Notice: This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for accurate information and meaning.

Summary

In this sermon on 1 John 1:5–2:2, the speaker explores the fundamental need for forgiveness and the deep assurance believers have through Jesus Christ. By examining God’s character as pure light, the message highlights the contrast between God’s holiness and human sin, encouraging believers to stop self-justifying, live in truth, and rely on Jesus as their righteous advocate and atoning sacrifice.

Key Points

• God Is Pure Light: God’s character defines holiness, truth, and righteousness, leaving no place for darkness or hidden sin.

• Walking in the Light Brings Fellowship: True Christian fellowship and unity require honesty about our lives and living in line with God’s light.

• The Trap of Self-Deception: Denying, minimizing, or re-labeling our sin is lying to ourselves and contradicting God’s Word.

• The Reality of Justification: True forgiveness involves both the complete washing away of sin by the blood of Jesus and being clothed in His righteousness.

• Jesus as Our Advocate: When believers stumble, Jesus stands before the Father as a faithful, righteous advocate and the complete atoning sacrifice for sin.

Sermon Transcript

Introduction & Scripture Reading

Thanks, Jesse.

As we continue in worship, we turn our attention to the book of 1 John as we continue our series through that epistle in the New Testament. It is a letter written by the Apostle John to a church—we’re not entirely sure who that church is or entirely what their situation was—but this is a book that is rich with classic Christian themes of forgiveness, the love of God, and various elements about Christian living and living a life that honors God and reflects the light of God. It’s a very concise, encouraging, helpful book.

So, we’re just kind of going back to basics a little bit and going through this book together. Last week, we looked at the introduction and that we can share Jesus, and that John gave us a good outline for what that might look like in our lives. Today, we’re going to pick up at verse 5 and go down to—we’re going to actually go a little bit further than what’s in the bulletin there—we’re going to go down to chapter 2, verse 2. So, we’ll go verse 5 in chapter 1 down to chapter 2, verse 2.

If you have a Bible in front of you, you can pull that out, or you can grab it on your phone, or you can just listen, and that’s fine too.

This morning, we’re looking at the fact that we need forgiveness. It’s a reality that many of us may struggle with, but we also look at the reality that forgiveness opens up for us as we are welcomed into fellowship with God and fellowship with each other.

With that in mind, let’s turn our attention to the Word of God, and let’s give ourselves to its reading this morning.

1 John chapter 1, verse 5:

“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But 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, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.

My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”

This is the Word of God. Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your grace that this morning you are giving us abundant forgiveness for the reality of our sins; that you have drawn close to us, that you desire relationship with us, that you desire for us to walk in the light as you are in the light, that you desire for us to tell the truth about the reality of our sin, and that you have given us a mighty advocate in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Righteous One who takes away the sins of the world. We thank you for all these things. We pray that you would open our hearts and our minds to you. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

The Challenge of Forgiveness and God’s Character

As we talk about forgiveness, I think if you’ve been a Christian for very long or if you’ve been in the church for very long, forgiveness comes up pretty frequently. But many of us struggle with the concept of forgiveness. We struggle to forgive others, we also at times struggle to receive it, and we also, for sure, struggle to ask for forgiveness.

This is probably no more evident than when you’re talking with young children and you’re trying to teach them the importance of saying sorry and then, when somebody apologizes to you, forgiving them. With our kids, we’ve been doing that where if you rip something out of your sibling’s hand and you hurt them and there’s been a fight, you need to go back and you need to say sorry. But oftentimes when they say sorry, there’s a disconnect as to why they’re saying it. They’re saying sorry simply because Mom or Dad said, “Go say sorry to your brother or sister,” right?

Something like that happened just this weekend. Paul—I’m going to have to give Paul a dollar now; I didn’t ask his permission to use him as an illustration—but Paul was… Phoebe had wandered up and grabbed his water bottle, and he ripped it out of her hand and said, “This is mine!” Phoebe started crying, and so I said, “Paul, you need to apologize to your sister. You need to apologize to Phoebe.”

He’s like, “Sorry, Phoebe.” He’s gotten really good at saying sorry.

But then I paused a bit and I said, “Why are you sorry, Paul?”

He kind of looked up quizzically and blankly for a few moments and just said, “I don’t know.”

So he was going through the motion of asking for forgiveness, but he didn’t really understand why he was asking for forgiveness. There wasn’t a deep sense in himself that he actually did something wrong. He was probably really only saying sorry because Dad told him to say sorry. Now, that’s still important because oftentimes we need to go through the motions before the heart connects to it all, right? We have to do the action for the heart to connect to it in many aspects of our lives.

But I think most of us as adults, we’re kind of the same way: “Well, if I just say sorry, the argument’s done. If I ask for forgiveness, I know the argument’s done. If I give forgiveness, the argument’s done.” And then the issue’s over, and we avoid the mess, we avoid the fight. But we don’t think critically about our own behavior, the behavior of others, and what true forgiveness actually means for us as individuals and the transformation that comes as a result of approaching forgiveness and receiving true forgiveness.

I think this section, as John goes through these topics of walking in the light as God is in the light, confessing our sin, and looking to Jesus as our advocate, encourages us to reflect on our own need for forgiveness and then rejoice in the fact that we have that forgiveness in Jesus.

Walking in the Light and Living Truthfully

John starts with this by looking at the character of God. He looks at this theme of walking in the light, so we can walk in the light as God is in the light. This is a key aspect of the forgiveness we receive from Jesus:

“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But 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, purifies us from all sin.”

So as John is beginning this section where he’s discussing these themes of confession, forgiveness, and the work of Jesus on our behalf, he starts with the character of God. Who is God? Who is this living and true God that we claim to follow and to look to? Well, He’s light.

This is a theme that pops up all over the Old Testament, all over the New Testament—particularly in the writings of John—referring to God as One who dwells in unapproachable light. As we think about Moses when he’s on Mount Sinai and God passes by him, His glory radiates in this light that can’t be approached, where we have this sense that if we approached God in His true form, He’s so purely light that we would evaporate in some way.

God is the essence of holiness, the essence of righteousness, the essence of all that is good. Everything that is good, worthy, and beautiful finds its definition in the person of God, and He is the One that defines those things out of Himself because He’s the source of all of it.

So if God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all: “If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth.”

That’s an encouragement for you and me this morning to reflect on God’s character. Reflect on the Ten Commandments, reflect on the Sermon on the Mount, and ask ourselves: Are we walking in the light? Do our lives reflect the light of God?

Because what John says is, if we don’t walk in the light as He is in the light, we lie and do not live out the truth. That verb there—”walk in the darkness”—is helpful, I think, for us because it’s emphasizing an ongoing, continuous walking in things that are opposite of God, things that are dark rather than things which are light.

If we think about the relationship between light and dark, when you enter into a dark room—say a basement room that has no lights, no outside lighting, and the lights are off—when you walk into the room, it’s dark. And then you flip the light on, and the darkness disappears. Right? God is so much defined by light, and is light itself, to the extent that darkness can’t even exist in His presence. As you and I look honestly at our lives, we see that there are many dark corners of our hearts, our souls, and our minds.

As we consider that this morning, why John is including this is to highlight the gap that exists between God’s character and our own character. Because we are people who, as Isaiah put it, were people who are walking in great darkness but have seen a great light. We are people who walk in a world that is defined by darkness; there is darkness in each of us, and God’s the antithesis to that.

Cleansed by the Blood of Jesus

So if that’s true, is there hope for us this morning?

Well, John seems to think so: “But 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, purifies us from all sin.”

That last clause in the Greek, I think, is a separate thought from the first part of verse 7. So: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. The blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”

The shift that happens there is that because the blood of Jesus purifies us from our sin, because the blood of Jesus covers us, we have fellowship with one another and we’re able to walk in the light. So the reality of Jesus’s forgiving work on the cross—His atoning work that gives us the forgiveness of sins and clothes us in His righteousness—is that we can actually walk in the light. We can reflect God through the work of Jesus, we can grow in holiness and in our obedience to God, and we can have greater fellowship with one another.

Because what disrupts fellowship between individuals, and particularly believers? It’s darkness. It’s sin. It’s our own selfishness, our own greed, our own anger, our own lack of being willing to forgive, our own inner sense of bitterness.

But when Jesus cleanses us—when we remember that Jesus has covered our sins, that He has purified us as He is pure—we can walk in the light. We can have fellowship with one another.

But it all starts with that recognition of who God is. What’s the standard we’re measuring things by? Oftentimes, when we think about our sin, we kind of think, “Well, so-and-so does this, so it’s fine. All my friends are doing it, it’s okay.” There are all sorts of things like that in the church—respectable sins. “It’s okay to get frustrated.” A co-worker of mine at a former church used to call frustration “Christian anger.” We won’t just say we’re angry; we’ll say, “Well, I was frustrated,” right?

But what’s that doing? We’re acting as though there isn’t darkness, that the darkness isn’t there, and we’re trying to push that to the side and ignore it. But we have those respectable sins all across the church. In America, it’s probably greed in a lot of ways. We find a lot of satisfaction and peace in money, possessions, and things, but we kind of give that a pass in many settings. But God hates those things. He hates greed, He hates anger, He hates lies.

If we look at our lives, each of those things, I’m pretty sure, we could all identify ways that we’ve sinned in those ways even this week—things that we might even consider lesser sins. But that’s not the standard that God sets, because God is pure light and there’s no darkness in Him at all. So the standard of right and wrong, the standard of light and darkness, is God Himself. It’s not the people we live in relationship with.

So as we’re thinking about light and darkness, as we’re thinking about our own sin and our own need for forgiveness, we look to the perfections of God, which highlights our need very highly. But then it drives us to Jesus—that Jesus’s blood purifies us from all sins, and because of that, we can walk in light as He is in the light, and we can have greater fellowship with one another, laying down those sins and walking in the light because of the forgiveness we have in Jesus.

Telling the Truth About Our Sin

As we recognize that we can walk in the light because of the forgiveness that Jesus gives us, we also recognize that we can tell the truth about our sin because of the forgiveness that is ours in Christ. Like I was just mentioning about anger, we like to change and self-justify constantly with our sins. We create categories like, “Well, that’s a white lie.” A lie is a lie, my friends! There’s no distinction in the mind of God, there’s no distinction in the Word of God about white lies versus any other lie.

But we do that because we have a running tally in our heads. It’s like we’ve got a set of weights in our brain every day, and we’re adding up the bad stuff, and we’re really hoping that the good stuff outweighs that bad stuff. How we manage that and manage our anxiety—especially as we relate to God—is that we start to self-justify and shift the goalposts. We say, “Well, that wasn’t really anger, that wasn’t really a lie, I wasn’t really being greedy.”

In so doing, what does John say? “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”

When we do those things, we’re lying to ourselves. We’re living in a false reality of our own making. We can’t handle the truth about who we are. We can’t handle the truth about what we’ve done. We desperately want to have a clean slate, but we want to have a clean slate that we made clean ourselves. We want to be the ones scrubbing it clean, rather than having it be washed clean by the blood of Jesus.

Because of that, we have a hard time admitting to the reality of our sin. But if Jesus’s blood has already covered your sin, if He has already given you the full forgiveness of sins in His death and His resurrection, that means we can tell the truth about our sin. Because no matter what is true of you—no matter what is true about your thought life, your actions, your words, your past, your present, your future—God already knows it, and Jesus has already covered it.

Which means that we can confess our sins freely. We can tell the truth about our sins. Sometimes maybe “confession” makes us a little squirrely and nervous, so maybe it’s better to just say: we can tell the truth about our sin. We can tell the truth about who we are—about our anger, our greed, our lust, about all of the hang-ups in our lives that we continually struggle through. Those things are true.

To not admit they’re true is to live in a place of self-deceit, and it’s also to live in a place where Jesus didn’t actually do anything. Because if we didn’t sin, then Jesus’s blood doesn’t cover us. Jesus died in order to cover our sin, to bring us to new life, to save us, and to draw us close to God. So we can tell the truth about our sins.

Not only are we living in self-deception when we refuse to confess our sins, verse 10 says: “If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.”

We’re then saying Jesus is a liar. As Jesus is going to be baptized and John the Baptist sees Him coming, what does John the Baptist proclaim? “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” If Jesus is the Lamb of God who came to take away the sin of the world, there surely must be sin for Him to be taking away. The purpose of Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension was so that He might do away with sin—that He might have victory over sin, death, and the devil, gather all His people to God, and make us sons and daughters of God.

To say that we don’t have sin is not only deceiving ourselves, but it’s also saying that Jesus is a liar—that He came for no reason.

The Promise of Forgiveness and Justification

As believers, as we cling to Jesus and the forgiveness He offers, we ought to be the people who are most defined by confessing our faults and our sins—to God primarily, and then, as we grow, having the boldness to confess our sins to one another. As you sin against somebody, say, “Hey, I’m sorry. I was angry, I shouldn’t have been angry. I lied, I shouldn’t have lied. I was jealous, I shouldn’t have been jealous,” on down the road.

This is a key part of what makes relationships work. As you think about marriage relationships or friendships, any relationship in your life that has any legs to it has to have a component of confession and forgiveness in it. If you can’t ask for forgiveness, receive it, and give it, you’re not going to have very many close, tight-knit relationships. Those who are married know that for sure! When you get married, you’re basically signing up for a life of confession and forgiveness—that’s most of what it is, because you’re living with another sinner. You’re a sinner, they’re a sinner; it’s going to happen.

As believers in these close relationships, we should be marked in our personal lives as ones who go to ask for forgiveness and who freely grant it, because we have everything we need in Jesus. He has purified us, He has cleansed us with His blood, and we have nothing to fear.

I think when we are afraid to confess, especially on a horizontal level, we’re afraid that person is going to reject us. We’re afraid whatever sin we’ve committed, they’re going to hear about it and say, “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Pack your bags, get going, we’re done.” That can happen, certainly, in our horizontal relationships, and sometimes should happen. As we live in this broken world, the reality of sin is real, and sin brings brokenness. Even as we confess it, there are consequences for sin.

But as we confess our sins to God, He never rejects us. As we confess our sins, He never pushes us away. Instead, what does it say?

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

When we confess our sins to Jesus, He’s faithful and just. He’s committed to doing it. He has decided far ahead of time—before the foundations of the earth—that He was going to forgive those sins. Not only that, He’s just; He’s going to follow through on it. He is the One who does what is right.

His ultimate justice is seen in that you and I weren’t hung on crosses, but instead, He was hung on a cross for our sake. He took the place that we should have held and took the weight of the wrath of God on Himself so that the cost of our sin was justly paid, allowing us to receive His righteousness in its place.

See, friends, for the believer, the wrath of God and all that separates us from God is gone, because Jesus has taken it already. It’s already been poured out, it’s already been spent. So when we come and confess our sins through our Lord Jesus, God is not coming for us. He’s not waiting to push us down and reject us. Instead, He’s running to us like the father in the parable of the prodigal son. While the son was a long way off walking toward him, the father hiked up his robe and ran to him. That’s what God does to us. He doesn’t reject; He runs, because Jesus has taken the cost on Himself and given us full forgiveness of sins as a result, purifying us from all unrighteousness.

He doesn’t just give us purification from sins; He gives us His righteousness.

A theological topic that is very near and dear to the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition is the idea of justification by faith alone. My pastor in York, one of the first questions he asked me was, “What are the two parts of justification?” At the time, I didn’t really know! But it’s a question that he asks to every candidate who comes into our presbytery to become a minister or a ruling elder: What are the two parts of justification?

This is an essential bedrock doctrine for us to really wrap our heads around:

1. The full, gracious forgiveness of sins in Jesus. As we’re justified, Jesus takes away every one of our sins.

2. As He takes away every one of our sins, He also clothes us in His righteousness.

So when God looks at us, He doesn’t see our filth, He doesn’t see the scars of our sin, He doesn’t see the blemishes that are left behind—He sees the perfect robe of Christ’s righteousness. When it talks here about how He forgives our sin and purifies us from all unrighteousness, He’s taking the sin away and giving us His righteousness, so that all that is Jesus’s becomes ours.

That’s how Jesus answers our confession. Jesus doesn’t answer our confession with, “It’s all good, mistakes happen, I get it.” No, He answers our confession with His blood! He answers our confession by saying, “I’m forgiving it all, and I’m giving you everything that’s mine—all of my righteousness.”

That should free us up to tell the truth about who we are and tell the truth about our sin, because Jesus has forgiven us and given us His righteousness.

Jesus Our Advocate and Atoning Sacrifice

So as we receive the forgiveness of sins, we can walk in the light as God is in the light, we can tell the truth about our sin, and we can look to Jesus Christ, our great advocate, the Righteous One.

Chapter 2, verse 1:

“My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”

“My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin.” One of the chief charges against the Protestants in the Reformation by the Roman Catholics was, “Well, you’re saying you’re justified by faith alone. If that’s true, aren’t you saying that anybody can just do whatever they want and they’ll just be saved anyways?”

No! Because as we receive the full forgiveness of sins, we are then transformed more and more into the likeness of Jesus. John, very clearly—we can’t really escape his language—says, “I write this to you so that you will not sin.” John is concerned that we don’t sin. Holiness is of utmost priority for all the apostles; you can’t escape it.

But the apostles lived in the real world. They lived in a world that is still cursed by sin and death, that is still under the sway of the devil to some extent. What they also proclaim, just as John does here, is: “But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate.”

In your sin, as you look at yourself this morning, maybe you’re remembering sins from this week, or remembering sins from decades ago—the sins that keep you up at night, where you wake up at 2:00 AM, stare at the ceiling, and wish you had never done them. As you think of those things this morning, it can be tempting to be overwhelmed by them and sink into despair as a result of the reality of your sin. Apart from Jesus, we should despair.

But that’s not what John says: “But if anybody does sin—anybody who is in Christ—we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.”

The One who is marked by righteousness, justice, and truth—the One who died for our sake in order to fully forgive our sins and clothe us in His righteousness—He is our advocate. As we sin and we confess our sins, Jesus goes before the Father and says, “These men, these women, these children who have sinned and who have confessed, they are mine. My blood has paid their debt; my blood covers them.”

Jesus Christ, the Righteous One, advocates for us who are unrighteous. He advocates for us so much that He makes us righteous by giving us His righteousness.

He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the whole world. As you read this language of atonement in the Bible, it roots us back in Leviticus 16 on the Day of Atonement. This was a day that every year the Israelites would celebrate, and it would be a time of ritual cleansing and atoning for the sins of the nation. The tabernacle and the altar would be cleansed by the high priest, and then a goat would be taken. The high priest would lay his hands on the goat, passing the sins of the nation onto this goat, and then this goat would be driven out into the wilderness. The goat was called a scapegoat.

The sins of the people were ceremonially put on this goat, and the goat was sent out into the wilderness, symbolizing that this goat had taken the brunt and borne the payment that was due for the sins of every man, woman, and child in the nation of Israel.

So when John the Baptist sees Jesus and declares that He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, that’s where our minds should go back to. Jesus is that scapegoat. Jesus is the One on whom all of our sins have been placed. Jesus is the sacrificial Lamb who has died in our place.

Because that’s who He is, and because His death takes away the sins of the whole world, if He’s our advocate, then we can stand with confidence before God. We can walk, imperfectly, in the light as God is in the light, because Jesus has cleansed us and forgiven us. He’s given us all that we need; we have His righteousness. We can fail forward, we can walk in the light even though we still sin, and then as we do sin, we can tell the truth about it. Because telling the truth doesn’t mean we lose our relationship with God. It doesn’t mean we lose our standing with God, because He already knows about it and He’s already paid for it.

And when the doubts come—when we’re worried that maybe our salvation isn’t ours, maybe our forgiveness isn’t real, maybe there’s still something on the ledger that hasn’t been paid—we look to our advocate, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. Though He was righteous and we were unrighteous, He died for our sake that we might be made sons and daughters of God.

So friends, we need forgiveness. As we trust in Jesus, that forgiveness is ours. As we have that forgiveness, we can walk in the light, we can tell the truth about our sin, and we can look to our advocate, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Closing Prayer

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your grace to us. Thank you for the forgiveness that is ours in Jesus. May that give us great joy and delight in this life. May we cling to Him with everything we have, as we recognize that He is clinging to us—that we come to Him because He is holding us firmly. May that give us great peace, rest, and joy today.

Help us to delight in you this week. Help us to walk in the light as you are in the light. Help us to tell the truth about our sin, and above all, help us to look to our great advocate, the Lord Jesus Christ. We ask all these things in Jesus’ mighty name, Amen.