Big Buts of the Bible

Read 1 John 1:1–10

There are two wonderfully hopeful buts tucked into the first chapter of John’s first letter. But before we get to them—and yes, that but was intentional—we need to notice how John begins.

This is John, the beloved disciple, one of Jesus’ closest companions. The opening of his letter sounds remarkably like the opening of his Gospel, which itself echoes the opening of Genesis: “That which was from the beginning…” John wants us thinking about Jesus as more than a great teacher who appeared at a particular moment in history. He was there in the beginning. He is the eternal Son of God, the Word of Life.

But John immediately makes this enormous theological truth wonderfully personal. He writes about what he and the other disciples had heard, seen with their eyes, looked at, and even touched with their hands. John isn’t passing along something he heard from somebody who heard it from somebody else. He walked with Jesus. He heard His teaching. He watched His miracles. He witnessed His death and burial. And then John encountered Him alive again.

Now listen to why John says he is telling us about it: “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us.” Then he adds: “Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”

Let that settle in for a moment. John is saying that the fellowship he and those first disciples experienced with Jesus is something you can enter into too. Not merely read about. Not admire from two thousand years away. Not hope to experience someday when you get to heaven. You can know Him now.

And that brings us to the first but.

Out of the Darkness

John summarizes the message he heard from Jesus: “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.”

If God is light, then fellowship with Him necessarily changes the direction in which we walk. John puts it plainly:

“If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.”

There’s the first pivot: But if we walk in the light.

The word John uses for walk speaks of the pattern or direction of a life. He isn’t saying that someone who walks in the light never stumbles. In fact, the next few verses make clear that John knows better than that. Walking in the light does not mean achieving sinless perfection.

Thank God.

It means darkness no longer owns us. Something has changed. Through Christ, we have been given a new direction, a new desire, a new heart toward God. We want the light. We want truth. We want fellowship with Him.

Does that mean we always get it right? Hardly. Paul described the struggle painfully well in Romans 7: “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” There are enough buts in that passage to keep Dr. Buttersworth occupied for an afternoon.

We stumble. We fall. We sometimes find ourselves doing the very things we don’t want to do.

But we don’t have to hide there.

That is the hope.

But Wait, There’s More

John anticipates another danger—the temptation to pretend otherwise.

“If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”

We human beings can be remarkably talented at self-deception. We minimize. We rationalize. We compare ourselves to somebody whose behavior looks worse. We hide what embarrasses us. We convince ourselves that something really isn’t that big a deal.

John says: Don’t fool yourself. You still sin. That might not sound particularly hopeful.

But there’s still more Good News.

Now, I don’t know why the editors of the NIV left the conjunction out, definitely an unfortunate oversight on their part. But thankfully, the editors of the NLT did not. So, let’s close with the rendering of that translation:

If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth. But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness (1 John 1:8-9 NLT).

There it is. We sin. But we confess. We fall short. But God is faithful. We wander into darkness. But the blood of Jesus cleanses us.

That little but turns our attention away from the failure and toward the faithfulness of God.

And notice what John does not say. He doesn’t tell us to hide our sin, excuse it, minimize it, or pretend we’ve finally reached some spiritual level where we no longer struggle. Quite the opposite. He tells us to bring it into the light. Confession is simply agreeing with God about what is already true.

There is tremendous freedom in that.

Some of us have become very good at hiding. We hide the things we’ve done. We hide the habits we can’t seem to break. We hide the thoughts we’re ashamed of, the places we’ve fallen again, the promises we’ve made and failed to keep. Sometimes we even hide from the people who love us because we’re afraid of what they might think if they knew the whole story.

John says: come into the light. Not because there is no sin there, but because Jesus is there.

Walking in the light doesn’t mean never stumbling. It means we no longer have to pretend we haven’t stumbled. We can live honestly before God because our hope has never rested in our ability to get everything right. It rests in the One who is faithful and just to forgive.

That is hope hidden in plain sight.

The darkness doesn’t get the last word. Your failure doesn’t get the last word. Your shame doesn’t get the last word.

But God … His grace does.

And perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things John wants us to understand from the very beginning of his letter: the fellowship he knew with Jesus—the Jesus he heard, saw, touched, followed, and loved—isn’t merely a story from two thousand years ago.

John says that fellowship can be ours.

Here. Now. Even with all our imperfections.

Walk in the light. There is grace there.