Don’t shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you others can see Him.
Light
N. T. Wright
Christmas is God lighting a candle and you don’t light a candle in a room that’s already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that’s so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are.
Steve Backlund
How do we get rid of darkness? By rebuking it? By seeking to rid our environments of it? No. The answer to stopping darkness is to bring light into the situation. Darkness cannot stay if light comes. The question is not “How do we remove the darkness?” It is “How can I turn the light on in this situation?
Bill Johnson
A jeweler often places a diamond on a piece of black velvet. The brilliance of the gem is clearer against that background. So it is with the Church. The dark condition of the world’s circumstances becomes the backdrop upon which He displays His glorious Church! “Where sin abounded, grace abounded much more” (Rom. 5:20).
Henri J. M. Nouwen
What needs to be guarded is the life of the Spirit within us. Especially we who want to witness to the presence of God’s Spirit in the world need to tend the fire within with utmost care…Our first and foremost task is faithfully to care for the inward fire so that when it is really needed it can offer warmth and light to lost travelers.
Selwyn Hughes
Robert Louis Stevenson, one evening, stood transfixed at his nursery window watching the lamplighter in the street. When his nanny asked the boy what he was doing he replied: “I’m watching the man knocking holes in the darkness.” We live in a universe made dark by sin. Let’s knock holes in the darkness.
Barbara Johnson
Faith is seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness.
Thomas Cranmer
I would marvel much that any man should be so mad, as to refuse in darkness, light: in hunger, food: in cold, fire: for the word of God is light, food, fire.
Thomas Merton
Shall I drive evil out of my soul by wrestling with my own darkness? This is not what God has planned for me. It is sufficient to turn away from my darkness to His light.
Madeleine L’Engle
We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.