"Wake up, son! You're missing half the good of life!" Many times the writer heard these words from his father when he was a boy. Sometimes his father would add, "You can't go through life in a fog!" Good human counsel, this, and certainly in the right direction; but the question was how to follow it, how to awaken to reality and to stay awake.
In human existence the spiritual, the good, and the true often seem obscured by the material, the evil, and the false. In this imperfect state of existence, such contradictions as abundance and lack, health and sickness, joy and sorrow, appear to ebb and flow and are unexplainable from a material, personal viewpoint. Paul saw the necessity of awakening from this false sense and indicated that such awakening is not a human process involving time, but spiritual enlightenment. He wrote to the Ephesians (5:14), "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light."
The effect of light is illumination. Light dawning on a landscape supplants the darkness and identifies what is already there. The substance, form, and action of things is not changed with the coming of light. Light supersedes the negative and obscuring darkness, and thus objects are seen better in the light.
