“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
Matthew 6:22-23
We are a broken people living in the midst of a broken creation. Most of us within the church will admit that we must pray more, read the Bible more, fast more often or take on some other Spiritual discipline. Deep down we know that we would have a more connected relationship to God if we just did these things. However, we don’t do them. Other things take priority in our lives. Some of these things are good. Work and love, action and rest all define much of our lives. Other things are mere distractions, watching excessive television, scrolling through social media and the occasional rant against those that oppose our world view.
Most understand how this works with food. We know that we should eat more healthy foods, exercise and get appropriate amounts of sleep. Deep down we know that if we do these very basic things, we will live a healthier more energy filled life. But life gets busy so it easier to eat fast food, drink soda and delight ourselves with a multitude of sweet pastries.
In all of this we tend to dwell on the temporary. Our broken culture (that has been broken since that incident in the Garden of Eden, this is not new my friends) teaches us the concept that if it feels good do it. So, we dive in and eat the whole carton of ice cream or the box of donuts and then have a tummy ache. Since we don’t feel good, we lounge on the couch and watch television, sacrificing sleep and connection with each other.
Daily we feed our eyes positive and negative ideas and concepts. Very little in our world really is neutral. Even the small things in our world make a difference. How do you start your day? Too many start off by grabbing their smart phones and getting their morning fix by scrolling and losing the first portion of the new day. How can we have a day filled with light when we start with darkness? We then drag ourselves to drink coffee, eat a few donuts and hopefully shower before we go to work. Our work we do halfheartedly with little energy, excusing our poor work habits by saying they don’t pay us enough. It might be true that you are underpaid, but you agreed to that price. You may have had to agree to that price because you failed to get education or experience or have not yet demonstrated your real value. We should be doing our work unto the Lord. If we do it in any other way, we are feeding our eyes negativity and darkness. After work we go home where we sit at the table or in the living room mutually scrolling our smartphones with our family. The meal we eat might be together but for too many families it looks more like an individual taste’s extravaganza. Our home life does not include connection, without our family we are in darkness.
My friends I am calling you into the light. I am not prescribing any specific Spiritual disciplines, not how long or often or even what time you should do them. What I am challenging you to do is recognize the darkness around you. Open your eyes to how our broken culture is coddling us, rocking us to sleep and keeping us from the light. Wake up. Connect with your creator, interact with your family and friends, and then do your part to show the light to others. You can only do that if you have the light within you.
