In episode 24 of In Light of the Cross, we pray and reflect on God’s fatherly love through 1 John 3:1–3, marveling that sinners are called—not just servants—but children of God.

We talk about the “now and not yet” of our identity, using the caterpillar-to-butterfly picture to show both continuity and radical transformation in what we’ll become when Christ appears. We discuss how this future hope shapes the present, moving us toward purity and a love that reflects God’s own—free, generous, and without strings.

Turning to Romans 8, we see God’s love most clearly in the cross: He did not spare His Son, so we can trust He’s “for us” and committed to our ultimate good, playing the long game beyond our timelines and problems.

00:00 Welcome and Setup

00:20 Prayerful Focus

00:52 Reading 1 John 3

01:39 Lavished Love and Identity

02:55 Caterpillar to Butterfly Hope

04:31 Hope That Purifies

05:30 Gods Love Without Strings

08:00 Fatherly Love and Long Game

09:07 Romans 8 Cross Shaped Love

10:51 Application When Life Hurts 12:54 Closing Lords Prayer

Welcome back.

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This is episode 24 of the podcast.

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In Light of the Cross, The last couple

days we've been talking about the

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beautiful concept that God calls us, his

own sons and daughters, trying to flesh

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out a little bit of what that means today.

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We're gonna do that one more

time with a little bit different

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angle that I think is wonderful

and challenging at the same time.

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Let's begin with a word of prayer.

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Ask God to reveal what he wants you

to know and what he wants you to do.

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Ask him to put away other

things from your mind.

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engage with him through prayer

for the next 30 seconds.

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So Nathan.

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Today we want to talk about

the love of God, especially as

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it relates to his fatherhood.

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There's a passage I

wanted us to start with.

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Would you mind reading First John

three verses one through three?

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Yeah.

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It says, see what great love the

father has lavished on us, that we

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should be called Children of God.

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And that is what we are.

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The reason the world does not know

us is that it does not know him.

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Dear friends, now we are the children of

God and what we will be has not yet been

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made known, but we know that when Christ

appears we shall be like him, for we shall

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see him as he is all who have this hope in

him, purify themselves just as he is pure.

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This is one of my favorite passages.

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Number one, just that whole idea of

behold, look at this manner of love

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that we, you and I, sinners like us,

should be called children of God.

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Not just servants of God, not just

followers of Christ, but children of God.

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What love he says.

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And indeed, it's hard to get

your mind around that, isn't it?

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Yeah.

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It's a thought worth.

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Meditating on for the rest of our lives.

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Yeah, indeed.

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I mean, my, my goodness.

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See what wonderful love the

father has lavished on us.

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Right.

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I love that lavished word so good.

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I do too.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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More than is necessary by far.

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Just lavished.

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Yeah.

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So gracious and generous.

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Yeah.

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And then the second part of that, he

says, now we are the children of God.

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Well, what we will be, and so

just like we talked about last

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time, there's two aspects of this.

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Time-wise at least.

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There's when God makes it happen

and there's, when we experience it

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now, we are the children of God.

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In his mind it's already settled and done.

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It will happen, but we

don't experience that yet.

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As we talked about last

time, what we will be.

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Has not yet been revealed to us.

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I like to think of caterpillars

and butterflies in this context.

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I'm not sure if John knew about

Caterpillars and butterflies.

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Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.

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But anyway, we do, and you can imagine

the caterpillars getting together and

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talking about how they're gonna have

life after death, their caterpillar

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life is gonna go on forever.

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And of course that's not

what's gonna happen, right?

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If someone could convey to them,

okay, you're not gonna live as

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caterpillars, you're gonna live as a

creature who can fly, and they'd be.

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What's fly?

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You know you're gonna have wings.

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What are wings?

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You're gonna have these beautiful colors.

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What are colors, you know, and patterns

they would not be able to understand

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because their whole life is formed around,

dominated by their caterpillar mind.

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Whatever Caterpillar mind is

like, and in the same way.

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What we are, there's a continuity

between our present body and our future

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resurrected body, our glorious body,

but it's also more of a contrast.

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There's continuity, but

also radical discontinuity.

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Paul talked about in acorn

versus an elk, for example.

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But I like the caterpillar and butterfly

because what we will be goes beyond

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what we can understand right now.

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That's why it hasn't been revealed to us.

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We wouldn't get it.

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And maybe if we did, it would

pop us up with pride too much.

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Who knows?

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But that's the promise.

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So we are that.

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Now, we're not worms, we're caterpillars.

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We don't know what our future's gonna

look like 'cause it goes beyond us

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the future is going to be something

more glorious than we can understand.

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And then that last part, he says,

everyone who has this hope in them in

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other words, everyone who puts this

in the front of their minds as their

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goal and what they're excited about

purifies themself just as he is pure.

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they don't have to be told.

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Don't sin, don't do this.

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They have a desire to be pure before

God who has done all this, and also

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who is the image of what they will be.

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Yeah.

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There's there's a way in which

future things impact the present.

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I mean, if you wanna go on vacation, then

you do planning and you save your money

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or whatever, you know, there's a future

reality that impacts the present and he's

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saying, look, we have a foretaste of this.

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We know that we're children of God.

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Our spirit testifies with the

spirit that we are children of God.

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Just like that passage we read yesterday.

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and in light of that, because of the great

love that God has lavished on us now,

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there is a way that we live in the present

that, eagerly desires that future state.

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Right.

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Exactly.

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And I like how John wraps us all up in

that phrase, behold, what manner of love?

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Because I don't think we can

really get to the bottom of

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understanding our God's love for us.

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I recall in Paul's prayers very often

saying, Ephesians three, he says, I pray

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that you would understand the depth and

the breadth of the love of God, and to

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know this love that goes beyond knowledge.

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So he resorts to paradox here.

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What a, Foundational thing that we

grow in our understanding of God's

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love for us expressed on the cross.

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So it's good I think, to reflect

on that and just how that

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love is totally committed to.

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Our good God needs nothing from us.

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There is nothing that we can give him.

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That he doesn't necessarily have himself

other than just whatever joy he gets

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out of our free trust and obedience.

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He doesn't need our worship,

he doesn't need our offerings,

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he doesn't need our gifts.

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He is the one who formed all

things and created all things.

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This is simply an act of love.

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His love is totally free.

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In our interactions with other

people, they're not always free

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because we want something from them.

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Mm-hmm.

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Not always, but normally we want

them to treat us in a certain way.

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Sometimes they do a certain thing for us.

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Uh, even in the best human relationships,

there is that element that, okay, if this

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is totally one sided 24 7, I'm probably

gonna bow out of this relationship.

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Right?

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Mm-hmm.

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but God has no needs like that.

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And so he's able to offer

us a totally free love.

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I wonder if that's what John means by

purifying ourselves just as he's pure.

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Oh, yeah.

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I mean, I'm sure that there are multiple

layers of meaning here, but that the,

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the purity of God's love without strings

attached, that there's a way, 'cause he's

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connecting it all in, in this letter.

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Connecting our love for others

and embedding that in the

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love of God for us, right?

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And so there's a purity of God's love

for us that is free and generous, lavish.

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and part of that, if this rule of love is

kind of the whole summary of the law and

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the prophets, if, if loving God and loving

others are the first and second most,

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important laws then that love that the

way that we love others, ought to approach

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the purity of love that God has for us.

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Right?

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Or as Paul says in Romans, if

you love, you fulfill the law.

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Yeah.

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So, okay.

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Another thing we see here in the

last few days is we talked about the

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love of God for us as a father, is

that he is committed to our good.

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And I don't think I've met a parent,

a mother or father yet who didn't

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want the good as they understood

it, at least for their child.

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And so God also desires our ultimate

good and he is committed to that.

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Now, he defines that sometimes

differently than we might because he

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defines that in terms of our ultimate

conformity to what we are created to be

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an individual and perfect expression.

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Of Jesus Christ reigning with

Christ in a unique way within

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this world, the new creation.

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And so he talks about being

conformed to the image of Jesus

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Christ in Romans 8 28 and 29.

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He is committed to the long game.

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His love cannot be interpreted by whether

he's solving our problems the way that we

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want and in the timeframe that we want.

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Sometimes he does that and

it's a gracious act of God.

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It's a token of his love, but

ultimately is seen in what he

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has done for us on the cross.

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So you had a passage there from Romans

a towards the end of the chapter.

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I think you he had pulled

that up, right, Nathan?

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Yeah.

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This whole thing, called in

light of the cross, and so.

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Really where we see God's love

most purely is on the cross.

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Listen to what Paul says.

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He says this at the end of the, uh,

Romans eight, he says, what, what then

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shall we say in response to these things?

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Now these things is referring to

the fact that we are children of God

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and that our spirits testify with

his spirit, that we are children.

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If you've been following this is the

past couple days, he says, what then

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shall we say in response to these things?

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If God is for us, who can be against us?

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He who did not spare his own

son, but gave him up for us all.

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How will he not also along with

him graciously give us all things.

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God's love is seen most purely in

the fact that he gave his son for us.

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That through Jesus we are able to

be restored into relationship with

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him, uh, made into the kinds of

people he has, um, created us to be.

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I love just the summary of what we've

been talking about, the love of God.

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It's lavish.

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It's so gracious and generous.

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It's committed to our

freedom and our good.

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And it's not just temporary,

but God's playing the long game.

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He is.

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He is forming us into

people of love by his love.

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Yeah.

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And that's a beautiful thing.

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And so for all of us who hope in this

future, let us walk in light of that,

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purifying ourselves just as he is pure.

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Hmm.

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Good thoughts.

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so as a way of application, I want

to invite you to think about the ways

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that you have thought about God's love

for you in the past and in particular,

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how you've evaluated guy's presence

and help in your life based on how

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he's maybe solved your problem.

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I remember the title of a.

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Young adult book

published some years back.

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If God loves me, why

can't I open my locker?

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that title stuck with me because very

often in our minds it's like, if God

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loves me, why am I struggling in this

relation with my spouse or my children?

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Why do I or someone I love have such

profound and painful health problems?

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Why are we struggling so much financially?

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If God loves me, why

isn't he fixing all this?

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And the answer is that he's playing

the long game and using all those

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things for our ultimate good.

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He's not so much interested in just

being a cosmic vending machine.

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He's a father.

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And just like we often know much

better than our toddlers or even older

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child, what's ultimately the right

thing for them and for their good.

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So God does also, so I invite

you in the time of reflection.

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To bring those things before your

thoughts, to pray through them,

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to receive God's love in prayer.

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Say, God, show me your love for me.

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Show me how you might be using the

things in my life that I'm struggling

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with for your ultimate purposes.

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Thank you that you're playing the long

game and you're playing it for my good.

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Not because you need me,

but because you love me.

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Let's conclude by praying to our

loving, gracious, and generous.

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Good Father, our father

in heaven, hallow it.

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Be your name.

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Your kingdom come, your will be

done on earth as it is in heaven.

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Give us today our daily bread

and forgive us our debts as we

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also have forgiven our debtors.

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And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from the evil one.

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Amen.

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Amen.