the first epistle of John chapter one

John 1:1 to john 1:2:1 I went to visit a former member of the team in Stornoway. While I was there, it was communion season. ( Describe it) The speaker was Fred Drummond, a man from my home town but we had never met. He preached for five nights from John’s first epistle I found it good for me, I had not planned on being there during communion season, but I felt that God wanted me there to hear what this man had to say and I found it so refreshing for my soul. It was about getting close to God To touch God He mimicked Fifers. It is getting close to God by dealing with sin that John concerns himself. V1)” That which was from the beginning “, seems to elude to Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created etc etc. John is presenting himself as a witness to what God had declared. He had seen, heard and touched the son of God. He now proclaims it to the readers and hearers of his letters in order that they may have fellowship one with another and with God. V 5- 7 This concerns fellowship with God. God is light, he his holy and if we say that we have fellowship with him but walk in darkness we lie. But if we walk in the light with him then we have fellowship with him. We are told in other scriptures that the human heard is deceitful and desperately wicked. If I lie to someone else and they are taken in by the lie then I have deceived them. However the devil is a deceiver. He makes sin look good, exciting and attractive. He also minimises sin and so through his enticing we practice self-deception. In the light of what God reveals, we need to be constantly examining our motives our hearts and asking ourselves the questions such as, am I truly walking in the light and having fellowship with the father, or have I been deceived by a lie. Is my walk with God getting stronger or weaker? We can never stand still. We are either walking forward with God, or we are going backwards and while still serving, perhaps we are colder than we once were. Sometimes it is good, to take time out and re-evaluate ourselves. I started such a process some time ago (Tim Chester’s book) There is nothing new in it, it just made me look at sin afresh and what leads to sin and what sin ultimately will lead to. While in Stornoway, this epistle was preached over five nights and I have read it several times since and experienced anew the forgiveness of God. If we sin, note IF we sin, then we have an advocate who speaks to the father on our behalf. It is this same advocate whom John saw touched and experienced. We to need to touch God. There is an inclination for when we sin to hide. When Adam and Eve sinned the hid from God. We do the same thing. We minimise sin, but our consciences say, you did wrong or you thought wrong and you are guilty. We need to go against that response of hiding and bring it out into the light and allow God to deal with it. Only then can we experience his forgiveness. That process involves confession of sin and drawing close to God and we may still find that there are consequences to what we did, but we still need to expose the sin for his forgiveness and then make adjustments so that we do not go on sinning. Recently in church we read Ezekiel 44 where God punished Levite priests by making them do the lesser tasks in the temple and they were not allowed to draw close to God like the other priests who remained loyal to him. Those who misled the people were not disqualified from serving God, but they were disqualified from being close to him and serving in the way that they otherwise could have and that stood as a stark warning to me. Am I serving as I should. I believe so, but I should not become complacent. I could be held at a distance from God. Still saved, but distant. I do not want that for myself. I need to check myself more and more in the light of God’s word. To do that I need to start by not neglecting his word. I then need to not to ignore his word when it prompts me and I need to take whatever measures big or small to avoid sin. To be close to God is an amazing thing and a costly thing. John is able to say, he saw, he touched and he heard that message that Jesus brought.