1 John 1:5-10, Test of Spiritual Fellowship, Dr. Ottavio Palombaro

Test of Spiritual Fellowship in 1 John 1:5-10

1 John, chapter 1, verses 5 to 10, hear the word of the Lord. 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. If we say we have no sin, we have deceived ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. May the Lord add his blessing to the reading of his holy word.

Thank you, everyone. It's a privilege for me to be back with you since last fall. I came to visit you, some of you, first time I see, and so it's a pleasure to meet you and some others, it's a pleasure to meet again.

Let us pray now as we approach the meditation of God's word. Gracious God, we thank you so much for the songs we sang, and Lord, we pray they will become truth in our hearts this morning, that you will open our eyes through your Holy Spirit, Lord, to see marvelous things from your word this morning.

We pray, God, for opening our eyes to the light of your word, and God, that we respond with the right attitude, confessing, pleading with you and through your Son, Jesus Christ, and his perfect sacrifice.

Be with my mouth, Lord, as imperfect as it is, to bring glory to your name this morning. In Jesus' name I pray, amen. Friends, have you ever tried to stare at the sun, to look in the face at that brilliance of the sun that comes to your eyes?

Perhaps when you were a kid, your mom told you not to stare at the sun, and you disobeyed, and what happened is you started crying, and something happened to your eyes. Your eyes began to burn, and then you looked back at places around you, and everything looked hard to see.

It was such a dazzling glory, that dazzling brightness, that you had trouble, and that is because your eye, the cells within your retina of the eyes, kicked into an overdrive. And there you came back into a world that was darker than the sun, unable to distinguish things from left to right.

God Is Light and the Nature of True Fellowship

And that is what, as our brother read in the words of our text, 1 John 1, verses 5 to 10, what I will call as something that Scripture puts before us as a test for spiritual fellowship, a test to see if we're really in fellowship with God, and if really we are walking in the light as God is the light.

And it comes to us from the words of the Apostle John, his first letter, the disciple whom Jesus loved. We know that John has learned those teachings that now he shares with us firsthand from Jesus. And he writes this, what I would call a poetic sermon in his first letter, where key themes of light, life, and love, and truth are dealt in a cyclical mode.

John goes back to these themes, and then goes back to it in future chapters, seeing a contrast between light and darkness, between love and hate, between truth and lies. And he's writing to all the churches, and he's answering some of the tension that the early church was going through because of false teachings.

People were coming into the church, and they were saying, actually what you do in the body does not matter. Because you are now a Christian, it does not matter. And any false cult, any false profession of Christianity, we think of Jehovah's Witness, we think of the Christian science, or even the Enlightenment, or any of the things, actually comes and brings this false teaching.

And he clothes it with an appearance of Christianity. But John has to warn the church and say, no. The first discussion that he gives here is that God is light. God is fellowship with God. If you claim to have fellowship with God, you have to live in keeping with the commandments of Jesus, in keeping what we call in the Christian life as sanctification, a walk in holiness with God.

And so he brings tests, tests, several tests, to test whether you are belonging to God, you are walking with God, and whether instead you belong to the world, the system of this world. And that means that your beliefs, what you believe must work out in righteousness and in love toward God and toward your neighbor.

You walk in the light. That means you live a holy, godly life. Eight times in this letter John says, by this we know, by this we know, by this we know. That means everything that he's teaching you is for you to know for sure, to have the goal of John is for you to have a true assurance of faith, that you know that you belong to God, but also to destroy false assurance, to destroy those who claim to know God, but that are not living in keeping with their profession.

So you may know, chapter 5, verse 13 of John says, that you have eternal life. And so if you're struggling with these questions this morning, you are in the right place this morning. And we look at some of the evidence of true conversion.

We see, and this is the key thought that I want you to keep in mind as we look at this verses 5 to 10, is that your relationship with sin, it is the test of the truthfulness of your claim of a relationship with God.

Your relationship with sin is the test of the truthfulness of your relationship with God. Let us first look at some hindrances, hindrances to true spiritual fellowship. What are some of the blockades to that?

And first of all, in chapter, in verse 5 of chapter 1 is holiness. The holiness of God itself is an hindrance. Why? John has to give some clarity here, that the message of the good news that we heard from God through Jesus Christ has some implication in our life.

And the first thing we notice there is that God is light. God is in His essence, two things in this letter, love later on, but He is light. If we were to summarize the message that Jesus has proclaimed, that we heard from Jesus and we pass now on to you churches, it's that God is light.

And that means that He's contrast to everything that is dark, that the fundamental principle of Christianity is to be what God is. And God is exactly that, light. God is light. Moses went into the mountain to approach who?

The light of God. When Jesus came and lived in this earth, the disciples saw His transfiguration into light to show the truthfulness of the fact that He was God in the flesh. And even in the future glory that we will have a new heaven and new earth, we are told in Revelation that God will be our light.

God is by definition light. It's like opening a light after you spent a night in a dark building and it's dazzling to your eyes. And that is the problem that John is trying to address, that there is darkness means the opposite of it, is to be without God, is to be without the illumination of God in your life, to live in sin.

If the perfection of God is symbolized by the light, then John, look in John, in this letter, chapter three of John. John has already dealt with this in chapter three of his gospel. Perhaps you're going through already.

Chapter three, verse 19. What does it says there? John 3, 19 to 21. This is the judgment that the light has come into the world and men love the darkness rather than the light. Why? For their deeds were evil.

For everyone does evil, hates the light. It does not come to the light for the fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practiced the truth comes to the light so that his deeds may be manifested as having been brought in God.

So you see right there that you either remain in the dominion in the realm of darkness and you cannot be a true Christian no matter your claims. Few times God is described as in his essence. God is. God is.

And here, light points to the fact that the essence of God is holiness. His characteristic of God's nature is to be holy. And therefore in him, let's go back to first John, there is no darkness at all.

John verse 5. In a moral sense, God has no sin. He's pure. Anything that is dark is enmity with God. Anything that is dark is corruption. But the point of John is that absolutely not even a trace of darkness is found in God.

And so the hindrance is the holiness of God in light of what? In light of our sin. Verse 6 gives a series of conditions. It says, if this is true, then this is the case. And the first one is, if you claim to have fellowship with God, and fellowship there is to have something in common, to have a close association driven by mutual interests.

That is fellowship. That you sit at the same table, that you have communion and you share, you claim you have a sharing with the resurrection of Christ, with his life in Christ. But you claim to be a friend of God while at the same time, at the very same time you walk in darkness, and that walking there is a continuative walking, an habitual walking.

You make a practice of sinning. The ESV translates it. If this is describing to you a lifestyle that is completely devoid of God, and in fact, you stumble, to have fellowship with light is impossible.

In fact, the text says in verse 6, you lie and you are not practicing the truth. One thing is to claim the truth. One thing is to put it in practice. By your action, you're not actually living what you claim.

And the truth is not in you, which means you become a living hypocrite. You are a hearer, but not a doer of the Word of God. And there, there's another condition. If you claim you have no sin, and that means you refuse to admit that you are sinning, you either have two options here.

You are either claiming to be sinless, and we'll see what that means, or you deny the existence of sin altogether. You're claiming to bear no guilt for sin. And that was the problem with the false teachers.

They were coming to the church saying, as long as you... You know, I have fellowship with God. I have this secret knowledge, but it doesn't matter what I do. You know, I still know God. And it's like, John has to say, no, that's a wrong teaching.

They claim that the sins of believers were unimportant to God. They could not affect your relationship to God. That is a problem, because sin does affect your fellowship with God. It destroys it. In fact, the text says in verse 6, you deceive yourself.

You think you can be a Christian, but your evidence is not there. Then this is self-deception, and it's the foolishness, the nonsense of our day to refusing to accept the truth of God's Word. I like what Spurgeon has to say here.

He says, it's like a miner who dwells from childhood beneath the surface of the ground, and he has never has experienced what life is. And he claims to know the world out there. That is absolutely... So is the natural man.

When you are without Christ, when you do not know Jesus, then you are blind and you are deceiving yourself. The condition in verse 10 continues, if we say we have not sinned, if we say we have not committed individual specific sins, or a state of complete sinlessness or perfection, we make God a liar.

I mean, that's strong language right there. We are accusing God to lie in His Word. And that, friends, is a greater sin than the sin that we deny that we are committing. And so the Word of God says clearly, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

And when you're saying that you have no sin, you are contradicting God's words. And Christ is not in you. So what we say here, first of all, is that to claim to know God while living in sin is as absurd as denying the reality of the difference between light and darkness.

That's what John wants you to see. That to know God means to live in righteousness. That God says, let there be light. The same God who gave light to the solar system that we see is a wise reflection of the magnificent character of God, that He is light, that He is pure.

That's why idolatry, and particularly not just statues, but false ideas about God are a problem, a great problem, or an excessive attachment to our own ideas about life. That is a problem. You see, at the root of any deception, at the root of any false doctrine, any false idea about God is a lack of fellowship with God.

It's like many follow false Jesus today, who is okay with sin, who is okay with you living your life as you please. That is because, as if, you know, Jesus actually brought light into the world, as we saw in John 3, and to know Christ requires to be conformed to God in righteousness and holiness.

In your light, we see light. So many people are claiming to be Christians today, and they live in unrepentant sin, and they're in a serious misconception about God. Our text draws a clear line in the sand between true and false fellowship.

The test, dear friends, is between real and nominal faith. There is no gray area. The true test of being in fellowship with God is that you walk in the light. That if you are near God, that you say you are near God, it obviously impacts your life.

Straight in. Now, this doesn't mean, friends, to be perfect, to be sinless, as we will see. We still live in a dark world, but that you strive toward holiness, that you strive to be closer to God as He is light.

You keep walking instead. If you keep walking in darkness, you remain far from God. And that is deception, friends. If you say you belong to God, but you make practice of sin, your life is filled with darkness, you cannot possibly be in fellowship with God.

That's what John is saying to us. In fact, you refuse to accept the claim of Jesus over your life, then you're denying Him. That's why we have, if that is our condition, we are called to repent, to turn away from our darkness to the light.

God is incompatible with men living in the dark and trying to cover up sin and still in darkness. It's a problem. But even among believers, the danger is to be living a life that is inconsistent with our claims.

That Christ shall shine His light over everything in our life and we should welcome that light, to walk in integrity of conscience. And if that's not the case, we are contradicting the gospel that we claim to believe.

And the fellowship, while the relationship with God may still be there, the fellowship with God is interrupted. And that God calls us back to His light, wherever we are. It impacts, therefore, you see, the fellowship, even in the entire church.

If someone walks in darkness, it impacts us corporately as well. To know God means also to battle with sin. You see right there that the deeper problem is actually love of sin. False ideas about God as just a justification to actually, you know, do what I please.

And that's the problem of the society we live in. We want to excuse our love for sin. You deny sin, you deny the need of a Savior. There's no more need of a Savior. You deny, some pretend sinless as well.

I mean, I know some Christians who say, I never sin. It's like, that's in contradiction with these verses. Other deny sin altogether, right? The atheist culture that is rising around us, it's indifferent toward what is true, what is false, what is sin and what is not.

The version of the gospel that sometimes people are presenting also makes sin also unimportant. And if that is unimportant, then you don't understand why on earth do I need to be saved? If sin is merely a mistake, minimized and redefined, there's no vertical concern toward the God you have offended and His holiness and this type of God that you have to face on judgment day.

And that is absolute foolishness. I remember there was this question that was proposed to R .C. Sproul once. And he's like, how do you help someone who does not know what sin is? And he said to him, well, steal his wallet.

Which is like, we claim that our sin doesn't exist. That's hypocrisy. You know exactly what sin is. But again, they claim they can see God, but the guilt remains. Blaise Pascal was a philosopher. He says, in faith, there is enough light for those who want to believe, enough shadow to blind those who don't.

Confession, Repentance, and Cleansing by Christ's Blood

And that leads us to the second point of our text. Not just the hindrance to our fellowship with God. Now we go toward, how do we get some help toward spiritual fellowship, right? And the first step right there outlined in your text in verse 9 is to confess your sin.

To open to the light. There is a better way, John says. Verse 9, if we confess our sin. And confessing means you admit it. Confess means that the nearer you take anything to the light, the darker the spots appear.

Robert Mary McShane has said this. But we need to freely admit we sinned. Sin cannot thrive in the light when it has the spotlight. And that means that everything, every change starts in your life when you are willing to bring such sin to the light, to be exposed.

That's how sin loses its deceiving grip over your life. If you keep it in darkness, that's where it thrives. Our self-deception grows in the darkness. The starting point is a command, friends. James 5 .16 says, confess your sins to one another and pray to one another.

And what does our text says here in verse 9? He is faithful. You see, unlike us who are not reliable, unlike us sinful men who often lie, we can actually depend on God to fulfill His promise. He is faithful and just.

That means He is truth to Himself. He's fair in the sense that He keeps His promise. That if you confess your sin, He can forgive you. And that justice, friends, is that the just requirement of the punishment of our sin, which meets the forgiveness of God at the cross on the basis of the just death of Christ on your behalf.

The fact that He took the darkness of the cup of God's wrath on your behalf. He was righteous for the unrighteous. And so it is perfectly proper for God to forgive our sin, to dismiss our case, to release us from our guilt and punishment for sin, and to what?

Cleanse us. Not just the first moment that you come to Christ, but even in your Christian life when you struggle with sin and you do the same thing, you confess that sin, you bring it to Him and He is faithful and just to forgive you of your sin and cleanse you.

It is done. It is removed as far as the East is from the West. Any kind of wrong. But again, it has to be confessed. It has to be, first of all, confessed. The proper way to deal with sin is you confess, you plead with God through Christ because of Him, not because of my righteousness, because of His merits.

Forgiveness is not divorced from our confession of sin. That needs to go hand in hand. And also our repentance, which you see now. The second step right there, verse 7. Repentance and restoration are listed for you.

If we walk in the light, right? The opposite of the previous case that we saw, the person who was continuously living a lifestyle in sin. Now there is a person who continues to walk in the light of God's presence.

And because God is light, as we saw, as He is in the light, then therefore we have fellowship with Him. We are changed and transformed. This light of God illumines your path. It allows you not to stumble in sin.

And we have fellowship, not just with God, but with one another in the church. It is a wonderful joy that we can confess our sins to one another as well as to God and be restored in a proper relationship of joy.

Why? Because our text in verse 7 gives us this wonderful promise that the blood of Jesus' Son, as we just sang, cleanses us from all sins. That means to remove the guilt, to erase the stain that sin had left into your conscience, and all the forms and manifestation of your sins are removed.

This is the wonder that Philip Brooks once said, Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks. Which means, in other words, the only true claim of knowing God takes place when we confess and repent of our sin, trusting in the Christ who sacrificed His life to restore us to God.

You see that? Confess, repent, and trust in the sacrifice of Christ. The same path to know God starts when you confess your sin. That's why to pretend to not have transgressed against God, you will not understand the gospel.

You cannot understand this is not a good news to you. The first step is you admit, not just simply admit your sin, that you have done various kind of wrong things to other people and it got you into trouble.

No, you lay them out before God. You say, Lord, this is what I've done and against you and you alone I've sinned. And then you seek His forgiveness. The other may say, oh, I cannot do this. I have sinned once too far.

But look, our text says God is faithful. He's faithful. He can be trusted by this promise that you cling to that promise in faith that His blood is indeed sufficient. He has a reconciliation ready and prepared for you.

All you have to do is to confess it, turn away from it, and plead His blood. And if you say so, you must believe Him over your own doubts, over your own wanting to be drawn back. Because that's what sin does.

Anytime you sin, you feel like you want to go back. You want to escape God. You want to run away from God. Like Adam and Eve and try to find your own solution. I'm going to put some leaves. No, you go out into the light and you say, Lord, I sinned against you.

I confess it. I assume my responsibility for my action before others, before you. And then it's repentance and belief. We are called to repent, which means to turn away from this darkness and to a pattern and lifestyle that people around you will tell you, oh yeah, I'm a Christian, but it's like their life is not showing.

And you have to say those things out. You have to call them out. Augustine says, when he converted, he said, Oh Lord, my God, You are my light and my salvation. That needs to be experienced, that light.

God enlightens you and you plead the blood of Jesus. Our text says clearly that this blood of Christ can cover you from head to toe. That can completely remove the punishment for your sin. It frees us from all of our sins.

So friend, no matter how dark the sin is, it is no darker than the Savior who brings light and shed light. But you have to be willing. You have to be willing. And it is an uncomfortable spot, as we said.

John knows that when the light shines into the darkness, it is like a criminal who is trying to get out of jail at night. And there's that spotlight that shines upon him. And I'm sure that he feels all the uncomfortableness of that moment, of having been caught.

But what he has to do is to turn himself in. And for us is to go to our judge and say, Lord, I deserve your punishment. But because of the mercy of Christ, because of His punishment on my behalf, because of the bloodshed, then I can be free and forgiven.

And that goes for you when you are first converted. That is the way you come to Christ. As you confess your sin, you turn away from your sin, you plead and you trust the only one that can be trusted, and that is His blood.

He can remove the guilt of sin. He can remove the power of sin. And so you can sing that hymn, what a fellowship, what a joy divine. Because you can lean on the one who died for you. And so friends, what do we take out of this?

We take indeed that what's done in the light and what's done in the dark will be brought to the light. That was a song that Johnny Cash used to sing, right? He said, you can run on a long time, but sooner or later it will come to the light.

And that is true in one sense. That if you want to follow Jesus, Jesus is the light of the world by definition. And that implies that you do not walk in darkness, that your life is not characterized by sinful and continuous habitual living in darkness.

Now, this does not even mean the opposite of pretending to be perfect and have everything together because that is not the Christian life. We will stumble from time to time. But again, whatever our circumstances in this process, whether we are self-deceived, whether we are in this moment of reveal and feeling even in the Christian walk, we have fallen.

We are all called to the same cross. We are all called to the same blood to plead for our forgiveness and restoration of fellowship. What follows is a fellowship with God and with the people of God in his church.

That is the sweetness of communion with God. We walk in the light. We walk in theacts. In fact, Jesus Christ is coming this morning to bestow the light of his gospel to you. He is the word of God who has now embodied the whole truth and in Him there is no lie, there is no deceitfulness.

But if we claim to possess and profess to know God, This God who is light, This God who is holy, then there must be evidence of this light in our life. Many professing Christians today want to have fellowship with God on their own terms.

On easy terms. Terms that are adjusted to their own situation. But the reality is that they're believing a God without the cross. A God without a holy life. Or you could say a double life. And that is troublesome.

Because friends, that is the most irreverent thing that you could do. To cling to the one who paid for your sin. While holding on to the sin that supposedly was nailed at the cross. So it may never be told of us.

But to believe but have no thought of repentance. Because you see, faith and repentance are two twin graces that go together. They go together as we come to Christ and as we live in Christ. As we continue to follow and walk after Jesus.

And so if this truth, if this righteousness is absent from your life. No matter what you say. Or no matter how spiritual you may sound. Because I'm sure these false teachers who had come to the church that John is preaching.

Might have sound very spiritual. But John is saying to them, look, this is the test of spiritual fellowship. And if you don't have this, then you do not have the eternal life that you claim to have. And so beware of those who will come to you.

And who will present to you a different version of this gospel. First, you see and you acknowledge sin. And you see that God's holiness because of this God, who God is. It exposes your unholiness. The fact that you are not holy.

And that therefore you need a crucified Christ. You need someone who will put to death that sin. And he alone can wash you clean with his blood. And he has done it. He said it when he was in the cross.

He said it is finished. And so be open, however, to God exposing darkness. And you know, there's ways in which when we are exposed, we don't want to say it. No, I didn't do it. The devil made me do it.

I was like, the woman made me do it. It's like we lie. You see why? Because our nature needs to be humbled and brought to the point of saying, Lord, I confess. I confess. I take my responsibility. And so if that's you this morning, my call and the call of the gospel is to humble yourself.

To turn to Jesus Christ. And to receive his forgiveness. Because he is faithful. And we can cling to this promise in this text. That as we repent, God exposes our darkness. We trust in the perfect Christ sacrifice.

That we can sing. Like the old hymn used to say, My God, how wonderful thou art. Thy majesty how bright. How beautiful thy mercy seat. In depths of burning light. How wonderful. How beautiful the sight of thee must be.

Thine endless wisdom. Boundless power. And awful purity. Let us pray. God, we thank you this morning for this word. So simple, yet so hard. That show us that indeed, Lord, you are light. That in you there is no darkness at all.

Let us not be fooled, Lord. By false views of you. False gospels. That proclaim a God who is far closer to us. And far like us. Instead, you are completely different. You are altogether holy, Lord. And may this lead us, Lord, to show light even in the darkest closets of our life.

And bring us, Lord, to open our lives, Lord. To be willing to have you speak into the issues of our life. And to confess, repent. Confess to you, Lord. That we have sinned against the holy God. But also confess to one another.

And then, Lord, to be re-established in the sweet communion. The sweet fellowship that we can have with you. And with one another in the church, Lord. Why? Because of your promise. God, we thank you for your promise.

That you are faithful and you are just. To forgive us. And we pray and plead all those things through the blood of Christ. Who is our only plea, Lord. That we cling to you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.