“Commit everything you do to the Lord. Trust Him, and He will help you. He will make your innocence radiate like the dawn, and the justice of your cause will shine like the noonday sun.” (Psalm 37:5-6 NLT)
When I think of the term radiate the thought that comes to mind is our old house when the kids were small. We had a floor furnace on the main floor and small gas heaters in the upstairs rooms. Of course, in the summer when we didn’t use them, the kids got used to putting their toothbrushes, toothpaste, and other small things on top of the heater in the bathroom.
Then comes Fall, cooler temperatures, and the need to once again begin using those old heaters. You know what happened. Even after many “warnings” of what would happen, I came into the bathroom one morning and the kids’ toothbrushes, toothpaste and a toy or two were melted to the top of the old heater.
Fortunately, the radiance of Christ and the warmth of our love for others isn’t harmful. The Lord grows our innocence as we learn to trust Him more fully, and as it grows it becomes contagious, inviting, warm, and attractive to those in our spheres of influence.
As the Psalmist writes, our innocence grows out of our willingness to “Commit everything you do to the Lord.” The clear implication to me is, what we do in secret will become the basis for the radiance of our witness for our Lord. It matters little how we interact in public if our private walk with the Lord isn’t meaningful, personal, and endearing.
Radiance for our Lord grows out of our alone time with Him. Time alone with the Lord Jesus is precious, not only because we get to share in His closeness, His comforting, power-filled presence, but it’s in those moments He speaks to us, teaches us, reveals to us things about Himself that even the Scriptures don’t reveal, but also things about ourselves to which we’re blinded.
It’s not unlike conversations with our spouse or close friend. It’s the things that grow out of our conversations about nothing in particular. After nearly 32 years of marriage, my wife said to me recently, “I didn’t know that about you. You’ve never shared that with me before.” It wasn’t that I’d deliberately kept it from her, it had just never come up, and it wouldn’t have had we not been having that conversation.
It’s like that with the Lord. We learn things about Him, intimate things that we don’t read in the Bible, but we learn in His presence. Things like how interested He is in our individual lives. He’ll remind me of things I need to do, people He desires me to reach out to, attitudes I need to harness, or projects I need to complete.
They aren’t “universal” truths that apply to everyone, they are individual instructions that I would likely miss if it weren’t for my time with Him. Our spiritual radiance grows out of our intimacy with the Son. He is the Light of the world, and it’s His radiance that will be seen in and through our lives when we invest time with Him.
I love how Ray Majoran expresses it in his prayer: “Please forgive us when we hide our lives in fear, or when we look to human life approval instead of Your light. Teach us to walk openly before You with integrity and trust, so that our lives reflect Your brilliance. Through Your Word, shape us to shine with compassion, mercy, and truth, that the world might see the hope You have given us.”
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 