Probably the most joyous and fulfilling thing that God allows me to do is to sit down with a brother (in my case) and dig into the Word of God together. Sadly the experience is not as often as I would like, but I am very thankful whenever it occurs. This morning J & I spent an hour in 1 John 1. We prayed that the Holy Spirit would teach and guide us. ( John 14:26, 16:13) The Father answered our prayer showing us many things. Among the highlights were John's eyewitness account of Jesus- "which we have seen" 3 times, John's declaration of what he had seen so that we might have fellowship with the Father and the Son, (v.3) the purpose of the declaration, that we might have full joy (What does that imply about God? He is joyful and wants us to experience that also), contrast between light and darkness, the identification of Jesus as truth cf. John 14:6, Ephesians 4:21 et. al., the crucial importance of the cleansing blood of Jesus to allow us, made of the dust of the earth, to have fellowship with an infinitely holy God, the deception of thinking that we have no sin, the part we must play in confession of sins, the righteous, fair and forgiving judge, God the Father, and the reality that it is through the lense of Christ, as the Head of the Body, that God can look upon us. (Habakkuk 1:13-14) We looked at a number of cross-references. While I would not make a law insisting that true fellowship with Christ and one another must involve the Word, it would surprise me to think that the Holy Spirit working through the Word (e.g. Acts 1:16, Hebrews 3:7) would not occur in some way.
*Fun with Portuguese. I learned a new phrase, which I don't know how to spell. The literal translation is "foot of a boy." This is a sweet, popular in Brazil, consisting of peanuts encrusted with a butterscotch colored sugary glaze, flat and about the size of a medium pancake.
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One of the things in 1 John that is meaning more and more to me is that when we confess our sins to God, he not only forgives, but also purifies us. And also the challenge that we need to walk as Jesus walked. Often believers don't pay full heed to these concepts, and can dismiss them because they seem to speak of Perfectionism, and we all know that sinless perfection cannot happen before glory. Nonetheless, in his word God does promise purification when we confess, and he does tell us that we must walk as Jesus walked...so this does mean something, and shouldn't we try to understand and seek to make this part of our faith experience with Jesus? My sense after 30+ years is that we Evangelicals make much of imputed righteousness, and we make little or nothing of imparted righteousness. But both are clearly taught in scripture, and without holiness no one will see the Lord (Heb 12:14). I believe that each of us who claim to have a saving relationship with God based on faith and repentance should, over time, increasingly evidence the fruit of righteousness (Eph 5:9 and Phl 1:11.
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