Let Your Light Shine
Day 248 – 5 September
The Light Spoken Into the Dark
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6, NIV)
The Night Godalming Changed
For most of human history, once the sun went down the world simply went dark. A candle here, a lantern there, and by the nineteenth century the dull orange of a gas lamp, but the night was still the night, and the corners of a room kept their shadows. Then, on a September evening in 1881, something new happened in a small market town in Surrey. Godalming had until then been lit, like everywhere else, by the weak glow of gas. That autumn the town council struck a deal, a waterwheel on the River Wey was set spinning to make electricity, and Godalming became the first town anywhere in the world to carry a public electric supply into its streets and its homes. Residents who had only ever squinted by gaslight could now flood their own rooms with a clean, steady brightness, and corners that had been dim for centuries were suddenly, plainly visible. It was a threshold moment, a before and an after; the same streets, the same houses, yet lit as they had never been lit. Paul reaches for exactly this kind of moment, though the light he has in mind falls somewhere stranger than a Surrey street: into the human heart.
The God Who Says “Let There Be Light”
Paul begins by naming God in a very particular way: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness'” (2 Corinthians 4:6). Every reader steeped in the Scriptures would hear the echo at once. This is the language of the first page of the Bible, the morning of creation, when the earth lay formless and dark and God spoke a single sentence, and there was light. Paul is doing something bold with that memory. He is saying that the God who once flung light across a lightless universe by the sheer force of His word has done the very same thing again, on a smaller and far more personal stage. “Made his light shine in our hearts,” Paul writes. The conversion of a human being, on this telling, is nothing less than a fresh act of creation; the Maker leans over the dark of a single life and speaks His oldest command, and light appears where there was none. What He did over the deep at the beginning, He does inside the chest of anyone who turns to Him. The same word. The same result.
Light You Can See By
Paul refuses to leave the light as a vague glow; he tells us precisely what it is for. God shone in the heart, he says, “to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.” The key word in the Greek is φωτισμός (phōtismos, illumination), and it means more than brightness for its own sake. φωτισμός (phōtismos, illumination) is light that lets you see something, the lighting-up of a room so that what was there all along can finally be made out. And the something the light reveals is God Himself, His glory (δόξα, doxa, glory), known and recognised in the face (πρόσωπον, prosōpon, face) of Jesus Christ. Here the Godalming picture turns exact. Electric light was never wanted for its own sake; people wanted it so they could see, read a page, find a face across a room, work after dark. In the same way, the light God kindles inside is given so that we might know Him, might look at Jesus and see, shining there, the glory of the God who made us. The verb Paul chooses for the shining, ἔλαμψεν (elampsen, he shone), is the plain, physical word for a light breaking out. This is no dim religious feeling. It is God switching on the lamp of the soul so that the eyes of the heart can at last make out His face.
A Light You Did Not Strike
The whole weight of the sentence rests on who does the work, and it changes how we hold it. God said. God made his light shine. God shone. From first to last the acting is His; the heart simply receives what the darkness could never have produced on its own. This is worth dwelling on, because faith is so easily turned into a project, as though the light in us were a lamp we had to keep lit by our own straining. The people of Godalming never generated the current; a wheel turned in the river and the power came to them, and their part was to open the door and let it in. So it is with the light of God. You never thought your way to it, never earned it by being good enough; a Word older than the world was spoken over your dark, and light came. Paul will say, two verses on, that we carry this treasure in ordinary clay jars, so that everyone can see the surpassing power belongs to God alone, never to us. The light is real, and it is yours, and from beginning to end it is a gift. And a gift, by its nature, is offered; this light is held out to anyone at all who will turn and receive it, with no favoured few and no one turned away.
Seeing by It This Saturday
This changes what an ordinary Saturday is for. The light was kindled so that you could see God, so the most natural thing in the world is to use it for exactly that. On a free day with fewer demands, that might mean an unhurried while with the open Scriptures, letting the face of Jesus come into focus without the week’s rush blurring Him. It might mean carrying the awareness of Him into the shopping and the chores and the meal with friends, catching sight of His goodness in a hundred small mercies you would normally hurry past. And because the light was given to be seen by others as well as by you, a Saturday is a fine place to let a little of it out, a patience in a crowded queue, a warmth to someone the week has worn down, a readiness to speak well of the One whose glory you have glimpsed. You will do none of this to switch the light on; it is already on. You are simply living in a house that has been wired for brightness, using the light for the very thing it was given for, which is to know Him and to let others catch His glow. Lived that way, an ordinary Saturday becomes a kind of seeing.
Declaration
The light in me was never struck by my own hand; it was spoken, the way the first morning was spoken over the dark. A word older than the world was said over the shut-up rooms of my life, and where there had only ever been shadow, there was suddenly light. I could no more have made it than a dark street could wire itself; the power came to me from outside, and my one part was to open the door and let it in. And it was given with a purpose, a light to see by more than a brightness to admire, so that I might look and know the One who made me, catching sight of the worth of the One who made me in a face I can trust. So I will use it today for what it is for. I will turn towards that face, let the light fall on the ordinary hours, and let a little of it spill out to the people around me. The room of my life has been lit by another’s word, and when the evening comes and the world outside goes dark, the light within me goes on shining.
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