We live life sometimes as though joy is something that we experience on the outside. But actually it’s something that lives in our hearts. And when we try to store up rubbish in our hearts, we shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t come up smelling like roses.

There's a basic maxim in today's society that if it feels good, just do it. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone else it's okay. In fact even if it does hurt other people a bit, well tough, I'm entitled and the next step beyond that is, well as long as we don't know about it, who cares, just ignore it and many, many people live their lives that way. Provided that everything looks decent and respectable on the outside, who cares what happens behind closed doors?

Who cares that men are caught up in pornography, who cares if husbands and wives are unfaithful, who cares if someone cheats on their tax returns, who cares if people carry around anger and hate and mistrust and unforgiveness in their hearts? Who cares, as long as they look clean and respectable on the outside, as long as they're doing a good job as far as we're concerned? Well, their private lives really do belong to them, who cares? And on the surface that sounds just fine and dandy but scratch below the thin veneer of respectability and it's a whole different story.

I want to share a story with you from my childhood; I've shared this once before on the program a long time ago. The wonderful thing about being a child in a family, it's a place where you can learn right from wrong, you can make mistakes along the way and so by the time you become an adult hopefully you get it right more often than you get it wrong. I would have been about 11 or 12 years old, I was old enough you would think to know right from wrong and I started stealing some money from my parents.

Now my mother had this green plastic piggy bank in the bottom of her wardrobe, it was full of 20 cent coins and I would liberate the odd 20 cents or 40 cents or even 60 cents, not enough for anyone to notice, I mean it wasn't hurting anyone, she could spare the money. See how even a child can rationalise these things and I'd spend it on lollies or down at the local fish and chip shop after school.

Now I used to kid myself how clever I was and how much I was enjoying the fruits of my newfound income but deep down inside I didn't have a lot of joy about what I was doing because it was just plain wrong, it was stealing, it was theft. Of course one day I was caught and I had to live out the consequences of that and it didn't do a whole bunch for my relationship with my parents as I recall, the loss of trust, to have someone stealing in their own home.

Now I learnt a lesson from that, the things that we have to hide are always wrong and they rob us of the natural peace and joy that we should have. My theft robbed me of my joy. I'll come back to that a little bit later and it's a lesson that I'll carry around with me for the rest of my life.

Now I want to share with you something that the apostle John wrote in a book called 1 John in the New Testament. It's a letter that he wrote to some other Christians in the first century. Have a listen, it comes from 1 John chapter 1, verse 5 through to 10:

This is a message that we've heard from Him and we declare it to you. God is light, in Him there's no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with Him yet we walk in darkness, we lie and we don't live by the truth 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.

If we claim to be without sin we're kidding ourselves and the truth isn't in us. If we confess our sins, He's faithful and just and He'll forgive us our sins and purify us from all that unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned we make Him out to be a liar and His word has no place in our lives.

Now this is a passage that confused me for a long time. You see he starts off by saying that, "if you're wandering around in that darkness, well you're living a lie" but the second part says, "if we claim to be without sin we're kidding ourselves." How can he have it both ways? He's saying we shouldn't be wandering around in the darkness and yet he's saying we've all sinned. It didn't make sense to me.

Now I know, for a lot of people and for me for a long time, sin is this old fashioned judgemental, moralising, religious word that has nothing to do with the realities of contemporary life. Well, it's not that at all. The word sin means literally "to miss the mark" or as we might say it today "to miss the whole point of life" because the point of life is that God wants us to live a good life, in relationship with Him and to enjoy our lives. And when we do things like liberate 20 or 40 or 60 cents from mum's piggy bank or worse, we're not going to enjoy our lives.

And as I thought and prayed a lot about this passage and yes, it's true we have all sinned. That's what John says here:

If we claim to be without sin we're kidding ourselves and the truth is not in us.

We have all sinned, we have all missed the mark, we've all missed the point of life but that's different, you see, from wandering around in the darkness.

Wandering around in the darkness is saying, "well um, it's not sin at all, its okay. I can rationalise what I do, I'm not hurting anyone, nobody notices, its fine, what's the point?" See, wandering around in the darkness is holding back from God. Just like that little boy who rationalised the 20 cents and the 40 cents that he stole from his parents, darkness is hidden sin. Listen to this:

This is the message we've heard from Him and we declare it to you. God is light, in Him there's no darkness. If we claimed to be in the light with Him, having fellowship with Him and yet we're walking in the darkness, we're lying; we're not living in the truth.

See darkness is walking is about walking around in sin and often its hidden sin. This darkness blinds us and we don't see it for what it is and that darkness robs us of our joy. Let’s talk about the man caught up in pornography. How much is he going to enjoy the intimacy in his marriage? Or the woman with hidden anger in her heart, how much is she going to enjoy life? Or someone harbouring bitterness or lying or stealing or whatever it is. That hidden stuff grips us, it's a pitch blackness and it robs us of the joy that Jesus wants us to have.

One of the passages over these last couple of weeks we've been coming back to again and again is what Jesus prayed just before He was crucified. You can read it in John chapter 17. He said:

Dad, I'm coming to you now but I pray all these things while I'm still here in the world so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them.

Jesus died for you and me to be set free from sin, to have a relationship with God through Him so that we could experience His joy. When we hold on to hidden sin, it robs us of that joy. It's just like theft as a child robbed me of my joy, it just wasn't worth it.

I want to encourage you today to examine your heart, please don't live another day in hidden sin. Jesus wants you to have His joy and He will give it to you if you ask Him. He will set you free from that sin if you ask Him. It's something we can't do on our own but by His spirit and His power and His healing He will set us free. To His disciples He said:

Until now you haven't asked for anything in my name; ask and you will receive and your joy will be complete.