Sex Sermon

If you go to the Little Falls home page, there is the text of a 5th sermon from my marriage series. It's pastoral advice on sex. Its amazing how prevalent sex is in our culture while missing or unsatisfying in many married people's lives. As Christians this should concern us a lot, because God set sex as the sign of marriage. In many ways having sex with a person is part of what makes you married to them. Thats why its so emotionally devastating to break up with someone you've been intimate with. Inside marriage sex is designed for fun and fulfillment, as well as procreation. Read the Song of Solomon in the Bible, it is a book about a couples love life. Warning: its a little graphic at times.

Love - 1 Corinthians 13 - October 25

Keller's new book Counterfeit Gods came out at just the right time. One of the points from this morning came right out of the book. But to be fair to myself - I had a very pedestrian and awkward way of saying the same thing! Thanks Tim - once again you are the man. The point was that if you are looking for the love that will fill your heart and soul, no person can deliver that kind of love.

"No one can live up to that. The inevitable result is bitter disillusionment."

When you realize that the people around you aren’t delivering the love you need, there are 4 possibilities. These come from Tim Keller’s new book:

1. You can blame the people around you who disappoint you and move on to better ones.

2. You can blame yourself and say, “I am a failure. There is something wrong with me.”

3. You can blame the world. “Curses on the entire opposite sex.”

4. You can reorient your entire life toward God.

Because He has the love that you desire and He’s amazingly generous with it. He has what you need and in order to be able to present it to you, He was willing to sacrifice his own flesh and blood. Jesus died so that you may have the love from God that your soul craves. That is what can save you – not romantic love.

If you want to truly love your spouse, let God be your God and your savior. Let him be their God and savior. Neither of you can be good gods. Then as each of you receive love from Him – you can reflect it to your spouse and all the other people in your world.

Praying together - Matthew 18:18-20 - October 18,2009

Since this blog isn't getting more comments, the posts are going to be a little shorter. If you actually read this, let me know and I'll beef it back up.

As per praying together as a couple. I feel like this sermon is like telling someone to have a will - everyone thinks its a good idea, yet far too few practice it. Practice is probably the key word. Dedicating yourself to trying to do this each day - even if its just 10 minutes - for 40 days will make a huge difference. You'll be amazed at how much your prayer life grows and how it becomes so much more natural to pray aloud. If you need additional help, I'm always here. There are also a host of books on this subject. Just type, "Praying together" into the search bar at Amazon.com.

Role Reversal - Ephesians 5:22-33 - October 11, 2009

In this week's sermon I mentioned the now classic book, The Five Love Languages. Its available on Amazon - just click here. Women as well as men need to figure out what language their mate speaks. Once again they are:

Words of Affirmation

Quality Time

Receiving Gifts

Acts of Service

Physical Touch

The passage is all about how to build up your mate - not demean one gender or the other. I hope and pray you will find freedom in it.

Hurry Home - Daniel 1:1-16 - October 4

The concept for my Hurry Home sermon came from Andy Stanley's book, Choosing to Cheat. He claims that when you look at everything that is expected from you at work, everything that is expected of you at home and everything that is expected of you with extended family and friends that their is just not enough time. When the choice is to cheat at home or cheat at work, most of us choose work. We'll stay a little later, because there will be something to show for our efforts. Go home earlier and you might play with your kids or talk to your wife for an extra half hour, but after its gone there is nothing tangible to see. So, we cheat the people we love the most for money. Ouch.

At home we can cheat our spouse by paying more attention to the kids than to them. Kids know how to give love very well and when we feel distant from our spouse, they can fill that void... kinda. But it sets in motion the destruction of our relationship. Neither this behavior or spending more time at work have any immediate consequences, but the long term result is deadly for our marriages.

If you're going to cheat (Andy says we all do) cheat at work, not at home.