Have you ever stopped to notice that almost every single thought you have is a judgment?
Think about it. From the moment you wake up, you are constantly categorizing your world into “good” and “bad.”
- “Sleeping in until 10 AM feels good.”
- “The traffic on the way to work is bad.”
- “Spending a Friday night on the couch with a few beers feels like the ‘good life.’”
- “Dealing with the hangover on Saturday morning is the ‘bad part.’”
We spend our entire lives adjusting our behavior based on this internal compass. But here is the glitch: Our compass is often calibrated to our comfort, not to the truth. We call things “good” because they feel good in the moment, and we call things “bad” simply because they are inconvenient.
We are all looking at the world through a lens, but for many of us, that lens is blurred by our past, our culture, and our own biases.
The Divine Upgrade: What it Means to be a “Son of Light”
In the New Testament, there is a recurring phrase: Sons of Light.
At first glance, that sounds like a religious title. But if you look at the original context, it’s actually describing a “lens upgrade.” In the biblical sense, Light isn’t just about visibility—it’s about Truth.
The way I read it, being a “Son of Light” isn’t about reaching a state of perfection where you never make a mistake. Instead, it describes how, through Christ, your flawed human lens is being replaced by a divine one. You stop asking, “Does this feel good to me?” and you start asking, “Does this align with the heart of God?”
It’s the shift from living by feeling to living by revelation.
The Beauty of the “Sift”
But here is the part we usually struggle with: You can’t get to that clarity without some friction.
There is a powerful image in the Bible of “sifting.” To sift wheat, you throw it into the air. The wind blows away the chaff (the useless outer shell), and the heavy, valuable grain falls back down.
Many of us view the hard seasons of our lives—the failures, the conflicts, the “dark nights of the soul”—as signs that we’ve drifted away from God or that we are being punished. We ask, “Why is this happening to me?”
But what if the struggle is actually a sifting process?
Think about Peter. The devil asked to “sift” him like wheat. Jesus didn’t stop the sifting; He just prayed that Peter’s faith wouldn’t fail. Why? Because the sifting is how the “chaff” in our lives—the pride, the ego, the false dependencies—gets stripped away.
The difficulties we face often serve as the wind that separates who we pretend to be from who we actually are in the Light.
The Proof is in the Friction
Here is the most encouraging thought for anyone feeling the weight of the battle today: The fact that you feel the struggle is the evidence that you belong to the Light.
Think about it. If you were a “son of darkness,” you would be perfectly comfortable in the dark. You wouldn’t feel the friction. You wouldn’t feel the conviction when you stumble, and you wouldn’t feel the drive to fight the evil you see in the world.
The very fact that you hate the darkness—the very fact that you are fighting to be a person of integrity, love, and truth—is the proof that there is a Light living inside you.
You aren’t fighting to become a son of light; you are fighting because you are one. The friction is the evidence of your identity.
A New Way to Look at Today
Whether you are just starting to question the lens you’ve been using, or you’ve been on this path for years, something that’s helped me is changing the question I ask in those harder seasons.
Instead of asking, “Why is this happening?” I’ve found it more useful to ask: “What is being sifted out of me right now so that the Light can shine through more clearly?”
We are all judging, dictating, and adjusting. The question is: Which lens are you using?
