1 John 1:5
to turn with me to 1 John 1. And if you’re looking for that
in your pew Bible, it’s on page 1021. 1021, 1 John 1. You’ll
notice in your worship guide, we’re gonna be focusing our attention
mainly just on verse five this morning, but I do want to read
the entire chapter, which is a short one, just for the sake
of context. So 1 John 1. Chapter one, beginning
in verse one. The Apostle John says this. That
which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we
have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched
with our hands concerning the word of life, the life was made
manifest and we have seen it and testified to it and proclaim
to you the eternal life. which was with the Father and
was made manifest to us. That which we have seen and heard
we proclaim also to you, so that you too might 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. If we say we have
no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If
we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins
and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned,
we make Him a liar and His word is not in us. Amen. This is God’s word to us this
morning. You may be seated. In John Calvin’s famous treatise,
The Institute of the Christian Religion, he begins by saying
that truly all good and sound wisdom is found in two things.
First, knowledge of God. and secondly, knowledge of ourselves.
The Bible is a book, not ultimately about ourselves, but it’s ultimately
about God. It is God’s word. He reveals
to us who he is and what he’s like and what he loves and what
he hates and what’s important. But then, secondarily, it is
in some way a book about ourselves because it’s revealing to us
something about us, our need, our brokenness, our sinfulness,
the alienation that we have naturally from God. And so what God is
doing in his word is he is revealing himself and he is exposing ourselves
and displaying our need, which is found ultimately in Jesus
Christ, who John in the gospel of John says is the light of
the world. and who Jesus himself refers
to himself as the light. And so what John is doing here
in this letter is he is displaying the certain marks of what it
means to be a person who’s united to Christ. What does that look
like when the rubber meets the road? What is the practical display
of that? And in 1 John, what he’s doing
is he is laying forth three tests that the Christian can look to
as manifestations, marks of what true Christianity actually looks
like. And the first test that John
spells out for us in this letter is a doctrinal test. That’s sort
of the foundation, a doctrinal test. In other words, do we believe
in Jesus, not as we imagine Him to be, not as we may want Him
to be, or as we’ve created Him to be in our own mind and in
our own image, but do we believe in Jesus as He actually reveals
Himself to be in His Word? Do we trust in Him? Do we not
merely assent to who He is, but do we trust Him? Do we believe
in Him with all of our heart and soul and mind and strength? There’s a doctrinal test. Secondly,
there’s a relational test. If we believe in who Jesus is,
if we receive the love of Christ to us in the gospel, that is
going to spill out of our lives as we live in relationship with
other people, particularly people in the church. We are going to
live in relationships of love with them. We are going to seek
to love them. We’re gonna even seek to love our enemies. And
so there’s a relational test. Does your life reflect the love
of Christ for you in the gospel? And thirdly, there’s a moral
test. And that’s very much what we’re
gonna be looking at here in this passage today. But the moral
test is this, does our life, however imperfectly, and it will
imperfectly look like this, but does our life reflect the holiness
of God? God reveals who he is in scripture. Do we, as we go about our lives,
both publicly and privately, reflect his glory, his truth,
his justice, his mercy, in the way in which we conduct ourselves.
So the moral test is what he’s looking at here in this passage.
And he does so by getting us to sort of develop this vision
of light and darkness, to get those categories kind of burrowed
into our soul. He’s leaning, John actually is
leaning into something that Jesus already reveals about himself.
So this isn’t something that John is manufacturing. This is
something that Jesus actually says about himself back in the
Gospel of John, chapter eight, where Jesus says about himself
that I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will walk
not in darkness, but will have the light of life. That’s a bold
thing for Jesus to say. But it is what is true about
Him, and we know it’s true because of His life, and because of the
cross, because of His death, and because He conquered sin
and death in the resurrection, because that is all then revealed
to be true as a matter of fact in history. And so because that’s
true, because Jesus is the light of the world, His people, Those
for whom He lived, those for whom He died, those for whom
He rose again, those who have been saved by grace alone, through
faith alone, and Christ alone, what we are now, what you are
now, if you believe in Him, is you are a child of the light. In other words, you now belong
to the light, and you’re going to live in the light. And you’re going to turn your
back on darkness because what Jesus has done for you is He’s
given you a new heart and a new spirit. He stirred up, he’s beginning
to stir up new affections, new habits. He’s creating new loves
within us. As John says here in verses six
and seven, he says, 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. That’s good news. So what is
John getting at here when he starts talking about darkness
and light and life? What are these categories that
he’s trying to get into us here? Well, let’s talk about darkness
first. The first thing that we discover about darkness is that
darkness sort of hides reality. Darkness hides what is actually
there, to where you can’t see it. If you were to come to our
house, our boys share a room, and if you were to go into their
room and shut the door and close the blinds and turn the lights
off and do so at night, it would be very, very dark in there.
And if you were to walk around with your bare feet in that room,
there is at least 110% chance that you will step on a Lego.
It will happen. and you will be in acute pain,
and you will probably say words that you wouldn’t ordinarily
say, because Legos are just there, but you wouldn’t be able to see
it because it’s so dark, right? And that’s what it’s like to
walk in the darkness. You’re unaware of the dangers.
You don’t see the dangers to your soul. You don’t see them
as dangers to your soul, even though they’re everywhere. And
sometimes walking in the figurative darkness, the kind that John
is talking about here, is like that. That we can walk in darkness
and think that we can navigate through it on the basis of our
own native strength. our own wisdom, which of course
is foolish. Think of how many lives have
been destroyed by disordered desires, through the dishonoring of authority,
through, anger and bitterness that alienates us from others
and breeds hostility. The kind of destruction that
undisciplined sexual desire brings. The greed, the slander, the gossip
that so often is stirred up in the lives of people, not just
outside the church, but within it. And all the while, the person
that makes such decisions in the moment says, well, it seemed
like a good idea at the time. In the moment, it seems like
life. But it’s actually darkness because they can’t see clearly.
And it’s the habit of their life. It’s the lifestyle. It’s the
way that leads to death. And they can’t see reality. John
in his gospel, again, says that these things are what people
do because people love the darkness. That’s our natural bent. That’s
the arc of our lives by nature. We’re not blank slates from birth
and we just can go in either direction. We’re people with
original sin by nature. Our hearts are deceitful. They’re naturally geared towards
the darkness and only Jesus Christ can come and chisel that away
and bring his light into the darkness of our hearts. But the
darkness hides reality. The second thing that the darkness
does is that it hides wickedness. People love darkness because
they can, or at least they think they can, do what they couldn’t
do in the light. So in other words, darkness not
only veils reality, but it fools you into thinking that your deceitful
heart will not be exposed. But the fact of the matter is
that your sin always has a way of finding you out. Hear that
again, your sin always has a way of finding you out. I mean, think
about the innumerable public figures who’ve had their darkened
hearts exposed for all the world to see. They’re all over the
place, they’re in politics, they’re in sports, they’re in entertainment,
they’re in the business world, they’re in the church. Many of
you have heard of the great apologist, Ravi Zacharias. recently. Perhaps the most well-known Christian
defender of the faith that’s lived over the past hundred years. Many people, skeptics, atheists,
people who hated God, became convinced of the truth of Jesus
Christ, convinced of the gospel because of the arguments that
Ravi Zacharias made. People were converted underneath
his ministry, and it appeared as if all of this good stuff
was happening, but in the darkness, Ravi Zacharias was abusing multiple
women in multiple countries over a long period of time. And this
comes to light after his death, which just happened less than
a year ago. And the darkness that was there was so at odds
with his public life. His private life and his public
life were completely incongruous. And there’s darkness there. He’s
trying to veil reality. He was seeking to hide his wickedness. And you may remember, if you
look back to Genesis chapter three, Adam and Eve, what did
they do after they thought they knew better than God? They just
went their own way. What’s the very first thing they
do? They go and hide, right? They go and hide, they cover
themselves And then they blame shift, right? Adam blames Eve and Eve blames
God. And they see themselves as victims.
Isn’t that how we are by nature? It’s the natural bent of our
heart. And it’s been that way ever since
the fall. And that’s how we’re geared.
That’s what the darkness is like. But John says here that Jesus
is the light of the world and in him is no darkness at all. No darkness at all. Darkness
has only one other alternative and it’s light. And it’s an interesting
metaphor that Jesus uses about himself because you need to think
about what the light actually does. What does it do? Well,
instead of veiling reality, the first thing the light does is
that it exposes it. It exposes reality. When you
go to the dentist office, what’s one of the first things they
do? You lay on your back and they shine this 10 million watt
light bulb right into the darkness of your mouth. I mean, it’s,
you know, I don’t know how people don’t get third degree burns
from this thing. I mean, it is bright, it is lit
up, and it’s looking into the darkness of your mouth. And that’s
what light does, it exposes what is in the darkness, that the
darkness is trying to hide. And so much of what happens when
we come face to face with who Jesus is, is that the light comes
in and it exposes the darkness of our hearts. When you come
to terms with who Jesus is, And listen, when you really come
to terms with who Jesus is, not just this kind of happy, clappy,
you know, maiden, China, Walmart version of Jesus that we manufacture
for ourselves, but who Jesus actually really is, as he reveals
himself to be in scripture, he exposes us. Isn’t that what happened
to Isaiah? In Isaiah chapter six, when he
comes face to face with who God is, and he says, woe is me, for
I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell amongst a people of unclean
lips, for my eyes have beheld The glorious one, the king of
glory? That’s what happens when you
come and encounter Jesus as he is. He exposes us, that’s the
first thing that he does. And sometimes when you get exposed
for who you really are, it’s not exactly a Carnival Cruise
experience, is it? I mean, it stings. Because he
brings you down to size. You realize that, you know, You
may be bad, but you’re not really that bad. No, you really do see
the deceitfulness of your heart. But when he exposes you, just
as when the dentist turns on that light, when the surgeon
turns on that light, and looks in to the decay, the
purpose when Jesus comes to you, Christian, is not to slice you
and dice you and destroy you. The purpose is to heal you. The purpose is to heal you because
he loves you. It’s to guide us out of the darkness. It’s to redeem what’s been decayed
and what’s broken and what’s diseased. That’s the purpose
of the light. John doesn’t paint this picture
of how radiantly glory Jesus is in order just to sort of satisfy
our intellectual interests. What John is trying to do here
is he’s trying to get you and I to see ourselves in the light
of his glory. To see ourselves in light of
who he is. So that we will realize our need
like the prodigal son realized his need and ran into the arms
of His loving and gracious Father who embraced Him and kissed Him
and put a purple robe on Him, celebrated Him and sang over
Him. That’s what the light of Jesus
is intended to do. The light also provides guidance,
right? That’s what lights do at the
risk of sounding like Captain Obvious here. Lights show you
the way. They illuminate where to go in
the midst of the darkness. Isn’t it one of the great existential
questions of life to ask yourself, where am I going? Like, where
is my life headed? What’s the direction of my life? Those are questions ultimately
of purpose. They’re kind of like the question above the underlying
question, which is really, what is the purpose of my life? And
how you answer that question is gonna derive, gonna push the
direction of your life. It’s gonna inform the things
that you value and the decisions that you make. But what God reveals
to us in His word is that the purpose of your life is not something
that we just kind of make up along the way. The purpose of
our life is displayed for us. And what it is is the purpose
of our life as a follower of Jesus is to display the light,
is to display the beauty and the glory and the grace and the
wisdom and the love and the holiness and justice and goodness and
truth of who God is. to display those things in our
life. And how do we do that? We do it by enjoying Him. The chief end of man is what?
To glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Those aren’t mutually
exclusive things. They’re two sides of the same
coin. We enjoy Him. We’re satisfied
in Him. And that’s why the most practical
thing that you can ever do in the Christian life is simply
to behold your God. Behold the God who is the light
of the world. Discover what He’s like. Discover
what He loves. Stand in awe of Him. Build habits of plumbing the
depths of Scripture so that you know Him. Build habits of gathering
in worship like this, which is this know, conversation that
we’re having with God, where He calls you to Himself in worship,
and you respond to Him with praise, and He exposes your sin, and
you confess it to Him, and He speaks back to you words of forgiveness,
and you lift up your praises to Him, and then you hear his
word read and preached, that’s brought to bear upon you, and
then you’re renewed by the grace of the Lord’s Supper, and he
sends you forth with blessing. That’s the liturgy, the pattern,
not just of our hour together on the Lord’s Day, but throughout
the course of your Christian life. It’s this ongoing communication,
conversation with God where he’s constantly coming to bear upon
your life. Constantly showing you who He
is. Constantly renewing you. And you do that by just leaning
all of the weight of your life upon Him. These habits, they
have a cumulative effect over the course of time of inflaming
your heart for God and bringing you to a place where you enjoy
Him and delight in Him. What else do we find about light? Light also provides life. It
provides life. The Gospel of John, chapter one,
verse four, the apostle John there says that in him was life
and the life was the light of men. The life was the light of
men. Light is necessary for life. Almost nothing lives in utter
darkness. I mean, you have to have light
in order to live. And I would suggest to you that
the… The crazy person who runs marathons,
I don’t know why people do this when they could drive the 26
miles, but they decide to run it, and so that’s what they do,
and the marathon runner and the person who just sits at home
for eight hours a day with a gallon of ice cream in their lap watching
who knows what on television, their desires are actually the
same. What is their desire? Pleasure. Joy. That’s what motivates us. Doesn’t that, in some sense,
quantify what it means to have life? What the aim of our life
really is, is just joy? See, later in the Gospel of John,
we see that Jesus says, the words of Jesus, he says, I am the way,
the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but
through me. He gives us all good things to
enjoy, right? He gives us all these good things
to enjoy, and we should enjoy the good things that He gives
to us. But when they become life, when
people or things become what’s ultimate to us, what we look
to for life, we’ll be crushed. by those who disapprove of us.
We will make all sorts of compromises in order to gain their acceptance.
We’ll manipulate, we’ll control, we’ll seek to abuse our power,
we’ll do all of these things. We become slaves to our things
rather than using our things to serve us. But what Jesus says,
he says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and by leaning
into me you find joy. And He orders our affections
and He orders our loves. The greatest desires of our heart
in this life and next are found in Him alone. And finally, what
we discover about light is that it brings us joy. If you’ve ever
had a disease or an injury exposed and you’ve taken the medicine
that just tastes awful or you’ve endured surgery, we know that
there’s ordinarily joy on the other side, right? There’s healing,
there’s joy on the other side and what John is saying is that
God is light and he’s the source of joy and he brings light. I used to live in Tucson, Arizona.
300 some odd sunny days. out of the years, sunniest, one
of the sunniest cities in the United States. But every winter,
it would seem like all of Canada would descend upon Arizona. I mean, Saskatchewan license
plates everywhere. These people who lived in these
places where the sun didn’t rise until 10 in the morning, and
when it did, it was gray and cloudy all day and miserable,
and then the sun went down at like two in the afternoon. and
there’s just this kind of depressing darkness that’s there and so
they were escaping it to come to the the warmth of Arizona
in January where it’s 72 degrees and sunny all the time and I
wonder if you feel like you like you sort of live in in Saskatchewan,
right? Figuratively like in your soul,
like you feel sometimes this depressing darkness and anything
that resembles light is so far away that it’s just not even
within your reach. Maybe you’re there right now.
Maybe you’re here right now and there’s something in your life
that’s just, a bearing down on you. You feel it in your shoulders. You feel it in your gut. You feel it physically in your
body and just sort of follows you wherever you go. It’s a depressing
darkness. That’s what depression really
is. It’s a darkness. It’s perpetual. And when you feel like that,
what you want more than anything in the whole wide world is joy.
The brightness and the warmth of knowing that that darkness
has been taken away. And not at all to undermine whatever
depression that you may be facing, whether it be chemically or circumstantially
at all. That’s a whole other discussion
for another day. But the point is here is that
God is perfect light. Jesus’ light underneath the deepest
possible pain is the light that informs that pain. And you can see it when David
writes the Psalms of the betrayal even of his own son. He starts
to look to who God is and he identifies you with himself. You become identified with him,
that’s your identity. The Bible calls it adoption.
It means that you belong to him. And you have his name upon you. You have the liberties and the
privileges of being his child. You have unhindered access to
him. He protects you, he provides
for you, he has mercy on you. This is who your father is and
he will never cast you off. Life is hard, and sometimes it
seems like the hardship is close at hand all the time, like it
just never ever goes away. But there’s this undercurrent
of joy that you can have in that, in the light of the world, because
He has taken your darkness and made it His darkness, and He
has taken His light, and He’s made it your light. Because do
you remember ultimately what happened on the cross? Mark and
the other gospel writers say that when the sixth hour had
come, what was over the whole land? Darkness. Darkness. And Jesus is on that
cross and he cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken
me? Can you imagine the feeling of
that darkness. The second person of the Trinity
who never felt that before, never experienced it, never knew that,
for the first time in history, has to ask the question, my God,
my God, why have you forsaken me? Because he’s on that cross
and he, takes the sin of all of his people at all times, everywhere. I mean, you’re bearing the weight
of your own, just your sin, but he’s bearing the weight of the
sins of all of his people. And it’s concentrated in his
body and in his soul on that cross. He experiences this temporary
wrath from his father, as opposed to his favor. He experiences
forsakenness, darkness on our behalf. You see, friends, if
you’re following the light of the world and stopped trusting
in your own merits, but started to trust instead in the grace
and merits of Jesus Christ to you, you will never, ever experience
anything of what like Jesus experienced when he was on that cross. Never. You will never have to cry out,
my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That will never
be the narrative of your life. Jesus endured the shame. He endured
the suffering. He endured the darkness so that
you would see his light. So that yes, he would expose
your sin, but that you would also be able to drink his water
and eat of his bread and be forgiven of that sin. so that you would
feast on Him as the bread of life, be nourished and fulfilled
and satisfied by Him. We live in cancel culture, right?
People are canceling everybody because they disagree with where
they stand on certain things. And the thing about cancel culture
is that there’s no forgiveness. You did something 70 years ago,
and you said something that you probably shouldn’t have said,
or believed something you shouldn’t have believed according to the
authorities of the world, and they cancel you, you’re shut
off, you lose your job, you lose your way of living, you lose
your reputation, you lose all, there’s no forgiveness. But in
Christ, there’s forgiveness. There is the imputation of his
perfect righteousness to you. In my place condemned he stood.
And he has given you his light. And boy, does that free you up,
friends, because now you can own your failures. You can confess
your sin. You can own who you really are
and not put up this facade. And you can come to a God who’s
going to forgive you, and he’s going to plunge your sins into
the depths of the sea, and cast them off as far as the east is
from the west, and remember them no more, and that’s because God
is light, and in him is no darkness at all. He is the light of the
world, but you know who else he calls the light of the world?
He calls you and me the light of the world. He says that his people are also
the light of the world, and because he brings that forgiveness, because
he brings that grace, Because it’s yours in the gospel, that’s
not a license to complacency. That’s a license to live for
His glory. That’s the fuel, if you will,
to accelerate your life, to display to a dark and decaying world
what Jesus is like, who He really is, what is important to Him. And we don’t do it in our own
power. We do it by the power of the Holy Spirit at work within
us. Because God is true light, there’s
no darkness in Him at all. Despite your darkness and my
darkness, He’s come to bring you light and life. And He rejoices
over you with singing and He quiets you with His love. And
when you’ve been loved like that, when you have been loved like
that, You come to experience that everything changes. Everything
changes. Take that with you now as you
go. Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the
great truth and the great promises of your word. Bring it to bear upon our lives.
Change us by the power of your spirit. cause us to seek your
face, glorifying and enjoying you forever. I pray in Jesus’
name, Amen.