Let the Son Shine in
1 John 1:5--2:14
Sermon
by Michael J. Anton

Are you a Christian? Now, that’s a ridiculous question from a Christian pulpit to a Christian congregation on a Sunday morning set aside by the Christian Church for Christian worship.

Perhaps so. But there is an important question yet to ask. How do you measure your faith? How do you test your relationship with God? If a person who is not a member of the Family asks you to produce the evidence for your claim to be part of the Family, what do you offer?

What John gives us in his first letter is a test, a means of measuring our fellowship with God. We don’t really care too much for exams when it comes to our faith. We shy away from the subject. We plead a kind of spiritual fifth amendment, knowing only too well that anything we say might incriminate us.

But John will not let us get away that easily. What he offers is a test we cannot avoid. We can’t hide; we must face up to it.

The question on the test is: Do we walk in the light as God is in the light? The answer is most important, because if we walk in darkness, we cannot claim fellowship with God.

God is light. God does not simply create or produce light. He is light. It is interesting to survey the various forms of religion in the world and discover how light is common to most of them. Light is seen as the source of knowledge and illumination and security and joy. But in the Word, God appears to us as the "true Light," the "light of the world."

The Old Testament echoes this picture: from Psalm 27, "The Lord is my light and my salvation ..."; Psalm 36, "In your light shall we see light ..." and from the prophet Malachi, "But unto you who fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings."

Well and good, but the test question is: Do we walk in the light? Are we, as Luke says, "the children of light," and do we bear, as Paul puts it, "the armor of light?"

The purpose of God’s light is to show life as it really is. A blind date has a 50-50 chance of being a ball. But it has an equal chance of being a total disaster. Before the two people meet, they walk in utter darkness, dependent on the descriptions of others perhaps, but actually ignorant of each other. When they meet, the light is turned on; it is the moment of truth, be it pleasant or painful.

For life to be seen as it really is, it has to be viewed under the penetrating rays of God’s light. His is the X-ray of Truth. Most importantly you and I must see ourselves and who we really are.

Walking in God’s light means far more than a vague, sentimental notion that "Somebody up there likes me," or that God is looking down with a benign smile. Walking in God’s light requires rigorous honesty, coming clean and not only acknowledging, but confessing our sin.

The central problem of our salvation is always that, as one author puts it, "... somehow the darkness of our minds must be broken through so that we can ... begin to see things as they really are - God as he really is - ourselves as we really are."

We begin to solve the problem when we pierce through the sophistication and rationalizations and blatant excuses we offer as substitute for confession. Many writers of our age have characterized our time as the age of the easy conscience. Whether it is any different from a previous age we do not know, but it is a fact that the easy conscience is a big part of our lot.

We eliminate guilt by believing those who tell us we just aren’t supposed to feel guilty. We excuse guilt by tracing it all back to a paranoid father. We ignore the subject by pretending it does not exist in this enlightened age.

But the reality of sin is easy to demonstrate. Look at the psychiatric and psychological research that has turned up uncivilized drives and undreamed of depths of evil in human nature. Simply look at the way nations shed blood while they battle each other like dogs over a bone. Read the great literature of the Western world: Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare, Milton, Hawthorne; to discover the sense of real sin felt by writers who were not all members of the Family.

But it’s relatively easy to speak in general about sin. To solve our problem we must become much more personal and speak of sin in concrete. We walk in the light when we are willing to say in all candor, "I am a cheat, I am a liar, I am a scandal-monger, I am jealous, I do covet what my neighbor has."

Confession is more than something that’s good for the soul. More than what the psychologist calls catharsis, a freeing of the mind of those things that burden us. Confession is the door by which we enter the real world. Confession is not muttering, "Well, I’m really not so bad." Confession is knowing and saying and believing how bad I really am.

A lady told me the other day of her experience immediately following surgery. As she was coming out of the anesthetic, she was running very freely with her words, totally unaware of what she was saying. Later, two of her children who were at her bedside at the time, advised her she had used a lot of vocabulary they had not heard her use before. Back in the real world, she said she never used those words in normal conversation. But she and I agreed that perhaps those were the words she would like to use but restraint holds her back. Those things we hold back in daily conversation cannot be held back in confession. To walk in the light is to tell all.

Not to tell all is to walk in darkness, in futility, uncertainty, frustration, without a purpose. To hold back is to lie; it is to live apart from the truth. And it is to make God himself a liar.

This kind of confession is painful at best, but it is not degrading. Because when it is sincere, we receive forgiveness and cleansing from God.

The great truth of the Gospel that draws this fellowship together is that while we are required to admit and confess our sin, we are not condemned to bear them on our own shoulders. By confessing them freely, God frees us from that real burden of guilt through the blood offered upon the altar of the cross by Jesus the Christ.

Against the attitude that flippantly denies the reality of sin or tries to ignore or repress it, the Gospel simply declares, CONFESS.

To confess is to talk in the light and to enjoy the fellowship with God and with each other. During some of our Communion services, we take time to speak words of peace to each other. This is one way to express our feelings of togetherness to each other.

But to enjoy the deepest levels of fellowship, we must come to each other without deception and be willing to be known to one another as we really are, with our faults and our hangups as well as our virtues.

To walk in the light is to have that kind of honest fellowship with God and one another. As we look at John’s test question, let us pray, let the Son shine in! Amen.

CSS Publishing Co., Inc., Snoring Through Sermons, by Michael J. Anton