God’s Amazing Love: Called to Be His Children!
Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.
Listen to the "Verse by Verse" episode covering this scripture.
The apostle John, the apostle Jesus especially loved, uses different forms of the word love 46 times in this letter. Here he asks us to pay attention to something so amazing that it seems incomprehensible. The eternal, all-powerful Creator God wants us to be in His family! Not as a pet or a household servant, but as a child like His firstborn Son, Jesus Christ. He wants us to inherit immortality and to then live with Him on a God-plane level of existence forever. (See our article “Becoming Sons and Daughters of God.”)
These incredible promises should strongly motivate us to change—to become more and more like our pure and holy Elder Brother (verse 3).
These verses talk about a future time when we will be transformed from physical life on the human level to spiritual life in God’s own family. But in a sense we are “now” God’s children. God counts those things that will be as if they already are (Romans 4:17). We can still disqualify ourselves (1 Corinthians 9:27; Hebrews 10:26-29), but God has every intention of bringing us into His family (Philippians 1:6).
To learn more about this process of conversion and transformation that God calls Christians to, see our articles “What Does It Mean to Be Born Again?” and “Children of God.”
