Righteousness, Adoption, and the Sovereign Love of God

1 John 2:29-3:1

February 9, 2003

            Take your Bibles and turn with me this morning to 1 John 2:28.  We are right in the middle of this study regarding the second coming of our Lord and how we ought to live in light of that, and this morning we will read from verse 28 through 3:3.  As we read, especially notice 2:29-3:1 as that will be the text we will be studying this morning.  To set the context, though, let’s read the whole passage.  Read text.  Let’s pray.

            As I said in my prayer, I feel inadequate this morning to handle this text of Scripture we find before us.  There are undoubtedly more difficult verses in 1 John to interpret, but there are no verses in 1 John as difficult to truly comprehend and understand and wrap our arms around.  These two verses are, in my opinion, the two most glorious verses in the entire letter.  Why do I say that?  I say that because in these two verses John explains and exults in and wonders at the fact that we – sinful, wicked, finite, wretched, God-hating, self-exalting human beings – we have been adopted by the Father through the Son into the family of God, and because of that been given His nature.  I don’t know of a more incredible, wonderful, delightful, inconceivable doctrine than the doctrine that we who once, according to Colossians 1, were enemies of God in our minds have been reconciled to God, but not only reconciled, but adopted by the Father Himself and made His children and partake in His nature.  There is an incredible amount of glory and wonder and mystery about this doctrine that John teaches here that we are children of God, born of God. 

            As I said last week and the week before and as I remind you again this morning, this section in which we find ourselves is all about what it means to be a child of God.  John is discussing how we sinful human beings, who are full of darkness, can have fellowship with a holy God, who is light.  He has dealt with many of the necessary ingredients to authentic fellowship with God, and now he is dealing with this particular aspect, namely, that it is only those who are children of God who have fellowship with God.  The only human beings that can truly claim to have fellowship with God are those who are truly His children.  So, it is very important that we know whether or not we are children of God, because if we are not, then we will face disastrous consequences when we stand before Him someday. 

            John deals with this in two ways.  We see in these verses what it means to be a child of God in light of Jesus’ coming in glory.  We see that especially in 2:28 and 3:2-3.  And then John goes on to deal with being a child of God in light of the Incarnation, the coming of Jesus as the Suffering Servant who died for our sins. 

            Now, for the last two weeks we have seen how John brings up the subject of Christ’s coming in glory, and he doesn’t deal with being a child of God in that section directly.  He first brings up the return of Christ.  In these verses this morning, the subject of adoption into God’s family is introduced.  And then next week, as we will see (Lord-willing), John ties them together and shows how they relate to one another.  So for the last two weeks we dealt with the coming of Christ and that as believers we need to abide in Him to be ready for His coming.  And this week we are dealing with being a child of God and what that entails, and next week we will look at how those two facts – the second coming and our adoption – come together into one, coherent implication for our lives today.  So that is where we are and where we are headed with this text.  It is important we don’t just see these verses in isolation from their context, but we need to look at what is coming and where we’ve been to make sure we understand fully, or as fully as we can, what John is talking about here.

            As we come to this text this morning there are three questions I want us to ask of it.  The first question is this: How can I know if I am in God’s family?  How do I know if I have been adopted by God?  That’s number one.  Number two: How do you get into God’s family?  How does it happen?  Kids always get to the age when they ask their parents, “Where do babies come from?”  This morning we are asking, “Where do spiritual babies come from?”  How do sinners like you and me get adopted by a holy God?  Third, then, is this question: What are the results of my adoption?  Any child who gets adopted will obviously experience major changes in his or her life as a part of a new family, and spiritually this is no different.  There are certain ramifications of being adopted by God, and so we want to find out what those ramifications are, so we will ask: What are the results of my adoption?

I.  The Proof of Our Adoption (2:29)

            Let’s begin with the first question: How can I know if I am in God’s family?  The first thing we want to find out is whether or not the rest of this will even apply to us, because if we’re not in God’s family, then it doesn’t matter to us the process or the results.  So this is the important application question this morning.  Are you really in God’s family? 

            There’s a saying that I’m sure you’re familiar with, and that saying is, “Like father, like son.”  Most of the time children resemble their parents in one way or another.  If my dad walked in here this morning, even though you’ve never met him, I don’t think it would take you long to figure out he was my dad.  We look similar, and there are other characteristics that would immediately tip you off that we were closely related.  John, here, does not necessarily say, “Like father, like son,” but instead he says, “Like Savior, like son.”  Look with me at verse 29.  John says, If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him.  Here’s the general argument of the verse: If you know that Jesus, God’s Son, is righteous, then you know that all of God’s children are righteous.  Because Jesus is undoubtedly and without any argument the Son of  God, and because He, the Son of God, is righteous, then the logical conclusion is that if someone is born of God, that person is righteous.  If someone is a child of God, that person must by nature be righteous.  If you are like God’s unique Son, Jesus, then you are His child.

            Let me unpack that piece by piece to show you why that is the argument of this verse.  He begins with the phrase, If you know that He is righteous.  Here is the condition.  If you know that He[, Jesus,] is righteous.  Now, I say that the He in this part of the verse is Jesus, because John calls Jesus the Righteous One in chapter 2, verse 1.  So John begins and ends the chapter with this affirmation: Jesus is righteous. 

            There are two things I want to point out to you about this conditional statement.  First, the phrase John uses in Greek that is translated in the NASB you know that is a common Greek phrase to introduce a well-known, well-established fact.  In Greek the word for know in the first half of the verse is different than the word for know in the second half of the verse.  That is significant here, because John is citing what is an indisputable fact for his readers.  Jesus is righteous, and that is fact, undeniable fact no matter what any other witness of teacher might say!  The word for know is a word that is based on knowledge by information, and not from experience.  And he is saying to his readers that they should know this indisputable fact, not because they ever saw Jesus or met Him or witnessed His righteousness, but because of the testimony they have heard and the intellectual and logical arguments from the Spirit through the Apostles themselves.  So John is very clear in the Greek text that the concept of Jesus’ righteousness is an undeniable fact.

            But, John also realizes he is up against false teachers who are very persuasive.  So he also makes room for the doubter here.  He doesn’t assume that we will all agree with this fact.  It is almost as if John is saying, “If you know that Jesus is righteous, and if you don’t know that you should, because it is indisputable fact…”  In general we would assume that church-going people would agree with the truth, at least intellectually if not practically.  But John here states this in such a way that, although he is presenting his readers with factual truth, he also realizes that people may reject the truth. 

            It must also be noted, though, that if someone rejects this truth, whether or not they are born of God is not really a question John needs to address here, because he has already addressed it in 2:18-27.  Anyone who would reject this truth is called an antichrist and a liar, so clearly John recognizes that rejection of this truth is a mark of an unbeliever.  So John’s concern here is not so much for the person who rejects this truth, although he is concerned about that person and deals with them as well in other parts of the letter, but his concern is primarily with someone who claims to be a Christian and believe the true doctrine.  There is no question that someone who rejects Jesus is not born again.  The question comes in when we encounter those who claim to know this fact.  So John acknowledges that there are doubters and nay-sayers, but they are not his concern here.

            John says, If you know that He is righteous, if you have the doctrine, if you have the truth, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him, or born of God.  So here’s the argument: If you have questions about who is a child of God among those who profess the right doctrine, here’s how you tell.  You look at the true Son of God.  Who is the One who is undeniably God’s Son?  Jesus.  He is without a doubt the Son of God, so everyone who is like Him we can conclude is also a child of God.  If we have doubts about whether or not we are children of God, we look to see if we resemble the One we know is the Son of God, and if we see a family resemblance between our older brother, Jesus, and ourselves, then we know that we have been born of God. 

            John describes this as practicing righteousness.  This simply means living the kind and quality of life that Jesus lived.  How did Jesus live?  He was sold out for the glory and kingdom of God.  Everything He did revolved around the will of His Father in heaven.  Jesus was never self-willed.  And He was never controlled by the will of men.  The will of His Father controlled Him and governed everything He did, including dying on the cross.  If you want to be like Jesus, you can’t be self-willed, and you can’t be a people-pleaser.  You have to live to please your Father. 

            It is important to understand at this point that we don’t do what is righteous to become children of God.  That will never work.  Jesus didn’t get to be the Son of God because He did right and good things.  That is seeing things completely backwards.  Jesus did right and good things not to become the Son of God, but because He is the Son of God.  He did not earn His position as God’s Son by doing righteous acts.  He did righteous acts because of His position as God’s Son.  It is His nature to be righteous because He is God’s Son.  It is the same for the Christian.  The Christian does not get to be a child of God because he does good deeds, good works; no, he does good works because he is a child of God.  It is the nature of the believer to do what pleases his Father.  You can’t earn your way into God’s family.  You can’t work your way to the Father.  John makes it clear that the one who lives a lifestyle patterned ever-increasingly after the lifestyle and motives and heart of Jesus is born of God.  Are you like Jesus, the true Son of God?  Then you’re born of God.  If you bear the family resemblance, you can be sure you’re part of the family.  Everyone who is in the family looks like the Father, and we can test who is really in the family and who isn’t because we know one person is in the family, and that’s Jesus.  So if you’re like Him, then you’re in the family; if you’re not like Him, you’re part of a different family and you haven’t been adopted as a child of God.

II.  The Means of Adoption (3:1)

            Now we said that you can’t work your way into the family.  You can’t earn a spot in God’s family.  So how do you get in?  This brings us to question two: How do you get into God’s family.  We said you can know that you are in it if you practice righteousness, if you’re like Jesus.  But the catch is that you can’t get in by being like Jesus.  There’s no work you can do to get you in, so how are we adopted by God?

            Here we have one of the most glorious verses in all of Scripture.  The love of God for His children!  At this point John just stops to marvel at the love of God.  You get into God’s family only one way, and that is by God reaching out and of His own love and free will putting you in as a gift to you.  God gives you the gift of love, and that’s how you get in.  John writes, See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God. 

            That first word, see, is a command, and it’s like John is saying, “Look at the love of God!  Just sit back for a minute and gaze upon the inconceivable and wondrous love of God!  Stop with your busy schedule and your appointments and your tasks and look at God’s great love!”  Have you looked at it lately?  Have you considered it?  Have you set out purposefully to see it?  This is a command of Scripture.  We are to take time to consider God’s great love for us and to think about it and look at it and wonder at it and marvel that we, wicked God-hating sinners should be called children of God!  Oh what a gift of God’s gracious love!

            The words how great in the NASB don’t do any justice to the original.  Great is such a watered-down word in our English language.  “How was lunch?”  “It was great!”  Is that what the love of God is like?  No.  The love of God is greater than that kind of great.  It is literally in the Greek from another planet or another realm.  John is here literally saying, “Look at this love of God that comes from another realm and is from another world!”  Oh this love of God is not human.  It is not at all like what we call love.  This love of God is so great that John uses a word that has the idea of love from another planet.  Perhaps our modern idiom “out of this world” would be the idea. 

            This wondrous love of God was a gift.  John says the Father has bestowed it upon us.  God gave it to us.  Of His own free will and gracious choice God decided to give His children this immense, unimaginable love.  On the front of your bulletin there are two verses from John.  John 1:13 says, and you can read it there on your bulletin, that those who believe in Jesus were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.  He says this: The children of God did not become the children of God because of their nationality.  That is born of blood.  It is not a bloodline, such as being an Israelite, that makes a person a child of God.  It is not from the will of the flesh.  It was not something you could will in your body.  It was not of the will of man.  It was not a choice a man made to give birth to a child.  Rather, all believers were born of God.  The idea in that verse is that it has nothing to do with anything external about us and nothing to do with anything internal in us, even our own free will.  It has everything to do with God’s gracious choice.  You read that all over the Bible.  And here in 1 John 3:1 we read that God’s love was given, it was a gift, and God gave it to His children.  They didn’t ask for it.  They didn’t seek it.  They didn’t search for it.  God bestowed it upon them.  He gave it to them because He loved them. 

            And He did it in order that we would be called children of God.  The whole purpose for God giving us His love was so that we would be His children.  So the only way to get into God’s family is for God to set His love upon you, give you His nature, change your heart to have a heart like His, and call you His child.  A person becomes a child of God because God calls that person, and He calls that person His child.  In the same way as God renamed Abram Abraham in Genesis and he renamed Jacob Israel in Genesis, so God calls those who were not His children His children.  In Romans 4:17 we read that God…calls into being that which does not exist.  That is it exactly!  There is no set of criteria God is bound to in order to make something happen or to make something exist.  When God calls, things happen.  When God said, Let there be light, even though there was no light before that moment, light came into existence.  God’s Word is a force that creates and changes and alters the course of history and the entire universe, and when God speaks, what He says happens even if all the circumstances are against it and it looks impossible and hopeless.  We were not God’s children, but then one day God called us His children, and we became His children.  He adopted us into His family. 

III.  The Results of Our Adoption (3:1)

            So the question is, and this is the third question now, if we have been so adopted by God, what are the results of our adoption?  How does being in God’s family affect us today?

            John adds the phrase in 3:1, and such we are.  This is John’s way of saying that when God purposed His love in Jesus so that He could call us His children, it happened, and we are His children.  That is the reality in which we live.  This verse is so incredible as it describes the plan of God, I want you to see it.  I want you to see what John is doing here with this sentence.  In the title of the sermon you see the words in “sovereign love.”  Why do I call it “sovereign love?”  Because of this sentence right here that ends with the words and such we are. 

            I want you to follow me here because this, to me, is the most amazing, incredible, mind-blowing, awe-inspiring aspect of this text.  There are three verbs in this verse, and I want to show you John’s flow of thought that gets him to these words and such we are.  This is crucial.  You see the verb at the beginning has bestowed or has given, either way, it means the same thing.  This verb is in a tense that says this: Sometime in the past God gave His love to us and He gave it to us completely.  It is my belief that this is not talking about our salvation.  This is talking about God’s Son Jesus coming into the world to die for our sins.  That was God bestowing His love on us.  And He did that a long time ago, and that process is finished because Jesus has paid the penalty for our sin.  And so John begins with this: God has given us His love in Jesus on the cross and in the tomb and out of the tomb ascending into heaven victorious over sin and death and hell.  But (and this is in the Greek verb, and you don’t get it from just the English translation because we don’t have a verb tense to say what the Greek says exactly as it says it) even though the death and resurrection of Jesus happened in the past, it has results that impact us even at the present moment.  The event is over, but the results, the effects remain. 

What are the effects?  Look at the second verb.  John says would be called.  John changes tenses here, and you notice that he doesn’t say, “are called.”  He says would be called.  Those words, would be, are so significant because they tell us something about the nature of God.  What John is saying is that God, from eternity past had a plan that at some point in history we would be called children of God.  At some point in time Robb Brunansky would hear the Gospel message, have his heart ripped apart because of his sin, and believe the truth and become a child of God.  God had all of that planned.  So John says that God bestowed or gave His love to us so that we would be called.  If he would have said that God gave His love so that we are called, we would lose this truth about God’s plan.  He would just be saying that God sent Jesus and now we are God’s children.  Maybe God had a plan, maybe He didn’t.  Maybe He knew who would believe, maybe He didn’t, but whatever the case, we are children of God because God sent His love.  But John doesn’t say that.  John speaks about God’s calling in this verse as if it hasn’t happened yet because in eternity past when God designed the plan of Jesus and our adoption it hadn’t happened yet.  But John’s point is this: God, in eternity past, had already planned out our adoption through the work of Jesus.  Paul says it like this in Ephesians 1:4-6: In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.  God has predestined us to be His children according to His own free will for His glory through Jesus, and it is freely given to us.  Paul’s words are remarkably similar to John’s in describing the gift of God’s love and adoption to unworthy sinners. 

So we see that God gave His love in Jesus, He predestined our adoption before we were ever born, and now the question is, can He finish His plan?  Will He bring it to pass?  And that is the third verb.  John says, and such we are.  What God predestined in eternity past has now happened in our lives if we are His children.  It is reality in time and God’s purpose and God’s plan stand.  His love is absolutely sovereign, and when God in eternity past planned to love me, His plan came to pass in my life at the appointed time, and now I am His child.  This is one of the most comforting, glorious, uplifting texts in the Bible.  What it means is this: If you’re a Christian, God chose to adopt you before you were ever born or creation ever existed, and then He sent Jesus, the Son of His love, into the world to make sure it would happen, and then when you were born at some point He called you His child, and you became His child so that even this morning you are a child of God.  God’s purposes stand, and His sovereign love reigns victorious in your life.  One of the results, then, of our adoption is that we are really are even today in truth part of God’s family.  We are His children if we bear the family resemblance from verse 29.  God’s sovereign, eternal love has been given to us in Christ with the purpose that we would become God’s children, and that purpose has worked effectively in our lives so that we are.

Secondly, the world doesn’t know us.  John writes, For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.  Because we are children of God the world doesn’t know us.  It doesn’t recognize us.  It doesn’t understand us.  We are rejected by the world.  “But,” John says, “don’t let that surprise you, because it did not know Him.”  The world did not know God revealed in Jesus Christ.  In fact, the world hated Him, rejected Him, mocked Him, beat Him, spit on Him, flogged Him, and nailed Him to a cross to die, and the charge against God the Son was blasphemy.  The world was so out of touch with who God is that it accused God Himself in human flesh of blasphemy. 

So John says, “Don’t worry.  The world is not going to know you because you are children of God.  But don’t let that bother you.  Instead realize that the world did not know Jesus as He revealed the Father.”  If the world does not know us, understand us, and accept, that should comfort us, not alarm us.  If we bear the family resemblance, we will get treated like the other members of the family.  The praise of the world and the ungodly is to be feared, not coveted.  Jesus said it like this in Luke 6:26: Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.  Do you want the praise of the world?  Don’t become a child of God.  The world and the ungodly only speaks well of false prophets.  If you bring the written Word of God to life in your life, you will be treated like the Word of God made flesh, Jesus Christ.  He was rejected by the world, but exalted by His Father.  For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. 

Righteousness, adoption, and the sovereign love of God.  All three should be evident in your life if you are a Christian.  Are you a child of God?  Do you manifest the righteousness of Christ in your life?  Could people say of you, “Like Savior, like Son?”  The love of God has been revealed in Jesus Christ so that everyone who believes on Him might become a child of God.  Let us strive to live like children of God and to imitate our Father.

What amazing love that God should send His Son to die for us so that we could become His children.  Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it like this: “The Son of God became the Son of Man that we, the sons of men, might become the children of God.”  Look at and observe and meditate on the love of God today as you spend your Lord’s day worshiping Him.  Take some time this week to enjoy the thought of God’s sovereign love which He freely gave to you if you are His child.  If you are not His child, believe on Jesus this morning, put your trust in Him alone for your salvation, and God will adopt you and be your heavenly Father.  Let’s pray.

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