When I was in High School, I visited Boonville, a town about 2 hours from my home in Sonoma County. There was a circus in town and I recognized it as the same one I’d seen at home a few weeks before; so I spoke to the head guy and mentioned this to him. He responded, “well, what are you doing here?” To which I answered, “this is where I’m from,” which was not really true. I was born in Mendocino county, further north on the coast and my family was deeply rooted there, but Boonville is inland and is about halfway between Sonoma and Manchester, the town where my family lived when I was born. Boonville was a place I traveled through on my way to somewhere else.
Why did I respond in this way? Boonville is in Mendocino County, and I think I felt, at that time, a stronger sense of connection with Mendocino County than the wine country in Sonoma, where I was growing up. My grandfather, who was one of my favorite people in the world, lived on the coast and knew everyone in the area. I often stayed with my sister and brother-in-law and was very close to their two sons, who were only a few years younger than I was. I think the rural coast environment felt more to me like a place I wanted to belong to. I identified myself as someone from Mendocino County, and that sense of identity was very important to me.
Several years ago I read a letter in “Runner’s World” magazine where a woman asked “at what point can I call myself a runner?” She didn’t think she ran very well, so she wasn’t sure she could legitimately claim that name. But the response from the magazine was “if you run, you are a runner.” I suspect this was a helpful answer and gave her the freedom to think of herself as a runner without second-guessing whether she was good enough. Our identity is important to us and can either free us to do the things we want or hinder us by taking away our confidence.
I suspect the success of identity politics right now is related to this. I think this movement is seriously wrong-headed by pitting groups against each other, leading to an increasing sense of tribalism in our culture, but its appeal is in giving people a sense of who they are and where they belong. And I was glad last Sunday to hear Chris Wicher point out that God’s Word gives us a sense of identity: “if you abide in my word you are truly my disciples” (John 8:31).
These verses in 1 John take this a step further by identifying us not only as disciples but as God’s children. We are disciples, people who are learning to follow Jesus, but we’ve also been adopted into God’s family and are called to increasingly bear the family likeness. If we see ourselves as slaves and God as a hard taskmaster, our Christian lives will be deeply impacted by this. On the other hand, if we believe we’ve been given a “get into heaven free card,” which guarantees our future salvation, and see God as an indulgent grandfatherly figure, that will also have a major impact on the way we live out our lives as Christians. The Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor and writer A.W. Tozer wrote that nothing so twists and deforms the soul as an unworthy or low conception of God (see “God is Easy to Live With” in The Root of the Righteous).
What we can see in this passage is that an awareness of our true identity, a confidence that we are God’s children, will lead us to begin eliminating things from our lives that are in conflict with this identity. We want to increasingly bear the family likeness. Being called to follow Jesus Christ as His disciples is an amazing thing. But then to be told that we are not only disciples but beloved children goes beyond our wildest imagination. Our discipleship is rooted in our adoption as children of God and we want to please our loving Father who has graciously called us to belong to His family.
So, the first thing these verses tell us is that God, in love, has made us His children: “see what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” God has adopted us into His family and set us apart as His children, we who by nature were “without hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). The words “what kind (of love),” translate a word that often meant “from what country.” “It is as if the Father’s love is so unearthly, so foreign to this world, that he wonders from what country it may come.” It carries with it a sense of astonishment (John Stott, The Epistles of John). This love the Father has bestowed on us in calling us His children is astonishing.
Now this sounds like a wonderful thing, and it is. But it doesn’t mean that we’re “kings kids” and that our lives on earth will go smoothly (as some have said from time to time), because it’s also true that we live in a world that doesn’t know God and is in rebellion against His lordship. So our identity as God’s children means that we are out of step with a world that doesn’t know or acknowledge Him. John says the world “doesn’t know us,” doesn’t recognize us as God’s children. Of course not. If they don’t know Him, they’re not going to know what it means when we say we are His children.
So, the first thing in this passage is a reminder of our identity, in the present, as God’s children. But the second thing is that although we know who we are as God’s children, we don’t know what our future, in God’s kingdom, will be like. We are members of God’s family, but we don’t know the particulars of what this will look like in the future.
It’s important to remember that God’s revelation is about leading us to salvation, not satisfying our curiosity. A few years ago a popular Bible teacher named Harold Camping forgot this and thought he had learned from Scripture that Jesus would return in May of 2011. He should have known better. After all, Jesus said to the apostles when they asked Him about the coming of His kingdom: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority” (Acts 1:7). These words should be enough to rule out that kind of speculation, but for some reason he got caught up in trying to calculate the date of Christ’s coming, and many others throughout the centuries have done the same. It’s good to keep in mind these words from Deuteronomy: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law” (29:29). The things revealed are things that bring us to God and prepare us for eternity, “that we may follow all the words of this law.” God is not interested in satisfying our curiosity about the things He has not revealed, and prying into these things -- the date of Christ’s return, what our lives will be like when we’re in His presence -- is a dangerous thing and a first step on the path of disobedience.
What we do know is that when Jesus appears we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is. Paul says that we see now “but a poor reflection as in a mirror” (1 Cor. 13:12), but even so “we who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). Even though we don’t see Him clearly now our communion with Him is transforming us into His image, and when we see Him clearly we will be fully transformed. Communion with Jesus is transformative even in our present clouded condition, but we know that in the future we will become fully like Him, “because we will see him as he is.”
So John tells us about our identity as God’s children and that in the future we will be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ, but then he says something about how this affects our lives in the present: “everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself as he is pure.” Knowing that when we see Him face to face we will be fully transformed into His image doesn’t lead us to sit back and do nothing: “well, I obviously can’t see clearly enough to bring about this transformation now so I may as well wait until His appearing. What’s the point of my feeble efforts in the present?” This is not the case at all. Knowing that we will one day see Him face too face motivates us to purify our lives in the present, even though what we accomplish in this life will always be imperfect..
How do we purify our lives? We confess our sins to God, as we do at the beginning of our worship service, and we turn our backs on the things in our lives that we know are displeasing to Him. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to make use of our prayer of confession in your own devotional life throughout the week. And spend time in God’s presence, cultivating a growing relationship with Him. Make regular use of the Psalms in prayer, and maybe pray through a hymnal or a prayer book. Spend unhurried time in God’s presence and invest some time in finding tools that will help you do this.
Something I’ve found helpful in the past and recently returned to is a prayerful way of reading Scripture called Lectio Divina, which is just Latin for divine reading. From what I’ve observed, Evangelical Protestants often limit their use of the Bible by only engaging in Bible study. I believe in Bible study and have spent lots of time doing it. But we need to do more than study God’s Word; just knowing what it means is not enough to purify our lives. So here’s a brief description of this prayerful reading of God’s Word.
Start by choosing a passage of Scripture, and after beginning with prayer for God’s help, read a short portion of it, maybe just a phrase or two. Go back and reread it several times, allowing it to sink in more deeply. Some people find it helpful to read out loud. If the passage is a narrative, visualize what is happening and imagine that you are there. If it is a teaching passage, think about how it might impact your life and how it connects with other things you know in the Bible. A friend of mine who was a psychiatrist once described meditation as worry; when we worry we go over and over in our minds what might happen in the future. So meditation on Scripture is doing this, going over and over different possibilities, what it might mean and how it might impact our lives.
By this time you may have become aware of things you need to pray about. If so, begin to pray in response to what you’re reading, and if not, just offer the words of the passage as a prayer and ask God to make it more of a reality in your life. And after you’ve done this just sit quietly in God’s presence, aware of the things you’ve been reading and open to whatever else He wants to say to you. You can go back and forth between these four steps and don’t need to proceed neatly through them. Start by doing this for a short time so you don’t wear yourself out, and tomorrow you can come back and start where you left off, or go on to another passage if you feel the need. The point is to interact with God in His Word and to give the Word time to impact your life in a deeper way.
But devotional practices are not the only part of purifying our lives. It’s very possible to have regular, strong devotional practices and yet be deceiving ourselves if our devotional life has no impact on the way we treat other people. Since God, in His grace and mercy, has shown such astonishing love toward us, He calls us to show love toward one another, especially those we interact with every day. Praying over God’s Word can be a place where He both makes us aware of changes we need to make and also gives us the strength to love others as He has loved us.
With all the noise surrounding us in our culture, we need to remind ourselves often of our true identity as members of God’s family. “What marvelous love the Father has extended to us! Just look at it—we’re called children of God! That’s who we really are. But that’s also why the world doesn’t recognize us or take us seriously, because it has no idea who he is or what he’s up to. But friends, that’s exactly who we are: children of God. And that’s only the beginning. Who knows how we’ll end up! What we know is that when Christ is openly revealed, we’ll see him—and in seeing him, become like him. All of us who look forward to his Coming stay ready, with the glistening purity of Jesus’ life as a model for our own” (The Message). May God enable us to order our lives in ways that prepare us for the day when we will see Him face to face.
