1 John 2. We're going to continue to look this morning at how John applies the theme, the truth that God is light, and what it means to walk in the light. We'll see that to walk in the light demands that you love your Christian brothers and sisters. 1 John 2. My little children, these things I write to you 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. Now by this we know that we know Him if we keep His commandments. He who says, I know him, and does not keep his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, truly in him is the love of God perfected. By this we know that we are in him. He who says he abides in him ought himself also to walk, just as he walked. Brethren, I write no new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which you heard. Again, a new commandment I write to you, which thing is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. He who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in darkness until now. He who loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But he who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes. I write to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for his name's sake. I write to you, fathers, because you have known him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you have overcome the wicked one. I write to you, little children, because you have known the Father. I have written to you, fathers, because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I have written to you, young men, because you are strong, and the Word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the wicked one. Do not love the world or the things in the world, If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world is passing away in the lust of it. But he who does the will of God abides forever." Let's pray. Heavenly Father, We praise You that You are light and that in You is no darkness at all. Help us to walk in the light by loving each other. Give us the grace to listen to this Word. Help us, Father, not to hold grudges, not to be angry, not to withdraw or neglect our brothers. Father, pour Your Spirit upon us so that we can love from His supernatural resources, with His mighty power. We pray that Your Son would speak to us through His Word in this sermon. We ask it in Jesus' name, Amen. God is light. And to live in His light demands that we love one another. That's what our text this morning tells us. Christians, quote unquote, who don't love each other, the apostle says, are wrapped in a thick, choking darkness. Some of you might like double chocolate cookies. I'm going to use them as an illustration. What is John saying? If you hate your brother, you're a dark chocolate chip in a dark chocolate cookie. You're in darkness, and you're blind, it's a double whammy. Two layers of blackness. Don't be that. That's the message. Don't be dark in darkness. Walk in the light, and you do that by loving each other. That's the message. We'll see that that's something that we can only do in God's power. We start by looking at the darkness in verse 9. He who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in darkness until now. John has been talking throughout and will continue to talk and give examples of someone who makes a representative claim. And here, of course, the claim is, I am in the light. Well, that's a claim that we can pretty easily verify if we think in terms of physical light. If somebody says to us, I can see perfectly, we do various tests, right? How many fingers am I holding up? And if the person says the wrong number, then we say, yeah, sure, you can see really well. Yep, looks like your eyes are working, not. And John says, somebody who says I am in the light in spiritual terms, it will be obvious immediately whether that claim is true. If you're in the light, then you will behave based on what your eyes are telling you. Why did the blind man fall in the well? He didn't see that well. It's stupid, but it's true. If you don't see what's in front of you, then yeah, you're going to walk right into it. You're going to make all kinds of terrible decisions because you're in the darkness and you don't know any different. All of us have, in the darkness, at some point or another, walked into something, stepped on something, and said, ow, that really hurt. But I couldn't see what I was about to step on, I couldn't see what I was about to run into, and I was unable to protect myself. Now this claim, I am in the light, if we go back to what we talked about about 10 Sundays ago, we remember that to say I am in the light means I am fully exposed to God. I let God see the truth about me. I confess my sins. I don't try to hide anything about myself from the Almighty. I don't pretend that there's some area of my life that He can't see. To say, I am in the light is to say, God, I'm laying it all out there. for you. You can see everything there is to see about me. And if that's true, if you're really in the light, if you're really fully exposed to God, then you won't be okay with sin. To be walking in the light is not to say, well, I always sin, but I always repent, and I always tell God, hey, here's my sin, so I'm not a hypocrite. I sin openly, therefore, that shows I'm in the light. No, sinning openly doesn't show you're in the light. If you're really in the light, if you're really exposed to God and you understand that you're exposed to God, you don't want to sin. Most of us suddenly feel a whole lot less desire to speed in the presence of a police officer. And if you happen to have one cop in the lane behind you and another one in the lane next to you, suddenly you decide that the speed limit looks a whole lot better. You're exposed and your desire to sin just evaporates. To claim I am in the light is to say I know God is watching and I know it so well that I don't want to sin. Some call conservative churches like ours unwelcoming for this very reason. We call it unwelcoming. Why? Because if you come to this church, and all of you do come to this church, you know this, you're reminded every week that you live life in front of God and that He disapproves of your sin. If you don't want to hear that God disapproves of your sin, you won't keep coming to this church. You'll say, that church is very unwelcoming, that church made it clear that God disapproved of my sin. And that they might have disapproved of my sin too. I don't like that. So I'm leaving. To say, I live in the light, though, is to say, I'm okay with God disapproving of my sin. I know my sin is ugly. I don't like it either. God, I disapprove of it. I agree with you that sin is evil and wrong and I should not do it. And that means that when you do sin, when you're in the light, which John says, right, I'm writing to you that you don't sin, but if you do, if anyone does, take it to God because we have an advocate with the Father. Confess, if we confess our sins, He's faithful and just, to forgive. When you leave the light and go sin in the darkness, what do you do? Come back to the light, admit your sin, confess your sin, that's the gospel. Say, for a minute there I was not exposed to God. I was trying to hide from Him. Now I'm back. Lord, here's what I did while I was in the darkness. It was wrong. I disown it. I don't want to do it. Please forgive me of it. So the claim, I am in the light, is first of all a claim to be fully exposed to God. But secondly, it's a claim to be appropriately exposed to your Christian brothers and sisters. And again, we talked about all of this in chapter 1. If we say we have fellowship with one another, walking in darkness, walking in darkness cuts you off not only from God but from your fellow Christians. To walk in the light is to be appropriately exposed. That doesn't mean you go around and dump all your deep dark secrets on everybody in your church. Hey, you want to know what I did this week? All my deep rotten secrets? No, but it does mean appropriate exposure, which is what? Dropping the pretense that you're a good person who never needs forgiveness. If that's the image you project, if that's the aura, the vibe you transmit, I've never done anything wrong. None of you has ever had to put up with anything from me. If there's ever been a conflict or a problem, the explanation is simple. You're wrong, I'm right. Heads I win, tails you lose. As long as you're transmitting that vibe, you're not appropriately exposed to your Christian brothers. Far from it. You're saying, I don't do anything wrong. If you think I did something wrong, you're wrong. to walk in the light is to drop that pretense and humbly say, you know what? I probably did something wrong to you. I'm probably a real pain. Sometimes, maybe I'm a real pain a lot of the time. And I know that, and I completely understand how I might have offended you. And I agree that I did something wrong. And that if you're a normal person, you will tend to resent it, unless the power of the Spirit enables you to forgive me. A church full of perfect people is the last church any of us wants to be part of. Some of you have told me about your experience in churches like that, and how deeply unpleasant it is. where everyone else rubs into you regularly that they're perfect and you're not. John says, no. He who says he is in the light, to be in the light, requires, demands, pity, compassion, and sympathy for your fellow Christians. It means admitting, I'm a sinner and you're a sinner too. And I expect to get hurt. And I expect to get mistreated. And I expect to get let down. Not all the time, but you know, somewhat regularly. Because I know how imperfect I am. I understand the same about you. So that's the claim. I am in the light. God sees everything about me. And my church understands that I'm imperfect, and they know that I understand that they're imperfect. And none of us pretends around each other that we have it all together, that I'm perfect and you're not. I'm fully exposed to God, appropriately exposed to all of you. That's the claim. That's a good claim. You should be in the light. You should be able to say, I am in the light. But you openly contradict it if you hate your brother. If you hate your brother, you're in darkness until now. This verse has personal meaning for me. I offended my little brother one time many years ago, but not as many as I would like. I told some of you this story. I plucked the sausage off his plate at breakfast and told him he wasn't supposed to have it. He hit me a little bit, knocked me off my chair. My father told me, Caleb, go eat in the garage. If you can't eat like a civilized human being, you won't eat at this table. Go. While you're out there, read 1 John. Tell me what it says about loving your brother. So I started into 1 John, got through chapter 1. I don't see anything about loving my brother. Got into chapter 2, and finally, here it was. He who loves his brother. So that's the message. Don't take food off your brother's plate. Now there's many, many ways to hate your brother. John says, any one of them is proof positive that you are not in the light, whatever you might say with your mouth. We can all imagine a blind person yelling, I can too see, and proceeding to do a bunch of stupid things to try to prove that he can see. We talk about that. Somebody with something to prove is notorious for making terrible choices. But that's how ridiculous you are when you're a brother-hating Christian. If there's somebody out there, somebody who is a fellow Christian with you, that you hate. Now what does John mean by hate? He who hates his brother is in darkness. We think of hatred as passionate hostility. Hatred would be essentially how Osama bin Laden felt about the World Trade Center. And we look around the church and say, you know what? That's not my church. And by the grace of God, that's no church I've ever been in. I don't see people who are openly homicidal. I don't see anybody who would gladly come in here and blow the place up. Oh, there might be some divisions. Some, I like the pastor, I don't like the pastor. Some, I like the carpet. Some, I don't like the carpet. Some I like the songs, some I don't like the songs, but there is nothing at the level of hating. Come on. I don't think John is telling us that as long as you're somewhere below that level of passionate hostility, you're okay. Well, that's not the point. He's talking about hatred, not as passionate hostility, but hatred as a much lower grade form, a sort of benign neglect. Here in Wyoming especially, right, what's the cultural expectation? It's, I love you by default. If I'm not actively harming you, then I love you because the way I love you is by leaving you alone to do your own thing. You're a pioneer. I'm a pioneer. We carve our own way in this world. And as long as I'm not trying to stop you from whatever you're doing, then consider yourself loved. I don't cross your fence and you don't cross mine. But I think John has his sights set on that definition of love. And he's about to open up with both barrels and try to blow it out of the water. That is not love. Love means actively seeking the good of somebody else. There is no loving by default. There is no, well, I leave you alone. Doesn't that prove how much I love you? Go down to the next chapter. Chapter 3, verse 17. Whoever has this world's goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth. Love is an action, not an inaction. Love is not a lack of action. Right, Christmas is coming up. What would you think of somebody who gave you a Christmas card that said, I love you so much this year, I'm not gonna do anything for you for Christmas. I guess theoretically there could be somebody who's pestered the life out of you at Christmas and you say, oh good. A person will finally leave me alone, what I've been wanting for the last 35 years. But say it's somebody you actually care about, that you enjoy. A person who's one of your friends who says, this year to show that I love you, I'll do nothing. Well, that shows how much that person loves you, right? You can't love by doing nothing. good intentions and positive thoughts aren't enough. Indeed, it would seem that love that costs you nothing is really more what the Apostle is calling hate. He who loves his brother abides in the light. and there is no cause for stumbling in Him. How do you love your brother? What is John telling us positively to do? He says, don't hate your brother. But how can you, even in a church this size, positively do something good for everybody? Is this saying, buy everyone a Christmas present? No, I don't think so. One way you can love and encourage your brothers is just by coming to church. Another thing you can do, as I preached about in my Holiday Gift Guide sermons the last two years, is to pray for your brothers and sisters. That is a gift that you not only can, but should give to the whole church. If you say, yes, I love these people, well, how often do you pray for them? Oh, I can't remember the last time I prayed for any of them. Wow. Well, they're really in your thoughts then, aren't they? They're really close to your heart, aren't they? if you never remember them in prayer. What's the way that we show love, ultimately? You show love, not by giving stuff, but by giving yourself. You can give money, you can even give time, you can give your body to the flames, the Apostle Paul says. But if you don't have love in your heart, it doesn't matter. It's basically a stereotype. There's a divorce. Father leaves. He comes back in 15 years and tries to make up for his absence by giving lots of money to his kids. Here, here's this nice thing and that nice thing and maybe this money will make up for the time when I wasn't part of your life. And do children everywhere say, Wow, it really does. You know what, Dad? I missed you those 15 years, but now that you gave me a $5,000 gift, I don't miss you at all. It doesn't work that way. The way you love is not just by giving stuff or time, by giving yourself. How do you give yourself to your brothers and sisters? Well, there are many, again, many, many ways to do it. But we can say about all of them that they're going to cost you something. Maybe carpet stains. Maybe increased grocery spending. Maybe time you wanted to spend with your favorite book or TV show. If you can't think of a time in the last year when you paid any of those costs to love your Christian brothers and sisters, are you sure you're loving your brothers? Jesus loved us, so He gave Himself in a love that cost Him everything. If your love costs you nothing, then it's probably what the Apostle is calling hate. So abide in the light. You're hearing me correctly if you're saying, that's impossible. I don't have the resources to love like that. That's too much. I can't give myself to all these people. There will be nothing left. Right, that's John's point. That's why he says, abide in the light. It goes both ways. You have to be supernaturally empowered by God's light, by God's Spirit, in order to love this way. And if you do love this way, you will abide in the light. If you aren't constantly with Christ, learning from Him, receiving from Him, letting His love be poured into you, then you won't have any love to give. This is a frankly supernatural command. Love the brethren. That means give yourself to them. That means you won't be able to do it without God's power in your heart. Abiding in the light, what does that mean? Confess your sin. Meet with God in worship. Remain fully exposed to Him and appropriately exposed to your brothers and sisters. And when you do that, the Spirit gives you the power, grows in your life the first fruit of the Spirit, which is love. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, Love in your life is not something you drum up from within your own resources. Love is something that the Spirit empowers you to do. And when you do this, then you're free from stumbling blocks. In Him, there is no cause for stumbling. Walking in God's light purges out every stumbling block, everything that would cause you to sin. All our troubles come from lack of communion with God. Every time you give way to sin, what is that saying? It's saying you weren't in God's light at that moment. You had turned away from Him somehow. But if you stay with Him, if you abide in the light, then you won't find anything that will trip you up. There will be no cause for stumbling. But John circles back around again to focus on the negative. He who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes. So he repeats the word darkness three times in that verse and then adds blindness on top of it for good measure. If you refuse to love your brothers with a love that costs you something, near the dark chocolate chip in the dark chocolate cookie, near the eyeless fish inside the pitch dark cave. A couple of years ago, I was out walking on the trail around the field of dreams, and night fell, and it got really, really dark, and I could not really see anything, and I heard this chuff that sounded like an antelope blowing out its breath. I was pretty sure it was an antelope, but it terrified me so bad. I'm standing there on the dark trail yelling, who's there? What was that? Of course, the antelope didn't say anything. Do you want to be walking in darkness? Do you want to be in a position where an antelope breathing terrifies you? Then go ahead and say, you know what? These brothers and sisters are not worth it. I don't want to spend myself on them. Are you kidding? I've got kids. I've got work. I've got commitments. I've got plenty of stuff to do. I can't give myself to these people. John says, if that's your attitude, You're courting ignorance, where you have no idea where you're going. And you're courting blindness, where you will be unable to learn where you're going because you can't open your eyes anymore. They don't work. If you won't spend anything, and you definitely won't spend yourself for your fellow saints, that attitude will send you to hell. That's the path of darkness. Don't go down it. Come to the light. Confess your sins and remain in God's light. And you'll find infinite mercy and infinite power to love the people you see sitting around you. Let's pray. Father, we praise You that You are light. We praise you that you call us to an impossible task of loving one another, but that you give us infinite resources with which to accomplish it. Father, we thank you for the love that you showed in giving your Son as the propitiation for the whole world. We thank You that that is the Gospel message, that is the Good News that You loved and gave, and that You call us to have the same attitude, to walk in the same way that You walked in and that Your Son walked in, and that You give us Your Spirit to empower us to walk it. Father, teach us to abide in the light. that we might love our brethren in a costly way that's paid for out of your infinite resources. We pray these things in the glorious name of our risen Lord, Jesus the Messiah. Amen.