Children of God

Sunday 30^th March 2014

Exeter Temple Message notes
Bible Reading:      1 John 3:1-3
The Authorised Version of 1 John 3:1 says, “Behold what manner of love the Father has given unto us that we should be called the sons of God.
Behold is derived from an old English word bihaldon which is a combination of bi meaning thorough and haldan which means to hold. So beholding is about being thorough in the way you observe something.
The CEV says: “Think about how much the Father loves us. He loves us so much that he lets us be called his children, as we truly are.”  

1.  Think about what the love of God is like

The NIV misses the phrase out but still declares God’s love to be great. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us.”
Whatever translation we use it is clear John wants to realized that God’s love is beyond the ordinary.
After the disciples saw Jesus still the storm on the lake they asked each other, “What kind of man is this?” (Luke 8:25) They knew they were dealing with a man who had power that they had never seen the like of before. 
Someone has said, “God may be out of the world, but he’s not out of the picture.”
Instead God’s love has been lavished upon us. It is more than just someone loving us. It is someone loving us in an uncommon and extraordinary way. We take this too much for granted. John was not a young man when he wrote these words but he still stands in awe of it

2.  Think about who we are in his love 

There is a sense in which all people are children of God just because God loves and created every person but John is clear in his letter that there is a personal child/parent relationship we can have with God that we have to deliberately enter into.
"Yet to all who received him, to those who believed on his name, he gave the right to become children of God." John 1:12  
God extends the free invitation to be a part of his family to everyone, but it is up to us to choose whether we will receive it or not. 
This is astounding because of our sin and rebellion and the fact that to bring us into his family God sacrificed his own son.                                                                                                                           
In the world there are three ways that you can become part of someone’s family.  First of all you can be born into it biologically.  And the majority of us stay with that family and grow up in it.  Another way is through the law. Adoption is a legal action by which parents take into their family a child who is not their own, in order to give that child all the privileges of their own children. An adopted child according to the law of the land is entitled to all the rights and privileges of a natural born child.
A third way is through marriage. Two people from two different families join together and become a new family but also in a sense join the family of their spouse.
All three ways of becoming part of a family have their parallel with becoming a child of God and part of God’s family.
When we join with Jesus Christ we enter into a covenant relationship as deep as a marriage that separates us from our old life and joins us to the divine family. Collectively believers are known as the bride of Christ and Jesus Christ as the bridegroom.
Adoption is referred to in the New Testament. Ephesians 1:5 “God was kind and decided that Christ would choose us to be God’s own adopted children.” (CEV)
There are reasons why people adopt children; a person has a longing for children but they cannot have any of their own, they might feel compassion towards children who have no family;  they might be attracted to a particular child or a bond may exist between the adoptees and the child’s natural who have died. When we ask what makes God adopt us there are no logical reasons. God is God, he does not need us his life in order to complete him; there was nothing about us that he should be attracted to us. Such is our sin, that we do not even deserve his compassion. We have been adopted simply because God loves us.
When John writes about our becoming children of God he is not thinking just in terms of marriage or adoption but of new birth.  The word translated children” is the translation of a Greek word meaning "born ones." John Piper writes that when a child is adopted as a baby, the new parents loved it and their love and their values influence its life but nothing they do can cause the child to be born again with their personality traits and temperament. But God does. God does not merely take care of paper work and adopts us but he moves into our very nature by his Spirit and implants his nature in us.  Jesus described it like this, “Humans give life to their children. Yet only God’s Spirit can change you into a child of God. Don’t be surprised when I say that you must be born from above.” (John 3:6-7 CEV)
John says we are called the children of God and adds, “And that is what we are.”  We are not just children of God through covenant, through adoption but by rebirth. We are not merely “called children of God” but we actually “are children of God.”

3. Think about how his love shapes our future

Only a person who knows God through Christ can appreciate what it means to be called a child of God and even they do not fully grasp the full implications of this for their future lives.
“We are already God’s children though what we will be hasn’t yet been made known but we know that when he appears we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3v2)
We know something of Jesus here and now, we are being changed in this world and are becoming increasingly like the Lord Jesus but that is nothing compared to the fact that when Jesus Christ returns we will see him as he is in the fullness of his glory and we shall be like him.
The famous preacher Charles Spurgeon reflects on this.  “We shall never see him as he was. In vain our fancy tries to paint it, or our imagination to fashion it. We cannot, must not, see him as he was; nor do we wish, for we have a larger promise, "We shall see him as he is."
He goes on to consider that this means we will not see him bound by human limitations or battered by temptation or suffering under the onslaught of evil.  We will see the nail prints in his hands but not the nails for they have been removed. We will see the marks of thorns but as the song says, “the head that once was crowned with thorns is crowned with glory now” We shall not see the Christ wrestling with pain, but Christ as a conqueror.
The result of Christ's appearing is that we will be like Him.  Christ’s victory is ours. We like him will no longer be bound by our human limitations, battered by temptation or suffering under the onslaught of evil.
Yet you and I were not adopted into God’s family to simply sit around and wait for Christ to return.
We have human limitations but we are also born again so we have the life of Christ within us through his spirit, yes we are battered by temptation but we are children of God and we love him and that guards our hearts. A true child of God, who has experienced the love of God, has no desire to sin against that love. We suffer from the onslaught of evil against us but what we have already seen and experienced Jesus helps us to keep faithful. We have the promise of the Word of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit which supports our confidence in the hope of our future state.
 “And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” or as the CEV says, “This hopes makes us keep ourselves holy, just as Christ is holy.” (v3)
The Holy Spirit inspired hope of seeing the Lord Jesus arouses the determination to be pure like Him. Then the grace of God touches the will of the Christian to motive him to action.
A Christian writer said, “When I didn’t know as much about Jesus as I know now, I wasn’t as impressed with Him as I am today. And this is amazing because in every other case, the better you know people, the more disillusioned you become as you begin to see their cracks and flaws. Not so with Jesus. The longer you walk with Him and the more you learn about Him, the more you will be impressed by Him, and the more you will long to see Him. Even though now we only see Him through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:12), I like what I see! The more and more clearly I see and understand Jesus, the more and more I want to be like Him. What about you?”

Think about how much the Father loves us.  

Think about what that love is like
Think about who you are know because you have received that love
Think about what you have to look forward to because of this love
Think about how that affects the way you live now because of all you have through this love.

Blessings
Carol