Paths of Light and Darkness

Because God is entirely light, with no darkness of sin in his character, we must identify, repent, and rid ourselves of all sin.

In his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, A.W. Tozer wrote, what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. So, if Tozer came over to your house this afternoon for lunch and he wanted to get to know you very early in that conversation, he would have you describe the thoughts that come into your mind when you think about God. Now, you might think that he’d get to know you better if he asked about your family or your career. What are your skills? What do you enjoy doing? Where were you born? What brought you to Rochester? Right. For Christians, we really prize asking someone their conversion testimony. When did you become a Christian? How did God get a hold of your heart? These are fine things to talk about, but I agree with Tozer. Your thoughts about God do more to shape you and who you are than anything else about you. And that’s because everything about you is profoundly impacted by what you think God is like. If you think that there is no God, no creator, then you will live autonomously. You’ll make your own rules. You’ll believe that there are no divine consequences. If you think God is amoral, meaning without morals, then you’ll live like God doesn’t care what you do. You really wouldn’t be any different than the atheist. If you think God is a angry dictator who must be appeased by you, then you will live in fear of him.

If you think God is just a spiritual force of love without any real character, then you’ll define love however you like and you’ll live like that. If you think God is just a source of blessing and curses, then you’ll probably live mostly ignoring God, assuming that you’re on his good side, turning to him only in times of need. All of these views about God are profound philosophies that shape everything about you. The choices that you make, the way you address conflict, how you handle your money. How you handle your free time. What you read. What you watch, how you cultivate your marriage, your fears, your hopes, your plans for the future. Tell me what you think about God, and I will have a pretty good start toward how you approach all of that. When it comes to God, it’s what’s in our minds that counts most. What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. So I think you’ll agree with me that it’s important to get that right, to make sure that what our thoughts are about God matches up with who God actually is, to make sure our thoughts match up with the actual nature and character of God. The apostle John wrote this letter so we would get that right. He’s not sharing his own thoughts. He’s sharing what God has revealed about himself through Jesus. You need to remember, constantly keep in mind John’s description from his prologue. The word of life was made manifest. And we have seen, and we have heard and we have touched it. John is not suggesting a new, more helpful way to think about God. He’s saying, God has shown us who he is. He wants our thoughts about God to be accurate, aligning with what God has revealed about himself. And that’s what I want for us too, church. That’s what I want for you as an individual. It’s what I want for us collectively. I don’t want us to walk blindly through life guessing as to what God is like, falling into all sorts of problems and hopelessness. Because we get it wrong. John will show us today that we don’t have to live like that because God has revealed himself.

We learn today that because God is entirely light with no darkness in him at all, we must identify, repent, and rid ourselves of all sin. We’re in First John chapter one, verses 5 to 10 today. The passage starts by revealing to us an important truth about the character of God. And then John gives us three hypothetical errors that we could make in the way that we see ourselves and the way we see God. And he begins each one of these with “if we say”.

So, let’s start with God’s character. 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. The first thing to note is the way John introduces his message here. He wants us to know that he is not the source of his message. See, he could have said here, this is what I know about God, right? That’s a fine way to talk. It’s a totally normal way of speaking. And given his credentials as an apostle, we probably wouldn’t have questioned the accuracy of what he said if he just said, here’s what I know about God. But John has already made his case in the first four verses with an abundance of language, that what he knows about God comes from the fact that he was with God. He walked with Jesus. He heard, he saw, he touched God’s word of life. So here in verse five, the way he phrases this matters. Here is the message I heard from Jesus. I am now giving this message to you. In other words, this is what I got from Christ and here’s why this matters. Let me briefly tell you what we know about why John wrote this letter. Letters are occasional documents that there’s always an occasion that they were written. Something’s going on that prompts someone to write a letter. And that’s true of all letters. But it’s true of the New Testament letters, of course. Everything that Paul wrote, John’s three letters, James, Jude, they were all written because something was going on in the church.

Usually we know the recipients of the letter because the author tells us who he’s writing to. So it could be a specific church like Ephesians written to the church in Ephesus. It could be a circular letter that’s intended to be taken to many churches through messengers like James, for instance. It’s likely that all of the letters eventually became circulated letters, which is one of the reasons why they’re identified by the church as Scripture. Determining the occasion of this letter is a little tricky, because you have to glean it from the evidence of the letter itself. I’ve heard it said many times that reading a New Testament letter is a little like listening to one half of a phone conversation. Perhaps you’ve heard that before, too. It’s a pretty accurate way of describing it. If my wife is in the other room and I hear her say, so does she have a doctor’s appointment? I know that somebody’s sick and that we’re pretty close to the front of that sickness. Right? There’s no doctor yet, right? So I get some information. I can glean some information about what the other side is saying. I know someone is sick, right? I know it’s early. I don’t have all the information, I know something. Same thing here with John. We don’t know the specific church or the churches that John wrote to, but we know something about the reason that he wrote. If you skip down to chapter two, verse 19, John mentions there were people who had been part of the church, but they had left, as John puts it, because they were not of us.

So there’s been something of a church split that’s taken place, but the people who left have errant theology, and now they’re going to other churches trying to share this theology. All three letters that John wrote appear to be warnings not to be misled by these false teachers and to fall into those errors. What are those errors? The whole letter contains them. We know what the false teachers were teaching based on the corrections, instructions, and theological emphases that John has for his readers. That’s our half of the phone call. So his need to correct the theology of these false teachers is the reason that he starts his argument with. This is the message we heard from him and proclaim to you. He’s establishing the authority of his message. The false teachers were standing on their own authority. John is giving us what Jesus Himself taught. Why can he claim that authority? Because he was with Jesus. He was there. And here’s what he knows directly from Jesus. The nature of God is that he is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. Light here represents truth, pure truth, and righteousness that’s found only in Jesus. Now I won’t go back over it, but if you read the opening of John’s Gospel again, you will see that light is John’s predominant metaphor for describing Jesus.

John one verse nine says, the true light which gives light to everyone was coming into the world. So Jesus is the embodiment of pure truth and righteousness, which means God himself has no error. He has no impurity in him. Darkness, of course, is the opposite of that. It represents sin and corruption. And so John is saying that God, with his nature and displayed in his character, is completely pure in his truth, justice, and righteousness, and contains no corruption of sin of any kind. God is not some combination of good and evil, of goodness and sin. There is no moral ambiguity in God’s character. God does not have a bad thought or a moment of moral failure. Now you might think, well, that just impractical ivory tower doctrine that really doesn’t matter practically for our lives. But this is actually one of the most foundational truths of Scripture. It’s one of the most foundational doctrines we have to hold. Again, the most important thing about us is what we think of God because it affects everything else. If we think that God might be evil sometimes, then we have no reason to trust him. You can’t put any trust in him if you think that. If you believe deep down in your heart that God might treat you unjustly on some occasion because he himself is prone to sin or cruelty, you won’t trust him, and you won’t want him, and you won’t worship him.

But because you were designed by God to do those things, the lies that you believe about him are now preventing you from living the way God designed you to live. And even more than that, if we believe that God is morally corrupt in certain ways, it gives us license in our minds to be morally corrupt too. This appears to be the main problem that John is addressing here with the churches. These false teachers are pushing a view of God that says that he’s not entirely holy and sinless and good, and it’s giving them license to engage in sin. And then they just argue that they are simply aligning themselves with God’s character. This is probably the result of the mixing of non-Christian religions with the gospel. In the first century, people would use sin to actually worship their gods, these false gods. There are a lot of ancient examples of this. I won’t go into detail this morning on the disgusting practices. But just let me tell you that temple prostitution and child sacrifice were still forms of worship in the first century. We don’t have those extremes in our Western society, but the practice of assigning corruption to God and then using it as a license to sin is very much still in practice. Every time that you have ever heard or thought or said, I can’t help it, this is the way God made me. You’ve just blame shifted your sin to God.

We have a really big one of these coming up here later in this book. First John chapter four, verse eight, the most quoted quarter of a verse in the history of biblical misinterpretation. God is love. If there are three words of the Bible more abused than those I have yet to read them. People routinely tear those words, that word love, out from the page of the Bible. They pack it with all sorts of definitions, implications and applications, reinsert it back into its three word phrase and declare that their understanding of love is the very essence of God’s nature. Friends, we can’t do that with the Bible. If we want to know how to live for God truly and faithfully, we must first know God. We’ve got to know who he is. If we get his character wrong, if we believe him to be sometimes sinful because he’s not entirely holy, then we will act sinfully based on that lie. And to do that puts you in a very dangerous spiritual position before the true God, who you don’t actually know and understand. John elaborates on this with three lies that we could believe, and they’re lies that we could tell ourselves, along with the dire consequences of them. The first two he gives us a solution for, the proper way to think about God. For the last one, he simply offers the warning. Here’s the first one. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

I like the repetition through this passage. If we say, if we say, if we say. It challenges one of the most powerful lies in our culture today that if I say something about myself, it must be true. If I say I have a relationship with God and that he accepts all of my choices and behaviors as good and correct, then that has to be true. In a sense, our culture has completely destroyed the category of hypocrisy. Isn’t that interesting? You keep moving the goalposts around, you actually destroy, there is no such thing anymore as hypocrisy. It’s impossible to be a hypocrite in a society that says morality is personal and fluid and can change at any time. See, hypocrisy requires an external, unchanging standard. It requires a moral law. Interestingly, it’s often Christians who are accused of being hypocrites, but the standard used to measure it comes from Christianity. It’s very interesting, strange world we live in. Anyway, let me summarize this. You can be a hypocrite. Okay. You can. You can be a hypocrite. How do you do that? Well, you start by saying to yourself and probably to other people that you have fellowship with the one true God. You say, I know Jesus. He’s my Saviour. I follow him. He’s the light of my life. I believe what he says is true and that he is leading me into a righteous life.

You say that, but then you live a life of darkness. The sinful patterns of your life demonstrate that you actually don’t have any spiritual connection to God at all. You walk in darkness. That word walk is a pretty important concept in this letter. See, a walk is a consistent, continued journey. So a walk in darkness is not a stumble or a temporary failure, from which you then get up and metaphorically dust yourself off and get back into the light. This is a chosen path of sin. The same, by the way, is true of a walk in the light. But we’ll get to that here in just a moment. If you say that you are in a Holy Spirit bound relationship with God, but you choose to live in sin contrary to his character, you don’t actually have a relationship with God at all. You are lying to yourself. You are telling yourself untruths. You have believed a lie about God. Now you might have made up that lie. Somebody might have told you that lie. However it happened, you’re basing your life on a lie. Your sin separates you from a holy God who is all light and no darkness. He will not unite himself in a relationship to people who choose willingly to persist in their sin. Thank God there is a solution for this. 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.

All the 90s kids just broke into a song in their hearts just now, right? You’ll have to dig out that Jesus Freak CD later, right? If you’ve got anything to play it on anymore? The solution? The solution is there is a different way to walk. That’s the solution. You can be on a different journey. A journey in light. Now, just like with a walk in darkness, this is a persistent journey that is just like an occasional failure is not a walk in darkness. An occasional good deed or religious activity is not a walk in the light. If we walk in the light as he, Jesus is in the light, meaning our life choices persistently match the truth and righteousness shown to us in God’s Word and demonstrated by Jesus. Then two things are true of us. First, we actually have the fellowship that we say we have. Here, John says it’s fellowship with one another, meaning we’re spiritually bonded together as a church. But you’ll remember from verse three before John said, fellowship with the church is also with the Father and the Son. So he’s basically saying the same thing here. The second thing that’s true, if you’re walking in the light, is that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. The gracious gift of God’s forgiveness through Christ’s sacrifice has been applied to you. So a person who walks in the light, whose life demonstrates the righteousness and truth of God, is showing two things that are true of him.

Right. So that’s the outward sign of two things that are true inside. He actually has a relationship with God because he actually has his sins washed away. The path that we are walking will tell us the truth of our relationship or lack of relationship with God. Now immediately, that presents us with a problem, doesn’t it? What about that sin that still clings to us? What about my sin failure? It happens every day. And it does, doesn’t it? Don’t you fail every day at some point. I mean, I’m fighting. I’m winning the war with God’s help, with the Holy Spirit actively at work in me because Christ has won the war for me on the cross. I am now winning the war. But I lose battles all the time. If I sin, what does that say about the path that I’m on? What does that say about my relationship with God? About my spiritual state? The second hypothetical error addresses this. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. See, the false teachers were apparently teaching a view of God that eliminated the category of sin. Or at least they took a lot of sins out of the category. You know, when you think up your own God, you know, when you when you think up your own God, you know what you get to do? You also get to think up his law, too. Which is incredibly convenient if you want to justify yourself, because then you get to claim that you have no sin according to the God that you made up that doesn’t exist, right? If you’ve ever wondered why I spend so much time up here on this stage preaching on self-deception, it’s because of verses like this. We find them all over the Bible. This is one of the clearest. When I read about Eve in the garden, there is no question that she was deceived by the serpent. She was told a lie. But that quickly became an entire conversation in her mind about the goodness of God, the goodness of the fruit, the benefits of eating it. And it caused her to question whether God, what he had said was true. In other words, deception quickly led to self-guided self-deception. Her errant thoughts about the truth of God led her into a self-chosen darkness. So yes, she heard the lies, but it was her heart that led her into sin. You know, a few years ago, I got my kids a bunch of stickers for their water bottles. That’s a thing, right? Just water bottle stickers everywhere, right? They love them. So I got them a bunch of stickers from this company called Missional Wear. Here’s one of the stickers that I got for them. Don’t follow your heart. Doesn’t he look like a happy little heart? Right.

Just as he’s on the go, he’s on his walk. By the way, this is not a commercial for Missional Wear. Wouldn’t that be weird if I started doing product placement in the middle of my sermons? That’d be a weird thing to do. I just, I put it up there to tell you where to get it because they’re the ones that designed it, they should get the credit for it. Every cartoon I have ever watched tells me to follow my heart. Why does this cartoon tell me not to? Well, if you look closely, there’s a reference there to Jeremiah 17:9, which says, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? So Jeremiah is describing a heart that hasn’t been changed. It’s not been made new by the Lord. The fallen state of our human ambition and desire means that our hearts aren’t going to lead us to truth on their own. Okay? That’s not where we’re headed on our own. Those hearts are going to lead us into darkness. They’re going to mislead us. Which is another way of saying that we will be self-deceived. What’s the solution? If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. The solution is not to deny your sin, it’s to own it. It’s to stand up and say, that is my sin.

Confession is the weapon that kills your sin and demonstrates that you are walking in the light of Christ. So back to our earlier question. If I sin, what does that say about the path I’m on? Nothing, by itself. It says nothing at all. By itself. You won’t know the path by whether you have sin in your life, you will know it by what you do next. What do you do with it? Are you going to confess it? Call it out? Turn from it? Seek forgiveness from God and people that you’ve wronged? Are you going to go before Christ in repentance? If so, you have nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. You’re in the light. Jesus is faithful when we fail, he forgives the one who repents. That’s the whole gospel. His death pays for our sin. When we go and repent, we’re saying Jesus took that on the cross. It’s no longer my penalty to pay. He paid it for me. Are you going to go in confession with it or are you going to justify it? Are you going to blame others? Essentially claim that you have no sin? If that’s the case, you’re walking in darkness. You’re walking in self-denial and darkness. Confession, repentance, and a confident trust in the forgiveness of Jesus is the evidence of your salvation. That’s what a walk in the light is. See, we are going to sin, and we’re going to fail until we have new bodies.

That’s going to be true. But until then, God has given us restoring grace.  He’s cleansing us of unrighteousness. It’s consistently challenging, molding and conforming us more and more into Christ. Conviction over our sin is part of that process. Okay. It’s a normal part of the process if you feel deep conviction over your sin. Praise God. Okay. That’s a gift to you. That is evidence that God is working inside of you in your heart. The spiritual danger isn’t when you feel shame and guilt that turns you to Jesus. The spiritual danger is when you don’t feel anything at all. Well, there’s one more hypothetical error that we can make. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. Have not sinned here is in the perfect tense, meaning that a person who thinks this, doesn’t believe that he has sinned at all. He’s in a state of sinlessness, and the only way to get there is to claim that sin doesn’t even exist. That it’s just a category that’s made up by religious people to give power to the church, or to keep their children in line. People think stuff like that. People think that that’s what sin is. It’s a very naive view when you consider the reality of the evil in our world. This is the sort of lie that mostly is believed by relatively wealthy, safe and comfortable people. But they’re out there.

People will believe this. You might even be inclined toward a thought like that. That maybe sin isn’t really a thing at all. Nobody really believes it. God’s law is written on our hearts. We have to suppress a lot of obvious truth in the world to get to a sin doesn’t exist position. And no one is ever consistent on this. As soon as a person is truly wronged, moral relativity just goes out the window and a strong sense of objective justice comes thundering back. But if you claim that you are not in a state of sin using whatever argument you like, it’s the same as calling God a liar because he’s revealed himself. And you’re saying that’s not true. You’re calling him a liar. You’re saying that the gospel isn’t true. And that means that his word isn’t in you. Meaning his gospel hasn’t changed you. You have no relationship with God. If you refuse to acknowledge your sin. You can’t. It’s not possible to have a relationship with God unless you acknowledge your sin. Without sin, there is no gospel. Jesus died for nothing. Salvation only makes sense if you can identify what you’re saved from.

You know, if I’m walking down the street and some guy comes up behind me and puts me in a headlock and drags me backwards and lays me down and starts pounding my chest, I’m going to sue him for assault. But if the same thing happens when I’m drowning, he just saved my life. The difference is the water. The difference is the position I’m in, which is imminent death. I’m drowning. Why don’t more people accept the saving work of Jesus? They don’t know they’re drowning. They don’t know they’re dying in sin. They think the gospel is an assault because they don’t know they’re drowning. They don’t yet see and believe the true nature of God and accept his revealed word. Their thoughts about him are not accurate.

I’ll leave you with this today. The incomparable J.I. Packer, in his book Knowing God wrote this. Disregard the study of God and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life, blindfold as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul. Friends, if you are walking the path of darkness and you are stumbling and blundering, I want to invite you into the light of Christ this morning. Light is available to you. There is a way through this life that makes sense. Where you acknowledge the sin and evil in your own heart as you see it objectively in the world around you and realize you’re part of that, but you can claim Christ and be set free and see the light. It’s available to you. Light that will make sense of this world, light that will lead you into righteousness. If you will confess your sin and trust in Jesus and begin a journey in the light. Would you pray with me?

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