Children of God Now

It is a quiet astonishment to watch a child grow into a face. For years the resemblance is only a rumor — a certain set of the jaw, a way of laughing that comes from nowhere the child has been — and then one morning the parent is simply there, looking out of a face that has become its own. The likeness was always coming. It only needed time to surface.

John cannot get over a smaller and a larger version of that same wonder. "See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are" (1 John 3:1). He breaks off to make us look — see what kind of love — as if the marvel is less that God forgives us at all than that he calls us his own, an adoption that hands us a name never ours by birth. And it is no courtesy title. We are God's children now, John insists, already, before a thing about us has caught up to it (1 John 3:2).

Which is where his honesty comes in, because most days we do not look much like it. "What we will be has not yet appeared" (1 John 3:2) — the family resemblance is still mostly rumor in us, a flash of the Father's mercy here, a stretch of nothing there where a stranger would never guess whose we are. Tim Keller, preaching this text, says the life of a child of God is powered less by trying harder to look the part than by stopping to behold the love that gave us the name in the first place.[1] The likeness deepens the way it always does — by long looking at the face we are coming to share.

And here John tells us how it will finally surface: "when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). Not by a last heave of our effort, but by sight — the face we have loved at a distance seen at last with nothing between, and the seeing itself remaking us into its likeness. Paul says as much from the near side of a clouded glass — "now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12) — where the dimness is real, and it is temporary. This is the whole gospel run in reverse: the Son of God became a child of man, born under our nature and our death, so that we could be carried the other way and adopted as children of God (Galatians 4:4-5). The cross is where that adoption was paid for; the empty tomb is the pledge that the likeness will hold.

So we are children who do not yet look the part, living toward a morning when we will. We do not have to manufacture the resemblance, or despair that it comes so slowly. We keep looking at him — the name is his gift and his finished work — until the day the veil lifts, the face is there, and the children at last resemble their Father because they have at last seen him. It is the surest thing about us — surer than our failures, surer than the slow mornings — that we are being carried toward that face.

[1] Tim Keller, "Beholding the Love of God," sermon, Gospel in Life.