Good morning. Thank you all for being here, for listening online. My name is Doug Bergeson. Thank you, thank you. It was my hope that I would get that. But to kick things off, I'm going to need a little help from you. The audience, congregation, flock, whatever you want to call yourselves. I need a little help. Who in today's culture, books, movies, TV, podcasts, or even real life would be considered a great detective, a master of deductive logic, one able to take the most cryptic clues, hints, and innuendo and figure out what's going on. I'm asking you all so as not to date myself and come across as a hopelessly out of touch boomer. So a little help, please. Just shout out some names of great detectives, masters of deductive logic from any realm of your experience. Sherlock Holmes. Okay, that's kind of a boomer response, but that's okay. Who else? I would have gotten that one. Who else? Columbo. That I had down too, and I wasn't going to share because it's so out of date. Anyone else? Axel Foley. Okay. Okay. In the first one or the one in the new release? Axel Foley. Okay. Who else? Ace Ventura. Okay. Okay. That's good. That's all I need. I really needed those names, and I appreciate your contributing to make this one point. When you see me being trotted up here to speak on a Sunday morning, you do not have to be a Sherlock Holmes, a Detective Columbo, an Axel Foley, or an Ace Ventura to know that we must be deep, deep, deep into the lazy, languid days of summer. When I plot up here on stage, you have the legitimate right to ask yourself dang why am I not on vacation but be that as it may I am here and I'm excited to share when Nate first reached out to me way back in March he wrote that he we'd be in the middle of our summer series which we started last year called 27 that covers the books of the New Testament and specifically the letters of the Apostle Paul and he said I could pick whichever one I wanted and build a sermon around its overall message. Now typically when asked to preach I deliberate, I agonize, hem and haw wringing my hands over whether I really want to do it or not. But not this time. I was excited and quickly responded to Nate, saying that I would leap at the chance to do the book of Colossians, as it is magisterial and soaring and easily one of my favorite books in all of Scripture. I was pumped. However, just moments later, Nate wrote back, and I quote, Doug, thanks for taking me up on the offer, though I have bad news that I hope will not dissuade you from your acceptance. Aaron preached on Colossians last year, and I failed to mention that to you in my request email. Kyle has also preached on 1 and 2 Thessalonians, so those are off the market as well. So remembering that old saying, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, I went back to Nate, explicitly asking him to confirm in writing what books were actually able and available for me to pick. And thankfully for me, and hopefully for you, Paul's letter to the Ephesians was one of them. And that's the book we're going to look at this morning. This letter was written by the Apostle Paul, once among the fiercest and most formidable opponents of the early Christian church. But God, in his wisdom and grace, had chosen Paul, this fervent enemy of the church and most unlikely of all candidates, to be his chosen messenger in spreading the life-changing news of Jesus Christ throughout the known world. And for two to three years, they don't know exactly how long, the city of Ephesus had been base camp for Paul's ministry, for his missionary work, establishing churches throughout the region. Now, by AD 60, some 25 years after his miraculous conversion experience on the road to Damascus, Paul is thought to have written this letter from a prison in Rome. Now, for those familiar with this letter, it is chock full of beautiful and iconic passages. Nate frequently has brought to our attention the last half of chapter 3, which is his favorite prayer in all of Scripture and one he prays over grace often. Ephesians also contains the verses that would shape and fuel the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. Ephesians 2, 8, and 9 asserting that salvation is only found through God's gracious gift of Jesus Christ and is by faith in him alone. In other words, there's nothing we can do to earn or curry God's favor. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not fromesians, there are the frequently misunderstood, misappropriated, and sometimes even abused house codes, describing how the relationships between wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters, are to work in light of the Lordship of Christ. Finally, in a very famous passage near the end of the letter, Paul exhorts all believers to put on the full armor of God. And there are more, but this morning, our focus will be on the one overarching theme of this entire letter, our identity as believers, who we truly are now that we are in Christ. According to Paul, everything in both the individual and collective Christian experience, hangs in the balance, directly dependent upon the extent to which we can wrap our minds around this one transcendent and surpassing reality. At this stage of my life, if you were to ask me why I believe what I believe, my most honest and transparent answer would go something like this. I believe because everything I've seen, everything I've learned, and everything I've experienced in my life so far has validated the truth of Scripture. Not just some things, but literally everything has reinforced what the Bible has been saying all along. And despite being such an ancient book, I've for the most part stopped being surprised when I again discover another way in which the Bible is fresh and profoundly modern, relevant, life-changing, and most importantly, true. Here's one quick example from my long-ago past. In 1966, Professors Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn at the University of Michigan published a groundbreaking work in the field of psychology and organizational behavior. By the time I started graduate business school up in Chicago in 1980, Katz and Kahn's cutting-edge theory, only about a dozen years old, had swept through academia and was now all the rage at the elite business schools. What this theory offered was a sweeping transformational alternative to classical business management that up to that point had viewed organizations as machines. Now what this new systems theory proposed was that organizations should best be viewed not as machines but as living organisms. When I first heard this I was floored, blown away. What insight, what brilliance, so outside the box. I'd never in my life heard anything like that before. Oh, wait. Yes, I had. The Apostle Paul had made that very same point when he compared the church and how its members were to operate to a human body in his first letter to the Corinthians, written around A.D. 55. Turns out the Bible had beaten Dr. Katsakan and Kotz to the punch by just over 19 centuries. Much more recently, I was again struck by Scripture's remarkable freshness and relevance, revealing truth and wisdom long before the rest of us even begin to catch up. The occasion was this past fall when I listened to the book, The Coddling of the American Mind. And it has direct relevance and application to what Paul is trying to do in his letter to the Ephesians. Written in 2018 by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff, the book makes the case that our society and culture have gradually but steadily moved towards broad acceptance of three great untruths with terrible consequences, particularly for our young people. The three great untruths the authors cite are, one, always trust your feelings. Two, avoid pain and discomfort if you can. And three, life is a battle between good people on the one side and bad people on the other. Even if well intended, as they often are, the book asserts that these beliefs represent terrible and demonstrably false ideas whose adoption and embrace by large swaths of our society have contributed to an epidemic of anxiety and depression and overall decline in our mental health, to the intolerance and turmoil roiling our public discourse, and to the tearing apart of any semblance of social cohesion in this country, to name just a few of the disastrous consequences of these ideas, these patterns of thinking. The book went on to show how these flawed beliefs not only contradicted thousands of years of wisdom literature from a variety of traditions, but also fly in the face of the latest findings of science and modern psychology. That the Bible is prominent among wisdom literature debunking those three great untruths came as no surprise. What did come as a new revelation to me was when the authors introduced something I've never heard of, something called cognitive behavior therapy, or CBT, as an especially effective remedy and tool in combating these three great untruths. Why this is pertinent to Ephesians is that the Bible in its entirety, and the Apostle Paul in particular, espoused and practiced cognitive behavior therapy almost two millennia before it was even a thing. Some of you older folks, as well as any country music freaks out there, might remember the 1981 chart-topping duet by Barbara Mandrell and George Jones, I Was Country Before When Country Wasn't Cool. Does anybody remember that? Yeah, there we go. Well, tweaking that a little bit for my purposes this morning, it turns out that the Apostle Paul was doing cognitive behavior therapy before cognitive behavior therapy was cool. First pioneered in the 1960s, CBT is premised on the idea that how we think and what we think is what determines to a large degree both our emotions and our behavior. Rather than focusing on the origins of a problem as happens in traditional psychotherapy, cognitive behavior therapy works to change our current thinking. It is our incorrect, distorted, and emotional thinking about ourselves and our world, what cognitive behavior therapy refers to as cognitive distortions that must be addressed and changed. In clinical practice over the last several decades, this has been shown to be true as CBT has been proven to be remarkably effective. But zoning in on just the first of those three great untruths, always trust your feelings. It's an important, even vital question to ask, to what extent should our feelings and emotions influence and shape what we think, what we believe to be true? If one has been paying any attention at all, we now live in a society and a culture which have elevated and anointed emotions and feelings to such prominence that they control the moral high ground. And in many instances instances assume ultimate authority, even to the extent of determining what is true and what is not. One simply doesn't question or challenge another's feelings in polite society. After all, that's what you feel. That's your truth, right? Well, no. Wrong. Wrong. Not according to cognitive behavior therapy, and certainly not according to what God has revealed in his word. It turns out that in many instances, God cares far less about our feelings and emotions than we do. It can be off-putting at first, even shocking. After all, if God's supposed to be so loving, how does that compute? But lest anyone here this morning or listening online misses this critical point, it's not that God doesn't care about our feelings and emotions, but that he cares more for those things that have the greatest chance to help us. And from God's vantage point, just as in cognitive behavior therapy, the mind is the key. The mind is the key because how we think determines how we act. Our behavior follows our thoughts and beliefs. And we intuitively know this to be true. If I care to know what you really think, what you really believe, there's no need for me to ask you or for you to tell me. I'll simply watch closely what you do. How do you spend your time and treasure? What you prioritize? What are you willing to stand up for, come what may? When are you quick to compromise and make exceptions? What sacrifices and trade-offs have you made? How do you treat people? How different are you in public than in private? Your actions are the tell. Even the old adage, follow your heart, which I love, is not so much an appeal to one's emotion as it is to what one truly believes is right and true. In actual practice, the heart doesn't do most of the leading. It is typically more of a follower. It is the convictions of your mind that set the wheels of action in motion. It's what one thinks and believes that does the leading, and our hearts then follow. That is why, whether we like it or not, it's a far greater concern to God how we think and what we think and why we think the way we do than how we might be feeling at any point in time. The priority on the mind rather than the emotion is found throughout scripture. Time and time again, the Bible asserts that our minds are the key. But you may ask, don't feelings and emotions greatly influence how we think? Absolutely they do. And therein lies the problem. God is obviously not against emotions, revealing in scripture his own deep emotions and feelings. Furthermore, he's imbued us, his treasured and loved creations, with gobs of both. Emotions can be wonderful and transcendent, an indispensable and indelible part of being human. But the downside to our feelings and emotions is that they are often fleeting and fickle. They can also easily deceive, mislead, and distort. Here's a simple case and point from real life. If we have any poker players in the house this morning, do we? Any poker players? Okay. It's probably not, I was hoping to get a little bit more, better response. Have to move to Vegas. But if you do play, well, if we have any poker players in the house, you're probably familiar with the term tilt. If you do play and are not familiar with the term, then my guess is you probably lose a lot. Always leaving the table a bit mystified as to why you have such bad luck. Tilt is when emotion knocks a player off balance, disrupting and distorting his objectivity and ability to discern what's really happening. Tilt most commonly occurs when a player suffers, is unlucky due to a bad beat, a hand he should by rights have won but didn't, as it can spiral into frustration and subsequent decision-making infected by emotion. But tilt can also happen to a player on a winning streak, where strong positive emotions lead to equally poor and distorted decision-making. In both instances, emotional reasoning, patterns of thinking unduly influenced by how we are feeling at the moment, leads to bad outcomes. But unless you're trying to make a living playing poker, that example might not strike much fear in you. But I think it should. Feelings are always compelling, but they are wholly subjective and not always reliable. For example, I might be thinking I'm absolutely killing it up here this morning, really giving Nate a run for his money. But just because I feel that way doesn't make it so, does it? We live in an age of emotional reasoning. Way, way too much importance is placed on how we feel, elevating our feelings to such a degree that they can overwhelm the facts and distort reality. It's not been good for our mental health. It's not been good for our public discourse. It's not been good for our social cohesion. And it just so happens it's not good for our faith either. The powerful and often pernicious ability of our emotions to distort reality and overwhelm our thinking, to convince us something is true that is not, or to convince us something is not true that really is, presents a clear and present danger to the vitality of our faith. Imagine being in a story in which you think you know what's going on. All your senses are in touch with that story. Yet, in fact, there is a much bigger story and a different reality at work. Guess what? We're all in that bigger story. And the challenge is that our feelings and emotions aren't going to be of much help as they often point us the wrong way. As the writer and pastor Eugene Peterson most famously known for his popular paraphrase of the Bible called the message states, my feelings are important for many things but they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors. In other words, it's not so much the feelings we have about God, but the facts we know about God, what we are convinced of, that need to be right. Whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, there is a raging battle going on for our minds, and the stakes couldn't be higher. The key to victory, in a nutshell, is to think right about the things that matter. Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Romans, do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing, and perfect will. This task of renewing our minds is made even more difficult because influenced by both our own sin as well as the fallen world in which we live, we all begin our journeys of faith with a constricted and impoverished view of what's possible, of what God wants and has in store for us. And this is Paul's overriding message in Ephesians, to convince us of the things that are actually and eternally true. Paul knows that we all need a radically new orientation in our thinking. Because only when we change the way we think do we change the way we live. And in Ephesians, Paul starts right up front. In the opening verse, offering a view of a reality that immediately confronts and calls into question my own. Addressing his readers as saints or holy ones. Those set apart by God. Paul is directly contradicting my feelings about myself. For I don't very often feel saint-like or holy or set apart. That's certainly not how I would describe myself. Yet Paul is asserting that it's true. I have been set apart by God for his purposes. That is who I am in Christ Jesus. In essence, Paul is conducting a master class in cognitive behavior therapy. Just like in modern CBT, Paul goes about combating our incorrect, distorted, and emotional thinking about ourselves, our world, and our faith by laying out the facts and the truth. And as in cognitive behavior therapy, the goal is that the process becomes a virtuous cycle of sorts, slowly but surely changing the way we understand and interpret things, which causes a change in how we respond emotionally, which in turn causes our thinking to change a little further. And so begins Paul's full frontal assault on our small and constrained views of ourselves and our world that constitute reality as we know it. Like rapid, sharp staccato bursts of machine gun fire, Paul rattles off a whole slew of facts that we are in fact part of a massively bigger and grander story, one that began long ago and will continue for all eternity, that we were chosen by God before the creation of the world, an act rooted in the eternal purposes of God, to have a people, holy and blameless, set apart for himself, something only made possible through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and that now unites all believers as one, that although once dead, we are now alive, despite rightfully deserving the judgment of a just God, someone else has borne our guilt and suffered in our stead, And by and through that extravagant act of love, we have been declared not guilty. Once consumed, controlled, enslaved by our own sinful natures, the ways of this world, we've been set free and made new through faith in Jesus Christ. And that even now, all of God's spiritual blessings in Christ are available, active, and evident in believers' lives. These are the things Paul thinks we should know. This is who we truly are. We can't intuit them. We can't feel our way towards them. Our feelings and emotions offer little help in arriving at these transcendent and transformational truths. Only by repeatedly reflecting on these things, allowing them to seep into us, to question and challenge our existing patterns of thinking and emotional reasoning, will we ever be able to renew our minds. Paul is asking, he's cajoling, commanding, encouraging us to put on a completely new lens, a lens designed to color everything that we think about and all of our thinking. We are indeed part of a bigger and grander story. And as Paul writes in chapter 1, verse 10, this story will culminate when the times will have reached their fulfillment to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. So, though the world may often seem chaotic, mystifying, and out of control, a time is coming and is advancing already when all will make sense under the lordship of Christ. In the meantime, believers in Jesus Christ have been given the gift of God's Holy Spirit as the first installment and guarantee of our salvation, a magnificent promise and blessing. However, this has led to a tendency for Christians to sometimes describe their conversion process as inviting Christ into their hearts, as if salvation entailed a mini-Jesus or a little bit of Jesus being in us. While that, in a sense, is true, it can lead to a misconception that downplays the extent to which all believers are united together in Christ and whose identities are found together in Christ. Far more common in Paul's writings and conceptually more powerful and accurate is the idea that believers are part of a larger reality of God. We are now in Christ, not the other way around. In fact, Ephesians describes two separate and completely distinct realms, that of Christ and that of the world, which are polar opposites diametrically opposed to utterly incompatible spheres of influence. To be in Christ means we are moving from one sphere of influence to another, from the realm of the world to the realm of is in them due to the former way of life to put off the old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires to be made new in the attitude of your minds and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Putting off the old self and putting on the new is the process which happens as we move from the world's sphere of influence to that of Christ, a migration to a new identity that will define us for all eternity. However, again, we're not going to move very far unless this increasingly becomes how we view and understand ourselves and our reality. Paul insists that we must engage our minds rather than our emotions. Again, it is only when we change the way we think that we change the way we live. That's when transformation happens. Now, personally, I've often observed in my own life that if I really believe what I said I believed, my life would look a lot different. The great majority of the time, I don't feel like I'm a new creation or that I put off my old self. Far from it. On the contrary, I still struggle with the things that I've struggled with all my life. This has been convicting and has made me feel like a giant hypocrite at times. However, if my mind, what I think and what I believe, is decisive in determining how I act, then all this disconnect really means is that I obviously have a long ways to go in changing my thinking and renewing my mind. I'm still very much a work in progress. Fortunately for me, and for all of us, one of the most consequential and vastly underappreciated blessings of having been given God's Holy Spirit is that the Spirit helps us to make this transition by helping us to better grasp these truths, by purging our minds of those influences which distort, deceive, and mislead. In other words, by helping us to renew our minds. God's spirit in us seeks to shape us by reminding and teaching us who we are now in Christ. Only when we more fully know and believe can we authentically move and change. But we need to do our part. We have a role to play. Again, just as in cognitive behavior therapy, we need to deliberately, intentionally expose our minds to the truths of God and ourselves. If we were to have any chance of changing our thinking. It's simply not going to happen otherwise. And this is why worship, prayer, study, community are so vital. Christians, including myself, often act like these activities are certainly good things to do, but essentially voluntary ones, more or less. That we have times and seasons in our lives when they can have less prominence, be less of a priority, perhaps because we're so busy. And other seasons when we can allocate more time to them and really get our spiritual mojo back. The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians does not share that view. Being a believer, being saved, to use a nice evangelical expression, being a follower of Christ, having our identity found in Christ, are all descriptions of the process of moving from one sphere of influence, the world, to a completely new sphere of influence in corresponding reality, Christ. that requires a radically new orientation in our thinking because only when we change the way we think do we change the way we live. And we can't depend on our feelings, emotions, and intuition to convince us of these things, for they often tell us something very different, which is why we're going to close by listening to Aaron sing a song from about a dozen years ago called Remind Me Who I Am. I personally find it so, so compelling because it captures my desperate need to be constantly reminded of the truth of who I am and who God is. I'd like to read a few of the lyrics. When I lose my way and I forget my name, remind me who I am. In the mirror all I see is who I don't want to be. Remind me who I am. In the loneliest places when I can't remember what grace is, tell me once again who I am to you, who I am to you. Tell me, lest I forget, who I am to you, that I belong to you. When my heart is like a stone and I'm running far from home, remind me who I am. When I can't receive your love, afraid I'll never be enough, remind me who I am. Tell me, once again, who I am to you, who I am to you. Tell me, lest I forget who I am to you, that I belong to you. Worship is how we are reminded. Spending time in scripture is how we are reminded. Getting down on our knees in prayer is how we are reminded. Being in community is how we are reminded. These ancient and timeless disciplines remain profoundly modern for when we worship together on Sunday mornings, when we open our Bibles, when we bow our heads, when we sit quietly alone in God's presence, when we spend time with others who share the same Savior and the same hope, we are working on and renewing our minds, implicitly acknowledging that we are part of a much grander story.