Daily Word

What does it mean to be “conceived in sin”?

To be born back-to-front!

What does that mean?

To be turned in the wrong direction: toward oneself instead of toward God.

A sunflower gets its beauty by being turned toward the sun – if it is turned the other way, it will never develop into a beautiful flower.

The same is true for humans.

God is the sun for man: “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.”

If we face the right direction, turned toward Him, our faces begin to shine with the light that emanates from Him.

If we are turned in another direction, our faces will sooner or later “be ashamed.” (Psalm 34:5)

Then we “walk in the darkness, and do not know where we are going because the darkness has blinded our eyes.” We are blinded by our self-centred self-absorption and do not know that we are walking towards our own destruction.

Our chronic self-centredness, which makes us constantly have to realize and assert ourselves, leads to our being dominated by the evil spirits of competition and comparison.

All wars, all misery, suffering and evil in our world have their root and cause in this.

But the problem is that we “love the darkness rather than the Light” and refuse to give up our dear self-life without understanding that it will end in total loss of all that we are and have for ourselves personally and ultimately in the destruction of the whole world.

Conversion means that we give up our self-centred self-life for the sake of Christ.

It implies that He becomes the centre of our life and the one we constantly direct our gaze and attention to. Then we are invaded by and born of the Light, so that we become “children of light.”

We get a completely new direction for our lives and stop trying to get attention and praise for ourselves. Instead, we want “the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” to shine forth, so that everyone will discover who Christ is, the only one who is worthy of all our attention and all our praise.

Conversion means change of direction.

In which direction are you turned – the right or the wrong?