Christ our Lighthouse…

On 9th February I was in a prophetic zoom chat when I had a sudden picture/ vision that seemed to come out of nowhere. It was brief but very clear… and left me puzzled as to what it meant.
In it I saw a smallish wooden boat on a stormy sea that was heading towards a lighthouse. The people inside seemed happy and unconcerned, but I could see they were heading for rocks as the base of the lighthouse, and I felt alarmed that they didn’t adjust course to go around it – they were going to be destroyed.

Usually when I see images like this I get a sense of what they are about, but in this case, all I could identify was my sense of alarm and questioning why they were heading straight for the rocks instead of heeding the warning and going around. So I asked God to help me understand. In response He led me to do some research into lighthouses, and through that, showed me many things I had not clearly seen before…

As I read, I learned that lighthouses were originally created as lights to show safe passage to voyagers – a kind of “come this way“, or welcome signal. Over time they were also built to designate areas of danger – a kind of “stay away”, or warning signal. Of the different kinds of lighthouse, the welcoming lights – typically found in harbours – are usually smaller & less bright, while the warning lights are further out to sea, larger and brighter. They also often have subtle differences of colour, flash pattern etc, to help differentiate between them.

As I prayed into my vision and the importance of my felt alarm that those in the boat were heading for, and not around the lighthouse, I came to realise the message of the picture was that the boat represented the Church and how in general they do not know how to discern between a welcome and a warning… the result being disaster. In the vision they were caught in a stormy sea, saw a light, and assumed it was a welcoming light, so headed right for it – not realising that it was a warning light, meant to help them navigate treacherous waters. Thus they were doomed to being dashed on rocks.

The Bible says in Ps 119:105, “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.“. It is God’s Word that is the lighthouse – that’s His written Word, aka the Bible. It’s His Son Jesus, the Word of God in flesh (John 1:14). God’s Word is also revealed through prophecy. His Word is the only reliable truth that lights our path and guides us around danger, until we come safely home.

If we approach the Word (the Bible, Jesus, and prophecy) with the view that it always has to feel nice and welcoming, always says ‘yes’ to our requests, we will reject the truth in His Word whenever it does not feel nice. It’s like treating all lighthouses as welcoming ones, when really some of them are sent to warn us to change direction. And that’s a dangerous approach.
If we receive the Word as truth even when it doesn’t feel nice, or make sense to our modern mindsets; if we humbly accept that God knows better and always has our best interests at heart – that He sometimes says ‘no’ because He knows what is liable to capsize us even when we can’t see what lurks beneath the surface, we will be much less likely to assume that the light we can see is endorsing our preferred path, and more likely to heed His warning messages.
Any safe and successful journey depends on knowing the difference between ‘stay away’ warnings and ‘come this way’ welcomes.

If the Gospel we preach only tells people the welcome half (“God loves you”) and fails to proclaim the warning half (“repent and sin no more”), we are failing to equip people for a successful Christian life – most likely setting them up for a shipwrecked faith later on.

Church, we have a responsibility to recognise both welcome signals and warning signals – to obey God’s ‘yes’s and His ‘no’s – to embrace God’s love AND His truth, first in our personal lives, and then to train others in it so that we can help those on stormy seas to navigate the route that leads them to salvation in Christ. Amen.