The Light Of God's Love

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 just be able to kind of relax into and enjoy and be open to and to soak in the goodness of God. In this series, we are calling Kipona Aloha, which means deep love. As we look in the book of 1 John, it's a letter to the churches, a general letter from John himself, talking about some very deep, deep concepts in very simple, profound ways. Deep love. We learned last week that God's love is not kind of wishful thinking or abstract or a general sense of okayness, like he's somewhere. But God becomes tangible, touchable, as we say incarnational, which is in the fleshness, that Jesus comes as a fully human being into this world, and that God goes to such great lengths to reach us to have full communion with us. Today, we're going to be looking at now what it means to, well, first of all, we're going to be confronting a few misconceptions of what deep love can might mean in this world because a lot of this world talks a lot about love. Have you ever noticed that? There's a lot of love talk. There's a lot of loose love talk. There's a lot of talk about how love is just whatever. And often, love becomes more or less like tolerance, not real love. And coexisting is very important rather than really what God talks about is communion, which is much deeper. Community is much deeper than just kind of bare, kind of hang, just whatever you do your thing, I do my thing, and we're okay. We're talking about communion that God wants us to have as well. And so we're going to be looking at how even in the early church, there were these misconceptions, a group of people. It's hinted at here already at the beginning of this letter, a group of people who kind of disaffected, separated themselves out, consider themselves better than the rest. And John is going to call them out already here at the beginning. And so we're going to look at today what there is a vast difference between coexistence and communion between tolerance and God's forgiveness. And that difference is the difference between light and darkness. So let's read 1 John 1, verses 5 to 10. This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, his son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. So John is contrasting here two different ways of living, two different ways of thinking, two different ways, as he says, of walking, which is kind of a metaphor in the Bible of walking is practically living, how you live out your life. And the delineation, he says, is between light and dark. And there's no gradation in between. There's no kind of like shadows that you can kind of be in one and the other. You're either living in the light of God or you're living in the darkness of self-delusion. So that's the question. Which one are you living in? So from this passage, we're going to learn three things today. First of all, what it means to walk in darkness, what it means to walk in the light. And then finally, how do you move from darkness to light? OK, makes sense. Pretty simple. All right. So walking in darkness. Now, John in his gospel also uses this whole imagery of light and darkness quite a bit. And one of the more profound passages where he develops this is in John chapter three. And this is what John writes. And this is the judgment. The light has come into the world. That is Jesus, actually. And people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. And I think this passage in John chapter three gives us a clue what it means to walk in light versus walking in darkness. And I don't know. Do you know where this occurs in John chapter three? What in John chapter three right before this passage? What's the you probably know a Bible verse. What is it? John 3 16. And what does it say? Right. You know it. Right. Every football game has that sign at the end zone. John 3 16. Right. Who's that being talked to this whole thing? Anybody know who's the person? Nicodemus. Now here we get a clue. When did Nicodemus come to visit with Jesus in the night in darkness? What does it mean to walk in darkness? Nicodemus is an example of that. Is that a shocker or wha...