p with God and our brother?
Here 1 John 1:7 has come afresh to us. "If we walk in the light, as
He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the
Blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin." What is
meant by light and darkness is that light reveals, darkness hides.
When anything reproves us, shows us up as we really are--that is
light. "Whatsoever doth make manifest is light."[footnote3:Eph.5: 13]
But whenever we do anything or say anything (or don't say anything)
to hide what we are or what we've done--that is darkness.

Now the first effect of sin in our lives is always to make us try and
hide what we are. Sin made our first parents hide behind the trees of
the garden and it has had the same effect on us ever since. Sin
always involves us in being unreal, pretending, duplicity, window
dressing, excusing ourselves and blaming 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