The One and Only Thing that Will Free You from the Dark Places of Your Life

When I saw the picture of the eight year old girl, that’s when it hit me.   What sort of darkness drives a guy to strap on a bomb and blow up a little girl and twenty others?  What happens inside someone to bring them to such an awful place? 

As I thought about it, I remembered Dr. Robert Reza.   Almost thirty years later, I still can’t forget it.  Dr. Reza served as an elder at a church about a half hour from my own in New York.   His wife sang in the choir there.  Each Sunday, they went to church literally morning and night.   They seemed to adore each other.  But in reality, Reza was having an affair with the church’s organist.  And two weeks before Christmas, he traveled home from a conference in Washington.  And he shot and strangled his wife, Marilyn, while she slept.  He then went back to the conference to cover his tracks.  But that cover story unraveled pretty quickly.  And when it did, it shocked everyone.  After all, this man wasn’t a monster.  He was a caring father to his two daughters.   He taught students at the medical school.   He served as a leader in his church.  How does someone like that do something so awful?   What sort of darkness leads a person to where he can stand above his wife of 22 years while she sleeps and murder her?

According to the Bible it’s the same sort of darkness that that lives in each person on the planet.  That darkness may not lead you to kill someone, but that doesn’t mean it won’t sabotage your life in all sorts of other ways.   This is the darkness that wrecks families, that messes up friendships, that leads you to actions you regret.  This is the darkness that can overwhelm you with guilt or shame.  This is the darkness that discourages you, and leads you to doubt God’s love.   This is the darkness that can make your life so much less than what God intended it to be.   But how do you conquer this darkness?  How do you become free of whatever dark places live in you?   In these words, God shows you the way.  Let’s hear what God has to say. 

I John 1:5-10

In every human being, there lives a darkness.   This darkness limits you.  It takes away the life you yearn to live.   It has the power to lead you down some truly awful paths.   But how do you break free of it?   How do you defeat the darkness?  Here God tells you.   God says.  If you want to defeat the darkness, you have to know where to begin.   You have to know that only beginning with God gets you there.    The path to darkness’ demise starts with God and nowhere else.    

Now what do I mean by beginning with God?  Before we get there, let’s get clear what the Bible tells you about darkness.    Growing up, I got the idea that getting away from the darkness had to do with stopping certain outward behaviors.  But darkness goes far deeper than a lie here or an ugly word there.   It encompasses everything you are.   It darkens your mind, confusing you about what you really need or what will truly fulfill you.   It darkens your soul with resentments and self-pity, with despair and guilt.    It darkens your heart with out of bounds desires that lead you to deep dissatisfaction, a life driven by appetites that never deliver what they promise.   And this darkness limits you.  It limits the entire world. 

Think about it.   Inside, don’t you have a vision for the ideal you, who you really yearn to be?  And you have a vision of what you yearn your family to be, your neighborhood, heck the whole world.  But why do the visions always fall short?   Your darkness, the darkness of this world gets in the way.  

But too often, when human beings try to defeat that darkness, they start at the wrong place.  They start with themselves.   They think.   If I can develop a new self-improvement plan, then I’ll get to a better place.   If I rally together with others, then we can make things better.   And, yes those things can, in some cases, push back the darkness a bit.    You become a little better.   The world becomes a little better.  But is that the best anyone can hope for?   Really?

In the Bible, God gives a very different message.  First, God says, this darkness that you see in you, in the world, you have no idea how bad it is.   It’s so bad that nothing you can do can ever defeat it. But then God says.  I haven’t come to just defeat this darkness.  I have come to eliminate it from existence, to end it forever.

But for that to happen, it can’t begin with you.  It has to begin with God.  That’s why John starts exactly there.   John writes that I have written this letter to give you complete joy, to give you communion with God.   But then where does John go next?   Does he focus on you, how you can get this joy, this communion.  No, he focuses on God.  This is the message. He says. God is light.   John makes it clear.  This joy has to begin with God.  Only God can destroy the darkness.    Now, why can’t it begin with you?

First, it’s because you don’t really know who you are, much less what you need.   Think about it. Have you ever heard a recording of your voice, and thought?  I don’t sound like that at all.  But here’s the truth, you don’t actually know what you sound like.   Only others know that.   Heck, you don’t even know what you look like.  That’s why you can look at a picture, and be a bit surprised.    I look like that, really?    And forget your voice or your looks, you don’t even know your own desires.   How many times have you regretted a dish you ordered at a restaurant, thinking I didn’t really want that?  Sheesh, if you don’t know your own desires there, what makes think you know them anywhere?        

More than that, when you begin with you, even this you, you don’t really know, you feed the darkness.  You keep it strong.   What keeps human beings in the dark is how we spend so much of our lives absorbed with ourselves, our appetites, our resentments, our joys, our hardships.   The last thing human beings need is to focus more on themselves.   They do that all the time already.   How many times have you worried about what others thought of you in a particular situation?   Do you realize the assumption?   Not only are you focused on you, you assume everyone else is too.  Sheesh, how self-absorbed is that?

And what does that self-focus do for you?   It doesn’t free you from the darkness.  It traps you in it. The psycho-analyst, Theodore Reik, put it well.    The secret of human happiness is not in self-seeking.  It’s in self-forgetting.

And how do you forget self?   You begin with God.   Why God?   First, if anyone knows you, it’s God.   After all, God created you.   Heck, God created everything.    More than that, the more you focus on God, the freer you become from the focus on yourself.    Why does the Bible command you to love God and to love others?   God doesn’t command this, just because it’s a nice thing to do.  God commands it because loving God and loving others frees you from yourself, from being trapped in your own darkness.

This past week, I was heading home, and I was caught up in the darkness, feeling self-pity, discouragement, all sorts of stuff.   Now I tried to get myself out of it.   But do you know what did it?   Oatmeal did it.    On the way home that night, I needed to buy some oats so that my wife could make oatmeal for our son’s breakfast the next morning.   And just going into the store, doing a little errand for my family shook me out of the darkness.  I went in all grumpy, but I came out grateful, grateful that I could meet this little need in my son’s life.       

In the same way, when I read scripture and talk with God, it shifts my perspective on everything.   It frees me from myself.    Why does it do that?   Because reading scripture reminds me that God isn’t a nice idea I have.   Reading scripture gives me a God I can actually know. 

You see.  It’s not just enough to begin with God.   You need to begin with the God you meet here in the Bible.   Before John says, God is, John says this.    “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you.”    You see.   John wasn’t sitting around pondering who God is, and then wrote a letter about it.  No, John is saying.   We thought we knew who God is.  But then we actually met God, and this is the message God gave us.

If you want to know God, then you’ve gotta begin here with the message God gave you.   If you don’t, then whatever God you believe in, it won’t really be God.   It’ll usually be a version of you.   St. Augustine put it well.  If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.    That sort of self-created God keeps you trapped in the very last place you need to be, focused on yourself.

More than that, when you walk away from the God you meet here, you’ll never really have a God you can know.   After all, how can you know someone, unless they talk with you, communicate with you.   And here, this is what God does.    And until, you listen to what God tells you here, you’ll never really know God. 

Look, if you come to me, and say.  “Kennedy, I know that you told me that you were born in Virginia, and raised mainly in Tennessee.”   But you know, “I like to think of you as being born in Colorado, and raised on a ranch in Montana.”   Well, that’s a nice story, but it’s not me.  You don’t know me. 

And what is the message that the Bible gives you about God?  Let’s look at what John tells you here.   John says that God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.  Basically, John is telling you that God is holy, a being so perfect and complete that no darkness can be found in him at all.  And in those words, God is giving you the best news about the holiness of God that you could ever hear.

You see, when Jesus came, people had a certain idea of what it meant for God to be holy.   It went something like this.  God is clean, and in God no dirt, no uncleanness can ever be found.  But if God is holy like that, do you see what it means?   It means God can’t be around anything dirty.   That would besmirch God.  That would compromise God’s holiness.   That means you have a God, who can never really be with you.   After all, you aren’t so clean.  So, God has to keep away from you.

And that image of holiness will never free you from self-absorption, it will sink you deeper into it.   You will spend your whole life trying to get clean for God.    You’ll come up with rules to get there, ways of judging others to reinforce your own sense of cleanness.   And none of it will work.  It will only make you miserable, and others around you miserable too.    You will be caught in the bondage of a religion, rather than the freedom of the gospel.  

But when Jesus came, God gave a different picture of what holiness means.  It’s the picture John gives you here.  God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.  And in that image, God’s holiness doesn’t separate from the darkness.  God’s holiness invades it.   God’s holiness destroys it.  God’s light shines into every dark place until no darkness can be found.    And that is what Jesus did.    In Jesus, God’s light shone into the darkness.  God’s light’s even came into the awful darkness of the cross, as we tortured and killed God, and had the gall to do it in God’s name.  Yet, not even that darkness overcame the light.   Instead, God transformed that cross.    What had become a shadow of judgement now became the source of salvation.   What had once delivered death now became the deliverer of life.     This is what God did for you.  This is how far the light of God’s love and holiness went to bring you home.  And the more and more you realize what God has done for you, the more that light will free you.  It will free you from yourself.  It will free you from the darkness that holds you.   And it will bring you into the light, the light of God where there is no darkness at all.