Spirituality is a universal human trait. Although there are those who have tried to suppress or deny their innate spiritual sense by claiming to not believe in God, the truth is that deep down in the heart of everyone there is the awareness of something other than the material world that we can see. As the French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, "There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus”
When one tries to deny what his own heart knows to be true he becomes frustrated. This can result in anger, anxiety, depression, and any number of conditions that will deny him joy and cause him to seek solace in pleasures or intellectual pursuits. When it comes to the unbeliever, the drunkard and the secular humanist philosopher may be both just trying to deal with the pain of an empty life. The playboy and the workaholic may both be trying to suppress that nagging little voice that says something is very wrong and your soul is in danger.
The light of the gospel is a wonderful thing but it may hurt the eyes of those who have shut them against that light for so long that the darkness is comfortable to them now. To have to see those things which the light reveals is unpleasant because the lost man does not want to repent of his sins and does not want to submit to the Lord. The Bible says, in 2 Cor. 4:3-4, "But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." Also we read that "men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil."
Whenever a lost person comes to a place where the light is shone, he is being drawn of God to make a choice to accept or reject the gospel. The work of the church, our work as individual believers, is to shine the light of God's truth in any and every way we can. Light will penetrate darkness. It always wins over darkness and will ultimately abolish darkness. Let's be sure our lamps are in good working order. When the wick is trimmed, and the oil reservoir is full, and the lamp is not hidden, but lifted high to shine brightly, the darkness must give way.
Quotes...
Intellectualism:
"One learns through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect." Mark Twain
"Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as to think." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." Galileo
Prov. 1:7"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction."
Illumination: “All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” Blaise Pascal
"Light itself is a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that are grown in darkness disappear, like owls and bats, before the light of day." James Abram Garfield
"The thing to do is to supply light and not heat." Thomas Woodrow Wilson