Today we're starting a brand new series on the book of Ephesians. We're going to go through the entirety of the book of Ephesians together as a church, and it's going to take us a long time. I don't know how long. I'm terrible at planning things, but I want you to know that by the end of whatever amount of time we're going to be in Ephesians, you will understand the book of Ephesians, which is actually a really powerful book in the Bible. And if you're unfamiliar, here's what Ephesians is. It's a letter that was written by a man named Paul, who was an apostle. An apostle was someone who actually saw Jesus, right? Different than even a disciple. This would be someone who actually had an encounter with Jesus. And Paul is unique in that he was an apostle, even though he was not a disciple of Jesus when Jesus was alive on the earth. Jesus died and then he ascended to heaven after he rose again, and he appeared to Paul after that. And so Paul became an apostle, someone who had actually physically been in the presence of Jesus and taught by Jesus after Jesus had died and rose again. Very unique story. Paul happens to be the most influential Jesus follower that has ever lived. In fact, there's a movie that was made about Paul that just came out very recently. There's never been a more influential follower of Jesus than Paul. And Ephesians is a letter that Paul wrote to a church. We call it Ephesians because the earliest manuscript copy that we have of this letter was found at a church in a place called Ephesus. And so that is why it has been called the letter to the Ephesians. But here's what's really cool about it. Most of Paul's letters, we have many in the New Testament, they were letters that he wrote to a specific church addressing specific problems in that church. And so it's kind of like us hearing one half of a conversation, and we have to infer and deduce what's going on on the other side of that conversation that's making Paul say the things that he's saying. Ephesians is different. It doesn't read like that. It doesn't read like someone addressing specific issues. It actually reads like a message, like a general statement of faith. In fact, most scholars believe that Ephesians was not a letter that was written specifically to the church at Ephesus, but it's a letter that Paul wrote to all the churches. That it was widely distributed. In other words, this is Paul, the most influential person that has ever followed Jesus, someone who has shaped the way that we think about God as much as any person that's ever lived. Not named Jesus. Like, this is him writing a letter to all Christians, saying, hey, if you're a Jesus follower, this is what I want you to know. This is what I want you to understand. This is what I want you to have as far as knowledge and understanding so that you can live out this faith that you've been given. You can look at Ephesians even more than any other letter in the New Testament. You can look at Ephesians as a letter written specifically to you. Because when Paul wrote it, he had all Christians in mind. This is what Paul would want us to know, would want us to understand. And we're going to go through it in its entirety, but just to keep it fun, to keep it fresh, we're going to break Ephesians down into little sections, and we're going to have each of those sections be its own series. And we might take a break here and there, but we're going to plow through this. And the first series that we're going to do on Ephesians is going to be called Blessed. That's what we're starting today. I'll get to that here in just a second. And we're going to be covering a very specific section of Ephesians. It's Ephesians chapter 1, verses 3 through 14. Verses 1 and 2 don't matter. They don't count. No, I'm just joking. Verses 1 and 2, they're an introduction. It's Paul saying, hey, this is Paul writing to you. I hope this letter finds you well. So it's an introduction. It's awesome. But we're going to spend our time focusing on verses 3 through 14, 11 verses. And I'm going to let you guys know this in advance. These 11 verses, it's going to take us a while just to get through them. Because they are rich and they are dense. I mean, it's it's these 11 verses are good, but they are rich and they are dense. They're kind of like cheesecake, if you want to think about it that way. You know? You don't eat cheesecake fast. You don't like woof cheesecake down. You savor it, you eat it in small bites because it's incredibly rich and it's incredibly dense. I hope this metaphor makes sense. Has anyone here never eaten cheesecake? Anyone in the room that's never had cheesecake? All right? Good. I'm glad. Because honestly, save for like an allergic reaction to cheesecake. If you're someone who had eaten cheesecake and you didn't eat cheesecake anymore, not because of health reasons, but because you don't like it, I would just ask you to leave because we have to draw a line somewhere. We have to have standards, right? And to not like cheesecake is insane. Like, does anyone here not like cheesecake and you want to be brave enough to raise your hand? Come on, what is Tab? Are you serious? You don't, you said Tab, you seriously don't like cheesecake. You're nuts. You're crazy. I came prepared. Did you know that in 2016 the cheesecake factory was named America's favorite casual dining restaurant? It was? That's a real thing. You can look it up. And and you want to know why? Cheesecake. That's the answer. Like cheesecake, it is it is savory, it is sweet, it is highly adaptable. There's like a billion and a half different ways to eat cheesecake. The opposite of cheesecake would be angel food cake, which isn't even cake. Like, there's there's never gonna be a restaurant called the Angel Food Cake Factory because angel food is horrible. It's horrible. And I know I'm offending you, but we're in church. We gotta be willing to be offended sometimes, okay? Angel, look, any angel food defenders? What? No! People, oh my goodness, Lord Jesus, bless this church and help us. Like, okay. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, no, no, no, angel food cake's good because if you smother it in like strawberries and fruit syrup, it tastes good. But you could smother a sponge at your house with strawberries and it would taste, I'm promise you, it would taste the same as angel food cake. It's just a sponge that's soaking up syrup. That's all that it is. And I personally believe that angels are offended that the one food that they are named after is that, and the devil has devil's food cake, which is actually really good, that has to bother, that has to bother the angels. I'm so sorry. I'm ranting about cheesecake. Little rant. I was just trying to say that what we're about to study is like cheesecake. It's very rich, it's very dense, we're gonna take our time with it. Okay. Let's do that. Let's eat some cheesecake or angel food cake if you have bad taste. All right, Ephesians 1, 3 through 14. All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his son, and he forgave our sins. And he has showered his kindness on us along with all wisdom and understanding. God has now revealed to us his mysterious will regarding Christ, which is to fulfill his own good plan. And this is the plan. At the right time, he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ, everything in heaven and on earth. Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for he chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan. God's purpose is that we Jews who are the first to trust in Christ would bring praise and glory to God. And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth. The good news that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago. The Spirit is God's guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised, and that he has purchased us to be his own people. He did this so we would praise and glorify him. Cheesecake. It's very rich, it's very dense. Now here's the deal: that whole rant that I was doing about cheesecake, it was somewhat planned, okay? Just pulling the curtain back. I'm not trying to lie to you guys. I'm not trying to ever put on a front, okay? The reality of these 11 verses is that this is Paul going on an epic rant. Okay? This is actually not Paul carefully sitting down and like meticulously thinking out logically how he wants to lay out what following Jesus is like. This is like Paul going on this off-the-cuff, passion-filled rant, like he's been set off by something that he's incredibly passionate about, and he doesn't even so much care if it's if it's hard to follow. Like if you've ever gone on a rant before because there's something that really bothers you, or maybe it's the opposite of a rant, it's like a rave. That's something that you're so passionate about, and you just start spewing out about it and talking about it, and people around you are like, I don't get it, and you're like, but you don't, you have to understand, it's so amazing, and you're just going on and on and on. That's what Paul's doing here. He is ranting and raving. And here's how we know this. In the original Greek language that this was written in, when Paul first sat down to write it, those 11 verses are one sentence. It's a 257-word sentence. All the punctuation that's in there, all the paragraph breakup that's in your Bible, that's just there. That's been added, not to like mess with the text, that's been added so that you can read it, so that it's understandable. And you know what? Here's the thing: Paul was a very well-educated person, and grammar rules have changed a lot in the last 2,000 years. But that wasn't normal. It wasn't normal to have a 257-word-long run-on sentence. And that's what Paul's doing. He's sitting there and he's going, and he's blessed us and he adopted us in advance to be his own, and he brought us to himself through Jesus, who's given us every gift and the Holy Spirit and inheritance and grace and kindness and mercy. And he's just going on and on. He's ranting and raving because he is so in awe at what God has done for us. This is this is Paul going off. And it's awesome. And man, if you if you know anything about Paul and his life and his impact, I would really pay attention, close attention, to something that would set him off like this. Because it's far more important than cheesecake, okay? And the reality is, what he's ranting and raving about is blessing. Paul is ranting and raving about the blessings that we have been given. That's why we're gonna call this study blessed. The very first verse that we read, verse 3, right, said, All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. The New American Standard Version puts it a little bit differently. It's actually the closest to the original language. And here's what it says Blessed be the God, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. So blessed be God, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing. Paul is basically saying, Hey, blessed be God for blessing us with blessings. Like he is he is going off on a rant about blessings. And then what he's gonna do is he's gonna lay out what those blessings actually are. And that's what we're gonna do over the next several weeks. We're gonna we're gonna dig into the blessing that we've been given. We're gonna look at all these different things that Paul talks about in the verses that follow. We're gonna dissect what it means to live a blessed life, what it means to have a life that is filled with spiritual blessings. But before we get into all of that, before we start looking and breaking these blessings down, I just want us today to understand how vital and how necessary it is for us to be blessed in the first place. You may not realize this. I don't always think about it this way. But we have a deep-seated need to be blessed as people. We've actually been created with a necessity for blessing. The Greek word that Paul uses that we translate blessing is the word eulogia. It's where we get the word eulogy from, right? Which we don't connect with a good thing. And I'm gonna say this, and this is for a very small sliver of us in the room that are born at a very specific time and grew up at a specific time, like late 90s, early 2000s kids. Anyone of you in here, late 90s? It's impossible for me to hear the word eulogy and not think of Derek Zoolander in a white suit saying the word you googly. If you've ever seen the movie Zoolander, so I just I had to get that out of my system and we can move on. And the rest of you are like, what is that? Don't worry about it, just let's move on. Um so the word, you guys can take that down. The word eulogy, the word eulogy is not a word that we associate positively. I'm so I'm I've given many eulogies. It's not something as a child I grew up in thinking in my mind, you know what I'd like to do one day, I'd like to give eulogies. Like we hear eulogy and that's a bad thing, right? Because that's something we do at a funeral. But the word eulogy just means blessing. So when Paul wrote that we've been blessed, that we've been given a blessing, every single time that he uses that word in the Greek, it's some form of the word that we get eulogy from. Because a eulogy is a blessing. It's just that in our culture, for some reason, we've decided to save our greatest blessings for people until after they've passed. Which is actually really strange when you think about it. Like quick side note the people you love in your life, you should speak to them in such a way that if you were to give the eulogy at their funeral, there's nothing you're going to say that they haven't heard a thousand times. All right? Because we actually have a deep-seated need for blessing and to receive a blessing. In the Old Testament, we see blessings and curses spoken about a lot. And we might look at that and actually think it's really superstitious. Because, like in ancient cultures, they took blessings really seriously. A blessing being like a spoken blessing. If someone spoke a blessing over you, they they took that seriously. They believed that that was gonna happen. And likewise, if someone spoke a curse over you, they they spoke over you and spoke into your life, but but it wasn't positive, people would freak out because they would believe that that curse would have power. It's actually a really new concept in our world today to be able to say something and then say, I take it back. You know, I didn't mean it, I take it back. Like that doesn't work. There's no, you can't take back words. And the people in ancient cultures understood that. Their understanding of words was like how we would understand maybe a bullet or an arrow from a bow that once it's released, it's doing its thing. It has a life of its own, and there's no taking it back at all. Blessings and curses were taken so seriously in ancient cultures, and we see that in scripture. For example, in scripture, there was a cultural thing that a father would bless his oldest son, specifically bless his oldest son, and bless all of his children as well, but but gave a special blessing to the oldest son, because in those cultures the oldest son would take over for the father and be responsible for the entire household. And so if a father believed that he was close to death, he would bless his child, and that blessing was as desired by the child as the inheritance that they would be given by the father. For example, in Genesis chapter 27, we see a man named Isaac give a blessing to his son Jacob. And it's actually really beautiful. Genesis 27, 28. This is what he speaks over his son. From the dew of heaven and the richness of the earth, may God always give you abundant harvests of grain and bountiful new wine. May many nations become your servants, and may they bow down to you. May you be the master over your brothers, and may your mother's sons bow down to you. All who curse you will be cursed, and all who bless you will be blessed. It's a beautiful blessing that this man speaks over his son. The interesting thing about this blessing is it actually wasn't supposed to go to Jacob. It was supposed to go to his old brother Esau. But Jacob was a very conniving person, and he so desperately desired the blessing of his father that he tricked his father into giving him the blessing. His father Isaac was blind. And so when Esau was out, Jacob came in and pretended to be Esau. And he got his blind father to speak the blessing intended for his brother over him because he craved that blessing so much. And we should not emulate Jacob's behavior at all. But I think we should recognize the deep need that we have to be blessed, and recognize that there was something inside of Jacob that was so desperate to be blessed by his father. We need to be blessed. And the crazy thing about this story is that the very thing that Isaac spoke over Jacob came true. In fact, Esau shows back up. If you know the story, it's in Genesis 27, read it. Esau shows back up and he realizes what's happened and he freaks out, and we might think that his father would be like, well, clearly that blessing I gave Jacob is null and void because of the method with which he he received it. So now I'm going to bless you, Esau, and that will be the real blessing. That's not what happens. Isaac looks at Esau and he says, What can I do? I already blessed him. I spoke over him. I said, May your brothers serve you, and it's done. So I'm sorry, Esau, you're gonna have to get used to serving your little brother. And Esau is like dying, like he's desperate, like, Father, please bless me. And and and Isaac gives him a blessing, but it's not the same kind of blessing. It's like, all right, here's what I can think of. This is what I've got left. Blessings have this way of coming true. Blessings and curses are actually really, really powerful. Again, we might look at that in ancient cultures and be like, oh, that's mumbo jumbo, that's superstitious, but it actually lines up completely with our modern understanding of psychology. There's a psychological term, a scientific psychological term called a self-fulfilling prophecy. You've probably heard this term, you may have at least. A self-fulfilling prophecy means that we have a tendency to either live up to or live down to what is spoken over us and into us as people. And this is not this is not a religious term, this is a psychological term, and they've done all kinds of studies to show this. Interestingly enough, one study that they did was they took children who had higher IQs and told those children they weren't smart. And then they took children that had lower IQs and told those children that they were smart. And what they found was that the children who were told that they were smart tested higher than many of the children who had higher IQs but were told they weren't smart. Because their intelligence actually didn't have as much to do with what played out as what they actually believed about themselves. And what all these studies have found, what the whole self-fulfilling prophecy term has really found, is that there is an absolute, concrete, undeniable connection between our beliefs and our behavior. What you believe about yourself is directly connected to the way you will behave in life, and the way you behave in life will determine your life. We live in a time and a culture where everyone wants to blame everything that happens to them in life on some other force outside of them. And there are situations for sure where outside situations, outside forces, outside prejudices affect us and keep us from being able to experience life to the fullest. But more often than not, our lives are the direct result of our choices. Our personal behavior shapes our life as much as anything else. And our behavior is related to our beliefs, and we tend to form our beliefs based on what people have spoken into us and what people have spoken over us. It's the blessings and the curses that have been spoken into your life that have shaped the way you believe about yourself, and those beliefs shape the way you behave. So we have scientific research today that just backs up this biblical understanding of blessings and curses, that what's spoken into us matters. We need to be blessed. Before we go into this series and we start breaking down all the blessings we have today, my hope is that we would just understand and crave a blessing from God. Like we've all experienced this to some degree. We've all experienced receiving a blessing. And we've all experienced receiving a curse. We've all experienced giving a blessing, and we've all experienced giving a curse. In fact, I I cursed my wife. I didn't curse her out, okay? It's different. I cursed my wife this last weekend, uh a couple days ago, Friday, and I'll I'll explain. I'm home for the month. I'm I'm doing the messages on Sundays, but the way we kind of worked it out, knowing that we were gonna have this child when we had our child, was that I worked a lot last month to kind of get ahead, so that this month with the newborn, I could be home most days and still have messages and stuff like that somewhat fleshed out. So I'm home, Megan's got me home, and there is a honeydew list, and it is it is I'm not just there for the baby, I'm there for Megan, and there's things that she wants to get done. And so we're kind of looking at our house and things that we need to do. There's been a long list that's been building, and one of the things we want to do is take this room that we don't really use next to where our laundry is, and we want to turn it into a full-fledged laundry room. Because if you have four children, wow! Like the laundry is insane. The amount of laundry that comes out every day, it's never ending. And so I wanted to buy a wire. Just like a little retractable wire. They sell these, they're like $15. And you run the wire alongside, you know, like you put it in a wall, you you send the other side to a hook. Very simple thing to do. You stretch the wire across and you can hang clothes to dry because some of my wife's clothes are too nice to dry, I guess. I don't really have those clothes, but my wife says, Don't dry that. Don't, whatever you do, don't dry that. That needs to be hung to dry, okay? And I actually look at the labels of the clothes that she tells me to hang to dry, and the label says, You can wash, you can wash this and dry this. I'll be like, hey, honey, right here, print it on the piece of clothing that you're wearing, says tumble dry low. So can I please follow those instructions? And she'll say, No, hang it to dry. I'm like, okay. So I have a lot of clothes that need to be hung to dry. And I was like, hey, we've got this room, let's run a wire. And my wife said, You know, I got a better idea. So she went out and she bought an antique ladder. Um, and it's really cute. It used to be in a barn, you know, it's like a super old ladder made of wood and everything. And she brought it home. And she's like, I want you to hang this ladder horizontally from the ceiling, okay? Because it's super cute and stylish, as if we're gonna give tours of our laundry room. I don't know. And so she's like, hang this. From the ceiling, and then on the rungs of the ladder, we can hang, you know, the clothes to dry, and there they'll be, and it'll be like cute. And there's a lot of guys here going, Oh my goodness, what don't listen to this. Like, we don't need a ladder hung. Okay? My wife does this all the time, and she's not here today, so I can talk about her. She won't hear this. She's not gonna listen to the podcast, I promise. So, like here's here's the thing. You ever watch the show Fix Her Upper? Anyone ever seen that show? Okay? My wife is like Joanna Gaines. She's she's got great ideas, she's very, very stylish, she has great taste. And if you ever watch that show, it's a husband and wife, Chip and Joanna Gaines. Joanna Gaines is like a superstar and she loves Chiplapp. Everything is shiplapped all the time. And and her husband Chip is a he's like a goofy guy, he's funny, but he's a contractor, he knows how to do stuff. And so she'll just show up and be like, hey Chip, I found this antique window at a store, and I want it installed in this house that we're innovating, and I want it to be like over here, and he goes, Okay. And that's the show. And it's not, I mean, if if you watch that show, there's no suspense. There's never like a time that you watch a show like that and go, I wonder if they're gonna mess this house up or it's gonna turn out amazing. Oh, it turned out amazing again. Wow, so much suspense. So I'm a little bit bitter about these shows. If you can't tell, a lot of rants today. So my wife is like Joanna Gaines. The problem is I'm not chip, I don't have these skills, I don't know how to do this stuff. She just shows up with things like ladders and goes, I want to hang this ladder from the ceiling. And I'm like, okay, how do we do that? I'm not a contractor, but she just drops it off and is like, I put that in the room so you can hang it up. And I'm like, that's not a thing. No one hangs ladders from ceilings. I've never even seen that. Maybe in a restaurant, but that's like that's a different thing, you know? And so now I'm trying to research it, I'm trying to figure out how to do this. So we go to Home Depot on Friday, a place that literally sends me into a panic attack because I don't know what any of this stuff is for. Okay? When I go into Home Depot or Lowe's, I freak out because I look around and it's like I don't know what any of this is or how to use it at all. Like, except for screws. That's about all I'm I'm good with. So we go there and and she's talking about let's get some of this, and I'm just starting I'm starting to say things out loud. Like, I don't think this is gonna work. I think this is a bad idea. You know, I think we should just hang a wire. Like I can visualize that, it's super easy. This is like two hooks, and we're done. And so I just I think maybe I don't think you're taking into consideration, you know, the ceiling. Like, if I if I put the hooks in the wrong place and they don't hold, like our ceiling is gonna come down, we're gonna hang wet laundry on it. Wet laundry is actually heavy, it's water. We could also just tumble dry your clothes, but whatever. Like, you know, let's this isn't gonna work. And I'm I'm literally just starting to speak this out the whole time we're at Home Depot. It's really bothering Megan. And then we get home, and uh, you know, it doesn't go well, the whole project at first, and it's gonna get done eventually, but initially we ran into some problems. And so as soon as we hit like a roadblock at home, Megan all of a sudden shifts. And she goes, You know, I don't think this is gonna work. This is a stupid idea. It was just we'll hang a wire or whatever, but I could tell it was really bothering her, and I could tell she was extremely discouraged. And what I realized after a minute, because I'm like, man, it is not like Megan to throw in the towel. If you know my wife, a quitter she is not, okay? And I'm like, what is going on? And I realized everything coming out of her mouth right now is what I was saying at Home Depot. And so, in my frustration, I was speaking a curse. Like, literally, not to make it an exaggerated thing, but I was I was speaking a curse over my wife. She was, she had a plan, she had a goal, she had something she wanted to do that she would enjoy. And the whole time I'm sitting there going, This isn't gonna work. You haven't thought this through. This isn't a good idea. And then the second she runs into a problem, she starts to repeat that because that's what we do. The problem is we just forget some of the things that have been spoken over us in the past. You will find yourself saying to yourself the things that have been spoken over you and into you. And if those have been blessings, then awesome. But if those have been curses, then look out. See, we need to be blessed. Jesus, by the way, was blessed. If you read the gospels, Jesus has tremendous confidence. And you might you might think for a second, well, of course he has tremendous confidence. He's Jesus. If I was Jesus, I'd be confident too. But one of the things you learn from Jesus, if you read him at all, if you know what he teaches, is that nothing he did came from his own strength. He didn't perform miracles out of his own strength, he relied on the Holy Spirit, just like we have to rely on the Holy Spirit. And the wisdom that he taught with, he did not get himself. It came from his father. Jesus always gave credit to the Father, always, for what he did. And the confidence that Jesus had in himself, it didn't just originate from Jesus. It wasn't like he was just a naturally self-confident person. So he could endure all the things that were said about him. Because Jesus, you want to talk about being cursed? If you can think of anything that could be said about you that would discourage you, that would discredit you, Jesus heard it. And he continues to today. The Pharisees, the religious leaders, for example, they once told Jesus that he was demon-possessed. Have you ever been told that you're possessed by Satan? Anyone in the room? You're like, someone's told you that you're possessed. A few people raised their hand. I'm sorry. Are you? No? Okay, good. All right. But like Jesus was told after performing a miracle to heal someone, you get your power from Satan. You are possessed by Satan himself. That is where your power comes from. And Jesus didn't freak out. He didn't like even really defend himself strongly. He just kind of let it roll off, and you wonder why. Like, how could he hear that and just be like, no, that's not true? And see, the answer is really simple. He was blessed by his father and he received it and he believed it. In Matthew chapter 3, Jesus gets baptized. Verse 16 says, After his baptism, as Jesus came up out of the water, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and setting on him. And a voice from heaven said, This is my dearly loved Son who brings me great joy. So see what happened is Jesus received the blessing of his father. And he believed it. And so whenever whenever someone would come to Jesus and say something like, Hey, you're possessed by Satan, he would just go, No, I'm not. I am the dearly loved Son of God. And he is proud of me. And he brings, I bring joy to him. When someone would say to Jesus that you're just a prophet, you're not God's son, he would be like, No, I am. He told me so. I am the Son of God. I bring him great joy. Jesus was blessed by his father. Literally, the father spoke over the son. And he believed it. And he received it. And he deposited that into himself. And then he lived out of that blessing. And he lived a life of power. And he lived a life of compassion. And it all came from that blessing that he was given. See, we have the ability, people, to live out of the blessing that we've been given by God. We have the ability to live out of the blessing that we've been given. We've been blessed. If you're here today, you've been blessed. And look, I know you've probably been cursed. In fact, I know that there have been people in your life who should have been the ones blessing you. Many of us here have parents that did not bless us the way that they should have. And maybe we've gone our whole lives and we've still never received that blessing from our Father on earth that we should have been given, or that blessing from our mother. We've had curses spoken over us by the people who should have spoken blessings over us. And I'm telling you that no matter what your experience is, you've been blessed. Because God the Father has blessed you, and you have the opportunity to live out of the blessing that you've been given if you'll receive it and believe it. But you have to do that. You can't live out of something if you haven't received it. If you were given an inheritance, for example, someone you loved passed away and they left you with some of money. You would have to deposit that inheritance into your account before you could live out of it. Like they may have given it to you. You get a check in the mail, and there it is. But if you don't actually deposit that into your account, you can't live from it. And I'm just saying that because in this room, I know there are some of us that haven't given our lives to Jesus, and man, I hope that changes today. I hope that you start living out of the blessing you've been given today, because it all comes through Jesus. You can't get it without Him. But what I see happen so often, what I experience so often in my own life is that Jesus' followers don't deposit the blessing that He's won for us into our lives. It's like we're holding on to the check, but we don't deposit it, so we can't live out of it. And so Jesus' followers live just as stressed out and just as depressed and just as anxious and just as fearful and just as worried as people who don't have Jesus. Which is nuts. It's crazy to be a Jesus follower and to discernibly have no difference in your attitude, in your heart, your spirit. But that happens when we don't deposit the blessing that God's given us into our lives. We can't live out of it if we don't deposit it. So today we need to deposit it. Before we start breaking the blessings down, that's gonna happen in the weeks to come. Today we need to receive the blessing we've been given. We need to let God speak into our lives. We've got to let Him speak into us. We've got to understand our need for blessing in the first place and receive it and deposit it and walk out of these doors and start living out of it. And so here's what I want to do as we wrap up. And worship team, will you guys please, please come out? And uh worship team is gonna start playing. And we're gonna go from this right into worship. Finish up on the the last song. One of the things that is really easy for us to do when it comes to scripture is to to wow, I just did that to my hair and like stuff came out. I saw like duh, you know, maybe you couldn't see it. Could you see it? Well, then I'm really glad I took the time to talk about it. Um but I saw it, it's real. Gotta start buying better gel. Um when we read scripture, so often we we read it as if it's not to us. Right? We read it and and we read it detached, and we don't actually see it as God speaking it over us, but He is. That's why I'm so excited that we're gonna be going through all of Ephesians, because guys, God is talking to you. Like when you read the Bible, God is talking to you. But sometimes that's hard for us to connect with. And so what I want to do is I want to pray. And then I want us to read this blessing, this rant that Paul goes on. I want to read it again, but I want to read it personally, and I want us to receive it personally. I want you to ask the Holy Spirit, this is a spiritual thing. It may not seem very practical, by the way, but if we're spiritual people, then there's nothing more practical to us than spiritual experiences. And so I want you to ask the Holy Spirit to prep your heart to receive this blessing. To forget about what's going on in your life this week, to forget about what's gonna happen later today, all the things that you've got to get done, all the stuff that's happening in your life, forget that for just a second. And we're gonna ask the Holy Spirit to make us receptive to this blessing. I'm gonna pray. We're gonna get blessed, and we're gonna praise God out of the blessing that we've been given. So pray with me, please. Holy Spirit, make room in our hearts for the blessing that you have for us. Jesus, thank you for for winning our right to be blessed by the Father. That this is not a blessing that we have to earn, because we could never earn it. But it's a gift that we've been given, Lord. Father, I pray over every single person in this room right now that you would replace the curses that have been spoken over them in this life with the blessing that comes from you. That your blessing would displace every word of discouragement that they've ever heard, every time they've been told that they can't, that they won't, that they'll never, that you would replace those beliefs with the truth. That we are children blessed by our Father. Lord, make us people who live out of the blessing that you've given us. But Lord, right now, in this moment, I pray that you make us ready to deposit your blessing into our lives. I pray this in your name, Jesus, amen. All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed me with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because I am united with Christ. Even before He made the world, God loved me and chose me in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. I pray that you receive that. Don't view this as words that were written to a group of people 2,000 years ago. This is God talking to you right now. This is your heart reflecting on what he's given you right now. Even before he made the world, God loved me and he chose me to be in Christ, to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt me into his own family by bringing me to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. So I praise God for the glorious grace he's poured out on me, who belongs to his dear son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased my freedom with the blood of his son and forgave my sins. He has showered his kindness on me, along with all wisdom and understanding. God has now revealed to me his mysterious will regarding Christ, which is to fulfill his own good plan. And this is the plan at the right time, he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ, everything in heaven and on earth. Furthermore, because I am united with Christ, I have received an inheritance from God, for he chose me in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan. God's purpose was that the Jews who were the first to trust in Christ would bring praise and glory to God. And now Gentiles have also heard the truth. The good news is that God saves us. And when I believed in Christ, he identified me as his own by giving me the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago. The Spirit is God's guarantee that he will give me the inheritance he promised, and that he has purchased me to be his own. He did this so I would praise and glorify him. You've been blessed this morning. So my prayer is that you would receive that, and that you would let those words shape what you believe about yourself, and that you would begin to live out of that and behave based on those beliefs. And ended by saying that all of this, all of the blessing that we've been given, was so that we, so that you and I would praise and glorify God. And so that's what we're gonna do right now. We're gonna praise and glorify the God who's spoken a blessing over us. And so if you'd stand with me, let's praise him. Let's worship him. Not out of a sense of religious duty, because we don't have that, but out of the understanding that he is our Father and He has blessed us more than we can ever understand. I'm so excited, guys, about exploring these blessings together over the next few weeks. But right now, let's just bless the God who's blessed us. All right? Love y'all.