January 12, 2009

• JMac - Hope - I John 2:28-3:3

  Condensed from John MacArthur

   

  A Theology of Hope
  
  1 John 2:28-3:3

  First John 2:28, "Now little children, abide in Him so that when He appears we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming.  If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him.  See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called children of God and such we are.  For this reason the world does not know us because it did not know Him.  Beloved, now we are children of God and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be.  We know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him just as He is.  And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies Himself just as He is pure." 
   
  This is about our hope in the appearing of Jesus Christ for those who are His beloved children.  The word "hope" in verse 3 really sums up our responsibility.   There are three great words, faith, hope and love.  Plenty of discussion occurs in the Bible with regard to faith and love.   On the other hand, hope goes begging a bit.  Hope is a word that immediately brightens, lifts, produces joy. First Corinthians 15 verse 19 Paul says, "If in this life only you have hope, you are of all men most miserable."  The severest misery is when your hope is only in this life.  If you don't have anything to hope for beyond this life, that is the supreme misery because this life is a vapor that appears for a little time and vanishes away.   

  There are some wishes, fantasies and religious promises that are made that are false hopes, but for most of the world, for most of humanity throughout its history there has been no real hope, no hope as described in Hebrews 6, "Hope that is an anchor for the soul," a real hope.  Death immediately brings the realization of the fact that any hope outside of God was a false hope.  Job 8:13 says, "The hypocrites hope will perish."  Job 27:8 says, "For what is the hope of the hypocrite when God takes away his soul?"  Job 31:24, "If I have made gold my hope, or said to the fine gold, 'You are my confidence,' then I have denied the God above."  Proverbs 10:28 says, "The hope of the righteous shall be gladness, but the hope of the wicked shall perish."  

  It's a terrible thing to have all your hope in this world, in a false religious system or gold, or money, or whatever it is in this world.  This is virtually to have no hope.  In Ephesians 2 Paul says, "They have no hope, being without God in the world."  If you don't have God, you have no hope.  And, in fact, many people in Paul's day actually acquiesced to that.  Unable to find anything that they could anchor their soul on, unable to find anything that was a sure and true hope, they came themselves to the conclusion that life was in itself futile.  There were philosophies extent at the time that believed that there was no hope for the body, that the soul was somehow imprisoned in the body.  Some day when the body died the soul reluctantly would leave the body with the last breath of the individual, leaving through the mouth of one who died of illness or through the open wound of one who was killed.  And the soul at that time, philosophers said in one way or another, that that soul would depart into the shade world where the dead bemoans their existence without comfort.  One writer, Diogenes, said, "I rejoice, I play in my youth, long enough beneath the earth shall I lie, bereft of life, voiceless as a stone and shall leave the sunlight which I loved.  Good man though I am, then shall I see nothing more."  Now that, I suppose, is the hope of the atheist, or the hope of the godless philosopher, that is the hopelessness of those without God who have nothing they can be sure of in the life to come.  And so they have hope only in this world and are therefore truly most miserable.  They drown their misery in alcohol, sex, entertainment and acquisition.  They drown it in sequential relationships.  Somehow, some way they try to make something out of their hopelessness, very different from those who know God. 
   
  Romans 8:23-25 says, "And not only this but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even ourselves groan within ourselves," and I love this phrase, "waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body for in hope we have been saved.  But hope that is seen is not hope.  Why does one also hope for what he sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see with perseverance, we wait eagerly for it."
   
  What this is saying is we have a salvation, the greatest part of which is as yet unrealized.  And that is all bound up in our hope.  It is wonderful to experience the joys of salvation presently, but they cannot be compared with that which God has prepared for us when our hope becomes reality.  The true benefits of salvation are as yet unrealized.  We hold to them by hope.  They are yet to be ours in their fullness.  And he says in verse 23 that we are waiting eagerly for that realization, we are waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons and the redemption of our body.  We have the redemption of our souls, we have received new nature within, we have been transformed by the renewing regenerating power of the Spirit of God.  We are new on the inner man but we have the same old unredeemed human flesh and we eagerly wait until our hope is realized in the redemption of our body.  That is, to receive the new body which God has prepared to go with the already redeemed soul when we will be made into the image of Jesus Christ, as we just read in 1 John, when we are made like Him because we see Him as He is.  We live in hope. 
   
  That is why death for us is not an ending.  It is the loosing, that is the very Greek word that is used, it is loosing us from our bondage.  We're in bondage now, our redeemed inner person, our redeemed man, the inner man, the redeemed nature, the life of God that has been granted to us in a transforming manner is incarcerated in unredeemed and fallen flesh and longs to be liberated so that for us death is liberation.  It is indeed the spirit being freed from the debilitating effects of sinful flesh.  Hope will become reality and when it does we will know for sure that the greater elements of our salvation were in this life unrealized.  It is good to know and experience the forgiveness of sin and the ministry of the Spirit of God that affirms that.  It is good to have the indwelling Holy Spirit.  It is good to experience the fruit of the Spirit; love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control.  It is good to be led by the Spirit.  It is good to experience answered prayer.  It is good to know Christian fellowship, to enjoy worship, etc., etc.  It is good to be engaged in serving the Lord.  It is good to see His hand of sovereign direction in our lives.  All of that is good but none of that comes close to what it will be when hope becomes reality.  We have a salvation then that is in its fullness as yet unrealized.  

  And so, verse 24 then says, "In hope we have been saved." And hope then is the major component of our salvation in the sense that we will only when that hope is realized participate in the very fullness of God's purpose in saving us in the first place. 
   
  Hope is in God, it is in no less than God.  It is not in men, it is in God.  It is in the unchanging God, the God who is never ever subject to alteration, the God who has spoken and has spoken the truth and cannot speak anything other than the truth.  Psalm 43:5 says, "Why are you in despair, O my soul?  Why are you disturbed within me?  Hope in God."  Things aren't what they should be.  Things aren't what you'd like them to be.  Things aren't the way you would plan them if you were in charge.  And so you become despairing and you become disturbed and the psalmist says, "Stop that and hope in God."  Remember that God is your help.  He is your help, he says, and your God.  Our hope then comes from God.  It is because God has made promises of care and concern and protection and guidance and direction and sustenance that we can trust Him for a better tomorrow.
   
  Psalm 78:7 says, "You should put your confidence in God."  "He is the one worthy of our hope."  It is God Himself who has committed to us the promise of care, the promise of meeting all our needs and the promise of eternal life. 
   
  The Bible also says that hope comes from God, He is the source of our hope, but it is a gift of grace.  It is not something you can earn.  2 Thessalonians 2:16 "Now may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and God our Father who has loved us and given us eternal comfort and good hope by grace comfort and strengthen your hearts in every good work and word."  Never let it be said that we did anything to earn our hope, it is a gracious gift.  God is the source of that gift.  God is the one who gives us everything to hope for. 
    
  In Romans 15:4, Paul refers to the Scripture the people were familiar with, the Old Testament at that time but it certainly refers to all God's revelation, whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction that through perseverance and the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.  Our hope comes from God by grace and is dispensed to us in the scriptures.  It is as we know what the Scripture says that we have hope.  Just as our faith is believing God for what He said just because He said it, so our hope is believing God for what He promised just because He promised it. 

  Psalm 119 says, "May those who fear Thee see me and be glad because I wait for Thy Word."  Here is a man who understood that what God said was true and there were times in his life of severe trial and difficulty where he had to wait until the realization of what he had hoped for came to pass.  He learned to live in that expectation.  He says it again in Psalm 119:81, "I wait for Thy Word, I will wait, God, until the time is right for You to deliver what You promised me in hope." 
    
  "Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts," 1 Peter 3:15, "always ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you."  And it says then, "Give this with gentleness and reverence."  You can defend your hope.  It is reasonable.  Our hope in eternal life, our hope in heaven, our hope in ultimately being made like Christ, our hope in a redeemed body wed together in indivisible oneness throughout all eternity with our redeemed spirit by which we will praise and serve the Lord is a reasonable hope. 
   
  It is defensible because it comes from the Word of God.  And God's Word is true.  Any faithful study of Scripture, any honest study of Scripture will allow Scripture itself to unload on an open-minded reader its own truthfulness.  The Bible can defend itself to anyone who studies it.
   
  So, we have a hope that comes from God.  We have a hope that is given us by grace.  We have a hope that is laid out for us in Scripture.  We have a hope therefore that is objectively defensible.  Our hope promised us in Scripture has already been secured for us by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  1 Peter 1:3, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus, our Lord Jesus Christ who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again unto a living hope that is a hope in life."  It's a living hope in the sense that it's a hope in eternal life.  And we bless God because He's caused us to be born again to this hope which truly lives through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  If Jesus didn't rise, we don't rise either.  John 14 Jesus said, "Because I live, you will live also."  We died in Him and we rose in Him.  We have risen to walk in newness of life in the very resurrection of Jesus Christ.  When Jesus went to the cross there might have been some question about whether our hope was valid.  There might have been some reason to wonder whether the promise of the Old Testament, "That will not allow Thy Holy One to see corruption," would really be true.  We might have wondered whether Job could honestly say, "Though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God."  Did Job have a reason for that hope?  Did the psalmist have a reason for that hope?  When Jesus was saying, "Whoever believes in Me though he were dead yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die," when He said that the home of Lazarus, Martha and Mary was a reason to believe that, well it was at least open to question until one monumental event and that event was the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  And at the resurrection of Jesus Christ, our eternal life was secured.

  Romans 15:13  "Now may the God of hope," do you ever call Him that?  As I say, it goes begging.  "The God of love" is often a term or a descriptive to refer to God.  Very rarely do I hear people call Him the God of hope, that simply means He is as we've already learned the source.  The God who is the source of hope, the God who has graciously given that hope to us and laid it out for us in Scripture and secured it by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, "Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."  Isn't this interesting?  Our hope is then confirmed, energized in us by the Holy Spirit.  Granted by God through grace, by means of the Scripture, secured by Christ, confirmed in us by the Holy Spirit.  It is the Holy Spirit who stirs up that hopeful attitude in the heart in response to the promises of God revealed in Scripture.  This is a marvelous hope.  This engulfs all of redemptive purpose.  This encompasses the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  The Father gives the hope, the Son secures the hope, the Spirit confirms the hope.  We are to live with hope.  We are not a people who have hope only in this world, we have hope in the world to come and it is a living hope.  It is a hope for real life guaranteed and secured for us because Jesus conquered death not only for Himself but for all who are in Him.

  As a Christian I assume that I'm going to be attacked by Satan.  One of the angles that Satan uses is to try to crush us with doubt.  Every Christian who has ever lived has experienced doubt.  Doubt is not an indication that you're not saved.  Doubt is a sin.  But like all other sin in the life of a believer, it's forgivable.  And by the Scripture and the work of the Spirit, we overcome it.  And so in Ephesians 6 we find that we are protected by a helmet.  Satan wants to come in with crushing blows of doubt, smashing us in the head, as it were, but we have on the helmet which is the hope of salvation.  Hope then defends us against Satan's attacks.  

  That's where the battle often is waged.  There are times in your life, I'm sure, where you wonder whether you're really a Christian.  Maybe you have the fleeting thought, "I don't even know if this whole gospel business is true, I wonder if I'm believing in a fantasy."  Maybe your thought is, "I don't know whether the Lord has really saved me.  I'm so sinful I'm not sure I'm  worthy.  I don't know whether I'm in or out.  Maybe the Lord has decided to let me go.  Maybe I only thought I was a Christian."  And all those battles go on and on and where do you go to be anchored?  You go back to the hope of salvation which is given you in Scripture by grace, guaranteed by the resurrection of Christ and confirmed by the wonderful internal witness of the Holy Spirit who continues to affirm that you are the child of God. 
   
  Hope defends us against Satan.  It's understanding the glorification aspect of salvation that is a defense.  No matter what goes wrong in this world we know there's a better life to come.  But it's more than just a positive hope, it's a defense because when Satan is hammering with doubt, we go back to the revelation of our hope.  The psalmist over and over again says, "I have hope in Your Word."  That's where you go and you read again what God has prepared for them that love Him, as much as has been revealed.  So our hope defends us against Satan.
   
  Our hope is confirmed through trials.  Look back Ephesians 6:8.  We have as a helmet the hope of salvation.  We go back and remember, as we read the Scripture, verse 9 that God has not destined us for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us that whether we're awake or asleep, we may live together with Him.  Therefore encourage one another and build up one another just as you're also doing.  
   
  In other words, what he is saying is in the middle of a trial when you're pounded by doubt, you go back, you re-grip the Scripture, you are reminded that God has not destined us for wrath, but rather has given us through Christ the salvation that is ours that has been obtained for us through Christ.  And by that you encourage one another.  You build up one another so that even through the struggle of doubt, even through the trial itself you come out stronger.
   
  I think Paul is affirming that in Romans 8 again, this is such a great chapter, Romans 8.  He says in verse 31, "If God's for us, who will be against us?"  Do we know that God is for us?  Is that revealed?  Is that part of what Scripture constitutes as our hope?  Absolutely.  We know that.  We know that He who didn't spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all will also freely give us all things necessary.  We know that no one can bring a successful charge against God's elect because God has already declared us righteous.  No one can successfully condemn us because Christ has already died for us.  No one can separate us from the love of Christ.  How do we know that?  Because Paul would say in personal testimony, I've been through tribulation, I've been through distress, I've been through persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword and I'm telling you in all those things we are conquerors.  And out of all those experiences he is convinced that there is nothing that can separate him from the love of Christ.  Trials actually have a way of affirming our hope, of strengthening our hope, and certainly of making our hope brighter. 

  Our hope is the source of our joy.   "How blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God."  How blessed is he?  That's the source of our greatest blessing, consequently our greatest joy that our God, the true and living God, has committed Himself to be our help.  Blessed is the man, Jeremiah 17:7, whose trust is in the Lord.  When you have your trust in Him, when you have your hope in Him, there's the source of your truest and purest and highest joy because you know your God is a rock, you know your God is unchangeable, you know your God is a covenant-keeping God, you know your God is sovereign and rules over everything and no one can hinder His unfolding purpose.  All these things are components of our hope. 
    
  Hope removes the fear of death.   What is there to be afraid of if all death does is release you into the fulfillment of your hope?  When you came to Jesus Christ and you acknowledged Him as Savior, what did you want?  You say, "I wanted forgiveness for sin."  Why did you want that?  Because I didn't want to go to hell.  I wanted to go to heaven.  You didn't come to Christ and say, "I want to be saved so I'll be a better wife.  I want to be saved so I'll be a nicer husband.  I'll be a better kid.  I want to be saved so I can have God working in my corner to make my life more successful, full of peace and joy and happiness."  That's not what was really in your mind because when you were truly saved what was overwhelming you at the time was the reality of your sin.  It wasn't about your circumstances.  You had to get beyond that to your sin and so you were coming as a sinner and you were saying, "O God, deliver me from my sin and its consequences into the blessedness of that eternal life which You provide."  You were very much aware, anybody is who comes to salvation, that you were engaging God in a matter that had eternal consequences.  You were looking all the way down into eternity and realizing the path you were on had immensely frightening eternal consequences.  It wasn't about fixing your marriage, it wasn't about fixing your family or your career, or making life easier to tolerate, you weren't thinking that.  Nobody does when they're genuinely saved.  You were overwhelmed with sin as to its reality and its severity and its permanent eternal consequences.  When you came to Christ then you were given eternal life, you were given the hope of that eternal life.  It should have been immediate that you lost the fear of death. 
   
  When you have this hope, the sting of death is gone.  It disappears because death simply ushers into the presence of the Lord and that's why the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 looks forward joyfully to death.  He says, "O, death, where is your victory?  O, death, where is your sting?  The sting of death is sin, the power of death is the law, but thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."  We've already...we're victorious over sin.  We're victorious over the indictment and punishment of the law.  So we can look at the future and we have a hope.  Colossians 1:5, "A hope laid up for you in heaven."  

  There's no fear of heaven.  Anybody afraid of heaven?  Anybody afraid to the presence of Jesus Christ?  Anybody afraid to go into the New Jerusalem?    The heavenly city, the capital of the eternal state, anybody afraid of holy angels?  God the Father?  Anybody afraid of the saints?  Nothing about heaven frightens me and death is simply the door.  So Paul, Colossians 1, says we have a hope laid up for us in heaven and he says of which you previously heard in the Word of truth.  Again it goes right back to the Scripture, you know about this hope because it's in the Word, it's been revealed by God in the Word.  And you have this hope.  And over in verse 23 of that same chapter he says, "If you just continue in the faith, firmly established and steadfast and not moved away from the hope of that gospel, you're going to realize it."  Verse 27 he calls it the hope of glory.
   
  So, we don't have anything to be afraid of when it comes to death.  Death is our releasing, freeing us up to be what we were redeemed to be.  Titus 1:2 refers to the hope of eternal life which God who cannot lie promised before time began.  Don't you just love that?  God who can't lie promised this hope of eternal life before time began and He promised it to His elect and He wrote their names down in a book and before you were ever created, before Adam was ever created, before the universe was ever created God had already written down the names of those who would receive the hope of eternal life.  And God cannot lie.  Hebrews 6:19 says, "We have this hope, strong words, we have this hope as an anchor of the soul, a hope sure and steadfast."  And he says, "It's tied to one who enters within the veil, even Jesus."  This is amazing language.  We have a hope that's anchored to Jesus who is inside the veil in the very throne of God interceding for us.  This is our hope.

  All of the glories of our hope will be fulfilled when Christ comes.  It's not really until He comes that we enter into the fullness of our hope.  If you're to die now, your spirit would go to heaven but your body would remain in the grave, right?  Until Jesus comes back, until He returns and the dead in Christ rise, 1 Thessalonians 4.  So it's not until Jesus comes that we have the full realization of our hope.  When He comes, everything comes together.  So, Titus 2:13, "We are looking for the blessed hope." And what is the key to that?  "We're looking for the blessed hope even the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus."  Isn't that great?  Our hope realizes its fullness at the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus.  Then the one who gave Himself for us, the one who redeemed us from every lawless deed will purify for Himself a people for His own possession in the purest sense possible.
   
  Quickly to review, our hope comes from God.  It is a gift of grace.  It is explained to us in the scriptures.  It is reasonable and defensible because the Scripture is true.  It is secured by the resurrection of Christ.  It is confirmed by the work of the Holy Spirit in us.  It is a hope that defends us against the blows of doubt that come from the enemy.  It is strengthened through our trials as we see the hand of God continually delivering us and protecting us and preserving us unto that hope.  It is the source of our greatest blessedness and joy.  It removes the fear of death.  It is absolutely secure and steadfast.  It is an anchor that is tied to Jesus Christ Himself who is inside the veil in the throne room of God interceding for us.  And all of its elements will be fulfilled when He appears.  This is our hope. 

  Now let me close with having you go back to 1 John.  Our hope is one that purges and purifies.  This becomes then the primary thrust of John's writing.  John is concerned with the ethical implications of this hope because the ethical implications of this hope verify whether we're truly Christians.  John is concerned about giving tests and standards by which a person's spiritual condition can be determined.  There are doctrinal tests that he's given in his epistle, such as one's view of sin and one's view of Christ.  There are moral tests such as obedience and love to which we have addressed ourselves in the months passed.  And here he expands that moral category, that ethical category and says, "A true believer, one who really has this hope in Christ purifies himself."  It's demonstrable.  Proof of being a Christian is what you believe about sin, what you believe about Christ.  Proof of being a Christian is obedience, love and purity.  And personal pursuit of purity, personal pursuit of holiness is an evidence that you're living in the light of a true eternal hope. 

  Comments relocated:

  From ufbad:  I read as far as I could, but when it got to "Godless philosophers" drowning their hopelessness in sex, alcohol and sequential relationships, it became personally offensive.
  
  There are many "godless" people who live happier or more rewarding life than many christians. This entire post is only valid if Christianity is right. If it's not, you've wasted your life the same as you accuse the rest of us to.
  
  I'm not trying to attack you, but this is a rather offensive piece in the manner of it's horrendous generalization of non-christians and philosophy. Christians love asking the question "but what if you're wrong" and yet rarely, if ever, ask themselves that same question. Fact of the matter is, everyone could be wrong. Who knows what comes after this life, but at least we're here at the moment and I'm going to enjoy it however I prefer.
  
  To paraphrase one of my brother's favourite quotes:
  "Religion is man's response to the realization that someday he must die."

  Seriously, posts like this only work to reaffirm the faith of other Christians. To the rest of us, including followers of those "false gods", it's just offensive

  @Ufbad - Sorry, no offense meant.  Actually, I appreciate your reading far enough to be offended.  The message of Christianity is offensive because of its exclusiveness, Christ's way or no way.  That has always been the problem, hasn't it?  CS Lewis once said that if there were any part that he could remove from the Bible it would be the exclusivity.  But there it is, and we are not free to remove it, I am truly sorry.  I cannot change what is written, as much as I would like to do so.  The entry is long and I respect the effort that you put into reading it.  This is just my study of John MacArthur's sermons that are personally helpful to me.  I need my faith reaffirmed, and that is why I am studying this.  I dont find answers anywhere else.  I have places where I need hope right now, and this is where I go to get it.  I guess that you hit the point exactly.  Christianity is certainly offensive to those who choose not to believe it.  Your brother's quote is an interesting one.  Supposing there is a possibility that everyone is wrong...  If Christianity is wrong, then I have lost no more than anyone else and have only to be thankful for this life.  But if it is right, that is another question and a dangerous gamble that I am not willing to take.  The Bible says what comes after this life, and that is judgment.  Those who are clothed in Christ's righteousness and cleansed by His shed blood will be credited with His perfection and undergo no judgement.  Those who have rejected it for something that they found more enjoyable than doing the will of their Creator will be judged.  This is not my personal message to anyone.  I am just saying what the Bible says, and I am not your judge and would never put myself in that position.  I think we are good enough friends to keep talking.  I appreciate your honesty about things that are important to you.

  From ufbad:  It's not the exclusive nature of Christianity that offended me, it was his generalizations and assertions that non-Christians lead meaningless, dissatisfied lives. I know there are dissatisfied Christians, if there weren't, no one would ever leave. There are dissatisfied peoples in every group on the world, because, ultimately, we're all just people. The groups we join or faiths we profess do not determine how good or bad of a person we are and it upsets me when people assert that non-Christians, or non-atheists or non-whoever are lesser people because of their lack of faith/common sense/whatever it may be.
  
  And what about the possibility of being judged by a different religion's deity? What if you die and find yourself face to face with Anubis in the Egyptian afterlife? There are infinite possibilities, which is why I believe in living this life for this life. I have no inkling of a next one, so I'll wait until it come, if one does, to worry about it.

  @ufbad:  Well, JMacArthur has been accused of being narrow minded, and I think he almost takes it as a compliment.  Haha!  Well, all I can say is time will tell if he is right or not.  God extends general grace to everyone whether they believe in Him or not.  Everyone gets a life to live, and the sun comes up on everyone - Christian wheat fields, Buddhist rice paddies, whatever.  Dissatisfied does not necessarily mean lesser.  There are actually no lesser or better people in God's eyes.  Everyone is in the lesser category because all have sinned.  There are no good people, only forgiven people.  We cannot gain forgiveness by joining one group or another.  It is only gained by asking God for it.

  Meaninglessness - you will not agree with me here, but I think this is what JMac meant. It is worship of the Creator and living to perform His will that gives meaning to life.  If we refuse to do this by rejecting a worshipful, loving relationship with YHWH who gave up even his very life for us, we will ultimately discover that we have spent our lives in a meaningless way when we chose to worship and please ourselves.

  What kind of Christians are dissatisfied?  Maybe those who could not control God as they wanted or had wrong expectations of what Christianity was all about.  There are others who are not willing to wait to see what God may be doing behind a trial and chuck the whole thing.  I know some people who have left because they didn't want to take the trouble to struggle though and refine their faith.  It was just easier to leave it behind.  I know another who left because he felt that God let him down in a trial.  Well, I would give such people the time they need to work through their dissatisfaction.  They will grow for it.

  Face to face with Anubis?  Hmm  I always did like their artwork, canopic jars, heiroglyphics and whatnot.  But then again, YHWH certainly kicked all those Egyptian godly butts in the plagues of Exodus, didn't He?  Nah, I don't think I will be seeing Anubis.  He ran away with his tail between his legs a long time ago.

  ---

  

  The Purifying Hope, Pt 1
  
  1 John 2:28

  "And now, little children, abide in Him so that when He appears we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming.  If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who practice righteousness is born of Him.  See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called children of God?  And such we are.  For this reason the world does not know us because it did not know Him.  Beloved, now we are children of God but it has not appeared as yet what we will be or shall be.  We know that when He appears we shall be like Him because we shall see Him just as He is.  And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him, purifies himself just as He is pure."
   
  This is about a purifying hope.  It's about the Second Coming, as noted in verse 28, and repeated again in verse 2.  We are waiting for His coming, we are waiting for His appearing.  And it is this hope that purifies.  Purification, holiness, righteousness obviously is the expectation of our God, it is what sanctification is.  It is the progressive decrease of sin and increase of holiness.  What seems to be missing, however, in our popular Christian culture today is any concern for holiness, any concern for purity of life. 

  Romans 12:1-2, "I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God which is your spiritual service of worship and be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect."  We are called to offer our lives as a sacrifice without blemish and without spot, a holy sacrifice.  
   
  Ephesians 5:27 that tells us the Lord desires to present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing but that she should be holy and blameless.   It is the Lord's desire to have a holy church, a holy people.  We are identified by Peter as a holy nation.  In II Corinthians 7:1 it says, "Therefore having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God."  It was the Apostle Paul writing the Thessalonians who said these words, "God has not called us for the purpose of impurity, but in sanctification and a call to holiness."  And then those most familiar words in 1 Peter 1, "But like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior because it is written, 'You shall be holy for I am holy.'" A call to holiness.  We are told that it is our responsibility to draw near to God in Hebrews chapter 10, but we are to draw near, verse 22 says, with a sincere heart, in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.  We are called to holiness.  We are to be fitted for holiness.  We are to be separated from sin unto righteousness. 
   
  We know that the Lord desires and has called to Himself a people to be holy, a holy nation.  One motive to be considered is the motive of fear.  In that very same passage in 1 Peter 1 where Peter says be holy for I am holy, verse 17 he says, "If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each man's work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth."  If you are calling holy God your Father, then you better conduct yourselves in fear.  Fear is a legitimate motive for holiness.  Fear of what?  Fear of God's chastening, fear that God will have a holy reaction to your unholy conduct. 
   
  This is nothing new.  Leviticus 18:30 says, "I am the Lord your God, I am the Lord your God, I am the Lord, I am the Lord.  Thus you're to keep My commandments that you do not practice any of the abominable customs which have been practiced before you so as not to defile yourselves why I am the Lord your God."  And what He's saying is you're going to have to answer to Me. 
   
  
  Leviticus19:2, "You shall be holy for I, the Lord your God, am holy.  I am holy.  I do not look favorably on unholiness."  And repeatedly, "I am the Lord your God, I am the Lord your God, I am the Lord your God, I am the Lord, I am the Lord, I am the Lord," over and over again in the chapter all the way through, all the way through.  And at the end, "You shall do no wrong, you shall observe My statutes and do them...why?...cause I am the Lord."  That is to say, "I am the sovereign Judge." 
   
  Leviticus 20:7 "You shall consecrate yourselves therefore and be holy, for I am the Lord your God."  In chapter 20 verse 26, "You are to be holy to Me for I the Lord am holy and I have set you apart from the peoples to be Mine."  Chapter 21 verse 6, "They shall be holy to their God and not profane the name of their God.  They shall be holy for He is holy." And so it goes verse after verse, chapter after chapter, on through Leviticus.  
   
  The mandate to holiness is clear.  And holiness means separation from sin.  "Be holy for I am holy."  And what that means is not only are we to emulate God, but to remember that a holy God is going to have a holy reaction to our unholiness.  And that reaction is defined for us in Scripture as chastening.  And even as judgment, if you come to the Lord's table, for example, in an unholy manner, you eat and drink judgment to yourself.  You will answer to God for your unholiness.  Talking to believers at this point.  Be holy because God is holy, and holds that holy standard high. 
   
  Fear is connected to hope.  We will face the Lord.  It is our Christian hope.  When He appears we're going to see Him.  When He comes, we're going to be joined to Him.  And that hope should have a purifying effect.  Not only should we have a healthy fear of God's chastening in this life, but we should have a healthy respect for the limitations that our sin will put on the life to come.  If you really live in the light of the return of Christ, if you really live in the light of His appearing and His coming, if you really recognize that some day you're going to face the judge and your life is going to be evaluated as to what part of it can be eternally rewarded, if you really understand that much of what your life has been made of, wood, hay and stubble will be consumed in a millisecond and all that will be left will be that which had eternal value and your eternal reward will be based only upon that.  If you understand that, that ought to be a motive.  You're going to live forever with the eternal reward for whatever level of holiness you were committed to in this life.  The Apostle Paul reminded Timothy of that when He told him to preach the Word and he said, "Here's your motive.  I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead by His appearing and His Kingdom."  I'm telling you, Timothy, preach the Word because you're going to stand one day before the judge and your eternal reward is going to be predicated upon your faithful service. 

  In 1 Thessalonians 3:11, Paul writes, "Now may our God and Father Himself and Jesus our Lord direct our way to you, and may the Lord cause you to increase and abound in love for one another and for all men, just as we also do for you."  That's part of your holiness, living in love.  "So that He may establish your hearts unblameable in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints."  He says, "Look, you need to live a holy life so that when the Lord comes you will stand before Him unblameable in holiness."  We're all going to stand before the Lord, we're all going to be there at the judgment seat of Christ and our lives are going to be evaluated, we're not going to pay for our sins, Jesus will have paid for them, but all the dross of our life, all of the failures and sins of our life will detract from our eternal reward and it may well be as the Apostle John says later on in another epistle to come, "Look to yourselves that you lose not those things which you have wrought but that you receive a full reward."  It is possible that your sin not only will cause you not to earn eternal reward, but your sin will cancel out that reward which you had earned.
   
  Living in the light of eternity is not easy in this society.  Very few people, even Christian people, do that.  We cling to this life with a vengeance.  We do everything we can to pack this life with all the good experiences, benefits and possessions that are conceivable.  It's a curse in some ways to live in a materialistic society.  We in this particular part of the world find it very difficult to live in that kind of hope.  Life is very comfortable for us.  And everything is dangled in front of us to keep us so well entertained that we have little interest in what lies ahead.  But living in the light of heaven is a motive for purity.  Living with the realization that you're going to face the Lord and be rewarded eternally on the basis of your sanctification, your holiness is in itself a motivation so that our eschatology, our hope in the return of Christ is not just something to speculate about, it has immense implications ethically and behaviorally. 

  True believers, says John, believe the right thing about themselves and their sin, they believe the right thing about Christ and His salvation.  True believers conduct themselves in obedience to the Word of God and true believers demonstrate love for God and for others and not for the world.  And true believers live in hope and are motivated by that hope to purity.  Paul in 1 Corinthians 4 says, "I don't care how you judge me, I don't care how other people judge me, I don't care about my own self-judgment."  He says, "I'm going to wait until the Lord comes who will both bring to life the things hidden in the darkness, disclose the motives of men's hearts and then each man's praise will come to him from God."  And I read that to remind you that God knows the heart.  It isn't how many people you've won to Christ, how big your class was, how many people you witnessed to, how much money you gave, it's what was going on in your heart. 
   
  Now then this is the purifying hope.  Here are five perspectives on it. 
  
  It is secured by abiding.  Verse 28, "And now, little children, abide in Him so that when He appears we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming."  When He does appear we want to face Him with confidence, not shrink away in shame and fear.  And the way to make sure that that doesn't happen is to abide in Him.  Meno is the Greek verb for abide, and means to remain, to stay.   

  The fifteenth chapter of the gospel of John is notable for its uses of the verb meno, the word abide, or remain.  John 15:4, "Abide in Me, or remain in Me, and I in you.  As a branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, or remains in the vine, no branch is going to bear fruit if it gets cut off, so neither can you unless you remain in Me."  Repeats it again in verse 6, "If anyone doesn't remain in Me, he's thrown away as a branch dries up, they gather them, cast them into the fire and they're burned.  Verse 7, "If you remain in Me and My words remain in you, you can ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you."  Again the emphasis on remaining.  Again down in verse 16, "You didn't chose Me but I chose you, I appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should remain."
   
  What John is saying is, "Stay faithful to Christ, persevere, remain.  Let's go back to 1 John 2:6, "The one who says he remains in Him, ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walks."  If you claim to be in Christ, if you claim to be remaining in Christ, staying faithful to Christ, then you ought to walk in such a way to demonstrate that that is reality.  Verse 10, "The one who loves his brother remains in the light."  Again the same verb is used.  Verse 14, he says, "You know Him who has been from the beginning.  I've written to you, young men, because you're strong and the Word of God remains in you."  John loves this word, the Word remains in you and you remain faithful to the Word.  In other words, there is a connection here that's unbroken.   You remain faithful to the truth and the light remains in you.  The seventeenth verse, "The world is passing away and its lusts, but the one who does the will of God remains forever."  John loves to talk about remaining.  And he's dealing with an issue of people who identifies with Christ and disappear, who identify with the gospel and turn against it.  And what he is calling for is the real thing.  Real conversion is about staying power, remaining in the truth, remaining faithful.  And the truth remaining in you in verse 19, really a key verse, "They went out from us, they were not really of us.  If they had been of us they would have remained with us."  Remaining, staying, abiding is the mark of true salvation. 

  How do you remain in Christ?  You stay there by staying committed to the truth.  That's what he's saying.  Committed to the teaching that you heard, you remain faithful to the truth.  Let that...verse 24...remain in you which you heard from the beginning and you will remain in the Son and in the Father."  And then down in verse 27, "As for you the anointing which is the Holy Spirit which you received from Him remains in you and you have no need for anyone to teach you but as His anointing teaches you about all things and is true and is not a lie and just as it has taught you, you remain in Him."
   
  Don't ever believe in a moment that the matter of divine sovereign salvation does not involve the will of the one being saved, because that's not true.  It does.  We are called to remain, faithful to the truth, faithful to the Lord of the truth, to abide, to continue.  Then in verse 28 he says it again, now our text begins, "Now, little children, remain in Him."  Your hope is secured by abiding.  It's secured by remaining. 
    
  I John 3:6, "No one who remains in Him sins."  No one who remains in Him has an ongoing, unbroken pattern of sin.  If you're one who remains, then you will adhere to the truth and pursue holiness.  Verse 9, "No one who is born of God practices sin because His seed remains in Him."  Down in verse 14, "We know that we have passed out of death into life."  How do we know that?  "Because we love the brethren," that's another one of the tests.  "He who does not love remains in death."  Down in verse 15 he uses it again, "Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer and you know that no murderer has eternal life remaining in him, staying in him."  Verse 17, "Whoever has this world's goods and beholds his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God remain or stay or dwell in him?"  If you don't have love, it doesn't.  And then down in verse 24, "He who keeps His commandments remains in Him and He in him and we know by this that He remains in us by the Spirit He's given."  Ah this word is all over the place. 
    
  I John 4:12  "If we love one another, God remains in us."  Verse 13, "By this we know that we remain in Him and He in us because He's given us His Spirit."  Verse 15, "Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God remains or stays in him."  Verse 16, "And we have come to know and believe the love which God has for us, God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God and God remains in him."  That's really amazing, isn't it?  And you have similar indications in the second epistle of John, verse 2 he says, "The truth remains in us."  Verse 9, he calls and says, "Anyone who goes too far and doesn't remain in the teaching of Christ doesn't have God, the one who remains in His teaching has both the Father and the Son."  

  It's about remaining and staying faithful.  John knows that there are people who are going to identify with the gospel, they're going to identify with Christianity, they're going to identify with the church but they're not going to stay.  And the question comes up, were they once saved and lost?  What happened?  How do we know who's a believer?  And John says it's very simple.  Eternal life remains in the person who believes the truth and remains faithful to the truth and faithful to the God and the Lord of the truth and the Spirit of the truth.  It's about remaining.
    
  True Christians then are identified by abiding.  And if someone doesn't, if they go out, reject, deny, they went out because they were not of us, if they had been of us they would have remained with us.  This is something like Jesus' words in Matthew 24:13, "The one who endures to the end, he shall be saved."  You've asked the question about your children, maybe a spouse, maybe a parent, or friend, relative, yeah there was a time when they made a profession of faith in Christ, there was a time when they quote/unquote went forward, or there was a time when they had some kind of an emotional experience, there was a time when they would have confessed Jesus as Lord.  They no longer do that, what's their state?  John says it so many times you cannot possibly mistake it, "If they don't remain, they aren't the real thing."  It's about remaining. 
   
  Colossians 1 brings Paul into our discussion in most specific terms.  Colossians 1 verse 21, "Although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He, Christ, has reconciled you in His fleshly body through death in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach."  "If indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast and not moved away from the hope of the gospel."
   
  You cannot draw the conclusion from this that a person can believe for a while and then be an unbelieving believer and still be the possessor of eternal life.  "They went out from us because they were never of us."  A true Christian remains faithful to the truth, faithful to the Lord, faithful to the Word and God remains faithful to produce and sustain in him fruit, love, joy, holiness, hope, eternal life through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit and the work of the Word.  It's about remaining.  But this is one of the great wonders of biblical truth that on the one hand we are secure in the eternal promise and purpose and plan of God, but not apart from our own faithfulness.  And the warnings and the pleas and the calls to believers to be steadfast, immovable, faithful, loyal, unwavering, continuing in the faith, abiding in the faith, those calls and those warnings prompt the heart, then energized by the Holy Spirit become the means by which we are secured.  That's why you have not only promises of the eternality of our salvation, but commands to remain, to abide, to hold on and be unwavering in our devotion to the truth.
   
  
  Go back to chapter 2 verse 24.  "As for you...John says, and he's talking to, I believe, those who heard and believed the gospel as opposed to the deniers of the gospel in verse 23, those who denied the Son...as for you...assumed who heard and believed the gospel...let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning."  Hold on to it.  If what you heard from the beginning remains in you, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father.  That is a very important statement.  You can't miss the meaning of that.  He says your eternal abiding is dependent upon your faithfulness.  That is why biblical theology demands not only the doctrine of eternal security but the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints.  It is the call...I say it again...and the warnings and the pleas and the commands to the believer to remain and abide, heard, believed and energized by the Spirit of God which become the means by which our salvation is secured.  You could not be saved apart from believing, right?  Even though salvation is a sovereign act of God, even though it is predetermined before the foundation of the world, even though you in your trespasses and sin are so hopelessly dark and dead and blind that you couldn't do anything to awaken yourself or give yourself sight or life, you are in that condition, therefore dependent upon the mercy of God but the means by which the mercy of God comes to you is through your willing response to the gospel which energized by the Holy Spirit becomes the means by which God works the miracle of salvation.  It's the same thing.  On the one hand we believe in salvation by the sovereignty of God.  On the other hand, we know that God only saves those who believe and that all the invitations and calls in the Scripture are calls to believe, not calls to see if you can find somebody who knows whether your name is in the book so you can find out whether you're saved.  The same is true here.
   
  In fact, all the great doctrines of the Bible have this sort of inscrutable reality in them that everything that happens to us in terms of redemptive purpose, everything that happens in our salvation, whether it's our justification, our sanctification, or our glorification, all of it depends upon the power and purpose of God and yet not apart from our faith and our abiding and our behaving in a godly fashion.  You were saved one day, if you're saved, because you believed.  You are being sanctified because you obey.  That's why the New Testament is full of commands for people to believe and be saved and full of commands to believers to be obedient to the Word of God.  You even when you get to heaven and come to that final phase of salvation, your glorification, are going to find out that what God has prepared for you to be enjoyed forever is going to be a reflection of the level of your faithfulness here.  So on the one hand God can say I've given you eternal life and you will abide.   On the other hand, He can tell us over and over again, be faithful, be faithful, remain, abide, don't forsake the truth, hold fast, hang on because it is when we hear those calls and hear those commands and our heart cries out to obey, then energized by the Spirit of God working in us those calls and those pleas and those commands become the means by which we remain.
   
  What he is really saying here is prove that you're the real thing.  Verse 26 he says, "These things I've written to you concerning those who are trying to deceive you."  Always there are deceivers, always there are deceivers.  He's saying don't let anybody deceive you, it's the people who remain who are the real Christians.  It's the people, verse 27, who continue to believe the truth because they have an anointing, the Holy Spirit, received from God remaining in them and they don't need human teachers to teach them things other than what the Spirit has revealed in Scripture because the Scripture and the Spirit teaches us all things and it's true and it's not a lie and just as it taught you, you Abide in Him.  
   
  
  It teaches us to abide in the Christ that's revealed in Scripture.  Don't defect to another Christ.  Don't defect to another gospel.  Don't abandon what you know to be true, what you heard to be true.  Back to verse 24, "If you let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning, then you can be sure that you will abide in the Son and in the Father." 
   
  Now go back to verse 28.  Maybe you understand it better.  "And now, little children, abide in Him."  Be real.  It's emphatic, "And now" is emphatic and introduces a new section.   There should be a paragraph there.  "And now" introduces a new section.  "Little children," teknia is John's word for all God's children in general, all who are born of God.  He uses it over in chapter 2 verse 12, "I'm writing to you, little children," collecting all believers at all levels of maturity.  Now to all of you who are true believers, abide in Him.  Be faithful.  Be loyal to Christ.  Continue to believe the gospel.  Continue to obey the Scripture.  Continue to love the Lord and one another.  And in that continuing you will prove to be the real thing.
   
  Here again we see this profound connection between God's eternal purpose and our responsibility.  There's no question that the Lord holds on to His own.  Romans 8 says that, doesn't it?  "What's going to separate us from the love of Christ?"  Is there anything?  Romans 8:38-39, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.  John 10, Jesus said, "Look, I have My sheep, I know My sheep, My sheep know Me and My sheep are protected, they're kept by Me and My Father and no man can take them out of My Father's hand."  That's the divine security side.  And we rejoice in that and we celebrate that.  And we're thankful for that.  But that doesn't mean we don't have a responsibility.  Again I say, the means by which our security is sustained is response, Holy-Spirit energized response to the commands and the warnings and pleas of Scripture.
   
  In 1 Corinthians 1:8 it says, "Jesus is coming and to confirm you to the end, blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ, faithful is God through whom you were called into fellowship with His Son."  Yes He'll be faithful, yes He'll be faithful.  But the means by which He is faithful is our being faithful. 
   
  We're all called to faithfulness repeatedly in Scripture.  We're all called to holiness over and over and over again.  And yet, it seems to be that the whole Christian community nowadays is just absolutely oblivious to this reality.  It's like if you prayed a prayer one time somewhere, you know, you're in and holiness has nothing to do with it, and even your theology has nothing to do with it.  You can warp the gospel, twist the gospel, pervert the gospel, come up with another gospel.  Well that's all right, we're not going to argue with that.  Or you can come up with the idea that everyone's going to go to heaven in the end anyway, so there really is no limited gospel.  You can sort of live any way you want in your life and it doesn't really matter a lot.  Sin up a storm veritably.  You can question things in Scripture.  You can question the authority of Scripture.  You can question sound doctrine and theology, it doesn't seem to matter to some people.  It matters to God.  Those who belong to Him are faithful to the truth of the gospel.  They're faithful to the reality of Jesus Christ and who He is.  They have the right Christ, they have the right understanding of their own sinfulness, they have the right understanding of the gospel.  They have the right attitude toward the Word of God and it's an attitude of submissive obedience. They have the right attitude toward other believers and the Lord and that is love.  And they have the right attitude toward the world and that's they don't love the world.  And they live not in the light of this life, but they live in the light of the life to come.  They have this hope and they live by hope.  This is a hope, John says at the very outset here, this is a hope that is sustained by our remaining.  It is secured by our abiding.  You can't live in this hope if you're not abiding in Christ.  Listen, if you've abandoned Christ, if you've abandoned the true gospel, if you've abandoned the true understanding of who Jesus is, if you've decided to live your own life in sin, you have no right to this hope.  You have no reason to look forward to the appearing of Jesus Christ that is coming because it's going to be your terminal judgment.  That's what he's saying.  Don't kid yourself and don't let anybody deceive you. 
   
  This hope, this being able to stand, as verse 28 says, with confidence and not shrink away from a returning Christ is predicated on your remaining faithful, enduring to the end.  We will press the duty of abiding, even though we believe in the doctrine of eternal security, even though we believe in sovereign salvation, and a plan from before time began because the Bible presses the responsibility of abiding.  I can't live my life as if the decree of God was in my hand and I was just following some pattern that had been established.  All I can do is respond to the Scripture.  And it says, "Apart from the elective purpose of God, you'll never be saved unless you repent and believe."  Apart from the sanctifying intention of the Spirit of God, you'll never grow into Christ's likeness until you subdue the flesh and follow holiness.  And you will never stand before the Lord when He returns to receive His reward with confidence and without shame, having a just hope unless you sustain an abiding faith in Christ and the gospel.  Privileges do not cancel obligations, they increase them. 

  I can give you a few other illustrations of this principle.  In Luke 22 the Lord says to Peter, "I have prayed for you that your faith fail not."  That sounds good to me, right?  My guess is that if Jesus prays that Peter's faith won't fail, it won't fail.  Right?  Because He's going to know what the Father's will is and He's got the power to make sure it doesn't happen.  And yet a few verses later Jesus has just said, "I have prayed for you that your faith fail not," He turns right around and says to Peter, "Pray that you don't enter into temptation."  That seems almost contradictory, doesn't it?  On the one hand He says...Look, I prayed that your faith isn't going to fail.  And from a sovereign standpoint, it's not going to fail.  It's not going to fail because I am interceding for you.  It's not automatic, it takes His passionate consistent intercession, but I'm also telling you your part is pray that you not get into a situation of temptation that could devastate your faith.  Those are critically important to understand, both of them. 
   
  Listen to 1 Corinthians 10:13, "God is faithful.  God will not allow you to be tempted above that which you are able but will with the temptation also make a way of escape that you may be able to bear it."  God is always going to overpower your temptation, He's always going to give you a way out, that's verse 13.  Verse 14 says, "Flee idolatry, get out of there." Why?  Because it has implications.  It's destructive.  But you just said God will be faithful and I'll never have more than I'm able to handle.  Oh that's the sovereign side of it and again I say to you, the promises of God are not apart from the obedience of His people.  
   
  Jude 21, "Keep yourselves in the love of God."  What do you mean keep yourselves in the love of God?  You have to abide, you have to remain in the place of obedience and the place of truth and the place of blessing and away from the mockers and the scorners and the false teachers and the ungodly lusters and the divisive and those void of the Holy Spirit.  You have to build yourselves up, verse 20, in the most holy faith and you have to pray in the Holy Spirit and you have to keep yourselves in the love of God.  All with a view to waiting anxiously for the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life, looking forward to the future.
   
  Man, sounds like it's all on my shoulders here.  Verse 24, "Now to Him who is able to keep you."  Isn't that something?  He just said in verse 21 keep yourselves.  Now he says in verse 24, "Now unto Him who is able to keep you."  And He will keep you from stumbling and He will make you stand in the presence of His glory, blameless with great joy because He is the only God our Savior and He'll do it through Jesus Christ our Lord and to Him we give glory, majesty, dominion, authority before time and now and forever, amen.  Wow!  That great benediction.  He's able to keep us from stumbling, why in the world does He say, "Keep yourselves."  Because the God who keeps His people, keeps His people through the energy of the Holy Spirit in response to their will.  This is such powerful truth.  Grace is not static.  It is a dynamic operative power and it works through our lives to keep us in the love of God, to keep us building up our most holy faith, to keep us praying in the Spirit, to keep us away from those void of the Holy Spirit who cause divisions, those who are worldly minded, those who follow ungodly lusts.  It protects us from mockers and scoffers and liars and false teachers who would steal our faith.  But not apart from our own will.  And that is really essentially what all men when he said to the Philippians, work out your salvation.  God put it in, now you work it out with fear and trembling.  No, you don't want to lose this salvation.  If you're real, you're going to battle in the strength of the Spirit to hold it fast to the end. 

  In Titus 2, "For the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation to all men."  And what does salvation do?  "Instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus who gave Himself for us that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds." 
   
  God's grace came to us and saved us.  And it's God's grace that sanctifies us.  And it's God's grace that will bring us our eternal reward.  But it is also God's grace that instructs us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, godly in this present age so that we are called upon to pursue a path of sanctification and also to live in the light of the blessed hope at the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus.  And that should be a purifying hope because the Lord gave Himself for us that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good works. 
   
  If you abide, you have secured your hope so that, verse 28, "When He appears...when He appears we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming." He's coming.  He's going to appear, phaneroo, He's going to be manifest, He's going to be made visible.  This is talking about His return, His Second Coming.  And I don't know about you but when He comes I want to be there with confidence.  I don't want to shrink away from Him in shame and fear at His coming...at His coming when He is present.  I want to stand before Him confident because I have remained faithful, I have remained hopeful.  And when He comes my hope will be realized not with shame or fear, but with consummate joy.  "Shrinking away."  It is a frightening scene.  There are going to be people who at the return of Jesus Christ ought to look for a place to hide.  On the other hand, those who are going to be confident, literally the word means outspoken, free to speak.  It's used to describe the Christian's boldness in approaching God.  It's used that way in Hebrews 4:16, and Hebrews 10:19.  First John 3:21, 1 John 5:14, it means boldness in prayer. 
   
  Can you imagine that when Jesus comes in all His glory being bold, confident?  That's what it says.  Because you have remained faithful.  On the other hand, there will be those who are ashamed, desperately cowering, cringing and looking for a place to hide before the judgment of God crushes them.  There will be no place for them to hide.  And we who are confident will enter in to the joy of the Lord.  
  

  ---

  

  The Purifying Hope, Pt 2
  
  1 John 2:28-3:1

   "And now, little children, abide in Him so that when He appears we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming.  If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone who also who practices righteousness is born of Him.  See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called children of God and such we are.  For this reason the world does not know us because it did not know Him.  Beloved, now we are children of God and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be.  We know that when He appears we shall be like Him because we shall see Him just as He is.  And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself just as He is pure." 
   
  We've entitled this little study here, "The Purifying Hope."  This hope refers to everything that's been said about the appearing of Jesus.  You will notice that "when He appears" is stated in verse 28, "when He appears" is repeated again in verse 2.  Twice we are told that Jesus will appear.  And this is our hope.  We live in the hope that Jesus will appear.  Now the question is, to what does that refer?  What is this appearing?  Well it is further described for us in verse 28 with the phrase "at His coming."  His appearing is His coming.  
   
  It is further described for us in verse 2, it is when He appears at His coming and when we see Him, end of verse 2, just as He is and further described, "When we shall be like Him."  It's very clear then what our hope is.  Our hope is that Jesus will come and at His coming He will appear and when He appears we will see Him.  And when we see Him, we will be like Him.  The appearing comes from the Greek word phaneroo.  Phaneroo, the appearing, the arrival is used of the incarnation, the birth of Christ.  It's used of the resurrection as well in the New Testament.  But here it clearly refers to the return of Jesus Christ in the future when He comes to reveal Himself to His people who then will see Him as He is and become like Him.  This is clearly a reference to the return of Jesus Christ.  We then live in the light of Christ's return.    Colossians 3:4, 1 Timothy 6:14, 2 Timothy 4:8, all refer to the same appearing, the future coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.  This is a future event which will culminate all of human history, the return of the Lord Jesus Christ, manifestly, visibly to reveal Himself to His people, make His people like Him and to bring His people into eternity glory. 

  Yhere are four elements to His appearing.  First of all, He will come for His saints, This is what is called in Scripture "the catching away," or the Rapture of the church.  Jesus initially made the promise of this coming for His saints, for His people in the upper room that night which He was betrayed, when He said this in John 14:1, "Let not your heart be troubled, believe in God, believe also in Me.  In My Father's house there are many rooms, if it were not so I would have told you, I go to prepare a place for you and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself that where I am there you may be also."  Jesus says I'm going to come for you, I'm going to come to take you away with Me.  1 Corinthians 15:51, "I tell you a mystery, we shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet, for the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable and we shall be changed."  That is to say the dead are raised into an imperishable body, already described in the chapter, and those that are alive are instantly transformed and the perishable puts on imperishability and the mortal puts on immortality.  That is the same event, when the Lord comes for His saints.  
   
  1 Thessalonians 4:14 "If we believe that Jesus died and rose again even so, God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus."  "We who alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not proceed those who have fallen asleep for the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with a voice of the archangel, with the trumpet of God the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air and thus we will always be with the Lord."  That's the same event.  I'm coming for you, I'm coming to reveal Myself to you, I'm going to catch you away.  The dead in Christ rise first, the alive are transformed into imperishability and immortality and we are taken up to heaven to the place that He's been preparing for us.  He will appear then for His saints. 
   
  The second phase of it is He will appear with His saints.  We believe that the Bible tells us that after He has come for His saints and taken us out of the world, all who are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ will leave in that wonderful event.  On the earth after we're gone, there will be a time of Tribulation.  That is described in Matthew 24 and Revelation 6-19.  It is also the time of Jacob's trouble from the Old Testament.  It is the final week of Daniel's 70 weeks when a covenant is made with the Antichrist and you know those kinds of details.  But the end of that period called Tribulation, the Lord will return this time with His saints.  The saints that He already came for, He comes back with.  Matthew 24 describes that feature of His appearing, Matthew 24:21, "There will be Great Tribulation, such as not occurred since the beginning of the world until now.  Unless those days should have been cut short, no life would have been saved.  For the sake of the elect, those days will be cut short.  If anyone says to you, 'Behold, here is the Christ,' or, 'There He is,' do not believe him, for false christs and false prophets will arise, will show great signs and wonders so as to mislead if possible even the elect."  So you have a time of Tribulation, proliferating false christs and false prophets.  Don't believe any of them.  Verse 25, "Behold, I've told you in advance, if therefore they say to you, 'Behold, he's in the wilderness,' don't go forth.  'Behold, he's in the inner rooms,' do not believe them for as the lightning comes from the east and it flashes even to the west, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.  Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather," indicating that when He comes with His saints He comes in judgment.  Vultures there to consume the flesh, a picture described, by the way, in of Revelation 19. 
   
  When it happens, verse 29, it will happen immediately after the Tribulation.  Immediately after the Tribulation is over, this event takes place.  "The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light.  The stars will fall from the sky.  The powers of the heavens will be shaken.  Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory.  And when He comes then He will send forth His angels with a great triumph and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other."  He comes with His saints. 
   
  This is reiterated in Matthew 25:31-32.  "When the Son of Man comes in His glory and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne, all the nations will be gathered before Him and He will separate them from one another as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats."  So the Lord Jesus is coming for His saints, then there's a Tribulation, after the Tribulation He comes with His saints both holy angels and glorified saints, gathers the rest of the saints, that is those who have been saved during the time of Tribulation and draws them into His Kingdom.  In Revelation 19:11 we have a very specific description of this event. "I saw heaven open and behold, a white horse and He who sat upon it called Faithful and True," that's our Lord Jesus, "and in righteousness He judges and wages war and His eyes are as a flame of fire and on His head are many diadems, or crowns.  He has a name written upon Him which no one knows except Himself.  He is clothed with a robe dipped in blood.  His name is called the Word of God.  And the armies which are in heaven clothed in fine linen, white and clean, were following Him on white horses." I believe this refers to the redeemed.  
   
  So here He is coming with His saints.  "Out of His mouth comes a sharp sword so that with it He may smite the nations.  He'll rule them with a rod of iron, treads the winepress with a fierce wrath of God the Almighty on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  And He wreaks havoc on the earth in judgment."  And after that, verse 20, He binds Satan and then establishes the thousand-year Kingdom in verse 3.  Verse 4 says He establishes thrones.  That's the third phase, He comes to reign through His saints.  He's establishing thrones.  They sat upon them, judgement was given to them.  "I saw the souls of those who were beheaded because of the testimony of Jesus, because of the Word of God, those who would not worship the beast or his image, did not receive the mark on their forehead and upon their hand, they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years."  We know that He promised that the apostles would reign over the twelve tribes of Israel.  We are told by the apostle Paul that we should never sue others, that the church would sit in judgment on those things since some day in the future we're going to have the position of ruling and reigning even over the angels.  We who are faithful to Christ will rule with Christ.  So first He comes for us.  After the Tribulation He comes with us.  And then He establishes His Kingdom on earth and reigns through us dispensing, as it were, His glorious reign across the earth through the saints that have been saved out of the Tribulation because they believed, and the glorified saints who have come back with Jesus Christ in their glorified form.  Through both the glorified and the living believers, Jesus Christ will reign.  It is at that point that the curse is reversed, as Romans 8 says, that the creation in verse 21 is set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  It is then that there is the glorious manifestation of God's children, a revealing of the children of God.  For the first time the world will see who believers really are.  They'll see them in millennial power.  They'll see them in heavenly glory as they come back to reign with Christ. 
   
  The fourth element is He establishes the new heaven and the new earth and forever dwells among His saints.  You come to chapter 21 and you only need to look at the opening three verses.  "I saw a new heaven and a new earth," that's the eternal state at the end of the thousand-year millennium.  He recreates the whole universe.  The first heaven, the first earth passed away, that's the one we're living in now.  No longer any sea.  The holy city, the New Jerusalem, the capital city of God's heaven comes down out of heaven, takes its place in the center of the new heaven and the new earth.  "And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men and He shall dwell among them, they shall be His people and God Himself shall be among them.'" Three times it says He will be among us.  
   
  So He comes for His saints, with His saints, to reign through His saints.  And then forever spends eternity among His saints.  Now all of that is the coming or the revealing of Jesus Christ and there are four elements to it, four features, four aspects.  The Rapture of the church, the return in judgment, the establishment of the millennial kingdom and the creation of the eternal state, the new heaven and the new earth.  We live in the light of this.  This is the next event on God's calendar.  This is the next event in prophecy.  There is no prophecy that needs to come to pass before the Lord comes for His saints.  That's why we say His coming is imminent.  It could happen at any time.  It's the next event.  There are no signs leading up to the Rapture of the church.  It is a sign-less event.  It happens when we don't expect it.  We live in the light of it.   It initiates and inaugurates all of those features of His glorious revealing.  First He's revealed to the saints.  Then at the end of the Tribulation He's revealed to the whole world as He comes back riding on that white horse, as it were, with no place to hide and He destroys all the ungodly.  Then sets up His Kingdom.  And then finally the eternal state.  We live in the light of this reality.  Jesus is going to appear.  This world has not seen the last of Jesus.  
   
  This is our hope.  First Timothy 1:1 calls it "our hope."  Titus 2:13 calls it "our blessed hope."  Second Thessalonians 2:16 calls it "our good hope." Romans 15:4 calls it "our comforting hope."  Romans 5:2 and Romans 12:12 calls it "our joyous hope."  Galatians 5:5 calls it "a righteous hope."  Hebrews 7:19, "our better hope."  First Peter 1:3, "our living hope."  Hebrews 6:19, "our sure and steadfast hope."  Romans 5:5 presents it as a non-disappointing hope.  First Peter 1:13 says it is "our gracious hope." Titus 3:7, "our eternal hope."  Colossians 1:27, "our glorious hope."  Hebrews 6:11, "our assured hope."  First Peter 3:15, "our defensible hope."  This is pretty important.  The story is not over until the story's over.  And there's no reason to be ambiguous and there's no reason to be confused and vague.  Oh, it's hard to understand the specific persons and the specific times but we do understand that.  Peter says the prophets of old look to see what person and what time these things were to come to pass.  We have a hard time identifying the exact personality of the Antichrist or the beast or the false prophet as they are described in the book of Revelation.  We have a hard time with precise timing in these things, certainly.  But we basically understand how the story will end if we interpret prophetic literature with the same literal historical grammatical principles with which we interpret everything else.  The story is not over until Jesus comes for His people, then returns with His people, then reigns through His people.  And then establishes the eternal dwelling place where He lives forever among His people.  That's how the story ends. 
   
  It's seriously disturbing to me that so many don't care about how the story ends.  Why do you think the whole book of Revelation was written?  So that you could know how the story ends and so that you can join in the praise that is going on in heaven in Revelation 4 and 5.  I'm glad I know how God ends the story and I can praise Him for what is coming.  

  When you come to the return, the appearing of Jesus Christ, the Bible is not ambiguous, absolutely crystal clear.  There's one verse that I want you to look at just to kind of nail this down for you.  In Acts 1:9, after Jesus said what He said about receiving the Holy Spirit, it says, "After He said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, a cloud received Him out of their sight."
   
  He was there.  He was talking with them.  He was real, could be touched.  He had the scars of His crucifixion.  He was recognizable.  He was the God-Man.  And all of a sudden He was just lifted up and He just kept ascending, this is His Ascension, until He disappeared in a cloud.  And as they were gazing intently into the sky while He was departing, behold two men in white clothing stood beside them, two angels appeared and they said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky?"  You know, that seems to me at first read a silly question.  People say, "Well, what would you be looking at if somebody just took off?"  But that's not what they meant.  It's why...the verb in the Greek...it's why are you gazing longingly as if He's lost to you?  "This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven..."  How did He go up, by the way?  Physically?  Bodily?  In full view.  "This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come in just the same way as you've watched Him go into heaven."  The way He left is the way He's coming back...clouds and He's visible and He's real and He appears.  He ascended in a physical, bodily form, He'll return from heaven in just the same way as you watched Him go into heaven.  

  Let's go back to 1 John.  Verse 3 says, anyone who has this hope fixed on Him will find that it has immense implications, practical implications.  These people who live as if Jesus already came in the past, they literally are cut off from this marvelous motivation.  John is going to show us here the powerful influence of living in the light of Christ's coming.  Living in the light of Christ's coming has powerful influence.  You know, the Thessalonian church understood that, one of the reasons they were such a wonderful church was that in verse 10 of chapter 1 of 1 Thessalonians, they lived waiting for His Son from heaven.  Do you live like that?  That's a tremendous impact, how you live and how you plan for the future. 
   
  John gives us in this text five features to a life lived in this hope.  The first feature related to living in the light of this hope is that the hope in the return of Christ is secured by abiding.  Not everybody can have this hope.  This hope is limited to people who are abiding.  Verse 28, "Now, little children, abide in Him so that when He appears we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming."  The term "abiding" means to remain, meno, to stay, remain faithful to the gospel.  We went into this in detail last time.  Remain faithful to Christ, don't do what they did back in verse 19, "They went out from us, they were not really of us, if they had been of us they would have remained with us.  They went out in order that it might be shown they were not all of us." 
   
  You remain.  If you want to be sustained in the benefits and blessings of this hope, if you want to enjoy the motivation and the influence of this hope, then abide in Him, remain faithful.  This is a call to persevere and not defect, to continue in His Word.  In Hebrews 3:6, Christ was faithful as a Son over His house whose house we are, whose house we are if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end.  The people who have this hope and for whom this hope has power in their lives are the people who hold fast their confidence in Christ, continue to cling to that hope firm to the very end. 

  "Take care, brethren, lest there should be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart in falling away from the living God."  And verse 14, "You will become partakers of Christ, we have and it will continue if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance, firm unto the end."  Just another way to describe abiding, be faithful.  Over in chapter 4 verse 11, comes at it on the negative side, "Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest lest anyone fall through following the same example of disobedience." 

  We are commanded to abide.  We are commanded to be overcomers.  Revelation 2 and 3, "Blessed are those who overcome...who sustain." The overcoming is described in 1 John 5:4 as our faith. 
   
  So our hope is secured by remaining faithful.  That is the means by which God secures us, by means of our preservation.  It is by faith as the means that He saves us.  It is by faith and obedience as the means that He sanctifies us.  It is by perseverance and endurance as the means by which He secures us.  And being secure and abiding, we will have confidence and not shrink from Him in shame at His coming.  Those who abide have a kind of fearless trust.  Verse 17 of chapter 4 speaks of the same thing.  "By this love is perfected with us that we may have confidence in the day of judgment."  When you see in your life the wonderful love of God poured out, shed abroad, when you love God, love Christ and love the people of God, when that love is perfected in you by the work of God, this gives you confidence in the day of judgment.  It allows you to fearlessly look forward to the return of Christ.  Look at it another way, if you have denied the name of Christ, if you once confessed Christ and you have fallen away, if you have once endeavored to walk obediently, you no longer care, you're in sin, you will have no right nor will you have any heart to hold to a hope that some day Jesus will appear because when He does you're going to be there in shame and there will be no confidence in His appearing.  That belongs to those who abide.  Our hope then is secured by abiding. 

  Secondly, it is manifest by righteousness and this is in verse 29.  "If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him."  Now our future hope begins to take on some behavioral impact.  The people who really have this hope, the people who abide will not only be blameless at the time of His appearing and stand before Him confidently and not shrink away from Him in shame, but they are here manifesting righteousness because those who have this hope have this hope because they've been born of God.  Wonderful, wonderful reality of new birth, regeneration.  This, of course, unmasks the phonies again, doesn't it?  John does this so well.  People who claim to be, "Oh yes, I'm waiting for Jesus to come...Oh yes."  And you look at their life and there's no righteousness there, there's no love of righteousness, hatred of sin.  So this unmasks the phonies who claim to have Christian hope and have absolutely no right to it.  It is a hope that belongs to those who manifest righteousness. 
   
  Look at the verse again.  "If you know that He is righteous, " if you know, oida, if you know absolutely that He is righteous, not by experience so much, but you know it because it's an absolute truth.  If you know that, and you do, that He is righteous, you know, different word, ginosko, you know consequently or experientially or reasonably that everyone also practices righteousness is born of Him.  If you know absolutely that He is righteous, then you can perceive that the one doing righteousness is reflecting His life.  Logical.  The son will be like his father.  A believer will be like His Father.  If you know He's righteous, you know that everyone practices, present-indicative pattern, the pattern of their life, not perfection, but direction...pattern of life.  If you know that He is righteous, that is He is without sin, without error, He is just, He is free from evil.  Psalm 11, "The Lord is righteous.  He loves righteous deeds."  Great verse.  If you know that He is righteous, you know that anyone who has been born of Him, past completed action with present continuing results, anyone who has been born of Him is going to manifest righteousness.  And you're back to this same thing again that a believer is known not by what they claim but by how they live. 
   
  So, our hope in Christ is guaranteed by abiding.  It is realized, or manifest in righteousness.  If your life is characterized by a practice and pattern of sin, you have no right to this hope.  And again John is saying what you did in the past, some prayer you prayed, as we heard again in baptism, some baptism that you had some time in your life isn't how you determine your spiritual condition before God, you look at your life right now and you ask...what is the pattern?  What do I long for?  What do I love?  What do I desire? 
   
  I was saying to the young people this week in a conference that what sets a Christian apart, really, is a longing to...to honor Christ.  It's a longing to honor Christ.  You don't always fulfill it, but that's your longing.  And I told them, I said, "You know, I study the Bible a lot but I don't ever study the Bible with the end in mind of understanding doctrine.  I don't ever study the Bible with the end in mind of solving an exegetical problem.  My understanding of the Bible, my ability to solve a problem in a text, my effort to interpret a passage, my grasp of theology is never an end in itself.  The end of all of that is to make Christ and to make God more wondrous in my mind, in my heart.  It's always to understand more about God, more about Christ, to make God more glorious and Christ more wondrous so that the compelling cry of my heart is to honor Him." 
    
  I think the driving force in living a Christian life is not somebody banging you with rules.  It's being lost in wonder, love and praise.  And you study the Scripture to understand what it says about God.  You study the Scripture to understand what it says about God manifest in the flesh in Jesus Christ so that you're so caught up and swept away by the wonder of God and the glory of Christ that the desire of your heart to please Him and to honor Him increases and increases and increases.  And that's how you move away from sin because the things you know that dishonor Him are so repulsive to you.  So when you're saying a righteous life, you're talking about the direction, you're not talking about perfection.  People who are born of God who possess the life of God pursue righteousness and are interrupted in the pursuit by sin. 
   
  Well, we could say more.  I can't believe the time has gone so fast.  I don't even have time for the next point, but I'll tell you what it is.  You can write it down cause it's an important one and it's going to set the foundation for things later in the epistle.  We said then that our hope is secured or guaranteed by abiding.  It is manifest or realized in righteousness.  And here is a wondrous thing.  Our hope is established in love...it is established in love. 
   
  Chapter 3 verse 1, "See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called children of God and such we are, for this reason the world doesn't know us because it did not know Him."  This is the astounding fact that we have been given this hope, we have been enabled to abide, we have empowered to manifest righteousness because of God's immense love.  The reason we're His children is because of His love.  And the language here, "See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us," John is overwhelmed with astonishment as he contemplates the amazing love which conferred on sinners the right to be sons of God and therefore to have this great hope. 
   
  Just the first word of chapter 3 "See, look, behold, wonder, adoring astonishment how great a love."  I just have to tell you about that word "great," can I?  Potapan(?), classical Greek.  It poses this question, where did that come from?  You would use it when you wanted to express the idea that this was foreign, this was alien.  It would be used to describe something that was so abnormal and unnatural that you would say, "What country did that come from?  What planet did that drop in from?"  Something completely foreign, something that has an origin completely outside of our world.  See what a foreign alien unearthly other-worldly love the Father has bestowed upon us that He would give us the privilege of being His sons and then having this great hope. 

  ---

  

  The Purifying Hope, Pt 3
  
  1 John 3:1-3

  
  "And now, little children, abide in Him so that when He appears we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming.  If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him.  See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called children of God, and such we are.  For this reason the world does not know us because it did not know Him.  Beloved, now we are children of God and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be.  We know that when He appears we shall be like Him because we shall see Him just as He is and everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies Himself just as He is pure."  
  
  This is tied together by references to His appearing and His coming and this hope.  The hope that we have in the return of Jesus Christ is what ties this portion of Scripture together.  Romans 8:24 says, "We are saved in hope."  Our salvation promises future benefits that are wonderful and glorious enough to cause us to make whatever necessary sacrifice must be made in this life.  We set aside all of the elements of normal desire, personal ambition, personal fulfillment, personal satisfaction, all of the enticements of the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, all the allurements of the system around us.  We set aside what is normal expression of human longings.  We set that all aside to embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ and the promise that it will deliver to us a far greater fulfillment in the life to come.  That's what it means to be saved in hope.  We, in the words of our Lord as we've seen in Luke chapter 9, are called to totally deny ourselves and thereby to follow Christ, denying all that this world would offer us now for all that God offers us in a future we have not seen and thus we live in hope. 
   
  I Peter 1:3, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." And here is that hope, "To obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you."  We are guaranteed that hope because verse 5 says we are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.  We are then born again unto a hope that lives, that hope procured for us by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  That hope involves an inheritance which cannot perish, cannot be defiled, cannot fade away, is reserved in heaven for us and us alone and we are protected by the power of God through the means of our faith unto the final salvation to be revealed in the last time.  This hope is so glorious that we greatly rejoice in it, verse 6, even though now for a little while if necessary you have been distressed by various trials.  We take whatever we have to take in this life, never sacrificing the future 9on the altar of the immediate.  We willingly endure all kinds of trials in the light of that future hope. 

  This, in fact, this testing and this enduring is the proof of our faith, says verse 7, which is more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, so that in the end we may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.  When we finally get to the fulfillment of our hope, and we get to the revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ, we will be filled with praise and joy and glory because it will be far more than we ever expected. 

  In 2 Timothy 4 Paul said, "I'm ready to be poured out as a drink offering, I'm willing to give my life as a sacrifice.  The time of my departure has come.  I have fought the good fight.  I have finished the course.  I have kept the face.  In the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day and not only to me but also to all who have loved His appearing.  I live in the light of His coming.  I live in the light of His appearing.  I make all the necessary sacrifices."
   
  Paul writing in Colossians 1:3 said, "We thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and the love which you have for all the saints because...here's the reason for his thanks...because of the hope laid up for you in heaven of which you previously heard in the Word of truth, the gospel which has come to you."  The gospel is the gospel of hope.  It delivers to us this message of an eternal hope.  Paul gives thanks to God that based on that hope they put their faith in Jesus Christ and lived in the light of that glorious promise.  It is then where we live in the realm of hope. 

  Romans 5:2 says, "We stand in grace and we rejoice in hope and therefore we also exult in our tribulations because tribulation produces perseverance, perseverance produces proven character, and proven character enhances hope and hope does not disappoint."  We live in hope, in the hope that cannot disappoint, in a hope that is not diminished by trial but it is embellished by trial.  It insights our hope.  It inflames our hope.  The more difficulties You throw at us in this life, the brighter our hope becomes.  So this is the hope in which we live.  That is why, as I pointed out earlier in this little look at this particular section, you can go back to 1 John now. 
   
  One's view of the Bible is so critical because you base your hope on what is written here.   I cannot put my trust in men and their opinions.  I cannot build my future hope and make the necessary sacrifices in this life to gain that which is eternal on somebody's opinion.  I can only build that on the truth of God's Word.  So the Apostle John wrote this epistle, 1 John, to provide objective truth, to encourage true Christians that they are indeed justified by faith in Christ and can live in hope, the hope of heaven and the hope of eternal life and that is the purpose of this epistle as indicated in chapter 5 verse 13, "These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God in order that you may know that you have eternal life and this is the confidence which we have before Him." 

  If I'm going to live my life in hope, I'm going to have to have some confidence that it's true.  I want to know that I really do have eternal life.  And so this wonderful epistle has been written to affirm to us that we can live in hope because we do possess eternal life and John gives a series of tests by which we can measure that.  The tests for true Christianity had to be given to these people because these people were under the assault of false teachers.  And false teachers were giving people false hope.  False teachers teach a false way of salvation and they give people a false hope of heaven.  That was happening to those who were addressed in this epistle.  This epistle needs to be continually reread to those people who are also exposed throughout all of the era of the church since.  You will notice in chapter 2 verse 26 is a statement of purpose that also directs us to why John wrote.  "These things I have written you concerning those who are trying to deceive you." They were trying to deceive about who was really a Christian, who had legitimate right to a hope.  They were saying, for example, that you could deny your sin and still count on eternal life.  They were saying it in these terms, that we can have fellowship with God and still walk in darkness.  We can be headed for heaven and deny that we have sin.  We can be headed for heaven and hold on to the hope of eternal life, even though we say we have not sinned.  We can say that we're headed to heaven and have a life of disobedience to the commands of God. Anybody who says, chapter 2 verse 4, "I have come to know Him, I have a right to that eternal hope, and doesn't keep His commandments is a liar." They say that they're headed for heaven, they say they have a right to the eternal hope, but they hate people rather than love.  In verse 9 of chapter 2, "If he says he's in the light and hates his brother, he's in the darkness."  Verse 11, "The one who hates his brother is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, doesn't know where he's going cause the darkness has blinded his eyes."  That is to say his sins are not forgiven, they're not even acknowledged.

  And then there were those who came along and said, "We have the hope of heaven, we're going to heaven."  But they denied that Jesus is the Christ.  And so in verse 22 of chapter 2 he says, "Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ, this is the Antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.  Whoever denies the Son doesn't have the Father.  The one who confesses the Son has the Father also." 

  So there were moral tests of behavior.  And there were doctrinal tests, one's view of one's own sinfulness and one's view of Christ.  And so, John is writing because false teachers are coming and they're deceiving people about who has a right to the hope of heaven.  John wants the true believer to know that he or she has eternal life.  And John wants to deliver us from the deception of those who would say we can know we're going to heaven, even though we deny our sin and deny the reality of Christ and even though we live in disobedience to the commands of God and without love toward others. And there's one other element too there in chapter 22, anybody who loves the world doesn't have the love of the Father in him.  

  So we're back to the whole basis of having this hope.  If you're legitimately going to have the hope of eternal life, if you're going to know that you have that hope of eternal life, you have the right view of your own sinfulness, you have the right view of Jesus Christ and His provision, you have the right animosity toward the world, you have the right heart toward obedience and loving others.  You will, as he's pointing out in the passage I just read in verse 28, not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming because you will have lived a life, verse 29 says, that practices righteousness.  So as true Christians, we live in hope, but only true Christians live in hope, only those with a right view of sin, that is a right anthropology with an understanding of sin and a right Christology, understanding Christ and His person and work, and right conduct manifest righteousness which demonstrates itself in obedience to the Word of God, and love toward others. 

  This hope then in which we legitimately live is the anchor of our lives.  When things go as bad as they can go in life, we hold on to hope, don't we?  We're going to a world where there will be no more sorrow, no more crying, no more tears, no more death, no more sin, no more temptation, we cling to that.  We cling to it.  We concern ourselves with laying up treasure in heaven, not on earth.  We hold lightly to the material things of this world.  We want only to use them in ways that advance the Kingdom of God.  It's a small matter to us, as Paul put it, what men think of us because they don't have the final verdict.  It's a small matter to us what we think of ourselves, we're not in to self-esteem, self-fulfillment because even when we know nothing against ourselves, that doesn't justify us.  We're committed, as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 4:5, to wait for the day when the Lord will reward us based upon the true intent and motives of our hearts.  We long for the day when all of the debilitating realities of our fallenness will disappear forever and we'll enter in to the fullness of God's glorious preparation for us.  But in the meantime, I love what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:9, in the meantime, he says, we have as our ambition whether here or there, to be pleasing to Him for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to be recompensed for deeds done in the body, whether they're good or worthless.  In fact, all our works one day will be tested by fire and that which is wood, hay and stubble, that's not sin that's just the stuff that didn't have any eternal value.  That will be burned and we'll be rewarded eternally on what's left...the gold, silver and precious stones.  So we live in the light of Christ's return. 

  As John pulls us in to this marvelous reality, he gives us five features of our hope.  Feature number one, it is secured by abiding.  "Now, little children," verse 28, "abide in Him so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming."  In other words, the people who legitimately have a claim to hope are the people who remain faithful to Christ.  People who have for a while a quote/unquote relationship to Christ, who have a temporary faith in Christ or around the church for some period of time, they don't qualify.  Chapter 2 verse 19, "They went out from us, they were not really of us.  If they had been of us they would have remained with us.  They went out in order that it might be shown that they all are not of us."  They didn't remain, same verb, meno, and that demonstrates that they weren't real.  If you have that hope, it is verified and justified by your abiding.  As long as we persevere and endure to the end, we give evidence of the fact that we have a right to that eternal hope.
   
  Secondly, it is secured by abiding and manifest by righteousness.  Verse 29, "If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him."  If you have been born again, if you have been regenerated, if you have been given the life of God, if you have the new birth, if you then are a child of God, you will manifest the life of God that is in you.  One who claims a right to the hope of heaven but does not practice righteousness is a liar and we have noted that all through chapters 1 and 2.  Righteousness is the result of the life of the righteous One in us...in us.  Verse 29 ends with that reference, "...is born of Him."  The new birth is one of John's themes, I won't take time to go all the way back into John's gospel, but just do a little click in your mind that John 1:12-13, very foundational in almost every presentation of the gospel you hear this, "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become the children of God, even to those who believe on His name who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."  There is the introduction by John to the new birth, being born of God.  And, of course, you remember in John chapter 3 Jesus says to Nicodemus, "If you want eternal life, if you want to enter the Kingdom, you must be born again."
   
  The language of the new birth is also in this epistle.  We haven't run into it until here and then again in chapter 3 verse 9, "No one who is born of God continues in an unbroken pattern of sin."  Chapter 4 verse 7, "Beloved, let us love one another, love is from God, everyone who loves is born of God."  And again in chapter 5 verse 1 refers to being born of God and born of Him, verse 2, then calling us children of God down in verse 4, and repeats it again, "Whoever, or whatever is born of God...verse 18...we know that no one who is born of God sins."  So this is a familiar concept to John.  He uses it repeatedly.  If salvation is seen as new birth, regeneration, the old life is gone, new life comes.  The believer is a new creation in Christ.  New life principle comes in and manifests itself in behavior that is consistent with that divine life.  And so, people who have been regenerated, been given new life, manifest that new life.  Since it is righteous life, the life of God, it produces righteous behavior. 

  So we say then that our hope is secured by abiding, faithful.  It is manifest in behaving righteously.  Now let's take the third and we'll finish up, I hope, the other two.  The third element in our hope, it is established in love.  "See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called children of God and such we are.  For this reason the world doesn't know us because it did not know Him."  John is astonished and amazed, thrilled with the reality that we are the children of God, overcome...literally...with astonishment when contemplating the amazing grace of God that makes sinners into children.  He starts by saying, "See!" an exclamation, "Look!  Behold!"  Calling for close attention and scrutiny. "How great a love."  "How great" doesn't do justice to the Greek.  "How great" is potapen(?), in the Greek, it's classic Greek for something foreign, something alien, something that is inexplicable in known terminology.  It really says, "Look, there is a love that is utterly unknown to us.  It is not at all like human love.  It is alien, it is a love that human experience doesn't know.  It's a love that's outside of us, above us, beyond us."
   
  The same word is used in Matthew 8:27 when Jesus stilled the wind and sea, they said, "What...what kind of man is this?  Is this an alien?  Is this man from another planet?" That's the same term.  It's also used in 2 Peter 3 I think it's verse 11.  Yes, since all these things are to be destroyed in this way in the future when the Lord destroys the universe, "What kind of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness."  We have one who has come, a man who is foreign to any human being, the God/Man.  We have a God who loves us with a love that is foreign to anything we would know, calls us to live lives that are alien to all those around us.  Unearthly, astonishing agape...agape is the word for the love of the will.  It's not the erotic love.  It's not the affectionate love that is elicited by a friendship or by love between a man or a woman or friends.  It's not the family kind of love that's normal between parents and children.  It's the love of the will.  It's the love that basically loves because it chooses to love.  It's the love of choice.  It's spontaneous, it's self-giving.  And its greatest expression, Jesus said, is this, "No man has demonstrated greater love than that he would give his life for his friends."  It's self-sacrificing, it seeks nothing for itself, only to give itself away for the benefit of someone else, freely and spontaneously without that person necessarily being worthy of such an expression. 
   
  John looks at that and says this alien love, look at it, this love the Father has bestowed on us.  And there he answers his question.  If the question is...what kind of love is this?  Where did it come from?  The answer is, it came from the Father, it is alien, it is foreign, it is not earthly.  The source and the origin is heavenly.  God is the initiator of this love.
    
  
  In looking at our Christian hope, we then understand that we live in hope because we have been made children of God, we have been made children of God because we were born of Him.  We were born of Him because He chose to love us with a saving love.  This love is foreign to anything we know about.  And this love, he says, is bestowed on us and he uses a Greek verb which expresses a generous kind of giving, we could almost say lavished on us.  This is the love that God has given to us.  Chapter 4 verse 9, "This love of God was manifest in us in that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him, and this is love not that we loved but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins."  It was a free, uninfluenced, undeserved, unmerited, spontaneous and sovereign love from God that has no human explanation, nor does it have a human counterpart cause there was nothing in us whatsoever to elicit that love.  He loved us because it was in Him to love us.  And He loved us so much that we should be called children of God.  He brought us as close as we could get, He brought us into His family, children of God.  Not just friends, not just co-workers and co-laborers, although those elements of our relationship to God are certainly celebrated portions of Scripture, not just members of His Kingdom, but family, adopted as His own beloved children.  And John struck by this says we should be called children of God and we are...he says...and we are.  All of this is affected by God's sovereign love.  We have this hope because He loved us into this hope.  
   
  He loved me when I was a sinner and undeserving.  He loved me when I was a stranger and a foreigner.  He loved me when I was alienated from Him.  He loved me when I was His enemy.  And He made me His child and if He loved me and gave me this marvelous hope and made me His child when I was His enemy, will He not sustain me now that I am His son?  We shall find later how God is love because John will discuss that in chapter 4.  We won't say much about that now, except to say keep it in mind that God's attributes are not segmented in Him.  Most people think that when the Bible says God is love you find some places where God loved, but the rest of the time He might not be love, or when God is acting in judgment, God is therefore angry and wrathful and vengeful and just and at that time He's not love, as if His attributes were sort of isolated from each other and plunked like keys on a piano playing one note at a time.  The truth of the matter is God is lovingly holy, God is lovingly omniscient, God is lovingly just.  God is lovingly vengeful.  God is lovingly gracious.  God is lovingly holy.  And God is wholly loving and so forth and so on.  They are all mingled in the person of God perfectly. 
   
  
  Love is intrinsically in the fabric of God so that every attribute of God is pervaded by every other attribute of God.  God loves us with a special love.  Yes He loves the world, He loves the world.  We've discussed that through the years here.  God so loved the world.  It tells us in Mark 10 that He looked at a rich young ruler who was lost and damned and rejected the way of salvation and it says, "Jesus looked at him and felt love for him."  God loves the world.  Jesus loves the world.  This love, however, is general, this love is universal, this love is indiscriminate.  It results in common grace.  It results in compassion for the lost.  It results in warning as men are called to repent.  It results in gospel presentation.  Yes He loves the world.   But His love for us is different than that.  It's different.  It is a saving love.  It is a complete love.  John 13:1, "He loved them to the end, to the max, to the full."  Zephaniah 3:17 says, "It's a renewing love."  It is presented in the New Covenant of Jeremiah 31 as an eternal love.  In John 13:1, as I said, is a perfect love.  In Romans 9:13-15, as an electing love.  In Romans 5:8 as a saving love.  In Romans 8:38-39 as an unbreakable love.  Ephesians 5 as a protecting and purifying love.  In Hebrews 12:6 as a chastening love.  It is not a general love, it is not a universal and it is not an indiscriminate love, it is special, particular and discriminating.  It is a love that only believers know.  The song writer put it years ago, "The love of Jesus, what it is.  None but His loved ones know."  None but His loved ones know.  It is the bliss of being loved into eternal hope and fulfillment when you don't deserve it. 
   
  John says as we think about this hope, we must remember that it is essentially the gift of sovereign love.  You find in Ezekiel 16 the sovereign love of God depicted in the most graphic terms as he picks up a little discarded baby thrown out in a field that had just been born with its umbilical cord still attached, and picks up that discarded throw-away child and cleans her up and raises her and marries her.  It's all a magnificent imagery of Israel.  Then goes on to talk about how Israel betrayed all that love, how Israel entered in to prostitution, unfaithfulness to God.  And yet at the end of the chapter there is this incredible re-statement of the undying, ultimate, saving love of God for Israel.  It's that amazing kind of love that's illustrated there.  It's that love that's expressed in Romans 8:28 to 39, nothing can ever separate us from the love of God which is ours in Christ.  We have been loved into being children of God.
   
  And then he says, "Such we are.  For this reason the world doesn't know us because it did not know Him."  Actually "for this reason" is "therefore," or "consequently."  Because we are the children of God by His sovereign, saving, supernatural love, having been transformed, the old life is gone, we walk in newness of life, we are new creations in Christ Jesus, the world does not know us.  That is true.  The unregenerate cannot comprehend who we really are.  Romans 8:19 says, "The glorious manifestation of the children of God hasn't happened."  You know, when you go into a restaurant and sit down, they don't have any idea you're a child of God.  They don't have any idea that the Spirit of God, that is the Creator of the universe lives in you, you are the temple of the Spirit of God, He lives in you.  They have no idea that literally in your soul is the life of God.  They have no concept of the fact that you are fitted for heaven.  Have no idea that beating in your mind and your heart is the hope of eternal life.  They have no idea that you have direct access to the throne of heaven and from that throne are dispensed to you all the things that you need in life, answers to your prayers, peace, joy.  That available to you is the fruit of the Spirit in all its fullness.  They have no idea that sent from heaven dispatched to your aide are all of the ministering angels of God doing His will and fulfilling His purpose and protective concern for you.  They have no clue who you are.  We possess a veiled life from above.  They had no clue who Jesus was either.  

  And that's what he says.  They didn't know Him...if they didn't know Him, they for sure won't know you because you're not going to do what He did.  Even when as we saw this morning in Luke, they looked at all that He did and they said, "This is the greatness of God, this is the majesty of God." Even though they said that, they still didn't get it.  There were a few of them, Peter, James and John, who went up the mountain when He was transfigured and they saw it...they saw who He was.  He was unveiled for them in the transfiguration.  But the people in the crowds certainly didn't know who He was and ultimately they executed Him.  And what did He say on the cross?  "Father, forgive them for they...they don't know what they're doing."  Why?  What did He mean?  They certainly don't know what they're doing as reflected in the fact that they're doing what they're doing.  They obviously don't know who I am.  They didn't know who He was.  They don't know who we are either.  We have loved into being God's children.  The world is clueless as to who we are.  

  We're not on equal footing with anybody in the world in any other religious system.  We have the true life of God.  We have the truth.  You know, that doesn't sell well in this climate today, does it?  The attitude today is all religions are just varying options of one and the same human need, reflecting a sort of inner desire to connect with the power of the universe.  The truth is, they don't know who we are, but we are the children of God.  That shouldn't make us proud, that should humble us, shouldn't it?  Because the truth of the matter is we're not any different than they are in terms of our humanness, except for the marvelous grace of God.  Some day they will know who we are.  That's one of the reasons I'm so committed to the millennial kingdom.  Some day they're going to know who we are when we all come back in our glorified form, we're going to be taken to glory, transformed, come back with Jesus when He sets up His Kingdom.  We'll reign with Him on the earth and then the world will know who we are.  That is what Romans 8 talks about is the glorious manifestation of the children of God.  Our day is coming.  That's one of the reasons why I'm not an amillennialist.  I think there has to be vindication.  There has to be a glorious manifestation of the children of God.  The world will see who we are in resurrection glory.  But until then they just have to take what they get.  And with a twinkle in our eye, we look at them and say, "You have no idea who you're looking at.  You don't know that the sovereign creator of the universe before time began wrote my name in His private book and I was born as a result of His purpose and that purpose unfolded in bringing me to the knowledge of Jesus Christ by which knowledge I was transformed so that what I was I am no longer and I am a new creation in Christ Jesus.  I now belong to God, the life of God is in me, God has transformed my inner man so that I am now a citizen of heaven and I am an alien here."  You talk about aliens?  We're all aliens, folks, all of us.  But they don't see it yet.  Some day in the glorious Kingdom of Christ they will. 
   
  Fifthly, our hope  is fulfilled in Christ's likeness. When you think about heaven do you think about doing something?  Do you think about heaven, if you're like some people, well what am I going to do?  If I don't ever go to sleep, if I don't ever get up?  If I don't get up, you know, there's nothing sort of new.  I mean, if you could just try to catapult yourself to heaven on human terms, it could sound like it was not very interesting.  There's something wonderful about going to sleep and burying a day, and starting over, isn't there?  But there never will be that.  And if everybody is perfect, what use will I have, who will need my advice?  You know.  And if nobody has a need, who will I help?  And if nothing's broken, what will I fix?  And for me, if nobody needs any information, what will I say?  How can I have a conversation with anybody if they already know everything?  What do we do, just sit around on that cloud, pluck that harp?  Talk about being superfluous.  Somebody says, "Well, I hope there's golf courses up there."  To which I answer, "Well if there are, everybody will make a hole in one every time and that's no fun."  

  Think about heaven like verse 2 tells you to think about heaven.  "Beloved, now are we the children of God." Not future, we're God's children right now even though t he world doesn't know it anymore than they knew He was the Son of God.  We are now the children of God.  "It has not appeared as yet what we shall be."  We're headed to the realization of a kind of personhood, a kind of incorruptible, imperishable personhood described in 1 Corinthians 15 that is not apparent.  We know that and here's the key way to view heaven, "When He appears we shall be like Him because we shall see Him just as He is." There is what makes heaven heaven.  What makes heaven attractive is when I get to heaven I'm going to be like Jesus Christ.  I can't imagine that Jesus Christ is for a moment bored.  I can't even imagine what it would be like to be like Jesus Christ.  I would be glad to go into heaven like the prodigal son who came home, you know.  Just let me serve somewhere, just give me a mop.  I mean, there's got to be some spot around here that I can clean up.  I don't need to be exalted.  Just to get in the gate, you know, just get me in the gate, I'll even be one of the homeless, I'll just hang at the gate, I don't even need a room.  I'll just hang at the pearl.  I'm glad just to be in there.  What kind of magnanimity is it?
   
  No, not only are you going to get in the gate, you're going to get in the gate all the way to the Father's house and I'm preparing a room for you.  And better than that, you're going to be made like Jesus Christ.  When you think about heaven, think about that, that you're going to be like Christ. 
   
  This is a wonderful, glorious component of my hope.  Paul said, "This is the goal," Philippians 3, "this is the goal of my life, this is the prize of the upward call to be like Christ, this is the goal of my life."  We are now the children of God, that's explicit, clear.  You can go back to Romans 8 where that is delineated in verses 14 through 18.  We are now, present tense, sons, children.  Not yet is the full manifestation taken place.  When that full manifestation does take place at His appearing, and it doesn't happen till He appears because that...if you die before then, the fullness of our transformation doesn't occur till He comes, right?  The dead in Christ rise first, they're changed, 1 Thessalonians 4.  But when He appears, at the time of His Second Coming, then we receive our glorified bodies.  First the believers in the church, then the Old Testament saints at the end of the time of Tribulation when He comes to set up His Kingdom, at that point then we are made like Him when we see Him just as He is. 

  God wants to reflect the glory of Jesus Christ through us.  It's just an absolutely staggering reality.  Romans 8:29, and I know you love the eighth chapter of Romans, every Christian does.  So many things are there unfolded in unique ways.  But Romans 8:29 is one of the peaks of this chapter.  "For whom He foreknew He predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son that He, the Son, might be the prototokos, the premier one among many brethren."  We're going to be conformed to the image of His Son.  What does it mean?  The only way I can say it is as much as glorified humanity can be like incarnate deity, we'll be like Jesus Christ.  Do I deserve that?  No.  Will I be glad just to get in the gate and hang there?  Yes.  Do I need a...do I deserve a room in the Father's house?  No.  Do I deserve to be made like Jesus Christ?  Absolutely not...absolutely not, but this is what heaven is.  I will be conformed to the image of God's Son, I will be made like Jesus Christ.  I don't know all that that means but I know it means holiness and righteousness.  I know it means I will be a supernatural person, both physical and spiritual, as Christ is, in a glorified kind of physicality.  I know why we'll have in the fullest possible capacity of my glorified humanity the mind of Christ so that if nothing else awaits me in heaven, I will have full, pure capacity to worship and glorify God forever and if that has satisfied Jesus forever, that will satisfy me, too.  If the Son delights in the Father forever, and no diminishing of that joy could possibly exist, then all heaven has to be for me is the undiminished worship of God coming from my Christlike person.  That's how our hope is fulfilled.

  One final thought.  Our hope is guaranteed by abiding, realized in righteousness, established by love, fulfilled in Christ's likeness.  But here's the practical aspect.  Our hope is characterized by purity and that's verse 3.  "Everyone who has this hope fixed on Him, on Christ, purifies Himself just as He is pure."  If your hope of heaven is to be like Christ, that's what he's saying, if your hope of heaven is to be like Jesus Christ, He's your Lord, He's your Savior, He's your model, He's your example, He's the one who sets the pattern, He's the one you press after, in the words of Paul.  He's the goal of life.  If that's true, if you really want to be like Christ, if that's...if that's your heavenly hope, then that will become your passion in time. 
   
  When you think about heaven then, don't think about clouds and gold streets and limit your thoughts to that.  When I get to heaven I'm going to be like Jesus Christ, that is God's ultimate purpose for my salvation.  That's why He foreknew me.  That's why He predestined me.  That's why He justified me to conform me to the image of His Son eternally, to make me like Christ.  That's where I'm headed.  That's my hope.  That is heaven to me.  And if that is my hope in eternity, then that becomes my desire in time.  And so as I look at pure Christ and as I long to be like Him in the future, I'll find that longing realized in the present.  If you fix this hope on Him, not on a place, not on activity, but on a person, that in itself becomes purifying...purifying.  I cannot gaze at the glory of Christ, 2 Corinthians 3:18, I cannot gaze at His glory and have a heart that longs to be like Him so that I can perfectly serve and worship and praise God as He does without that leaking in to my life here.  I can't have a passionate longing to be like Christ in the life to come without it affecting the life I live here.  So when you think about heaven, fix your hope on Him and see how it purifies your life here.  Living in this hope is absolutely life-transforming.   

  • 04:23
  • Comments Off