The Light of the World
I was praying today, just allowing the Holy Spirit to lead me into what He wanted to do. After a while, my prayers turned towards the church in the UK. I’ve said in a previous blog that there was a day last year when I felt God put His passion and zeal for His house in my heart. I still carry this and so cannot help but pray for the church. I also heard someone say a few months ago, ‘as the church goes, so goes the world’. I have a deep conviction in my heart that this is true, and so whenever I pray for the church in Great Britain, I always have at the back of my mind the effect that a revived and awakened church would have on this nation. I feel as though the church is actually the heart of Great Britain. It is where the life-blood flows from. As I prayed, the Holy Spirit opened His word to me and showed me that the church is also the eyes of the nation. Matt 6:22-23 says ‘the eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!’ Our nation right now is in great darkness because our eyes are shut, allowing no light into the body. The rest of this passage of scripture shows us the cause of the church’s darkness. ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also…No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and hate the other. You cannot serve both God and money’ (19-21,24). When the people of God forget that they are a spiritual people and are foreigners on this earth, we get caught up in the things of this world, with the worry of what we will eat and drink, and the clothes we wear. But no one can serve two masters, and so the light of God’s kingdom dims, and eventually goes out, leaving the world in great darkness. So I’m praying right now that God will disentangle His church from the cares of this world and set us free to be people of the Spirit in whom the Light of the World can shine bright again.