First John 3:1

The Bible says in First John 3:1, “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.” In John chapter three we are being reminded of some important circumstances of our lives here on this earth: some of those circumstances are not so pleasant. The good things about life have to do primarily with who loves us, and the bad things about life have to do primarily with who does not love us.

If you have true faith in Christ, then you have entered into the love of the Father. John wrote in First John 3V1, “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us…” The greatest love of all is to be loved by God. All human beings need love. There is nothing like being loved. It is one of the greatest needs of human life: love. No wonder that the Apostle Paul wrote in First Corinthians 3V13, “Now abideth faith, hope, love: these three, but the greatest of these is love.” You are a poor and wretched soul indeed if no one were to love you. But God does love you. He loves everyone. John 3V16, “For God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” A great song has the words, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” What a wonderful thought for the believer to rest upon: Jesus loves me.

John wrote, “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God.” According to this verse in the Bible, what is it that has been done for us that demonstrates to us how much God loves us? To be called a son of God, a child of God, demonstrates how much God loves us. You could not be called a child of God except that God loved you before you loved Him. He loved you when you were unlovely. He loved you when you were undeserving. And He will always love you because of Christ. What should you be called? You should be called a child of darkness, or a child of sinfulness, or a child of weakness, or a child of unfaithfulness; but no… you are called “a son of God.” That is the very name given to Jesus. Jesus is the Son of God. What an honor and what an example of God’s mercy, that He would look down from heaven, look at you, and call you a “child of God.”

You become a Son of God through faith in Christ. That is the spiritual birth when you repent of your sins and turn to Jesus. First John 3:1 speaks of the Father and the sons of God. Sometimes you will hear someone speak of the fatherhood of God in relation to all mankind. That is true in regards to our physical life, because everyone has received physical life from the Father. But it is not true in regards to spiritual life. Jesus said, “You must be born again.” And he said, “That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit.” When you repent of your sins and turn to Jesus for forgiveness, then you become a son of God. Until then you are not a son of God. The Bible says in the Gospel of John 1:11-12, “He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.”

God offers His love to everyone, but you only enter into this unique loving relationship of a son to a Father when you are born again. It is important to believe and to know that God loves you. Much of your faith and confidence will be based upon knowing that God loves you. By the way, He loves you with an unconditional love. He always loves you. He loves you wherever you are, and whatever you have done. He loves you because of Christ. If only we knew more about the love of God for us. If only we could see life through the eyes of the love of God. Maybe some people look for evidences that God loves them. Be careful of looking at circumstances for proof that God loves you. The proof will be when you know the final result of your circumstance, and sometimes you will not know that until the judgment. The Apostle John said that the proof that God loves you is that He chooses to call even you one of the “sons of God.”

But not everyone loves you. There are those who are not of the Spirit of God. Some of them will trouble your soul. John speaks of that situation in the last part of First John 3:1 when John writes, “therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.” Much of the rest of the book of John will be based upon these two situations mentioned in this verse. The first is the fact that God loves the sons of God, and therefore you should love the sons of God especially if you are a son of God yourself. The second is the fact that many people in the world do not love the sons of God because they are of a different spirit. They are of the spirit of darkness: the spirit that does not know God or Christ. They do not know us. We do not have things in common. That circumstance will always be a source of a certain amount of contention and difference of view-point to say the least.

But before John goes into greater detail about Christian love, John has some things to write about being a son of God. The Bible says in First John 3:2, “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him: for we shall see him as he is.” Now we are the son of God, and we have many good things that have already been given to us. We have the Spirit, we have the love of God through Christ, we have hope, we have faith, we have our burdens lifted, but we have them in our flesh and blood and in our earthly tabernacle. The day is coming when we will have much more. Because we are sons of God there are some changes to look forward to. God has plans for His children, and God’s plans will be fulfilled. The Father has plans for the children. That is the way that it should be.

Who is the One who shall appear? God. A pronoun has a noun to which it refers. Who is the One who shall appear? Christ. In this verse Christ and God are the same. Christ shall appear. That is what John is writing about. And when Christ appears, something wonderful will happen: the sons of God will be changed. Right now we struggle in this earthly tabernacle. Sin doth easily beset us. Sorrow is on every hand. These are the last days. But thank God the days are short. Christ shall appear, and He shall appear for the benefit of the sons of God. If you are a believer, you are on the winning side, and what a win you will be given. Happy days are ahead, and those days will begin with the appearing of Jesus the Savior. Some people look forward to certain events of this life, but the Apostle John looked forward to the appearing of Christ. So did Paul. Paul wrote of the event of our change in First Corinthians 15:51-52 where the Bible says, “Behold, I show 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 trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

Notice that the Apostle John said that we shall be manifested in a new way as a result of seeing Jesus. The power of Jesus is so great, that just to look upon Him will transform us. In a spiritual sense already, look upon Jesus and your soul will be transformed. The day that your physical eyes look upon Jesus, your body will be transformed. This truth is a great indicator of the difference between law and grace, and the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The law, which was given in the Old Testament, can only condemn you; unless you keep it perfectly. That is why it said, “No man can see God and live.” The holy Law-giver must punish law breakers. But God loves man whom He created, and God does not wish to punish man. And so Christ was sent to take away the sins of the world. “The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” Do not be as those who turn back. Keep looking to Jesus, because the day will come when your eyes shall behold Him who was pierced, and then even your body will be changed. That body of sin that you have that gets sick and grows old and dies will be transformed into a glorious body that will live forever. This will happen because of the power of Jesus.

Even though we are saved by grace, and not by law; we still have a practical relationship to the law because the law is still holy and the law is still good. Just because some people may emphasize the law in the wrong way does not mean that I should fail to emphasize it in the right way. The law is still my guide. The law says, “Thou shalt not covet.” I lusted and broke the law and was condemned by the law. But Jesus found me and saved me from the condemnation of the law. Jesus freed me from the law. In other words, Jesus freed me from the circumstance whereby I was condemned by the law. But that does not mean that I am free from the responsibility to do what the law says in certain moral and spiritual meanings. I am not free to covet or to lie or to murder or to commit adultery or to break any other moral law. When I turned from my sins and turned to Jesus, I was turning to the law-giver as well as the grace-giver. Yes, it was grace that saved me, but one of the purposes for which I was saved was to start doing His will and start obeying His laws. His laws are simply His instructions on how life should be lived. “Thou shalt not covet” applies to me now even more than it ever did, because now through Christ I have the strength to obey it.

The point is that doing the right thing is a part of being a true believer in Christ. That is the point that John is making in First John 3:3 that says, “And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.” A true Christian wants to do the right thing. When you get up in the morning, one of your primary goals for the day should be to do the right thing. And once again the goal is the highest of standards: the pure life that Jesus Himself lived. A Christian has a challenge each day: the highest of all possible standards.

The true Christian desires greatly to do the right thing, because the Holy Spirit lives within the true Christian. This is one of the things that is different between a true believer and an unbeliever. An unbeliever has no such desire to do the right thing. An unbeliever can live in a sinful condition and it does not bother him one bit, at least until such a time as he comes under conviction by the Holy Spirit. When a person repents, they not only turn from sin, they also turn to that which is right. A person who becomes born-again has made a decision to start doing the right thing the best they know how. Yes, they are forgiven by the grace of God that is in Christ; but they are only forgiven if they repent. Your relationship to the law, i.e. your relationship to God’s commands of right and wrong, is the central issue. Those who have not repented remain in their sins and they are often without the moral law. They reject law. They are lawless. John describes their condition in First John 3:4 that says, “Whosoever commiteth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.” A way of paraphrasing this verse would be to say, “The person who is living the sinful life-style is the person who has rejected God’s law.”

There are several great truths to say about the sin problem. Two of those truths are said in First John 3:5, “And you know that he was manifested to take away our sins; and in him is no sin.” The first great truth is that Jesus is the one, the only one who can solve your sin problem. You cannot solve it. You need the Savior to have your sin problem fixed. The second great truth is that Jesus had no sin. That in itself is a proof of His divinity. All men have sinned. Jesus did not sin. Therefore, He was not just a man. He was more than a man: he was the God-man.

Two more great truths in regards to sin are stated in First John 3:6 that says, “Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not; whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him.” The first phrase of this verse is speaking of imputed righteousness. All men have sinned. The Apostle John spoke of himself and of other Christians when he wrote in First John 1:8, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” How do you go from being a sinful person to being a righteous person in God’s eyes? That is the key question. It involves turning from sin and turning to the right path, but it also involves something more than that. It involves imputed righteousness. David spoke of it in the Old Testament when he wrote in Psalm 32:1-2, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity…” Just before Paul referred to this Psalm in Romans chapter four, Paul wrote of Abraham in Romans 4:3, “For what saith the scriptures? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.” Even though I have repented and turned from my sins to do God’s will, that attempt of mine to do right is not what makes me righteous. What makes me righteous is simply that God declares that I am righteous. That is why every true believer is a saint. God decides who the saints are, and God has decided that everyone who believes in Christ is a saint. Of course, if you believe in Christ, then surely you abide in Him. That is why John said, “Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not…” What can I say about those who do not abide in Christ? I cannot say anything good about them. One possibility is that if someone is not abiding in Christ, then they never came to know Him in the first place. They are sinning and they are not being cleansed of their sins. In my case, as weak and as often as I fail, yet I continue to look to Christ to whom I first looked almost forty years ago. My righteousness is found in Christ not in myself. Because I abide in Him, I sinneth not (I am not continually sinning.) What a wonderful Savior we have. He gives victory over the sin problem. God wants you to believe in Christ, and then abide in Christ: keep believing, keep trusting, keep walking with Him.

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