Let Your Light Shine
Day 269 – 26 September
Dressed for the Day
The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day. (Romans 13:12–13, KJV)
Take Up and Read
In the late summer of 386 a thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric sat weeping in the garden of his lodgings in Milan. Augustine had spent years circling the Christian faith, persuaded in his mind yet held fast by habits he could see no way to break, and that afternoon the struggle drove him away from his friend Alypius to throw himself down beneath a fig tree. Then, from a neighbouring house, he heard a child’s voice, a boy’s or a girl’s, he could never tell which, chanting the same words over and over: take up and read, take up and read. He could recall no children’s game that used such a rhyme, so he took it as a summons, went back to the place where Alypius was sitting, picked up the volume of Paul’s letters he had left there, and read in silence the first passage his eyes fell on. Years later he wrote that he needed to read no further, because as the sentence ended a light, as it were, of serenity came into his heart, and all the darkness of doubt vanished away. The passage he read came from Romans 13, and it was about night and day, and about what to put on.
The Dress Code of the Dawn
What to put on runs through Paul’s whole paragraph like a thread. “The night is far spent,” he wrote, “the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light” (Romans 13:12). The night προέκοψεν (proekopsen, has advanced, has run its course), the day ἤγγικεν (ēngiken, has drawn near), and the believer stands at the moment between, when the sky is paling and it is time to get dressed. The clothing verbs are unmistakable: ἀποβαλώμεθα (apobalōmetha, let us cast off), the word for throwing a garment aside, and ἐνδυσώμεθα (endysōmetha, let us put on), the word for pulling one on, and what is put on is τὰ ὅπλα τοῦ φωτός (ta hopla tou phōtos, the armour of light), the gear of someone going out into the day. Then Paul names the manner of walking that goes with such clothes: “Let us walk honestly, as in the day” (13:13). The word behind “honestly” is εὐσχημόνως (euschēmonōs, becomingly, decently), built from εὖ (eu, well) and σχῆμα (schēma, bearing, outward form), a word the old commentator Adam Clarke glossed as mien, habit, or dress. To walk εὐσχημόνως (euschēmonōs, becomingly) is to walk well dressed in the fullest sense, with a bearing fit to be seen. The King James “honestly” meant exactly that when the translators set it down, since it carried the Latin sense of honeste, decently and becomingly, as the translators’ own margin records; and Paul uses the same word when he asks the Thessalonians to walk becomingly before outsiders and the Corinthians to do everything decently and in order. The commentators catch its sense in a single phrase: as people behave when their actions are seen. The surprise at the centre of the passage comes next. The day has only drawn near, and its full light is still to come, yet Paul asks believers to get dressed for it now, to live in the clothes of a daylight that is only dawning and to walk through the last grey of the night as though the sun were already up. That is the dress code of the dawn. The next verse then tells us what the clothes are, and it is the verse Augustine read to its end: “But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ” (13:14). The armour of light turns out to be a Person, and the garment the dawn requires is Christ Himself, worn.
The Night Clothes
Worn clothes are what Paul has in view when he lists what comes off first. The works of darkness, he says, are rioting and drunkenness, chambering and wantonness, strife and envying, which in plainer modern English means wild parties and heavy drinking, sexual licence and shamelessness, quarrelling and jealousy. Many readers pass the first two pairs with a certain relief, and then the last pair lands, because quarrelling and jealousy hang on the same rail as the drunken revel, garments of the same night, and many a reader who expected to pass the list untouched finds something of their own hanging there. The remedy Paul gives pairs the casting off with a putting on, and it is the putting on that makes the casting off possible. He tells his readers to put on Christ, and the old garments then go the way old garments always go once new ones are on, dropped on the floor and left there. That is grace doing the dressing. Paul uses the same image of every baptised believer, writing that as many as have been baptised into Christ have put on Christ (Galatians 3:27); the garment is given, and it is given alike to all who come. Walking becomingly, then, is simply wearing well what has been handed to us, going out into the day in clothes that were never ours to make.
Laying Out Tomorrow’s Clothes
Never ours to make, and yet ours to lay out, which brings us to Saturday night, when a great many households set clean shirts on the chair and good shoes by the door, ready for the Lord’s Day morning. Do the same for your soul tonight. Pick one piece of night clothing and take it off before you sleep: the argument you have been replaying, the envy you have been feeding, the habit that only shows itself after dark. Leave it on the floor where Paul told you to leave it. Then, in the morning, before you reach for anything else, put on Christ, with a sentence of prayer as you button your coat and a deliberate turning of the heart towards Him as you step outside. And walk becomingly into the day, into whatever gathering of His people you join tomorrow and into every room after it, as one who expects to be seen, because a person dressed in the light has nothing to hide from the daylight and every reason to be glad of it. The night has run its course, and the day is already near enough to dress for. Augustine found one verse enough to change his clothes for the rest of his life, and it can do the same for a Saturday.
Declaration
I am laying out tomorrow’s clothes tonight, and I am doing the same for my soul. Something I have been wearing belongs to the night, an argument I keep replaying or a jealousy I keep feeding, and before I sleep I will take it off and leave it on the floor. I have kept it on long enough, telling myself it suited me. In the morning I will dress for a day that is already dawning, and the garment I reach for first will be the One who was given to cover me, put on in a sentence of prayer before anything else. Then I will walk out becomingly, as someone who expects to be seen and has nothing to hide from the light. Every thread of what I wear was handed to me, and it fits me because it was cut for me. The night has run its course, so let me walk into the morning dressed for the day.
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