Welcome again to Things Unseen. This week, I thought it might be stimulating for all of us if I reflected on some of the texts in Scripture that have seemed like dots on the blank page of my life, and when I join them up together,

I'm helped to see something of the pattern of God's providences in my life.

I hope perhaps that you've already started thinking about passages that have shaped your own life.

The texts I'm thinking of are great texts, and that's another reason I wanted to share them.

It just so happens that they've meant a lot to me in particular.

Yesterday I mentioned the first words that seem to leap off the pages of the Bible to me, John 5, 39 to 40.

Today it's another verse from John's Gospel.

It was the text of the sermon to which I look back as marking the poem Today it's another verse from John's Gospel.

It was the text of the sermon to which I look back as marking the point of my coming to faith in Christ.

The verse is John chapter 8, verse 12.

Again Jesus spoke to them saying, I am the light of the world.

Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. As it happens, the sermon was preached in the same church in which I was ordained to the

ministry of the gospel some eight and a half years later on.

But that's another text I'm going to mention later in the week. I'd been what our forefathers would have called, awakened, but not yet converted.

I hadn't been seeking after Christ, but now I was.

And as those same forefathers would have said, I'd come under conviction of sin.

The details don't concern us here, but in essence

what happened was this. I knew I wasn't perfect, and we all do, don't we? And I knew that I did

specific things that were wrong and failed in various ways. And yet I was doing my best and doing my best to keep the commandments

from my youth up, as the rich young ruler said. I think I could put it like this. I knew I sinned

sometimes, but I didn't think of myself as a sinner. I shared the natural man or woman's view of themselves, assuming that

the divine report card probably read something like this, basically more or less satisfactory,

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