Observation: In his conversation about God's love for us, John declares that all believers are "children of God". However, he also discusses the worldly problem with such a great and loving 'adoption' into the family of God; Since the world itself does not know God, it cannot know or understand us. Furthermore, what we will be - our form in heaven - isn't worldly, and therefore we don't even know ourselves what that will look like, for it "has not yet been made known" even to us.
Application: When I think about how 'the world' - our current society and all its social and political norms - reject faith because the truth of the Lord is far outside humans' core understanding of the world, I forget this truth ... the world CAN'T actually KNOW the truth. By its very definition, that wouldn't be faith.
The Lord created the world and reveals himself within that creation. The Lord speaks and interacts with people, and acts in their lives. Jesus was the Lord's own son and a component of his very being, who taught the truth of God and a hope in salvation through faith. The Holy Spirit is the power of God that can indwell within us and provide reliable truth and insight and guidance in our lives, in obedience to the Lord. However, when it comes to "knowing" the Lord, either you must believe that everything is of the Lord and therefore you see and hear and feel him around you all the time, or you do not believe that and therefore you never see or hear or feel the Lord.
In this manner, within the overall context of the world, the world - and the worldly - cannot know God. As a result, people cannot just innately know or understand Jesus and Christianity and Christians. It isn't their fault. Instead of knowing, they must find faith, believing in that which they cannot (yet) see and hear and touch.
Interestingly, once we as children of God do believe, we still don't even know what that means for our future selves. We don't know the form of our heavenly selves, likely because - still bound to the world as we are - we cannot fully comprehend a 'perfected self' in a spiritual form. When Christ appears, we will then know, for we will see his form and thus understand our own form. So at this time, there are elements of our faith that remains unknowable to us, and yet we have faith in the Lord ... those who don't have faith cannot begin to contextualize future salvation, and again that is not their fault.
Any and all level of knowing the Lord, therefore, begins not as an act of learning, but as an act of believing. Upon believing, we still won't know everything, but we'll have a path to learn.
Prayer: Lord, as we have now entered the Christmas season and working the lights at church, give us all your truth in our hearts, which is that the many non-believers we encounter in the next three weeks do not know you and cannot know you yet, but they can begin a journey toward faith. May love and joy help them on that journey, and help them understand beyond the world they see and feel and hear every day. Amen.
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