Stay close to Jesus, your dawning light.

I was in the dark, literally and figuratively. No streetlights, no street signs, only potholed and unfamiliar roads. My passengers had a cadence to their speech that my ears hadn’t yet learned. It was only my second day on the Caribbean island of Antigua. After my several failed attempts to understand their verbal directions, my passengers simply pinned their desired destination on my phone. With the help of GPS, I was able to navigate those dark streets successfully.

It’s no fun being in the dark. No wonder we love our smartphones! The people living at the time of the prophet Isaiah didn’t have smartphones. Instead, they had fortune tellers who were willing to tell paying customers anything they wanted to know. But when it came to what they needed to know, the Israelites were walking in darkness. They needed a light to reveal the potholes in their lives. We also need a light to tell us the hard truths about ourselves—a light better than the blue glow of our smartphones. And we have it: the great light of God’s Son.

Like a mechanic who shines a light under the hood of a car to illuminate the problem, Jesus came to shine the light of God’s law on our sins. It’s not okay for us to bad-mouth others. It’s not okay to withhold forgiveness. “Repent!” cries Jesus. And it’s dangerous to refuse. Just as it takes only a few seconds for a hand to burn in a candle flame, so any sin, no matter how small it may seem, damages our relationship with a holy God.

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned” (Isaiah 9:2).

But just like a smartphone that doesn’t only deliver information but also summons the help we need, Jesus beams the light of God’s rescuing love into our lives. Like the tow truck that your roadside assistance app mobilizes, Jesus came to hook our broken lives to himself. He towed that mess to the cross and parked it in his tomb.

When Jesus rose again, we did too—forgiven, renewed, and confident of our eternal destination. With Jesus, we are never in the dark, even if we’re not quite sure what’s around the next corner.

Stay close to Jesus, our dawning light. He illuminates our way through this life until we stand in the full light of his glory in the next.

Author: Daniel Habben
Volume 113, Number 1
Issue: January 2026