Acts 3:12-19
Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48
Take
a few seconds and answer the following question in your mind. Who
are you?
[give a few seconds]
How did you respond?
Perhaps many of you immediately answered by giving your name...
But after that -- what came to mind, how did you identify yourself?
perhaps you identified yourself by your work -- farmer, craftsperson, teacher, nurse, entrepreneur...
or
perhaps you identified yourself by your hobbies or interests -- actor, fisher, hunter, gardener, dancer, intellectual
or
perhaps you identified yourself by a relationship -- say spouse, parent, uncle, aunt, grandparent
how we identify ourselves plays a large role in how we live our lives, how we think about ourselves and our place in this world.
we are a people of many hats, many masks, many shoes, insert an additional metaphor here...
we have many identities.
I’ve thought about this a lot as I have taken on two new identities this year.
In addition to being a husband, I am now a pastor and a student.
but there is an identity that we have as followers of Christ that takes precedence over all other identities.
we are children.
that’s right, children.
in 1 John 3:1 we read:
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
That is what we are. We are children. This is an identity that is foundational, it’s bigger than our identity as employee, it’s bigger than our identity as employer, it’s even bigger than our identity as spouse, as parent, and so on.
We are fundamentally children.
we read in the first chapter of John’s gospel:
“All who received [Christ], who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”
when we begin to follow Christ, we welcome a new reality to take precedence over the old.
no longer are we primarily parents or spouses, farmers or teachers.
we are all children.
and of course this is nothing new. we all know that we are children. there’s no other way to enter into life in this world.
but we are no longer simply children, as the scriptures say, “by the flesh”
but we are born of God, born of the Spirit -- to a new existence, a new identity.
and this identity is: child of God.
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
i am a husband. i am a pastor. i am a student. heck, I’m even a musician.
but above and beyond all these is the reality that sustains me and will sustain me through my journey in life.
I am a child of God.
God is born in us. Where there was an existence of death, now there is an existence of life. God’s spirit has made a home within us. And God’s Spirit is making us into new people, full of God’s grace and truth -- going forward in faith.
This is our adoption into God’s family. We share in the same Spirit of God who unites us and ignites a new desire for God’s goodness and God’s love to be manifest in ourselves and in the world.
we are children of God. and the next verse goes on to say: “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”
by faith, we know now that we are God’s children, that God has received us into God’s family.
But that’s about all that we do know. “what we will be has not yet been revealed.”
We talked last week about the penchant for certainty that we as humans have.
Again we see here that we are not called by God to know the future -- we don’t know what it will be like to meet our Maker, we don’t even know what tomorrow will hold for us, if indeed tomorrow happens to come.
What we do know is that we are God’s children now.
it goes on to say that “when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
when God is revealed we will see God and in order to see God we will be like God. And we know already that we have become like God -- because God has loved us so much that God has brought us into God’s family.
This is our hope. Our hope is not that we will have a life free of trouble, but that we will have a life lived in God’s family. Our hope is not that we will somehow get out of this life alive, but that we will have been prepared by God’s Spirit to enjoy the presence of God in whatever the future holds.
What we do know is that we are children of God.
We know that God has begun a good work in us, beginning a new life, redeeming us from the old and that Paul’s words ring true: “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.”
We are children of God. We have a journey, a life ahead of us. Even those of us who are grandparents are children of God. And perhaps many of you feel as if you are even younger now than when you first came to know God.
I love Bob Dylan’s refrain in the song “My Back Pages.”
“I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.”
We are on a journey, a journey with a new identity: child of God.
And we have been given this new identity, this new relationship to God by God’s great grace, by God’s generous love. And this new life is not an easy road.
It’s a hike up Gates Mountain. Or for those more seasoned hikers, Mt. Washington.
It’s a hard road. And some of you are further along than me. And you can tell me all about how tough that one spot is where the tree line ends and you have to start climbing some tough steep rocks.
And one day we will see God as God is. And we will be able to see God because we will have become like God. This is the transformation of God’s grace on our lives. God melts our pride and hate, God melts our selfish porcupine defenses. God slowly erodes the sharp violent edges of our wills. God slowly grows a new tree of life and love in the ashes of our former way of destructive hatred of self or others.
God’s good work will bring us to the end of our days and we will see God as God is because God will have given birth to light within us, a light that will know God’s light, a love that will recognize God’s love.
And that’s about all we know. We are acorns now. Then we will be a strong oak tree, the planting of our God.
And this is the journey we embark on by faith. We don’t know the future, but we know that God is love. We don’t know how it ends, but we know the Author of the story and we have come to call him Father.
We have this hope within ourselves.
And our epistle reading goes on:
“And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.”
This is our spiritual journey. It is a kind of purification.
It is a slow washing, a cleaning of what has been made unclean.
Perhaps you’ve got a messy room somewhere at home right now. I’ve often thought of my mind as a kind of room that can be messy or clean or somewhere in between.
When I’m busy busy busy -- my mind will oftentimes feel quite chaotic and messy.
When I slow down, when I have some time to meditate and pray, or even when my anxiety is broken by a refreshing and nourishing conversation with a friend or loved one, or a stranger -- when I slow down I find the room in my mind gets less cluttered, things start to make their way back to the shelves where they belong and order and clarity gets restored.
I think we can think of this verse in our text in a similar way.
“All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.”
by the nature of this hope -- that we are children of God and that God’s presence in us will sustain us through life and beyond -- by the nature of this hope we are gradually brought to a greater purity, a greater freshness, a greater orderliness, we might think of it as a greater simplicity.
for what is more simple than love? when Jesus sums up the law, the moral life, the spiritual life as “love God and love neighbor” there is a kind of simplicity. there is a kind of purity to this.
immediately when we begin to try to live that way we realize that while it may be simple in one way it is not simple in many other ways.
but as we grow in this life that God has given us, we realize that God is slowly purifying us through God’s love. God is slowly making us more aware of God’s love for us and we are made more pure through that awareness.
And the result of our coming to know God’s love is our radiating of that love to those around us. God’s love is transformative.
God’s love is like the nourishment from a meal. It sustains, it grows, it gives life.
And that life nourishes those around us.
Now all of this sounds very passive. God loves us and somehow that love radiates from us. Where are we, our active willing selves in all of this?
The truth is that God purifies us as we purify ourselves. That both we and God are journeying together in a dance that makes it not easily discernible who is doing what.
God indwells us and spurs us to lives which manifest the good works of one who has known love and who therefore loves.
We purify ourselves as God is pure. But since God is the only one who is truly pure it is God who is purifying us as we purify ourselves.
Perhaps it is best to leave this as a mysterious cause and effect relationship. But I kind of like the dance metaphor. Both God and the self are together moving to create a beautiful new reality and the music which lifts us to the movements is God’s music of unbounded grace and love.
There will be times when we will prefer to identify as something other than God’s child. There will be times when we will prefer that we were not identified as children of the one who forgives enemies. There will be times when we will prefer to hate, prefer to horde up treasures for ourselves, prefer to preserve our own identities and interests at the expense of others -- there will be times when being a child of God will be an embarrassing tattoo that we wish we could just surgically remove.
[give a few seconds]
How did you respond?
Perhaps many of you immediately answered by giving your name...
But after that -- what came to mind, how did you identify yourself?
perhaps you identified yourself by your work -- farmer, craftsperson, teacher, nurse, entrepreneur...
or
perhaps you identified yourself by your hobbies or interests -- actor, fisher, hunter, gardener, dancer, intellectual
or
perhaps you identified yourself by a relationship -- say spouse, parent, uncle, aunt, grandparent
how we identify ourselves plays a large role in how we live our lives, how we think about ourselves and our place in this world.
we are a people of many hats, many masks, many shoes, insert an additional metaphor here...
we have many identities.
I’ve thought about this a lot as I have taken on two new identities this year.
In addition to being a husband, I am now a pastor and a student.
but there is an identity that we have as followers of Christ that takes precedence over all other identities.
we are children.
that’s right, children.
in 1 John 3:1 we read:
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
That is what we are. We are children. This is an identity that is foundational, it’s bigger than our identity as employee, it’s bigger than our identity as employer, it’s even bigger than our identity as spouse, as parent, and so on.
We are fundamentally children.
we read in the first chapter of John’s gospel:
“All who received [Christ], who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”
when we begin to follow Christ, we welcome a new reality to take precedence over the old.
no longer are we primarily parents or spouses, farmers or teachers.
we are all children.
and of course this is nothing new. we all know that we are children. there’s no other way to enter into life in this world.
but we are no longer simply children, as the scriptures say, “by the flesh”
but we are born of God, born of the Spirit -- to a new existence, a new identity.
and this identity is: child of God.
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
i am a husband. i am a pastor. i am a student. heck, I’m even a musician.
but above and beyond all these is the reality that sustains me and will sustain me through my journey in life.
I am a child of God.
God is born in us. Where there was an existence of death, now there is an existence of life. God’s spirit has made a home within us. And God’s Spirit is making us into new people, full of God’s grace and truth -- going forward in faith.
This is our adoption into God’s family. We share in the same Spirit of God who unites us and ignites a new desire for God’s goodness and God’s love to be manifest in ourselves and in the world.
we are children of God. and the next verse goes on to say: “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”
by faith, we know now that we are God’s children, that God has received us into God’s family.
But that’s about all that we do know. “what we will be has not yet been revealed.”
We talked last week about the penchant for certainty that we as humans have.
Again we see here that we are not called by God to know the future -- we don’t know what it will be like to meet our Maker, we don’t even know what tomorrow will hold for us, if indeed tomorrow happens to come.
What we do know is that we are God’s children now.
it goes on to say that “when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
when God is revealed we will see God and in order to see God we will be like God. And we know already that we have become like God -- because God has loved us so much that God has brought us into God’s family.
This is our hope. Our hope is not that we will have a life free of trouble, but that we will have a life lived in God’s family. Our hope is not that we will somehow get out of this life alive, but that we will have been prepared by God’s Spirit to enjoy the presence of God in whatever the future holds.
What we do know is that we are children of God.
We know that God has begun a good work in us, beginning a new life, redeeming us from the old and that Paul’s words ring true: “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.”
We are children of God. We have a journey, a life ahead of us. Even those of us who are grandparents are children of God. And perhaps many of you feel as if you are even younger now than when you first came to know God.
I love Bob Dylan’s refrain in the song “My Back Pages.”
“I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.”
We are on a journey, a journey with a new identity: child of God.
And we have been given this new identity, this new relationship to God by God’s great grace, by God’s generous love. And this new life is not an easy road.
It’s a hike up Gates Mountain. Or for those more seasoned hikers, Mt. Washington.
It’s a hard road. And some of you are further along than me. And you can tell me all about how tough that one spot is where the tree line ends and you have to start climbing some tough steep rocks.
And one day we will see God as God is. And we will be able to see God because we will have become like God. This is the transformation of God’s grace on our lives. God melts our pride and hate, God melts our selfish porcupine defenses. God slowly erodes the sharp violent edges of our wills. God slowly grows a new tree of life and love in the ashes of our former way of destructive hatred of self or others.
God’s good work will bring us to the end of our days and we will see God as God is because God will have given birth to light within us, a light that will know God’s light, a love that will recognize God’s love.
And that’s about all we know. We are acorns now. Then we will be a strong oak tree, the planting of our God.
And this is the journey we embark on by faith. We don’t know the future, but we know that God is love. We don’t know how it ends, but we know the Author of the story and we have come to call him Father.
We have this hope within ourselves.
And our epistle reading goes on:
“And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.”
This is our spiritual journey. It is a kind of purification.
It is a slow washing, a cleaning of what has been made unclean.
Perhaps you’ve got a messy room somewhere at home right now. I’ve often thought of my mind as a kind of room that can be messy or clean or somewhere in between.
When I’m busy busy busy -- my mind will oftentimes feel quite chaotic and messy.
When I slow down, when I have some time to meditate and pray, or even when my anxiety is broken by a refreshing and nourishing conversation with a friend or loved one, or a stranger -- when I slow down I find the room in my mind gets less cluttered, things start to make their way back to the shelves where they belong and order and clarity gets restored.
I think we can think of this verse in our text in a similar way.
“All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.”
by the nature of this hope -- that we are children of God and that God’s presence in us will sustain us through life and beyond -- by the nature of this hope we are gradually brought to a greater purity, a greater freshness, a greater orderliness, we might think of it as a greater simplicity.
for what is more simple than love? when Jesus sums up the law, the moral life, the spiritual life as “love God and love neighbor” there is a kind of simplicity. there is a kind of purity to this.
immediately when we begin to try to live that way we realize that while it may be simple in one way it is not simple in many other ways.
but as we grow in this life that God has given us, we realize that God is slowly purifying us through God’s love. God is slowly making us more aware of God’s love for us and we are made more pure through that awareness.
And the result of our coming to know God’s love is our radiating of that love to those around us. God’s love is transformative.
God’s love is like the nourishment from a meal. It sustains, it grows, it gives life.
And that life nourishes those around us.
Now all of this sounds very passive. God loves us and somehow that love radiates from us. Where are we, our active willing selves in all of this?
The truth is that God purifies us as we purify ourselves. That both we and God are journeying together in a dance that makes it not easily discernible who is doing what.
God indwells us and spurs us to lives which manifest the good works of one who has known love and who therefore loves.
We purify ourselves as God is pure. But since God is the only one who is truly pure it is God who is purifying us as we purify ourselves.
Perhaps it is best to leave this as a mysterious cause and effect relationship. But I kind of like the dance metaphor. Both God and the self are together moving to create a beautiful new reality and the music which lifts us to the movements is God’s music of unbounded grace and love.
There will be times when we will prefer to identify as something other than God’s child. There will be times when we will prefer that we were not identified as children of the one who forgives enemies. There will be times when we will prefer to hate, prefer to horde up treasures for ourselves, prefer to preserve our own identities and interests at the expense of others -- there will be times when being a child of God will be an embarrassing tattoo that we wish we could just surgically remove.
These times will come and perhaps
for some of us are present right now. Let us let go of our
selfishness and allow God's love to melt our wills, to show us anew
that we are children of God, that we have a new way, and no longer
live according to the way of self-preservation or the partisan
identities which war for our allegiance in this world. We have an
identity which transcends other identities and calls us to be healed
by God and be agents of God's healing in this place at this time.
There
will be times where we will not feel like or not want to be children
of God. But just as the Father received with open arms the prodigal
son who returned, God's forgiveness is inexhaustible.
What blessedness there is in the way of Christ. It’s not easy, but it is true. It is not always pleasant, but it is the abundant life. As it is said of Aslan in the stories of Narnia: “of course he's not safe – but he's good.”
God will be with us always, to end of our lives and beyond. We are called out by God’s love to be that love in the world. And folks, this world needs that love now more than ever.
There’s a lot of violence. There’s a lot of brokenness. There’s a lot of fear. The shadow of death is dark and many live enslaved to its reality -- living lives of stiff resistance, of tough-minded defensiveness -- or worse, escaping the harsh realities of the brokenness in this world by entertainment, or by escaping somehow into unreality.
But we are children of the God who longs for the reconciliation of the world. God longs for the redemption of what is broken. The restoration of what has gone wrong, the healing of what has been made sick. Now more than ever this community, this state, this world needs those who identify themselves as children of God. Those who long to be purified by love as God is pure in love. Those who may not know what the future holds, but who by faith rest like a nursing babe in the nourishment of God’s never-ending grace and generous love.
Let us remember that we are on a journey as followers of Christ. And this journey is founded in God’s love and continues in the way of God’s love. As we are purified in ourselves by God’s love -- breaking down the barriers in our hearts by which we’ve justified our own hates and violence, pride and greed -- as we are purified by God, purifying ourselves through our daily choices, our daily actions -- in that mutual activity between God and us, the dance of grace to the music of God’s new way, God’s kingdom -- as we are purified we will more and more come to receive Christ, to love God, to rejoice in the simplicity of God’s love for us and the world -- the purity of God’s childlike acceptance of others.
And we will purify ourselves as God is pure and know the blessedness that is our existence in God’s family. And our families and other families will be nourished by the radiant light that beams from the one who has known the purity of God’s love.
But this is a journey that we take together. Here we come to remind ourselves and to remind each other that we are not the only one in God’s family. We are in good company and together we will be purified by love from God and from one another. Let us remember this new identity we have been given.
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
What blessedness there is in the way of Christ. It’s not easy, but it is true. It is not always pleasant, but it is the abundant life. As it is said of Aslan in the stories of Narnia: “of course he's not safe – but he's good.”
God will be with us always, to end of our lives and beyond. We are called out by God’s love to be that love in the world. And folks, this world needs that love now more than ever.
There’s a lot of violence. There’s a lot of brokenness. There’s a lot of fear. The shadow of death is dark and many live enslaved to its reality -- living lives of stiff resistance, of tough-minded defensiveness -- or worse, escaping the harsh realities of the brokenness in this world by entertainment, or by escaping somehow into unreality.
But we are children of the God who longs for the reconciliation of the world. God longs for the redemption of what is broken. The restoration of what has gone wrong, the healing of what has been made sick. Now more than ever this community, this state, this world needs those who identify themselves as children of God. Those who long to be purified by love as God is pure in love. Those who may not know what the future holds, but who by faith rest like a nursing babe in the nourishment of God’s never-ending grace and generous love.
Let us remember that we are on a journey as followers of Christ. And this journey is founded in God’s love and continues in the way of God’s love. As we are purified in ourselves by God’s love -- breaking down the barriers in our hearts by which we’ve justified our own hates and violence, pride and greed -- as we are purified by God, purifying ourselves through our daily choices, our daily actions -- in that mutual activity between God and us, the dance of grace to the music of God’s new way, God’s kingdom -- as we are purified we will more and more come to receive Christ, to love God, to rejoice in the simplicity of God’s love for us and the world -- the purity of God’s childlike acceptance of others.
And we will purify ourselves as God is pure and know the blessedness that is our existence in God’s family. And our families and other families will be nourished by the radiant light that beams from the one who has known the purity of God’s love.
But this is a journey that we take together. Here we come to remind ourselves and to remind each other that we are not the only one in God’s family. We are in good company and together we will be purified by love from God and from one another. Let us remember this new identity we have been given.
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”
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