Some years ago, I attended a conference at which one of the keynote speakers was Jack Kemp.  While Jack has been out of the public spotlight for a while, many of you will remember that he followed a long and successful career as a professional football player with a long and successful career in politics.  After serving 17 years in the House of Representatives he served in the White House as the first President Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.  What I most appreciate about Jack Kemp is that in the murky world of politics he distinguished himself as a man of character and integrity.

 

    Kemp’s speech at the conference I attended focused on the myriad problems that we as a nation are now facing as a result of what he called our society’s “moral ambiguity.”   He said, in part, “We face a crisis deeper than crime, deeper than the economy and much higher and bigger than political partisanship.  We face a crisis of confidence in our very own ideals.  It is the very strip mining of our ideals, which leaves men and women and particularly our children unable to believe in anything.  The answer to the tears and the fears of mankind is the law and the love of God.”  Then Kemp concluded, “All mankind’s problems are answered in the life of a babe born in a manger.”

 

    Now, let me say that it’s been my experience that those are the kinds of statements that tend to elicit loud, “Amen’s,” from Christians and scornful chuckles from non-Christians.   “Oh, there you go again with that, ‘Jesus is the answer,’ nonsense.  Don’t you realize that the problems we face today can’t be solved with trite little responses?  ‘Jesus is the answer,’ doesn’t make our streets any safer.  ‘Jesus is the answer,’ doesn’t pay my bills when I lose my job.  ‘Jesus is the answer,’ doesn’t stop the slaughter in Darfur.  When are you going to grow up and get real?”

    And, in a sense, those kinds of accusations are right.  The truth is, we can sit in our churches and study the bible and sing praise songs all day long and the problems of the world are still going to be there.  But that doesn’t invalidate Mr. Kemp’s premise—namely, that beneath the surface of all of these terribly difficult problems…crime, poverty, injustice and so forth…there is a deeper and more significant problem that is eating away at our very humanity and leaving us empty and hollow on the inside.  It’s a crisis of meaning; a sense of worthlessness; a nagging sense that life itself has no grand purpose. And it’s this most fundamental of all of life’s struggles that really is perfectly answered by Jesus, the “babe born in a manger.”

It breaks my heart to know that people, right here in Petaluma, go to bed hungry at night.  It’s why I’m involved in our pantry ministries.  But the truth is, you can be exceedingly well-fed and still feel empty inside.

What’s more, you can live in a safe and secure neighborhood and still go to bed every night with a nagging sense of uneasiness about your life.

You can have a spouse and a family and a career and a nice car and a house and still live with a sense that there’s got to be more to life than this…that something is missing from your life.  

And if that’s all you have, there is something missing.  We were created, every single one of us, to be connected to God through a personal relationship with His son, Jesus.  And until that happens for us there will be, about our lives, a sense of incompleteness a sense that something is missing.

To that end, I’m beginning, today, a new series of messages that I’m calling, “Fresh Encounters with Jesus.”  We’re going to spend the next several weeks walking through the Gospel of John…that gospel written by one of Jesus’ closest and dearest friends.  

And my goal for this journey is two-fold:  for those among us who don’t yet know Jesus, I’m hoping and praying that you will know him by our journeys’ end.  

And for those of us who do know Him…even those of us who’ve known Him for a very long time…I’m hoping and praying that we will be blessed with some fresh encounters that will help us to get to know Him even better.  

Our first encounter with Jesus occurs in the opening verses of John’s Gospel.  In verses 1-5 we read:

 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

 

Most people today tend to think that Jesus’ story begins in a manger in Bethlehem, but John makes it clear that that’s not so by giving us a glimpse of Jesus that pre-dates by millennia His birth in Bethlehem, taking us all the way back to the time of creation.  Referring to Jesus as, “the Word,” John tells us that Jesus was not only with God from the very beginning, but that he was also a full and active participant in the creation process itself.  Verse 3 says it like this, “Through him… (that is, Jesus)… all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”  

 

And what was Jesus’ primary contribution to the creation process?  Life.  Verse 4 says, “In him was life, and that life was the light of men.”   Those two images together— life and light —are the beginning points of understanding who Jesus really is.  He is life.  He is the very essence of life.  

--Life itself would never have existed apart from Jesus’ work in creation.

--What’s more, because Jesus remains, to this very day, the source, the sustainer and the essence of life there is simply no way to experience all that life is meant to be apart from a relationship with Him.  

--And, finally, Jesus is so determined for us to experience the full measure of all that life is meant to be that he shines the light of his life into our world so that we can see the difference between the dull, black and gray experience of life without Jesus and the invigorating, full color life that is available to all of us through a relationship with Jesus.  As John says here, his “life was the light of men.”

If you want to know who Jesus really is, start here—from the very beginning to this very day Jesus’ involvement in our world has always pointed to and resulted in life.  And I’m not talking about the ability to fog a mirror.  I’m talking about a quality of life that is full and rich and altogether satisfying—because it is the life that we were created to experience. Folks, take note as we make our way through this book in the weeks to come.  Every time we meet him, Jesus is always pointing people and directing people and leading people in the direction of life.  

Which leads me to ask this question—If Jesus has been actively working all this time to guide people into the full, rich and satisfying life for which we were created, why are so many people living such empty, miserable and unfulfilled lives?  How did that happen?  Let’s read verses 9-11 to find out.  Verse 9 says,

The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

Notice that Jesus is described, here, as, “the true light.”   The point is that there will always be an abundance of people who claim to be able to point us in the direction of life at it’s very best, but in the end they can’t deliver.  In the end, their advice and counsel come up short.  

So, you get the new car and you’re still not satisfied.

And you get the new job and you’re still not satisfied.

And you trade in your spouse and you’re still not satisfied.

And it’s not surprising, because none of those things speak to the essence of life.  They’re all peripheral.  I’m not saying that they’re not important, but I am saying that they’re not the essence of life.  But Jesus is.  He is the very essence of life.  Life comes through him.  That’s why, once we connect with him, he never disappoints us.  He is, “the true light.”  And everyone who truly knows him and moves through life in a personal relationship with Him is genuinely, thoroughly and completely satisfied.

Now, let’s move on to verses 10-11.  It says,

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.  He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

Now, let’s stop and consider what we’ve just read.  John reminds us, here, of what he first told us in verse 3, namely, that Jesus was actively involved in the creation of the world.  All things…including mankind…were created through him.  

And it’s on that basis that John can say in verse 11, “he came to that which was his own…” Folks, think about this.  Long before you were ever conceived in your mother’s womb, you had already been conceived in the mind and according to the purposes of God.  All people were created by God.  Consequently when Jesus came into the world, he came to a people that were rightfully His.  He came to, “His own.”

Interestingly, the Greek words translated here as, “his own,” also convey the idea of “home.”  So, the broader meaning here is that we were created for this reason—that Jesus would come and make his home in us.  That he would come to us and we would welcome him into our lives to occupy that place in us that was created to be His home.  He came to, “his own.”

Sadly, it’s at this point that this beautiful story takes a tragic turn because verse 11 goes on to say, “but his own did not receive him.”   So, here’s the picture.   He created each of us with a special place in our lives that is supposed to be reserved just for him.  Unfortunately, all too often, when Jesus shows up to occupy that place he finds that we’ve already filled it with something else.  There’s just no room in our lives for him.

So, instead of a life-enhancing, soul satisfying personal relationship with the one who is the very essence of life, we end up with a stack of bills for a bunch of stuff that was supposed to make us really happy but we can’t enjoy it because of all the overtime we’re working to try and pay off all those bills.

And instead of a life-enhancing, soul satisfying personal relationship with the one who is the very essence of life, we end up really, really busy keeping up with a mountain of assignments, projects, tasks, demands and commitments…many of which are perfectly good things…but at the end of the day we can’t get away from the sense that there ought to be more to life than all of this.

And, once again, it really shouldn’t surprise us to find out that life just doesn’t work very well when we fail to include the one who made us, who came to make His home in us so that He could lead us to a rich, full and truly satisfying life.

Thankfully, there’s a way out of all the chaos and futility.  That’s the point of verses 12 & 16 which say,

“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.  From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.”

Key words—“believe” and “receive.”  Folks, there’s the map that leads from wherever we may be today to the satisfying life that God intended us to experience from the very beginning.

“Jesus, I believe that You are Son of God.  I believe that You are full of grace.   I believe that you are the very essence of life itself.  I’ve tried life without You and it just hasn’t worked out very well.  I need You in my life.  From this day forward I want to live my life with you. I invite you into my life and I want to receive all that you have for me.”

Folks, that’s the beginning point of the grand adventure that God intends our life to be.

If you’ve never taken that step before, I invite you to do so today.

And if you have taken that step previously…but you’ve drifted or lost focus along the way…I invite you to tell God that your great desire is for a fresh encounter with Jesus.