The Calvary Road | Page 8

others--and we can do all that as much
by our silence as by saying or doing something. This is what the
previous verse calls "walking in darkness." With some of us, the sin in
question may be nothing more than self-consciousness (anything with
"I" in it is sin) and the hiding, nothing more than an assumed heartiness
to cover that self-consciousness, but it is walking in darkness none the
less.
In contrast to all this in us, verse 5 of this chapter tells us that "God is
light," that is, God is the All-revealing One, who shows up every man
as he really is. And it goes on to say, "In Him is no darkness at all," that
is, there is absolutely nothing in God which can be one with the tiniest
bit of darkness or hiding in us.

Quite obviously, then, it is utterly impossible for us to be walking in
any degree of darkness and have fellowship with God. While we are in
that condition of darkness, we cannot have true fellowship with our
brother either--for we are not real with him, and no one can have
fellowship with an unreal person. A wall of reserve separates him and
us.
The Only Basis for Fellowship.
The only basis for real fellowship with God and man is to live out in
the open with both. "But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we
have fellowship one with another." To walk in the light is the opposite
of walking in darkness. Spurgeon defines it in one of his sermons as
"the willingness to know and be known." As far as God is concerned,
this means that we are willing to know the whole truth about ourselves,
we are open to conviction. We will bend the neck to the first twinges of
conscience. Everything He shows us to be sin, we will deal with as
sin--we will hide or excuse nothing. Such a walk in the light cannot but
discover sin increasingly in our lives, and we shall see things to be sin
which we never thought to be such before. For that reason we might
shrink from this walk, and be tempted to make for cover. But the verse
goes on with the precious words, "and the Blood of Jesus Christ, His
Son, cleanseth us from all sin." Everything that the light of God shows
up as sin, we can confess and carry to the Fountain of Blood and it is
gone, gone from God's sight and gone from our hearts. By the power of
the precious Blood we can be made more stainless than the driven snow;
and thus continually abiding in the light and cleansed by the Blood, we
have fellowship with God.
But the fellowship promised us here is not only with God, but "one
with another"; and that involves us in walking in the light with our
brother too. In any case, we cannot be "in the open" with God and "in
the dark" with him. This means that we must be as willing to know the
truth about ourselves from our brother as to know it from God. We
must be prepared for him to hold the light to us (and we must be
willing to do the same service for him) and challenge us in love about
anything he sees in our lives which is not the highest. We must be

willing not only to know, but to be known by him for what we really
are. That means we are not going to hide our inner selves from those
with whom we ought to be in fellowship; we are not going to window
dress and put on appearances; nor are we going to whitewash and
excuse ourselves. We are going to be honest about ourselves with them.
We are willing to give up our spiritual privacy, pocket our pride and
risk our reputations for the sake of being open and transparent with our
brethren in Christ. It means, too, that we are not going to cherish any
wrong feeling in our hearts about another, but we are first going to
claim deliverance from it from God and put it right with the one
concerned. As we walk this way, we shall find that we shall have
fellowship with one another at an altogether new level, and we shall not
love one another less, but infinitely more.
No Bondage.
Walking in the light is simply walking with Jesus. Therefore there need
be no bondage about it. We have not necessarily got to tell everybody
everything about ourselves. The fundamental thing is our attitude of
walking in the light, rather than the act. Are we willing to be in the
open with our brother--and be so in word when God tells