The Christian Witness

 “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him.” (John 1:6)  

A new voice enters the fray, a human voice, the voice of a man sent from God. The Apostle assumes so much here: John didn’t come on his own authority. He wasn’t merely trying to explain his own religious experience. Here is a man sent by God to speak for the Almighty. John is a real man, with a real name, and He has real authority. He comes as a witness, to bear witness about the Light. 

Yet from the world, an immediate voice of skepticism cries out: “Why should we listen to this man? How do we know that he is for real?” The Gospel’s answer is as simple as it is direct: Like a man describing the sun, John speaks of a Light that you have already seen. None can plead ignorance. The Light has come and we have seen it; we have heard His voice. We no longer have the right to be atheists or agnostics. None of us do; God hasn’t left that bolt hole open to anyone. If we are honest with God and ourselves, what has been seen cannot be unseen.

In our gospel witness, we must remind unbelievers of this. Gently. Persistently. Firmly. We must deny them the right to rebuff what God says they know only too well: There is a Creator. He is God and they are not. They are hostile to Him, willfully ignorant of His person, glory, and the debt of gratitude that they owe to Him (Rom 1:18 ff). If we don’t start here in our witness, we run the risk of dignifying unbelief. As if there could be a justifiable rationale for a world denying its Creator. John patently believes such folly is absurd (John 1:10). Do you see how He puts these two ideas side by side? That is, that the world was made through Him (It did not come from nowhere. None of us are self-made men), yet the world does not know Him. The madness, the sheer ingratitude of unbelief!

This problem cannot be cured by religion, even the right religion. “He came to his own, and His own did not receive Him.” Let this thought sink in: Jesus came to the Jews, His own people, the people He redeemed from the land of Egypt. The ones He promised to come and rescue. He came to them and their hearts were closed to Him. They were not willing to come to Him. They did not receive Him.

But those who did receive Him, John says, to them God gave the right to become His children. What does it mean to receive Jesus? It means, John says, to believe in His Name, to put your trust in Him. This is vital. You can believe the truth about Jesus without actually believing in His Name. You can be convinced but not converted. For example, let’s say I was trapped at the window of a burning building. The firefighters arrive and raise a ladder to within a few feet of my window. The fireman stands in the cherry picker with his arms outstretched. “Jump into my arms,” he says. Now, I might believe that He could catch me. I might even believe that He will catch me. But until I jump out from the soon-to-be-gone safety of my window into his arms, I haven’t really put my faith in him. So it is for the believer and Jesus. We must believe the truth about Jesus. That is part of what saving faith does, but it’s not the whole part. The additional step is all important: We must commit our souls into the hands of Jesus. We must rest in Him as our ONLY hope of forgiveness, our ONLY hope of eternal life. We must not trust anything we do or feel; we must not even trust our faith in Jesus. We must simply trust Him with the sure and certain knowledge that if He fails us, we are lost forever. There is no other avenue of mercy. He must save and He alone.

Those with such faith, John says, are children born of God. This new birth does not flow through the bloodline of a family; that is, we are not justified by birth into a Christian home. This new birth does not come because of any decision we made in the flesh (“born not of the will of the flesh), nor does it come from the activity or choice of any human being (“born not of the will of man”). The new birth comes simply as an act of God (“but of God”). 

Jesus isn’t the only gift God determined to give at Christmastime. God also decided to give a hateful, hostile, hell-deserving world a new heart, a new start, and a new family. We wanted nothing to do with Him, but He undertook everything for us. At Christmastime this year, amidst all our gift giving, remember this: God loves a cheerful giver because He Himself is One. The birth, death, and resurrection of the Savior born in Bethlehem prove this.      Merry Christmas!