Psalms 27:1

‘DOMINUS ILLUMINATIO MEA’

‘The Lord is my light.’

Psalms 27:1

‘The Lord is my light.’ Here only does David, in all his psalms, so speak of the Lord; and, indeed, this exact expression only occurs twice in the Old Testament. ‘When I sit in darkness,’ says the prophet Micah, ‘the Lord shall be a light unto me.’

I. ‘The Lord is my light.’—David’s was a life of great vicissitudes. His temperament, too, was of a kind which alternates between periods of great exhilaration and great depression. The Lord was his light, the light by which he saw things as they really were when the mists of passion and of self-love would fain have hidden them.

II. Jesus Christ was ‘the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.’—He is light because He is what He is: absolute perfection in respect of intellectual truths; absolute perfection in respect of moral beauty. Hence those momentous words, ‘I am the Light of the world,’ and hence that confession of the Christian creed, ‘God of God, Light of Light.’

III. ‘The Lord is my light.’—Here is a motto for the Church of Christ. In the darkest time of the Church the darkness has never been universal, the sap never dried up; the tradition of light and warmth has been handed on to happier times, when her members could again say with something like truthful accord, ‘The Lord is my light.’

IV. Here, too, is a motto for Christian education.—One kind of education only is safe, one only deserves the name, and its governing principle is from age to age, ‘The Lord is my light.’

V. This is the motto of individual Christians.—In precisely the sense in which we can truthfully say these words, we are loyal to our Lord Jesus Christ.

—Canon Liddon.