Advent 2025, Week 3: Psalm 139, Part 5
This guest post is by Molly Stouffer, a ministry student at Regent University.
Does anything feel like darkness in your life right now?
Maybe it’s sin that you can’t seem to shake yourself from, or shame that you’ve carried for such a long time that you feel its weight daily.
Maybe it’s the state of our world with so much turmoil and politics and violence and hate going on. You turn on the news and you feel fear for what next week or next year might bring.
Maybe it’s something closer to home. It’s your family and burdens that you carry for them. You’re worried that people you love might not yet know their savior.
Maybe it’s a cloud of mental health concerns or even physical health concerns that you can’t seem to find escape from even after countless years and efforts and dollars.
The message of Christmas is that Jesus is God who entered our darkness. He took on incarnate flesh, still holding on to all of his powerful divinity, while becoming entirely human. We see that in John 1:5.
He became the sacrificial lamb for our sins. The true light entered into the darkness of a fallen and sinful world. He shone his light, in a sense, by dying on the cross for our sins and raising from the grave three days later.
Now those of us who have walked in darkness have indeed seen such a great light. A light that shone into the darkness of our sin and saw us before we even realized that we needed saved. So we can walk in the light, but how? Think about the situations that might feel like burdens or worries in your life.
Because of Jesus, I want to push back for a moment on the darkness that you might be feeling, and I want to challenge you to consider something.
Why do we assume that we’re stuck there or that we’re unseen in darkness? In a previous post, I mentioned that God has seen us in darkness. He saw us in the darkness of the womb and what did he do there? He intricately wove you in darkness and made you exactly as he intended. He saw us in the darkness and sin of this world and what did he do? He sent a savior to come and rescue us in the darkness and be the light we needed.
In the beginning of time, God made light out of darkness as his first act of creation from the very beginning of the earth to the coming of Christ. God sends his son as the true light to shine through the dark of the world. From the beginning of our lives he knit us together in darkness.
So why do we assume now that he can’t work in the dark? Why do we assume that? Has he changed? Has anything about him changed? I don’t think so. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. We’re encouraged by that in Hebrews 13:8. He has not changed and he’s never going to.
He will always be the God that created you in darkness, rescued you from the darkness of sin, and sees you now in whatever darkness you feel you might face.
In the first post in this week’s series on Psalm 139, I asked you to imagine what it would feel like waking up in a dark and foreign room in the middle of the night. You imagine the darkness covering the room.
Perhaps you’re feeling some of that right now. We know that we’re not home yet. This side of heaven is not our home.
We’re still in a world of darkness that’s clouded by sin. Yet God is present. Even if we cannot see him, he always sees us.
He always does and he always will. He will always be the light that never goes out. We can trust in him and lean into his light because the darkness with him is light as day.
While we’re on earth here we will still wrestle with darkness trying to sneak its way back into our life. But take heart and a deep breath and rest in the fact that darkness with God is as light as day because he is the light of the world. Cling to him and walk into his light because we know that the darkness is never dark with our God, with our bright light that is our God and our Savior.
Engaging Scripture 