Holding the Flashlight

Don't participate in the fruitless works of darkness, but instead, expose them....Everything exposed by the light is made clear, for what makes everything clear is light.

Ephesians 5:11,13

We all have something that we don't like to talk about because it makes us uncomfortable. Maybe we don't want to stir up controversy. Maybe we just don't want anyone knowing how much we struggle with a particular issue for fear of judgment. Perhaps the issue reminds us of just how little we know. When we overcome our fears, hang-ups and dislikes for the Kingdom of God, we are fulfilling our most basic duty as warriors of light. It's rather simple, yet rather complicated; Every believer's duty, first and foremost, is to fight the urge to enable anything to hide in the dark. And since we carry Christ's light in us, all we really have to do is be willing to speak into everything we see. 

We, as the body of Christ, have a duty to expose the darkness. And since we are "the light of the world," this wouldn't be so hard if we would stay awake and pay attention to matters of the spirit. But you and I both know that there are many issues in our society that we don't like to talk about. Basically, these unaddressed issues are mere "elephants" in the room. We feel overwhelmed at the thought of tackling them because somehow we have it in our minds that it's our job to fix them, but it's not. We may not have all the answers, but according to scripture, we simply need to bring them out of the secrecy of darkness. God will do the rest.

While we're shining our light, it's important to remember that the flesh is not our enemies. Other people may appear as enemies or barriers in what we feel necessary to accomplish, but they are not the real enemy. They, just like us, wrestle with the same powers of darkness as we do. Just flip right over into the next chapter of Ephesians and you'll see that Paul felt it was crucial to add this aspect to this very conversation. 

In Ephesians 6:12 he said, "For our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against rulers, against the authorities, against the world powers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens."  

Shining our light is a big task. But as we do so, we can easily do damage if we treat fellow soldiers or bystanders as enemies. We're all in this together, with a very sneaky and divisive Enemy. He wants us to be short-sighted enough to mistreat our own. He wants us to cause more damage to those who are already hurting so that he can continue to skew the truth. Let’s focus on shining our lights and make it a point to remember who the real enemy is here as we really are smack dab in the middle of in a war.