Transcription
Always excited to hear my Bishop teach. If we could just lift our hands and ask God to bless the service. Lord Jesus, I'm asking you, God, to bless this service. God, anoint our ears, God, to receive your word. Touch every Sunday school class, God. Their Sunday School classes going on all over this campus. God, I'm asking you to anoint the teachers, God, in the name of Jesus.
Worship with him.
[Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] I don't know. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Thank you.
I'm thankful for a day in my life that I called on His name and He moved in mine. You may return to your seats. I remember a day that it was dark and gloomy, seemed like I had lost all hope. And I went to a church. I went to a church and God filled me with a precious gift of the Holy Ghost. I can't tell you. You may be seated. I can't tell you that that, uh, that my life has become much clearer. I've still got issues. I've still got problems, but I know who's in control.
[Music]
Before, I didn't know. I didn't have anybody to turn to. The people that was around me was dealing with the same stuff I was, or worse. But now I've got a God. I've got a God. I've got the gift of the Holy Ghost. He said, "Whenever I leave, He said, 'I'm going to leave with you a comforter, which is the Holy Ghost.'" So glad that, that God's many things to me, but He's been my comforter. He's been my help whenever I've been in trouble. Let's all just lift our hands. If you've got the Holy Ghost, thank God for the Holy Ghost.
[Music] so much [Music] [Music] you don't know [Music] rise [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] you ready [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music]
Praise the Lord. You may return to your seats. If I could, and remain standing. If I could get a few ushers to help me, we're going to give you an opportunity to be blessed today.
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There's one thing I know. I owe the church everything. The church has been my, my family. The church has been my father, my mother.
[Music] mistake. I'm thankful for the church. There's, there's nothing in my life that I don't know. God, I owe God everything. Oh, God, everything. You feel that way today? Lord Jesus, we love you. I ask you to bless this offering, God. Bless the giver in the name of Jesus. Come, come cheerfully, as, uh, we receive the tithes and offerings today.
[Music] to all the wrong places. [Music] [Music] Oh, and grace came all in my name. That grave was held out, lost.
You would need me. You followed me through darkness and chased me down with mercy. You see me on my past. There is, I'm not the same. Like alive.
He would leave me. He followed me through darkness and chased me down with mercy. You would look back. You'd see behind my past. There is nothing I have ever done to make. And grace came all in my name. Lost.
[Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] Thank you for setting me free. Thank you for taking these chains off of me. Thank you that I'm not who I used to be. Thank you for loving me.
[Music] Thank you for taking me. Thank you that I'm not who I used to be. And grace came, call in my name. Lived in my soul up out of that grave. I was held out, lost, and then found. Look what you've done. You've turned it all around.
[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Hallelujah.
Man, I love that song. I love that song. And I love the worship of these, uh, young people. How many of you appreciate these young people worshiping around the front of this building? I want to say, I want to say thank you to our young people for your exuberant worship, uh, your standings. I want to go quickly with the word and let you be seated. I'm going to do part two of boundaries. Uh, Proverbs 25 and 17. Proverbs the 25th chapter in the 17th verse. Proverbs chapter 25 and verse 17. And this is going to be boundaries part two. I was unable to finish last week, and so I'm going to do part two this week.
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So, you preachers, always remember that if you don't get finished with a sermon, you don't have to keep preaching. You can always do part two.
Somebody said, "Well, what if it's my only shot at a church?" Well, preach too long, and it will be. Proverbs 25 and 17. Proverbs 25 and 17. It says, "Let your foot be seldom in your neighbor's house, or withdraw thy foot from thy neighbor's house, lest he should be weary with thee and so hate thee." God bless you. You can be seated.
Boundaries part two. Boundaries part two. So, let me get down to where I stopped last week. And, uh, last week we talked about, um, last week we talked about boundaries with family, boundaries with people, interpersonal boundaries. And this week, I want to talk to you about some ground rules that should be in your life concerning those boundaries. We talked about the general overarching principle last week, but I did not get to any illustrations or particulars. So this week, I actually want to talk about some of those circumstances and situations. But before I do, I want to go to First Corinthians chapter 5. First Corinthians the fifth chapter, and I'm going to read the 9th through the 11th verses. First Corinthians chapter 11. In verse, verses 9, or I'm sorry, First Corinthians chapter 5, verses 9 through 11. First Corinthians chapter 5, verses 9 through 11.
And what I'm going to discuss with you is the fact that we think in order to be a Christian, that we should not have any boundaries. That our door ought to be open to everyone. We ought to be helping everyone. We ought to be doing everything we can to help everyone. But when you go back through history, you're going to find out that too many preachers, too many preachers, too many missionaries lost their marriages, their children, and their health because they didn't have healthy boundaries. And I want to start out by saying Jesus Christ himself set boundaries. What does that mean? That means that, that means that people want miracles performed, and He jumped in a boat with His disciples and went to the other side and got away from them and rested, because He understood that if He was not at peak mental, physical, and spiritual performance, then He was of no use to anyone anyway. And so boundaries are important. You know, one of the things that we don't talk about is when Jesus healed blind Bartimaeus, the greatest chance is he was not the only beggar on that street. There's no telling how many he passed up to get to Bartimaeus. There's no telling how many he passed after he left Bartimaeus. And so Jesus did not come to heal. He came to save. So He don't have to heal everybody. That's not His purpose in being here. I'm gonna say that again because I think you missed that. He doesn't have to heal everybody because that's His purpose for coming. That's not His purpose for coming. His purpose for coming is to save. To save.
"I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators." Well, that's strong, isn't it? You know, that's parents also. Thank you. That went over real good. Let's talk about parents too. "Yet all together with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, then must need to go out of the world." So what He's saying is, is there's a different set of rules for people in the world that do that stuff. And He says, "That's not who I'm talking about because you can't leave this world." So if you're going to be in this world, you're going to have to trade and barter and buy and sell and deal with these people that I'm going to mention. He said, "But there's a different set of rules for people that claim to be Holy Ghost people and people in the church that do these things."
Verse 11. "But now I have written to you not to keep company. If any man that is called a brother." That's the deciding factor. If they're in the church, supposed to be a part of the church, supposed to be a brother, sister in the church, and they're a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a, or a drunkard, or an extortioner, with such a one know not to eat." You don't go out to eat and hang around with people like that. You tell them, "I'm sorry, I'm hanging out with you. You're a regular." What is a regular? Somebody's always causing confusion and trouble and talking about people. And if there's problems going on, you stir around a little bit, their head always pops up. Don't hang out with them. Don't go out to eat with them. Don't feed them. You know, some of this stuff just sits heavy, don't it? Just sits heavy. You know, we need to pay attention to this. It could be why we're blessed or not blessed. It could be why we, some people have favor and some people don't. Maybe you don't have favor because you like to hang out with the wrong people. You know, if I was hanging out with somebody that was mean to people and talked behind people's back and was arrogant and cocky, oh, I wouldn't hang out with them. I wouldn't want to be associated with that. I would want to hang out with someone that was kind, someone that wanted to do right. You know, I used to teach on this all the time. I'm glad all you young people are in here because, you know, if you get in the car with a young person and you're riding down the road, they want to listen to rock and roll or or country music or whatever. You know what you need to do? You need to say, "You need to pull over and let me out. I ain't riding." Why is that? Because you're a young driver anyway. It ain't right like I'm riding with my mom and dad. Been riding for 30 years. You, you know, you've been driving about five years anyhow. You're not a very skilled driver. I just don't want to run the risk of you sending me into eternity listening to ungodly music. You know, neither one of our skilled drivers anyway. So if we're going to ride around together, the least thing we could do is listen to some worship music or something.
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I mean, let's, let's at least get the favor. Let's at least get the favor of God on this car. I mean, am I making sense to y'all? Don't ride around with somebody who wants to listen to worldly music, ungodly music. Set some boundaries. Respect yourself. Respect yourself. Somebody said, "Well, it's not a big deal." If it wasn't a big deal, I wouldn't be making a big deal out of it. It is a big deal. It is a big deal. Somebody said, "Well, Brother Copeland, you go to Branson and go to that Silver Dollar City, and they play, they play country music." Silver Dollar City? Yeah, you're right. There's a lot of difference in walking around Silver Dollar City and then playing it and me putting it on in my car. That's just what this scripture is about. What it's saying is, is you can't leave this world. You're going to run into some things while you're in this world. But it changes things when someone says, "I am a brother." You know, you can't control what they play in a, in a restaurant or a clothing store where you are. But you can control your environment. And so you've got to set boundaries. Why are boundaries important? Boundaries are important because there is a strong correlation between, and this is hitting the church, this is the world. There's a strong correlation between rock music and suicide. It, it's not the church that talks about that. The world talks about that. There's a strong correlation between rock music and drug use. Well, let me tell you where else there's a strong correlation. There's a strong correlation between country music and marriages falling apart. You, you can't listen to all this cheating hearts and, you know, lying here, will unknown my mind, and all that kind of stuff, and not start thinking in those thought patterns. It's important what you put in your cranium. It's important what you decide to think on. I read a quote the other day that, that, uh, Lamborghini, the Lamborghini car has never advertised on television. Never in the history of selling cars have they ever advertised on television. You know why? Because they said, "Anybody that can afford our cars ain't wasting their time watching television." I didn't know anything in our clientele. Because if they're wasting time watching television, they're not driven enough to drive one of our cars. They're time wasters. They can't be making enough money wasting time to afford one of our vehicles. So they've never advertised on television. That's not their clientele. It's important what you spend your time with. It's important what you listen to. Yes, it's important what you're doing with your mind, with your brain. And if you listen to losing your house and losing your wife and losing your car and losing your dog, you're probably going to wind up a loser. That's what you are. You're setting yourself up to be a loser. You're going to set some boundaries in your world, and you've got to say, "There's things that I don't give my brain to." It's too important. You know, we live in a, we live in a world where an alarming amount of people every year are developing dementia, Alzheimer's, and dementia. It's escalating. Well, there is a strong correlation between the escalating of dementia and Alzheimer's and people that don't use their brain anymore. What does that mean? What does that mean? That means that prior to the cell phone, you memorized somewhere around 500 phone numbers. How many of you got memorized now? You need to think about what I'm saying to you. Prior to the cell phone, you knew 500 people's phone numbers by memory. You just walk the phone dial. You know, there was a few people that you didn't call on a regular basis that you had to pull a little tab out and go for, go through a turn, some little pages in your wallet and call them. You know, if you wasn't a business person or you wasn't a social butterfly, it might have been a hundred numbers. But I'm going to tell you, memorizing 30 numbers would be a big thing today. If you had 30 numbers on recall, prior to the calculator, everybody had to do math. No one does math anymore. You said, "Why is people getting dementia and Alzheimer's?" If you don't use it, you lose it. And we live in a world that demands no brain power anymore. Because I don't believe that. Well, I just, let me challenge you. Let me challenge you to pick up a book written a hundred years ago, and within three chapters, you're going to come across a dozen words that you have to look up. Because we now have an average of about 150 words that we use on a day-to-day basis. And if you curse, use about 30. Because you know every other word has to be an explicit. If you know, and it's a dumbing down. It's a dumbing down that has nothing to do with race or creed or color or anything else. You know, they want to make race relations out of everything now. We don't, we don't have a race problem. We have too many people talking about race problems. We don't have a genuine real race issue. It's the dumbing down of Americans across the board. You know, you, you today, because you have a cell phone, you don't know your own daughter's phone number. You tap her name in the phone, tell them. And so the, the, the, for someone to say that that this is a racial divide, this is a racial situation. No, it's an American problem. It's an American problem that there is an overarching dumbing down that is connected. The reason I'm talking about this is because it's connected to media, whether it's music, movies, uh, cell phones, Facebook, whatever it is. It is dumbing you down. That someone else is telling you what to look at, what to think, what to buy, what's cool, what's not cool. And you're feeling the pressure of it every day that you live. You're feeling the pressure of it that you've got to look a certain way. You, I couldn't believe it a few years ago when I realized the pressure of, and I'm, I'm running out of time here, but when you're, I realized that we were run, that the pressure was actually in our church. The pressure of Facebook and Instagram was actually affecting the young people in our church. I couldn't believe it. And you say, "Are you sure, Pastor?" Absolutely. Because I could get up as their pastor and ask them to repost Winter Summit, and they would not do it. You know why they wouldn't do it? Because they had an online persona, and advertising their youth summit didn't fit that persona. And I couldn't believe that they'd rather not advertise their youth meeting to have an online persona of a bunch of people that they did not know, would never meet, but they were worried about how they felt about them so much that they wouldn't help out the people that they didn't know. And so I saw on an everyday basis, that's a, that is a powerful thing. You say, "Well, Brother Copeland, why are you, why are you bringing up this scripture?" Because something happened a few years ago that was quite amazing. See, your life used to be in categories and in boxes. Because in order to go to work, you had to get up early, you had to fix your lunch, you had to get in your car, you had to drive to your workplace. And when you walked through the doors of your workplace, you had a set of boundaries that you knew for that workplace. Many of them were demanded by the place that you worked. One is, you, you don't fraternize with, with, with other employees, such as dating and, and relationships. That demanded a set of boundaries to make sure that that didn't happen. There were, there were boundaries that you knew. Then you would, when you got off work, you'd get in your car and you drive home. And when you got to your home, your home was distinctly separated from your workplace. And you had another set of boundaries within the house, or you should have. We did it. My house, I knew my mother's boundaries very well. Mom, I'm thirsty. Well, go get you something to drink. Her boundary was, I fed you a bottle when you was a baby. I brought a drink to you when I was afraid you're going to spill it and put a lid on it. But now that you're 13, you go fix your own drink. That was her boundaries. Mom, I need to iron a shirt, iron for, for school tomorrow. You know where the laundry room is. Make sure you unplug the iron. I'm not ironing your shirt for you. There's a set of boundaries in our house. Am I, am I making sense to y'all here? There's boundaries on the job. There were boundaries in the home. Listen, listen, here's what happened to us. You've got to get a hold of this. Something came along that pierced time and space. It was called the internet. It mixed everything up. Now you don't know whether you're at work or at home. Because you may, even though you may go into the workplace, you may go home and answer 30 emails at your house. And you know what it did? It, and it was, I believe it was designed by the enemy, but it threw boundaries out the window. And you saw this only increase during COVID. Because at least there was a semblance of workplace and home place before COVID. But buddy, during COVID, there were no separations. Well, what happened to that? We'll read about it. Marital affairs and divorces and all that went out the roof. Because now a guy is, can I talk plain to you now? You got a guy sitting at a computer typing out an email to a female co-worker that's in her pajamas too, right? You say, "What does that matter?" It matters a lot if you understand anything about psychology. Because it's one thing for two dressed people to talk to each other. It's another thing for two naked people to talk to each other. Well, they don't know I'm naked. No, but you do. And there's something about that. There's something about a woman sitting in a little negligee in her bedroom emailing a guy that she's halfway attracted to that she works with. She wouldn't have done that under any other circumstances. But now all of a sudden, we have a world with no boundaries. And read about it. Men and women went home to their spouses, locked down in their house with their spouse, but they weren't with their spouses. They were with everybody else while they were at home. Because the internet made that possible. And, and divorce and extramarital affairs went out the roof when we weren't supposed to be meeting with one another. How do you do that? I said, "Now I'm not supposed to be six feet of somebody else." But they figured out how to have an affair. Now, I count myself a pretty smart man, but I don't know how you have an affair with someone from six feet away. I mean, my, my wife and I have had two children. We had to get closer than six feet to make that happen. Now, now listen, listen. I'm not trying to make you laugh. I'm trying to be real with you. What I'm trying to tell you is that we now live in a world where proximity don't matter. Because we've developed a time where people are interacting soulishly instead of fleshly. Now, if you, if you missed what I just said, you're not going to get the entire rest of this. We're linking souls now instead of bodies. And it's on a whole another spiritual level. People don't have to meet one-on-one anymore. Sexting. They're sexting from one country to the other. They're having online intimacy and they're not even on the same continent. Because we have lost all sense of boundaries.
So in 15 minutes, I need to talk to you specifically about a few things. And that is, if you don't want to be saved and you want to be a part of this world, this is the way you do it. You just keep hanging out with those kind of people. But if there's any desire in you to live above the norm and say, "First of all, I want to see." Here's what it comes down to. And I keep coming back and back and back to this. Who, who do you want to have relationship with? If you want relationship with God, you cannot have a relationship with this world. If you want a relationship with this world, it will not allow you to have a relationship with God. So more and more and more, you're going to be pushed to a choice. And everybody has got to make that choice for themselves. One of the most disappointing things that I know is that you cannot control someone else's choices. I hate it. Why? But you, you can't control your husband's choice. I hate it for you, husband. But you can't control your wife's choices. And here's the real heartbreak. Parents, we can't control our children's choices. Now, we can to a certain age. But there is an age where they get up 16, 17 years old, and I'm just going to tell you, if you've not already put that foundation in them, it's over with. If you do not put a deep love for God in your kids before they get to about 16 years old, you can't go back and relay that foundation. You know, you, you can remodel a house all you want to from the concrete up. You know, you can do anything you want to from the concrete up. But you'll never go back and redo that foundation without tearing that house down. And you got one shot at putting it in your kids. And you're only going to do it with proper boundaries. Here's the deal. And let me say this right quick, and then we're going to move on to some specifics. But that's really the whole thing. They're never going to know about boundaries if you don't teach them boundaries in their growing up years. They're not going to go and figure boundaries out later. It's something that's got to be in them from children. Good, solid boundaries. You can build anything from there. But if you raise them without boundaries, it's a concept they'll never wrap their head around the rest of their lives. Now, listen to what I'm telling you right now. You say, "Well, how do you know that? How can you establish this?" Because I've been pastoring here for 25 years. And the average person that comes in and prays through in this church and becomes a part of this church, that was raised in a family and raised in a decent household, you know what they take to live for God like a duck to water. But I've never prayed anybody through yet that came out of the drug culture that did not struggle to live for God for at least a decade. Why is that? Because what the drug culture does is does away with all boundaries. In order to be in the drug culture, you have no boundaries. You'll steal from your mama as easily as you will the lady on the street. I hate to be unkind, but you, you know, and off-color, but you, you know, you'll sleep with a girl in the bedroom next door as well as you will your wife. It's a drug culture. And the drug culture is, there are no boundaries. There are no limitations. There are no restrictions. And so when it, when a person prays through out of the drug culture, it's not that the drugs call them back. God delivers them from the drugs. Why do they want back on drugs? Not because they want to go get back on drugs. It's that they struggle to totally change their life. See, I don't believe that. What, just, just work with one. It's not that they want to go, that they want to go back to drugs. It's that they don't want to get up Monday and go to a job they've never had one before. That boundary of setting that clock at eight, at 7:30, and being on a job at eight o'clock is just too much for them. You mean I got to be here at eight? I was tired. I mean, I know it's 9:30, but look here, I'm here. You don't understand. You got to be here at eight. Well, why? They can't get it. They've never had boundaries. And they don't want you putting boundaries on them. Am I making sense to y'all? They don't go back to drugs because, because they want drugs. They go back to drugs because, you know, they, they disappear out of your life for three days and you start tracking them now. And you're like, "Hey, you wasn't at church Wednesday night. Where were you?" Were you the FBI? No, it's just that in our world, if you're not going to be somewhere, you call and let somebody know. Well, man, I've been living a life where I disappeared for three or four days and nobody knows where I was. I'm sure. I mean, yeah, I gotta check in with you. What, you my boss? No, it's a relationship. It's a friendship that they have no clue about. You don't lose them because God didn't really deliver them from drugs. You lose them because they lived a life for years without any boundaries. And they don't know how to all of a sudden have a set. And they think you're being mean and cruel and harsh and unkind and unchristian. Well, I thought y'all were Christians. You're firing me. Well, yeah, but you was late three days this week. There's boundaries. You've got to be on the job at eight o'clock, just like everybody else. I never had to do that before. Boundaries is a big deal. And it's the make or break of many people's lives. Again, careers are lost, marriages are destroyed, lives are hampered, people crash and burn on the road to success because they lack boundaries.
Let's talk about some that's in the church that are not in the world. And again, the minute you start talking about boundaries, people, people pause. But the thing about it is, if you rolled back time 50 years, these boundaries used to be in society. And the reason I'm so hard on music and movies and all that is because that is the media that broke down boundaries. It totally changed the world. When I was a kid, when I was a kid, and I think I might have mentioned this last week, if I did, forgive me, it bears telling me. When I, I was a kid in the 70s, if, if someone moved into our neighborhood who were not married, it set the entire neighborhood abuzz. You know, kids were told, "Stay out of their yard. They're not married. They're shacking up. You don't go around them. They shouldn't be doing that." Anybody else old enough to remember that? Anybody? You should come on. Some of y'all my age. Oh, I forgot. Yo, this is Mississippi. Y'all don't have any neighborhoods here. I was raised in Texas. Now, now you live on 30 acres, ma'am. There's 500. That was 500 families lived in 30 acres in Texas. But it was a, it was a deal that, you know, everybody felt that that was wrong. You don't do that. If you want to live with someone, you marry them. You make a life commitment. One, one television sitcom broke that. And it was called Three's Company. And after about a five-year run of Three's Company on television, everybody had a different opinion. People just living together. It broke a boundary. It broke a boundary. Now, now you know, 40 years later, parents are just go help two kids set up a household together that's living together. No requirement to get married. We'll go bring them furniture and eat with them. And but what does that, what does that say? Well, I know the Bible don't matter. We let, we let society tell us how to live. Society says that's mean, that's rude, that's cruel. No, the Bible says you set a boundary and you tell them, "I love you. I'll always love you. That'll never change. But I'm not going to back you living a different way than I raised you." Um, I'd raise you like that. You want to sleep with that girl? Make a life commitment to her. Marry her. If you don't want to make a life commitment to her, don't sleep with her. That's still what the Bible says. I know it's 2023, but that's still what the Bible says. The Bible says it's fornication. It may be not popular in today's society. But guess what is popular in today's society? Broken homes. Kids strung out from one side of the nation to the other. No stability in families or homes. Kids had a lot better chance at life when I was raised where you got married and you had mama and daddy both in the home and they stayed together. They had a lot better chance than the brokenness of today. I still vote that the Bible's right, no matter what society says.
So let's cover a few particulars. I still believe, I still believe that that young people, as when they're when they're living in the home and they're under 18 years old, shouldn't be dating alone. I don't think they have any business getting in a car and leaving at six o'clock in the evening and say, "Y'all be home by midnight." Six hours. What are they going to do for six hours? I got a pretty good idea. You know, it takes them about an hour to drive to a restaurant, eat, get back in the car and leave. And then they got to try to find something to do till midnight. Well, guess what? When two people the opposite sex are really like each other and really attracted to each other, they're going to find something to do. And it ain't gonna be their fault when they come in and tell you they're expecting a baby. You did that. Ain't no sense you hollering, screaming, and fussing at them. You did that. 16-year-old, 17-year-olds don't have any business getting a car and riding around. I mean, they're still in school. They can't, they can't work a job yet. Their frontal lobe is completely undeveloped. And that creates part of the problem. They have no fear factor. They know where all those boundaries are in that frontal lobe that is still. Listen to me. I know, I know the kids start laughing every time I mention frontal lobe. We just laugh because it's true. If the insurance companies had their way, they would raise the driving age to 25. Because the frontal lobe where the fear factor is and all the boundaries are developed are in that frontal lobe. The frontal lobe of the brain. And guess what is not developed until somewhere around 25, depending on male or female or things of that nature. What does that mean? That means the parents have to set the boundaries because the kids don't have the ability to. They don't have the mental capacity to. That's why they've got to have parents. And they don't need a daddy in Washington State. They need a mother and daddy in the home working together to set boundaries. I know it's not popular. But guess what? I didn't come here to pass this church to win a popularity contest. I came to preach the truth. Dating, a mother and daddy in the home, setting boundaries for them because they can't set their own boundaries. They'll have, they don't have the mental capacity to. You know what Mom and Daddy said needs to say? "Come on over to the house. You can visit with her, and we'll order some pizza and stay in the living room." You know, when I was growing up, I couldn't take a girl I was dating to the back of the house, kitchen, and living rooms. The only place I could go. My mama, she has no business in your bedroom. And there was an open door policy in my house. I couldn't even close my bedroom door because I was changing clothes. I'm just telling you where I was raised. Close races, open door policy. If you're naked, close the door. If you're dressed, the door stays open. Why? Because devious minds invent all kind of things behind closed doors. That's why, son. That's the way it was in our house. And if my bedroom door stayed closed too long, somebody said, "Hey, what you doing in there? Get the door open." Yeah, there were boundaries in our house. You say, "Well, that was overkill. There wasn't no sense in all that." Well, I'm pastoring a church today. You want me to tell you about some of the guys I grew up with that didn't have those boundaries? You'll have boundaries when you go. I'm done because it's four o'clock. And then, then comes a time that, you know, 19, 20, 21, that kids get old enough, they got to express themselves. And you, you've got to give, you've got to give them some leeway. But they still don't need to just be going off into the night. You know, it's one thing to ride somewhere, turn around and come back. It's another thing just to have all these hours that you can just disappear and do what you want to do. You know what you're going to do? You're going to mess your life up before you even get your life started. That's what you're going to do. And parents, I can't set. Somebody said, "Well, Brother Copeland, you don't even have rules once they graduate and turn 19 years old. You don't have rules for them." That's your job. Ain't mine. You handle that. Stop being afraid of your kids and handle them. Because if you're scared of them, they're going to mess your world up too. It won't just be them. They're going to mess your world up too.
Last thing I want to say because I got to be done with this is no, no man has any business, unless it's job-related, emailing or texting someone that's not their spouse. Don't do that. You don't text somebody, some other man's wife. Have a texting conversation. Well, she's a friend. You don't have friends that's somebody else's spouse or somebody else's wife. Or not. Y'all may have friends, but once you're married, the two become one. That's both of y'all's friends. So if it's both of y'all's friend, then you copy each other in the text. If she needs to text you, she copies your husband in it, or your wife. Am I making sense to you? If I get a text from a woman, I go straight to my wife and say, "I want you to see this. I want you to read this. How you want me to respond?" So if you text me, I promise you my wife knows about it. If I'm not, whether I forward it to her, it may be harmless. It may be a text that says, "There's a dog in the yard." It don't matter. It's amazing how a dog in the yard can wind up an affair if you start texting back and forth with someone. Put up boundaries. If you go to visit your buddy and he's not home, you don't go in and sit there and visit with his wife till he gets home. You leave. Tell Bill to call me when he gets home, and I'll come back over. You get off the doorstep. You remove your foot from your neighbor's house. Because many, many lives are destroyed because people didn't have boundaries. Set boundaries and live by them. It'll make you happy. It'll make you successful.
Stand together. I'm done. Let's lift our hands and thank God for this opportunity to be in His word. Jesus, dear Lord, thank you for Your Word. Thank you for speaking to our hearts and our minds and our spirits. Get a hold of us. Get a hold of our hearts, our minds. Change us, God. Help us to have good, healthy boundaries in our lives, in our relationships. I didn't get done, so next week, maybe boundaries part three. We'll see how it happens. I love you. God bless you. You're dismissed in the name of Jesus and the fear of God.