Self

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Good morning. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here on this Sunday. Now, we've been in this series for five weeks now. This is our fifth week of spring cleaning, where we are trying to clear out the clutter in our lives and make more room for Jesus. In the first week, we talked about getting rid of the good things in life that can become distractions to allow the greatness of God's goodness into our lives. That was week one. In week two, we talked about sweeping out the anxiety that so easily fills us these days, and instead being granted and making room for God's patience, waiting on him, and understanding how that improves our character and grows us to be more like Jesus himself. In our third week, we looked at the chronic guilts that can linger in our lives and how we can clean that out by swimming in and bathing in the ocean of God's grace and forgiveness. Last week, we looked at how shame can become so toxic and paralyze us that we are fearful of being exposed and we get down on ourselves and focus on ourselves. Instead, we want to replace that with God's honor and glory and goodness, that he sees us and how he shines his light upon us and looks at us and is not ashamed to call us his brothers and sisters. Jesus is not ashamed of you in any way. So that was last week. This week, we're kind of summing it all up, putting it all together, seeing it's really not this little piecemeal thing and that little piecemeal thing that we need to get out of our lives. But from Ephesians chapter 4, we're going to look at how the whole self, the old self, is removed and how we put out a new self in Jesus Christ. But before we do that, let's pray. Lord God, thank you so much for your work in our lives these days. We do pray right now for our community and our nation and our world as we are all undergoing this pandemic. And as we are still facing it, we pray, Lord God, that you would truly be with those who are on the front line, those front line workers, those essential workers who so often were working behind the scenes. But now we see how integral their ministry is. We lift up to our health care professionals. We lift up to all those who serve in the hospitals. We lift up to, oh Lord, our first responders who are risking their lives for your sake right now, for the sake of others. And we pray, Lord, too, for the essential workers in all sorts of fields that are involved out in the public at this point in time. We ask, oh Lord, that you give wisdom and guidance to our leaders, both locally and nationally, so that as we take steps forward to reopening, Lord, that we do it in humility, in understanding, in compassion. Lord, you know the divisiveness that is in our nation that is plaguing us right now with a lot of rhetoric and a lot of us-them-ness going on. We pray, Lord, that at least in the church, that we are unified and we show and model that unity with a diversity of people and opinions, Lord. We still focus on your truth and your goodness, and we place you first, others second, and ourselves third, that we understand that that's what true joy is and true service is. And help us, Lord, model to our community and world how we can, even in our freedom, serve others and consider others better than ourselves, more important than just our needs right now. Lord God, we lift up to you all these needs. We lift up to you those who are really facing difficult times financially, who are unemployed, who are needing you right now. We lift up to you those who are in fear, O Lord, yet of what this pandemic might mean for them or for their family. We lift up those who need your healing presence right now. And we lift up, O Lord, our church and your Christian church, Lord, that we thrive, we flourish during this time. That you do work in us behind the scenes in whatever way you want, and that you give us the creativity, O Lord, to face this challenge, to face it with courage, with faith, with understanding, with humility, with compassion, with patience, with the full character of Jesus Christ. And bless, O Lord, this message today, that it would really sink into my heart and life and into our hearts and lives, Lord, that you'd open our ears and our heart to what you have to say to us today. All this we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. So today we're talking about putting off the old self and putting on the new self, as Paul talks about that in the book of Ephesians, chapter 4. And here we look at chapter 4, verse 17 to 24. Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impur...