Being Comfortable In The Dark

Being Comfortable In The Dark

Scriptures: Hebrews 11:1; John 20:24-29; First Corinthians 2:14

The title of my message this morning is “Being Comfortable in the Dark.” The writer of the book of Hebrews wrote, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) I will come back to this later, but for right now I want you to know that if we are to walk in faith we must become comfortable being in the dark – walking without having all of the directions beforehand. This message is one that I have preached to myself this week – it is very personal. There are a lot of things happening around me and for a brief moment I felt my focus and assurance wavering – a very scary feeling. I felt darkness engulfing me in a way that I have not experienced in years. However, within that darkness, God spoke to me about faith. When we are walking in faith, sometimes walking alone on that path, we will experience times when we are in the dark and relying totally on God, which should be our way of life. But sometimes we need the darkness to remind us of our reliance on God. This morning I want to talk to you about faith, but from the viewpoint of not knowing – the very definition of being in the dark.

In order to walk in faith, we must become comfortable with being in the dark. I am not necessarily talking about physical darkness, although there are some similarities that I will talk about shortly. I am talking about mental darkness – the darkness that we experience when we do not understand what is happening, yet we are supposed to be taking steps and moving forward. Walking in faith means that we believe and hope for something that we cannot presently see. This belief is grounded in our understanding of God and Who He is in our life. Because we have that trusting relationship, we are willing to follow Him blindly. To understand how this works, I want to spend a few minutes talking about the natural darkness.

When I was a small boy there were times when I was afraid of the dark. There was just something scary about not being able to see what was out there when everything was dark. In total darkness, it is impossible for you know everything that is going on around you because you cannot see it. When I was a child there were times when my parents would ask me to go into another part of the house to get something and immediately I began to turn on lights as I went to make sure there was nothing going to jump out at me. Even though I knew there was no one else present in our house, my imagination still conjured up ideas of someone hiding in the darkness just waiting to get me as I walked down the darken hallways. Even though we were allowed to play outside after dark, we had to stay pretty much in our yard or in the school yard right across the street from our house because we understood that bad things happened in the dark. How many times have we heard about places that we should not go to after dark? The reason is that bad things happen in the dark. When Jesus talked about our being ready and on guard as we watch for His return, He used the analogy of a thief coming in the dark. He said, “But be sure of this, that if the head of the house had known at what time of the night the thief was coming, he would have been on the alert and would not have allowed his house to be broken into.” (Matthew 24:43) We know that, “in general”, thieves break in during the darkness because it decreases their chance of getting caught.

The physical darkness complicates our lives. We are limited as to what we can do and where we can go after it becomes dark. The darkness limits us and, for some people, it terrifies them. I have been traveling on roads in western Kansas in the daytime that I would not want to travel at night. These roads had no lights and it would be pitch black with many miles between two cities. I always imagine what it would be like to have car trouble on one of those roads late at night and having to sit there in the darkness – not being able to see anything. The physical darkness is scary and so is the mental darkness. I am using the term “mental darkness” to represent our not knowing everything and yet we must continue forward until the light breaks through. This, New Light, is called walking in faith.