God is Light: Walk WIth Him There
God is light.
He doesn’t only dwell in light, although He is described that way too. John says that He Himself is light. He is purity and perfection without limit, flaw, or hidden error. He’s perfect. He is the thing that all of us should be striving for.
Like a plant is naturally drawn toward the light, we are naturally drawn toward Him. As believers, the Holy Spirit cries out that we would be close to Him. His purity is what our hearts are longing for. Our souls see His light and cry out within us, ‘that is what I have been wanting all this time.’ Perfection is not a threat to believers. It is something that makes our hearts race as we see what our lives are aiming and growing toward.
As a matter of fact, when people who were not yet believers saw Jesus, the image of the invisible God, they were drawn to Him too. His perfection didn’t drive them away. His light drew lost people to God. As the Bible says, when He was lifted up, He drew all people to Himself. (John 12:32)
Light has this drawing property. We want to come closer to it. It’s the same with God. 1 John 1 doesn’t just say God carries the light for us, or that He is in the presence of the light, it says that He is the light. He is the One that we are drawn toward and He is the object of our longing.
John goes on with his metaphor and says that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. This is logical of course. If God (in this metaphor) is light, of course darkness cannot exist in Him. God’s light drives away darkness. Without getting ahead of ourselves or John, we know this from experience. As believers, we’ve seen, as we’ve drawn closer to Jesus, that His light drives away the darkness in our hearts and our minds so that we are made more like Him. How much more do we see the truth in John’s words that there is “no darkness at all” in God Himself, Who is Himself light.
John, then, has created this metaphor for us, “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.” He says this message is the Gospel: “the message we have heard from Him and declare to you” (1 John 1:5). John also says that the truth of this message should complete our joy. We’ll return to this later, but it’s important to keep in mind for now.
John introduces His point in 1 John 1:6: “If we claim to have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth.” This is a bracing statement to be sure, and we want to make sure we understand it. When John talks about walking, he is talking about how we live our lives. John says, God is light, so if we are walking in darkness, we are not walking in harmony with God. We are not walking (to mix the metaphor slightly) where God is. John uses the expression, “to have fellowship with Him.” In other words, if we are living lives that are characterized by sin, we are not living in close relationship–fellowship–with God. We cannot say we are close to God if we are living in sin. He is light. If we are living in darkness. There’s an essential and obvious contradiction there.
Jesus gives His disciples similar teaching in John 15. He says that we remain in Him and in His love when we obey. He says in John 15:9-11, “remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in His love.” He continues, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” Notice that just as John connects living in the light and fellowship with God to our complete joy, Jesus connects living with Him and remaining in His love to our joy. We need to remember this truth: our obedience to God is essential, but it isn’t cumbersome obedience. It isn’t dead rule following.
If our relationship with God isn’t bringing us joy, we’re probably doing it wrong.
The problem, John and Jesus both warn us, is that we step away from God and from fellowship with Him. So often we forget that Jesus is the source of our joy. It is in God’s presence that we find fulfillment. The light is not to be found, ‘elsewhere.’ We don’t have to look for fulfillment somewhere else and then try to find our relationship with God in the empty spaces of our lives. The fact that God is light reminds us that He is the source of everything we desire. When Jesus reminds us to obey His commands so that His joy may be in us and that our joy may be complete, He is telling us that the only place we will find joy is in the presence of God, who John says is light. He is the One that we are yearning for and growing toward. He is the One that our spirits are crying out for. Jesus and John remind us what David says in Psalm 16, “in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” It is in obedience and in God’s presence that we will find fullness and joy.
It’s hard to accept: obedience to God is the source of joy. Walking in God’s light and fellowship with God in His purity is where we want to be. It’s not something we resign ourselves to, Jesus says this will be our complete joy. There’s not something better out there that we’re rejecting. Our joy is with Him.
John then raises an incredibly important question: what are we supposed to do with the darkness in our own hearts? The question is significant. We all have this darkness. Too often we deify the darkness even if we don’t realize that’s what we’re doing. We say, “this darkness must be okay with God, because here it is. I follow God, and I have this behavior or this set of feelings, so God must be okay with them. But John has already told us that God is light, and there is no darkness in Him, and to have fellowship with Him, we have to walk not in our sinful behavior or our sinful way of seeing the world, but in the light. It’s not even just our actions that have to be pure. As Paul says elsewhere, we must, “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5)
So what are we supposed to do with the sin that we all have?
And we do indeed all have sin. John acknowledges the reality of our sin. He says in verse 8, “If we claim to be without sin, we lie, and the truth is not in us.” Sometimes, we claim to be without sin as a way of denying our symptoms. We pretend it’s not there because we are ashamed of it or in the hope that if we ignore it, maybe it will go away. John says this behavior will not be effective. John uses strong language, “we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us,” and again in verse 10, “if we claim we have not sinned, we make Him out to be a liar and His word is not in us.”
Sometimes we’re denying the presence of sin in our lives for a more dangerous reason. Sometimes we’re just refusing to name the darkness in our hearts ‘sin.’ Sometimes we want the darkness in our hearts to have a home. We’ve grown comfortable with it. We say, ‘I’m without sin,’ because we’ve chosen to believe that our lifestyle, our entertainment choices, our thought patterns, the ways we treat people, the ways we interact with our family, and so on, are all just fine with God. But we’ve forgotten that “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all,” and if we want to have fellowship with Him, we cannot walk in darkness, we have to live in the light as He is in the light.
So that leads us back to our question: what are we supposed to do with the darkness and the sin that all of us–each one of us even as believers–finds in our hearts? John tells us.
John says, in 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” That’s it. All we have to do is confess our sins, which are so very present in our hearts, and He will forgive us. He won’t just forgive us, He will purify us.
It’s one thing to forgive. To forgive is to no longer hold our identity in the things we have done that were sinful and dark and against the very character of God Who is light and in Whom is no darkness at all. It is another thing entirely that God says He will purify us from all unrighteousness. This purification is how we get back into the close relationship with God that our hearts long for. It’s how we’re able to walk in the light.
Forgiveness and purification are beyond our wildest dreams and hope. God is, as He always does, giving us more than we could ask or imagine. But we have to reject the darkness. He’s not looking for legalistic precision in asking for forgiveness. If we’re forgetting the tiniest of things to ask Him to forgive, it isn’t going to shatter our relationship. If we’ve forgotten to confess something, the Holy Spirit will direct us to those things for which we need to ask forgiveness.
But here’s the issue for us: we need to walk with Him in the light. To do that, we have to reject the darkness. We can’t harbor the darkness in our own hearts and claim to be walking with Him. We can’t live however we want and say we’re also living with Him.
God says we have to choose.