Page 1 Sermon Manuscript WALKING IN THE LIGHT: EXPOSITORY STUDIES IN FIRST JOHN “LYING TO OURSELVES” (PT I: 1 JOHN 1:5–2:2) • JUNE 10, 2001 • DR. DOUG MCINTOSH, SENIOR PASTOR Introduction: The Message that Christian Faith Was in the Beginning We are embarked on a study of the letter that the New Testament lists as First John. As I said last week, John was writing to mend the wounds of the early Christian church. By the time that he took pen in hand, a variety of cults and –isms had attacked the church both from without and from within. This book is to address some of those, par- ticularly some of the most dangerous. John’s purpose is to take the church back to the original doctrines of the apostles. To use his terminology, he wants to go back to “that which was from the beginning.” It is apparent that people had been challenging some of the basic teachings of the apostles and had been putting their viewpoint forth as an improvement on apostolic doctrine. John is going to address the first such notion in the passage that we are going to look at today. In fact, we are going to look at this passage both today and next week. We simply don’t have time to do it justice in one sitting, and it’s too important to condense. John leads with his teaching about the place of sin in the life of the believer. Christian faith offers eternal life and forgiveness of sins. In fact, it offers the forgiveness of all the sins of one who puts his trust in Christ: past, present, and future. From day one of the church that has always created problems for some people. It is perfectly evident that Christians still commit sins even after believing in Jesus. It is also perfectly evident that those sins do not please God. So what does God want the Christian believer to do when he sins, and how does He want that believer to think about the sins that he com- mits? That is what 1 John 1:5-2:2 is all about. Let’s look at it together. Page 2 Scripture: 1 John 1:5-2:2 5 This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. 6 If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. 7 But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. 8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive our- selves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. 1 My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 2 And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for [those of the] the whole world. (NKJV) Walking in the Light: A Definition Verse seven refers to “walking in the light.” We need to know what John is talk- ing about in order to do that. In verse five he says that “GOD IS LIGHT, AND IN HIM THERE IS NO DARKNESS AT ALL.” So light describes some characteristic of the life or character of God, and we obviously need to know what that is. What light is in the physical realm, God is on the level of spiritual experience. We may know more about the physics of light now, but its role in human experience has been known for thousands of years. What light does Now what does light do? Basically, three things. To begin with, light reveals. We can see each other and enjoy each other’s presence because there is light in this room with us. Beauty and variety cannot exist in ways that we can enjoy them without light. I was reading this week about a pastor who visited the Grand Canyon for the first time when he was just a young man. He had driven from Texas through northern Arizona and decided to drive up and see the Grand Canyon. When he decided to go it was about eleven o’clock at night, and he didn’t have enough money to stay in a motel; so he thought he would take his trusty sleeping bag and sleep in the area that night and then see the canyon in the morning. So, he drove into Grand Canyon national park, found a wide spot in the road, and pulled the car off onto the shoulder. He took out his sleeping bag, threw it on the ground, and went to sleep. When he got up in the morning, he discovered that he had been sleeping within an arm’s length of the rim of the canyon. If he had even rolled over in his sleep, he would have fallen hundreds of feet into the canyon’s mouth. In the darkness he did something that he would never have done if he had been able to see. Darkness had caused him to do something foolish. That’s what John is asserting here. God reveals the standard of behavior when He reveals His own character. “Sin” simply means “whatever is contrary to the character of God.” In His character as the Light of the World, God through Christ reveals that. I said that there were three characteristics that distinguish light as an entity. The first is that light reveals. The second is that light measures. It is what we use to determine whether things match a standard or not. Did you ever watch a man pick up a two-by-four, hold it up, and sight along it? What is he doing? He is trying to see if it is crooked or not, and what enables him to make that determination is a beam of light. Light is the measuring device. Anything that Page 3 does not correspond to the realities revealed by the light is crooked. Light is the most common measuring stick in the universe. We measure whether things are straight or crooked by looking at them in the light. Surveyors use light to measure distances and angles, to see whether they are up or down, high or low, right or left. They have a little instrument they sight through with a small telescope on it. It uses light as a measurement. You all have seen the little equation E=mc2. That equation summarizes Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. It says that the total quantity of energy in a sys- tem is equal to the total mass in the universe times a quantity known as c2. Now c is the speed of light. What Dr. Einstein was saying in his theory was that there is only one fixed entity in the universe that we can measure everything against, and that is the speed of light. The speed of light is the fixed point that everything is compared to. So light is a standard of measurement. The third quality of light is that light energizes. After dark, the world slows down. People sleep, businesses close, homes and public places lock their doors. When the light returns in the morning, the world rises and begins to do its work again. As the light from the sun transfers its heat energy into our world, things start to move. Cheryl and I like to walk very early every morning before daylight. At some point during our walk, our neighborhood songbird toots reveille and within a few minutes all the birds in the neighborhood come alive just at the moment the eastern sky begins to show the first hint of dawn. So we could summarize by saying that light reveals, serves as a standard of meas- urement, and energizes the world. It is the first two of these in particular that are germane to our text for this morning. God is light: He reveals His own moral purity to us through His word, and that moral purity serves as His own standard of measurement for what He wants from us. Of course, what He wants from us is our hearts — but that is basically demonstrated by the way we behave. A definition That means that walking in the light is living in constant openness to correction by God’s own moral purity. It means that we live in such a way that our conduct is al- ways subject to God’s scrutiny, and always subject to being corrected by His word. That means that walking in the light is a constant process of self-discovery. We are regularly coming to an awareness that things we do fall short of God’s standards for human be- havior. When we get to that point, we have a decision to make. The first and most im- portant decision is whether we will choose to lie—first of all, to ourselves, and then to God. One approach to dealing with sin in the believer’s life is self-deception. So what John does here is to give us three ways that people handle this awareness of sin in their lives. There are three possible false affirmations — forms of self-deception — that people can make. This morning we only have time to deal with the first of these. Walking in the Light: Three Possible False Affirmations False Affirmation #1 You see the first false affirmation in verse 6: “IF WE SAY THAT WE HAVE FEL- LOWSHIP WITH HIM, AND WALK IN DARKNESS, WE LIE AND DO NOT PRACTICE THE TRUTH” (1 John 1:6). People can say that they are having fellowship with God while walking in darkness all the while. They can claim to be in perfect harmony with God while they do Page 4 what is wrong. This potential even includes apostles, because John uses the first person plural: “If we say… we lie.” And how can people do this? There is a strong hint in verse five: “THIS IS THE MESSAGE WHICH WE HAVE HEARD FROM HIM AND DECLARE TO YOU, THAT GOD IS LIGHT AND IN HIM IS NO DARKNESS AT ALL” (1 John 1:5). John got this teaching directly from Jesus Christ. “Now,” you may be thinking, “I’ve read the Gospels and I don’t remember any statement like that.” That is true; but John wrote in his own Gospel that many of the things Jesus did and said never were written down in those accounts (21:25), and this happens to be one of them. The last part of verse five is instructive. John didn’t need to add that. He could have just said, “GOD IS LIGHT.” Instead, he added, “IN HIM IS NO DARKNESS AT ALL.” Why would he go to the trouble to add that? The answer: because there were people who were teaching the churches that John was writing that there was darkness in God. They taught that God was not a totally pure moral being. He included purity, but there was a side of God that wasn’t pure at all. In fact, the heresy that lies behind this book has definite kinship with doctrines being taught in the twenty-first century. For example, there is a movement today that is very large and growing one called “contemplative spirituality.” It is a mixture of Roman Catholic and Buddhist mysticism. It critiques the current state of Christianity by arguing that since God is holy and is a “wholly other being,” He cannot be defined by systems of doctrine. Contemplative spirituality maintains that western rationalism has ruined the knowledge of God by making it too intellectual, and that we must return to a more intui- tively received knowledge. We have to move beyond the intellect, beyond doctrine, in fact beyond words to a deeper oneness with God. The writings of these people contain rather complex discussions on the nature of being and speak of common themes of uni- versality, mystical union with God through contemplation (wordless “prayer”), social justice, and non-violence. In this system, God is a person who combines all aspects of human character in Himself—both good and evil. He has a dark side to His character, according to the pro- ponents of this system. That is what John is arguing against here. God in fact, he says, has no dark side. He dwells in unapproachable light. He lives in perfect goodness and in total separation from evil. That leads to the interpretation he makes of this false affirma- tion. We see that in verse six. False Affirmation #1: The interpretation John says that there are two conclusions that we can draw about a person who claims to be in fellowship with God who walks in darkness. The first conclusion is that the claim is false: “IF WE SAY THAT WE HAVE FELLOWSHIP WITH HIM, AND WALK IN DARKNESS, WE LIE.” That is not the same as saying that the person who makes that claim is not a Christian. However, if he is a believer, he is not walking in harmony and fellowship with God at the time he makes the claim. Conversion is the establishing of a relationship. Fel- lowship is the enjoyment of that relationship. The other conclusion that we can draw is that the false claim is exposing a pattern of life that is inconsistent with God’s truth. That is, not only is the claim false, it says a lot about the way the claimant is used to living. The way John says this is that such a person “does not practice the truth.” He isn’t living the way Christians are supposed to live. Christians are capable of behaving in ways that dishonor God and create problems for Page 5 themselves. You would think that that statement would be an obvious truth, but a sizable portion of evangelicalism is committed to the idea that once you become a Christian, moral and upright living is inevitable. John says flat out that that is simply not true. A Christian may behave uprightly. A Christian should behave uprightly. But it is not certain that he will. Some of us do not practice the truth. False Affirmation #1: The alternative That leads us to the alternative. Once the light of God exposes wrong behavior on our parts, what are we supposed to do and say about it? John gives the answer in verse seven: “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). He makes two points here. He says that the person who is always open to being rebuked and changed by God’s word is having fellowship with God. That’s what he means when he says, “WE HAVE FELLOWSHIP WITH ONE ANOTHER.” He isn’t talking about Christians having fellowship with each other in this verse. He is talking about Christians having fellowship with God. “God and I have fellowship with one another” is his point. The proof of this is in the contrast with verse six. There he said that the person who claims to have fellowship with God and who walks in darkness is lying. Verse seven is the opposite. The person who claims to have fellowship with God and who walks in the light is telling the truth. You can’t get any more basic than this. A person who becomes a Christian believer is signing on for a lifetime of change. He admits at the outset that God has lots of work to do on his character. The other point he makes is that fellowship with God is only possible at all be- cause there is a continual cleansing process going on as we walk in the light. This is im- portant because the inevitable result of evading light is guilt. You cannot walk in dark- ness — you cannot insist on doing things your own way rather than God’s way — with- out feeling guilty. Guilt is on the psychological level what pain is on the physical level. It is God’s way of getting our attention. Guilt is the underlying cause of Christian depression; it is the thing that creates that somber, straight-laced and sad approach that so many Christians exhibit. It is because they are suffering from guilt and they are trying to make up for it in ways that God does not prescribe. The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin as we walk in the light. How this cleansing works will be make clearer later in this paragraph. False Affirmation #1: The application Christian living means living a life that is constantly being corrected by the proc- ess of having sin exposed and rebuked by God’s Word. People can avoid this, of course, and frequently do. There are several ways they do this. One approach is to stop being part of the life of a local church. This is the classic way it’s done nowadays. I wish I had a nickel for every time someone has told me that they can worship God just as well at home or in the woods. I’m afraid I’m going to have to agree with the New Testament against that point of view. The writer of Hebrews saw the same kind of silliness going on in his own day. He wrote that believers should “NOT FORSAKE THE ASSEMBLING OF OURSELVES TOGETHER, AS IS THE MANNER OF SOME, BUT EXHORTING ONE ANOTHER, AND SO MUCH THE MORE AS YOU SEE THE DAY APPROACHING” (Heb 10:25). Even then there were people who had stopped being part of a local church. It’s hard enough to walk with God when you are part of a church. If you aren’t, you move the Page 6 business into the realm of the impossible. The delusions of this age tend to make us want to avoid the light. As one writer said, “It is more comfortable to sit around in the old slip- pers of the flesh and enjoy oneself at home.” That is one way to turn off the light. A second way to do this is to stay away from the Scriptures. Again, that is very popular nowadays. A large percentage of the Christian public simply never opens the Bi- ble. They may even attend church, but they don’t expose their hearts to the word from Sunday to Sunday. Another way to keep in the darkness is never to do any self-assessment. Hear the word, even read the word, but never let it get too personal. We may even give the impres- sion to other people that we have life by the tail. We may be unwilling to admit that we have problems, or that we have needs. That is what the Bible calls hypocrisy, and it is the product of walking in the darkness. Walking in the light does not mean behaving perfectly. It means that we go along fairly comfortably for a while, but then through our hearing of the word at church, or through our reading of the word for ourselves we see the character of God in a fresh way and come to realize that we have been doing something wrong. We acknowledge that re- ality to God, ask for his strength to be different, and move along until we come to the next part of self-discovery. And there will always be one. When we do that, we have fellowship with the Father and the Son. You see, we’re working in harmony when we do that. That is what God wants us to do, and that is what we want to do. We’re walking together in harmony. But when God says, “You need to change at this point,” and we say, “No we don’t,” then we have shown that we are walk- ing in the darkness. Now verse seven, as I said, is about fellowship with God. However, walking in the light will also make us enjoy our fellowship with other believers. I never go very long before I see some aspect of my character that needs changing. That keeps me real. The word keeps me from being proud and thinking that I’m something important when I’m not. The word keeps me sympathetic, because I know too well my own weaknesses, therefore I can relate to the weaknesses of others. Walking in the light makes me more conscious of my own sins and less critical of the sins of others. Walking in the light means to hide nothing, to defend yourself neither from the light of God nor in any way try to appear to be something that you are not. It means to come instantly, without defensiveness, to the light and deal with it before God. If you see something wrong, you say so. The first part of living authentically is being able to look frankly at yourself and to tell yourself—and God—the truth. COPYRIGHT © 2001 P. DOUGLAS MCINTOSH. THIS DATA FILE/MANUSCRIPT IS THE SOLE PROPERTY OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER AND MAY BE COPIED ONLY IN ITS ENTIRETY FOR CIRCULATION FREELY WITHOUT CHARGE. ALL COPIES OF THIS DATA FILE/MANUSCRIPT MUST CONTAIN THE ABOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICE. THIS DATA FILE/MANUSCRIPT MAY NOT BE COPIED IN PART (EXCEPT FOR SMALL QUOTATIONS USED WITH CITATION OF SOURCE), EDITED, REVISED, COPIED FOR RESALE, OR INCORPORATED IN ANY COMMERCIAL PUBLICATIONS, RECORDINGS, BROADCASTS, PERFORMANCES, DISPLAYS, OR OTHER PRODUCTS OFFERED FOR SALE WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER. REQUESTS FOR PERMISSION SHOULD BE MADE IN WRITING AND ADDRESSED TO DR. DOUG MCINTOSH, SENIOR PASTOR, CORNERSTONE BIBLE CHURCH, 869 COLE DRIVE, LILBURN, GA 30047.