Word of Salvation – Vol. 28 No. 03 – February 1983
Look Now, Look!
Sermon by Rev. A.I. deGraaf v.d.m. on 1John 3:1-3
Scripture Reading: 1John 2:28-3:10
Liturgy: BoW H.9; 227:1, 2; 446:1,2; BoW H.7:1,3,4; 493
Old John in this text speaks with the excitement of a child. It is one of the most excited verses of the whole Bible. Like a child looking at fireworks! Look! Look at that! Like a poor beggar getting sent to him a treasure beyond imagination and calling all his mates to come and have a look! LOOK, says John.
There’s something to look at in the sign of Baptism.
And a Christian may confess that in his baptism he received the greatest riches of his life.
In fact – when I look back on it I can say that when I was baptised, in an old church in Holland, the most important event of my life took place. And I cannot say that my life has been exactly uneventful. But my baptism was the most important of them all – and I was exactly a week old!
The most important event in a Christian’s life?
You would not say that if you’d go by experience, or by “pomp and circumstance”. It’s all rather simple, really.
A few drops of water, what does it mean?
Well, old John cries out excitedly,
HAVE A GOOD LOOK AT IT.
God is telling you a most wonderful thing.
It is known of the famous Reformer and learned theologian Martin Luther that at times he could get really depressed. Some people have that kind of character. Once, when he was deep down in the dumps it is known that he snapped right out of his depression by saying to himself:
“I was baptized, too!”
That means: Long, long ago when I could not say anything to God at all myself yet, God said something incredibly beautiful TO ME.
To a fragile little human being
The Creator of heaven and earth,
the Ruler of the very Universe, said something very wonderful.
And he said it in visible form, he gave a sign,
SO we can point at it and say: LOOK, just LOOK AT IT!
In our text there are three things the old disciple of Jesus calls us to look at.
1. Look at who you may be
2. Look at what you will be, and
3. Look at how you should be.
LOOK WHAT A LOVE THE FATHER HAS GIVEN TO US!
– to US of all people! –
THAT WE MAY BE CHILDREN OF GOD!
That is no wonder and no excitement to people who think the world of themselves.
If you walk around thinking that you have “made it” and that the world owes you a living and other people owe you admiration and honour, if you are in love with yourself – or: trying to prove how good you are because you WANT to be in love with yourself, then you will never know the wonder of the discovery John made:
God made me HIS CHILD, while I WAS a crook
while I WAS God’s enemy
while I was lost He found me – and how?
By giving up the Only Dear Child He had, His only Son, to win me back.
God came to look me up and did not rest before He had me, and what was I but a stench in His holy nostrils, what was I except a misfit? But He came all the way to find me and when He found me he rejoiced with the joy of a man who finds his child back.
The Almighty Ruler of all the universe calls me His child and baptism is a sign of that.
John looks at it and is lost in wonder. What a love!
Our love is the kind that wants to get.
Our kind of love is for what can make US happy:
thus a man says to his woman I LOVE YOU
because she is the fulfilment of his desires and dreams.
Thus a friend says to a friend: “I love you.”
NOW he has someone to break through his loneliness and now he can talk to someone.
But what did the love of the Holy Lord see in ME?
Could He not have gone on and live His life perfectly without me, rebel that I am? But no, He went out and sought me and rested not before He found me, and then He said: YOU are My child.
What a love!
WE may be children of THAT God!
…and then we hear John say with amazement:
WE ARE!
We are already.
It is not a matter of what we MAY BE ONE DAY if we make the grade, after a life of striving and toil.
No, we are, for the sake of the Son who died lonely on that cross. We are!
All we need to do to get this unbelievable gift is to accept it with a believing heart.
God gave us that assurance when we were baptised. And who would then still deny that this is the most important event in the life of a Christian?
By the greatest miracle of all times God made me His child.
By the way – John then goes on to show what consequence this will have. To be excited need NOT mean to be blind for what happens to us. He says: we have not deserved it but we got that gift; We are children of God, but that’s why the world does not know us.
The world is not meant here in the sense of: God’s creation”.
It is not meant here in the sense of John 3:16…
“God so loved THE WORLD that He gave His one and only Son to it”.
No, the world here has that specific meaning of
CREATION IN REBELLION
PEOPLE as they try TO LIVE THEIR LIFE WITHOUT GOD.
THAT WORLD does not know us, children of God,
Oh, that world knows our name and the colour of our hair and it had our credit rating on a computer and is aware of our vital statistics.
It knows about us, but KNOW us? No.
As a child of God you are an odd one out.
As a child of God you are a stranger.
And racism and anti-semitism shows you what the world thinks of – and does with – strangers.
Baptism is a sign also in that sense that it sets us apart.
Israel was God’s special people before Jesus came and still today they are made to feel at times what awkward position that gets you into.
That is what the word “holy” means.
Not that you’re a “holy Joe,”
“holier than thou”
but “set apart”,
one whose life is at cross-purposes
to that of those who do not care about God.
And any teenager knows how hard it is to be different, to be shunned by your peers, to have your mates look at you and say: He’s different – why aren’t you like all of us?”
It is a hard thing at times.
But you may as well get used to it.
In fact, when God’s children are getting popular because they take on too much the colour of their surroundings….
If we become so much part of the establishment that we are blending in with its life
we may well wonder if we are faithful,
we may well wonder if we live a life of obedience.
When GOD knows you,
when HE says: “Look there goes a dear child of Mine!”
then for the world that hates God that is enough reason to say:
“Look there goes another one of those awkward misfits”.
And then it is yet that very same love of God that puts you IN THAT WORLD so that YOU may show His love there, with open arms and deep compassion.
Not a conceited bigot who knows everything better, mind you – (that’s not how the Son of God was here among sinners either, so why should we?) –
but as a priest, merciful follower of the Prince of Peace.
Your Baptism calls you onto that path when it has taught you the wonder, the utter amazement that God has made you His child for ever.
….LOOK WHAT WE ARE ALLOWED TO BE.
And now point two:
LOOK WHAT WE SHALL BE.
We know what we are.
But that is only the start.
You watch says John – what we WILL be!
And then in his excitement John says something funny:
“WE DO NOT K N O W Y E T WHAT WE WILL BE”
But he means:
You have no idea!
It will be much, much better than you can imagine!
But then he uses ONE expression we CAN get hold of:
WE WILL BE LIKE JESUS IS NOW.
John knew a BIT about that, you see.
He had seen Jesus after He had arisen out of the grave, and his body that had been battered and broken before had walked the earth in such glory that even he – his friend of three years – had trouble recognising Him.
Yet: nothing airy-fairy about it, either;
He had his friends FEEL Him,
His feet had made true prints on the sand
and He had eaten before their eyes.
Nothing spooky about Jesus’ new Body.
Later, when an exile on the island of Patmos, John had seen Jesus again,
but then in a new glory, so bright that it made him fall at His feet as dead.
Well, says John, we all will see Him,
who has given Himself for us and loved us,
and we will be like Him.
You know the most wonderful fruit of the gospel for us people here in this world is hope.
God teaches us to look ahead without fear.
We may look past death, our death too.
We may look past the grave, our grave also.
And say: The God who loved us will never let us go, there’s nothing fickle in His love.
He holds on to us and His love brings us into a life that never ends.
Look ahead, says God,
beyond the threatening clouds,
beyond the prospects of this world,
beyond the sharpening conflicts…
the deteriorating economy and the threatening clouds.
Beyond your grief and beyond even your dreams!
We shall be like Him.
Baptism calls us into a life of pilgrims.
Pilgrims who are like strangers in the world but also:
Pilgrims, like Abraham on the way
now knowing where we shall end up: the Promised Land,
and God is the Giver of it.
The same God, Who created these heavens and this earth,
is the One Who restores and gives the new one,
and so there is nothing unreal or spooky about it;
No ghostly nirvana for despisers of the body
or avoiders of God’s creation:
but the final fulfilment of the homesickness
of those who have begun to love God in return.
And it is then, after looking with us at this good news,
that we are children of God and that we shall be like Jesus,
that John, thirdly, points us at our response to this truth:
Everyone who has THIS bright HOPE in him,
makes himself pure as Jesus is pure.
We will be like Him – so we try now already to look like Him here; and begin doing that.
It looks a bit strange the way it is written here
You’d be inclined to ask: Ah, we MUST make OUR OWN lives clean?
It is DO-IT-YOURSELF-RELIGION after all?
Well… if that’d be your conclusion
you have forgotten the CONTEXT.
What are we again? CHILDREN OF GOD!
By His grace, by the miracle of HIS LOVE for LOST rebels!
And so: “making yourself clean”,
“doing the law”
is never THE ROAD TOWARDS THE FATHER’S HOUSE,
the thing to MAKE US children of God.
Never!
It is not THE ROAD TO Father’s home,
but the RULE INSIDE Father’s home.
Once you got your place inside that home
you YOURSELF begin to ask:
Lord what do you want me to do?
You want to look like Jesus
and follow Him in His footsteps.
NOT BECAUSE YOU WANT TO MAKE IT INTO HEAVEN
BUT BECAUSE YOU LOVE HIM
FOR GIVING YOU THE PROMISE
AND ASSURANCE OF HEAVEN.
And then God, who by His Spirit makes you and me more and more human,
does not say:
I’ll do it all for you
why don’t you just sit down…!
No, he says:
My Child, be my guest! I DO have work for you to do!
And you know yourself enough to ask:
But Lord, what good can I do for You?
I know myself!
but then He answers:
I know you better than you know yourself
and I am working on you.
I trust My children,
and I want you, together with Me,
to set to work in the world.
That is what the Covenant of Grace means,
that God takes the likes of us
into His partnership
and calls us to be in a team with Him!
He takes me seriously, because
He takes His own work seriously!
You belong, when you are a child of His,
you belong, completely.
That is what God tells people in their baptism.
That’s what he told me when I was a week old there in that old church in Holland.
That’s what long ago, he told you, too.
Would you not agree, then.
that this is the most important event
that ever took place in your life?
Once you see that and agree with it, He says:
It’s the beginning.
Watch what I WILL do!
Amen.