You walk into the room and grope around to get your bearings until you find a chair. You then sit in the chair and get comfortable when you feel a small furry creature hop on your lap. You feel the little guy for a bit and then start petting it nicely. You stroke it from head to back over and over. After a while you end up liking this little creature and assume it must be a cat. The furry animal then turns its backside to you in the manner a cat does when showing respect. You continue to pet it nicely while smiling.
Then someone turns on the light and you see it is actually a skunk sitting on your lap.
What would you do?
I know I would get away from that skunk as quickly as I could without getting sprayed. I would not continue to pet that skunk as much as I may have liked it when the lights were off.
In 1 John chapter 1 we are told that God is light and that we should walk in the light. I think the story of the skunk in the dark tells us some about how to walk in the light.
"If we claim to have fellowship with Him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth." 1 John 1:6
Jesus is the light, we're told in the Gospel of John that Jesus is the truth and 1 John equates light with truth. So, I believe that much of walking in the light is a simple as walking in the truth. Walking in reality, not as we conceive it to be with the lights off, but as we are shown it to be with the lights turned on.
If someone had the lights turned on and discovered that the truth was that the furry creature was not a cat but rather a skunk they would get rid of or get away from the skunk. They would not try to convince the person who turned on the lights that the little animal was most definitely a cat and not a skunk.
Too often we live as if we preferred the way we thought things were in the dark. We don't want to live according to what the light reveals because we liked the lifestyle in the dark room better. We liked the comfort of what we thought was a cat and now we're shown that we have a potential stinker on our laps from which we must flee.
Too often we have a pet sin in our lives that hasn't hurt us yet but like that skunk will likely backfire on us stinking up our entire being.
Pet skunks in our lives might take the form of gossip, pornography, grudges, excessive drinking, social media inspired jealousy or other seeming harmless sins. "Well, I see now that it's not a cat but it's never hurt me before. In fact, I quite like it." But sin is not a pet. Sin is a skunk that will backfire, it is a shark dedicated to devouring us. Sin can not and will not be tamed as a pet no matter how long you've lived with it without an attack; it is a dangerous thing that must be expelled, fled from or killed.
Walking in the light requires us to change. Walking in the light requires that when light is shed in the darkness of our lives we rid ourselves of the evil exposed.
But thanks be to God that He doesn't just expose sin but He also cures it.
"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." 1 John 1:7
Walk in the light. When the light of Jesus exposes a pet sin we must act according to the knowledge of the truth and not the ignorance of the dark room today.
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