Intimate Love

By Bishop Dr. Laverne Chapman

This book will inspire you to become a better husband, wife, companion, and friend. It will encourage you to take nothing for granted and have a stronger relationship. It will motivate, challenge, and influence you to move forward in life and build upon the principles that God has established. God has gifted and anointed Dr. Chapman to speak the word of the Lord prophetically into the hearts and lives of His people. This groundbreaking message will open your eyes to the truth about intimate love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452052212

Book preview

© 2010 Bishop Dr. Laverne Chapman. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 9/1/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4520-5221-2 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-5219-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-5220-5 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010910455

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Dedication

Marriage and Relationships

A Personal Experience

Baby Girl

Affected By The Seed

Man, Know who you are

Struggles of Leading

Anointed For Battle

You be the Man

Soul

What’s In A Gift

Love and Respect

The Male Covering

The Body

Intimate Love

Leader

Relationships

Death to Self

What About Name Calling

About The Author

Acknowledgments

Dedication

To you, the reader, for whom I pray that it will inspire and change your life.

To encourage marriages, relationships and everyone that is seeking to better their lives.

Marriage and Relationships

There are many marriages and relationships that are divorcing or splitting up and going their separate ways, leaving dysfunctional families behind. Often times, it begins with a lack of communication and how well do we relate to each other. When a body part is missing it causes excruciating pain and imbalance throughout the whole entire body. So, it is in marriage when the husband, who is the head of the family is missing the entire family suffers. Where is the head ? Where is the leadership ? Where is the vision ? and where is the hearing ? When the head is cut off everything is out of place. The wife immediately has to fulfill his role and hold things together. We must be of the same mind and of the same spirit as we both flow together with close relationship and oneness that life challenges will not be able to wedge us apart. As we study the Bible, we will discover that God approves relationships. The only way to know Him is through relationship. If we are going to know and understand each other, it’s going to be through relationships. How well do I know you? Or how can I relate to you? How can I trust you or invite you into my life?

When God created man on the sixth day, He said in (Genesis 1:26), Let us make man in our image and likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. All other creatures reproduce after their kind, but man is the only one made in the image of God and reproducing in that image. The terms image and likeness refer primarily to man’s spiritual resemblance to his maker.

Only man has the capacity for eternal life, fellowship, moral discernment, self-consciousness, speech, and worship. Even after the Fall, man retained this image of God, though it had been marred. Regaining a likeness of God is one of the accomplishments of salvation. Our spiritual likeness is restored in justification. Our character likeness continuously develops in the process of sanctification. God’s purpose in our lives today is to conform us to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29). Man was created in both the image and likeness of God. An image is a representation of one person or thing by another; it may be similar, but not necessarily identical, to its original. When God said Let us make man in our image and likeness, He had to be speaking to someone He knew, loved, and understood; someone He could trust and have faith in; someone who would commune with Him and have partnership with Him. Here, we find God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit in unity, oneness, fellowship, and relationship with each other. I would like to call them the First Family.

In (Genesis 2:18), the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him. He wanted to create someone who would be compatible to the man, who could work well together with him, be capable of living together harmoniously or getting along; who could relate and combine with him well. He wanted someone who could help the man make sound decisions and good opinions. God’s creative work was not complete until He made woman.

He could have made her from the dust of the ground, as He made man. God chose, however, to make her from the man’s flesh and bone. In so doing, He illustrated for us that in marriage, man and woman symbolically become one flesh. This is a mystical union of the couple’s hearts and lives. Throughout the Bible, God treats this special partnership seriously. If you are married or planning to get married, are you willing to keep the commitment that makes the two of you one? The goal in marriage should be more than friendship; it should be oneness.

God forms and equips men and women for various tasks, but all these tasks lead to the same goal: honoring God. Man gives life to woman; woman gives life to the world. Each role carries exclusive privileges; there is no room for thinking that one sex is superior to the other. There have to be good communication skills when relating to each other.

In (Genesis 2:24) says, Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. They were created perfectly for each other. Marriage is a gift from God, one that should not be taken for granted. Marriage was not just convenient, nor was it bought about by any culture. It was instituted by God and has three basic aspects: (1) The man leaves his parents and promises himself to his wife; (2) The man and woman are joined together by taking responsibility for each other’s welfare and by loving the mate above all other; (3) The two become one flesh in the intimacy and commitment of sexual union that is reserved for marriage. Strong marriages include all three of these aspects.

Have you ever noticed how a little child can run naked through a room full of strangers without embarrassment? He is not aware of his nakedness, just as Adam and Eve were not embarrassed in their nakedness. But after Adam and Eve sinned, shame followed, creating barriers between themselves and God. We often experience these same barriers in marriage. However, a husband and wife should have no barriers and feel no embarrassment in exposing themselves to each other or to God. But, like Adam and Eve in (Genesis 3:7), we put on fig leaves (our barriers) because we have areas we don’t want our spouse, or God, to know about. Then we hide, just as Adam and Eve hid from God. I can remember in a church service when someone cried out to the Lord Get the rest out of me In essence, they were saying I surrender all, If anything in me that should not be take it all out of me. They were willing to expose themselves no matter what the cost. They had refused to live a life of hypocrisy. They refused to wear fig leaves any longer whether it was before God or their spouse they wanted to make it right. In (St. Mark 4:22), says For there is nothing hid, which shall not be revealed; neither was anything kept secret, but it should come to the light. In marriage, lack of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual intimacy usually precedes a breakdown of physical intimacy. In the same way, when we fail to expose our secret thoughts of God, we break our lines of communication with him.

Marriage is so important in the mind of God that it was the first of three divine institutions and was patterned to illustrate Christ’s love for the church. God’s ideal plan for marriage is one man for one woman for one lifetime. God’s pattern for marital happiness is evident when a man loves and leads his family, with children who obey and reverence their parents (Ephesians 6:1–4) and a wife who respects and supports her husband’s leadership (Ephesians 5:21–33). A mutually supportive attitude must characterize both husband and wife if they are to succeed in building a harmonious home.

In a marriage relationship, both husband and wife are called to submit. For the wife, this means willingly following her husband’s leadership in Christ. For the husband, it means putting aside his own interests in order to care for his wife. Submission is rarely a problem in homes where both parents have a strong relationship with Christ and where each is concerned for the happiness of the other and will help encourage them toward their destiny. In the apostle Paul’s day, women, children, and slaves were to submit to the head of the family. Slaves would submit until they were freed, male children until they grew up, and women and girls their whole lives. Paul emphasized the equality of all believers in Christ (Galatians 3:28), but he did not suggest overthrowing Roman society to achieve it. Instead, he counseled his listeners to submit to one another by choice: wives to husbands and also husbands to wives; slaves to masters and also masters to slaves; children to parents and also parents to children.

There is a difference between obeying and honoring. To obey means to do as one is told; to honor means to respect and love. Children are not commanded to disobey God in obeying their parents. Adult children are not asked to be subordinate