Evening, July 9

Charles Spurgeon · Morning and Evening: Daily Readings

"And God divided the light from the darkness."

  Genesis 1:4

   A believer has two principles at work within him. In his natural estate
   he was subject to one principle only, which was darkness; now light has
   entered, and the two principles disagree. Mark the apostle Paul's words
   in the seventh chapter of Romans: "I find then a law, that, when I
   would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God
   after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring
   against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law
   of sin, which is in my members." How is this state of things
   occasioned? "The Lord divided the light from the darkness." Darkness,
   by itself, is quiet and undisturbed, but when the Lord sends in light,
   there is a conflict, for the one is in opposition to the other: a
   conflict which will never cease till the believer is altogether light
   in the Lord. If there be a division within the individual Christian,
   there is certain to be a division without. So soon as the Lord gives to
   any man light, he proceeds to separate himself from the darkness
   around; he secedes from a merely worldly religion of outward
   ceremonial, for nothing short of the gospel of Christ will now satisfy
   him, and he withdraws himself from worldly society and frivolous
   amusements, and seeks the company of the saints, for "We know we have
   passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren." The light
   gathers to itself, and the darkness to itself. What God has divided,
   let us never try to unite, but as Christ went without the camp, bearing
   his reproach, so let us come out from the ungodly, and be a peculiar
   people. He was holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners; and,
   as he was, so we are to be nonconformists to the world, dissenting from
   all sin, and distinguished from the rest of mankind by our likeness to
   our Master.