See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin. No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.
Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.. - 1 John 3:1-17
When I was a kid, people would always ask me what I wanted to be when I grow up. As a kid, I really didn't know. So I looked around at other people that I knew or saw on TV or read about in books and imagined myself like them and assumed that was what it meant to be grown up. I could go cool stuff. No one could tell me what to do. I could watch whatever I wanted on TV, eat as much as I wanted and go to bed when I wanted. Of course, I'd have to do the boring stuff also, like work and taking out the trash, but secretly I assumed that this was all a masquerade that hid the true coolness of being an adult.
What would I do if I couldn't see other adults to help my imagination along? I guess I would have been pretty clueless in some areas and, because my imagination wasn't yet crippled by reality, in some ways I was pretty wise. This past week I looked back over a lot of my early creative work: poems, plays, short stories, made up languages and maps. But I also didn't understand, as Liza Bennet once said, "Handsome young men must have something to live on as well as the plain." Parents can create an environment for this to happen without the worry and details.
That is what John says: "The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him." The world can't imagine what it means to grown up because they don't know Jesus. Even we, who are children of God, do not fully know ("what we will be has not yet been made known") but we get a glimpse the closer we get to Jesus, because he is the the adult. For even the best of us, there will be a shock because we can't really imagine all of the ramifications of living with the same mindset as Jesus. But we know that can be as much like him as we can imagine: pure and righteous.
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