Transformed by Hope
Summary
In this sermon on 1 John 3:1–6, Matt Crummy explores the astonishing truth that we are called children of God—not metaphorically or aspirationally, but as a present and permanent identity rooted in God’s initiating love. This identity, given not earned, shapes how we see ourselves, how we respond to sin, and how we live in hopeful anticipation of what we will become. Matt contrasts being named by the world with being named by God, calling us to resist self-definition and instead live from the reality of our belovedness. Rather than viewing sin as legal infraction, he points to a relational vision of holiness—one shaped by the love of the Father and the hope of becoming like Christ.
Questions for reflection
What is the significance of being a child of God?
How does your sense of identity impact your actions and desires?
In what ways do you feel the tension between who you are and who you’re becoming?
Where are you tempted to find identity apart from God’s love?
How might the hope of seeing Christ more clearly shape your life today?
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There's a guy named Joseph Pieper. Yes, his last name was Pieper. It's German. He's born in Germany in 1904, just two hours from where my grandma would be born 20 years later in northern Germany and growing up peeper, he saw his own country sort of staggered through the first world war, the trenches, hunger, blockades, the humiliation of defeat. And of course these are also the types of things that led families like mine later on to leave for America or other places in the 1920s. Here's a photo of the boat that my grandma came on as an infant, sort of a big kind of Titanic looking thing as a man in the 1920s, Joseph Pierper, he studied philosophy while Germany was reeling from inflation and political chaos. He began his teaching career in the 1930s just as Hitler was rising to power. Talk about a tough time to enter the workforce or academia, I cannot imagine. Now initially peeper, he tried to build a bridge between Catholic social teaching and Nazi social policies. It didn't go so well. In 1934, he asked his publisher to sort of suspend one of his books because it was being co-opted by sort of Nazi ideology. So while the Nazis were demanding that universities sort of serve their primary interests, Pieper quietly refused to cooperate. Eventually, some of his own lectures were banned and later he was banned from publishing all together.
So while they were demanding that, or after there were second World War, I'm sorry, peeper, he stayed in Germany. You can show a photo of him here if you want there. This is him later in life, he devoted himself to rebuilding through teaching and he tried to reconnect people with the wisdom of both sort of classical philosophy and Christian tradition. His writings on the four cardinal virtues have been formative for me this year, particularly prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance, which are sort of some old fashioned words we don't use very much other than justice and became wellknown and they're actually the basis of a gateway discussion group that's happening here on Wednesday nights. So shout out to all those folks and I'm sorry, I'm mentioning Joseph Pieper again. Sorry, not sorry. So you see for paper the virtues, the virtues, they were not abstractions good, wasn't just like a nice idea or something to philosophize about.
Goodness was powering the powering force generating and moving the universe forward and this is exactly what the world needed at that time, probably what his own country needed to hear at that time that good was possible. There needed to be, what you could say was a radical re humanization rehumanizing the world, a radical reorientation toward the good, toward virtue. Later he wrote these kind of related words, and for those of you at the discussion group, again, I'm sorry, I intentionally tried to confuse you and I'm going to confuse everyone today. So welcome to the confusion. This is what it says. Don't try to take it all in. He says, the preeminence of prudence means that realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality. Okay, not expecting. You're going to take all that in and I'll explain it in a minute. So prudence is simply goodness in action.
It's the ability to make wise choices and hopefully I think most of us want to do that. It's wisdom in motion for people without prudence, none of the other virtues are good or even possible justice, which is maybe giving others their due. For example, it's undercut if we can't wisely evaluate or take appropriate action in a given situation or temperance, which is a type ultimately of self justice, it meets the same fate if we can't sort of evaluate objectively. So the real stuff of life is what he was interested in. The blood, the sweat, the tears, the frustration, the confusion. Maybe you feel some of that today. He pushes against sort of grand complicated ethical systems that sort of stack and stack on top of one another, intend to eventually lead us to think more about situations and systems or maybe disembodied ethics and a lot less than the living, breathing people who were looking in the eye or who live next to us, right?
People were supposed to serve as Christians. Here's his quote again and then I'll unpack it. He says, the preeminence of prudence means that realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality. He's saying that because wisdom and action is of utmost importance, it's the most important. That means our ability to do good stuff. It assumes you can actually understand what's real, okay? You can't do what's good until you understand reality. You can't do anything until you understand what you're stepping into, right? At least with any meaning. So we don't want to trick ourselves into thinking here that good equals good ideas only. Does that make sense? So this is what he continues with. He says he alone can do good. Who knows what things are like and what their situation is. Realization of the good it presupposes our actions are appropriate to the real situation that is the concrete realities which form the environment of a concrete human action that we therefore take this concrete reality seriously with clear-eyed objectivity.
Again, there's a lot, but here's the thing. Prudence is about having the courage to face reality as it is and then acting in line with the truth, not just what feels good or looks good. If you want to do good, you can't just rely on having nice thoughts or maybe even good intentions. You actually have to understand what's really going on around you. If you ignore the facts or only see what you want to see, then your kind actions could even end up doing harm to really do good. Your decisions have to fit the actual situation, the real people, the real needs, the real consequences.
So this fall we've been studying First John, which has been absolutely fantastic. It's been so helpful for me. And today we're going to continue that series by looking a little bit at first John chapter three. And what I love about the way Dominic has been navigating this book for us is that he's been helping us to see that life in the church, life following Jesus has never been like a Thomas Kincaid painting. It's never a simple sterile environment where everyone gets along and pain is easily managed and Jesus is glorified and we never fail and so on. It's just not in church history, certainly not in the early church. So I think, I don't know if that's encouraging or discouraging, but there it's so while that could be depressing, I suppose I do think it's a testament to the mercy of God and the resiliency of the human spirit that we're still here today somehow against all odds.
We're doing it, yes, imperfectly, but we are still here. You are still here. Jesus is still alive. Jesus loves his bride, the church, and somehow there is still goodness in the world. So let's pray before we really jump into the text and then we'll, we'll unpack things. God thank you for this morning. Thanks just for a beautiful fall day. Thank you for a chance to open your word together. God, I pray just that we would be able to rest our hearts in you, spirit that you would guide this time and just illuminate our minds. Help us to understand how goodness translates to action. Give us grace. Give us mercy. We thank you for this day. In Jesus name, amen.
So just like people lived in a world where reality was hard to face, maybe increasingly so, wars, propaganda, ruin, the early church lived in its own season of upheaval. Communities John was writing to had already been torn apart in various ways. People who had once worshiped alongside them had already began to split off. They claimed maybe like a higher knowledge of God, but in the process they actually dismissed Jesus's humanity and downplayed the need for doing love in our actual physical bodies and not just thinking love, but for those who stayed around, the wounds were real friends were gone. Trust was maybe shaken and there were kind of pretty big questions about what was true and maybe even who belonged to God. So that's the world into which first John speaks as we read, and in a way I think the author's doing exactly what people described.
He's prompting the church to look reality with clear-eyed objectivity, a tough look. There are some mirrors, for example, I don't like very much anymore at 42 to call things what they really are. God's love is real. Our identity is children of God is real. Sin is still an abandonment of what's true. Christ's mission was to take away sin, at least in part in your life as a Christian. It won't make much sense until you're able to see these realities. This is what's starting to be addressed. Now, a quick note before I jump into our passage today, and this is just a personal note, I'm going to be really honest. I have struggled a little bit with the authorship of this book, meaning I'm a little bit less confident than some are. That first, second, and third John were actually written by John the evangelist, meaning John the beloved disciple of Jesus.
I'm not going to get into all the reasons of why that's where I'm at, and I don't honestly think they are that important because in my mind, if it wasn't John the disciple of Jesus, it was most certainly a disciple of John's instead. And first John is deeply, deeply connected to the language of the gospel of John intentionally. So either way, John's teaching is front and center, and I fully affirm of course, that this book is in fact scripture. But because I don't want to stand over and against church history, I will teach today's sermon referencing John as the author because even if he wasn't first, John is completely johannan as a theologian would say in its construction, its meaning and its language. However, I realized about midnight last night, I couldn't actually teach this sermon in good conscience without at least mentioning it before I talked about and named John for the next 20 minutes.
So just hear me out, okay? All emails and rocks can come at me, it's personal note. Okay, more an opportunity to learn a lesson area of confusion for me. Here's first John three. It says, 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 will has not 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 may 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.
Okay, so John, like I mentioned, is riding in the wake of some sort of church split and there's other things too, and these aren't like people that sort of showed up with a nefarious agenda and took over. That was not the situation. These are fellow church members who were reading the same texts, singing the same songs, praying the same prayers. These were their friends, but their departure left. Some big questions, what does it mean to abide in Christ or what is expected of us Christians today? It seems like there was a beginning to be a little bit of a tension between works and faith or something like that. So John, he draws very stark lines in an effort to stabilize a wounded church after the word is schism, he's pushing for clarity, and I'll admit that because of this, the language of this particular book, it kind of pushes against my desire for nuance.
It really isn't a very nuanced book. It's all sort of good and evil, light and dark. You get the idea. But John, he does something crucial that I think all spiritual directors and pastors spend a lot of time doing and that is listening and helping people remember. Remember that God loves us. Remember that he adopted us. Remember that we have hope and that real life is found in Jesus. Remember that knowing God means living like him. Remember, remember I would say memory is pretty important. Joseph Pieper, he calls memory a container of the truth of real things, a container of the truth of real things. I love that He also said this. There is no more insidious way for error to establish itself than by the falsification of memory. How through slight retouches displacement, discolorations omissions, shifts of accent. You can imagine what that looked like in Nazi Germany.
So our individual and collective memory is vital to the church. It's part of why we have things like creeds, catechesis, we are forgetful. It's an acknowledgement that we are passing things along to future generations. We're entrusting these truths to people who will hopefully go on and do bigger and better things than us one day memory. It's also crucial for relationships. It's what connects you in some way and allows you to have sort of a shared reality together with another person. Make memories together. You reflect on the past, maybe tell and retell stories. You argue over details about something and so on. Memories matter, and that's part of why it's so difficult today, kind of in the moment we're living in, it seems like there's this constant battle to narrate what's occurred, to tell the story of the past, even the extremely recent past in one way or another, and this is very common when you examine the history of the church. The other night we were chatting about this at this discussion group I'm talking about, and someone astutely pointed out that the serpent in the garden of Eden went after Eve's memory, and I thought that was so keen. It said, did God really say this is in Genesis, you must not eat from any tree in the garden. It was a falsification of memory.
So John is not teaching something new to these people. Maybe it's new to you today, but that wouldn't have been the case for this sort of ancient community. First one is to 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. He literally says, look at the type or quality of love the Father has bestowed or given to us lavished on us, and that is what we are. That is our identity. Later he'll set this up as sort of a comparison versus being children of the world or Satan. In end of verse one, he says this, the reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Literally it says that the cosmos did not know him, which could just mean understand or perceive no, right?
No, because they don't understand or perceive God and that my friends is the beginning of prudence. It's the way Joseph Peiper frames it to be able to look at reality in the face and to name it even when it gets a little weird or maybe unexpected to know it. Of course, you'll need both a willingness to change your mind and somehow the stability not to be tossed about. It's hard that it will require others to help you interpret of course. But when push comes to shove, here's the thing, and I think this is hard as a parent, I've had to come to terms with this reality. Ultimately, as somebody grows up and of course matures, your decisions are ultimately between you and God at the very base, right? Believe it or not, you are the one positioned to make decisions for you with God. That's kind of how personhood is supposed to work when you have maybe the mental capacity to do so safely. So God certainly doesn't seem risk averse giving us that sort of responsibility. Sometimes I feel a great amount of responsibility just leading myself. That sounds goofy, but I'm like, I don't want to be responsible for me. But here we are.
It seems a little bit to me like the Cheesecake Factory menu. It's so long, so complicated, and it all sounds good in theory, but then if you go the wrong direction, things might not go so well and you'll be disappointed and then your gift card will be wasted. So for whoever is in this boat, maybe you feel like I don't know how to make decisions anymore. The world is really complicated. It's like a Cheesecake Factory menu. I would say you're in good company. It really is true. Maybe you're frozen in sort of this indecision for people who deny God altogether. Of course, Christianity looks pretty goofy. It looks like worshiping the flying spaghetti monster. It looks like foolishness. But what we believe, what John believes is that God in his grace has pursued us in love and adopted us as children of God by his spirit, not as a nice analogy or like a hallmark keepsake ornament.
Is that a thing? Right? This isn't like a neat tidy thing, but as a real relationship rooted in named people in a real God, the real cosmos. So this is in contrast to the group who had left the church in one John, a group that theologians today would call secessionists, right? It's like this idea of seceding, like people talk about Texas seceding from the union or something, right? This faction may have argued that true belonging was actually proved by higher knowledge of God, but John insists if God's love or that it is God's love, not our knowledge that names us as children. So knowing is important, but there's more to the story and we'll see that in a minute. Let's look back at our passage verse one, see what great love the Father has lavished us that we should be called the 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. So the secessionists may have claimed to already be perfected or fully enlightened. We're not a hundred percent sure and John affirms that while they are indeed children of God, the fullness of this truth would ultimately be revealed when Christ returns they were living in the now and the not yet and so are we. But the end of verse two is really kind of the animating idea for us today. John says, we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him for what or we shall see him as he is. We will be transformed into Christ's likeness when we see him as he truly is.
I think it's beautiful. This is people's confrontation with reality, but with sort of a relational flare. Reality itself is held together by none other than God. When we confront this Jesus, we confront reality. We confront, you could say a mirror as well. We see all the pain, the disappointment, the mess up, the abandonment, the embarrassment, the shame, the confusion, the tears, and what do we find? We find love. We find mercy. We find the purpose of life. We see the true human. The second Adam, we see the person we are meant to be in the mirror somehow who we could be. We see who we dream to be, but can't quite get there. You see, the big unexpected secret in the universe is that the whole thing is powered by love, by goodness, by a relational God who is somehow in a wild twist, knowable and yes, huge and very other, but also confounding in that he is also Emanuel God with us, which we think about at Christmas a lot. Friends, you are the children of God. The one and only. What we will be has not yet fully happened yet, but wow, when Christ appears, we're going to be transformed and that's a very good thing. We'll be made like Jesus when we see him as he is, and that's a lesson for us today. Our view of radically transforms us both now and forever. Our view of Jesus, it radically transforms the way we live, the way we see ourselves, the way we see other people now and forever.
Maybe if you saw a person flying, the windows were open here and we looked outside and a person just flew by and that might mess you up. That would probably mess me up if I saw a person just flying casually, they didn't have any sort of propulsion, they were just flying around. You'd have to do some sort of radical reworking of your understanding of what's possible, right? At least I would. I dunno, maybe you all are seeing flying people. I'm not. You'd have to review your view of reality to truly see Jesus for who he really is in all his fullness and glory. It will utterly change you. It will transform you and the way you see the cosmos, see yourself. You begin to understand the world through a different horizon of possibility. You'll see reality differently. Verse three, it says, all who have this hope in him purify themselves just as he is pure.
Everyone who breaks or sins rather breaks the law. In fact, sin is lawlessness. But you know that he appeared so that he may 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. This is a tough word. He's saying that one claims to know God, but dismisses sort of obedience as irrelevant. Maybe that their hope may be counterfeit or misplaced. They haven't aligned their hearts with reality, you could say. And so their actions or maybe even lack thereof are sinful. I guess it could also be an inspiring word too, that the hope we have to know Jesus as he is to know ourselves as we truly are to know the world as it is. It moves us to want the real thing. Now, that's really all purity is the real thing.
Goodness powers the universe and the evil is a twisting of that goodness, a disordering of the loves as Augustine put it. But at the heart of it all is something someone deep and good and yes pure, who is both sinless and takes away our sins, namely Jesus. Again, these folks that are reading this and were hearing this, they already knew this, but they needed a reminder. Their memory was a problem. Maybe it is for you too. So the questions are what motivates you, your obedience to God? Is it guilt, shame, terror, prosperity, glory, wealth, the love of God? Here are just a couple of things. I'm just going to name. This is a rapid fire list. It's not going to be in the screen ways that I was thinking about how we can learn to sort of move on from sin. The scriptures would even say flee from it, right? We can learn to see truthfully, we learn to return to God. This is part of why we do a prayer of confession and a declaration of assurance. Each week we learn to retrain or reorder our loves. We learn to make things right with other people because sin disorders, relationship and love repairs them. It's part of the role of communion actually. Each week we learn to learn in our suffering.
We learn how to embed ourselves in a truth filled community. We learn to pay attention to how we use language, and this can often come in prayer and reflection that things come to mind that I regret. Frankly, we learn to protect sort of an inner posture of hope. Maybe journaling walks, confession. Who knows? I don't know what it is for you, but where does all of this move? Well, yes, obedience, but let's slightly reframe that as simply learning to realize love in action. Obedience looks a lot like love in action. So for time, we're going to jump over the middle chunk of First John three today. It'd be great to get into it. We just don't have time. But it's an expression of continued warnings and sort of not to be deceived into a life of sin and hatred, which Dominic sort of talked about a little bit last week.
So here's part of where the argument goes later on in one John three 16 through 18. This is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ lay down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech, but in actions and in truth, and this is where the cessationists were going astray. They had divorced the love of God from the love of neighbor. But of course, that's not relevant to us today at all. So we can just skip that. No, I'm kidding. But seriously, this was an outworking of a theology gone astray. They disconnected in some way from reality.
Jesus, from love, from the real needs of the real friends and neighbors. There was a group of people who essentially heard the words of Jesus in the gospel of John and drew the line that if you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. And they're like, cool, I'm good. Right? He was an intellectual ascent and that's it. That's all we need. Belief ism. We think the right things and so we are good. Their Christology, it was limited to Christ's work of salvation and reign, perhaps his return. But the everyday human elements of Jesus are just too nitty and gritty, joining God in the renewal of all things.
But of course this is an incomplete view of who Jesus is and what he did in the incarnation. When our view of Jesus, it contorts or conforms to something more convenient for us, we end up transforming him into a tool and either his divinity or his humanity end up becoming diminished, or both. Jesus being truly God and truly man, he shows us a new way to be human. He's closing the book on death. He's inviting us back into communion with himself, with others, and with creation. So isn't it interesting how the passage actually phrases this rather than just saying he was killed, it's actually emphasizing that he voluntarily gave up his life. That's an interesting phrase, the truest fullest, most perfect, purest life. There could be Jesus. He set aside life itself for the sake of love, but it doesn't end there. It's a transfer of life that happens.
You see, we're invited to do the same. We don't pursue death for the sake of death. We pursue generosity via sacrifice to share life, to plant a seed and see something grow. We're sharing the fruit of our lives while others with others who need it. Frankly, it's not a popular thing probably to believe today, but we really do need each other. We are actually better together in the long run. Part of how God provides for us is through his image bearing people. So when my grandma came to the United States, she arrived in New York and we can still see the papers from the day that she arrived November 1st, 101 years ago. Here's sort of the manifest of the ship.
You can show the next one too. Yeah, there's my grandma. Can you imagine? She wasn't even a year old. It says Mann infant and her dad. Heinrich was a farmer and he was 24 years old. They just left everything in Germany. Can you imagine little baby coming on a ship? It's a story of many people in our country, of course too. So many of these people had hope, hope even incomplete. They didn't even know what they were walking into, right? I didn't even know until this week that she actually ended up in Iowa to begin with in a town that doesn't even exist anymore. But they had hope enough to leave and never return some way. I kind of feel like we're all sort of in this boat together called life. This sounds like a Dave Matthews song or something. I don't know. We're in this family on the way together somewhere.
My great grandpapa, 24 years old, took that risk. I guess we're all in different places in life like a ship. None of us has arrived on the other shore. But as we anticipate the age to come, we have hope together as passengers sort of. And this hope, it does transform us into a community. It brings us clarity of mind and purpose. It changes the way we speak to one another. It sets us in a direction toward the author and perfecter of our faith, and it pushes us to deal with our differences with humility and respect. Because we're all on the same boat, life's ultimate destination. It is away from sin, away from division, away from pain. So we begin to take on the practices of our new land. Today. We begin to take on the practices of Jesus Heaven on earth. We extend the love of God through acts of kindness and charity and forgiveness to other people. We take a collective deep breath and look for a hint of that land to come. We look on the horizon and we remember that we will be transformed in the Christ's likeness when we see him as he truly is. Let's close in prayer.
Father, thank you. Just that you have revealed yourself to us. It's wild to me to realize that the Son of God loves us. That the one who created the world is good and not afraid that you have brought us into your family and called us beloved. I just pray for anyone here who has believed something other than that about themselves, whether it's self-condemnation or other condemnation, and I pray just that you would show us that goodness still reigns, that you still reign, we pray. Just that you would give us confidence this week to look for you, in the humility to pursue you. Maybe when no one knows. Pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
