in us.

But if we walk in the light, If we confess our sins,
as He is in the light,

we have fellowship one with He is faithful and righteous to
another. forgive us our sins,

and the blood of Jesus His Son and to cleanse us from all
cleanseth us from all sin. unrighteousness.

As to the former of these two paragraphs, the underlying thought is that
fellowship with God necessarily involves moral likeness to Him. Worship
is always aspiration after, and conformity to, the character of the god
worshipped, and there can be no true communion with a God who is light
unless the worshipper walks in light. In plain language, all high-flying
pretensions to communion with God must verify themselves by practical
righteousness. That cuts deep into an emotional religion, which has much
to say about raptures and the like, but produces little purifying effect
on the humble details of daily life.

There are always professing Christians who talk of their blessed
experiences, and woefully fail in prosaic virtues. It is a pity that a
man should hold his head so high that he does not look to keep his feet
out of the mud. Such a profession is for the most part tainted with more
or less conscious falsehood, and is always a proof that the truth--the
sum of God's revelation--is not operative in the man; that he is not
turning his belief into act, as all belief should be. On the other hand,
the true relation resulting from the message is that we should walk in
the light, as He is in it.

Verse 10 seems to be simply a reiteration of the preceding idea, with
some intensifying, and that chiefly in the description of the true
character of the denial of sin. To make God a liar is worse than to lie
or to deceive ourselves; and all ignoring of sin does that, because not
only has God declared its universality by the words of revelation, but
all His dealings with men are based upon the fact that they are all
sinners, and we fly in the face of all His words and works if we deny
that which we ourselves are. Therefore the Apostle further varies his
expression, and says 'His word' instead of 'the truth,' thus bringing
into prominence the thought that 'the truth' is made accessible to us
because God has spoken.

III. Chapter ii. 1-6 is in structure analogous to the preceding section.
As there, so here, the 'message' is summed up in one great
fact,--Christ