Sermon Tone Analysis

It is always interesting to see how people express the concept of love.

You see people fall in love.

You see the crazy things they're willing to do to try to express the fact that they care so deeply about the other person.

When you see a parent and a child and the love that is expressed between them and the unique and special things…maybe it is even phrases that they say or nicknames or special treats or special times…things that identify the love they have one to another.

We have that same relationship with the God of the universe if we have received Christ as our Savior.

Today I want us to look at that because it is actually the love God expresses toward us that gives us the hope we talk about so often in the Christian life.

I want to talk about hope.

I want us to define it.

I want us to see how the apostle John defines it as we look at intentional hope today.

Hope is not something we just wish upon a star, but it is an unfulfilled reality.

We live in hope.

We live in the reality of that which has not yet come to pass.

John speaks about that hope for us in 1 John 3, this morning.

I want to invite your attention there as we look at just a few verses and this idea of hope.

Notice he says in 1 John 3, beginning in the first verse, /"Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him."/

Now, a good translation of that word manner would be to say, "Behold, what crazy, out-of-this-world, unique love God has for us."

That's what John is trying to express.

He's not saying this is just agape love.

He's literally saying this is crazy love.

This is out-of-this-world, unique love God has for us.

While we were His enemies, the Bible tells us, God loved us.

Notice what he says, /"This love that the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called children of God."/

Now this is not some high-sounding title.

This is reality.

This is what we lay claim to.

This is what God has bestowed upon us.

He loves us in such a crazy way that He has given us inheritance into His family.

John describes it that He has bestowed it on us such that we can legally and legitimately and really be called the children of God.

It's not just a title.

We talk about the children of God, and we say that euphemistically, but John says it's a reality.

For those of us who know Christ, we are the children, the very children, of God.

Then he goes on in that verse to say the world does not understand this.

Then again, the world does not understand the love of God.

It can't understand how humans can lay claim to being the children of the Creator of the universe, but then again it doesn't understand the love that comes from the Creator of the universe.

Only a believer can know the intimate reality of that relationship.

When God created man, when God first created that garden, He created a being in Adam and in Eve that was different from every other living thing He had created…different not only from the plants, and not only from the fish, but different from every animal that walked on the face of the earth.

In fact, the Bible tells us when God created man, He created man in His image.

There's something different about that.

There is something unique about being in the image of God.

He created a being that could actually have a personal relationship with the Creator of the universe.

So what did He do?

He created a perfect being…a perfect being in the sense that man and man alone was created in the image of God.

While we may speculate what that means, one thing was for sure.

It meant that the creation, a creation, could have a relationship with the Creator.

Unlike every other created thing in all the universe, mankind could have a relationship back and forth with the Creator.

No other animal or plant conversed with the Creator as man did.

No other creation received the level of personal concern that man received from the Creator.

What made man so perfect?

What made him so suitable for relating to God? Well we might say his brain.

Well maybe I guess in the sense that man can reason, in the sense that human beings can comprehend a Creator, that human beings have within them a desire for God.

In every created human, there is this void that is filled by a relationship with God.

There is uniqueness in that mental sense, but also in a soul.

Man was created with a soul so there would be an unspoken connection between a physical being and an invisible God.

A soul…a way of communicating and feeling and empathizing and comprehending that which is often unspoken…a soul that makes us perfect, that makes us in the image of God.

That meant that man was without sin or what the Bible called innocent.

Now innocent does not mean naive, it means innocent from sin.

When man was created, when Adam was created, when Eve was created, they were created as sinless souls.

As a sinless soul, a reasoning creation could have a conversation with the Creator.

What we discover in Scripture is an essential quality of being able to converse with the Creator is to be sinless.

What we just sang about as being holy.

Now holy is very much a church word, but that simply means to be set apart.

That's what holiness means.

When God made man He set him apart from all the other creation and made a sinless being, and because God cannot cohabitate with sin, and therefore by being sinless man is able to have a conversation and a relationship and share a love with its Creator.

Only a sinless man could speak and commune with a holy God.

So when sin came into the garden, fellowship with the Creator became man's greatest casualty.

It wasn't just dying and going to hell.

Literally, hell can be defined as the absence of God.

What man suffered was that break in that conversation, in that walking in the cool of the evening, in being able to stand with, walk with, and sit with the Creator of the universe.

My friends, ever since that fateful day when man was evicted from the garden, that garden that was a place of fellowship, that God's love did not die in the garden.

Everything that has happened since, everything has been part of the absolute, necessary and unavoidable process of returning His special creation…man…back to the garden.

God's love was deeper than man's rebellion.

God's foreknowledge knew that before man was ever made, what man would do and laid plans even before He made man how He would deal with man's own fall in order to restore that fellowship God desired…His restoration was settled before creation every took form from the dust.

God's crazy, out-of-this-world love for us has always been with one thing in mind, that we could become His children in a special intimate, permanent way that is described as being children of God.

You see, if Adam and Eve lost through sin the ability to physically walk with God and to physically fellowship with Him, then recovering that physical ability, the ability to stand and walk and sit with God, that is the goal of God's plan.

God's plan is to restore the physical fellowship with Himself.

That's what God has been doing down through the ages.

The cross, the plan of salvation, is all pointing to this purpose…to make in each human a new creation who is incapable of sin.

It begins spiritually, but that is not the ultimate goal.

The end game is not a spiritual relationship, but a physical relationship.

What we experience spiritually is a small part of what God intends for those who trust Him.

Therefore, when we get to verse 2, of 1 John 3, it says, /"Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is."/

Now John says, /"Beloved, we are children of God now, but it's a spiritual sense in which we are the children of God."/ He's saying, /"It has not yet been revealed what's going to happen…what we will be like, but we know this…when He is revealed, we'll be like Him." /"For we shall see Him as He is."/ Oh, this verse conjures a lot of imagination and speculation, but the object of this verse is very clear to me.

The phrase that often draws our greatest interest is the phrase that says, /"We shall be like Him."/ Really I believe, and studying in the context and looking back at the previous verse…and remember this is about the love of God…I believe that the phrase that should occupy our attention is the next one.

/"We shall see Him as He is."/

You see, when we think of being like Him, we think of a glorified body.

We think perhaps of shining with that burnished-bronze glow that we see revealed in Christ in Revelation.

The context of this verse is John speaking of the love of God, and being called His children.

Really the key phrase is, /"We shall see Him as He is."/

Why is that important?

Because it's telling us something.

John is telling us we will be able to stand in the presence of our Creator…/to see Him as He is/ means we will be able to do so without a veil, without hiding our eyes.

We'll be able to stand in His presence.

We will have nothing that separates us from an intimate fellowship with God.

I believe with all my heart this is what John is pointing to.

When we see Him as He is means we can talk to Him.

That means we can view Him, we can praise Him, we can bask in the glow of the Shekinah lightning of His presence without being afraid…without falling to our knees, without running.

Where He is, we will be there, and we will look at Him and thus talk with Him and love Him as a child should love his own parent.

That's what John is looking forward to.

He says, "I don't know how this is going to be accomplished, but I do know that we'll see Him, and when we see Him, we'll be as He is, in order that we will be able to fellowship with Him.

That glorified body more than anything else allows us to walk in the cool of the evening again with God.