 Throughout my life, I've increasingly found that reading Scripture in public isn't just about feeding our own spirits and minds. It's about rehearsing the mighty acts of God for God's glory. So let's think together about 1 John 3 verse 2, and first we're going to need some tea. Beloved ones, we are now already God's children. It hasn't yet been revealed what we are going to be. We know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is. This is a remarkable promise about seeing Jesus. There's a lovely verse in one of the Christmas carols which says, And our eyes at last shall see Him through His own redeeming love. And anyone who knows Jesus in this life by faith longs for that moment. There's a time towards the end of John's Gospel when Jesus says to Thomas, Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. But the promise of seeing Jesus in the end is one of the ones that we long for that draws us forward. That's where the hope is focused. And it's fascinating what John says in this passage because in some Christian traditions, it appears that we have to be purified in order eventually to be able to see God. But according to this, when we see Him, that is what will transform us. And so when we see Him as He is, we shall be like Him. And that's the thing which holds us in hope. We don't understand quite at the moment what our life consists of. John says we are God's children. Hasn't yet been revealed what actually the future life is going to be like? People often say to me as a minister when they're thinking about somebody who has died, where are they now or what are they now? And the New Testament is very reticent about trying to answer that kind of question. The point is we belong to God. We are God's children. There is a family identity which goes all the way back, of course, into the Old Testament where God says of Israel, Israel is my son, my firstborn. That's part of the great promise at the time of the Exodus, when God says through Moses to Pharaoh, Israel is my son. And that promise which then gets focused on Jesus as the unique son of God opens out, broadens out so that for Paul and for John and for Jesus himself, those who follow Jesus, who are part of his family are themselves, not just servants, not just hangers on, but actually children, part of the family, part of those who stand to inherit all God's promises and purposes, promises for the redemption of the whole creation. So that we are caught up within those promises without exactly knowing what it's going to be like in the future, but clinging to this hope that as the risen Jesus was known through the mark of the nails, was known in the breaking of the bread in the house at Emmaus in Luke 24. So when we see him as he is, we will be transformed into his likeness. And the very next verse goes on, therefore anyone who has this hope purifies themselves as he is pure. The sight of Jesus will be the final act of grace which will transform us, but already by the Spirit we are to be people who take the initiative to find ways of living in advance as we are supposed to be in the end. Those who have this hope therefore are to live in the present as they are to be in the future. So the present identity of God's children leads to the future identity of God's transformed children. And in the middle, in between the one and the other, we are to live gladly and hopefully and to seek that holiness which eventually will be complete in our transformation by seeing Jesus himself. So may God give you grace in the present to know Jesus so that when you see him, it will be a glad moment of transformation, the transformation of love. Amen.