NOTES for Jo1 3:2

It is astonishing to understand that we are purified from sin and lawlessness by hope in God alone. For it seems that hope is so little, so easy, while to love and to believe are much harder.

Hope is the awareness that God can make the world and ourselves completely new, can transform everything, outside and inside. Hope is the refusal to rely on the experience that something is impossible, that something "does not happen," for with God all things are possible; He is the "Lord of the impossible."

Such hope purifies, because understanding that God will transform us so much that we will "see Him as He is" and "be like Him" leads to the fear of the Lord and to trembling, to the desire to become obedient children of a loving Father, to avoid sin, and to await the Meeting.