Sermon Transcript
Welcome, everyone. I hope that you’re excited about this new study that we’ve begun last week in the book of 1 John. If you have a Bible, you might want to turn there with us this morning. We’re in 1 John chapter 1. We’re going to look at just 3 verses, verses 5 to 7.
And if you brought a bulletin into the service, then there’s some Scripture that’s on that bulletin that’ll help you follow along with the passage, or there’s, I think, a Bible in the pew there in front of you that you can use. But we’re excited to be talking together about this very applicable book, so I hope what we talk about this morning is going to be helpful to you. One of the things that I do when I meet couples who are getting married in the course of my counseling, I usually ask them the question, are you done dating? And by that what I mean is I’m not asking, are you done dating each other? Because we want them to continue to date each other, obviously.
But I’m asking them, are you done dating others? I’m really asking them, are you ready to put the single life behind you and live a married life? Recently I had a conversation with a young adult that got married a little over a year ago, and I asked him this week, so, how did you know you were ready to get married? He said, well, Dave, I knew because I was ready to make a mental shift from living as a single person to living as a married person, I really wanted to make that shift because I knew that my life could be so much better if I was to marry this person that I was dating. Well, that perspective is not only needed to build a great marriage, it’s also needed to build a great relationship with God.
And in fact, it’s needed to make a great relationship with others, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. But for a person’s relationship to be all it could be with with God, there needs to be an intentional shift, an intentional shift from what we might call a self-centric life to a God-centric life. Or another way of saying that is for anybody to have the kind of fellowship that Pastor Steve talked about last week, a fellowship with God that means a shared life with God and a shared life with others, for anybody to have that kind of fellowship, they’re going to have to shift from living for the kingdom of darkness and start living for the kingdom of light. Now, if we don’t make the shift from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, we’re not going to experience this other matter that Steve talked about last week, and that is the matter of joy, life. For us to experience the fullness of life or the fullness of joy, we’ve got to shift from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light.
Several years ago, I got a call from a distraught wife who was less than a month into her brand-new marriage. And she said, Dave, my husband’s cheating on me. She just came right out on the phone and said, my husband’s cheating on me. She said, my first clue came on our Hawaiian honeymoon when I saw him on several occasions checking out other women. That were walking by.
I didn’t say anything. I just decided that he would probably soon stop doing that now that we’re married. But, she said, actually things got worse because I caught him this week in the garage on the computer looking at porn. Now, what was this wife saying? Well, she was saying, if we’re going to make a good marriage, my husband is going to need to make a mental shift a mental commitment to completely say goodbye to his old life as a single, including checking out other women that come across his path, which is something that’s going to happen like all the time.
And he’s going to need to focus his attention on our relationship for the good of our relationship and so that our relationship might be everything that it could possibly be. Now, that’s what you would call like Marriage 101, right? Marriage 101, which is a mental fidelity commitment to commit ourself only to the marriage, only to that person that we are married to. Well, that kind of mental shift is key to a relationship with God if we hope to experience life and experience fellowship with God in all of its fullness, we as God’s children must learn to say no to darkness, and we must say yes to light. And that lifestyle change is what comes into focus in the little passage we’re looking at this morning in 1 John chapter 5— excuse me, 1 John chapter 1, verses 5 through 7.
Having briefly introduced the whole life— the whole matter of the eternal life, as Steve took us into verses 1 to 4 last week. John then turns his attention to a matter that certainly needs our attention. And so, even as we read it before, let’s think about it again. This passage that he wrote says, so this is the message we’ve heard from him, and we declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.
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. Now, I just encourage you, if you’ve got a pen or a highlighter or something, a pencil, whatever, but to underline or highlight 4 words, okay, 4 words in that passage. 4 words that the church of Asia Minor, these house churches, these house church community, they needed to take to heart. And really, these 4 words are something that we need to take to heart as well today living in the 21st century. Believers must learn— here are the words— to walk in the light.
Those 4 words, walk in the light. Verse 7, we now learn to walk in the light and Not in darkness, verse 6, and not walk in darkness. Now, why is that so important? Well, because it’s the key to fellowship. The word fellowship is used here.
It’s the key to fellowship with God, and it’s the key to fellowship with God’s children. In fact, it’s fundamental to what Steve talked about last week, koinonia. Koinonia being fellowship or sharing eternal life with God and the fullness of that eternal life that produces joy in our hearts, in our very being. And so if we hope to experience the fullness of life, eternal life, we’ve got to learn to walk in the light, which is to say we’ve got to learn to live in the light. Whose light?
God’s light. If we walk in light with God, then we’ve got to say no to darkness. That’s all he’s saying here. In fact, to make his point, he says God is light, verse 5. God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all.
Those 3 words, God is light, describes His nature. So, if somebody was to describe your nature, I don’t know what they’d say, you know. Hopefully, they’d say something good. But when we talk about God’s nature, we talk about His virtues or His qualities, His nature is light. So, He’s described here as light.
Actually, as we go through this little letter, 1 John, we’re going to see that God is also described, chapter 4, verse 8, as love. And we’re going to see in chapter 4, verse 24, that God is described as Spirit. So, you’ve got God is light, God is love, God is Spirit. And when you think about that, you know what that ought to do for us? It ought to fill up our hearts with joy because this God who is light, who is love, who is Spirit wants a relationship with us.
He wants us to walk with Him. Think about that. God is not a bitter old man who’s out to get us. He’s not, you know, somebody that you’d rather not have a relationship with or somebody that you’d rather not be seen with. He is light.
And knowing that God is light should fill our hearts with relief, quite frankly. It should fill our hearts with thanks, knowing that God is life, that that’s who He is, that that’s in His fabric, that’s in His DNA. It’s who He is all of the time. That means, listen, that means God is always good. That means that God is always true.
That means that God is always trustworthy, that God is always beautiful, that God is always holy, He’s always pure, He’s always righteous. And since God is life, light, That means there is no darkness in Him at all, as John says here. There is no darkness in Him at all, not any degree of darkness in God. God is not inflicted in any way with darkness to any degree. So there’s no sin, there’s no evil, there’s no wrongdoing, there’s no injustice, there’s no selfishness, there’s no immorality, there’s no dishonesty, there’s no lying, there’s no cheating, there’s no stealing, None of that stuff in any way has polluted God.
God is not polluted or contaminated by sin or by evil. That— what that is to say is he is completely free of sin. He’s free of sinful thoughts. He’s free of sinful actions. He’s free of sinful reactions.
He’s free of the dark side, and he’s committed to bringing his light and his purity and his love and his justice and his peace and his hope into our dark world through transforming people like us who learn to walk in the light. But the key, the key is us walking where God walks. And where does God walk? He walks in the light. He walks in the midst of a dark world in light.
He is not inflicted with the darkness of the world. Now, you’re probably aware of the fact that there’s a cosmic war going on in the universe. And John contrasts this cosmic war that is going on in the universe, these opposite sides, in his reflections in this epistle, especially right here in this passage we’re looking at. This isn’t something new for us, is it? I mean, when you go to the movies or you read books or You see kids playing on playgrounds or families, and sometimes even in the church, you can see the contrast between light— let’s use this side as darkness— between light and darkness.
You could see the difference. You could see the difference between good and bad. You can see when the kingdom of light is dominating or the kingdom of darkness is dominating. You can see it where, you know, in maybe movies or shows that we’ve seen where something Some people are clothed in white and they wear white hats, and there are other people that are clothed in black and they wear black hats. And so you have this tension, and this tension is made for good movies.
And, you know, it gets us into it with whatever’s going on in the show or whatever it might be. We read these novels about dark and light, and so we get this. In fact, it’s a key to the Star Wars movies, isn’t it? I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those. I don’t know, all 30 of them.
No, it seems like 30. I think it’s just 11. But you probably know that the dark side, the dark side was popularized in the first Star Wars movie back in 1977. So, you can go all the way back and this whole thing was built on this dark side thing, the Force, the Force, which was a dark side power that controlled the universe and the principal antagonist aka the bad guy was Darth Vader, who was paralleled quite frankly in earlier Hollywood movies by that cowboy with the black hat. Well, Darth Vader went farther with all of that.
He epitomized the darkness with his distinctive black helmet and mask and all the rest of it. And so anyway, people watch this and we’ve watched it and And it has become a hit. Millions, millions of people view these films. If another one comes out, they’re gonna go back and see this other film about the dark side and, you know, the Force and the battle against the dark side and all the rest of that. The popularity of Darth Vader alone has led to millions of dollars of sales in costumes and outfits and helmets and things like that.
In fact, the latest sale happened 3 days ago at the Icons and Legends of Hollywood auction when the original Darth Vader helmet sold for $900,000. 3 days ago.
Now let me tell you, that’s a lot of money to spend on a mask that represents the dark side.
But it’s actually symbolic, quite frankly, of what’s going on every day in our world where a lot of money is being invested and time and energy in the ongoing dark side, in an ongoing effort to satisfy our insatiable human flesh-driven appetites. We seemingly can’t get enough of the dark side. It’s just kind of woven into our fabric. It’s woven into our makeup. It’s been that way ever since evil came into the world, and it’s going to be this way until God’s kingdom comes on earth, and darkness finally, and sin finally is going to be eradicated from the world for good, and we’re going to finally live with no more sin and no more devastating conscience of sin, which means there will be no more death, No more suffering, no more pain, no more broken relationships, no more hurts, no more illness, no more self-centeredness, no more wars, no more fighting, none of that.
But until that day, God wants his children to oppose darkness. And the way that we oppose darkness is by walking in the light, by walking where God walks. Now, if you wanted to walk with me this morning, you could not have done that without coming to Cuesta Park where I was walking. I don’t know if you walked or not this morning. I don’t know if you ran this morning.
I have no idea. But if you were walking around that beautiful track at Mountain View High School, great. But you could not, by walking around that track, Walk with me because I was walking in Cuesta Park. Well, similarly, if we want to walk with God, this is very simple to understand. If we want to walk with God, we can’t walk in darkness.
We got to walk where God walks. And where is God walking? He is walking in light. He is not walking in darkness. You say, well, should I really want to walk in light that much?
Yeah, that’s a great place to walk because when we walk in light, John says 3 things. He says, number one, we experience intimacy with God. When we walk in the light, we experience intimacy with God. He says in verse 6, if we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie. And we do not live by the truth.
He said, if you’d like to experience intimacy with God, and I think we all should want to experience intimacy with God, take your best relationship, multiply it 1,000 million times, that’s the potential relationship that is there for any one of us. If we want to experience intimacy with God, fellowship, communion with God, koinonia, You’re not going to find it by walking in darkness. It can only be found by walking in the light. And for that to happen, John says, we got to walk in truth. We must— do you see it there?
We must live by the truth. We must live by God’s Word. Now, this is one of the reasons why we’re doing what we’re doing right now. We’re teaching the truth. We’re teaching what the Scriptures teach us.
It’s one of the reasons why Teaching the Bible at Bridges Community Church is a big deal. It really is. It’s why it’s an essential commitment in a worship service like this where we want to try to help each other understand what the scriptures teach and see its application in our lives, because it could have profound impact in how we live, what we do with our life. Our commitment as a church is to help you and I grow in our fellowship with God and our fellowship with each other. So, it’s all about this vertical dimension, loving God, loving each other more.
But for that to happen, it necessitates reading and hearing and understanding and believing and applying God’s Word. It’s why we have Bible studies on Sundays. It’s why we have Bible studies throughout the week so people can get into the Word and understand it and be transformed by it. It’s why we teach our children the Bible and our youth the Bible. It’s why we’re willing to host on our campus Bible study fellowship.
And other groups like that that are going to help people understand the Scriptures. It’s why we are now hosting an international college student ministry on Wednesday nights here at the church. It’s now connected to the Fusion Dinner, and right afterwards there’s a group of people that began to meet this past week, and we’re very excited about that. But the Word of God is an essential part of that. Why would we make the Word of God an essential part of our lives and our studies and what we’re trying to do as a ministry?
Well, because The Word of God is the bread of life. It gives life to us through the work of God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. So, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re trying to do the best that we can with that, but at the same time, we live in the midst of a world that is undermining the Word of God. You notice that? It’s even happening in churches.
There’s a massive effort in our world today to put a spin on God’s Word to make it say what it is that we want it to say, or to dismiss it entirely as untrue, irrelevant. Many people view God’s Word as archaic. They used— they see it as dated. They see it as out of touch with reality. They just say, not for me.
But the reality is, and as you can see it here, God’s Word is as relevant today as it always has been. Especially when it comes to us having an intimate relationship with God. And if you want to experience fellowship with God, you’ve got to walk in truth. Do you see that? Now, I want you just to notice the word walk.
That word walk, the way it’s used in verses 6 and 7 there, talks about a habitual life. It’s a habitual thing. It’s an ongoing thing in a person’s life. And it refers here— it’s referring to 2 different kinds of walks. You’ve got in verse 6 the habitual walk of sin, and then in verse 7 you have the habitual walk of godliness.
And what he is saying is if your life is characterized by ongoing habitual sin, intentional sin, that says something about your fellowship with God. What it’s saying is you’re not having fellowship with God. Because if you’re living in darkness, if you’re living in sin, you’re not in fellowship with God. That fact is central in 1 John, and he’s going to hit that over and over so that hopefully we come to believe, I can’t have fellowship with God and live an intentional, habitual life of sin. So, we’re talking about this is something that’s just intentional.
The word fellowship, as Steve suggested last week, is very significant. In us knowing for sure that we’re saved, that we’re actually in God’s family. The word means intimacy. It means communion. And in this case, we’re talking about communion with God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.
It’s the act of intimate communion or partnership. It’s, as Steve said last week, it is the sharing of life together. It’s this, it’s participation in a close relationship with God, not simply association with. There’s a big difference there. It’s participation in, not simply association with.
You can have association with God just like you can have association with anybody but not really know them. Not really have a relationship with him. You can know about God. You could call yourself a Christian. You may have even been baptized.
You may spend an hour or so in church on Sunday mornings on occasion hanging out, worshiping God. At some point in your life, you may have prayed the sinner’s prayer, that it’s been called, or you may have walked down an aisle. All of that’s great, but if you still are living as if God doesn’t exist, meaning you pretty much do as you please regardless of what you know God’s Word teaches and what God desires for you, you know what’s true about all of that? You’re not in fellowship with God. That’s what John’s saying.
You’re not walking in the light. You are walking in darkness.
We’ve got to get that. To say, hey, God and I are tight. Yeah. And I’m living as if God doesn’t even exist? No!
You see, he’s saying no. Way back when I was a youth pastor, I loved it when kids came into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. It was always a ministry highlight. I loved to hear them share their, you know, conversion experiences. Each experience was unique and wonderful, and every time they got up and they shared their story, it just encouraged us to want to continue to minister to students.
I mean, how wonderful to hear that happen. But on the other side of the spectrum was the feeling of sadness that came when some of those kids fell away from their faith stories. And the kids ended up checking out on their faith. They decided they were done with God and they were done with what the Bible was saying. And usually that happened because there was a pull of a relationship.
A pull of a boyfriend or a girlfriend that took them away from the light into the darkness.
Or it was friends luring them, you know, luring them over to the dark side and out of fellowship with God. The outcome was inevitable. The outcome was always tragic. They were no longer able to walk in fellowship with God, in intimacy with God. And what John is trying to do here for these people he’s writing to and for people like us that are reading this account is to help us see that the best thing that we can do is intentionally make a decision to walk in the light.
And to walk in the light is to walk in truth. It is not to walk in darkness. And when we make that kind of a decision, and that becomes an ongoing part of our life in growing ways, we begin to experience greater and greater intimacy with God, greater fellowship with God. That’s not all. We also enjoy intimacy or community with each other.
We enjoy community with each other. 1 John 1:7, the first part says, but if we walk in the light as he, God, is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. If we walk in the light, we share community with each other, we have fellowship. The idea here is that we actually experience community with each other if we walk in the light. Now you understand this is— you’ve seen what it’s like for people that hopefully are in the same family or they’re friends to live in community or out of community.
And he’s talking here about living in community, experiencing or sharing genuine, authentic community, growth into oneness. I think the easiest way to understand what John is saying right here is to think of the last time that you and someone, maybe a family member or a friend, were at odds with each other, all right? You were at odds with each other. You were at war or whatever it was. Can you think of a time?
All right, just one. Don’t try to think of 40, just one. Can you think of one incident where you and a family member were at odds with each other. You had a strained relationship. Something was going on there.
So just think of, just for a minute, just think of one family member or one friend, and once you get it in your mind, hold on to it just for a second. I don’t want you to look at the person. I don’t want you to point at the person, all right? That’s just gonna make things worse as we try to work with some relational help here. The worst thing we could do is actually make this worse for you.
But here’s what we know. When something comes between you and someone else, what’s happening? Community is hurt. This relationship is wounded. It pains you and it pains the relationship.
And typically what happens when there’s something going on that way is that we end up pulling away from each other. We pull away from each other mentally. We pull away emotionally. We might pull away Physically, we just remove ourselves. And why do we remove ourselves?
Because we want to protect ourselves. We don’t want to be wounded again, or we don’t want to be hurt again, or we don’t want to be hurt in a deeper way than we’ve already been hurt. And so there’s kind of this reflexive response to just move away. And what are we moving away from? We’re moving away from fellowship, or we’re moving away from community.
Community takes a nosedive at this point. You’ve seen that before. We’ve all seen that before. We might even see it right now in a relationship that we have with somebody where— what’s happening? Darkness has interrupted our sweet communion.
Something’s come between us, and what caused it was darkness, and what will fix it is light, God’s light, walking in the light. Walking in the light increases the chance of restoration of fellowship. Of continuing in fellowship together more than walking in darkness. I’m telling you, walking in darkness is not going to fix it. You know that.
You’ve seen that. The minute that you and I decided in a broken relationship to stop walking in darkness and instead walk in the light, the minute we decided to stop pretending that everything is okay when it’s not, we decided to stop faking it, we decided to stop walking around the elephant that’s in the room, the minute that we decided to start walking in the light, potentially fellowship could come back into this relationship, and that’s what he’s talking about here. We are not gonna be able to experience community with each other at the levels that God so longs us to experience that community if we continue to walk in darkness.
It? So, when we live in the light, we experience intimacy with God, we enjoy community with each other, and finally, he says this, and we are cleansed when we mess up. We are cleansed when we mess up. Now, I like the sound of that, don’t you? I’m not talking about the mess-up part.
I like the sound of that when it talks about the cleansed part. Notice the words In verse 7, the last part, and the blood of Jesus his Son purifies us from all sin. Friends, that is absolutely amazing. Think about it. What this is saying for all of us is we do not have to live with ongoing guilt and shame.
We don’t have to live that way. There’s a remedy. There is a remedy for the worst sickness that you could have.
You know, I’ve talked to people recently who are trying to find a remedy for their sickness. They’ve gone to doctor after doctor after doctor, and in some cases they haven’t been able to find a remedy. Doctors are baffled. Well, if you ask me, the worst sickness is a sin sickness. It’s sin.
And forgiveness is ours. Forgiveness for our sins is ours when we walk in the light. And how is that possible? Well, it’s possible, John says here, is through the shed blood of Jesus, through God’s Son, God’s only Son, the one who lived, the one who died to make a way for us to ultimately have an eternal relationship with God now and forever. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins, that would be us, The sins of the world, he takes them away.
There’s an old hymn that speaks about this. What can wash away my sin? It says, this hymn, nothing but the blood of Jesus. What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
Oh, precious is the flow that makes me white as snow. No other fount I know, nothing but the blood of Jesus. And what John is saying here is that the answer to our initial and our ongoing battle with sin, with darkness, is the blood of Jesus. And through his blood, we can continue to be cleansed from our sin. Now that has got to be good news.
Believers and nonbelievers alike, through Jesus Christ, can be saved from their sins. Salvation comes through Jesus. And this salvation of cleansing is a lifetime work. It’s a lifetime work in us. He doesn’t just clean us once and that’s it.
It is continual. See, that’s what’s focused here is continual cleansing. I mean, that makes sense. Just like a surgeon has instruments that are used, then before they are reused, they need to be sterilized. And they need to be cleansed again and again and again.
Well, Jesus’ blood cleanses us from our filth, from our sin, again and again and again. And John is saying, turn to Jesus, turn to him for forgiveness, for cleansing. Stop looking to other remedies. Jesus is the answer. Come to Jesus like that woman who had spent all of the money that she had on one doctor after another doctor after another doctor after another doctor, and she never found relief for her problem until she came to Jesus and Jesus healed her.
Well, the best thing that we can do is come to Jesus. It’s to turn to Jesus. It’s to come to the light of the world. And it’s continue to walk in his light. And when we don’t walk in his light, it’s to come back to him again and again and again.
So what’s John saying? Do you get it? 4 words. He’s saying, walk in the light. Make a pledge.
If you’ve never made this pledge, make a pledge. Make a pledge through the enabling, transforming power of God to intentionally walk in the light, to say, I’m not walking in darkness.
If you’re married, you made a pledge. You made an intentional pledge to live differently, to let the single life go and to live a married life. This is suggesting a pledge, a commitment, a way of living. Make a pledge. To walk in the light.
Pastor Dan and I were talking this week about that shift, that shift in relationships. If you get to the place where maybe you’re gonna, you know, get married, you’re gonna have to make a shift between the single life and the married life. And he told me the story, Dan did, about pastor, speaker, author Tim Keller, who talked once about the time— Dan heard him speak on one occasion about the time where early in his marriage As he was coming home from his place of business, he decided to stop. He decided to stop and buy bread on the way home. So he did that, and the errand turned out to be longer than he thought it would be, and so he was prolonged in this trip getting home so that when he finally got home and walked in the door, his wife was there and she was very worried.
She was upset. She was very upset. She did not know— this is before cell phones— she did not know where he had been. He said as he was telling this story that that was the moment when he saw how distraught his wife was, he said, that was the moment that I truly realized there are no unilateral decisions in marriage. What’s a unilateral decision?
A one-sided decision. He said, I finally at that moment in time really realized that you can’t be one-sided in marriage if you’re married. You can’t make a unilateral decision. Even if it’s something as simple as stopping to buy bread, you need to take into account that you’re no longer single but you’re married and that commitment needs to be lived out even with little matters like that. Well, that’s the kind of commitment that John’s speaking about here that needs to play out in our relationship with God.
We need to make an intentional pledge to put behind us the former life that included walking in darkness. And why would we do that? Because we want to experience fellowship with God at its deepest level. We want to experience fellowship with each other at its deepest level. We no longer want to walk in darkness.
We want to walk in a better life, and this better life is found by walking where God walks. And where does God walk? He walks in the light.
Let’s pray.
Lord, this is so helpful to us because every day we’re plagued by darkness.
We see it in our thoughts. We see it in our desires. We see it in our decisions.
We don’t have this perfect. We fall short. We sin.
And Lord, help us just to accept that fact. Help us not to deny it. Help us to accept it. And help us then in accepting it, look to you for help, for salvation, for hope, for a new life. And here this morning, this text so clearly says there is a better life than a life of darkness, and it’s found in walking with you.
So my prayer today is that if we’ve never yet made the decision to walk with you in the light, that would be our first decision. That anybody who’s here right now that has never made the decision to have a close personal relationship with you, that would be the decision. That even now they would say, Lord, that is what I want. And if that’s the desire of your heart, tell God that. God, that’s what I want.
I want a relationship with you, and I thank you that you want a relationship with me, sinful me. And you don’t want just the relationship in a little way, you want the relationship in an enormous, wonderful way. You want to walk with me. You want to change me. You want to make me like yourself.
God, I need that. Tell God that. And, Lord, so I want to receive the gift of life. That’s found in your Son Jesus Christ today. I ask that you would forgive me of my sins and that through Christ, his blood would take away my sin.
I would be washed, I would be clean, I would be born again, I would be adopted into your family, I would begin a brand new life. And Lord, thank you for the assurance that as we go on, when we sin against you, there is cleansing for our sin.
Thank you for that promise. There is cleansing for our sin, and it is found not in this remedy, this remedy, this remedy, or this remedy, It’s found in Jesus Christ. So help us turn to Christ again and again and again, for we pray that in Jesus’ name. Amen.
