light and darkness on Isolation

Leader: Heavenly Father, You do not want anyone to suffer in darkness or separation, but rather for everyone to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. As members of your family, may we remembe...

Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to bre...

In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light fo...

It’s important to note that God does not obliterate the darkness; rather, God names it and limits it—puts boundaries on it. The boundary is the light.

Put light against light - you have nothing. Put dark against dark - you have nothing. It's the contrast of light and dark that each give the other one meaning.

The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.

“They will look toward the earth and see only distress, darkness, and the gloom of affliction, and they will be driven into thick darkness.” (Isa. 8:22) In The Two Towers , the second novel in Tolki...

Darkness is not the opposite of light; it is the absence of light.

Dare to reach out your hand into the darkness, to pull another hand into the light.

Years ago, my wife and I traveled to Kentucky where I went to seminary and decided to stop and tour Mammoth Cave. The trip marked my first and only time ever to be in a cavern like this, and I’ll neve...

What Moses saw in the burning bush was nothing less than “the transcendent essence and cause of the universe, on which everything depends, alone subsists.

Leader: God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. People: If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth. Leader: But if we walk in the light...

All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not ...

Unless we form the habit of going to the Bible in bright moments as well as in trouble, we cannot fully respond to its consolations because we lack equilibrium between light and darkness.

We are a people that prefer the darkness. The darkness hides that which we wish others dare not see and that which we loathe about ourselves, our twisted thoughts, perverted practices, and foolish fol...

Ancient Lens What’s the historical context? Mixed Loyalties Diving straight into 2 Corinthians 4:3-6 without giving a nod to 2 Corinthians 3:1-4:2 gives a strange impression, because Paul’s point...

Mike Mason recounts how his friend Daniel Adair once said: Whenever I meet someone new, I take that person and fix him or her in my heart. To do this, I literally see that person as a star, and I ...

The dark night is a key part of God’s missional purpose in the world.

While we are now surrounded by a never-ending number of pixels with our smartphones, there once was a time where the process of developing photographs took something much more significant than pointin...

In the [Roman] catacombs, we are told, explorers take a thread with them through all the dark passages and tortuous windings, and by this thread they find their way back again to the light. There is s...

One of the biggest challenges in the Christian journey is grasping the heart of grace. Oftentimes there is an internal battle between our theology and our lived experience. In this short excerpt, Fred...

Many of us assume that our spiritual heroes do not have to experience the same inner-wrestling that we do. Mother Teresa, beloved across the world is one such figure we might “assume” didn’t have to d...

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

The very nature of light provides contrast. In juxtaposition, differing levels of light illuminate in extraordinary ways, helping us to see what we’ve been missing. In the late 1400s, the art world ma...

When I looked for God in the light, God was not there. When I faced the unfaceable, I found that I had joined God in the darkness. And so, paradoxically, the darkness had become light.

The men and women who are truly filled with the light are those who have gazed deeply into the darkness of their own imperfect existence.

Context Text Clues While all pericopes, of course, need to be read in context, sometimes we get clear textual clues that we are to do this. In this week’s text we get that by way of a bookended “fo...

Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don't light a candle in a room that's already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that's so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals ...

Context Text Clues While all pericopes, of course, need to be read in context, sometimes we get clear textual clues that we are to do this. In this week’s text we get that by way of a bookended “fo...