1 John 1:5-2:2—Walk in the Light

Good morning! I’m Bill Connors, senior pastor here with Eastern Hills, and I’m blessed to be here this morning as the church gathers together to worship the Lord and to reflect on His Word. I pray that this time is a blessing to you as well, but more than anything, I pray that our joining together today brings honor and glory to God, and points us to Him. I wanted to take a moment this morning and say thanks to a couple of groups of people who are so important to the church family: our Safety & Security and Welcome teams. Every week, they get here early in order to be the first faces that folks see as they come on campus and into the building, and I really appreciate their faithfulness and hearts of service.

If you’re a first-time guest this morning, whether you’re in the room or online, we’d love to have the opportunity to drop you a note and thank you for joining with the church family at Eastern Hills today. If you wouldn’t mind, would you just shoot a quick text with just the word WELCOME to 505-339-2004? You’ll get a text back with a link to our digital communication card, where you can give us just a little more information so we can pray for you and drop you a quick card thanking you for being with Eastern Hills today. If you’re here in the building and you’d rather fill out a physical card, you’ll find those in the back of the pew in front of you. Just take a minute during the service to complete that, and you can drop it in the offering plates as you leave the sanctuary at the close of service, or you can bring it down here to me when service is over, so I can meet you and thank you personally for joining us today with a gift. Either way, thanks for being with Eastern Hills this morning.

Announcements

AOM tonight: Dimitrii Sozontov and family will be sharing at 4:15 in the Parlor

Evangelism Conference Info

Monday night 2/27 starting at 5:45; pie fellowship following

Tuesday 2/28 all day starting at 8:50 am; breakout sessions that afternoon beginning at 1:00 pm; praise & worship & preaching that night beginning at 5:45 pm.

Registration is free. Register at bcnm.com/nmec.

Opening

Last week, we began what will be a 13 week series on the book of 1 John. We primarily looked at the incarnation: the theological word that explains that Jesus is both God and man, and as we considered the truth of the incarnation, we ultimately opened this series by saying that the book of 1 John is all about Jesus, as John declared in his prologue or introduction. This morning, we will continue through chapter 1 and into the beginning of chapter 2 of this important epistle.

So as you are able, would you please stand in honor of God’s Holy Word as we read our focal passage together:

1 John 1:5–2:2 CSB

5 This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light, and there is absolutely no darkness in him. 6 If we say, “We have fellowship with him,” and yet we walk in darkness, we are lying and are not practicing the truth. 7 If we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. 8 If we say, “We have no sin,” we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say, “We have not sinned,” we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. 1 My little children, I am writing you these things so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ the righteous one. 2 He himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world.

PRAYER - Taking a week off of praying for sister CBA churches to pray for the nations of Turkey and Syria following the massive earthquake there on Monday. The death toll continues to rise, and is currently well over 25,000.

I’ll be very honest here about something that is actually painful for me to contemplate. Over my years in student ministry, I had a lot of students come through the doors of that youth room. Some were students that I invested a great deal of time in, even some that I had serve as student leaders alongside me, some that I met with one-on-one on a regular basis and who I talked with about faith and life and Scripture and God and holiness, students I prayed with and prayed over. I was the student pastor for nearly 20 years, so I can’t even guess how many students came through the ministry during my time in Trevor’s chair. Thankfully, many of them are still walking with Jesus—serving in churches (some still in EHBC), raising godly families, even pastoring or serving in other ministry capacities.

But one thing that bothers me about my time in student ministry is how many former students graduated from the student ministry and shortly thereafter graduated from the church, or worse: they kind of graduated from faith altogether. They went off to college and threw off the shackles of parents and youth group, decided that there were other things in life that they cared more about, and walked away from the path I believed that they were on. When they were in the student ministry, I’d have said that they were saved, and I would have been sure of it. I mean, I baptized some of those students. But now, I think back on some of these students, and I have to wonder: “Was I wrong about them?” It’s heartbreaking to know that some of the students I was closest with no longer walk with or even claim to believe in Jesus.

So to make a quick aside for the students in the room right now: make the most of your time in the student ministry. Trevor is a great teacher of Scripture, and I know that his heart is for you guys. Listen and engage now. Really consider the truth of the Gospel message, the hope and security that Jesus brings, and respond to that message in faith. Draw a line in the sand and determine that it’s Jesus that you’re going to follow and be faithful to. This church loves you and wants the very best for you. We are your family, and we care for you. So plug in and connect, so that you’ll have this body of believers as a home base, even as you get older and your life changes.

To be completely frank, the actual knowledge of whether anyone is saved is above my pay grade. God knows if someone is saved, I don’t. I can make an educated guess based on knowing them and watching them and talking with them, but as I’ve experienced, I can be completely wrong. Then we come to a passage like this one. This passage is difficult. It’s severe in what it says—so severe, in fact, that there is a part of us that recoils a little bit from how starkly John paints the picture here. And when we read it, we might want to soften it a little bit, to come up with a way that John isn’t saying what he seems to be saying: that it’s possible for someone to say that he or she belongs to Jesus, and to even think for a time that he belongs to Jesus, when he actually doesn’t.

The problem with us trying to soften this passage is that John doesn’t. He doesn’t give us an escape hatch in his language so we can get out of the severity of what he’s actually saying. Not to put too fine a point on this, but he’s saying that if you’re in Christ, your life should show it. And if instead your life looks to be exactly the opposite—that Jesus has no place in your life, and you look nothing like Him—then you’re probably not actually in Christ at all, and if you aren’t in Christ now, then you never really were in the first place.

Before you mentally accuse me of saying that John is claiming that we’re saved by works, please know that I’m not. Salvation is a gift of God’s grace received by surrendered faith in Jesus Christ that can never be earned or deserved. But if our lives don’t have any resemblance to Jesus, then can we really call ourselves His disciples, His followers, those who bear His name: Christians? John’s not preaching perfectionism here, as we will see. He’s basically just saying that salvation is an all or nothing deal: either you've been really, truly, honestly, completely, regenerately saved through faith in Christ; or you’re really and truly lost and bound for eternal hell because of your sin.

John is likely dealing with some bad thinking that had arisen in the church here—likely an early form of a heresy called gnosticism—people who claimed that they could have fellowship with God through a special kind of secret knowledge, and without actually believing that Jesus is the incarnate Son of God. As is often the case with heresy, it’s the bad thinking that forces us to clearly state what right thinking is. And John opens by saying something about God that sets the stage for the rest of his argument. He says that God is light.

1) God is light.

What we looked at last week in verses 1-4 was all about Jesus: That Jesus is the eternal God stepping down into time, the transcendent God knowable, the invisible God visible, the intangible God tangible. Now suddenly, John says that he heard directly from Jesus a message that he declares about who God is, and it is this statement which gives meaning to the rest of our focal passage this morning:

1 John 1:5 CSB

5 This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light, and there is absolutely no darkness in him.

God is light. What does John mean by this? Does he simply mean that God is shiny or sparkly? I really doubt it. I mean, there is some aspect of that which is true, because Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6 that God lives in unapproachable light, and we see in Revelation 21 that the heavenly Jerusalem will be illuminated by God’s glory, and won’t need the sun or the moon. But in the context of what John is saying here, it must be something more than a physical manifestation of light. In John’s prologue to his Gospel, he speaks of light in connection with the Word:

John 1:4–5 CSB

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5 That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it.

John 1:9 CSB

9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.

This builds on what we looked at last week in verses 1-4 as we looked at Jesus at the Word of life. Light represents the source of life. The fact is that both life and light have to have a source for them to exist at all. God is the only One who can be the Source, because only He has always existed. At the dawn of creation, nothing but God existed, and then God spoke and all things apart from Him came into being. And the first thing that God spoke into existence was light:

Genesis 1:3 CSB

3 Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

That declaration made the life of everything and everyone else possible, because without light, there would be no life. So God is the Source of life, and our life (the “light of men”) is derived from Him. This makes sense then with what we see in verse 5 of 1 John 1: God is the ultimate Source of life, the fullness of what life is, and the One who defines life. By contrast, there is absolutely no darkness, no “lack of life” in Him at all. He is light. Our triune God is the only One who has life in Himself:

John 5:26 CSB

26 For just as the Father has life in himself, so also he has granted to the Son to have life in himself.

The rest of what John says here is based on this initial declaration that God is light, and has no darkness within Him.

2) To walk with God is to walk in the light of Christ.

As I said earlier, John doesn’t mince any words when he makes his argument here. He draws what for many of us feels like a really hard line… a line so hard that we might feel uncomfortable drawing it as well.

1 John 1:6–7 CSB

6 If we say, “We have fellowship with him,” and yet we walk in darkness, we are lying and are not practicing the truth. 7 If we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

Notice that verses 6 and 7 include two different perspectives: one negative, and one positive. Before we look at the two comparatives, a note: the word “walk” in these verses is used to denote one’s “way of life.” This is what defines your life, who you truly are and how you truly live. Again, this isn’t about being perfect—it’s about the bend of your life.

First, the negative. In verse 6, John argues that if we say we have fellowship with God, but we walk in the absence of light (darkness, or the absence of the Source of life), then we are lying and aren’t “practicing the truth.” This is completely logical. If God is light with no mixture of darkness, then if your way of life is defined by the things of darkness, that means that you are not walking with God.

Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 6:

2 Corinthians 6:14b (CSB)

14 ...For what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness? Or what fellowship does light have with darkness?

If we say that we are walking with God when our lives don’t look anything like Jesus, what confidence could we possibly have that we are speaking truthfully about being in fellowship with God?

In his Gospel, John recorded Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in John 3, and in that conversation was the same idea, the same contrast between light and darkness.

John 3:19–20 CSB

19 This is the judgment: The light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil. 20 For everyone who does evil hates the light and avoids it, so that his deeds may not be exposed.

Every weekday morning at our house, we wake Abbie up at 6:15. And most weekday mornings at our house, Abbie comes out of her completely dark room and into a fully lighted kitchen. She comes out with her hands over her face, scowling at the brightness, and I ordinarily take that as an opportunity for a good long hug: she can hide her face in my chest for a minute while her eyes begin to adjust. But my point is this: when we spend all of our time in the darkness, the light is unbearable, and we want nothing to do with it.

This is the problem. The light, the Source of life, has come into the world, but because of humanity’s brokenness, we love the darkness. We love our sin. We don’t want to come into the light, because we don’t want our sinful, evil deeds exposed to the truth of God, to be held up to the light, to be compared to true life. We don’t want to live in the light, practicing the truth. We want to live our own way, as our own lord, making all of our own decisions, saying that we invent “our” truth by what we think and approve, rather than discovering THE truth and adjusting our lives to it through our submission to God’s Lordship. Truth isn’t something we manufacture. Truth is objective. And God is the source of truth. We’d rather hide from God, like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden.

But we need the light to shine on us and our lives if we are really going to live, which takes us to the positive comparison:

John says in verse 7:

1 John 1:7 CSB

7 If we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

In verse 3, John had explained why he was writing as he was at that moment. It was so his readers would have fellowship with him and the other apostles, because they have believed the message of the Gospel, and have come to have fellowship with God Himself as well—they are walking in the light.

Jesus also spoke of the confidence that we can have in Him:

John 8:12 CSB

12 Jesus spoke to them again: “I am the light of the world. Anyone who follows me will never walk in the darkness but will have the light of life.”

And not only that, but if we have true life because of Jesus, then our sin has been atoned for by His blood and we have been made clean in God’s eyes. These are those whose lives are now defined by the light, not the darkness.

In John 3, Jesus continued with Nicodemus:

John 3:21 CSB

21 But anyone who lives by the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be shown to be accomplished by God.”

Those who live by the truth actually want their deeds compared with the Source of Life, so they can be seen correctly, and so that He gets the glory for what He has done.

So the first question that we need to ask ourselves this morning in response to John’s writing is this: “Is my life defined by light? Or by darkness?… By life? Or by death?” If your life is defined by death and darkness, there’s only one right response: cry out to Jesus, repenting of your sin and surrendering to Him as Savior and Lord.

3) To walk with God is to understand our need for Christ.

John ended verse 7 by saying that if we walk in the light, then the blood of Jesus shed on the cross cleanses us from all sin. This presupposes something: the fact that we all have sin, and we all fall short of the standard of perfection that we would need to have to deserve to be in fellowship with the perfect, holy, and righteous God, and thus, we all need the cleansing blood of Jesus because only He lived a perfect life, and it is through His death on our behalf that we can be forgiven.

Unfortunately, the gnostics that John was arguing against had a strange view of human existence. They saw that the material world, including our physical bodies, was corrupt and broken, but they also believed that the spiritual part of us was inherently divine, and thus incorruptible and immune to sin. Therefore, they could say things like what John said here in verses 8-10:

1 John 1:8–10 CSB

8 If we say, “We have no sin,” we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say, “We have not sinned,” we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

Verses 8 and 10 are essentially parallel to one another. In verse 8, claiming that we are sinless is a form of lying to ourselves. In verse 10, doing so also makes God a liar, because the Scriptures tell us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23).

Verse 9 points to our need for Jesus, and part of what it looks like to walk with God: that we agree with Him about our sins. This is what confession means. It’s not a matter of simply listing off our sins to God. He knows what we’ve done, and He knows how sinful we can be. No, confession is an acknowledgment that what God says about our sin is correct—that it is sinful—and that those sins deserve both His wrath and His just punishment.

This is where the need for Christ comes in. Since our sin is evil in God’s eyes, how could He be “faithful and righteous” if He forgives it, since it deserves wrath and punishment in accordance with justice? It’s in what we see in chapter 2:

1 John 2:1–2 CSB

1 My little children, I am writing you these things so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ the righteous one. 2 He himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world.

John says that he’s writing so that his “little children…may not sin.” But he’s saying that as an encouragement, not as a formula. The things written in this letter are meant to strengthen the believers so that they would be more able to resist the temptation to sin. But then he offers this word of hope: “But if anyone does sin...”

John understands that we aren’t going to be perfect on this side of heaven. And so now he speaks of two roles that Jesus plays in meeting our desperate need for Him because of our sins: First, Jesus is our advocate, and second, He is our atonement.

A) Jesus as our advocate.

An advocate is “one who pleads the cause of another.” This could be someone in a courtroom, such as an attorney, or it could be someone in some other profession where they represent or help someone through a complicated situation by virtue of their position, expertise, or experience. John says that Jesus is our “advocate with the Father.” This is, in a way, what Jesus is doing for us right now.

In fact, Paul says in Romans about Jesus’ position as our advocate:

Romans 8:33–34 CSB

33 Who can bring an accusation against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies. 34 Who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is the one who died, but even more, has been raised; he also is at the right hand of God and intercedes for us.

But the word that John uses in 1 John 2:1 for Jesus being our “advocate” is an interesting one. He uses the Greek word parakletos. This word only appears five times in the New Testament, and every time but this one it is in reference to the Holy Spirit. Parakletos is one who comes alongside. And it is Jesus’ standing as “the Righteous One” that allows Him to hold this position on our behalf. There’s a prophecy about Messiah in Isaiah 53 that we find echoes of here:

Isaiah 53:11 CSB

11 After his anguish, he will see light and be satisfied. By his knowledge, my righteous servant will justify many, and he will carry their iniquities.

In Revelation 12:10, John records that he heard a loud voice in heaven refer to Satan as our accuser, who accuses us before God day and night. But that’s all Satan can do before God: accuse us. It’s good to know that we have an advocate who simply has to point to what He has done on our behalf, which takes us to what Jesus has done for us.

B) Jesus as our atonement.

The fact is that apart from Christ, we are lost and without hope. The Scriptures tell us that because of sin, we by nature are God’s enemies, rebels against the rule of the King of kings, beings constantly attempting to throw off His claim to rule our lives and to usurp His rightful authority in the world. We are at odds with God, hopelessly and completely broken. But Jesus came to restore that relationship into oneness by taking our place in death, paying the penalty that we deserve:

1 John 2:2 CSB

2 He himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world.

In the footnotes of your Bible, you might see that another word could be used for “atoning sacrifice.” That word is “propitiation.” Neither is wrong. They really just define each other. Jesus “atoned” for our sin by His sacrificial death. This means that he willingly paid the debt of justice that we owe because of our sin to make it so that we can be at one with God. And the word propitiation means that Jesus took the fullness of the wrath of God against our sin as our covering, so that we no longer have to be objects of wrath, but now can be objects of God’s grace and mercy, while upholding His justice.

Isaiah prophesied about the atoning sacrifice that the Righteous servant would make in order to pay for our iniquity:

Isaiah 53:4–8 CSB

4 Yet he himself bore our sicknesses, and he carried our pains; but we in turn regarded him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities; punishment for our peace was on him, and we are healed by his wounds. 6 We all went astray like sheep; we all have turned to our own way; and the Lord has punished him for the iniquity of us all. 7 He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. Like a lamb led to the slaughter and like a sheep silent before her shearers, he did not open his mouth. 8 He was taken away because of oppression and judgment, and who considered his fate? For he was cut off from the land of the living; he was struck because of my people’s rebellion.

Salvation is only found in Christ. When we surrender to Him in faith, trusting in His sacrifice for our salvation, it’s like we come underneath the umbrella of Jesus, and He covers us as God’s righteous wrath against sin is poured out on Him. Jesus chose to die in order to save us. We can give up and give in to Him as Savior and Lord, or we can take the deluge of God’s wrath ourselves.

Closing

The last thing I want us to consider is the scope of Jesus’ sacrifice. He died for the sins of the whole world. That doesn’t mean that we have some universal salvation, that everyone is saved because Jesus died for everyone. The Gospel is expansive enough to include anyone who would come to Jesus in faith. Jesus died for your sins and mine, and He did so willingly.

But the Gospel is also narrow, in that it says that salvation is only in Jesus. There’s no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved, according to Peter in Acts 4, but all who would surrender in faith may come. This is how we walk with God, how we walk in light, how we have eternal life.

If you’ve never trusted in Jesus as your Savior and Lord, never truly surrendered to Him in faith, then I have to speak the way John does: you’re lost. God loves you and proved that love by sending His Son to die in your place. He wants to be in a right relationship with you. Surrender right now, confessing your need for Jesus to save you so your sins would be forgiven, and confessing His covering over you as Lord, committing your life to Him in faith. He died as your atonement, and He rose and ascended to the right hand of the Father where He sits as your advocate if you belong to Him. If you are surrendering to Christ as Savior and Lord this morning, or if you have questions about salvation, please let us know.

Church membership

Prayer

Offering

PRAYER

Closing Remarks

Bible reading plan (Song of Songs 1)

Even though I hear there is some football game happening tonight, Pastor’s Study tonight at 5:30 pm

Prayer Meeting Wednesday 5:45 pm

Parents: Don’t forget to pick up your kids from the Clubhouse

Instructions for guests

Benediction

Ephesians 5:8–11 CSB

8 For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light—9 for the fruit of the light consists of all goodness, righteousness, and truth—10 testing what is pleasing to the Lord. 11 Don’t participate in the fruitless works of darkness, but instead expose them.

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