Let Your Light Shine
Day 245 – 2 September
The End of the Long Night
For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. (Ephesians 5:8, NKJV)
A Country Without a Sun
Far to the north, in the scattered towns that cling to the top of the world, there comes a season when the sun simply stops rising. In Longyearbyen, out on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, the sun slips below the horizon towards the end of October and stays there until the middle of February; for the darkest stretch of those months no daylight climbs over the mountains at all, and midday wears the same deep blue as midnight. Utqiaġvik in Alaska keeps a shorter version of the same fast, roughly sixty-five days with no sunrise. Life carries on under lamplight, the work and the errands and the school runs, yet everyone is waiting. And when the sun at last clears the ridge again, the waiting breaks into festival. Svalbard greets the returning light with Solfestuka, a sun-festival week, its people gathering on the steps of the old hospital to watch the first rim of gold lift over the horizon; a little further south, Tromsø welcomes it with sweet buns baked and named for the sunshine. The celebration carries an unspoken admission: no one in those towns made the sun come back. They received it. The light arrived from some ninety million miles away, wholly outside themselves, and their whole part was to step into it and be glad. Paul writes about a homecoming exactly like it, only larger.
He Calls You Light Itself
Paul reminds the Ephesian believers what they used to be, and the wording is sharper than we might expect. He never says they once lived in darkness, as though darkness were a place they had since walked out of. He says, in Greek, ἦτε ποτε σκότος (ēte pote skotos, you were once darkness), making σκότος (skotos, darkness) the very name of the person. Darkness was what they were, through and through, the way that sunless country is no mere covering of night; it becomes, for a season, a land of night. The word σκότος (skotos, darkness) reaches well past a dim room to name a whole condition: a blindness that cannot find its own way, a realm where nothing of the truth can be seen. That is a bleak thing to hear said of oneself, and Paul says it without flinching. Then, in the same breath, he tips the whole sentence over: νῦν δὲ φῶς (nyn de phōs, but now light). He never says they now stand in the light, the way a man stands near a lamp; he says they now are light (φῶς, phōs, light), light itself, as thoroughly as they were once darkness. One of the older study notes catches the force well, observing that the believer is now Light itself. The reversal is total. Nothing halfway has taken place, no lifting of the gloom by slow degrees; one thing has become its opposite.
Light in the Lord, and Only There
Yet the sentence guards itself against a proud misreading, and it does so with three small words: ἐν κυρίῳ (en kyriō, in the Lord). You are light, Paul says, in the Lord. The brightness is real and it is truly yours, though its whole source and standing rest in Another. Return for a moment to those Arctic towns. The people there summon no sunrise; they hold no switch that could call up the dawn; every ray that ends their long night is poured in from a sun they neither made nor keep burning. Their part is to wake, to open the shutters, and to walk out into what was given. So it stands with anyone the gospel has reached. The light you carry was kindled in the Lord and stays alight in Him, which means it can never harden into a private possession to boast of, and it can never become a mark of favour shown to some and withheld from their neighbours. The offer of it runs to the whole world; the identity of light belongs to everyone who turns to Him, and those who do are called, with no exception among them, children of light (τέκνα φωτός, tekna phōtos, children of light). A decisive little word sits at the hinge of the verse, νῦν (nyn, now), marking the very moment the darkness ended. No slow thinning of the shadows brought this about, and no gradual self-improvement earned it. Once you were the one thing; now, in Him, you are the other.
Walk as the Day’s Own
Only after all of this does Paul give a command, and the order is the gospel’s own courtesy. He first tells them what they are, light in the Lord, and then, upon that settled ground, he says, “Walk as children of light.” The walking follows the being; it never manufactures it. A returning-sun town earns no daylight by bustling about; the daylight comes, and then the people live by it, travelling roads that lay hidden a week before, working in a brightness handed to them free of charge. The believer walks the same way. You wake today already light in the Lord, the verdict long since spoken over you, and the day’s whole assignment is to live as the thing you now are. That means letting the brightness reach the ordinary corners of a Wednesday: the tone you take when patience wears thin, the honesty you keep when a shortcut beckons, the kindness you spend on someone who can hand you nothing in return. None of it is done to become light; all of it is done because you already are. The long night lies behind you, and the morning owns the day. Step out into it, and walk as one the sunrise has already claimed.
Declaration
Once I was the darkness itself, and now I am light, though never a light of my own making. The morning that ended my long night was poured in from outside me; I woke to it, I never called it up, and it stays bright in the One who gave it. I refuse to wear it as a private badge, or to imagine it a favour kept from anyone else, because the same dawn is offered to the whole world. I own no sunrise to boast of and carry no shadow left to fear. Today I will live by the light I was given, letting it reach the plain and awkward corners of the hours, and asking nothing back from the people it warms through me. The night lies behind me. The day is mine because it was handed to me, and I will walk it as one the morning has already claimed.
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