Following the Light of the World

Until we come to saving faith in Christ, we remain lost in the darkness of sin and condemnation. Today, Sinclair Ferguson reflects on the verses of Scripture that were instrumental in opening his eyes to the light of the world.

Welcome again to Things Unseen. This week, I thought it might be stimulating for all of us if I reflected on some of the texts in Scripture that have seemed like dots on the blank page of my life. And when I join them up together, I’m helped to see something of the pattern of God’s providences in my life. I hope, perhaps, that you’ve already started thinking about passages that have shaped your own life. The texts I’m thinking of are great texts, and that’s another reason I wanted to share them. It just so happens that they’ve meant a lot to me, in particular. Yesterday, I mentioned the first words that seem to leap off the pages of the Bible to me, John 5:39–40. Today, it’s another verse from John’s gospel. It was the text of the sermon to which I look back as marking the point of my coming to faith in Christ.

The verse is John 8:12: “Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’” As it happens, the sermon was preached in the same church in which I was ordained to the ministry of the gospel some eight-and-a-half years later on, but that’s another text I’m going to mention later in the week.

I’d been what our forefathers would’ve called awakened, but not yet converted. I hadn’t been seeking after Christ, but now I was. And, as those same forefathers would’ve said, I’d come under conviction of sin. The details don’t concern us here, but in essence, what happened was this: I knew I wasn’t perfect—and we all do, don’t we? I knew that I did specific things that were wrong and failed in various ways, and yet I was doing my best and doing my best to keep the commandments from my youth up, as the rich young ruler said.

I think I could put it like this: I knew I sinned sometimes, but I didn’t think of myself as a sinner. I shared the natural man or woman’s view of themselves, assuming that the divine report card probably read something like this: “Basically more or less satisfactory but could try harder and do better.” But now, I was discovering not just that I did sinful things, but that I was a sinner. In other words, the sin wasn’t just in my actions, it was woven into the warp and woof of my life. Sinner was what I was. Basically, before God, I wasn’t satisfactory at all.

If you know and have experienced what I’m talking about here, you’ll understand, I think, what I’m about to say. Having read the Bible since I was eight or nine and tried to live a decent life, thinking that’s what it meant to be a Christian, this discovery that I was actually a sinner by nature—not just someone who occasionally lapsed—it came as a tremendous shock to me, and it shook me to the foundations. That’s the only way I can express it.

I now began to realize I’d seen myself entirely from the wrong point of view—my point of view—not God’s viewpoint. I was seeing myself in terms of whether I was as good as the next person. I wasn’t thinking about myself coram Deo, as we sometimes say, standing before the face of the holy God. And now, I was having a kind of miniature version of the experience Isaiah describes in Isaiah 6. I know I was only fourteen coming on fifteen, but I really felt undone. And I now realized, to use Jesus’ words, that the light I thought was in me was actually darkness.

And it was then that some older friends suggested I go to a city center church in Glasgow, to a service on a Saturday night, and I did. And during the sermon, Christ was presented to this fourteen-year-old boy, who was conscious he was in spiritual darkness, and Jesus Christ spoke to me again: “I am the Light of the World. Follow Me, and you’ll no longer walk in the darkness.”

I came to understand why Wesley wrote as he did in his own conversion hymn:

And can it be, that I should gain An int’rest in the Savior’s blood?

Long my imprisoned spirit lay Fast bound in sin and nature’s night; Thine eye diffused a quick’ning ray, I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth and followed Thee.

You know, I don’t think that the Lord Jesus meant that we’d never experience any dark days in life if we’re Christians. You couldn’t read the rest of His teaching or the teaching of the Apostles and think that, could you? He wasn’t promising that life would be plain sailing. No, He meant what David discovered: that even when we walk through the valley of deep darkness, He is with us, so it’s never totally dark. There’s always light. We may not even be able to see as far as the end of the tunnel, but we can see Jesus, and He’s promised to be the light of life to us and guide us through the darkness, for He alone has gone into the outer darkness of the cross for our sins and dispelled total, final darkness from our lives.

And so, as Charles Wesley says, and millions of others can say, “I rose, went forth and followed Christ.” I hope you have too. He’ll never leave you. He’ll never forsake you. He is the Light of the World. So, make sure you’ve come to Him and that you’re trusting Him as your Savior and following Him as your Lord. And if you are, look back with thanksgiving today for the way He brought you, too, to come to trust Him.