Sons of God

“Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” — i JOHN iii. 2.

“WE are the sons of God,” St. John says, “and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.” He says we. He binds his own experience to his disciples.’ He does not stand apart, either telling them of something which belongs only to himself or announcing what concerns only them. He does not say “I” or “you,” but “we.” His present and future are theirs, and theirs are his. And this is almost always St. John’s way. It seems to be the necessary character of all the truest and deepest religion when it is experimentally conceived. The profoundest experiences admit of no monopoly. The attempt to limit them strips their whole value out of them. I cannot believe in the highest spiritual privileges for myself, unless I believe in their possibility for you; nor can I really think them possible for you unless I know that I too may have them. So it is by the experimental character of all his religion, the way in which his theology comes out of his life, that St. John is brought into clear understanding of and sympathy with the spiritual life of others, and says, “We are the sons of God.”

We want to look at this statement of the Christian life, with reference to its present and its future, which John makes for himself and those who believe with him. Servants of Christ together, they lived the same life now, and the same prospects stretched out before them all. They were the sons of God, and that sonship must open into a fuller life which they could not yet grasp or understand. It did not yet appear what they should be. These were the two elements of their life.

And notice, first, how these are really the elements of all the highest and most successful living. All the best life that we see about us, all the truest parts of our own life, have been characterized by a certain combination. They have united a clear, tangible, intelligible present to a vast and indefinite future. Out from some fixed and certain point, where everything was solid and indisputable, they have reached into a distance which stretched beyond their ken and lost itself in visions of unexplored possibilities. The best moments of all our lives, as we look back upon them, seem, I am sure, to be the times when we were clearest about our present position and present duty, and when the possibilip ties of life seemed most infinite to us. The best scenes in the ever-moving panorama have been those which had in them the elements of the best pictures — a clear, strong foreground, where the foot was planted solidly, and a vast vague outlook, where the imagination might find endless room to range; a steady point to stand on and infinity to look into. Both are essential to the happiest and largest life, — not merely a vast future and not merely a solid present, but the two together.

Just look at one or two of the points of life where these two characteristics supremely meet, and see if they are not the strongest and most beautiful. They meet in childhood most pre-eminently. Nowhere is the present so definite and clear as there. The simple relations that surround his life, the few plain duties that belong to every day, the narrow circle in which his habits move, the comprehensible authority that presses him on every side — all make the child’s life tangible with a distinctness that is lost in the complicated relations that come with later years. He is one thing — his father’s son. That is his every thing — his fountain of enjoyment, his law of work, his rest, and his incitement. But at the same time, what wide outlooks from that strong simple standing point! What visions come to that boy, shut in to the limits of his father’s care! How vast life looks to him! Just because the foreground is so sharp and real, the distant stretches into a more measureless infinity. Because he understands the limited present so clearly, he dreams of the future so enthusiastically. But is it not the union of these two, of the limited present with the limitless future, that makes the charm and romance of his childhood? He knows what he is now, but it doth not yet appear what he shall be.

There is another moment in which the same union appears, and to which something of the same charm belongs. It is the time when the young man has just chosen his profession and looks out into the possibilities of that work in life whose new tools are thrilling the unfamiliar hands that have just grasped them. I think that there is no more interesting or beautiful time in life. He is a boy no longer. The boyish fixedness in the limitations of his home is over. Those doors have opened years ago, and let him out into the unsettledness that belongs next in life. He has passed through the years of early youth, the years in college, when everything is vague and doubtful, when the boy does not know either what he is to be or what he is. At last his feet have touched the solid ground. “I am this” he is able to say once more. “Here is my ground. Now I am a doctor, a merchant, a minister, a lawyer.” It is not mere conceit in the new sign board or the new surplice that you see glowing in his face; it is a healthy satisfaction in being some thing, and knowing what he is. But in that glowing moment does he see what he shall be? Do any limits of his new work stand up in the distance? Is it not just then, when his feet are set firm on the strong ground, that the horizon of his profession sweeps away from him? Never before and never after does the work seem so vast. To be the perfect lawyer, the perfect minister, the perfect merchant, never before and never after seems so unattainable. By and by, among the ridges and the hollows of his professional life, the horizon of its possibilities contracts, and he gets some point in his eye which is the farthest that he can attain; but the glory of this first moment is that the new work allows itself no limits, and the neophyte, strong in a definite task and gazing into an indefinite prospect, can say: “I am this now. What I shall be doth not yet appear.”

The same is true of the clear and convinced acceptance of any strong, clear truth. You come to the unhesitating belief in any fundamental principle in philosophy or politics or social life, and are there not two elements in the satisfaction of that strong moment when you fasten yourself upon it? You say: “This is strong; how good it is to be here!” and you say also: “I wonder where this will carry me, — what other thing shall I come to believe be cause of my believing this?” At that good moment when you thoroughly believe in a new truth, your feet plant themselves firmer and your eyes look out wider. The ground grows solid under you and the distance vast before you.

As one says this, he longs to stop and point out to the young people who listen to him what a lesson and law of life all this involves. Fixity and range, a definite working-place and a vast prospect, — these are the necessary conditions of the best and most effective life. Every man must have these two conditions, or his life grows weak and narrow. What then? One wants to say these two things: First, find yourself a place. Do not be drifting hither and thither, ready to do anything and doing nothing. Be something as early and as wisely as you can find for yourself a place in some profession, in some of the clear, tangible, definite tasks of men.

Do not let the accident of wealth be your curse by standing between you and a work in life. Do not let anything hinder you from the deep satisfaction of knowing something, doing something, being something, having something, — of which you can say to yourself and other people, “I am this.” However it may be in other lands, there is no chance here in America for a man to do his best good or live his best life except in some definite and recognized employment of his powers. But be sure your work is large enough to give you prospects, and be sure you see the prospects that it offers. No profession is worthy that does not give a man room to look out into more usefulness and higher character than he can comprehend at once; but any honest task is capable of being so largely conceived that he who enters into it may see stretching before him the promise of things to do and be that will stir his enthusiasm and satisfy his best desires.

So this is the lesson of our truth: Be something definite and special, but let that something be so large, and be it in so large a spirit, that you shall not be able to be it all at once, but that it shall tempt you on forever to indefinitely greater things. Two kinds of creatures haunt our city as they have haunted cities ever since Cain, the son of Adam, built the first. We know them both, and we have seen the harm that both can do. One is the visionary and the other is the drudge. The visionary is the man who has no present; the drudge is the man who has no future. The visionary never can say, “Now, I am this.” The drudge never lifts up his eye? r.nd says, “It doth not yet appear what I shall be.” To the visionary all is future; to the drudge there is nothing but the present. One’s life floats off like the smoke from the city’s chimneys; the other’s runs off like water from the city’s streets. To be saved from being either, to be strong and permanent and useful — that can come only by joining a clear, sharp, solid work to large hopes and great ambitions; by seeing visions from some peak of rock. But now we turn from all this general discussion to find the same principle which we have been describing at work in Christian life. St. John says, “Now are we the sons of God.” There is the present for him and his disciples. Ah, my dear friends, we must put ourselves back into a time when the simplest truths of Christianity were all new; we must strip off all the familiarity which Christian thought and love have clustered about the idea of God’s Fatherhood before we can understand how strong and clear a fact that was in the experience of those first disciples. “We are the sons of God.” Except in some inspired poet here and there, the first sense that all men were God’s children had been lost. Men had counted themselves and treated their brethren like brutes. They had drifted alike out of the responsibilities and the joys of sonship to the Almighty. Then Christ had come and made them again, so far as they would accept His blessing, the sons of God. “To as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.” What does that mean? Not that He made men something which it had never been in man to be before; He made it possible for man to come where he always had belonged. Not that He established a new relationship between man and his Creator; He declared the beauty and glory of the first relationship from which man had voluntarily departed. It was a redemption. It is nowhere said that Christ made God man’s Father. He made man God’s child by showing him the unquenched love that was in his Father’s heart, and then by the touch of love, made vital and strong by suffering, wakening up the divine consciousness, the power of godliness, the power of living like a child of God, in the human heart.

I said how new and strong a fact that was to those disciples, but how new and strong it is to any man now who really plants his feet upon it! You have been living like a child of the world or a child of the devil. Nothing that you ever do or say would ever indicate — nay, you have yourself for gotten — that there is anything divine about you. None of the restraints and none of the incentives of high parentage are in your life. But Christ comes, comes to you as truly as He came to those peasants fishing on the lake, or to that tax-man sitting at his table. He brings and sets before you a human life. How human it is every act in it bears witness. If any one tells you that He is different from you, of another race, you cry: “No; this is a man indeed, the type, the pattern, the interpreter of this humanity of mine. He is a man like me, and yet behold He surely is a Son of God. Behold the filialness that runs through all His life. He has the divine nature in Him everywhere. He calls God His Father not merely in His words but in His actions. My Brother, and the Son of God! What am I, then?” You think, and the thought grows into a new consciousness that floods your life with peace and solemnity and strength: “Why, then, I too am God’s son. Then He was right when He talked about ‘His Father’ and ‘My Father.’ He has taught me that God is my Father. He has made me a son of God.” That is what it means! You have received Him and He has given you the power to become a son of God. And what then? Standing strong upon that point how clear it is! The old doubts of your life — the doubts about what you are and how you came here and whether it is worth while to be here at all — are all answered in this new certainty that you are God’s son. You are no longer bewildered about duty; you have accepted your Father’s law. You are not in doubt how to treat these men about you, — they are your Father’s children. Everything has grown definite and plain in that. The sand under your feet has turned to rock. You have a strong and sure present standing-place, now that you can say, “I am a son of God.”

But yet, with all that new preciseness, has not the other element of strong life come too? Has not the future widened as the present has grown firm beneath you? Is not life more infinite, now that the central point of life is clear? While you did not know what you were, it did not seem very likely that you would ever be anything more. Now that you know you are God’s child, you are sure that there are untold, unguessed regions of life and character. This is but the beginning. It doth not yet appear what you shall be. The end is very far — a whole eternity away.

I feel sure that I am touching here one of the commonest consciousnesses of the Christian life. Its vastness is bound up with its first simple certainty. As it assures itself of a present relationship to God new features open before it. The clearer it becomes in realizing what it is, the more vast and vague becomes to it the prospect of what it is to be. I should like to suggest to you how this appears in several different departments of the Christian life.

First, it is true of Christian belief. I think that this forces itself upon us constantly — that it is the shallow and not the profound, the half and not the whole believer who thinks that he has exhausted the capacities of his belief. The more profound a man is in his belief the more he looks forward and expects developments and enlargements of what he now holds to be true. Take two believers in any doctrine — of the Trinity, for instance, or of the Atonement. Let one of them be the ordinary flippant matter-of-course believer, of whose kind our churches are so full. And let the other be a man whose very soul has drunk in the truth that he believes, who lives upon it, who has seized it with the strong eagerness of a hungry heart. The first of these will surely be the man who will expect no opening or richening of the faith he holds, who will expect to believe in the Trinity or the Atonement always just exactly as he believes in it to-day, and who will insist that other men shall hold his truth just after his pattern, and be indignant at every least departure from it. On the other hand, the man who holds the doctrine more profoundly will be the man who says: “This doctrine I shall always hold, but the very preciousnes of it shows me that it is far too rich for me to have comprehended it completely. I have not mastered all its power. I have not fathomed all its mystery. New sides it surely has to turn to me. I shall see it new forever.” And so he will look with tolerance upon his brethren who already see this truth in other lights than his. The deepest faith is strongest in hope and charity. He who most profoundly knows that he is the son of God is most ready to leave the future to his Father, most ready to own that it doth not yet appear what he shall be.

And the same thing is true about the Christian affections as about the Christian faith. They, too, as they grow deeper and stronger under the influence of Christ, become aware of their own present limitations and look forward to a vast, as yet unknown, extension. The man who has never learned that he is a son of God is satisfied with the little ordinary exercise of his affectional nature in the common relationship of daily life. To love his children and his country with the ordinary warmth of parentship and patriotism, and so do his duty respectably to both out of this commonplace affection, seems to him enough. He thinks of nothing further. But make that man God’s son, deepen his life with

Christ, give to everything about him the sweet solemnity which it gathers from the Father’s hands that hold it, and how that man’s affections strengthen! With what new vehemence he loves and hates! How the new holiness he sees summons an unguessed power of admiration, and the meanness which he used to disregard stirs him with passionate indignation! How the sight of misery evokes a new kind of pity, and the sight of joy a strangely heightened gratitude and congratulation! But in this deepening of the affections they find out their imperfection. There are some tasks they can not undertake. Do you not know it? As you grow more sensitive there open to you efforts to which your sensitiveness is not equal. There is a virtue above praise, a pain that outgoes pity, a voice that is too terrible for blame, a joy that we dare not congratulate. All these we pass back beyond ourselves to God who alone is fit to deal with them; but yet they open to us prospects of growth, hints, and suggestions that the affectional life in us has only just begun its work and is some day to attain a power of enjoyment and culture which is yet unimagined.

Everywhere with the strengthening and clarifying of any of our powers, its range and outlook widens. It is so with Christian work as well as with faith and affection. A man whose labor has been desultory, purposeless, unintelligent, begins to work as a son of God. I have often tried to describe what that change is. It is not that the occupations alter. They may go on just the same. In his store or in his study the man still handles the same tools, and all his outside life remains unchanged. The difference is in the spirit which he works with. Once it was for himself, now it is for the Father he has found. Once it was as his own slave, now it is as the willing servant of that Christ who has made him a son of God. What new power will that put into his work? It will make it certainly more precise and conscientious in every least detail. Just as his Lord is more sacred to him than himself, just as the desire to do His will precisely becomes stronger than any old impulse of self-seeking, just so will each minutest part of all his work be faithfully and scrupulously done; but at the same time the greatness of the Christ for whom he works will enter into his labor and spread it out to infinite results. His work will enter into the great fulfilment of the Divine Will which is going on all through the universe, and be inspired by the anticipation of its endless prospects. Still the new son of God works at the forge or the bar, but wherever he works, working for Christ, he is able to meet Christ’s command and labor not for the meat which perisheth, but for that which endureth unto everlasting life. Ah, my dear friends, is it not what we need? Something which shall take these daily tasks of ours which are so trivial that we either neglect them or else are slaves to them, and redeem them from their littleness so that we shall do them with a joyful conscientiousness, and at the same time find in them continual suggestions of larger tasks, of the infinite issues of every faithful work in the unknown future? And that can come only by our whole life being taken up and set over on to new ground where we shall do everything for God.

Here, then, are these three — knowledge, affection, work. In each of them do we not see the power of Christianity at once to intensify the present and to expand the future? As we look at the men in history whose lives have been most full of the sense of their own sonship and of the Fatherhood of God, something of the same character seems to shine out in all of their diversity. Think of Moses, the patient, faithful governor, the man of affairs, shaping out for his people a scheme of government full of minute details, alert, vivid, strong, feeling the present always under his feet and yet yearning for the unseen things to which all these seen things pointed, the prophet of the future as well as the toiler in the present, enduring the present “as seeing Him who is invisible.” Look at David, with the clearest present experiences of pain and joy, of rapture, sin, and repentance that any man ever had, at least that any man ever told, yet always suggesting larger experiences than his own, so that the Psalms which he wrote about himself have even availed to sing the story of the humiliation and the triumph of the incarnate God. Think of the Prophets, those real seers of the Old Testament, seeing the future because they saw the present so profoundly, coming by insight into foresight. Think of Paul with his clear creed, yet glorying in his ignorance of what was still beyond. “I am this now,” each of them in his own way seems to cry, “this now certainly and clearly, but there is more beyond. This is only the beginning. It doth not yet appear what we shall be.” There lies the charm and strength of all of them. Nay, why should we stop with them, why should we not dare to speak of Jesus? — fastening Himself into His own present there in Palestine, with a strength that has never been equalled, and yet reaching out and claiming eternity for the fulfilment of His purposes. He was the perfect Son of God, so eager about His Father’s business, and yet using those mysterious words, “Of that day knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father” — the vivid present and the unknown future. “Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.”

It is strange how, if we look widely enough, the needs of life, the things that are wanting to make life what it ought to be, are everywhere the same. What do we need in religion? Greater clearness and greater breadth, a sharper faith and a larger expectation, less vagueness and less bigotry. What do we need in politics and public life? More faithfulness and more outlook, a more honest and devoted care for every day’s details of public business and a more inspired prospect of the better possibilities of government, less unfaithfulness and less routine. What do we need in education? More concientious hard work and larger thoughts of learning, less superficialness and less pedantry. What do you need in your daily life? Ah! do you not know well enough? Is it not that you should do your duty and hold your truth at once more strictly and more largely? You want to go to your life to-morrow morning and take it up with other hands, to delight in it, to dwell on every detail of it with joy, to do it with a thoroughness that you have lamentably lacked before; and yet not to be crushed by it, not to be reduced to a mere school-teaching or shoptending or housekeeping machine, — but to see beyond your work into eternity. Everywhere the need is still the same, from the senator at the capital down to the school boy at his desk, — a sharper present and a vaster future; not either gained at the expense of the other, but both together making life shine with the intensity and the broadness of the sun. And can that need, the same everywhere, be ever everywhere supplied? It can, if men can ever really come to be the sons of God, if life can be all over the wide earth the doing of His will in grateful love, — if everywhere men can feel His eye judging their hourly faithfulness and see His hand pointing them on into infinity. When that comes for all the world, then the world’s redemption is attained and its new life begins. When that comes for you and me, then we are redeemed and our new life is begun.

We grow profoundly weary of hearing narrow men — wrapped up in the present, given to some little business, shutting their eyes to all the vast outlooks of life — pour their cheap sneers upon any feeble effort that any poor soul near them makes to realize a higher or a little broader life, to live for other people, to live for their own souls, to live for God. There is hardly any such attempt, however clumsy, that is not more respectable than the miserable cynicism with which men, who know nothing of the impulse out of which it springs, stand round and try to sneer it down. But still the weakness of very many of such attempts is evident enough. Men try after the vague and distant who have not first fastened themselves in the tangible and near. To be a maundering philanthropist, and weep over the woes of men half-round the globe while your brother begs in vain at your door; to long for the conversion of China while the heathenism here in Boston does not kindle you or shame you; to dwell with rapture on the service you will do for God all through eternity in heaven, and yet let the task that He has given you to do to-day lie unattacked; these have been the subjects of cheap satire till it is commonplace enough. But it is not always, by any means, the contemptible hypocrisy that men suppose. It is a foolish, helpless reaching out after the future, with no strong foothold in the present. Still it does show an aspiration, however ignorant, a longing, however shallow. But it must deepen itself with present duty. It must strongly fasten itself in the near. So only can it reach out to the future and the distant worthily and strongly. The philanthropist whose care for the poor child who has fallen in the street here is intensified by the cry of suffering that reaches him from a suffering world, the Christian who is first in evangelizing the home heathen and the heathen of China too, the saint who, dreaming of heaven, makes earth heavenly with the daily doing of duty and service of the Lord, — there are no sneers for them; or the few poor creatures who venture to pour their feeble contempt on lives like these have it blown back in their own faces, and find themselves despised.

I dare to hope that what I have said to you to day — if it meets any of your experiences and falls in with any of your desires — will give you help. It may be that there is some one here who has found just the dissatisfaction with life that I have aimed at. Such an one says: “I would not be what I have been. I vacillate between two wrong conditions. When I try to do my duty faithfully I grow a slave to its details, and every lofty expectation and spiritual wish is lost. When I fling my soul out into the future and expect eternity and reach after heaven, my present work, the life that I ought to be living now, grows weak and lies neglected.” Ah, if it were only as easy to help you to the remedy as it is to tell you what you need. You must be a son of God! That is your only salvation. And if you ask me, “How can I be God’s son?” the answer is: “You are God’s son already, if you only knew it.” And if you say, “How can I know it?” then you give me a chance to tell you once more what it is always such a joy to tell: “Jesus, God’s Son, your Brother, came tfp show it to you. He must show it to you. You must go to Him, — nay, you must let Him come and speak to you. You must see His filialness. You must hear His message. You must feel the power of His Cross telling you how your Father loved you. ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father,’ He declared. You must see Him with your soul, and so you shall see God.”

When that is done, then the new consciousness of sonship shall fill you. Everything you do and think and say shall be deep and strong and happy with your Father’s presence. You shall go on your way singing, “Now I am a son of God.” And what then? The infinite future shall open around the clear and beautiful present. “What is this new life to come to? I cannot tell. It doth not yet appear what I shall be.” Suspicions and faint glimpses of it shall come to you as you work; the thought of those who once were with you and have gone on before you, to learn more of the mystery of love, shall strengthen and encourage you; but yet you shall not be impatient. Enough that now you are God’s son, and that all which that sonship contains is waiting for you. Enough that you are on the sea, with your ship’s prow set towards the perfect shore. What does it matter whether the storms make your voyage a day more or less? The distance before you you cannot read, but in it is the same God who is with you. You live by Him, and so you live deeper and deeper into Him. Your life is full, through Him, of those two powers by which a human life is saved, — faithfulness and hope, — faithfulness made enthusiastic by hope, and hope made clear by faithfulness. That is eternal life — to know God by Christ.