Lighting, Light Fixtures, Ceiling and Exhaust Fans - Installing ceiling light with 3 wires when ceiling only has 2 wires

I am replacing an old ceiling light. There are only 2 wires coming from my ceiling, a black and a white, but the new light I got has 3, black, white, and green, plus a green ground. I tried connecting the black, white, and ground, and leaving the green alone, but no light. Can someone help? By the way, my old light fixture only has 2 wires.

Welcome to the forums! Describe the box in the ceiling. Most likely it is older wiring and is run with BX, or armored cable, which, when installed sufficed for the grounding wire. You said the light had a green and a green ground. The green wires are all grounding wires, and can be safely tied together and placed under a grounding screw in the back of the ceiling box. Connecting the white wire to the white wire in the ceiling box, and black wire to the black wire in the ceiling box is proper. Is that how you hooked them up? Is this light fixture, by chance, from IKEA? If so, it may be wired for European 220 volts. Take a picture of your light fixture and ceiling box and post it on a site such as photobucket.com and either give us the urls, or copy/paste the HTML codes to your reply post.

Thanks Chandler. I'm embarrassed to say that the light did not work, because the bulb was bad. I must have damaged it when I unscrewed it from the old light, as it lit right before in the old light. Someone else told me to do what you say and that the green ground won't do anything, since I don't have a green coming from my ceiling. Yes, it is from Ikea, but I am returning it and getting something else, as it hangs too low for me, so I'm getting a light that mounts flush to the ceiling. I saw a lot at Lowes I liked.