Fathom His Choice

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. It's great to have you all here today, and welcome to Thrive, both those who are online and you who are here in person. It's good to see you back again. We are starting a new series today called Fathom. It's going to be for six weeks where we walk through the letter of Ephesians, one message per chapter of the book. What we are trying to do is to fathom the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God in Jesus Christ. That's actually taken from Ephesians chapter three, which we'll get to in a minute. Before we do that, I want to share with you that we've got a couple things coming up. We have Ash Wednesday. This Wednesday, it's a traditional time of reflection on the passion of Jesus Christ. It starts Wednesday and all the weekdays through till Easter, a time to reflect on what the cross was like for Jesus. Instead of having a service in person this year and all that stuff, we were trying, how do we do ashes or any of that stuff with COVID, right? We're just going to have it online, but I think it's going to be a nice time of reflection. It'll premiere at 6.30 this Wednesday. Then this week, as Hunter had mentioned in the announcements ahead of time, we're calling it Thrive Support Week through these videos. We usually have a banquet. It's usually a great time. Everybody's kind of hanging out here, enjoying and celebrating what God has done. We hear wonderful personal testimonies and all of that type of stuff about what God has done here at Thrive over the year. As a mission, we still ask for the larger body of Christ outside of Thrive to support us yet at this time as we are growing and as we are envisioning and looking forward to what God is doing next with us. We are humbly trying to seek that out at this point in time. Instead of a banquet because of COVID-19 again, we are instead having a week of videos online. We really need you to help with those and basically share those videos once they're posted. Just share them on your social media accounts, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Nextdoor. I don't know if any of you use that one. Or even TikTok. I don't know if it really works with TikTok. I've never TikToked myself. I am so old school, right? Yeah, I know. But anyways, if you could share those videos. TikTok videos are usually really short, right? Some of these are like six or seven minutes long, so I don't know if they would work. Is what they are on TikTok, yeah. Okay, there you go. Put that on TikTok. No, I don't know. Anyways, but we'd love for you to do that. So we're going to celebrate this week in a different way, but we are asking for support. Now we're getting back to Ephesians. Here's a basic truth I want you to understand throughout this whole series, and that is as you fathom God's grace, you will live in freedom, joy, and love, okay? We're going to be exploring that in these six weeks. When you fathom the grace of God, how that changes everything, everything. So why fathom? Why did we come up with this? Well, it comes sort of. It's not actually the word used in the text, but it could have been. And that is in Ephesians chapter three. It's a prayer of Paul he has, and this is where the theme came from. For this reason, he says, I bow my knees before the father from whom every family in heaven on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have strength to comprehend it. That word comprehend there, to grasp, to ascertain, to fathom with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. So we're going to kind of try to grasp in a sense the ungraspable, because how do you measure the love of God in Jesus Christ, the infinite love of God in Jesus Christ? May we start, though, trying to do that, or maybe what's happening is that we are just by the Holy Spirit going to hear more of what God has to say about it, and hopefully at the end of the message, your basic response is, wow, what a savior we have. It's the only thing, just what a savior we have. Not wow, how great this church is, man. Sorry, James, not wow, how great the band is, although it's good, okay? And not wow, how great that pastor is, man, he's awesome. No, you know, none of that, none of that, wow, what a savior we have. What an amazing story that God has put us in the middle of. We're going to find out about that story now in Ephesians chapter 1, verses 3 to 14, and we're going to read this. By the way, you can look all of this stuff up on the You version of the Bible and search and you'll find Bible notes with the quotes that I use and all that stuff in t...