Learning to Walk in the Light
The goals of this blog are found in 1John1:1-7, which may be summarized in the following paraphrase:
“We have met Christ, the Creator, who was there from the beginning of time. We have fellowship with the Father and with Christ Jesus, His Son. This text is written so that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will for your lives. God is good, and His will for your lives is good. Evil cannot be found in Him. Evil is the absence of God in our lives. If we walk with God and embrace evil in our lives then, we are lying and are not living (walking) in truth. But if we walk in God’s will (light) , along with God, we will share life with each other. And the blood of Christ Jesus washes all of our sins away.”
There are three main points of this passage: 1) We can have fellowship with God. 2) God wants us to experience His will in our lives. 3) God’s grace enables us to do His will.
There are several questions that result from this passage: How does one walk in fellowship with God? What is God’s will? How is the will of God related to light? How is wisdom related, to light, and God’s will? If God is good, why is evil present in the world? We will try to answer these questions.
How does one walk in fellowship? The Bible describes our fellowship with God as a progressive journey. It describes parents as representatives or agents to demonstrate and nurture a relationship with Christ.. The process of walking is something unique to mankind whereby we make progressive steps towards our destination.
The Bible says that we walk by faith (2Cor 5:7). This is true both physically and spiritually. When our children were toddlers, we had a special bonding time after I came home from work. During this time, my wife was fairly saturated, because like all toddlers, they wanted to explore everything on all fours. Keeping tabs on our toddlers was quite a chore. So when I came home and found our toddler able to pull up on sofa or a chair, I would hold out my two index fingers for their hands to grab. Their little hands would just fit barely fit around my fingers. My hands were like handle bars, or like a rail to support them as they stood on two feet. Initially, because they were not used to standing, I could feel a lot of pressure on my fingers as they tried to balance themselves. Each day we would go through this exercise. After awhile, we were making several steps walking together in succession. As they began to gain confidence with taking steps, I could feel less and less pressure on my fingers that I used to support them. As the pressure lessened, I began to remove one of my fingers from one of their hands. The first time this happened, our toddlers would normally sit down on their diaper because it felt weird not having my hand there. Eventually, when I would pull my one finger from one of their hands, our toddler would just hesitate, but continue to walk. Before long, our toddler could not only walk independently, but run!
This story is a picture of the Christian faith and fellowship with God. We learn to walk and even run (Heb 12:1-2) by faith in the supporting hand of our father and mother. We go from a point where our little legs could barely support our weight, to a place where our legs must support the weight of others. The walk that I am speaking about is not only physical, but also spiritual. As our parents release our hands, they are really allowing our children’s fingers to reach to the unseen hand of our heavenly Father. Our goal as parents is not to have our children walk aimlessly without purpose. Our goal is have our children to walk in light as it says in 1John1:7, because God is in the light.
The light represents God’s will for our lives (Eph 5:13). Some say there is no light, or that God has no will. A conspicuous example of modern day repugnance to God’s will is being fought in the court system. The Bible clearly defines qualifying conditions for marriage, and it defines the responsibility and authority of parents to care for their children. Yet these fundamental societal building blocks are being challenged or redefined through progressive legislative amendments to civil laws and by judicial decrees. We are unable to distinguish civil rights from civil wrongs. Our courts are places were legal precedent determines morals and where social experimentation prevails rather than absolute laws from the Creator.
God designed mankind to walk uprightly. This means our mouth (what we say) is vertically in line with our feet (how we live). Without light (God’s will), we stumble upon things (Prov 4:18-19) and find ourselves lying (horizontally) , instead walking (vertically) as we should. Lying is what we do if we accept man made decisions regarding God’s will concerning marriage, parental responsibility or any other subject matter. We are commanded to know the will of God for our lives, and by doing so makes us wise (Eph 5:17).
When we train others to walk, we wobble; we tire, and sometimes struggled to keep our own balance. Nevertheless, we persevere together knowing one day a transition will occur and our loved ones will run (Heb 12:1-2), not on their own, but with a fading dependence upon us.
Walking is a gradual, cyclical progression of steps moving from a dependency on our caretakers to a dependency on God. God’s will is the means that we see where we are going. If we do not know His will we stumble and are found lying instead of standing and walking.
