To Bring the Light

Scripture References: Isaiah 60:16, 19; Ephesians 3:10-11

An English doctor found writing short stories more to his liking than writing prescriptions. After numerous rejections, Beeton’s Christmas Annual delighted the doctor by publishing his murder tale in 1887. Although Dr. Conan Doyle was paid a miserly amount for the story, that single mystery launched one of the most successful literary careers in history: the arrogant, impatient, and brilliant Sherlock Holmes.

Read by devotees around the world, Holmes continues to be studied, analyzed, appreciated, and imitated. As one said, he’s the greatest detective who never was. People quiz each other’s knowledge about him. They accumulate Sherlockian memorabilia—and he never existed. A complete fabrication is the object of this intense devotion, the kind usually reserved for historical beings. Is it a measure of our desperate need of heroes that we create one from a myth?

Like everyone else, believers need heroes. We have many of them, but ultimately only One, and he is authentic, not mythical. He lived among us. He is not the creation of our imagination, he is the Creator making us in his image and revealing himself to us verbally and bodily. He intruded himself into history so boldly and remarkably that he divided it in two. He abolished sin as a principle instead of condemning sinners.

Courtesy of Speaker’s Sourcebook of New Illustrations by Virgil Hurley © 1995 by Word, Incorporated.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®, NKJV © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.