And that’s only feasible, if you love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and know His will and yield yourself to His will, just like Jesus, Who loved His Father with all His heart, soul, mind and strength and knew His Father’s will and yielded Himself to the will of the Father. What is the will of God? the night advanced, and the day came near; let us lay aside, therefore, the works of the darkness, and let us put on the armor of the light; To put on the armor of light is to put on the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the light and life of the world. This light—His light—forsakes the evil one.

Advent is a season of penitence, but it is very different in mood from Lent. In Advent we are prisoners, but we know release will come; we are exiles, but we know we are going home; we are sinful, but we know we are forgiven. The cry of Advent is, ‘Keep awake’. Keep wanting, keep desiring, don’t settle for anything less than the Lord himself. For he comes as a thief in the night and at an hour you do not expect.

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I started out writing spy stories. And I decided that the spy story would be more thrilling if the activities of the spy affected some real event in history: the course of a battle or the course of a war. So first of all I wrote Eye of the Needle, which was a spy story leading up to D-Day. And then I started to read military history to find examples of battles and wars where the spy’s action made a difference or might have made a difference. So I got into military history that way. And then my horizons expanded and instead of just writing thrillers I began to write general historical novels – but still looking at real history to find those gems where true history gives you a set of characters whose lives are exciting. When did you know you first wanted to be a writer? Public liberties were crushed. The American and French Revolutions were recent, and the King and Parliament feared similar uprisings in England. The light of the body is the eye; if, therefore, thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

When I was twelve years old I read Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming, and I reread it, actually for the third time, quite recently. It's terrific. I became a James Bond fan, and when I started to write novels myself I remembered the thrill of being twelve and having a new James Bond novel in my hands to read. And I thought: that's what I need my readers to feel. I really wanted people to say ‘oh great, it's a new Ken Follett.’ And that's a high bar. So I set myself a high ambition: that was the way that Ian Fleming influenced me. I don't write like him. You can’t write like him: he's got a very particular and quite brilliant prose style. But what remained was that feeling. ‘I remembered the thrill of being twelve and having a new James Bond novel in my hands to read. And I thought: that's what I need my readers to feel. I really wanted people to say ‘oh great, it's a new Ken Follett.’’ But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me. And I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments, and do them (Ezekiel 36:27) The characters are so well-crafted that they become like friends. Some characters you fall in love with, some you find despicable. I loved Sal! Her no-nonsense attitude and resilience were so heartwarming! Follett gives us many glimpses of history, though all of it is fed through the fictional city of Kingsbridge. We see the long miserable battle between masters and workers-- the formation of trade unions to demand workers' rights, the masters responding by bringing in cheap foreign labour, self-serving local government assisting the masters to keep the workers down through intimidation and the threat of flogging, or worse.The night [this present evil age] is almost gone and the day [of Christ’s return] is almost here. So let us fling away the works of darkness and put on the [full] armor of light. I testify that the things I have spoken of today are true. I pray that we might maintain the brightness of our armor, the armor of light, by consistently coming unto the light—even Jesus Christ—who is the light. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.

But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If, therefore, the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness![3 Nephi 13:22–23]

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I want to reflect, this evening, upon a phrase of Paul’s in that reading from Romans: the armour of light. As well as our usual, longer, silence after the sermon, there will some shorter silences as part of the sermon. He started his career as a reporter, first with his hometown newspaper the South Wales Echo and then with the London Evening News. Subsequently, he worked for a small London publishing house, Everest Books, eventually becoming Deputy Managing Director. God has given you in Christ all authority and power to resist the devil and resist sin; the works of darkness.