Come to the Light  

Come to the Light, Spread the Light (Message given at Albert Lea United Methodist on Feb 5, 2006 and at Round Prairie and Lunder Lutheran Churches on Feb. 12, 2006)

[Greetings and thanks]I am an Albert Lean born and bred, but God sent me to Africa. And today, He has sent me back to you. God has brought us together for a reason – He wants to tell you something, maybe even through something I say! So please listen up!

I work among a relatively small and obscure people called the Ndaa. There’s about three times as many Ndaa as there are people in Albert Lea. Lots of them are farmers, but mostly they are what you call “subsistance farmers”. They eat most of what they grow. Corn and red beans, not corn and soybeans, among other things. All tilled, planted, cultivated and harvested by hand.

For cash, they grow coffee bushes, raise pigs and chickens or sell extra food crops including plantains and potatoes. Some have “truck gardens” – they grow lettuce, tomatoes, carrots and green beans to sell. I have a friend , Adolphe, with land by a creek and he irrigates chili peppers, okra, tomatoes, etc., during the dry season and sells them. They call them truck gardens, but he has to haul it out of the field on his back or maybe head and take it to the market in town. If he has a lot to sell, he may hire a taxi for a couple bucks, which is a lot for him. Some of his produce may end up on a truck from Mbouda, the market town to one of the major cities.

Africa used to be called the “dark” continent, perhaps out of cultural arrogance. But there is still plenty of spiritual darkness there as there is here. Lying, cheating, stealing, violence, corruption, immorality – signs of spiritual darkness – are present in the villages and cities there as they are here. Sin is sin wherever you happen to be and the Bible teaches us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Rom 3.23) Yes, Minnesotans, even “nice people” have sinned, they’ve missed the mark of what God wanted them to be and do. The Ndaa worship their ancestors and many Americans worship their bank accounts – both are in bondage to a form of idolotry. Most people here and probably among the Ndaa have at least heard the name of Jesus Christ, but don’t know Him. They don’t know Him as their Savior, Lord and friend. He is the Light of the World, but they’re still in darkness.

Are you still in darkness or have you come to the light? I came to the light as a teenager. I grew up in (this) church and heard a great deal about Jesus. I still remember some of the Scipture and hymns I memorized in confirmation class. It wasn’t, however, until I was a ninth grader that I put my faith in Christ as my Lord and Savior. That was at a Youth For Christ rally on a snowy, Saturday night. I started to walk more in the light some weeks later after a Lay Witness Mission here turned our youth group around. We began to seriously pray and study God’s Word together because we wanted to walk in the Light.

I believe God sent my wife Vicky and I to Africa, to Cameroon, to the Ndaa people...to help spread His light by translating His Word. We believe everyone should have access to God’s Word in their mother tongue. Up until now, the Ndaa have only had access to God’s Word in French, a second language they learn in school. (There are also off-the-cuff oral translations into their own language done in church services.) Most people don’t make it past the 6th grade and many not even 3rd grade, so reading French is not their strong suit. Most, except for the very old and the very young get along in French, but the message of God’s Word has still not penetrated into their hearts and lives.

Now, translating into the mother tongue has been a long and involved process because Ngomba, the language of the Ndaa, was basically an unwritten language until I studied it and proposed an alphabet and marks for tone, etc. Few passages have thus far been translated and fewer still have been checked and tentatively published. Some Ndaa co-workers and I did a rough draft of  John 3.16-21 last year so I could use it in preaching the gospel in Ngomba before we left on furlough. I’ve done what we call a back translation of it into English for you. We work from various French translations and I look up hard words and expressions in a Greek lexicon an various translation helps we have. For a translation consultant to check our work, we do a back translation, that is we translate in back into English or French – it’s somewhat literal to give an idea of the expressions used, like our choices for what are known as “key terms”. The expression for putting your trust in someone is “to put or place your heart on” that person, so that is what you’ll hear instead of “to believe in”. “To do God’s will” is translated as to do what God wants or loves people to do. Listen, maybe even close your eyes as you do,  and imagine you are an Ndaa person. You’re sitting in a mud brick church with a corrugated metal roof, on low benches with no back and this is the first time you’ve heard this in your mother tongue:

Lord God loved people on the world a lot even to the point of giving His only Child that the person who puts their heart on Him won’t die and be lost but he/she will have life without end. Because Lord God had not sent His Child onto the world to judge people but that people would follow after Him and live. The person who has placed their heart on Him, Lord God is not going to condemn him. But the person who has not put their heart on Him, he/she has already fallen under judgement. The judgement is: the Light had come onto the world but people loved darkness more than light because the things they did were not good. The doer of evil avoids the light and avoids coming to the place where the Light is for fear of their evil deeds being lit up. But the person of truth seeks the light that one may see that what he/she has done is what Lord God loves.

Christ is the light of the world, without Him in charge of your life, you’re stumbling around in the dark spiritually. Cameroonians are pretty good at walking in the dark, actually, but prefer a flashlight or kerosene lantern to light the way, especially when there’s no moonlight. At night in an Ndaa village, far from the lights of the city, you can appreciate verses like Ps 119.105: “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.” We had a language survey team (of expat missionaries and Cameroonians) in the Ndaa area once that recorded a stories for dialect testing. One story was about a man who used to go hunting at night. One dark night this hunter shot at what moved on a path and the next morning found he had killed, not an animal, but a relative of his!

Apart from Christ and His light, we’re like that hunter, blind to our deeds of darkness and unaware of the consequences of those deeds. There are consequences in the here and now. For example, if you hold a grudge and refuse to forgive, it messes up your relationship to God and others and maybe even makes you ill. If you take up a weapon against that person, they put you in prison. I don’t know if you have seen the movie “The End of the Spear” yet. It’s about the martyrs killed by the Auca or Waodani as they call themselves in Ecuador in 1956.  That tribe, that people group was exterminating itself through revenge killings.

And there are eternal consequences – the wages of sin is death (it says in Rom 6.23). Not only physical death, but spiritual death – being separated from God’s love and mercy; consigned, instead, to eternal torment. That’s what happens eventually when you shun the light your whole life. Heaven and Hell are real. 

“But,” the verse goes on to say,  “the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  The gift of eternal life is in Christ the light of the world. Come to the Light and then you can also go out and spread the Light. Yet, it is so hard for us to come to the light because we do things that are not good and we don’t want to admit it. But that’s the very thing we must do. We want to make excuses and point our fingers at someone else. ‘I’m not such a bad person, am I? I’m not as bad as so-and-so.’ We need to own our sin. I learned 1 Jn 1.9 in confirmation class – If we confess our sins[that’s confess our sins, not deny them or make excuses for them] he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. No excuses, just fess up and come clean before God. If you don’t “accept your bad things”, as they say in Ngomba “Yup, that’s me and that’s bad”, if you don’t accept the fact that you are a sinner, you can never receive God’s forgiveness. Now, I’m preaching Law here. The Law teaches us that we’re sinners and we need to hear that. We need the light to shine on our deeds of darkness so we can see them for what they are. How can you receive forgiveness if you maintain there’s nothing for God to forgive?

The Gospel teaches us there is forgiveness because Christ died for your sins and for my sins and for the sins of the Ndaa. The Lord’s Supper proclaims this. In Mafofa Church in the Ndaa village of Bamendjinda, we drink red kool-aid made from Grenadine syrup and eat french bread for communion. The elements are not so important, but your faith is. Your heart attitude is. When you [next] come to take communion, please don’t come on autopilot. It’s not about the ritual, but about the relationship, about reconciliation. Put your spirit and mind in gear and do business with God. Do confess and forsake your sins. For real! [In Ngomba there are two expressions we considered for translating repentance. One means to turn your heart. We need to turn our hearts from sin, from being the boss in our life and turn toward God. The other means to change your ways.] Do heartily and earnestly repent of your sins. Do receive the forgiveness that is available through Christ’s sacrifice – His blood shed for you, for your sins to be washed away and His body broken for you to be saved from eternal punishment, to be delivered from sin’s power, to be made whole and to be reconciled to God. Lay your heart on Jesus, not on church attendance, not on how good or nice you think you are compared to other people. God doesn’t measure you and I against Attilla the Hun or Idi Amin. He doesn’t say, ‘You’re not an ax murderer. I guess I’ll let you into my heaven.’  The standard we’re judged by is God’s Word. The standard is Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh. Are you as good and kind and holy and righteous and faithful and loving as Him? I know I’m not. Do you honestly believe you’re good enough to get into heaven on your own merits apart from Christ’s sacrifice for your sins? Follow Jesus into the light and live! Then you can walk in the light and spread the light, doing the good deeds he prepared in advance for you to do (like it says in Ephe. 2.10). We’re not saved by doing good. We’re saved for doing good. [Thank them for their kind attention and pray.]