03.19.2022 - Fourth Sunday in Lent - Visible Grace

Scripture: Ephesians 5:8-14

Ephesians 5:8–14 NRSV

8 For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light— 9 for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. 10 Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. 11 Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. 12 For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly; 13 but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, 14 for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

Visible Grace

Mornings

My dad worked two jobs his entire adult life. He started his own business fixing small engines when he was fourteen years old to help bring money for his struggling family when his dad was hurt in a car accident. Then, when he was eighteen, he began working at the local post office. He worked six days a week, almost every week, until the day he died.

I remember him waking up at 5 am daily and being ready for bed by 9 pm. He used to tell me that the morning was the best time of the day because it was quiet and you could get more work done. I have struggled with mornings my entire life, and last Sunday, where we lost an hour of sleep, has always seemed like one of the rudest days of the year.

I agree with my dad that they often are quieter and leave you plenty of opportunities to get things done. However, my problem with the mornings has less to do with the rest of the world and more with me. I have even grown to often wake up before my alarm clock. However, without fail, I usually spend the first fifteen minutes of every morning just trying to figure out who I am. When Paul wrote, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead,” I can relate. I know he is using poetic language and talking about spiritual things. He may be referring to Christ, calling us all to rise from the dead someday. But there are few phrases that better describe my mornings. Jesus, can’t I have ten more minutes resting in peace before I have to deal with being alive again today?

I know most of you are better than me at mornings, or you find yourself in your coffee cup each day before you start each day. However, we all have things in our life that cause us to lose ourselves. They are the usual suspects, like addictions, television, and social media. Sometimes they are sports or music that we watch, listen to, or play. It could even be as simple as getting lost in a good book.

Most of those things are not inherently bad, but they can pull us away from God. Anything can if we let it. But God’s grace brings the truth to light and leads us out of the darkness.

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Darkness

Darkness is comfortable. It keeps us ignorant of what is going on around us. When we are young and are worried about monsters under the bed, we hide under the blankets and make our parents look. We don’t want to see what is there ourselves. It is safer to stay in the dark. In fact, it is not usually the darkness we are most afraid of. It is what we hear or feel in the dark that causes us alarm.

It is not just when we are children, either. In one of our former homes, we had problems with mice getting into the house. So we set mousetraps and caught mice every night until we got our cats. Then, the mice decided not to bother us anymore.

Several months later, though, I woke up in the middle of the night to hear a scratching sound in the walls. It was a Saturday night, and I was preaching the following day and was frustrated. So I turned on a few lights and tracked the sound to the ceiling above our bathroom. I thought I would make a bigger noise and scare the pesky critter away, so I stomped on the floor and knocked on the ceiling with my fists. The scratching stopped immediately and was replaced by a low growl.

Now, I did not grow up in the country, and there are plenty of things about wildlife that I still do not know. However, there is one thing that I do know. Mice do not growl. Rather than shine a light and find the truth about what was there that night, I decided to strike a deal there. I told it I was going to bed and would leave it alone if it left me alone. To this day, I have no idea if it was a raccoon, possum, cat, or something even stranger than that. There are moments when knowing is scarier than not knowing and staying in the dark.

The light is also scary if you have something to hide. Darkness gives us the illusion of control of ourselves and the world around us, making it easier to deny what we cannot see. Sometimes it is more than denying that something is living in our attic that should not be there. Sometimes we have something that has taken root in our lives that should not be there.

The twelve steps of recovery from anything, be it alcohol abuse, drugs, grief that has taken over your life, or co-dependency, all begin with the same first step: Admitting that we are in the dark and that we are not in control of our lives. The first time we turn on the light in our lives is not an act of getting things cleaned up and fixed. Instead, it is an act of admitting that we are a mess. That first step into the light is probably the most challenging. But if we stay in the dark, we miss out on what we gain from being in the light.

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Fruit of Light

The fruit of the light is visible grace.

Paul says we were all in the darkness, but when we are in Christ, we are in the light, so we should live as children of light. Paul’s letter to the people of Ephesus is filled with these short, powerful illustrations of what it means to be God’s people. They have layers and layers of meaning, and we can miss them if we read them too quickly and with too many assumptions.

As a teenager, I would have summed these verses in one word: Behave. That’s what Mom always told me to do when she dropped me off at school, church, or the babysitter's house. Just behave.

But Paul is saying more than that. I’ve read from Genesis 1 that in the beginning, darkness covered everything. The first thing God created was light. Without the light, we cannot know what is up or down, left or right, right or wrong. We depend on God’s light to help us see everything. When we choose darkness, we rebel against God and follow lies. Some of those are lies we have heard from others, and some are lies we tell ourselves. Most temptations we face look most appealing when we are not standing in the light of Christ.

Paul says the light exposes things and shows them as they truly are.

A few years before my showdown with the growling mouse, my great-grandpa heard something scratching in his attic. He called my Dad and asked for help finding out what it was and getting rid of it. Dad did live in the country and had experience with all kinds of animals. Some of their pets met unhappy endings on the highway or went missing and were presumed taken by other animals. Great-grandpa Graham lived in town, though, and did not expect to have anything living in his attic other than perhaps a confused squirrel.

Dad climbed the ladder, shined the light into that storage space, and found something bigger than a squirrel. It was a cat. And not just any cat, either. It was a black and white cat, not more than three or four years old, that was named Armani. Dad knew exactly who that cat was because it belonged to him.

Armani had gone missing two weeks earlier, and everyone figured he was gone for good. But, somehow, he must have hitched a ride into town in the back of Dad’s truck and managed to find Grandpa Graham’s house and a way into the attic crawlspace. It was a God thing with too many coincidences to have been an accident.

The moral to that story is this: I refused to shine a light on the thing scratching in my attic because I didn’t want to know what it was, and I never found out. But dad wasn’t afraid to look and found it wasn’t a scary monster or sick animal. He found a member of the family he thought was lost for good.

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Applying the Light in our Life

Jesus taught about light in several different ways. One important truth is that we cannot help others into the light without being in the light ourselves. The way Jesus said it was that we cannot pick at specks in the eyes of others while we have planks in our own eyes. We must remove the things that blind us and keep us in the dark before we can help others.

But it is ok to ask for help. Indeed, we all need help.

Some of that help has to come from God. I know many of you are using our lent devotionals, reading the upper room, or have other bible studies you read regularly. Every good bible study, Sunday school lesson, or devotional has three parts. The first part gets you reading the scripture and observing what you see there. The second part gets you to think a little deeper about what that scripture might mean. The last part helps you figure out how to apply the scripture to your life.

Reading and studying the Bible without anything you learn into action is like hearing a strange noise, tracking it down, but not doing anything about it. Sometimes you need to be more like my Dad and be brave enough to shine that lesson onto the dark places in your life. Sometimes you are like Grandpa Graham, and you need to ask someone to help you do it. Either way will help you grow closer to Jesus and bring the grace of God into your life.

You cannot make deals with the darkness. You can’t hide things forever. The truth has a way of getting out eventually. More importantly, God knows it all. There is no darkness to hide things from His eyes. He sees us exactly as we are, and the truth is, He loves us despite all that. A true friend will love you just as you are but will not stand by and let you stay that way, and there is no more faithful friend than Jesus.

If Jesus is calling you into the light, then step out into it. If you need help, please ask. You will find that the light of Christ brings truth, grace, and a life that is so much more than you will ever experience in the comfort of the darkness. God’s light will make Him visible to you, and as you apply that light to your life, others will see God made visible in you as well.

Sleeper, awake!

Rise from the dead,

and Christ will shine on you.”

You are invited to join us for our 6 pm worship service this evening. If you have yet to be part of a Sunday School class, today is an excellent day to check one out. There is information on the back table to help you find them.