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MEN AND WOMEN
Final Four – Part II
Ed Young
April 14, 2002
Tuesday afternoon, I flew into Nashville, TN to do some speaking. I spoke late into the night, spent the night, got up early the next morning, and fumbled around for my room key. As I picked up my room key at about 5:45 am, I noticed that the logo from the hotel had actually been stamped on this little key. I thought that was a pretty cool thing. I got dressed and someone was there to take me to the airport. This guy greeted me in a shirt that had stamped across it, “Re-generation.” That was the conference where I spoke.
He was kind enough to stop by Starbucks and we picked up a cup of coffee. I looked at this cup of coffee and thought how cool it was that they had stamped “Starbucks” on the coffee cup.
When we got to the airport, they had stamped our tickets and then restamped them.
I was just thinking about the whole stamping thing. People stamp a lot. They stamp bottles, clothes, and different types of literature. Also, men, our souls are stamped. Our souls are stamped with significance. We have been stamped by initiative. We discovered that God is an initiative-taking God and we have this stamp on our soul.
We also discovered that we have been stamped with risk as well. God is a risk-taking God. We said God is such a high risk-taking God that he made you and me with the freedom of choice.
We have said throughout this series that there is no way, men, we can understand our true masculinity unless we realize who God is. And God will show us who he is and who we should be because we are made in his image. When God fashioned us, he put his masculine character qualities all over our lives. He stamped it upon us. The stampee has the impression of the stamper.
The Stamp of COMPETITION
We have got initiative and risk, but we also have two other stamps that I want to bring to your attention. This is the third stamp. Men, we have been stamped with competition.
Some of you right now are thinking, “You mean I got up this morning, rushed to Fellowship Church, to hear you, Ed Young, state the obvious that men are competitive? No kidding. I know men are competitive.”
Yes, ladies, we are competitive. Men are competitive. The question that hangs in the balance is why? Why are we so competitive? I’m glad you asked. Exodus 20:3, here is God speaking, “You shall have no other gods before me.” In verse 5, “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God…”
What is God saying here? God is saying not to waste your worship. Don’t be competitive for anything or anyone else except for God. Make sure you are competitive in those areas where God is competitive.
We serve a competitive God. He is competitive for our thoughts, our feelings, our activities, our relationships and everything we are, men.
Exodus 14:14, “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”
God is competitive. That means God is a fighter. Look at Deuteronomy 20:4, “For the Lord your God is the one who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies to give you victory.”
We are competitive, guys. Sadly, our culture has tried to castrate our competitiveness. Our culture has said, “Don’t be so competitive, men. Go soft. Get more in touch with your feminine side.”
Ladies, we can’t. It’s who we are. Competition is in our chromosomes. It’s hard-wired to our souls.
We are competitive, guys, but could it be that we are competitive in the wrong areas? I have been thinking about that issue for the last several weeks. A lot of men I have bumped into these days have a disorder called MCD, Misplaced Competitive Disorder. Maybe you have got MCD. What is MCD? How is it manifested? It’s manifested in ways that are not necessarily God’s ways. It’s manifested in ways that sometimes are good but not great.
For example, most guys are really into sports, ESPN, the field or the court, or watching racecars go around and around the track, competition, flag football. Most guys are into that. Most guys are also into competing in their careers. So we think the whole competition realm is just in recreation and occupation. That’s it. Most men think that is it. That’s why they listen to sports radio 24/7 and they are addicted to everything on television, channel surfing this game or that contest. That’s exactly where the evil one wants us.
The Bible says we should work hard at our occupation, play hard in our recreation, but there is a bigger game going on in town. The evil one wants to keep us out in the dark. He doesn’t want us to know that there is a bigger game going on in town because, once we know that, we will become true men. We will become people who understand our masculinity. There is a battle out there, a war out there, a bigger game in town. It’s called the battle, the war, the competition for the masculine soul, and the evil one has a lot of guys duped into thinking that it is just about recreation and occupation. That’s not the deal. It’s a bigger deal. There is a bigger battle out there.
Where is it taking place? Where is this game going on, you might ask? In our soul, our heart of hearts, in our thoughts. That is where the battle is going on.
1 Peter 5:8-9 talks about this battle. This text was written to Christians. If you are a believer, this is for you, men. If you are not a believer, I’m glad that you are at Fellowship Church. Remember, we don’t want anything from you. We do, though, want something for you. We want you to know what it means to have a personal relationship with Christ. We truly believe that if you continue to kick tires, and test waters, and ask questions and lob doubts God’s way, that he is going to reveal himself to you. This is what is going to happen to you once you step over the line.
This text happens to be for those men here who are in the family of God. Simon Peter is taking for granted that we get this bigger game idea. “Be self controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”
This roaring lion, the evil one, is looking for men to devour, men who think they can do it by themselves, men who are autonomous, men who are kind of away from the pack.
Verse 9 says, “Resist him,…” That means in the initial stages, resist him. “…standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.”
The evil one is crafty. He knows that there is a bigger game in town than just recreation and occupation. He has the ability to infiltrate our minds, our thoughts and our feelings. He has the ability to make us think that we are thinking what we are thinking, but in reality, he is making us think what we are thinking.
Have you ever been walking around and said to yourself, “Wow, I wonder why I had that feeling? Wow, I wonder why I had that emotion?”
Or, maybe you had a feeling to lie about something, to exaggerate something, or take advantage of someone, or to be ugly to another person, or to say, “I want to sleep with her.” You say to yourself, “I guess I just thought those up. I guess those feelings are just me. I guess those thoughts are just all from me.”
No, they are not. They are from the camouflaged one, the evil one, who has infiltrated our thoughts, feelings and emotions. We have got to call them to the carpet. We have got to realize who it is who is speaking to us.
One of my close friends, who is a marriage and family therapist, and attends Fellowship Church, has counseled with thousands of people in his life. A couple of days ago, I was with him and asking him some questions.
I said, “Tell me what you think is the biggest thing that men deal with. What do you think is the biggest temptation, the biggest issue, that trips most men up?”
He didn’t have to think for more than a second. He looked at me and said, “Lust. Of all the people I deal with, all the men I talk to, that is the biggest hurdle in their life, the whole lust thing.”
Billy Graham said it best, “The first look will not get you into trouble. It’s that second, third and fourth that will mess you up.”
It’s in the initial stages where we must stop lust. The book of James says, “When you are tempted,” not if, not you might be, but when you are tempted. So, we are going to be tempted. The pictures will be there. The images will be there. It’s what we do with those images.
I want to talk to you about lust in a different way, though. I want to talk to women. Women, do you realize it’s possible just by the way you dress to cause other men to stumble. Women, do you realize that just by the way you dress, you can say, “Hey, I am a lure in Satan’s tackle box.” Why do women dress seductively and sexually?
Number one, a lot of you dress that way because your husbands or boyfriends make you dress that way. Guys, I am going to bust you, man.
“Oh, baby, you have got to dress like that because I can walk around with you and say, ‘Look what I got.’”
Another reason women dress the way they do is because of insecurity. A lot of women are insecure. They have a poor self-esteem. They see themselves the way others see them instead of seeing themselves the way God sees them. They will dress and wear anything just to get the attention.
Another reason why women dress sexually and seductively, and I hate to say this, but I am going to say it, is because a lot of you women are just clueless. You don’t have all the line on your fishing reel.
“You mean by the way I dress, I can cause someone to lust after me? I’m just wearing this for my husband.”
Yes, you might be wearing it for your husband, but what is your dress saying to other people?
Let me stop and say a pastoral word to parents. Parents, some of the outfits that you allow your daughters to wear, those of us on staff are thinking, “What are you thinking? What in the world is going through your brains?”
Have you seen these low-rider pants that are so popular, showing all the midriff and all that. I was reading something on fashion the other day and this writer said that three types of people wear those low-rider jeans, Britney Spears is number one. Number two, Britney Spears’ fans. And number three, plumbers. After that, it’s pretty much over. This article went on to say that the low-rider jeans are out of style anyway.
Now what am I saying? Am I telling the women, based on God’s word, to wear burlap sacks the rest of your life? No. We should dress fashionably, I believe, not seductively. I think we should dress modestly and not flauntingly.
Single guys, and students, if you see a girl dressed provocatively like that, don’t go out with her. She is going to mess you up. She has something messed up in her mind and in her whole psyche and self-esteem. That’s just only after I am 41. I have been talking to students now for over 22 years. I have a little bit of experience there. Just a little bit.
Let’s go back to the battle. We are in a battle and most guys don’t realize it. Most of us just think the battle is for our recreation and occupation, for sports, for hunting and fishing or whatever. But there is a bigger battle going on. It’s spiritual warfare. It’s a battle for the masculine soul. Satan wants to keep us down. He doesn’t want us to know who we are. He is scared of us because he knows who we can become once we realize who we are in Christ. What will happen in your life and mine, when I realize that there is a bigger battle going on, there’s a bigger game in town? What will happen? I’ll tell you what will happen.
Our prayers will change. Suddenly, praying will not just be a little Christian to-do list that we check off. Okay, I’ve prayed, my quiet time is done. No, it will be more than that. It will be more like I have got to pray. I’ve got to talk to God because I realize that, when I talk to God, he is going to show me the weaponry, the artillery, the armor that I must put on every day to make it, to fight the battle of the flesh, to fight the battle of materialism, to fight the battle to have great relationships.
I’ll tell you something else that will happen. It will change the way we do marriage. Once we realize there is a bigger game in town, it will change the way we do marriage. We will learn that we need to compete for our spouse, compete for her love, compete for that date night, compete for those times of intimacy. We have got to compete for it. The evil one is not going to sit in a Jacuzzi with his feet dangled into the waters, sipping Perrier and allowing us to build great Christian marriages. That’s not going to happen. Why? Because marriage reflects Christ’s relationship to the church. He hates it. He knows what your marriage can become. That’s why it is so difficult to have a great marriage. But I am telling you that it is worth it. Once we learn how to fight the good fight, once we learn how to compete, we’ll be ahead of the game.
I watched a guy at Fellowship Church years ago, this is so sad, compete for the love of this girl. He competed for the love. He was romantic and did all this stuff. Finally, he asked the girl to marry him. When they walked down the wedding runner, when people poured rice on their heads, everyone thought this whole love thing was just beginning for them. This guy was going to continue to be competitive. You know what happened? She didn’t realize it, but this guy morphed his competitiveness from her over to his career and over to sports. She was clueless about it. About 24 months later, she woke up and their marriage was on the rocks. From the get-go in their marriage, they have had some severe trouble. Why? Because he stopped being competitive.
At our Home Team the other night that Lisa and I lead (we have small groups around the area where we have times of Bible study, fellowship and prayer), there was a couple talking about their marriage.
This lady was saying, “This past week, I kind of feel like my husband neglected me because he is so involved with work.”
She went on to say that her husband had an opportunity to invite her somewhere to meet some people at work, and he didn’t. It upset her. She said that she and her husband began to talk and she said, “I just wanted my husband to look at me and say he needed me.”
What was she saying? She wanted him to compete for her. That’s what she was saying. It’ll change our prayer life. It will change our marriage. It will also change our families. Great families are not built in a vacuum. We have to work to spend quality and quantity time with our kids.
When I was five years of age, I’ll never forget it. My father was walking out the front door of our house in Canton, NC to play yet another round of golf. I grabbed him by the pants leg and said, “Dad, don’t go.”
He turned and stopped and said, “Ed, I’m not going today.”
He went into the other room, picked up the phone and called the other guys in his foursome and said, “I’m not playing.”
Later on, he told me, “I knew, Ed, at that moment that I had a choice to make. I could either build a great golf game or some great boys. I chose to build great boys.”
He backed off of his golf game from the time I was five years of age until I went off to Florida State University. A lot of guys, a lot of fathers, need to make some hard and tough choices. I am not saying not to recreate or have hobbies. I’m not saying not to play golf and do all those fun things. But there is a balance there. There is a bigger game going on in town and most of us don’t realize it. We need to wake up and smell the Starbucks.
1 Timothy 6:11-12, “But you, man of God, flee from all of this, and pursue righteousness, faith, godliness, love, endurance and gentleness.” We have to compete for integrity, don’t we? “Fight the good fight of faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called…”
Competition is in our chromosomes. It’s a good thing because it is a God thing.
The Stamp of LOYALTY
There is another stamp that we have got to talk about, loyalty. It is not accident that loyalty rhymes with royalty. If you want to live like royalty, if you want to be a king, men, you begin to realize that God is a loyal God and you begin to realize who you can become when you are loyal.
Speaking of loyalty, think about our Lord. Listen to these words, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” (Hebrews 13:5) “I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) Loyalty.
Here we sin against Him, here we mess Him around, here we commit cosmic treason, yet, He is loyal to us.
I saw a beautiful picture of loyalty culminated this past Friday morning. Because at about 11:00, we had a funeral for one of the founding members of Fellowship Church. Her name was Pam Skinner. Pam was married. She has two handsome sons. One is about 10 and the other about 14. Five long years she suffered with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Her marriage and her family was and is a picture of loyalty.
Several months before Pam died, I had the opportunity to interview her husband about his commitment. Listen to his words of loyalty.
(Video of Mark Skinner)
When most men would have bailed, when most men would have thrown in the towel, Mark Skinner hung in there, a man of loyalty. Wow, we need guys with loyalty, don’t we? Satan always attacks our loyalty quotient. Its roots go all the way back to the Garden. Adam and Eve are loyal to God. Satan attacked their loyalty. They became disloyal.
I was on a flight a few days ago and talked to some people from the West Coast. As I was talking to these men, they began to rip apart their boss, make kind of snide remarks, negative things about this person. Disloyalty. It’s reached epidemic proportions. One of the reasons that we are so disloyal is because of our selfishness. We have this southward, downward, gravitational pull to take us away from trust, away from loyalty. The Bible says that men need loyal friends. We need friendship loyalty. Wouldn’t you agree?
Here is what Ecclesiastes 4:12 says, “A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.”
Men have a hard time being vulnerable, putting our hearts on the line. If we are not vulnerable, there is no real attachment. Conversely, if we show vulnerability, there is a great attachment.
God sent Christ. As Jesus was hanging on the cross dying for your sins and mine, he was vulnerable. Because of his vulnerability, we have this attachment once we come to know him.
Men, do you have some friends in your life, some real friends who love Christ, who seek him, who seek to honor him in marriage and family dynamics? Do you have friends like that, friends you can be vulnerable with? Because if you are vulnerable with them, you will have a great attachment. If we are not vulnerable in male-to-male friendships, we are going to take that pressure and put it on the backs of our spouses and they cannot hold it. They can’t take it all.
“Well, yes, I have got some friends, Ed, some guys I hung out with back in high school and college and fraternity brothers and stuff. We used to party together. Those are my friends.”
No, I am talking about the real deal. I am talking about having your soul knit with other men. I am talking about having your soul knit with other men who have a passion for Christ.
“Well, I don’t want to dis my old friends.”
These guys are messing you up. They are pulling you down. They are keeping you from being the kind of guy that God wants you to be. Again, we are in warfare. Wake up. Smell the coffee. The evil one is going to put three or four jerks in your life to keep you away from where God wants you to be. It happens in every person’s life. You have got to be man enough in a nice way to love these people and say, “I will meet you in areas that will not cause me to compromise. We will hang out now and then, but I am going to seek Godly, Christ-centered relationships.”
When you do, you will end up being the kind of man that God wants you to become. God will give you the strength. That’s why I love Fellowship Church. Fellowship Church is a huge church. We are one of the top ten biggest churches in the country. That’s great. Do you know why it is great? Because it gives us a lot of opportunities for different relationships, men. If you are part of a small church of 400-500 people, you are pretty limited on who you can hang out with.
“Wow, that’s the group my age? I don’t dig them. I don’t like them.”
Here at Fellowship Church, you can meet anyone. They are here. We have 30-40,000 people who come here once a month. That’s a huge pool. It’s not like we don’t have a bazillion opportunities each and every week for you to get involved and meet other men in our small group ministry, our Home Teams, Men’s ministry, Athletics ministry. I could go on and on. We’ve got to take the risk. We have got to say, “I am going to be vulnerable. I’m going to pray that God will bring people into my life and show me if they are the right people for me. I will hook up with them and I will have my soul knit with them.”
Back in the Old Testament, do you remember David and Jonathan? The Bible says that their souls were knitted together. They were vulnerable with each other. They loved one another. They were loyal to each other.
I know a lot of us have been damaged by disloyalty. It hurts. A lot of men here have been wounded by it. I have been wounded by disloyalty before. There was someone about seven years ago that I really trusted. This person was disloyal to me and I cannot tell you how that hurt me. I know what you are talking about. But just because this person was disloyal to me, it didn’t stop me from taking other relational risks. It didn’t stop me from stepping out. You have got to continue to step out. God will reward you in a great way.
Just think about it. There are some people right here, right now, probably in this service that God wants you to hook up with and befriend that can change your life, but you have got to get out there to do it. You’ve got to get involved in maybe the parking crew, or the greeters. Maybe it’s teaching Children’s Church. Maybe it’s the youth. I don’t know. But you have got to get out there and show that you are available and pray for God to bring men like that into your life. God will do it.
So, we need friendship loyalty. I think we also need leadership loyalty. Romans 13:1-2, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.”
In other words, we need to find out how God’s chain of command is linked together and we have got to discover what kind of link we are in God’s chain of command and get in on that link. Because once we are in on God’s link and God’s chain of command, then our lives will cruise.
There is a chain of command at church. There is a chain of command around the office. There is a chain of command around the home. There is a chain of command in marriage. We have got to get the chain of command and say, “Okay. Here is the leader. Or maybe, I’m the leader. I’m going to submit to the authority God has put in my life.” When we do that, our life will cruise.
We have all these people messing around with authority. They have a hard time with authority, hard time with this and that. God has placed his chain of command in your life and mine for a reason. We are like diamonds in the rough and these parents, coaches, teachers, pastors and other leaders are going to chip away the excess to make us into beautiful diamonds. So, we need leadership loyalty.
I’ve been talking about friendship loyalty and leadership loyalty. Is it possible to be too loyal? Yes. A lot of us are too loyal to some friends that are messing us up. Some ladies here, let me reverse the roles for a second, are too loyal to your children. You are more loyal to your son or your daughter than you are your husband. That’s wrong. The Bible never tells us that we are to love our children as Christ loved the church. It never says that. It never says that we are to honor our children in a self-sacrificing way. It doesn’t say that. It says to love our spouses that way, but not our kids. Yes, we are to love our kids. But number one has got to be our spouse.
There was a study done a while back. This question was asked of children: If you had a choice, would you rather see your parent show affection to you or toward each other? 95% of the respondents said they would rather see their parents show affection to each other. It starts there.
So, yes, we can be loyal and too loyal in certain areas.
I am excited about what I am seeing here at Fellowship. I am excited about the lives that are changed. I’m excited about men who are understanding who they are in Christ. Initiative. Risk. Competition. Loyalty.
The next time you see something stamped on a piece of paper or glass, or someone’s skin, think about the significant stamping that you have from God. It’s a God thing and, because it is a God thing, it is an awesome thing. Guys, you are awesome. Live it out and watch and see what happens to your life.