The Little Letters - Day 2

1 John 1:5 This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in him. 6 So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth. 7 But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.

What does God of me? What does God want of us? These are standard questions for Christians. They are often asked in times of anguish and times of distress, implicitly and explicitly. In this next section of 1 John takes this question head-on because the church that John was writing to was asking this question. 

To address this issue, John uses the image of “walking in the light.” He begins by saying that God is light, and of course, there is no way that darkness could exist within God. The fact that God is light is not a very startling statement for most of us. In the Old Testament, there are many references to God being light, giving light, wearing light, and more. Therefore, we have become used to this metaphor. All of these images are related. 

But John goes a bit further than just that God is light. He reminds us that no darkness can exist in God. But how does this help us understand what God wants of us? 

Simply, it means that we are to seek those things that are bringing us into the light of Christ. C. S. Lewis put it this way: “We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else” (Lewis 1947:133).

In other words, the shadows sometimes prove the sunshine (Old African Proverb). And therefore, we should be moving toward the light in everything we seek to do. While this may seem nebulous, it is a good way to start thinking about what we are involved in. 

So what would be antithetical to the light? Things like falsehood (1:6, 8), hatred (1:9; 3:13, 15; 4:20), impurity (1:7, 9), fear (4:18), and sinfulness (2:16). John speaks of these things as part of the “world” or “darkness.” 

So there is a simple question for you; “what are you doing that is growing and leading you toward the light?” To walk in the light means to live continually guided by and committed to the God who is light! God wants us to shape our lives in accordance with that same trajectory that leads us toward everything that God is. 

1. What are you doing today that leads you toward the light? 
2. What are you doing today that has led you toward the darkness? 
3. What direction would you like to go?