Grace Church exists to glorify our Heavenly Father by
 continually making more disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105

(262) 763-3021

It’s a lot more than just this little light of mine 1 John 1:5-7 Get Real: A Study of 1 John Sermon #5 Most of us have a love/hate relationship with light. We’re fairly comfortable with light on others but we hesitate to have it on ourselves. Did you know that making a decision when you’re in the dark can have regrettable consequences?   Some of you may have heard of Evangelist Paul Levin. Brother Paul is home with the Lord now. Brother Paul began preaching when he was nineteen. In 1934 he teamed up with blind singer, Bob Findley, and they crisscrossed the America preaching the Gospel. Now Paul Levin had a wonderful sense of humor and you can imagine that driving back then without Interstates would get rather monotonous. And sometimes Brother Paul would take advantage of Bob Findley’s blindness.   One time Paul started griping about another driver’s driving…but there wasn’t another driver. He got Bob all fired up and he told Bob when he passed this guy to hang out the window, shake his fist and yell at this other drive. So Bob fell for it…then afterwards, Paul started acting like he was nervous, and he said, “Uh oh, Bob, I think we really ticked him off. I think he’s following us.” And poor Bob got all nervous, slinks down in the seat but there never was another car or driver.     My all time favorite Paul Levin story was when they were invited to a farmhouse out in the country for dinner one hot summer Sunday afternoon…and there were no screens on the windows. Flies were all over the food. Brother Paul said, “I just kept heaping more food on Bob’s plate. He didn’t care…he couldn’t see the flies.” Making decisions in the dark can lead to some regrettable consequences.   1 John 1:5-7 is about living in the light. It’s about a lifestyle and a complete behavior. Turn with me there (p. 862). This passage is a lot more than just this little light of mine. Living in the light is to be our way of life, our very existence. Because the light is Who God is and where God lives, that’s where our Heavenly Father wants us, as His children to live. And that’s the best place for us to live. But most of us have a love/hate relationship with light. We really don’t want to make foolish decisions but we’re intimidated and insecure with who we really are in God’s light.   Most of have heard of SADs or Seasonal Affective Disorder which is caused by a lack of exposure to sunlight. During the fall and winter months when daylight hours are shorter, many people suffer from SADs or symptoms of depression, one in five according to recent estimates. One in one of the people on this planet suffer from a greater malady, Spiritual Light Deficiency. Apart from Jesus Christ, we all live in darkness. That’s why we have such a sad world. That’s what John is talking about. As living without sunlight can cause depression, living outside of God’s light has much greater consequences. That’s why it’s imperative that we live in the light, God’s light.    So what does God want of me? What’s God’s plan and will for my life? Every true Christian has asked those questions. Because He loves us God wants us to live in the light. If you’re taking notes… 1. To walk with God, we must realize that He is absolutely holy. Are you afraid of the dark? Many people are. Children are especially fearful of the darkness. I remember being afraid of the dark as a child myself. I liked going to sleep with a light on.   So are you afraid of the dark? In one interview, Stephen King, best selling author of many tales of horror, talked about his daily writing routine. He said that he only writes in the morning. When he was asked whether he ever wrote at night, he replied, "Are you kidding? Not with the stuff I write." Apparently, even Stephen King knows the power of the darkness.     We see losing that fear of the dark as a good thing, as part of becoming a mature adult. But is it? I suppose that losing an unhealthy fear is a good thing. But, at the same time, we should beware lest we lose sight of the effects of darkness. Those effects are very real indeed. Darkness is nothing to be trifled with, especially spiritual darkness.   The problem for most of the world and even too often in the Church is that we are terrified of the light, at least on a spiritual level. It’s for that reason John begins the letter proper by launching us into one of the greatest theological statements in all of Scripture, “God is light” (v. 5). He writes “God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all.”   Unlike the Force in the Star Wars movies, which has a light and dark side, there is not an ounce of darkness in God. God is absolute in the purity of His eternal righteousness and holiness. Remember John’s readers had been schooled with the Greek gods who were little more than human, particularly in their morality. John says that the one true God is not like their Greek gods and He is not like us, struggling with temptation and sin. John uses this light metaphor to speak of God’s holiness. God is 100% holy. A literal translation would be, “Darkness there is not in God! No, not all!” The double-negative purposefully added to stress the absoluteness of God’s nature as light. Darkness cannot drive out the light but the light can drive out the darkness.   John wouldn’t be popular today. He doesn’t begin with his hearers felt needs. He doesn’t discuss where they may be hurting, or bring up how this message will help them have a happy family life or a successful personal life. Rather, John begins with God and then he brings us face to face, not with God’s love, but with His holiness. Coming after verse 3, about having fellowship with God, we would expect John to say, “To have fellowship with God, you need to know that He loves you very much.” But, rather, he bluntly says, “God is light.” Then, so that we don’t dodge the uncomfortable implications of that, he states the negative, “and in Him there is no darkness at all.”   Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones makes this point that we must always start with God. He argues that our main problem is our self-centeredness, and so we come to the Christian faith looking to have our needs met. “I’m not happy; can God make me happy? I’m looking for something that I don’t have; can God give it to me? How can Christianity help me with my problems and needs?” But to approach the Christian faith in that manner is to cater to our main problem, which is self! Again, let me quote Lloyd-Jones, “The first answer of the gospel can always, in effect, be put in this way: ‘Forget yourself and contemplate God’…The way to be delivered from self-centeredness is to stand in the presence of God.”   John says that to have fellowship with God, we must begin with God and His authoritative revelation of Himself, not with ourselves. To have fellowship with God we must begin with His holiness.   Now church marketers will tell you, “‘God is holy’ won’t sell. That’s just not popular. If you want to draw big crowds, begin with, ‘God is love.’ Everyone wants to hear that!” But John begins with, “God is light.”   In Scripture light may refer to God as the source of knowledge, illumination, or guidance. Or, it may point to God’s glory and that He is unapproachable, infinite, unchangeable, and omnipresent. But here, the primary concept is that God is holy. This is indicated by the negative explanation, “and in Him there is no darkness at all.” It’s this moral connotation that Jesus brought out when He said, “This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).   Now maybe you’re asking, “Scott, why start with God’s holiness? Why not start with His love? That’s a lot more inviting?” Because if you don’t begin with God’s holiness you will never understand God’s plan of salvation through the Cross of Christ. If God is only love, then the Cross is both unnecessary and meaningless.   Secondly, if we start with God’s holiness, it exposes all false claims of fellowship with God. In our day, as in John’s, many claim to have fellowship with God, but often it’s an empty claim based on their own imagination with a false god that they’ve made up. True fellowship is with the holy God, not with a good buddy god.   Then, starting with God’s holiness saves us from the danger of blaming God in times of trouble. We’re all prone to ask, “Why is God allowing this? I didn’t deserve this!” But if we start with God’s absolute holiness, we will see that we deserve nothing but His wrath, and we won’t challenge and criticize God when trials come.   Finally, starting with God’s holiness is the only way to true joy. It’s easy to have a false peace if you have a “user-friendly” god. If you bring God down to man’s level, then you can enjoy peace with God without dealing with your own sins. But my friend, it’s a false peace that will not hold up in the Day of Judgment. True peace and joy come from being truly reconciled to the holy God through the blood of His Son Jesus (1:7). So, John begins with God’s holiness. He says that to have fellowship with God, we must recognize that He is absolutely holy, “in Him there is no darkness at all.” 2. To walk with God, we must walk in His holiness. Over the years I’ve had a lot of people tell me some very shocking things; one though was probably the most shocking. It was in Detroit before Jane and I were married. I was selling commercial roofing and I met a man who worked at a strip club, (Detroit back then was notorious for strip clubs). He wanted a quote on replacing his roof and I told him that I really wanted nothing to do with his business because I was a Christian. And I’ll never forget his response. He told me they were all Christians where he worked…even though it was a strip club. That foolish man had never read 1 John 1:6, “If we claim to have fellowship with Him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.” The Message renders this, if we claim to be a Christian “and continue to stumble around in the dark, we’re obviously lying through our teeth--we’re not living what we claim.”   One of the damnable lies of the contemporary church is that if you’ve said a prayer, no matter how you live, you’re a Christian. John says, “No way!”    We dare not take salvation for granted. The Biblical testimony of salvation is not the right words but a changed life. It’s not the talk, it’s the walk. That’s why Peter warned, “Therefore…be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure” (2 Peter 1:10). Much of the Church today has an insubstantial and unbiblical view of assurance. The condition of our souls raises real fears for earnest people and causes them to search their hearts and face the facts about themselves. But, today, in all corners of the Church, it seems that it is no longer, as the Scripture says, “a hard thing for the righteous to be saved,” it’s an easy thing. So easy, in fact, that no one who thinks they’re saved should trouble themselves to make sure.   We’ve almost become like the liberals and propagating universalism that everyone is saved. Assurance of salvation is then automatically given to someone if they’ve merely mouthed a prayer or even just claim to be a Christian. That contradicts First John! John does not accept just anything as evidence of genuine belief and salvation—including and especially, a person's making some profession of belief in Jesus at a church service, or summer camp, or some crusade. John says the true test of salvation is repentance, a new life in Christ – walking in the light. A testimony can be a testiphony. Our real testimony is living in the light.   Let illustrate this. One Christian magazine had an article about a Christian grandmother who longed for the salvation of her teenage granddaughter. She had offered to talk to her granddaughter about the Lord, but the offer was not accepted. And then this teenager was killed in a car accident. Before her death she had been accompanying a friend to the meetings of a young people's ministry and folks from that ministry had led a memorial service for the girl in her high school gymnasium. The next Christmas, the grandmother met the leader of this Christian work in an ice cream shop and asked him if her granddaughter had ever accepted Christ. 'Was she saved?' she asked him.   I'm quoting the article now: “He grinned at me. ‘Oh, didn't you know? She gave her heart to God two years ago at one of our weekend retreats. She never really established a close walk with the Lord, but she's OK. Don't you worry about Kimberly’.” The grandmother continues: "Christmas bells began to ring out the joy of the season in my heart. I'd just received a most magnificent gift." Here was a Christian worker, telling a grandmother that her granddaughter was in heaven, on the strength of the girl's having made some profession of faith in Jesus. But in the two years following that profession, this girl did not show any evidence of walking with the Lord and there was nothing in her life, there was no change in her behavior that ever suggested to her grandma who knew her and loved her that she had become a Christian. In short, there was no changed life.   Now no one can say that this girl Kimberly was not a Christian. God alone knows the heart. But, as often as the Bible warns that not all who claim to be Christians are in fact Christians, that Christian worker certainly had no biblical basis for saying that she was. She had no testimony. Her life, clearly, did not pass John's tests of having eternal life. She never demonstrated that she was walking in the light.   Too often we take salvation for granted. And I fear that we have folk that sit in our churches week after week that are going to Hell. But Satan has deceived them and they believe that they are going to heaven because they said a prayer, often as a child. Friend, if you don’t love the Lord, if you don’t want to be in His Word, if you don’t have a desire to be with His people, if your life doesn’t have the fruits of the Spirit…please check your spiritual pulse, please check and see if you are indeed a believer. It would be so much better to humble yourself and admit that you really don’t know the Lord, than to spend an eternity in Hell…just to save face.   John uses this word “walk” to describe a person’s lifestyle. It refers to their words and actions and attitudes. It describes their behavior and visible witness. If someone’s lifestyle is one of habitual sin, if we care about them, we must question whether they are genuinely a Christian when the habit of their life is to live a life of sin and spiritual apathy. John says a person who lives this way and claims to have a relationship with the holy God is a liar. They deliberately know that such a claim cannot be the truth. And they not only contradict this claim with their words, they contradict this claim with their life. They don’t do the truth.   We tend to think of the truth as something you believe, but in the Bible the truth is always something you do, or you don’t believe it. Many people in our community believe that Jesus is the Son of God but they don’t live for God. They don’t do the truth. John says that if you don’t do the truth, you’re not a Christian.   Pastor Steve Zeisler shares this personal illustration that I think wonderfully clarifies this. He writes, “What [John] is talking about is a pattern or way of life. If we claim to have fellowship with Him and yet our life is characterized by and sold out to the darkness, then we are liars.” He then shares, “We have a picture of my wife-not one of her favorites-which was taken on a family vacation on a river raft trip. We were floating down the American River, and as we came to a rapid where professional photographers were set-up, we hit a rock. The picture caught her looking fairly aghast, four feet above the edge of the boat. It turned out that she ended up in the water, and we faced a very frightening few moments. But the snapshot leaves you with a question. The person up in the air could have ended up back in the boat or in the water. We don't know from the snapshot whether she is an in-the-boat person or an in-the-water person.   That is really the point that John is raising when he speaks of our walk. On many occasions in our lives, if you just [look at] a snapshot, you couldn't tell if we were godly or ungodly-we're up in the air. You would have to watch the whole video, the whole course of someone's life to determine that they were defending sin instead of resisting it. Thus, if a person claims fellowship with God yet walks in darkness as a pattern of life he is lying.”   3. To walk with God, in His holiness results in some wonderful blessings. John says that if we walk in the light with our Heavenly Father in His holiness, not only do we demonstrate that we are truly believers, His children, there are some wonderful outcomes. There are some blessings that are arrived at because of this walk, “But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, His Son, purifies us from all sin.” As walking in darkness has a tragic outcome, walking in the light has wonderful ones: fellowship with other believers and spiritual cleansing.   a) Walking with God in His holiness deepens our fellowship with one another. There are a lot of lonely professing Christians. Let me put what John is saying in our vernacular: If you’re not walking with Daddy, you’re not going to feel close to the brothers and the sisters. If you’re close to the Lord and living in a way that pleases Him, then you want to be around others that love Him and are walking close to Him too. Do you want a closer marriage? If you’re both Christians, walk close to the Lord and you’ll walk closer to one another. Most Christian marriages don’t need counseling, they need commitment – first to God, and then they will be committed and closer to one another. And sadly, we try everything but God’s way. You can have a great sex life and not be close. You can go on wonderful dates, extravagant vacations and not be close. Do you want to be close to your spouse? Do you want to get close to other believers? Get close to God. As we draw near to the Lord, we will draw nearer to each other. It can’t not happen because this is a promise. If you find that you can’t get along with other brothers and sisters, check your heart, or as John says “your walk in the light.” To put it another way, carnal Christians are cranky and cantankerous. And when we’re not fellowshipping with the Lord or one another, it only makes it worse. God designed us for both. A closer walk with God results in a closer walk with other believers.   We are brothers and sisters in Christ because of our relationship to Him. Fellowship, though, requires more than relationship. Fellowship requires honesty, openness, approachability, an uncritical spirit, and vulnerability. Walking in the light will produce those characteristics in our lives. Walking in the light will deliver us from the things that block fellowship with one another and make us people others desire to spend time with. Walking in the light will meet the need that every Christian has to have meaningful relationships with other believers. True fellowship with God always brings us into fellowship with others who are in fellowship with Him. If someone can’t get along with other believers, it’s very possible that he or she may not be in fellowship with God. Walking with God in His holiness deepens our fellowship with one another.   b) Walking with God in His holiness results in God’s purification from sinfulness. Tragically, some pagans make fun of the blood of Jesus. They’ll say, “Don’t give me a slaughterhouse religion; don’t talk to me about blood.” Yet God’s Word says, “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Heb. 9:22). Praise God for the precious blood of the Lord Jesus. 1 Peter 1:18-19 says, “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” When Jesus died on the Cross, He purchased us from the slave market of sin, redeemed us from the depths of sin, and made it possible for us to go to Heaven.   Please note John does not say the blood “purified” (past tense) but instead the blood “purifies” (present tense). That means that Christ’s blood keeps on cleansing. The magnificent blessing here is that not only does the blood cleanse us from sin that we confess and acknowledge, but we are so contaminated by sin, in that you and I continually sin and don’t even know it…and Christ’s blood purifies us from even those sins that we aren’t even aware of are sins, “all sins.” Isn’t that wonderful!?! No sin, however heinous, is beyond the power of the cleansing of the blood of Christ.   A skeptic challenged a believer, “How does blood cleanse sin?” The believer countered with another question, “How does water quench thirst?” The skeptic replied, “I don’t know, but I know that it does.” And this wise believer said, “In the same way I don’t know how blood cleanses sin, but I know that it does – God says so.” But not just any blood. It had to be the blood of God’s only Son, Jesus. Through His blood we are forgiven and continually purified! Conclusion: God wants us to love the light because we love Him. He wants us to live and walk in the light. Too often we talk the talk better than we walk the walk. If we do not walk in the light, John says that we do not know God.   In the 18th century an abbot was disciplining two monks for some infraction of the rules so he imposed on them the rule of silence. They could not talk to one another. They tried to figure out some way to fill the long hours. Finally, one of them gathered 28 flat stones from the courtyard. Putting different numbers on them, he devised a new game. By using gestures, the men agreed on certain rules, but the most difficult part was keeping silent when one of them scored a victory. Then they remembered that they were permitted to say aloud the prayer, “Dixit Dominus Domino Meo.” By using the one word of this Latin expression meaning “Lord,” the winner was able to signal his triumph by yelling, “Domino!”   Those monks gave the impression that they were praying, but really, they were playing. Thus, the game of dominoes was born.    You and I know all too well that it is very easy to put on a religious veneer by claiming that you have fellowship with God, when really, you’re walking in the darkness and deceiving yourself. John doesn’t want us to play spiritual dominoes. He wants us to experience genuine fellowship with the holy God by walking in the light, as He Himself is in the light.   Let’s stop having a love/hate relationship with light. Let’s love the light because “God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all.”