It is the same identical light that John is telling us of here that so shines in upon every man, and always has.  There is no light but His.  His later name is Jesus.  From the first, and everywhere still, it is the light that shines from Him that lights men.  He was with the Father in the beginning.  He acted for the Father in that creation week.  He gave and sustained all life of every sort everywhere, and does, though only a third of us know His later, nearer, newer Name—­Jesus.

But the light was obscured, terribly beclouded and bedimmed, hindered by earth-fogs, and swampy clouds rising up, until we are apt to think there was no light, and is none; only darkness.  Then He came closer, and yet closer.  He came in nearer form so as to get the light closer, and let it shine through fog and cloud, for the sake of the befogged, beswamped crowd.

And then—­ah! hold your heart still—­then He let the Light-holder, the great human Lantern, be broken, utterly broken, that so the light might flash out through broken lantern in its sweet soft wondrous clearness into our blinded blinking eyes, and show us the real way back home.  It was in that breaking that it got that wondrous exquisite red tingeing that becomes the unfailing hall-mark, the unmistakable evidence of the real thing of light.

And it’s only as men know of this latest coming of the light, this tremendous tragic Jesus-coming of the light, that they can come into the full light.  That’s the reason He came in the way He did.  That’s the reason when He gets possession of us there’s the passion to take the full Jesus-light out to every one.  And this passion burns in us and through us, and ours, and sweeps all in the sweep of its tender holy flame.  In this way every man may be fully lit, and so in following the Jesus-light he shall not walk in the darkness where he has been, but in the sweet clear light of life.

Looking for Recognition.

Then we come to the first of John’s heart-breaking sentences.  John had a hard time writing his Gospel.  He was not simply writing a book.  That might have been fairly easy for him with his personal knowledge and all the facts so familiar.  But he is telling about his dearest Friend.  And the telling makes his heart throb harder, and his eyes fill up, and the writing look dim to him, as he tries to put the words down.

Listen:  He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world recognized, or rather acknowledged, Him not. It was His world, His child, His creation.  He had made it.  But it failed to acknowledge Him.  He came walking down the street of life.  He met the world going the other way.  And He gave it a warm good-morning greeting.  And it knew Him full well.  It knew who He was.  But it turned its face aside and walked by with no return greeting.  This is what John is saying.  It recognized, it acknowledged Him not.