“The Light has come into the world, but people loved the darkness rather than the Light because their deeds were evil.”
(John 3:19)
When Jesus talked about darkness, he wasn’t speaking of a physical darkness. The darkness he spoke of is a metaphor for our sinful, selfish ways.
We often think of evil as some sort of treacherous and vile act, but evil can be subtle, too. Rape and murder are clearly evil, but it’s also evil to ignore someone’s suffering when we have the ability to help.
Just because some expressions of evil are more extreme than others, doesn’t make lesser evils somehow more tolerable. We deceive ourselves if we think that’s true.
That’s one reason darkness is such a proper analogy for evil. When it’s physically dark around us, and we can’t see clearly, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s mostly dark or pitch black. Regardless, we’re likely to stumble around, unable to find our way. Darkness is darkness, and the only cure for it is light.
In the same way, the only cure for spiritual darkness is spiritual light. We have to prune out our selfishness entirely, if we’re to fully live in the Light of Christ. Otherwise, we’ll just keep stumbling around through life, hurting ourselves and others — in big and small ways.
Living in the Light is the only way we’ll find true inner peace, joy, grace, and fulfillment.
Photo by Mstudio from Pexels
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