1 John
The First Epistle General of John
Fellowship, Light, and Love
John wrote this letter as an old man, likely from Ephesus, somewhere near the end of the first century — the last living eyewitness of the incarnate Christ, writing to churches he had shepherded for decades. He does not name himself, and he does not need to. His voice is unmistakable: the same rhythm of light and darkness, life and death, love and hate, that fills his Gospel now fills a pastor's letter to people he calls, again and again, "my little children."
Two dangers had entered the churches John loved. The first was doctrinal: a teaching, later called Gnosticism, that regarded matter as evil and spirit as the only true good. Some carried this so far that they denied Jesus Christ had truly come "in the flesh" (4:2–3) — to them, a real incarnation was unthinkable for a holy God. John calls this teaching what it is: the spirit of antichrist. The second danger was moral: if the body doesn't matter, why does sin? Some in these churches had begun to claim advanced spiritual knowledge while living however they pleased, treating obedience as optional for the truly enlightened. John will not allow the two to be separated. Right belief about Christ and right living in Christ stand or fall together.
That is why "Walk In Obedience" is the right title for this study. Walking is John's own picture for the whole of the Christian life — not a single decision but a direction, a daily manner of life. "He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked" (2:6). Obedience, for John, is never legalism; it is the shape love takes when it is real. "This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous" (5:3). He writes so that his readers might know — not hope, not guess, but know — that they have eternal life (5:13). The tests he gives throughout the letter (do you believe rightly about Christ, do you walk in the light, do you love the brethren) are not hoops to jump through. They are simply what a real, living fellowship with God looks like from the outside, offered to a church that needed to tell the true from the false in an hour when both were loudly claiming to speak for Christ.