First Baptist Church Las Colinas

Part 2 of "The Mind of Christ" picks up where Philippians 2:1-4 left off and moves to the model itself: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" (2:5-6). Robert Rohlin reviews the four cords that bind believers together - consolation, comfort, communion, and compassion - then shows why church fights are almost never about doctrine. They are about me. He works through the Greek behind "esteem others better than themselves," explains why your outlook determines your outcome, and uses a first driving lesson, a hijacked airliner in the news, and John 13's basin and towel to make the point stick. The heart of the message is a Savior secure enough to serve: Jesus knew exactly who He was, and that is precisely why He picked up the towel. It ends at the cross, where Robert asks a question worth sitting with - how can anyone be arrogant standing beside the cross? Three things to carry home: remember what you have in Christ, regard others as more important than yourself, and resemble the Savior who did not grasp. If pride is quietly winning somewhere in your life, this message hands you a cure you can start using Monday morning.

Part one of a two-part message on Philippians 2:1-6, and the tenth message in Pastor Robert Rohlin's study of Philippians. Epaphroditus has carried good news and hard news from Philippi to Paul's prison cell - a joyful church with a crack in it, and two faithful women, Euodia and Syntyche, who no longer get along. Rohlin works through the four cords Paul uses to hold a church together: consolation in Christ, the comfort of love, the fellowship of the Spirit, and compassion from the deepest part of a person. He then turns to the mindset that keeps unity - one mind, one love, one accord - and to the two things that kill it, selfish ambition and empty glory. Division inside a church, he says, is more dangerous than any enemy outside it, and it almost always starts over something small. Why listen? Because the little things are what divide people, at church and at home. Rohlin brings in the rowers of Ben Hur pulling to one drumbeat, the church at Ephesus that kept its programs and lost its first love, D. L. Moody quietly shining the shoes of visiting preachers at Northfield, and the man who comforted a young widow by polishing her children's shoes for their father's funeral. You will get a plain definition of humility - not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less - and a test you can put to your own attitude this week. Part two picks up the mind of Christ in verses 5 and 6.

Part two of Walking Worthy, and the ninth message in Pastor Robert Rohlin's study of Philippians. Paul writes to a church 600 miles from Rome and tells it to behave like the citizens of heaven they already are (Philippians 1:27-30). Rohlin works through the conduct, the cohesion, the courage and the conflict of that walk, using the Roman shield wall as his picture of a church that closes ranks. He shows why spiritual retreat never looks like retreat - it looks like one small compromise at a time. Believers, he says, are magnets, not marbles. The message ends on the hardest word in the passage: God grants both the faith to believe and the grace to suffer, and opposition is courtroom evidence that a person belongs to Christ. Why listen? If your faith has never cost you anything, this sermon asks why. Rohlin brings in John Knox standing firm under Bloody Mary, the martyrs of the last 150 years, two women in Philippi who could not get along, and the marriages that need the glasses of forgiveness put on after the wedding, not before. You will leave with a plain test for your own walk and a reason not to be terrified by anyone who opposes it.

Message 6 in the "Be Joyful" series through Philippians. Paul turns from his own chains to the church's conduct, and the one word he chooses is "citizen": only let your conversation be as it becometh the gospel of Christ (1:27). Philippi was a colony of retired Roman legionaries - Pastor Rohlin tells how the battles of 42 B.C. and 31 B.C. put them there, why Rome parked its old soldiers on the trade road, and why people who had never seen Rome still lived by Rome's laws. That is the picture: we have never seen heaven, but we live by its laws now. "Worthy" is never earning - it is matching. A life lighter than the gospel leaves your words with no weight, the way a Marine is judged by the uniform he wears. Three cords of the gospel in chapter 1: we defend it, we proclaim it - but do we adorn it? And constancy: the same walk whether anyone is watching, because Someone always is. The message closes on cohesion - standing fast like a shield wall at Thermopylae, one soul, magnets rather than marbles - and pauses at verse 27, with verses 28-30 (courage and the calling to suffer) to follow next week. For anyone who has ever wondered what "walk worthy" actually asks of a Tuesday.

Paul writes from house arrest in Rome, chained to a guard and waiting on an appeal to Caesar that could end in his release or his execution. He does not know which is coming — and he says he cannot lose either way. This message walks verse by verse through Philippians 1:20-26, the passage that gives us the eight one-syllable words at its center: "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." Along the way we look at what Paul's words actually meant in Greek — the word for his "earnest expectation" pictures a man craning his neck toward the horizon, watching for what is coming — and at why a man on trial for his life could speak of magnifying Christ "whether it be by life, or by death." Paul then makes his choice: he expects to stay, not because it is easier, but because the Philippians still need him. The message closes with three things to do this week: fix your aim, surrender your grip on what you cannot keep, and stay at your post until God moves you. If you have ever wondered how a believer faces a future he cannot control, this is the passage that answers it. Fifth message in the Be Joyful series through Philippians.

Paul wrote to Philippi from house arrest in Rome - not a dungeon, but chained at the wrist to a Roman guard whose shift changed around the clock - and the church was waiting on news of his trial. What he sent back was not a report on his case but a report on the gospel: the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel. This fourth message in the Be Joyful series walks Philippians 1:12-19 in four movements: the progress the chains created, the courage they stirred in other preachers, the priority that kept Paul rejoicing even while rivals preached Christ to spite him, and the provision - their prayers and the supply of the Spirit - that held him steady. Along the way you will hear what the Praetorian Guard actually was and how a chain became a pulpit that reached Caesar's own household, why Paul treated prison as an assignment and not an accident, and a tale of two preachers who watched the same revival - one with envy, one on his knees. If your own plans have collapsed and you cannot yet see what God is doing with the wreckage, this message was preached for you. Paul's plan fell apart; God's plan did not. There are no chains on the gospel.

Paul does not pray for the Philippians' safety. In three verses - one long sentence in the Greek - he asks God for four specific things, and this message walks through each of them: the petition that their love would overflow, the precision of knowledge and discernment to keep it in its banks, the proof of a life that is transparent and trips no one, and the produce of fruit that only Christ can grow. Along the way: why agape means living for another person's benefit rather than your own, why the apostle never believed there was any such thing as enough love, and what the produce section of a grocery store has to say about the difference between real fruit and religious activity. If your praying for other believers has narrowed down to "Lord, bless them," this message hands you Paul's list instead - four things worth asking God for the next time you name someone before Him.

Paul wrote these verses from a Roman prison, chained to a guard, 800 miles and ten years removed from the church he was thanking God for. Philippians 1:3-8 is one long sentence in the Greek, and it holds four reasons his joy never moved: the praise of joy, the partnership of joy, the promise of joy, and the passion of joy. The message walks back through Acts 16 - the riverside prayer meeting, the slave girl set free, the beating, and the jailer who washed the wounds he had helped inflict - because those are the memories behind "I thank my God upon every remembrance of you." A long look at lukewarm Laodicea and its salty aqueduct draws the line between a believer who refreshes the people around him and one who makes them sick. If your joy rises and falls with your circumstances, this points somewhere steadier: the people God has joined to you in the gospel, and the God who began a good work in you and will carry it through to the day of Jesus Christ. It closes with four things to do about it - give thanks, give yourself, give God the glory, and give Him your heart.

Message one in a study of Philippians. Pastor Robert Rohlin opens Paul's most joyful letter at the words most readers skip - the greeting. Writing from a Roman prison cell around AD 60, chained day and night to a rotating guard, Paul introduces himself not as an apostle pulling rank but as a bondservant: the Old Testament slave who could have walked away free and chose to stay, ear pierced at the doorpost, because he loved his master. He calls the Philippians saints, greets their bishops and deacons, and remembers the unlikely first church in Europe - a businesswoman, a delivered slave girl, and the jailer who had beaten him. Why listen? If joy depended on circumstances, Paul had none left to draw on, and he still wrote the most joyful book in the New Testament. If your own trials have quietly convinced you that gladness has to wait for easier days, this message shows you where Paul actually found his: in belonging to Christ, in gospel progress that mattered more to him than his own comfort, and in a church family whose most painful memories God turned into joyful ones. Begin the series here and find out what it means to serve Christ by choice rather than by force. Please note: about six minutes at the start of the message, including the opening overview of the book of Philippians, are not included in this recording.

Naaman was the second most powerful man in Syria, a decorated general with rank, wealth, and the ear of the king. He was also a leper, and nothing he owned could buy a cure. In this study of 2 Kings 5, Pastor Robert Rohlin traces how God used a captured slave girl whose name we never learn to point the great man toward the one prophet who could help him, and how Naaman had to be humbled before he could be healed. The message draws a careful line between leprosy and sin as Leviticus 13 describes it. Sin goes deeper than the skin, it spreads, it defiles, and it isolates, and no amount of money or government help can reach it. If you are carrying something you cannot fix on your own, this sermon shows you where the cure actually comes from.