John has a second thing to write to those he calls “dear children,” this time in 1 John 2:13. Again, he’s talking to those starting out on their journey into “fellowship with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ” (1:3).
And they’re well on the way, because, John writes, “you have known the Father.” Which ties in with the first thing John wrote to his “dear children,” about their sins being forgiven, because the reason their sins had been forgiven was because of the Father’s love. The two go together, as John goes on to explain in 1 John 4:10, that “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and (it was he who) sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
The realization that our sins are forgiven leads to understanding that it was the Father’s love for us that got that ball rolling. And how crucial that is in our fellowship with him getting off to a good start, because as John writes in 1 John 4:19, “We love, because he first loved us.” We set out on life, therefore, “knowing and relying on the love God has for us” (16), knowing too that he loved us at our worst.
And isn’t that how life starts for us as babies too? Our fellowship with our parents starts off the same way. We enter the world as entirely selfish beings. As one Dad said about his baby daughter, “I found, first, that she was very lazy. She did nothing but lie around the house all day, and contributed absolutely nothing to the household except to make a lot of trouble for everyone. And she was rude. She would burp right in your face and never apologize. She was utterly unconcerned about another’s reaction or another’s welfare. She was also highly uncooperative, oftentimes waking us up in the middle of the night for demands that could well have waited for morning.”
Not a bad description of our lives as little Christians too, because we’re still stuck with a lot of what we were: still being judgmental, impatient, rude, egotistical, easily offended, emotionally volatile, etc. But as that little baby girl grew, a lovely thing happened. She’d cry out “Daddy” and wave her arms around excitedly on seeing him. Because she’d come to know she was always forgiven and always loved by this weary, half-asleep creature, and that’s what would enable her to love in return.
And with a start like that our fellowship with God can grow too, into the next wonderful stage John mentions, of “Growing up strong”….(next blog)
