The little ray of sunshine crept into the dark room. He jumped from the window sill to the bed covers, light as nothing, bright as the day. He slipped from fold to fold of the blanket while the occupant of the bed played Beethoven’s fifth symphony in snore language.

Snyxx, snarks, skyxx, skooo!

The little ray sneaked up his pillow, hopped up on the sleeper’s chest, then darted forward, jumped for the chin, and pulled himself up with difficulty. There he stood for a minute to survey his task. He ran to the nose and tickled it slightly. The snoring stopped abruptly. Finally, he darted to an eyelid and began to dance.

“Grrrr!” the ex-sleeper responded drawing the pillow over his head in an attempt to smother the light-bearing intruder. The ray of light perched happily on the pillow as the rising sun sent hundreds of reinforcements to join him. They cavorted on the pillow, on the bedcovers, and the bed table.

And they sang a happy song. “We’re here so you may as well get up! We’re here and we’re not going to leave!” The man groaned and turned to the other side, again smashing the pillow to his head. The sunbeams crooned louder.

Finally, he flung the covers back, stalked angrily to the window, jerked the shade down, pulled the curtains tightly together and crawled back into bed. “There,” he smiled contently as he left in pursuit of his sweet friend, Sleep.

Back at the curtains the light rays pushed at the back corners of the shade, slipped through unseen openings in the curtains and hurled themselves against the dresser mirror, then rebounded on the unsuspecting sleeper like warriors of the 101st Airborne dropping into enemy territory.

Finally the man surrendered and got up.

Light can be a pain.

Or it can be a life-changing revelation!

God revealed Himself to man, but in his arrogance and selfishness, man hid from the revelation. He refused to worship God and thank Him for his goodness (Rom. 1:18) and so began a slow, nasty descent into twisted ideas and actions.

Listen to Eugene Peterson describe what happened: “But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand.
“So God said, in effect, ‘If that’s what you want, that’s what you get.’ It wasn’t long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out.” (Romans 1:18-24, The Message).

Most try to “put a shroud” over the truth. It intrudes upon the way they want to live and hurts their conscience. Others yank the curtains wide open and let the full light of the sun wash away the darkness of their lives. That light is Jesus, the Son of God.

Gordon McDonald quotes Whittaker Chambers, former communist, who holds his newborn daughter in his arms. “My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘no, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.’ The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I did not know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.” (quoted in Gordon McDonald’s book, “The Life God Blesses,” page 35. from “Witness” Random House,1952)

Let’s keep the window open so that the light of God’s truth can do its work in our lives.