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.

What does a spiritual life feel like? The Psalms, and the life of Jesus, are our guides, in a world that has forgotten the truth of who we are: not just bodies, but also souls. (ft. Caleb Knedlik, Pastoral Assistant at Elevate Hope Centennial)

How many of us make New Year’s Resolutions? Over the last couple of years, an interesting trend has started with New Year’s Resolutions. Studies have found now that FEW people who make resolutions actually intend to keep them, but now they are simply made to signal a new start rather than to be a catalyst for change. So now I just say that I resolve to do something, just to signal that I want to change it. It seems that what they say is true: “A New Year's Resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other. But, in all seriousness….what is it about New Year’s Day that makes us feel like we have a fresh start? Another chance? A line in the sand of change? What is it that makes us feel like on January 1st, real change is finally possible, that in our minds everything is new or at least has the possibility of being new? This Sunday we are going to look at what Scripture says about real and lasting change, and offer real and practical advice from the Bible on how we can truly change in ways that matter. In ways that move beyond simply resolving to do better.

This Christmas we may need a lot of things. We may need more money, deeper family connection, a new job, or maybe our health back. This Christmas we may need a lot of things. But what we really need is peace; a settled peace that nothing can shake. And that is the message of that first Christmas, and every Christmas, that we need so badly. That peace on earth is possible. Not the absence of war, but a deeper peace even than that. The peace on earth promised on that first Christmas means an existence without fear. A peace that brings with it light and hope and doesn’t depend on us having it all together, being in control, or knowing what the coming year will bring. Peace with God again, and peace with one another again. That’s why we need Christmas so badly. Because what we really need is peace - our Prince of Peace.

We’ve been going through the titles of Jesus in Isaiah 9 as a church this Advent season, anticipating the celebration of Christmas and the coming of our Lord. In Isaiah 9 the anticipated child to be born to save Israel is named ‘Everlasting Father’: what does it mean for this baby to be called our Everlasting Father? It can be difficult for us when we hear of God being referred to as ‘Father’ because we immediately imagine our own earthly fathers and place our own experiences, good or bad, of our own fathers onto God. So let’s look at what the text has to say for us, pointing us towards our immensely good and Everlasting Father.

The holidays often come with a storage problem. Where do we put all of the stuff we asked for or didn’t ask for? And here is what is also true: when it comes to our lives, our thoughts and our emotions around the holidays, we can also have a storage problem. We are burdened and stressed out by all sorts of things. Some things that we brought on ourselves but a lot of things we didn’t ask for. Finishing school well, holiday travel, Christmas parties, cleaning the house, endless gift lists, stuff to bake, stuff to buy. Maybe Christmas reminds us of hard relationships, or loved ones we have lost. People who are in our home that we wish would leave. A child who is far away from home. When it comes to all of the burdens, stresses and sorrows that can get amplified by the holidays, we can have a storage problem as well. Sometimes we just don’t know where to put our burdens, our struggles, our sorrows or our stress. But we have to store them somewhere. So we carry around fear as a pit in our stomach, we carry hurt in our hearts, and we carry burdens and responsibilities on our shoulders. And yet the very meaning of Christmas, the good news of what actually happened on that first Christmas, offers an invitation that all who are burdened in life need desperately to hear and to consider. We need Christmas and we need the Mighty God.

We need Christmas this year. Not more presents, or more nutmeg or peppermint, or movies about saving Christmas. We need Christmas. We have always needed Christmas, even BEFORE the very first Christmas. In fact, Christmas—God with us, as one of us, to save us—was the plan for our world all along. 700 years BEFORE the very first Christmas, in the time when the prophets wrote about the coming of that baby in a manger, people were feeling the same way as we are today. A maniacal king, King Ahaz, ruled the land. Faith, religion and spirituality had stopped providing any answers because they had become a harmful mix of idolatry and evil and just downright awful. There was war and struggle and fear of war. And in the midst of that, a prophet of God most High named Isaiah received a promise to pass on to God’s people that we now use as one of our main Christmas texts. For the next four weeks, through the time we call Advent leading up to Christmas, we will talk about each of these names for Jesus who came to offer us forgiveness of everything we have ever done, past present and future. To give us a new start and bring us back into right relationship with God. That is the good news we call the gospel. That’s what we celebrate at Christmas. And each one of these names tells us something about that good news! The first name for the coming Savior Jesus is: Wonderful Counselor. We need a Wonderful Counselor this year.

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.