Family Life Baptist Church Sermon Audio

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.

The marital relationship is not intended by God to be a relationship that is initiated because of emotion. When making a marriage decision, an objective evaluation of Biblical criteria is more important than an emotional attachment.

God did not create the man as an infant, but as one that had the maturity to consider the needs of another over his own. The sequence of operations that prepares us for marriage is to first reach chronological maturity, and then intellectual maturity, and then emotional maturity, at which point, a person is able to co-exist with another person while having the best interests of the other person at heart.

Ruth chose God, and God used the natural attributes that He gave Ruth to provide for Ruth and Naomi, through the protective generosity of Boaz. Although neither Ruth nor Naomi had a husband, God was still looking after them through Boaz, their kinsman-redeemer.

There is no demographic characteristic, be it race, ethnic background, or national origin, that can separate a believer from God.

Those of us that will have the opportunity to judge angels are not going to do so willy-nilly; our judgment will not be based upon our subjective conclusions, but rather, on how well we have mastered the objective concepts given in the Word of God.

It requires a great deal of personal discipline and a close relationship with God to overcome the temptation of the free love generation. And Israel proved not to have the discipline.

The less successful that we are in keeping our marriages together, the more we role model divorce as a viable solution for the next generation, allowing the devil to dig the hooks that he has in our society in deeper.

Although God says that the husband is the head of the wife, when the husband abdicates his responsibilities, God will use the wife to get the job done. Deborah shows us that God will use whomever is willing to say, ]Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.^

The strength for which God is calling is the strength to say, ]nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.^ Regardless of our will, we ought do the will of God, because God is wiser than are we, God loves us and God has our best interests at heart.