Let Your Light Shine
Day 249 – 6 September
Lit From One Light
For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light. (Psalm 36:9, KJV)
One Flame, a Whole Room
It is a small marvel, watching light spread through a darkened room by candle. One flame is lit, and from it a second wick catches, and from those two a fourth and a fifth, until what began as a single point of fire has filled the whole space with a soft, moving brightness. And here is the beauty of it: the first candle loses nothing at all. You can light a hundred wicks from one flame and that flame burns on exactly as before, undiminished, none the poorer for all it has given away. Every candle in the room is now alight, and yet none of them kindled itself; each is simply carrying the same fire, handed on from the one that was lit first. It makes a fitting picture for a Sunday, and for the week we have just walked through, because across the past five mornings we have looked at the light a believer carries, and today, the sixth, it is worth gathering all of it back to its single source.
In Your Light We See Light
The gathering place is a single line from an old psalm, and it may be one of the most searching sentences in all of Scripture. David sings to God, “For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light” (Psalm 36:9). Sit with that second half for a moment. In thy light shall we see light. Every scrap of light we have ever seen, we have seen because a prior light made it visible; we see by a brightness we never kindled. The Hebrew word standing at both ends of that line is אוֹר (or, light), the plainest and oldest light-word in the Bible, the very word God spoke on the first morning when He said, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). David’s claim is that this same אוֹר (or, light) has its home with God, and that all our seeing, all our knowing, every glimmer we call our own, is simply His light reaching us and letting us see. We are, every one of us, like candles in that dark room. The light is real, and it is truly ours to carry, and yet from first to last it was handed to us; it burns with a fire we never struck.
Six Windows on One Light
Laid side by side, the week’s mornings show one light through all of them, like a single lamp seen through several windows. On the first day the light was a borrowed brightness, ours the way the moon’s glow is the sun’s, real and yet reflected. On the second it was a rescue, a long polar night broken by a sun that returned from outside ourselves. On the third it was a belonging, the settled truth that we are people of the daytime, at home in the light. On the fourth it was life itself, a light that turns into living the way sunshine turns into a green and growing leaf. And on the fifth it was a new creation, the God who said “let there be light” over the void speaking the same word into the dark of a human heart. Five pictures, five mornings, and behind every one of them the same fire. The moon owns no glow but the sun’s; the polar dawn is the returning of a light from elsewhere; the day belongs to the sun that rules it; the leaf lives on a light it receives; the lit heart shines with a word that was spoken to it. None of these lights is self-made. Every last one is His light, reaching us, seen by us, carried by us, and in every case it is “in thy light” that we have seen light at all.
One Light, and All His Languages Name It
There is one more gathering to make, and it reaches back across the whole Bible. The Scriptures were written in three tongues, and each of them has its own word for this light, as though the one radiance were too large for any single language to hold. In Hebrew it is אוֹר (or, light), the word of the first morning. In Greek, the language of the week just gone, it is φῶς (phōs, light), the word behind every morning we have studied. And in the Aramaic of the prophet Daniel it is נְהוֹρָא (nehora, light), which appears in a line that gathers everything we have been saying into a single breath: God “knoweth what is in the darkness, and the light dwelleth with him” (Daniel 2:22). There it is, in the oldest and simplest terms. The light dwells with God. It is at home with Him, it belongs to Him, it pours out from where He is; and because it dwells with Him, He sees perfectly into every darkness while the darkness can hide nothing from Him. Three languages, three words, one light, and all of it His. When a believer carries light into a grey Monday or a hard conversation, this is the fire being handed on: the אוֹר (or, light) of creation, the φῶς (phōs, light) of the gospel, the נְהוֹρָא (nehora, light) that dwells with God, passed candle to candle, and burning in us with a flame we were given.
The Day the Lamps Are Gathered
This is why a Sunday sits so rightly at the close of such a week. Six days the light has been ours to carry through kitchens and workplaces and streets, and now the Lord’s Day comes and does something a scattered week cannot. It gathers the lamps. All over a city, in halls and living rooms and old stone buildings, people who have been shining in a hundred separate places come together into one room, and the effect is exactly the candlelit room made visible: many flames, one fire, a brightness far greater gathered than any single wick alone. And gathered worship does the truest thing a lit candle can do, which is to turn its light back towards the flame that lit it. We never meet on a Sunday to admire our own glow. We meet to look again at the Source, to see, in His light, the light; to let the moon face the sun. When the people of God sing and pray and open the Scriptures together, they are candles turned back towards the first fire, giving the brightness home.
Carrying It Into Monday
Wherever the people of God are meeting today, go and be gathered with them if you can, and let your own small flame stand among the others, turned back towards the One who lit it. Let the singing be the moon facing the sun; let the Scriptures open a little more of His light to you; let the company of other burning candles remind you that you were never meant to shine alone in the dark. And when tomorrow comes and the room empties and each of you carries a flame back out into an ordinary week, remember where the fire came from. You will walk into Monday already alight, and the fire will be nothing you struck, only a light that dwells with God and was handed to you to carry. Shine it freely. There is no danger of running the fountain dry; the One whose light it is loses nothing by lighting you, and nothing by lighting the next person through you. In His light, you have seen light. Now go and let others see by it too.
Declaration
Every bit of light I have was handed to me; none of it began with me. Whatever brightness I carry, I carry the way a candle carries fire, lit from a flame I never kindled, burning with a light that was given. So today, with others, I gather. I turn my small flame back towards the One who lit it, glad to be one light among many, glad that I was never meant to burn alone in the dark. Here I look again at the Source, and in that light I see everything else more clearly, my own small glow included. Then, when the week begins again, I will carry the flame out into the ordinary hours and let it spread, spending it freely on every dim corner and every face I pass. I never made this light. I was only lit, and asked to carry it, and shown where to bring it back. The light is mine to carry. It was always the Giver’s to give.
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