Standing Under a Spotlight

Christians are not bronze saints. We are human beings. We’re no better than anyone else. We’re simply saved from our humanness by our relationship with Jesus Christ. This is not our doing. It’s God’s doing.

“God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

God created mankind for something better than what we are. We were supposed to live in communion with Him, as He lives in communion with Himself. Instead, Adam and Eve believed Satan’s lies and broke their fellowship with God. In doing so, they changed the world. Nothing in this world is as it should have been. CS Lewis described it as “bent” and that’s a pretty good way to think about it. The world is like a 2×4 that’s warped so that it doesn’t quite fit as it should and we human beings are products of that bent world.

The bad news is that we are in this world and we can’t change it because we are the cause of its bentness. The good news is that God still loves us and He was willing to step down into our misery and offer us a way out.

Jesus explained this simple, yet complex concept to a Pharisee named Nicodemus who wanted to understand God.

“God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through Him.”

So why do Christians think they are somehow different from everyone else? Because we are.

“The one who believes in Him is not condemned. The one who does not believe in Him is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God.”

Christians are given some basic rules of thumb for recognizing the condition of the world.

“Now this is the basis for judging, that the light has come into the world and people loved the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil.”

Jesus makes a sweeping statement – the world loves darkness rather than light because darkness makes it easier to hide evil deeds.

“For everyone who does evil deeds hates the light and does not come to the light, so that their deeds will not be exposed. But the one who practices the truth comes to the light, so that it may be plainly evident that his deeds have been done in God.”

Christians are not better than anyone else, but we’ve answered God’s call to come to the light and when we stand in the light, our behaviors become evident. If our actions are evil by God’s standard, we’ll be found out, so we must practice the truth (as He defines it) because we standing under a spotlight.