The Light, not Twilight

Our world seems to live every day in the dark. At times the Church looks to this same darkness in order to “reach” those who need to know God. There is a search for meaning, hope, a hero in the hearts of the people all around us, and sadly a few have given up and are willing to exist in the darkness, not even trying to find a way out.

It is into this same kind of culture that the Light burst forth 2000 years ago. How bright the light of Christ appears in such a dark world. The darkness that we now live in is the perfect place to bring forth the Light.

Take heart my friends, we are the hope. It is to us that Jesus gave the great commission. God into ALL the world and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and I am with you ALWAYS even to the end of the age.

Jesus totally knew that the false image of God would dominate the best seller list for months, as The Shack sits on the top #10 list on every bookstore shelf in the country; that Twilight would claim the hearts of His daughters; that movies like Transformers would present lustful images to ours sons taking them to places of desire they should not be taken to; that the youngest among us would be fed a line of hopelessness from a movie about Wild Things, and that those same kids would be led to worship a man instead of the One who all of our hearts were made to worship.

It is into this age that He chose for you and me to live, and it is those of us who hold the name Christian that He chose to bring the light into the darkness. Don’t get me wrong, we are sooooo flying upside down, but we have the knowledge that our Savior lives and that He is at work all around us.

Paul experienced life just like we do at times. When he walked into one of the most immoral city in the Roman Empire, the city of Corinth, the Bible says that he entered with fear and trembling. Now this was not a metaphor for how he kind of felt inside. No, Paul was physically shaking when he entered the city gates. He was all alone at the time. Silas and Timothy were still hanging out in Berea, and Paul had just left Athens, failing to see the Spirit move among the people of that great city even after he delivered one of his most eloquent messages.

Paul felt rather useless when he entered Corinth, but he did something that a lot of us DON’T do when we feel we have failed. He surrendered his life fully to Christ, to know nothing except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. No too often, when we feel that God has not used us, we withdraw, go into a hole, take our toys and go home. But not Paul. He sought more of Jesus and kept going, not worrying about the result.

Corinth was the home of the cult of Aphrodite. The city was filled with sexual immorality because of this, and that sexual immorality was not left at the door of the church. Yet, through the faithful preaching and teaching of Paul and other men of God, the city was forever changed as the Light of Christ entered its streets.

Every day we have the chance to walk into Corinth. Kids are put in our paths who think that salvation means picking up the trash in the neighborhood to help save the planet. They need to know that work is good, but it isn’t the answer to eternity. They need to be loved for who they are, and shown Jesus.

There are teenager girls dying to talk to us about how wonderful Edward is, so we need to engage them. We need to say, “Ya, Edward’s cool, but he isn’t real, and even if he were his salvation is death, but there is someone so much more wonderful, who loves you and defeated death. Jesus is the answer to all your heart’s desire.”

There are young men so captivated by the images on a screen, that they live lives no different from those who once worshiped at the altar of Aphrodite. They can't have a real relationship with a woman because they have been made to feel less than as men. These young men need to experience the love of God in their hearts, and then their lives can be saved.

The world seems so dark at times that I just want to keep the doors locked. I don’t want to be faithful to anyone but my own little family, to keep it safe from all the wrong in our culture, but that is not how we are suppose to live. We are to be lights in the darkness, to stand up for the innocent, to share the love of Jesus in the smallest way to every person we meet, and who knows, that Light might hit just one person's heart and drive the darkness out! So, if you are sad about what is going on all around us, know that He has chosen you for just this moment in time. Take heart, He has overcome the world.

I have told you these things, so that in Me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have OVERCOME the World. John 16:33

Where the Wild Things Are

Jesus Hates Zombies and Lincoln hates Werewolves, well that is a title for a graphic novel if I ever heard one. Our world looks for heroes in the strangest places. We now equate, Jesus with an American president, and I am surprised the author did not have the zombies and werewolf as the good guys.

If Jesus hates zombies, he hates vampires, but that fact might greatly upset a whole generation of girls who believe the greatest men of our day, are a 90 year old vampire, who looks nineteen and a teenage werewolf. Girls (and not just girls) swoon at the thought of knowing men like them. They have no repulsion toward the bloodletting that one of the characters indulges in, nor do they recoil at the idea of a wolf sleeping with a woman. Their hearts throb in anticipation as a vampire sneaks into the room of a girl their own age every night without anyone knowing. They long for a smelly werewolf to sit at their door to protect them.

Our world seems to be flying upside down, as Dallas Willard points out. And the sad thing is that the culture doesn’t even care, because there is not right side up. There is an emptiness, and a searching among us. Yet we are looking and searching in the dark. Hoping that some supernatural being will save us from our mundane existence and add excitement to our lives. Thing is that, that Supernatural Being died and rose again 2000 years ago to save us, yet we ignore him in favor of the "undead".

Funny, we are even willing to embrace someone else’s dream to gain our own hope of salvation. That is right, Stephanie Meyer had a dream about a vampire that led her to write the Twilight series, and through that dream came T-shirts, and discussion groups, and pilgrimages to the small town of Forks in Washington state.

At least in the pages of the Twilight books, there is the hope of redemption, the dream of an eternal future. One that is seriously misguided, but still it is there. I realized today that there is a part of the world that does not even have a false savior to give them hope. Part of the world is living in such utter darkness that they don’t even believe that there is a way out of the bleakness of human existence. They visit a place called Where the Wild Things Are, and discover there is no redeemer, there is no better tomorrow, there is only pain and sorrow.

If you are not familiar with this title, it is a very short children’s book, about a boy who visits an island inhabited by fantastic creatures called the “Wild Things”. That said the short children’s book has been transformed into a motion picture, in which a boy filled with anger and rage flees to the Wild Things, and discovers that they are just as angry and destructive as the place of pain that fills his own heart. He promises them that he will be their king and save them from sadness and pain with his invisible shield, but in the end, they discover that he is a fraud and all their hope for happiness is dashed when he fails to save them from themselves. The boy returns home to his own mother, his own family, with the simple words spoke to or by one of the unhappy Wild Things, “It’s hard to be a family.”

There is no redemption just the reality of the darkness, joylessness, hopelessness of life to endure until death. That, in the end, is the takeaway the movie leaves the audience with. I left the theater utterly depressed, thankful that the sun was out in all of its Arizona glory, and that the Son of God reigns in all of His.

I have always told my children that no matter what story, what movie, what book, or play, that I can find Jesus in it in some aspect or another. But today, I told them that I was wrong. Today, there was NO redeemer in Where the Wild Things Are. When the Son is absent, then too is His light and all that is left is darkness. The makers of the movie must have felt this as well, because the forest the Wild Things live in is without life, the world they exist in had a sun, but it is muted by clouds, and the lives they live are filled with bitterness, rage, betrayal and violence.

When a vampire is the hero of the young, and a movie for kids is filled with so much “realism” that they leave the theaters in quiet contemplation, we know we are flying upside down, about to take a nosedive into the earth.

The postmodern age looks to darkness for redemption and when it does not find it there, it discovers that the darkness is devoid of all hope.

The Light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him. He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him.

Even within the walls and halls of our own churches, the younger generation is looking to darkness to redeem them. Will we be like the generation Jesus first came to, the one who crucified him, who were His own, but did not recognize Him because He came as light.

In Him was LIFE and that LIFE was the LIGHT of MEN!