Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!  Therefore the world does not know us because it did not know Him.  (2) Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. 

John begins chapter 3 of this letter emphasizing the favor of God who has bestowed His love on the faithful so they may be children of God through Christ Jesus. It is also called grace.  It is NOT that we are worthy to be adopted because then it would not be a free gift of God.  This adoption does not depend in any regard to good works of men  or through any merit on our part.

The reason why God defers the manifestation of our future glory is that Christ is not yet manifestated in the power of His kingdom when all – believers and non believers will see Him. The faithful will be “like“ Him and saved to eternal life but the wicked will dread His presence and they will be judged.

i just finished reading c.s. Lewis book, “Surprised by Joy” where Lewis describes first,  his belief in the one God and then his faith in Christ Jesus.  I thought this a good place to describe one man’s experience of conversion which was certainly an election by God but also a rational journey to become an adopted child of God.

“I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste.  And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion – those narrow unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them – was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another.  But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognizable, through all that depth of time……..yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god – we are no longer polytheist – then not a god, but God.  Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man.  This is not a ‘religion’, not a ‘philosophy’.  It is the summing up and actuality of them all.