Walking on the light side - I John 1:5

I John 1:5 says, "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all."  This verse uses light and darkness imagery to help us understand what exactly it means that God is Holy.  We need help with the concept because nothing in our world is 100% pure.  Everything has flaws, everything has impurities.  Every day we deal with the imperfections of htis world.  They can simply be minor irriations, or the hurdles that make life difficult to bear at times.  Either way, we live in a world of second best options.
Not so with God.  One of the reasons why God is worthy of worship is because he has no flaws.  God has no compromises in his character.  He never acts based upon prejudice, greed, or fear.  Does that make God an emotion-free force, like a law of nature?  A quick look at Scripture reminds us that God gets angry, feels joy, knows sorrow, and laughs.  And yet, God's character remains the same, holy.  It isn't something that is easy for us to grasp.  We often fall into sin because our emotions "get the better of us" or we allow our thinking to become self-centered as we fail to act in accordance with our new life in Christ.
When John tells us to, "walk in the light, as he is in the light" (vs. 7), he is saying that the direction that our lives are going in need to be toward more holiness, righteousness, and Christ-likeness.  It is certainly beyond our ability in this life to be 100% free of darkness, as God is, but thanks be to God that our savior Jesus Christ was.  The only way we will ever accomplish such a monumental task is to stop trying on our own and accept that Jesus' life will stand in for our own in God's judgment.  Only then will we be able to start the process of purging darkness from our lives with the stength of the Holy Spirit.  One day, we too will walk in the light, as we stand in the presence of our holy God.