1 John 3:1-3

There are some things you just have to have. I mean, everyone has one, and if everyone has one then you better have one, too. What does everybody have that you need to have? MP3 player, certain brand of shoes, certain way your hair is cut, kind of clothes…

And this thing, whatever it is, is more than just the thing. It’s more than just fabric or plastic or hair style. It means something, right, to have this, because everyone else has this. If you have it, if you own it, if you look a certain way, then you’re part of the group. You belong. And there’s some good feelings that go with belonging. You feel important. You feel good. You maybe even feel a little safe, because you’re with the rest of the people, and there’s safety in numbers. You’re like you’re friends. You belong

It works the other way, too. If you don’t have what everybody else has, if you don’t dress like they do, if you’re hair looks different, if you are different in any way, sometimes that doesn’t feel so good

But here’s the thing, you’re never going to be like everybody else. Trying to feel like you belong by buying something or wearing something or looking some way is never ever going to work. You’ll always be trying to figure out what the next thing is. Even if you have the right thing or look the right way right now, today, that might be different a week later, and now you have to get that, or you don’t belong. People who are young think this way. People who are older think this way. We want to belong, and we think it’s stuff or looks that make us belong. And we never reach that, we never feel as safe or as loved as we want.

Until we realize that we belong in another way. We belong to God’s family. And maybe at first that doesn’t seem as important as the stuff and the clothes and the looks. But let’s go slow through the text here in 1 John 3, and as we hear about belong, as we hear God’s love, we’ll find that all that other stuff is just going to look cheap and breakable and not even worth thinking about.

Because, verse 1:

How great is His love. This is the part that I’m afraid we’re going to miss. If we don’t understand, or at least begin to understand how great the love the Father has for us, then we’re not going to understand anything else that follows.

And we might not understand how great His love is, because of human beings who were supposed to love us, but let us down. We had good friends, or maybe a parent, who hurt us very deeply, and we can’t trust it anymore when someone tells us that they love us. So when we hear that the Father loves us so much, in the back of our minds we’re thinking, Yeah, right. When’s He going let us down. When is He going to hurt us.

And sometimes we don’t understand how great His love is, because the church doesn’t talk like this or act like this. Sometimes, we see the church, who is supposed to know God’s love the best, sometimes we see people fighting and arguing and talking behind each other’s backs and not treating each other at all like we love them. So if the church can’t love, how can God?

And sometimes, the way the church talks about God doesn’t make Him seem very loving. Sometimes, the way the church talks about God makes Him seem really angry, just ticked off at us all the time, because of how rotten we really are. So then when we hear about how much He loves us, this doesn’t make sense. And we think that maybe, okay, He loves us, like He tolerates us, like He puts up with us, kind of rolling His eyes when we pray to Him, when we need something. We think that if He loves us, it’s a stingy kind of love.

But listen to verse 1 again:

This doesn’t sound like a stingy kind of love, does it? In spite of what others have done to us, our Father in heaven loves us with a great big love. In spite of how God’s people treat one another, God’s love never ends. And even if the church makes God’s love look stingy, God lavishes, pours out, floods us with His love.

And yes, we have done rotten things, horrible things, and yes, God hates that sin. But listen to this:

We belong. We’re in the family, the family of God. And compared to all the other groups we can ever belong to, the family of God beats them all. It doesn’t matter if your part of the group that everybody likes at school, the most popular group. You’re in the family of God! It doesn’t matter if you have what every body else has. You’re in the family of God. Moms, dads, it doesn’t matter if you drive as nice or better a car than everybody. You’re in the family of God. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the group that talks about everybody, rather than being the one everybody talks about. You’re in the family of God. It doesn’t matter if your job is not the most important one at work. It doesn’t matter that you’re not doing huge projects or making major impacts on your community, on your world. You…are in…the family of God.

God has lavished His love on you and you are His son, His daughter, because of Jesus. Jesus died for you. Jesus came back to life for you. I know you’re hearing the words I’m saying, but if you believe what I’m telling you, then you are a child of God. Like verse 1 says:

Now, most of our friends and people we hang out with aren’t going to get this. They’re going to want us to try to belong with them, by the stuff we by and the places we hang out and the way we dress and all the other stuff. They want us to try to belong in all those other ways, because that’s what they’re trying to do. They don’t understand how God lavished His love on you and made you already belong to His family. Still in verse 1:

They don’t know that God showed His love to them, so they couldn’t possibly understand how beautiful it is to belong to the Father’s family. They don’t know the Father.

And even we don’t fully understand this. Verse 2:

Here’s the fact: If Jesus died and rose for you, if He’s your Savior, and He gets to decide what you do and where you go, then you are a child of God. But what that looks like isn’t always clear. First, we don’t always act like it. While God is always loving us, we’re not always loving Him and we’re not always loving each other, and we’re even not always loving ourselves. Even though we’re are children of God, we’d rather spend time with other families. There are lots of things that look better to us than spending time with God, right? It’s usually not too hard to think of an excuse to do something other than praying or reading God’s word or just spending some alone time with Jesus. We’re children of God, and nothing can change that, we just don’t always look like it.

Not only do we sin, though we are children of God, we don’t always remember the safety and security and blessings that come from being His children. If we really remembered that we are the children of God, nothing would frighten us. We’re children of God, what do we have to be afraid of? We’re children of God, what could possibly beat us? God lavishly loves us, because of what Jesus did. Could anything possibly come close to pulling us down? Everything from scary stormy nights to serious sickness, from retirement in a recession to being rejected by your friends. Even death can’t beat us. I love Psalm 91:5:

We are absolutely, totally, constantly safe.

But we don’t always remember this, do we? What we will be, what we can be has not yet been made known. Just like we still sin, we still get scared. Just like we walk away from God, we don’t always remember that He’s there, that we are His children, that He lavishes His love on us. That’s when we take matters into our own hands and we stay up late at night worrying about stuff and sometimes we get angry when things aren’t going our way.

But we’re getting there. We’re moving in the direction where we’re acting like God’s children. We’re sinning less and we’re trusting more. We’re looking less like children of stuff, and we’re looking more like children of God. More and more we’re loving God and we’re loving ourselves and we’re loving each other until, verse 2:

When our Jesus appears, that’s the moment. That’s when we become like Him in our actions, our thoughts, the words we say, the way we treat each other. That’s when we become like Him in what we make important in our lives. The junk becomes junk, and He becomes everything. All the fear that we didn’t need to be carrying all this time, all of it will finally be totally gone, forever.

Because we’ll be like Jesus, totally, forever. As sons and daughters of God, we will be like the Son of God. Sometimes, I wonder if we think that when Jesus comes back, that this will be a scary day, that we’re going to have to face that angry, ticked off God and explain all our actions to Him, in front of everybody. We’d like Jesus come, and yet we’re a little nervous about that day. We know that He loves us, but maybe it will be a stern, scolding kind of love that day, when we see Him.

So let’s go back a moment and remember. We belong. We are children of God. He loves us with a huge, great big love. He lavishes His love. His love is extravagant, overflowing. And that won’t change on that day when we see Jesus. If Jesus died for you, and you know this, and you love this, on that day, you’re going to see Jesus coming, and His eyes are going to be looking at you with a love you’ve never seen before. And His smile at seeing you is going to light up the sky. And you, because you love Jesus, you’re not going to run and hide. You’re going to jump and cheer, because the God who loves you so much has come.

So, until that day, verse 3:

Until that day, we remember. With Jesus as Savior and with Jesus as Lord, we belong. There’s nothing to be afraid of, we belong. We don’t have to lose our temper or give in to greed or talk behind about somebody behind their back, we belong. We are children of the Father. That’s what we are! You have been loved, you are loved, you and you and you always, always will be loved, and how great is His love.