Walking in the Light

Before we begin our study of 1 John 1 today, I wanna share a little something that I read recently that might help us have an appreciation for how John begins this letter, okay? I was born in Southwest Minnesota, I was born on the prairie. I'm a girl of the prairie, well I wasn't born on the prairie, I was born in a hospital, but a hospital on the prairie, okay? So the prairie is in my heart, even though we've been on the West Coast for 34 years. My mom and dad were both born within five miles of a town called Jeffers. They met at high school, they married, I met my husband at the same high school, we married, and I belong to a Facebook group that's called Growing Up in Jeffers. It's kind of fun, maybe you belong to groups like this of the place that you came from. There was a post recently from Good Housekeeping on that site that had, it was called 50 Underrated Attractions in Each State. And so each state had an opportunity to boast about a special place that maybe doesn't get the press that it deserves, and there on page 23 of this blog was the Jeffers Petroglyphs on County Road 2. It's a historical site now, it has been for a few decades, but it's a place where the Red Rock Ridge, the prairie grass gives way to this rock outcropping, and the Native Americans would carve bison and deer and different things, whether it was a local regional newspaper to be read or whether they were recording history, no one really knows for sure. But the point is that this place was super special to me, it was very near our farm, and it was the one tourist attraction that we had, so if we had company, let's go to the petroglyphs, you know. And it kind of looked, it was cool, it sort of looks like Egyptian hieroglyphics, you know. My mom worked there as a guide when I was in high school, my dad brought his heavy equipment and erected the first big wooden teepee that was the visitor center, so this is really like buried in my heart. And I looked at that blog, number 53, excuse me, number 23 from Minnesota, and I thought to myself when I saw that, hey, I know that place, like that place is part of me. You people reading this blog don't know that place, like I know this place. And it gave me something a little bit to work with as I read John's opening in this letter that we're studying, because he writes, that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands concerning the word of life. Can you hear that energy? I know about this, I know him, I was there, I was a part of his life, now he's a part of my life. And we have to remember, like we said last week, that 60 years have passed, and so only people that are probably older than 70 could say the same thing, and they had to have lived in Judea 70 years ago, so it's a small group that shares that same passion as John, and there are certainly people around him now who have heard about Jesus, believed in Jesus, but John knew him intimately, in the flesh, and now through the Spirit. And so I want to put a reminder on the screen here, 1 John 5, 13, that tells us the purpose. He was writing to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. John wants to pass on what he knows so that you may know. I feel like many Christians go through a time of questioning whether or not what they believe is really true. I think that that's really common. And the opening words of this letter really help us to understand that our Christian faith is a historical faith. It's not something that was, it's not a system of thought, it wasn't a revelation by an angel, it was rooted in a person, Jesus Christ, who was historically validated, personally experienced, and now proclaimed to others. And that should give us a lot of comfort. The apostles all staked their lives on the claims that they experienced Jesus, and they all paid with their lives, except for John, who is the last one left by the time he's writing this letter. Everyone else has been martyred for what they claimed about their experience. And we have said that men will die, excuse me, men will lie about their experiences, but they will rarely die for the lie. That just doesn't happen. So as we begin reading, we're going to read verses 1 through 4 here and then talk about a little bit. I want you to notice these we statements, that John is including the other eyewitness apostles in what he's talking about. And these verses are very similar to the prologue of his gospel, which we studied a little bit in our study guide. So let's read that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we've seen with our eyes, which we've looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life. The life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testified to it, and proclaimed to you eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us. That which we have seen and heard, we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us. And indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ, and we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. So the main topic of this opening four verses is the word of life. That is the point of what John's talking about, that God chose to put on display. That's what made manifest means, to put on display for us. So the word of life became flesh and came in the person of Jesus Christ. And did you notice all these experiential sensing words in here? We heard, we have seen, we have touched. And I thought to myself, you know, if I was going to say I know a person, I would simply say yes, I know that person. I wouldn't go to these lengths. Or I know the Jeffress Petroglyphs. I wouldn't elaborate unless I heard somebody saying things wrong about it. So if I was in a restaurant and overheard a conversation and somebody was telling another person, hey, there's this place in southwest Minnesota on the Red Rock Ridge, and at midnight, and the moon is full, the fog parts, and there's writings in glow-in-the-dark writings that will tell you from aliens, you know, if I heard somebody say that, I would turn around then and say, no, I know this place. No, I've seen it in the sunshine. I've felt the wind. I've heard the meadowlarks. I've traced the bison with my finger. I'm an eyewitness. I know it. And I would correct. I kind of feel like that's what John's doing. He's correcting without dragging us through what is false. And the Gnostics were describing Jesus in terms that John knew were not accurate. They had altered views about who Jesus was. And false teachings almost always have altered views on the work and the person of Jesus Christ because that is so foundational to our faith. And so it's not a surprise to us. And in those days, people were describing Jesus as either a spirit or a man who merely received the God Spirit at his baptism, and it left him before the cross. And that doesn't work at all for our gospel. Nothing unhinges if we don't believe that Jesus was both sinless God and our human representative at the same time. We have to have those two parts for our gospel to make sense. So John was proclaiming to anyone who would listen what was from the Father. And in our study guide, we went back to the gospel of John, and I just want to run through some of those things that we reviewed for ourselves. Like in John 1, 2, that Jesus was in the beginning with God, face-to-face communication and presence, fellowship with God the Father from the beginning. And John 1, 3, that all things were made through him. In John 1, 9, that he was the true light, giving light to everyone. And then, of course, the lovely verse, John 1, 12, to all who received him who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. And so these are the things that John had detailed in his former gospel that now he's upholding as he begins writing this letter. And so we see this beautiful logic that's laid out in the first four verses that we just went through, how one thing leads to another. It's like a domino. In verse 1, that knowing Jesus begins with reliable information. We have that as Christians. We have reliable information on who... who God is, who Jesus Christ is. And this information in verse two leads, when believed, it leads to eternal life to anyone. And in verse three, eternal life then leads to fellowship with God. Well, we'll talk about fellowship and what that means and fellowship with one another, fellowship with his church, which in verse four leads to joy. He says, I'm writing these things so that our joy may be complete. I wanna show you where he wrote in the gospel of John. He had heard Jesus say something very similar,

So I wanna take just a little side journey for one minute to talk about joy and the difference between joy and happiness because our summer Bible study was rooted in the word joy, finding joy. So let's talk about what joy is and what happiness is, all right? Joy is an abiding sense of contentment and cheerfulness based on God and his kingdom. That's joy, contentment and cheerfulness based on God and his kingdom. Happiness is an abiding sense of contentment and cheerfulness based on my current circumstances. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being happy. But our current circumstances, whether they are important or unimportant, I can get up in the morning and make myself the perfect blend of coffee and it makes me happy. I am happy because I nailed it. My current circumstances said this is a happy thing. My coffee can also make me unhappy, okay? But all the way from a cup of coffee to the tragedies and the grief in life, we can go through quite a season of sadness and grief and just a sense of unhappiness because of terrible things that are going on in our life. But joy is different because joy is an eternal perspective based on God and his kingdom. So it is possible for us to have joy and not be happy at the moment. But it is a tragedy for a Christian woman to be happy in her current circumstances and not experience the joy of the Lord at the same time. And we see that and I've done that as well. So that's our side trip. Now we're back to the main event. And let's go on and start reading the second section. Verse five says, this is the message that we heard from him and proclaimed to you that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. And John is getting right to the heart of the universal problem of man now as he's writing sort of this discipleship manual. The problem is that God is light, God is holy and we have sin and this separates us from God. And the next five verses are gonna detail issues related to our sin. But this verse tells us that God is light, in him is no darkness at all. So, couple things about this. God is light, but the converse is not true. Light is not God. And the only reason I bring that up is because there are philosophies and I guess religion kind of things that do have that as a foundation, that light is God. It's all about the light, seeking the light. It's sort of a metaphysical kind of a thing. And it can sound mildly appealing to baby Christians because of this understanding that God is light. So I just wanted to make it clear. What this verse does for us is it sets up an analogy, sort of a dualism. We can say God is to light as sin is to darkness, okay? God is to light as sin is to darkness. And what we have are these opposites. God and sin, light and darkness. And so we've set up some opposite talk, which is gonna play really prominently into the next verses. And sin is what we bring into the relationship. Light is what God brings into our relationship. And even once we step into God's kingdom, we still retain our sinful nature. Don't we all know that well? And we still retain the battle against sin. That's something that we live with on this earth. But the nature of light is that it exposes things, everything in its path, while darkness conceals things. This is obvious to us. We know this from just the world around us. Light exposes, darkness conceals. And Paul wrote in Ephesians 5.13, when anything is exposed by light, it becomes visible. Again, this is obvious to us. So stepping into the light exposes sin and sinfulness in our lives. But it also gives us an opportunity to deal with it. And that is the important message in this beginning to this letter that John is writing. The problem that we have, all of us, God is perfect, God is light, God is holy. We have sin. What are we gonna do, all right? Our minds are weak and our thinking is a little bit sneaky. We can be tricked, we can be deceived. And John's warning us that we can be deceived. So we need right thinking in these next five verses. I'll begin with the word if, as if it's a list of things that we should consider, potential situations that we should consider. So let's look at the first one in verse six. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and we do not practice the truth. Okay, we're gonna take each one separately. So in this situation, someone has led themselves to believe that they are in fellowship with God and yet they are concealing their sin by actually walking, living in the darkness, okay? Let's talk about fellowship so that we really understand what that word means here. Fellowship is the word koinonia and it means sharing in common, okay? And so it suggests a certain closeness or transparency between two partners. Hopefully in marriages, we have koinonia. We have a closeness and a transparency. Or in friendships, in this case, we're talking about a person and God who is all light, no darkness at all, as we sang this morning. No room for hidden or concealed sin. Now this other phrase that starts if we say, which we read this multiple times, it kind of highlights our words, our thinking which become our words. I just thought it was an interesting contrast between the word of life and my words. If we say the word of life is all truth, my words aren't. I can say things that aren't true. So it's easy to convince ourselves of all sorts of things. Like for example, I can say to you, I'm on a diet. Well, you can take me to lunch and you might find out if I'm telling you the truth or if I'm lying to you or if I'm lying to myself, right? All those kinds of possibilities can exist. Just because we say something doesn't necessarily means the truth came out of it. Just because I think something doesn't mean it's the truth. People can say whatever they want, which leads us into verse seven, which is our actions. But if we walk, so if our actions, if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin. Because this person has chosen to actually walk in the light to have transparency with God and allow the light of God's presence to expose and make visible what's going on in their life. Okay, again, the first one was centered on talking. If we say, this is centered on action. If we walk and the truth is borne out by our actions, not by our mere talk. Look at the benefits that we see in this verse. First, fellowship with one another. That is the benefit of walking in the light, of our actions actually moving closer to the light of God's presence. And we're gonna read a lot in this book about fellowship with one another and love for one another. Have you ever noticed how fellowship can be broken with people? One thing I've noticed with my husband being a pastor, that when people aren't in good fellowship with God, sometimes they really are not in good fellowship with us either. They see my husband and I as a representative of God in a way, and that fellowship just becomes broken. And maybe in your world, maybe you represent Christ in some way, and when someone in your world is not in good fellowship with God, maybe they're not in good fellowship with you either. Maybe they kind of create. a distance with you, but walking in the light, the promise here, or the benefit we see, is when people are walking in the light, we do have fellowship with one another. And then it also promises that the blood of Jesus keeps on cleansing me from my sin. So walking in the light is not a matter of not sinning. It is a matter of being transparent about the sin that I carry that comes out from time to time. But the blood of Jesus keeps on cleansing me. But the cleansing does not happen in the darkness. Cleansing only happens in the light. It cannot happen in darkness, only in the light. Okay, I wanna look at verses eight and 10 together, because if you were to write them out, they are almost, they really parallel one another. Verse eight says, if we say we have no sin, well, then we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. And verse 10 says, if we say we have not sinned, then we make him a liar and the word is not in us. And again, I wanna say that we can be easily deceived. Sometimes people reject the notion that sin is a baseline problem in their life. John's going to lengths to tell us this is a foundational problem in your life, okay? And sometimes people conceal their sin, and they say, we have not sinned. And they convince themselves that we have not sinned. Let's look at both situations. If we allow our sinful nature, which loves the cover of darkness, to conceal a specific sin, eventually we will say to ourselves, I have not sinned. If we choose to conceal that, eventually we will convince ourselves we will be deceived, and say that we have not sinned. And this is how we do it. First of all, we do something that misses the mark, that is clearly wrong. And then we look at that, we examine that in our minds, and it's all a matter of where you choose to examine it. It's kind of like this, you wake up at five in the morning, you go into your dark closet, you do not turn on the lights, and you choose a pair of dark wash jeans, and you examine them for any stains, and you come to the conclusion, yeah, pretty good. I think they look pretty good. We do that with our sin. We examine it in the darkness, and we come to the conclusion, it's pretty good. Because we can't see anything wrong with it. Have you ever sinned, and you said, I don't really see anything wrong with it, because we've deceived ourselves, we've justified it, based on all kinds of things. Another thing that we do, often, is someone sins against us, and we react sinfully to them, and the deception says, I have not sinned. They started it. It's the five-year-old thing, right? They started it, and so we've justified, we've examined in the darkness and said, I wouldn't have had to yell if those kids would just put their shoes on. Then I wouldn't have to yell. It's not my sin, it's their fault. And this goes on in relationships, on and on. It's one of the biggest problems of marriage, I think, is that we hold our partner to such a high level of not missing the mark, while we justify anything that we might do, because we say to ourselves, well, if they would have done this or that, then I would have responded properly, and we don't even think. And so we do, just like John says. If we say, I have not sinned, they're the ones that have done it, right? Are you with me? Can you just nod so that I don't feel like I'm the only one? Okay, thank you very much. And when we do that, when we become deceived, and we deny that we have sinned, it creates a vacuum. And what moves into a vacuum? Pride always moves into a vacuum. And we build up more and more pride, and we just think that we're above it. And then also there's the person who denies that she even has sinned to be forgiven, and that's sort of pride in full bloom. And we see this in our culture, certainly. Our culture does not embrace the idea of original sin, the fact that this is our problem, our universal problem, that we have to deal with this sin. That's just not something, you know, it seems very old-fashioned and puritanical to talk about sin. But is it possible for a Christian to also sort of think this way? Well, John is writing this to Christians. And so maybe it is possible for us to kind of deceive ourselves into the fact that I don't have sin, so I don't really need to deal with it. But if we actually embrace it and not allow ourselves to be deceived, then we come to verse nine, and this is what we're gonna land on and finish with the familiar verse for a lot of you. If we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we confess, have you noticed that a lot of these if statements, with the exception of if we walk, they were all about talking. If we say, if we say, if we say, it's centered on our words. If we confess is the best kind of talking to do, the best kind of words to come out of our mouth, because that is walking in the light, is just to say, oh, look, I missed the mark. I had this attitude. I had this, and to say, Lord, help me, forgive me. Would you cleanse me from that sin and help me to move forward? If we confess our sins, this is the foundation that we're launching from in this whole study, is this concept of walking in the light, confession of sins, and moving on to what the Lord would have us to do. And there's a couple insights in that verse. First of all, the character of God. What do we see about God's character? He's faithful. It means he's dependable, he's reliable, he's trustworthy. He will always respond in the same way. He won't change the rules depending on the person. He is faithful to forgive. We sincerely confess, he truly forgives. This is a formula. It's just like a principle of gravity, okay? It's to be dependent on. And the promise that he will forgive our sins and cleanse us from unrighteousness. We love promises in the Bible. Almost all promises have a condition. So if we read the promise, he will forgive our sins if we confess our sins and we add the condition, that's very important. That's what it means to be walking in the light. He will forgive if we confess there's a condition. So I think that this first chapter was pretty easy for us to comprehend and ask, well, what does it say? That went pretty well. As far as interpreting, what does it mean? Well, it means that my greatest problem in life is what I'm gonna do with my sin. Even Christians don't like to admit that we have sin. We struggle to consider ourselves a sinner. We often choose to conceal our sin. But this chapter gives us and opens the door to show how to deal with it, how to deal with our biggest problem. But it's the application. When we ask what does it mean to me, it's the application part that's the most troublesome in this passage because I have to ask myself some questions about am I walking in the light? Do I have true fellowship with God in the light? Am I willing to be transparent about my thoughts, my actions, my words, the intentions of my heart? Or do I want to conceal it in the darkness? The terrible thing about concealing it is we're only concealing it from ourselves. The Lord knows anyway. He knows anyway. So if we try to conceal it, do you see the self-deception that happens? Do I admit my sin and my sinfulness to myself or am I deceived? Here's one, do I take responsibility for my sinful actions and my sinful reactions? It's the reaction part. Like have you often thought the world would be just such an easy place to live in if there weren't any other people? It's those people that cause me to react. Oh, there's always a disappointment, always a you guys know what it is. And then the application, do I confess my sins to my heavenly Father in the light of his presence and then receive the pardon from sin? So I'll let you discuss all those things. Father, thank you for this opening. And Lord, I thank you when you sort of jolt us into dealing with things that we may be going merrily on our way, living in darkness in certain areas. And Lord, you give us a passage like this for us to study and to meditate on. And then you. show us how it is that we can deal with that, simply walk into the light, simply confess what's going on in our lives and receive that free-flowing forgiveness and freedom and peace with you and the energy that that gives us to pursue the things that you've given us to do in this life. So, Lord, I thank you and I just pray that as we discuss this that you would give us more and more insights as we share with one another. In Jesus' name, Amen.