Second Sunday of Advent

To recognize the power of light, we have to first acknowledge the reality of darkness. 

If you’ve grown up in the city on streets with automatic street lights and the constant glow of traffic, stop lights and buildings, the first time you experienced the total darkness of the country must have come as a shock. Maybe you were camping or on a road trip, and the night sky overwhelmed you. 

Or perhaps, like me, you grew up in a rural area and know well the powerful presence of darkness. To walk out into the inky blackness of a summer night and hear the frogs and cicadas and even coyotes in the distances is to acknowledge that without light, you’re in a precarious situation. One false step, one wrong move, and you could be hurt or lost or disoriented. 

Navigating in the darkness without light isn’t easy. Your eyes adjust some, but often things look distorted and misshapen in the darkness, bigger and more powerful or dangerous than they really are. In the darkness, it’s hard to discern which way to go, what step to take—and you feel powerless. 

There’s a reason one of the primary metaphors of our sinful condition is darkness. “For once you were full of darkness, but now you have light from the Lord. So live as people of light!” Paul wrote in Ephesians 5:8 (NLT). “For you are all children of the light and of the day; we don’t belong to darkness and night,” he wrote in 1 Thessalonians 5:5 (NLT). 

Before we met Jesus, we walked in the darkness of our sin. In this season of light and joy, don’t let that reality pass you by. In the darkness of sin, we were “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2 :1, CSB), powerless with no ability to find our own way. We were stumbling in the dark, making decisions we thought could be right, but we couldn't see, we didn't know the truth, and everything was distorted and misshapen, seeming bigger and more important or powerful than it really was.

Only when we have the light can we see our darkness for what it really is: sin. What we once thought was freedom is just a chain of our own making. 

This week, turn your eyes to Jesus, the light of the world. As you light the Advent candle and sing the hymns and carols that announce his birth on this second Sunday of Advent, dwell on the reality that he is the light—the only light—that can rouse you from the darkness of sin. 

His birth marks the beautiful moment when the rescue God had been planning since before the foundation of the world began to unfold in real time. In the fullness of time, Jesus entered into the darkness of sin that characterizes our broken world to rescue us. 

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