Marks of a Godly Husband

Laurel Bible Church

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titled, Marks of a Godly Husband, Marks of a Godly Husband.

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I invite you to stand as we read God's Word together, Ephesians 5, beginning in verse 25.

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Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her, so that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless.

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So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself.

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You may be seated. Marks of a

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Godly Husband. There are three institutions created by God.

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The institution of the home, the institution of the church, and the institution of the government.

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The home, the church, and the government. And at least two of these institutions,

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God has designed and decreed that men are to be the leaders, the spiritual leaders in both the home and the church.

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Now this is not a popular concept today that men are to be the spiritual leaders.

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Society often portrays men as knuckle -dragging rubes that don't have sense enough to come out of the rain.

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This is not popular in our culture, but this is God's design.

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Both homes and churches fail when men fail to be the leaders.

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I want to say that again. Both our homes and our churches fail when men fail to be the leaders.

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And so I want us to look this morning at what it means to be a Godly Husband, the marks of a

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Godly Husband. First, what does that word Godly even mean? Now, to be

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Godly means that we are to be reflective of the character of God and obeying the model of Christ.

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Being Godly necessitates that we first understand that we are not inherently

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Godly. You can be a kind person and not be

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Godly. You can serve other people and not be

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Godly. You can be patient and not be Godly. You can exhibit any number of admirable qualities and not be

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Godly. When we talk about being a Godly Husband or being a

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Godly person, just kind of in a general sense, this means that we are to reflect the character and the nature of God.

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And the only way to be Godly is to be in a saving relationship with the

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Lord Jesus Christ. And so I kind of want to begin where I usually end my sermons.

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I almost always end my sermons with at least a short gospel presentation, and I want to begin there because you can't be

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Godly unless you know Christ. Has there been a time in your life, and this is for, of course, men and women, has there been a time in your life when you have been convicted by the

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Holy Spirit of God that you are a sinner, that you have broken God's laws, the

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Ten Commandments? Thou shalt not lie. We have all told lies.

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Thou shalt not steal. I dare say almost all of us, if not all of us in this room, have taken something at some point in our lives that did not belong to us.

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The value of what we take is irrelevant. So we are liars, every single one of us.

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We are thieves. And also one of the commandments is thou shalt not take the name of the

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Lord thy God in vain. Taking God's name in vain is the sin of blasphemy.

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And blasphemy, dear friends, includes but is not limited to saying

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OMG or some derivative of that. We take

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God's name in vain not only in what we say but in what we do.

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To take God's name in vain means to bring His name to of no effect, means to leave

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His name empty. And so when we sin against God in word and in deed, that is taking

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His name in vain, the sin of blasphemy. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

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Don't let yourself off the hook too quickly. Jesus said if you look at a woman with lust, you have committed adultery already in your heart.

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And all of us have looked at other people with lust. And so when you go through the Ten Commandments, you find out very quickly that we are all lawbreakers.

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We have transgressed God's moral law. And just like when we break laws on earth, there is a penalty to be paid.

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How much more so when we break the laws of God. But because we have sinned against God who is eternal and infinite, the punishment of that sin is also eternal.

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And it is also infinite. And if we die in our sins, we will very rightly and very justly go to a very real place that the

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Bible calls hell. The lake of fire. And the Bible describes the lake of fire in horrific terms, a place where the worm will not die, the fire will not be quenched.

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There will be wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth. And the full undiluted fury of God's wrath will be poured out against people who refuse to repent and place their trust in Christ.

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That is the just punishment. That is the wages that our sins have earned us.

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And there is nothing that we can do to earn our salvation. There is nothing that we can do to earn favor with God.

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In fact, biblical Christianity, and I have to say biblical because there are all these aberrant forms of Christianity.

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Biblical Christianity is the only religion on the planet that is

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God reaching down to man. Every other aberrant religion, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and aberrant forms of Christianity, all of these things, even

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Roman Catholicism, all of them have the one thing in common that they are all some variation of man trying to work his way up to God.

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But biblical Christianity is unique amongst all the world religions in that it is

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God who has reached down to us. And God sent his son,

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Jesus Christ, to this earth. Jesus was one person with two distinct natures, truly

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God, truly man. And Jesus never broke any of God's laws. He lived a life of perfect satisfaction to God the

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Father. And then Jesus willingly gave his life on the cross. His life was not taken from him.

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He gave it. And on the cross, this perfect person offered himself as a perfect sacrifice to perfectly satisfy the perfect wrath of God.

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Our sins were imputed to Christ on the cross. And God the

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Father treated his own son as though he were a sinner even though he was not. He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

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2 Corinthians 5 .21 Our sins imputed to Christ. And Christ's righteousness is imputed to us when we turn from our sin, repent, and place our trust in him.

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Jesus died on the cross satisfying the wrath of God. And on the third day bodily raised from the dead proving himself to be who we said he was,

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God in human flesh. And there is salvation in no one else. But if you will turn from your sin, repent of your sin, place your faith in Christ, your full confidence in what he did for you on the cross, you will be saved.

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That is the good news of the gospel. All of our sins washed away.

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All of the old things will pass away. Behold, all things will be made new.

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He will give you a new heart with new desires, new affections.

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And for everyone who trusts Christ and Christ alone for their salvation, according to Romans 8 chapter 1, there is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

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None. All condemnation will be wiped away as far as the east is from the west.

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And Jesus is our reward. So to be godly we must first be a

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Christian. A godly husband. As husbands, men, our model is

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Christ himself. We are to shepherd and we are to love our wives as Christ shepherds and loves the church.

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Christ is our typos in the Greek. He is our type. He is our model.

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He is the example that we imitate. Most of us probably, at least when

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I was coming up in school, I guess they still do it, I don't know, I can remember being taught how to write and the teacher would pass out these templates, you know, and you'd have the solid line on the bottom, the solid line on the top, little dotted line in the middle, bringing back memories here, you know, and you put your tracing paper over on top of that and there would be letters and you get your pencil, number two pencil, and you trace those letters.

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And, of course, nobody ever traces them perfectly, but that's how we learned to write.

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Christ is our template. And none of us imitates him perfectly, but he is our template.

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He is our model that we strive to imitate. 1 John 2 verse 5 says,

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Christ is our model. And we see here in Ephesians 5, God's instructions to us men as husbands, we are to love our wives as Christ loved the church.

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But what is love? Love is often misunderstood to be emotions.

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Well, I love someone if I have warm feelings of affection toward that person.

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And I'm certainly not saying that that is not a component of love. I'm not against feelings.

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I'm not against emotions at all. But feelings and emotions ebb and wane, don't they?

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They kind of come and go. They don't tend to be real steady. So our love, it does encapsulate that, but love is much, much, much more than just feelings and emotions.

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Love is primarily an action. 1

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Corinthians chapter 13 is the great love chapter, the great discourse on love.

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In beginning in verse 4, Paul says, It is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered.

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It does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

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Love does stuff. Love is an action before it is an emotion.

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It does stuff. The feelings and emotions follow the actions.

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And we men are to love our wives as Christ loved the church.

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How did Christ love the church? In this message, I want to give you four ways that Christ loved the church and we are to love our wives.

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Now, I'll go through these, but let me list them quickly for you note takers. Number one, Christ loved self -sacrificially.

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We will look at the self -sacrificial love of Christ, the self -denying love of Christ, the forgiving love of Christ, and then the guiding love of Christ.

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Self -sacrificial, self -denying, forgiving, and guiding. First, the self -sacrificial love of Christ.

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Jesus said in John 15 verse 3, Christ loved the church first and foremost because he gave his life for the church.

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And greater love has no man than that, than he would give his life for his friends.

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Men, if you are ever tempted to think that you have arrived, that I love my wife enough,

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I have news for you. You don't. Men, you do not love your wife enough.

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I love my wife Kathy, but you know what? I don't love her enough. Why? Because I don't love her as much as Christ loved the church.

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I don't love her that much. And she doesn't love me that much.

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So there is always, always, always room for us to improve upon our love for our wives.

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There's always room for us to love our wives more. And ladies, there's always room for you to love your husbands more.

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Because none of us loves our spouses as much as Christ loved the church.

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It is a self -sacrificial love. Christ purchased the church with his own blood.

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Acts chapter 20 verse 28. He shepherded the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood.

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And so to say to husbands, men, love your wives as Christ loved the church, that was a revolutionary statement in the ancient world.

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In the Roman world, women were basically property to be owned, not fellow image bearers of God to love and to respect and even to give one's life for.

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I have very little patience when I hear people say that Christianity is demeaning to women.

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I wish somebody could invent a time machine. And everybody that thinks that or says that, put them in a time machine, send them back 2 ,000 years ago and plop them down right in the

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Roman world. And then you tell me how Christianity is demeaning to women. Women were basically property back then.

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Christianity was revolutionary because it elevated women to the same status as men.

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We are fellow image bearers of God. Women, Christianity elevated far from being property to be owned.

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They are image bearers to love and to respect and to even men give our lives for.

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That was revolutionary 2 ,000 years ago. About, I think this was about 2 ,000, when was it, 14, 15 years ago or so,

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I was preaching at a little town in Alaska called Bethel. And Bethel is not, let's just say it's not a vacation destination.

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Bethel is not in the pretty part of Alaska. Bethel is out in the flat, frozen tundra out in the middle of nowhere

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Alaska. In fact, I was actually kind of in a little village outside of Bethel. And you don't drive to Bethel.

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If you want to go to Bethel, leave your car at home. You can't drive there. There are no roads. You have to fly into Bethel.

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And by fly, I don't mean you take Delta. You get on a little bush plane, you know, with these big balloon kind of tires, and there is no concrete runway.

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You just land on the grass if you want to go to Bethel. But I was preaching there and so landed in this bush plane.

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And we got to the little village where I was. And when you look around in the village, when you go by houses, out in the carport,

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I guess, you know, driveway of sorts, you're just as likely to see an airplane parked outside of a home as you are a car because if you want to get out of Bethel, you've got to get on an airplane.

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So most of the people that lived in this village were actually pilots. And so everybody had their little airplane.

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And as I was there preaching, the pastor of this small church told me about one of the men in his church.

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And just a couple of years before I was preaching there, this man, he was a husband, had a wife, and had a little girl, a 6 -year -old little girl.

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And they flew, he was the pilot, and they flew out to get some supplies.

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And it was wintertime, kind of early winter. And as they were flying back, a big storm came up.

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There was a large lake there that the village was kind of built around. And the storm got very, very bad, full -on blizzard, zero visibility.

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And because of the wind and the blowing snow and all that, the man actually landed on the lake, which was frozen, but it was early winter, and it was barely frozen.

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The plane landed, but it crashed through the ice and almost immediately began to sink.

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His wife was knocked unconscious, his 6 -year -old little girl strapped in the back seat, and the plane's going down.

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He physically can't save both of them at the same time. He's got to make a decision.

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Who does he save first, his wife or his little girl?

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He reached over and he unbuckled his wife, pulled her out of the plane, and managed to swim to the shore and got her up on the bank.

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But by that time, the plane was gone, and his little girl drowned, gut -wrenching.

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Did he save the right person? Yes, he did.

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He saved the right person. He would have saved both if he could have, but he couldn't.

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Men, there is only one person in the

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Bible that we are commanded to leave and cleave to, and that is our wives.

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Our wives come before everyone else, including our children.

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Christ loved the church so much that he gave his own life for the church.

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We protect our wives. We protect our wives physically, like this man did in Alaska.

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We protect our wives physically, but men, we are also to protect them verbally.

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We are to protect our wives not only from physical attacks, but from verbal attacks. We are to speak kindly and respectfully to our wives.

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And men, don't you dare speak badly about your wife to anyone else.

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Don't do it. Don't talk badly about your wife to anyone else.

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And don't countenance anyone else talking badly about your wife to you.

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Don't do it. I don't care if it's your best friend. I don't care if it's your family, your mom, your dad, your siblings, nobody.

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If someone starts talking badly about your wife to you, shut it down. Shut it down.

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And men, husbands, fathers, don't let your children do that.

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Don't let your children talk back to their mother. It is not only disrespectful to her, but it is bad for your kid.

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Don't let your kids disrespect their mother. Men, if your boy disrespects his own mother, he will one day disrespect his own wife.

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If your son talks back to your wife and is disrespectful towards her, if that is left unchecked, one of these days he will also be disrespectful to his wife.

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Shut it down. We are to respect and protect our wives. And if called upon to do so, even give our own lives for them.

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Self -sacrificial love. Number two, we are to love our wives with a self -denying love.

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Denial of self for our wives. We are to put her needs above those of our own.

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Philippians 2, verse 3 says, Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain glory, but with humility of mind, regarding one another as more important than yourselves.

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We are to regard one another as more important than ourselves, and that begins first and foremost, men, with our wives.

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We are to regard our wife as more important than ourselves. Our wives' needs come before those of our own.

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If you've got big plans to watch the ball game with the fellas on Saturday or go fishing and do something like that with the boys or with one of your friends, you've had these plans made for weeks, maybe months, and then your wife comes along and says,

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Honey, I need you, I need you for whatever it is that she might need us for.

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Then you have to call the fellas and say, Boys, I'm going to have to take a rain check. My wife needs me.

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Our wives' needs come before our own. Six or seven years ago,

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I was on Twitter, and there was some social justice stuff going on at the time, and of course

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I'm against the social justice movement, and people were saying all kinds of nasty, mean things about me online.

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Kathy saw it and it began to really bother her and was a stumbling block for her spiritually.

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It really grieved her, and so she asked me if I would get off of Twitter, and so I did.

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I did. I got off of it. Her spiritual well -being was more important to me than being on Twitter, and so I got off of it.

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Now, a couple of years ago, we kind of both decided to get back on it, and I'm back on it now, but nonetheless, that was a need that she had at the time, and so her needs came before my own, and so I graciously got off Twitter.

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We are to put our wives above ourselves. Consider one another more important than ourselves.

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Our spiritual leadership, men, is a servant leadership, not a dictatorial one.

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Yes, we are the spiritual leaders in our home, but that does not mean that we are dictators. We are servants.

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That leadership is a servant leadership. John 13, beginning in verse 14,

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Jesus says, as I did to you.

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We are to lead not in a dictatorial way but in a servant way, and also we are to have a forgiving love for our wives, a forgiving love.

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We are to be quick to forgive. A lack of forgiveness, men and women, will destroy a marriage.

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It will destroy a marriage. Remember love. Remember 1 Corinthians 13? One of the things that love does not do?

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Love does not keep a record of wrong. Forgive your wives when they sin against you.

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The next time you have a disagreement or an argument, don't bring up the past.

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Don't bring up some wrong that she may have committed against you at some point in the past.

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Don't bring it up. Bury the hatchet. Don't leave the handle sticking out. John MacArthur has said that we are never more like Christ than when we forgive.

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Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. If Christ could forgive the men who were literally nailing him to a cross, surely we can forgive our wives when they sin against us.

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When do we forgive? Always. Even when they might disrespect us.

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Even when they sin against us. Men, this doesn't mean that there's never not a time for correction.

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As the spiritual leaders, that is one of our responsibilities, is when it is appropriate and necessary to offer a biblical correction, but in a gentle way.

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It should be done lovingly. Any correction we offer should be done lovingly, and it should be done patiently.

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But, men, also remember this, speaking of correction, be ready and be willing to receive correction from your wife.

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Men, just because we are the spiritual leaders in our homes does not mean that we are always right.

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Sometimes we're not. And believe it or not, I know this is hard to believe, but there has been a time or two in our 15 years of being married, perished the thought that I was wrong, and I received correction from my wife.

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Because, men, our wives are indwelt by the same

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Holy Spirit who indwells us. They don't have a female

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Holy Spirit. They don't have less of the Holy Spirit. They have the same

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Holy Spirit who we have, who indwells in each and every single believer.

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We have the Spirit without measure. They have the same Holy Spirit that we do. And sometimes they're right and we're wrong.

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And so receive that correction from them. Also, we are to love our wives with a holy love, a holy love.

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God says, Be ye holy, for I am holy.

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And, men, this is where I'm going to bear down a little bit, spend a little time here.

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Men, one of the things that almost all of us struggle with is the lust of the flesh.

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This is an area that all men struggle. In preparation for this message,

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I looked up some statistics on pornography. Statistics on pornography.

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It's one of those things I almost kind of wished I hadn't done it because after I got these statistics then it kind of left me depressed.

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But this is sobering. Listen to this. The annual revenue of the pornographic industry, pornography industry, is more than the

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NBA, MLB, Major League Baseball, and the NFL combined.

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Combined. The porn industry. The revenue of the porn industry is more than ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, MSNBC combined.

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The average age of a child who is first exposed to pornography, nine.

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That's the average age. And this is the real depressing statistic.

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Over half of pastors admitted, these are just the ones that admitted it, view porn on a regular basis.

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If you're a pastor, if you're a deacon, if you're an elder, if you're in ministry and you're looking at porn, get out.

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Get out of the ministry. Do yourself a favor. Stop heaping condemnation upon yourself.

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Get out of ministry. I tell men that you can't help what you see.

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All of us see things that we wish we didn't see. Something will flash up on TV or a commercial that we all see stuff that we wish we hadn't seen.

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You can't help what you see, but you can help what you look at. You can help what you look at.

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I get emails regularly from men, and they all go something like this.

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They'll start off, Justin, thank you for your ministry, blah, blah, blah.

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But I've got this one thing that I struggle with. I've got this one thing, this one sin that I just can't seem to beat, and I always know what it is.

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Anytime an email or a letter starts off that way, I always know what it is.

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It's pornography. And they say I just can't break it. I just can't.

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And my response to them is it's not that you can't, it's that you won't. Oh, you could, you just don't want to.

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If I were to, let's say if I had a little explosive device, a little small explosive device filled with gunpowder, had a little sensor on it, and I inserted that into your right arm, and the next time you went to a website, man, that you shouldn't go to, that sensor would detect it, and it would detonate that gunpowder and blow your right arm off your torso.

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Could you stop looking at pornography then? You better believe you could.

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Of course you could. What if I kind of come at it from the other angle and from the more positive aspect and say if you do not look at anything, any pornography on the

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Internet or your phone or whatever that you should not be looking at, and I have some way of verifying that that is the case, and you can go two years without doing that a single time, at the end of two years,

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I write you out a check for $50 million. Could you stop looking at porn then?

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Of course you could. Of course you could. So, you see, what you've just admitted to me is not that you can't, but that you won't.

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You've just admitted to me that your right arm is more important to you than your wife, your own personal holiness, and Christ.

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You've just admitted to me that $50 million is more important to you than your wife, your own holiness, and Christ.

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And I have men tell me this too. They'll say, I look at porn, but I still love my wife.

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No, you don't. No, you don't. You may have some emotional affection for her at some level, but you don't love her.

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Love is an action. And men hear this, there is no action that you can undertake that would convey a lack of love, indeed a hatred, towards your wife more clearly than looking at pornography.

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You could look at your wife directly in the eye and say, I hate you with the white -hot hatred of a thousand sons, and that would not convey hatred to her as much as looking at pornography.

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It's the ultimate betrayal. The Bible says we are to flee immorality.

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Flee it. Sexual sin is not to even be named amongst

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God's people, Ephesians 5, verse 3. And Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6, he says,

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Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor revilers, coveters, swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

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Paul says do not be deceived. If your life is marked by those sins, do not be deceived.

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You will not inherit the kingdom of God. Fornication, adultery.

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And that includes looking at porn. 1 Corinthians 6, verse 18 says this,

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Every sin that a man commits is outside the body, but he that commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.

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There is something about sexual sin that is different than other sin. Because every other sin is sin that's committed outside of the body.

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But sexual sin is different. It leaves a wound. It leaves a scar.

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Proverbs 6, verses 32 and 33 says that the one who commits adultery, his reproach will not be blotted out.

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Will not be blotted out. That is not to say that we cannot be forgiven of sexual sin.

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Absolutely we can. Hear me clearly. God expends no more energy, if you will, for giving us of sexual sin than he does any other sin.

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But there is something different about that sin that leaves a wound. It leaves a reproach. That's why in our theological circles, if you commit that sin as a preacher, you're done.

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You're done. You'll never be behind the pulpit again. Because a reproach won't be blotted out.

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Flee it. Flee it. It will wreck your marriages.

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And as I was looking up these statistics, there was another statistic that really surprised me.

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Did you know that one -third of pornography viewers are women?

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A third of them. That surprised me. It's not just a problem that the men have.

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More common with the men. But it's pretty common with women too. We are to put to death the deeds of the body.

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Go to war with our flesh, Romans 8, 13. 2 Corinthians 10, verse 5 says, take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ.

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Men, take every thought captive. Go to war with your flesh.

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And some of the ladies out there right now, you're thinking, yeah, Justin, you just let those mean old men have it.

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Yeah, you get them, Justin. Well, ladies, I have a verse for you too. 1 Timothy 2, verse 9,

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Paul says, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, with modesty, self -restraint, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly clothing.

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Now, there is a context here, and I don't think it is inherently sinful for a woman to braid her hair or put on like a pearl earrings or whatever.

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That's not the point Paul was making. The point Paul was making is back in that day and age, if a woman walked around with braided hair and gold and pearls, she was intentionally bringing attention to herself.

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She wanted people to notice her. Ladies, if you dress in such a way that you are trying to get people to notice you, that is sinful.

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That's sinful. And men and women, as husbands and wives, there should not be any secrets.

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Our spouses should have full access to all of our devices. Kathy can pick up my iPhones in my pocket right here, but Kathy, if I were to hand my iPhone to Kathy, Kathy could do the little facial recognition thing, full access to my phone, full access to it.

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She can check my e -mail. I've even got a statement at the bottom of my e -mails. I could e -mail my dad, and this statement is on there.

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It's just part of my signature line, and it says basically that all e -mails are subject to the review of my wife or something to that effect.

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So just to let everybody know that we're an open book.

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There's no secrets. There's no we should have full access into each other's lives.

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I cannot tell you how many marriages have been destroyed because a man or a woman starts texting, finding somebody on social media, maybe they went to school with or whatever, and before you know it, an affair of the heart starts, and it wrecks the marriage.

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So men, go to war with the flesh. We are to love our wives with a holy love, and also we are to love our wives with a guiding love.

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We are to guide our wives. Why? Because women are the weaker vessel.

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Now that is not politically correct to say, but that is biblical. They are the weaker vessel.

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Let me read this to you. 1 Peter 3, verse 7. Peter writes, You husbands, in the same way, live with your wives in an understanding way, as with a weaker vessel, since she is a woman.

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And show her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life, so that your prayers will not be hindered.

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Women are the weaker vessels, but we are to still show them honor as Peter quickly follows this up with.

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But what does this mean that women are the weaker vessel? I do not think that Peter here is simply referring to physical strength.

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And yes, on average, even though our society doesn't like to admit this nowadays, but on average it is undoubtedly true that women tend to be physically weaker than men.

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There's a reason that when you hear about, you know, the trans, quote, unquote, trans people that are, you know, playing in sports, you never, ever, ever, ever see a woman who thinks she's a man wanting to compete with men.

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It's always the other way around. There are physical differences, to be sure. But I don't think that's what

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Peter had in mind when he refers to women as the weaker vessel. What Peter means here is that women tend to be, now ladies, bear with me, women tend to be more easily led by their emotions.

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That's not always true, but it tends to be true. For those of you who are old enough, if you remember the presidential election in the year 2000, it was

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Al Gore against George Bush, George W. Bush. Remember that? Any of you old enough to remember that?

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A few months before the election, the Democrats had their national convention, and Al Gore got up to give his big speech at the convention, the closing thing of the convention.

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And does anybody remember what Al Gore did at the end of that speech?

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Al Gore, his wife, Tipper, walked up on the platform, and just out of the blue,

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Al Gore all of a sudden grabbed Tipper and kind of leaned her over and gave her a big, wet kiss right on her mouth, just kind of like a sudden, out of the blue thing.

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And it scared Tipper. When you watch the old video, it really took her like she wasn't expecting it. But he laid this big, old, wet, sloppy one right on Tipper, this big, demonstrative kiss.

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Al Gore's approval rating amongst women went up 20 percentage points overnight.

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The needle didn't move with men, but it went up 20 percentage points overnight with women.

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Why? Because of his monetary policy, foreign policy, judicial appointment?

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No, because he kissed his wife. He almost became the leader of the free world because he kissed his wife.

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Because women tend to be more easily led by their emotions.

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And women tend to be, this is not always true, but generally true, men, they tend to be more susceptible to false teachers.

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The reason that Beth Moore and Joyce Meyer are so wildly popular with women, not because of their expositional genius, not because they're good preachers, they couldn't preach themselves out of a wet paper bag.

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Women like Joyce Meyer and Beth Moore because they have compelling life stories.

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And I heard at least one lady, bless her heart, she was honest enough to come up and tell me this, this was several years ago, she came up to me after I preached one time, and she said,

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Justin, I used to really not like you. And I was like, oh, okay, why's that? She said, because I heard you say that Beth Moore is a false teacher, and I loved

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Beth Moore. And she said, I really didn't like you. But she said, then after a while, as I listened a little bit more, then

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I realized that Beth Moore is a false teacher. And then she said,

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I got to thinking about it even more, and she said, one of the main reasons I liked Beth Moore was the way she dressed.

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I thought she dressed really cute, and so she liked Beth Moore. Now, that's not always true, of course, but generally it is.

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Now, my wife Kathy, she can spot a false teacher most times before I can. So it's not always true, but most of the time it is.

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They are the weaker vessel in that they tend to be more easily led by emotions, and they tend to be more susceptible to false teachers.

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The charismatic movement is driven by women. And so this is why it is important for us to be the spiritual leaders in our home.

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And men, finally, you cannot lead where you have not been yourself. What I'm saying is, make it a matter of personal discipline to read and study

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God's Word. Nurture your walk with the Lord Jesus Christ. Grow in sanctification.

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Grow in purity. Grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Grow in your understanding of God's Word, because you cannot lead where you have not been yourself.

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I would encourage all of our couples, families, husbands, and wives to read God's Word together.

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Make that a practice. Read the Bible together. Deuteronomy 11, verse 18,

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God says, You shall teach them to your sons, to your children, speaking of them, when you sit in your house, when you walk along the road, when you lie down, and when you rise up.

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Men, be the spiritual leader in the home. Read and study the Word of God yourself, and read the

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Bible with your wives and with your children. Talk about the things of the

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Lord on a regular basis. When you sit in your house, when you walk along the road, when you lie down, and when you rise up.

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Talk about the things of the Lord. The things of the Lord should be a regular part of your daily conversation in your home.

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Men, we are the ones that God has ordained to be the leaders in this.

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Men and women are of equal value before God. We are indwelt by the same

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Holy Spirit. We have the same access to the same throne of grace. We are saved the same way.

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But God has ordained it that men are to be the leaders in the home and in the church.

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So men, be a godly husband. Love your wives as Christ loved the church.

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Serve her. Sacrifice for her. Deny yourself. Be holy.

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Guard your purity. And you will grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ together.