when your light is darkness

Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light. (Luke 11:34-36 ESV)

On this passage Francis and Edith Schaeffer write,

"Remember what we talked about at the beginning of this chapter? That some people talk about prayer, and God, and they don't mean the true God at all? Think carefully now. If people think they have the truth, something true when they talk about hundreds of thousands of gods and prayer being incense sticks or prayer being pieces of paper going around on wheels; if people think they are giving truth to others when they teach that Jesus is just a man; or that God did not create man in the first place; or that the Bible is not true when it speaks about the universe and about history; or when they teach that you get to heaven by being good, and you don't need to have a Messiah or a Savior; if people then think they have a light and walk by that light and try to get other people to walk along with them in that light, and if all the time the light is darkness -- Jesus said that that darkness is very terrible indeed, it is a great darkness. How dangerous it is to think you have a light, and then walk by a precipice, with a gorge thousands of feet below, or a slippery cliff with the sea pounding below... when your light is darkness.

"'I doesn't matter,' some people say. 'It doesn't matter what you believe, just as long as you believe something. If it makes you feel good inside, it doesn't matter what religions, philosophy, rules, you live by.'

"Does it matter if there is such a thing as truth? Yes, says Jesus, it matters, because there is truth and there is that which is the opposite, not true. There is true light, and there is darkness acting as light. Be sure, Jesus says, that your light is the real light."

~ Francis and Edith Schaeffer, Everybody Can Know (Tyndale House, 1974).

Photo above by Lane Smith on Unsplash

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