Light versus darkness. Good versus evil. God versus Satan. It doesn’t really seem like a very insightful revelation, but there’s a great theme in scripture of things of God being associated with light and things of the devil being associated with darkness. I was reading, just yesterday, in Ecclesiastes and I came across Ecclesiastes 11:7. It says, “Light is sweet and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun.” I started thinking of the challenge of trying to find a Bible verse that is an inverse corollary that says darkness is sweet and it is wonderful to experience blindness and the darkness gloom and doom. You just won’t find it in scripture.

I immediately just sent that verse in a text to my family and reminded them that light is always a good thing. I did a Bible study, a personal Bible study a number of years ago, where I just went through the Bible and noticed words that were associated with sin. And the words that I found that were most commonly associated with sin in the Bible were words like darkness, shadows, deceit, hiding, blackness, gloom, nighttime, like the verse that says those who get drunk get drunk at night. Those are common words that are associated with sin.

The famous Psalm 23 says “the shadow of death.” In fact, the only shadow that I could find in the Bible that really was a good shadow was hiding in the shadow of God himself, hiding in the shadow of the Almighty, which I don’t think is a very dark place. God is light. And just like sin is associated with darkness, God is always associated with light, freedom, liberation, and righteousness.

Another great example is the verse from James that says God doesn’t change like shifting shadows because every good gift comes down from the Father of the Heavenly Lights. In Revelation, we see that God himself will illuminate heaven by the likeness of his glory.These aren’t preposterously insightful revelations, but it does make it obvious that God desires for us to be like him. He desires us to live lives of righteousness and openness and freedom and liberation, as opposed to living in the bondage that comes along with living in deceit and darkness and hiding.

We, at Passion Life, are dealing with people who are trying to face or deal with the guilt that they feel inside of themselves because they have not been able to expose their sin and their inward shame to the cleansing power of the gospel and the light. Ephesians says to have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but to expose them. So often people feel so ashamed by their sin, especially, their sexual sin, strikes the conscience with a particular guiltiness and a grief that makes people want to shrink and hide and deceive themselves and deceive God and deceive others and deceive Satan, though none of these things really ultimately will work well.

Our job as a missions organization is to help people find the freedom of the gospel, the lightness and the forgiveness of walking with God in righteousness and openness and honesty and truth. My admonition to you today is to be willing to expose the fruitless deeds of darkness in your own life to the cleansing power of the light of the gospel in Jesus Christ. We want to live our lives in such a way that we are not burdened by past guilt and shame because when we do that, we give Satan a foothold to come in and accuse and to remind us of our sin and to keep us in shame and keep us weak. Our desire is to live in strength and in the boldness of the gospel. That is our goal with Passion Life: to help people find that freedom. And I hope that you will take that into consideration and as an encouragement in your own walk with Christ today. Walk in the light as he is in the light.