And I’m just going to read one verse to begin with, but we’re going to be in 1 John 2:3-11 today, talking about abiding in the light, continuing on in 1 John as we’ve been going.
And this verse I wanted to read is verse 10—sorry, verse 10:
He that loveth his brother abideth in the light,
and there is no occasion of stumbling in him.
He that loveth his brother abideth in the light,
and there is no occasion of stumbling in him.
Let’s pray together.
Lord, we come to You. We bring Your Word to You, Lord, and we pray that You would break it and bless it and feed us, that this would be a word that dwells in our hearts richly. We pray that the Word would be in us, and even things that You’ve commanded us or shown us, that You would so dwell there that we walk in them.
Lord, we trust in You, and we fix our eyes continually on You for this time. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Amen.
Okay, so we have been in 1 John, and because of that, we need to see—even though we’re going to focus on some verses—when studying a book of the Bible, we have to see the large picture constantly, or else you get lost in the weeds and miss the whole shape of the forest, I guess.
There is this foundation to fellowship, which is eternal life. At the beginning of 1 John, in the first four verses, John reveals to us that Christ Himself is eternal life: the eternal life that appeared, the eternal life that was spoken about, the eternal life that they themselves experienced and were even able to touch.
We ourselves have been brought into this fellowship. We can also say that we’ve seen and heard of Christ, and we can share our fellowship with others as well.
The way that this book is laid out is to show us how fellowship works: that we’re sharing eternal life, and we’re doing something with it. That’s what fellowship is. You’re sharing something in common.
For example, there is fellowship in light, in righteousness, and in love. Now, we’re in the area of light.
At the beginning, it says that God is light. In the experience of fellowship, we call this walking in the light—or actually, 1 John calls it walking in the light.
If we walk in the light as He is in the light,
we have fellowship one with another.
That is 1 John 1:7. There is a fellowship that we have as we walk in the light. It is based on the fact that God is light.
Everything we talk about with fellowship includes eternal life. It includes an experience of eternal life.
We’ve split this whole area of walking in the light into three sections. Last time we looked into being cleansed in the light, and this time we’re looking into abiding in the light.
Based on that experience of being cleansed in the light, now we’re getting into not merely trying not to walk in darkness, but remaining in the walk of light and seeing what that actually looks like.
I’ve called this abiding in the light, and I just want to show why. Let me pull out some phrases from these verses so we can see where this comes from.
For example: “He that saith he abideth in Him.” Here is this word abiding. We will see this a few times.
Also: “He that saith he is in the light and hateth his brother, is in the darkness even until now.” Darkness, of course, is the opposite of light, so we are still in the area of light. This is still a section talking about light.
If we say that we are in the light, this sounds familiar:
He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also to walk even as He walked.
Here is the aspect of walking as well. Remember, I said that the overall theme for this big section is walking in the light. This covers all the way to almost the end of chapter 2. So we are in a smaller section about abiding in the light, but overall it is still about walking.
If you are abiding in Him, you ought to walk, because you are walking in the light just as He walked in the light.
Here is another one that includes walking:
He that loveth his brother abideth in the light,
and there is no occasion of stumbling in him.
Stumbling is kind of a walking word. If you stand and stumble, that is a little more rare. It can happen—like if you are at a wedding and buckle your knees as one of the groomsmen. I’ve seen somebody faint before like that.
Normally, though, you do not stumble standing, and you do not stumble in your chair unless you lean back too much. But when you walk, you can trip. So the picture with stumbling is that you step outside of walking in the light.
Another phrase says:
He that hateth his brother is in the darkness,
and walketh in the darkness,
and knoweth not whither he goeth,
because the darkness hath blinded his eyes.
All of this is to show that we are talking about abiding in the light in the bigger picture of walking in the light.
Abiding in the light is not standing still necessarily. If I think of abiding, I think of sitting on my couch, maybe just in my own mind, or laying down: “I’m abiding. This is so peaceful and relaxing.”
But abiding is not just abiding in your lazy chair. Abiding is abiding in a home. Or, with the Israelites, they could dwell in the land. In the land there is farming, all kinds of things, even fighting; but there is a dwelling in a place.
Our place of dwelling is in Christ, and there is much to do in Christ. There is much to do in the light.
Even though we use the phrase abiding in the light, the verses say, “Abide in Him.” Whether later in 1 John it says abiding in love or abiding in light, it is always abiding in Christ.
It is not as though you are abiding in light and then later today you are going to abide in Christ as some new experience. If you are abiding in the light, you are abiding in Christ. It is simply a certain emphasis of the fellowship we have in Christ: we dwell in the light, just as He walked in the light.
That is our theme concept. With that, we have to cover another concept: the relationship between love and commandments.
This comes up a lot in these verses: love and commandments. We have to see that they show up everywhere. It does not mean that just because the word love comes up a lot that we are only talking about love.
Actually, 1 John has the most instances of the word love of any book in the Bible. There is a section on love that really focuses on the statement, “God is love.” We know that God is love, and we are called to love our brethren.
But love has to come up everywhere. Even if you are talking about faith or hope, love is embedded in there. Fellowship is a little bit messy. It is not like, “I’m fellowshipping now just with light. I’ll deal with righteousness later.” Keeping His commandments is actually practicing righteousness, so these things overlap.
But love and commandments have a special relationship. Consider 1 John 3:23:
And this is His commandment,
that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ,
and love one another,
even as He gave us commandment.
Notice the word commandment. We believe in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, and we love one another, even as He gave us commandment.
If you think of believing on the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, this is really our experience of loving God. If you love the Lord God, you are going to receive His Son.
It is actually the main, major broken commandment for which you will be judged at the great white throne judgment if you are an unbeliever: “What have you done with My Son? Your name is not in the book of life.”
So, the commandment to believe on the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, overflows into loving one another. Love is actually the commandment.
In the section on love and fellowship, John says:
And this commandment have we from Him,
that he who loveth God love his brother also.
This reminds us that the commandments include loving God and loving our neighbors, even as Jesus spoke about the greatest commandment: to love the Lord your God with everything. The second is like it: to love your neighbor as yourself.
The commandment is love. If you love, you keep His commandment.
Again, 1 John 5:2-3 says:
Hereby we know that we love the children of God,
when we love God, and keep His commandments.For this is the love of God,
that we keep His commandments:
and His commandments are not grievous.
This can sound like circular reasoning. The love of God is that you keep His commandments. If you love God, you keep His commandments. What are His commandments? To love God.
We can get lost in this cycle of obeying and responding to His commandments, but what is He actually commanding us to do? It either has something specifically to do with loving the Lord Himself or, as an outflow of that, loving one another.
Love and commandments have to be put together—or at least we have to see their relationship. You can pick out a specific commandment and say, “He has commanded me to do this thing.” But if you step back, you see the overall goal of God: that you love Him and that you love people.
Love and commandments also show up when we are talking about abiding. I want to use some of Jesus’ instructions on abiding from John 15, His perfect abiding chapter.
John 15:10 says:
If ye keep My commandments,
ye shall abide in My love;
even as I have kept My Father’s commandments,
and abide in His love.
Here, commandments, abiding, and love are all put together. That is exactly what we find in 1 John 2.
When we mention the word abiding, it sounds very mature. It sounds like, “Someday I’m going to learn how to abide,” because we have read books by mystics of old and seen their goals. At the end of their lives, they were found abiding.
But the Lord Jesus gives us a starting point with abiding that you can do from day one as a believer: keep His commandments.
Now, I am very dull and very dumb spiritually, but I know that He has commanded me to do something, and I have the option to obey it or not. Now I can begin to abide.
Obviously, if I absolutely disobey His commandment, I am not abiding. But to experience abiding, the simple start is to keep His commandments.
Again, John 15:12 says:
This is My commandment,
that ye love one another,
as I have loved you.
And John 15:17 says:
These things I command you,
that ye love one another.
The commandment is to love.
Before we get into the verses, I want to look at the overflow from being cleansed into abiding. Remember, last time we talked about being cleansed.
The first thing you notice when you read 1 John 2:3-11 is that it sounds and feels similar to what we just looked at in chapter 1.
Before John would say, “If we say”; here he says, “He that saith.” In the section on cleansing, there were those three times talking about lies. He says, “We deceive ourselves,” and now the lying concept comes up again: “He is a liar, and the truth is not in him.”
There is a direct relationship. If I stop abiding right now, I need to be cleansed. What just happened? I went to dwell in darkness.
It is not like, “I’m being a good Christian, but I’m not yet there for abiding.” If I am walking with the Lord, if I am in fellowship, it is called abiding. I am walking in the light. I am abiding in the light. When I am with the Lord, I am abiding.
If I stop abiding, I am dwelling in darkness.
We are not talking about merely the feeling of abiding. Occasionally, with just the right song, morning time, or fellowship, you have that sense: “There is His presence. I feel like I am in Him and He is in me. This whole room is His presence. We are abiding in Christ.”
It is not necessarily that you always feel that you are abiding. You do not always notice the decorations in your home, but you are inside it when you are there. When we are in Christ, we are doing many things. We do not always notice His presence.
But you will notice when you are not in His presence, as we get used to these things. As we talked about with being cleansed, you notice when your conscience is uncomfortable—when something is wrong, when something is off.
Sometimes you do not know that you are not abiding except that you realize, through conviction, that there is some darkness. Then you know, “Something happened and got me out of the presence of the Lord.”
Then you confess, you are cleansed, and you get back right. There is this constant, regular relationship between being cleansed and abiding.
At the beginning of the cleansing section, even though when you think of being cleansed you think of your issues—“I’ve been hiding, I’ve been lying, I’ve been saying that I am walking in the light, but I am actually walking in darkness”—there was something hidden there: a discovery of the Lord.
We fellowship when we are cleansed. When we fellowship, we are cleansed. That is something of a jewel to the Lord, a goal of God: He wants to bring us into fellowship.
Even at the start, John says:
If we walk in the light, as He is in the light,
we have fellowship one with another,
and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.
The goal in all of the cleansing and walking in the light is that we enter into fellowship—fellowship with one another.
Then we got into the routine, the regular habit, of confessing our sins. That keeps us clean, and it actually keeps us abiding.
Lastly, we looked at that potentially impossible sin to overcome. Yet the Lord has said, “I write these things unto you, that ye may not sin.” There is a way, because we have an Advocate with the Father: Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, the atoning sacrifice.
As we fix our eyes on Him, we are cleansed to sin no more. Just as the Lord Jesus said to the woman caught in her sins:
Neither do I condemn thee:
go, and sin no more.
When we are cleansed, it is not merely to have this repeating cycle. There is hope in it all. “I am in a cleansed spot right now. There is no need to sin.” Stop looking at your history, and start looking at the Lord Jesus Himself.
This brings us into what we are looking at now. The cleansing section finished with 1 John 2:2, and verse 3 moves into something for which we need the cleansed foundation: walking even as the Lord Jesus walked and keeping His commandments.
We have to know that we have been cleansed, and that we have been cleansed so that we would not sin. We have to have the discovery in front of us that Christ Himself is there and that He is able to overcome.
The first section is that we abide and actually walk. While we are resting, it is not just about not sinning.
It is not, “Okay, I am in Christ. Please don’t sin, please don’t sin.” We are not just hoping not to sin. Our whole focus in life as Christians is not merely to stop sinning, overcome some evil, or overcome ourselves.
We have some walking to do. We have some commands to keep, and commands are not all negative, like, “Stop doing that.” The commands are, “Do something. Love.”
There is something to actually walk in, just like the Lord Jesus. He did not sin, but when you look at His life in the Gospels, you notice all the many things He walked in. He was doing things.
At the end of the Gospel of John, it says that He did so many things that there would not be enough books in the world to write about all that He did. He was walking in the light.
As we abide in Him, He is going to walk through us.
Now, 1 John 2:3 says:
And hereby we do know that we know Him,
if we keep His commandments.
On the surface, this can be confusing or a stumbling verse, if all I am thinking about is, “Am I saved or am I not saved?” But remember, in 1 John we are dealing with, “Am I in fellowship or am I not in fellowship?”
“Hereby we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.” Have you broken a commandment? Does that mean you have never known the Lord? Does that mean you are just an unbeliever? It does not mean that.
This is similar to what is spoken of in Matthew 7, where Jesus talks about people doing many good things, but at the end He says:
Depart from Me, ye that work iniquity,
I never knew you.
It is not that they were doing nothing. They were casting out demons and doing many good things. But they were not His commands. They were not Him speaking to them and leading them. They were lawless good things, and He did not know them in those things.
We know that we know Him if we keep His commandments. This is current knowing.
Do you have assurance of knowing the Lord—assurance of your salvation? “I know that I know the Lord because so many years ago, when I was this age, I believed on the Lord and received eternal life. I know the Lord.”
That is real. But the way to know that you know the Lord is also the current moment right now. There is assurance in the history of knowing the Lord, but there is also this: “I know that I am knowing Him right now.” That is by keeping His commandments.
Verse 4 says:
He that saith, I know Him,
and keepeth not His commandments,
is a liar,
and the truth is not in him.
This is the opposite. Before, we said that we know we know Him if we actually do the job of keeping His commandments. Here is a case where I am saying, “I know the Lord,” but I am not keeping His commandments.
Though I know the Lord, though I am in Christ, I am not abiding in Christ. I am someone who knows the Lord, but I do not know Him right now in the abiding way.
In that abiding way, we experience the truth dwelling in us. Light has shown, commandments have been spoken, and the truth is actually in us.
Who are we lying to in this case? I do not know. There are a lot of lies that go on. Am I saying that I know Him to other people? Am I saying that I know Him to myself?
We saw before in the cleansing verses that this is what happens. You lie to others, but then you lie to yourself. You deceive yourself. You get into this cycle of tons of lies and darkness, and the truth has not landed.
Keeping the Lord’s commandments has everything to do with the current knowing of the Lord. I know the Lord from receiving His love and receiving His forgiveness. But do you know the Lord when He lives through you? That is a new knowing of Him.
It is a wonderful knowing of Him. I am abiding in Him, but now He is abiding in me. To know the Lord when He loves somebody through you—that is a new knowledge of the Lord.
I know what it is like for the Lord to love me. I do know the Lord that way. But when I keep His commandment, now I know the Lord more intimately because His life has flowed through me.
We are not to keep His commandments without Him, without His very life in us, or else we will not know Him.
We have this heart, like in Philippians 3:10: “I want to know Him. This is my goal, to know Him more.” Sometimes it is in the fellowship of His sufferings. Sometimes it is in the power of resurrection, as we need resurrection power to keep a commandment.
Maybe it is a commandment of discipline, something very hard for you. But you tap into His resurrection life within, and then you know Him in the power of His resurrection.
This desire to know Him is experienced as we abide in Him. But abiding in Him is not sitting still. It is keeping His commandments.
Then verse 5 says:
But whoso keepeth His word,
in him verily is the love of God perfected:
hereby know we that we are in Him.
In 1 John 1:8, John says that the truth is not in someone who says that they have no sin. In verse 10, he says that if you say you have not sinned, His Word is not in you. Here we have the picture of the Word as well.
Whoever keeps His Word: think of God speaking a word specifically to you, a command, something from Him that you are convicted to do—or even not to do.
If you keep that Word instead of disobeying it, you respond to that Word and do it. You do not say that God is a liar by saying, “You gave me that command, but I just cannot do it. You said to stop doing this, but I cannot stop.”
Instead, you look away to Jesus, and you actually keep His Word by the life of Christ within. If you do that, the love of God is perfected in you.
The love of God is perfect, of course, but to be perfected means completion. The love of God has come to us, but now it is completed because it has come out through us.
In order to keep His command, the love of God flows through us. I love the Lord back with the very love with which He loved me. Or I love the brethren, but it is not by my love or by mustering up emotional love for them. It is by allowing the love of God to love them.
The love of God is perfected, or completed, when I keep His Word.
I may think, “I’m just trying to keep His Word. I do not feel the love of God, but He has commanded me to do something. He has commanded me to talk to someone.”
As I trust in the Lord and look away to Him, I may not feel like it. I may not even necessarily like the person too much. But He has commanded fellowship; He has commanded a little bit of loving the brethren.
You contact them, talk with them, or go up to them on a Sunday to say hello. As you do that, because you are looking to the Lord for His grace, the love of God is completed. He has just loved that believer through you.
This is how you know that you are abiding in Him. “Hereby we know that we are in Him.”
We are in Christ. In 1 Corinthians 1:30, it says that of God, you are in Christ. I know that I am in Christ because the Word of God says so. I know that I am in Christ because I had an experience in my life of being born again.
It is good to know that you are in Christ, because all the essentials and facts of our salvation are there because we are literally, spiritually, in Christ. God has put us in Christ.
But we need also to abide in Him.
I was thinking of neighborhoods with a neighborhood association. They have a swimming pool for those who live in the neighborhood, perhaps a clubhouse or other benefits.
You have to have a house there to have access to the pool and other things. But some people travel during the winter and are gone for months at a time. They are not abiding in their home, so they do not get to swim or have the experience of those neighborhood benefits.
Maybe it is a bad illustration, but it was helping me. You have your home there, and you are definitely going to retire there and live there forever. Yet you can travel outside of the neighborhood, it seems.
All your pictures and everything are there in that home, but you do not get the benefit of the recreation building or swimming pool. You do not get the joy of the Lord.
“We write these things unto you, that your joy may be full.” If you do not have fellowship, you do not have the joy of the Lord.
Find a sad Christian, and one thing missing is a little bit of fellowship. The joy of the Lord becomes our strength. Even when terrible things are going on, we can have the joy of the Lord.
But when we are not abiding, we find that we are not keeping His commandments. We lose that joy.
When the love of God is perfected, we discover and know that we are in Him. Just as we know that we know Him if we keep His commandments, when we keep His Word, we know that we are in Him.
Our assurance is based on fellowship.
The first level of assurance is that I have had a real experience—I have seen and heard. Another level is the Word of God. This is a very strong assurance, because some of us do not know our first experience very well, but the Word of God says, “He that believeth hath eternal life.” I know that I have eternal life.
But the third assurance, perhaps the more practical and regular one, is that I am fellowshipping with Him right now. I know that I am in Him. I know that my Redeemer lives; I was with Him this morning. I know that He lives.
Then 1 John 2:6 says:
He that saith he abideth in Him
ought himself also so to walk,
even as He walked.
This is what we have been talking about. If we are going to enter into this experience of abiding, the starting spot is to realize that we need to walk.
We need to walk, and then we are going to find out that it is the Lord walking through us.
If you think abiding in Him just means not sinning, you are missing out on abiding. Some of the problem is that we are not actually doing. We are not actually loving the brethren.
But if we see that we ought to walk, then we have the question: How do I keep those commandments? How do I love the Lord? How do I love His people? How do I do this abiding?
At least we have to catch this concept: there is something for us to do. There is something for us to walk in.
Again, in view is Christ Jesus Himself. See how He walked. This is the way we are going to walk.
Fellowship is sharing eternal life. It is going to be Christ walking through us. He is still walking, but now through His greater body, the church. He is still doing this walking in the light.
This is like when the Lord said, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” It is like when the Lord gave all the standards in the Sermon on the Mount. These are things that He walked in.
The Lord showed us, as He gave these commands, that these are things to do—the way of the kingdom. We also ought to walk in this way.
It is not impossible. As we read earlier, His commandments are not grievous. They are not burdensome, because the Lord is walking in us. He is the One doing this.
Now, in the next section, we are talking about the old commandment and the new commandment.
1 John 2:7 says:
Brethren, I write no new commandment unto you,
but an old commandment which ye had from the beginning.
The old commandment is the word which ye have heard from the beginning.
Point taken: this is an old commandment. It is as old as mankind has existed.
Even from the beginning, Adam and Eve did not have the Ten Commandments, true, but they had one thing to obey. They had one command.
If they were to obey that command—not to eat of the forbidden tree—that was their way of loving the Lord their God.
Behind the scenes of that command is the Lord loving them, but also their response to His great love. He gave them a garden, a garden of pleasure.
There were so many trees, more trees than you could eat all the fruit from in one day. There was a tree of life also at the center. There was love expressed in the vegetation to eat, in the trees, and in the lovely animals that did not bite.
All of this was the love of God expressed. Their response was simply to love the Lord their God—not to muster up feelings, but not to eat of this one tree. There is a command that lets you express your love.
This is an old command.
The second part of the commandment is like unto it. Remember Cain and Abel. One brother, Cain, fell into hating his brother.
The command he seemed to have in his conscience—because God spoke to him about sin crouching at the door of his heart—was, “Love your brother. Do not hate your brother.”
Cain hated his brother and murdered his brother. He disobeyed the command upon his conscience to love his brother.
Cain had also disobeyed the command to love the Lord his God in the way he came to worship. Either way, we see the love of God in the first commands to Adam and Eve, and we see the opposite of love for the brethren in Cain and Abel.
This is an old commandment. Before the Ten Commandments came, it was upon the conscience of men. The knowledge was there.
Romans 2 says that even those who have never heard the Word or commandments have the work of the law written in their hearts. Their conscience convicts them and speaks to them about this.
It is also an old commandment that you have had from the beginning. It is the Word which you have heard.
Later in chapter 2, in verse 24, John says:
Let that therefore abide in you,
which ye have heard from the beginning.
If that which ye have heard from the beginning shall remain in you,
ye also shall continue in the Son, and in the Father.
There you have what you heard from the beginning—the word, the command you have had from the beginning.
This may be speaking of my specific experience with the Lord when I was first saved and received the Word of God concerning my salvation. But packaged with that was a response back to the Lord.
The response is basically always this, in bare bones: to love the Lord our God and to love one another. It was there right at the beginning. Let that abide in you.
This is the Word by which I received eternal life, that which I had from the beginning.
It is also the Word which we heard. This phrase should remind us of 1 John 1:1, where John says, “That which was from the beginning.” That is like the Lord Jesus before all things began or were created.
Then he says, “That which we have heard,” speaking of the Scriptures that spoke about the Lord Jesus.
Whatever time I heard of the Lord, and whatever my individual experience was with Scripture, we all have the Scriptures that speak of Him and the commands throughout the Old Testament. This is an old commandment.
When you go to Deuteronomy, you see the commandments of Moses filtered with this word love all throughout. After their journey in the wilderness, Moses gave the commandments again to the second generation entering the promised land, and he showed them that behind it all was loving the Lord their God and loving one another.
The Israelites discovered this early on. It became common knowledge. So they asked the Lord Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment?” They were trying to see if He had it down right.
He said the same thing their fathers of old had taught them: that the commands are basically to love God and to love your neighbor. They said, “Thou hast well said,” as if they had to tell the Lord Jesus, “Yeah, You’re right this time.”
But He confirmed it: yes, that is it.
Why were there two tablets? Moses had to carry them both anyway. Could God not have put it all on one tablet? I think God’s handwriting could be as small as He wanted. He could fit everything wherever He wanted.
But there are two tablets because the second is like unto the first. The common thought among the Israelites was that the first tablet included the first four commandments, because they have to do with loving God.
The second tablet included the next six, beginning with honoring your father and mother. It has to do with our relationships with one another, ending with “Thou shalt not covet.”
They are the Ten Commandments, one package of the law, but they are two that are distinguishable and not separable.
That is the old commandment which we have heard.
Then we have the paradox in 1 John 2:8:
Again, a new commandment I write unto you,
which thing is true in Him and in you:
because the darkness is past,
and the true light now shineth.
“I write to you an old commandment, and I write to you a new commandment.” It is like Proverbs 26, where one verse says not to answer a fool according to his folly, and the next says to answer a fool according to his folly.
They are right next to each other, by the same author. You know there is not a mistake. It is on purpose, to catch our attention and show us there is a balance.
This commandment is very old, but it is also brand new.
The Lord Jesus said in John 13:34:
A new commandment I give unto you,
That ye love one another;
as I have loved you,
that ye also love one another.
But was that a new commandment? To love one another is an old commandment which we have had from the beginning. Yet when the Lord Jesus gave it, it was a new commandment.
How is it new? It is true in Him and in you. That is why it is new.
It is new because you can actually do it.
It became new when the Lord Jesus gave His life so that we could be cleansed and have eternal life, able to keep His commandments.
Now we no longer have commandments merely to expose our sin. We have commandments that we can actually obey. We have commandments that we can do.
It is no longer the commandments leading us to see our need of a Savior. Now, when the Lord gives us commandments, they lead us into the experience of abiding and fellowship.
His commandments are not burdensome. His commandments are joyful because we actually have the truth of it inside of us.
The commandments were true in the Lord Jesus. When He lived, He kept all the commandments.
Think about the Sermon on the Mount, where He gave the old commandments: “Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not kill.” But in Him it was new, because in Him there was life to actually do it.
It was not simply doing the bare-bones end of the matter—“Okay, I’m not going to stab someone.” It was doing the whole goal of God in giving the commandment: loving the person.
He said that even if in your heart you are hating someone, you have broken it, because you are not loving them. Even if you speak out and curse them, you are missing the whole thing.
In Him, it was new.
If the commandment says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” that is the old commandment. Someone could keep that outwardly, but the Lord Jesus says that in Christ there is not even looking upon a woman to lust after her. There is not even falling into that temptation in the mind.
It is not only that you do not do the evil; there is some love to do instead.
Because He is loving the world, it is not a matter of simply stopping and not doing the sin. He is doing something behind the scenes.
The command to love the Lord God was true in Him. He loved His Father and was obedient even unto death. The command to love the world was true in Him. He loved the world and gave His life for us.
We agree on this. It is not something I need to explain. But if it is true in Him, now, because of eternal life—because we have the shared life of Christ—it is also true in us.
You can do the commandment by the eternal life within. This is now possible. It is true in you.
It only works by faith, only in the realization that it is true in Him. If I fix my eyes on Jesus and say, “It is true in You,” there is a response back from Him.
As I abide in Him, He abides in me. Jesus said, “Abide in Me, and I in you.”
As I see that it is true in Him, then He gives me a commandment. With that commandment, every time He gives you the commandment, He says, “It is also true in you.”
When Jesus forgives us, He says, “Go, and sin no more.” There is a twinkle in His eye that says, “It is also true in you. You have eternal life. You may overcome now. Let’s do this together.”
This joyful abiding experience of keeping His commandments is how we know Him, experience Him, and fellowship with Him. I love to get a commandment because I can know Him.
His commandments are not burdensome. It is not, “I do not want to hear anything more from the Lord for me to do. I am overwhelmed. I keep failing at everything.”
Fix your eyes on the Lord Jesus. He says, “See that it is true in Me.” Read the Gospels, and every chapter you say, “Amen. I see that it is true in Him. He was doing it. He was doing it.”
The Lord brings that mirror of reflection and says, “Even as I am, so also are you to be. Even as My life is, I have shared it with you. It is also true in you.”
Here is what is happening with us: the darkness is actually passing, and the true light already shines.
Where is this happening in the world right now? It is in you. The darkness is currently passing away. The true light is currently shining inside of you.
Every step of obedience to His commands is an experience of His eternal life flowing out from us.
We begin this type of experience when we take our first step of walking in the light and are baptized. The Lord has loved me, and I respond back: “I love the Lord my God.” I take that stance and step out. I expose to everyone that I have been saved.
It is the demand of a good conscience. It is actually a demand of love. I love the Lord my God.
As I come into that experience, the darkness begins to pass and the true light is already shining. Every step of abiding shows this happening.
Imagine you have been cleansed this morning, or last night, of something. You have been in depression from it, as we talked about before. Yet you have been cleansed to go and sin no more.
If you could look back in retrospect from the Lord’s viewpoint, He sees you, and even that cleansing has washed away darkness.
Having been cleansed that 576th time of that specific sin, the true light is shining more in you than it was before.
Every day brings the whole world closer to the experience of the true light shining. The darkness will pass when the Lord returns. This day marks one day closer to the true light shining.
He is coming sooner than yesterday. The darkness is beginning to pass, though it looks darker.
When the morning star comes, when it is about to get light, it is darkest at night. So even though it looks like darkness is growing, darkness is actually passing. Something is changing, and something is changing in us.
Something is really happening as you take this new commandment.
We have to take every commandment, as a regular habit, as though it is new and not old.
This is a new commandment this day. Even though last week I heard the commandment, I may have taken it in the old-commandment way, by myself.
It is an old commandment when you do it. It is a new commandment when He does it.
Take every commandment as a new commandment. It is true in Him and in you.
If you see a commandment and are overwhelmed, under the law, then you know you have an old commandment. Set it down.
Receive grace and hear Him with His new commandment: “It is true in you. The darkness has been passing. You are walking in the light. You are with the Lord. He is able to do this.”
He will never command something that you cannot yet do. If He has a future command beyond your ability, He will make us first. He will mature us first.
It takes these other commands He has currently given us to get us there. Someday I am going to be like this, but the Lord has not commanded me to be like that yet. What He has commanded me, He has given me grace to do today.
It is a new commandment. This is a new day. This is a new week. We just broke bread. All things are cleansed. We have a fresh start.
In this new week, we take new commands from the Lord, to do the new commands by the newness of the life within us.
If we have been identified with Him in the likeness of His death, as Romans 6 says, then we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection.
He died, but when He rose from the dead, we have this newness of life. We have this newness for the new commands.
Now, if we can understand that every command is a new commandment and that it is all the Lord, notice how it is something positive more than negative.
True, the Lord commands you to stop sinning. But with a new commandment, ask the Lord, “What do You also say with this? What is Your replacement?”
I do not want to spend the hour merely not doing the wrong thing. I want to spend the hour with the Lord.
1 John 2:9 says:
He that saith he is in the light,
and hateth his brother,
is in darkness even until now.
Then verse 10 says:
He that loveth his brother abideth in the light,
and there is none occasion of stumbling in him.
These are a package. They are parallel. If you say that you are in the light but hate your brother, you are in darkness.
Everything we do when we walk in the light is loving the Lord God and loving our brethren.
Think about those neutral things we might be doing, or perhaps a specific sin that seems to affect only me. “I do not hate you, but I did nothing for you last week.”
That is something, because look at this parallel: he who loves his brother abides in the light. Loving your brother is some active, positive thing to actually do.
It is not just not growling at them. It is not just not thinking wrongly about them. It is not just not despising them or hating them in your feelings. It is doing something positively in loving the brethren.
The Lord may give us a few brothers and sisters in our lives with whom we are connected, and with that He gives us some positive way of fellowship. He gives us some commands.
It is not just that the Lord has placed on your heart, “Please stop hating this person.” He does do that. But when He does, you begin to pray for your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, and love your enemies.
As you love your enemies, you discover that the Lord wants you to love your brother. There might be something to do besides praying for them, but praying for them is a beginning.
To say it another way, if I ignore my brother and sister, think nothing to do with them, and only think about myself not sinning, first, I am going to end up sinning a lot. Second, I end up indirectly hating my brethren.
It is indirect, but it is not loving them. You know what I mean?
Just as not walking in the light is actually walking in darkness, even though it does not always feel dark, so it can be with this. I may not feel like I am sinning. I may be lawless in my good deeds. I may be helping many people, but the Lord is not with me. I am helping them in darkness.
Darkness does not always look like darkness, and hating your brother or sister does not always look that way.
Sometimes you go to the Lord and ask, “Lord, search me. Is there anything I should be walking in?”
This is a brand-new year. It has just started. The old has passed away. Many of us are looking at the new year and asking, “Lord, what do You want me to be doing this year?”
The Lord will show you ways that He wants you to love your brethren.
Sometimes, looking back, part of our confession of sins is, “I confess that I have not been praying for anyone but myself all week.” If the Lord convicts me, I need to actually love my brother.
When I am in darkness, I may not notice that I am hating my brother. You are in darkness when you hate your brother, so you may not know that you hate your brother.
I remember seeing things in my inbox—brethren I had meant to reply to. When I had the moment to reply, I just was not feeling it. “I do not know if I can do it.”
Perhaps there is a note or reminder: “Remember to call this person.” But in the moment, you are just thinking, “I’m not feeling it.”
That is exactly when you probably have to look to the Lord and receive it as a new commandment. It is old to you because you are not feeling it, but you take it from the Lord.
Have you ever started a note or phone call when you were not feeling it, but you faith it by the Lord? As you get going, His love flows through you. You are surprised, and you are edified, because you just walked in the light.
At the end of this verse, there is no occasion of stumbling. The best way not to sin is to love some other people.
If I have free time, I can try not to sin in my free time: “Please, Lord.” But then I start feeling whatever temptation is tempting me in that free time.
Instead, if the Lord places something in my hand—some love of the brethren to do—then we get busy in our abiding. We get busy loving the brethren.
If you love your brother, there is no occasion of stumbling. Think about the moment when you are doing an action of love for your brother or sister.
As you are doing it, receiving the Lord’s grace, walking in the light, and abiding in Him, in that moment you are not stumbling. You are not walking in darkness. You are not sinning.
The best time not to sin is when you are actually doing something with the Lord.
It is very hard to sin then—unless you are prone to sin in a particular way and somebody wearing a yellow shirt suddenly reminds you of a certain sin, and you get distracted for a moment.
But because we know the way of being cleansed, even if we are doing some good with the Lord and stumble, we know what to do.
This especially happens with spouses, friends, roommates, or siblings. We are around each other so much, and we are in the middle of loving one another, but something comes out of our mouth that does not sound quite right. We stumbled.
But in the moment of the Lord’s grace, we are not stumbling. When those things come out, we quickly apologize and get cleansed.
That is different from major stumbling in darkness. That is different from walking in darkness. It is like a misstep that you confess right away: “Oh, I’m sorry. I did not mean it that way.”
The overflow of love for the brethren keeps you from stumbling.
Verse 11 says:
But he that hateth his brother is in darkness,
and walketh in darkness,
and knoweth not whither he goeth,
because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.
I just want to bring up one thing from this part. We can probably easily get the general concept. Of course, if I am hating my brother, everything is dark.
You cannot worship God and hate your brother. That is why we cannot break bread and take of that cup when we cannot forgive someone else.
In the Lord Jesus’ prayer, He says that if you do not forgive others their trespasses, the Father cannot forgive you. That is a truth to know while I am hating somebody.
But we generally think about hating with the feeling of hate, the hatred of hate. I think the more common experience of hatred is bitterness.
It is a minor form of hating, but it is darkness. It is more dangerous because it is so minor. Somebody has done something wrong to me.
If I am a little kid, I would say, “I hate you. You did this to me.” That is maybe more honest, maybe more in the light.
If I am a grown adult, I might say, “Hmm, you know, I’m just holding on to it.” I see them, and there is some cut in my heart. When I see them, I see the sin they did to me.
When I think about them, I get angry about things in the church. I get upset. It is some form of bitterness that becomes an accidental hatred of my brethren.
It is especially easy to hate the mean brothers and sisters. All of us occasionally are pretty evil to each other, accidentally or on purpose. Those are the ones you will end up hating if you have bitterness.
Instead, being cleansed by the Lord, the overflow of that is, in a sense, to cleanse everybody else in your mind.
Not that you can cleanse anybody, but let the Lord remove from your thoughts the sin that others have done to you. Let Him handle it.
It is like when we talked about being cleansed: I fix my eyes on Jesus, who is with the Father—Jesus Christ the righteous. He died for them.
Just as I would confess my own sin to Him in order to be cleansed, I confess to the Lord the person who sinned against me. Not for them to be forgiven—keep that clear—but I bring it to the Lord and say, “This person has sinned against me. This is for You to handle.”
He is the One who died for sins. I am never going to die for sins. Vengeance belongs to the Lord, never to me. I am His bondservant.
He is the only One who can really forgive them. If I can step into His forgiveness, then when they come and apologize—maybe five years later, or maybe never—I am ready to give them forgiveness.
Maybe they never do apologize, but He has died for them, and I can leave it alone. I can go on and love my brother. That is the way through.
Otherwise, you do not know where you are going. The darkness of bitterness has blinded your eyes.
Suddenly, your prayers are drier. Something is wrong. There is awkwardness going on. Usually, I think the greater hatred that creeps in and blinds our eyes is a little bit of bitterness.
Someone has offended us, and that happens. But the Lord’s command is a new commandment: love that person.
Though I cannot forgive them in myself, though I cannot do anything about it, this is a new commandment now, and I take it from the Lord. It is not a heavy thing.
I take it from the Lord and say, “You want me to love them? I’ll start praying for them. You want me to love them? I bring this sin before You, Lord, and You take this.”
Then you go on and love them. Maybe you even smile at them, say hello, and talk to them. I do not know. But whatever it is, you love your brethren in that way.
This is a new commandment. In this way of abiding in the light, we love our brothers. It is positive. We are doing this walking in the light.
When we keep His commandments to love one another, that is the way we abide in the light.
Let’s entrust this to the Lord.
Lord, we come to You for this new commandment to be spoken to all of our hearts. We hear You speaking to us to love one another, to love You.
Lord, rather than being overwhelmed by our failures or the impossibility of commandments in the old way, we fix our eyes on You.
This thing is true in You, Lord, and we receive it as Your command to us that is true also in us.
We worship You and thank You in Jesus’ name. Amen.