Last Sunday we walked through the beginning of Ephesians and we talked about how God's glorious grace has adopted us as sons and daughters before the foundation of the world.

And I just want to put this on the front end of this sermon because a lot of you were really encouraged last Sunday.

But for a lot of you, as I got to see your faces for the first time in so long from up here, I've been preaching to a camera. I have no idea how people are reacting to what I'm saying. But last week, I saw the reaction. And the reaction a lot of the time was people whose worldview and former view of God was getting disrupted slash blown up in a moment. And it was like, I was preaching and I'm watching him going, no, no, I've

never heard that before. No, I don't know what to do with what you're telling me. And it isn't that

what I was preaching was bad. It's just that what I was preaching from the Word of God runs

contrary to a lot of our assumptions. And something that I was encouraged to do as a college student is

something I want to encourage everybody to do at some point. I want you to take account of how many assumptions and biases you carry to opening the Word of God. Because every time we open the Word of God, we have a tendency of carrying everything we've ever heard about God and everything we've ever assumed about God. And so when I was in college, I started coming into contact with things in the scriptures

that I've never really noticed before. And I was like, I don't know what to do with that because that kind of runs contrary to who I thought God was or what I thought God was like and what I assumed the scripture said. And I had a mentor speak into me. He said, what you need to try to do is you need to try to read the New Testament of the Bible and delete everything you've ever heard about God.

And I was like, well, some of the things I heard was good. And I've been in church my whole life. I've been in Sunday school. How do I do that? And it isn't that everything I'd ever heard was bad. It's just that I never really realized how many things I was holding God to in my own mind. and I wasn't giving him permission to just be who

he is in the Bible. In 2020, let me just tell you this. It's really contrary to what culture says.

You do not have the right to tell God who to be. God has the right through the scriptures

to reveal who he is. Because at the end of the day, if he's God and you were created by him,

this is going to shatter some of your minds. He has permission to be whomever he wants. And so I think

a lot of us who grew up in the Bible Belt, especially in the American church, what we've done

over time is we've kind of constructed a God in our own image who we like to worship,

who we like to believe in. And he does things according to what we assumed he was going to do.

Guys, that's called idolatry. Reading the Bible is when you go, God, you know what, you're God.

And you have permission to be different than I am. Because guess what? If God was not totally

different than the way you think, you would have never because guess what if God was not totally different

than the way you think you would have never been saved if God did not run totally contrary to so many

of our assumptions he is not the God of glorious grace that we read about last week and so I just wanted

to get in front of you and humbly go as you open the scriptures allow God to speak to you about who

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