Already Lit Before the Bell

The hall is gray when the caretaker comes through the stage door, the particular gray of a big room with the blinds still down and a hundred stacked chairs in it. It smells of floor polish and yesterday's dinners.

She goes along the bank of switches beside the door the way she has for years, and the strip lights come on in sections, thunk, hum, thunk, hum, back to front, until the whole hall stops being a store cupboard and becomes a room again. Then she props the fire door with the wedge, because the caretaker before her did, and it is a good idea.

The first children arrive with their coats half off. The one who is always first sits on the end of the third row and tells her something enormous about a lizard.

At the harvest assembly last term, one of the teachers thanked everybody who makes this place run, and looked over at her while she said it, and the caretaker looked at the floor and then at the fire door and then at nothing in particular until it was over.

That evening she said something to her husband while she was filling the kettle, and she said it lightly, the way people say the heaviest things.

"I have been told to be a light since I was a girl. I have never once felt like one."

You have your own version of that sentence, and you have been carrying it a long time. It gets said from platforms, and printed on things, and it is meant kindly every single time. And every single time it arrives, some quiet clerk in the back of your head opens a file and writes down that you are behind again.

So here is what you may not have noticed about the hall.

Those strip lights are not glowing because they are trying. Nobody has ever gone into a school hall and thanked the lights for making an effort. They are lit because there is a supply, and because somebody who was not them closed the circuit at ten to eight.

Look at what kind of sentence it is

Everything turns on the grammar, and the grammar has been quietly mistranslated in your hearing for about thirty years.

When Jesus tells that crowd they are the light of the world, He is not issuing an instruction. He is stating a fact. It is the same kind of sentence as she is his mother, or this is a Tuesday. There is no verb in it that anybody is being asked to perform. He is not saying become, and He is not saying try, and He is very much not saying that some of the people listening are managing it better than the rest.

And look at who He said it to. A hillside of ordinary people who had walked out of ordinary villages that morning. Fishermen, farmers, mothers with children on their hips, a few who had come for the free opinion and were staying for the weather. Not one of them had done anything about it yet. He said it first, over all of them, before a single result came in.

You are the light of the world this morning, and it was true of you before you got out of bed. That is not my flattery; that is His sentence, kept in Scripture in the plain present tense, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a fact like that land in a person's chest rather than the number of times they have heard it. Nobody put you in the sentence by performing well, so nobody takes you out of it by performing badly.

Sit in the grammar of it for one more second, because the grammar is the mercy. You are the light of the world, and Jesus put that in the indicative and not the imperative. He did not say become, or try, or make sure that you are. 2 Corinthians 4:6 says God has already shone in our hearts, written in a finished tense, and the Spirit does not spend His time upgrading a fact. He spends it convincing the person the fact is about.

Where the supply comes from

Paul, writing to a church that would not have described itself as impressive, reaches all the way back to the first morning of the world for the comparison.

For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.2 Corinthians 4:6

Read the verbs again and notice that every one of them belongs to God. He said. He has shone. The shining is not something a believer works up in the dark and then holds out hopefully. It is the same act that started the first day, done again inside a person.

You have His light in you now, and you did not have to generate one photon of it. The written word ties the shining in a heart directly to the voice that made the morning, and His Spirit is the one who keeps the circuit closed, which means the supply does not depend on how the week has gone. This is a lamp, not a bonfire. A lamp has never once been asked where the electricity comes from.

That is also why nobody has to grade you. The lights in that hall do not compete. There is no strip light halfway down the room glowing anxiously because it heard a talk about brightness at the weekend. Every one of them is doing the only thing a lit thing does, which is be lit.

So the ten minutes before the bell are not an audit. You were lit at a source that has never once run low, and nothing in that corridor draws from your own reserves. God commanded the light to shine out of darkness, and 2 Corinthians 4:6 says He is the One who shone it into hearts. The Spirit keeps the supply running while you walk the bank of switches thinking about something else entirely.