The theme of the first chapter of 1John is how we can have fellowship with God. Last time we saw the basis of fellowship starts with a relationship with Jesus Christ. Without the basis of a relationship, there can be no fellowship. Basically, that means that you must be born again by faith in Christ, trusting Him as your Savior and Lord for the forgiveness of your sins. That relationship is the basis by which you can have fellowship with God.

As we turn now to the remainder of the passage, we are going to look further at this principle of fellowship, particularly the nature of fellowship. Fellowship, by the way of reminder, is from the Greek word koininea, which means communion, intimacy, fellowship, communication. Some one has said it well that relationship is accepting Christ; fellowship is experiencing Him. You can never have fellowship until you have established relationship, but you can certainly have relationship without fellowship. It is possible to be a believer, a born again Christian, and be out of fellowship with God. We have seen several examples of that in Christ’s letters to the churches of Revelation. It’s possible to have lost your first love for God, to even commit adultery against God, all of which hurts your fellowship with God. So though you may have a relationship, you do not have fellowship, because of sin in your life. And as a consequence you may feel far from God, you may feel distant from God, or feel like you can’t talk to God. Such is the nature of fellowship, or broken fellowship with God. It causes separation.

An illustration can be found in your family. Your children are yours by relationship. Nothing is going to change that. But when they come to the dinner table with dirty hands and feet they are not going to have communion with you until they get cleaned up. That’s a simple illustration of fellowship. We are God’s children by relationship, but we lose fellowship with Him when we are stained by sin, when we pick up the muck and mire from being in the world. And to be restored to fellowship we must be cleansed from our unrighteousness.

Now John is addressing that problem. The Christian mired in sin is not the life that God has designed for us. That kind of life is not going to produce the joy of salvation that God intended, nor will it produce fruitfulness, nor the blessings of our salvation. If you are truly saved, living in sin will produce misery and heartache, and it can even require God’s discipline in order to turn you around to keep you from hurting yourself, or others, or the church. Paul, speaking about the Lord’s Supper, said for this reason, for the reason of unconfessed sin, many of you are sick and a number sleep. Some had even died as a result of living in sin. God is jealous for church and will act to keep it pure and to do away with stumbling blocks.

So now that John has established in vs1-4 the basis of our relationship with Christ, which gives us fellowship with God, he moves on to show us the nature of fellowship. And he starts with a message from Christ to the church. He says in vs.5; “This is the message we have heard from Him (that is Christ) and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” He said, I have been with Christ, touched Him, lived with Him, walked with Him and heard His teaching. He is the Son of God who was in the flesh. Now here is His message, “God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.”

Well, at first glance that seems a strange way to summarize the gospel. But if you really think about it, it is a brilliant synopsis of the nature of God and our relationship to Him. It states the nature of God, and the nature of our fellowship with Him.

If I were an eloquent speaker, scientifically minded, I would probably try to give you an entire sermon today on the nature of light and how vs.5 illustrates it. But I’m not scientifically minded. However, I don’t think that John is making a sweeping theological treatise here which is meant to stand alone, but I think instead it is particularly pertinent to his theme of fellowship. For instance, John records in John 4:24 Jesus as saying that God is Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. Now he records Jesus saying that God is Light. Does that mean that God is actually Light? Or is it perhaps an allegorical reference to God? I would suggest that it may be both to some extent. But perhaps it is better to understand it as God has manifested Himself as Light, both literally and figuratively.

Now I do not have time to spend this morning showing you all the ways in which God has manifested Himself as light in the Bible. But let me just show you one, which I think is illustrative. It’s found in Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.”

Notice a couple of things here real quickly; one is that God commanded light to appear on the first day, before He made the sun, moon and stars. Secondly, notice, the Spirit of God was moving before the Light appeared. So God existed as Spirit before light was manifested to the world. Thirdly, notice that the world was in darkness and then God said, “let there be light.”

Cross reference that to John 1. And you will see that the Word was in the beginning with God and was God. The Word became Light in vs4. And in vs.5, the Light shined in darkness and the darkness did not overpower it, or understand it. It’s pretty cool to see the correlation between Genesis 1 and John 1. Now in 1John1, we see the Message, that is the Word, manifested in the flesh, and the message is that God is light and there is no darkness in Him at all. So we can say that as light is manifested to the world, it is a picture of God manifesting Himself to the world as the Word of God, the Truth.

So what is light, what does it figuratively represent about God? Well, I would suggest from the scriptures we just looked at and others that it represents purity, holiness, truth and life. Light represents the attributes of God; He is holy, pure, He is truth, and life.

John goes on to say that “in Him there is no darkness at all.” This speaks of God’s holiness. Darkness throughout the scriptures represents evil, i.e., the kingdom of darkness being the kingdom of Satan. When the scriptures speak of the world being in darkness it’s speaking of the sinful nature of the world, the blindness of the world in regards to spiritual truth. So God being without sin, being holy and pure, He cannot tolerate sin, or have fellowship with sin. Thus man when he sinned was kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and lost fellowship with God.

So the message from Christ states the principle that God is light and cannot have fellowship with darkness because He is without darkness, being holy. So we can say that Christians can have a relationship with God, and yet be out of fellowship with Him because we have sin in our lives. God cannot have fellowship with sin.

So now John presents three ways by which Christians lose fellowship with God. If you look at the first chapter of John’s letter, you will see three times he uses the phrase, “if we say”. Verse 6, “If we say we have fellowship,” Verse 8, “If we say we have no sin,” and Verse 10, “If we say we have not sinned.” Three times a false profession is made, but the condition that follows belies the profession. There are three false professions of man that are contrary to fellowship with God; the man who walks in darkness, the man who denies his sin, and the man who rationalizes his sin.

Let’s look at the first one in vs6; “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” Now the most common way of interpreting this verse is to say that to walk in darkness is to walk in the world, according to the lusts of the world, which is to walk in sin. And that is true. James 4:4 says, “You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” So walking in darkness can be correlated with friendship with the enemies of God. Hardly conducive to fellowship.

Yet there is another dimension to walking in the darkness which is another possible interpretation. It is possible to be a Christian and yet walk in darkness by turning God off. To stop coming to a Bible teaching church, to stop reading the Word. To become attuned to the world, and out of tune towards God. In other words, to turn off the Light. If the Light is Truth, then to turn it off is to simply stop listening to the truth, to stop hearing the truth, and then to stop practicing the truth. The opposite of the truth is a lie. Listening to the lie of the devil is a sure fire way of walking in darkness. And when you start listening to a lie, you will start practicing evil and stop practicing the truth.

Now in each false profession John presents for us, he also gives us a remedy. And in this case, the remedy is simple; rather than walking in darkness, walk in the light as He is in the light. Walk in the truth. Listen to the truth, practice the truth.To walk in the light is to walk according to what God reveals in the Word. Psalm 119:105 says, “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

And one more aspect of walking in the light, is to let the light of God’s word shine in you and reveal in you all that is darkness, to examine yourself in the light of His word, and then you will have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.

The second false profession that men make is to deny their sin. Vs.8, “If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.” There is an anecdote about the late D.L. Moody which illustrates this principle. Someone attending one of his services came up afterwards and told him that he had reached the place where he no longer sinned. Mr. Moody said, “Well, I’d like to ask your wife about that.”

If we say we have no ability to sin at all, we are only deceiving ourselves. Others are quite aware that we are lying to and deceiving ourselves. They are not fooled, it is we who are fooled. The first man who had a relationship with God but didn’t walk in the light may deceive others, but seldom himself. He knows that he is not living as he ought, he knows he is ignoring the truth. But this man deceives himself. He actually believes that he can no longer sin, that there is no longer any possibility of evil in him. I’ve heard some people in that camp describe it by saying that God no longer sees their sin as sin, so therefore it isn’t sin. They are perfect and cannot sin.

This self righteousness goes by a lot of names and has found it’s way into a lot of churches and false teaching. Ironically, many call themselves “holiness” practitioners. Some think that salvation eliminates the penalty of sin, which it does, but then think that a subsequent spiritual baptism eliminates the presence of sin, irregardless of their actions. But whenever this self righteousness occurs, the one who makes this false claim loses immediately that fellowship which gives Christianity it’s life. He loses his power, his influence, his vitality, and his effectiveness as a Christian.

John once again gives a remedy for this broken fellowship with God. Vs.9, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Now the word confess does not necessarily mean to ask for forgiveness. Christ’s work for us upon the cross has already done all that is necessary to forgive us. What God wants us to do is to look at the sin before us and call it what he calls it. That means to agree with God about it, and that is what the word confess means: Fess comes from a root which means “to say,” and con means “with.” “To say with” God what he says about this thing, that is confessing sin.

When we confess our sin, it says He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. We are forgiven for our sins by faith in what Christ has done on the cross to atone for our sins. There He removed the penalty of our sin. To cleanse us is to wash us. And here Jesus cleanses us from the practice of our sin. Jesus illustrated this washing in the Last Supper, on the night He was betrayed.

Gathered with his disciples in the Upper Room, he took a basin and a towel and girded himself and set about to wash the feet of the disciples. You recall, as he came to Peter, Peter shook his head and said, “No, Lord, you will never wash my feet,” (John 13:8). Jesus then said these significant words, “If I wash do not wash you, you can have no part with me.” Peter, always going overboard, said, “Lord, if that’s the case, then wash me all over.” Again the Lord has to correct him. “No, Peter, he that is bathed does not need to wash again.” That first cleansing of redemption, that coming to Christ which washes away the guilt of the past, that is “bathing all over.” Jesus said he that is so bathed does not need to wash all over again, but he does need to wash his feet. This is what John is talking about — this repeated washing of the feet. Being cleansed from traipsing in sin as we walk in this world. It is illustrated in the ancient practice of washing at a public bath, then when walking back to your home, your feet get soiled. So though you have been bathed, you need to have your feet washed. We have been made righteous by faith, but in practice we grow soiled in this world we live in. To retain fellowship with God, we need to confess it as sin, and be cleansed.

The third false profession is found in vs.10, “If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.” This false profession is of the man who rationalizes his sin. Once again, it results in breaking fellowship with God. In this third case, the person is saying, “Of course, I know I can sin as a Christian. I know I need the light of the truth. But when I stop to look at my life, and examine myself, what I see is not sin. Weakness and failure perhaps, but not sin. I may have to admit that I have been weak, but I have not sinned.” This what John means: “If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

This is the exercise of the human mind which we call rationalization, the tendency to categorize wrong so that it sounds better, and evil so that it looks good. We redefine sin according to our definition, rather than according to God’s. We relabel sin as something that doesn’t sound so bad. We hold our sin to a different standard. We have no problem usually seeing sin in other people, just not in ourselves. Others have prejudices; we have convictions. Others are prideful; but we have self-respect. Someone else may be lazy, but when we do not want to do something, we say we are too busy. When someone else goes ahead and acts on his own, we say he is presumptuous; when we do the same thing, we have initiative. When someone else gets angry and blows up, we say he has lost his temper; but when we do that, we are merely showing righteous indignation. And as long as we can find a nicer label we never will treat the thing like the sinful cancer that it is.

We make excuses for our sin due to our circumstances. But the truth is, we do not like our circumstances. We don”t like where God has put us. We don’t like the people or the pressures we have to live under, we don’t like the circumstances that surround us, and we refuse to accept them. That is the real problem. Therefore, we are not interested in Christ’s power to live in the circumstances we find ourselves in. But Romans 14:23 says that whatever is not of faith is sin. Therefore, when we refuse to see our sin as sin, we make God a liar and His word is not in us. We call our sin ok, so that means God is a liar because He says sin requires death. We are back in the darkness again, His word is not in us. We create our own standard for sin.

But thank God there is a remedy which John gives us in the second chapter. Vs.1, “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin.” The solution is to come back to the word, the things which John has written, so that we may see sin for what it is, that you will see God’s standard for sin, that having a love for God you will not sin. When you come to know God and love God as we should, then we won’t want to sin, to bring shame upon the name of God. When we have fellowship with Him, we don’t have a desire to sin.

But if we do sin, and no one on this side of heaven is free from sin, then we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. Advocate is from the Greek word “parakletos”. It means to come alongside. Jesus comes alongside us to help us get back up on our feet and walk with the Lord again. He is a faithful friend who sticks closer than a brother. He is our Helper, our Shepherd. He walks with us, and is there to pick us up and clean us up when we fall.

And note that John says He is Jesus Christ the righteous. His righteousness is so expansive, so great, that it is more than enough to cover our sins. When we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, because His righteousness is more than enough, not only for our sins, John says, but for the sins of the whole world. That shows us the magnitude of Christ’s righteousness. He is God, and is eternal, the maker of life, so that His righteousness is more than equal to the sins of the world. That is a tremendous thing, beyond our comprehension. But it is given to us as a comfort to those who fall into sin, that God’s mercy and grace are more than sufficient to forgive even the worst of sinners, because Jesus Christ is the Righteous One who is able to atone for all the sins of the world and still have an unlimited supply left over.

Listen, God made us for fellowship with Him. In walking with Him, in fellowship with Him, we have life more abundantly. In fellowship with Him we have joy and peace and hope. But Satan as the god of this world has devised a strategy to lure you back to the darkness, to cause you to turn off the light, to redefine sin, to rationalize sin. Whatever lie he has to make he will make it. But his strategy is always to lie. Notice that in each of the remedies John identifies a lie as part of the problem. In vs.6 he says, “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” In vs.8 he says, “If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.” In vs. 10, “If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.” That’s the progression of the lie of the devil. We lie to others, we lie to ourselves, and then we even get to the place where we call God a liar. How can we have fellowship with God when we live a lie? God is light/truth, and in Him is no darkness at all.

But thanks be to God that His love for us is so great, His desire for fellowship with us is so great, that He has made a way for us to be reconciled to Him, to restore that fellowship with Him. We confess our sins, we are forgiven and cleansed of our sin, and we have His presence with us to help us when we sin to get back up and come back into fellowship. But it starts with walking in the truth, the light, even as He is in the light. When we walk with Him, we follow Him, stay close to Him. We may not understand everything. We may not know why we have to deal with some things, or go through some things, but we continue to walk with Him, to follow Him, to pattern our lives according to the example we see in Him. Because He is Light, and when we walk with Him we walk in the Light. I pray that you will walk in the Light this week. And if you sin, you have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, confess your sins to Him that you can be restored to fellowship. There is no other way to joy. Don’t believe the lie. Believe the truth and walk in it. Walk in the truth, and you will have fellowship with God, that your joy may be complete.