Read with Me
1 John 2:29-3:3 (HCSB)
If you know that He is righteous, you know this as well: Everyone who does what is right has been born of Him. 1 Look at how great a love the Father has given us that we should be called God’s children. And we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it didn’t know Him. Dear friends, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him because we will see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself just as He is pure.
Listen with Me
The key difference that John points to between those who truly are children of God and those who are not is behavior. Those who are God’s children, who have been born of God through faith in Jesus, will share a family characteristic: they will do what is right.
This was a vital distinction in the days in which John wrote. The Gnostics were mounting a serious challenge to the faith espoused by both Jesus and the apostles. They taught that saving faith was a matter of this spirit of a person, not of the body. They taught that the body and spirit were composed of two different types of material. The body was made of coarse, earthy material that was by nature irredeemable, while the spirit was made of much finer stuff, which could be redeemed and perfected.
This philosophy resulted in a belief that those two parts of a person, the body and the spirit, had little or no interaction, and therefore, what one part did had no effect on the other. Therefore the physical body could continue to sin, or even grow more sinful after salvation, and it didn’t affect the saved state of the soul at all.
But John has a perfectly clear way of telling if someone has truly become a child of God through faith in Jesus: If they do what is right, holy, then they have been born of God and are truly His child. Those who profess to be God’s children but who still are mired in sin, who act in sinful ways and refuse to truly repent, to turn away from their sins and sinfulness, are pretenders.
But at the same time, John also realizes that there is unlimited potential for growth in every Christian. Our absolute perfection must wait the return of Jesus. And when we see Him as He truly is, as John saw him in the book of Revelation, we will be made like Him in purity.
But far from becoming complacent, somehow believing that, since we can’t be made 100% perfect in the world, how we live is not important at all, John points out that those who truly belong to Jesus focus intently on purifying ourselves, trusting in the power of the Holy Spirit to take our best efforts further than we can take them in our own strength, and bringing true purity each heart, so that our actions outside truly can line up with the holiness that God is making real day by day on the inside.
Pray with Me
Father, I have heard Christians say that since we cannot be 100% perfect in this life, it doesn’t actually matter what we do, or how we live. They say that You know we are made of dirt and can’t ever be perfect, so, why try? But John clearly says here that this reasoning is deeply flawed. His view is that the person who lives every day in relationship with You will naturally strive for purity in every area of our lives, leaning on You for the power and purity that we need, because we understand that our own striving will fall short, but that You can live Your holy life through us if we will let You. Lord, make me genuinely holy of heart, and then help me to live out that holiness on the outside in Your power every day. Amen.