Tidings for Tuesday
Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not. 1 John 3:1
The late preacher Doug Howard was telling us of a time when he and fellow evangelist Frank Piercey were travelling somewhere and stopped at a service station to a fill-up. As the attendant was pumping the gasoline, a barefoot little boy in dusty clothes and rumpled hair walked up to their car and stared curiously at the preachers. In his friendly way, Frank spoke to the youngster, ‘Hey sonny, what does your daddy think about you?’ Confidently, the lad replied, ‘My daddy thinks the world of me!’ Well, good for his daddy, to let the boy know how important he was to him! The youngster might not look like much to anybody else, but there was a daddy who looked upon him as the apple of his eye, and that is all that mattered. It’s the same with you and me; the world around us might not appreciate our relationship with our Heavenly Father, but to our Father, we are His precious children.
In John 3:16, we read of God’s love being so great that it would offer everlasting life to all who believe. In today’s text, we read of the same love specifically directed to those who have believed. Here, it is not only everlasting life that we have entered into, but also the relationship of sons and daughters in the very family of God. ‘For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father’ (Romans 8:15). It was the very purpose of God in saving us, ‘To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons’ (Galatians 4:5). Most of the time, we take this great relationship far too lightly. If we were to sit down and ponder the truth and the magnitude of it, this would fill us with awe and transform our lives into loving and dutiful service to the One Who calls us His sons and daughters.
Whenever you see the word ‘therefore’ in the Scriptures, stop and see what is it there for. The ‘therefore’ in our text links our divine sonship with our rejection by the world. If the world rejects God and His righteousness, denies His existence, dismisses Jesus as only an irrelevant teacher of old, and mocks the Word of God, then it should come as no surprise that the same world will not recognize us in our relationship with God. The more we live in the good of that relationship, the less the world will want to have anything to do with us. The more Christ-like our lives, the more the world will reject us.
The more important our relationship with God is, the more we will be rejected by the world that crucified our Lord. Is that OK with you? – Jim MacIntosh