“Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness.”

                                             (Luke 11:35)

                           Is Your Light Darkness?
    These are the words of Jesus as He teaches about the light within the body. What a startling statement He is making. How is it that light can be darkness? Is there such a scientific phenomenon in the physical realm? Obviously, this is a possibility in the spiritual.
    Today, must a gospel preacher expose the blindness of this age? Darkness, depravity, and devoid of discernment all characterize this generation. The “Light,” the “Truth,” – Christ is hid from them. They tolerate the ways, lack of morals and customs of this world with a vicious intolerance of the godly and righteous. The eye of light they plucked from its socket to leave a blackened wound of blindness. O’ dear God, help the blinded eye, the fallen-in-the-ditch, the blind trying to lead the blind. The eye is evil, and the light be darkness.
    Even in the church some have taken the light of God’s love, grace, and mercy to their license, licentiousness, and lust. Thus, the truth of what Christ said; if “thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness.” It is this evil liberty taken that blots the light from the eye. Sinful desires have blinded the light of Christ and no longer can we spiritually see and discern.
    The world will kick the gold dust of materialism into the eye of light and darken the understanding as well. Mammon is an enemy of the light. Many a minister and believer has fallen into a dark place in pursuit of this world’s glitter.
    Then there are those who refuse to be taught. The spirit will guide, they have an impression, this education stuff is not of the Lord. Soon the blindness of ignorance fills the eye with darkness.
    Obviously, the devil, himself, is persistently firing his darts of evil at the eye of light. Can this occur in what may initially seem to be the most noble of pursuits? We are not talking a heart of evil pursuing the darkness of the alleyway or gutter, but the desire that seeks a noble and high office. Yet along the journey the flesh arises and darkness steps on the scene. Charles H. Spurgeon illustrates it this way:
    “I have also seen this light turned to darkness in the case of the student who has gathered great erudition, and enrolled himself among the learned. He begins to criticize. Do not condemn him for that: he judges very properly at first, he criticizes things that ought to be criticized; but he stops not there. Once having his critical faculty aroused, he is like a boy with a new knife; he must cut something or other. Nothing comes in his way more often than the Scriptures; and he must have a cut at them. He whittles at Genesis; he makes a gash in Deuteronomy; he halves Isaiah; he takes slices out of the Gospels, and cuts the Epistles into slivers. You see, he has so sharp a knife that he must use it. By-and-by, from a critic he advances to an irreverent faultfinder, and from that to an utter unbeliever, hard in the mouth and stiff in the neck. His light has blinded him. He has taken his own eye to pieces that he might study its anatomy, and henceforth the light will be of no more use to him than to the dead.”

   It has been my experience to hear several dear friends in the ministry say, “this verse should read or this word would be better translated.” Maybe their intentions were good in the beginning. But that new penknife got the best of them and soon began to cut out the very light they once embraced. With modern Bible versions the Word has been cut, criticized and corrected until the light which was in them has become darkness. Some in their zealous pursuit have even called it “higher criticism.” It was a “big bang” heard round the world – the Darwinian evolution of the Bible. Is this natural selection or yet survival of the fittest - whichever “Bible” sells the most survives!

   “Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness!”
                                                                                                         RLW