“Night is coming, when no one can work.” (John 9:4)
Expanded Passage: John 9:4-7
Four thousand years ago, one day’s wages would buy you enough oil to light one room in your house for ten minutes. Today, one day’s wages will buy you enough energy to light a room for 20,000 hours! In our world today, artificial light is cheap, so darkness is no barrier to being productive. But when Jesus said that no one can work after dark, he meant it—darkness brought the world to a standstill until the sun came back in the morning. Jesus knew the daylight was precious, and so one had to work hard when work could be done. For Jesus, this meant healing and teaching because this moment would not last forever.
In our modern world, it is easy to blur day and night. It creates an illusion that time will go on forever, that we will always have time to do what we need to do. But we are time-bound creatures—we get seventy, eighty, ninety years here, sometimes less, sometimes more. And this is our time to follow Jesus in our work, to do what we can to point people to Jesus, and to build communities where people can come to know him. There will come a time to rest, and the blessed Sabbaths of this life prefigure that great rest with Jesus. Until then, we put our hands to work.
Find one small way today to point someone to Jesus.
J. Michael Jordan is associate professor of theology at Houghton University, and the author of Worship in an Age of Anxiety (IVP, 2024).
© 2025 Wesleyan Publishing House. Reprinted from Light from the Word. Used by permission. Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®.
