How do we live joyfully in an age of anger and anxiety? The circumstances of our lives often leave us haggard, tired and worn out emotionally and physically. And yet, we may find moments such as these to be the most joy-filled of our lives - if we recognize this joy as an underserved gift of God. (ft. Caleb Knedlik, Pastoral Assistant at Elevate Hope Centennial).

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.

This morning we will be looking at the beginning of the history of the church in the book of Acts. In Acts 2, we find the disciples of Jesus gathered together on a day called Pentecost , awaiting the coming of the promised Helper from their Lord. As we read we see the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples, a great testimony to the gospel from the apostle Peter, the mass conversion of over 3000 people, and the resulting fellowship of believers. And in this last part, we see the early followers of Jesus emboldened by supernatural power of the Holy Spirit to pursue natural, ordinary means of fellowship and communion with each other (ft. JP Watson, Church Planting Resident at Deer Creek Church).

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.

Life often feels out of our control, like being pummeled by a flurry of waves, unable to surface for breath. What are we supposed to do when we feel like we are losing control? We’ve been going through the book of Ephesians as a church, and Ephesians 2 in particular captures the very heart and essence of the Christian faith. Join us this Sunday as we look at the early life of Abraham in Genesis 11-12, pondering what the text reveals for us in light of Ephesians 2, that we may discover what we are to do when in life we feel like we are losing control (ft. Caleb Knedlik, Pastoral Assistant at Elevate Hope Centennial).

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.

Unfortunately, men and women, I think the telemarketer tally board is how many or most people see the God of the Bible and the Christian life. Even those who don’t believe that God is the great tally marker in the sky often slip into living that way when it comes to prayer, church, sharing Christ, doing good deeds, doing my job or not sinning. Trying to earn something from God based on how I perform on a given day. It’s easy for us to think that how God feels about us—whether or not He will accept us, love us and forgive each day—depends on how many spiritual tally marks we have next to our names. Have I done enough good things, have I have prayed enough or won the battle with sin on a given day, or have been a good father or husband or Christian? And even worse, it’s easy to feel like at the end of each day, all our past works don’t matter and we need to prove ourselves with enough tally marks again each day. And I think many or most of us can go through life like this as we relate to God whether we are a Christian or not. And I hope this morning that we would allow the Bible to remind us anew that we are only made worthy of anything before God by His free grace alone.

What happens when love grows cold? There is this journey, this course that we are on and it is taking us somewhere. And our passage says that we all as a human race are on this same course—this same destination—together, toward the things that are making us dead. And we also saw last week that some people have gotten off of that course leading to spiritual death and have been raised into new life by God. After the sobering introduction, our passage takes a hopeful turn, revealing to us that rich, great and immeasurable are God’s love, mercy, kindness and grace to those who are dead in sin. As we look around in our world today and often in our own hearts, we are compelled to ask: what has happened to all of those things? Love, mercy, grace and kindness? Where have they gone? Maybe they are gone from your life as well, gone from your home. Gone in how we treat others, how we treat ourselves or how others treat us. But the good news this morning is that we can know from God’s Word—no matter how we have experienced God, no matter if we are doubting God’s love or discouraged by our world, no matter if we are unkind to others, or unkind to ourselves—we can know from our passage this morning that in a loveless, merciless, graceless, unkind world—in which sometimes we are the worst offenders—the God of the universe doesn’t just possess those things. But He is immeasurably rich and lavish in all of those things which are in such short supply today. And that truth, which the Bible calls the good news or the gospel, is more important today than ever before. And that may sound like exaggeration. But if we don’t have love, kindness, mercy and grace it may actually be the end of the world.

If you had a nail in your forehead, would you want someone to let you know it’s there? Would you want someone to help you get it out? Have we gotten so used to the pain and trouble in our life and in our world that we just want to complain about it rather than have someone actually help remove it? Thankfully the Bible is both honest and helpful when it comes to what the nail in our foreheads really is. It’s honest about what is causing us misery and about the nagging sense that something isn’t right in our human condition. Scripture shows us a relational and compassionate God who listens to our complaints, but also frees us from our greatest problem. Let’s read God’s Word this morning as we continue going through the book of Ephesians.

Join us this Sunday as we look at the overarching story that God is writing in the Bible. In Part 4, we will look at the final book of the Bible, Revelation, to discover the promises of restoration, re-creation and glorification available for those who have been redeemed by Jesus and are ushered in to dwell with God once again. Join us for the fourth and final act of God’s story - Restoration (ft. JP Watson, Church Planting Resident at Deer Creek Church).