Forgiveness

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. Aloha! Ha! Caught you, didn't I? You were thinking I was going to say good morning, but aloha is going to be our greeting this summer. And aloha means so many things. It means welcome. It means love, actually. So our series this summer is going to be on the book of 1 John, where we learn about the Kipona Aloha, the deep love of God that we find, deeper than what you can imagine. God has gone to great lengths to love you, to the depths of the depths, the height of the heights, how wide and vast it is, and we're going to find that out in the book of 1 John as we walk through it this summer. So we're in kind of a vacation kind of mindset. Now some of you are already planning, thinking, already almost there on vacation. How many are taking a vacation the next couple of weeks? Yes! John, just like his gospel, writes the most simple, simple, simple language. It's kind of like almost a Dick and Jane reader. Now I've dated myself with that. Do you remember? I was Dick and Jane. I was not McGuffey's readers. Okay. You weren't McGuffey's readers. Was anybody doing McGuffey's readers when they were a kid? Is that right? Is that the name of the... That's way back. Yes. Okay. Not quite Civil War back, but way back. You did a McGuffey's reader? Boy, you were a throwback, because you're way younger than me, like half my age. There were schools doing it in the 60s. Oh, kind of as a... Okay. Well, anyways, Dick and Jane. So we're kind of reading very simple language, but it's like the most profound. And today we're going to learn that God's deep love is so deep, the Kipona Aloha is so deep, that God becomes tangible, graspable, touchable, and what that all means. So let's read in 1 John chapter 1, verses 1 through 4. That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we look upon and have touched with our hands concerning the word of life, the life was made manifest, and we have seen it and testified to it and proclaimed to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us, that which we have seen and heard, we've also proclaimed to you, so that you may too have fellowship with us, and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. Now, from just these four verses, we're going to have four points. I know quite a bit today. We're going to find out what it means that God's deep love has come to us through Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. And what that means that Jesus became human means that, first of all, you are saved by grace. Secondly, you have fellowship with God. Thirdly, love actually really matters. And fourth, you can be filled with joy. Lots to cover, I know. You're saved by grace, which comes up in here where he says, that which was from the beginning. Now, some of you may know, if you've ever read the Gospel of John, the language is similar, and the prologue, those first 18 verses, sound almost eerily, well, what do you expect? A writer's a writer. And John, when he writes this and he writes that, he's going to sound similar. This is how the Gospel of John starts. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of man. So if you put those two together, because they sound very similar, you find out that the Word, Jesus is called the Word. That is Logos. He's, in a sense, the Logos, which was a profoundly deep term in Greek philosophy, by the way, but we won't get into quite all that. Basically means Jesus is the reason. The Son of God is the reason the world is created, and the pattern or the standard or the whole parameters of what it was created to reflect God's glory through his Son, and the love of Father and Son together with the Holy Spirit, and that he becomes the one who holds it all together, and he was before all things. And then the fact that we find in John's Gospel, just in the simple that he was already from the beginning, that he is life, and that he has eternal life or is eternal life with the Father, which means Jesus doesn't just kind of give life or grant life or have life. He is life. Is life. That makes all the difference in Christianity. Compared to other religious systems and ideas and philosophies, what a difference it is. In other religions and philosophies, you have a founder like Jesus, but a founder who is more or less a prophet or a sage who will talk to you and say, this is the path to follow and will point to that path. This is the way to do it. And here's the method, the eightfold method this way, the 12 steps to this. But Jesus says, I am the way, not here is the way. I ...