Walking in the Light: Embracing Forgiveness and Fellowship

Welcome to worship today! We are grateful that you are here. This is July 2nd, two days from now is July 4th, so happy Fourth of July Eve!

We want to acknowledge those who have served or are serving our country because without you we don't have the freedoms we enjoy. Would you please stand so we can acknowledge you and give a clap for you? Thank you very much. We are grateful to God for the privilege of living in this nation and for the freedoms that we enjoy. We pray that we use those freedoms and never take them for granted, that we use them for the sake of the kingdom of God.

I also want to acknowledge that we are looking for yet one more home for home stays for the Japanese students. If you feel God is nudging on your heart, yes, He is pulling really hard. If you let me be His voice, please do so.

There is a sociological phenomenon using the reality of light and darkness. Sometimes we think Japan has it all together and we don't need them because they are a first world country, but candidly, the darkness in Japan is polite. People behind the scenes don't know who Jesus is, and so the idea of trying to build relationships is only one of the 25 students that's coming here is Christian, only one. The rest of them are not. The one is a child of a pastor, and so the issue is that we are trying to help the missionaries there plant the seeds of Christianity.

I encourage you to make sure you sign up on your calendar, and the last Sunday of this month I'm trying to talk Michiko to speak during the sermon because you can hear what life is like to grow up in a world apart from Jesus in that culture and what it's now like for her. She spoke at our church a number of years ago, a powerful reality of how our relationship with them impacted her eternity, and so I encourage you to consider that possibility.

To help us in this respect, we are in five weeks down, four weeks to go of summer camp. If you still have stuff, we still need stuff; that is great. Two weeks from today there is a blood drive. We are now having our blood mobile drive always on Sunday morning hours in front of the sanctuary so that you don't have to come at a separate time. If you're a person who gives blood, I encourage you to consider two weeks from today that is happening.

I would also ask that you would consider keeping in prayer the Proves family as he continues to recover. Let us have a word of prayer at this time.

Lord God, I give you thanks for this weekend and for your grace in Christ. I give you thanks for the mercy that you give to us and the blessings we have in this country. May you bless us, may we be a blessing. Let us live the life you intend, let us live in the love that you desire, let us walk in your light. In Jesus' name, amen.

Please stand and greet one another with a peace of Christ this morning. God bless you. Let's stay standing and continue to worship together.

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Like a fire in the night, whose flames reach and touch the sky, burn within my soul and mind till all I see are your eyes. Like the dawn takes back the light, then like her son brought back to life, resurrects my soul's desire to burn again with true love. True love.

The Lord God, come away, I'm desperate just to know you and give you all my heart. Let's sing that again, I live to love you, Almighty God. Lord God, come stir my soul to long for all you are. I'm desperate just to come away. Amen, amen.

We wanted to take just a few minutes this morning as we do approach the Fourth of July to maybe zoom out a little bit and pray about what God might want to do not just in our country but in the world.

We know from scripture it says that if the Son has set us free, we are free indeed. So we have been set free by Jesus Christ himself through his death and resurrection on the cross, and our desire is to, as Pastor Jeff said, not to take for granted the reality that we live in a freedom that a lot of other people don't live in.

And so it's not just our freedom to hoard; it's then our freedom to pray over the rest of the world, to pray for people who don't have freedom, to pray that the spirit of the freedom that we have in Christ would be the spirit we walk out of this place with and deliver to the rest of the world.

We want to choose to use prayer over pride for our nation, and we want to choose to be about the things that Jesus was about, and we want to choose to be thankful and to be grateful more than to be powerful.

So we're just going to sing this chorus again, and this time as we sing it, we just want to sing it really over our country as a Thanksgiving, as a prayer that God would in fact come and awaken love, awaken us to His love so that we can be a part of the rest of the world's awakening to His love.

It is a dark place out there for particularly people who don't know the light of Jesus, and so we forget, I think sometimes, how powerful and effective our prayers are. We pray them like maybe God's listening or maybe He wants to participate, but in fact, He is committed to it. He has given us His word over and over and over again; He's been faithful over and over again.

So let's just sing this again, again we're going to pray it just as a prayer not over us but over the whole world that God created and the one that we long to see Him return to.

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Me, Lord God, come stir my soul to long for more of Your heart.

Come away, thank You!

All creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and with a song, oh praise Him, Hallelujah! The burning sun with golden beam, those summer days with softer gleam, oh praise Him, oh praise Him, Hallelujah, Hallelujah!

Thou rushing wind with clouds and skies, ye clouds that sail in heaven's high, oh praise Him, Hallelujah! Rising moon with glowing light, ye stars that shine so fair and bright, oh praise Him, oh praise Him, Hallelujah!

Let all things their Creator bless, and worship Him in humbleness, oh praise Him, Hallelujah!

Oh God, we do praise You this morning. You are good and You are kind and You are sovereign. We pray that You would speak to us again this morning. God, would You stir in us humility, awe and gratitude, Thanksgiving and faithfulness? God, all the things that You died to give us, pray that we would live in the fullness of joy. God, even remind us of that this morning. We love You. It's in Jesus' name we pray, Amen.

You could have a seat. Good morning. If you're going to Bible Bird Island, right out that back way, we are grateful that you are here today.

We are starting a new sermon series. Pastor Dave has chosen it on First John: Live in Light, Live in Love. So John wrote five books in the New Testament: Gospel of John, First, Second and Third John, and Revelation.

Actually, the person who wrote the most words in the New Testament is actually Luke, because Luke writes Luke and Acts, and if you add up all the words, that's 27 percent of the words in the New Testament. Who writes the most books is Paul, 13 letters, and then you have John, five letters.

John is different because John is thematic. So Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the synoptic gospels. They are sequential, they are chronological, and then you have John. John writes thematic.

And the difficulty, to be blunt, with thematic is that people can add their own definition. So here's the concept: We live in a world where everybody uses the same words, but people have different dictionaries. So you can end up having conversations and say, "What did we say? Did we just say the same thing or did we not say the same thing? What does it mean?"

And awkwardly, it becomes it needs to be clarified so we understand it. And really, at the end of the day, it's this question: How much love and how much light? How much love?

So if you study the United States, one out of every ten people says they have never had a friend. One out of every ten people say they've never had one friend in their life. And candidly, eighty percent say love actually exists in the world, but only sixty percent say they've actually experienced it.

So in a world where one out of every ten people said they never even had one friend and only sixty percent have... We should not take for granted where we live. It is not an accident that we are living here, and our lives would be inextricably different if we lived in North Korea, Iran, Indonesia, or a host of other places.

First Timothy Chapter 2 verses 1 and following says that we should pray for those who govern over us, so that we can live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This pleases God, who wants all people to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. If government does its job rightly, then the church can do its job more clearly, and it is about truth and light.

In our world today, there is a lot of lies, and we must evaluate what is ultimately true.

John, one of the twelve apostles, was part of the inner circle. He and his brother, James, were known as the 'sons of thunder', but later became known as the 'disciple whom Jesus loved'. This is seen when Jesus, on the cross, handed the responsibility of his mother's well-being off to John. On Easter morning, Peter and John ran to the tomb.

John's themes and thematic realities are really dealing with the issue of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a heresy, a false teaching of that day. In the 60s and 70s, almost every few miles there would be a Christian Science Reading Room, which was a teaching of Gnosticism.

As a college student, I had Friday afternoons off and I would go and find people to talk about spiritual things. I remember having a conversation with a woman in the Christian Science Reading Room at Oak Park, Illinois. She said Jesus was just a good guy, and when I asked her about sin, she said it doesn't exist. She also said the material and physical don't exist.

I wanted to ask all kinds of questions, but I didn't. I wanted to see if she would scream. She said we're not talking anymore, and I couldn't talk to her anymore. I thought it was the craziest thing I ever experienced, and I went back to college and told all my friends.

We got to go to the Christian Science reading room for a great conversation about what does and does not exist. Christian Science was popular in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but now it has been replaced by Tom Cruise and the Scientologists.

Gnosticism believes that the physical is evil, so they said Jesus could not have come in the flesh because flesh is evil. However, the opposite truth of the Incarnation is that the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only who came from the Father full of grace and truth.

In a conversation with someone who thinks we are in a simulation, it is difficult to prove that we are not in a video game. We can understand that there is a debate and a battle about Gnosticism and the truth of the Incarnation.

In First John, the defense of space and time is made four times. Jesus came in space and in time, and we have seen and testified to the eternal life which was with the Father and has now appeared to us.

John Maxwell said that in any given room, there will always be people who struggle with insecurity, personal value, and purpose. If you struggle with insecurity, value, or purpose, what kind of life do you have?

The life appeared, and we can evaluate our lives by what we have and who is around us. The life of Jesus appeared, and we have seen and testified to it. We proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us. Our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.

Do you have complete joy? That is what God wants. He wants you to have filled up joy. Now, if you study the United States, one out of every ten people say they have never had a friend, and four out of every ten people say they have never had love. Before the pandemic, if you asked people if they were joyful, 48% would have said yes. Do you think that number went up or down since the pandemic? It went down to 41%.

So, six out of every ten people say they don't have joy. We need to have fellowship to have joy. We don't need to manufacture joy, but remember that joy has a foundation and a reason for it. We write this to make our joy complete. A portion of joy is fellowship.

Have you ever had a really great day until a person messed it up? Or have you ever been the one who did the annoying? Fellowship is really the issue of connectedness. Who are you connected to? Who gets you? Who understands you? Who do you belong to?

Fellowship is belonging and connectedness. For the scripture says, we proclaim what we have seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us and with our fellowship with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.

This is the message we have heard from Him and declared to you. God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. Connectedness is what you need to have joy. You don't have to be everybody's best friend, but you should have some people who can honestly pray with you and honestly say what they are struggling with.

If you are down in a pit somewhere, you are not alone. Connectedness is the key to joy.

God has promised us that He will never leave us nor forsake us. If we want to experience joy, we must have connectedness with Him and live in truth. Darkness distorts our perception of reality and can lead us to believe lies about God. We may think that God doesn't care or isn't able, but that is not true. God cares more than we do and is able to do anything.

We must live out the truth and not our own individual truth. We need Jesus to purify us from all sin. The bad news is that we are not as good as we want to be, but the good news is that Jesus is. If we walk in the light and truth of God, we will have connectedness with one another and be purified from all sin.

I had a friend in college who went to a different Christian college outside of Chicago in a little place called River Forest. One day we went out to eat at a fast food restaurant, and the food didn't come quickly or warm enough for him. He started to say things, and I said, "Is this part of the 'you're getting better' thing?"

I shouldn't have said it because I wasn't perfect, but I said it. He then said some words that clearly said he wasn't getting any better, and I said, "You can say 'shut up' to me too, but the issue is like this: on your final moment, you will need Jesus. On your final breath, you will need Him.

It isn't that we become so intelligent that sin just wraps itself away. We, in our own sinful nature, figure out new ways to rebel against God. 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, purifies us from all sin. All sin.

This is how human nature works. Human nature says there are the hermetically sealed sins that we talk about, and then there are these other sins we don't ever want to talk about. But God says 'all sin'. When Jesus died on the cross, He knows precisely those things that are the most painful for us to even rehearse. We don't even want to talk about them.

When we sin in thought, word, and deed, our decisions and our failings, He purifies us. We have fellowship with one another.

First John chapter one says, "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make Him out to be a liar and His word is not in us."

If you say you don't need Jesus, you're lying to yourself. People lie to themselves in two ways: they think they don't need Jesus because they're pretty good, or they think they're so bad God can never forgive them. But God says He will forgive all sin and purify us from all unrighteousness.

You're a little kid, and your parents will let you go down with a knife to get asparagus and rhubarb out of those ditches. Just an aside, but the issue is both ditches can you are you in one ditch. Are you lying to yourself? Are you lying to yourself about God?

It says a statement: if we claim to be without sin, we lie to ourselves and the truth is not in us. You and I need Jesus; we still will need Jesus today, we need Jesus tomorrow, we need Jesus. It isn't because we've known so much that we are compounding more and more perfect; we need Him.

And if we confess our sins, if we say God be merciful to me a sinner, He is faithful. God is faithful. Have you ever had anybody fail you, betray you, abandon you? God will never do any of those things; He is faithful and just, and He will forgive our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

He will forgive us, for it says He will forgive you. The best message I can give you this day is precisely that you confess your sins; God, who is faithful and just, will forgive your sins and purify you from all unrighteousness.

If there's never any more gracious thing you're given, it is that because of Christ you're forgiven. You can't make yourself forgiven; you can't undo the brokenness that we carry around, but God will forgive you.

If we say we don't have sin, we actually, the scripture uses the language that we are calling God a liar. You know we've had summer camp going on for the last five weeks, and at summer camp, I am the local judge, the appellate judge, and the supreme court. I am all of those, and I have much opportunity to bring down judgments on what needs to happen about Pokémon cards and other such important things.

And the interesting thing is little kids can say things that adults can never say to each other. You cannot scream at somebody's face, "You are just a liar." It's hard to recover from that when you're in your 40s or 50s.

What's fascinating about little kids is they can say that to each other, they can scream at each other, they can solve the problem, and then they can go play as if nothing ever happened. What an interesting resiliency for children; adults do not have such a resiliency.

"Liar" is a pretty strong word, but God says this statement at the heart of all of this issue is love. God wants you to know that your insecurities are answered by His love, your question of purpose is answered by His love, your statement of value is answered by His love.

He wants your joy to be complete when you grasp the reality of His love. You see, this is a simple Greek book; if you were to learn Greek, you could read First John; it's easy Greek, but it is a very deep reality because down deep all of us want to know love, and we will never know more love than understanding that the love of God in Jesus Christ upon that cross showed how valuable you were and are and always will be.

As we study this book, may your love be complete, may your joy be complete.

We understand and admit we have sinned against God today. We recognize our sin and humbly ask God to forgive us. We believe that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior, that He is our only hope against sin, death, and the devil.

We believe the risen Christ is really present in the sacrament and under the form of the bread and wine. We receive His true body and blood for the forgiveness of our sin and the strength in our faith and life.

We promise to dedicate our life to the Lord and His church by faithfully worshiping Him, cheerfully giving our time and resources, and joyfully sharing the good news of Jesus with others.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, on the same night when He was betrayed, took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, "Take, eat; this is My body which is given for you; this do in remembrance of Me."

After the same manner also He took the cup, when He had supped, and when He had given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, "Drink of it, all of you; this cup is the new testament in My blood, which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins; this do as often as you drink it in remembrance of Me."

The peace of the Lord be with you always. With those who are coming forward to help distribute the Lord's Supper, please do so. If it is a child, we ask that you would cross your arms instead.

All the Earth will shout Your praise, our hearts pour out our prayers, and our praise to You only. You give life, You are love, You bring life to the darkness, You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken, and great are You, Lord.

It's Your breath in our lungs, so we pour out our praise. Will we cry? These bones will sing, great are You, Lord!

All the