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So that you too may have fellowship with us, and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. This is the message we have heard from Him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.
If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice 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, cleanses us from all sin.
This is the message, John says. You might remember from last time, if you were here, the last time that I preached and I preached on verses one through four, that when we looked at those first four verses, that John and his fellow apostles, they had a proclamation for us.
And that proclamation is of a person, namely Jesus. That Jesus is the eternal life, that He's truly God, that He clothed Himself in flesh, truly man, and that He could be seen and touched and heard. And the purpose of their proclamation was in verses three and verse four, that we might have fellowship, both vertically with God the Father and horizontally with each other.
What sin had once separated, we learned, the atoning death of Christ brings together. So when we get to verse five, and it starts with, this is the message, you might expect to read next that Christ died for your sins and rose on the third day.
Or you might expect to read, repent and be saved, or even love God and love your neighbor. But instead, what we read is that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. So tonight, we're going to look closely at this message and try to answer two questions together.
One, what does it mean to say God is light? And two, how do we live in fellowship with Him who is light? A very simple two-part outline, the doctrine and the application of the affirmation, God is light.
And we're going to answer these questions because John's purpose in writing this epistle is to give us assurance. His gospel, his gospel he even tells us is evangelical, that you may believe on his name.
And this epistle is for your assurance, he tells us at the very end of the epistle, that you who believe may know that you have eternal life in this light. So let's answer the first question together.
What does it mean to say God is light? This is the message we have heard from Him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. First notice that this message we have heard is from Him, namely who he was talking about in verses one through four, that is from Jesus.
Now, Jesus, we don't have any quotes in the gospel of Jesus teaching the disciples specifically this message, God is light. Rather, probably what John is referring to here is that this is the sum total of Jesus' teaching, that you could summarize it, that you could wrap it up with the notion, the concept that God is light.
One commentator puts it like this, that the word of life who's mentioned in verse one with which John's proclamation is concerned, could be condensed into this single great absolute affirmation, God is light.
And we also see in verse five, we see the word proclaim next, that we have heard from Him and proclaim to you. We also saw this word proclaim back in verse two, that we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life.
Although it's a slightly different Greek word here in verse five than it was in verse two. It's John's duty to both testify and proclaim this message and both words, all three words are about some kind of authority.
Testify is the Greek word that is a legal term. And so just like when we hear testify in English, we think to ourselves, court of law. So true is what John is getting at in the Greek, that it is a court of law, that he is a witness, that he could give a certified witness statement, so to speak, in court.
He was called to bear witness to what he had experienced firsthand. And so this is the authority of his experience. And proclaim, that Greek word is about the authority of commission. That is, that Christ had commanded him and all the other apostles to tell the good news and given them the great commission, right, that we read in Matthew 28.
Now this proclaim in verse five is to announce, to declare, to report, to rehearse, as in that John did not invent this message. What he's giving you is a message that he had heard from Jesus. He's sharing it with us.
He's sharing what he witnessed and by sharing it with the authority that was given to him by Jesus. And now let's look at the message itself, that statement itself, God is light. Notice that there's no article here.
It doesn't say that God is a light. It doesn't say even that God is the light or the light bearer, maybe. It just says God is light. It's as if God is light in essence, that he is the very definition of light.
It's easier, in fact, to really grasp this and think about this when you look at the other similar declarations that John makes about the essence of God's nature. In his gospel, he says God is spirit.
And later in this epistle in 1 John, he says God is love. That's the really famous one. And for example, we only know what love is because God loved us. Philosophically speaking, every way that we can describe pure, true love, what we're describing is his nature.
And so when we look at what God, that statement, God is light, what kind of light is God talking about? A while ago when I was teaching a creationism class in Sunday school when I lived in Pittsburgh, I showed everyone this shirt, a picture of a shirt.
I didn't buy it. I should have bought it. That would have really given me some serious nerd cred. The shirt said, at the top it said, and God said, and then a whole bunch of Greek letters and symbols, and at the bottom, and there was light.
And for those who were in the know, you would know that all those Greek letters and symbols were actually the four Maxwell's equations of light. Essentially they say that the divergence of an electric field equals 4 pi times the total electric charge density.
And the divergence of a magnetic field equals zero. I'll spare you the other two. This is being recorded, though. I had to maintain my nerd quotient. So is that what John's talking about? Is he talking about photons, and waves, and electromagnetic energy?
No. Instead, let's consider what John wrote in the opening chapter to his gospel, where he wrote, the true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. And he says, in him was life, and the life was the light of men.
And then, of course, in chapter 8 of John, he says, in one of the great I am statements that Jesus spoke, Jesus said, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.
That God is light, that Jesus is the light of the world, then, is a symbol of his purity and his truth. Pink calls it the sum of all his excellency. To say that God is pure is that in him is no darkness at all.
John even emphasizes it for us in this verse. That God is good. Whatever is truly good is of God. That evil, or even imperfection, can have no place beside him, because he is so pure. And truth, in that he is the source of all truth.
Whatever is true, whatever we know to be true, it's only true because it conforms to him. He is the standard of truth, the measuring stick. And also this, that the only way, if you've ever considered this, that the only way we can know about God and really study him, is because he is light.
We can look, we call it general revelation, right? We can look at the heavens, and the heavens declare the glory of God, and we can look at creation, and we can see that God, that there is a God. We can see that he is a powerful God.
We can see that he's a God who loves order. But we don't really know about him. And we certainly can't know him personally, just from looking at creation. But God's nature is to be self-revelatory, to tell us about himself.
And so he spoke to prophets. And then he inspired scriptures. And the prophets wrote those scriptures down. He wants to make himself known. And Christ, the light of the world, he is the light of the world because he was the fullest revelation of God.
As we learned way back at the beginning of Hebrews 1. The prophets, and now the son. In the Nicene Creed, the church confesses Jesus Christ as God of God, light of light. To see Jesus, and to know him, was to see and know the Father.
And so, by seeing Christ, we can know him. And Christ is also the light of the world because he is our hope. And that's the hope about Christmas. All the believers of the Old Testament, they all looked forward.
They were all in that darkness and they were wondering, how is God going to save us? They trusted that God was going to make a way for salvation. But how? How is it going to occur? When is Messiah coming?
Who is Messiah going to be? How is he going to make a way for us to be reconciled to God? And then, the light shines in the darkness. Hope has finally arrived. That's the Christmas message. That's the Christmas hope.
And Jesus is our only hope against death. Why? Because the tomb is empty. That's why. Because he rose from the dead. We know that because he rose, we know that his sacrifice was perfect and acceptable in the sight of the Father.
And so, we can look at the empty tomb as our hope that we too will rise someday and live forever with him. And in that way, Jesus is like a beacon or a lighthouse. For those ships in the stormy weather, nothing was a more welcome sight than that lighthouse way out in the distance that marked entrance to the safe harbor.
Christ shows us the way to the Father, to heaven, to the ultimate safe harbor. And he himself is the way that he shows us. Recently, I spent some time in New York City. And I got to see my cousin who lives there and works at a restaurant right in Times Square.
And before arriving in New York, I told my son all about Times Square and how it was filled with these giant billboards and signs and all the flashing blinky lights. Right? Super bright, all day long, all day, all day long and all night long.
My cousin even had told us that when he's working there, the light is so bright that he kind of loses all sense of time. He doesn't know when he's in the restaurant, is it early afternoon? Is it sunset?
Is it after midnight? Like the overall ambient light around him just doesn't change much because of all the artificial light there. But when we arrived in New York. And we stayed in our checked into our hotel, and our hotel was only just a few blocks from Times Square.
My son refused to believe that we were close to it. Because he's like, I don't see any light. Where is it? You told me it was really bright. And if you've been to New York, you might know what I mean.
For all of the glow of Times Square, there's so many tall buildings around it that they do a really great job of hiding it. But you almost sort of stumble into it. And you're like, oh, oh, here we are.
We're in Times Square. Right? As bright as Times Square is, it can still hide. The lights from this world still disappear in the darkness. But Jesus Christ, who is light, shines forth and calls out, look to me and be saved.
And with that, I've almost answered the second question of the night before I even asked it, which is, how do we live in the fellowship with him who is the light? That God is light means that God is true and he's pure.
So splendid that he's unapproachable even in his holiness. But God made a way to approach him, and that is through his son. So that is the prerequisite. We cannot be in fellowship with God unless we repent of our sin and we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
But my second question goes further than that. It's how do we live in fellowship with him in the present once we are saved? Because remember, this epistle is for your assurance. He is writing this to us, to Christians, to believers, and asking us to be able to read this and know that we are in him, in Christ.
And so how do we live in the present, in fellowship with him who is the light? Now, the direct answer is in verse 7, so we're going to skip down to verse 7 first and we'll come back to verse 6 later. Verse 7, 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 cleanses us from all sin.
So the answer is walk in the light. Now, walking in the light is not a prerequisite to salvation. Beyond just the purpose that I said already about this epistle, we can look through ahead to verse 8 and all the way down through chapter 2, verse 2, and we're going to see all these inclusive words, we, my little children, us, advocate, our.
This is all written for and about those who belong to Christ. So rather, this is not a prerequisite, but rather a test of salvation, or as MacArthur puts it, that by walking in the light, we demonstrate that we believe in the forgiveness of sins, that we believe in him.
And we see that also in the tense of the word cleanses. It's not cleansed, not past, it's cleanses present. It's ongoing, it's continual, it's never ceasing. This morning, Pastor Mike stole this next illustration from me.
No, but I just want to, just like Bob Bowman said, I also want to just make note that I thought of this first, but no. We have heard often said, as a wrong view of salvation, a very wrong view of election, that it says that in eternity past, right, God looked down the corridors of time.
And in his omniscience, he looked down and he saw ahead of time who would believe in him. And he said, I elect them to be saved. Right now, that is just preposterous, utter nonsense, because the Bible clearly teaches that we're all desperately wicked, that we've all gone astray.
There is no alternate history in which we would have had some island of righteousness, some speck of light inside of us that would have believed. We are all enemies of God before he saves us. There is none who are righteous.
No, not one. But I'll tell you what God did see in eternity past. And he looked down the corridors of time. He saw every one of your sins and mine. Every single one. Every one that we will ever commit past, present, and future.
Every one that you committed today. Every one that you'll commit tomorrow. And the next day, and so on, until we die. Countless, innumerable sins. And every single one of them is enough to condemn us to hell forever.
And yet, he still chose to save me. Christian, he still chose to save you. He knew what he was getting when he chose you. And he provided the one thing that could possibly cleanse that much sin. And it was the blood of his son, Jesus.
Now then, there's a kind of cleansing which has to do with our justification. That when we're saved by grace through faith, in that moment, we're forever and irrevocably declared forgiven. We're declared righteous.
We're adopted as a joint heir of Christ. It's official. And forever. But there's also an idea of cleansing in sanctification. And that's most likely what John has more in view here. Because only two verses later, in verse 9, again, he reuses this word cleansing.
And he re-ups his assertion that this is present and continual and ongoing. John records the teaching of our Lord himself on this very topic in the 13th chapter of his gospel. So let's turn there. In John 13, there's a very famous incident of the washing of the disciples' feet at the Last Supper.
John chapter 13. Now, before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.
During supper, when the devil had already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot Simon's son to betray him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper.
He laid aside his outer garments and, taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.
Now, the primary purpose of this act was an object lesson to the apostles about servant leadership and humility. And Christ clearly explains that below in verses 12 through 17. But on the way to that lesson, good old Peter, good old impetuous Peter, he butts in with good intentions but incredibly wrong thinking.
Here in verse 6. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, Lord, do you wash my feet? Jesus answered him, What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand. And Peter said to him, You shall never wash my feet.
Jesus answered him, If I do not wash you, you have no share with me. Simon Peter said to him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head. And then we get to verse 10. Jesus said to him, The one who has bathed does not need to wash except for his feet, but is completely clean.
Do you see it? We all who are believers, who have trusted Christ as our Savior, we're all bathed. That's what Jesus is telling Peter. We're all bathed. And even the dirt that gathers on his feet, does not need to wash except for his feet, but is completely clean.
Even the dirt that gathers on our feet, we are still, as it says, completely clean in that we are justified and forgiven. So what is this dust then that clings to our feet? It's the sin against which we still struggle.
We're washed. Yes, we're completely clean. Yes, but we still sin. We sin today and tomorrow and likely every day that we remain on this earth. And if that sounds like a contradiction, then just remember this, that one speaks of our justification and the other our sanctification.
And in our sanctification, we all need a good foot washing now and then. Spurgeon said that if we walk in the light as God is in the light and have fellowship with him, still the blood of Jesus Christ, his son cleanses us from all sin.
What a mercy it is for us to feel the continual cleansing of the precious blood of Jesus, so that if we sin, that precious blood constantly keeps us so pure that we can still walk with God. So turning back then to the first, back to the epistle in first John, let's just talk about how those feet get washed.
How do you want to get cleaned? Do you want to have victory over the sin in your life? Do you want to love your neighbor more? Do you want to love them more purely? Do you want to serve more joyously?
Do you want to think more biblically? In short, do you want to be more like Christ? I hope so. I pray so. That ought to be the first desire of every believer. For God is glorified when we stop acting like the world and start acting like his son.
So how do we do that then? The earlier answer, walk in the light. Let me give you this illustration. Imagine that the world is like a pitch black theater, the stage in a pitch black theater. And Christ came into the world, and now there is a spotlight right on center stage, focused and tight.
But if you've ever been to a live theater show, you know that that spotlight, no matter how good they get it focused, there's still this sort of glow around it, right? And it still lights up even the parts around the stage a little bit.
Evil runs from the spotlight. They run to the farthest corners of the stage. They don't even want to be in the glow. But as believers, we can and we should be walking in that spotlight. Now, if you're in a spotlight, naturally that makes you very visible, right?
And there's two aspects to that. One is that it makes us that city on a hill that Jesus talks about. That we can, from that spotlight, we can proclaim God's truth. From that spotlight, we can share the gospel.
From that spotlight, we can be a good example and a good influence on others. And the test that John lays out for us here is how can you know that you are saved? One way to know is, are you walking in the light like this?
There's also no hiding from God in that light. And that's good. At first, your sinful, prideful reaction might be like, I don't want to be in the light and exposed like that. But it's good. It's good for you.
It's good for us. If we want to be more like Christ, then we want to put away sin. We want to renounce it. We want to destroy it. We want to be out there in that light to be carefully examined and purified.
It's not that God needs a bright light to be able to see our hearts and our minds and root out the wickedness. But to walk in the light means that we are willing, we are desirous even, of being examined.
Or to echo what the psalmist says in Psalm 139, Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts, and lead me in the way everlasting. And that's what John had in mind back in verse 6, which we skipped over earlier but we'll go back to now.
In verse 6, if we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. To walk in the light is a test of fellowship. It's an evidence of our salvation. Mike, this morning, he told us that there is a ground of our salvation and there is a fruit of our salvation.
The ground of our salvation is Christ. It's his finished work. It's faith, the faith that he gives us. Not our faithfulness, his faithfulness. His faithfulness to finish the work that he did finish. And that he died for our sins and that he rose again on the third day.
That's the ground of it. And the fruit of our salvation is obedience. The fruit of it is believing. The fruit of it is walking in the light. This verse, verse 6, it's a condemnation of false teachers that John knew who were walking in the darkness.
And that phrase that we walk in the darkness, that's not just every once in a while we sin. We read in verse 7 that Jesus has made provision for that. That even after we're saved and we still sin, that we have that cleansing available to us.
This is not just the occasional still sinning or even the, not even occasional, even just the sins that we still commit as believers. But rather that to walk in darkness means to flagrantly avoid the light.
To run as far from that spotlight as possible. We're ignoring what the Bible teaches. That you're doing whatever it is you want instead. Forget that. Over here, I'm going to go this way. That's walking in darkness.
It's about what one says versus what one does. And that's a pattern that John repeats often in this epistle. Later on in chapter 2, verse 4, and in 2 .6, and 2 .9, and 4 .20, over and over he says, if we say this but don't do that, then we're not really in fellowship with him.
We're not really saved. How can we know we are saved? This is a negative example. The negative example is, are we not walking in darkness? If you're not walking in darkness. If you don't run from the light.
If you don't run from truth. If, in fact, when you're taught the Bible and you're confronted with something that maybe even before you hadn't considered might be sinful, but then you realize from listening to the word preached or reading it that what you've been doing is sinful, do you run and say, I'm still going to keep doing it?
Or are you heartbroken and you repent and you ask God for forgiveness and you turn and you try and you say, I, by God's grace, do not want to commit that again. That's walking in the light. To walk in the light means that you don't just pay lip service to God.
Who is he in your life? Is he just the queen of England to you? Is he just a figurehead for ceremony and tradition? Someone that you come to on Sunday morning and sing and pray and then go home. Does he have no real authority to you or is he your Lord and master?
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. Cleanses us from all sin. God is light. What does that mean? It means that his very essence is truth and purity.
He did not leave us to wander lost in the darkness. He has revealed himself in the light of the world. His son, Jesus. Whom he then made to be sin. Who knew no sin. So that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
And how should we live? Knowing that God is light. We should walk boldly in that light. Proclaiming God's truth. Seeking cleansing from those sins which we still commit. Growing evermore like Christ. To the praise.
Of his glory. Now. I want to conclude. With a word of warning. Because there are also those who do not believe. But try to get close to the light. Perhaps to go back to our theater spotlight picture. They're standing just outside the edges of that spotlight.
Where they're dimly touched by its glow. They're there because they're deceiving themselves that where they're standing is bright enough. That they are near believers. That they go to church. That they might even read their Bibles and pray.
They're very close. But they're not in the light. And the reason they stay there just outside. Is because. Actually in their heart. They do not truly believe. In the gracious forgiveness of God. They either don't believe that they can be forgiven.
Or they don't believe that they need to be forgiven. But they don't believe. And so I. Ask you to ask yourself. All of you please. And be honest with yourself. Are you. Really willing to lay bare before God.
Every one of your secret sins. Are you really willing to admit. That you're not good enough to get into heaven. If you realize that the answer has actually. Secretly. Ben no. Then I beg you. I beg you today is the day to change the answer.
Repent and stop hiding in that darkness. Come into the light of the world. And trust in Christ alone. As your lord. And savior. Let's pray. Heavenly father. We thank you and we praise you. That you are light.
And that you have revealed yourself. To us in your son. Jesus Christ. That we were all sheep gone astray. And yet. You chose to rescue us. And you sent your son. To do it. And he did it perfectly. Living the perfect life.
We could not live. Dying on our behalf. Being made sin. That you have imputed our sins onto him. Those of us who believe. And then. Have taken his righteousness and imputed upon us. That we might live forever in heaven with you.
We thank you for the great hope that is the resurrection. And the empty tomb. That because he lives. We know we to show live. May we live even now in the present. In the light of that glorious truth. Amen.