The Purpose of Light.
Welcome if you have been receiving the Belonging House Friday email.
I post my teaching from Sundays on Monday, and send out the Friday email every Friday. If this encourages you, please share it with others.
Thanks for being part of our online community.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedYou are the light of the world.
Human beings work from the outside in.
This is the essence of the world's system.
God works from the inside out.
This is the essence of the Kingdom of God.
This week I want to talk about what it means to be the light,
and also answer two questions that were sent to me:
"How do I strengthen myself in the Lord?"
and
"Can you explain Lent?'
It might surprise you,
but all three of these ideas
being light,
being strengthened,
and the season of Lent
are related.
We think that when Jesus said
"you are the light of the world"
he was using this as a metaphor.
A lot of people think that things in Scripture
are metaphorical,
when Jesus was being literal.
We see this in John 6
where Jesus says
unless you eat my body and drink my blood
you will not have life within you.
He was not talking about a metaphor,
he was talking about His presence in the Eucharist,
and Paul reasserts this,
by saying in I Corinthians 11 that if you do not
discern the Body of Christ
you will get sick and die.
Paul said that if you do not recognize the real presence
you are going to get sick.
That's pretty real.
So Jesus says,
you are the light of the world.
Agnes Sanford,
in her book the Healing Light,
writes in great detail about what was being discovered
in the 1940's.
Nuclear physics was changing our understanding of the world.
Light is energy.
And there are different kinds of energy.
This is light at different frequencies.
Ultra-violet,
and x-rays
are different kinds of light
that pass through other things.
And you are a form of light too.
We now know that when a child is conceived,
at the moment of conception
a burst of light is released.
Human beings
are light beings.
And the Kingdom of God is a kingdom of light.
Jesus
true God from God,
begotten not made,
of one being with the Father
took on the flesh of the Virgin Mary
and as John said,
brought light into the world.
To follow what Agnes Sanford said,
He was a higher form of light
at a quantum level.
And he promised that we would be the light of the world.
What is the purpose of light?
To illuminate the darkness.
And Jesus says,
you are the light of the world,
and you have no purpose
if you put that light under a bushel.
The purpose of light
is to bring light to dark places.
The religious mind
thinks from the outside in,
and that the darkness
will make my light dim.
No.
The light in you
will make the darkness lighter.
So many of us
are trapped in a religious grid,
and so we see Christians flee
the places of influence
to run to little enclaves out in the country
instead of running toward the darkness.
That is the opposite of what Jesus said.
You are the light of the world.
And that light comes out of your innermost being.
The Light comes from the Inside out.
Last night I found a list of the most demonized cities
in the United States, by a very respected exorcist.
And he said
sensitive people cannot go into these places without
spiritual preparation.
He also said that his ministry in these places is more difficult.
City number ten was Boston, Massachusetts.
City number five was New York.
City Number one, was Salem Massachusetts.
Bully for me.
The warfare our ministry faces is real.
God calls us into dark places.
It is very hard to be light in places like this.
If you are operating out of a religious grid,
you cannot survive in a dark place.
Religious people look at their surroundings,
other people,
or their activities
to prop them up.
Satan is not looking for victims,
but rather allies,
and so you have to get your strength from another source.
You cannot depend on the system around you
to carry you.
Again and again we see Christians
who think that they can agree with the world
to get ahead
eventually succumb to the world system.
This is why God gave us an imagination,
and gave us a simple picture to understand.
You are light.
Light is the energy of the Kingdom.
And if we understand how to come into that light
from the inside out,
we will be strengthened.
It is very counter intuitive.
Because we are told by the world,
we have to do something to make our light brighter.
The Kingdom doesn't work this way.
You cannot make the light brighter from the outside in.
Father Al Durrance
used to teach how to receive Holy Communion.
He said that the Eucharist
was the primary way God heals us.
This is our physical contact point
with the light and love of God.
And he would explain,
that as he consecrated the bread,
the bread was infused with the pure light and life of God.
And he would tell us to imagine the light
coming from the host as he lifted it up.
And then he said,
when you receive the bread in your hands,
imagine it as pure light coming into your body.
He would ask God to show him every place
where there was darkness
and imagine the light going into that place.
And then he would say,
sit until you see the light
filling your entire being.
Jesus is in you,
this is Jesus abiding in you,
and you abiding in him.
And anytime
we need to forgive someone,
need to confess a sin,
or need to release anger,
these things stop the flow of the light of God
through us.
We bring these things to God
and then the light,
from the inside out
begins to get brighter.
John tells us this
in his first letter:
If we confess our sins,
he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins,
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
If we walk in the light,
as he is in the light,
we have fellowship one with another
and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.
The Light heals our relationships,
and also cleanses us from sin.
This is how we strengthen ourselves in the Lord.
When you find that the outside world
is pressing in on you,
you need to come back to the center.
Jesus is Light from Light.
We are the light of the world.
And so,
you take a moment,
and you stop.
I tell people to put their hand on their heart,
so that you can come back to the center.
And I tell people to take a breath
and you have to relax.
Jesus Christ is in you.
So you imagine yourself,
in Jesus,
in his light.
And you imagine the light and love of God
flowing into every area of your life.
And if something negative comes up
you simple hand it to Jesus.
There is no shame.
Jesus sees everything in your life.
He is not surprised by your sin or weakness.
He knows already.
When you bring it to him in confession,
you are agreeing that whatever you have done
is not God's plan,
and you are coming into agreement with God's order.
When you come into agreement with reality:
that I have been walking in unreality,
the Holy Spirit
can begin to work and bring you back to God.
And when you do this,
the light can flow
the blood of Jesus will cover you.
You are forgiven,
healed,
and then you can feel the light of God
flow into and through you.
It is very simple and practical.
Jesus is in you.
And the more you get confortable with Jesus in you,
the more the light can flow.
And this produces fruit.
You cannot make fruit happen,
you can only learn to let the light flow.
It is very easy,
and it is relaxed.
Then you discover
that a power greater than you
is flowing through you.
And this leads us to the second question I wanted to answer today.
Lent begins in a week and a half,
on February 18.
Our house,
is unaffiliated,
but we come from a long heritage in English catholic Christianity.
We follow the liturgical year
because it is a very helpful way
for artists and creative people to get
into a discipleship rhythm
that is more right brained.
Life is made of times and seasons,
and it is not always the same.
Isaiah 58 tells us
that fasting is not about giving things up
and doing a religious thing.
Fasting is about seeing the poor,
the weak,
the naked,
the hungry,
and being their help and support.
And in doing this,
the you will be the light.
And the world will see your light.
God is speaking to a number of people in our community
about Lent,
and that this is a significant time
for us to come into alignment with God.
Lent is always an opportunity to come back to basics.
This is an opportunity for a remedial class
in discipleship,
and for God to tune us to his heart.
It is a time for all the smudges on your lives
that keep the light from shining bright
to get cleaned off.
And it is all pointing toward the
Passover of the Lord
and the Easter vigil
where we renew our covenant
with God.
It is the most important event of our year as a community.
There seems to be a consensus
that we will be doing a community wide
media fast.
No news, no entertainment,
no social media.
No doom scroll.
It will be a season of detox.
And the whole point
is so that our light will grow brighter.
Our community
is not called to run away and hide,
or live in a Christian enclave.
Our community is to go out into a hill
and shine.
Jesus in you
makes you brighter
and wherever you go
he is.
You are the light of the world.
The light shines in the darkness
and the darkness cannot overcome it.
We have a Mighty Network for artists and creative people who are committed to a lifestyle of discipleship: https://belonging-house.mn.co
You can support Belonging House at https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/raise-up-an-army-of-artists, https://belonginghouse.betterworld.org or buymeacoffee.com/christjohnotto.
Member discussion