It’s one thing to know information about Jesus with your head, but it’s another thing entirely to know Jesus with your heart. It’s the difference between information about Jesus and intimacy with Jesus.

Ephesians 1 tells us that when God looks at people, regardless of their ethnicity, the color of their skin, he whispers in their ears, “I wish you were my little girl. I wish you were my little boy.” It doesn’t matter whether they are black, white, yellow, or brown. God is offering a salvation that is way bigger and more important than ethnicity.

The Bible was written for us, but it wasn't written to us. Ephesians was a letter written to a particular church at a particular point in history for a particular reason. Before we jump into chapter 1 we must learn the context that this letter was written in. What we'll see is that the gospel has the power to completely alter a city.

God calls us to love Him with ALL we are. We’ll see that in Deuteronomy 6:1-9. But He doesn’t just leave us hanging. He shows us HOW to live that out. And in HOW we live that out is through the family. The beauty is we each have a family, but even bigger we have each other as the family of God. No matter what you call family, you are a part of THE family and can help each other live out HOW to love God with all we are.

We live in a broken world. The book of Malachi was written in such a world. And the people of Malachi’s day, well, they noticed. As a result, they aired some very serious complaints against God, which He answered in no uncertain terms.

When someone robs you, you never forget it, and in Malachi 3, God actually says that his people are guilty of robbing him. The word “rob” in Malachi is a rare and violent word. It literally means to “plunder of pillage.” How can human beings “pillage” God?

To break faith with someone is to fail to support them. In fact, when Jesus came to bring a new covenant, he brought a new command. He said, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Jesus didn’t ask us to love others as we would want to be loved, but as He loved us.

The beginning of Malachi will set the pace for the rest of the book. At the beginning, the first topic is God’s love for His people. If that comes into question, that affects the rest of who we are and how we respond to Him. We’ll see that He does love us, and we can see that throughout the Bible. We’ll also see how others were responding and how that affected them and their relationship to God.

When God created in Genesis we're introduced to Adam and Eve in the garden. God gives them a command to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Through their disobedience, sin enters the world. When Jesus is crucified He is nailed to a tree for the forgiveness for our disobedience. Today we live between the trees.

Without Jesus, who is the light of the world, our world would simply be a dark and dangerous place. But because His light shines in the darkness, the world is a far brighter and more colorful place. Make no mistake friends, the darker the darkness, the brighter the light.