Our theme this month is "intimacy with God," and I find this an interesting but difficult subject to speak on. My primary problem is that I am not an intimate sort of person. I am not very good with relationships, so it is difficult for me to be intimate with anyone, or with God.

My relationship with God is not as good as it should be. I do not pray as much as some people do, and I do not pray as well as some people do. I do not have a continual awareness of God's presence in the way that some people do. I struggle with these things. I see what the Bible says, and I see where I am, and I see a big gap between the two.

Some of you could probably speak about this subject better than I can, and some of the other speakers this month probably have more intimacy with God than I do. I don't know; it's hard for me to judge that sort of thing.

But I know that everyone here falls short of the ideal. There is always a gap between spiritual possibilities and spiritual realities. We all need help, and so it is helpful for us to discuss this subject from several different angles, and that's one reason that we have several different speakers this month. Perhaps what I will say will help those who are like me in being less relational in personality.

I want to begin by reading from the NewLife worship brochure, inside, under the word "Welcome." It begins by saying, "We at NewLife Fellowship want to help more people enjoy new life through faith in Jesus Christ." I think that is a wonderfully concise way of saying what we as a church are all about.

First, we want to help people. We are a service-oriented congregation. We get people involved, and the purpose is to help other people. That's what our lives are for. That's what "love your neighbor" is all about.

Now, one of the important ways that we help people is to help them have new life in Jesus Christ. That's our name: The NewLife Fellowship. New life is important to us, because it is important to all people. Everyone needs a new life, needs to be born again, needs to be a new creation, needs to have life from God, an eternal life. The old life is not good enough — we all need a new life, and we want to help people find this new life. Our message, our gospel, invites people into a new and better life.

This new life, of course is in Jesus Christ. It is made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and our new life is described by Paul in many places as being "in Christ." We live in Christ, and he lives in us. The new life that we live is Jesus Christ living in us.

Now, this little statement in our brochure also tells us how we have that new life: it is not just through Jesus Christ, it is also through faith in Jesus Christ. He bought it for us, he paid the price for us, and now he offers it to us for free, but our part is to accept the gift, to accept him as our life. It is by faith that the old life is set aside and the new life is received. As Galatians 2:20 says, our new life, of Christ living in us, we live by faith in him.

Now, most of us have already begun this new life, so we want to help more people find new life through faith in Jesus Christ. As our brochure says, we want to help more people accept this new life that Jesus offers. Evangelism is an important reason for our existence as a congregation. We want to help more people have this new life, and they get it through hearing about and having faith in Jesus Christ.

But there is an important word in this sentence that I have not commented on yet, and that is the word "enjoy." We want people to not just have a new life, we also want them to enjoy it. There are several reasons for this.

For one, if the new life is not better than the old, then we aren't helping anybody if we give then a worse life than they had before. "New" is not always better, but the new life we are talking about is better, and we should enjoy it. If we don't enjoy it, we are much less likely to want others to have it. We are much less likely to share it. We might share it out of duty, but it is better for us to share it out of joy, out of a conviction that this new life is distinctly better and more enjoyable than the old life. By telling people how they can get this new life, we are doing them a favor, helping them in a specific and important way.

Now, this means an ongoing job, a never-ending job. First, people get the new life, and after that, they enjoy it — or I should say that they learn to enjoy it. It does not come instantly. We all need help in living the Christian life, and in learning to enjoy the Christian life, and our brochure is saying that this is one of the reasons that this congregation exists: we not only want to help more people begin the new life that Jesus offers, we also want to help each other enjoy the new life that we have. We want to help each other in our pains and difficulties, and we want to encourage each other as we live for Christ, and we want to encourage each other in our spiritual growth.

And that's what today's message is about — it's about intimacy with God, with the specific focus of joy — of having joy in our relationship with God, of enjoying the life we have with him.

Now, like I said, I am not an expert on this, so I can't use myself for a lot of sermon illustrations. I can't describe wonderful experiences and tell you to "go thou and do likewise." Instead, I will have to turn the scriptures. I don't want to preach myself — I want to preach what the Scriptures say. They are the authority; I am not.

So this morning I want to turn to a passage of Scripture that can help us have more joy in our relationship with God — that is the book of First John.

Verse 4 tells us why John wrote this letter. 1 John 1, verse 4 tells us "We write this to make our joy complete." That's the New International Version; the King James Version says that "We write these things to you that your joy may be full." Some of the earliest copies of this letter say "our joy," and some say "your joy." Perhaps that is because John sometimes includes his readers when he says "we," and sometimes he makes a distinction.

But no matter which word was original, it amounts to the same thing. The kind of spiritual growth that would make John full of joy, would also make his readers full of joy. In John 15:11 we are told that Jesus wants his disciples to be full of joy. John wasn't writing this just to amuse himself — he was writing it for a spiritual reason, for spiritual growth in his readers. He was trying to help them in their faith. It seems that they already had faith, they were already Christians, they already had a new life, and John was writing to help them in that new life, to grow spiritually, to have a better understanding and a better appreciation of that new life. He wanted them to enjoy it more, to be able to rejoice more, to be more thankful, to be more dedicated to Jesus Christ, who had given them this new life.

So I take it that this book is going to help us, too, and it does that by talking about fellowship with God — that's the word that verse 3 uses — and this word "fellowship" is another word for intimacy with God. So I want to look at this book to see what it says about how we can enjoy intimacy with God.

How does does it start? It starts with a historical fact. John begins by describing the authority for what he writes. He didn't just make it up. He was not just giving his own ideas or "this is the way I look at it."

He says in verse 1: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched -- this we proclaim concerning the Word of life."

John is saying, in other words, that we know what we are talking about. He have heard it with our own ears, we have seen it with our own eyes, we have investigated it ourselves, even touching it with our hands. We are absolutely sure that we've got a grip on the truth that we are writing to you.

John wrote near the end of the first century, and by that time there were already some false ideas circulating about Jesus Christ. Many of these ideas were categorized under the name Gnosticism, which comes from the Greek word for knowledge. People claimed to have secret knowledge about Jesus, or about the way of salvation. And from the way that John writes, we can see that he must have been confronting some time of Gnosticism.

And he's saying, in contrast, we don't have any secret knowledge. We haven't thought this up in some mysterious philosophy. We are just talking about what we have seen and touched with our own hands. If you had been there, you could have seen it, too. You could have touched it, too. There's nothing secret or mysterious about it. The true faith is based on ordinary facts, not some cleverly designed fables.

And what we have seen actually dates from the beginning — from the beginning of time. We are not talking about plan B or plan C: we are talking about God's original plan. Nothing mysterious here. This Jesus that we saw is the Word of life. This is the life we are talking about, the life that is in Jesus Christ. This is the message about new life in Jesus Christ.

"The life appeared," he writes in verse 2, "we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us." He's talking about Jesus Christ, the man who said, I am the way and the truth and the life. Jesus Christ is the author of life and the incarnation of life. He shows us what life is, what true humanity is. This eternal being called life became flesh and appeared to us. We have seen it and touched it with our own hands.

This eternal life is in Jesus Christ. It's not in weird speculations or strange teachings. It is in a specific person who lived at a specific time in history, not in some mythological distant past, but in my own lifetime, says John. It has solid historical roots, facts that can be investigated, it's not speculations falsely called knowledge.

John has confidence that what he says is true. He doesn't need to talk fancy words to convince anybody. The truth is simple.

Verse 3: "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ." So here's the purpose of the letter: fellowship with one another, and fellowship with God and Jesus Christ. This fellowship begins with a historical foundation — it begins with Jesus Christ, a specific person.

You see, it's not enough to know God as a Creator, as an All-Powerful, All-knowing spirit being out there somewhere. It's not enough to know that there is a God. That's a good start, but we cannot have fellowship or relationship with an abstract power, with a philosophical idea, with a logical conclusion. No, to have a relationship, to have any intimacy, we must know God as a personal being, a person who is interested in us as a person.

God is so great, so glorious. He knows everything, so of course he knows us, but does he care about us as an individual? Certainly — God is the sort of God who takes interest in individuals, and we know that primarily from Jesus Christ, who reveals to us in flesh and blood what God is really like.

He is a person who interacts with people as individuals. He walked on dusty roads. He got hungry and he got tired. He asked questions and gave answers. He laughed and he cried. He talked with specific people like Zaccheus and Martha and Thomas. And yet he was the way and the truth and the life. He was the author of life, and the author of individual personalities.

If you have seen me, he said, you have seen the Father. He's not talking about hair color or skin color or any superficial thing — he is talking about being a person. If we can interact with Jesus, then we can interact with God the Father. Jesus is just a carbon copy of the Father. Jesus puts flesh and bones onto our relationship with God.

Without Jesus, our relationship with God would be an abstract one. He is the Almighty, the Eternal. He can appear as a human being, or he can appear as a pillar of fire, or he can appear as a burning bush. He can speak with thunder, or in a whisper, or through a prophet. He can open the Red Sea, or rain fire and brimstone down on Sodom, or cause a stone to hit Goliath in the forehead. God has rules, and he commands us to obey — but what is he really like?

He is really like Jesus. Jesus shows us what God is like, and by doing that, it is possible for us to have a relationship with him — not an abstract relationship of obeying certain rules, but a more personal relationship that involves love and joy.

Jesus didn't just die for our sins. He did that that, but he also lived to show us what God is like. When our relationship with God is abstract and impersonal, we need to see Jesus. We need to know him as the real revelation of what God is like. Now, that doesn't instantly solve all our problems and give us instant intimacy, but it is a start in the right direction. At least that's the way that John starts us off in this letter: He roots our fellowship and our joy in a Jesus who was heard and seen and touched. He proclaims this Jesus so that we can have fellowship with the Father and the Son.

Verse 4: "We write this to make our joy complete." Now, what is it that would make John most happy? It would be to help others understand more accurately about Jesus, to have the fellowship with Jesus that he has. This letter is designed to help us have that kind of intimacy with God.

And he proceeds in a somewhat surprising way — verse 5: "This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all." Now, I think this is suprising, because if I wanted to encourage you to have a closer relationship with God, I would not begin by talking about how pure and perfect he is. Because all of us still have weaknesses. We still have sins. We still have some darkness in our lives, and so it might seem discouraging to be told that God will have nothing to do with us the way we are.

Ah, but that's not what he means.

He has already told us that Jesus Christ, the perfect person, has walked among us and talked with us and had fellowship with us even when we were sinners. And one of the things that Jesus told us is that God is perfect, but he wants to have fellowship with us anyway. He is saying that we already have fellowship with a perfect being. We do not have to work our way up toward perfection, as the Gnostics taught.

John is not trying to scare us here — he is trying to encourage us by saying that we already have fellowship with the perfect God. We don't have to work our way up through intermediaries, or take special steps, or work our way up a hierarchy. The God we already have access to is the perfect God, not some subordinate being who got his hands dirty by working with mortal beings like us. We have fellowship with the highest being possible, the perfect light, the perfectly holy one.

Verse 6: "If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth." Now, obviously, John is using a metaphor here, a figure of speech. He is not talking about light in the electromagnetic spectrum. He is not talking about light that can be measured by a camera light meter.

Rather, he is using the words light and darkness to refer to spiritual realities, spiritual conditions. And we have to be careful that we do not misidentify what he is referring to. What does it mean to walk in the darkness? It is easy to assume — and many Christians have made this assumption — that if we sin then we are walking in darkness.

Well now, that's a discouraging thought. If we sin — and we all do — then God won't have anything to do with us.

I agree that Christians should try to avoid sin, and that we should try to please God in the way we live. But this does not seem to be what John is saying right here, and the best way to show that, I think, is just to read the next verse.

Verse 7: "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." Now, if walking in the light means to live without sin, then the verse makes no sense. It would mean that people who are perfect get along great with each other, and the blood of Jesus purifies them. But if they are perfect, they don't need to be purified. John is apparently talking about something else.

He says very clearly in verse 8 that Christians sin, just like everybody else. We sin, but yet we walk in the light. Other people might do good in their lives, but if they do not believe in Christ, they are walking in darkness.

And that is apparently what John is saying: people who believe in Jesus Christ, who accept him as Savior, are by that very faith walking in light. Walking in the light means to have faith in Christ. We are not walking perfectly, but we are walking in the right place.

It's like Paul said in Colossians 1:12-13 — when we believe in Christ, we are transferring into the kingdom of God, into the kingdom of light. Even though we sometimes sin, just as we did before, we are at least headed in the right direction. We are in the right place. If we have accepted Jesus Christ as our Savior, then we are by definition in his kingdom and we are by definition walking in the light. Not walking perfectly, but walking in the right place.

Here again, what John writes here is supposed to encourage us, not intimidate us into thinking that we face an impossible task. He is saying that even though we sometimes sin, we have fellowship with the perfect God, and we are walking in the right place, and the blood of Jesus is purifying us from all sin.

But apparently the Gnostic teachers were saying that human beings are walking in darkness and there is this enormous gap between God and us, and it is only through special knowledge and secret mysteries that we can slowly get into a little more light and make a step upward.

Not so, says John. If we have Jesus, we are already walking in the light. We already have fellowship with God, who is perfect light. We do not have to be perfect to have a relationship with God. If we have faith in Jesus, then we have fellowship with one another, and fellowship with God and Jesus Christ, and if we have faith in Jesus, then his blood purifies us from all sin — and I do mean all sin. We do not get purified by living a perfect life. We get purified by believing in Jesus Christ, who paid the penalty to pay for all our sins.

John is saying that Christians do not need special passwords to get to God. We do not need special secrets to be cleansed of our sins. All we need is Jesus, and faith in Jesus, because he has done everything that is needed.

Now, we have already addressed a couple of barriers that inhibit our fellowship with God. First, that he is so great and so perfect that he wouldn't want anything to do with us. Not so, says John. Though we are imperfect, we already have fellowship with the light. We already walk in the light.

The second barrier is related to the first: we are sinners. We fall short of God's glory, so why would he want anything to do with us? Well, don't worry about that, John says. Jesus purifies us from all sins. That's why we can have fellowship with God — because of Jesus, we are pure. God wants to fellowship with us so much that he sent his Son to make it possible. There is no real barrier.

If we feel like there is a barrier, as all of us do at times, then it is in our own mind. That's why John is writing to them, to educate them, to help them understand.

Now, between one person and another, what can interrupt our fellowship? If I've done something bad to you, whether you know it or not, I will feel a strain between me and you. My guilty conscience will prevent me from being at ease with you. My sin will trouble me.

And on the other hand, if I think you have something against me, deserved or not, I won't be at ease with you. I will be mindful of the grudge you have against me.

Now, between us and God, Jesus takes care of both of these problems. He says, yes, you have done wrong, but I forgive you. You can admit your sin, clear it, and go forward. That does not need to be a barrier.

And you've done wrong things that you don't even know about. Don't worry about those, either. They are already taken care of. You don't need to search for all the skeletons in your closet — I have removed them. You are forgiven. You are pure. You are walking in the light, because you are in me, and I am perfect light. So, through Jesus, we have fellowship with God Almighty.