Yesterday morning we talked a little bit about Christ-likeness, not only that the Lord has made us like Himself as to our acceptance, and one of these days is going to make us like Himself completely, even physically, but that He has a plan for us now that He would like for us to be more like His Son now. I believe that's his aim and plan. I think that's the embodiment of everything that God has for us. Not so much our service, though anyone who is like Christ will be a good servant, but that we might be like him. When he chose his twelve... He says he chose them that they might be with him and that they might go out and preach. But we need to have time with him. Now I'd like to get some handles on this thing this morning so you can take it home with you. I don't think truth is much good as long as it's just between your ears. Mr. Aaron O'Brien used to say most of the truth which the people of God know. needs to be lowered about a foot from your head down to your heart. Because if you get it into your heart, then it will come out through your feet and your hands. This is very practical. The fact of the matter is I don't know of any other kind of truth in the Word of God. I know a man who was invited one time to hold some meetings in a certain place and they asked him to preach separation truths. Well, he said, what other kind is there? All truth has a sanctifying, separating effect on the people of God. If you really know the Lord and you learn what he's like, and that's our scene in First John, the Lord Jesus came from the Father to reveal the Father so that you and I might have fellowship with him and with the Father. And as we have fellowship with him, Why, of course, we'll become more like Him. Now, there are two ways in John's epistle in which the Lord Jesus reveals the Father to us. First of all, as light and then as love. The Lord willing, I should like to take up the former this morning and save the good one until the last. We all enjoy thinking about God as love. and about how we may show the love of God to others. But we need light, and we need to live as children of light. Let's go into a little bit this morning. Well, this is a big subject, and if you question that, just pick up any concordance, even a crudence. And notice how many, many times light is mentioned in the Bible. Begins right on the first page of your Bible. The first thing that God did was to say, let there be light. Because God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. And God has nothing to do with darkness, not even physical darkness. In fact, he says the light in the dark are alike to him. And he wipes out the darkness. and he gave light before he ever went ahead with the rest of creation. And then light is used symbolically all through the Old Testament. The oldest book in the world, the book of Job, I was amazed to find this full of references to light. Look in your concordance and see how many times the book of Job talks about light and symbolically, showing us that light is is God-like, that light stands for revelation of God, revelation of the will of God, that light stands for things that are good, in contrast to the darkness of evil, and the powers of darkness, and even the result of sin, because we're told there's the blackness of darkness forever. Well, this is a big subject, and I don't expect to even touch it this morning. I'm sure that most of you who are acquainted with your Bible will wonder why I didn't refer to this scripture or to that one. Let me suggest that when a scripture comes to your mind about a subject that's being spoken on, that you jot down that scripture, because the Lord may be giving you a little more light to go with what you do have. It's as we add these things together, that we get to know more and more of God's ways. That's comparing spiritual things with spiritual. Now the Lord Jesus himself is presented to us in the New Testament as light, and especially by John. Look at John's Gospel a little bit, first of all, this morning. John chapter one. After this wonderful and profound statement about the word, we're told in verse four, in him, that is the Lord Jesus Christ, in him was life, and the life was the light of man. Now this is the eternal life of God. In Christ is the light of man. And the light shines in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. The same came for a witness to bear witness of the light that all men through him might believe. He was not that light, capital L. Although the Lord Jesus said in the fifth chapter, in verse thirty-five, I think it is, that he was a burning and shining light. John was a light with a little letter L, but he was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light. That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And then the Lord Jesus said in the eighth chapter about himself, And at verse twelve, then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world. He that follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. So the Lord Jesus is the true light. The Lord Jesus reveals to us God as light. And if you think of the life of the Lord Jesus, you'll know what light is like. You'll know the absolute righteousness of his life. You'll know that in him was no sin, that he did no sin, that he knew no sin. You'll know that the Lord Jesus Christ was transparently for God. There was no dual motives. There was no second reason for what he did. We find it very difficult to trust men, and even as Christians sometimes we find it a little difficult to trust one another, because we're not right sure what's back of all this, just what is the motive. And I'd like to suggest to you that we have no right to question motives. Only God can judge motives. Love thinketh no evil. Maybe we'll get taken a time or two, but you'll be far better off if you trust your fellow Christians so far as you possibly can. But in the case of our Lord Jesus, you never have any question as to His motives, you never have any question as to his actions. He was light. There was nothing shady, nothing questionable. He was light. But now the Lord Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, in the fifth chapter of Matthew, ye are the light of the world. While John was not the true light, he was a light. In order to be a light, you have to be both burning and shining. Burning means being consumed. Shining means giving off light. John was a burning and a shining light. You and I are light in this world. He says in the second chapter of Philippians, Among whom ye shine as lights in the world, there may not be much light where you work, except the light you give. There may not be much light in your neighborhood, except the light that shines from your dwelling. I think Brother Tatham mentioned something about the difference between the people of God and the Egyptians in his prayer this morning. Somebody did anyway. Do you know what the difference was? Well, in the land of Goshen, the children of Israel had light in their dwelling. We as people of God have light in our dwelling, and it ought to make a difference. It doesn't always, but it ought to. Your home ought to be different from the homes of the unconverted. There ought to be distinguishing features about your home, and those features ought to have to do with Christ, the light. My father only preached once on the platform, and everybody felt terribly sorry for him. He had been a vaudeville performer in his younger days. He had spent a good bit of time on the stage, an entertainer. song and dance man in between Acts and Vaudeville. Yet when he got up to preach, he just fumbled and stumbled around until everybody was glad when he sat down, including himself. But my dad had a wonderful gift. I heard a number of preachers say that they envied my father his gift. He could get a conversation on the Lord's things with anybody. and make them believe that they thought it up. And they'd kicked themselves all around the place for ever mentioning the subject. He was so subtle in getting the subject around to where he could talk about the Lord. And his work necessitated our moving around. And I don't remember a time when we ever lived in a neighborhood that we didn't see some of the neighbors saved. My mother was a good old Dutch cook. You just can't beat Dutch cooking. And my dad used to say, well, now let's have the Joneses in for dinner Sunday, and then we'll have a little Bible reading with him. Well, you know, when you're full of dinner, you feel sort of open and mellow and ready to listen to what people have to say. And mother certainly could make them mellow, and then my dad could pump in the words. Try it sometimes. You ought to be light in your dwelling. You'd be surprised how many of the neighbors you could win for Christ if you showed a genuine interest in them. My wife and I have had a wonderful time with the students in Colorado College, foreign students, especially. You'd be surprised how many foreign students there are. If you live in a neighborhood of a university, for goodness sakes, investigate this. We're missing a wonderful chance. We have thirty-five thousand of the choice foreign young people in our country, going to school. At an intervarsity conference where I spoke recently, a young fellow said my only regret, as I go back, he was a Mohammedan. My only regret as I go back to my country is that I have never had opportunity to get inside of an American home. And he studied in this country for three years. All you need to do is call up the registrar at the school and ask if there are any international students there who would like an invitation out to your house and then hold the door open and stand back because then they'll come. They love the chance to get into these homes. Of course you'll have to have some cigarette trays, ice trays, sitting out. You can always air the house out. You don't have to worry about what people will think if they walk past and see a bunch sitting in your living room smoking. Don't be so self-righteous. Let them come in and make them at home. You don't have to smoke with them. Just make them at home, in your home. Let there be light shining from your home. And then you'll be surprised how open they are to the Word of God. There ought to be a difference in our homes, for we are light in the Lord. But now let me read a little bit in John's gospel or epistle about this light. In the second verse of the first chapter, which is a parenthesis, We read these words, For the life was manifested. Now we were told in John's Gospel chapter one that this life is the light of men. The life was manifested. That's one of the wonderful things about light. You can't hide light unless you enclose it. There are two ways that we as Christians are warned about hiding our light. Putting it under a bushel or under a bed. I suppose the bushel stands for our business and the bed stands for our own ease. You can hide your light that way, but you couldn't possibly have light in a room and have darkness with it. There has to be a partition between. There's no fellowship between light and darkness. Darkness does not smother the light, but light dispels the darkness. And the Lord Jesus came into this world as light. And the only way that men could avoid seeing the light, which he says was manifested, was by closing their eyes. We have a proverb, there are none so blind as those who will not see. And the Lord Jesus said, ye will not come to the light. And he said in the third chapter of John that they love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. The life was manifested. Light shines out. So this life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us. Verse five, this then is the message which we have heard from him, literally, from the Lord Jesus, and declare unto you that God is light. and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth. This is false profession. But you say, he says we. Well, he's taking in all profession. But there are some who say, but their lies do not show it. but if we walk in the light now this is not perfection of living this is honesty of living this is coming into the light the Lord Jesus said you won't come to the light because you love the darkness and you don't want your deeds to be manifested I like to say then that I believe the first requisite If you and I are going to manifest the light of God, if we are going to be light bearers for Christ, the first thing is we'll have to come into the light. I'm not speaking now of conversion. I'm not speaking now of our becoming the children of light. I'm speaking of our being willing to come into the light. We're not honest. At least I'm not. We're just not honest. We're just a bunch of hypocrites. We love to go to a meeting and go to a conference and put our best foot forward, best feet forward, and get a nice smile on our faces and make everybody believe that we're just happy, happy, happy all the time. And then any honest soul is terribly discouraged because he says, well, I'm not as happy as the rest of those folks. Yes, you are. You're just about average. We're not honest. Whenever we hear somebody honest in confession, we're almost shocked, aren't we? You hear somebody get up in the prayer meeting and really tell God the truth, we all sort of look around at each other nervously and wonder, what are we coming to here? I attended a meeting one time. It was a terrible ordeal. When I was a young man, I was so discouraged over it that I thought I was just going to leave the Christians there and and go over to some neighboring church where they never had any trouble. And I began to study the Word of God to get reasons for going, because I knew my dad well enough, I'd have to give him a scriptural reason for why I was going to make the change for the first time in my life I saw why I should stay. But anyway, I attended a meeting, and the meeting was called for the purpose of settling a row among the Lord's people. And usually meetings to settle rows end up in a bigger row than you had to start with, because the flesh within us simply means that we're there to have our own way. But there was one godly man in that group. I don't know if there are any others, but there was one. He wasn't the blame for anything. And everybody knew he was not to blame. But he said we ought to pray first, brethren, and he got up to pray. And he told the Lord that he was responsible for the whole thing. He says, these Christians wouldn't have been fussing with each other if I'd been praying for them like I should. And the tears streamed down his cheeks as he told God how responsible he was. You know, we never got the old route settled, but it just didn't look as big. After he got through... And we didn't have any new one. There were quite a few prayers of confession before we left there. As far as I can remember, that's the first time that I'd ever seen any real honesty in that meeting. You're not going to get right with the Lord unless you're honest. You've got to face the light. What you say, I'm afraid to face it. Well, God already knows all about you, and you might be surprised how much your brethren and sisters already know about you. They're just too polite to say so, too. If we would get into the presence of God in genuine, heart-searching, read the hundred and thirty-nine Psalms. That's what God put it in the book for. The psalmist was very uneasy at first. He said, Oh, Lord, there's no place I can go to get away from me. But after he thought it over, he thought it was a pretty good thing to have the Lord search him out. And so he said, Go ahead and do it again, Lord. Search me. See if there be any wicked way or motive in me. Go right down to the root of this thing. That's first. Then the next thing is we need to associate with the light. We need to spend time with Him who is light. I'm interested in rocks. I'm not a rock hound, but I wish I had time to be. I really enjoy learning what I can about rocks. They're the oldest things, you know, in our world. Today we're going up to see these wonderful big old trees, but they're just infants. compared to the rocks, for the rock is part of the original creation of God. God made these rocks, I don't know how long ago, and I'm very interested in them. Some rocks have a property which we call fluorescence. The word comes from one particular stone known as fluorite, which really isn't as fluorescent as a good many other kinds of rocks. You can use any black light, ultraviolet light, X-ray, or any such rays, and you can bring out the fluorescence in rocks. In other words, the light brings out certain things in the rock, which you didn't know were there. Some of them good, some of them bad. but then other rocks have a property known as phosphorescence, which means that they not only can be revealed by the light, but they can absorb the light and give it back later on. We use certain of these minerals to paint the hands on our watches, the dial numbers, and they absorb during the day or during the evening when the lights are on, enough of the light so that they can give out light. Now, they're not luminary bodies. They're just batteries. They're just storehouses. They store up light, and then they give it out. If you and I would spend a little time with the Lord Jesus before we go out to meet our fellow men, we would be phosphorescent. in our spiritual life. Do you know why it is that we don't talk about the Lord Jesus? The Bible says, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. Mr. Gibbs was telling me one time about a young man. He said he was a very capable and intelligent young man, but you couldn't get a peep out of him about spiritual things. He'd sit as dumb as an ox in a young people's meeting and never say a word. Just grunt when you'd speak to him. And he said, I was exercised about it, and I said to him, you know, you really should be able to take more part than you are. No, he said, I just can't do it. I just can't talk. But he said, one night after the young people's meeting, I heard that young fellow cut loose, and all of the young people gathered around him, and he was telling them all about the sport cars. Man, he knew all about them. He knew all about horsepower. He knew all about four-barrel carburetors. Why, he said, every time that young man opened his mouth, you could hear the grinding of gears and smell the exhaust. And he said, I saw what was the matter. That young man's heart was a garage. He didn't have anything of God in him. He was soaking up cars all of his spare time. Therefore, he could talk about nothing but cars. What are you soaking up? Now, I don't mean talking religiously. There are some folks who think that you have to say something religious. There's a lot of difference. But if your heart is filled with Christ, and you can say a little word about Him, you don't know what it might do for some of your fellow Christians. And then the last thing is, we should not only face the light and associate with the light, but we should manifest the light, too. How do we do it? Well, let me read a verse or two to you. Look at Ephesians chapter five. Ephesians chapter five and verse eight. For ye were sometimes darkness. That means at one time. Now, this is true of every one of us. You may have been a very fine little boy as you grew up in Sunday school, but you were still darkness until the Lord gave you light. For you were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord. Walk as children of the light. Walk as children of the light. Be honest in your business dealings. for God is honest. Be careful of your morals, for God is good. Be kind to your association, for God is kind. Walk as children of light. Be like your Heavenly Father. Be like the Lord Jesus Christ. But you say, I don't seem to be able to do it. Yes, but He has put within you a new power. The Holy Spirit of God, indwelling you as a believer, will reproduce the Lord Jesus Christ in your life so that it is not simply the imitation of Christ, but the outliving of Christ from a believer who loves Christ. Walk as children in the light. Look at Philippians, second chapter of Philippians. Verse fifteen, that ye may be blameless and harmless, that is, unmixed and unalloyed, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world. I'd like to call on you this morning, brothers and sisters, to go back home as luminaries. It'll be a wonderful thing to shine as the stars in glory. It'll be a wonderful thing if you shine a little bit like a star here in this present world, for the light is needed here. And you may be all the light that the poor dark world where you live will ever get.