And hereby we do know that we have knowledge of Him, if we observe His commandments. He that saith I have knowledge of Him and observeth not His commandments is a liar, and in this man the truth is not. But whoso observeth His word verily in this man the love of God is perfected. Hereby know we that we are in Him: he that saith he abideth in Him is bound, even as He walked, so also himself to be ever walking.
"He that saith he abideth in Him, ought himself also so to walk even as He also walked."--1 JOHN ii. 6.
This verse is one of those in reading which we may easily fall into the fallacy of mistaking _familiarity_ for knowledge.
Let us bring out its meaning with accuracy.
St. John's hatred of unreality, of lying in every form, leads him to claim in Christians a perfect correspondence between the outward profession and the inward life, as well as the visible manifestation of it. "He that saith" always marks a danger to those who are outwardly in Christian communion. It is the "take notice" of a hidden falsity. He whose claim, possibly whose vaunt, is that he abideth in Christ, has contracted a moral debt of far-reaching significance. St. John seems to pause for a moment. He points to a picture in a page of the scroll which is beside him--the picture of Christ in the Gospel drawn by himself; not a vague magnificence, a mere harmony of colour, but a likeness of absolute historical truth. Every pilgrim of time in the continuous course of his daily walk, outward and inward, has by the possession of that Gospel contracted an obligation to be walking by the one great life-walk of the Pilgrim of eternity. The very depth and intensity of feeling half hushes the Apostle's voice. Instead of the beloved Name which all who love it will easily supply,[167] St. John uses the reverential _He_, the pronoun which specially belongs to Christ in the vocabulary of the Epistle.[168] "He that saith he abideth in Him" is bound, even as He once walked, to be ever walking.