Light Walker

There is the admonition today to "be yourself", to "believe in yourself", to "trust yourself".   All this sounds like wise counsel and of course it is upbeat in its approach to personality.  But it is sheer folly to put any real confidence in ourselves without taking into account the destructive working of Sin at every level of our personality.  Our dreams hint at the vast unconscious mind we possess.  It is a tangle of lusts, bitter frustrations and crippling fears.  Anger and hatred boil below the surface of our consciousness as does despair and loneliness along with hopes and loves and passions.  Our Lord is the great realist and he refuses to ignore the true condition of our humanity.  For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. (Matthew 15:19-20 NIV)  Many wave this all off as negative thinking but God knows how deeply Sin has worked its way in us and how corrupted the inner parts of our being are.  We don't need an infusion of positive thinking so we can blindly look past our true brokenness; we need a Savior to cleanse the deep parts of us that control our moodsand impulses.  John the Apostle puts perfectly what we must do.  Walk in the light and as the Holy Spirit reveals a matter of doing or stopping, immediately act upon that impulse of God.  As we remain in the light the Lord gives us, the blood of Christ will cleanse and purify the damage caused by Sin, even in the unconscious parts of us.  We will discover that while we walk in the light, the darkness in our dreams will begin to clear also so that we will see, as if on a big screen, the great work of our Lord in the inner parts of our soul!

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.   1 John 1:7 NIV

Walking in the Light

What does it mean that we are not our own, we were bought at a price except that we are not our own.  (1 Corinthians 6:19)  It is paganism at its core to struggle out of the grip of the Holy Spirit and venture off without a single thought what God who is truly God might want.  We are certainly free to say what we think and do as we wish but if we are in Christ we are not our own and that will become perfectly clear to us in the workings of God in our daily doings.  The things we ask of Him and the gifts we desire will lie neglected until we get this matter straight.  We are not our own.  To walk in the light requires we stay away from the dark places of independence and rely upon the Word to direct our steps.  Of course it isn't easy but it is the One Way that makes the love of Christ fill our hearts with lasting gladness.