A Child of God
1 John 2:28-3:10
Children of God have hope
Hope that Abides in Him brings confidence
Hope that Abides in Yourself brings shame
Children of God are loved
Children of God face reality in the present
Children of God look forward to the future
Slide
Intro
It was in the news a couple of weeks ago that Prince Harry, the youngest son of Prince Charles and the Late Princess Diana was serving in the military in Afghanistan.
He had to come home after it was disclosed that he was there for his and the troops he was with safety. Because he was a prince, he became a target when it was discovered.
Have you ever thought about being a prince, a child of Royalty?
I am sure many of us have as a child.
Little Girls often dream of being a princess and being swept off their feet by Prince Charming.
Little boys dream of being a prince and slaying the dragon and saving the town and the beautiful young woman.
Ah to be royalty.
Well the fact of the matter is you are royalty if you are a child of God.
And being a Child of God, just like being in the royal family of England, brings with it certain things.
That is what we are going to talk about today as we continue in 1 John.
Turn with me to
1 John 2:28-3:10
Slide
If you remember from last week, John was talking about the antichrists that were teaching false doctrines about Jesus and what it means to be the Christ. John was refuting that teaching and encouraging those in the church to remain true to the teaching of the apostles.
Now he encourages them with the fact that those who receive Christ are children of God and he talks about some of the blessings as well as responsibilities that brings with it.
Read with me starting in
1 John 2:28
28 And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.
29 If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him.
3:1 How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 3 Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure.
4 Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. 5 But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin. 6 No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.
7 Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. 8 He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. 9 No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God. 10 This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.
Wow, there is a whole lot there.
I want to start with what John speaks about in the beginning of this section and the first thing we will see is that
A Child of God has Hope
Slide
In verse 28, John writes,
28 And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears
When he appears.
When Jesus Christ appears again
The second coming of Jesus Christ is the great hope for the child of God.
Paul when he writes to Titus, says in
Titus 2:13
we wait for the blessed hope-the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ
Why is this a hope for the child of God?
It is the great hope because Christ is coming to bring the fulfillment of our salvation.
Hebrews 9:28
28 so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.
The hope is that we will finally have the fullness of the salvation we have inherited.
It is true that that moment we receive Christ as our Savior and become a child of God, we begin living out our eternal life, our salvation.
And while that is an awesome and great thing, we don’t experience the fullness of the salvation we have been provided until Christ returns for us.
That is because right now, we still have these bodies
That decay
that suffer
that die
But when Christ returns,
Suffering will be ended
Our bodies won’t decay
Death will no longer be.
That is the great hope for the Child of God.
We are experiencing life now kind of like a prince in the royal family.
That prince has many benefits of being an heir to the King, of living the royal life, but they don’t know the fullness of that until they are king.
While we will never be king, there is a fullness of our salvation that awaits us when Christ returns.
That is the blessed hope of the child of God.
It is not a hope like “I would like this to happen.”
It is the hope “knowing it will happen” and that “you can’t wait for it to happen.”
Now, while all children of God have this hope, how we experience this hope during this life has some conditions.
Hope that Abides in Him brings Confidence
Slide
1 John 2:28
28 And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.
We can be confident in our hope.
This is not an arrogant confidence.
It is not “Hey, look at me,”
“I have salvation and a hope that you don’t have.”
“I am better than you”
It is not that.
This is
a confidence in Him and His work, and
a confidence that He has changed us
because we can see that change in our lives.
Do you see the change that the Lord has made in your life?
Do you see the change on the inside?
This is where we need to look into our hearts
1 John 3:21
If our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God
How is your heart?
Can you see the work of Christ in your life?
Do you feel you can be confident before God, not because of what you have done, but because His work is visible in and through you?
If you are not walking in the ways of Christ, if you don’t have a hope that abides in him, you will never have a confidence in the hope that we can have as a child of God.
And if you don’t have a hope that is abiding in Him, then you have a
Hope that Abides in Yourself brings shame
Slide
1 John 2:28
28 And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.
If abiding in him brings confidence, then the opposite is true as well.
If you are not abiding in Christ, you are abiding in yourself.
Now, this is a bit difficult.
I can find Scripture that indicates that you are not saved if you are not abiding in Him and Scripture that supports that you may be saved but you will lack assurance and totally lack the fulfilled life and but, you will enter heaven, though you will not be confident and unashamed at his return, but in fact may even be ashamed at the way you have lived as a child of God.
This is not how you want to experience the hope we have as a child of God.
Let’s assume for a moment that you truly are a Child of God, yet your life does not readily show it.
This is when we are living our life in such a way as there is not fruit readily apparent in our life, even though we have truly come into a saving relationship with Christ.
Paul describes this as building on the foundation of Jesus Christ with things that will burn up.
1 Corinthians 3:10-15
10 By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. 11 For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12 If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, 13 his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. 14 If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. 15 If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.
If upon Christ’s return, we are “as one escaping through the flames,” I believe we are going to be ashamed on that day.
Yes, we will have eternal life, which I do not want to discount at all. This is vital.
But,
There will be no “Well done thou good and faithful servant”
There will be no rewards for you.
But I believe there will be some shame on that day because you will also have a realization that you could have
done so much more and
had so much more.
Jesus says in
Revelation 22:12
12 "Behold, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what he has done.
How are you living your life?
Will you be able to be confident at his coming?
What if He were to return today?
Build your life upon the foundation of Faith in Jesus Christ using Gold, Silver and costly stones, not things that will burn up, so you don’t have a hope that brings shame, but that you have a hope that is confident in Christ’s work through you and in you.
Ok, moving on, we have other benefits besides hope as a child of God.
We are told here that
A Child of God is Loved
Slide
1 John 3:1a
1 How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!
Think about that first part of verse 1.
How great is the love the Father has lavished on us.
I want you to think about how awesome this is.
As God’s creation who sinned against Him, He could have showed his love simply by paying the price for our sins.
And He did show his love for us that way.
Romans 5:8
8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
But He has done so much more for us than that.
He didn’t just pay the price for our sins and move on.
He paid the price for our sins and adopted us into his family.
We are God’s children now.
A verse I quote often is
John 1:12
12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God- (from New International Version)
To all who receive Jesus Christ, who believe in Him and who He is and what He did, he has given the right to become children of God.
That’s like taking the child whose actions caused your own sons death and adopting him into your family.
That love is too great for us to even fully comprehend.
That is the type of love that we have lavished on us.
God loved us and made us His own child.
Having this love of God in our loves and understanding is going to help us because
A Child of God Faces Reality in the Present
Slide
We need to realize that when we become a child of God, we are no longer of this world.
1 John 3:1b
The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
Why do we expect the world to treat Christians kindly?
We should not expect the world to treat us kindly.
We become foreigners here when we become a child of God.
We need to face the reality that as a child of God, our present situation does not always become easier, even though there are many blessings to being a child of God.
Illustration – Prince William and Prince Harry – The realities of Royal Life
Kind of like being Prince William or Harry.
I am sure that it is nice to be a prince and to be famous, but there are some realities that they need to face as royalty.
Because they are children of royalty,
Their lives are being constantly monitored by the press
Every move they make is watched by the world
Their actions are judged
Those things come with the territory of being royalty.
As a child of God, we are not going to be of this world, so we should not expect the world to know us or to be our friend.
In fact, James tells us that
James 4:4
friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.
As children of God, the things the world loves should not be the things we love and because we don’t love sin, the world is going to not love us.
Our lives should be ones where it testifies against evil by the way we live.
And the world will not like that.
John continues on in this section to speak again against sin and how a Child of God needs to follow after Jesus in verses 4-10.
When we are living like Christ, the world will hate us
When we are living like the world, we will get along just fine, but you have some hard questions to ask yourself about the reality of being a Christian.
Jesus, when he was talking to his brothers before they were believers, said to them in
John 7:7
7 The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil.
We need to face the reality that being a child of God now, means that the world will not know us or be kind to us.
But we don’t have to nor should we be living for this world, instead we can be looking forward to the future
A Child of God Looks Forward to the Future
Slide
1 John 3:2
2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
John tells us that right this very minute, we are children of God, but the future reality is not nearly as clear for us.
There are many things we don’t fully grasp about our eternity.
But, One thing we do know is that we will be like Jesus.
John says “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
Paul tells us the same thing in
1 Corinthians 13:12
12 Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
We don’t really understand all of what our future eternity will be like, or even what we will be like in eternity.
We know we will have glorified bodies that
don’t get sick,
don’t wear out,
don’t suffer
but it is difficult for our minds to wrap around that.
All that we know now are
bodies that don’t want to get out of bed,
bones that ache when the weather changes,
sickness that beats us up and knocks us down.
We can overcome that as we look forward to the future as a Child of God who lives by faith.
The author of Hebrews writes of many of the Old Testament saints as they lived lives of faith facing the reality of the present that the Messiah had not yet come, but looking forward to the future which enabled them to live by faith and experience joy and confidence in their hope.
Hebrews 11:13-16
13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. 14 People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. 15 If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 Instead, they were longing for a better country-a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
As a child of God,
Do you live your life by His power and His strength so that God is glorified and you will not be ashamed on the day Christ returns?
What is it in your life that is preventing you from experiencing a hope that is confident?
Is there a sin in your life that needs to be overcome?
Confess it to God and then confess it to someone else so you can expose it and break the power of Satan in your life.
Is there something you need to be doing that you aren’t doing?
Do you need to begin serving in a ministry?
Do you need to make financial sacrifices for the Kingdom so that gospel of Jesus Christ and the word of God continues to go out?
Do you need to be growing in your knowledge of the word by getting into a small group Bible study?
Do you need to be baptized?
We have some getting baptized in 2 weeks.
Do you need to commit to be a part of Hickory Creek as a member agreeing to financially support and physically serve with this body of believers so that the Great Commission will be fulfilled in this area?
Maybe you first need to become a child of God, being adopted into His family by receiving Him, by believing in His name.
Romans 10:9-10
9 That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.
Whatever your need, pray with me now, and receive the Lord’s grace and mercy and strength to live for Him that He offers to all of His children.
Pray.
