Needing the Light

My yard has a section that I call “the back 40.” It’s an area that was once a solid thicket. I know. I spent two solid weeks fighting the burning rash from clearing away all the poison oak many years ago. Now, the underbrush is gone, but the thick canopy above the ground keeps in solid shade.

I have tried to coax my grass to grow there, but every effort has failed. So, one day I was reading a news article about that problem and the author said it very plainly: “Grass needs the light. Period. It can’t grow without it.”

Sometimes we wonder why it’s so hard to make good choices, or to sense God’s presence, or to understand our pains and struggles.  But I believe that one of the core issues is that we try to “grow” those choices without exposing them to the Light of God’s Word.  We’re all dependent on the eyewitness accounts of Jesus–His teaching, His actions, and His example.  They recorded those things so that future generations could know Him and experience His power.  To know Him, we need to pursue Him, and at some point we must face the fact that we need to hear His words in the Scripture.  And unless we measure our thinking against His standards, we can talk ourselves into all kinds of weedy, debilitating behaviors and choices.

Like the grass needs the light of the sun, we need the light of God’s Word.