Basic Christianity: God Loves His Children

Today’s post is part of a series to help us take what we learn on Sunday into the rest of the week. These posts summarize the main points from the week’s sermon and include questions for continued reflection and prayer. The posts in this series are written by members of our church’s Adult Christian Formation team.

 

Our service theme last Sunday was “God Loves His Children.” Pastor Bobby preached from 1 John 2:28-3:3. The main point of his sermon was that we are deeply loved children of God and that affects how we live.

Many people feel as though there is something or someone who has a watchful eye over us at all times. The truth is that there is someone who knows us infinitely and we will one day appear before Him (that is, God). We are responsible, then, to live in response to God. In order to do this, we need to know our identity, our destiny, and the implications of this.

Our identity is that we are children of God, through faith in Christ (3:2). This means we have rights as children – it’s not something we need to earn and we are loved by God no matter what! God loves us at our worst and we don’t need to clean ourselves up to go to Him. It also means that we should be marked as people of wonder. When we consider how much God loves us, we can see everything in life as coming from our loving Father and we can be surprised and excited by God’s grace, instead of assuming we deserve any of the good that comes to us.

Our destiny is that we are transformed when we recognize that God sees us (3:2). God looks on us with love and affirmation. When we see God seeing us, it drowns out our vanity and pride and compels us to pursue purity and righteousness (3:3), so that when He returns, we can’t wait to be identified as His.

The implications of all this include:

  1. We need to remember that we are immortal. We are being made into people who are more like Christ. We need to take one another seriously, because we will always be part of God’s family together.
  2. We should behold this – we should meditate on the fact that God deeply loves us. Then, when we think about a heavy area of our life and apply the fact that we are a child of God to that area, our approach and perspective is changed.

Questions for prayer and reflection:

How did the Holy Spirit speak to you through this Scripture and sermon?

In your own words, how would you explain the rights we have as children of God through faith?

Are you living as though you need to perform for God or as though you’ve already been accepted by God and given the privileges of being His child?

If we truly believed and lived out of the fact that we are children of God, how would that change our approach to hardship? justice? relationships? What would our church community be like?

What does it look like to purify ourselves “as he is pure” (3:3)? How does the knowledge that God sees us affect this response?

How might this passage and message give hope to someone who has not yet put their faith in Christ?

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