We begin today on a four week journey through the book of I John. Before I read today’s passage, some background information on this letter.

To begin with, the author is the apostle John, the son of Zebedee, brother of James, and the author of the fourth gospel, the Gospel of John. The language of this letter is very similar to the language of the Gospel of John—particularly the images of darkness and light, and its emphasis on love.

Many of the commentaries on I John speak of this letter being more like a sermon than a letter. It lacks the usual greeting of a letter as well as lacking the closing salutation of a letter. The recipients appear to be intimately known by John—like a loving elder, he appeals to them as "my dear children." Likely, the recipients are members in the church of Ephesus where John was known to minister for some time and the earliest known use of the letter was among churches in that area. I John is probably a "circulation letter" that would be passed along to the churches of Ephesus and the surrounding area.

Central to understanding and drawing relevance from this letter is to understand something about John’s purpose in writing it. There are two presenting concerns behind this letter, or sermon, if you will, of I John. One is that the church appears to have slipped into a kind of complacency. Oftentimes, the letters we have that make up many of the books of the New Testament were written to churches suffering under some kind of persecution. That is not the case for I John. Rather than persecution from outside the church being the concern, it is a seduction of the church from the inside that prompts John to write this church. The churches around the area of Ephesus have existed for almost half a century at the time of this writing and the foundations of the faith they’ve been built upon have begun to erode some with the passage of time. It is the church in Ephesus of which it is said in Revelation, "Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love." (Revelation 2:4) John’s first letter addresses the concern of complacency—of a church that has lost some of its enthusiasm and diligence for the faith—a church that has lost its first love. The problem of seduction from within the church that draws the attention and devotion of its members away from its first love, its first priority remains a relevant concern for today.

The second concern that John is addressing is a specific one, the problem of Gnosticism in the early church. That may seem irrelevant to our concern today—we don’t speak of Gnosticism today—but similar teachings and errors of Gnosticism are still around today. We just don’t call it Gnosticism. "Gnosticism" draws its name from the Greek word for "knowledge" = Gnosis, because the Gnostics claimed a special "knowledge" regarding God and faith. Thus, our word "agnostic" today—applying the negative "a" prefix to the word Gnostic, meaning someone who claims we can’t "know" there is a God. The Gnostics claimed special knowledge of God, knowledge that couldn’t be shared with everyone. There is a kind of arrogance to such a position—an "us vs. them" mentality, the "ins and the outs." Wherever such an attitude surfaces in the church today the concerns of John and others who wrote and spoke against such an attitude remain relevant.

Furthermore, the Gnostics made a distinction between the spirit and the physical--believing the spirit was good and the physical was bad. In its extreme application, such a teaching denied the humanity of Jesus Christ. Believing the spirit was good and the physical bad, the Gnostics developed the philosophy that it didn’t matter what was done in the body, only the spiritual mattered. Consequently, sin wasn’t taken seriously. Sin was something that happened in the physical world. Only the spiritual mattered. Such teaching led to the practice of asceticism—severe denial of basic physical needs—or, licentiousness—morally unrestrained living because "it didn’t matter." John’s first letter and his teaching against Gnosticism has relevancy today wherever sin is treated lightly.

The series is entitled, "Leading with Love," because, at its core, John’s first letter is a letter of love: teaching first and foremost that God’s very nature is one of love; because of God’s loving nature, God loves us; we respond to God’s love by loving God; and, finally, because of this cycle of love, we love others. What we say and do matters!

So, as we journey through this letter of I John over the next few weeks, let’s keep those issues in mind as we seek to understand John’s teachings and their relevance for us today. (Read I John 1:5-2:2)

Immediately, John addresses the Gnostics and their "secret knowledge." The message shared with the church at Ephesus was not one of secret knowledge. It was received firsthand from Jesus Christ. In the opening of the letter—which we didn’t read—John is emphatic that the knowledge of faith shared with the church didn’t have a secret, hidden source. Rather, it was something "heard," something "seen," something "touched" firsthand by John. We do well to remember as we come to the writings of John, and others like him, that they are firsthand recipients of the message they are passing along to others. Furthermore, the message of faith was openly shared. It was available to everyone. There is no hint of arrogance, no sense of superiority in possessing some secret knowledge. It is willingly shared so that everyone might believe and, thus, bring joy to the one sharing.

Then, John attacks the Gnostic notion that what was done in the physical didn’t matter. On the contrary, says John, to claim fellowship with God, yet to continue to walk in darkness—to live a life of immorality, a life lacking in ethics—is a lie. That’s pretty strong language! What we do and say, how we live our lives matters, says John. To claim anything else is a lie!

There is a school of thought—sometimes blatantly spoken, sometimes unspoken but lived out—that separates out one’s "religious" life and one’s "secular" life. It can appear in different forms. Sometimes, it looks like this—for an hour or two on Sunday mornings, we dress up, we make an appearance in church, we offer some form of homage to God, then we go out and live however we please. What is stated in our faith has little or no bearing on how we live our lives. Business practices are conducted in an unethical manner. Our dealings with others bear no impression of the love of Christ, but are self-serving and self-indulgent. Such practices, says John, are a lie. Or, sometimes it looks like this—professing fellowship with God through Jesus Christ, we nonetheless pursue after something we know to be a sin. We might even say, "I know this is wrong, but I also know that God forgives me." Such practice is a lie, says John. That’s what the Gnostics did—separating out the spiritual life from the physical life. To continually walk in the darkness of sin while claiming fellowship with God, or to practice faith for an hour or two on Sunday morning then show little or no signs of our faith the rest of the week is darkness and cannot be in harmony with a God who is light. Let’s not be like the Gnostics—living two lives, a life of faith…spirit, and a life of the physical. Let’s make every effort to live out in the realities of our lives what we celebrate and claim in our faith.

Yet, we also must live with the fact that we aren’t perfect. Despite even the best of efforts, we have moments of darkness. The good news from John is that the God we serve is a loving and forgiving God. God has addressed the incompatibility between our darkness and His light. And that is through Jesus Christ. When we sin—and we will sin—God has made provision for us to be restored. That provision is Jesus Christ. John uses two images of Jesus to express this. Jesus is, first of all, "the one who speaks to the Father in our defense." The word is paraclete and it means someone who comes alongside for comfort and support. Interestingly, it is the same word Jesus uses to describe the Holy Spirit in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John—the "Comforter" who is to come. It is something like a court of law where Jesus represents us. But, the role of Jesus as our paraclete is more than a defender of us when we sin. It is certainly that, but it is also more than that. Jesus, as our comforter and counselor, is also alongside us to steer us away from sin. Jesus both restores our relationship with God and maintains that relationship. The second image is one of sacrifice—that Jesus is the "atoning sacrifice" for our sins. The word is "propitiation" and means to cause someone to be "favorably disposed" to us. Again, that favorable disposition is ours toward restoring our relationship with God, and towards maintaining that relationship. It removes the darkness from our lives, making it possible for us to stand in the presence of the light, and it brings light into our journey with God, helping us to avoid the darkness.

There is an image I have long held in my mind of what the journey of faith looks like. It is an image of walking in a dark tunnel toward a light that shines at the end of the tunnel. As one starts out in the tunnel, little of the light reaches that end of the tunnel. Consequently, there are obstacles in the way that cause one to stumble and fall. If we remain where we fall, we obviously make no further progress on the journey. If we pick ourselves up, however, dust ourselves off and continue forward, we discover that more light illumines our path. We can see some of the obstacles that caused us to stumble. Now, we’re able to avoid them. As we move closer and closer to the light, more and more of the light shines in the tunnel. Less and less do we stumble and fall. The journey of faith is like that.

It is God’s desire that we would not stumble and fall. God willingly, and lovingly, shines His light upon us that the darkness would disappear. Light is revealing, it reveals what we could not see in our surrounding darkness. The light towards which we are moving in our journey of faith reveals the splendor and glory of God. The light reveals God’s purity and holiness. "God is light, in Him there is no darkness at all." To be sure, the light also reveals where we fall short of the glory and the holiness of God. The light can make us uncomfortable in such revelations. But, in his message that sin is to be taken seriously, John also makes it clear how forgiving God is. For the light also reveals the loving and merciful nature of God. The light reminds us that "as far as east is from west, ………………" So let us continually move forward