“I am the light of the world; the one following Me should in no way be walking in the darkness, but will have the light of life (John 8:12).
Too many Christians today consider Jesus a convenience; we make Him a lifeboat to get us ashore, a guide to find us when we are lost and wandering about in confusion and error; we reduce Him merely to sort of Santa Claus figure able to help us when we are in trouble. This, of course, is not the true faith of Christ at all; it may be Christianity, but it is not of Christ.
Jesus Christ is Lord and when a man surrenders his will to do the will of Christ Jesus, the truth flashes in and he knows what true repentance is; this is the light of life. He now finds himself, perhaps for the first time in his life as a Christian, able to say “I will do the Lord’s will even if I must die for it”.
Before the Word of God can truly mean anything inside of me there must be obedience to the Word and the Spirit; truth will not give itself to a rebel; truth will not impart life to a man who walks in his own counsel. Scripture teaches that no man can know the Son except the Father tell him and no man can know the Father except the Son reveal Him. We can know about God; that is the body of truth; but we cannot know God, the soul of truth, unless we have surrendered to obey Him. As the Lord said Himself; “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them” (John 13:17).
Spiritual enlightenment begins in the heart of a man who is truly repentant for he knows that he has been following his own will. True discipleship is obeying Jesus Christ and nothing else and how we get from that understanding, to where the Church is today, is something about which the apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church many centuries ago:-
“But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is concealed, it is concealed to those perishing in whom the god of this world blinded the minds of the unfaithful believers, so that they could not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:2-4).
When we are unfaithful to what God has shown us, we invite the god of this world in to blind our minds so that we cannot see the true light; instead, the light that is in us becomes darkness, or false light, of which Jesus said, “how great is that darkness” (Matthew 6:23).
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