THE END OF LIGHT

THE END OF LIGHT

When the light of God breaks in on us, the first impression is that of wonder and delight; and this impression is so new and exhilarating that the tendency often is to be engaged with it rather than with the use of it. Nothing is more palpable and painful than the fact that in all ages light broke in on many who were either satisfied with the dawn of it or with using it very partially; and thus they did not reach to the end of light. The end of light is only reached by using it, and if I am satisfied with the fact of the entrance of it, or of having used it in some measure, I have failed to discover the end of it. It is thus we can account for all the imperfect movements in the church of God since its decline.

^[p. 14] Every reformation, every separation, was suggested and executed by light at the first, and the effect seemed so satisfactory that souls were buoyed up with the idea that they had reached the end of light. The end of light is to separate from all evil, and to place us “in the light, as he is in the light”. We then “have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin”. The end of light is never reached until this point, for this is the point to which light leads, and all its exertion is thitherward.

When light first dawns on a soul, it is felt to be to it as real a spiritual power as the light of the sun is real and powerful to the natural eye. The soul first awakes to it, and then begins to use it, and it is in the use of it that it finds out the end and value of it. If I am in a deep dark dungeon, long enveloped in darkness, and a light strikes in on me, and discloses a way of escape from it, I am immeasurably entranced with the light. But when I begin to use it, one stage of the journey is not enough; I must follow it, and follow it until I reach where it is supreme, where there is no darkness at all. It is not enough that I know that it has begun to work, or that it has helped me to take one step. No, I must follow it onward until I am “in the light, as he is in the light”; for after all, that is my only true place, and the place in which I am now recognised by God, for I am now “light in the Lord”, Ephesians 5: 8. The danger is that I become satisfied with this new favour because it has reached me and has acted to a certain point; and this is the reason why so many who have received light never advance to maturity. Like an oak planted in a flower-pot, such will never grow to their true proportions, for they satisfy themselves with the fact that light has reached them, and not with its value and use. Light is too often regarded as of individual existence, as if it were a lamp within me, rather than as reaching me from Him who is the Light. Christ is the Light, and the action of it is to lead me to Himself,

^[p. 15] to place me in the light as He is in the light. This is the end to which it reaches, and towards which all its activity tends, for “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”; and if I do not reach to it, there is not singleness of eye (Luke 11: 34 - 36). There is some part dark, there is a seeking something besides Christ. The whole body is not luminous, as when a candle in its blaze gives light; and the end of light is lost to the soul. The light has dawned, and that is deemed sufficient, and just as much of it is accepted as suits us and enables us to go on with our fellows on earth, and not what suits God and us as His heavenly people. But to suit God is what we are called to now; and to reach this we must be in the light as He is in the light, and in no mere measure of it. And not only so, but it is there only that we can truly suit our christian fellows, for there only can we “have fellowship” with them; and our separation is of no low earthly character, but of a divine one.