Concluding Affirmations

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 to Thrive. It's good to have you here this day. And it is our last Sunday where you're going to see me in a Hawaiian shirt, okay? We are finishing up this series called Kipona Aloha, which is Hawaiian for deep love. And we are looking and finishing up now the letter of 1 John. We're in chapter 5 today, and that's going to be exciting. Next week, we start a new series. We're going to go from the letter of 1 John into the gospel of John, and the series called Identity, discovering who we are in Christ through the gospel of John. And that, I don't know if you realize this, but the gospel of John has many, like, case studies, you could call them. That is, different interactions of different individuals from all different backgrounds with Jesus. So, we're going to look at Nathanael, Nicodemus, the woman at the well, and many others. And in them, each one of them is looking for and answering the question or trying to figure out who am I? What am I about? What does my life mean? Which is a huge issue for our generation and our time. Individual identities today are made up of all sorts of different things people are kind of grabbing after from race, culture, nationality, region, work, sexuality, and we're putting it all together and trying to figure it out. And I think in the gospel of John, what we're going to find out is this is no new phenomenon, that these individuals, too, were struggling with those basic issues of who they are. But what we find in the Bible is not something that you just do, like, by looking inside or trying to figure it out how you're feeling today, but it's you find out and discover the joy of who you are when you find whose you are, okay? First John chapter 5, verse 13 to 21, I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. And this is the confidence that we have toward Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of Him. If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death, I do not say that one should pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death. We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who has been born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him. We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true, and we are in Him who is true. In His Son, Jesus Christ, He is the true God and eternal life. So children, keep yourselves from idols. In some ways, it's been 10 weeks, do you realize? We've been doing this study for the first John for 10 weeks. And some of you are like, yes, we're finally finished. But in some ways, we're kind of back at the beginning. The end of the letter, John himself is kind of a circular Semitic, that's kind of Middle Eastern style of writing. And he kind of spins around different ideas and takes it from different angles and looks at it this way and that way. So it's kind of like how you kind of, how in the Hebrew scriptures it talks about meditating on God's word. It's not something you just kind of read and you get over. But you think about it, you read it again, you speak it kind of quietly to yourself, you come back to it, you look at it from another angle. John is kind of doing that in his letter here. And he's kind of taking us around some of these things. And he uses very simple words with profoundly deep theology behind it. Not always easy to grasp. The words are easy to understand, but it's like, what is he really getting at? So today we come up against one of these words. And that is when he says that we are born of God, or born again. You heard born again before? And you might kind of read, well, I don't want to be called born again. You know those born again people, have you ever? So this started back in 1976, well before some of you were born, or even, right? It was called by Newsweek, the Year of the Evangelical, or Born Again, because it was Jimmy Carter who became president and called himself a born again Christian. And everybody goes like, what's that? Right? And they were trying to figure it out. And from that point on, the word born again, as well as the word evangelical, has been gone through a lot of different transitions and stuff, sociologists look at this, politicians look at these words, it's used as a demographic category in this way or that way. And I think if you're not confused by what these terms mean, I'd be surprised. Because I'm confused...