Shante, I have a torch in my freestuff here which is pretty simple both in geometry and materials. It has the visible flame, an unseen IDL emitter, and the faint foggy glow aura as Acrionix referred to. Download the torch and study it.

Here is the shortcoming with simply jacking up the ambient: The amount of light cast is not enough compared to the apparent brightness of the prop. So, your prop looks scorchingly bright, but it is only weakly casting light. If you dial the ambient down to make the prop look right, then it casts hardly any noticeable light at all.

My solution is to make the prop look about right in brightness, and then use an unseen (not visible in camera) IDL emitter prop with hyper-ambience to do the lightcasting. See my diagram of the torch posted above.

TrekkieGrrrl's lamp is an example where I would just dial up the ambient of the bulb itself, and then add a point light. That combination of ambient bulb with point light will give better lighting than either source used alone. But... if I had a scene with 200+ lamps in it, I would give up on the point lights, and use IDL emitters for the lamps - like so:

That's a Poser Pro 2012 render. Too many lights to use point/spot lights, but easily handled using emitter mesh.

Miscellaneous Superfly MT5/MC6 material files, including the ambient boost nodes (see reference in earlier post).

Superfly materials for fiery HiveWire horse and Angelyna wings.

I would encourage learning P11Pro. It's much easier to do glowy stuff in Superfly. I'm setting up TinkerBell's Drive-In Cafe' -and the entire surrounding neighborhood- to be self illuminated, and with Superfly you don't even need emitters. No Poser lights in this render:

Poser 12, in feet.  

OSes:  Win7Prox64, Win7Ultx64

Silo Pro 2.5.6 64bit, Vue Infinite 2014.7, Genetica 4.0 Studio, UV Mapper Pro, UV Layout Pro, PhotoImpact X3, GIF Animator 5