The Red Tinged Light

Quiet Talks on John's Gospel by Samuel Dickey Gordon written over a hundred years ago in 1915, yet still ringing true today.

The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.

John 1:9

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Every man in the world is lighted by this Light. Through nature, the nightly twinklers in the wondrous blue overhead, the unfailing freshness of the green out of the brown under foot; through the never-ceasing wonders of these bodies of ours, so awesomely and skilfully made, and kept going; through that clear quiet inner voice that does speak in every human heart amidst all the noises of earth and of passion;  through these the Light is shining, noiselessly, softly, endlessly, by day and night.

It is the same identical Light that John is tell- ing us of here that so shines in upon every man, and always has. There is no light but His. His name is Jesus. From the first, and everywhere still, it is the Light that shines from Him that lights men. He was with the Father in the beginning. He acted for the Father in that creation week. He gave and sustained all life of every sort everywhere, and does, though only a third of us know His Name—Jesus. 

But the light was obscured, terribly beclouded and bedimmed, hindered by earth-fogs, and swampy clouds rising up, until we are apt to think there was no light, and is none; only darkness. Then He came closer, and yet closer. He came in nearer form so as to get the Light closer, and let it shine through fog and cloud, for the sake of the befogged, beswamped crowd.

And then—ah! hold your heart still—then He let the Light-holder, the great human Lantern, be broken, utterly broken, that so the Light might flash out through broken lantern in its sweet soft wondrous clearness into our blinded blinking eyes, and show us the real way back home. 

It was in that breaking that it got that wondrous exquisite red tingeing that becomes the unfailing

hall-mark, the unmistakable evidence of the real thing of light. And it's only as men know of this latest coming of the Light, this tremendous tragic Jesus-coming of the Light, that they can come into the
full light. That's the reason He came in the way He did. That's the reason when He gets possession of us there's the passion to take the full Jesus-Light out to every one. 

And this passion burns in us and through us, and ours, and sweeps all in the sweep of its tender holy

flame. In this way every man may be fully lit, and so in following the Jesus-Light he shall not walk in the darkness where he has been, but in the sweet clear light of life.