Evening, August 31

Charles Spurgeon · Morning and Evening: Daily Readings

"If we walk in the light, as he is in the light."

  1 John 1:7

   As he is in the light! Can we ever attain to this? Shall we ever be
   able to walk as clearly in the light as he is whom we call "Our
   Father," of whom it is written, "God is light, and in him is no
   darkness at all?" Certainly, this is the model which is set before us,
   for the Saviour himself said, "Be ye perfect, even as your Father who
   is in heaven is perfect;" and although we may feel that we can never
   rival the perfection of God, yet we are to seek after it, and never to
   be satisfied until we attain to it. The youthful artist, as he grasps
   his early pencil, can hardly hope to equal Raphael or Michael Angelo,
   but still, if he did not have a noble beau ideal before his mind, he
   would only attain to something very mean and ordinary. But what is
   meant by the expression that the Christian is to walk in light as God
   is in the light? We conceive it to import likeness, but not degree. We
   are as truly in the light, we are as heartily in the light, we are as
   sincerely in the light, as honestly in the light, though we cannot be
   there in the same measure. I cannot dwell in the sun, it is too bright
   a place for my residence, but I can walk in the light of the sun; and
   so, though I cannot attain to that perfection of purity and truth which
   belongs to the Lord of hosts by nature as the infinitely good, yet I
   can set the Lord always before me, and strive, by the help of the
   indwelling Spirit, after conformity to his image. That famous old
   commentator, John Trapp, says, "We may be in the light as God is in the
   light for quality, but not for equality." We are to have the same
   light, and are as truly to have it and walk in it as God does, though,
   as for equality with God in his holiness and purity, that must be left
   until we cross the Jordan and enter into the perfection of the Most
   High. Mark that the blessings of sacred fellowship and perfect
   cleansing are bound up with walking in the light.