Being at war changes things. It changes our plans, our priorities and our prayers. It changes how we view our freedoms. War suspends certain privileges and makes us re-evaluate life. War brings an urgency and a reorienting of all of our resources around stopping whatever it is we are at war with. It’s no surprise then, that the Bible uses the imagery of war when talking about good and evil in our world. We can say we don’t like certain things, or something is bad or messed up. But when we are really serious about stopping it, we declare war on those things that need to be stopped. Over the last few decades our country has declared war on drugs, on poverty and on terror. But somehow when we begin speaking in terms of a war with evil we as good sensible Americans begin to get uncomfortable. So what do we do with all of this war and battle imagery in the Bible? Should we try to find kinder, gentler ways to communicate Biblical truths? Or is it one of the keys to understanding our messed up world? Today we are in the last week of our series going through the book of Ephesians. And we end with one of the most famous passages of Scripture on the spiritual battle that we face in this world.

We all have to serve someone, whether that is God, the devil or ourselves. Jesus says in Matthew 6 that “No one can serve two masters. For he will either hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and ____” (fill in the blank, whatever it may be for you). We are going through a series as a church called, “The Secret To Healthy Relationships,” and in this final part we will look at relationships of authority: those who serve and those who are served. And we will see the eternal perspective the Bible gives us on power and control, on service and submission.

It is hard to be a parent on display, responsible for guiding your kids in righteousness and goodness. It is also hard to be a child, watching and having to obey an imperfect, flawed and sometimes downright ungodly parent try their best to parent successfully. We are in a series as a church called, “The Secret to Healthy Relationships” looking at what the book of Ephesians has to say for us in a variety of relationships. This morning we will look at the beginning of Ephesians 6 as we talk about healthy relationships between parents and children. This is one of the most remarkable passages in Scripture, equally difficult to fulfill as both parents and children - and God’s Word has something to say for all of us as His children.

We are in a series called “The Secret to Healthy Relationships,” going through the book of Ephesians verse by verse. Our passage today deals with relationships between husbands and wives. Marriage can be one of our greatest sources of joy and fulfillment. Or it can be our greatest source of pain and misery. Just like tandem kayaking. One of the articles online you can find on Tandem Kayaking is an article entitled: How to Paddle a Tandem Kayak (and Avoid Opposition, Mutiny and Divorce). And it says this: “Two people both trying to steer a tandem kayak is a recipe for misery. You can only be successful if you and your partner are willing to come together, to sacrifice the idea of full control and to exercise patience with each other’s shortcomings. If you can do this, then paddling a tandem kayak can be magnificently fun.” What the Bible will tell us today is that no matter your past, your present situation or what the future throws at you in terms of marriage there are some secrets to having a healthy marriage relationship that brings joy and laughter, rather than strife, stress and paddling around in passive aggressive circles.

Relationships can often be the source of some of our greatest joys in this life, but they can also often be a source of our greatest sorrow, anxiety and exhaustion. And the common denominator for unsuccessful relationships in our lives is simple: us. Many of us have wounds, shortcomings, insecurities and sins in our lives that make us capable of making a mess of some if not all of the relationships in our lives. We are going through a series as a church called, “The Secret to Healthy Relationships,” and this week we will look at what the Bible has to offer us as the genuine power to change in relationships; a power that doesn’t start with others, and doesn’t even start with each of ourselves, but rather starts with the God who made us.

We are a people in love with love. And yet few have any idea what real and lasting love looks like or how it acts. It would be easy to sum up healthy relationships, whether it is romantic relationships or relationships between family or friends or neighbors, with something like “All we need is love.” But that brings up the question: What KIND of love is foundational to healthy relationships? What does that kind of love look like? Are we basing our relationships on something that looks like love, but really isn’t love at all? Is that why they are failing or stressed out? We are in a series called “The Secret to Healthy Relationships,” looking at what the Bible says about how to have relationships that are strong, growing and reflect God’s best for us. And we are doing that by going verse by verse through a book of the Bible called Ephesians. Last week we talked about forgiving others and realizing our own need to be forgiven as one of the secrets of a healthy relationship. This morning we’ll talk about our second secret to healthy relationships: having a love that gives and is satisfied, rather than a love that takes and always wants more.

How are your relationships lately? Whether it is in your marriage, in your family, or at work, relationships can be our greatest source of joy or our greatest source of heartache. Join us starting this Sunday for a new 6 week series as we examine the key to building healthy relationships in our marriage, in our family, in our personal and in our work lives.

Behavioral scientists have identified a phenomenon called “Enclothed Cognition" to describe the effect our clothes seem to have on things like our emotions, our evaluation of ourselves, our attitudes and our interpersonal interactions. So, if you want to change your behavior in small ways, change your clothes. But what about if you want to really change your life? Do you want to live a life that is righteous and free? To break the power of anger and bitterness or some other sin pattern in your life? Do you want to really know and experience the heart of God, or to live truly free under grace and become more like Jesus? Well, to change in THOSE ways, the Bible also says change your clothes. But not into something that can be found in your closet, your gym bag or in a designer outlet. Let’s read what Scripture has to say to us this morning as we continue in our series on the book of Ephesians.

We are all walking around in blindness that can’t be cured unless we allow Jesus to recreate our life. Unless He reaches back into the dirt from which we are created, unites us to Him and creates us completely anew, so that we are no longer people of the dust who walk around in blindness. We are new creations in Jesus, our lives of clay united to the life of Jesus by faith, allowing us to finally see and take hold of real, eternal life. The battle for truth always starts in our mind, with our belief. Why does the world around us do what it does? It simply acts according to what it believes. Why do any of us do what we do? We always act and speak according to our belief. In order to really change, we need to change what we believe is true. Wrong actions can always be traced back to wrong belief. If the people of God start looking just like the world around us in our speech and in our actions, we need to go back and look at what is going on in our minds and in our hearts. Do we believe the same things about God, about Scripture and about ourselves as the world does? We will see from our passage this morning a heart and mind can never truly change apart from a work of God that creates us anew and gives us eyes to see.

The Bible compares a church, the assembled people of God, to a body. So the question is, are there any members within THAT body, the body of Christ, who serve no purpose? Or do some of us just have a hard time seeing our purpose in the body of Christ at the moment? Maybe you have asked at times: why does the body of Christ even need a member like me? Or maybe you are in a place of weakness right now, or feeling unseen, or maybe you are wanting to do more. We will see from our passage today that every member of the body of Christ, from the quietest to the most visible, has a role, a spiritual gift given to them by grace for the purpose of building up the body of Christ.

We are in a series as a church going through the book of Ephesians together in the Bible. And for the past three chapters we have learned in great and glorious terms about who we are in Jesus as followers of Him. We are chosen by God, loved by God, united to Christ, forgiven by grace, one with each other in spite of our differences and so much more. And this morning we start Chapter 4. And it begins comparing all that we ARE in Christ to how we live each DAY in Christ. Ephesians 4-6 connect our actions with our identity. Scripture always demands that our actions come out of our identity rather than to be somehow disconnected from it. Our actions always start with GOD’S identity and then OUR identity IN Him. Even the 10 Commandments begin by telling us who God is: “I am the Lord your God who rescued you from slavery…” and here is how you should act in light of that. In our passage today we will look at how identity or doctrine without the matching behavior is simply hypocrisy. And behavior without the matching identity is simply moralistic legalism. And if you are not a Christian joining us this morning, this will be of special interest to you not only for taking stock of your own life, but also as you have no doubt watched how Christians behave on the public and private stage.

If you could pick something in your life to be overflowing, what would it be? Money? Relationships? Time? When was the last time you lived out of an overflow of anything? Many of us, or even most of us, often live life out of a depletion, a lack, a scarcity. Life uses up our time, or crisis after crisis seems to deplete our trust, our hope, our reserves. Once we finally build those things up again, life seems to take us back down to depleted. Today we are going to look at what Scripture has to say about serving others in the name of Jesus. Not only are we to be disciples, but we are also given the privilege of being disciple makers: those who proclaim the excellencies of what Jesus has done for us in the good news of His saving grace. But the problem with that in our American lives is that when the Bible or the church talks about reaching out to others or being a witness to those around us, if we read those parts of Scripture while we are feeling depleted, as we often are, they just come as a burden. In fact, the invitation to serve God often comes in the form of guilt or being made to feel like we don’t do enough as it is. And maybe we don’t. But that isn’t God’s heart at all. The sharpest edge of any sword is grace rather than guilt. So this morning let’s see what the Bible has to say about living and serving out of an overflow rather than out of constant emptiness.

Rejection tends to produce people who are more anxious, more insecure, and often more hostile and aggressive towards others. Ultimately rejection is about access. Access to my time, access to my attention, access to my presence, access to my heart, my gentleness, my love and acceptance. If I reject you, it simply means that I close myself off to you so you can no longer have access to me, to my heart, my love, my presence or my time. And I think it wouldn’t be a sneaky, Jesus-y bait and switch from popular psychology to Biblical theology to say that what drives much if not most of our destructive and harmful behavior as human beings is an attempt to get back something that we have lost almost since the beginning of time. Access to our Heavenly Father’s love, presence and acceptance. The thing that we crave most deeply is to once again have access to our Heavenly Father, our Creator who made us to be most satisfied when we are in relationship with Him. Deep down we want what we lost. To know that the one who made us, whose opinion matters the most, has not rejected us but is seeking out the relationship with us that He created us for.

Happy Birthday, Elevate Hope Centennial! Two years of God’s faithfulness to this church, to this new work of the gospel in South Metro Denver and beyond. Elevate Hope Centennial launched with the vision of being a church for people who aren’t perfect and don’t pretend to be, bringing the real and lasting hope of Jesus to Centennial and beyond. Our mission is to be a church where people: Connect with God, Connect with Others, and help Connect Others to God. Because only the power of God, through the saving and reconciling work of Jesus, lived out in community with others, only that gospel can bring hope and life to our cities as we live out the freedom and forgiveness of God’s work of His Spirit in us.

In Ephesians 3 Paul uses the word “mystery” four times in the first nine verses. He keeps using this word “mystery" when he talks about God’s grace given to him through Jesus AND when he talks about the relationship of Jesus to people of all different ethnic backgrounds—the Gentiles. He calls it all a mystery. And we can easily mis-understand this passage right off the bat because of that word mystery. When we hear the word “mystery” today, we think of a mystery as something that isn’t known and CAN’T be known until WE figure it out. But mystery is used in the Bible in a totally different way. It’s not a truth that we find, it’s a truth that finds us. A mystery in the Bible is something that is not knowable by us as human beings until God HIMSELF chooses to reveal it to us. So when Paul talks about a mystery four times in our short nine verses, he is talking about something that was not previously known by anyone because God hadn’t revealed it to us yet. Even to His own chosen people, the nation of Israel. But now, they are standing on a historic moment when God has chosen to reveal the mystery of His plan of salvation of all nations to them.

Does one degree off really matter? Does it really matter if we are off just a little bit, by even one degree, on the things in our lives? The truth is that being off by even the smallest of margins can have an immense impact on the outcome of your life. And then you will ask yourself the question: how did we end up here? Join us this Sunday as we learn what God says about getting off by even one degree on the things that most truly matter in our lives - because for these most important things, the consequences are of eternal significance.

We live in a world separated by dividing walls of hostility. Dividing walls of ethnicity, of rich and poor. Dividing walls between men and women, and many other divisions. Even among those claiming to follow Christ, hostility is at an all time high. Thankfully, God has not left us without a way forward if we choose to hear His answer to the dividing walls of hostility we have built. Let’s read our text this morning and see what His Word would say to us.

There are a lot of common grace benefits to ourselves when we do good works. But at the end of the day, why do we do good works? Is there any reason beyond just an impulse to feel better and to better our own lives? It seems we may be witnessing the emergence of a new generation of Americans that are fascinated with good works but who have not met the author and source of good works. Maybe you have your own struggle with good works. Maybe good works just seem like one more thing in your already busy Christian life. Or maybe you just go with the suburban solution of just giving money to a professional organization who can do the good works for you. Ultimately, we get our knowledge of good works and why we do them from the unchanging pages of the Holy Scriptures. Jesus once challenged a man who didn’t believe that He was the Son of God but called Him “Good teacher.” Jesus’ response was, “No one is good except God alone.” So let’s read what our good God says about good works.