In 2004, Melissa and I went to Kenya with a small group for a mission’s trip. One night we had a terrifying experience. We were in bed, windows open because it was hot, all tucked in beneath our mosquito net, when we heard something in our room. It was pitch black, we were not just in Kenya, we were in rural, remote Kenya. The pastor who organized the conference we were there to take part in was emailing me, months before the trip, that we needed to get the hotel booked ASAP, he was adamant about it, I could not figure out what the hurry was. Once we arrived we discovered it was the only place in the area with running water and the pastor knew how important that would be to us as Americans. The room was dark, it was impossible to see anything, and we could hear something moving around inside the room. I’m going to be honest, I’m scared of basically every kind of animal, I’m not a “nature” guy, so it doesn’t take much to get me to panic, but we were in Africa, so my mind was going all over the place. Was it a snake, a scorpion, an animal? We laid in bed, laughing and scared, trying to convince ourselves it was nothing to worry about but getting more and more worried the more we heard the thing moving around. The realization was, we needed light, we had to find out what this thing was so that we could know what we were dealing with and what we had to do. We finally got out from under our mosquito net and got the lights on to discover that our intruder was a simple field mouse, he was actually cute, little body with big ears. We laughed, we still laugh about it, but the light revealed there was nothing to fear and we were able to go back to sleep. Light does two important things, it shows us what we’ve been missing, what we didn’t know was there, but it also reveals what we’ve been hiding, what we’ve been hoping no one else would see. In our text today Jesus declared, “I am the light of the world.” That declaration means that Jesus came to show us what we’ve been missing and to reveal what we’ve been hiding. He didn’t bring light, He is light, this is not something Jesus does for us, it is what being near Jesus does to us. We can’t see Jesus without seeing ourselves, two things are seen clearly in God’s presence, His character and our condition. There are things we have to see or else we will live in constant fear and anxiety, there are things about us that have to be seen or else those things will become the source of constant accusations from the enemy and shame in our own hearts. This morning I want us to talk about the connection between light and life, how light reveals what life was meant to be and what we have limited it to. My prayer is that we will get close enough to Jesus to see Him as He is so that He can show us that He knows us as we are, that His light will bring us out of hiding and lead us into the life that can’t be hidden by darkness.