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“If we walk in the light,” that is, if we walk in the light of the Word of God. Dr. Harry Ironside tells of his own confusion of mind relative to this verse. Noticing that the cleansing of the blood depends upon our walking in the light, he read it as though it said, “If we walk according to the light, the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.” He thought it meant that if he was very punctilious about obeying every command of God, God would cleanse him. Then he noticed that it does not say if we walk according to light, but if we walk in the light. The important thing is where we walk, not how we walk. Have we come into the presence of God and allowed the Word of God to shine upon our sinful hearts? You see, it is possible to walk in darkness, thinking you are all right.

Let me illustrate this. I went squirrel hunting several years ago when I was holding meetings in my first pastorate in Middle Tennessee in a place called Woodbury. After the morning service a doctor came to me and asked me if I would like to go squirrel hunting, and I told him there was nothing I would rather do. After lunch he brought me a shotgun, and we drove out to his farm and parked in the barnyard. We walked along by the creek there and had some good hunting. Finally we came to a fork in the creek, and he said to me, “I’ll take the right fork, and you take the left fork. It will lead you around the hill and back to the barnyard. We will meet there.” In the meantime it looked like it was going to rain. It had drizzled once or twice and stopped. When I started out by myself, it started drizzling again. I kept going, and I made the turn around the hill. I noticed quite a few caves in the hill, and when it started to really rain, I knew I was going to get wet; so I crawled into one of those caves. I went into the largest one I could find and sat in that dark cave for about thirty minutes. I began to get cold and decided I needed a fire; so I gathered together a bunch of leaves scattered on the floor of the cave and put a match to them. I soon had a small fire going, and when I looked around the cave, I found out that I wasn’t alone. I have never been a place in which there were so many spiders and lizards as there were in that cave! Over in one corner was a little snake all coiled up, just looking at me. My friend, I got out of there in a hurry, working on the assumption that possession is nine-tenths of the law, and since those creatures had the cave ahead of me, it belonged to them. I proceeded down to the barn and really got soaking wet, but I wasn’t going to stay in that cave!

Now let me make an application. I had been sitting in comfort for about thirty minutes while I was in darkness, but when the light of the fire revealed what was in the cave, I could no longer be comfortable there. My friend, across this land today are multitudes of folk who are sitting in churches every Sunday morning but are not hearing the Word of God. As a result, they are sitting there in darkness, hearing some dissertation on economics or politics or the “good life” or an exhortation on doing the best they can. And they are comfortable. Of course, they are comfortable! But if they would get into the light of the Word of God, they would see that they are sinners and that they cannot bring God down to their level. John has said that if a person says he is having fellowship with God but is living in sin, he is lying.

During my many years as a pastor I have encountered a great deal of this. I think of a layman who was a good speaker and went about giving his testimony to different groups. Then it was discovered that he was living in adultery—for several years he had been keeping a woman on the side. When it was discovered, my, the damage it did to the cause of Christ. And that man still insists that he is having fellowship with God! I recognize that we are living in a day when moral standards are changing drastically and folk rationalize their sinning and try to explain it away, but they cannot bring God down to their level. If you are living in sin, God will not have fellowship with you. If you think otherwise, you are fooling yourself or using a psychological ploy to put up a good front. And many of our psychological hang-ups today center around this very point. As someone commented, after hearing me speak on this subject, “What you mean, Dr. McGee, is that there are hypocrites in the church.” And when you come right down to the nitty-gritty, that’s what we are talking about. Hypocrites. They profess one thing, “I’m having fellowship with God,” and all the while they are walking in darkness. John says that they are lying.

Now, suppose you are a child of God, and you are living in sin—but you see it now in the light of the Word of God. Have you lost your salvation? When the light in my study revealed that spot of dirt on my hand, I went and washed it off. And John says, “And the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” That word cleanseth is in the present tense—Christ’s blood just keeps on cleansing us from all sin. You haven’t lost your salvation, but you have lost your fellowship, and you cannot regain your fellowship with God until you are cleansed.

You see, John is talking about family truth. At the time I am writing this, there is abroad a great emphasis on what is known as body truth. Some folk have stumbled onto it for the first time and have gone off the deep end in their overemphasis of it. Body truth is great and it is an important part of New Testament teaching, but family truth is also important. If you are in the family of God and have sin in your life, God is not going to treat you like the sinner outside of Christ. He is going to treat you like a disobedient child. He will take you to the woodshed for punishment. Remember that He took David to the woodshed, and certainly Ananias and Sapphira didn’t get off easily. My friend, our attempt to bring God down to our level simply will not work. However, that is one method which is often used in an attempt to bridge the gap between a holy God and sinful man.

McGee, J. Vernon: Thru the Bible Commentary. electronic ed. Nashville : Thomas Nelson, 1997, c1981, S. 5:761-762