Walking in The Light

August 24, 2025|Walking in The Light|1 John 1:5-10

JD Cutler

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Last week we looked at John’s prologue where he introduces the reason he is writing this letter we call 1st John, so that through the proclamation and reception of the manifested word, those whom he is writing to may have fellowship with the apostles whose fellowship is with the Father and the Son, and in knowing that they have fellowship, the joy of the apostles may be complete.

This is John’s heart as a messenger of Christ and an eyewitness to his life, death, resurrection, and lordship. In the two shorter letters of John, 2nd and 3rd John he says something very similar.

2 John 4 “4 I rejoiced greatly to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as we were commanded by the Father.”

3 John 3 “3 For I rejoiced greatly when the brothers came and testified to your truth, as indeed you are walking in the truth.”

The greatest joy for a disciple of Christ is seeing someone receive the message of truth and having received the truth experiencing the transformative work of the Spirit, being brought from death to life, the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of life.

John says as much and as disciples ourselves, this ought to be the source of our greatest joy as well. Seeing people come from death to life.

But here is the other side to that.

For John, his source of joy was not simply a profession of faith, but seeing those who profess have their lives radically changed. Those, he says, who were walking in the truth.

The bulk of 1 John follows this theme: there is a demonstrable contrast between those who belong to Christ and those who do not. He uses varies words to describe it, those who are… walking in the light, abiding in the light, doing the will of the Father, abiding in the Son and the Father, abiding in him, practicing righteousness, keeping his commandments, and abiding in love.

Walking, abiding, practicing, keeping as well as others like knowing, believing, confessing, doing, purifying, loving, testifying, overcoming. 1 John is full of these habitual, ongoing-action verbs that show what life in Christ looks like, ongoing patterns that evidence real fellowship with God.

John’s argument is not that our work produces a right relationship with God, but that our relationship with God produces works.

I think there is a tendency in American Evangelical Christianity to immediately have a feeling of uneasiness in describing fellowship with God with anything like what sounds like a work. We have focused so much on believing and faith as intellectual elements that we have missed the simple truth that right belief will produce right actions.

John’s argument is not that our work produces a right relationship with God, but that our relationship with God produces works. The reformers argument against a salvation by works, but simultaneously rejecting what we would call easy believism or cheap grace can summed up in the saying, "We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone".

The first way John describes this life of ongoing patterns that evidence real fellowship with God is walking in the light, which corresponds with the way he summarizes their message as apostles, God is light.

In 1 John 1:5-10 John introduces the first contrast he will use in 1 John. Light verses darkness, a theme he will return to in chapter 2. Also he introduces his first God is statement. God is light.The other being God is love. His argument is that since God is light, those who belong to him will walk in the light. John urge's his readers to make sure that their lives evidence their confession of being in fellowship with God by evaluating whether they are walking in the light. The question that inevitably comes from John’s words here is, ‘how do I know if I am walking in the light?’ Which understandably is a pretty important question for those who claim to know Christ and his saving power. A question John addresses and which we will attempt to understand better this morning by looking at three essential elements involved with walking in the light.

Three essential elements to walking in the light.

I. BEGIN WITH GOD’S PURITY.

A right relationship with God begins with a right understanding of who God has revealed himself to be. This is where we must start and where John starts the content of his letter after his prologue. Let’s read verse 5 together this morning.

1 John 1:5 (ESV)

⁵ This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

Keeping the context of the prologue in mind, who is the him from which they heard the message?

The word of life, the manifested word, the one who they saw and testify to, the one they saw and heard. The Son Jesus Christ.

What is the message that they heard?

God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

John chooses a slightly different word here for proclaim than he used in verses 2 and 3. In verse 2 and 3 John uses a word that means to announce from indicating their personal experience with the word. Here in verse 5 the emphasis is on relaying the message that he received from Christ. The message that they proclaim did not originate with John, but with Jesus who more perfectly revealed who the father is.

John records a number of things Jesus says in reference to God being light in his gospel account. In that famous encounter with Nicodemus, John records Jesus saying, beginning with the most well knows verse. Verse 16. 16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 21 But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”

Jesus makes the contrast between light and darkness that John uses in his own letter here. Light exposes, darkness hides. Light is good, darkness is evil.

Jesus also says that he is the light, not just here but in John 8 when he says, John 8:11–12 “11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.” 12 Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”” and again in John 12:35 “35 So Jesus said to them, “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going.”

The very foundation of Christianity is that Jesus is God in the flesh, God with us. Christ is light because God is light. But what does it mean that God is light?

The Old Testament writers often used light to describe the presence of God or knowledge of God.

Psalm 36:8–9 “8 They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights. 9 For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.”

Psalm 89:15 “15 Blessed are the people who know the festal shout, who walk, O Lord, in the light of your face,”

Psalm 119:105 “105 Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

Isaiah 2:5 “5 O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

His justice is described as light in Isaiah 51:4 “4 “Give attention to me, my people, and give ear to me, my nation; for a law will go out from me, and I will set my justice for a light to the peoples.”

He is personified as light in places like Psalm 27:1 “1 The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”

It is important for us to understand that the Bible draws parallels between light and glory. For instance… Revelation 22:3-5 (ESV) 3 No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

God’s presence and glory will be their light and because the light of God permeates everything there will be no longer be anything accursed, represented by night.

Think about this from the Old Testament. Exodus 34:29 (ESV) 29 When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.

Listen to the way Paul applies this in 2 Corinthians 3:7-8 (ESV) 7 Now if the ministry of death, carved in letters on stone, came with such glory that the Israelites could not gaze at Moses’ face because of its glory, which was being brought to an end, 8 will not the ministry of the Spirit have even more glory?

So when John says God is light, it is a way to talk about God’s inherent glory, which encompasses everything that he is, His goodness, mercy, grace, truthfulness, justice, infiniteness.

God often uses something we can understand from the natural world to help us understand what is beyond our comprehension. For instance, we can understand light. There are various degrees of intensity of light, from the soft light of a 40W bulb to the blinding light of the sun. When you think about the ‘glory’ of the sun, if we can borrow that word for a minute, it’s almost incomprehensible, and even then we know that it is not perfect, we can observe dark spots on the sun, it’s not a perfect light.

Holding on to that, John says that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. In the greek this is a strong negation, something like, no, “not even one speck of darkness”. That is there is no darkness in his goodness, his mercy, his grace, his truth, his justice, his infiniteness, whatever we could say about God, he is perfectly that, fully and finally, completely.

James says it this way, James 1:17 “17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”

Not only is he perfect, he will always be perfect. He is pure in all that he is.

Why is it important that we start with God’s purity?

Because if we truly understand his holiness, then we will rightly understand that he could never have intimate fellowship with anything that has darkness in it, which is where the apostle goes next.

The next essential element in walking in the light is to…

II. BUILD FELLOWSHIP IN THE LIGHT.

Let’s pick up in verse 6.

1 John 1:6–7 (ESV)

⁶ If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. ⁷ 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 cleanses us from all sin.

John begins a series of ‘if we’ conditional statements here.

These conditional statements flow throughout this letter. By my count, there are some forty conditional statements in 1 John like this one. Let’s look at what John says here.

If we say we have fellowship with him… We looked at that word fellowship last week, but it bears repeating.

The Greek word translated fellowship here is koinōnia (koy-nohn-ee'-ah). It represents a relational intimacy or a participation in something. Anyone that says they have a relationship with God.

This is someone professing to belonging to God.

I wonder if it was as culturally shocking in John’s day as it would be today if you didn’t just accept that someone said they had a relationship with God. Today, if someone makes that claim, I think we have this idea imposed on us by culture that we can’t rightly question that. That somehow since faith is personal it cannot be evaluated.

I mean where else would that work?

If I walked into one of our local hospitals and said I was a doctor, do you think they would let me perform surgery on someone? Do you think they would let me drive a big rig if I just said I’m a truck driver?

Not only does John make it a conditional statement, he says someone who claims to have fellowship with God while walking in darkness is a liar and is not practicing the truth.

John’s certainly not going to be preaching at any mega churches with that kind of message.

And yet, if his first statement is true, God is light and there is no darkness at all in him, then this is the logical application.

Then those who claim to know him cannot walk in darkness. It is contrary to the very nature of God.

Now, walking in darkness is not the same thing as sinning.

Everyone of us will wrestle with sin until we die or Jesus returns. John actually deals with that shortly. Walking in darkness is living in unrepentant ongoing sin. Fellowship with God requires walking in the light, which is John’s next conditional statement. But if we walk in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the implication is with God, as John explained in the prologue.

As I have been studying this and thinking about it, I was struck by the second part of his statement. John gives two applications of walking in the light just like he gives two applications for walking in the darkness. We lie and do not practice the truth is contrasted with we have fellowship and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

If we look at this linguistically, John says. If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we walk in the light. Meaning if you are walking in darkness you do not have the cleansing power of the blood of Jesus applied to you.

You cannot be walking in the darkness and have come to the light. Jesus says they are mutually exclusive.

Isn’t this exactly what Jesus said to Nicodemus. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 21 But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”

You cannot be walking in the darkness and have come to the light. Jesus says they are mutually exclusive.

On the other hand, in coming to the light your works are exposed, and having sufficiently seen that you are in darkness and do not want to remain there, the light of God floods your life and you see your sin the same way God sees it, you repent of it and ask God to cover it by the blood of Christ.

Now that our sin is in the light and we are covered by the blood of Christ, we can have true fellowship with one another and with God.

This is what true fellowship is built on, not hiding in darkness, but living in the light.

None of us have fellowship with God unless we have first understood and admitted that our sin has separated us from Him and that only through the blood of Christ have they been covered.

Everyone of us stands in the presence of God and one another fully understanding that none of us have a right to be here.

Look at the person on your left, now look at the person on your right, now look up here. Everyone you just looked at is a sinner, either walking in darkness or walking in the light because they have been saved by grace through faith. There is no other way into the kingdom of God.

Don’t hear what John is not saying, walking in the light is not being perfect. It is not being sinless. (too often I think we build our fellowship on hiding our sin) Walking in the light is living your life in light of who God is, who Christ is, what he has done, and what he has done in us. It is being willing to have our ongoing sins exposed, its being honest about our struggles, it is calling sin sin, and doing our best by the power of God to reject it and to live rightly before God. Authentic relationship with both God and one another are founded in light, not darkness.

So what do we do with darkness when it creeps into our life, when our battle with the flesh gets the better of us?

What do people who are walking in the light do when we find darkness in our life in light of who God is?

This is where John goes next. Our third essential element of walking in the light is we…

III. BANISH DARKNESS WITH CONFESSION.

John issues another set of ‘if we’ conditional statements in our next few verses. Let’s pick up in verse 8.

1 John 1:8–10 (ESV)

⁸ If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. ¹⁰ If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

Notice the present tense John uses.

If we say we have no sin (singular). If we claim to not have sin in our lives, John says we are deceiving ourselves. If we do not admit that the corruption of the old man is still present with us, we are deceiving ourselves.

Yes, we are justified, yet we will be glorified, but between the two we will wrestle with the remnant of the old man of sin. Period. Anyone that says otherwise does not have the truth in them.

On the other hand, if we rightly understand that old nature still affects us in our sins (plural) what do we do with that?

John says, we confess our sins. What does confess our sins mean?

The word confess carries the idea of saying the same thing as another.

Think about confession in terms of law enforcement, it is admitting that you did what you are suspected of doing, right. It is saying the same thing as the authorities. Yes, I did this crime.

Confessing our sins is similar, it is saying the same thing God says about our sin. Yes Lord, this is wrong, this is disobedient, this is not consistent with who you have created me to be. It is bringing our sin into the light.

The opposite of confessing is concealment.

Now, I do not think we see in 1 John 9 a requirement for forgiveness.

If we are in Christ, every sin we have ever or will ever commit is forgiven.

We do not seek forgiveness of sin by confession, we confess in order to experience the blessing of forgiveness in real time.

Mark Dever says it like this. If you are truly trusting in Christ, you can’t confess a sin for which God has not provided forgiveness in Jesus. Indeed, if you work at the discipline of confessing your sin, it should not lead to despair at all, but rather to rejoicing over the extent of God’s love to you in Christ. Mark Dever

We do not seek forgiveness of sin by confession, we confess in order to experience the blessing of forgiveness in real time. God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Because we deserve it? No because God has accepted Christ’s sacrifice for the sins of his people, when we confess we can be sure our sin is forgiven because God is faithful to his word and he is just in his judgment, the price of our sins has been paid.

I think John is simply reminding us that we can confess our sins precisely because we know God is faithful and just. On the other hand, If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. A refusal to admit our sin is evidence that we think God is a liar and his word (Christ) is not in us.

Listen to the progression John has placed in our text. I we say we have fellowship and walk in darkness we lie to others, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and worst of all if we deny that we are sinners, we make God a liar by denying his word that all men are sinners.

God works with our confession to assure our hearts that we are forgiven and to cleanse us.

Confession is our cooperation with the Holy Spirit in His sanctifying work. As he convicts of sin, we confess, and he assures.

Now, up to this point we have been working under the assumption that John is talking about confession of our sins to God, and it certainly includes that.

But what do we do with verses like?

James 5:16 “16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.” James is clearly talking about confession between believers.

Or Paul when he says in Ephesians to ‘take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them’? In that same verse he says, you are light in the Lord, walk as children of light (for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true) Exposing any unfruitful works of darkness certainly sounds like confessing them to someone else.

Here is the question, when is ‘confess our sins’ a private matter between God and when is it a matter of confessing to another believer?

It’s funny that so often we would rather confess our sins to God than to another believer.

Think about it for a minute. We have no problem approaching a thrice holy, righteous, perfect God and confessing our willing sin against him, but we hesitate to confess to another sinner saved by grace?

Maybe we figure God already knows how messed up we are, but we really don’t want anyone else around us to really know us.

Ultimately all sin is against God and we should confess our sins regularly to God, both privately and corporately through praying congregational confessionary prayers.

So why should we confess our sins to one another?

I can think of a few reasons, and by no means is this an exhaustive list.

One, because it encourages humility by removing the facade of self-righteousness. By confessing our sins to a trusted brother or sister in Christ we are admitting, out loud, that we are not perfect.

Two, because it allows our brother or sister the ministry of assuring our hearts through the word of God. We cannot forgive one another, but we can point one another to the truth of God’s word on forgiveness.

Three, because although all sin is ultimately against God, we often sin against one another. This goes back to building authentic fellowship in the light.

Four, because often we struggle with specific areas of sin and we need one another to help encourage us to stand strong, to check on us regularly, to remind us that we cannot find satisfaction in sin.

Fifth, because our sin has a way of isolating us and giving the enemy a foothold in our life.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it this way. A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person. As long as I am by myself in the confession of my sins, everything remains in the clear, but in the presence of a brother, the sin has to be brought into the light.

In other words, by confessing to a brother or sister, I am no longer dealing in platitudes, God, please forgive my sin in a general way, I am dealing with specifics, this week I (fill in the blank), and I don’t want to live that way, please pray with me.

Sometimes, I think that we struggle with the same sins for this very reason, because even though we have confessed it to God, by keeping it between God and I only, I am keeping it in the proverbial dark, that is, I remain relatively unaccountable. When a brother or sister knows my struggle, when it has been drug into the light, it becomes something to deal with rather than something to excuse.

We banish darkness in our life by being willing to confess our sins, yes to God, but when necessary or beneficial, to one another so that we might pray for one another. While I think the application for us is certainly to be willing to confess our sins, but an even more critical application is we need to be people to whom people can confess sins.

If someone came to you today and confessed their sin to you, either a personal struggle or a sin against you, what kind of reception would they receive?

If our first instinct would not be to pray for their healing as James says we should do, we need to pray that God would draw us nearer to himself. That he would give us a greater understanding of the grace and mercy that has been extended to each of us through the blood of Jesus Christ. We ought to be a church where those close to us could come to us and confess their sins, and receive not condemnation, but comfort. And while yes, there may be consequences, there often are with sin, our first response ought to be to pray for their healing, to point them to God’s word and the assurance they can have in Christ that they are forgiven.

Here’s where I want to land this morning. Where we started. ‘how do I know if I am walking in the light?’

In light of everything we have seen today, these three essential elements to walking in the light.

These are some questions you can ask yourself… …do I have a right view of the holiness and purity of God?

Do I understand that there is no darkness in him and he does not fellowship with those walking in the darkness?

…is my fellowship with God and with fellow believers founded on light, or am I walking in darkness?

…am I battling sin through regularly confessing my sin?

Do I believe that I am a sinner, and do I take that sin seriously?

Do I hate the dark and want desperately to be in the light?

The heart of the matter, according to John here is the question, Is my profession of knowing God evidenced in my life?

As we continue through this letter of 1st John, let me encourage you to do the hard work of applying John’s test to your life, whether you have identified as a Christian for four weeks or forty years. Today, the question is, is there an habitual, ongoing desire to be in the light as he is in the light?

Let us pray.