Tag Archives: darkness

Sermons and Preaching

Darkness and Light

Read to 1 John 1 and Genesis 1:1-4 to start

Are you familiar with the song “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel? While I enjoy the song, it’s not exactly a cheerful tune; it’s about social isolation and alienation. Although it’s more than 60 years old, it feels even more relevant now than it did in the 1960s. I mention it this morning because we’re going to be talking about darkness and light this morning, and that song starts with the line “Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.”

Let’s get one thing straight right off the mark — darkness is not your friend. Oh, you might be friendly with darkness, you might be comfortable with it, but certainly darkness will be as comfortable and accommodating as you want it to be, but it’s not your friend. A friend wants good things for you, and darkness does not.

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Sermons and Preaching

Binary States

This morning I’d like to talk about binary states. No, we are not going to have a lesson in technology, although you would be entirely within reason to think that. Computers use binary code in order to store information. That’s how computer storage works, it’s all ones and zeroes. Every piece of data on your computer, on your phone, on the entire internet, in fact, it is all stored as ones and zeroes. A bit is a one or a zero, and from that single piece of information, from millions and billions of ones and zeros, we store information.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. A binary state is something that is an either/or condition. Ones are zeroes are hardly the only examples. Look at the lights above you. Those are all LED bulbs, they are either on or off. These bulbs don’t dim, but even if they did, they are still on or off, because on-but-dim is still one. The windows on either wall, those are either open or closed. They’re closed right now, but if it was summer the windows would probably be open. A window might be open a little or a lot, but it’s still either open or closed.

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