The Believer's Sonship.
It is a law of our nature, or rather of our mental constitution, that in looking at any particular truth or subject we unconsciously present it in that aspect which strikes ourselves most forcibly, or which is the most congenial to our own minds. Take, for example, the heaven of the believer's hope and prospect. While the object of expectation has been one with the universal Church, the features of that object have been various as in the glass of the kaleidoscope, and individuals have dwelt for their comfort upon the different aspects of its blessedness, according to their own felt need or yearning sorrow. Thus it is said of Wilberforce, whose life was one sunny activity of benevolence, unbroken by the wearing languors of the sick-bed, that when he thought of heaven it was as a place which refined and sublimated every righteous affection, that his central idea was love; while the suffering Robert Hall, whose life was a torturing illness, and his brow beaded ever with the sweat of pain, murmured in his acutest paroxysms of the promised recompense of rest. Thus we are not surprised to find John the beloved declaring the gospel of love, warming every precept to its genial inspiration, and exhorting the whole body of the faithful to its cultivation and spread. In the words of the text there is a rich mine of comforting truth. It brings before us
I. The believer's present relationship: "Now are we the sons of God." Who shall estimate the preciousness of this rare and hallowed privilege? God commendeth His love to us, not merely in that "while we were yet sinners Christ died for us," but in "that we might receive the adoption of sons."
II. The text gives us a glimpse of the believer's future. There is a general uncertainty, redeemed by a particular assurance: "We shall be like Him," etc. This is not the language of hesitation, nor even of conjecture, but of firm and well-warranted conviction. To be like Christ, fully and without a drawback to reflect His image this is the destiny of our ransomed nature.
W. M. Punshon, Sermons,p. 66.
Our Views of Heaven.
I. When we claim on behalf of the Christian morality a purity or disinterestedness greater than that: of any other religion, we are sometimes met with the reply that the motives it offers to man, however they may be disguised in language, are really selfish, inasmuch as they appeal to his self-interest: "Do this, and you shall obtain a reward; do that, and you shall be punished." And these objectors say that, so far from Christianity inspiring men with the most perfect spirit of self-devotion, it is quite impossible that it should do so; and that men in ages preceding the Christian revelation who gave up their lives for their country or one another without any expectation of recompense in another world were in reality exhibiting a much more perfect form of sacrifice.
II. St. John says plainly in the passage of his first epistle which is before us that our view of a future life determines our present one: "Whoso hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure." He says boldly, therefore, that the hope of reward is a powerful agent, in fact the only effectual one. As men learned what was the treasure which God offered to every one of them, so they learned to hope for that treasure thereafter, and to lay it up for themselves while on earth by following the Divine likeness. Christ did appeal to men's self-interest, but not till He had taught them that their interest was to be perfect, as their Father in heaven was perfect. To lose self in Christ, not to find it haunting us still, is the heaven which God has promised to His redeemed.
III. The desire for repose, the desire to find rest for the spirit in some thing or some person, is the master yearning of every man's life. We want to be delivered from falsehoods, from vanities of all kinds, from delusions which hold us one day only to yield to others the next. We try to find rest in some object short of the highest, and we feel that we are only hiding from us our own poverty, and that when this object has been attained there will remain a power, a righteousness, above us, to which we have not been reconciled. St. John offers us a method different from our own. He does not say, "Be good, be true, and you shall find out God." He says, "Take to your comfort a hope, and that hope shall make you pure."
A. Ainger, Sermons in the Temple Church,p. 13.
Sonship the Foreshadowing of Heaven.
I. In our text we have concealment: "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." Christ reveals the fact of immortality, gives the promise of immortality, but tells us little or nothing about the outward conditions of immortality. A Christian must frankly accept this ignorance. By the terms of his Christian covenant he engages to walk by faith, not by sight. Restlessness, toil, sorrow, bereavement, ignorance, are all outgrowths of sin; and the Bible promises the abolition of these in promising a sinless heaven.
II. But there is revelation as well as concealment. It doth not yet appear, but we know something. Concealments are necessary because of the limitations of our intelligence; but these concealments are in the interest of our knowledge on another side, and are intended to direct our researches into another and more profitable channel. For if we rightly read the New Testament, we find it aiming, not so much to put us in possession of new facts about the future life, as to put us in the right attitude alike toward what is revealed and what is hidden. Our disposition is to inquire into the circumstances of the world to come, while the Gospel persistently counteracts this tendency by showing us that the future life is essentially a matter of character rather than of circumstances. On this side we know something of the heavenly world. We know the moral laws which govern it, for they are essentially the same laws which the Gospel applies here. We know the moral sentiments which pervade heaven. They are the very sentiments which the Gospel is seeking to foster in us here. We know that holiness, which is urged upon us here, is the character of God, and that where a holy God reigns the atmosphere must be one of holiness; that if God is love, love must pervade heaven; that if God is truth, truth must pervade heaven.
III. The essence of the promise is that we shall be like God. Likeness to God comes through vision of God. Love has a power of transformation. In that fact we have both a consolation and an exhortation to duty.
M. R. Vincent, The Covenant of Peace,p. 175.
References: 1 John 3:2; 1 John 3:3. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 291; Ibid.,vol. vi., p. 27.