Loving Life – Part 1 Lawson and Aaron Perdue

  Hi, friends. I’m so glad that you tuned in today. I have a question for you. Do you love life? I believe that God wants you to love life. I believe that God wants you to see good days and I believe that the answer is in His word. So open your heart today and receive the good word of God. Blessings. Friends, I’m glad you’re with us today, and I’m glad I have Aaron with us, and we’re sharing a brand new series that I’ve never taught about loving life. And actually, we’re beginning with the scripture in 1 Peter 3. And we’re gonna be going from verse eight through verse 12 that is talking about having godly positive relationships, and specifically, it’s talking about the relationship of marriage. But right in the middle of it, it says in verse 10, “He who will love life and see good days,” He says, “Let him refrain his tongue from evil and his lips that they speak no deceit.” So when we look at that, God wants us to love life. And sometimes as believers, when we look out here and we see all the corruption and all the destruction in the world and difficulties and problems, if we’re not careful, we let that overwhelm us and we forget to love life. So we need to love life, and we’re gonna talk about how to love life, praise God. And we’re gonna talk specifically today. But before we do that, I wanna go into the context of this. And Aaron, if you’ll read 1 Peter 3:8 12, and we can comment it as we go through it or however you want to do it.

 

  Yeah, it says, “Finally, all of you be of one mind, having compassion for one another. Love as brothers. Be tenderhearted. Be courteous, not returning evil for evil or reviling for reviling. For on the contrary, blessing, knowing that you were called to this, that you may inherit a blessing. He who would love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit. Let him turn away from evil and do good. Let him seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and His ears are open to their prayers, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”

 

  So if we wanna love life, praise God, and I wanna love life. I want to enjoy the good life that God’s given me. One thing that we need to do, praise God, is we need to have a foundation for that. And so, you know, in this aspect of relationship, He’s saying this, “Be of one mind, have compassion on one another.” He’s talking about in your marriage. Things work better when you work together, when you get agreement, when you have the same mind, when you’re compassionate towards your mate. And many times in the church, it’s easy for us to be maybe compassionate on people on the outside, but we need to be compassionate on one another in the church. And then it’s even easier sometimes for us to be more compassionate with others in the church than in our own family. But He says, “You need to have compassion on one another and you need to be merciful.” The New King James there says, “Be tenderhearted.” We need to be tenderhearted towards our spouse. And it says this, “Be courteous.” We should be courteous to our own families and extended families.

 

  There’s actually a really strong connection between longevity, how long someone lives, and their relationships. I actually saw a study that was done on longevity, and they studied a lot of people and looked at a lot of factors. I thought, you know, people who don’t smoke, that would be one of the number one factors. But really, the number one factor in longevity in this study, the trait that they saw across the board was if people are connected in community. Secondly was if they’re connected in healthy family relationships. But being in a healthy community, they’ve noticed in certain areas, people just, they walk around the community, they know all their neighbors, they’re friendly with people. They always have just conversation going on, people looking out for them. Those people live a lot longer.

 

  Right.

 

  And you know, just as society kind of progresses with people just being so connected to technology, sometimes they’re disconnected from real interactions. Like a lot of people don’t even know their own neighbors. I think I saw a statistic, a lot of people have never even talk to their neighbors. You know, my wife is from Tennessee. When she moved to Colorado, she noticed a very strong difference between the culture in Tennessee and the culture here.

 

  Right.

 

  She even, when we moved to a new neighborhood, baked cookies for different neighbors, and most of our neighbors were really happy, but I know, like, I think in your neighborhood, Mom gave cookies to people and people acted like, “Why are you doing this? I don’t eat cookies.”

 

  Right, some of ’em 

 

  They’re just very antisocial.

 

  Different ones. Now I have a neighbor who doesn’t really claim to serve God in different things, but I went to his house and took cookies on Christmas Eve and he hasn’t really professed faith in Jesus, so on and so forth. But he told, and he’s pretty antiquated about his ways of living, but he’s actually changed some of that in the last few years. But when I went over to his house on Christmas Eve, he had a bunch of his family there and he said, “This is Pastor Lawson Perdue, he’s pastor of Grace For All Church. He’s my pastor.” I thought, “Well, praise God.” And we began to make inroads. And when we first moved there, the men’s fellowship here in the church helped move me. And he said, “What’s going on?” And they said, “Well, we’re moving in our pastor.” And he’s like, “Well, I don’t like pastors,” and so on and so forth. But we’ve become good friends with him. And actually I believe we’ve had positive influence and he’s moving in a good direction. He actually was living in a relationship outside of marriage, had a very bad marriage and had a negative kind of connotation. But since we’ve moved there, he’s married a person, which is a big step for him. And the person he married is a born again believer. And they’ve actually been here to church and they’re positive about us and I believe we can move relationships forward, but we have to spend time with people. And here’s something in the society that we live in, a lot of people say, well, I’ve got so many thousand friends on social media, but yet they don’t interact with people personally, and we need personal interaction. And so Mom and I, we know the people next to us on both sides. We know the people actually three houses down for every house. We know the people behind us, in the house behind us. We know the people across the street and there’s a little cul de sac. We know every family, we visited with every family on that block, and we know every neighbor within a reasonable distance. And we’ve got number of neighbors, we live in an area, it’s got about a road that goes around the neighborhood. It’s a little over three miles long. And we know numbers of people within our neighborhood where there’s several hundred houses. But you don’t get to know people if you don’t communicate with people.

 

  And I just love here in the middle of 1 Peter 3, we see that really strong connection between relationships and loving life, having good days 

 

  Right.

 

  And just, relationships really affect the quality of your life and even the length of your life.

 

  Right, they’ll ask you questions like this when you get a life insurance policy. And a church, really, you know, we understand that the church by definition is the body of Christ. But another definition for a church is a community of faith. And I know Aaron, while you were attending Rice University, I believe there were some people that helped you when you went to a very high level music, it was out in California.

 

  Oh yeah. Uh huh.

 

  And when you met those people, you found out that they had been part of a church community for a long time, and they had had several relationships that they built in the church over 50 years prior. And they were all living, they were all married, they were all healthy. And part of this was because of these relationships that they had. And so some people even come to church and not try to build community, but we all need to make time for community. And a church is a community of faith. When a church gets larger, our church is a little bit larger church, you have to get involved in different things to really make community.

 

  Yeah, and you know, one thing I’ve always done when I was 18, I moved away. I went to Pittsburgh, went to school there, but also got involved in church. Serving and volunteering is a great way to connect with people. That’s something that we encourage here. So maybe you go to church, but you never really connected through serving. Man, getting involved through serving’s a great way to connect to other people, get to know people.

 

  Right.

 

  You know, when my wife had moved here before we had met, she just got involved right away. Within a couple weeks she was serving, helping in kids church, you know, checking in kids. But she really understands the importance of community and being involved, getting to know people. And we see just how important that really is. Relationships really affect your life.

 

  And to have a friend, you’ve gotta be a friend. So some people don’t, you know, they’ll say, “Well, I find no relationships there,” but they really don’t reach out to anyone. And in a church setting, they may come late, leave early, and they’re really kind of distant, they’re kind of cold towards other people. And then they say, “Well, I’m not finding friends.” Well, if you’re gonna have friends, Proverb says, you’ve gotta be friendly. And so a man to have friends must be friendly. And it says there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother, and that’s Jesus. And so he tells us some things specifically about the marriage relationship, but I believe this works with every relationship. He says in verse nine, “Don’t render evil for evil.” In other words, if you want to have good, positive relationships, you can’t be giving back evil when somebody does evil to you. You can’t, it’s not an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, that’s under the law. Jesus said that’s what Moses said, but He said, you know, the new covenant, “I’ll tell you,” He said, “Pray for those who despitefully use you. Do good to those who curse you, bless those who curse you.” So the new covenant’s a different way, He says, “Or railing for railing.” This is what it says in the King James. It said it a different way in the New King James. So if you want your marriage to work, don’t just chew somebody out, right? If somebody chews you out, He says, “Contrary wise, bless them for your call that you might inherit a blessing.” If you want to inherit a blessing, if somebody’s had a bad day, if they get on your nerves, if they chew you out, you don’t have to respond, right? By chewing them back out, you can 

 

  Also, you know, this is a really good piece of advice concerning marriage, but don’t keep score. Here it’s talking about don’t keep score in a negative way, but also don’t keep score in a positive way. Like, “Well, I did the dishes three nights in a row. Now you need to,” like, some people keep score and they score themselves very high compared to their partner. But you shouldn’t do that. It’s not a scorecard type thing. Either positive things that you’re doing or negative things that your spouse is doing.

 

  When our family got involved with the full gospel, 45 years ago, I got baptized in Holy Spirit, called to preach in Andrew Wommack’s meetings. But my mom was actually talking about divorcing my dad. And so Andrew Wommack came to our house and he sat down with them. This is when almost nobody knew Andrew Wommack. He had six bible studies around different places in southeast Colorado, in southwest Kansas. He held ’em every night, Monday through Saturday night. But he came to our house and he was counseling my parents, and I was there and they asked if I needed to go in the other room. And he said, “No, I don’t think he needs to go. I think he could sit right here.” And Andrew just, my mom started talking about things that my dad had done to her before they ever got married. You know, we’re talking about 16, 17 years earlier. My dad started talking about stuff earlier in their marriage, and Andrew just stopped them immediately. And you’re talking about not keeping score. And he just said, “You guys need to quit putting X’s on the fence and we need to get whitewash out and just go over it and just forget about it.” Praise God. In fact, Jesse Duplantis was preaching, and I was with him just the other day, with him and Andrew Wommack, and he was preaching at Charis Bible College, and Jesse said, “This is the way I counsel people. Admit it, praise God, and quit it, and forget it.” And Andrew Wommack said, “That’s what I believe in.” Later, we were visiting, we were having a meal together. And Andrew’s like, “That’s how I am. I don’t believe in all this counsel stuff. Admit it, quit it, and forget it.” And basically, that’s what he was telling my parents. But you know what, my parents, in a very short time, when we got involved in that meeting, they turned their marriage from being very negative to very positive. And God healed their marriage. And you know what? God can heal relationships for you. He’s no respecter of persons. And I believe part of loving life is, you know, quit just being an eye for a eye and a tooth for a tooth and start living the gospel, start living the grace of God. And when somebody may be rails on you, contrary wise, He says, “You bless them, that you can inherit a blessing.” Now we’re gonna come back and we’re gonna be sharing more on loving life. So stay tuned. We’ll be back right after this break. Thanks so much. Blessings. Hey, friend, I have a question for you. Do you love life? I believe that God wants you, as a believer, to love life, to enjoy living. And I believe that God has given us the keys in his work so that we can do that. So go to our website at Charis Christian Center and download this teaching absolutely free. Blessings.

 

  I had become a Christian and a believer in college. There was so much I didn’t know. So got plugged in, got some good foundation, but I wanted more. The first time we’d come to this church, we just were so blown away with what we saw. People being healed, people, a woman in a wheelchair stands up and starts walking.

 

  Running!

 

  And she was in braces, and we’re going, “Whoa.”

 

  “Whoa.”

 

  Friends, I’m so glad that you stayed tuned. I’m glad that you’re here. We are talking about loving life. And it says right here in the scripture, “He who will love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil and his lips that they speak no deceit.” So we’ve got to guard our mouth, and we’ll be talking about this later, maybe not even this week, maybe next week depending on how the programs flow. But our mouth, your mouth can get you in trouble. You know, my mother had this saying that she put, and it was right over our kitchen sink, and it said, “Be careful of the words you speak. Keep them short and sweet. You never know from day to day which ones you’ll have to eat.” And so we’ve gotta guard our tongue. Our tongue, we can bless people, we can curse people, we can. And He says, He goes on and says, “Let us hate evil and do good. Let us seek peace and pursue it.”

 

  Mm.

 

  Praise God. We need to hate evil. I think sometimes people wanna see how close to hell they can live and still make heaven. That is not my heart. In fact, I think if you are using grace for an excuse to do that, you might need to check yourself out and get born again. And we need to seek peace and pursuit it. Now sometimes, you know, we live in a world, it’s corrupt, there’s sin. Sometimes you have to be firm. And sometimes, you know, the devil will try to run all over you and beat you up. But I found in a major thing that we had going on here at the church recently, you know, we need to seek peace. We need to pursue it. We need to do what’s peaceful and pursue peace, so.

 

  You know, it’s really interesting. It says here, you know, in 1 Peter 3:12 that, “The face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”

 

  Right.

 

  There’s kind of a popular movement, especially amongst young people, like deconstructionism. But one of the main things that cause people to want to deconstruct and really just kind of throw away their faith and their belief and Christian doctrine is this idea of evil. And it’s not an idea, but the person of the devil and a place called hell. And you know, a lot of people have a hard time just believing that there is evil in the world, but there is evil. And you know, not too long ago, in the Middle East, Hamas, a terrorist organization attacked Israel and it was just pure, unadulterated evil.

 

  Right.

 

  And a lot of, you know, there’s students, universities, professors, a lot of people are actually protesting against Israel, even though 

 

  That is crazy.

 

  And a big part of it’s ’cause people don’t want to admit that there is evil. That there is just filthy, you know.

 

  A lot of the liberal media, Aaron, they were refusing to report this, refusing to tell the truth. What had happened, where these people just murdered women, outright beheading people. Kill, rape.

 

  But there is evil. There is a devil. There are people who submit completely to the devil and there is an eternal place known as hell.

 

  Yeah.

 

  And you know, the Lord is against that. God is against evil. He’s prepared a place that’s the opposite of hell. It’s called heaven. And evil does exist.

 

  Yeah, and you can’t just let evil people run over good people. I can’t believe that anybody would stand up for a terrorist organization.

 

  Mm hmm.

 

  And you know, if somebody came and brutalized my wife, in my house, I would take my double barrel 12 gauge and pull both triggers at the same time.

 

  And evil, you know, even being complicit with evil, like trying to, you know, it never leads to a good place.

 

  It’s talking about this and it says, “Let us,” a couple things come to my mind as you’re talking about this. “Let us hate evil and do good.” You know, the Bible says in, I think it’s Romans 12:28, it’s the very last verse of Romans 12. It says, “Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.” But then as you’re talking about it, Hebrews 12 says this, He says, “Follow peace with all men and holiness without which no man will see the Lord.” And He says, right in that context in Hebrews 12, He says, “As much as possible, live peaceably with all men.” Well even, I heard this just yesterday in this situation in Israel and dealing with Hamas, that a number of years ago people had submitted to the PLO, let’s just make two states here. Which is crazy, right? It’s crazy. Then Israel didn’t wanna do it. But the PLO didn’t want to do it. No, they wanna wipe Israel off the face of the map. And these statements like that they have at colleges, they have these big banners, “From the river to the sea.” That means from the Jordan River, they wanna push Israel out of, you know, just wipe ’em out. There are actually world maps that they have in a lot of Middle Eastern countries where they don’t have Israel on the map. They refuse to give them the right to exist, but they’re gonna exist because God’s gonna protect them. And he has supernaturally protect them since 1948, since they were reinstated as a nation, and he’s gonna continue to supernaturally protect Israel. And I can’t believe that anybody in their right mind would support a terrorist organization raping women, murdering babies, murdering people. And I think Israel has every right to do whatever they need to do, militarily, so on and so forth, to protect themselves from this kind of nonsense.

 

  Yeah, and evil, you know, evilness, that leads to just actually a hatred for life. You know, the devil just hates what God has created, what God has done. And God created, He is the author of life.

 

  Yes.

 

  And it’s actually, you know, evil to come against life.

 

  Right. Absolutely. And just along with what you were saying, there’s a heaven to gain, there’s a hell to shun. The Bible plainly presents that. And when you read the rest of this context that we were reading, He says, “The eyes of the Lord are over the righteous and His ears are open to their prayers.” But we wanna bless, we wanna do good, we wanna be kind. But at the same point in time, God hates evil. And did you know what? We’re not just gonna let evil people. In fact, in Romans 13, right after it says, “Be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good,” Paul talks in Romans chapter 13 about the responsibility of godly government. And it says this in Romans chapter 13, “It’s the responsibility of godly government to stand against evil.” And He’s talking about being subject to higher powers. But He says this in Romans 13:3 4. He says, “Rulers are not a terror to good works.” Godly government has a right to exist. In fact, we need to support godly government. But they are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Godly governments are to be a terror, to good, to evil people. So terrorists should not be supported by godly government. He says, “Will then you not be afraid of the power, do that which is good, and you will have the praise of the same.” And any country ought to have the right to stand up against terrorist organizations, so on and so forth. And he says this, talking about rulers in godly government. In verse four, “He’s a minister of God to you for good. But if you do that which is evil, be afraid, for He bears not the sword in vain.” In other words, they ought to just be able to stand up. Thank God for godly government that they can stand up against evil, against perversion, against things that are wrong. He says, “A revenger to execute wrath upon those that do evil.” So before hell comes, praise God, before the eternal judgment of God comes. and there is a day of eternal judgment. And the Bible talks about it. You can read Revelation 21:1 7. The first seven verses talk about heaven. But the eighth verse talks about hell. And it says plainly, “The fearful and the unbelieving, so on and so forth, and people that come commit evil are gonna be cast into the lake of fire.” That’s just the way it is. So I wanna stand up for good, and I wanna stand for right. I don’t wanna let evil overcome me, praise God, but however, I want to do good as much as possible. The Bible says, “Do good to all men, seek peace with all men.” But at the same point in time, godly government will stand up against evil and stand for those who are doing good.

 

  And even here in our country, I’m really glad, you know, we have people who watch this broadcast from all around the world, but I’m very thankful that we have a country that was set up just with people who valued our God given rights to pursue life.

 

  Amen.

 

  And really, that’s what good governments that God backs should be doing, is allow people to pursue life, freedom.

 

  That’s correct.

 

  And that’s really . . .

 

  If you’ll actually study history, you’ll find this too. Any nation who has stood against Israel has fallen. So we wanna be, you know, in the United States of America on the right side of this and stand, right? Number one, we wanna stand for the, you know, covenant people of God and Godly principles. And number two, we wanna stand for the nation of Israel. Praise God. I’m so glad that you’ve tuned in today. I’m glad that you’ve been a part of the broadcast. We have this series on Loving Life available online. You can get it free of charge just by going to our website CharisChristianCenter.com. We actually have hundreds of hours of teaching. We have children’s materials, we have all these things, and we do this through the help of our partners. So if you need prayer today or you want to partner with us and help us with this message, just give us a call. Blessings. Friends, we don’t want to leave this broadcast without giving you the opportunity to receive Jesus Christ as your Lord. Pray with me right now. Heavenly Father, I believe that Jesus Christ is your son. I believe that he died for my sins, and you raised him from the dead and made him Lord. And right now, I surrender my life to your Lordship. In Jesus’ name, amen.

 

  God is the author of life, and every gift from him is perfect and good. If you have breath in your lungs, you have a reason to rejoice. You can love life because God is good. His word is always true. Jesus’ Lord and His blessing is upon you. We’d like to bless you with a digital copy of the teaching Loving Life, a $20 value free of charge. Download it today at CharisChristianCenter.com. Thanks for watching “Grace For Today.” This broadcast has been made possible by our faithful partners. If you would like to become a partner, need prayer, or have a question, please call us at 719 418 4000. Or to partner online, go to CharisChristianCenter.com/Give. You can write us at PO Box 63733, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 80962. See you next time on “Grace For Today.”