The text came in at 6:40 in the morning, before the coffee had finished dripping. Somebody in another state had tried to open a credit card in your name, and the bank wanted to know whether that was you. It wasn’t, and the next two hours went to phone trees, frozen accounts, and a new password with more symbols than anyone could remember. The strange part is how personal it feels, even though the thief never wanted you at all. He wanted your name and whatever doors it would open.

Most of us live life assuming our identity is something nobody would bother to steal. The people who steal identities know better. A name carries access, standing, and privilege, which is why banks now guard it behind two and three layers of verification.

The apostle John wrote to a group of ordinary believers about an identity of an entirely different kind. It was given rather than stolen, and the One who gave it knew exactly who He was giving it to. It came with privileges, and (as privileges usually do) responsibilities came along with it too.

“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” (1 John 3:1)

The Love That Names Us Children

John’s sentence opens with an exclamation, and English doesn’t carry its force well. The King James rendered it “Behold, what manner of love,” which at least tells the reader to stop and pay attention. The sense is closer to stopping in your tracks and staring, the way a teenager says “No way” when something is too good to be real. The living God, who made the universe and owes it nothing, has decided to call us His children, and John wants his readers to be a little stunned by that.

He then adds four words he didn’t really need: “and so we are.” The sentence could have ended at “children of God,” and it would have been true and wonderful. John doubles it anyway, as though he knows some of his readers will take the first half as a pleasant figure of speech, a courtesy title handed out once and forgotten. The name describes what a believer actually is, and John says it twice so that anyone who missed it the first time won’t miss it the second.

“For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.” (Romans 5:10)

Taking in a stranger would be kindness enough. Taking in an enemy, giving him the family name, and setting a place for him at the table is a different order of love altogether, and it’s the only category big enough for what the Father has done. The relationship has changed at the root, from hostility and alienation to belonging.

Adoption shows one side of this. When a couple learns a baby is on the way, they are in, and gladly, and the child is coming either way. An adoptive family has to choose. Somebody sat with the paperwork, counted what it would cost, stood in front of a judge, and said, “This one is ours.” That’s the posture of the Father toward every person who trusts His Son. You were chosen on purpose, with the cost fully known (and the cost was the death of the Son), and the name was freely handed to you. Nobody had to steal it.

A Family the World Does Not Recognize

The second half of the verse turns from the privilege to the cost. “The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” Children of God will not be recognized as children of God by the world around them, and John states that as a settled fact rather than a problem to be solved.

Some people think that if we are kind enough, generous enough, and pleasant enough at the neighborhood cookout, the world will eventually come around and admire us. While kindness is commanded, and nobody should use John’s words as an excuse to be sour, kindness cannot make a life centered on Jesus Christ look normal to people who do not know Him. They will find it a little odd. They may tell you, with a grin, that you have gone religious on them, since you keep showing up at church and then going back for the other things the church does too.

The change usually shows up in small things first. Your language is different than it used to be, and so are the jokes. The priorities that used to fill the calendar have been rearranged around following Christ on the narrow way. Old friends notice, and some of them say, “We miss the old you, come on back.”

John’s answer is simple. The world did not recognize Jesus either, and it would be foolish to expect it to honor His followers when it would not honor Him. It did lift Him up, but it lifted Him up on a cross. Believers across twenty centuries have faced rejection, abuse, and martyrdom for belonging to Him, and Isaac Watts asked the right question about it three hundred years ago, wondering whether he should expect to be “carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease, while others fought to win the prize and sailed through bloody seas.” Being thought a little odd is a very small price by comparison. A believer who cannot bear an eye roll is in trouble. We must live out our faith graciously enough that when the invitations stop coming, we can say that we are okay.

There is a danger on the other side, too. When the world pulls back, the natural response is to pull back too, until every friend we have sits in the same pews on Sunday. That feels safe, because church people share our priorities and worship the same Savior, and those friendships are a good gift. As the only friendships, they become a dangerous place to live. A lamp that only shines inside a closet doesn’t help anybody find the stairs, and salt that stays in the shaker doesn’t flavor a thing (Matthew 5:13–16). Keep the friendships you have outside the church, and keep making new ones. The world may not recognize you, and you are still called to be light in it.

What We Will Be Has Not Yet Appeared

“Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)

The word “now” fixes the identity in the present. A believer is not waiting to become a child of God, since that is already settled. What has not yet appeared is the finished version of that child, and John freely admits he cannot describe it.

Believers have always had questions about eternity: what kind of body we will have, whether we will know one another, what becomes of a marriage when one spouse is already with the Lord. They are good questions, and it is good to wonder about them, though God has chosen to keep most of the answers hidden for now. Paul told the Corinthians the same thing.

“But, as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him’” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

A young couple in an ultrasound room gets a small taste of this. The technician points to a gray flicker on the screen and says that is the heart, and the parents nod as though they can see it. They can’t tell whether the child will have her mother’s laugh or her grandfather’s stubborn streak. Everything that child will become is already there, but none of it has been revealed yet. Nobody in that room doubts it’s going to be wonderful.

John does know one thing about the finished version: “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” Faith is a necessary part of the journey here, but it will not be needed there. Paul wrote that faith, hope, and love abide, and that the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13), and part of the reason is that love is the one that carries over whole. Faith becomes sight and hope becomes possession when we finally see the Savior as He is, still bearing the marks of the cross, the Lamb standing as though He had been slain (Revelation 5:6).

Regeneration is the new birth, a one-time event that brings a person into the family. Sanctification is the long process of becoming less like the world and more like Christ, which ought to be a steady climb and in practice looks more like a stock chart in a rough year, jagged all the way and trending upward, because we are broken people. Glorification is the end of the process, when the work is finished, and the believer stands before Christ completely transformed.

Being like Him means being made holy, pure, and completely clean. Certain perfections belong to God alone, and no creature will ever possess them, so a believer made like Christ does not become deity or anything close to it. The mortal body puts on immortality (1 Corinthians 15:53), and sin is gone for good.

Paul wrote about doing what he did not want to do and failing to do what he wanted, and he finally cried out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). Any believer who has fought the same sin for the tenth year running knows that cry. Paul’s answer was Jesus Christ, and a day is coming when that answer is complete. The greed will be gone, along with the hatred, the lust, the pride, and the selfishness that follows us into every room. The battle will be over. As the body of Jesus was raised from the grave and transformed, ours will be transformed too, and so will our hearts, and so will everything else.

Unashamed When He Appears

All of that hope rests on a command John gives a few verses earlier:

“And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming.” (1 John 2:28)

“Little children” is a term of affection for people who are already inside the family. Abiding is what family members do once they are home, which means it cannot be how anyone gets in the door, and reading the verse as an entrance requirement turns John’s tenderness into a threshold he never set. The new identity is God’s gift, and abiding is how the relationship is tended.

John learned the word from Jesus on the night before the cross.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

A branch lives on what flows to it through the vine, and once it is cut off, it withers, however healthy it looked the day before. In practical terms, abiding looks like an ongoing conversation with the Lord through the day, an awareness of the connection, and a deliberate effort to walk with Him and please Him.

Every marriage knows the difference between a relationship and an arrangement. Picture a couple who run their whole household through a shared calendar app, every appointment logged and every pickup assigned, but who haven’t had a real conversation since Spring. The logistics are flawless, but the marriage is dying. Anyone looking in would say they have a problem, and they would be right, because a relationship lives on attention. When God speaks through His Word, abiding means listening the way a husband ought to listen to his wife, wanting to catch what she asks and wanting to do it, even when his mind is pulled six other directions.

Here’s the result of abiding: confidence at Christ’s appearing instead of shrinking back from Him in shame. The word translated “confidence” carries the sense of openness, of having nothing to hide. Two kids are at the front window when the truck turns into the driveway. One runs for the door. The other remembers the lamp in the back bedroom and suddenly finds somewhere else to be. Both belong to the same father, and only one of them wants to be seen.

Scripture is plain that believers will stand before the judgment seat of Christ, where what we have done in the body will be evaluated (2 Corinthians 5:10), and that some of what we built will burn up because it had no eternal value (1 Corinthians 3:12–15). The confidence John has in mind is an open heart, which is a long way from swagger, since nobody is going to stride up to that evaluation eager to get started. It sounds more like, “Lord, I wish there were more, but I have loved You since the day You saved me, and I tried to spend my life on what lasts.” That openness is the difference between dread and joy at His coming, and abiding is what produces it.

A Family Resemblance

“If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him.” (1 John 2:29)

The verse begins with the most basic thing a believer knows about Jesus, the kind of entry-level, embryonic faith every Christian starts with: He is righteous. He is truly without sin, which is why He could die on the cross for others, having no death of His own to pay. John reasons from there. Children bear a resemblance to the family they were born into, and this resemblance shows up in practice.

The practice turns out to be a family affair. John’s “you may be sure” looks outward as well as inward, since abiding in Christ is something believers do together, worshiping, praying, and exhorting one another as one body. It might be the retired farmer who prays through the church directory a page at a time, or the widow whose Bible is open on the kitchen table every time anyone stops by, and who mentions, without making anything of it, that she was just praying for you. That kind of faithfulness never makes the paper, yet it is the family resemblance all the same, and seeing it in someone else strengthens our confidence that it is real in us.

Hope That Purifies

“And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.” (1 John 3:3)

The whole passage lands here. The hope John has been describing refuses to stay in the future, because a person who is looking forward to the appearing of Christ, with the confident anticipation the Bible calls hope, starts cleaning house in the present.

Paul described the house that needs cleaning. He told the Ephesians that sexual immorality, impurity, and covetousness must not even be named among the saints, and neither should filthiness, foolish talk, or crude joking, and that thanksgiving belongs in their place (Ephesians 5:3–4). Then he gave the reason.

“for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light” (Ephesians 5:8)

Paul’s hinge is the same one John has been using all along, a before and an after. The unbelieving heart works toward all kinds of earthly priorities, and some of them are good things that slowly harden into idols. The believer has a new priority, and it sounds like a prayer: Lord, help me live in purity before You. Where there is sin, the way forward is confession.

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)

The danger at this point is rarely open rebellion. More often it is a comfortable half-heartedness, the lukewarm condition Jesus rebuked in the church at Laodicea, neither cold nor hot (Revelation 3:15–16). A lukewarm Christian usually stops caring where he is headed long before he would ever think of walking away, and the hope that was supposed to purify him goes cold in his pocket.

The purifying John describes happens in ordinary places. It happens at the break room table when a joke starts going somewhere it should not, and you let it die instead of adding the punchline. It happens at eleven at night, when the phone offers what it always offers, and you set it face down on the nightstand. It happens in the truck on the way to work, when a grudge you have been polishing for weeks comes up again, and you name it before the Lord for what it is. It happens on a Tuesday afternoon, when the coworker who thinks you have gone religious asks why you will not come along Friday night, and you answer him kindly and invite him to something instead.

None of that earns the identity of child of God, since that identity was settled the day you trusted Christ. The purifying is simply what a child does who knows his Father is coming home and wants to be at the door with nothing to hide. Nobody can make that choice for you, and nobody is supposed to.

Christian, you are called a child of God, and so you are. Do not settle for half a heart. Ask the Lord to search you and cleanse you and make you a trophy of His grace, and then walk into Monday with your hope fixed on His appearing.