The Light Has Come

Now that we’ve finished our series on Revelation, we’re going to look at the letters John wrote afterwards (1, 2, and 3 John) when he returned from exile. John was legendary at this point in his life. He was in his nineties, the last living apostle. He had walked with Jesus as a teenager, survived an execution attempt, and visited Heaven, where he saw the end of the world. People called him the Elder—the Ancient One.

Between the Gospel of John, his letters, and Revelation, the writing styles are so different that some scholars think other people wrote them. In a way, that’s precisely the case, even though the same hand penned all five books.

John first appears in the Bible as Jesus’s youngest disciple. He was fiercely passionate, but he was also an immature young man, fixated on flashy miracles (Luke 9:51-56) and competing for Jesus’s favour (Mark 10:35-39), with little clue about what he was actually dealing with.

When Jesus was dying on the cross, he assigned John an unexpected task: to care for his mother, Mary, for the rest of her life (John 19:26-27). No heroic evangelism or fires from Heaven—just looking after an elderly person. John was probably disappointed, but this was precisely the experience he needed to mature into the legend he eventually became. His Gospel, written decades later, carries the wisdom of a fiery old man who has learned to appreciate the deeper, quieter work that God does every day (John 20:30-31). He is, in a way, a completely different person, like Gandalf the Grey returning as Gandalf the White in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

God matures us over the course of decades, often by leading us down paths we don’t expect—or want—to take. But if we follow His lead, we’ll come out the other side reborn as people ready to shine the light of Christ into the world.

Watch the full sermon here.