You Are a Light in the Darkness
“You are the salt of the earth …
You are the light of the world …
Let your light shine before men.”
Matthew 5:13a,14a,16a (NKJV)
You are not responsible for saving others — that’s the Holy Spirit’s job. Your responsibility is to shine the light God has given you into the world God has placed you in. When you go into a dark room, you bring the Light that is within you into that room. Your job in a dark room is to bring the Light who will expose the darkness. That doesn’t mean that you are to walk into every dark room you find. A large part of following God’s will for your life is determining which dark rooms God has not called you to and not walking into those rooms. This will ensure you have the time and strength to walk into the dark rooms God does have for you.
Expose the darkness God has given you influence over with the Light God has put within you.
Your life is like a burning candle; even if you live as long as Methuselah, you are only made to burn for a limited amount of time. Just as a candle burns brighter when its flame joins another burning candle, so your life will be more impactful when you live in community with other believers. As burning candles, we all are in the process of losing ourselves in this life. As we go through life, we drip wax along the way. We don’t get to determine whether or not we will melt, we only get to determine what, where, and who we will allow our lives to drip onto. When we join others in friendship we create a better glow as we burn. We can keep a room dimly lit by ourselves or we can join with other candles and build a growing light that we share with the world around us. Learning to build glowing relationships with other candles can fuel our desire and knowledge of building a relationship with the Light.
When we become comfortable at not standing alone in our own room, but entering a room filled with the lights of other candles, we also become comfortable standing in the presence of the Light. The learning process of being unselfish and not standing alone continues with us in our relationship with the Light. Since our life is burning anyhow, we gain a greater purpose when we direct the melting wax of our lives to flow into places that don’t know what it’s like to be melted by the presence of Light. We keep the flame alive in us by causing it to come alive in others.
The light in your life is not something you can produce; you can only reflect the light coming from the One True Light.
The mirror does not say to the person looking at it, “This is how I will reflect you.” The mirror reflects the face of the person because that’s what it was created to do. You were created to reflect God’s light to the world and the way you can continue to reflect Him clearly is by washing yourself in the river of life that also flows out of every believer who is filled with the Spirit of God.
You may feel like you are surrounded by darkness with only a faint reflection of dim Light within. But turn towards that Light no matter how dim He feels in your life and you will find Him becoming more and more clear in your life.