Light Fellowship
Ours is a fellowship of confession. Fellowship begins with Christ. The Greek word we translate as fellowship is koinonia, which could also be translated as participation, communion. We have fellowship with Christ through his blood: his self-giving, saving act for us. We are now his blood brothers. His blood, his life, his light, is purifying us as he reforms us in fellowship. Our fellowship is more than eating together, good as that most certainly is! Our fellowship in Christ is for growing together in holiness and truth for salvation and life.
To go astray is to cast away these pearls of rare price, these blood-bought blessings. We have an inborn, headstrong tendency to follow our fickle hearts, making up truth as needed. Our wayward impulses are adept at harnessing our hearts to guide us down paths that seem right and feel good, but that do not lead us to God. John urges us to keep on the blessed though difficult way of consistency with Christ, imitation of the one who made the atoning sacrifice: he is the gateway to eternal life; he is our model for living with one another in truth, faith, hope, and love. This world has its own ideas about truth and love and spares no effort to teach us another faith.
“God is light; in him there is no darkness at all” (1:5). Whatever is of darkness then—whatever darkness may mean—is not of God. John rules out gray areas. We like gray areas: we can be in the light while holding on to our darkness. John saw the church excited, jubilant, empowered; it is now in a bored, tired, confused, troubled time. Then, as now, the church is subject to forces pulling from outside and within. The world works its way into the church by working its way into us. We spend a lot of time out in the world, pounded by the world’s messages and hounded by its values. Over time, these messages and values will begin to seem harmless, even helpful, maybe even . . . holy—just like what God wants, just like what He has been telling us all along, once we can get past all the stuff in this book that we don’t really like, anyway, don’t really understand, that doesn’t really seem to matter in our day. The world works its way into the church to pawn off darkness as though it were God’s light, new light, more light.
John has much to say about light. Light is from God and of God. Light is life, hope, salvation, knowledge; it is the power of creation; it is sight, seeing. Darkness is blindness, ignorance, error; it is death. As I was typing blindness it came out bindness: holy typo! For John, darkness is the blindness that binds. Christ came to set us free. He has. The world starts seeping back in, to bind us again with those cords that feel like silk, at first, but become something much worse, thereafter.
God forgives. He doesn’t cover over or paint with a prettier brush. He is light. “Light,” William Barclay writes, “is the great revealer. Flaws and stains which are hidden in the shade are obvious in the light.”[1] Some of us like the look of white clothes; we dare not wear them: stains of every color and size are just waiting for us. The blessing of God’s light is that it both reveals and purifies. English evangelical pastor and biblical scholar John Stott writes that “God does more than forgive; He erases the stain of sin [. . . .] it is a continuous process.”[2] Truth corrodes falsehood. Falsehood tries to hide, to cover itself or to cover truth. Truth burns through, burns away. God’s light purifies. John, writing about light, also has in view God’s “absolute moral perfection.”[3] Stott goes on to say that “Truth, like light, in Scripture has a moral content.”[4] “[F]or the Christian,” Barclay writes, “truth is never only intellectual; it is always moral.”[5] Truth isn’t something only to be known; we do truth. Truth is character-forming and action-inducing. Truth grips us for transformed living.
Conversely, people also do falsehood, among them those “who want fellowship with God on easy terms.”[6] An accommodating God is easy to get along with, or God demanding or accommodating depending on the issue and your feelings: God in conformity with our values. We are to be conformed to Christ.
John insists upon the integrity of discipleship, our fellowship with God in Christ: “If we claim to have fellowship with [Jesus] and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth” (1:6). Truth is to be lived, to be done. Scripture tells us what is darkness; Scripture tells us what is light. We prefer gray areas, so that we can be in the light while holding on to our darkness. We know the light is good; we rationalize that the darkness isn’t that bad, isn’t really darkness, much lighter than those mean, hate-filled people say. Making room for darkness is to prefer a fiction. The fiction is accommodating and in line with our personal beliefs.
Where did we ever get these beliefs? The Bible? We got them from others who taught us, directly or indirectly, to interpret God’s love a certain way, to look at God through the lens they provided. Ooh, that “they”—sounds like a conspiracy! Did you have me figured for a paranoid, wacko pastor? Now you know. It is a conspiracy: the world’s operatives are working to bring you over or at least undermine you. But Christ has already brought you over into the light, life, and love. The light is very bright. The life is very different from what we knew, the way we walked before. And as for this love? It’s demanding. Should love be demanding? Expectations? Isn’t love letting go? How can it be love when feelings are hurt?
What if love is accountability? When we love, we are answerable to the one whom we love, who loves us. In Christ, we are accountable. We are accountable to one another. Our fellowship is for walking in the light, for living out the truth. John is clear: “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, purifies us from all sin.” (1:7). There is a way to claim Jesus yet not have him. To have him is to have fellowship, koinonia, participation, communion—reforming, transforming, vital. To be in the light is to be in the ongoing, active process of purification.
If we don’t actually want the purification—what’s there to purify, after all? I’m not a bad person!—we aren’t going to invest in the fellowship. We don’t get to pick and choose what God may purify out of us and what He may not touch; He leaves nothing in the shadows. He is light.
John reminds us that our fellowship with one another is through the blood. No blood, no purification. No blood, no fellowship. We are brothers and sisters now because we are Christ’s blood brothers: his life is active and at work in our lives and in our life together. Christ knows about the shadows and the darkness—he knows about ours, even if we don’t! He came to dispel them, to speak his Word of light and life into every darkness. His Word reveals darkness for what it is; we don’t completely love that part; our feelings and self-regard get hurt along the way. His Word guides us out of every darkness because his Word is light, just as he is light. This congregation delights in fellowship. If we would have even more profound fellowship, let us walk in the light, encouraging one another to walk in the light. Our fellowship is for purification, sanctification—God is making us holy, together.
We are being purified. Our sin is forgiven; the stains remain. The blood is washing away, erasing, those stains. It’s a long, slow process; it’s demanding. We have a knack for slopping stuff on our clean clothes. We get up from indulging ourselves, and there the stains are. We will never be fully in the presence of God without being purified. God will never be fully present with us if we will not be fully purified. Sin, sin, sin—pastor, can’t we have one Sunday without sin? Yes! eventually, as we fix our hearts upon the blood of Jesus, purifying us in fellowship.
We are active participants in this purification for life as we do righteousness. Scripture is clear: we cannot be righteous without doing righteousness. Truth has moral consequences. Participating in Christ’s purification, as Stott puts it, means we permit no “consciously tolerated sin in our conduct.”[7] John might say we cannot have or know Christ if we will not dedicate ourselves to live up to Christ, emulate him, imitate him, love what he loved and as he loved. What this means is very difficult for us and can be very wearing if we lack real hope, which is to say, if we are not constantly relying upon grace through faith. I don’t achieve Christ; Christ achieves himself in me: grace, faith, love.
Ours is a fellowship of confession. God aligns our thinking with the Spirit. The difficult way of the cross is to confess, recognize and name sin, trusting in God in Christ Jesus through the power of His Holy Spirit to be purifying us over the remainder of our lives on this earth. It means continually fighting sin in our life. Disobedience doesn’t just go away, never to be seen or heard from again. The world works to align our thinking with the flesh. The way of easy terms and accommodation—the faith the world teaches—involves redefining things out of the category of sin so that we no longer feel troubled about them. To say the sin I do or desire is not sin is to say we need no purification, we need no Christ. Jesus we’ll take. Christ we can do without. The way of accommodation is the way of progressive stumbling into greater, deeper darkness. It is not the way to life because it is not life in the light. “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1:8).
We know sin is part of church talk, especially with this preacher: I mean! The church thrives when it is most alive to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit: spirit of power, yes, spirit of light and life, yes, and the spirit of truth. Power, light, life, truth, and love—all go together with God: they are all one, and we are one with God and all these, in Christ. This is koinonia, fellowship. We claim the faith. Do we permit the faith to claim us? If we are being purified from sin, we still sin; otherwise, there would be nothing to purify. But what is sin? I’m nice! (Except when I’m not.) I’m kind! (Except when I’m not.) I think Jesus is just great. (Even as I do things God’s living Word condemns.)
In worship, we make time to confess, early in the service: we need to do this before we can get any further. Our confession is part of our fellowship in the light, our accountability in Christ. What is Christ to us if there is nothing to confess? Unless we just want to confess our love for Jesus. Our love arises from need, though; unless we just love Jesus because he’s simply lovely. I fear the church has lost touch with who Jesus Christ is for us and why we need him. We risk losing touch with how truly we are lost when we lose sight of the truth. That’s scary, and John, who loves God’s love with a total love, wants to assure us: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.” (1:9-10).
In our fellowship of confession, we are offered the blessing of rediscovering, reconnecting with the faithfulness of our Father in heaven. He reveals and reaffirms His faithfulness in forgiving us. He reveals His love and justice by continuing to purify us. This is the gift of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Our constant, holy hope—which is no foolish hope, though the fulfillment can feel a long way off—is that we will not sin. O for that day! O for that kind of living! This is John’s hope, too (2:1). “But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One” (2:1). We know righteous living is difficult! Take courage, though. Confession is for encouragement; Christ is for encouragement; truth is for encouragement. God has bound Himself to you through the blood of Jesus, in whom our Father gives us one who speaks up for us, who pleads for us. He’s sure to be heard!
He is sure to be heard because, John reminds us, “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” (2:2). How precious, this fellowship in the blood, in the light. How precious, our confession.
To the God of all grace, who calls you to share God’s eternal glory in union with Christ, be the power forever!
[1] William Barclay. Letters of John and Jude. Daily Study Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975. 26.
[2] J. R. W. Stott. Epistles of John. Tyndale NT Commentaries. London: Tyndale, 1964. 75.
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