The Truth Will Set You Free

One of the first things we notice about 1 John is that it doesn’t follow the typical style of a NT letter. Much like the book of Hebrews it is written more like a sermon or a tract concerning the Gospel. It’s a tract that seeks to solidify or reinforce what the churches of Asia Minor first believed and to counter the new false teachings that are creeping into church.

We face the same things today, that is why we need to stay grounded the in the truth. The truth will set you free. But what is the truth?

Many people if not a majority today will say there is no truth at least there is no absolute truth. Or they ignore the truth, or they spin it and say the truth can change. Let me tell you something, the truth, the Word of God, God himself does not change. He is the same yesterday, He is the same today, and He will be the same tomorrow.

During our time in Indonesia sometimes discussions would arise as to whether Allah, god in Al Qur'an and Yahweh, our God were the same. The Bible is different from the Al Qur’an. Allah is not God, at least the God of the Bible. They have different characters. Muslims and Christians both believe they worship the God of Abraham but only our God is the Holy and unchanging God and His son Jesus is the only way to salvation.

John testifies to this in the opening to 1 John. Verses 1-4 say:

1 John 1:1–4 NIV84

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.

John testifies to the truth.

He says, this isn’t something we made up! We are telling you what we heard! What we saw with our own eyes! What we have touched with our hands! We are telling you the truth about the Word of Life, Jesus Christ! John goes on in the rest of the letter to expound on what this meant for them and hopefully I can build a bridge over the next several days that brings this message into the world and culture in which we live encourage you all.

This brings me to our main text for this morning. Please open your Bibles again to 1 John. We will be reading 1:5-2:2.

1 John 1:5–2:2 NIV84

This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by 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, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in 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 has no place in our lives. My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.

John uses a combination of opposite comparisons to illustrate his point. As we read through 1 John we see the contrast between “light” and “dark,” between the “truth” and a “lie,” and between “love” and hate.

Darkness and Light

The world is a dark place, and it is getting even darker. All you have to do is turn on your TV (American Horror Story, Walking Dead, …) or look at the kinds of movies Hollywood is producing today. Some of them are ok to watch but it seems that many of them have become darker and darker. Even the newer fairy tale movies seem darker. The evil is more real. For instance, Helen and I like the superhero movies, the Avengers, Superman, Spiderman, and the like. But Helen wouldn’t watch the Batman – The Dark Night Rises because she said it was too dark.

Darkness is real; spiritual darkness is real. In some places in the world you can feel it much stronger than here in the US. Here I think Satan uses science and technology to achieve his purposes. But in places like Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, and even sometimes here in the US the impact of dark spiritual forces is very real.

Thankfully John tells us in verse 5 that God is light!! God is holy and righteous and there is no darkness in Him, none. Jesus is that light for us. This is one of the themes that runs throughout 1 John and is prevalent in the Gospel of John as well.

John 1:5 - The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.[3]

John 1:9 - The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.[4]

Jesus himself claimed to be the light.

John 8:12 - “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” [5]

John 12:46 - I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness. [6]

Jesus came to bring light in the darkness, pure light. He came to bring light into our dark lives, to light the dark places in our heart and soul.

God is different than we are, God is holy.

All of us, no matter how good we are, have a little darkness in us. We all have something we don’t want anyone to know, some doubt, some fear, some sinful thought or action, some darkness. Hopefully if we have followed Jesus for any length of time there is less darkness in us than before.

There is no darkness in God, He chases away the darkness. It is impossible to have darkness in the presence of light. Notice that John does not say God is a light or the light but that God IS light. He is the source!!

James 1:17 NIV84

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.

Light is to darkness as righteousness is to sin. The two cannot exist together. Scripture equates darkness with sin. The Bible tells us that the things done in the darkness will be brought into the light.

In verse 6-7 we see where John shifts to his second comparison and basically connects the dots if you will and makes the main point of my sermon this morning and his letter –

1 John 1:6–7 NIV84

If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by 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, purifies us from all sin.

God is light so if you want to live by the truth you must walk in the light!! You can’t walk in darkness and claim to walk with God!!!!! You can’t live in sin, especially willful sin and claim to have fellowship of friendship with God.

Dallas Willard, an American philosopher and writer who has authored several books on Christian living, writes about a 2-and-a-half-year-old girl in her backyard who one day discovered the secret to making mud (which she called "warm chocolate"). Her grandmother had been reading and was facing away from the action, but after cleaning up what was to her a mess, she told little Larissa not to make any more chocolate and turned her chair around so as to be facing her granddaughter.

The little girl soon resumed her "warm chocolate" routine, with one request posed as sweetly as a 2-and-a-half-year-old can make it: "Don't look at me, Nana. Okay?" Nana (being a little co-dependent) of course agreed.

Larissa continued to manufacture warm chocolate. Three times she said, as she continued her work, "Don't look at me, Nana. Okay?"

Then Willard writes: "Thus the tender soul of a little child shows us how necessary it is to us that we be unobserved in our wrong."

Any time we choose to do wrong or to withhold doing right, we choose hiddenness as well. It may be that out of all the prayers that are ever spoken, the most common one—the quietest one; the one that we least acknowledge making—is simply this: Don't look at me, God.

It was the very first prayer spoken after the Fall. God came to walk in the garden, to be with the man and the woman, and called, "Where are you?"

"I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid," Adam answered, "so I hid." Don't look at me, God.

John Ortberg, God Is Closer Than You Think (Zondervan, 2005), p. 40-41

I have said this to God, “Don’t look at me.” I’ve been there and done this as a Christian man. Fortunately, in my life, the Light overpowered the darkness. Sometimes, I’m not saying all the time when God feels far away or like He is not with us or ignoring us it’s because of us, not Him.

The truth will set you free, but you have to be honest.

This is what John means when he says “we lie and do not live by the truth.” If you want to live in fellowship with God and other believers you have to walk in the light, walk in righteousness, not your own righteousness but the righteousness that comes from believing in Jesus.

This begs the question, what does it mean to walk in the light?

We all at one time or another have probably asked ourselves, “What does God want from me? It may be in the midst of a crisis, or it may be a daily event. I know I have asked this question of God myself. But what does God require of those of us who want to offer our sincere allegiance and devotion? What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? What does it mean to be a faithful Christian? John tells us there are expectations for those who want to walk in the light. And this morning and for the next few evenings we are going to explore what that means. Briefly those expectations have to do with:

· Imitating the character of God,

· Dependence on the cleansing from sin provided by Jesus death,

· Obedience to the commands of God, especially the command to love

· Steadfast resistance to the lure of the ways of the world, and to false teaching.

But be warned this list is not one that we can just check them off one by one. We must develop the understanding of God’s character and His activity in Christ because that is what brings all of this list together, God is LIGHT. Everything flows from this so we need to understand it.

John says that “God is light and in Him there is no darkness.” God is pure light, he is not diluted or mixed with any evil, hatred, untruth, ignorance, or hostility.

One commentator explains it this way –

Now, if we agree that God is pure light, how does it help us answer the question, What does God want of us? John’s answer comes here in absolute terms: light and darkness are as incompatible in the Christian as they are in God (see the discussion of dualism in the introduction). We can picture this with two circles. One contains in it truth (1:6, 8; 2:21), love (3:1; 4:7–12), righteousness (1:9; 2:1, 29; 3:7), eternal life (1:2; 2:17, 25), hope (3:3), purity (1:7, 9; 3:3) and confidence (2:28; 3:21; 4:17). This is God’s sphere of light, and the children of light walk in it. In biblical thought walking (1:6–7) is a synonym for living (Prov 6:23; Ps 1). Thus to say that Christians walk in the light is another way of saying that Christian life is lived within the circle of God’s light. In[9]

Alongside this circle lies another that encompasses everything that is opposite or catrary to the goodness of light. In this circle are falsehood (1:6, 8), hatred (1:9; 3:13, 15; 4:20), impurity (1:7, 9), fear (4:18) and sinfulness (2:16). This is the sphere of evil, what is called the “world” (2:15–17; 3:3) and “darkness” (1:6; 2:6, 8). It consists of all that God is not.

These two circles share nothing in common. They do not overlap at all. God has no fellowship with darkness, for God is pure light. God is wholly righteous. And the children of God are to walk in the light and not in darkness. To walk in the light means to shape one’s whole being, all one’s actions, decisions, thoughts and beliefs by the standard of the God who is light, even as a circle gives shape to empty space. It does not mean to be perfect, as God is perfect, for the author’s statements about human sinfulness (1:8, 10) do not allow such an interpretation. Rather, to walk in the light means to live continually guided by and committed to the God who is light. What God wants of us is that we shape our lives not by an external norm or by some arbitrary standard, but in conformity with the very character and heart of God. [10]

The longer we do this the more we reflect the light of God.

2 Corinthians 3:18 NIV84

And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

The scientific term for reflect is albedo. It's a measurement of how much sunlight a celestial body reflects. The planet Venus, for example, has the highest albedo at .65. In other words, 65 percent of the light that hits Venus is reflected. Depending on where it's at in its orbit, the almost-a-planet Pluto has an albedo ranging from .49 to .66. Our night-light, the moon, has an albedo of .07. Only seven percent of sunlight is reflected, yet it lights our way on cloudless nights.

In a similar sense, each of us has a spiritual albedo. The goal? One hundred percent reflectivity. We, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord. You cannot produce light. You can only reflect it.

Mark Batterson, If: Trading Your If Only Regrets for God's What If Possibilities (Baker Books, 2015), page 220

Walking in the light means walking in the truth, reflecting both God’s light and truth. It means that we are children of God. We are the people of God and have fellowship with one another.

It is really interesting to me that John makes a point of saying that walking in the light is a condition of our fellowship. Maybe when our fellowship with others begins to break down we need to look within ourselves and ask God because He is light to reveal the darkness in us. As we come together in fellowship our lights should unite to become even brighter. God’s light should shine through us or more correctly we should be a reflection of God’s light and truth.

If we do this John goes on to say that Jesus blood will purify us from sin.

The truth will set you free. But we have to walk in the truth.

Don’t deceive yourself!!

1 John 1:8–10 NIV84

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in 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 has no place in our lives.

Sometimes the first and hardest step of salvation is admitting that we are sinners. Admitting that we are walking in darkness. For some of us darkness was and maybe still is comfortable. It’s comfortable because we know it. We know it’s outcomes.

The alcoholic

The drug addict

We try all kinds of things, all kinds of sin to find a way to deal with life, to deal with low self-esteem, and inadequacies. And some of those things may work momentarily but when all is said and done we end up feeling worse.

See the devil tells us the lie that we don’t need God, we don’t need his grace or either that we don’t deserve His grace. WE NEED GOD’S GRACE, and we don’t deserve it but He has still given it to us. We just need to admit that we need it, confess our sin, and accept His grace and forgiveness.

Change takes place after we own and our sin.

God is waiting for us to confess our sin so He can lift our burden and shine His light on us.

His word tells us plainly right here that if we will do that, He is faithful and just and will not only forgive our sins but will purify us from all unrighteousness, we call that sanctification.

John goes on to tell us if we don’t confess our sins not only will they not be forgiven but it amounts to claiming we have no sin and calling God a liar. His word has no place in our hearts if we claim to have no sin. Jesus work on the cross is pointless. I know people who live this way. This is one of the lies people have bought into today.

There is only one truth and that is the truth of the Gospel. John boils this down for us in 1 John 2:1-2.

My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. 2 He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.