The Vision

Light flickers from every secret motive, every private conversation.
It loves people away from their suicide leaps, their Satan games.

Here I am, back to The Vision at last. I’ve been wanting to keep going on it for a while now, but I got seriously stuck on this line. Honestly, it scares me more than any other line in this poem. Light flickers from EVERY secret motive? Seriously? It sounds completely unattainable. I had no idea how to write about it. I knew I needed to take time to really ask God about it, so last night in the prayer room, that’s what I did.

I remember being about eleven or twelve years old, loving Jesus but not really knowing him or letting him transform me yet, sitting on the floor in my room, singing this song by DC Talk:

I keep trying to find a life
On my own, apart from You
I am the king of excuses
I’ve got one for every selfish thing I do
What’s going on inside of me?
I despise my own behavior
This only serves to confirm my suspicions
That I’m still a man in need of a Savior
–In the Light, DC Talk

Selfishness and impure motives are so deeply ingrained in the human heart, it’s a wonder we ever manage anything good at all. Humans are notoriously crappy at having truly pure hearts, especially when we try to purify them on their own.

“Who can say, ‘I have made my heart pure; I am clean from my sin’?”
(Proverbs 20:9)

Not to burst any bubbles here, but it’s impossible. And it seems that not even becoming a Christian fully rewrites our motivations. I know I still find myself stuck in the same old little prideful thoughts and selfish motivations. It sucks. And somehow I’m supposed to be “perfect as [my] Heavenly Father is perfect”? (Mt. 5:48)

I wanna be in the Light
As You are in the Light
I wanna shine like the stars in the heavens
Oh, Lord, be my Light and be my salvation
Cause all I want is to be in the Light
All I want is to be in the Light

There is only one source of Light in this entire universe. We need to stop trying to conjure up some kind of purity on our own, and instead turn ourselves over to the One who is longing to do this kind of work in us.

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
(Psalm 51:10)

We need to be renewed. And renewed. And renewed. Over, and over, and over. This is our only hope of ever having that holy Light burning in our every secret motive. It is not something we can ever,  ever attain on our own power. We need to be constantly refreshed in his grace.

We may never get to the point of being able to say, “I never have an impure motivation.”  But that has to be the vision. That is where the reach in our spirits is trying to get to. Because it is possible to get closer, and looking like him, walking in deeper unity with him, is what our souls crave. We cry out again and again, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me! Give me your light and make me look like you!”

Because the more that Light is flickering in us, the more powerful that love will be.

We were once rescued by a pure, burning Love that snatched us out of darkness, and we become a conduit for that same Love to now rescue others through us. We will watch in wonder as the impossible, supernatural Light that we never could have attained on our own reaches out and snags people away from the edge of the precipice.

Remember that “holiness that hurts the eyes“?

This is what it looks like.