That little phrase ‘from darkness to light’ should be an accurate description of what has happened in the life of every Christian.
1 Peter 2:9 says, ‘But you are A CHOSEN RACE, A royal PRIESTHOOD, A HOLY NATION, A PEOPLE FOR God's OWN POSSESSION, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light;’
This is who we are, not to be so special, but SO THAT we might PROCLAIM who He is.
That is the call upon the life of every believer and the question is as to whether we will follow that call and live a life in the light God calls us to.
Someone has said that the ‘Ten Commandments were not multiple choice’ and neither is the Christian life a ‘take this and leave that’ series of choices. God has called us to a life of total surrender to His will and His calling.
Last Sunday night we looked at the first 4 verses of chapter 1.
1) John alerted us to the missing ingredient in life of church: TRUE FELLOWSHIP.
2) This kind of fellowship is not an agreement of facts or ideas but is a Person
3) This fellowship is not only with one another but with the Father and Jesus the Son.
4) The end result is to know real joy: A constant and not a variable.
Not based on circumstances but on a genuine relationship with God.
In Romania, after communism fell we became aware that many children there were warehoused in huge orphanages. While babies had most of their physical needs met(food, shelter …etc) they were very seldom picked up, hugged or played with. Many of them had what doctors called “failure to thrive syndrome.” This meant that even though they might have been many months or even years old, they still looked and acted like newborns. What they did not have is family that would encourage growth.
Many Christians seem to have this same ‘failure to thrive syndrome’.
It may have been years since they made a decision for Christ but they still have many of the characteristics of a brand new believer. They know little, do little and sometimes care little for the things of the kingdom of God.
Ephesians 4:14, “Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.”
John saw that barriers existed from people enjoying this kind of true fellowship:
TRUE FELLOWSHIP has an enemy: SIN – darkness – self-deception
John used the contrasts of Light and Darkness & Saying verses doing The Christian life is to amount to more than just mere talk:
If we are living in true fellowship then our walk will back up our talk.
If our walk contradicts our talk then we are living a lie.
IF WE PREACH A LIFE CHANGING MESSAGE THEN WE SHOULD HAVE LIVES THAT ARE CHANGED!!
1:5-7 This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but 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.
A woman put an ad in the local paper: “Lost 50 pounds! Selling my fat clothes – they’re in good condition, sizes 18-20.” She was bombarded with phone calls, but nobody wanted to buy the clothes – they all wanted to know how she had lost the 50 pounds. She didn’t know it but the ad said less about the clothes and more about her success which meant she no longer needed the clothes. People in this world are less interested in the religious activities we go through but they are more interested in the true change in a person’s life.
I could put an ad in the paper, ‘Come get free parking, comfortable air conditioning, and a front seat to stretch out on’. That is not what we are here for but what a visitor should find is a building full of changed lives.
Three important questions we can ask ourselves this morning to help our lives get back where God desires them to be.
WHAT DOES HIS LIGHT SAY ABOUT WHO GOD IS?
(5) And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.
John says that one of the things that Jesus made sure we knew was that ‘GOD IS LIGHT’…’no darkness at all’.
This is hard for us to understand since what we know from our world and even from our own hearts is darkness. That which falls short of all God is in His Glory.
That is the reason some people don’t like the light. It is because of what the light shows us to be true about ourselves. It illuminates the sin of our lives.
PS 36:9 For with You is the fountain of life; In Your light we see light.
John 3:19-20 "This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. "For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
Truth be told: We love our darkness. God’s Word shows the filth in my life and warns me of its dangers. In the darkness both evil and good look alike but in the light they can be distinguished.
Did you know that in the darkness I look just like George Clooney or Brad Pitt.
It needs to be REALLY DARK THOUGH.
You can’t tell the difference until the light is turned on.
It is interesting that we are exposed to so much of the darkness of the world by the ‘light of our TV screens’.
THE 23rd CHANNEL: The TV is my shepherd, I shall not turn it off.
It maketh me to lie down on the sofa; It leadeth me away from my faith;
It destroys my soul;
It leadeth me into the paths of sex and violence for the producers sake.
Yea, though I walk through the shadow of my Christian responsibilities, there is no interruption, for the TV is with me; Its cables and remote control, they comfort me. It prepareth a commercial for me in the presence of my worldliness.
It annointeth my head with humanism and materialism; my coveting runneth over.
Surely, laziness and ignorance shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in my house, just watching TV all the time.
John says that instead of darkness we need to remember that GOD IS LIGHT.
IF we want to know God and serve God and walk with God we will only find that possible if we head for the light.
WHAT IS LIGHT? Dictionary: 3rd definition ’an electromagnetic radiation in the wavelength range including infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and x-rays and traveling in a vacuum with a speed of about 186,281 miles per SECOND’.
1st definition: ’something(Someone) that makes vision possible’.
God is light. Scientist’s tell us that light reveals the world to us. We would never see the real world unless God illuminated it through the lens of His Word and His presence.
Psalm 119:130 “The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.
2 Samuel 22:29, “You are my lamp, O Lord; the Lord turns my darkness into light.”
Light helps us to see from God’s perspective and to see things that we could never see when we were in our darkness.
C.S. Lewis said, ’I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else’.
IT IS THE LIGHT TO SEE TRUTH BY.
JESUS: declared Himself ’the Light of the world’. Everywhere He went He brought light: penetrated hearts, exposed sin, revealed truth. made seeing possible
Light provides safety, reveals beauty, exposes flaws, impurity & uncleanness:
In the EARLY 60’s a generation reached up and attempted to turn off the light in this nation. The process of removing God’s Word(and prayer) began in the United States. As a result we as a people began to stumble blindly in the darkness.
We have now spent the last 5 decades not being able to tell the difference between evil and good because in the darkness they both can look very much alike.
Anne Graham - When the daughter of Billy Graham was asked how God could have allowed the tragedy of 911: "I believe that God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years now we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand that He leave us alone!?"
WHAT DOES MY LIFE SAY ABOUT WHO I AM?
(6) If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth;
A man said he got stuck in a traffic jam while commuting into Los Angeles one day. ‘The woman in the SUV in front of me took full advantage of the slowdown. She whipped out her eyebrow pencil, lip gloss and a mirror, applying the finishing touches on her face in the ten minutes it took us to creep through the traffic jam. Finally, as she zoomed away, I caught a glimpse of her vehicle's license plate: NTRL BTY.’(natural beauty)I would say that it may be beauty but it was not NATURAL. Maybe there were all natural products in her make up ingredients?
My license plate, if honest, would have to say ‘ntrl snnr’. NATURAL SINNER
President Calvin Cooledge went to church, and afterwards was asked by a friend what the minister spoke on. “He preached on sin.” The friend asked what the preacher had to say about sin, and was told, “He’s against it.”... A political answer to a definite truth.
When it comes to our sin I am a NATURAL at it and GOD IS AGAINST IT! If sin is defining our lives then we are only fooling ourselves if we think we have a healthy fellowship with God.
Contrast between SAYING & DOING: If we say we have true fellowship then our lives should be a demonstration of that truth.
The lives of too many in the church are making it too hard for lost people to believe in God. Too much saying one thing and living another.
IF WE PREACH A LIFE CHANGING MESSAGE THEN WE SHOULD HAVE CHANGED LIVES!
In San Jose, California a man was illegally burning garbage out back of his home. While burning this garbage the fire got away from him. It spread over a hundred acres. It took six helicopters and 400 firefighters to put it out. He was captain of the San Jose fire department. A man who devotes his life to fighting fires / teaching fire prevention/ but burns down forests.
Chuck Swindoll said, “Some people who recite 'Our Father' on Sunday, the rest of the week go around acting like orphans."
Someone else said, ‘A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday’.
Revelation 3 is a letter to a ‘dead church’ named Sardis. It says that, ‘you have a name that you are alive but you are dead’.
John was saying there was a problem in the church with those who said one thing but their lives evidenced another. That still exists today.
People who claim to their world that they are in fellowship with God but they go on living in spiritual darkness.
Many make lots of big claims: Made this decision, member of this church, gave to this cause but what is your life saying? What is the world hearing from you?
we lie and do not practice the truth;
John is often thought of as being the creampuff disciple. Apostle of Love.
But Jesus called Him a ’son of thunder’.
Speaking the truth in love demands that we sometimes use a little thunder.
John is very blunt: ‘you say you are right with God and live in sin? LIAR!’
I think the last person I would want to go visiting with would be the John.
Imagine John coming back to visit our church and we might visit some less committed church members. I might take him with me to a house and then knock on the door.
‘Mr. _______ I am here with the Apostle John, the one from the Bible, we have noticed that you have not been in church awhile and wanted to make you were doing ok’. The man might reply, ‘I am doing fine spiritually, I was baptized when I was 4 and come to church if I feel like it which is about every three months’.
I am afraid John might say from behind me, ‘LIAR’. ‘I got this John’.
‘Mr. _____ we were just concerned everything was ok for you and wanted to let you know we are thinking and praying for you’. He might reply, ‘I know some of your church members and I am as good as some of them’. LIAR!!
‘John you can’t do that because we don’t tell people the truth today like you did when you were around’. John would say, ‘They lie and do not practice the truth’! The only thing that might scare me more is going to church with the Apostle Paul and listening to a sermon from one of these newer preachers who remove sin, hell, the cross and judgment from the message and just tell people God loves them and would never send anyone to hell. While others might say ‘AMEN’ Paul would stand and say, ‘Sir thou are accursed’.(Gal 1:8)
I have known people in different churches that reminded me of roses. They can do beautiful things for the church. They worked with the youth, were actively involved in outreach, worked with missions. They might have been extremely talented and just like a rose had so much that was beautiful about them.
But roses have thorns, and so did they. Whenever you were around them they would often complain. They complained about the preacher or the sermon, the church leadership, the music, the way the church did this or did not do that, other members, this program or that event.
They never seemed to be happy or to have real no joy in their life.
Just like a rose there is so much that was beautiful but being around them was like holding on to the stem of a rose loaded with thorns.
Like a rose, there is nothing more beautiful than what it means to know Christ.
But roses have thorns and so do many Christians who are not living by the power of the faith they embrace. They can be sharp and pointed to get near.
John is saying that when we say that we are in right fellowship with Christ and live and walk in sin or like the world then we are only fooling ourselves.
In fact for many years, polls have shown that about 1/3 of Americans claim to be born again. You would think that Christianity was alive and well in the United States.
The Bleeding of the Evangelical Church - David Wells reports that pollsters added a few questions to, “Are you born again?” such as “Do you go to church with some regularity, do you pray with some regularity, and do you have then some minimal structure of formal Christian belief?” The number claiming to be born again then dropped from 32 percent to 8 percent. Wells goes on to speculate that if you added a few more basic questions the numbers would drop to 1 or 2 percent. REAL NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTIANITY IS HARD TO FIND.
IF WE PROCLAIM TO THE WORLD A LIFE CHANGING MESSAGE THEN WE OUGHT TO OURSELVES HAVE CHANGED LIVES!
WHAT CAN OUR LIFE SAY ABOUT WHAT CHRIST HAS DONE?
(7) but 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.
One of the problems we often run into here in East Texas is birds on the roads. All of us who drive have probably experience buzzards on the road and wondered ‘will they move out of the way before I hit them’? They always do. Geese and buzzards are different. I was driving thru Holly Lake and about 5 geese were laying and standing in the road. I drove up to them expecting them to move. They simply looked at my car as if to read my front license plate and didn’t even make the effort to stand up.
There are some Crazy birds in Belize - They’re brown and have big eyes. They lay by the roads & wait for car lights to come by. Then they dart at the last second and to try to find bugs in the passing lights.
It reminds me of those who run in and out of church as fast as they can to try to get as much as they can, as quick as they can so they can get back to what they really want to be doing.
John says that a true follower of Christ does not dart in and out of the light but that they WALK in the light. They walk in the light because that is the only way to truly experience a relationship with Christ.
How far can you walk? one block, two? one mile, ten? We used to be a nation of people who walked, but now are a nation dependent upon the automobile. Churches used to be filled people who walked with God. But now most depend upon the music leader, preacher, Sunday school teacher, youth pastor and other members or upon programs to do the walking for them.
Walking can be hard. People walk in different ways. Some people SIT. Some people stroll, some people strut, and some people power walk. Which one of these would best describe your Christian faith?
A baby is born and it eventually learns among other things to walk. But walking has an enemy: It is called GRAVITY. Gravity causes stumbling and falling.
New believers also must learn to ’walk in the light’. To make progress, move forward. But like a child it is learned behavior. One enemy of Christian walk: SIN-constantly pulling us down, causing us to stumble and fall.
SIN is not simply outer disobedience but is inner rebellion.
It is a refusal to submit to the law of God.
The essence of sin is a desire for personal independence from God’s demands.
Sin makes us get the whole idea of God and ourselves backwards.
if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light,
Martyn Lloyd-Jones says our main problem is our self-centeredness and so we come to the Christian faith looking to have personal needs met. I’m not happy; can God make me happy? I’m looking for something that I don’t have; can God give it to me? How can Christianity help me with my problems and needs?
To approach the Christian faith in that manner is to cater to our main problem, which is self! He says, “The first answer of the gospel can always, in effect, be put in this way: ‘Forget yourself and contemplate God.’”
When we put God first then it changes everything else in our spiritual lives: we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.
Corrie Ten Boom made this observation about our trying to rationalize our sins. She said, “The blood of Jesus never cleansed an excuse.”
In Charles Colson's book, Born Again, which is about his experiences during Watergate, Colson shares one of President Nixon's problems -- he could never admit he was wrong in anything. In fact, Colson said that even when Nixon obviously had a cold -- nose running, face red, sneezing, all the symptoms of a cold -- he would never admit it.
An honest walk with God in the light of His presence and holiness exposes all of our sinfulness but it also transforms our relationships with both God and men.
One of the astronauts talked of the feelings of being alone while the other men were on the surface of the moon. He said it was the worst feeling he had ever had. Sin is not only disobedience but leads to a distance from God and others that is worse than the sin itself.
When we are walking with God in the light it is then true fellowship is possible with one another. No more loneliness or an emptiness inside.
TO WALK IN THE LIGHT is to live a life: 1) illumined by God’s truth,
2) In Constant contact with God,
3) Having no tolerance for the darkness,
Together we can agree upon these ground rules for our fellowship:
Are you walking in the light?
Do you have real fellowship in your life with God? With others in the body of Christ?
Or are you just fooling yourself and not facing the fact that your life and His calling are far from adding up?
There is a museum in Barcelona that has an interesting exhibit. 26 works of Michelangelo. Michelangelo worked on 40 statutes but only 14 were ever finished. That means that 26 were left incomplete. These statues are a strange mixture of images which look like people trying to escape from a block of stone from which they are only halfway carved out of.
I wonder if heaven will have an exhibit like this. I wonder if we will be put on display in a way that shows how much of God’s work was left unfinished in our lives. How much of sin still dominated our image.
How far we ended from the finish line in the race God called us to.
Things in this life were just too important to stick with the race. How can you finish anything when you only give it any attention on one day a week?
John says God is light and fellowship with Him will only happen in the light.
If we live our lives in darkness and say we have fellowship with God then we are fooling ourselves.
God calls us to the light but the only way in is through the cleansing power of His Son’s blood that was shed for us on Calvary.
Do you know Christ as your Savior? No other name under heaven by which we may be saved…. Jesus said, ‘No one comes to the Father except by Me’.
Are you walking with God in obedient fellowship? What is the next step you need to take in your Christian walk? Can you take it right now?
WE WHO PROCLAIM A LIFE CHANGING MESSAGE SHOULD ALSO BE PRESENTING LIVES THAT ARE CHANGED!!
