Description
IGNITE
You’re Fired
Ed Young
July 14, 2002
You know, it’s a pretty amazing thing to look back over your life and to recall all the interesting people that you have met. I did that a while back and I want to tell you about a guy I met in Houston several years ago. This guy’s name is Robert and he is an agent for a lot of professional boxers. I’m talking about some serious guys. Anyway, he walked up to me one day and he said, “Ed, have you ever been to a professional boxing match?” I said, “No.” So he took me to a boxing match in Houston.
So while I was sitting there watching this boxing match, he walked up to me and said, “Ed, I’ve been back there in the dressing room and I was wondering if you would like to experience what it is like to be in the ring with a heavy-weight boxer? Would you like to feel what’s it like?” I said, “No man, I mean I don’t want to get hit.” He said, “No, no, no. I’m not talking about getting hit. I’m talking about you standing there and letting a boxer throw punches at your head.” I said, “Well yeah, I’ll do that.” He said, “Come on.”
So we went into this dressing room and here is this heavy-weight boxer. He’s like 6’4”, 230; he has a hood on and he’s shadow boxing. Robert says, “Okay, Ed, come a little closer.” And then he told the guy to start punching at my head. This guy’s gloves are coming like an inch away from my nose and eyes. I could feel the wind. It was a frightening experience. But it was a unique experience because literally this guy could kill you with just one punch. We like to experience things don’t we? We don’t want to just watch a game, we want to experience a game.
How many brand new fathers do we have in the house? If you’re a brand new dad lift your hand. Dads, I guarantee it, you went into the delivery room didn’t you? Because your wife wanted you to experience and you wanted to experience childbirth. We see these commercials about cars. They say, “Don’t just buy a car, have that ultimate driving experience.” Virtual reality is really popular and then there are these reality based television shows. We want to experience things. Experiencing things is a great thing. And this desire, this capacity that all of us have to experience things, has been given to us by God himself. Isn’t that neat? I mean that is a great thing to think about. God has created us in His image and we have a great capacity for experience. Here’s my next question. Do you, on a regular basis, experience God? Do you have personal, deep encounters with Him? Do you feel God speaking to you? Do you recognize him?
In this closing session of this series called “Ignite” we are going to find out how to experience and connect with God on a regular basis. Now some of you here might not be believers, maybe you are outside the family of God. Maybe you are testing the waters, kicking the tires. Welcome to Fellowship Church. Listen very carefully to what I am going to talk about today. Because one day, when you step over the line and make a faith decision, you’ll get what I’m talking about. But right now you might not get it all. But God, I’m telling you, wants to say something great to you right now.
Those of us here who are inside the family of God, those of us who are believers, who are life long followers of Christ, this talk is tailor made for us. A lot of us here are maybe a little dry spiritually, a lot of us here need that spark to really get ignited. Well, we are going to look at a guy that you have probably heard of before. I’m talking about a major player in the Bible, Moses. Moses experienced God. He really did. His story is found in the book of Exodus, Chapter 3.
Moses was born into Egyptian slavery and it was a really tough time to be alive. The Pharaoh of Egypt wanted to curb the Hebrew baby boom so he asked the midwives to kill all the male babies that were being born. Well through a miraculous turn of events, Moses was adopted into Pharaoh’s family. This Hebrew boy became a son to Pharaoh, the leader of this huge and great and powerful nation. Moses was educated in the best schools. I’m sure he had his Ph.D. from the U. of Egypt. He could speak a lot of languages. He wore designer robes and drove Ferrari chariots. I mean this guy had it going on. And a lot of people were saying, “Oh, Moses, man. You’re going to be the next Pharaoh. You’re going to be the man Moses!” And he probably would have been.
When he was 40 years of age, he walked outside one of his homes and he saw, the Bible says, an Egyptian man taking advantage of a Hebrew. So Moses looked this way and that and he killed the Egyptian. He wanted to take the leadership into his own hands. Well, when word got out that Moses, the future Pharaoh, had killed an Egyptian, this future Pharaoh overnight became the ultimate fugitive. He began to run from the law. And then the Bible says that Moses ran to the desert.
So come along and join me because I want to take you to the desert.
Video Starts (Ed is in a desert in Arizona):
Whew, it is hot. I’m in a desert. It is like a hundred and twelve degrees. One minute Moses was the future Pharaoh of Egypt. He had everything going his way. The next moment, the Bible tells us, he was the ultimate fugitive. Where did Moses go? Where did he run to? He ran to the desert, he ran to this barren wasteland. A desert is a wild place. There’s not very much water around and all the plants and stuff, they can mess you up. There are rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, which is a poisonous lizard. There are all sorts of things that can mess you up. The desert is also a place where you’re alone. You look up the word desert it means in the Bible “to speak.” God uses desert dwellings in order to speak in our lives. Because I guarantee you many of you here right now listening to my voice are going through desert times right now. Maybe you have just gotten a bad report from the doctor. Maybe you’re going through a health desert. It could be a martial desert or a child-rearing desert. Maybe it could be an emotional desert. I don’t know. Many of us go through deserts. And God allows these deserts. Why? To speak to us.
Well, let’s think about Moses for a second. Moses was in the desert and, not only was he in the desert, he had another difficulty journey ahead of him. Let me pick up where Scripture starts in Exodus 3:1. “Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro.” Now, Jethro, that’s not Jethro Bodine in the Beverly Hillbillies thing, that was Moses’ father-in-law. So as I said not only was Moses a fugitive and running from everybody in the desert. He was also working for his father-in-law. I imagine that would be pretty tough. And the Bible says, “He led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush.” So, for example, take one of these bushes right here. Spontaneous combustion happens now and then in the desert and I’m sure Moses had seen that before. But what intrigued him about this particular bush was that the fire was not consuming it. And God spoke to Moses, the Bible says, through the bush.
How do you react when you face a desert dwelling in your life? Sometimes we react in a very pride centered way, don’t we? We say, “God, I’m the man or I’m the woman. Why me God? I’m too good for this, God. God, you don’t understand that I don’t deserve this?” We think that we’re too big, we’re too bad, we’re too spiritual for a desert dwelling. Sometimes though we react in a very impatient way, don’t we? We say, “Okay, God, I’m in the desert but time is running out for me. I’ve got my agenda, I’ve got my deal, I’ve got my stuff God. I’m ready for it to be over. Come on God. Come on, come on. Let’s go, let’s go let’s go.” We try to hurry God up.
Well, Moses did not react in a prideful way to his desert dwelling. He didn’t react in an impatient way. He reacted in a mature fashion. In essence he said, “God,” not why me, he said, “What now?” He said God I don’t understand it, but I receive it. And I’m telling you something friends, when we come to that point, when we allow God to bring us to the point where we say, “Lord have your way in my life. I know your desert is the best for me.” Then, we’ll be able to hear what God wants to say to us. Because remember God pursues an intimate, powerful, authentic, love relationship with all of us and He will take us and allow deserts in our lives in order to speak to us. What is God saying to you? Are you listening? It’s all about the desert.
(Video ends.)
The Seek
The word desert in the Bible means to speak. God allows deserts in your life and mine to communicate to us. God pursues us. He pursues an intimate and deep relationship with everyone. And what’s kind of interesting is that sometimes people say, “Well I found the Lord.” Or “I found God.” No you didn’t find the Lord. You didn’t find God. God found you because he is a pursuing lover. So if we’re going to understand what it means to experience God on a day by day basis, we have to know that God is all about The Seek. God is seeking us.
Every time I talk about God seeking us I think back to the time when my son was about 19 months old. We lived in a house in Irving and I would get up pretty early about three or four mornings a week. I would get up without waking Lisa and the kids and I would make my way down to our living room, close these kind of French doors, and I would study. Like two hours of uninterrupted time just studying before all the phones started ringing, and I had to go in the office and so forth. EJ would get up about 7:30 and I would hear Lisa carrying him down the steps. He would always try to get my attention, even as a young guy, to try and go in there and talk to me or whatever. Usually he would toddle up to the doors and he would start beating on the doors saying, “Dad Da, Dad da, Dad Da…” And I would kind of act like he wasn’t there and I would study so hopefully Lisa would take him away and then later I could spend some time with him.
Now and then though he would open up those doors and he would come up to me and hug me and he’d have yogurt on his mouth and green beans on his hands and he’d get it all over me, you know what I’m saying? EJ is Daddy’s boy. He always pursued me and that’s the way God is, God is pursuing you. He’s pursuing me. But so often we just ignore him, don’t we? He’s beating on the door of our lives and we’re thinking, “No, man, I’m not opening my door. I’m not going to open the study of my life to God.” God is all about The Seek. Respond to it by saying, “OK Lord, I know you have something great to say to me. I know you’re seeking me. I want you to reveal yourself to me in a powerful way.” That’s where it begins.
The Peek
Let’s go down to The Peek. Because we’ve got The Seek, and then The Seek segues into The Peek. Here’s what God does. God gives us a peek. He gives us a little window into the future about what He’s going to, about what He’s about to do, about what’s out there in all of our lives. God shows us where is he going to work. Exodus 3:4, “When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look,” we’re back in the desert now, this is Moses, “When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look. God called to him from within the bush. “Moses! Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.””
God gets our attention before He speaks to us. God makes us notice something; then he communicates. God speaks through people. He speaks through events. He speaks through songs, through church services, and obviously He speaks though this book. God is a God who likes to talk to you and to me. But again, so often we just miss out on it because we are so into our little deal. So I believe one of the best prayers that we can pray is simply this, “God help me to recognize when you are speaking to me. Help me to recognize it God.” Because God speaks, watch this now, through the ordinary, and extraordinary ways. Just ordinary, run-of-the-mill stuff.
But the rub comes into play when we’re not locked into God and we miss Him through the ordinary. And because we miss him through the ordinary, we don’t live extraordinary lives. That’s why a lot of people feel like they’re dry spiritually. They’re not really growing spiritually. They’re missing God.
The first time that I ever saw God speak to me and communicate to me through a very ordinary thing was when I was like seventeen years of age. I was sitting at my friend’s house. My friend is named Russell Shelton and we were going through our senior year of high school together. We were talking about stuff like basketball and football and things of that nature and I was thumbing through his yearbooks. And I looked at the section titled “Sports” and I was just checking out pictures and stuff and I saw the basketball section. I noticed that this team was not that good. Their record was posted there and it was like 13 and 22 or something like that. I saw a little black and white picture, though, in this year book of a guy dunking the ball. On the bottom of the picture it read, “Well, Mickey slams one home.”
Now, I don’t why I remember that because I have seen thousands of pictures of people dunking basketballs. You know I’ve played basketball a lot. I’ve been dunked on a lot. I’ve just seen a lot of those kinds of pictures. And I asked my friend, “Man, who is this lanky guy?” And Russell said, “Oh his name is Phil Elders.” And for some reason at seventeen I said, “Hey, Russell, is Phil Elders a Christian?” He goes, “No, man, this guy is off the charts. He’s not a Christian.” And then I kept on looking through the book and whatever.
Well, I was 17. Let’s move the clock forward to when I was 27. I had gone to college and all of that, finished up there, gone to seminary, and I was working at a church. I was one of the pastors in this large staff. This church where I worked had a large gymnasium and all of that. One day this guy walked up to me and said, “Hey, Ed, I know that you love basketball and used to play ball and stuff in college. There’s this guy who’s been playing basketball at the church. He’s a great player and he has also played college basketball.” I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, the guy’s name is Phil.” I said, “Phil? Are you talking about Phil Elders?” He said, “Yeah!”
Now, why in the world I could still remember that who knows, but of course I’m going to tell you it was God. Anyway, I got to know Phil and after I had known him for several weeks we began to talk one night and he began to pour his heart out to me about his life and how difficult it was and just how unhappy he was. He’d made a pile of money but he told me he had kind of gotten the money in a gray area type fashion. He told me his marriage wasn’t really what it should be, his wife drank too much and on and on and on and on. So, God just began to speak through me and I watched Phil make a decision to become a life long follower of Christ.
So Phil became a Christian. Once he became a Christian, then his wife became a Christian. She totally gave up all that stuff that she was involved in. Then his wife’s parents became Christians. Then Phil’s brother and his wife became Christians. And now, I’m happy to tell you, the whole family are just real stand-up leaders in this church and in this area of Houston.
God spoke to a 17-year-old in a unique way, but in a very ordinary way by looking at a yearbook. It really didn’t mature and come to fruition till I was 27 years of age. But look at the fruit that occurred just because God spoke to me in an ordinary fashion but used it in an extraordinary way. When I tell you that story and I give God the glory, I think about all the hundreds of times I have missed God’s speaking. I mean think about all those times I have missed it! I’ve been looking through other yearbooks or whatever. Or I’ve encountered other events when I’ve just been thinking about myself or my deal or whatever. Listen, you’re the same too. You are. And that’s the grace of God, and the mercy of God. Because God is a God that gives us three, four, five, seven hundred chances to keep after it. But I’m going to tell you something, once you believe that God is about The Seek, and He’s about The Peek, then you can see God move in the normal and abnormal ways.
So what is God showing you about your marriage? What is he showing you about your career? What is he showing you about how to lead your children? First of all He’s going to get your attention, maybe through a desert. Then He’s going to say, “Okay, here’s what I’m saying to you.” But we’ve got to listen to him. We have to open up the study of our lives and invite him in so he can show us what to do.
The Weak
The Seek and The Peek, but there’s something else: The Weak. Now, let’s go back to Moses. He’s in the desert; he’s had the burning bush experience; he has been there for like 40 years. This is an incredible guy. Look at Verses 7 and 8, “The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I’ve heard them crying out because of their slave drivers and I’m concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”” God shows us what he is about to do. He seeks us, he gives us the peek, and then our response should be, “God, I am weak.”
But before we start talking about being weak, we’ve got to understand what God is about to do, because God cannot get us to where He wants us to be unless we understand what He’s about to do. I think about Fellowship Church. God showed a small group of people, about 150 people, what He was about to do 12 years ago. I mean we were clueless about all of this. You know people ask me all the time, “Did you plan for Fellowship Church to look like it does, to be the size it is, to have the style it has?” The answer is a resounding, “No.” All we knew was that God was working in a huge way and He gave us an opportunity to join in where He was working. Talk to some of the founding members of our church and they will tell you that this church, from the get go, has been a God thing. But had we not been tied into Him, and listening to Him, had we not been sensitive to where He was working, we would have missed out on joining in God’s workmanship here in this great church.
I remember praying before I became a pastor of this church. I was out in Irving on this little hill right by the TPC Course, because that was the area we started the church in and all that. I was praying and I felt God just saying to me, not audibly, but I just felt this in my spirit. He was saying, “Ed, I am going to do something great here in this area and I am giving you a chance right now to be a part of it.” And I said yes and many other people said yes and here we are. So, the good news is God is always sending us those invitations. But first of all He gives us a revelation, before He gives us an invitation.
Look at Amos 3:7. The Bible says, “Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing his plan to His servants the prophets.” So He usually reveals what He is going to do to a person, to a leader, to the small group, to a group of individuals, and then they have the choice to either get in on the work or not.
Let’s keep going now. Look at Verses 9 through 12. “And the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh,” that’s Moses now, “to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, Who am I?”” Now, isn’t that classic? “Who am I?” That’s all we can say to God. “Who am I?” Because, really, who am I? Who are you? We’re sinners, we’re people who mess up all the time, we’re stained. “Who am I, that I should go the Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” “And God said,” oh don’t you like this, “I will be with you.”
Don’t you know God sometimes laughs when Christians pray like this, “God be with us as we travel. God be with Pastor Ed as he speaks. God be with us as we make a decision.” I think God is going, “Ha, ha, ha.” Because God is going to say, “I’m omnipresent, I’m already there! I’m already with you in that decision. I’m already with Pastor Ed. I’m already everywhere.” So don’t pray dumb prayers.
Some people pray some dumb prayers. Like they’ll go to McDonald’s and they’ll order four Big Macs and French fries. “God bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies.” I was talking a while back to a couple and they were living together. They said they were Christians. They said, “Yes, Ed, you know, we’re praying about moving out until we get married.” You’re praying about moving out? You see, that’s a dumb prayer because God says don’t have sex until marriage. So don’t pray dumb prayers. That’s the weak. Man, I’m weak before God. That’s the position that He wants you in and He wants me in. And oftentimes in the desert we’re weak, aren’t we? No water, these little Gila monsters biting at you, rattlesnakes, cactus everywhere, sand everywhere, it’s just lonely. God has allowed that in our lives to communicate to us.
The Tweak
So we’ve got The Seek, The Peek, The Weak, and there’s one more: The Tweak. Moses was willing to make some serious tweaks in his life. God said, “Ok Moses, here is what I’m about to do. You can join in on what I’m about to do Moses, I’ve chosen you for it. But you have to be willing,” check this out now, “to make some major adjustments in your life if you’re going to be the person that I want you to be, if you’re going to do what I want you to do, if you’re going to go where I want you to go.” And Moses said, “Yes God, sign me up. I’m weak and I’m ready for the tweak.”
What did Moses do? Well, I’m glad you asked. Look at Verse 20, Exodus 4. “So Moses took his wife and sons, put them on a donkey and started back to Egypt. And he took the staff of God in his hands.” He left his job, he left his in-laws, and he moved to Egypt. He was willing to make those major adjustments. How can you make the major adjustments in your marriage? I ask you, how can you make them unless you know where God wants you to go in your marriage? You can’t make the right adjustments. How can you make the right parental adjustments if you don’t know where God wants you to go as a parent? How can you make the right career adjustments if you don’t know where God wants you go? I could go on and on and on… We have to be ready to make adjustments. Moses was willing to do all of that.
Desert, it means to speak. But the word dessert is kind of close to the word dessert, just add an “s” and you know you have dessert. So in a real way our deserts can become God’s desserts if we do what God wants us to do within those desert dwellings. I’ll say once again, He wants to speak to you. He wants you to experience Him on a day-by-day-basis. We need to say, “God, I want to be moldable and I want to be at your disposal. I want to be moldable, God.”
I majored in fine arts at Florida State University and I took this class on sculpture. Our professor was named Tom Hatch. He was the quintessential artist, you know. Tom would take these globs of clay, throw them on the table, and he would start all this stuff. He would make these beautiful sculptures out of clay. God is the sculptor, we’re just the clay. We need to say, “God, I’m glad I’m in your hands God. I’m just this blob. Mold me. Make me. Shape me.” It’s not always fun to be clay is it? But that’s how God does something out of our lives. We need to be moldable.
We also again need to say, “God I am a sinner. I am weak. I am frail. I can’t do it. I’ve got to rely on an infusion of your grace and mercy and power. God, help me to realize the desserts in my desert.” Because once we do that, I believe God will look at you and He will look at me and say, “You’re fired. You’re fired.”