Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 John 1-5.

John writes that we must walk in God’s light and not in the darkness of sin.  Yet, he also tells us that if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and do not know, or understand, truth.    So, we must strive to live without sin, while understanding that we will sin.  When we fall to sin, if we confess our sins, God will forgive us, and cleanse us of unrighteousness.  If we claim to know God, but do not follow His commands we are liars.   On the other hand if we want to know God we will strive to live as Jesus lived.  Living as Jesus lived is living and walking in God’s light.  And that means loving each other.  If we harbor hate for others, we are choosing to walk in darkness.  Which brings us back to John’s introduction to this letter: we cannot have fellowship with God if we walk in darkness.  Perhaps that is part of how wonderful John’s message here is.  If we walk with God, if we fellowship with God, His light will drive out the darkness, will drive out the hate.  However, we have a choice.  As God’s light drives the darkness of hate away from Him, we can choose to stay with Him, or we can keep our hate by following it away from Him.  John gives us one more important piece of advice.  We cannot just talk about loving others, we must act on it.  It is not enough to say that we love others we must do loving things for them.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.