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1st John- Wayne Barber (Part 4)

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<span id=hs_cos_wrapper_name class=hs_cos_wrapper hs_cos_wrapper_meta_field hs_cos_wrapper_type_text style= data-hs-cos-general-type=meta_field data-hs-cos-type=text >1st John- Wayne Barber (Part 4)</span>
By: Dr. Wayne Barber; ©2007
If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? Sad to say, there are a lot of people whose walk and talk don’t line up.
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Evidence of Christianity

1 John 1:5-10

If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? Sad to say, there are a lot of people whose walk and talk don’t line up. We are going to pick up in 1 John 1:5, but I would like to back up with you as we feel the flow of what John is doing. Verse 1 says, “What was from the beginning, what we have heard [John is speaking of himself and the apostles], what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the Word of Life – and the life was manifested, and we have seen and bear witness and pro­claim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us – what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, that you also may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. And these things we write, so that our joy [or rather it should be, your joy] may be made complete.” Now pick up in verse 5: “And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.” That is the whole first chapter, as John begins to introduce what he is about to say. The term “darkness” is found in 1 John several times. I want to make sure we understand what it means. It is found in 1 John 1:5-6, and in 2:8-9, 11. There are two different words used for darkness. The first word is in verse 5. It is the word skotia. In verse 6 it is the word skotos. Now if you look in a Greek lexicon, you are going to find in verse 5 it says skotia means darkness. Skotos, in verse 6 means darkness. That is all they are basically going to say about it. But if you will do your homework, run both words through the New Testament, you will discover that there is a significant difference in verses 5 and 6. Skotia is the word John uses 98% of the time in both his gospel and his epistles. Skotos is rarely used. In fact, it is only used in 1 John 1:6 and in John 3:19. Those are the only two times you are going to find the word skotos used by John. Let me show you the difference. The word in verse 5, skotia, means the result of darkness. If I walk outside in the darkness and fall over a stump and break my leg, I have been out in the darkness. But I have suffered the consequence of being in that darkness. The word skotos in verse 6 means the essence of darkness itself. Let’s look over in John 3:19. I want you to see what this darkness is. It is impor­tant to realize what John is saying here. Why does he bring up the word “darkness” and why does he contrast it with light? He is dealing with false doctrine. Any false doctrine is darkness. It is clear here that darkness is the environment in which men seek to hide their sin. “And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness.” This is not the consequence of the darkness because they haven’t realized that yet, but they love the essence of darkness. They love the darkness “rather than the light; for their deeds were evil.” Verse 20 says, “For every­one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light lest his deeds should be exposed.” So we see that darkness, skotos, is something that hides a man’s sin. He likes it because no one knows what is going on in the darkness. But Jesus is the light, and when Jesus comes into a man’s life, He turns on the light and exposes what is going on. That is why men would not respond to the light. That is the judgment that has come into the world. If you will look at our text, 1 John 1:6, we will see a very similar truth that John is bringing out. He says, “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” “Lie” and “practice” are in the present tense, so they should read “lying” and “practicing.” In other words, John is saying, “You can’t say you know Christ and seek to go off in the darkness and hide your sin. You cannot do that and claim to be a believer.” As I have been studying this is what is coming to me. Darkness seems to repre­sent false doctrine and its unethical connection to sin. Can I share something with you? If you are not living in the Word of God, if you are not a believer, you already somehow have learned to tolerate sin in your life. Now that doesn’t come from the truth because the truth is light. God is light. You cannot come to Him and in any way hide anything from Him. You see, His light will expose you. So an individual who gets off is getting into wrong thinking. Wrong thinking is going to cause wrong living. In Romans Paul is dealing with is legalism. Legalism is truth that has been per­verted and has caused people to think wrongly and is leading them into sin. Antinomianism is another false doctrine he is dealing with. An antinomian is some­one who is against the law and feels like you can do anything you want to do. Either way, false doctrine has an unethical connection with sin. When a person thinks wrong, he is going to live wrong. Now, why does John use light? Because you see, light is truth. It is God’s truth. It exposes sin and opens our minds to understand the will and the way of God. A man has a choice to make. Am I going to walk in darkness or am I going to walk in light? The Apostle John is making a contrast between the real believers and the fakes, the ones who if they were put on trial for being a Christian would not be found guilty. There is nothing in their walk to back it up. They have plenty of talk but they don’t have any walk. Ephesians alludes to this. In Ephesians 5 Paul talks about this unethical connec­tion with sin that darkness has. He warns the believers in Ephesus not to go back and live like they used to live. You see, when you come to Christ, you come out of darkness and you come into light. There is no fellowship with darkness and light whatsoever. In Ephesians 5:8 it says, “for you were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” We were the epitome of what darkness is all about before we came to know Christ. It was His light, the light of the gospel that came to us and showed us the wickedness and the error of our ways. The verse continues, “walk as children of light.” What is the fruit of that? Verses 9-10 read, “(for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth), trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.” One of the quickest ways to know if a person loves Christ and is walking in the light is that he seeks every single way that he possibly can to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Verse 11 goes on to say, “And do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of dark­ness.” You see, darkness, that false thinking, is associated with deeds. But I want you also to see that there is no fruit in them. He didn’t say the less fruit, he says the unfruitful deeds of darkness. What is he saying? When you start walking in the darkness and hiding your sin, the deeds that you do in the darkness will never benefit anybody and all you are doing is bringing destruction to yourself. Verse 11 continues, “but instead even expose them.” How do you expose them? By the way you live. When you live following after the Light, you even expose the evil deeds of those around you. That is why the conflict is there between us and the unbelievers in the world. Verse 12 says, “for it is disgraceful even to speak of the thing which are done by them in secret.” You see, that word “darkness” has the idea of hiding. Nobody knows what I am doing. I like that lifestyle. I will go to church on Sunday morning. I will stand up with the best of them. I’ll confess I have fellowship with Jesus. But on Monday through Saturday, I am going to live my own kind of life. I am going to slip off in the darkness and do what I want to do. Those are unfruitful deeds. When you get around people who are living right, they are going to expose you for what you are. Verse 13 reads, “But all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light.” Actually, “that which makes mani­fest is light” is the better translation. Look at verse 14: “For this reason it says, ‘Awake, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine [His light] on you.’“ Obviously John is saying, as he does in the gospel, Christ is light and when one professes to know Him, everything about their life will be exposed. Everything will be open, and they can walk in the purity of that relationship with Him. We have a choice to make. We either walk in the darkness or we walk in the light. Okay, let’s get to the text in verse 5. I wanted you to know some of those things as we enter into it because they are important to John’s thinking. If you have ever studied his gospel, then it is easy to come into 1 John because he says so many of these things over and over again in his gospel. Verses 1-4 tell us that the message of Jesus Christ has not changed. John says from the very beginning it has been so. The beginning he speaks of there is not the same one as in John 1:1. He is speak­ing about the first time he wrote to them. “Jesus Christ is the Son of God who has come in the flesh to live on this earth, to go to a cross, and to take our sin upon Himself. We saw Him. We heard Him. We beheld Him, and we touched Him. That has not changed.” That drives a nail into that Cerenthian heresy. The Cerenthian heresy says, “Oh no, Jesus wasn’t God.” Gnosticism says you don’t even need Jesus to be saved. You can be saved by your knowledge. John is saying, “You can’t be saved except through Jesus Christ.” Gnosticism says, “That is hogwash. Jesus was not the Son of God.” So John is methodically, as an apostle, nailing that Cerenthian heresy. We saw Him. We heard Him. We beheld Him. The word “beheld” means we saw Him to the point we recognized that He wasn’t just a man. He was God in the flesh. We touched Him with our hands, signify­ing even after He resurrected they were able to be around Him and to touch Him and to realize He had flesh and bones, that He didn’t just resurrect spiritually. He resurrected bodily. John is about to drive another nail into that heresy. Look at what he says in verse 5: “And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” In God, there is no consequence of sin. Let me work my way through the verse. I don’t think you have seen it yet. When you see it you are going to say, “That is what he is saying!” First of all, it is in the perfect tense. Perfect tense means we have heard Him. We have heard Him back here. Perfect tense also means a state of something. In other words, we heard it and we are hearing it and it has not changed even until now. That is the beauty of the perfect tense. It is used a lot in 1 John. Again he is just reinforc­ing the fact that nothing has changed. “Nothing has changed. Quit listening to these false teachers who are among you.” What is the message? There is no darkness in God. There is no consequence of sin in God. What does that tell us? That tells us that the Gnostics are off the wall because you see, they couldn’t understand. All flesh is evil. So how could God have a body? If He had a body that makes God evil. Therefore, Jesus could not have been the Son of God. God who is perfect and holy would never inhabit a body that was evil. John, led of the Holy Spirit of God, uses words that give us a picture. To make his point clearer he says, “In Him there is no darkness.” There are two words for “no” in the Greek. One means in a relative sense, but the other one means absolutely never, of any kind. That is the word he uses here. No, there were none, no propensity to sin, no sin nature, nothing to do with sin. There was no consequence of sin whatsoever in the Lord Jesus Christ. Romans 5:12 threw all of the Gnostics in Rome. As a matter of fact, if anybody in Asia Minor knew what was written to the Romans they would have been confused. Romans 5:12 says, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned – for until the Law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law.” What he is saying is, “By one man, Adam, sin came to all men.” Can you see the confusion the people went through? They probably said, “You are telling me God is a man. Well, if he is a man and all men are under sin, then He had to have a body of sin. It couldn’t have been Jesus.” In Romans 8:20 and 22 it talks about the suffering, the consequence of Adam’s sin that spread to all men. Look in Romans 8:20 and 22. It says, “For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation [that is nature itself] groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.” That is the sphere of what Adam’s sin has affected. It affected all men, and all men are now under sin and because they are under sin, the law came to condemn them all and to wait to lead them unto grace. Not only were men under sin, but the created order was under sin also. We have in nature things that are suffering and groaning, waiting until the revelation of the sons of God. You know it says the rocks will cry out and the trees will praise Him. I read an article that said when trees are starving for lack of water, they make a chirping sound that no human ear can hear. But the roaches and the bugs that prey on them hear it and they are drawn to those trees to eat them. That little chirping noise is going on and human ears cannot hear it. There is a groaning going on in creation, folks. So you can understand how the Gnostic heresy got started. You can understand how it could have been out of sincerity. Somebody said, “Hey, flesh is evil. Adam sinned. All men born of Adam are under sin. How could God, the God-man, Jesus Christ, be the Son of God?” But here is what Paul is trying to bring out. In all of us there is the consequence of Adam’s sin. Would you not agree with that? We are going to die. Death is the first consequence. We know we are going to die. And thank God, He has conquered death but we are still going to die unless He comes between now and then. Some people say, “Oh no, the more righteous you are, you can live forever.” Nobody ever says that after they turn 40. There is a consequence to sin. We are going to die. Everyone of us are under that consequence. Thank God, He took the curse off of us, but we are all under the consequence. I want to tell you something, Jesus was not under that curse. There was some­thing unique about His body that you may have overlooked. The moment I am born I start to die. Paul says the outer man is decaying. Your body decays. You see, at death our spirit goes on to be with the Lord, but our body is still subjected and as a result of that, it continues to decay. Now I don’t like to talk about that. You are probably thinking, “Why are you pulling that out?” That is important. The body of Jesus Christ could not decay. You have got to understand something. There is no consequence of darkness, skotia, in the Lord Jesus. Yes, He had a body. John was saying, “You Cerenthians, I want to tell you something. He did come in the body of flesh, but that body was not like your body. When Satan came to tempt Him, there was nothing in Him that he could draw out of Him.” Do you remember how John says it the Gospel of John? Have you ever taken a magnet and put it over a tool box? It is amazing. You put that magnet over the tool box and everything in that tool box that responds to that magnet will just go right up to it. But if you have something in there that has some kind of alloy in it, something in it that doesn’t respond to that magnet, it just sits there. Satan holds his magnet over you or over me. This afternoon I was fighting with my computer. I mean I was upset! Satan put that magnet over me and my flesh responded to it! Why did it respond to it? Because I am still in my body and I suffer the consequences of Adam’s sin. Skotia means no consequence of darkness. In the Lord Jesus Christ was no consequence. Look in Psalms 16. If the Lord Jesus hadn’t wanted to die, He wouldn’t have. He dismissed His own spirit from His body when He was on the cross. No man can take His life. He gave it willingly. That is the gospel, the good news. That is God. That is not a man. The Gnostics said, “Jesus is just simply the son of Joseph.” No, He was God! He always has been God. He didn’t enter into flesh. John 1:14 says He became flesh. Study the difference between the two. He didn’t find him a man and enter into him. He was born of a virgin. He became flesh. Psalm 16:8 says, “I have set the Lord continually before me; because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoices; my flesh also will dwell securely.” This is pointing at the Lord Jesus. You ask, “How do you know?” Look at verse 10: “For Thou wilt not abandon my soul to Sheol.” Do you know what Sheol was? That was where the departed spirits went in the Old Testa­ment. Do you know what it is called in the New Testament? Hades. So often transla­tors put “hell” in there, and it is not the right translation. Hades had two compartments to it. Remember Lazarus and the rich man? One went into Abraham’s bosom and one went to a place of torment. The rich man wouldn’t argue with you that it wasn’t hell, but it wasn’t the literal hell we talk about. It is torment. It is the absence of God. But hell is being reserved for the last of the thousand years when the first ones will be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone. “Hades” or “sheol” is a very important word to know. There were two compartments. What did Jesus do when He went to the cross? After He died on the cross, He went in there and took those out of Abraham’s bosom and took them right up into heaven. So now when we die, we don’t go to Abraham’s bosom, we go into the presence of Jesus Himself. The Psalmist goes on, “For Thou wilt not abandon my soul to Sheol; neither wilt Thou allow Thy Holy One to undergo decay.” Whew! That’s it! Now do you think that is important? In Acts 2:27-35 Peter brings it out again in his message. It is trying to tell us something. He is not just a man like we know of men. Yes, He had a body of human flesh. He is the God-man, 100% man, 100% God, but He had no nature or propensity to sin, for in Him was no darkness at all, no consequence of darkness at all. That is almost a final blow to that Cerenthian heresy. Now you ask yourself, “I wonder why John is doing all this?” We know he is refut­ing their doctrine. But wait a minute, that doctrine has gotten into the church. And because it has gotten into the church, you’ve got some believers sitting around who never study anything saying, “Golly, I didn’t know that.” They are getting their atten­tion and are beginning to lead them astray. So the Apostle John begins in verse 6 and goes all the way through the book contrasting what people say and what they live as being two different things. He is saying, “These are Christians. These aren’t.” Do you want to know what a Christian is? I am going to call them forth and put them on the witness stand and it won’t be by what they say, it will definitely be by how they live. Look at verse 6. In verses 6-10 he has three false statements, then he has the truth that contrasts that and he shows you the evidence that will prove you to be guilty if you claim to be a child of God. False statement number one is found in verse 6: “If we say that we have fellow­ship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.” Since there is no darkness in Him and we profess to have fellowship with Him, attached to Him, in Him and He in us as John says in his gospel, you can immediately begin to see where he is headed. You can’t tolerate sin in any way in a habitual way and claim to know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Oh yes, you will still deal with sin. Before you be­came a Christian you chased it. After you become a Christian it chases you. You will still sin. That is what chapter 2 is all about. However, when you find a Christian living in darkness (present tense), hiding under darkness, seeking to think nobody knows what he is doing and if he lives habitually that way, John has something to say about him. False doctrine has that unethical connection with sin. Truth has nothing to do with sin, nothing. Light has nothing to do with sin. First of all he says, “If we say.” The little word “if” is a suppositional conjunction. There are different words for “if.” There is ea, and there is ean. Ean is used here. Ean means “suppose.” It is almost like saying, “If Superman walked in the back door, let’s just suppose, okay.” What John is saying is, “In the future let’s just sup­pose that some of you in the congregation I am writing to would say that you have fellowship with Him and yet there is something about your lifestyle that doesn’t back it up.” Here we have the word “fellowship” again. What does this mean? There are two groups of thinking here. I will give you both of them and let you decide for yourself. On one side the word “fellowship” does not mean relationship. It’s like when I forgot and left the bait in my Daddy’s car on a hot day in August. We had fished all night for catfish. I forgot and left it in the car all day. He came home from work that afternoon, got off the bus and could smell it from the corner. I had a relationship with my Father, but the fellowship was deeply strained! As a matter of fact, when we sold that car it still smelled like that bait. Some people say the word “fellowship” is a different word than the word “relation­ship. They say John is simply trying to say you can’t walk in intimacy with God if you are consistently tolerating sin in your life. That is what some say. But others say, “Now wait a minute, fellowship here is like in verse 3. It says it you want fellowship with us, you are first of all going to have to find it with the Father. Our fellowship is with the Father and the Son. What he is saying is, ‘We have intimacy with the Father through His Son and until you come to know Him through His Son, you can’t have intimacy with us.’” So it is a matter of relationship even though it is the word “fellow­ship.” They say the word “fellowship” means relationship in the sense of, do you know Him at all? I personally am going to have to side with the second. I believe what he is doing is drawing a contrast. I don’t think he is talking right here to the fact that believers can go off and live consistently in sin and then claim to have a relationship, just no fellowship at the time. Now certainly my fellowship is strained when sin gets into my life. But we are talking about habitual, present tense, lifestyle of sin. That would agree with chapter 3 which says a man who claims to know Christ cannot sin. But he says it in the present tense, he cannot habitually sin. So you really have to make up your mind. I am not going to force my opinion on you, but you can go two different ways. I think truth has its beauty on both sides of it if you will look at it. As a Christian, if I do sin my fellowship is ruined. But I can’t consistently habitually live in sin. That is the thing I want you to see. I think he talks of fellowship here as a relationship with the Father because it would line up with the context. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature.” Do you know what that word “new” is? It is the same word used for new covenant, New Testament. It is the word kainos. Kainos means absolutely, qualitatively brand new, never seen before. What did you use to do? You lived in darkness. You hid your sin under darkness. That is the judgment that has come into the world. What hap­pened when light came into your life? You exposed yourself to the light, you were exposed to the light, the light exposed you and you saw yourself as a sinner. You came out of the darkness. Ephesians says you were once darkness, now you have been made light. How can a person who has been made light go back and consis­tently live habitually in darkness? John is saying you can’t do that. “Well,” you might say, “if that is the case, there are a lot of people who have joined the church who aren’t saved.” That is what I am saying. Yes, salvation is by grace, but you’ve got to understand grace. You’ve got to make up your own mind. You say, “Well, there are two sides to argument.” There really are. You can find both sides of it. But I think when you stay in the book of 1 John all the way through you are going to see he is drawing a contrast between those who know Christ and those who don’t know Christ. That is the whole reason for writing, remember. Chapter 5:13 says, “These things I have written...that you may know that you have eternal life.” Well, look at the contrast in 1:7. That is why I think that he is talking about relation­ships, not just an intimacy. Verse 7 says, “but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.” What does he mean, “walk in the light?” I think by now the picture should be clear for you. Darkness hides sin. Walk in the light. What does it do? It exposes sin. What is there going to be in the light? There is going to be confession of sin. I heard a man not long ago say on the radio, “We are coming into a level of maturity to where you don’t have to confess sin anymore. Confess your righteousness and what you say shall be so.” Huh? That’s ridiculous. As a matter of fact, the closer you get to God the more you are going to want to confess sin. Do you know why? He is Light. He is not a light. He is not like light. He is Light. Nobody turned Him on and nobody can turn Him off. He is perpetual Light. When I come to Him and draw near to Him, as James says, the first thing that happens is, He ex­poses anything that has been hidden in my life. You can’t say that you don’t confess sin anymore if you are a believer. You’ve got to confess sin. Do you know what “confess” means? It is the word homologeo. It means you agree with God. “Yes sir, God, you are exactly right. That is sin in my life.” It is to say the same thing. That is what it means. The word “sin” means I have missed the mark. It is like an archer pulling an arrow back and shooting at a target and missing it. That is sin. Hey, now is He in the Light. He can’t get out of it. I mean, He is Light. He is wrapped up in it. He can’t remove Himself from it. If you will walk in the Light as He is in the Light. If you will determine in your life, I am going to stay in that Light, then something is going to be seen about your life. The first signal of living that way is we will have fellowship one with another. Ephesians 4:3 says, “Preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Nowhere does it say to produce it; it says to preserve it. What is peace? Peace means to walk in relationships that have nothing in between them that will cause friction, with God first and then with man. As we walk that way, we are going to have fellowship with one another. That word “fellowship” is more than cookies and ice cream. It is the intimate spiritual participation in the things of God. We can share together. That is the way it works. I don’t have to know your name. You don’t have to come to my house; I don’t have to come to yours. That is not the way you produce it. You preserve it. You don’t produce it. That is the first signal. How do you know people who have their talk matched up with their walk? Watch them fellowship with others who are the same way. Watch them. There is no “Did you hear what I heard?” Forget that. They have stepped off somewhere. It is in the Light. The second thing is he says, “and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.” Now explain that to me. I have heard people say, “Well, when I confess this sin, He covers all the other ones I haven’t confessed yet.” Well, I am sure He does that. But do you think that is what he means? How do I even know He is doing that, then. I don’t even know what I’ve done, so how do I know if He is cleansing me of it? I think it means something else and I want to show you. Look over in Hebrews 9:14. I think what he is talking about here is that He clears our consciences of guilt and moral defilement. Are you laden down with guilt for your past? He cleanses that. He washes you. Oh! Hebrews 9:14 reads, “how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blem­ish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” Look in Hebrews 10:2: “Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, because the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have had consciousness of sins?” He is talking about the sacrifices of the Old Testament. Look in verse 22: “let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” Do you know what the beautiful thing is? You don’t walk around laden down with guilt all the time when you walk in the Light as He is in the Light. Why? Because you are dealing with sin as He brings it up in your life and He is washing out all that ole guilt and moral defilement in your life. How many people today are laden down with guilt for the sins of their past and don’t know that His blood has cleansed them once and daily continues to keep them cleansed from the guilt and the moral defilement of sin? One of the greatest things in my life was to realize that the strength of sin is the law. The power of sin is the law. Why is it powerful? To condemn me. But He has set me free from the power of sin which means when I walk in the Light as He is in the Light, He frees me from not just the sin held against me, but He frees me from the guilt. Oh, there are consequences, yes. But He gives me mercy to bear up under them. I don’t have to walk around, my head hung every day, with guilt hanging all over me as He cleanses me with His blood. You see, a lot of people talk it but who are the ones who walk it? If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? If we say we have fellowship with Him but we live in darkness, we are lying [present tense] and we are not doing the truth [present tense]. We are not living a life that has any­thing to do with the truth. I think He just separated the ones who are and the ones who aren’t. Isn’t it good to be clean from sin? It is just amazing when you are clean. If you are a Christian and you are trying to hide sin in your life, the blood just stopped cleans­ing you of

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