Truth Encounter: Weekly Message Podcast

No one else made the magic happen when in the midst of a night club, sitting on a barroom stool, Frank Sinatra began to croon “I did it my way!” He has done it all and he did it his way. But is this stress upon getting your way the essence of human existence? From the millions who applaud you would gather the case is closed. But there was another man who said that if you want to find your life, you are going to have to be willing to lose it; that if you live for yourself you will lose yourself, but if you lose yourself in caring for others, you will discover to your surprise that you have discovered it all.

Get at the facts! Improve your investigative procedures! Stretch your mind! Expand your horizons. If you have a Ph.D. behind your name in our society it makes you an expert, and people are supposed to listen to you. Few would argue that education is not a good thing, but did you know that there is a great danger in education?

There has never been a church with more available Bibles, more effective teachers, more beautiful and efficient worship centers, and more financial resources. Looking at the externals you would expect this church to have the most healthy spiritual people and to exert a powerful influence for God in their society. But for the most part the secular society views the church as angry, radical dissidents who view anyone who disagrees with them as an enemy. Where have we missed the path? What’s wrong with the evangelical church in America?

How does a single person know whether they should marry? If a life partner is taken away, what does God say about how the remaining partner needs to live out their days? Since the world is in such a mess, wouldn’t it be better not to marry and bear children? These are questions Christ followers are asking today and they were asking these same kinds of questions in the first century. We can be thankful because it means we can allow the Apostle Paul to respond to the issue of “to marry or not to marry.”

Change—it’s the name of the game. In the midst of all these changes we need to ask ourselves, “Why?” Why am I moving across the country to get that big promotion? Why am I moving into the bigger house with the gigantic payments? Why am I so restless? For the next few minutes call time out, and let’s explore together whether we might be going down a road we don’t want to travel toward a destination we don’t want to arrive at.

We have become a culture of broken relationships. Take a moment to take an inventory. How many old friends do you have? When someone wrongs you, do you lay them aside and move them out of your life? What about your marriage? Do you think of it as a place of reconciliation and forgiveness or as a place where your deepest felt needs should be met? Listen to Part Two of the Permanence of the Marriage Bond, a study of Paul’s strong counsel to couples struggling in their marriages.

Divorce. It has become the norm in our culture. A young couple starts out with high intentions, but for most the high temperature passion begins to wear off and after two, five, ten years, a couple mutually decides to go their separate ways. In most states this is a relatively easy legal procedure. What does God think about this “easy divorce” situation? In your town you can go from church to church and sooner or later you will find a pastor who will agree with your particular view about divorce. But for a few minutes let’s try and lay aside our preconceived ideas and try to understand God’s heartbeat.

It is in the top ten of most talked about subjects on any given day in the United States of America. Just form the letters of this tiny English word on your lips and immediately ears begin to search and seek for the next juicy morsel. You hear about it constantly just about anywhere communication takes place, but you rarely hear about it in a church building between the hours of 11:00 and 12:00. Today’s discussion brings us to 1 Corinthians 7:1-9 and the subject on the Apostle Paul’s mind is sex.

On a popular television series the main character cynically takes a jab at the celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday by saying, “Who wants to celebrate the coming to this continent of a group of people who were kicked out of England because they were against dancing and any other form of human pleasure?” The underlying message is that if you believe in the Pilgrims’ Jesus, you can kiss fun and good times good bye. It is the popular caricature of the pious Christian but does New Testament Christianity actually teach that the body is evil and any pleasure it enjoys must be sinful?

The evil one has decimated the testimony of so-called followers of Christ by strongly divorcing what we say with our lips about our beliefs from what we practice in our lives. If you do read the New Testament you will discover that this problem of sexual sin was never a problem for the Lord of the Church, but his followers from the first century to the present have wrestled with this temptation just like everyone else. Paul tells the truth about it and gives us the right information to overcome these temptations.