My dearest cousin’s husband is dying.  How odd that phrase when , in fact, we are all dying, just at different times.  For an atheist the idea of death must be one of great loss and despair.  To have as your only hope, “like the little dog rover, when you’re dead you’re dead all over,” would not be extremely comforting.  I suspect most atheists don’t remind themselves of death very often.  Yet, we are surrounded by it.  Every day the local paper reports them in the “obit” section.  I am very happy to report that my cousin’s family are not atheists and have a comfort available to them that is not the case for people that prefer to “go it alone” without God.  There are days when my cousin’s husband just wants to go on and leave the old shell behind, but he lingers.  Even in asking, “why,” we know, if we’re honest in our quest for the answer.  I believe the answer is the one given by one actor to another in a movie I saw once.  One asked the other on the occasion of leaving this life for the next, “It’s hard to let go isn’t it?”

Physical life is precious, it’s a gift of God, yet, eternal life is so much more a gift.  The transformation from one to the other is a great mystery.  In his great novel, “If Winter Comes”, A.S.M. Hutchinson describes how a young man named Freddie Perch who had just been killed in the war (WW I) came back to help his mother die.  He was the type of son that would never allow his mother to even cross a road without him.  And here he was to help his mother cross the greatest road in her life.

She was moaning….  That inhabitant of her body had done its preparations and now stood at the door in the darkness, very frightened.  It wanted to go back.  It had been very accustomed to being here.  It could not go back.  It did not want to shut the door.  The door was shutting.  It stood and shrank and whimpered there…..  It was old Mrs. Perch that stood there whimpering, shrinking upon the threshold of that huge abyss, wide as space, dark as night …

In my last post I outlined how through Christ we bask in the light of God and become the avenue of redemption for God on this old earth.  Our mission is to let the light of Christ reflect from our lives so that others will follow.  In doing so we are preparing for the day when “the glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it” (Rev 21:26  Our primary purpose is to live and build the glory and honor for God on that day.  This drives our worship, mission, and life.

But we take our Light for granted WAY to often.  It’s tempting to focus on the prize at the expense of our mission to build the glory and honor for God. One of the most convicting songs written and performed by the late Keith Green:

The world is sleeping in the dark,

That the church can’t fight, cause it’s asleep in the light,

How can you be so dead, when you’ve been so well fed,

Jesus rose from the grave, and you, you can’t even get out of bed,

Oh, Jesus rose from the dead, come on, get out of your bed.

What a rallying cry for us.  We are blessed with the comfort of eternal life and guidance from God through the Spirit.  Put it to work.

We often describe our Christian life as a daily walk, which is an enduring example of how we dedicate every moment of every day to Christ. The good news is we walk in the light near to God which gives a guiding light and illuminates a Spiritual path to the comfort of eternal life.  To discover the true depth of this good news we need to focus on things to come. In Revelation the new heaven and the new earth are described by John:

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”….And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.  Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. Revelation 21:1, 21:3, 21:23-27 (TNIV)

For believers it’s almost overwhelming to think of the day we can walk in the light of the Lord.  BUT WE ALREADY ARE!

Truth is, humans have a heart of darkness.  Left to our own devices, or trusting in anything (idols) other than love from God will trap us there.   Jesus referred to this one time while he was in Jerusalem:

…from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.  All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean. Mark 7:21-23 (NIV)

Too many times we read these words and begin to pass judgment on a host of people who we just KNOW are living in darkness because they are not like us.  We are too good to live in darkness – and we must have missed it when Jesus chastised the Pharisees and teachers of the law just moments earlier.

…Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:
“These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.”
You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.  Mark 7:6-8 (NIV)

The Pharisees Jesus was talking to were considered the conservatives of Judaism. They held strictly to the Torah and the Talmud and were very outwardly moral. But because they trusted in the traditions of men (meaning adding to the law) they were far from him, they had hearts of darkness.

Bottom line up front: Darkness doesn’t mean the same thing today as it did 2000 years ago.  In the first century people understood and feared real darkness so they got it when Jesus told them, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” John8:12 (NIV).  If you’re not a Christian you’re walking in darkness, put your trust in Christ who is the light.

Darkness has lost its meaning to us.  Since the discovery of electricity and invention of the light bulb the world has been on a campaign to banish darkness.  Just look around you some night:  guard lights flood every house, street lights bathe our roads, office buildings shine through the night, spot lights sweep through the air, the rooms in our houses have lights on even if we are not in them, and our retinas burn as we stare for hours into the glare of our televisions.  If you don’t believe it, you will the first time the electricity fails and the night as you know it stops…dark, dark, dark and silent…very silent.