Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3004
“Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is.” 1 John 3:2.
THE text mentions, “now,” and then passes on to the future and speaks of, “yet.” It does, however, speak of, “now” and, after all, despite our trials, there is much to make us happy in our present condition. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God.” Our manifold temptations and infirmities cannot make us lose the blessings that come to us through our adoption into the family of God! “Happy are you, O Israel: who is like unto you, O people saved by the Lord?” Today, even today, we are the blessed of the Lord and we find in godliness the blessing of “the life that now is.”
Yet, Beloved, for all that, we are still forced to cry—
“Alas for us if you were all, And nothing beyond, O earth!” If this were all our life, it would have been better for us not to have lived. Woe unto us if we had to live here always! Young says—
“Were there no death, even fools might wish to die”—
and, certainly, wise men would do so, for, Brothers and Sisters, this is a life of distractions, cares, anxieties, disappointments and, what is worse, it is a life of sins, sorrows and bitter repentances for wrong-doing! This life is to us a traveler’s life with all the inconveniences that we meet with in travelling. We are here today and we are gone tomorrow! Sometimes the heat consumes us and at other times the cold bites us. We are like men at sea—we have not yet cast our anchor, nor furled our sails, nor reached the port where we are bound—and the sea in which we are sailing is rough, tempest-tossed and beset with rocks, shoals and quicksands. Our soul is often half a wreck and longs for the desired haven where, “the wicked cease from troubling” and, “the weary are at rest.” Ours is a soldier’s life—we have to be constantly fighting, or else continually upon our guard. Think not, you who have just buckled on your harness, that you have won the victory, for the good soldiers of Jesus Christ must fight from morn till evening, from youth’s happy morning till the eve of gray old age!
I would not paint life in sadder colors than it needs, but I dare not shut my eyes to the fact that this is a sad world and that our path is one of sorrow, for it is “through much tribulation” that we “enter into the Kingdom of God.”—
“The path of sorrow and that path alone, Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown.”
It is to that other and better land that I would, for a little while, bear away your thoughts. We shall borrow the wings of our text and, like the eagle, soar towards Heaven!
I. We will begin with this sentence—IT DOES NOT YET APPEAR WHAT WE SHALL BE.
What we are to be, we can scarcely guess. Indeed, we cannot guess at all by the use of our senses. “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love Him. But God has revealed them unto us by His Spirit.” But only to our spirits! Flesh and blood, as they are, cannot inherit the Kingdom of God and cannot even guess what that Kingdom is like. This is not the place where the Christian is to be seen. This is the place of his veiling—Heaven is the place of his manifestation. This is the place of his night. Yonder is the place of his day. Our portion is on the other side of the river—our days of feasting are not yet!
Some of the reasons why “it does not yet appear what we shall be” may be as follows. First, our Master was, to a great extent, concealed and hidden, and we must expect to be as He was. Is it not written, in this very Epistle, “as He is, as are we in this world?” Jesus said to His followers when He was here upon earth, “The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant as his lord.” My Brothers and Sisters, see that Man wearing a coat “without seam, woven from the top throughout”—the carpenter’s son, the heir of poverty, the Companion of the humblest classes of mankind? Can you see in Him God over all, blessed forever? If you can, you are not looking with the eyes of your flesh, I am sure, for in that manner, you cannot detect the Glory of the Lord Jesus Christ beneath so humble a garb. The veil which the Savior cast about Himself was not so thick but that some rays of His Glory burst through when He trod the waves, rebuked the winds and raised the dead, but still, it was sufficiently dense, for He cried, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has not where to lay His head.” You will see that Christ was concealed as you remember that.
But, as Dr. Watts says—
“All riches are His native right”—
yet, when He had to pay the Temple tax, He had to work a miracle that Peter might be able to catch the fish which had the exact amount required in its mouth. He was so poor that He had to live upon the charity of His followers. Would you have believed that He was the Lord of all creation if you had seen Him up on yonder lonely mountain’s side without a bed to rest upon, or sitting wearily upon Jacob’s well at Sychar and asking a sinful woman to give Him a little water to drink? The Savior was, indeed, masked and hidden so that the vulgar eye could not detect His Glory. Only such eagle-eyed men as John were able to say, “We beheld His Glory, the Glory as of the Only-Begotten of the Father, full of Grace and truth.” Our Lord’s wisdom, Grace, power and all His other illustrious attributes were concealed beneath the veil of our inferior clay. Dr. Watts was right, as I reminded you just now, when he wrote—