Amen and amen.

Hope you're ready for this.

Grab your Bibles.

We're going to be in John chapter 8.

I keep looking, especially lately.

The last few weeks have been kind of intense, right?

And so it's going to get intense again.

I don't know what to tell you.

It just is intense right now in the Gospel of John.

So if you're looking to just come be entertained and then go to the beach, you might want to leave now.

Cause what we're talking about is light and freedom, light and freedom, which is pretty appropriate coming off of Fourth of July, right?

Because what do we do? We celebrate our freedom by blowing up stuff with colorful lights, which is pretty cool. And I hope you did.

I hope it didn't blow you up because this is the land of the free, although my HOA has yet

to get that memo because I had to go to Georgia to blow up what I wanted to blow up.

But anyway, that's a different sermon.

So here we go.

John chapter 8, we're going to pick it up in verse 12, and it says this, again, Jesus spoke to them, saying, I am the light of the world.

Now again, every time we hear these I am statements, we don't hear them the way the first century

Jewish people would hear them. Because we hear a statement like that, and we hear it as a positive

statement. But I'm just telling you, there was an emotional, there was a theological, there was a religious

grenade that went off in their head every single time Jesus said, I am, because what he was

doing is he was equating equality with God. And every time he says it, he's going to do seven

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