Lesson for the Lord’s Day
For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light. Ephesians 5:8
The very first mention of darkness and light in our Bibles is in the first three verses; Genesis 1:2 tells us about darkness being upon the face of the shapeless, void earth, and Genesis 1:3 tells us that God spoke light into being. They are also mentioned in the very last chapter of our Bible, in Revelation 22:5: ‘And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever’. Between these two chapters are many references to both darkness and light in a wide variety of contexts. So these are extremely important. In our text, the darkness and the light are used to describe us before and after God brought us unto Himself.
Note that our text does not say we were in darkness and are now in light; it says we used to be darkness and now are light. We were darkness because our minds were dark, our eyes were blind, our hearts were opposed to God and we loved the darkness because our deeds were evil (John 3:19). Now that we are saved, we are not only light, but we delight in the light and in the One Who has brought us into His light. So we look at the admonition in our text: walk as children of light, and ask ourselves how we do that?
For starters, we do not walk as the children of disobedience walk. We don’t do the things they do, as Ephesians 5:7 tells us: ‘Be not ye therefore partakers with them’. Nor do we endorse what those children of disobedience do: ‘Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them’ – Ephesians 5:11. And Verse 12 tells us we should not even talk about the things that the children of disobedience do: ‘For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret’. So the first step in walking as children of light is to make sure that we don’t walk in the darkness with the children of darkness.
The Lord Jesus tells us that we are the light of the world, and we are to let our light shine before men (Matthew 5:16). We have the light of Christ within us to display. We also have the light of the Lord Jesus to dwell in, with all of its benefits: ‘But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin’ – 1 John 1:7. In addition, we also have the Word of God to read and study, as Psalm 119:105 tells us: ‘Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path’.
The children of darkness cannot walk in the light, but we can. We are light in the Lord. -Jim MacIntosh