TO WALK IN DARKNESS


If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie, and do not practice the truth.
(1 John 1: 6 – NAS)


Why would anyone who announces that they are “in fellowship with Jesus” choose to still walk in darkness? It seems a silly proposition. And yet, it does happen. Should we just write it off to “human nature”?

But the fact remains that in this fallen world, figurative darkness has its attractions, its temptations. Darkness can hide many things. When we wish to keep someone from knowledge of a particular event or activity, we “keep them in the dark.”

Little children love to play peek-a-boo. The limited awareness of the world that such a child has leads him to believe that if he cannot see a thing, it is “out of existence.” If a thing is hidden from his sight or he closes his eyes, it is very easy for the child to think it is gone. That it comes back is always a delight to the child. Gone. Back. Gone. Back.

Some of that outlook tends to persist in our hearts and minds as we grow older. We hide parts of our lives, our activities, our attitudes and beliefs, from others – for all sorts of reasons. It might not even be because we are lying about anything. It may simply be that we wish to keep something secret. It’s nobody else’s business, right?

But what happens when we claim to be followers of Jesus, and we still hold on to such hidden things, such “dark secrets”?

John had previously said that “God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.”

If we claim to have fellowship with the Lord, what is it that we are bringing into the situation? It is said that as believers we are in Him as He is in us. Is it possible for us to bring our “little darknesses” into the Lord?

John says that no, it is not possible. There is, in Him, no darkness at all.

So, if we persist on keeping our dark secrets and choosing to “walk in darkness,” we cannot also claim to be in fellowship with the Lord. It just doesn’t work that way. We can’t be in the Lord and still hold on to our private darkness. There is no darkness in the Lord.

John is quite bluntly truthful when he says that anyone who claims fellowship and yet walks in darkness is lying.

There’s a phrase that people misquote a lot these days. People say, “He wants to have his cake and eat it too.” But the fact is, that is the ordinary sequence. You have to have a cake before you can eat it, after all. The original phrase is slightly different: “He wants to eat his cake and have it too.” It means that the person wants the pleasure of eating the cake, but that after eating it, he still also wants the pleasure of having the cake before him, enticing, promising yet more pleasures. It is the picture of greed. We want to consume and we want to have the prospect, the possibility, of continued consumption before us. We want no end of cake or the eating of cake.

That is what we are doing when we try to drag our personal darkness into fellowship with the Lord. Yes, we want that fellowship with Jesus, the closeness with God. But we also do not want to give up on our little sins and vices. We don’t really want to let go of all our angers (That guy really deserves my anger!) or pride or little greeds. “It’s a small thing. I’m just a flawed human – God loves me anyway, doesn’t He?” We try to use the great good nature of God against Him, in order to hold onto those things we want.

Yes, God loves us in spite of those flaws and darknesses. But having God love us is not quite the same thing as being in fellowship with Him.

Fellowship is so much more than just being in the presence of the other person. We can be in the midst of a huge crowd and not be in fellowship with a single person there. To be in fellowship with someone is to share an interest, to be engaged, to be a peer of the other person, an equal partner.

And we are invited to be in fellowship with God through Jesus. What an astonishing thing! The Creator of the Universe is willing to connect and engage with me, this speck on the surface of a small planet circling a small star on the edge of one of a myriad of galaxies. Fellowship!

But....

God is light and there is in Him no darkness at all.

I cannot hold on to my private darkness and still claim to be walking in the Light of the Lord. It just doesn’t work.

One year at Vacation Bible School, we whiled away the time learning the meaning of our given names. For some of the children, it made for an amusing game, because we wondered if their parents had known the meaning of the names (unlikely juxtapositions of personality and name-meaning seemed quite frequent).

Since I had been born into a church-going family, I of course knew the significance of my first name, Sarah. Much amusement was hand in my family, because of the Biblical story of the wife of Abraham. Originally, her name was Sarai, and I was taught that it meant “quarrelsome or contentious”. And I was contentious as a child, very much so. But the Lord changed Sarai’s name to Sarah, which means “princess.” (Many scholars do not hold that “Sarai” means “quarrelsome,” however, indicating that “Sarai” is not significantly different in meaning from “Sarah”.) To me, at that time, there seemed a particular responsibility in being designated a “princess.” I was not enveloped in visions of fairy tale princesses, being waiting on hand and foot. Somehow to me it had a weight of responsibility and authority, a weight I was not particularly eager to carry. What added to this weight, particularly for a child growing up in a Christian home, was learning that “Lucy,” my middle name, meant “light.” The combination of names, for a child of believers, had a haunting significance.

There have certainly been times in my life when I have wanted to clutch my private darkness and hide away from God. But when one’s very name does not allow that sort of escape .... I became resigned to it. I cannot escape the Light of the Lord. It is impressed into my very identity. I might as well learn to “walk in the Light.”

I am not so foolish as to claim that I have excised all my own inner darkness. I believe it is a life-long process, a life’s work, to reach that goal. But I do not want to lie, when I claim to be in fellowship with the Lord. I would much rather be in the Light than I would to walk in darkness.