It is too much!

As followers of Christ, we often forget all that God has planned for us–we have a hopeful future so glorious that we cannot take it all in now.  “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)  This is one reason that we need God’s Word to not only inform our minds, but also to warm our hearts.  We need God’s truth to not only instruct us now, but also to point us forward through our present to what God is preparing us for.  This is what 1 John 3:2 has done for me recently:  “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.”

Today, fellow believer in our resurrected King Jesus, you are God’s child.  If you are in Christ you will never more be God’s child than you already are now.

But God went even further, even beyond bringing us into an intimate family relationship as His child.  He wants us to be near Him.  He has completely reconciled us to Himself through what Christ did on the cross, and that includes our future hope of glorification!  When people see the resurrected Christ in the Bible, they fall down out of fear because they are overwhelmed at His majesty, and at His holiness and their sinfulness (Revelation 1:17).  We may fall before Jesus’ feet when He appears at His Second Coming just out of sheer worship and praise and adoration and love and awe–but it will not be out of fear–because He will change us.

The Apostle John lovingly reminds us that although we cannot fully comprehend what we will be when Christ comes back at His Second Coming, we can know this: “we shall be like Him.”  We will finally be sinless, and we will have transformed, glorified resurrection bodies!

A missionary was working with a tribe that had received the gospel fairly recently, and as he was translating 1 John a scribe was making a copy.  When the missionary told him to write, “…we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is,” the scribe threw down his pen and exclaimed, “No!  It is too much!  Let us write, ‘when He appears we shall kiss His feet.'”  He was right.  It is too much.  Our God lavishes His grace on us in Christ.  Are you overwhelmed with praise at these precious promises?