God’s Plan! Revealed and Finally Realized!
The Plan Reveals Who We Are
1 John 3:1-3

† In Jesus Name †

May the grace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ help you to accept that you are His child and that you are pure and holy!

I am Your Father!

On Friday, I was over at the retreat Bob was heading up, with the purpose of meeting the team, and giving a 20 minute talk about what it meant to be friends with God.

The format that they gave me required some pretty deep thought about my identity and who I was, and what I’ve went through in life. The basic idea – was that God was there, in the midst of the trauma, in the midst of it all…

Jesus no longer called us slaves or servants, He calls us His friends.

Which means something we can hear and know with our minds, but it will take a lifetime to really, really understand with out heart and our soul…

Think about how long it took Luke Skywalker to comprehend that Darth Vader was his dad—no I have a better illustration, a real one. Rather than being a reunion with a dad,  it was one with a mother, my birth mom. (and it didn’t cost me my hand!)

In July of 2006, at 10:16 in the lobby of a casino in Vegas, I met the lady who gave birth to me 41 years before.  It was an awkward, confusing, joyful, amazing time as we gave each other a hug and talked for 4 or 5 hours.

Over the next few days, I learned a lot, had a number of questions answered that gave me insight into who I am, and oddly enough, enhanced the other relationships I have in my life, including those with my adopted parents.

My point is simple here… whether we are talking about Jesus calling us his brothers, or the Father calling us His sons and daughters, there is a lot to think through, a lot to understand this truth here in our head, and then it boil in our hearts and souls as this truth begins to affect out life.

The world can’t help us! They have it all wrong!

The first challenge to this, the transforming truth comes from the world. The Apostle John describes it with these words. “But the people who belong to this world don’t recognize that we are God’s children because they don’t know him.”

I first read this with a sense that the people of this world were antagonisticly evil, that they were opposed to us so viciously, and so violently because they didn’t like God, and therefore they didn’t like us.

But then I thought of my birth mom and my conversation, finding out that our families ate at the same restaurant on Sundays, that her mom was a nurse where I often was a patient, and fifty other times and places where we could have been a couple of feet apart.

But we didn’t know…

In the same way, people don’t understand what it means to be a Christian and child of God, because even though they are close. They don’t see a God who loves us as a good Father loves His children, but instead they see God as a Darth Vader type character, who will cut anyone in half, if they don’t do what He expects.

Using our theme for October and November, they didn’t know the plans God has for them, they didn’t even have a clue about God’s love, so they are without a future and a hope, which is why sin doesn’t bother them in the same way as it does us.

Or the way it should bother us…

John wrote, “³ And all who have this eager expectation will keep themselves pure, just as he is pure.

If you don’t know God’s plan, if you don’t understand the relationship we have with God, then you can’t understand the doctrines affecting holiness, the doctrine of having a pure, unmarred, unmarked by sin.

If the relationship matters, even if we don’t comprehend it completely, then our attitude toward sin is different. We realize the division sin causes in the relationship with God, and we dread the consequences.

And when we are thinking properly, we communicate about sin that way – talking of being saved from it and wanting people saved from it, rather than being in bondage to it and the condemnation it carries with it.

The love of a parent

That is why it is so essential to see God as our heavenly Father, or even better, as our Abba – our daddy. The one who cares for us so much that He sent His one and only begotten Son Jesus, to join with us.

Martin Luther described this passage with these words, As if he were what we are, he makes whatever concerns us to concern him as well, and even more than it does us. In turn we so care for Christ, as if we were what he is, which indeed we shall finally be—we shall be conformed to his likeness. As St. John says, “We know that when he shall be revealed we shall be like him” [1 John 3:2]. So deep and complete is the fellowship of Christ and all the saints with us. Thus our sins assail him, while his righteousness protects us. For the union makes all things common, until at last Christ completely destroys sin in us and makes us like himself, at the Last Day. Likewise by the same love we are to be united with our neighbors, we in them and they in us.^[1]

This was God’s plan, to reveal to us in Christ what the transformation, that’s what God’s plan has always been, to make us like Jesus… to unite us to our Dad, God the Father, and all our siblings  AMEN!

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^[1] Luther, M. (2012). Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (W. R. Russell & T. F. Lull, Eds.; Third Edition, pp. 190–191). Fortress Press.