Let Your Light Shine
Day 252 – 9 September
Out of the Cellar
No one lights a lamp and puts it away in a cellar nor under a basket, but on the lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light. (Luke 11:33, NASB)
Put That Light Out
On the evening of the first of September 1939, two days before Britain declared war, the whole country went dark. Blackout regulations came into force that night and stayed for nearly six years. Every window and doorway had to be covered after sunset with heavy curtains, cardboard, or black paint, so that no glimmer could escape to guide a bomber overhead. Street lamps were switched off at the mains, car headlights masked to a slit, shop signs darkened, and a person could be fined for striking a match in the street. Air Raid Precautions wardens patrolled every night, hammering on doors at the merest pinpoint of light with the cry that became the sound of the war at home: put that light out! It was hiding on a national scale, and it was entirely reasonable, because the danger overhead was real. Yet the darkness had a cost. In that first month alone, over a thousand people died on London’s roads as drivers crept along blind, and others fell into docks and canals they could no longer see. A land that has hidden all its lights becomes a hard and dangerous place to move through, even when the hiding is wise. Jesus, long before, had reached for the same idea, and the hiding place He named was the deepest in the house.
The Deepest Hiding Place
Luke records the lamp saying twice, and the second time Jesus names a hiding place that appears nowhere else in the Bible. “No one lights a lamp and puts it away in a cellar nor under a basket, but on the lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light” (Luke 11:33). The word rendered “cellar” is κρύπτη (kryptē, a hidden place, a cellar or vault), and it occurs only here in the whole New Testament. It is the word behind our English crypt, and its root is the ordinary verb for hiding. The translators’ notes describe it as any secret place in a house where a lamp could be put so that its light would be useless. So this is a step beyond the other two coverings. The grain-measure was clapped over the lamp in the middle of the living space; the bed hid it in the private room; but the cellar takes the lamp down below the floor, into the one part of the house built for keeping things out of sight. Nobody stumbles on a cellar by accident. A lamp put there has been put there on purpose, carried down the steps and shut away, and the whole house left dark above it. That is the hiding Jesus is describing, and He calls it what it is: absurd, because a lamp lit and then buried has been made useless at the one thing it exists to do.
Three Lids, One Lamp
Taken together, the three coverings read like a diagnosis of the ways a believer’s light goes missing. Under the grain-measure it is smothered by busyness, the press of getting and spending. Under the bed it is kept for private comfort, warming its owner and no one else. And in the cellar it is deliberately put away, out of fear. Each lid is a little darker than the last, and each is more intentional. The busy person hardly notices the light has gone; the comfortable person has let it drift out of sight; but the one who carries the lamp down to the cellar has looked at it, decided it must be hidden, and hidden it. It is the blackout of the soul: every window of a life covered over, every glimmer stopped at the curtain, because of something feared overhead.
What We Are Afraid Of
The question that follows is what the bombers are. What is the danger that makes a Christian black out their own windows? For most of us it is the fear of being seen: the dread of a colleague’s raised eyebrow, of being thought odd or pushy or naive, of the awkward silence when it comes out that you pray. It is the fear of being asked a question you cannot answer, or of being held to a standard you are sure you will fail. Sometimes it is plain shame, a sense that your life is too patched and ordinary to carry anything as bright as the light of God, so better to keep it downstairs where no one can measure the gap. And sometimes it is the memory of a real wound, an occasion when you did let the light show and someone mocked it, so the lamp went down the cellar steps and has stayed there since. None of these fears is foolish; each has some experience behind it. But the question the blackout puts to us is a sharp one: is the danger still overhead? Are the bombers still coming, or are we keeping the curtains drawn against a sky that has been clear for years?
The All-Clear
Here is the news the lamp has been waiting for down in the dark. The all-clear has sounded. In April 1945, with the war in Europe all but over, the blackout was lifted, and for the first time in five and a half years people threw back the curtains and let the light pour out into the street, because the thing they had feared was finished. The gospel says something very like that over every believer’s cellar. The danger you are hiding from has been dealt with. Christ has gone before you into every raised eyebrow and every mocking silence; He was despised and rejected far more thoroughly than you ever will be, and He came through it alive. The verdict that you dreaded from other people has already been overruled by the only verdict that lasts, the Father’s welcome. This is why the Psalmist could put light and fearlessness in the same breath: “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” (Psalm 27:1). When God Himself is your light, the fear that drove the lamp underground has lost its reason. The sky is clear. The raid you keep bracing for is over, and has been for a long time. There is no warden at the door tonight, only a Saviour, and what He says is the opposite of the wartime cry: put that light back on.
Up the Cellar Steps on a Wednesday
A midweek Wednesday is a good day to go down the steps and fetch the lamp. It has been down there a while, and you will have to go and get it. Bringing it up is rarely dramatic. It is one act of un-hiding, chosen against the old fear: saying grace at the table where you have always bowed your head in silence, mentioning where you were on Sunday when someone asks about your weekend, admitting to the friend in trouble that you pray and asking if you might pray for them, letting the reason for your patience or your peace be spoken when someone wonders at it. Small things, all of them, and each one a curtain drawn back to let a little light onto the street. You may feel the flinch as you do it, the old instinct to duck as if the sirens were sounding. Let the flinch come and go. The danger it is warning you about was dealt with at a cross and an empty tomb, and the One whose light you carry has never once been caught out by a raised eyebrow. Bring the lamp up. Set it on the stand. The sky has been clear for longer than you have dared to believe.
Declaration
I know exactly where I have been keeping my light, because I carried it down there myself. Out of fear of what people would think, of the question I had no answer for, of the laugh at my expense, I took the lamp to the lowest room in the house and shut the door on it, and I have lived in the dark above it as if the raid were still on. But the all-clear went long ago. The danger I keep bracing for was met and finished by One who walked into every rejection ahead of me and came out alive, and the only verdict that lasts on my life has already been spoken, and it is welcome. So today I go down the steps and fetch the lamp. The old fear will speak; I will let it finish, and then I will go on. I will draw back one curtain, speak one plain word about the light I carry, let one person see what has been hidden. The sky above my life has been clear for years. I bring the lamp up. I set it where it belongs. And I let it burn where anyone coming in can see it.
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