Grace Church exists to glorify our Heavenly Father by
 continually making more disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105

(262) 763-3021

We are family! 1 John 2:28-3:3 Get Real: A Study of 1 John Sermon #13 Bugeldy! Bugeldy! The word means nothing to you but it means everything to me. It was a nickname for my oldest brother, Mike when he was a boy.   Yesterday was a fantastic for me. Jane and I met my cousin, Rita Guest, whom I haven’t seen for nearly thirty years in Chicago for lunch. You know when some folk forward e-mails; they don’t send a blind carbon copy so you can see everyone else that they e-mailed. My older brother, Mike, continually forwards jokes and other articles to me and I noticed my cousin, Rita’s e-mail address, on his e-mail. I also noticed that she had a web site, so I looked her up and shot her a short e-mail. It turned out that Rita is an interior designer and had an upcoming Conference in Chicago and offered to meet for lunch. I looked forward to that for weeks. There’s just something about family.   Rita’s father, Harold was my Dad’s younger brother and died of cancer when I was a teenager. But he made a big impression on me. He was a big guy with a smile and a laugh as big as he was. He was a constant tease. Every family has those wonderful family stories. When my brother, Mike, was just a little guy, Harold was at my grandparent’s home and they sent Mike in to wake him up from a nap and Harold tried to get him to leave him alone. And Harold said to him, “Leave me alone, Bugeldy!” Well, you know how tender little kids can be. So Mike went running out crying “He called my Bugeldy!” And my Dad said, “Go back in there and call him, Drizzle.” And Drizzle and Bugeldy were born. Now it doesn’t mean anything to anyone outside of our family. It’s really not even a word but the cuteness and innocence, along with Uncle Harold’s beloved sense of humor, made it a part of my family’s treasure house of stories.   There’s just something about family. Everyone here has a treasure house of family memories and stories and our kids will tell new ones from growing up in our homes. The remainder of 1 John is about family, God’s family. Until this point John has been writing about community and fellowship, now he switches gears for the remainder of the book to family. Turn to 1 John 2:28-3:3 (p. 863).   These verses are very difficult to fit into a neat outline of the letter. Some commentators regard them as the opening words of an entirely new section of the epistle. Others split them, as did those who established the chapter division. Some begin a new section with verse 29. Others call verses 28 and 29 transition verses. I’m not sure and I don’t think that it really matters because there will be little difference in interpretation regardless of how one divides them.   What does matter is that there is a rich inheritance here. As we work through this passage today, I almost want that hit song from the late seventies by Sister Sledge to be echoing in your heart cuz she was right – We are family!! In these five verses John shares both extraordinary blessings and expected behavior just because We are family…because we are God’s children. And we’re going to approach this passage a little differently. We’re going to backload it. We’re going to jump ahead to chapter 3:1 with the out of this world blessings and then come back and tie it up with the expected behavior of God’s family. 1. As God’s children, we have blessings far beyond our finite minds. This past week Paris Hilton was in the news…again. She was sent home from the LA County Jail because of some “unspecified” medical condition and then brought back when the Judge found out. She had served just three days of her 45 day sentence for reckless driving. It looked like she’d fulfill the rest of her sentence with an ankle bracelet and in-home confinement. Most of us would love to spend a night in Paris Hilton’s home. The value of Paris's inheritance has been estimated at between $30 and $50 million. But compared to what we have as part of God’s family, that’s about as noteworthy as prison food. Someday her huge fortune will turn to dust and ashes. But our inheritance, the blessings that we have are ours forever. That’s because…   a) We have been recipients of the lavish love of God. Four-year-old Ashton Clarke loved the movie, Toy Story 2, particularly the space ranger hero, Buzz Lightyear. In Sunday school he was learning that God's love has no limits. At the end of class the teacher, reviewing the lesson, asked, "So, how much does God love us?" Quoting Buzz's big line in the film, Ashton replied, "To infinity and beyond!" That’s a good paraphrase of John’s words, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us!” (3:1). The Amplified Bible renders this, “SEE WHAT [ an incredible] quality of love the Father has given us.” The NIV translators left out that first word “see.” It’s often translated behold. It’s both an exclamation and a command.   1) As an exclamation, it shows that the Father’s great love should amaze us. This word see is a like a flashing neon sign. The Father’s love should take our breath away. The ancient world was much more comfortable with the wrath of god but most of us have been conditioned by the Christian message so that we take God’s love for granted. Some things just grow commonplace over time. We’ve heard them and known about them for years. Maybe at first, when it was new, an idea or experience affected us. But over the years, the effect grows weaker and weaker, until finally it’s just a far-distant memory. But our Heavenly Father’s great love for us is the kind of experience that should grow stronger and stronger over the years, until it totally dominates every aspect of our lives. It should consume our thoughts and control our behavior. It should motivate us to serve God and to live holy lives. It should give us comfort in all our trials. It should fill us with the eager hope of being with Him in heaven. It should fill us with awe and worship, that He, the holy sovereign of the universe, would set His love on a sinful, self-willed rebel like me! “Amazing love, how can it be, that Thou, my God, should die for me!” Please don’t let yourself ever hear of the Father’s great love and think, “Ho hum!” It ought always to amaze you. It ought to always send chills up our spine and a shiver through our soul. After nearly a century of knowing the Lord, John is still awed by God’s lavish love. But see is also a command.   2) As a command, it shows that the Father’s great love should instruct us. The command is, “Stop everything else! Look at this Think about it! Ponder the significance of it!” The word translated, “how great” is literally “what kind.” It originally meant “of what country,” and always implies astonishment. The love of God is unparalleled in human experience. It’s as if John thinks about the Father’s great love and says, “Where does this come from? It must be from heaven, because there’s nothing like it in this world!” The habit of devout, thankful meditation on God’s great love demonstrated in the sacrifice of His Son for us, along with the humble, thankful conviction that I am a child of God because of it, lies at the foundation of all fulfilled, joyful Christian living.   Many of us have old friends from college or from a town where we used to live. If we never think about them and never communicate with them, that friendship fades and will not have much significance in our lives. For the friendship to affect you, you must think often about this friend and what they mean to you. Such thought always requires great effort. We all have too many other things crowding into our daily lives. If we do not deliberately take the time and effort to block out all of these pressing things and to focus on what God has done for us in Christ, His lavish love will get crowded out of our thoughts and daily lives. Do you know what one of the outcomes of meditating on God’s lavish love is? You’ll be more loving. When you and I consistently meditate on God’s lavish love for us, this fruit of love starts growing and reproducing itself in our lives. If you’re a grump, it’s very likely that you’re not meditating on God’s love for you.        b) We are now God’s children. John continues, “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. Dear friends, now we are children of God” (vs. 1b-2a). Not only did it cost the Father His Son to save us from sin and death and hell; not only were we enemies so that God had to propitiate His own righteous anger and justice in order to save us, but the Father went way beyond the love of rescue and the love of sacrifice and the love of clemency to His enemies. In and through all this He had a greater design. He showed us another kind of love far beyond all that. He might have rescued us, sacrificed for us, forgiven us, and not gone any further. Instead He showed us another kind of love; He took us into His family so that we could be called “children of God.”   Please don't take this for granted. First of all, He didn’t have to save us at all. He might have said, "Enemies don't deserve saving and that's that." He might have said, "My Son is too precious to pay for angels, let alone humans, let alone ungodly, rebellious humans." But He also might have said, "I’ll save them from hell, and forgive their sins, and give them eternal existence—on another planet, and I’ll communicate with them through angels." Nothing in us or in the nature of the world required that God would go beyond all redeeming, forgiving, rescuing, and healing love to this extreme—namely, to an adopting love. A love that will not settle for a truce, or a formal gratitude, or distant planet of material pleasure, but will press all the way in to make you a child of God, a member of His family.   But even that is not an adequate description of this kind of love. When John writes about our becoming children of God, he’s not thinking in terms of adoption (that’s a Pauline concept). John’s thinking in terms of something much more profound, the new birth. There is no human analogy for this. If I find a child and want to take him into my home, I can’t cause the child to be born again. I take him and I love him with the personality and temperament that he has from his biological parents. I influence with love, but I do not get into the very nature of the person and change it…but God does. The love that John has in view here is not the love that merely takes care of paper work and adopts. That would be amazing beyond words, to be adopted into God's family and Paul does describe it this way. But John sees more. God does not adopt. He moves in, by His Spirit, His seed; John calls it, and imparts something of Himself to us, so that we take on a family resemblance. If you’re a child of God this morning, you are so by adoption, yes, and by more than adoption, by new birth. 1 John 5:1 says it this way, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well.”   The love of God for us goes beyond adoption. God will not stop in His aggressive pursuit of closeness and communion until He has penetrated our very souls and planted His seed in us and given us a new nature, not a divine one—we are not God—but a nature like God's—in the image of God. Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes of this, “I feel that this is perhaps the greatest weakness of all in the Christian church, that we fail to realise what we are, or who we are.” Maybe your earthly father was a drunk or a murderer or even a child molester. But you have a new Father…do you know who you are? You are a child of God. And He will never disown you…you’re not just adopted, you have His DNA.   Now some who hear Christians talking this way say, “What a bunch of hypocrites you are! What do you mean, ‘children of God'’ What makes you think you're any better than anybody else? Why do you act as though you are saints and we are sinners?” Their thinking is that if someone says that they’re a child of God, they’re claiming to be perfect and without sin. To be a child of God doesn’t mean that we’re perfect or even think that we are. It doesn’t even mean that we have yet learned all that is involved in being a child of God or even begun to experience it ourselves. What it does mean is that the healing process has begun. God has begun a transforming work and the evidences of it should be obvious right from the beginning. Not that it is all completed, but it’s begun.   Let me illustrate. Say you’re walking down the street and you see a building with scaffolding around it. Looking through the scaffolding you can see that there is no glass in the windows and obviously things are in a state of incompletion. A sign out front says, "This Building Is Under Construction." You wouldn’t write a hot letter to the contractor and say, "What's the matter with you! What do you mean, claiming to be under construction? Why, I walked by there and there's no glass, there’s nothing finished about it at all." He’d reply, "You’re right. We never claimed it to be finished. It’s simply under construction." That’s what Christians are claiming when they use this phrase, children of God, we’re under  construction.   And just in case John’s first readers were thinking, “If we’re children of God, why doesn’t the world recognize it?” he adds, “The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him.” The world’s hostility toward us is merely the fallout of their hatred and hostility toward the Lord Jesus. The world’s ignorance of us is theological. They don’t know God, so they don’t know us.   c) We will share the glory of God. “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.” Anticipating our future glorification, one person insightfully observed, “There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.” Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, as heir to the throne of England, lives already in the light of what he will be one day. He does not yet possess his full inheritance, but his whole life is and has been shaped by it. One day we will be like Jesus, changed into His likeness.   In this verse the two emphatic expressions are now and not yet. The privileges and dignity of being God’s children are already ours, but the full disclosure of the glory of all that means is yet to be. The apostle's words suggest that the Christian's present status is unbelievably wonderful but that the future destiny is even more so. What we do "know" (the word means to know intuitively, unquestioningly, as a matter of principle) is that, when King Jesus shall appear, “we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is.” The goal of every believer is conformity to the likeness of Christ. What John has in view then is the ultimate conformity that we will experience. The process has already begun. We are being changed. One day that process of change will be completed and we shall be like Him.   W. Alexander records an incident from the mission field which is a fitting commentary on these words. Some native converts were translating 1 John. When they came to this statement, "we shall be like him," the translator laid down his pen and exclaimed, "No! It is too much; let us write, 'We shall kiss His feet.' " But as Barrett comments in relating this, "it is not 'too much' for the love of God."   God has poured out His lavish love on us. Now we are the children of God and someday in the not too distant future, we shall be like Him. As God’s children, we have blessings far beyond our finite minds! 2. If we are God’s children, we will behave like it. One of the critical problems of mainline churches is that while if they teach the truth, that salvation is by grace alone, they often so the muddy salvatory issue with non-salvatory behaviors like baptism, confirmation, church membership, communion, Bible reading, prayer, as well as personal piety and obedience, that many of their members conclude that salvation is an action or something that you do. Add to that, most of them never ask the bottom line question of their members that Jesus asked, “Do you know that you have been born-again?” But Evangelicals have muddied the salvatory issue with making it a conversion experience: Did you pray the sinner’s prayer? Did you ask Jesus into your heart? That methodology is foreign to the New Testament. Where do you find Peter or James or John praying the sinner’s prayer? We don’t have the “conversion experience” of most of those early Christians.   Stay with me. While John writes to tell his followers that it is their rebirth that gives them assurance, he does not tell them to anchor their spirituality in some powerful ecstatic experience that validates the presence of God in their lives. The Bible does not teach this notion that a valid Christian life must have a dramatic beginning or at least some dramatic component. In evangelical circles this is usually some profound conversion experience. Among charismatics, it may be an ecstatic experience such as speaking in tongues or a healing.    I’m not denying that Christians must be born again. John 3 makes that perfectly clear! Nor am I saying that a powerful, transforming experience with the Holy Spirit should not be an important part of the Christian faith. What I am saying is that our experiential theologies and preaching/teaching that reinforces the centrality of experience, make faith tenuous. If what I feel in my Christian walk is where my assurance is anchored, then any confidence in my faith is very frail because I cannot continue to manufacture those experiences and I can’t reinvent them. As time passes on and the earlier experiences become more and more dim, I find that they have less and less power to reassure me.   That’s why John’s words are such a blessing! The assurance of our faith is not some long ago conversion experience. It’s not that I prayed the sinner’s prayer. The assurance of our salvation is a changed life. John and the entire New Testament teach that If we are God’s children, we will behave like it. We must be instructed by John's teaching that feeling the power of rebirth is not the foremost measure of being reborn. For John it lies elsewhere. The yardstick is that Spirit led impulse to do right, to obey God's Word, to live an ethical life. Those are the first by-products of divine rebirth. John reiterates James, “faith without works is dead” (James 2:26).         And John gives us three behaviors that are evidence of real faith: godliness, righteousness and purification.   a) We do what is godly because our King is coming back. “And now, dear children, continue in Him, so that when He appears we may be confident and unashamed before Him at His coming” (v. 28). When Jimmy Carter was President, to promote his populist image, on several occasions he spent the night in the homes of normal people. Of course, he didn’t drop in unannounced! Those people had fair warning he was coming on a particular date and I’m sure that they had to agree to the visit. But, if you knew that the President would come at some unknown date to stay in your home and that the news cameras would be there to broadcast the state of your living room to the entire world, I’ll bet that you’d be motivated to clean house! And that’s John’s point…we know that King Jesus is coming back, we just don’t know when. So that we’re ready, we keep our house clean now. We don’t want the Lord who is pure to come to a filthy house.         Most preachers give the wrong emphasis in this passage. The emphasis is not on the shame but on the confidence. This word confidence primary meaning is freedom of speech or unreserved of utterance. It’s the same word used elsewhere for urging confidence in prayer and fearlessness in approaching the Father. It’s not meant to be a negative. The picture is of someone with glad fearlessness because of an assured conscience.   Let me illustrate what John is saying. Remember when you were in school and you had a final…and you really, really studied. You knew the material backwards and forwards. The time for the exam came around; you went to class with total confidence that you were ready and knew the material. That’s John’s point. He’s urging us to live so that when Jesus comes back, we’re waiting and ready to meet Him. That’s easy when you spend time with Him every day. That way when He physically returns, it’s just turning faith into sight. You’re already spending so much time with Him; His physical return is just a continuance of your normal life. The best way to prepare for the coming of Christ is to never forget the presence of Christ.       An easy way to live this out is to take a piece of paper and put a line down the middle. On one side list out the things in your life that make you ashamed. On the other side list out the things that give you confidence with the Lord. Having confidence then is easy. By God’s grace just do what you have confidence in.      b) We do what is right because of who we are. “If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of Him” (v. 29). When we show God’s righteous character, we show that we are born of Him because it’s not natural, it’s supernatural. As a child will show the features of their parents, if we are truly God’s children, we will have His nature. As it is God’s nature to be righteous, so it is the nature of His children to do righteousness. The life that is real is a life of doing righteousness, not just talking about it. It’s a habit of life. But it doesn’t work the other way around. Doing righteousness is not a precondition for being born of Him. As John Stott says, “A person’s righteousness is the evidence of his new birth, not the cause or condition of it.”   c) We purify ourselves because we want to be like Him. Look again at 3:3 “Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” Because our hope is focused on something that is real, because we are children of God and someday that will be clear, we therefore purify ourselves right now. This word purifies is in the present tense indicating it is to be a continuous, habitual process.   If you’re married, you can probably remember the time when you were engaged. It may have been good or terrible; engagements have all sorts of track records. But in general, for the vast majority of people, one of the things that engagement does is change your behavior. Because you’ve committed yourself to be married to your betrothed, you changed the way you thought and acted around members of the opposite sex. The day was coming when you’d be married and current behavior changed accordingly. John is making the exact same argument. “Someday I'm going to be a diamond, visible for who I am. So I should start acting that way now.” As John has told us what we are previously, he now tells us in verse 3 what we should be. Since we are expecting to be like Christ in heaven, why not begin to live right now as we will then?     One football coach had a wise policy. At the football banquet at the end of the season, there were various awards and commendations given out. But near the end the coach appointed the two captains, who were juniors, for the next year. Suddenly, the responsibility to lead, to get teammates to focus on football anticipating the year to come, became real for these two. Already they were thinking of next year, and that would alter their behavior. Being given a designation regarding something important to come, knowing for sure that it will happen, should change our behavior in the present. That's what John argues for: Because we have this hope, we purify ourselves now. We start choosing to live lives that are consistent with what will happen on the day that Jesus is revealed. Conclusion: John reminds us We are family! Let me urge you to appreciate how much you’re loved. We're called children of God; He’s lavished us with His love and someday we’ll have glorified bodies like His.   Next Sunday is Father's Day. It’s a good time to have family themes in mind. I hope you’ll honor your biological father and say thanks to him, if that's possible and appropriate, or perhaps to someone else who cared for you as a father. That's a very good thing to do. But our heavenly Father is the one who deserves our thanks in infinite terms—the one who has lavished His love upon us and made us His children, changing us from the inside out by His indwelling Spirit.   Someday we and everyone else will be able to see that we are like Jesus Christ, adopted as God’s children. We cry, "Abba, Father, Daddy," to the one who loves us.   Let me challenge you during this week preceding Father's Day that you make some place for gratitude to your Father---perhaps times for prayer, a note left in a journal, or a word of praise and appreciation spoken to a friend…maybe a sacrifice of praise for His glory.   We are family! Live in your blessings and live out the way that He has called us to live.