Daily Devotional

When you walk into a pitch-black room, you reach for the walls, shuffle your feet, and try to get some kind of reference point. Darkness disorients. It conceals danger. It leaves you feeling utterly alone. That is what life apart from God looks like.

Matthew tells us that when Jesus relocated to Capernaum, He moved into a region that had been sitting in darkness for 700 years. The territory of Zebulun and Naphtali was the first to fall when Assyria invaded in 732 BC. The people were carried into exile, the land was resettled with Gentiles, and for centuries it stood as a symbol of judgment, loss, and spiritual neglect. The religious elite in Jerusalem had written these people off entirely.

But before the light can do its work, the darkness must be acknowledged. This is a principle that applies to salvation and to every season of the Christian life. You cannot get to where God wants you to be until you acknowledge where you are. Many people today are living in spiritual darkness and do not even know it. They are distracted by entertainment, numbed by comfort, deceived by false religion. As one author put it, “The opposite of hope is not despair, it’s distraction.”

The first step toward freedom is always honesty. Where are you today? Are there areas of your life where you have been avoiding the truth about your spiritual condition? Are there corners of your heart where darkness has quietly settled in through complacency or unconfessed sin? Before you rush to the good news, take a moment to sit with the honest assessment of where you are. God meets us in our honesty, not in our pretending.