Have you ever sat at night in a dark room with no source of light and then lit a match? Or flicked a flashlight on when you were camping out in the dark? The light of those little torches pushes the darkness away and allows you to see what is around you and in-front of you much more clearly. But if you try to walk with no source of light, you're likely to stumble around a lot more, trip on something and likely eventually will fall. Now, if you're in a room with the lights on, its a whole lot less likely you'll fall over something if you pay attention to where you're going. If you try to close your eyes in the room though, you'll also likely fall over. If your room is extra messy, its easy to want to keep the lights off so you don't see the mess, but with the lights out, you'll probably trip on the mess or step on your kid's lego (ouch). Darkness is really good at hiding things, but light allows us to see the hazards in our paths and rooms so we can either avoid them or clean up the mess properly so there's no fear when night does fall.
Jesus talked about something similar for us spiritually in John 3:19-21, "This is the judgement: The light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the light and avoids it, so that his deeds may not be exposed. But anyone who lives by the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be shown to be accomplished by God."
Darkness in a spiritual sense looks a lot like lying, hiding, secrets, and often, things done alone without chance of being revealed. Can you think of areas in your life that you tend to shy away from talking about, you "hide" and purposely seek to keep in the darkness? Let this be a self-reflective reality check, if you can't bring it to the light, you're living in darkness and are choosing sin over God's freedom. I want to encourage you today that despite what you might feel about that "thing" in your life, the darkness only has a stronghold if it isn't exposed to the light. Seek God! Bring your whole self to Jesus, the Light of the World, and let His Word shine light into those dark places, exposing the messy, broken areas where you trip up and fall down. Let Him help you clean it up and hold His light in those areas until it's clean and ready for exposure to the Father, because no sin will be hidden from Him, it can only be covered by Christ. Choose light, choose life. My prayer is that you have the strength to choose Christ over whatever darkness you currently love. May you love Him more.
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