Let Your Light Shine – Part Three

Matthew 5:14-16

As a young child, Robert Louis Stevenson watched through a window as night covered his community.  His nurse said, “Come sit down, it is so dark you can’t see anything now.” “Oh yes I can,” he replied as he watched the lamplighter coming up the street igniting the gas street lights, “I see a man making holes in the darkness.”  That is exactly what Christ wants us to do spiritually.

When A.W. Milne, missionary to New Guinea died, the natives erected a marker: “When he came to us there was no light.  When he left there was no darkness.” May it be said of your sphere area of influence.

Joni Erickson Tada, observed “The world does not get it’s concept of Christianity from the Bible but from believers.”

Let your light “so shine” not as to dazzle nor to obscure.  Light can be used to blind or guide.  Don’t use your light so as to offend, but to guide.

The reason is “…that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

That they may see “your good works, not you, the worker.  People don’t look at the sun, but they marvel over its effects.

There are two Greek words for good: “agathos”meaning good in quality, and “kalos, meaning good in quality, but also beautiful and winsome.  The latter is used.

Let your good works be done spontaneously and naturally, not demonstrably.  That they may “glorify your Father….”

Light, literally, is a form of energy.  Solar panels on satellites capture rays of the sun and convert them to energy.

Plant life is energized by capturing the sun’s rays and by a process called photosynthesis, transforms it into life.

A missionary in China had his meager hospital which he had worked years to develop burned by General Chaing Ki Sheck when the General’s army occupied the territory.  The doctor followed the General’s army treating his wounded soldiers.  The General later asked the doctor’s wife why he did this.  “It is because he is a Christian,”  she replied.  “Then I, too, must become a Christian,” was the General’s reply.  That doctor was one of the three influences that brought Chaing Ki Sheck to Jesus by letting his work glorify the Father.

“For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (II Corinthians 4: 6)

As Jesus prayed so might we: “Father, glorify Thy name…I have glorified you on earth.”

Light shows.  There’s nothing secretive about the Christian life.  This appeal by Christ is a call to demonstrate the joy of fellowship with Him.