Read the sermon · 32 min
Becoming your parents
Good morning, everybody. How's everybody doing this morning? Good. I love it. Well, my name is Austin Duncan. I'm the associate pastor here at Crosswalk. And I'll just mimic Josh. It's so good to be here with you today. This week we've wrapped up our series in James. And so I just get to talk about whatever I want to talk about today. So we're talking about families this morning.
And on that, I just want to start: have you ever heard just your mom or your dad come out of your mouth? I don't mean like it sounded a little like him. I mean the exact sentence, the exact tone. Like you're standing in your kitchen and you hear yourself say the thing that your mother always said, in the voice that she always said it in. And then somewhere in the middle of that sentence, that little alarm goes off in the back of your head and you're like, "Oh no, it's happening. I've become my mother."
Maybe for you it's the way you answer your phone or the way you sigh when you're tired, the way you open the refrigerator and stare into it and you suddenly realize, "Man, that's exactly how my dad used to stand in front of the fridge." Or maybe someone's told you that you look exactly like your mom or your dad. Maybe your grandma grabs your face and says, "Oh, you've got your dad's eyes." Or someone says you laugh just like your mom. Has that ever happened to you? Well, okay. So that's what this whole sermon is about. That exact thing.
And I think that's what's funny about family resemblance. Sometimes you're just born with it. You don't pick your nose or your eyes or that one curl that won't lay flat or any of those sort of things. You get those for free. But other things you can catch just from living close to people. Sometimes it's the way you laugh or the way you stand or the words you use. Kids soak up those things from grown-ups that they love and they don't even realize that it's happening.
A gift, and an ache
And I'll tell you maybe where this gets a little tender for me. I spent the vast majority of my childhood being told that I looked like my dad, like same eyes, that sort of thing, and same way of standing in a room, all that sort of stuff. People who hadn't seen me in years would be like, "Oh yeah, you're a Duncan." No question about it. I heard that growing up all the time. And so my dad's birthday was this past Friday and he passed away on New Year's this year. So it was the first birthday without him.
And I'll be honest with you, this week I caught myself doing something or saying something, and the thought that surfaced was, "Oh man, that's him. That's his laugh coming right out of my mouth." And some of you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. You look down and you're like, "These are my mom's hands." That sort of thing where you've got your grandfather's stubborn streak and people have been telling you so your whole life. Well, I'll tell you, that's a gift. So hold on to it.
But I also know that that's not for everybody. Maybe for some of you, nobody ever told you whose eyes you have because maybe you're adopted or because the person who should have been there just wasn't. And for some of you, maybe a father figure isn't the person you want to see when you look in the mirror, because that's not a warm word for you to hear. And when you hear it, maybe you don't picture safety. You picture an empty chair or a slammed door or something worse. And if that's with you, I just want to encourage you, stay with me today. Because here's the first surprise of this morning: the passage that we're going to be in isn't about bloodlines. Not even a little bit. So nobody in this room gets to be on the outside of this.
Reading the passage
So I'll show you what I'm talking about. We're going to be in Ephesians 4 starting in verse 31. We're just going to read the whole passage that we're going to be in today and then we're going to go through and talk about it. So if you'll read this with me, starting in verse 31, it says this:
Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
So I want to ask you right out of the gate, did you catch that phrase right there in the middle? "Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children." Not as people trying to break into the family. Not as employees trying to keep their jobs. As what? As beloved children. Already loved, already in.
So the question this morning is not, "Okay, how do I get God to love me?" The question is, what starts to change in me when I finally believe that he already does? And so Paul's going to walk us through three things. He's going to walk us through what we take off. He's going to walk us through who we belong to. And he's going to walk us through what this family actually looks like when you see it up close. And I'll warn you right now, where Paul lands at the end of this is not where most of us would guess.
Where we are standing in Ephesians
So before we get into this, I want us to set this up as to where we're standing. The book of Ephesians has two halves to it. The first three chapters are almost entirely about who you already are. If you're in Christ, Paul says you are chosen, you are forgiven, you are rescued, you are adopted, you are sealed with the Spirit, you are brought near, you are seated with Christ. Three whole chapters of, "Here's what's already true about you."
And then chapter 4 turns a corner and it starts talking about, "Then okay, here's how to live." And that turn is chapter 4 verse 1, which says, "walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called." So I want you to notice the order in that. The calling comes first, the walking comes second. So you don't walk in order to earn the calling. You walk because the calling is already yours.
Then a few verses later in verse 24, Paul says you've put on a new self. He says that you're created after the likeness of God. So if you're taking notes in your Bible, I would circle that word likeness, because everything that Paul says after that, all the way through the passage that we just read, is just him spelling out what it looks like to be a brand new kind of human, remade to resemble the God who made you.
So when we get to "be imitators of God," that is not some brand new demand that is dropped on us out of nowhere, added like this vacuum where all of a sudden, boom, be an imitator of God. No, it's the summary of the entire thing that Paul has been saying up until this point. The family resemblance was Paul's idea long before it was ever a sermon title that I slapped on a screen in a sick '90s font for y'all to see this morning. He's been building toward it the entire letter.
What has to come off
So let's look back again at verse 31. Before Paul tells us a single thing to do, he tells us some things to get rid of. The first thing he says is, "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice."
So here's a picture. Imagine a kid who's been outside all afternoon. Mud on their knees, grass stains. If it was me, probably something sticky on their sleeve, this mysterious stickiness that no one knows, just this foreign substance no one can identify. And it's time to come and sit down at the dinner table. Maybe the lights have come on. And what does mom say at the door when you come back in? "Nope, not like that. You get to go change. Take that off first." No, that's not happening. You don't get to bring muddy clothes to the clean table.
And that's basically what Paul is saying here. He says you've already been brought into a new family, and you've got a new set of clean clothes to put on. But first, some of the old stuff has to come off.
And then I want you to look at what's on the list. It is bitterness, rage, anger, shouting, slander, and then underneath all of that, malice. And notice something. Almost every single one of these is about how we treat other people. I think it's interesting that this isn't a list of private sins that you commit alone in a room by yourself. This is a list of sins that happens at dinner tables and in marriages and in group texts and in church parking lots and in the way that we talk about somebody the second that they're no longer around. These are the sins that crack a family right down the middle.
Now, I could stop and we could start defining all of these words in the original language for you. And I'm sure that sounds just like something all of you want to do right now. So I'm not going to do that. And here's why. A list like this isn't meant to be studied one word at a time. It's meant to hit us all at once, like a smell. You walk into the picture of this and you just know: that is an angry, bitter, mean-spirited place, and I don't want to be living like this. So the point of this is to let all of this land at once.
Bitterness is the root
But if we were to slow down anywhere in this, let's slow down in the very first word, which would be bitterness. Because bitterness is the root that all the rest of this grows out of. You could think of it like a fire. If we were thinking of this like a fire, then bitterness is the ember. It's smoldering down in the heart where nobody can see it. And then anger is that first open flame that comes up. Then the tongue catches and now you've got a wildfire of shouting and slander. And at the very end of the list is that word malice, which is just cold, settled meanness. The kind that doesn't only say, "Man, you know what, you really hurt me." It says, "You hurt me, and now I want to hurt you too."
So here's what bitterness actually does. It's a heart that can only see the thing that's wrong right now. It's a heart that forgets the enormous gift that God already gave in Christ. And it forgets the future that God has also promised it. It's a heart that just sits and stares at the wound. And a wound you keep staring at and poking and feeding doesn't heal. It festers. That's what wounds do when you keep poking and prodding at them.
And I want to be careful. I want to be fair here, because it would be naive to think otherwise. I think some of us probably grew up being told that all anger is sinful. And that is not what this passage says. Just a few verses earlier in verse 26, Paul actually can say, "Be angry and do not sin." So there is such a thing as righteous anger. Anger at real evil. Anger that something precious is being damaged. That kind of anger can be holy. What Paul is targeting here though is anger that's gone sour, anger that's curdled into bitterness and then goes public as cruelty. That kind of anger. That's the stuff that has to come off.
Take it off, and keep putting on
And look closely at how Paul says it. He says, "Let all bitterness be put away." And in the Greek, the phrase for "be put away" is a sharp and decisive word. It's not "manage your bitterness." It's not "try to keep a lid on it." It's take it off and get rid of it the way that you would peel off those muddy clothes.
And the beautiful part in the next verse, when Paul lists the good stuff which we're going to get to, he says be kind, be tenderhearted. Those are written as ongoing, day after day commands. So here's the entire picture of what Paul's painting for us. He says there's a decisive moment when you take the old thing off, and then there's a whole new life that you keep putting on every single day.
And I'll be real with all of you here for a second too. I think the hardest part of getting rid of these old traits is that we have gotten so incredibly good at renaming them. It's easy to sit here and think, "Yeah, I don't want to be bitter." But maybe we don't call it bitterness. Maybe we call it just being discerning. Or we don't call it slander. We call it sharing a concern. "Please pray for them." Maybe we don't call it rage, we call it passion. Or maybe some of us have learned how to be cruel in a really spiritual sounding voice.
And here's a true thing about that old kind of lifestyle: even after you've been brought into a safe new place, the old habits don't just fall off automatically. Think about somebody who finally got out of a job where they got chewed out week after week after week, or out of a relationship that kept them braced for that next big explosion or that next huge argument. And they're safe now. They're in a new place. But for a long time, they still flinch when a voice gets loud, or they still rehearse arguments that they don't even need to have anymore. The address changed, but the instincts took longer.
I think there's a lot of us with those old family traits. But I want to encourage you, we belong to a new father now. But the bitterness and the sharp tongue can still show up at the dinner table. And Paul says with great love, but also with great firmness, that has to come off. Not managed, not renamed. Off.
What goes on: kindness, tenderheartedness, forgiveness
So how do you actually then set it down? That's the next move, and that's the heart of the entire thing. In verse 32, right after the stuff comes off, here's what goes on. He says, "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you."
And I love this, because he lists three family traits. Those are kindness, tenderheartedness, and forgiveness. And then this phrase that's doing all this heavy lifting in this whole passage: "as God in Christ forgave you."
Look at what Paul just did. He didn't say forgive people because I'm Paul and I said to. He didn't say forgive people because that's what a mature person would do and that's what you should do. He didn't say be kind because the world could really use more kindness, even though it could. He said forgive the way that you've been forgiven. Be kind because God has been kind to you. The reason for the command isn't out in front of you. The reason for the command is behind you. It already happened.
And here's a little thing that I love. That word forgiving comes from the same root word for grace in the original language. It's from the grace family of words. So you could almost translate it as, be gracious to one another the same way that God was gracious to you. Which means the cure that Paul prescribes for all that bitterness way back in verse 31 is not "try harder to be nice." The cure for bitterness is grace. Specifically, grace that you already received, now flowing back out of you. So you fight a bitter heart with a grace that you never earned.
Imitators of God
Then verse 1 of chapter 5, here's the summit of this. He says, "Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children." Imitators. In the Greek, we get "mimic" from this same word, and it means to deliberately copy, to pattern yourself after someone.
And I want you to feel how heavy and weighty this kind of command actually is. All throughout the Bible, God calls his people to reflect his own character. In Leviticus, he says, "Be holy, for I am holy." In Luke, it says, "Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful." Jesus says that. John says that we should walk the way that Jesus walked. But here in Ephesians, Paul says it as directly as it ever gets said: be imitators of God. Pattern your whole life on his. Look like your father.
And how can Paul ask for something that big? Well, because of the three words that come right after it: as beloved children. And I want you to watch the order of this, because it's everything. Paul doesn't say imitate God so that you can become his beloved children. He says imitate God because you already are his children. Beloved comes first. The resemblance comes second. You don't perform in order to get adopted. You're already adopted. And then the family resemblance grows up out of that.
And if you're a kid in this room, here's how this actually works, and you already know it, even if nobody's told you. Little kids don't study their parents like a school class project. They don't make a list, "Okay, check mark, things my dad does, I'm going to go off to my room and now practice these things." No, you just watch and listen. And then one day a four-year-old puts her hands on her hips and says something in the exact tone that her mother uses. And you watch, and you're like, "Wow, that's her. That's mom." She's imitating. She just loves her mom and lives near her and then imitates.
That's how we become like God too. Not by standing way off in the distance and writing down this list and then, "I'm going to study this and then try and do these things." We become imitators by drawing in close as children who are already loved, and then as a result of that, letting that rub off on us.
When "father" is a hard word
And now I want to stop and speak for people that this is hard for, which could be every single one of us. I've been tossing around this word father all morning like it's this easy, warm, happy word. And for some of you, it might not be that nice of a word. And so when you hear "imitate your father," something might lock up inside you, because the father that you knew might not be that safe, or not steady, or not even there.
And I want to say this gently and clearly. Paul's not asking you to take some person in your life who hurt you and put a halo on him and call that God. He's asking you to let God show you what the word father was always supposed to mean. This father doesn't abandon. This father doesn't wound the way that a sinful human father may wound. This father doesn't manipulate you or make you grovel for scraps of affection. This father forgives you in Christ and calls you beloved out loud. And then from inside that safety, it slowly starts to make you look like him. So if that word father has only ever meant pain to you, then this passage is not pouring salt in the wound. It's offering you the real thing, maybe for the first time.
The one family with no bloodline
And then here's the thing that hopefully should pull everybody back in, including those of you who maybe have never heard it that way. I want you to look at that word children back in chapter 1 verse 5 of this book of Ephesians. Paul already told us how a person gets into the family in the first place. He says God predestined us for adoption.
Not one person in the family of God was born into it. Not one. Every single Christian in this room got in the exact same way, by a father who wanted them. So if you have spent your whole life feeling like you're on the outside of a family, like you don't have the bloodline, like you don't have the pedigree, then hear this: this is the one family on earth where there's no bloodline. There is only adoption. The thing that you have wanted for your entire life, to be picked, to be wanted, to be brought in and given a name, that is not the rare exception in God's family. That is how every last one of us got here.
And adoption, I also want to say, is not the only word that the Bible uses for what God has done. He also calls it being made new, being declared right with him, being joined to him in Christ, being brought back from being enemies into friends. It's a diamond with a lot of faces, but adoption is the face that Paul is holding up to the light in this passage, because it's the one that answers that ache. And it tells you this: that your identity doesn't hang on the family you came from. It hangs on the father who chose you and who adopted you.
What forgiveness is not
And also, when Paul says forgive, I think some people have grabbed that word and maybe we've told hurting people, "You have to forgive, so you have to act like it never happened. You have to keep letting it happen." And I just want to be really clear, because Jesus is clear: forgiveness is not permission for someone to keep harming you. Forgiving a person is not the same thing as acting like it never happened, and it's not the same thing as staying somewhere dangerous.
This same Paul just a few verses up commands the church to take care of the people who are in need and being hurt. So the call to forgive is never a command to stay in a dangerous place. Forgiveness frees your heart. It does not hand you back to the person harming you.
Love with a shape
So we take the old stuff off. We belong already as children, as beloved adopted children. And from that secure place we slowly start to resemble our father. But then the next question is, how do we resemble him? What does it actually look like? Because that phrase "be loving" can be filled with almost anything. And Paul flat refuses to leave that word vague. And I love that. And that's the third move in this. And this is where it gets really surprising.
So if you'll look with me in verse 2, it says, "And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God."
So Paul says, "Walk in love." And then before we can stuff that word love with whatever we want it to mean, he grabs it and he defines it for us. How does he define that word for us? He says, "as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us." So Christian love is not just a vague warm feeling. It has a shape. It has a cost. It has a direction. It moves towards somebody else's good even whenever it costs you something to get there.
And Paul gives us the ultimate picture of it. Jesus "gave himself up for us." And that phrase "gave himself up" is really worth sitting with. It means to hand over. It means to deliver up. And it's actually the same word the Old Testament uses in Isaiah 53 for the servant of God who gets handed over for the sins of other people. So when Paul reaches for this word, he is reaching straight for the cross.
And notice Paul says Christ gave himself. So Jesus wasn't a victim who got swept up in something he couldn't escape. Nobody took his life from him. He laid it down. He laid it down out of love. He handed it over himself.
And you know, for me, it's like that feeling whenever there's a jar of cookies and there's one cookie left and it's the big one, it's the good one, and you really, really want it. And then somebody else really wants it too. Maybe it's a little brother or a cousin. Love is when you give them that big one and it cost you something, because you actually wanted it. That little thing, giving something up that you really want so somebody else can have something good, that is a tiny picture of what Jesus did. Except he didn't just give up a cookie. He gave up his whole life. That's how far love goes in this family.
A fragrant offering
And here's a detail I love about how Paul describes it. He calls Jesus's sacrifice a fragrant offering. A good smell. And where does that come from? Well, all the way back in the Old Testament, when God's people would bring an offering and they would burn it on the altar, the smoke would rise up and the Bible describes it as a pleasing aroma to God, a smell that he was glad to receive. And you can go all the way back to Noah with this, who steps off the ark and he builds an altar, and Scripture says the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma.
We have a friend, whenever we go over to her house, my wife and I. She has a business where she dog sits and walks dogs and house sits and all that sort of stuff. And we have this friend in Murfreesboro that every time we go over to her house, I don't know that I have smelled a house that smells as good as her house smells. I feel sorry for her when she comes to our house. But we walk in there and it smells so good. And the only way I can liken it to y'all is, if you go into someone's house and they're in the middle of baking cookies, it's like that. And before you even see a single thing, the smell tells you, "Man, there's something good going on in here, and you're welcome here." It's that kind of message that's being sent.
Paul says that's what the cross was to God. The self-giving love of Jesus went up like the best smell in the world, and the father received it fully and gladly on our behalf.
The resemblance is shaped like a cross
So now put the whole thing together, because here's the surprise that I promised you at the very beginning. We started with this idea of family resemblance, of looking like your father. And you might have assumed that looking like God means being powerful or impressive or having it all together. But Paul says the family resemblance is shaped like a cross.
I'll put it like this. We look most like the father when we love like the son. We look most like the father when we love like the son.
That turns the direction of everything around. The old self says, "Protect yourself, defend yourself, get even, hold the grudge, win the argument, keep the advantage, look out for number one." But the family likeness runs the other way entirely. It says, "No, give yourself away. Spend yourself for somebody else's good."
And the work of Christ is finished, and it has Jesus's name on it. We are imitating its pattern, the shape of a love that's costly, that forgets itself, that aims at somebody else's good. And one of the commentaries I was reading as I was preparing for this morning put it so beautifully. It said that this is a love that gives itself not for itself but for others. So we can't do the atonement, but we can love for others. And that's the family resemblance.
And I think the honest part in this too is that I don't know that anybody has ever looked at a comfortable, self-protected, carefully guarded life and been like, "Man, there's somebody that's sacrificing for everybody else around them."
When we see people who resemble Christ, we see somebody who forgives a wound that cost them something real. When somebody serves and doesn't need anybody to notice. When someone serves and maybe they're not filming it and putting it on YouTube for internet points. When somebody keeps showing up for a person who cannot possibly pay them back anything. When somebody moves toward the hurting instead of away from the inconvenience. That's when we look like Jesus.
And I think the whole world around us is built on getting more and protecting what's ours. And the family resemblance points in the opposite direction of that. It's not measured by what you've managed to gather up. It's measured by what we're willing to give away.
Where is the father asking you to give yourself away?
So here's the question. And in your mind, answer this in specific, not someday, not general kind of terms, this week. Where is the father asking you to give yourself away in love?
Maybe it's in your marriage. Maybe it's with your kids. Maybe it's with aging parents. Maybe it's with somebody in this church. Maybe if we're being honest, it's with that one person, that when that person enters your mind, you're like, "Man, I hope they don't ask me to do something." What would it look like to take a step towards that direction this week? What would it look like to walk in love right there, right towards that person? To take that old bitterness off and to put the cross shaped kindness on?
I think there's something really powerful about that kind of family resemblance. Somebody catches the eyes, the laugh, the way that you carry yourself, and before you even say your name, they go, "Wait, what is it about that person? I want what they have." That kind of resemblance. That is the whole hope of the church. Peter talks about it in First Peter, saying that whenever someone visits the church, they should be able to see and get the gospel message before a sermon is even preached from the pulpit.
That's the family resemblance: that the people around us, the neighbors, the co-workers, the folks maybe watching online right now, would look at how we treat each other and say, "Man, they belong to him. They've got the father's love all over them." Not because we're impressive, or because we've got it all figured out, or because we never fight, or because we never fail. Not because of any of those things, but because beloved children over time start to look like their father.
So my encouragement is, yes, take off what doesn't fit being in God's family anymore: the bitterness, the rage, shouting, slander, the cold meanness. Set it down, and put on what actually runs in the family, which is kindness, tenderheartedness, forgiveness, love.
But please don't walk out of here hearing a to-do list. That's the one way to get this completely backwards. You don't do these things to earn adoption. You're loved first, you are forgiven in Christ first, and then we resemble the father.
Prayer
So all of that being said, I would like to pray for us and then we will continue in worship. So if you'll bow your heads with me.
Dear Lord, thank you for today. Thank you that you made it so that we didn't have to earn our way into your family. Thank you that you chose us in Christ. Thank you that you planned to choose each and every one of us, if we are willing to accept Christ as our Lord and Savior, that you chose us in Christ as beloved children in your family. Thank you that you brought us home. Thank you that you called us beloved before we ever looked a thing like you.
I just ask that you would take off the old stuff off of us this week, the bitterness, the sharp words, the cold hearts, and you would grow your son's kind of love in us, the kind that just gives itself for others freely, not seeking anything in return. Lord, I just ask that you make us look like you, Father, for the sake of a world that's watching. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.
A resemblance that death cannot touch
Awesome. So now we are going to enter into a time of communion together. One of the things as I was preparing this week and I was reading through these passages that stuck out to me was how the Bible describes that fragrant offering and sacrifice to God, that it describes Jesus's sacrifice on the cross. And that's the love that saved you. That's the love that saved you and me. That saved us. That's the love that named you and me. And as believers, as we take communion and we join together at the table, that's the love that's starting to show up in you. That's the love that's starting to show up in each and every one of us.
And I told you that my dad passed away this year, and that I keep catching things about him in my life. I'm more hyper aware this week. And I'll be honest with you, I don't know if I said it in the sermon that much, but it's a strange gift. It's sweet, and it's also an ache at the same time. Because that resemblance is all I've got left on this side.
And that's how it goes with earthly fathers. The resemblance is precious, but it fades. And one day it's something that's just a memory. But the joy is that the resemblance that Paul is talking about is the one kind that death doesn't get to touch, because this father doesn't die. And this family is forever. And the likeness that he is growing in believers, that he is growing in you, the cross shaped, self-giving love, that is not the memory of something that you lost, but it's the beginning of something that never ends. And that's a wildly different perspective, and one that can hopefully fill your hearts with joy. Should fill your hearts with joy.
So again, where we land is that belonging came first. The likeness is just love that's catching. And we look most like the father again when we love like the son. So I want you to hear me whenever I say that: thank God for a son that loved us the way that Christ did, that sacrificed for us the way that Christ did, and that enabled us to even be able to be here in a room worshiping him publicly the way that we can here this morning, and to remember what he did for us, and to even be able to have the opportunity to resemble him even just a fraction of the amount of the kind of God that he is.
Prayer before communion
So with that, if you'll pray with me and then we will take the elements together.
Father, again, thank you that we did not earn our way into this family. Thank you that you brought us home. Thank you that you take the old stuff off of us, and the bitterness, and that we can put on the righteousness that you call us to.
Thank you, as weird as it feels to say, thank you that on the night that you were betrayed that Jesus, that you took the bread, and that when you broke it that you said that this is my body, that it's given for you. Thank you that it was for a body that was already given, when you said that this cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink of it. Do this in remembrance of me.
Thank you for the proof that we've been brought into the family for good. Not on a trial basis, not as long as we are able to keep up some sort of resemblance, but for good. So thank you that we get to trust in you as our savior. And thank you that it doesn't matter if we've been walking with you for 50 years or for the last 45 minutes, that we get to do this together as a family. That we get to remember you, and that we get to honor you and remember you and just resemble you a little more each and every day. So we thank you. We love you and we worship you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. You may take the elements.