Sent to Testify, Free to Receive

A man named John shows up eight verses into this Gospel, and he's not the point. He never claimed to be. He was sent to point at someone else.

In this session we walk through John 1:6-13 and watch two things happen at once: the true Light comes into the world, and the world He made looks right past Him. Even His own people, the ones who should have known Him best, don't receive Him. But the passage doesn't end there. Verse 12 turns everything with one word: "But." To all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.

We'll talk about who John the Baptist really was, why this Gospel goes out of its way to say what he wasn't, and how to tell him apart from John the Apostle, the man who actually wrote this book. We'll look at what it means to be a true witness, why "the world" means something different by the end of verse 10 than it did at the start, and why nobody is born a child of God. That status is given, not inherited.

This is session 3 of a verse-by-verse study through the Gospel of John.