They asked us to have something on our hearts that we could share. Driving back from the first meeting, the concept of light kept coming up. It was pitch black, but there were lights here and there: streetlights, a police light from a passing car. It got me thinking about how light is part of everybody’s Christian life, but do we really think that much about it?
If y’all could turn with me to John 8:12.
Then Jesus again spake unto them, saying,
I am the light of the world:
he that followeth Me shall not walk in the darkness,
but shall have the light of life.
Then turn to Acts 9:1-5.
But Saul, yet breathing threatening and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest,
and asked of him letters to Damascus unto the synagogues, that if he found any that were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.
And as he journeyed, it came to pass that he drew nigh unto Damascus: and suddenly there shone round about him a light out of heaven:
and he fell upon the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?
And he said, Who art Thou, Lord?
And He said, I am Jesus.
So, just kicking it off right there: what is light? This is a workshop, so it is supposed to be a little interactive. What do y’all think? What do you think the light is? Who do you think the light is?
Like Aaron said, light is the absence of darkness. Because of our sinful nature, all of us are born in darkness. It is just part of who we are.
Imagine your life is like a really, really dark room. It can be neat; it can be semi-neat; but it is still dark. When we meet the Lord, it is like He sets off a flare inside the room. All of a sudden, you can see all the big stuff.
Now, you cannot see the smaller stuff at first. If you snap on a light really quick, you see the bed and the desk, but you do not see the stuff hiding underneath them. That comes later. But when you are first saved, you see, “Oh, this is what light is,” and then you try to move in that as best you can.
After a while, though, the thrill of seeing the light can get a little old because sometimes we fail to look at it again. Above all, it is important that you keep focusing on the source, which is Christ. The light is the life that Christ gives us—the light to change, to clean ourselves up, and to become like Christ. If we look away from that light, then we completely lose it.
But the Lord is very patient with us. The Christian walk is hard, but He helps us all the way. So when we accept the light, what does that mean? It means that the mess has got to get out of the room. It means that the clutter that is not pleasing to Him has got to go.
We are all at different levels. At the beginning, we all have different big things that need to go, because that is just what the light has shown us. One person can get immediately convicted about language, another about laziness, and another about lust. Our only responsibility is to react to the light that we have, but it does not stop there.
As we go on, we have to learn to renounce our sins. Part of accepting the light is learning to hate the darkness, because darkness is very easy to slip into. Sadly, people sometimes get a little back into it and then get a little back out, but the Lord will still take us back. Still, the focus on the Lord is important.
Part of the reason why some people hate going to Christ is because they hate being exposed. That is understandable. Some people have different sins, some worse than others, and a lot of the time that prevents us from really entering into Christ. But sometimes you have just got to face it.
A lot of faith is understanding that God will not judge us in the sense of casting us off; God will fix us. The people around us will not judge us either. Getting saved hurts initially because it is coming to life. It is unpleasant. A little baby, when it comes into the world, suddenly experiences light, cold, everything.
But as we start, we get this liberating feeling: “I’m free. This is right. This is different. This is cool.” You have got to learn to cling to the light that Christ gives you at that point. If you let it go—if you say, “Okay, that was cool”—then, in retrospect, it is like the manna in the Bible: it rots.
Then, all of a sudden, you get two or three weeks into it and start thinking, “Was I crazy? Was that weird?” Then you slip back into your old ways. You may be a little more moral. You have semi-morality. But you still do not have Christ, so the darkness starts to slip back in. It is less noticeable, but you are still in the dark.
Another thing that gets us is that we stop feeling like we are making progress. We saw the flare, we saw the big things, and we dealt with the immediate big things. Then we lose focus on Christ and start focusing on ourselves: “Okay, we are going to get everything fixed.”
We feel like, “Oh, I have a little trouble with this or a little trouble with that, so I am going to focus all my energy on that.” The Lord is not really fixing it, so we get frustrated. We feel like the Lord is not going anywhere.
Sadly, that is condemnation. It is not actual repentance when we feel like, “Oh, I have all these sins, and I am not getting anywhere.” That is beginning to doubt God, because God is doing the work in us. When that happens, darkness comes back in, because a lack of faith is sinning.
I had to learn that very vividly recently. When you do that, you automatically lose the means of continuing in the light. The light begins to dim a little bit, and we keep striving—trying to fix it, trying to fix it, trying to fix it. In our effort to clean ourselves, we just completely slide back into the dark.
Sometimes, on that downward spiral, we get so far that we realize that while we were trying to focus on that little thing, we lost everything else. Maybe we have been taking out the garbage more or cleaning our room more, but we realize that we have been a bully to everyone. We realize that we do not care about what other people think.
Suddenly, you just feel overwhelmingly ashamed of yourself because you realize, “I’m in darkness.” Then you do not have the Lord as your light to guide you out of it, and you can just despair. But the Lord is always sending little love telegrams to you, because you are His. You accepted the light.
He is still going to send you notes, or whatever. You can ignore them, but He is still trying to talk to you.
One thing that holds a lot of people back when they are in that state of condemnation is that they feel like it will take too much, or it will hurt too much. But turning back to the Lord is as little as one choice.
You may feel like you are twenty feet deep in sin. You may feel like you do not see a way out, and you may wonder, “Was my salvation even real?” But then God sends along little opportunities for you to exercise that dormant Christ-life inside of you—the Christ-life that you received when you accepted His salvation.
Little opportunities come along:
Then, all of a sudden, if you take that one positive step in the right direction, it is like God is one of the most easily won-over lovers ever. You can do terrible, terrible things, and He loves you the whole time. There is a separation, but if you come back and say you are sorry and take a step in the right direction, God picks you up and pulls you back.
It takes a while. There are consequences. But repentance is as simple as taking a step in the right direction, accepting the Christ-life again, and learning to get that little spiritual new life working again.
Light is not just for cases where we have completely digressed, though. Light can be used for different things. A way to keep your eyes on the light is to constantly keep your eyes on the Lord.
People think that having light is just making good decisions, coming to all the meetings, or reading ninety different books of Scripture. But it is tied into the simplicity that you have got to be focused on Christ entirely. That consists of seeking out the Lord and finding Him.
Our actions do not matter apart from Christ. The actions that we do when we are following Christ matter, but we are no different from Catholics or Muslims if we are just doing good stuff because we feel like it is stuff we should do. When we are focusing on Christ, the light can show us so many different things.
When we are walking with Christ, the light can pinpoint things that we have been doing wrong—not in a condemning way. When you are walking with Christ, you see a problem, but you also have your hands on the solution at the same time.
If you are in darkness and see that you have a problem, your automatic instinct is to turn inward: introspection, depression, frustration, lashing out at others out of frustration with yourself. But when you are walking with the Lord, you are so completely soaked in the Christ-life that you forget about all those little emotions, because that is not who you are.
You are using a heart that wants to love and chase after the Lord. So when the Lord points something out, it is as simple as saying, “Okay.” And that is it.
The light can also encourage us, which is really cool, because our lives are hard. We are all in various parts of life. We are in high school, college, careers, and parenthood. Life is hard. But when we are walking with Christ, the Lord is able to encourage us.
It is not just limited to reading a word or listening to a message. When we are walking with Christ, we can see Him in His creation. A lot of us went walking this morning, and it was just beautiful outside. Some of us got up a little earlier than other people, but those of us who got up a little later, it was still pretty.
You can walk outside and just think, “Wow. Look what God made. Look at it.”
When we are walking with Christ, He can speak to us in so many different ways because we are receptive and we are looking at Him. Sometimes it happens just when you need it, because we are never going to run out of opportunities to get frustrated. But Christ is always there for us when we need Him.
Whether or not we accept His help is up to us, but Christ is always there to help. The light can point out sins, but when you have the light, it is joyful because you realize you are obeying.
It is not an issue of, “I’m doing this, and I can’t get out of it.” It is an issue of, “Here is an opportunity for me to continue walking with the Lord.” Here is an opportunity that is a perfect example of how I am a weak, fallen individual, and the Lord is a mighty Savior who loves me.
Light is also very good at warning people about doing things. We are humans. We do not know that much. We are not very smart. But the Lord always sends us little messages when we are getting too close to the line.
For example, this fall I was in a little auto accident on Rattlesnake Road. There was a stop sign there that I had missed two or three times just because it was in the middle of nowhere. It was a quiet little back road, and you miss it.
I ran it two or three times, and then it got to the point where I did not even notice it was there. I was driving along, completely missed it, and my van got T-boned by another driver. Nobody got hurt, but I had this feeling that if I had paid attention to the lesson when it happened—the warning—I could have avoided it.
I got the warning. I got the warning. I got the warning. I got the warning, but I completely ignored it. Then, all of a sudden, bam. But the lesson was still learned.
I think if God has something He is trying to do in all our lives, He is going to get it done eventually. How painful it is is entirely up to us. The Lord always provides little opportunities for us to yank out little weeds before they grow into huge, huge bushes.
Say you are a student trying to follow the Lord. Friends who are walking in a sinful lifestyle say, “Hey, you want to hang out with us?” Then the Lord gives you the warning: “Stay with godly company. Do not do anything that would shame My name.”
But if you compromise there, all of a sudden it is a little harder for you to hear the Lord’s voice when He warns you the next time. The next time someone says, “Hey, let’s go and do such-and-such,” it may not seem that bad. It is just the people you are with, you know? It is in the moral gray zone.
So you do it. Then the next time it is harder, and the next time it is harder. Eventually, they ask you to do something illegal, and you have completely lost sight of that light because you are not walking with the Lord. You are just in the dark a little bit.
Then you get caught, and the Lord teaches you a lesson, because the Lord is a very powerful speaker when He needs to be. When you realize you messed up and realize it was your fault, the Lord will still take you back. The light is always there for people who need it. You just have to understand that you need it, and you have to start looking for it.
Light can show us glorious things. When you are looking at Christ, you can see more Christ. Of course, it shows you the frustrating parts of your nature. It shows you the parts that need to get fixed. It shows you all your little issues and flaws.
But when you are focusing on Christ, you see more of Him. It is like looking at the sun and then blinking, and you can see it a little clearer; then blinking again, and you can see the surface of it. It is so glorious who Christ is.
There is so much joy in walking in His light and walking in His life. You find out so many things about Him: His creation, His church, and His eternal purpose. It is all just joy.
There is a misconception that walking in the light means you do not do anything wrong or that you have to be perfect. It does not. Really, walking in the light is just acknowledging that you are not perfect, that you are like a five-year-old who cannot be trusted to run your own life. The Lord has got to take the wheel. The Lord has got to be in control.
The Lord is always willing to take control, and He is always willing to guide us. There are so many cases where we need Him. We really need Him.
Humans cannot get by without God. They say they can, but they are miserable and depressed all the time. Worldwide, nearly a million people just give up every year. But when we have Christ, we have such a hope inside of us.
When people see us, they need to see, “That person is different.” They may not know why, and they cannot fully know why, because we have Christ in us. They cannot understand what we are feeling or what we are seeing.
When we have Christ inside of us, life will still be hard. As it says in Matthew 5:45, the rain falls on the just and the unjust. But we are not alone in all this.
I was talking to a friend in my physics class, and he is a devout atheist. He believes that we are all stardust and that we do not mean anything. He thinks his destiny is just to die and eventually become fertilizer. He has such a bleak outlook on the world.
As I have gotten to know him, he is just so hopeless. He spends his time trying to find a good time. He likes to party. He is very quick and very funny, but he is always so miserable. It is such a sober warning and reminder of what we all have because we are following Christ.
I do not know if this is scientifically true, but I think the world would be able to survive if there were twenty-four hours of light. Yet there are always twelve hours of night. We can survive with twenty-four hours of daytime, but we cannot survive with twenty-four hours of nighttime.
A lot of the time, that is how the Christian life is: this mix of black and white, of light and dark. It should not be that way.
I was talking to my father about some problems I was having and how I felt like I had so much darkness inside of me. He said, “Just plunge into Christ. Replace it. Assert that you are under new management. Give it up. Change your spiritual diet, as it were.”
Stop spending all your time plunging into shows and different stuff. Spend your time going to a positive source. That is the only way all my problems will be solved, to be honest. It is the only way that we can keep on going, because we cannot survive if we are divided.
As Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” It cannot. We find ourselves in conflicts all the time—stuff that gets into our gray area.
Some Christians get into the scary path of thinking that morality is relative: “What is okay for me is not okay for you, and what is okay for you is not okay for me.” It is a really dangerous place to be.
If you spend all your time building your moral code around what one person thinks is okay, you will find one person who allows himself everything. One person thinks it is okay to do a lot of one sin, but not okay to do others. Then you find another person who says it is okay to do one sin, but not a lot of others.
But we need to have the moral solidness of knowing that it is Christ’s life. A lot of the time, we can only know that if we are looking at Him, because we do not know on our own.
We had the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but it pretty much flew over our heads. The spiritual order got inverted. It used to be spirit, soul, body; now it is body, soul, spirit. With our spirit dead, we are just walking around doing whatever feels right.
I have made decisions just by flipping a coin. I have made decisions based on how I was feeling. They always had a fifty-fifty mix, but there was always doubt. There was always looking over my shoulder.
But with the Christ-life, you always have the blessed certainty of knowing, “This is something that my Lord approves of. This is something that lasts for eternity.”
Sometimes we feel like giving up, plunging into the light, and getting rid of the darkness is just going to be hard. We feel like it means we are not going to have any friends. We think we will not have all the little pleasures of the world that we get when we are walking in darkness.
But light is joy. Life is contentment. Life is satisfaction. Darkness is fear. Darkness is coveting. Darkness is all the negative things that we humans secretly are afraid of and do not know it.
If we cling to the Lord, that is where our real satisfaction is. The Lord will never ask you to trade your life for something that is not as good. The Lord always replaces it with something better.
I have a dear brother that I really love, Ray Valerio. One of his go-to phrases when talking to his kids is, “Good is the enemy of the best.” It is so true.
The world is not even good. The world is just bad. So often we hold on to it so hard. We trick ourselves. We allow ourselves to be tricked into thinking that the world is so attractive, but it is not. Only the Lord has the things that we are looking for.
Light can be scary, and light can hurt. If you look into the sun, it hurts your eyes and makes the stuff around you a little blurry. Police lights behind you are always scary. But it is always worth it, because any instance where the Lord shows you His light is for our own benefit.
It is Christ intervening in our lives, and everything Christ does is always good.
With Christ, it is just straight life. With darkness, it is just death. A lot of the time we feel like, “This is okay; that is not okay. This is okay; that is not okay.” But when we do that, we find that we are making the choices. We allow ourselves to pick what is okay and what is not.
You discover that you are doing something in darkness because it looks an awful lot like your natural inclinations. You walk in and see so-and-so sitting over here and so-and-so sitting over there. You think, “Okay, I am going to sit over there because my friends are over there, and I do not really care if he is having a hard time because I do not care.”
You cannot even do good stuff if you are not walking in the light—not really—because there is always a cost. Every action that we do has a cost. There is always a negative consequence.
History is just an enormous case of cause and effect. But when we are walking with the Lord, He always leads us in His perfect will, and it always works out.
So, in closing—sorry this was a little short—but just look for the light.
Sometimes it will be something obvious. When I was flying out of Texas after going down over Christmas, I looked down and saw clouds trying to form, but we were in Texas, so it was dry. You could see these massive tears of light in the clouds. It looked like you were looking down at a velvet blanket, and there were massive holes in it. You could see little starlight underneath it.
Sometimes it is like that. Other times, I was walking out of a grocery store and really struggling with some sins. I got overwhelmed, turned around, and walked out. The second I walked out, the clouds rolled away, and this massive ray of sunshine hit me.
Other times, it is like when I was a kid and scared of the dark. I always had a little pump flashlight next to my bed. I could point it and crank it, because it was a pump flashlight, and there would be a ray of light.
Light always looks different. There are many different kinds of it, but the source is always the same. The source is always Christ.
It is important that all of us have a relationship with Christ—a personal relationship with Christ. We need Him. We are on Christ support, people, because we need Him.
It is not enough to have the Christian name. It is not enough to wear a cross. We need Him. It is the only way we can get by.
Some humans are naturally strong. I know some people who can wear their Christian T-shirts, go to school, be surrounded by bullies, and listen to Jesus freak music in their cars with the stereos loud. I know Jeffrey did that.
Most people cannot do that. I know I cannot. I go to school and get bullied. I cannot survive with all the different temptations the world throws at us. Nobody can. We need the Lord. We need the Lord to get to the Lord. That is the only way we can get by.
I pray that all you guys can find a way for that light to be the thing you are running on, because there is nothing else that is going to work.
Lord, thank You that You came to earth to be the light of the world. Thank You that You love us all and that You are actively moving in each and every one of our lives, even if we feel like we cannot see it.
Lord, please show us how desperately we need You, and show us that we cannot make it on our own. Lord, I pray that You would take away some of the shadows between us and You.
I pray that You would teach us to consecrate our lives to You, not in a way that is just frantically removing vice after vice, but in a way that honors You and asks You to let us be like You, and for You to provide the strength for us to do so, Lord.
I pray that You will guide all of us, Lord. I pray that You would protect all Your children as they go back out into the world, wherever they came from.
I pray that You would bless them and keep them, Lord. I pray that You would send them Your little rays of light when they need them, Lord, because it is hard.
I pray that we would all walk with You, Lord. Amen.