Let your light shine

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

My wife and I teach a “Couples with Children” Sunday school class at church. You have to divide folks into classes somehow, and at Marion First Baptist, we have adopted a “where you are in life” approach to that, so the kids are divided by grade (and by gender and grade once they get to middle school or so), while in the adults, you’ve got your “College and Career” and your “Young Singles” and your “Young Couples” and there are three different “Couples with Children” classes, and one of those is where my wife and I can be found most Sunday mornings. I know there are older classes waiting for me in the years to come, with my end goal to end up in the JOY class (JOY being an acronym for “Just Older Youth”).

But in the meantime, we are a bunch of thirty-somethings and forty-somethings, hanging out and spending time learning what the Lord has for us and our families to learn. As you will find unsurprising in every way, this month we started a new unit centered on the birth of Jesus. Seeing as how his birthday is coming up and whatnot, it seems appropriate.

Now, I’m 49 years old, so I’ve heard at least one million

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“birth of Jesus” Sunday school lessons or “big church” sermons, but the cool thing about the one we’re doing right now is that it takes Old Testament prophecies and then shows in the New Testament where those prophecies were fulfilled.

It not only paints a vivid picture of what the birth of Jesus meant back then and what it means to us now, but it also shows all the different ways that God’s promises to his people were kept. In a time where a lot of folks are even debating the “War on Christmas” and it is no doubt becoming a more secular holiday, it’s become a cliche but it’s worth remembering “The Reason for the Season.”

So, this past Sunday was about Jesus being the “light unto the world,” and the key takeaway was that it meant not only a physical light to keep the darkness away but a spiritual darkness to drive out the shadows in our hearts.

And boy, do we need that right now. It seems like there is just darkness all around us. And I don’t mean like how it gets dark at like 4:30 these days. I mean that we are going through some dark times right now. We are a divided nation. It seems like there is no spirit of cooperation at all among us. In a time of economic uncertainty, social animosity and, oh yeah, still this global pandemic we’re all pretending

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is over (or pretending it wasn’t really all that bad in the first place, it would be a time to come together, but that does not seem to be the case.

So, what can we do to bring light into all the world? Well, “all the world” is a lot, but we can light our own little corner of the world and start there. If enough people do that, eventually the darkness will run out of places to be. One of the great things about this concept is that it really does just start with you… and me. I can’t make you a better person but I can make me a better person. I can be a light, just like that song a lot of us learned as kids… “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…Hide it under a bushel? No! I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine!”

Say, what is a bushel anyway?