Two Ways To Walk

The Apostle John sent this sermon to a church that was in danger of having their view of Christ distorted by false teaching. The chief purpose of this letter was that Christians would have confidence and know that they have eternal life. The prologue, the first four verses, it declared that the life that was from the beginning has come. John testified to this life, and he proclaimed that we might have fellowship with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ, so that our joy would be made complete. That was the purpose. It's the purpose of this whole letter. And now in our text today, John turns from invitation to examination and begins with the message itself. And that message is this.

God is light

God is light, so turn from the deceit of darkness and walk in the light cleansed by Christ. God is light, so turn from the deceit of darkness and walk in the light cleansed by Christ. Be looking at the text in three points today, beginning simply with the first point, God is light, in verse five. God is light.

Verse 5 says,

this is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.

So there are several key words in this first half of verse 5 that reiterate the same themes that we've already seen in the first four verses of 1 John.

John is proclaiming to the church that something has been heard, a message. And this isn't John's idea or his best guess as to what this message is. It came from Christ himself. And John is passing this message to the church. What is this message? The message is, God is light. Sit with me for a moment in this.

Is God literally light? Don't dismiss that angle too quickly. Paul to Timothy speaks of God as the one who alone dwells, has immortality, and who dwells in unapproachable light. So at a minimum, God in heaven is described as living and dwelling in light that is unapproachable in glory. Similarly, and you could look at many places in the scriptures for this, but the vision that the prophet Ezekiel saw in chapter one of the great one who is seated on the throne, he appeared what was like gleaming metal and fire and brightness emanating from him all around.

So though John's language is particularly direct in this, God is light, it's not singularly unique in scripture. Now, God's actual substance isn't the subatomic photons. It's not his substance. John is speaking more to the essence of what God is, describing him as emanating brightness from his essence. It's the idea of God's nature that John has in mind here when he declares that God is light. He's saying that God, he's not saying just that God has light or that God gives light, but that he is light. Theologians have various takes on what aspects of God's nature are being pointed to in this description of God as light, but three stand out.

First, God is light means that God is truth. He's truth. Light exposes, light reveals. Darkness and falsehood can't survive where light is. Likewise, God as light means that his essence is one that is totally and completely true, always right, completely without error, perfectly wise and without fault. So God as light means God is true.

Secondly, God is light means that God is holiness, holy, even holiness itself. So great is the holiness of our God, meaning totally other than, totally set apart from what is common, without sin, without imperfection, without one ounce of taintedness.

We read earlier from Exodus 33 where Moses encountered the glory of God just from this backside on Sinai. And Moses himself went down from the mountain with his face shining such that he had to veil his face in front of the Israelites. Even this backwards glance at the radiance and holiness of God left his face too bright to look at. And that was only its reflection and imprint on a sinner's skin.

God radiates the light of holiness. Third, God is light means that God is life. He is life itself. Without life there's, without light, excuse me, there's no warmth, there's no growth, no food, no life. One way or another, everything that is is running on light. Flip off the switch and it dies. This is our God. Radiant and life giving to all who would walk in his way. The text goes on from here, saying,

God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

In Greek here, there's a double negative. It's the strongest emphasis that Greek can make. Rather than two negatives canceling each other out, they compound here. There is no darkness, no, none at all. Literally, there is not one speck of darkness in the light of God. Not one speck.

Perhaps more than anywhere else, we see this clearly in God's Son, Jesus Christ, who is light. Where he boldly declared of himself in John's Gospel,

I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.

Christ entered that which is dark and filled with sin, and yet was not diminished in his brightness at all. He touched the leper, and he did not become unclean. The leper became clean. He ate with sinners, and he did not become a sinner.

The sinners were made new. even unto death, the radiance of the glory of God, though shrouded in human form, was lifted up on a cross to die, which should have been the greatest darkness that could possibly exist, but it became the greatest triumph for the undiminished light of the world.

As even death itself lost its sting at the empty tomb, darkness has no victory over the light of the world. leaves us with the question, friends, is this God, the God of radiant light, the God that we picture, one of infinite radiance and holiness and glory, the God who is light? It's too often we, our view of God is something so much lesser than this, something much more comfortable, much more like us, a God who is mostly bright, sure, Or maybe if we think about him in relation to us, we're convinced that maybe he's just gonna overlook our sin and kind of grade on a curve. If we're honest, we too often view God as some moderately improved version of us, on whom we project our own blind spots, our own laxity with sin.

That God feels safer and easier to live with. Friends, that God does not exist. He does not exist. And this kind of thinking is probably the most damaging. When our false and lowly view of God would cause us to, in response, overestimate ourselves. That we would walk around, as the next verses would describe, deceived of our own sinlessness. Deceived that God, this God of light, would be ambivalent toward our filth.

And yet this is the warning that John gives. Brothers and sisters, hold up your sin in the light of verse five. The God who has not one speck of darkness in him. And let the verdict of his holiness stand over us. Stop negotiating. Bring that sin to him. but do so with the confidence that the God who is light can overcome that darkness within you. You aren't protecting his holiness by keeping your distance from it.

You're just doing what these next verses describe. You're wandering around in the dark with something that he is willing, able, and eager to set right within you. So we move to point two. Notice how John writes the rest of the section. He alternates.

Deceived in the dark

In verse six, darkness. Verse seven, light. Eight, darkness. Nine, light. Ten, darkness. We're going to take these remaining verses in groupings. That there are two ways to walk, in the dark or in the light. So point two is deceived in the dark. deceived in the dark.

Verses 6, 8, and 10 give us three different statements that all begin with the words, if we say. And they're all bad, what follows. The key distinction here is that saying is happening, speaking is happening, but doing is not. Or saying something that is completely false. Remember, this is a letter written primarily and first to Christians, to the church.

John includes himself in this, if we say, which means none of us here this morning are excused from this warning. Look first at verse six. It says,

if we say that we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

So walking in darkness in the way that it describes here isn't a single moment where we stumble, where we slip up in sin.

Rather, it's talking about a settled direction. Maybe a sin that you're trying to manage on your own or to explain away. Or maybe just totally ignore rather than repenting of. Some of us at different seasons of our lives know too well what this is talking about. A sin with a time of the day attached to it. The sin in your life that you'd have to delete something in order to hide. The one that you've built your schedule around and are protecting. That kind of behavior isn't stumbling. It's a direction that we choose one step at a time.

And notice here that this rebuke It's not focused on what is being said, it's focused on what is not being practiced. Truth, it's not enough just to affirm truth. It must be practiced. So much of our sermon text from last week about the Pharisees talked of that, the hypocrisy, that they had many times the right words, but the action, their life, their practicing of the truth entirely wrong. If we think we can just say and not practice, 1 John tells us that we lie. That's a strong word.

We lie. Not because we got the words wrong by mistake, but because we are not practicing the truth that we profess. That is a lie. It's a lie to those around us, and most terrifyingly, it's a lie to ourselves. We must fear this kind of self-deception. And it's that kind of deception that verse 8 goes on and presses further into. He says,

if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

Again, if we say that we have no sin, for many of us in this room, this is not the kind of thing that we would say out loud or maybe even actively think. It's the kind of behavior that shows up in our assumptions. Maybe for some, the assumption that we've grown out of sin. Maybe for some, it shows up in excusing sin by saying, I just make mistakes sometimes. Or maybe for some of us, we're no longer desperate sinners that we think that we're in need of the grace that this talks about. You might notice it if you regularly soften how you talk about your sin when speaking of it to others or to yourself. When it's easier to call your sin a slip-up or a rough patch rather than to truly own it. Because when our own view of sin gets smaller and smaller, our need for the cross grows ever smaller with it. John calls this deception. No one thinks that they're deceived. That's the nature of deception. We don't see it.

The closest thing I know to it is that no one truly knows the smell of their own home. Every person's house, and you all know what I'm talking about, has a distinct smell. Some homes you walk into, it's crisp and pleasant. Others are, well, less that way. Some of you are thinking, wait, does my house smell bad? The whole point is you might not know.

We live our whole lives in these unique smells of our homes for so long that our noses stop reporting it. We might not be lying when we say that it smells fine to us. We actually believe it. But it doesn't make it true. That's deception. You're never gonna fix that by just sniffing harder in your own house either.

You need some kind and hopefully very gentle and gracious brother or sister to tell you. And so church, seek out the kind of friend and then give them permission to say hard things to you that you can't see for yourself. Seek out the kind of friend that will tell you, brother or sister, I think that you love money. The hard things to hear, not just the easy ones, are the kinds of things that we need to invite our brothers and sisters to speak to us and then resist that defensive instinct to deny it.

Self-deception requires outside input into our lives. So receive it humbly. You need the light to come through the window at the right angle, and you need a friend to walk through your front door. And if you are a brother or sister here this morning who's been walking with the Lord for a long time, please be willing to give that kind of input to those of us who are younger. Even in my own life, I invite you to help expose those parts of my own life that I fall short and may not see it. We need that kind of input from one another.

But hear the warning that's attached with this diagnosis. He says,

if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

This is describing one who sits among believers and sings with them, even speaks their language, but may not have the truth in them. If we claim to be a Christian and yet believe that we have no sin, we are so self-deceived that we are right to even question the reality of our own conversion. So this warning against those, this is a warning directly against those churches or traditions who would teach us that there is no sin. It's a warning against the premise that I'm just a generally good person that God is sure to accept. Practically, this could look like if God's word as it's preached never makes you uncomfortable with your own sin, it could be a sign, brothers and sisters, that your nose has become desensitized to your own stink, that you're deceived. It's a wake-up call for all of us.

The enemy rejoices at deceived sinners who do not see their own sin. Because if you cannot see your own sin, you will not bend your knee to the one who can make you clean. Verse 10 takes it even further. It says,

if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us.

Notice verse 8 was in the present tense. I have no sin now. Verse 10 reaches back across one's whole life for the person who would claim that I have never sinned. I have no sin. Notice this escalation that you see in each of these three verses. In this escalation, look at verse 6.

It says that if we claim that we have fellowship with God but are in the dark, we lie. Verse 8 says, if we say that we have no present sin, we're deceived. And in this escalation yet again in verse 10, if we say that we have never sinned, we make God a liar. To say that we have never sinned is so completely ridiculous, it's so deceived, such that we make God himself a liar. Of course, God cannot lie. God does not lie. And yet, to deny that you have ever sinned, brothers and sisters, is to spit in the face of God and to call Him a liar.

Think of what doing this requires. To say that you've never sinned requires that every single page of Scripture that says that you are a sinner, they're all wrong. To say that you've never sinned means that every sacrifice that has been made for sin is unnecessary. To say that you've never sinned means that the cross of Jesus Christ becomes the most pointless act of cruelty in all of human history. It is to spit in the face of God and call him a liar.

Here where this warning is aimed, John writes to the church He describes the person here that though he may sit in the pews, does not know the word of God at all. Nothing true lives inside this kind of person. And again, this isn't describing the stumbling of someone who is genuinely a follower of Jesus. but one who delights in their deception and who delights in the chaos of walking in the dark, hiding in it, even while proclaiming the name of Christ. And that is the tragedy of this whole picture of the one who walks in deceit and darkness. It can be a place where religious people hide from God while still using his name.

If that's you, maybe you didn't mean to end up where you are right now. But step by step, further and further into the darkness, one bad decision after the next, and now those bad decisions don't feel so wrong anymore when you continue to make them. Are you sitting this morning under the weight of conviction? That question applies to you regardless of who you think that you are. A longtime churchgoer or someone who's here this morning is a skeptic.

Walk in the light

But friends, walking in the darkness is not the only way. Listen, because there's hope to come. Point three is walk in the light. Walk in the light. Verse 7 begins,

but if we walk in the light as he is in the light.

Remember, God is light. It's his very nature. We can never be light in total purity in the way that God can. He's encouraging us to walk in the light as our direction. Walking in the light is not walking without sin, Walking in the light is walking in the one who is light. The middle of verse 7 gives us the first result of walking in the light. It says that

if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.

There's so much that could be said here about the implications of the fellowship that may exist between one another here in this church body. But I think chiefly, if you look at this text, the fellowship with one another here is the subjects that have been in focus the whole time.

He means restored fellowship with God. Feel how outrageous that is. The God of Moses' encounter on Sinai. The God of unapproachable light without a single speck of darkness within him. And the suggestion here is that you, Yes, you specifically might have fellowship with him.

And the last clause of verse 7 tells us how that's possible.

And the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.

Notice here once again that John isn't making sinless living the condition for cleansing. He's describing the ongoing cleansing that takes place in the light of the one who has already been brought out of darkness and into God's light. If verse seven required sinless living, it would stand in direct contradiction to these warnings given in verses eight and 10 to the one who does not believe that he has sin at all. Only, only the cleansing of the blood of the Son can make this fellowship possible. Only the cleansing of the blood of the Son.

At the moment that you first trusted Christ, God rendered a verdict over you. Your sin was credited to Christ, and his righteousness was credited to you. As his blood was spilled, a punishment that you deserve, but he took. God, the judge, declared you righteous. This is justification. But cleansing that's described here doesn't end at justification. The cleansing here is present tense to the believer. Even in the life of a Christian, the blood of Jesus goes on cleansing.

And notice that he doesn't qualify some of your sin that's cleansed. He says all of your sin will be cleansed. The sin that you've confessed 100 times but committed 101. The sin from before you were a Christian and when you think about it, it still leaves a pit in your stomach. The sin that nobody in this room knows about and that you've told no one. sin that you'll commit this afternoon on your drive home and tomorrow and next week. All of it, all of it is cleansed by the blood of the Son. You have no sin that is too large to exhaust the blood of Christ and you have no sin that is too small that it did not require his blood to be shed.

We know these right answers theologically, many of us in this room do. We know that it's the blood of Jesus alone that can cleanse us. Good, I'm glad that we know that that's the truth. But the whole point of this text is that knowing the truth is not enough. And so many times our actions reveal that our confidence in the blood is not as great as we actually claim that it is. Three ways that you might see this. Some of us, rather than trusting in the blood, in reality trust in rituals to cleanse us. And maybe you say that's not me, but hold on.

Think about your own life, where you sin on a Saturday night and something inside you says, I better be at church tomorrow morning to make this right. Think about the Lord's Supper, where you skip it because you feel unworthy, or on the other hand, maybe you take it. thinking that it's somehow gonna scrub away the filth in your life. Maybe you squeeze in an extra long time of Bible reading and devotions, not because you're genuinely worshiping God, but as payment, as payment and recompense for your sin. The right rituals are not a bad thing, all of the means of grace, but rituals will not cleanse you.

Secondly, some of us claim the blood of Christ, but ultimately trust in the affirmation of others as proof of our cleansing. Maybe you confess your sin to a friend, but if you're honest, what you're waiting for is not God's verdict about the situation, but theirs, the person that you confess to. You really want their affirmation. And if you don't get it, you don't feel worthy. It's the fear of man. And again, affirmation from others is not bad, but it does not cleanse.

Thirdly, some of us trust in our own ability to maintain holiness as a means to cleanse ourselves. This one's easy to hide or even be deceived over because this kind of life can masquerade as seriousness about sin. But in reality, it plays out in our own hearts as feeling close to God when we're doing well and performing well, but feeling that he's pulled back from us when we mess up. Condemnation after confession is not humility. It's unbelief wearing humility's clothes.

And it does not cleanse. As I reflect on these things even in my own life and where I see these things present, the weight of them at times is almost too much to bear. Because if rituals cannot cleanse, if the opinions of man cannot make me right, if even my own effort is insufficient, then why do I keep turning to them again and again in my heart?

Confess our sins

How can I stop living in the deceit of the lies of what this text says if you say, if you say, if you say, And John answers this with what I think is the most freeing sentence in this entire chapter. In verse nine he says,

if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Confess our sins. word confess means to say the same thing or to agree with. There are two senses in which every person is called to confess. First, to those who are not Christians, confess that you might enter fellowship with God. Jesus came to earth proclaiming a message of repentance, literally one to turn from sin and to turn to him in faith.

There's no price to be paid to earn the grace that he gives, and yet we all know that it is exceptionally costly to reject our own desires, maybe even the ones that we love. And yet spirit-inspired confession is the doorway to true repentance. We must acknowledge sin with grief so that we might turn from it and turn toward God. John has just told us that we cannot claim to have fellowship with God and walk in the darkness.

All sinners, which is every person here, every man or woman who has ever been born or ever will be born, must confess to find forgiveness. And if you have never done that this morning, if you've never agreed with God about your own sinful condition and trusted in Christ, then this invitation is here for you today. not an invitation to clean yourself up and then to come, but to heed these warnings about the deceit of darkness, the lies and twistedness of our own heart to convince us that we don't need God. Friend, you do. agree with him about your helplessness to save yourself, and agree that Christ has done the saving, and come to him. Come to him.

Secondly, confession applies to those who are walking in the light. This confession is the confession that happens again and again and again and is active and ongoing, a demonstration of your reliance on his grace to forgive. This is, after all, Christians who are walking in the light, who have fellowship with God, who have found forgiveness.

Why then, you might ask, if we've been forgiven once for all, do we need to continue to confess? We confess continually for four reasons. First, we confess continually for the restoring of our joy in God. For the restoring of our joy in God. Sin in the life of a Christian robs us of our joy of our relationship with Christ, and confession is one part of restoring that joy.

I think of King David's worst failures and how he prayed in those moments of sin,

restore to me the joy of your salvation.

He didn't pray restore my salvation. He had not lost his salvation. He had lost the joy of it. Right confession restores joy. Second, right confession is for the bolstering of our eternal security. It's for our confidence. Because as we confess, we are reminded of his promises to forgive, and our hearts can find peace there. Assurance of our salvation doesn't grow in the dark. It grows where sin is named and forgiveness is applied to it. Confession gives confidence. Third, ongoing confession is for the killing of sin in our lives, to put it to death.

The very next verse in 1 John 2.1 says,

I'm writing these things so that you may not sin.

Confession produces humility, genuine sorrow, and prayerfully it produces real repentance in us. Sin that's dragged into the light, it loses so much of its power. So say it out loud. Confess it to God or to a brother and sister, or better both, and it will begin to die by God's grace. Confession is used to kill sin. And finally, ongoing confession is an act of worship.

1 John 2.1 continues on and says,

but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.

Friends, pathetic and weak sinners though we are, we have an advocate in Jesus Christ who is awesome and strong. He is an advocate who has finished his work, his precious blood that has been spilled for our cleansing, and who is now sat down at the Father's right hand, the place of highest honor. And from that place, Christ advocates for us.

Christ speaks on our behalf to the Father, speaking of his redemption when we sin, speaking of his blood when we fall again, speaking of his claiming of you as his own according to the Father's will when you yet again find yourself on your knees confessing the failure that should earn you God's wrath. It will not. It will not. Because Christ, our advocates, spilled blood. Your accuser is loud. but your advocate, he is louder still.

That is how John can write without qualifications to Christians that if we confess our sins, he is faithful, faithful to his own word, faithful to his own work in Christ, that he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Taking God's side against yourself

The beauty of confession in the life of a Christian is it's really no more than taking God's side against yourself. It's taking God's side against yourself and your sin. You agree with God in terms of his evaluation of your sin, and you take his side rather than the side of what feels like self-preservation. God's side is that you rightly deserve his judgment. You deserve his wrath for specific sin in your life.

And so we can't let our prayers of confession end without really confessing anything at all. Lord, forgive me if I did anything wrong. Nobody speaks like that about something that they think is an actual problem. You don't tell the car mechanic, my car has fallen short in some way. You tell him that the transmission is shot, that the windshield wipers need fixing, that the windows won't go up. Taking God's side against your sin means naming it specifically. Not something vague like, Lord, I've been struggling recently.

But God, I confess that I lied to my spouse, and I'm still letting them believe that it's true. Not, I've had a little rough patch with my temper, seeking to minimize your sin. But God, I confess that I was angry and I yelled at my son. He was afraid and I'm too embarrassed to apologize. Not minimizing your sin, praying, God, I confess that I've just been a little distracted recently.

But real confession that acknowledges the heart. God, I confess to you that I am lazy. that I waste my time scrolling endlessly on this little device in my pocket and then I have no time left for your word. You cannot put to death sin that you refuse to name. Hear me. The reason that you can afford to say this plainly without fear is right here in this verse.

Because you don't just take God's side against your sin, you also take the side of Christ against the own doubts of your heart. Your doubts that he could not possibly forgive the likes of you. Christ stands against those lies with grace that abounds where sin abounds. It says right here,

he is faithful and just to forgive you your sins and to cleanse you from all your unrighteousness.

In this taking of God's side, our pride is left as a heap of rubble so that the glory of Christ's redemption might stand in our lives, shining and radiant All of this stands on two words in verse 9, and God is the subject of both. He is faithful. He keeps his word. You are his, and he is just, not as leniency, but as a testimony to the justice that has been satisfied.

Not a bending of the rules or grading on a curve so that God forgives you, but an honoring of a debt that is already settled in the blood of the Son. In the light of the blood of Christ, forgiving you is the just thing for God to do. As is the purpose of this letter, the light does much exposing. Those nose smudges on the windows of our lives, they have nowhere to hide in the light of God. But there is so much confidence to be gained as well. You have no reason to fear or to doubt or to wonder if you are in Christ. For every sin in our lives, the blood of Christ has an answer. And reconciliation with God is prepared for us. If you've never stepped foot into that light, come. The light that exposes you is the God who cleanses you. God is light. So turn from the deceit of darkness and walk into the light cleansed by the sun.

Would you pray with me? Father, we praise you as the one who is just and the justifier, as the one who is faithful to your word, that all who confess might find life in you. Help us by your grace to walk in the light where you are in the light, that we might be transformed ever more into the glory of our Savior. In Jesus' name, amen.