He is alert to push us into such feelings, to arouse such fears within us, whenever we examine ourselves.
REFLECTOR 2 HAS STOPPED WORKING SERIES
He evidently feels there may be many who are saying to themselves, "Am I really a Christian at all? Can I even claim a saving relationship with Christ?" If the Spirit has convicted us and we sense a lack, the question that is at the back of our mind may be, "Perhaps my trouble is not merely a break in fellowship perhaps I am experiencing a complete breakdown of faith." Of course, as we saw in our series on spiritual warfare, the Tempter is very quick to suggest this very thing.
So when John is examining our spiritual lives, as a doctor would examine our physical lives, and points out the sicknesses of the soul, it is only natural that he would expect a reaction of spiritual hypochondria, in which some of us might feel we had some of these diseases, or even worse. Is that not what often happens when we start reading about sickness? We all have a bit of hypochondria in us, and perhaps it is true on the spiritual level as well. Inevitably, after each reading of that book, I became aware of certain symptoms which I had just read about that were apparent in my own body, and I spent some hours of intense anxiety over the suspicion that I was developing one of these terrible diseases. I remember reading through that book many, many times, and feeling a kind of macabre fascination at descriptions of such horrendous things as cancer, diabetes, heart failure, perforated ulcers, and other equally horrible diseases. It had a lot of fascinating pictures in it - fascinating to me because I was hoping at that time to become a surgeon - and it gave a brief description of all the sicknesses that afflict the human race, their symptoms, and their cures, or, at least, certain suggestions as to the cures. When I was a boy we had on the shelf of our library at home a big, thick book called, The Journal of Home Medicine. In Chapter 2, beginning with Verse 3, we shall look at that reaction and what he says about it.
Now John pauses in the flow of his discourse to deal with an inevitable human reaction to this kind of a searching examination of our spiritual life. And finally, we can obscure the light by rationalizing the sin which is revealed in our life, by excusing it because of circumstances, or calling it another name that does not sound as bad. John indicates that it is possible to come to the place where we think that, for one reason or another, we are no longer able to sin. Then we can close our eyes to the light by denying the possibility of sin. We can block the light from shining into our life, and thus revealing reality in three ways:įirst, by ignoring the light, i.e., refusing to examine ourselves, never stopping to look at what the light reveals, going on with our life without ever stopping to ask ourselves questions about where we are and what we are doing and why we are what we are. "God is light and in him is no darkness at all," (1 John 1:5b RSV).
Or, to use the figure that John himself employs, that block the light that shines to us from the person of God. Now in this first letter of John we have examined the three conditions which, John indicates, interrupt the flow of these rivers. John adds, "this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive," (John 7:39a RSV). 'Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water,'" (John 7:37-38 RSV). Jesus said, "If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink. It is something that cannot be hindered by anything outward because it comes from within. Such fellowship is described to us by Jesus himself as the flowing of rivers of living water out of the center of life. We are considering John's great analysis, in his first letter, of the way to maintain unbroken fellowship with the Son of God.
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