NOTHING QUITE PREPARES you for becoming a parent. Before our first child is actually born, we may romanticize what it’ll be like to be a mom or dad. Or we might be terrified. Or both. But raising a child means learning who this little creature is, in ways that may be the same or different than us or our other kids, and finding ways to simultaneously love them for who they are and guide who they will become.

Much of parenting is spur of the moment, responding to the situation at hand. But we can lose our way if we don’t have some vision of the future, some idea of maturity, of the kind of person we want our children to grow up to be. That vision should shape our goals and intentions; who do we as parents need to be to help our children become the people we hope they will become?

The problem, of course, is that we’re not quite finished growing up ourselves. We’re still quite capable of being childish. Someone overhearing a fight between us and one or more of our kids might wonder if there were any adults present.

But that’s how it is. Growing up is a long journey with many detours and bumps along the way. We may never completely get there — wherever “there” may be! — but hopefully, year by year, we’ve grown a bit from where we were before.

Something similar might be said about the Christian life. There are stories of miraculous, Amazing Grace kinds of transformations when people become believers: I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind, but now I see! But even then, they don’t necessarily become an entirely different person overnight. They don’t stop being peeved at petty annoyances; they don’t lose all their fears and struggles. There will always be more growing to do — especially when the end goal is to become more and more like Jesus.

OVER AND OVER, as I read John’s letter, I hear echoes of his master. We’ve seen how often John refers back to the words Jesus spoke in the Upper Room. But some of what he says in chapter 4 also makes me think of the Sermon on the Mount. At the end of Matthew 5, we read these words of Jesus:

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matt 5:48)

Be perfect as God is perfect? Be flawless, sinless, don’t make mistakes? Is that even possible?

Of course not. And that’s not what Jesus is saying. He is teaching his listeners what it truly means to be righteous, in a way that surpasses the legalism of the Pharisees. The people have been taught to love their neighbor; that’s good. But they’ve been taught it in a way that’s been twisted into a justification for hating their enemies. No, Jesus says. If you want to be like your heavenly Father, you have to love your enemies.

Moreover, the adjective that is translated here as “perfect” doesn’t mean flawless. It means mature or complete; it describes something that’s reached its goal. What Jesus is saying, in other words, is that the plan is for us to grow up to be like our heavenly Father — and that means growing in love.

With that as background, listen again to what John says in chapter 4 of 1 John. In verse 12, he writes:

No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (1 John 4:12, NIV)

And just a few verses later, he says something similar:

This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. (vs. 17)

The plan is for God’s love to be “made complete” in us individually and among us as a community of believers. “Made complete”: that’s the verb form of the adjective Jesus uses in the Sermon on the Mount, and in both cases, the teaching is about love. When we love one another, John says, we show how God abides in and among us and is growing us up.

After all, Jesus himself taught that the essence of the whole of the Old Testament law and prophets came down to love: the love of God and the love of neighbor. God, whose very nature is love, always wanted a people who would reflect his character to the world. He revealed that character in the person of Jesus. And after the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, the plan was to reveal his character through the followers of Jesus, through their love for one another. That’s what Jesus told his disciples in the Upper Room: You are to love one another as I have loved you. The more we see that happening, the greater our assurance that everything is going according to God’s plan.

Astonishingly, John says, “In this world we are like Jesus.” How we respond to those words depends on how we take John’s description of being “made complete” or Jesus’ command to be “perfect.” The Pharisaic mindset of religious scrupulosity and perfectionism can either leave us self-righteous and arrogant or else intimidated and insecure. The alternative is to see ourselves as always in the process of maturing, of growing up, of becoming more and more like Jesus.

I doubt that John was naive to the ways in which his readers still had some growing to do. Yet he was still able to say that when we love one another, we are like Jesus. God’s love is being brought to its full completion in us, little by little, and glimpses of the character of both the Father and Son can be seen in us. That is a tremendous grace. And it was the plan all along.