But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.
1 John 1:7
God Is Light
John opens his letter with the message he says he heard from Jesus himself. "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all." Then he starts testing what we claim against how we actually live, and he says that if we claim fellowship with him while we walk in the darkness, we're lying. Verse 7 is where he turns to what's true instead, and verse 8 is the check on it. "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us."
John puts those two verses one after the other, so walking in the light can't mean sinlessness. He says in the same paragraph that anyone claiming to be without sin is fooling himself. Walking in the light describes a person who has stopped hiding, rather than a life with nothing wrong in it.
What the light produces isn't what you'd expect either. "We have fellowship with one another." You would expect fellowship with him, and John writes with one another, so coming into the light with God is what connects you to other people.
The purifying is ongoing too. The blood of Jesus purifies us, present tense, while we walk, rather than one washing at the entrance with the rest of it left to us. We walk in the light and he keeps cleaning as we go.
Tell Someone the True Version
Walking into the light is usually one sentence, said to one person. It could be telling your spouse the truth. It could be showing one friend the balance on the card. It could be telling somebody how you actually feel about your job. It could be praying the complaint you actually have, in the words you actually have, instead of the polite version.
Every one of those is a step into the light, and John's promise is that the step doesn't leave you exposed there. He names two things that come to meet you, which are people and cleansing.
I wrote about that pattern in Unity Comes Down, where David's two pictures of unity both fall from above rather than getting built from below. The fellowship John describes arrives the same way, so you step into the light and find people already standing there, rather than gathering them yourself.
We have this backwards, because we think we have to get clean before we can come into the light, and John says the light is where the cleaning happens.
Prayer
Father, you are light, and there's nothing dark in you at all. Thank you that you don't ask us to arrive clean. Give us the courage to stop editing, with you and with the people you've put around us. Where we've been hiding, help us take one step out today. Thank you that Jesus keeps washing us while we walk. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.