Travelers

Living with the Lights On

Perhaps your parents were always telling you to turn off lights in order to not waste electricity. That was my dad. As soon as I left a room, the light was to be off. Honestly, as a child I wasn’t very good at turning lights off, and he was frequently exasperated with my brother and me.

What makes good sense for your utility bill is not what we want inwardly and spiritually. Darkness is ignorance, brings inner decay, and immaturity. These are all related, for when we don’t know what is true or good, we often act in ways that degrade and ruin our lives and those of others. Immaturity is, by definition, the state of not having the understanding we need. A lack of wisdom can result in us living against our own best interests.

But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. John 16:13

We can think of the Spirit of God as turning the lights on for us and in us, and we want to live with those lights shining brightly. Rather than spirituality being equated with hyper-religiosity or outward piety, spirituality is maturity, groundedness, and the awareness of truth and reality. Spiritual individuals have gained wisdom about life, understand themselves enough to be humble, and know their limitations. They know they don’t know. Their lights are all on.

The Spirit of God wakes us up to reality in ways that reveal the Christ to us and in us. By guiding us into all truth, the Spirit is leading us into Jesus, for He is that reality of existence that we desperately need. He is the truth. He embodies what harmony between the divine and humanity looks like.

Jesus’ statement about the Spirit telling us “what is to come” could be thought to be referencing predictions of future events on the world stage, but what real value would that have? To allow us to do a kind of prophetic insider trading?

I believe that what the Spirit shows us about “what is to come” is particularly the journey ahead, the next step each one of us needs to take. End-time events are of little interest to me, but what I need to do to live into the mystery of Christ is crucial. What lies ahead is always the next right thing, the needed growth and change.

The Spirit is a personalized, inner guide to life in Christ, who reinforces and particularizes the general contours of the transformative journey toward wisdom and maturity. We could call this the path to godliness.

But this disclosing what lies ahead does not mean we have such clarity that trust is not needed. We still walk by faith, perhaps seeing what we need to do next, but not knowing how that will work out, or even being sure that it will.

We might long for more clarity with regard to the Spirit’s leading. The guidance may be harder to ascertain than we would like, but we grow to trust that grace is providing what needs to be, fitting for our progress in Christlikeness. We trust the light that the Spirit turns on for us, relying on a work that if we do perceive it, it is more apparent in hindsight.