Arise And Shine: Part 1 Series

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.

2 For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.

3 And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.

We see two things over here: one is the Lord is telling us to arise and the second thing is God is telling us to shine. When we go in and tell somebody arises that means obviously they are either sitting down or they are lying down, so they are not standing up. So the Lord is coming and telling to those people who are sitting or lying down, because of sorrow, or because of what they have been going through they didn’t have the strength to get up and their legs are feeble and their soul is weak, emotionally they are drained and they saying Lord I am seeing darkness after darkness after darkness, my whole period is like that, going through a tremendous dark period and the Lord is saying, “Arise and Shine because Jesus Christ is the light of the world, He has come, He has come and He is shining!” And the most beautiful thing over here is the glory of the Lord is not just around, He is not just beside. The Lord is saying, “The glory of the Lord is upon you.” That means Lord is upon, the brightness of the Lord is upon us, people who are in darkness, the Lord is saying this month my glory has risen upon you, it's not future tense like He is saying it Has risen upon you, I am there, I have risen on you and my brightness is there. We can say If the Lord’s glory is on me, how am I not able to see it? If we are able to see it, God will not say,” Arise and Shine for the Glory is on you, obviously, we are not able to see it, it’s an act of faith when the Lord comes to us and He tells us Arise and Shine Glory of the Lord has risen upon you. We are not able to see, we still feel like everything is dark around us, when we hear the Lord speak to us and say, His Glory has come on us, we obey and we arise that’s one when we actually see, the Glory of the Lord on us. That’s when people around us will see, God’s glory in our lives. So it’s a matter of us believing what the Lord speaks to us and acting on what God is telling us to.

Two Bible characters went through a dark period and when Jesus came and told them to arise, what did they do? How did God’s glory shine in their life? In our lives, the application is what is the purpose? What is the purpose of God’s glory coming into our lives? When we are going through a dark situation, we are looking to the morning to come. Everybody will say, “Ok, If you are going through a dark period, the morning will come, daybreak will come.” When we continue to go through, for some people it like year after year, month after month, seems like the darkness is never gone, for them, the Lord is saying, (if you believe what is the Lord is speaking to us tonight), “God’s glory rises upon us.” This month going to be a bright month.

The two-fold blessing is:

Number one, we are actually coming out of darkness, our dark period is finished.

Number two is, the people around us they will see the brightness, for that’s what verse three is and And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.

So it’s not just us, we are not just happy with the brightness, God took me out of my dark environment I will see the darkness around me, but it's a two-fold blessing. One is I am happy because God took me out of it I am so thankful, number two is people are seeing the Light, The Lord in our lives. We become like the moon, the moon is reflecting the sunlight, Without the sun, the moon is dark. So without the light of the Lord, we are dark. But when His light comes on our lives. We begin to radiate and that light attracts gentiles, to the brightness of the light of the Lord. So we going to see, how the Lord came, How the Lord Jesus was the light of the world, came to two people, there are many people that the Lord came, who were in darkness the Lord came and because of His grace even though they did not know the Lord Jesus Christ that’s what we are going to see those two people did not know the light came to them, but they believed, and they obeyed and as the result of that they saw the light and the people around them saw the light. So we are going to see what the Lord did to those two people. We turn to the book of John chapter 5 verses 1 through 15.