Children of the Light (i)

I have a terrible confession to make. I’m one of those morning people. Maybe you’ve seen our kind on the way to work, at the drive though line, dropping your kids off at school It’s 730 and we’re smiling, the sun isn’t up yet, and we’re cheerful. What can i say? On behalf of all morning people, we’re sorry, and we’re trying to do better.

I love the mornings. Especially this time of the year when the sun is slowly coming up, and the colours are slowly changing. God is good to give us a world where we don’t just flick a switch and get daylight, but where changes comes slowly, and beautifully.

And we live in a world with lots of different shades don’t we? Different shades of political affiliation, hard Republican to hard Democrat and everywhere in between. We live in a world with different shades of sporting support, whether it’s red, or dark blue or purple and gold. We live in a world of varying shades of religious belief, from the atheist who claims to hate God, even though he doesn’t believe in him, to the pantheist, the polytheist, all the way to those of us here this morning, and all around the world who worship Jesus.

That example is an interesting one isn’t it? In 2014 we love to see religious belief as a spectrum, as a group of people on different paths up the same mountain. This is my truth, tell me yours. But the Bible makes clear than when it comes to Jesus there is  no grey, there is no spectrum, there is only black and white. There is only day and night. You’re either living in the daylight, or your living in the night-time. Psalm 107 describes people’s salvation as being brought out of darkness, Isaiah 9:2 tells us that when Jesus comes the people living in darkness will see a great light, In Luke 1:79 we’re told that Jesus has come to rescue those who sit in darkness. Jesus Himself said in John 8:12 ‘i am the light of the world.’

And we recognize these categories from our own experiences of life don’t we? We turn on the news and we see darkness abroad. Our brothers and sisters killed for their faith, whole countries torn apart by war. We see it on our own streets, it’s hard to watch the local news without hearing of another shooting, another break in. And most of all, we see it in our own hearts. When we’re lazy in BIble reading, when we’re slow in speaking for Jesus, when we skip church, we see this darkness in our hearts.

We’re either in the light, or we’re in darkness. On the last day, those two categories are all that will matter. Are you in the darkness, or are you in the light? Are you a sheep or a goat? That was part of the reason behind Paul writing this letter to the Thessalonians. He’d only been with them a short time, and they wanted some assurance from him that they hadn’t missed the day of the Lord, and that when it came, they were going to be ok. And we should want the same assurance ourselves shouldn’t we? We should want to know, more than anything else, that we live in the day, not in the night.

Paul gives us three ways we can know here.

First of all, in verses 4 and 5, we see that if we live in the day, we have a new nature. Read those with me. Christians aren’t people who just do things differently, Christians are different. Verse 4 tells us that we’re not in darkness. In the dark you stumble over things that would be harmless in the light, in the dark you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know whose around you. In the dark you’re lost. Isn’t that a picture of us before our salvation. Enslaved to sin without even knowing it? Wandering around aimlessly, blindly, with no direction. We’re not in darkness anymore, so we desire to honour God, particularly when it comes to thinking about Christ’s return. If you’re in the dark, verse 4 tells us, that day will overtake you like a thief. Thieves work by surprise don’t they? They never send a note telling you they’re on their way! If we live in the dark, we’re not ready for Jesus to come back. He will surprise us, and there will be nothing we can do about it.

But, as verse 5 tells us, we are children of light. What a lovely phrase! We’re children, so we depend on the good care of our loving Father, and we’re in the light. We know where we’re going because the Bible lights our way. In our hearts there is no longer the darkness of sin, but the light of a new creation. Jesus has come and we see Him, and we love Him. He’s no longer boring or irrelevant, He’s beautiful to us, He’s life. We hang on His every word, we long to think His thoughts after Him, to follow His commands. We have been changed inside! CSL says that we believe in Jesus in the same way we believe in the noonday sun, not just because we see it, but because by it we see everything else. Is that your nature, your daytime nature, that you see everything by Christ?