². . . We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. ³And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure. ⁴Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness. ⁵You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin. ⁶No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him.

Our hope is in the Lord, a truth well stated by many preachers and sung by Christians through the years. This hope assures us of our future wellbeing (we will become like Him when we see Him, which is great for us). But this hope also motivates us to live righteously now. We see now by faith what we will see in the future by sight and in person. We believe now that we shall be like Him because we will finally see Him unclouded by the distractions of this fallen world and our own sinful nature. But because we see by faith that future perfection, we get a head start on living as though it were true now. In particular, we begin now to live the holy life that we will fully realize when we see Him face to face. That is the value of Christian hope—we don’t have to wait until Christ has returned, but we engage in our sanctification with God, who is bringing it about in our lives now.

Purifying ourselves means we remove all un-Christlike behaviors and attitudes from our lives. We often refer to this process as a lifelong struggle, but John doesn’t see it that way. Rather, this is what enjoying fellowship with God is all about now. The more we know of Him, the more we see Him by faith, then the more we connect with Him and become like Him. That is our part in keeping in step with what God is doing in us through His Spirit. He is the one who makes us holy, and He does this by revealing Christ to us more and more. Our role is to respond by living in faith, increasingly looking for and seeing our Lord in and around us.

What John is writing about is the reality of the Christian dynamic. Those who know God are on the track of walking in faith, which is evident by their behavior, their efforts to live holy lives. Those who do not know God do not have the hope that we have of seeing Christ and becoming fully like Him; they do not keep the law as Jesus expounded on it in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 7–8). He came so that God could write His law on our hearts (Heb. 10:16), in order that our desire to walk in obedience to Him would emanate from the inner prompting of the Holy Spirit and not from fleshly efforts bereft of genuine spiritual life. That is God’s plan for removing not only the guilt of sin but also the practice of sin. That is true holiness.

Lord, I desire to walk by faith now because someday I will see You face to face!