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