BY THE TIME the apostle John wrote his letters, he was no spring chicken. (Comic Paul Reiser once quipped that whatever a “spring chicken” is, apparently, it’s only something you’re not. After all, you never say that someone is “currently a spring chicken.”) The apostle didn’t die until near the end of the first century. By the time he penned those letters, John may have been in his late eighties — possibly even 90. It had been decades since the death and resurrection of Jesus, Pentecost, and the birth of the church. He knew as much about the history of the Christian movement as anyone alive.

So if he was indeed the author of the three letters that traditionally bear his name, then he was known as “the Elder” for good reason.

As we’ve seen, John declared that God is light in a way that was consistent with what he had written earlier in his gospel. Somehow, some believers had apparently taken that a step further, but in the wrong direction: they began to claim that they no longer sinned. Reading between the lines of John’s letter, we might imagine these misguided Christians doing sinful things but deluding themselves into thinking that all was well. They may even have attempted to draw others into their delusion, as in, “Let’s start a new denomination. We’ll call it The Church of Children of the Light. Or maybe just The Church of We Get It and They Don’t.”

John, of course, couldn’t let this stand, and wrote to correct the budding heresy. Using strong language, he insisted that anyone who denied sin was not only lying to themselves, but calling God a liar!

That doesn’t mean that John was abrasive by nature. Having forcefully confronted the error, he now switches from the more sweeping pronoun “we” to the more direct and personal “I,” and speaks as a loving elder:

My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. (1 John 2:1-2, NIV)

“My dear children,” he says, in the New International Version. Your translation may have “my little children” instead. John is using the diminutive form of the usual Greek word for child here. In English, it would be similar to the difference between “kids” and “kiddos,” or even “kiddies.” It’s a term of affection.

And what he wants is for the kiddos to avoid sin whenever they can.

AGAIN, FROM THE apostle’s perspective, anyone who claims to be without sin lives in denial. The consequence of such a claim is that we are blind to the way we are mistreating our brothers and sisters and therefore never take responsibility for our behavior.

Obviously, we don’t have to be heretics for that to be true. As I’ve already suggested, any of us can be guilty of downplaying our own sin and selfishness. We often have an automatic and defensive preference for thinking well of ourselves and therefore less well of others, a need to be right at the expense of others being wrong. And what goes around comes around. The more we insist on our innocence, the more others feel blamed and insist on their innocence in turn. People — even well-meaning, faithful Christians — become too busy trying to prove that they’re right to listen to any other point of view.

You may have seen it. Imagine two people (or two groups of people!) arguing with each other over a point of doctrine. Both are convinced that they’re right. Both see themselves as defending the faith, as upholding what the Bible really teaches, or what God really wants. And both may be blind to their own offensive behavior toward the other: the anger, the innuendo, the name-calling, the contemptuous rolling of the eyes. Later, when they calm down, they might be willing to admit, Okay, so I didn’t handle that as well as I could have. But that admission isn’t followed by repentance, apology, or a desire for reconciliation — just an insistence that even if they were wrong in some way, the other person was more wrong, and therefore really the one to blame.

Yes, this happens in the church. And if it happens regularly enough in any particular congregation, some people will no longer feel safe to be there. They may walk in with smiles pasted on their faces, but part of their brain is on the alert for the next offense.

WHATEVER THE SITUATION was in his community, John approaches the people as a wise elder. He doesn’t want the kiddos to sin, and knows that for any of them to deny their own sin will only make the situation worse. So he makes it clear: complete sinlessness simply isn’t possible. No Christian is without sin.

But what then? Where does that leave us with a holy God who hates sin?

John’s letter reads as if he knows that insisting on the reality of sin is going to make some people nervous. What to do? Give them encouragement. Remind them of who God is, of who the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross has shown God to be. That will be John’s next word of fatherly wisdom.