Sermon Notes

1 5 This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. 6 If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; 7 but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. 8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
2 My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, 2 and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. 3 Now by this we know that we have come to know him, if we obey his commandments. 4 Whoever says, “I have come to know him,” but does not obey his commandments is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist; 5 but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection. By this we know that we are in him: 6 whoever says, “I abide in him,” ought to walk in the same way as he walked. (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, NRSVue)

1 5 This, in essence, is the message we heard from Christ and are passing on to you: God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him. 6-7 If we claim that we experience a shared life with him and continue to stumble around in the dark, we’re obviously lying through our teeth—we’re not living what we claim. But if we walk in the light, God himself being the light, we also experience a shared life with one another, as the sacrificed blood of Jesus, God’s Son, purges all our sin. 8-10 If we claim that we’re free of sin, we’re only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins—simply come clean about them—he won’t let us down; he’ll be true to himself. He’ll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing. If we claim that we’ve never sinned, we out-and-out contradict God—make a liar out of him. A claim like that only shows off our ignorance of God.
2 1-2 I write this, dear children, to guide you out of sin. But if anyone does sin, we have a Priest-Friend in the presence of the Father: Jesus Christ, righteous Jesus. When he served as a sacrifice for our sins, he solved the sin problem for good—not only ours, but the whole world’s. 2-3 Here’s how we can be sure that we know God in the right way: Keep his commandments. 4-6 If someone claims, “I know him well!” but doesn’t keep his commandments, he’s obviously a liar. His life doesn’t match his words. But the one who keeps God’s word is the person in whom we see God’s mature love. This is the only way to be sure we’re in God. Anyone who claims to be intimate with God ought to live the same kind of life Jesus lived. (The Message, MSG)

The Johannine Epistles (1 John, 2 John, and 3 John), along with the Gospel of John are called “The Johannine Literature” and biblical scholars consider them to have been influenced by the “Johannine School of thought”—a community of early Christians who were related in some way to the Gospel of John. While 2 John and 3 John say they were written by “the Elder,” 1 John does not have an author subscription. However, the writer does say he was an eyewitness to Jesus’ earthly ministry. Because of the widespread familiarity with the Gospel of John, many early Christians thought the person who wrote the Gospel of John—attributed to John, the son of Zebedee—also wrote the Johannine Epistles. Later, early Christians also assumed the writer of Revelation was the author of the Gospel of John as well. If the Johannine Epistles are dated after the gospel, they were likely composed around 100 CE. Regardless of authorship, the Johannine Epistles reflect a complicated history of composition with multiple persons from the Johannine Community likely informing and shaping its development.
Like all New Testament literature, the Johannine Epistles are occasional documents—they are written to specifically address particular issues the Johannine Christian community was wrestling with within their 1st Century context. The writer of 1 John addresses Docetism, the idea that Jesus only appeared to be human or have a real flesh and blood body. To rebut this heresy, the writer forcefully states Jesus was both human and divine supporting traditional Christology and Soteriology ( Christian ideas about the identity and saving work of Jesus Christ). Likewise, 2 John addresses similar false teachings that assert Jesus was not human, love is not the foundation of Christian conduct, and what qualities make Christians the children of God.
Ultimately, both 1 John and 2 John say walking in the “light of God” is what defines a child of God. Christianity is not, at its core, the observance of rituals or rules. Rather, it is a walk of personal fellowship with the living God. John makes it clear that to have genuine fellowship with God, we must walk in God’s light.

5 This, in essence, is the message we heard from Christ and are passing on to you: God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him.
In the opening verses of the lesson text, the writer states “God is light” indicating God’s luminescence as clarified reality, measuring stick, and energizing force. God reveals reality. God, through Christ, opens the eyes of the heart and life comes into focus, and we see clearly, without distortion. It does not all happen in one amazing transformation. It’s a gradual process; we would not be able to take the full revelation at once. But the purpose of God’s entering human hearts is that we might see reality. Light reveals. The enigmas of life will gradually unfold, the mysteries will become clear, illusions will be seen for what they are.
God also measures. Light is the most common measuring stick in the universe. We measure whether things are straight or crooked by light. Surveyors use light to measure distances and angles. That is what God does. God is a measuring stick, a point of reference. We can use God to measure everything else. Humans are forever seeking to solve the puzzles of life on every level around us—economic life, political life, social life, scientific life, psychological life. As we seek to ferret out the solutions to these puzzles, we come up with many proposed solutions. Some are contradictory, some are supplementary to each other, some are absurd, some are very appealing and practical. But how do we know which one is right. That is where God comes in as the ultimate measuring stick.
God energizes. That is the most dramatic quality about light. It imparts life, it activates, it quickens. God intensifies, fulfills, and glorifies our essential humanity. God does not destroy it. God takes it and leads it on through the darkness into an ever-growing experience of life and vitality and productivity.
6-7 If we claim that we experience a shared life with him and continue to stumble around in the dark, we’re obviously lying through our teeth—we’re not living what we claim. But if we walk in the light, God himself being the light, we also experience a shared life with one another, as the sacrificed blood of Jesus, God’s Son, purges all our sin.
Verses 6-7 describe what is often misconstrued as “a backslidden condition.” But if we view it this way, we are confusing cause with results. “What is darkness?” The absence of light. To walk in darkness is to walk as though there were no God, for God is light. It is to be a practical atheist. We believe there is a God, we know God exists, but we live as though there were none. That is walking in darkness. It is possible to be a Christian and yet walk in darkness by turning God off. We can miss the benefits of God's presence in our hearts and lives by ignoring the light.
People ignore the light and walk in darkness when they stop coming to Church, stop reading the Scriptures, and stop engaging in self-examination. Guilt and regret are powerful emotions that can lock us into a defeatist mode that can have a devastating impact on our lives. We sinned. People were hurt; lives were affected. And we’ve been saddled with guilt and regret ever since. We long to undo what we have done. We try to make amends with those that we have hurt. But every attempt at recovery is plagued with disaster and dissatisfaction. And though we continue on, we feel like defeat was inevitable. It was just a matter of time.
Guilt and regret have the power to negatively impact the quality of our lives. We become uncertain of ourselves. We are stagnated by the fear of making the same error (or worse) in the future. We don’t believe we deserve to be happy, thus dooming ourselves to perpetual unhappiness. We stop expecting good things to happen to us because guilt and regret have moved us to a place of low expectation, or no expectation. And life has become an endless string of disappointments and frustrations. But there is good news for all of us today. Guilt and regret can be overcome. There is recovery; guilt and regret are not all that is left to us. In Christ, we can start living in expectation again.
8-10 If we claim that we’re free of sin, we’re only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins—simply come clean about them—he won’t let us down; he’ll be true to himself. He’ll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing. If we claim that we’ve never sinned, we out-and-out contradict God—make a liar out of him. A claim like that only shows off our ignorance of God.
Please note first the difference between the words, sin and sins. In Verse 8 it is singular; in Verse 9 it is plural. This is the distinction between the root which is sin, singular, and the fruit, which are sins, plural. Sin is that aspect of humanity that makes us want to supplant God on every occasion. We want the world to revolve around us, always to be the center of things. That self-centeredness is sin. Sins are those specific forms which this inward bent makes us take from time to time. They can cover a wide range of experience. There are many kinds of sins, but all from one root, sin. John says if we say we have no sin, that is, no capacity to commit sins, if we deny the very possibility of sins, then we deceive ourselves.
Sadly, many Christians have fallen into this deception; they believe that sin merely calls for an adjustment in their thinking. But the truth, as it is revealed in Jesus, is quite different. According to the word of the Lord—both directly from His own lips and through the apostles that followed—sin is a very objective reality. It does exist, it is always a present possibility. To treat it otherwise is to practice self-deception and fall victim of the saddest of delusions. John says that the way to resolve this delusion is through confession. 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. The cleansing is not based upon the activity of the Father; it is based on the work of Jesus Christ. On that basis God is faithful and just to forgive.
2 1-2 I write this, dear children, to guide you out of sin. But if anyone does sin, we have a Priest-Friend in the presence of the Father: Jesus Christ, righteous Jesus. When he served as a sacrifice for our sins, he solved the sin problem for good—not only ours, but the whole world’s. 2-3 Here’s how we can be sure that we know God in the right way: Keep his commandments.
While there is never any need to sin—the Holy Spirit empowers us to live without sinning—if we find ourselves doing so, we have an advocate in Jesus Christ who is perpetually in God’s presence to rush to our defense immediately. In Greek, the term for “advocate” is actually paraclete (“paraklētos”). This word means “one who is called alongside. It literally means someone who pleads a person’s case like a criminal defense attorney. But Jesus’ defense is of no avail to us if we try to defend ourselves. There cannot be two advocates in this case. We can either rely on his defense of us—the manifestation of his work on our behalf which has wiped away every stain, every sin which you ever will commit or ever have committed—or we must rely on our own defense.
The writer makes it clear that when Jesus sacrificed his life on the cross he solved the “sin” problem for the whole world. We no longer have to be concerned about whether our sins will lead us into eternal damnation. Because we know that Jesus has forever reconciled us to God the Father, we don’t worry about judgement. Instead, we have an opportunity to show God that we appreciate Jesus dying for us by living our lives in the light of God’s love, and, in the light of Jesus’ sacrifice on Calvary. The commandments that the writer speaks of are those ethical behaviors that Jesus demanded of the disciples: to love (agape) one another. Loving each other is the way that we show God that we appreciate God’s love—in Jesus Christ—towards us.
4-6 If someone claims, “I know him well!” but doesn’t keep his commandments, he’s obviously a liar. His life doesn’t match his words. But the one who keeps God’s word is the person in whom we see God’s mature love. This is the only way to be sure we’re in God. Anyone who claims to be intimate with God ought to live the same kind of life Jesus lived.
In the final verses of the lesson text, the writer says love is the fruit of authentic relationship with God. If we say we know God, but don’t exhibit God’s love in our living, then we are liars. The primary way that people know we are intimately acquainted with God is not evidenced in Sunday worship, Sunday School, or bible study. Instead, like Jesus, we are to reach out—with Christ’s love, hospitality, and extravagant welcome—to everyone we meet. We literally “abide” (NRSV), or stay connected to God, through loving others. That is living a life like Jesus!