Family Life Baptist Church Sermon Audio

Peter knew, for a fact, that the fear of death that had caused him to deny Jesus was baseless. The resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ taught Peter that people actually do not die; rather, they simply go somewhere else to live.

We must learn to accept rebuke calmly, consider the objective content of the rebuke, be slow to take offense, but always be ready for repentance and reconciliation.

We ought not let childhood things negatively influence our behavior. It is not ours to look back at the slights we feel from our history, but to move on to our destiny.

When we decide that we are ]good Christians^, we have the tendency to develop either disdain or anger for those that are not, even as Moses showed his disdain for his fellow Israelites by calling them ]rebels^. We have to be vigilant to be neither disdainful of nor angry with one another in order to overcome evil with good.

Rationality and logic, wisdom and knowledge are wonderful things to have, but you can have all of those things and still come to naught. But the attribute that is necessary to make rational thought profitable is love.

It does not matter that which you have done to displease the Lord, because there is no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus. There is only the admonition to start following Jesus' commandment today. And Jesus' commandment is to love one another.

It has taken me 60 years, but I have finally figured it out. If you want to be exalted in heaven, love someone sacrificially here. And the best place to start is at home, with your husband or wife.

We that plan to go into the Kingdom of Heaven need to remain vigilantly on watch for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ at all times, as He is coming at an hour that we do not expect.

If we believe in Jesus Christ, meaning, if we believe that Jesus Christ actually existed, that Jesus Christ is a Wonderful Counselor and that we should do as Jesus Christ instructs us, that Jesus Christ was sent by God, and that Jesus Christ is actually God in the flesh, our primary act of belief in Him is fulfilling His commandment to love one another.

God has ordained that a person's primary relationship is supposed to be between themselves and their own spouse, not with a mother or with a child. A child is supposed to bond to their own spouse and create their own family, hopefully, without interference from their mother.

The Church was born out of death. Jesus Christ died on the Cross. If we learn nothing else from our belief in Jesus Christ, we should learn that we are going to live forever.

The Bible teaches that that there are two aspects to faithfulness. One can be unfaithful to a spouse by having sex with someone other than the spouse, or one can be unfaithful to a spouse by depriving them without consent for a time.

A woman appealing to a man is the design of male/female relationships. Didn't you have to appeal to your husband to get him interested in you in the first place? Then, when you became girlfriend and boyfriend, didn't you have to be appealing to him to convince him to give you that ring?

God does not command us to feel an emotion. God commands us to act; to give ourselves to one another sacrificially, even as He gave His Son to us sacrificially. The emotion that we colloquially call love is our reward for giving ourselves.

Jesus Christ has paid our penalty, so we don't have to continue to find someone to blame for our circumstances and we don't have to continue to justify that which we do by making it someone else's fault.

Jesus Christ did not come to condemn us, but He did come to admonish us stop listening to the foolishness of the devil and disobeying the instructions of God.

Every time we decide to ]do our own thing^ rather than following God's instructions, we ultimately learn, by our own experience, that God's instructions are correct and our ]thing^ is wrong.

God commands that we live, not by the excitement of sexual or emotional attraction, but by the stable principle of commitment.

Jesus saved the day at a wedding at the behest of the mother whom He loved, because Jesus' ministry was not about ceremonial law or sacrifices, but about love.

When we find that our plans are in conflict with the plans of God, we ought make the conscious choice to follow God, as Mary did.

The gentle husband endeavors to respond to his wife in a way that will transmit, not only the intellectual concept that he is trying to get across, but also his affection and concern for his wife. God tells husbands that it is more effective for a man to be gentle, loving and right, rather than to just be right.

We thank those virtuous wives that have submitted to and seduced us to manipulate and mold us into better husbands, and have used their physical bodies and emotional resources to raise strong boys and virtuous girls into adulthood

The relationship between men and women is a microcosm of the relationship between man and God. It is impossible to be both promiscuous and Godly, because God does not endorse the promiscuity of either men or women.

Our salvation is based upon our being mature enough to acknowledge that we are wrong when we are, because it is only by acknowledging our sins that we can turn from sin and repent.

Our only claim to Christianity and to eternal life is that we are covered, not by our righteousness or our good works, but by the Blood of Jesus Christ, shed on the Cross of Calvary that our sins might be forgiven.

Following our own plan, as the idolaters did, will lead us into sin and death, but following the plan of God will lead us into eternal life, eternal maturity and eternal leadership.

God's commandment's provide us with principles by which we should act, overriding our desires. We have an obligation to not fulfill our own wants or needs, if to do so violates the principles that God has given us.

We ought not worry about the way that our obedience to God makes us look to others, nor ought we feel embarrassed when exercising our with faith in God, because our obedience, not our pride, matters to God.

The purpose of Biblical love is to facilitate salvation, that men should not perish but have everlasting life. Since none of the attributes of Biblical love are emotions, it is possible to show love to someone for whom you feel no emotion whatsoever, or even someone for whom you feel negative emotion. Love requires us to perform loving actions because of God's command to do so.

If we fail to recognize that the only reason that we hold a place in God's Kingdom is because our sins have been forgiven, we will arrogantly think that we are better than we are and feel conceitedly justified in not forgiving others and thus displaying the love that Jesus commands.

Submission and love is the crux of Christianity, and only as we show that love to one another in our most intimate relationships can others see our Christian testimony. If we show our Christian ]love^ only to those with whom our relationship is peripheral, we have not really passed the test, because the real test is our ability to sacrifice ourselves for one another, as Jesus sacrificed Himself for us.

The Lord has given women a way to control men; it's just not by arguing. Husbands have authority, while wives have influence. Men are, by design, emotionally dependent on their wives, and if wives use the tool that they are given to positively control their husband's emotions rather than trying to use the negative tool of argument, wives will, according to the Scripture, be successful in getting that which they desire from even those men that do not obey the Word of God.

The devil is hostile to husband and wife becoming one. Since marriage is the basic building block of God's program, when we allow Satan to attack our marriages, we are letting him attack God's program at its' very root.

From a spiritual perspective, one of the most important choices that anyone can make, after accepting Jesus Christ Savior, is that of a Christian spouse. Marriage is the most important and most intimate relationship that we can have, because it is the relationship, above all others, in which we can practice Jesus' command to love.

A man and his wife are co-heirs of grace, because once we receive the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, we cannot hold it in a vacuum. And marriage is the laboratory in which the Lord Jesus Christ commands us to display this love.

We can only pass God's test by implementing wisdom in our lives, disciplining our desires to listen to the rebukes of life, fear God, and keep His commandments. We have to modify our propensity to act on our desires and rather comply with God's commands. When we do so, we become wise.

The Holy Spirit is our Helper. But He does not make our decisions for us. Our conduct is still our own decision. With the help of the Holy Spirit, we have to deny the call of our members, of our flesh, and even of those that would tempt us, and decide to do that which is right rather than wrong.

We are preparing for another life in heaven after this life on earth, and that our dominion will not end on Planet Earth, but will carry on to our eternal life if we conform ourselves to the Plan of the Lord Jesus Christ and use our earthly experiences to learn the principles that the Lord teaches us in His Word. But if we don't learn to love here, we can forget about dominion over there.

Jesus Christ rose from the dead, physically, on that first Easter Sunday morning, to let us know, through the testimony of the disciples and the ministry of the Holy Spirit, that we are preparing for another life in heaven after this life on earth. Our dominion will not end on earth if we conform ourselves to the Plan of the Lord Jesus Christ and use our earthly experiences to learn the principles that the Lord teaches us in His Word.

The Biblical design of gender is, that before sexual activity begins, a man will make a volitional decision to marry a woman and propose marriage to her, followed by the acceptance of the man's proposal of marriage by the woman.

Neither education, nor riches, nor fame will equip us for heaven, but we will only be equipped for heaven if we have the ability to act lovingly, especially in our primary human relationship, which is, marriage.

God wants our relationship with Him to be intact whether or not we keep the letter of His law. As a matter of fact, God recognizes our sinfulness and has made provision for our sins, even before we commit them.

We must continually preach repentance, hear about repentance and actually repent because that it is so easy for us to allow our sins to beset us, so easy for us to become defensive about the evil that we may do, and so easy to decide us to call wrong right.

Choose to marry a mature person with whom you share a value system, and the two of you should not have ]conflict^ with one another. The idea of marriage is not to learn to fight well; the idea is to choose someone with whom a fight will be unnecessary.

If anyone in your life is more emotionally important to you than your spouse, the two of you are not "one". Two people can marry, share a domicile and even share a bed, but if someone is emotionally closer to one of them than their spouse, it is intuitively obvious that the two cannot be ]one^.

Not only is a gentle and quiet spirit precious in the sight of God, but a gentle and quiet spirit makes a husband love his wife. In the wedding vows, the vow to love, honor and cherish comes before the vow of fidelity. The avoidance of arguing and strife is that which love, honoring and cherishing is all about.

A woman building up her house has nothing to do with brick and mortar; it has to do with a woman giving herself to cement the relationship between herself and her husband. Michal, the King's daughter, served her husband David instead of King Saul. Jesus Christ, the King's Son, also took on the demeanor of a servant.

Sex and childbearing outside of wedlock is the wicked way. Those that reject this teaching lack humility because think that they know better than God. But children are a blessing to our lives when we have them within the will and plan of God.

A calm, sweet, grateful, loving person is extremely attractive. But in our society, our marriages often fall apart because that sweet person that we married decides, once the ceremony is over, that they are no longer going to be our lover, but rather our drill sergeant.

It is inappropriate to allow feelings, however romantic they may be, to motivate us to deviate from that which we know is the objective design of God for the interaction of the genders.

A man is putty in the hands of a woman if she influences him with the power of love. God has given women that which they need to help and to influence a man to become that which he should, and ultimately, to form a loving and bonded relationship with her.