‘I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness’ John 12.46 NIV.
We cannot see with Jesus Eyes if if our gospel is warped and our christ is crooked. Any dilution of Christ and His Gospel promotes dullness and death. How do we get to know the truth about God and Jesus Christ and make our way through the thicket of aberrations, dilutions, ‘other gospels’ and paddocks of tares posing as wheat? How do we ensure that truth is our life and that we are the truth as fruitful disciples of Jesus?
In short our light is Christ our life. In greater detail it is to be informed by the Gospel of Jesus and the apostles, the Church Fathers, Reformers and those who express this Gospel of the Kingdom.
LIFE AND LIGHT ‘In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’ John 1.4 NIV. The prologue to the book of John is a good place to get our bearings. The Revelation of God is a person who is the Light of the World and the Light of every person, discerning enough to live from His Light instead of the gloom of flickering candles and smoking embers of half-truth and un-truth.
NEVER MEANS NEVER ‘He said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’ John 8.12 NIV. Then why do Christians walk in fogs of illusion? Could this be the result of following themselves instead of following Jesus?
GOD’S REVELATION Speaking of knowing God by revelation and ‘being,’ Thomas Torrance writes, “The Word of God addressed to Israel did not return to him fruitless without accomplishing his purpose or succeeding in the task he gave it. For it laid hold upon the mind and will of this people in a creative way which called forth from it responses that were taken up, purified and assimilated to the Word of God as the means of its ever-deepening penetration into the understanding, life and service of Israel, so that it could be bearer of divine revelation for all mankind. Jesus of Nazareth was the end-point of this unfolding of God in Israel. JESUS THE BRIGHTNESS OF LIGHT That was the movement of God's self-revelation which was brought to its culmination in Jesus Christ through the Incarnation when the Word of God actualised itself within Israel and within mankind in the visible, tangible form of a particular human being who embodied in himself the personal address of God's Word to man and the personal response of man to God's Word. In Jesus the Word of God was translated into the form of a human life in whom there was only truth and light and no darkness.” Baptised into this reality is the living way in which we live in Christ instead of a confected ideology. BECOMING LIGHT Israel as the bearer of God’s revelation was the soil and garden from which the Messiah sprang, the tree of life that would be the healer of individuals and the nations. This Christ who is entirely truth, light and no darkness, has drawn you into His life. He has come to you as THE LIGHT and Christ in you and Christ your life, so that if you are His disciple and agree that His life is for you, in you and in you, you are alive and sighted. Because this light is becoming you – you will increasingly possess the light of life and leave behind all darkness. This is our foundation of our being agents of light and our inclusion in the Universal Church. ‘That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me’ John 17.21 NIV.