We're going to be in 1 John 1, starting in verse 5, and we'll work our way all the way through chapter 2 too. So why don't you go ahead and turn there, 1 John 1. While you're turning there, let me pray for the message. Lord, we do ask that you would speak now to us through the words of the Apostle John. Help me to be faithful to them. Help us all to have open hearts and open ears. We do pray that You would convict and encourage us, that You would strengthen the faith of those who know You and trust You, and that You would even now give new faith to any who do not yet possess it. Grant the gift of eternal life and confirm us in that eternal life now, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. 1 John 1, verses 5 all the way going through 2-2. Follow along with me as I read the text in its entirety. This is the message we have heard from Him and proclaimed to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. 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 cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. What are the essentials of Christianity? When it comes to Christianity, what teachings should you start with if you want to understand Christianity? You want to get what Christianity is all about. Where do you start? Or another question, what teachings or doctrines are of primary importance, such that if you remove them, you don't really have Christianity at all anymore? What doctrines, what teachings do outside parties, do interested parties need to know to really have a handle on what Christianity is? I mean, in one sense, we understand in one sense all the doctrines of the faith are important because they're all true as far as we're representing biblical truth, as far as they're coming from the Bible. Every word of the Bible flows from God. It is produced from God. So every word of the Bible is inspired. Every word of the Bible is profitable. So it is true that depending on any given context or someone's background knowledge or the specific situation that you find yourself in, that every doctrine at some point will be centrally important. But there are truths that are more centrally positioned overall. There are times when the Bible itself summarizes really big, important ideas and highlights them as really big and important ideas. I mean, Paul said at the end of 1 Corinthians that the death and resurrection of Jesus was of first importance. And this morning we're going to see, in a sense, what is of first importance to the Apostle John. Consider the way that the passage opens relative to how the last verse ended. You remember last week. Last week we looked at John's long opening sentence. And it's a sort of mini prologue to the whole book. And John tells us in that sentence that he and the other apostolic witnesses, they saw and they heard and they touched something amazing. Jesus Christ. The one who was from the beginning. The one who was there before there was there. The one who was life before there was life. The eternal life that was with the Father. The life that existed before there were things breathing because there was no oxygen yet. That life, that predated life manifested. He appeared. He came. And John saw, and he heard, and he touched Him. And John's main point in that opening sentence was, I saw him, I heard him, I touched him, and so I'm publicly announcing that to you. I'm telling you that so that you would join me in fellowship, fellowship with me, fellowship with God, and so that my joy would be full. And we considered how this wasn't selfish on John's part, for him to want to complete his own joy, and how it didn't devalue the inherent glory of Jesus, for him to say that there was more joy for him to have, even after having met Jesus in person. John's joy in Jesus increases as others see and value and enjoy Jesus because of how amazing the Lord is. When something is amazing, it gives you more joy for others to recognize it and enjoy it. Just as John the Baptist had said his joy was complete as Jesus started to get more attention than he did. Therefore, John's joy, John the Apostle's joy, is his audience's joy. because he is giving to the audience the source of all real joy, Jesus himself. So both his joy, his audience's joy, are in Jesus Christ getting his due glory, being recognized. So Jesus is still ultimate in this scheme. John opens his letter by saying, I have a message for you, which comes from the fact that I have seen and heard life and eternity in person. And this message is given so that you can fellowship with me and that you can fellowship ultimately with God and Jesus and so that I can enjoy Jesus being glorified in your eyes. I have a message for you. And then our passage this morning starts with, this is the message. This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you. In other words, what follows in our text today is John's elaboration on the content of the message. The message that will grant you fellowship with the apostles, with the people who saw and touched Jesus, and ultimately with God the Father and Jesus Christ himself. This is the message that will cause Jesus Christ to be glorified in your sight and so increase John's joy because it's making Jesus glorified and it's giving you joy. This is the elaboration on what you need to understand in order to recognize Jesus as glorious and so receive joy from Him. What follows today in John's thinking is at the heart of what you need to understand about Jesus so that you will respond to Him in a way that increases John's joy because you're receiving joy in Jesus. This is what you need to understand about Jesus that will glorify Him in your eyes. I mean really the whole book. The whole book is the content. The whole book is the message. But the text this morning is where John chooses to start. This is his starting point. This is the first thing that comes to his mind in delivering this message. The words that John thinks of first in this situation when he wants to say something that will glorify Jesus in our sight. And we have further confirmation that this is exactly how these two passages relate because in both, in the opening, both fellowship with God and fellowship with each other were described as the purpose for John sharing the gospel. That's why he's sharing the gospel. For you to have fellowship with him and so that you would have fellowship with God. And then here, both of those are also described as what is at stake in our passage this morning. John says, if we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie. We lie. We don't practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. In other words, key to whether or not you taste and see and experience eternal life from Jesus, and therefore fellowship with John the Apostle, fellowship with God the Father and His Son, is whether you are walking in darkness or whether you are walking in light. That's key. This is at the heart of the message. Are you walking in darkness or are you walking in the light? So it's huge for us to understand what does he mean? What does it mean to walk in the darkness? What does it mean to walk in the light? If you have a sensitive conscience, contemplating these alternatives could crush you if you don't understand it. We have to tread carefully here because you could be crushed if you don't understand what John is saying. I would guess that many of you, like me sometimes, when reading this text, your first thought is you hear walking in the light, walking in darkness, and that just kind of takes the form of a generic description of moral living. To walk in the light is to live a sinless, or basically sinless, or at least statistically mostly sinless life. And walking in darkness is the opposite. It's to sin. And then, If you assess yourself as a sinner, you don't feel joy. You feel terror. You feel terror because you think, I'm walking in darkness. Everything I did this week was sin, or tainted by sin. This week was 80% darkness, 20% light, if that. I am walking in darkness, and I am a sinner. That means I don't have fellowship with John or God. I am a sinner. There is no joy for Jesus in me. And sorry, John, there is no more joy for you. because I am walking in darkness. If that is your initial response, then you are actually far closer to the light than you realize right now. So you just sit still and you let John speak gospel to you. So let's start where John starts. The first thing John says after he's introduced the message is, God is light. God is light and in him there is no darkness. John starts, just as an aside, John starts with the nature of God and then he makes some pointed application from that nature. And this is a staple way that John likes to do things. We'll see this at least a few more times in the letter as we continue our sermon series. But here John starts and he tells us, God is light. Okay, God is light. What does that mean? I mean, most of us probably have at least something that comes to mind when we hear this, but we want to make sure we understand what John means. Fortunately, usually we have a background in having heard teaching in the Bibles and we understand that there has been a theme of light woven all the way through scripture. And we have digested that and we recognize that God has identified both as the source of light and being light himself. And we see the associations that we have for light. You know, it's how we see. Especially for ancient people, but still today, it's safety. Night is dangerous. Day is safe. It reflects God's moral purity. His holiness is often associated with light. And we see, in fact, that Jesus is identified as the light. In fact, it's probably very intentional that John starts here by saying God is light when 21 out of 23 times in his gospel Jesus is explicitly identified as the light or the source of the light. John is able to go back and forth between the two very easily in his mind because he recognized Jesus is the light. God is the light. So we have these ideas of moral purity and vision I'm able to see and safety. So what is John getting at? Which, if any of these, or all of these associations of light is John drawing on by calling God the light here? By saying there's no darkness in him. And another question is how do we answer that? How do we answer that question? How do we get at making a decision on what John is saying here? That isn't just a guess or relying on our personal intuition. Well, fortunately, this statement that God is light is not a proverb or theological statement in isolation. John immediately applies it. He immediately applies it, and so the answer becomes clear as we unpack the next five verses. That's how we'll understand. What is the main idea that you're getting at here, John? We see how he applies it. So let's read the next five verses, verses 6 through 10 of chapter 1 again. If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. 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 cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. I'm very grateful that the verses have been numbered the way they are, because it's going to make talking about this easier. We have five verses, and I will ask you, please, eye on the text so we can follow along. I'm probably going to explain structure a little more exactingly than usual, but there is eternal life here. There is eternal life here, and you need to see it. You must understand what John is saying. So eyes on the text. What we have here is very repetitive, verses six through 10. And this repetition is gonna be key to understanding, to unpacking all five verses. Here are five verses, and each of these five verses is identical in overall structure. Each of these five verses is an if-then statement. It's a hypothetical. First you get an if statement, followed by a then statement, which in this case is always composed of two parts, connected by and. Which is to say we get if this, then this, and this, five times. If this, then this, and this. Although in the ESV you don't get a literal then at the start of the then half, but you know what I mean when I say an if-then statement, a hypothetical. So listen again, but now listen for the structural repetition. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, then we lie and do not practice the truth. If we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, then we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, then he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, then we make him a liar and his word is not in us. So you can hear the structural repetition. Five highly parallel hypothetical statements. It's list-like in its composition, in the way that John speaks here. And this list-like repetition is extremely instructive in the intricate and thoughtful way that John composed it. And most importantly, perhaps, it explains to us what John is thinking when he says, what he means when he says, walking in the light and walking in darkness. Now, when you have a list, when you have parallel statements, you have at least a couple options on how the pieces relate to each other. The first option is that each piece is totally distinct. These are separate items on a list. Each statement says something unique. Like if I said, this is my friend Bill. He's a good runner. He's an avid reader. He's never late to work. Excellent chef. And he is a good friend. I said five things about my friend Bill in a list form. And in this case, each of these parallel statements said something really totally different about Bill. Like they're unified. in that they all describe Bill, but they contribute totally independent facts to the big picture. There isn't really any conceptual overlap between the five different things that I said. Alternatively, you can have a list where the statements are roughly synonymous, or the way we kind of say that is you're saying the same thing with different words. You say the same thing with different words. That's an oversimplification. It doesn't quite mean that each item in the list is interchangeable. Usually you have one that elaborates on the other or describes the same fundamental reality with the different vantage point. But there's a great deal of overlap. conceptual overlap, a great deal of similarity between the statements. So if I said, this is my friend Bill. He's really strong. He works out a lot. He power lifts at the gym every day. He carried my couch by himself. Arm wrestled Chuck Norris and won. Now, I still said five things about Bill, but this time the five were really kind of the same thing in one sense. They were all conveying the fact that Bill is strong. Each sentence still made a positive contribution. You can't just delete them. There's repetition, there's overlap of concept, but each sentence still contributes. I submit that this second idea, this second concept, this idea of synonymous, heavily overlapping meanings and statements is what is going on in these five verses of 1 John 1, 6 through 10. Which is to say that here, in these five verses, John repeats the same underlying idea in five slightly different hypotheticals. So same idea, five different hypotheticals getting at it from different angles, different emphases, different elaborations. So in a very real sense, each of these hypotheticals is an elaboration or an explanation of the other four. So each of them you can pick, and that will help me understand the other four. And we can see this. We can see that this is repetition of. conceptual overlap that's the same underlying idea by all these links that John puts between them, right? It's not an independent list, is it? There's a lot of links. I mean, you can see, for example, we already talked about it, but in the first pair of hypotheticals, we have two clear opposites, right? They're alternatives to each other. Verse six, the if statement includes walking in darkness. And then alternatively, in verse 7, the if statement includes walking in the light. So we have these two opposite vantages on the same idea. There's walking in light versus walking in darkness. This is what happens when you walk in darkness versus what happens when you walk in the light. We're clearly dealing with the same topic from two different vantage points. And then we have another clear pair of opposites in verses 8-10. Actually this time we get three of them. Two of the same sandwiching their opposite. In verse 8, if we say we have no sin, also in verse 10, if we say we have not sinned, which is juxtaposed with verse 9, if we confess our sins, So again, in the if portion of the hypothetical, we have two opposite vantage points. Denying we have sins versus confessing our sins. So again, clearly the same topic. But then the question is, how do these two topics relate? What is the relationship between walking in darkness versus walking in the light and denying our sin versus confessing our sin? argue that these are the same thing. In other words, what John means by walking in darkness, primarily, his major emphasis here is denying your sins. And what John means by walking in the light is confessing your sins. And we can see this by, again, the cross-links between the statements. In verse six, the results of walking in darkness and claiming fellowship with God is that we lie and do not practice the truth. Then in verse eight, the results of saying we have no sin is that the truth is not in us. And then in verse 10, the result of denying sin is that God's word is not in us. And as we know, in Jesus' high priestly prayer recorded for us in John, that God's word is truth. So, not practicing the truth, not having the truth in us, not having God's Word in us. John presents these three things. Essentially the same result as a result from walking in darkness and a result as from denying your sin. So if you deny your sin, you don't have the truth in you. You don't do the truth. You don't have God's Word in you. If you walk in darkness, you don't have the truth in you. You don't perform the truth. God's Word is not in you. Similarly, from the positive side, in verse 7, one of the results of walking in the light is being cleansed from all sin. If you walk in light, you're cleansed from all sin. And then in verse 9, one of the results of confessing our sins is being cleansed from all unrighteousness. So again, essentially the same result from walking in the light and from confessing sins. The point is, what John means specifically by saying walking in the light is not living a sinless or practically sinless or mostly sinless life. I mean, after all, one of the results of walking in the light is being cleansed from your sins. So it obviously doesn't mean being sinless. No, what John means by walking in the light in this passage is recognizing and confessing your sins. God is light and His light shines. Jesus is light and His light shines. And it reveals the actual moral quality of our lives. So often you get this interchange in both the Gospel of John and in John's letters between light and truth and life. Jesus is the light. He is the truth. He is the light. He came to bring light. He came to bring truth. He came to bring life. And you see that light and life and truth in this interchange, all centering on Jesus, helps you understand, well then how do I get light? I get life from Jesus, but I also get light from Jesus. I also get truth from Jesus. So I'm not going to have truth apart from life and light, and I'm not going to have life apart from truth and light. There's all of these. They all go together. That means that God, in His quality, in His character, the Son, in His quality and character of being light, one of the things, or being life, or being truth, one of the things they do is reveal truth. So God is light. He is perfect in His character, He is perfect in His holiness, and one of the things that that does, God's character, His perfectness, His holiness, is it reveals, by juxtaposition, our character, and therefore our imperfection, and our lack of holiness. When God's light shines on us, we are confronted. We're confronted with His word. We're confronted with the truth. And then it reveals our evil. And that's one of the realities, the effects of God being light, is His light will reveal things about us. It will reveal things about us because we are, and it will reveal the sin about us because we are sinners. We have moral evil. bound up in our hearts, in our natures, idolatry, dishonor, ingratitude, murder, theft, covetousness, adultery. These things flow out of our heart. And the light, God's Word, His truth, Jesus Christ, reveals that about us. It's not the only thing it means when it says God is light, but because He is light, it reveals that about us when we are confronted, when we stand in the light. When Jesus said in John 3, 20, everyone who does wicked things hates the light. They hate the light and they do not come to the light lest their works should be exposed. They don't want to come to the light because that's what light does. Light exposes things. It helps you see things that are there and if you don't want to see the things that are there, you don't want to come to the light. That's the way we are naturally. Apart from God, we are naturally in sin and we don't want to come to Jesus because Jesus will expose us. He will expose us. We will see what we know deep down to be there, what God has written on our consciences. To walk in the light here is not to be sinless, it's rather to allow the light to expose our sins. So when John says God is light in our passage, he is saying God is holy and He is good and He is truth. He's both the source of truth and He's the revealer of truth. And the particular truth that is foremost in John's mind and is revealed to us by being confronted by God is the truth of our own fallen moral condition. We are sinners. We are evil. So we have before us two alternatives, two alternatives that John presents, walking in darkness and walking in the light. To walk in darkness is to deny our sins and to go about in happy semi-ignorance, pretending we're not sinners. To walk in the light is to confess our sins, to come to God who is light and to compare ourselves against his holy good standard, find ourselves wanting to acknowledge that we do fall short of the glory of God. And the alternatives are eternally significant. It's very grave what John is dealing with. Because if we deny, if we walk in darkness, if we deny that we are sinners, John says we do not have fellowship with God. We do not speak the truth. We do not have the truth in us. We do not have God's Word in us. This is very important. You cannot have God's Word in you. You cannot be a truthful person if you do not admit that you are a sinner, that you have fallen short of the glory of the one true God. Alternatively, consider walking in the light, confessing our sins, consider what He sets before us, what's promised. If we confess our sins, if we do, then we will have fellowship with each other, that special fellowship within the family of faith, with the apostles that we talked about last week, that fellowship that is ultimately with God. that we will be welcomed into the eternal love between the Father and the Son. That is the result of confessing sins, of walking in the light, of coming to the light, to be in the family of faith, have friendship, eternal friendship with each other and ultimately with God. And we will have all that, as John says, because, in verse 7, because the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin. He makes this promise and then He gives this glorious reality that upholds it. We will have fellowship with each other. We will have fellowship with God because if we confess our sins, if we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin. Now this refers at least to a judicial cleansing from guilt and cosmic consequences. And we know this because the cleansing is paired with forgiveness here. And the cleansing is described as being just. It is a just act to cleanse us from sins. We see both of those in verse 9. God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we confess our sins, God will forgive them, and that includes a cleansing work that washes away any lingering stains of guilt that might implicate us on judgment day. That's washed away, cleansed. That's what happens when we confess our sins. But, how does that work? Why? Why does that work? Why does confessing our sins guarantee us forgiveness? Why is it just? Why is it faithful of God to forgive us our sins when we confess? John gives us the answer with the way that he concludes his discussion of sin here. If you're reading the ESV at this point, you might, we're gonna move on to verses one and two of chapter two. If you're reading the ESV, you might be thinking, wow, we're stopping at a really random point. We're just going two sentences in to this next paragraph. That is because there are no paragraphs originally in the text. We always have to make decisions, and editors have to make decisions on where we're gonna break up the text, and John speaks very conversationally, so most people don't really know where to break it, because when you're having a conversation, You don't have very clear breaks. Some people break there. If you're reading the Holman Christian Standard or NIV, a number of other translations break where we're putting the break, which is after verse 2 of chapter 2. And the reason for this is all of this. chapter 1, verse 5 all the way through chapter 2, verse 2 is dominated by sin language. In 8 times in 8 verses John repeats the word sin or to sin. And then he drops that after 2, 2 and doesn't return to it again until 3, 4. So this really is chapters 2, verse 1 and 2 is a conclusion of sorts to John's whole discussion of sin. That's why we're including verses 1 and 2 in this sermon. So it's a conclusion of sorts. And notice how he concludes. He says, in light of what I've said about confession, walking in the light, he says, my children, my little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. my purpose. John clarifies, just because walking in the light means to confess sins doesn't mean that John is fatalistically thinking there is no hope for any moral improvement or goodness, you're just stuck the way you are. No, John hopes that the gospel that he is announcing will also have a morally transformative effect on your life. And he's going to unpack that more as he goes in this letter. When you have a light, yes, the light will illumine your path so that you can walk. But the first thing the light does is it illuminates you and you see how dirty you are. So it does both. The light does provide a path. God's light does provide both the path and the means for moral transformation. He is going to unpack that. But here at the start, right now, his focus is on what do you do with your sins, right? You've got the light. Before we even get on the path, this light has revealed your sins. What do you do with those sins? He says, but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. The reason, the reason why confession of sins guarantees cleansing from those sins, which is both an exercise of justice and faithfulness on God's part, not just mercy, but justice and faithfulness, is because we have an advocate. That is, we've got a lawyer. We've got a lawyer in the heavenly courtroom who represents us. And the reason why his representation is effective for our acquittal, such that God must acquit in order to be just and faithful, is because Jesus is the propitiation for our sins. This is one of those times where you just can't get away without learning a word. There are a few theological words that you just, you have to learn. You're gonna be a Christian, you gotta learn these words. Propitiation is one of them. Propitiation, apropitiation in biblical theology is a payment. It is a payment that appeases God's wrath. God has wrath against sin. He has divine anger. And He has a divine anger that is aimed at sinners because of their sin. Not aimed at sin just in the abstract, but aimed at sinners, aimed at individual. God has wrath against every individual for their sin. And that God makes us uncomfortable sometimes to think about it. especially if you're not a Christian here. You hear that and that's very uncomfortable. But that God has wrath against sin is not something that should make us question God's character. It's something that should make us question our character. If the one who is light, who is eternal life, whose word is truth, if that one has an eternal wrath against our sin, that should be an indication of how serious our sin is. Our sin is not a minor issue. It's not trivial imperfection on an overall wonderful human being. Our sin is evil. Sometimes sin is too sterile for us because the word has lost its meaning. It's evil. We have evil. I mean, we could see a picture of the evil just in how John progressively describes the relationship to truth, our relationship to truth in this passage, right? Because refusing to confess our sins is itself a sin. And notice how in verse 6 that's described as lying, generically, but then in verse 7 it's lying to ourselves, and then in verse 10 it's making God a liar. That's what all of our sin ultimately does. Ultimately, it challenges God. It's not just a problem of us and external action. It's not just a problem of us and ourselves. Ultimately, it challenges God and rejects Him. It stakes a claim, it draws a line, and it says, I'm sticking with me. I'm rejecting you. I'm rejecting life and light and truth. That's what our sin does. It rejects light and life and truth. It is not a minor issue. None of our sin is a minor issue. And so God has wrath. He rightfully has wrath against evil. For God to be just, He must have wrath against evil. For God to be faithful, He must have wrath against evil. And propitiation, propitiation is something that satisfies that wrath. And when I say satisfies, I'm using it in the strong sense of the word, not in the weaker sense in some English usage, like when we say, like, I'm okay with that. I'm satisfied. No, for God's wrath to be satisfied doesn't just mean God is soothed or distracted so that now He's okay ignoring sin. That's not what we mean when we say that God's wrath is satisfied in propitiation. It's a limited illustration, but you can think about it this way. Like, if I really, really wanted a slice of Nino's pizza from Buffalo Grove, and that's all I could think about. I really wanted it. It is possible to soothe and distract me from that desire. We could watch a TV show, or play a board game, or go hit some tennis balls. You could take my mind off the craving so it no longer drives me, and at the end of the day, I didn't get my pizza, and you say, was today a good day? It's like, yeah, I'm satisfied. For God's wrath to be satisfied doesn't mean God is just soothed and distracted. That's not propitiation. Propitiation is a bite of the pizza. It is the satisfaction in the sense of perfectly fulfilling the desire. For God's wrath to be propitiated means God's wrath has to be perfectly fulfilled. And the desire of God's wrath is for justice against the evil of our sin to be distributed, to be meted out. That's the drive behind divine wrath, justice against wickedness. For that to be satisfied means that wickedness must be punished in a satisfactory way. Totally, completely, wholly in a way that still respects God's holiness and goodness and still holds it up perfectly. Jesus is a propitiation in that way, in that he satisfies the wrath of God by being punished on our behalf, by taking all the punishment that sin deserves by himself in his eternal person, taking the eternal punishment that all of our sins deserve. As John says, not just for us only, not just for us apostles, not just for us first generation of Christians, but anyone, anyone who would believe, anyone who would confess their sins, Jesus is a propitiation able to satisfy the wrath of God for every single individual who would trust in Him. He is able to bear the punishment on the cross for every individual because of His eternal person. He actually bore divine wrath. That's what happened on the cross. On the cross, He didn't just bear nails and scorn and mocking, physical suffering. All of that is true. We don't minimize physical suffering. but on the cross he bore divine wrath. So that God's justice isn't just soothed, it's satisfied. God's wrath isn't soothed, it's satisfied. That's most fundamentally what the cross of Jesus Christ is. It's why the cross has become the symbol of the Christian faith, not just because it's an example of self-sacrifice, it was, it was an example of self-sacrifice, but because the cross is a propitiation. It's a satisfaction of the wrath of God. Because the cross is when God spent his wrath against the sin of all those who would trust in Jesus, on Jesus. Justice is satisfying. So now, Now, when we confess our sins, which is an act of trust, we heard that in Psalm 32. In Psalm 32, you remember, David is exhorting confession. He wants you to confess your sins. And at the end, one of the things he says to help that exhortation is, steadfast love surrounds the ones who trust in the Lord. He calls the ones who confess the ones who trust. If you trust, you will confess. And if you confess, that's an act of trusting. Steadfast love surrounds the one who trusts. To trust God, in such a way that you take the exposing light of His truth seriously, and you take seriously also all the promises of His words. You trust Him, you come to Him, you come to His exposing light, and you take that light seriously, and you take all the promises in that light seriously. To confess your sins is to trust God. And when you trust God, you are counted in Jesus. When you trust God, He is the wrath satisfying payment on your behalf. And He becomes your lawyer in the heavenly courtroom to make sure that that payment is credited to you before the watching eyes of all the cosmos. No one, not Satan, not any of the heavenly beings will be able to bring a charge against you. No one can bring any charge against God's elect. because Jesus is there making sure that His payment on your behalf is credited to you. So when you walk in the light, when you confess your sins, God then is faithful and He's just to forgive you of those sins. But perhaps you are not here with a sensitive conscience exposed by the light of God's Word. Perhaps you're here with a hardened conscience. I don't know the hearts of the people in this room, You might be the opposite case that I mentioned in the beginning. You might be here today thinking, even still, I'm not that bad. I'm not that bad. I mean, I'm not perfect. I will admit. I'm not perfect. I make mistakes. And yes, I will even admit to consciously doing bad things, intentional. That happens. I do do that from time to time. But I'm not that bad. I'm on the whole a good person. If that is your honest self-assessment, then you are in darkness. You're in darkness right now. You're calling God a liar. And you do not have fellowship with God. You do not have friendship with God. You cannot have friendship with God and deny your sins. You cannot have the truth in you and claim that God's wrath is what's the problem and deny that you deserve that wrath. It's not possible. When you let the light of Jesus' Word shine on you, it will reveal sin, serious sin, grievous sin. It will reveal all the ways that you have challenged and rejected God, that you have called Him a liar. It will reveal that you are actually in need of saving. Not just a little pick-me-up, but you are in need of saving. If you avoid the light, if you avoid the light and you stay in the darkness of self-denial and you believe in your own inherent mostly perfect, not perfect, but mostly perfect goodness, you are not God's friend. You are His enemy under His wrath. But it doesn't need to stay that way. It doesn't need to stay that way. You don't have to be afraid to come to the light. You don't have to be afraid to come. So come, come into the light. If you confess your sins, if you confess your sins, Jesus will be an advocate for you. Jesus Christ, for you, sinner though you are, he will advocate for you in heaven. The word, the truth, the life, the one who was there before there was there, he will be in heaven and he will argue for you. He will represent you and He will do it on the basis of the satisfying payment that He made for your sins. And therefore, even now, God will be faithful and He will be just to forgive you of those sins and to cleanse you from all of them. Let's pray. Lord, we do ask that we would continually come to You, that we would continually come to Your Word to have its light and life and truth exposed, the sin that is in us. That we who have made that definitive confession and acknowledgement of our sin would continue to grow in recognizing and confessing to You that we might experience evermore Your forgiveness and Your Son's representation of us that we would know what it's like to have the wrath against our sins satisfying. And I pray and ask for any, in this room particularly, who have not yet confessed their sins, that they would be exposed by Your person and Your truth through all the readings, all the prayers, all the singing that we've done and will do, that in this You would reveal Yourself, and therefore reveal them to themselves, that they might turn to You for saving. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.