I John
1:5-2:2
God, You
indeed are light, and in You, there is no darkness at all. We pray that You would give us understanding
in this passage today. Please help us to
hone in on what we can apply in our own lives from Your Word. Thank You for Your love. We worship You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Beginning
with verse 5 …
This is the message we have heard from him
[Jesus] and declare to you: God is light; in Him there is no darkness at
all. I John 1:5
I think the
first statement is straightforward enough, right? God is light.
He is perfect and pure. In I
Timothy, it says that God is light and lives in unapproachable light
(6:16). In the Psalms, it says that he
wraps Himself with light as a garment. (104:2)
Jesus as a part of God declared that He was the light of the world and
that He had received everything from His Father.
What about
us? What about apart from Christ? Until we are made into light, then we are
darkness (Ephesians 5:8). We do not
possess the ability to find our way apart from Jesus. We are completely in darkness.
I was at
work a week ago, and I saw this calendar on a coworker’s desk for the month of
January. I’d been looking at it every now
and then all month. It is such a
fantastic picture, that I was actually able to google it and show it to you.
I love the
fact that you can see through the wave and even catch a glimpse of the
shore. It won some awards in photography
competition. I think this is one of the
really big turtles, but to me, it looks small in the picture because of the
fish eye effect of the lens.
Back in
September, our family was at the beach.
We had the blessing of seeing a sea turtle nest hatch one night while we
were there. About 100 turtles hatched
that night. It was a combination of
really cute and amazing.
What was
amazing to me wasn’t so much this awe inspiring sense of the beauty of
nature. It was the fact that any turtle
survives to adulthood. There are people
there working so diligently to ensure that all of those turtles which hatch
make it to the ocean. They patrol the
beach each night to see if there is going to be a hatch that night. They even move nests when they are too close
to the water or in too busy of an area.
Many of these folks are retirees, so it is an activity that they can
keep busy with and look forward to.
Here’s a
couple of minute video from our trip. I
apologize that it is not motion picture quality, but it was like ten or eleven
at night. The artificial lights that you
see are red or green. I think this was
taken on an iPod because that is what we had at the time.
As we
watched these little guys going down to the water, they seemed to almost
desperately need the lamps and flashlights that you saw in the video. Without that, they would have been all over
the place. Then, even still, once they
did reach the water, a single wave would push them back 20 or 30 feet or more.
I’m sure
that the sea turtles get along a lot better in water than they do on sand, but
compared to a decent sized fish, I’m sure they are really slow movers. If they were too close to the surface, they’d
be a tasty treat for a bird. They are
reptiles, they’ve got to breath.
So back to
my epiphany while looking at the first picture I showed you. Sitting there in the office looking at that
picture, I finally observed out loud, it’s almost miraculous that any of those
turtles survives to adulthood. You know
how you get these flashes of understanding.
You’re just shocked. (You
remember in Ratatouille when Ego eats the Ratatouille at the end, and there’s
this freeze frame and flash back to his childhood. The spoon just falls from his hand.)
In my case
about the turtles, it was the realization that it is a miracle that any of
those turtles gets to adulthood. There
is no way that any of those turtles by their own initiative can insure their
survival. If any one of those turtles
swims or crawls anywhere other than God’s path for them, then they are
dead. They can’t outswim another
fish. They can’t hide in the open ocean.
The lady at
the beach that night said they needed to swim 200 miles to reach the Sargasso
Sea where they could hide in the seaweed and find necessary food to grow
up. When I looked it up yesterday, it
turns out the Sargasso is about 600 miles away from where we saw the eggs
hatch.
These little
turtles could barely get themselves in the water under the cover of
darkness. What should you expect to
happen to them in the open water in daylight?
It is only by God’s leading and protection that a single one of those
turtles has a chance at survival.
What about
us then? Are we any different than the
sea turtles? Can we find our way in the
darkness? Can we protect ourselves if we
are exposed to danger and harm? Don’t we
need to stay in the light that God has provided us? Can we hope to fare any better than the
turtles without God’s leading and direction?
If we claim to have fellowship with Him yet
walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. I John 1:6
In II
Corinthians 6:14, Paul writes this question, “What fellowship can light have
with darkness?” If God is light, pure
light, without darkness, then He cannot contain or be connected to any darkness
at all.
Thinking
back to the sea turtles, why would we want to walk in darkness?
What is
darkness? Absence of light? Well, yes, but take it a step further. What do we gain with light, when light is
present? We can see. There is clarity. What is the opposite of that? Confusion, obscurity?
The second definition
for darkness in Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary is this, “Obscurity; want of
clearness or perspicuity; that quality or state which renders any thing
difficult to be understood; as the darkness of counsels.”
Let me tell
you guys a funny story. I told the folks
in the book study for How People Grow
that I really desired to grow in the area of eating. Not that I would eat more, but that I would
eat less. I’ve always had this thing
with food that I get some kind of comfort value from food that is not in line
with what it should be. So, if I’m
bummed or stressed or tired or feeling like I’m not in control of my life, a
fistful of chips or a block of cheese or whatever will somehow make my life
better.
I’m not
saying food is bad or wrong. It’s also
not bad or wrong to enjoy food. God
Himself promised to the people of Israel again and again to bring them into the
Promisedland, a land flowing with? Milk
and honey. I’m just saying you can eat
for the wrong reasons and that I’m the chief of sinners.
I guess the
Lord has been bugging me about it for a while, but I just did my own thing like
always. It was kind of my own little
Gnostic heresy. “It doesn’t matter
because it’s just matter.” Even in the
past when I would lose weight, I was always trying to figure out some angle
where I could eat something with freedom.
The last one I remember was trying to see if I could lose weight by
eating as much as I wanted following a diabetic diet. When Fred switched to a diabetic diet, he
lost weight. It should work for me,
right? You know what? That didn’t work either.
I lost 30
lbs one time on a Diet 7Up and sugar free peppermint bubble gum diet. As long as there was something unlimited for
me, then I could feel like I wasn’t “trapped” by my diet.
I’ve known
it for a long time, and I came to this realization that I was not walking in
the light with respect to food. Why is
God not sufficient for me in facing my trials?
Why does a half a box of Cheese-Its have any impact on my attitude? If I’m going to heaven where I will have
every good thing, why am I worried today about whether or not I can eat 5
Cheetos or 500? My thinking about food
was obscured, clouded, and not right.
We can also have wrong thinking and be in
darkness when we use the wrong standard.
God gives us the Bible as our standard.
Whenever we get tangled up with the wrong standard, then we can be left
believing the wrong things. The Word
tells us that Satan masquerades as an angel of light (II Corinthians
11:14). There are plenty of places for
wrong standards out there.
I’ll go on
with the weight loss thing. I’ve been
sharing this thing with a few folks to get their help and encouragement. One guy at work is trying to quit smoking. I forwarded him some of my thoughts about
eating to try and encourage him to have a right attitude about smoking, extra
ammunition as it were.
It turns
out, he’s given me more encouragement than anyone about exercising than anyone
else I’ve talked to. He was talking to
me about not weighing a scale and using body fat table to check my
progress. Well, the table has
waist-wrist measurements in half inches and weight in 5 lb increments. Even if you’re doing really good, you don’t
lose a half an inch or 5 lbs a week. It
turns out that according to this table, my body fat percentage is actually
going up since I’ve really changed my eating habits.
So, I’m like
that can’t be right. I’m wondering how I
should be measuring this stuff, and so I figure if I measure my stomach around
my waist where my pants fit rather than my spare tire, then I’ll get a better
result. Better means lower.
I measure my
waist, where I wear my pants, and it’s 38 inches. 38 inches!
I wear size 34 pants. Now, I’ve
got a mechanical engineering degree. I
know enough physics to know that you can’t put a 38 inch waist inside a 34 inch
circle. So, I go and pull out my pants
and start measuring. All my pants are
marked 34/32, meaning 34” in the waist and 32” in the inseam.
Here are the
waist measurements of all my slacks from end of the button hole to the point
where the button is sewed on. Are you
ready for this? 36, 35 ½, 35 ½, 36.5,
37, 35 ¾.
There is a
huge variation, and the average is more than 2 inches greater than the size printed
on the pants. What is written on the
pants (size 34) has nothing to do with how they are actually put together.
Let me drop
in one more caveat. God does not look at
external appearances. He looks at the
heart. What the scale or the body fat table
says should not be the ultimate standard.
The standard should be whether we walk in the light in every area of our
lives. Let God inform us on where we
need to be and what we need to be doing.
There is this old song from Charlie Peacock called Monkeys at the
Zoo. Let’s listen to it now. We’ll have the lyrics up on the overhead so
that you can follow along.
Monkeys at the Zoo
Charlie Peacock
Will it be different now, or the same?
Will I have learned anything, or was it
just a way to spend a day or two set aside for thinking thoughts about you?
If that's all it was I had a good time.
But that won't be enough for me, not
this year, not anytime soon,
I have got to clean house, gotta make
my bed, gotta clear my head,
It's getting kinda stuffy in here,
smells sort of funky too, like monkeys at the zoo,
I have been whoring after things 'cause
I wanna feel safe inside - that's a big, fat lie,
No amount of green, gold or silver will
ever take the place of the peace of God.
Spirit, come flush the lies out,
Spirit, come flush the lies out.
Will it be different now, or the same?
Have I changed at all?
And if you were to dive deep inside my
soul would you find Jesus there, or a gaping hole?
Should I be content with my
"beautiful" Christian life?
But that won't be enough for me, not
this year, not anytime soon,
I have got to clean house, gotta make
my bed, gotta clear my head,
It's getting kinda stuffy in here,
smells sort of funky too, like monkeys at the zoo,
I have been whoring after things 'cause
I wanna get everything right - that's a big, fat lie,
No amount of green, gold or silver, the
perfect body, another hot toddy, work for the Lord, fame and power, power and
sex, a seat at the table at the Belle Mead Country Club,
Here's the rub: nothing will ever take
the place of the peace of God.
Spirit, come flush the lies out,
Spirit, come flush the lies out.
Will it be different now, or the same?
Will I have learned anything?
I mention
all this in reference to darkness because if you have the wrong standard, then
you very easily can draw the wrong conclusions.
What are
some of the wrong standards we can follow?
There’s the stuff we think up.
There’s the stuff that other people tell us, or that we overhear. There’s the stuff that we hear on the
television. There’s the stuff we read on
the internet. When we measure our lives
by the wrong standards, then we as believers are miserable. We don’t ever feel right. We keep “chasing after the wind” like Solomon
did and then wrote about in Ecclesiastes, which is one of the saddest books in
the entire Bible.
What if we
have the right focus? What if we connect
to the truth instead of artificial and inadequate substitutes?
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. I John 1:7
If we walk
in the light, this enables all kind of good stuff to happen. We can have fellowship with God and with one
another. And, we are purified from all
sin. Not only are we forgiven, which is
what we most often focus on. Don’t get
me wrong. I’m ecstatic over
forgiveness. I’m dependent on
forgiveness daily. However, there is
purification from sin, too. We don’t
have to live in bondage to sin anymore (Roman 6:16). We don’t have to present ourselves to sin
anymore. Instead, we can be slaves of
righteousness. (Romans 6:18)
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive
ourselves and the truth is not in us. I
John 1:8
This topic
of sin will keep coming up throughout I John.
Sin is mentioned 27 times in I John either in the verb or noun form
(Strong’s words G264 and G266, hamartanō and hamartia)
Jesus is the
way, the truth, and the life. (John
14:6) If we claim to be without sin,
then we have separated ourselves from Jesus.
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and
just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. I John
1:9
When we open
up and confess, God’s response to us is in keeping with His character and His
gracious commitment to us His people.
When we come to God and confess Jesus as Lord, we enter into the
intimate fellowship of a covenant relationship, like marriage. (Zechariah 8:8, Hosea who was the
representative of God’s faithfulness in the midst of desertion and adultery.)
31 “The time is coming,” declares the
LORD,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel
and with the house of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their forefathers
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,”
declares the LORD.
33 “This is the covenant I will make
with the house of Israel
after that time,” declares the
LORD.
“I will put my law in their
minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
34 No longer will a man teach his
neighbor,
or a man his brother, saying,
‘Know the LORD,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the
greatest,”
declares the LORD.
“For I will forgive their
wickedness
and will remember their sins no
more.”
Jeremiah 31:31-34
This is the
covenant God has established with us. We
are forgiven, and He will put His law in our minds and on our hearts, not the
law of death, but the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:1)
If we claim we have not sinned, we make Him
out to be a liar and His word has no place in our lives. I John 1:10
So John is
writing primarily against the Gnostic heresies that had already begun to spring
up at the end of the first century.
These heresies would go on to become much more organized and formalized
over the next two centuries or so.
Gnostics had this weird paradoxical belief with which they could have
their cake and eat it, too. Gnostics
said that matter and thereby all flesh was evil. To them, spirit was all that mattered. Spirit was good. These are the same guys that came up with all
sorts of different reasons why Jesus wasn’t really here in the flesh. So, here’s where it gets weird. Since matter was the evil rather than
breaking God’s righteous law (I John 3:4), then what you did in the body didn’t
matter. I know that it sounds really
weird to our ears, but this was the kind of belief system they had built
up. It was completely contrary to the
doctrine of God.
Let’s be
careful ourselves to confess our sins quickly and not hold out thinking that we
are somehow justified in any wrong behavior lest we ourselves make Jesus out to
be a liar.
My dear children, I write this to you so
that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the
Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning
sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the
whole world.
I John 2:1-2
God’s
holiness demands punishment for the trespass, for the sin. Jesus is the atonement, propitiation,
appeasement. God’s wrath is directed
onto Jesus. (Isaiah 53:5)
This idea of
one who speaks in our defense is the same language that John used in his gospel
to describe the Holy Spirit (John 14:16).
I find that really cool. We have
a comforter and advocate that is with us and even in us, the Holy Spirit. We also have a defender and advocate who is
with the Father which is Jesus.
The NIV text
note is kind of fun. It renders the
translation, “He is the one who turns aside God’s wrath, taking away our
sins.” Jesus is our Savior, saving even
the whole world.
That
statement regarding the sins of the whole world does not imply universalism (or
that everyone will get saved) but rather it demonstrates the impartiality of
God. (John 1:29) We still have to believe in Jesus individually
to be saved. (Roman 3:25) “Christ Jesus whom God put forward as a
propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith.”
Earlier, we
read I John 1:7 where it says that the blood of Jesus purifies us from all
sin. In Hebrews, it explains there is no
forgiveness apart from the shedding of blood (9:22).
Blood is
amazing. Our life is in our blood. But it’s also kind of gross. In John 6, when Jesus talked to His followers
saying they must drink His blood and eat His flesh, then people started to turn
away. It was prohibited to eat blood or
even flesh with blood in it according to the Old Testament law. Now, we are instructed to “drink” it and we
sing songs about it, fountains filled with blood. I used to think that was strange, but now, I
have a different feeling. I feel sorrow
at the sacrifice and loss that Jesus and the Father endured because of me. But, I also rejoice that I have a new life
because of that blood. I am so relieved
that I am clean because of the blood that Jesus shed for me.
I want to
show you a short video that may help change your perspective about the blood
that was shed and what it has done for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx0L_biKLuo
from 14:00 to 18:47
This is John
3:19-21. Jesus is speaking.
It is not
what we have done. It is what God has
done through us. Let us live by the
truth and come into the light. Let us
see plainly and not be deceived. Let us
put our hope in Jesus Christ alone.
Let’s pray.
Lord Jesus,
it is You whom we worship. Thank you for
being our defender. Thank you for dying
on the cross for our sins. I pray for
each one here today. I pray that they
would take Your truth with them. For
those who know you, I pray that they would multiply the new life that you have
given them by telling others the good news that they can have new life,
too. For those who do not know you, I
pray that they would call on your Name alone and that they would believe that
You are who You said You are. The Son of
God and our Savior and Lord. In Jesus’
name. Amen.
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