“When Jesus spoke again to the people, He said, ‘I am the light of the world. Whosoever follows Me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.'”
John 8:12 (NIV)
Years ago before I retired and my kids still lived at home, an electrical power outage in the middle of the night caused my family to oversleep. When we awoke the next morning, there was only a half hour until we needed to leave for work and school. Since the power had not yet been restored and the sky was still dark, we all scrambled to get ready by candle light and flashlight. Needless to say, it was extremely difficult to navigate in the partial darkness.
There are many ways that we can “walk in darkness” without even realizing it. One of the easiest ways to stray from the light is to forget or ignore that we are sinners in need of God’s forgiveness.
In a survey taken about the time of our power outage, 54% of Christians polled stated that they could somehow earn their way to heaven. This result might not be surprising given the human inclination to be self sufficient. It is easy to lull ourselves into a false satisfaction that we are pretty good people. We may go to church nearly every Sunday. We haven’t killed anyone or stolen something of real value. We might not curse as much as other people or cheat on our spouse.
Pretty soon we begin to think that we deserve the good things that are happening to us, especially when things are going well with our health and finances. It is only a small step from there to believing that we can get to heaven by our own merits.
How do we get back into the light that Jesus talks about in the Gospel of John? Does “following Him” mean that we need to be perfect like Jesus? On the contrary! Jesus didn’t come to earth as the sinless Son of God because we needed an example to follow. He came because we cannot, no matter how hard or long we try, keep God’s commandments perfectly. Because we can’t save ourselves by our own obedience, God sent Jesus to be the perfect sacrifice for the many sins we commit daily – to suffer the punishment that we deserve.
Walking in the light means understanding that it is only through God’s grace that we are saved. We can’t do anything by our own efforts to accomplish that. Instead, the Holy Spirit comes to us through the Word and Sacraments to turn the light on. Although we continue to struggle with sin daily, we know that forgiveness is ours through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
As forgiven sinners, we do God’s will out of thanksgiving and gratitude. This means sharing His love with others. It means supporting the work of His church on earth. It means loving Him more than anything or anyone else and loving our neighbors as ourselves – not because we are trying to earn our way to heaven, but because heaven is already ours.
Will we always walk in the light? Not likely. There will times when sin and temptation cause us to slip into darkness. Those are the times that we need God the most. Fortunately, the Light of the World is always with us even if we temporarily stray from the path He wants us to follow.