Light and Darkness - Out of Darkness into His Marvelous Light

 This is another talk that I'm sure I've shared before. In this talk, Elder Robert D. Hales talks about a pear-shaped generator he attached to his bike, that generated light for him, as long as he kept pedaling. But before that, he talked about the 2002 Winter Olympics being held in Salt Lake City, helping to bring the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints "out of obscurity."

But the section that relates to my topic, Light and Darkness, is found farther down the article, under the heading: Darkness and Light. He says:

As children, we learned how to keep darkness away by turning on a light. Sometimes, when our parents went away for the evening, we would turn on every light in the house! We understood the physical law that is also a spiritual law: light and darkness cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

Light dispels darkness. When light is present, darkness is vanquished and must depart. More importantly, darkness cannot conquer light unless the light is diminished or departs. When the spiritual light of the Holy Ghost is present, the darkness of Satan departs.

These two paragraphs, the last paragraph especially, show that Light and Darkness are always at war with each other, and that "unless the light is diminished or departs," the light always wins. This should be encouraging; as long as we keep the Holy Ghost with us, Satan can't touch us. But while, theoretically, that plan is sound, in practicality, it's not that easy. As in the bike-light generator analogy that I barely mentioned above, keeping the Spirit with us takes constant effort, and if there's one thing I know about the average human, we're not good at making efforts, let alone constant effort.

Elder Hales wisely warns, "in this world, the darkness is never far away. In fact, it is always just around the corner, waiting for an opportunity to come in. ...

It is as predictable as any physical law: if we let the light of the Spirit flicker or fade by failing to keep the commandments or by not partaking of the sacrament or praying or studying the scriptures, the darkness of the adversary will surely come in. “That wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth, through disobedience.” (D&C 93:39)

Satan knows that if he can trick us into disobedience to God's laws, we'll lose the spiritual light that otherwise would have been a guide and protector to us. And the worst part is that he has already done that. All of us, at some point in our lives, have been tricked into disobeying some commandment or another, and all of us have felt the following loss of light. It felt miserable. And for some of us, still laboring in sin, it still feels miserable. But there's a way to escape that misery, a way to come back into the light of the lord. The way is repentance.

Repentance isn't easy. I don't think it was meant to be. I think God wants us to have to struggle to come out of the darkness and into the light, because He knows that our struggles make us stronger, and He wants us to eventually be as strong and as wise as He is.

The battle between light and darkness is hard fought, and all of us have been wounded in the conflict, but through our repentance and His Atonement, Christ offers us healing and help. He wants all of us to come "out of darkness and into His marvelous light," (1 Peter 2:9) or in other words, to "cast off the works of darkness, and... put on the armor of light" (Romans 13:12). Satan wants us to lose our souls, but God wants us to win, and we all know which of the two is stronger.