Children of God

This is the text of a sermon preached at the evening service on 19 April 2009 on 1 John 3:1-3.

I wonder: if you were asked to sum up your relationship as a Christian to God, what would you say? And if you were asked to sum up the Church’s relationship with God, what would you say? Well of course the Bible speaks of these relationships in a number of ways. An individual might say he or she is a believer, a follower of Christ, maybe even a servant of God. The church might be described as a group of sinners saved by grace, the congregation of believers with a living faith, God’s covenant people, or maybe as Christ’s body. And of course none of these descriptions is wrong – in fact all of them are biblical and all of them are complementary. But there’s another way of describing both the individual and Christians as a group that includes all these things and conveys, I think, so much more about the personal, loving, sharing, relationship and commitment that each of us as individuals and together as a church has with God. And that’s the way that the apostle John describes in this passage: we are each children of God and together we are the family of God.

Think about an earthly King. It’s one thing to say you are a subject of the King, or to say you are the King’s servant, or to say you are a loyal follower of the King, or even to say that you are the King’s friend; but it’s quite another thing to say that you are the King’s son or daughter. That’s the difference. And I think that if we look at our relationship with God the Father, our relationship with Jesus Christ, and our relationships with other Christians and with the world, everything somehow changes when viewed through this lens of sonship, daughtership and Christian brother and sisterhood. I hope that as we look at this together we will find our faith, hope and love deepened and strengthened.

If we look at the passage we read in 1 John 3, and in particular the first paragraph from verse 1 to verse 3, I think there are three main points for us to focus on as God’s children:

· The Father loves his children
· God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father
· During their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins.

So, the first thing for us to grasp from this passage is one of those truths in the Bible that grabs to me deep in my heart every time I hear it: God is my Father and he absolutely loves and adores me as his son. God loves each and every Christian, including you, more deeply and more powerfully than any human father could ever love his son or daughter. Isn’t that an astonishing thing when you think about it? The almighty God who created the universe, who governs all things by his providence and rules over all things in his sovereign power as King of Kings and Lords of Lords, the One who sits in all majesty and glory in the throne room of heaven, and is worshipped night and day by squadrons of angels and archangels – this God is my Father! This God is my Daddy (‘Abba’ as the original Greek has it). He’s not some remote spiritual being with no real knowledge of me, no real interest in what’s happening in my life. He’s not an absent father. The Child Support Agency doesn’t have to go after him. No, this God – the God of the Bible – is my Daddy who stays with me, who loves me, cares for me, is concerned about me, provides for me and protects me. All these things are implied whenever we call God ‘Father’.

There are places in the Old Testament where the God of Israel is described as being like a Father to his people.

As far back as Deuteronomy 1:31 we read of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt described like this: ‘The LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son.’

In Psalm 103, it says: ‘As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.’

In Isaiah 63, the prophet says to God: ‘You are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, O LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.’

However, although the Old Testament people of God might have regarded God as their Father, they would not have dared address God as ‘Father.’ Jesus changed that forever. It will Jesus who taught that not just that God is like a father to his people, but that God is their Father, and it’s okay to speak to God like a child speaks to his father. That’s one of many truths Christ taught us in the Lord’s Prayer that we say every week: ‘Our Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 6:9).

So, God is our Father, and as our Father God loves us with all his heart. That’s what the first verse in our passage says. God doesn’t love us a bit – God’s love is ‘lavished’ on us. He loves us so much that he makes us his children. ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’

That is absolutely one of the most astonishing and profound teachings in the entire Bible. In fact it may be the most amazing thing of all.

We know that God’s amazing love for us is one of the big themes of the Bible – especially in the writings of the apostle John. In perhaps the most famous verse in the whole Bible, John points out that God loves us so much that not only does he make us his children, but that he gave his own child to die for us:

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ (John 3:16)

The apostle Paul said the same thing in his own way:

‘But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ (Romans 5:8)

Later on in this Letter, John writes:

‘This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ (1 John 4:9-10)

I know that for me, when I think about God as my Father, about Christ as my Father’s Son and my brother, and about the Holy Spirit as my family counsellor and guide who brought about my adoption as a child of God (as Romans 8:15 teaches), it completely changes how I feel about God, it has really deepened my relationship with God this past week or two, especially over Easter. Once you see God as Father and Christ as your brother, it’s hard to not feel different. For me it changes my attitude and my heart in worship, in reading the Bible, in prayer, in sharing fellowship with others, in obeying God’s commandments, in serving other people, in being the man I want to be.

It helps us see that our relationship with God is for every day living, every second of our life, every situation we go through, good and bad. Most of us here have families – brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. How natural do we find it to spend time with them, to share our lives with them, to tell them our worries and laugh with them in our joys. Isn’t that how our relationship with God should be too?

The next time you are feeling a bit down, a bit low, or the next time you are feeling disheartened because you’ve been laughed at or scoffed at for being a Christian, remember this verse: ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’

The passage teaches, like so much of the New Testament teaches us, that opposition is what we should expect as Christians. As verse 1 goes on to say: ‘The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.’

But I think that John is also encouraging us here to ‘keep your chins up’ in the face of opposition. You are a prince or princess of the Most High God. You are a child of the royal family of King David. You are destined to rule with King Jesus forever. Once you see yourself in that light, don’t you feel a bit better about yourself and about the challenges life throws at us?

The prophet Zechariah wrote: ‘The LORD…will save his people…as a shepherd saves his flock. They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown.’

All God’s sons and daughters are like jewels in the royal crown. Grasp that and hold on to that, and never forget it.

The second thing for us to take from this passage is that God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father God.

John writes in verse two: ‘Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’

The contrast that John makes here is not between bad and good (things are bad now but will be good later) but between good and better. We already are children of God, and the future we will ‘grow up’ if you like to fully become like our Father God.

Unfortunately, isn’t the Christian life often caricatured by those who don’t know Jesus in a different way? People distort the Christian gospel and say that what Christianity teaches is that we are supposed to be content with a second-rate life now in exchange for a first rate second life after we die. This was one of the objections that Karl Marx had to Christianity – that it told the poor to be happy being miserable in this life.

I don’t know often I’ve heard people say things like – the trouble with asking me to be a Christian is that I’m you then expect me to have a miserable life of not sinning and enjoying myself now, in exchange for happiness in another life I don’t even know for sure exists. The kind of spiritual equivalent of ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ Have you ever heard anyone say anything like that?

Well the apostle John has an answer to that. He says the truth is that things are great now but will still be better in the next life! We are children now he says, but ‘what we will be has not been made known.’ We do know some of ‘what we will be’ in the life we shall have after death. We know that we shall go to heaven, we shall see God and Christ face-to-face, we shall conform to the image of Christ, we shall become without sin, we shall know things we do not know here, and one day we shall receive new resurrection bodies and go on to live with God forever in a new heaven and a new earth. But what John is saying is that God has not told us the full extent of the joy and bliss that awaits us as God’s children. He really means ‘the full extent of what it means to be a child of God in eternity has not been revealed to us yet.’

We do know when this will happen though – it will be when Christ appears – for the second coming of Christ will usher in the end of this world, the last judgment and beginning of those new heavens and earth that John later wrote about in the Book of Revelation.

That’s what’s ahead of us in the future. For now, John points out that God’s children will resemble their Father.

There’s an old saying – ‘like father, like son’. Sometimes people will say of a child that he’s ‘cut from the same cloth’ as a parent, meaning not just that he or she looks like their parent, but resembles them in their attitudes, behaviour, speech, mannerisms, and so on.

I think John is saying here that God’s children should resemble their heavenly Father when he says ‘We shall be like him’. It doesn’t really matter whether that ‘him’ refers to the Father or Christ the Son, for to have seen one is to have seen the other, and they are One anyway. Either way, we should be ‘cut from the same cloth’ so that people can see in our attitudes, our words, our actions that we look like in practice what we actually are in principle – God’s beloved children.

This is exactly the same as what Jesus himself taught in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:44-48 Jesus says to us:

‘But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’

My goodness, don’t these words challenge us? I know that they force me to look at myself. What a standard to set! ‘Be perfect.’

That is the long-term goal for all of us as Christians, to become in nature, what we are in status already. To grow into the kind of people who live as God’s children should. Why are we to do this? To make ourselves into God’s children and earn God’s blessings? No! John teaches we already are God’s children and therefore should live that way.

The way we become God’s children is not by something we do, not by doing good works, but by faith in Jesus Christ and trusting in his work – his perfect life, his sacrificial death on the cross and his victorious resurrection from the dead.

As John taught in his Gospel:

‘Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.’ (John 1:12-13)

A lot of this is future of course. John is clear that we won’t realise our ambitions to truly perfect lives as children of God until we get to heaven. It will only be once Christ returns that this will happen.

Even so, the third point that John makes is that during their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins for us. In other words, the process of God’s adopted children growing and developing into the people God wants them to be begins in the here and now.

Verse three says as much: ‘All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’

We’re going to be looking at verses 4-10 next week and they teach us a lot more about the Christian’s battles against sin and the devil but here in verse 3 John makes it very clear that although becoming a child of God is entirely of grace and entirely of faith – it is not a matter of human effort or good works – nevertheless being a child of God does affect how we live our lives. The Bible knows nothing of a Christianity that so emphasises grace so as to excuse sinful, wrong behaviour.

As Paul answered an imaginary questioner who thought that the gospel of salvation by grace was a licence to commit sins in Romans 6:1-2:

‘What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?’

John’s message is exactly the same as Paul’s. ‘All who have this hope in him [i.e. in Christ] purify themselves, just as he is pure.’

In other words, all who consider themselves children of God, and look forward to eternal life as princes and princesses of their Father God, seek holiness in this life, because their Father is holy.

The Old Testament gave the same command to the people of God time and time again. Nine times in the Book of Leviticus alone the commandment occurs:

‘Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.’ (Leviticus 19:2)

The principle in the New Testament is the same as in the Old – if you are my people, my children, God says, you’ll be like me. You’ll copy me, follow me. You’ll live my way.

It’s interesting that what John writes in verse 3 is not a command, it’s a description. He doesn’t say: ‘All who have this hope should purify themselves’. He merely points out that anyone who is a Christian does purify themselves.

You see what we mustn’t do is think that we need the gospel of Christ dying for us to take away our sins to get into God’s Kingdom or God’s family, and then think that once we’re in we have to stay in through doing enough good. In theological terms, I thought we entered the Kingdom by grace but stayed in by law, by doing good.

That is a mistake I made in my Christian life for years and it stopped me from growing as a Christian for years. Instead of feeling loved and enjoying the freedom I have in Christ, I would feel I’d never done enough good, had sinned too much, and I was burdened with a sense of guilt for what I’d done and what I hadn’t managed to do nearly all the time. It reduced my Christian walk to a hard drudgery, a world away from the ‘easy burden and light yoke’ that Christ promises his followers.

I used to think that becoming a Christian was by faith, but remaining a Christian was by works. This is just not the case. I remember my thinking being completely turned around when I read an article by an American evangelist and Bible teacher, Jerry Bridges. Bridges pointed out a simple truth that I hadn’t really grasped before – that the gospel message of salvation by grace through faith in Christ is a message for Christians as well as for non-Christians. It’s the key to living as a Christian, not just the key to becoming a Christian.

You see, we as Christians need the message of the cross and the empty tomb preached to ourselves every day to stop ourselves turning into either guilt-ridden legalists or sin-stained libertines. Trusting in Christ and his work on the cross is not just something people need to believe to become Christians; it’s what we need to believe every day in order to live as Christians. It’s the way in which we ‘purify ourselves’ in the way John describes.

John has already said as much in this very letter. That’s why it’s really useful if sometimes we read large chunks of the Bible or even a whole letter at a sitting. It helps us get things in context.

On their own, John’s words about people ‘purifying themselves’ might suggest they are to do it on their own effort, without reference to Jesus. But that would be entirely wrong. Back in the first chapter of this letter, John has already explained what he means by a Christian purifying themselves. I’m going to read 1 John 1:7-10 because they are very important to us understanding this verse about us purifying ourselves just as God is pure. Listen carefully to what John says:

‘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 deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.’

So, yes we are to purify ourselves. But how do we do it? According to John it is by looking to Jesus. We do it by trusting in his work on the cross, by relying on his blood, which purifies us from all sin. We do it by being brutally honest with God and admitting to him that we are far from perfect, by acknowledging that his word is right to assess what we’ve said and done as sinful. We do it by confessing our sins to God and trusting that God’s word is true and so he will be faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us.

John is clear that Christians are to seek to live good lives, to try to do good works, and to make an effort at refraining from sinning. It is the heart that the Father looks into. It is the seeking that matters to God, not the succeeding. Or to use a sporting cliché, it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part. Truly seeking to do good, to follow Christ and to not commit sins matters more to God than whether we actually succeed or fail. We are his children; he knows what we’re like. He remembers we are only like little toddlers here on earth staggering around, not too good on our feet and likely to fall over more often than we stand up.

John characterises how we should live as ‘walking in the light’ but he is also totally realistic. John – like the apostles Paul and James, and Jesus himself – knew we would not reach perfection in this life, and it is not God’s will for us to live lives crushed by guilt. Friends if you leave here with one thing tonight, make it this: God does not want you to spend your life feeling guilty because you fail. Because you will fail, over and over again, and God wants his children to be filled with love and joy and peace, not guilt. Instead, when we sin, we need to remember that we are not saved by our works but by Christ – that there is no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus as Romans 8:1 says, and second, we need to come to God, confessing to him what we’ve done and asking to be forgiven. And there’s no limit on how often we can do that. God’s love and God’s grace are boundless. If we commit a sin a hundred thousand times and come back to God to ask for forgiveness and are truly sorry, he will forgive us.

After all, as God is our Father, so Jesus Christ is our brother. Once Peter asked him: ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive someone who sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Jesus, our brother answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’

And when you remember that the number seven signifies perfection and completeness in the Bible, then it is obvious that Jesus is not saying up to precisely 490 times, but rather, an infinite number of times. Just as he commands this of us, so he offers us unlimited forgiveness.

It is through availing ourselves of that forgiveness on offer because of Christ’s cross and resurrection that John understands and pictures Christians purifying themselves.

Next week we’ll look more at the battle the Christian faces with sin. Tonight may we all rest and find comfort in the facts that God loves us as his children, that great though that is, the future will be even better, and until then as God’s children we will purify ourselves, not by our own efforts, but by looking to Jesus, his cross, his blood and his victorious resurrection life.

As the writer to Hebrews put it, echoing the words of John here in this passage:

‘We … see Jesus … crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.’ (Hebrews 2:9-11).