“It’s the first time I’ve met you but it’s sure not hard to tell who you are. You’re the spitting image of your dad. You’ve heard the expression, ‘She’s a chip off the old block!’ – well, you’re the chip. The resemblances, even the way you shrug your shoulders and bite your lip – it’s just your dad through and through.”

It’s no big mystery that someone who was born into a family displays resemblances, features and traits of their parents. As you mature, people might even make more comments about how much like your dad or your mom you really are. It could be your voice. Your laugh. The way you think. Your style of humor. Your body movements. Or even your asthma or your eczema.

When a lab test showed their blood types were incompatible, a mother in China immediately suspected the son she was raising was not her son. More tests proved conclusively the mother and the son were not biologically related. She obtained the hospital’s birth registry of babies born the same day as their ‘son’ – 13 years earlier. “It was confirmed that a boy raised by a woman surnamed Liu who had given birth to a son on the same day was actually theirs, and that the boy they had raised was the son of Liu and a man surnamed Yao,” Xinhua said. Liu and Yao told the court that as their “son” grew older, his appearance and personality were so different from their own as “to make people point,” and eventually led to their divorce. (1) The child became conspicuous because of his growing dissimilarities.

Are people pointing at me and saying: “There’s something wrong; he’s so different from the rest of us, he must belong to a different family?” The Apostle John wrote a letter to children in a family. He wrote: “Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons (children) of God…”

John writes about the traits and characteristics of those who have been born again – born into the family of God. You’re either in the family or you’re not. You either have it or you don’t. As time passes, is the evidence that I am a child of God getting stronger or weaker? Are more people asking me about my faith or fewer? Am I getting less like the world and more like Christ?

Development is a progressive thing. As the Chinese son grew older the differences in his appearance and personality became more noticeable. And that’s the way it is for a maturing believer too. The gap between the world and the maturing Christian in the family of God grows wider and wider.

If the world is materialistic, greedy and selfish in its pursuits – as a maturing Christian, these things should have a diminishing grip upon me. If the fashions and styles of the world are immodest, showy and glitzy, as a growing child of God, my taste for clothing, ornamentation and body decorations should be going in the opposite direction – looking less like the world – not more like it. The list goes on. The gap should be widening.

And John was serious about all of this. It wasn’t optional or a matter of personal preference for each believer. No! John’s message is unmistakably clear: the inevitable outcome of being in the family of God will always be, without exception a widening gap between a maturing genuine ‘child of God’ and the world around them.

(1) http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,20721455-13762,00.html