Just Enough Light for the Step I’m on<BR>> By Stormie Omartian<BR>Chapter Two: Beginning to See the Light<P>Our lives are touched by many different kinds of light. <P>Sunlight and moonlight. Stoplights and spotlights. Firelight, city lights, candlelight, and lamplight. Headlights, night-lights, neon lights, and streetlights. Glittering and blinding lights. Confusing and deceiving lights.<P>All of these lights have one thing in common. They eventually go out. They’re not reliable. They can never be the light we need to illuminate the path of our life. There is only one light that never goes out. It comes from God. <P>It is God.<P>God’s light is the true light. His light makes clear. All other light confuses. His light reveals the truth. All other light obscures it. His light brings us out of our blindness, and helps us see in a way we’ve never been able to see before. He says, “I will bring the blind by a way they did no know; I will lead them in paths they have not known. I will make darkness light before them, and crooked places straight. These things I will do for them, and not forsake them” (Isaiah 42:16). God’s light penetrates darkness, and darkness cannot put it out.<P>Unless we follow the true light, we are being led into darkness.<P>In the years before I had a personal relationship with God, I walked in a thick darkness of depression, fear, anxiety, and despair. Everything I experimented with was a desperate search for something to light up my life. But I never found anything lasting. When I received the Lord I was not suddenly filled with light, as some people have described it. The light I saw was a glimmer of hope. I compare it to sleeping in a dark room with a pinhole of light of light entering through the curtains and shining brightly in your eyes. It’s a small light, but noticeably bright enough to awaken you if you’ve grown accustomed to the blackness of the room. The light of the Lord was that unmistakable to me because of the contrasting darkness of my life. Any more light would have been blinding. But because of my own bondage, the light was dim at the beginning of my walk compared to what was to come.<P>From that day on, I walked toward the light. There were times when I took a wrong turn and fell into sudden darkness, but I found it so shocking and repulsive that u quickly fog back on track. The more I walked in the light of the Lord, the brighter it became until it lit up every part of my being.<P>I have heard peole talk about near-death experiences where they saw a bright light. I don’t doubt that they saw it. But I know that when we who believe in the Lord die, we won’t see a light. We will se the light. We will see Jesus who is the light of th wworkd. The best way to make sure we see His light after we die is to follow His light as long as we’re alive.<P>We begin to see the light when we begin to see the Lord.<P>The way to keep from following the wrong light is to not follow any light except for the light of Jesus. The world wants us to follow its light. The devil wants us to follow his light. “For Satan himself transforms himself into and angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). We will encounter people who fancy themselves to be our savior and will want us to follow their light. But God does not have us follow a light. He has us follow Him. And He becomes our light. The more faithfully we follow Him, the more of His light we will have shining on our path. “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4).<P>God’s light is constant because He is constant. He is without change. His light doesn’t grow dim or go out. If it appears to, it’s because we have stepped out of the light of His presence. Although God is omnipresent, we must remember that there are degrees of the fullness of His presence as we are able to receive. Although His light never goes out, we sometimes do things that separate us from the fullness of His life and cause His light to appear dim in our lives.<P>King David was a man who went through some very dark times. Some of them were his fault (his immoral relationship with Bathsheba), and some of them weren’t (His volatile relationship with the jealous King Saul). In either case, David always knew that the light on his path came from God. He was still God’s anointed no matter how dark it got. Even when he made bad choices, he had a heart for the Lord, and God never allowed him to be destroyed. <P>It’s the same with those of us who love God. His light is always available to us. No matter how badly we think we’ve blown it in our lives, we are never truly in darkness when we look to him.<P>Our problem is that when we enter into a dark time, we don’t always realize that we have a light within us, which never goes out. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life” (John 8:12). If we don’t understand what that verse means, we can get confused and begin to doubt. We see darkness and run after a light that is unreliable, instead of opening our eyes to follow the true light that cannot be extinguished.<P>During my first year as a new believer, every time anything went wrong I though God had abandoned me. I felt like I was moving backwards. I didn’t realize that the layers of darkness I had lived a lifetime with needed to be stripped away so I could be free of them. In order to do that, I should have turned to God each time they surfaced. Instead, when the darkness of depression descended upon me as it had so many times in the past, I thought God was not there for me and so I sought our the old familiar comforts of ungodly relationships and alcohol. I became sidetracked and wasted precious time. None of this would have happened if I had mad a strong effort to walk in the light every day, no matter what was going on in my life.<P>I have electricity in my home, but if I don’t plug into it, I don’t see the light. I have Jesus in my heart, but if I don’t plug into Him daily, I won’t see His light either, even though it is there. I have to connect with him. Talk to Him. Worship Him. Spend time with Him. Bask in His radiance like bathing in the sun. Becomes so familiar with His illumination of my soul that I immediately recognize any counterfeit.<P>I remember a conversation I had with a man who works as a nigh watchman. He described how he always looked intensely for the first sign of morning light. Because that meant he wand the property he had been guarding were out of danger and he could be relieved from the burden. God wants us to look for His light in our lives even “more than those who watch for the morning” (Psalm 130:6). That means we don’t rest until we know we see it.<P>Whenever we go through difficult times, we anticipate the coming moment when all the pressure is off, the worry has subsided, the healing has manifested, the sadness has lifted, and the pain is gone. We continuously look for God to take away the discomfort we are experiencing, But God wants us to know that even as we wait for those changes to happen, His light is there all the time shining into our darkness. He wants us to trust that, and open our eyes to see it.<P>No matter how dark things seem in your life, when you walk with God you will find and abundance of His light right where you are. You will never be without it because you have the source of true and everlasting light within you. “The city had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God illuminated it. The Lamb is its light” (Revelation 21:23). When God is your light, you have no need of any other.<P>So don’t worry about seeing or understanding what the future holds. God wants you to trust Him as He leads you, even though you can’t see clearly ahead. And don’t be overly concerned about fully comprehending the past. Only He knows the whole truth about it, anyway. You have Him now. <P>He is your light. And that’s all that matters.<BR>--------------------<BR>Prayer light<P>Lord, You are the light of my life. You illuminate my path, and I will follow wherever You lead. Shield me from being lured by the light of the world. Keep me from being deceived by the light of eel. Protect me from being blinded by the light that confuses. Help me to always identify the counterfeit. I depend on You to lift up the light of Your countenance upon me (Psalm 4:6). Thank You, Lord, that because You never change, Your light is constant in my life no matter what is going on around me. Shine Your light through me as I walk with my hand in Yours. I give this day to You and trust that the light You give me is just the amount I need for the step I’m on.<BR>--------------------<BR>Footlights<P>This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.<BR> If we way that we have fellowship with Him, and walk I darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.<BR>But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.<BR>~1 John 1:5-7<P>That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world.<BR>~ John 1:9<P>While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.<BR>~ John 12:36<P>The path of the just is life the shining sun, That shines ever brighter unto the perfect day.<BR>~ Proverbs 4:18<P>God is the Lord, And He has given us light…<BR>~ Psalm 118:27<P><p>[This message has been edited by Scared and lonely (edited January 18, 2001).]
