Wednesday, August 11, 2021 PM

The Lamp of the Body and the Light of the World

Looking at verses 33, 44. Luke chapter 11, verses 33 through 44. Let's begin with a word of prayer. Father, I thank you for the time you've given to us. You are a good God. What you do is good. I pray that you would help us to trust you in all things, to look to you for our provision, our daily bread, the sustenance we need for our life, food, clothing, and shelter.

But also, Lord, we look to you for the sustenance we need for every day, that you would feed us and quench our thirst and cover us as only you can through Christ and through your word about your Son. We ask that you would fill us with your Holy Spirit tonight, that our time in fellowshipping around your word and our praying for one another would be honoring and glorifying to you, and that you would have your way in our midst.

We pray these things for Christ's sake. Amen. All right, Luke chapter 11. Begin reading in verse 33. No one, when he has lit a lamp, puts it in a secret place or under a basket but on a lampstand, that those who come in may see the light.

The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body is also full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body also is full of darkness. Therefore, take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness.

If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, the whole body will be full of light, as when the bright shining of a lamp gives you light. And as he spoke, a certain Pharisee asked him to dine with him.

So he went in and sat down to eat. When the Pharisee saw it, he marveled that he had not first washed before dinner. Then the Lord said to him, Now you Pharisees make the outside of the cup and dish clean, but your inward part is full of greed and wickedness.

Foolish ones, did not he who made the outside make the inside also? But rather give alms of such things as you have, that indeed all things are clean to you. But woe to you Pharisees, for you tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs and pass by justice and the love of God.

These you ought to have done without leaving the others undone. Woe to you Pharisees, for you love the best seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.

For you are like graves which are not seen, and the men who walk over them are not aware of them. Well, I don't know how far we can get on that today. We recognize the image, the illustration of Jesus.

The lamp lit and set up high in the house. You don't put it under a bushel.

No, right?

Where do we find that illustration elsewhere in the Gospels? This is a totally different context. Same image, very useful image, but we find it in a different context somewhere else. Right after the Beatitudes.

You are the light of the world. You're the salt of the earth. Salt that's lost its savor is useless. And then you are the light of the world. You don't take the lamp that you've just lit, you filled it with oil, you trimmed the wick, you light the lamp, and you don't immediately put it under the bed.

You don't put it under a basket or underneath a clay pot. You put it up a little alcove that's been hollowed out of your adobe brick wall where you set your lamp. It's where everybody sets their lamp.

You go in, everybody has the same scorch marks on that. It's the same black little alcove. You stick your lamp right up in there, and you're trying to give light to all who are in the house. And Jesus was trying to make the point about his disciples.

He says, well, Jesus is the light of the world, right? But then we being with Christ and Christ being in us and so on, we are the light of the world. Now, in that, not everybody is a big fan of light.

My dad went on several mission trips to Mexico. And on one of the trips, the housing was going to be pretty sparse. And so the young men in the trip were very noble and said, well, we'll let the women have the dorm.

There's enough room for them to sleep in the dorm, enough beds in there. And we're all just going to sleep in the vans. I'd be more comfortable for them. They get the bathroom and so on. We'll stay out in the vans.

And so they go into this old dormitory building, and there's this light bulb in the middle, you know, the one that hangs down by wires and has a little chain on the side of it you pull. And so they went to the middle of the room, and they hit the chain, and the floor moved.

These Mexican cockroaches that had made this dormitory their domain did not care for the light. And they all ran to the only cover that they had, which was the beds. So the girls spent the night in the vans, and the young men played the valiant part and stayed in the dorm.

When Jesus says, you are the light of the world, he says this just after a passage about persecution, about those who would spitefully use you, those who would lie about you, those who would come after you.

Jesus is the light of the world, and we're to be the light of the world. We need to shine light on everything so that everything can be seen for what it actually is, so that everything will be seen for what it actually is, that a lie will be known as a lie, that the truth will be known as the truth, that righteousness will be known as righteousness, and that wickedness will be known as wickedness, so that everything will be put into its proper light.

Now, Jesus takes that very same concept and personalizes it here. Not the light of the world, but the light of your life. Yes, Jesus is the light of the world, and the church in him is to be the light of the world, but what about the light of your life?

What about the light of your soul? What about the light of your inner person? And just as he says, you know, in your own home, you put the light up so that everyone can see. He says, the lamp of the body is the eye.

Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your whole body is also full of darkness. Now, I have a question for you. Is Jesus talking about physical sight?

Now, certainly he's drawing on the notion. Now, if you have, if you're totally blind, you cannot see anything. You see no light at all. Can't see the images that are around you and so on. So obviously, there's a physical sense in which it's darkness.

But someone like Fanny Crosby had all the light she needed, and her eyes were, and her eye was perfectly, it was perfectly fine. She had a good eye of light. And I guess what Jesus is talking about, if your eye is good, your whole body is then full of light.

But when your eye is bad, your body is also full of darkness. You know how it is when, you know, if somebody, they just can't see it. I just can't see it. There's the expression in scripture, they have eyes, but they do not see.

Only ears to hear, but eyes that see. So, Jesus is going to deal with some Pharisees and later on some lawyers, which are the scribes, they're the ones who wrote on the scriptures, because they made so many copies.

And these Pharisees and these lawyers saw the world around them, but they didn't really see it. Their eye was bad. So when they looked at this issue of righteousness, or this issue of morality, or this matter of mercy, or this truth from the word of God, they would see it, but they really didn't see it.

And so, because their eye was bad, their entire lives were filled with darkness. The irony, of course, was that they were the leading lights of their society, and yet their whole lives were full of darkness.

So Jesus says, therefore, take heed, verse 35, take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, the whole body will be full of light, as when the bright shining of a lamp gives you light.

So there's certainly something to be said here about Christ using the example of a lamp and the house, the additional image that he puts on top of that one of the eye and the body. But his point, of course, is that your entire life is going to be in darkness unless your eye is good.

Now, who's the one that is really good at healing the blind? Jesus is. He is the one who goes around healing the blind, that they may see, and not only in the physical sense, but he also does so in the spiritual sense.

I don't mean to separate those so harshly. The Bible doesn't. In general, we are to understand our body and soul as one whole. We are created with that in mind. So it is a natural association that Jesus makes between the physical eye and the spiritual perception that he wants us to have.

Our spiritual orientation has a massive impact on our physical activity, and our physical activity has a massive connection to our spiritual goings-on. We were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which belong to him.

Right?

So, this seems pretty obvious. If somebody's eye is bad, then their entire life is in darkness. The eye has to be healed. The eye has to be restored. They must be given sight. And nobody can give themselves sight.

Certainly, we have Bartimaeus crying out, O Jesus, Son of David, asking for healing for his sight. But this is the situation that everyone is in. In Adam, whose eye went bad, we need the light of the world to make our eye good again.

The Pharisees' Blindness and Religious Minutiae

Now, of course, if you were to survey not only what I read about the Pharisees, but also the lawyers, you see that they have a great concern for what? What does it appear that the Pharisees and the, and even if you sneak ahead and look at the scribes, the lawyers, what do they seem to be very concerned about?

They want to be seen in a good light? What else? Washing their hands? Yeah. Okay, washing hands, being approved of.

They were deep into. Minutia.

Yes. Deep in the minutia. Minutia such as tithing, herbs. Okay, so washing hands. Why was that important? Why was it important to the Jews? It was ceremonial. It had to do with purity. Lots of instructions in the Old Testament about washing your hands.

Part of the Old Covenant, part of the shadows, God teaching his people about holiness, purity, and so on. Not something that was a terrible thing to do, right? I hope all of us wash our hands. Not a terrible thing to, you miss washing your hands.

Was Jesus here tempting God by not putting on a seatbelt? He didn't wash his hands. Didn't he know about bacteria? He made bacteria. But he didn't wash his hands. What is he doing? He's proving a point.

He's putting some stressors on the Pharisees to see what comes out. Their cup is full of minutia. And so when he jostles their arm, that's what comes out. They want to look good. They want to look like they've got it together.

There's a sarcasm alert in verse 41. He's dealing with the washing of the hands, verse 39. Now you Pharisees make the outside cup and dish clean, but your inward part is full of greed and wickedness. Remember what he's talked about already, what's inward, what's on the inside.

If your eye is bad, everything inward is dark. They don't know. So the light of the world is shining a spotlight into their dark dormitory to see what's there. And he said these are the best students of the Bible.

How did they miss that? Now verse 41 is the sarcasm. So rather than deal with the greed and wickedness inside, he says this is what you do, basically. But rather give alms of such things as you have. That's not a prescription.

That's sarcasm. Because he goes on to say you think that you make everything clean in your life by giving tithes and alms and so on and so forth. Because you even tithe your herbs, mint, rue, and all manner of herbs.

Now I don't go out to my oregano plant that may have survived, grab a handful of the stuff and then take aside a tenth and then drive down to Grace Rescue. So here's some oregano for your spaghetti. Now I could do that.

But if I did that and then did the Pharisee thing and social media-ed that and said, hey, look, I'm giving to the poor, and I virtue-signaled me doing that, is my life now clean? In other words, have I now made myself feel really good?

Now my whole life feels a lot better because I did this thing. This is what the Pharisees were doing. And Jesus is making a sarcastic remark. But he says, woe on that. He says, you pass by justice and the love of God.

These you ought to have done without leaving the others undone. Tithing is a good thing. Giving and tithing is a good thing. Giving to the Lord, giving to God, being generous. We have this incredibly fleshed out in the Word of God, yes, even the New Testament, that if the Christians were giving to the Lord the way that we're supposed to, then there would be a whole lot less problems in the world.

God's plan. Giving is fine. But you see, the Pharisees are in darkness, and so they're using religion as a covering to look good, rather than communion to love God, and they're stuck there. And so Jesus is being the light of the world.

Jesus Shining Light on Pharisaic Darkness

We'll look at this more next time. But Jesus is being the light of the world. How is he being the light of the world? He's our example. He tells us to be the light of the world. He just talked about how terrible it is for somebody who has a bad eye, who has no light, and they're stuck in darkness, and we need to be the light of the world.

How do we be the light of the world? By shining a light on the darkness. By shining a light on the darkness. And Jesus shines a big 10 ,000 lumen light on the Pharisees and the scribes by saying,.

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!

Why is he being so condemning? That's not nice. I don't think Jesus used the proper tone. Couldn't he have gone about this in a more winsome manner? He's shining light. He's being a light to those who are in darkness.

They had no idea.

They had no idea.

They were very confident in their standing, but they were very much in darkness, and they had no idea how blind they were. See, there's that kind of blindness when people know they're blind, and there's that kind of blindness where they're blind and they had no idea that they are.

And that's the kind of darkness that Jesus says that the light needs to be shined on. So, we'll look more at his approach next week. If the Lord wills. Okay, let's turn our attention to some prayer requests.