Walk as Children of the Light

For 400 years leading up to the birth of Jesus, there had been no prophet to bring the Word of God to Israel. The silence was finally broken when the Angel Gabriel came to Zacharias to tell him that his prayer for a child had been heard (Luke 1:13):-

But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John. / And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth. / For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb. / And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. / And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

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Later Zacharias was to prophesy over the child (Luke 1:68) :-

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people, / And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David; / As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began: / That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us; / To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant; / The oath which he sware to our father Abraham, / That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, / In holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life. / And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways; / To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins, / Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, / To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.


Sometimes we find ourselves in dark circumstances, unsure of the way forward. But as we see here, God can bring about a complete and utter change – just as at the very beginning of creation, He spoke light out of darkness.

In the passage above, Zacharias referred to scriptures written 700 years before in the time of Isaiah and King Ahaz. Israel and Judah had split, Ahaz was going contrary to God, and there was no hope in the land. Against this background of darkness, Isaiah prophesied both of the evil which was to come, and of the hope which found its realisation in Jesus (Is 8:21 22, 9:2) :-

And … it shall come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward. And they shall look unto the earth; and behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish; and they shall be driven to darkness … The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.


When Zacharias spoke, he knew he was heralding a transformation – no hope to hope, darkness to light.

The passage from Isaiah continues: For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. / Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this.


The child Jesus Christ is the one who became a light to the Gentiles, who brought light in the midst of darkness, as Paul reminds us in Corinthians (2 Cor 4:6) :-

For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.


The same God who commanded light out of darkness, who made something out of nothing … that same God came through the one heralded by John the Baptist. He came as a light to lighten the Gentiles and has come into your life and taken what was decay and total darkness, has drawn you with His chords of love, and has caused you to come to His glorious light.

So what does all this mean for us? You may be in circumstances where there is darkness and you feel uncertain of the way forward. But the God who brought light out of darkness can change everything. As we go into a new year, lay aside the analysis which you have played over and over in your mind, and be like Zacharias, proclaiming Jesus Christ, Lord and Saviour, the light who dispels darkness.

Ephesians 5:8,10 says :-

For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light: / Proving what is acceptable unto the Lord.


As we stand at the threshold of a new year, I invite you to join me. Together in 2009 let us walk as children of the light.