Jesus Provided Purification for Everyone Whose Hope is in Him

What Did Jesus Do?

Everyone who hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.
1 John 3:3

While the pot may find pleasure in calling the kettle “black,” the truth is, pot or kettle, neither vessel can do anything to clean itself up. The only hope of dirty pots and pans is in the dishwasher. Because of sin, Christians are like blackened pots and kettles in that there is nothing we can do to make ourselves clean and pure. So where does a believer’s security and hope come from? First of all, every believer needs to know that, here and now, we are children of God (1 John 3:2a). THAT is eternal security. Every believer should also know that, though it is not now entirely clear what we will be, when Christ returns we shall be like him (1 John 3:2b). THAT is eternal hope. Both our security and our hope are based on the relationship that we have with the Father through the Son.

In the present, our hope motivates us to follow Jesus, and to follow him as closely as we can, desiring to become more and more like him in every way, including his purity. The net effect of our desiring is the day in day out process of purifying ourselves. This is not to say that any of us can purify ourselves by trying. But we can certainly see to it that we remain totally impure by not trying. Though it is not by force of will or dint of effort that we are purified, as our hope in Jesus motivates us, and as our desire to know the Lord and to live more and more by his example grows, sin, and all other lifestyles grow less and less appealing. The Christian life, or, I should say the life of Christ, becomes more attractive to us, even as we come to understand that it is a life of humility, obedience, and sacrifice. By the action of the Holy Spirit within us, by our becoming a little bit more like Jesus every day, a believer becomes a little more pure each day. Is it our personal piety and purity? No, it is, now and forever, Christ’s own purity, his love for and obedience to the Father’s law, that is imparted to us by grace through faith, through our hope, in him.

A Christian whose chief occupation is finding fault with, and pointing out the sins of, other believers, is like a soot stained and blackened pot that not only ridicules its neighbor the kettle, but gets blacker and blacker doing so, and never recognizes its own need to be cleaned. This is hardly the kind of life together in Jesus that John imagined for the Body of Christ. And so John wrote to the Church to encourage her (us) to abide in the love of God, even as we come to learn more of the life Jesus, the Son, who lived completely in the love of the Father.

A lot of people are making a lot of “New Year’s Resolutions” right about now. If we are believers, our chief resolution this, and every year, ought to be to be more pure by the end of next December, by clinging to Christ our hope, and trying in the Holy Spirit to be more like Jesus, even as we encourage and help all our brother “pots” and sister “kettles.”

S.D.G.

Jim
www.jimwilkenministries.org
Marion, NC
PS 37.4