June 10, 2007

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Reverend David S. Huffer

Westwood Baptist Church
 2124 Davis Road - Waynesboro, VA

God Is Light: The Fellowship Of Light

1 John 1:6-2:2

Several weeks ago I started a sermon series entitled: God is Light.

• 1^st sermon – The Joy of The Light
• Purpose Statement: Truth of Christ + Light of Christ = Joy of Christ

Joy comes from an “Active” relationship with Christ

• Present tense
• Inactivity brings about complacency, boredom, and cynicism
• To be active is to make manifest, to validate, and to declare the Joy of the Light in our lives.

TODAY

From the Joy of the Light we move into the Fellowship of the Light.

• Word association – “fellowship” – “What is the first thing you think of?

For some Baptist we might say: “Dinner” as in “Fellowship Dinner”

• Ah! A good fellowship meal is inviting!
• The nice thing about a fellowship dinner is there are all sorts of good things to chose from …
• You can “pick-and-choose” what you want to eat or not eat

This “pick-and-choose” manner in which we go about at fellowship dinners seems to have made itself into our fellowship with God.

• We have a tendency to “pick-and-choose” what we want from God and His Word and leave the rest alone.

Is that the true fellowship God desires with you and I as His children?

We need to know the falsehoods and truth concerning our fellowship with God.

• Fellowship literally means to share things in common.
• Where people deny the basic beliefs and truths about God there is no fellowship with either God or Christians.
• READ 1 John 1:6-10 again
• 1 John 2:1-2 – “My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.”

We can liken John’s words to the drawing of two circles:

• Circle of Light: This circle contains truth, love, righteousness, eternal life, hope, purity, and confidence. This is God’s circle of light and His children are to walk within it and the things of God
• Circle of Darkness: This circle contains falsehood, hatred, impurity, fear, and sinfulness. This is the world’s circle of darkness. It consists of all that God is not.

FRIENDS – These two circles share nothing in common.

• They do not overlap in any way
• For God is light and in Him there is no darkness
• Therefore God has no fellowship with the darkness.
• We need to understand that one or the other circle will influence us in the way that we live.
• We will either live for God or against God and not in fellowship with Him

John the Elder writes to encourage a fresh recognition and realization of the fellowship, so that we as God’s children might have a restoration of fellowship with the Father in the light of His circle of influence.

FELLOWSHIP IN THE RECOGNITION OF THE LIGHT – 1:6-7

1.    Recognition of the Darkness

·         Falsehood of Fellowship

·         Darkness is characterized by disobedience and a lack of relationship with God

·         Darkness is anything and everything that is hostile (enmity) and opposes itself against God

·         Darkness is a disregard for and defiance of God’s self-revelation as light

·         Darkness is to live a life of sin

FRIENDS - The person who walks – influenced living – in darkness, lives his or her life without thought to God and His Word.

• When walking in darkness our fellowship with God is not broken, but repairable!

• I want to make clear that John is not making a case here for the loss of salvation.
• He is speaking to our fellowship and makes it clear that sin (walking in darkness) breaks fellowship with God.

FRIENDS - John makes it very clear that those who are walking opposite of God as light are not practicing (living in) the influence of the truth.

1.    Recognition of the Light

A.   Truth of Fellowship: We can only fellowship with God in the light

·         Walk in the Light – means to live by or to be shaped by the standard of God’s Light. That means actions, decisions, thoughts and beliefs are to be conformed to God’s standard – Jesus Christ

·         Walk in the Light – means to live guided by the Word

·         Walk in the Light – means to be committed to God and His purpose

·         Walk in the Light – means to recognize what is false and impure in us and in the world.

The great French leader Napoleon said that laws were made for ordinary people, but were never meant for the likes of him.

• To walk in the light of God’s fellowship says we cannot think sin doesn’t matter.
• To think such a way is “dark thinking”

FRIENDS – Our walk with God must not become a “Discussion Circle Christianity” where we merely look on Christianity as a series of problems to be solved and the Bible a book to be taught and lectured.

• Fellowship with God is to walk in the light of following the savior and adhering our lives to His Word – the Bible
• Fellowshipping with God will always bring us closer to one another. We cannot have one without the other.

Robert Law – “God as light is always seeking to shine into the minds He has made in His own image.”

REALIZATION OF THE LIGHT

A. Realization of the deception of sin – V.8

Adrian Rodgers – “A growing problem in our society is that people have the burden of guilt without the sense of sin.”

• We see this thinking in people who reject the ideas that man has sinned and is in need of atonement.

FRIENDS – John states this is the greatest form of self-deception that leads us astray from walking the right path God desires we walk upon.

·         John makes an absolute statement – If we have no sin – the Truth is not in us.

·         The truth might be all around us … we might even acknowledge the truth... But when we deny our own sinfulness the truth of God’s Word has not reached our hearts.

·         To deny that we have sinned is to deny the need for Christ and His death!

·         Romans 3:23 – “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’

B. Realization of the Confession of Sin – V.9

I want to be quick to say that this verse as wonderful and blessed as it is … is not a cliché or a quick fix that gives us a license to sin.

• It is easy to say we have sinned, but to confess our sin says our hearts are broken over our sin.
• Confession of sin must never become a cold and calculated formula for the forgiveness of sin

Confession is:

1. Acknowledgment of sin
2. Acknowledgment of God as light (His standard and measurement of righteousness)
3. Acknowledgment of dependence on God
4. Acknowledgment of turning to God with a desire to conform our lives to His character

\Confession is the measure given to man by God to bring us into counsel and conformity of His Word.

·           When we confess (admit and agree) our sin we can be assured that God is faithful t o do TWO THINGS:

1. Forgive us our sin and remove the guilt of sin (Hebrews 10:22 – Cleansed from a guilty conscious)
2. Cleanses us from the pollution brought on by sin

FRIENDS – We can have no fellowship with God apart from the confession of our sins, and the forgiving and cleansing work of God in our lives.

FELLOWSHIP IN THE RESTORATION OF THE LIGHT

A. Restoration of the Counsel – V.10

• The counsel of God’s Word declares there is none righteous (Romans 3:10).

• Without being covered in the righteousness of Christ man has no righteousness or right standing before God on his own.

B. Restoration of the Counselor – 2:1-2

• We can only be righteous and forgiven through Jesus Christ
• I read this week: “God never alters the robe of righteousness to fit the man, but the man to fit the robe.”
• Left to ourselves – we would never get it right!
• We’d be walking around looking shabby all the time.

In this passage John gives us the “preventive” theology of sin, and the “corrective” theology of sin.

• That is – you do not have to sin (preventive), but if you sin there is a remedy (corrective).
• Christ is our Advocate – helper; supporter; defender
• Christ is our Propitiation – to pacify; to forgive – through Christ God is satisfied with the price of atonement to forgive man his sins.

CLOSE

Fellowship with God is sweet and wonderful when we allow our lives to walk in the circle of Light.

If we are to experience fellowship with God we must:

1. Recognize our sin and realize that it is our sin that has broken our fellowship with God
2. We must confess that sin to receive restoration of our fellowship with God and man

FRIENDS – Let us walk in the influence of god’s circle of Light and let us fellowship with our heavenly father and our brothers and sisters in Christ.

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