Toggle Switch Faith

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.

Colossians 1:13

This verse fascinates me for three reasons.

1. It’s strikingly binary. My 1979 Fiat had a toggle switch for the lights and it was awesome. They were on or off, no flipping around with running lights,fog lights or any other mess. Simplicity is clarity, and Paul is being very simple. We are either owned by ignorance (the domain of darkness) or owned by a love-driven savior (the kingdom of his beloved Son). There is no middle ground, no living in two worlds. That doesn’t mean that we don’t sometimes try, but for a Christian it will never do. We may try driving with the lights off for a while but our eyes will never adjust to the dark. Squinting is exhausting.
   

2. We cannot learn our status alone. The Colossians had to learn it from Paul, someone from the outside, speaking with authority, and we have the exact same outside authority in the Bible. We also have the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:16). This means we need a prayer life that is a dialogue rather than a monologue, so there are some feeling parts too.
   

3. Set in Stone. The word “transferred” has a finality to it. It’s sometimes used to describe death, and I wonder if Paul smiled at the irony because this transfer is the result of a death that did not stay dead. For us Paul is describing an objective change, something that happens at a particular point, something with hard corners that does not change back. We might not be able to point to a single moment when this happened, but He can. In that moment we go from being one type of thing to another, or as Paul puts it to the Corinthians, we become a new creation.

So where does that leave us on a Friday? First, we need to be aware of the cultural pressure to fiddle with the lights, turn them off with one set of friends and then back on

with another. Doing that scrapes against what’s true, who we really are, and scraping hurts. Second, it may be worth taking two minutes (set a timer) and asking God to show us the difference between living in the domain of darkness and living in the kingdom of his beloved Son (see #2 above).