A Devotional As Review for the Sermon "This Little Light of Mine"

The sermon begins somewhere around the 55:20 mark.

Scripture Focus: John 1:1–5

Before fear learned your name, before confusion found your address, before darkness felt familiar, the Light was already there. John opens his Gospel not with human failure or imperial power, but with reality’s deepest truth: “In the beginning was the Word.” That opening sentence steadies the ground beneath our lives. Reality itself is not fragile. God was already present, already speaking, already shining.

Why God Turns on the Light Before Changing Our Lives

Many of us were taught that spiritual growth means fixing visible behavior first. Try harder. Be better. Stop doing the wrong things. But that approach often leaves us exhausted, discouraged, and secretly unchanged. Why? Because too often we are rearranging furniture in the dark instead of turning on the light.

Trying to stop fornicating without naming our loneliness or unhealed trauma is moving furniture in the dark. Trying to break substance dependence without acknowledging the pain driving the dependence is moving furniture in the dark. We may shift habits temporarily, but we keep bumping into the same walls because we never addressed the lack of light in the room.

The light Jesus brings does not begin with condemnation or behavioral control. It begins with truthful seeing. In the light, we discover that God’s beloved children are often emotionally wounded, relationally hungry, and spiritually tired. In the light, we realize that God has always done business with “sinners” not as a last resort, but as His chosen way of healing the world.

When the light is on, we can finally assess our behavior without fear of divine punishment or rejection. God is not waiting for us to get it right before loving us. He has always loved us and is only waiting for us to accept the depth of his love that can heal what is at the root of what we are trying to change or stop doing. God’s love is what makes it safe to tell the truth about us and what is really hurting and what we really need. That changes everything.

In the light, moral growth becomes lower stakes. Not because holiness doesn’t matter, but because fear is no longer driving the process. We are not trying to earn belonging. We are learning how to live from it. Transformation becomes less about managing appearances and more about receiving healing. Less about hiding symptoms and more about addressing wounds.

God does not ask us to rearrange ourselves into something acceptable. God turns on the light and says, “Now let’s see what’s really going on and heal it together.”

1. The Light Is Eternal

John insists that the Word was not arrived, not discovered, not activated by human need. God did not become God when creation began. Love, relationship, and life already existed within God. This means darkness is never original. It always arrives late. Fear may feel loud, but it is not foundational. Whatever storm we are standing in did not create reality. The foundation was laid long before the storm clouds gathered.

2. The Light Is Essential

“All things came into being through Him… In Him was life.” Life is not borrowed or fragile; it abides in God. And that life expresses itself as light not rules, not shame, not coercion. Light reveals what is real. Darkness, in John’s Gospel, is not ignorance but misrecognition. It is seeing clearly and still refusing truth. It is fear filtering perception and power resisting exposure. We do not heal by rearranging the furniture of our lives. Healing begins when the light is turned on.

3. The Light Is Effective

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Darkness can resist, but it cannot extinguish. It can react, but it cannot reign. Darkness is active, but it is not creative. Light does not argue or negotiate. It simply shines and darkness yields. God’s light does not retreat from our pain or fear. It meets us there, steady and undefeated.

When we sing “This little light of mine,” we are not talking about a fragile, private glow. We are bearing witness to an eternal, essential, victorious light already at work within us. The question is not whether the light is shining. The question is whether we will trust it enough to step forward into that light, the beautiful light.

Reflection Questions

1. Where in your life are you trying to manage behavior without addressing the deeper loneliness, grief, or trauma beneath it?

2. In what ways might you be rearranging “furniture” instead of allowing God’s light to reveal what is truly going on?

3. What fears surface when you imagine fully “turning on the light” with God rather than just adjusting surface-level habits?

4. How would your spiritual life change if you truly believed that God’s love is not withdrawn when your brokenness is revealed?

5. What would it look like this week to trust that the light was already shining before your situation began?

6. In what areas have shame or fear made transformation feel high-risk rather than healing-centered?

7. What would it look like this week to invite God’s light into the real pain driving your patterns, not just the patterns themselves?