Learning To Be The Light
1 John 1:5-10
Intro. There’s a new show on television called Sleepy Hollow. Have any of you seen it? It’s loosely based on the old story of the legend of sleepy hollow and the headless horseman. When I say loosely, I mean really loosely. The story doesn’t take place in olden times but in today’s society. It would take much too long to explain how they did that. As I tell my wife, you will just have to trust me on that. As the show has gone forward, they have tracked way off the legend of sleepy hollow and have gotten really creepy. We watch this show because at my house, it may not be what we all want to watch but it is something we can compromise on. Anyway, this week was especially creepy because it involved demon possession. I had already been studying today’s scripture and at the end of the show, the little girl that was possessed looked at the heroes, Ichabod Crane being one of them and said this. “The darkness is coming”. My immediate thought was sweetheart; you don’t know what you’re talking about. The darkness is already here. It has been here since mankind disobeyed God and has gotten darker ever since.
. Our scripture this morning is about light in the darkness.
. How we become a light and how we sustain that light.
. You see, even one small individual can be a light.
. In 1972, NASA launched the exploratory space probe Pioneer 10. According to Leon Jaroff in Time, the satellite’s primary mission was to reach Jupiter, photograph the planet and its moons, and beam data to earth about Jupiter’s magnetic field, radiation belts, and atmosphere. Scientists regarded this as a bold plan, for at that time no earth satellite had ever gone beyond Mars, and they feared the asteroid belt would destroy the satellite before it could reach its target.
But Pioneer 10 accomplished its mission and much, much more. Swinging past the giant planet in November 1973, Jupiter’s immense gravity hurled Pioneer 10 at a higher rate of speed toward the edge of the solar system. At one billion miles from the sun, Pioneer 10 passed Saturn. At some two billion miles, it hurtled past Uranus; Neptune at nearly three billion miles; Pluto at almost four billion miles. By 1997, twenty-five years after its launch, Pioneer 10 was more than six billion miles from the sun.
And despite that immense distance, Pioneer 10 continued to beam back radio signals to scientists on Earth. "Perhaps most remarkable," writes Jaroff, "those signals emanate from an 8-watt transmitter, which radiates about as much power as a bedroom night light, and takes more than nine hours to reach Earth."
The Little Satellite That Could was not qualified to do what it did. Engineers designed Pioneer 10 with a useful life of just three years. But it kept going and going. By simple longevity, its tiny 8-watt transmitter radio accomplished more than anyone thought possible.
So it is when we offer ourselves to serve the Lord. God can work even through someone with 8-watt abilities.
. All we have to do is be the light and let God use us.
.How do we live in the light though, How do we learn to be the light.
. Living in the light is a process that we learn as Christians.
. I asked that they play the song, learning to be the light, right before the sermon because that is what John is talking about in our scripture this morning.
. When we are saved, God does not go “Poof” you are now a perfect individual. We are in his eyes but in the eyes of the world, we are still the same person we had always been. We must live in the light in order to break through the darkness that is in the world.
. That’s what John is writing about in our scripture this morning.
. In the first 4 verses, John introduces this letter by telling his readers that they can believe what he is about to tell them because he got this “straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak”.
. He says that he has seen this Jesus, touched this Jesus , talked with this Jesus and that Jesus is life itself. In Jesus all life is revealed.
He was from the beginning and came to us and is now back with God.
. He sums up why he is writing to them in verse 4 of 1 John 1.
. 4We are writing these things so that you may fully share our joy.
. He says what I am about to share with you is how to be joyous. How to share in the Joy of knowing Jesus.
. Then he tells them how to live in the light of God.
. Lets read our scripture.
. 5This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all.
6So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth.
7But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.
8If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth.
9But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.
10If we claim we have not sinned, we are calling God a liar and showing that his word has no place in our hearts.
. Fellowship is crucial to living in the light.
. The first thing we see here is that:
We must have fellowship with God.
. Look at verses 5&6 again.
. 5This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all.
6So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth.
. We must have true fellowship with God.
. Do we truly have fellowship with God or are we just pretenders.
. John calls this living in spiritual darkness.
. Merriam Webster’s online dictionary defines a pretender as:
. “One who makes false or hypocritical show”
. Many people claim to have fellowship with God but they are only pretenders.
. They live in what John calls “spiritual darkness”
. Let me tell you a story.
. William Lobdell is a writer and reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Several years ago he attended a men’s retreat and decided that he wanted to follow Christ. He began to attend church, read the Bible and serve God in a variety of ways. He soon wanted to write about faith and he approached the Times on numerous occasions about creating a religion column. After much persuasion the Times allowed Lobdell to write “Getting Religion”, a weekly column about religion.
Lobdell wrote about an elderly church organist who became a mentor to the man that tried to rape and kill her. He wrote about an Orthodox Jewish mother who developed a line of modest clothing for Barbie dolls. Lobdell’s stories didn’t just inform but they inspired the reader.
Lobdell loved his life. He couldn’t wait to get up and go to work in the morning and he couldn’t wait to go to church on Sundays. Then some of his religion stories began to bother him at a deep level. He began to cover the Catholic clergy sex scandal. He saw how the church had been covering up the misdeeds of her priests. He interviewed victims and families and became deeply grieved.
Then Lobdell began to cover the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). The prosperity theology of founders Paul and Jan Crouch had them calling for sacrificial donations from viewers with the promise of God answering prayers and bestowing blessings. Meanwhile the Crouches ate $180 per plate meals, flew in a $21 million corporate jet and had access to 30 TBN owned homes across the country. All paid for with donor money.
Lobdell met and covered the work of faith healer Benny Hinn. He interviewed sick people from all over the world who would spend their life savings to come to one of Hinn’s “Miracle Crusades”. As an act of faith they would give money to Hinn and take themselves off of medical treatments so that God might heal them. And they weren’t healed.
The final straw was when Lobdell went to Portland to cover the case of a single mom whose sickly son needed help and she was seeking child support from the child’s father, a Catholic priest. The priest simply declared to the court that he had taken a vow of poverty, had no possessions but the clothes on his back and therefore could not afford the $323 a month child support. Yet, the religious order came up with the necessary money for the priest to have a sharp lawyer to represent him. The mother who couldn’t afford a lawyer lost the case.
With that Lobdell walked away from Christianity. The lifestyles of “pretender Christians” was too discouraging for him to overcome. He has asked the Times to remove him from the religion beat.
.Folks, we don’t have any control over what happens with clergy sex scandals and extravagant lifestyles of religious celebrities.
.But, what we can deal with is our own faithfulness to Christ and His mission, and the faithfulness of this church.
. If we are to walk in the light, we must have true fellowship with God.
. We cannot be Pretend Christians.
. In learning to be the light, we realize that our fellowship with God must be genuine.
. Not only are we to have fellowship with God, we are also to have fellowship with each other.
. Look at verse 7 with me.
. 7But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.
. If we are living in the light, if we are radiating the light of Jesus, we must have fellowship with one another.
. John was writing this letter to people who claimed to be Christians.
. He is telling them and us that we must have fellowship with our Christian brothers and sisters.
. There was a sect that had developed within the Christian community who were called Gnostics.
. The Gnostics thought that they were special.
. We could get into the weeds of Gnosticism but this isn’t the forum for that.
. Suffice it to say.
. They thought that they had a special relationship with God that the other church folk didn’t have.
. John is saying to them that they are no different from all other believers.
. We are all believers in the same God and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses all of us from our sin. You are no more special to God than any other believer.
. We are to love one another and stay in fellowship with each other.
. When Christians fight among themselves, do you know who suffers?
. The lost. Unfortunately, that is the light that many of us shine. Instead of the light of Jesus shining in our lives, people see the darkness of selfishness and pettiness that comes into churches and destroys them.
. When some of us think that we are better or more enlightened or “better Christians” than others, the light gets extinguished.
. We are to have fellowship with God and fellowship with or Christian brothers and sisters if we are to walk in the light and be a light for God.
. Lastly, we need to realize that we are not:
Perfect Christians
. Living in the light does not include a holier than thou attitude.
. Look at verses 8-10 again.
. 8If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth.
9But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.
10If we claim we have not sinned, we are calling God a liar and showing that his word has no place in our hearts.
. The Gnostics claimed that they were sinless and that their higher knowledge lifted them above other people.
. John hits them right between the eyes here.
. If you claim that you have no sin, you are only fooling yourself.
. WE all have sin and must continually confess and ask forgiveness from God.
. Have you ever seen the bumper sticker that says “Christians are not perfect, just forgiven”.
. John says that we must confess our sins and when we do, God will forgive our sins through the blood of Jesus Christ.
. This is one thing we can learn from the Catholic Church.
. This concept of confession. We must confess our sin. It’s who we confess them to that I disagree with them on.
. We confess our sins directly to God; He is faithful and just to forgive them.
. When was the last time you looked to God and confessed your sin.
. John is telling us that in order to live in the light, we must confess our sin.
. You have heard that confession is good for the soul, I tell you that confession is essential to living in fellowship with God and our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.
. When we are in the proper relationship with God and our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, the light of Jesus will shine in the darkness.
. Folks don’t let your light grow dim.
. The farther you get out of fellowship with God and others, the dimmer your light is.
. We are all in this process of learning to be the light.
. Our light grows brighter as we develop a deeper fellowship with God and each other.
. If we as a Church are to be a light on this hill here in Monroe Ga, It will be accomplished through our relationship with God and with each other.
Invitation
*** Illustrations from sermon central
