Reflecting the Light of Jesus

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If we could say this together—this is the vision statement that we… it’s not just a statement; it’s something we desire to live into. Can we say it loud and proud together?

Pursuing God and reflecting the light of Jesus to see burdens shared, joys multiplied, and love bridging differences.

This is a good one. Can you imagine, just for a moment, if the world was a place in which burdens were shared? Can you imagine a place where joys were multiplied—like people rejoiced with one another as good things happen and just multiplied? Can you imagine love bridging differences? Can you imagine the differences between people—between husbands and wives, and parents and children, and neighbors and nations? Can you imagine a world in which love bridges those differences, heals those divides?

This is the world in which we are pursuing. This is the world we want and desire, because it reflects God’s desire. And this kind of world will only be found in what we just sang—the realization that we were made to know and be known by God.

The purpose of our life—well, I’m getting ahead of myself. Here we go. That was point two or three.

Again, we’re in the season of Easter: 50 days—ten more days than Lent. And every Sunday is a celebration of resurrection. It’s a mini Easter where we remember what we declared on Easter: that we are dead to sin and fully alive to love.

We are alive. And when you are alive, you live, right? You live. And so we live. We live together. We live a life in union with Christ—a life that we were made to live.

God created the world. He made this beautiful garden. And you know what the purpose was? To live in it—to cultivate it, to enjoy God’s presence, and to enjoy one another’s presence in God’s presence, and to enjoy creation.

This is what our life is meant to be: lived, to be fully alive. The glory of God, as it says, is a human being fully alive. That’s what we were made for—to be fully alive.

And Christ has made it possible that all that sin—missing the mark, distorting love, distorting life—death has been put to death, and we’re able to live.

So that’s what this mission statement is all about. It’s about living, and it’s about inviting people into the life they were intended to live, created to live.

So again, the purpose of our life is to know and to be known by God, and to love and to be loved by God—to walk in the garden, to walk in the cities, to walk together knowing that we are loved, knowing that we are fully known and fully loved.

There is no greater joy than that—to be fully known, all that is in you, and to be fully loved, fully accepted, fully invited into relationship.

And so last week we talked about this—pursuing God together. Remember, this only happens together. I believe I’ve said this many times: your relationship with God is deeply personal, but never individual.

It’s a deeply personal thing, but you are invited into a family. You pursue God together. That’s what you were made for—you were made to pursue God in community.

And so it’s never an individual “you and Jesus” kind of thing. It’s a very personal thing, but it’s a together thing.

So that’s why we have “together” in our statement: we’re pursuing God and reflecting the light of God.

To pursue God is what you were made for—to become awake to God. And that’s what we talked about last week.

To pursue God—it’s kind of an oxymoron, right? Because God isn’t playing hide and seek with you. He’s not going far away and making Himself hard to find.

He might be playing hide and seek, but He’s right there, saying, “Wake up. I’m right here.”

It’s like playing with your little kid—you’re hiding behind your hands like, “Where am I?” Peekaboo. Yeah, you’re there.

So to pursue God is to become awake to a God who is already present and already in pursuit of you.

He’s right there. He’s reaching out. He wants to be with us. He is declaring and desiring to be with His creation—to bring us into relationship with Him.

And so we talked about that.

Pursuing God is how we find ourselves. That was the last point of last week—just reviewing here.

Pursuing God is not really a pursuit of a God that’s distant. It’s a pursuit of a God that is already present. It’s awakening.

And when we pursue God, we actually find ourselves. We find who we were made to be. We become fully alive into the human beings that we were made to be.

It is in relationship with our Creator that we come fully alive into all that we were made to be, and we fully experience the life that God intended.

So getting near with God is what we were made for.

As we do so, we’re moving—transitioning—into the second statement here.

Pursuing God is to be awake to the nearness of God and to soak in His life and light and love—to be near God, this God who loves you, knows you, and just wants you to be near Him.

And when you are near pure and perfect love, do you think you might get changed? Do you think you might be transformed? Do you think you might start to feel the healing and the release?

You might. You might die to sin and become fully alive and start living.

It’s interesting in Acts—you read the book of Acts—because Christ has been crucified, is resurrected, He is ascended, and now you have these disciples that were with Jesus for three years. They were just fishermen. They’re just normal guys, right?

And all of a sudden, they are risking their lives. They’re traveling across continents. They’re going into prison. They’re healing people.

And people recognized that these men had been with Jesus. That was the source of their transformation—the nearness with God.

They had been with the living God of the universe for three years, in person, in the flesh, and they were changed forever.

So if you pursue God, you get near God. You wake up to God’s presence with you and His work in the world. You start to be transformed. You soak up that life of God, and you become a bearer of that life.

And so we are to reflect the light of God—pursuing God and reflecting the light of Jesus.

I’m going to give a little bit of a summary of an article I read from Ligonier Ministries. As you may know, R.C. Sproul was the big figure there. He’s no longer alive, but I’m just going to summarize this.

Just to—the depth of light in Scripture is something you could spend months looking at.

In fact, it starts off in Genesis: “In the beginning, God said, ‘Let there be light.’”

So the first point here is, when we talk about light and reflecting light, the first thing we’ve got to get clear on is the source of light.

God is light. He’s the source of all reality and all life and all love.

Light originates in God Himself.

“Let there be light,” and there was light.

First John 1:5: God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.

Light is not just something God gives; it’s something that God is.

And this light represents a lot of things in Scripture.

First, light represents God’s holiness. And I like to describe holiness as wholeness.

To be holy is to be whole—whole in love. There’s no darkness. There’s no sin. There’s no failure or distortion of love.

It’s holiness.

Shalom is this idea—God created the world in perfect shalom: perfect peace, wholeness, perfect relationship between God and humans, humans and humans, humans and creation.

There’s a wholeness. There’s a perfection. There’s a holiness—a wholeness—to God.

So that is what the light of God represents: His holiness.

Also truth—light in Scripture represents God’s truth, His faithfulness. He’s never deceptive. He’s never going to betray you. He’s never going back on His promises.

He is fully faithful.

The light of God is also His life. It’s the opposite of death. It’s the opposite of chaos. It’s what brings life.

We have this idea of photosynthesis—things can’t grow, can’t exist without light.

So it is life.

Creation itself reflects God’s light—physical light, sun, stars.

It’s amazing to think about.

I think the concept of “God is light” is that all illumination comes from God.

All illumination—spiritual, moral, existential—comes from God.

God is the ultimate source.

Everything we want to know, everything we need to know, comes to light in the light of God.

And that’s beautiful.

Okay, so if God is light—and again, books could be written about it, and have been written about it—God is light. He’s the source of light.

Then who’s Jesus?

Well, Jesus is light as well. He’s the embodied revelation and saving power of God.

I was thinking about this—I was sharing this with a couple people earlier this morning.

Do you remember when you were a kid? Did you ever have a magnifying glass and take the power of the sun and concentrate it—let it shine through that magnifying glass—and then try to start fires or torture ants with that beam of light?

I don’t know what you would do with it, but the point is—yes, yes—the idea here, though, is: what’s that magnifying glass doing?

It is taking the brilliance, all that power of the sun, and concentrating it into one specific focal point.

And I think Jesus’ life—His incarnation—is that concentration of God’s light, life, and love.

When you look at Jesus, you see God. You see a concentration, an embodiment, a powerful concentration of that life and light.

And thankfully, God didn’t use Jesus as a cosmic laser beam to burn things. He becomes a cosmic ray of healing.

You come into contact with Jesus—the concentration and embodiment of light—and it shines into your life. It changes you. It transforms you. It brings life out of darkness.

So when Jesus says, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12), “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life,” He’s claiming divinity.

“I am the light.” God is light. “I am the light of the world.”

He’s claiming to be the source of life and the source of salvation.

First John 1:4–5—I love this:

“In Him was life, and that life was the light of humanity. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

And Jesus is the concentration of God’s light.

Jesus reveals God’s glory, dispels darkness—sin, ignorance, distortion, betrayals of love that lead to death.

And so this light—I love this idea of light—it’s not neutral.

The concentration of God’s life, light, and love is not neutral. Jesus is not neutral.

It exposes and heals.

Light exposes what’s hidden and heals what’s hurting and broken.

It reveals all that’s unloving in us.

If we would allow the full light of Jesus to illuminate our lives, we would see everything.

But you know what’s beautiful about it? And I keep bringing her up—the woman at the well:

“Come and see a person who told me everything I ever did.”

That’s the light of God shining into her life.

And is she bummed about it? Is she ashamed? Is she guilty?

No—she’s overjoyed.

Because the light of God that reveals everything harmful and hurting in her has also healed it.

As it’s brought to light, it’s healed in the light.

And that’s what being in the light is all about.

Everything exposed, revealed—that is killing us, that is hurting us, that is breaking down relationships, that is breaking down shalom in the world, that is preventing everything in our life from being all that it’s meant to be, from being fully alive—is exposed, and then it is healed.

All right, so that brings us to us.

Foothills Fellowship—on the tramway and Candle area—reflecting the light of Jesus.

The light of Jesus is the concentration of God’s light in humanity. You and I are both receivers and reflectors.

We’ve had that concentration of light—that laser beam of light—shine into our hearts. We’ve received it. We’ve been exposed, and we’ve been healed. We’re being healed.

And now we get to participate in extending that light into the world.

What becomes true of Jesus as the concentration of God’s light becomes true of His people.

That’s amazing, if you think about it.

Are we called Christians? Yes—little Christs, little bearers of light, little magnifying glasses of God’s love, light, and life shining into the world.

Not to burn ants, by the way, but to bring healing and restoration.

I love this—2 Corinthians 4:6:

“For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made His light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.”

Man, that’s awesome.

Ephesians 5:8:

“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.”

So this isn’t only just a metaphor—it’s literal participation.

We don’t just receive light; we become bearers of it.

It’s like when I took my daughter to—have you ever been to indoor miniature golf? It’s black light, and it’s weird.

We went in, and it’s dark, and everything’s glowing neon. Every spot and stain on your shirt is exposed. Talk about the light and the black light of Jesus.

But they have these balls that glow in the dark, and you’ve got to recharge them, because their light is not their own.

I don’t know the science behind it—I’m sure someone in this room does—but every couple holes, you’ve got to put it in this tube.

And once it comes out of the tube, it’s bright, it’s glowing. You play a couple holes, and it dims, it dims, it dims. And you’ve got to put it back in the hole.

So this light is a derivative light. It’s a light that comes from being with the light—being in the presence of the light, being awake and near to the God who is near to us.

And as we receive it, we glow—like the face of Moses. We bear that light, but we stay near the light.

So we receive the light, and we become bearers of the light.

Christ’s light shines through the church. Together, we are a city on a hill.

“Let your light shine.”

We often think of that in individual terms. Again—personal, not individual.

If you drive—one of my favorite things to do is to drive over, coming from a long road trip, usually from Phoenix—you come back into Albuquerque, and you come up over Nine Mile Hill or whatever, and you see all the lights of Albuquerque.

It’s one of the most beautiful things.

If I saw one little light, I wouldn’t even be able to see it. It wouldn’t be impressive.

But the collective effect of all the light shining in the city of Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, is glorious.

And that is what we are to be as the people of God.

It is our collective light—together pursuing God and reflecting the light of Jesus—that is like the welcome of Albuquerque lights for a hurting world.

Coming out of a dark road, coming from Arizona—“Oh, we’re home. There’s life. There’s civilization. There’s food. There’s my bed. There’s comfort. There’s invitation. There’s home. There’s shelter.”

I’m almost done.

And so that’s what we are as a people—a community of reflected light, carrying Christ’s presence into the world.

So what does it mean to reflect the light?

Review, and then we can eat:

God is light—He’s the eternal source of life and holiness, wholeness.

Jesus is light—He’s the concentration, the incarnate revelation, the saving power of God in a particular place, concentrated in a particular time, in a particular person.

And now we become light—bearers of light, the reflected presence of Christ in a dark world.

So we are called to walk in the light, to reflect the light and love of Jesus into the world, to be that concentration of God’s light and life and love—to be a healing presence in a hurting world.