Love And Hatred For Fellow Believers

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. Welcome. It's good to have you here today as we are in our third week of kind of a laid back vacation mood in our series called Kipona Aloha. In Hawaiian, that means deep love. As we're journeying through this letter of 1 John this summer. We happen so far to have gone through a number of steps. We found out, first of all, in the first week that God's love is not some abstract sentimental gee I wish I kind of sort of love you from a distance thing. You know, it's easy to love people from a distance, right? That's not love. God's love is very, what we found in the flesh, incarnation is the word, that God comes to us as fully human, fully divine in the person of Jesus Christ. It's specific. It's graphic. It's real. And that's the kind of love that we have from God. That great lengths he has gone to, to have fellowship with us. And last week, we also learned what it meant to walk in the light versus in the darkness. And walking in the light is not to walk in moral perfection, like I've got to be perfect. There's a lot of churches where it's like, if you show up, you better be perfect. You know, it's like, we're not one of them. Just for you to know, we're not one of them. You don't have, you've got a imperfect pastor, a bunch of imperfect people that gather together here. Walking in the light is actually walking in openness to God and his word and truth. It's not being perfect by any means. In fact, we found out last week that those who were walking in darkness said that they were perfect, that they were fine, that they were beyond sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive, not God, ourselves. And the truth isn't in us. So walking in the light is able to be who we are before God and with others, open, transparent, and have real fellowship and community. And today we're continuing kind of this thought about what it means to walk in the light, and that it means to know who God is, and to be known by God. That's the gospel, the good news, and you can have certainty. But as you can know that you know, we're going to find that out as we are now in first John chapter two, and just read the first six verses, writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. And by this, we know that we have come to know him. If we keep his commandments, whoever says, I know him, but does not keep his commandments is a liar. And the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this, we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. Okay. There are things that you know, right? There are things that you know. There are also things that you don't know that you actually do know. And you go like, haven't you ever said, I didn't know that. I didn't know I knew that. Have you ever said that? No. Okay. Well, I have. There are also things you don't know that you don't know. And there are things that you know that you don't know. Have you followed me with all of those? So what do you know? There was a show, I think it was, it's still on? We keep missing it. Not, wait, wait, don't tell me. It was called, What Do You Know? And the answer was, with Michael Feldman on National Public Radio, was not much. That was the answer. And if you ever watch the show, it's a little comedy thing, but they also ask very bizarrely trivial questions that nobody knew the answers to. And that's the truth. Often we don't know too much, but today we're going to talk about the fact of the one thing that we do know and how we can know the deep love of God and what that means. With the advent of Google and other search engines, you don't have to know much. All you have to know is where to find the answers, right? Well, we're going to say, even today, Christians don't know at all. We don't know everything. We don't have a corner on the market of knowledge. But the one thing, the one we know, the one who knows us, that makes all the difference. So today we're going to explore what 1 John 2, 3 says, and that is, by this we know that we have come to know him. Did you see that? We know that we've come to know him. If we keep his commandments, we're going to explore what that actually means. To know that we've come to know. And what that really means is you can be sure whom you know. You can be sure and have certainty over your faith in Jesus Christ. So today from this passage, these are the three points. How you know you know, what it means to know, and how you live because you know. Now, this first point, how you know you know, that is how you can be sure, how that you can be certain of who you know and what you know about salvation. T...