1 John 1:5-2:3
Living in the Light - Get Real
Last week I talked about two streams of thought about Jesus that have some similarities to groups that the apostle John was having to deal with. I think these streams are best represented today by people like Dan Brown & his novel, the Da Vinci Code and Tom Harpur and his book, the Pagan Christ. These writers have very little in common except that they both present a conspiracy theory that says that early Christianity was very different from Christianity today, and that the original version was suppressed by the Church in order to keep the people in their place, and keep the truth from them. both brown and harpur say that they have discovered the original faith long buried and declare it to us now. It’s strange that the two versions are so vastly different from each other!
John had the opposite problem to deal with – there were people around his community who were declaring that they had the truth about God, the universe and everything, but they weren’t telling unless you joined their club, were initiated and got “enlightened.”
1 John 1:5-2:3
This is the message we have heard from him and 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.
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.
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.
Living in the Light (5-7)
Up until a few months ago, when I would read this passage there would be a number of questions swimming around my brain – I read John’s symbolic words about light as speaking of moral purity – God is light, he is pure, holy, never doing wrong. Darkness is sin, the wrong things we do in our lives and the wrong lifestyles we choose, so a verse like “If we claim to have fellowship with (God) and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.” would seem to say that if we know God we will not sin. Which is funny, because the next paragraph says if we say we are without sin, we are liars!
John seem to contradict himself within one paragraph!
Last spring, I was talking with Glen Nyhus and everything became clear. When John is talking about living in the light, he is not talking about being perfect, but about living open lives – about being honest about who we are and what we do, what we believe and what we feel. Living in the light is not about being perfect, but it is about living with the lights on, so we don’t hide anything.
John is combating the people who have said that they have found the light and are keeping it a secret by calling his own people live open lives, free for all to see. The truth is not something that you keep hidden, it is something that you bring out into the light! And if we say that we are friends of God who is pure light, there should not be parts of our lives that we keep hidden in the shadows, we are people of the light and we need to live in the light.
The difficulty is that many people’s experience of the church is often the exact opposite! They say that they’ve given up on church because it is full of hypocrites. Instead of church being the community where you can truly be who you are, there often seems to be an unwritten rule that says that we need to keep the broken areas of our life in the shadows. We might put up a sign that says, “Welcome to church, pick up your happy mask at the door.” Many of us are not happy with who we are, or we are even ashamed with who we think we are, so we present something that we think is much better and acceptable than who we are.
Jesus accused the Pharisees of the same thing – they were more concerned with being seen as good and respectable than they were with actually being good. Jesus calls them well decorated graves – beautiful on the outside, rotting on the inside.
This is not the way it is supposed to be. The church should be the place where we can be most real, a place where we can leave our masks at the door.
Many of us keep our masks firmly in place because we believe that “If people really knew me, they would hate me.” So, in order to keep our friends and the acceptance of others, we keep out “true” selves hidden and present what we think is a much more acceptable “us.” John says that the opposite is true! He says: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.”
It is when we let people see the real us that we have fellowship, friendship, family, community, not when we keep hidden. I have experienced this myself – the guys that I have the deepest friendship, love and acceptance are the guys that I have been most real with: sharing my struggles, confessing my sin, sharing my joys and my tears with. When I need a good shot of acceptance and love, I call one of these guys who knows me best, and they remind me that even in the bright light of day, they still want me as a friend.
There is responsibility on both sides of this – we are called to live in the light, but we are also called to accept those who step out into the light and reveal themselves. If we foster a culture of judgmentalism no one will be real. If someone steps into the light and we run in horror, everyone else will stay firmly in the shadows
Romans 15:7
Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.
Colossians 3:
12Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
Luke Describes the early church this way:
Acts 2:46
Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, - sincere = the outside matches the inside
John argues against the secretism of the Gnostics of his day by saying, we are living in the Light. Our difficulty is that it is easy for Joe or Josephine public to believe in the conspiracy theories of Brown or Harpur because their experience of the church is a group full of cover-ups. The recent cover-ups of the Catholic church down in the States only helps to reinforce that we are a group that keeps the truth hidden. It is not a great leap for people to believe that the church has kept the truth hidden for 2,000 years. One of the ways that we can fight against various conspiracy theories is to be the most open people that our friends and neighbours have ever met.
Peter writes us
1 Peter 2:12
Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
Living In the Light Begins With Admitting Our Sin (8-10)
Living in the light is not all about showing what we might see as our ugly side, but it usually starts there. If we can admit our wrongs, we can also share our hopes, dreams, and our joys with our friends.
On the other side, we are not a community that shares our dark side with one another and is happy to remain with it. We share our wrongs in order to allow the Spirit of God, to shape us to be more like the savior we worship. As the title of Max Lucado’s book says, God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to leave you like that, he wants you to be just like Jesus.”
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.
We begin getting real with each other by first getting real with God.
This is what David writes in the psalms:
Psalm 32
1 Blessed are those
whose transgressions are forgiven,
whose sins are covered.
2 Blessed are those
whose sin the LORD does not count against them
and in whose spirit is no deceit.
3 When I kept silent,
my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
4 For day and night
your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was sapped
as in the heat of summer.
5 Then I acknowledged my sin to you
and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, "I will confess
my transgressions to the LORD "—
and you forgave
the guilt of my sin.
6 Therefore let everyone who is godly pray to you
while you may be found;
surely when the mighty waters rise,
they will not reach him.
Why would we hold our sins inside, when it is so good to give them up to God and let him take them away?
But we need to go a step further as we come out into the light – we need to confess our sins to another Christian. This is what James writes:
James 5:16
Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.
If this much light scares you, you are not alone – the first time I confessed my sin to a friend, it was the most frightening thing I have ever done – cliff jumping was a cake-walk compared to confession, but listen to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer says in “Life Together:”
“Why is that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is a just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to a Holy God?
But if we do find it easier, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution (forgiveness)
Andis not the reason perhaps for our countless relapses and the feebleness of our Christian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living on self-forgiveness and not a real forgiveness? Self-forgiveness can never lead to a breach with sin…”
Although we are a community called to live in the light, there are certain areas that are private, not public, so we do not have public confession of sin, but in order to make your confession real, find a trustworthy friend who can hear your confession and who can assure you of God’s forgiveness. You will be surprise how confession will remove your shame, your fear and your need for a mask.
Why stepping into the light is good – Japanese pilot confessing after the crash – millions saved
Why stepping into the light is dangerous – Cheri Dinovo – past life is brought up to haunt her
Same with St. Patrick – confessed sin was used against him later in life
Our Hope: Jesus atonement
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.
Once again, John is calling us to not just be open to others about our brokenness, but his hope is that we stop the behaviors that hurt ourselves, hurt others, and hurt God. The good news is that Jesus, in his death on the cross, takes the pain that we caused God upon himself.
Why can’t God just forgive us? - our neighbour backing into our brand new car – we can forgive them, but someone must still pay for the repair. Jesus pays for the repair with his life
Baptism as a symbol of our unity with Christ’s death, burial and resurrection.
John invites us to bare our soul to God and to our Christian friends, but he doesn’t leave us naked, Jesus comes and clothes us with his goodness, his righteousness.
Conclusion
Get real – step into the light – you might not like what you see, but there is nothing that it is hidden from God, he already knows it – he only starts to work on it when we admit to it.
Get real – people will see that there are no secrets in church & know that it is for them
