Family Life Baptist Church Sermon Audio

Religious rituals are only useful if they lead us to recognize our shortcomings and repent. Coming to church without the proper mindset is useless.

The commitment for which Jesus calls is one of a living sacrifice. Jesus calls men to give their all to the task at hand, even unto death.

Our ability to forgive others is the key to the salvific contract, and for many of us, that is not an easy task. The ability to interact with others in the way that Jesus did is the primary attribute that we need to receive from the Holy Spirit.

It might not be wise to put a numerical limit on the number of times that you will forgive someone else, because you may find that you yourself need to be forgiven by God more times than your number allows.

Our objective as Christians is to learn to be less self-centered and more other-directed, which, if we are successful, will reduce our defensiveness, and increase our ability to admit error and become one with the body once again.

Jesus is telling us that we are participants in something that is bigger than ourselves, and as long our thinking revolves around ourselves, we cannot develop the personal characteristics required for maturity.

Disobedience - our arrogant thinking that we know better than the one that has the position of authority over us, and so rather than discussing the situation with them and getting their agreement to our proposed action, we can just ignore their instructions and do that which we want.

If we want to successfully maintain our Christian walk, we need to study the Word of God and spend time with God in prayer to become confident in His truth, and we cannot allow suggestions of doubt from the world to distract us from the truths of God.

Husbands, God has not given you a family that you may lord it over them, but that you may sacrifice yourself for them. Neither your personal comfort nor that of your spouse should be your primary concern, but rather doing the will of God by raising godly offspring.

Those that do not believe in God do not have a reason to disbelieve; they have simply made the choice to not believe in spite of the abundant evidence that God has interacted with our world, rather than because of any evidence to the contrary.

Jesus Christ tells us that although we need to believe the historical facts about His life death and resurrection, we need to do more in order to be saved than just believe the facts. We must put our own covetous desires to one side, just as we do on the job or as wives do when they obey their husbands. We must pick up the cross, just as when we do the things that the boss asks us to do or as husbands do when they love their wives and give themselves for them. We must follow the instructions and commandments of Jesus Christ.

Although Jesus came to the Jews and as a Jew, Jesus did not come for just the Jews. God sent Jesus because He so loved us that He does not want us to perish, as the result of our being judged on our own merits would be that we would be condemned to hell. Jesus did not come to establish or participate in a temporary earthly kingdom, but to establish an everlasting heavenly kingdom by preparing a place in which we sinners can cleanse ourselves and prepare to come into contact with a Holy God.

When I was a boy, I went to church, but I did not believe in Jesus Christ. When I became an adult, however, a person that I respected convinced me to investigate the truth of the claims of Jesus Christ, and I did so. The historical evidence that I studied since that day has convinced me that Jesus Christ was a real person, and that the New Testament is just as much of a factual account of what actually happened as any account of any event about which I could read a history book or in a newspaper.

The Scripture indicates that a child should honor both of his or her parents. The designation of both mother and father in the commandment along with the Scripture references about marriage leads me to the conclusion that the designation of honor is, in part, determined by marital status. Fathers and mothers are meant to be honored in the context of the family unit.

The Lord corrects errors in character development. In His Word, God gives us objective principles for behavior that He expects us to follow. Academic success has to do with the ability to remember objective facts: character development has to do with applying objective Biblical principles properly in order to live in the way that God has ordained. Character development allows us to know whether or not it is proper to do that which we desire to do.

Infants and toddlers intuitively find it distressing to have their care relegated to an institutional day-care center, even one run in the most benevolent fashion possible. Children younger than school age are simply not emotionally prepared to participate in an institutional setting; the design of God is that a child be raised by a hands-on parent that can devote his or her, generally her, primary attention to the child when attention is needed. That is why mothers have attached breasts to feed infants and comfort children.

The intellectual fallacy that the parental input of men is not needed can be traced to the fact that children need an intuitive parental interaction during their infant and toddler years. Before children have the intellectual capacity for structured verbal communication, their majority of the interaction that they have require an intuitive focus by their caregiver. Women, created by God to mother children, are uniquely gifted by God to perform this intuitive task.

We have the good things that we have, not because of our own power, but because the Lord has chosen to not withhold them from us. The Lord is the one that paid the price on Calvary, and we should thank Him for our successes rather than having self-esteem, considering ourselves more highly than we ought.

Jesus Christ has come to be the sacrifice for our sins, to take the punishment that we are owed for the sins that we have committed so that God can give us a new, spiritual nature by the power of the Holy Spirit, and then allow us into Heaven rather than give us the punishment that we so justly deserve.

Jesus Christ died so that we would believe in Him, and then become salt and light to those with whom we come into contact. He could have mentored the whole world, but Jesus chose to only have a few faithful disciples so that we would be encouraged by His example to touch the few with whom we come into contact, and not become discouraged simply because our reach is not as wide as that of the Jewish and Roman leadership.