Hey, if you have a Bible, Ephesians chapter four is where we're going to be. I want to start with

this question. If you knew there was something in your life that was harming you or hurting the

people that you loved, wouldn't you want to know? I was on the phone with a friend this week,

and he just came to my mind, and I hadn't seen him in a while, so I just checked in. He said, how are you doing? He said, sorry, I can hardly hear you. I'm in a moving truck. So what are you in a moving truck for? He said, you know how my kids have been so sick lately? He said, we found out there was black mold all over the home that we were living in. And it explained the sickness. It was,

it was harming us. And so the moment I found out, he said, I got out. We got out. He said,

they offered us to stay there and live there while they were working on it, ripping everything

out. He said, no, thank you, right? So here's in a moving truck. Why? Because he found out what he didn't know. There was something harming him, something

harming the people that he loves. Welcome to killing you softly. The seven, uh, different things

we're going to discover today are all things that God's going to open our eyes

through His Word, through His Spirit, to see in our lives, harming us that we don't even realize

like black mold are there. The list that we're going to be using as a syllabus first emerged

only a few hundred years after Jesus' ascension to heaven in the deserts outside of Egypt,

where just after Christianity was legalized and normalized in the Roman Empire,

there began to be a growing sense of, for many people, of dissatisfaction with what that was doing to the church.

While the church was persecuted,

it remained somewhat purified. But the moment it became normalized and kind of everybody was

sort of a nominal Christian, they began to realize, man, so many people are impure with their

motives now. So many people are, you know, naming the name of Christ because there's something to be gained from. There's power now. There's, there's money now. So there was a group of people who thought, you know what, let's just get out of town. Let's just move into the desert. We'll sort of form these monasteries so we can really seek Christ. And here's the crazy thing they discovered. They got out of the sinful city and found out they brought sin with them inside of themselves. They, they smuggled it

into their perfect communities, their little heaven on earth. And so it was in the midst of these

monasteries that they began to realize, dang it, what we thought we would do was escape defilement

actually turned up right here in our midst.

And so they began to take note. They began to make lists. And what emerged out of that period

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