Devotion

The Light

C. S. Lewis wrote the following piece in an English newspaper near the end of World War 2. It’s a fairly simple illustration of the two ways we can go about living our lives. He writes:

I was standing today in the dark tool shed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no tool shed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun.

Hopefully, you can picture that. You get a different experience of the beam of light depending on if you are looking at it, or through it. So that raises some questions for us. From what point of view do you look at the different experiences that you go through? Are you fully indulged with the experience, or constantly on the outside? And ultimately, as C.S. Lewis concludes his essay, from what lens do you view God? 

Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences. As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction, it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the “true” or “valid” experience? Which tells you most about the thing?

This analogy provides an amazing illustration of our Bible verse this week. Unfortunately, from the outside, in the darkness, we may try to hide from the light of Jesus because of shame, guilt or something else. But in the light of Jesus, we find lasting security and confidence in Him which gives us life.

As John 3:19-21 (TPT) says, “The Light of God has now come into the world, but the hearts of people love their darkness more than the Light because they want the darkness to conceal their evil. So they hate the Light and try to hide from it, for their lives are fully exposed in the Light. But those who love the truth will come out into the Light and welcome its exposure, for the Light will reveal that their fruitful works were produced by God.”

May you find the light of Jesus in your lives and live in it.

Jason Kupke

Chaplain