Children of God
“ Beloved, now we are children of God,” 1 John 3:2 NASBS
Brothers and sisters in Christ, I pray that you truly know the Lord and experience the power of His death and resurrection in the inner man. That is, to be awakened to the reality of your sin so that you may begin to comprehend the riches of His love and long for His imputed righteousness to be given to you. For those who are not sick have no need of a physician nor do they desire one, but it is those who see the pollution of sin in the very makeup of their nature who cry out for mercy, “Sinner that I am, why should the sun give me light, the air supply breath, the earth bear my tread, its fruits nourish me, its creatures subserve my ends? Yet, thy compassions yearn over me, thy heart hastens to my rescue, thy love endured my curse, thy mercy bore my deserved stripes. Let me walk humbly in the lowest depths of humiliation, bathed in thy blood, tender of conscience, triumphing gloriously as an heir of salvation.” These are the ones who are led by the Holy Spirit into sweet communion with Christ; To talk to Him as one who talks to his friend. Oh may our hearts yearn to know the secrets of His heart and to search the length and breadth and depth and height of His love that surpasses all knowledge.
J.C. Philpot wrote concerning this many years ago, “To know Him so as to drink into His spirit, and to have His image stamped by the Holy Ghost upon our souls; to know Him as coming down into our hearts out of His glorious sanctuary, filling our souls with His presence and His love; to know Him as formed in us the hope of glory, making our bodies His temple, dwelling in us, breathing himself into us, speaking with us, moving as it were every affection of our heart and every faculty of our soul. Thus to know the Lord is the sum and substance of vital godliness.” To understand this is a foretaste of heaven in this life, and a guarantee of the promise of God, which aren’t seen by the human eye, as though they already were. “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.”