Truly "the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness apprehended it not."
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Marvelous way, is it not, in which the creature is to be made perfect and known and loved and great: simply letting God's will be done in us and in our circumstances and surroundings? Yet heretofore one's saying, "Thy will be done," has been associated in mind only with death and suffering and failure, and with a forced submission to these un-Godlike conditions, as though God were the author of them. "God is not a God of confusion, but of peace." Oh, how in our ignorance we have mistaken and misunderstood God, in consequence of which we are today pygmies when He wanted to make us giants in love and health and power by manifesting more of Himself through us! We would not let Him, because we have been afraid to say, "Have Thy way in me; manifest Thyself through me as Thou wilt"
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Health is more life. Drugs will not give life. Travel and change of scene, so often resorted to in illness of mind and body, will not give life except in so far as they tend to relax the tense, rigid mind and body of man and permit God — who is always in process of outgoing as life toward us His children — to flow in to fill the lack. We do not have to beseech God. Life more abundant rushes into the souls and bodies of men, as air does into a vacuum, the moment they learn how consciously to relax and, turning toward God, let it. People who are persistently ill or unsuccessful in any way say they are tired of it all and want to die. They know not what they say. They do not understand. It is not death they want but more life. This breath of the Almighty is to us the only health and strength, the only power and success of either mind or body.
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What then are we to do? Change our minds. Turn around. If through ignorance of the only and unfailing source of all life we have turned our backs upon God and our faces toward human helps, like drugs, change of environment, and the like, let us halt, face about!
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The inner light comes to “every man, coming into the world"; but we may close ourselves to this light either through ignorance or willfullness — the result is the same — and live in darkness. The light within every man goes right on shining just the same, whether he accepts it or rejects it. 'The light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness apprehended it not." In this case the light is shut off through ignorance. "'And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, and cometh not to the light [free will], lest his works should be reproved [or detected}." Thus is the light voluntarily or willfully shut out, again as a matter of man's choice. Both conditions are dependent on the mental attitude of man. In the first instance he is not conscious that there is light within himself: "the darkness apprehended it not." In the second instance he stubbornly refuses to come to the light because he "hateth the light."
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Life a Ministry LOOKED AT from a purely commercial standpoint, the life of Jesus Christ was a failure. His place in the world was obscure, His occupation a humble one. The work of His hands commanded only the usual recompense. From the world's point of view His contribution was merely that of an average man.
Even after His public life began He seemingly failed just as signally as before. He made Himself of no reputation among men. In the field where His greatest visible success lay, the delivering of men from sorrow and trouble, He sometimes failed. "He saved others; himself he cannot save," they cried when deriding Him. All the way to His ignominious death He stood before self-satisfied men, chief priests and Pharisees, as a failure. Why? Because He and these men were living from entirely different standpoints. Men were living largely from the external; Jesus was living from within. Men were reckoning success then as the world reckons success today, largely in terms of numbers and figures and the possession of external things.
After two thousand years we can see that the life of Jesus Christ, lived so obscurely, so unostentatiously, really was not the failure that it seemed; that He was living a life that in the long run was the only successful one. For today, when His contemporaries have passed away and are forgotten. His life stands forth among men and within men as the inspiration of all love and all goodness, the inspiration of all success.
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God gives without thought or hope of return. So do we as soon as we become conscious of an indwelling Christ; we cease any longer to expect or desire to be ministered unto. If we would live the life of real success, real joy, real Christlikeness, we must keep the current turned to flow from within outward instead of in the opposite direction.
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Christ is the light of the world. Christ is within us. This light is ever fed from the great fountain of all light, the Father in Him: "I in them, and thou in me." God made each one of US to be a radiating center, constantly shining outward toward others in a spirit of ministry and giving. If you draw out your soul to satisfy the afflicted, then your light will break forth as the morning and your darkness will be as the noonday (See Isa. 58:8-10); for I, very Christ, who have come to abide within you, I am the light of the world, and when anyone draws out his soul he draws Me out. But if you put a bushel over your light by harboring the thought of not letting your neighbor receive from you anything for which he makes no return, you will simply find yourself walking in the darkness. 'If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is the darkness." As Christian Gellert said,
“whoever in the darkness lighteth another with this lamp [Christ] lighteth himself also; and the light is not of ourselves, it is of Him who appointeth the suns in their courses."
God a Present Help
by H. Emilie Cady
was first published in 1938.
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