1 John 1

A lot of times, I feel like I'm missing something in the Christian life. Jesus came and promised this abundant life, but I don't really feel like I'm living it. I feel like I'm sorta living it. Maybe about 60% living it. But I read in the Bible how it talks about joy in Christ and abundant life and all that kind of thing, and honestly I have a lot of trouble resonating with that.

I have my mountaintop experiences like everyone else, but I don't think that's what the Bible is talking about when it talks about joy. It seems like the original Christians had this kind of ongoing experience where, even when things were hard, they really enjoyed life. “Sorrowful but always rejoicing,” you know. (2 Corinthians 6:10) I feel like something is just a little bit off. Not way off, mind you, but a little bit off, and I have trouble expressing it.

And I feel like if I told Christians about that, they'd say something really cute about finding my joy in the Lord or being faithful in quiet times or something like that. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I do decent with that sort of thing. I really don't think that's the problem.

And honestly, I don't think I'm alone. I live in this Christian community and I see a lot of things, and I feel a lot of us have this Godly contentment—sort of. We have joy in the Lord—sort of. You ask people how things are going and they're like, “life is rough but God is good,” and that's fine but something in the way they say makes me feel like we're all missing something.

First John is my favorite book in the Bible. John wrote it around 90 AD. At this point, stuff has been pretty hard. John is really old, probably in his 80's or so.

When I think about John's life, I feel like this should have been a really sad time for him. Like, John is a teenager or so and this incredible teacher named Jesus shows up when he's fishing with his brother. So, the teacher wants them to come with him, and John and James follow Jesus around for about three years. And I have to imagine those were the most incredible three years of John's life. He sees the transfiguration. He sees all these miracles, he gets to talk with God incarnate and learn from him and he has this totally life changing experience.

Then, Jesus dies and it's awful, but he comes back from the dead and it's incredible. And they hang out with the Risen Jesus a couple times, and then John sees him go back into heaven. Then John's in the upper room and the Holy Spirit falls on him and all the other apostles at Pentecost, and that had to be incredible. Then all these people start getting saved, and John and Peter are doing miracles and teaching in the temple.

And then John's brother gets stoned to death in public, and all the Christians flee from the Jewish persecution. But then the leader of the persecution (Paul) becomes a believer in this amazing appearing of Christ, and stuff is going pretty good again. And then the Holy Spirit says that Gentiles are to be included in the Kingdom of God too, and there's this awesome period of evangelism led by this guy, Paul, where churches get planted in most of the known world within about 10 years.

Then Paul gets murdered. And then Peter gets murdered, and everything kinda falls to John. And then the headquarters of the Church in Jerusalem gets destroyed because the Romans burn the whole thing to the ground. So John has to flee his homeland and he ends up in this pagan city of Ephesus. He starts pastoring a church there that Paul started, but apparently after Paul died things just went sideways, and the Ephesian church is having all these problems, and Christians are getting tortured and killed left and right.

So, I imagine old man John sitting in his house, and all his friends that he started with in the Church are dead. The ones who didn't get themselves lit on fire or boiled in oil just died of old age, and there's hardly anyone left who remembers the earthly Jesus or the Holy Spirit falling at Pentecost. And John's sitting there and he's probably thinking:

“You know, I'm probably not going to make it much longer. The Romans have already tried to kill me, the Ephesian silver guild tried to kill Paul and they don't really like me either. I get sick all the time now, it's hard to travel, I can't stand up straight. One day they're going to knock on my door and drag me out and burn me to death, and if that doesn't happen, any night I might go to bed and just die in my sleep.”

So he sits down and he writes this letter, except it doesn't seem to be written to anyone in particular. There's no addressees, there's no greeting. It doesn't have a lot of structure like the other epistles. I read it and I feel like John just sat down one night and started writing. It's like people who write a letter to be read at their funeral or something. It's like he's saying, “I'm going to die and there's some things you Christians need to remember when I'm gone.”

So, he sits down and he basically sums up all the essentials of the Christian faith. And that's why I like it so much. John doesn't seem to have some specific problem in mind. He's just telling all the Christians who are going to live after him what's really important for them to remember. So the first thing he says is this:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you.”

And basically all that's saying is that John wants to tell the Christians about his personal experience with Jesus. It must seem like a lifetime ago that he went around the Judean countryside with the Rabbi Jesus, but that's the first thing that comes to his mind. He wants to tell them about it.

Then he says two things that really confused me. He says, “so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.”

So in two sentences he has two purpose statements, and it took me a long time to reconcile those two together, and this is what I got.

He tells them about his experience with Jesus, and then right after that he says “so that you too may have fellowship with us.” Now, some people are going to tell you this that means that the recipients aren't Christians, and that John wants to have fellowship with them by them getting saved and being included in the universal Church together.

In the next chapter, John specifically says, “I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth.” Apart from that, he talks about the readers being his children, and having the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and an intercessor for their sins, so it's pretty clear to me that you have to side with commentators who say that this is referring to people who are already Christians. The Bible just doesn't use phrases like that to talk about nonchristians.

What John is demonstrating is that every Christian can experience deep fellowship with other believers if they choose to follow specific practices, and in this text John gives us two specific practices that develop deep fellowship between believers.

I already talked about the first practice. John says that he is telling them about his personal experience with Jesus so that they will have fellowship with him. Honestly, I don't think that's very hard to apply, but to be really honest I don't see it a lot within the Church.

How come no one talks about their quiet times? I mean, seriously. We talk about our day and our classes and our girlfriend or or a book we ready or even some theological issue, and we talk about all of that because it has a level of importance to us. But sometimes, (not always, but decently often, I think) we have a really good quiet time, and there's some kind of a eureka moment, and the Holy Spirit speaks to us through the Bible, and when that happens it's a big deal, but we don't usually talk about with out friends. Maybe if there's like a testimony night you might say something or maybe you put it on your blog, but somehow it never makes dinner-with-friends conversation.

And I don't do this too much either so I think I get why it doesn't happen. At least for me, I'm afraid of being seen as arrogant or 'that super-spiritual guy' or like I'm disclosing too much or something. And it does seem like there's this cultural attitude that your time in the word and your prayer life and your interaction with the Holy Spirit are private things. That somehow it's not okay to talk about them at the in an informal setting, when you're just hanging out with your friends in the cafeteria or whatever.

But honestly, that's not Biblical. In the Bible, when God says something to someone, or the Holy Spirit moves in someone, they share it with their brothers and sisters in Christ. Because it's good for them. Believe it or not the Holy Spirit doesn't speak to you just for you. He speaks to you so you can take that word and build up other people. And when you share that truth that you got from your time with the Lord, it lets that truth sink more deeply into you. The Bible is not your personal manual to the spiritual life. It's meant to be understood in community. It's supposed to be shared and discussed and explained and proclaimed and sometimes even debated and all of that is good.

So the first practice John gives us to create deep fellowship is to share your experiences of God with other people. Then he says:

“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. 6If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. 7But 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. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

What I want us to get from this transparency. That's the big idea of the light and dark metaphor. Walking in the light doesn't mean you never sin, and it isn't as much related to the idea of living rightly as it is to the idea of living in a manner that is open and vulnerable. It means talking about sins and struggles. When I was doing my research for this passage I came across a commenter who said it really well, so I'm just going to read what he said about it because I think it's helpful.

“The symbolism of light as knowledge also implies that when Christians 'walk in the light' their lives will not contain hidden sins, falsehoods, or deception. Such walking 'in the light' results in deep divine and human fellowship.”1

I have a friend at a nearby college who is kind of like a little sister to me. Some of you know I'm an only child and I always wished I had siblings, so this girl kind fills that void in my life a little. We have a very, very open relationship in which we feel comfortable talking about issues that we need some masculine or feminine perspective on.

She has a pretty serious boyfriend, and a lot of the time she talks to me about issues relating to their relationship. Before I started talking to this girl I didn't really realize how hard it is for girls to understand guys, but apparently it's really hard.

Recently, she's been struggling because her boyfriend used pornography. And she came to me out of the blue and she said, “Matt, why do guys use porn?”

And the little sensor in my head that tells me when to step carefully started going off, because, you know, it's kind of a touchy issue. And so I kinda hemmed and hawed because I honestly there's no easy answer to that question and I wasn't really sure if it was the kind of thing that I should talk about with her, and she cut me off and said,

“Is it for masturbation?”

And I was like, “Well, yea.”

And you know I could tell she looked very sad because of her boyfriends issues with that and so forth. And so she started asking me all these questions about why he would want to do that and what that says about her and if it's an issue to break up over and so forth and so on, and I did the best I could to help her understand what was going on from my personal experience with it and the experience of guys I know who are struggling with it. And at the end I gave her some Christian websites that might be able to give her a little more information.

At the end of our conversation she said something that just burned itself in my memory, and I thought I would share it with you because I think it really illuminates this passage. I tried to get it down word for word after our conversation, but I may have paraphrased it some.

She told me, “You know, I think we need to talk about issues like this in groups of guys and girls. I know that most girls would freak out if they heard me say that, but I think it's really important for girls to understand the struggle that's going on and understand where they can help and where they need to let the guy handle it with his guys friends, because most girls know that almost all guys have used porn, but they don't know what to think of it or how to deal with it, so they just pretend like it's never been a problem for their husband or their boyfriend, and that's not healthy. And the same thing with girls. Girls have all kinds of issues with body image and eating disorders and masturbation and things like that, and I think guys need to know what they are doing to make those problems worse and what they could do to help. And I know that it's not really socially acceptable to talk about those things in the SDR or whatever, but I think we need to change that because I think it's really important to get those issues out in the open, especially between guys and girls.”

And as much as what she said scares me, and as much as I cringe away from the idea of talking about those things in mixed gender groups or even just in a group in general, and I think she's right. I'm sure you've all heard “Sin grows in the dark and dies in the light,” and there's a lot of truth to that.

And so, this is really the second practice that John is advocating: He's saying, if you want deep fellowship, be open about your sins and your struggles. That's what it means to walk in the light.

I've been using words like open and transparent, and I want to clarify what I mean by that. Being open or transparent or walking in the light does not mean that there's one or two people who know all about your dirty laundry and you put on a clean, shining face in front of the rest of the Church. It also doesn't mean you dump your issues on everyone. It means that, when stuff is really bad, you bring it before a community. Or, when someone brings up a topic that you have struggled with or do struggle with, you're okay talking about those personal issues with your brothers and sisters in Christ.

And I know that's a really scary thing, but I'm pretty darn sure that this is the Biblical model.

So,in the beginning I told you that I felt like I was some kind of joy missing in the Christian life. And then I told you that John says that every Christian can experience deep fellowship through two practices, and that those practices are talking about how you have experienced God in your life, and being transparent about your sin and struggles.

John says, “indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.”

John has joy because he has fellowship with God. But the twist is, the thing we wouldn't expect, is that his joy isn't complete. Here is an apostle, who witnessed the transfiguration, saw the risen Christ, was indwelt with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, wrote a large section of the Bible, and his joy is not complete.

And you notice, he doesn't say that his joy will be complete when he gets to heaven, and he doesn't say that is joy isn't complete because not everyone is a Christian, or because people are turning away or there is persecution or something.

He says that he is writing this letter so his joy will be complete. He also says he is writing the letter so he will have fellowship with these other Christians. I already told you that you can have deep fellowship with other Christians, and John already told us how. This is the why.

Because when we have deep fellowship with Christians it completes the joy that we already have in our fellowship with Christ. And I think that's what is missing.