Search Results for: fall series

THE RECOVERY CHANNEL SERMON SERIES

HOW TO FIND RESTORATION

ED YOUNG

AUGUST 13, 1995

I tell you, seeing all this baggage up here reminds me of my recent family vacation.  Prior to leaving Lisa and I got into a very interesting discussion about all the baggage we were going to take.  We have four children, an eight year old, a three years old and one-year-old twins.  You can imagine all the humidifiers, high-chairs, cribs, tons and tons of diapers that we need to take for an outing like a vacation.  And I said to Lisa in a very direct way, “Lisa, there is no way we can get all of this in one car.  We are going to have to take two cars as we travel to San Antonio and Houston on our break.”  And she said in a very sweet voice, “Honey, we can make it in one car and I can tell you how we are going to do that in two words.”  I said, “What are those two words?”  And she said, “Luggage carriers.”  I said, “You mean those Clark Griswold-type contraptions that fit on top of the car and you jam all our your suitcases in there?”  And she said, “Yes, in fact Western Auto is having a special on luggage carriers.”

So the next morning yours truly was down at the Western Auto picking up two jumbo, gargantuan luggage carriers.  I climbed on top of our suburban in the boiling heat of the Metroplex and I loaded all of our baggage into them.  Believe it or not, we got everything packed on top and all human beings into our suburban.  We didn’t put any children into the luggage carriers, but we did fit all the luggage up there.  So we leave.  At the first hotel we check into in San Antonio we called a bellman over to help us with the luggage.  He said, “Folks, I want to tell you something.  I have been working here at this hotel for eight years and this is the most luggage I have ever seen in all that time.  We stayed there and then went on to Houston.  It eventually came time to return to the Metroplex.  We were excited to get back home.  We were getting LeeBeth ready to start school.  I had everything packed.  The luggage carriers were secure.  We made the long drive home, turn into our neighborhood and then wheel into the driveway.  I instinctively push the garage door opener.  The garage door opens and for a nanosecond, I know it is hard for you to believe, I forgot about the giant, jumbo luggage carriers on top of the car.  I mash the gas pedal to kind of cruise into the garage safe and sound when suddenly I hear an enormous crash.  I see boards flying.  We had torn off the top portion of our garage due to the Western Auto, jumbo luggage carriers.  I put the car into reverse and assess the damage.  There was some damage to the garage but the car was OK.  I climbed on top of the suburban, unfastened the luggage carriers and took the bags out piece by piece and carried them into the house.  Then I was able to park the suburban safe and sound in the garage.  Wow.

Many of us today are tearing our lives apart, we are tearing our relationships apart because we have never dealt with the baggage in the luggage carriers strapped to the backs of our lives.  We have tried to excuse it, we have tried to explain it away, we tried to forget about it, yet it is still there and it is still tripping us up.  It is still knocking the wood off of different areas of our lives.  In this brand new series called The Recovery Channel I am going to promise you something.  I am going to promise you, inspired by the word of God, we are going to look into the luggage carriers of our lives, take the bags out, piece by piece, open them up, identify the contents and do what should be done with the contents so we can be free to be the kind of Christ-followers that God wants us to become.

On this stage you see various styles of baggage and each has a different name on, representing different issues and problems that we deal with.  Some of us have problems that are not illustrated up here.  But if you see something kind of in your problem zone, focus on that piece of luggage.  If you stay with us here for the next month, we are going to give you a step by step scriptural process on how to deal with the baggage.  This process is going to get a little sticky, it is going to be thought provoking, it is going to be a little bit different.  We have never done a series like this in the history of the Fellowship of Las Colinas.  But, we felt led by the Lord to do this because it is our desire to have mature, fully developed Christ-followers.  And for us to accomplish this, we have got to deal with the baggage.

The foundational text for this series is found in Isaiah 57:18.  I like to personalize this verse and I want you to personalize it also.  “I have seen how Ed has acted, but I will heal Ed, I will lead Ed and help Ed, I will comfort Ed when he mourns, I will offer peace to Ed both near and far.” (Paraphrased)  A lot of us are dealing with a number of issues these days and the exciting news about that is that the steps of recovery are the same.  If you are dealing with the habit of lying, of not eating enough, gambling, drug addiction, whatever the issue, whatever the baggage that you bring to the Lord, that you put on the table today, the steps to recovery are the same.  Today’s message is going to be a unique one.  I am going to do the first part over the next twelve minutes, then I am going to stop and we are going to have a drama.  The drama is going to illustrate the futility of men and women trying to control their lives.  Then after the drama I will come back for Part II and step two of this exciting series.

Well let’s jump right in.  Step one on the recovery channel is, admit that you are powerless to change your problem.  We have to admit that we are powerless to change our problems.  Some of you are saying, this kind of sounds like the twelve step process.  The powerless stuff.  You are exactly right.  The twelve step process was invented by two alcoholics and a couple of Christians in 1935.  The basic twelve steps are from the word of God.  We are going to condense these steps and some of them will sound familiar to you.  This first step is saying, “God, I admit to You that I am powerless to change my problem.”  That is a big step.  Most of us kind of skip over that one and go to the next one.  Have you ever admitted that you are powerless to change your problem?  We all have problems and our problems center around the first Roman numeral on your outline.  The root of all of our problems can be summarized in a brief phrase, our sin nature.  Our sin nature.  Or to put it in modern day terms, we want to be the boss.  I call it the Bruce Springsteen disease.  We want to forge our own future, carve our own path. We want to be autonomous, independent.  We want to kick God out of the capital of our lives and say I know what is best for me.  In other words, we want to play God.  That is pretty radical, isn’t it?  Yet you do it and I do it.  Even Adam and Eve did it.  You can trace the roots of rebellion all the way back to the soils of the Garden of Eden.  God said, “Adam and Eve, all you have got to think about is worshiping Me and doing a bunch of yard work.  That’s it.  Adam and Eve, I am going to plant a tree right here and don’t touch this tree.  Don’t touch the fruit of this tree.”  A faith that has not been tested cannot be trusted.  Adam and Eve heard the voice of the evil one, you’ll see it there in the first scripture verse.  The evil one said, “Pssst, Adam, Eve, the reason God is telling you not to touch the fruit is, if you touch it you will be like God.  You can control paradise.”  And they thought, wow.  And they ate it and from that moment on, we have been struggling with these issues of control, of trying to be boss.  We try to control our image.  Ever done any image control?

Maybe I will be in a restaurant with my wife and as we walk in I will see some church members, “Hi, how are you doing?  Oh yeah, nice to see you all again.  Great?  Really, you have been a member of our church for two years?  Excellent.  OK.  Yeah, we eat here often.  Thank you very much.”  And we sit down.  And over the course of the meal, let’s say Lisa and I get into an intense discussion over an issue.  Now and then, what I have tried to do is, I have tried to act like when we are arguing that everything was cool, that we are not arguing at all, because I don’t want to put myself in a bad light before church member.  Image control.  Sound familiar?              Then we want to control our problems.  People say, “How are you doing?”  And we say, “Oh, I’m doing great, man, just great.”  Down deep, though, we are dying.  We are kind of like the shirt I heard about the other day.  It shows a picture of a dead cow.  And underneath the cow is saying, “Really, I’m fine.”

We also try to control out pain.  God uses pain as an alarm to help us change and oftentimes He will let a crisis or catastrophe occur to get you or I to change.  And the sad thing is, it takes that until we really deal with our baggage.  I have only bought one thing in my life from the Home Shopping Network.  I bought a triathlon watch.  The watch was delivered to my house and I could not get the alarm thing to stop going off at odd times, I couldn’t figure it out.  So after a couple of nights of being alarmed out of our sleep, I would take this watch, put it in one of my Nike tennis shoes, size 12, put three athletic socks in the Nike tennis shoes, put four towels over it.  Still I could hear the beep of the alarm.  Finally I just took it and threw it away.  We try to cover pain, we try to camouflage pain.  We drink to deaden it, smoke to deaden it, snort to deaden it, eat to deaden it.  We get angry, we criticize others.  We are in control, you see.  Could that be you, could that be me?  The root of our problem, we want to control.

See the phrase, the result of my problem, on your outline?  The result of my problem.  This is going to be scary here.  When I try to run the show, I join the 4F club.

The first F is fear.  If I try to run the show, I am going to be a person who faces fear.  The root of my problem is my sin nature.  And as I get into these problems, I will join the 4F club.  Fear.  There is our man Adam.  When Adam discovered he had messed up, when he still had the pulp of the orange dribbling off of his lips, Adam hid.  He was afraid.  We deal with fear.  Are you fearful today?  People might find out who I really am, I have got to put the mask on.

The number two F is frustration.  The Apostle Paul said in Romans 7:21 & 23, “I am at war with my mind…..sometimes sin wins the fight.”  Paul said this.  In Psalm 32:3, “My dishonesty made me miserable and filled my days with frustration.”  Are you frustrated today?  Wow.  I think back on my life when I have tried to run a certain area, I get fearful.  It is tough being a little demigod, trying to sovereignly rule over a universe called you, isn’t it?  Frustrating.

Also, the third F, fatigue.  It will flat wear you out.  It will rule your world.  My strength evaporated like water on a sunny day.  I think we can find illustrations for that here in this Texas heat, can’t we.

Until finally, I admitted all of my sins, all of my baggage of rebellion to You and stopped trying to hid them.  We try to hid our sins and cover our baggage, jumping from fun fix to fun fix to fun fix.  And it doesn’t work.  It wears us out because we are not designed to run the show and you will see this beautifully portrayed in our drama in a couple of minutes.  Anybody frustrated today?

The fourth F is the old failure F.  We have got fear, frustration, fatigue and failure.  Proverbs 28:13, “You will never succeed in life if you try to hide your sins.  Confess them.”  That means to articulate.  “God, I have messed up.”  And to many of us here there is a dangerous four letter word that we are afraid to admit,

H E L P.

Yesterday I did something that I have only done one other time in my life, I attempted to water ski.  My family and I went out with some friends and I was riding in the back of the boat when my friend say he would like to see me water ski.  He had been with me during my first attempt, and encouraged me to try again.  Well you know, I am kind of this macho male and I don’t want to do something that I can’t do well.  I jump in the water, it is cold.  I try to remember what I was supposed to do, I refused to ask him because I believe I can do it with no help.  We start off and I fall and fall again.  Finally the boat comes around after about the fifth fall in a row and I say, “I need some help.  What am I doing wrong here?  Help.”  I think so many of us are in that situation.  And you are saying to yourself, well I’ll put it off until next week or next year.  I can control it.  I can do it.  If you could control it, if you could do it, why haven’t you done it?  Say help.  Confess your sins.  Say God here is the baggage, and give them up.  Then God will show mercy to you.

The root of my problem is my sin nature.  The result, the 4F club.  The remedy, admit that you are powerless, and listen to me, watch this, to change the past.  Admit you are powerless to change the past.  As God looks at the vehicles of our lives, many of us have a huge rearview mirror and a small, little windshield, and we spend all of our time looking into the rearview mirror, back in the past.  “That girl never called me back.”  “My parents really hurt me.”  And a rearview mirror is important.  We need to learn from the past.  It gives us perspective.  But, if you have a giant rearview mirror and a tiny little windshield, you can’t enjoy the present, you can’t get on with your life.  The Apostle Paul said in a classic scripture verse, “I forget what lies behind, I reach forward to what is ahead.”  I enjoy the moment.  In this series, the scripture is going to reduce the size of our rearview mirrors and expand the windshield.  I am powerless to change the past.

I am powerless to control others.  Don’t we love to control other people?  We love to.  I remember the great Jim Henson, and I have watched Sesame Street for years and years and years due to our large family.  Jim was a master with the Count, Big Bird, Ernie and Burt.  And he controlled these puppets with strings and wires and things and they looked real.  Even for me, I would say, hey this Count guy is a nice fellow.  I think the Cookie Monster really likes chocolate chip cookies.  It was believable.  Henson, though, was controlling everything.  I try to control others sometimes.  And you do to.  And it is frustrating.  I am powerless, you are powerless to do that.  We have got to worry about who we are before God.  Some of you, figuratively speaking, need to take a giant pair of sheers and clip the strings.  I am powerless to control other people.

I am powerless to cope with my habit.  I can’t do it alone.  I am powerless.  Have you admitted that really?  James 4:6, “God opposes the proud but gives grace (amazing grace) to the humble.”  Recently I have been traveling a lot and one thing never ceases to amaze me.  The plane is packed and a least one traveler is trying to carry on about four bags.  I watch while he whacks every single person in the head with these bags.  It is like a bunch of dominos.  And I am waiting for just one guy to turn around and nail him.  Isn’t that kind of stupid for people to do that?  It is just dumb.  All they have to do just say, “Hey, would you check these please?”

As God looks at your life and my life, He sees all these bags on us.  “OK God, I am ready to board Your flight.”  And God accepts us but He says, “Hey, stop before you board my flight, and I’ll take care of the bags, you can’t deal with them.”  Why don’t we admit that?  Why don’t we admit that right now.

 

DRAMA BREAK

When we try to run our lives it is like a bunch of mannequins thinking they can run a department store.  We have got to realize that God is the King of the Jungle, He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Step one.  I have to admit that I am powerless to change my problem.  Step two.  I have to believe that Jesus Christ has the power to heal me of my condition, of my shortcomings, of my problem, of my habit.  I believe that Jesus Christ has the power to do it.

It is interesting.  In the classic twelve step program, step two talks about a higher power, and a lot of Christians are uncomfortable because it says a higher power and not Jesus Christ.  Let me tell you why the alcoholics who founded this twelve step program used the words higher power.  It is because the church had rejected them because of their problems with alcoholism.  And they said alcoholics will not join a twelve step program if you say Jesus Christ because most of them have been rejected by the church due to their habit.

If you have turned outside of yourself to a higher power, if you are seeking, we say at this church, great.  We say at this church, we want to have the attitude that the Apostle Paul had in Acts 17.  Paul came to Athens, he went to a place called Morris Hill.  A bunch of people, philosophers, armchair theologians, had a view of a higher power and Paul said in Acts 17, it is good that you guys have a concept of a higher power, but you have an underdeveloped picture of who God is.  If you will listen to me, I will clarify the picture, I will spell it out, because the true God is not some humanistic, man-made god, he is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the God who sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross for all of your sins and to rise again.  And they saw a picture that was developed by the Apostle Paul.  And that is precisely the role of our church.  If you have turned to a high power, great.  But we are going to fill in who the higher power is, it is Jesus Christ.  Because if you trusted anything else, some New Age philosophy or some other religion, it is not going to come through for you.  They are going to let you down.  Believe that Jesus Christ has the power to heal and to change you.

How do I do that?  Number one on the second side of your outline, God knows about my problem.  When I comprehend God’s character, I realize that he knows about my problem.  Nike made millions of dollars with that crazy commercial with Bo Jackson saying, “Bo knows.”  Bo knows baseball.  Bo knows football.  We all laughed and bought more and more Nike products.  I think we ought to print a shirt up that says, “God Knows It All.”  He is omniscient.  God knows about my problem.  You say, well no one really know the pain I felt after I lost my father or when my mate turned and left.  No one knows how I deal with this problem of pornography or dope.  No one knows what I am struggling with.  God knows.  The Bible says in Psalm 56:8, David speaking, “You know how troubled I am, You have kept a record of my tears.”  Is that powerful, or what?  Tears in a bottle.  Ed Young’s name on a bottle containing all the tears I have shed in my life, God has counted them and knows about every one.  I love Psalm 31:7, “You have seen the crisis in my soul.”  You can’t hide anything from God.  There is nothing on the sly.  He sees it all.

About three months ago I was leaving the hugh airport of Tegucigalpa, Honduras.  And before I left Tegucigalpa, Honduras I had to put my bags on the counter and one of the officials unzipped my bags and took out everything and examined my stuff.  And I know I felt violated.  Everything from underwear to deodorant.  We have got to let God do the same.  We have got to realize that God sees everything, it is like when you put your baggage on one of those scanners before you board a flight.  God sees it all, God knows it all.  And we can’t trust Him until we know that He knows about our problem.

Number two.  God is sympathetic about my problem, no only does He know about my problem, He is sympathetic about it.  The Bible says He is like a father to us, tender and sympathetic.  He is perfectly balanced.  Now a lot of times we take our earthly father’s characteristics and move them over to our Heavenly Father.  We mess up when we do that.  God is sympathetic, He is perfect, He is always there, loving us, forgiving us, helping us.  God is sympathetic.  For some of you the scales have come off your eyes.  You mean God knows and He is sympathetic about my problems?  Whoa.

Number three.  God can change my problem.  And the longer we put off change, the longer we miss opportunities to serve Him.  I like what is says in Ephesians 1:19-20.  “I pray that you will begin to understand how incredibly great His power is to help those who believe in Him.”  And that word, believe, is not just an intellectual assent, it is I have faith in, I put my weight on, I trust You.  Because the Bible says, the same power that raised Christ from the dead is available to all of us.  God did not have a power shortage or a power failure.  It is there.  He can do it.  So comprehend God’s character.

Next, comply with God’s offer.  He is offering His help.  He is offering guidance.  Philippians 2:13, “For it is God who is at work in you giving you the will and the power to achieve His purpose.”  Circle the words will and power.  We can’t do it under our own willpower, God will give us the will and the power to do it.  And finally, the last verse on your outline, Isaiah 43:2.  It talks about how God will be with us no matter what we are going through, even through the deep waters.

Over our vacation, EJ, our three year old, jumped off the diving board with his floaties on.  And he was skeptical about doing this and I told him that I would be in the water with him.  He said, “Daddy, catch me, be right there at the end of the diving board.”  “EJ, I’m going to be with you.  It is over your head but jump.  Do it.”  And I watched him muster up enough courage to walk to the end of the board, curl his toes over the board, close his eyes and cover his face.  When he jumped, I let him sink a little bit but I had him right there in the water.  I was not going to let go, because he is my child.

No matter what we are going through we are going to have to say, “God, by faith I jump off.”  God is going to catch us, He is going to be with us in this process of recovery.  Don’t skip to step four, five or six.  That is on down the road.  You have got to deal with it Biblically and know who God is and then you will know what the greatest channel in all the world is, no more channel surfing.  It is the Recovery Channel, straight from God’s word.

THE RECOVERY CHANNEL SERMON SERIES

HOW TO GAIN CONTROL

ED YOUNG

AUGUST 20, 1995

Imagine that the man who owned the tallest skyscraper in downtown Dallas invited you, your family members and your closest friends to the observation tower on the top of his structure to check out the beautiful skyline of the metroplex.  You were so excited.  While you were up there looking at everything around you, Fair Park, Reunion Arena, Texas Stadium, the different freeway systems, this owner had enough class to serve you and your guests some of the best fresh lemonade you ever tasted in your entire life.  Suddenly, though, without warning your worst nightmare becomes a reality.  You begin to smell smoke.  You see the flames and in a nanosecond this building you are standing on has become a towering inferno.  The owner of the building panics and he looks at you and your family members and friends and he says, “We are in trouble, we can’t get down from the top of this structure.  The staircase leading down from the observation tower has burned up.  The elevator system has jammed.  I don’t know what we will do.  I really don’t.”

I am in a series called The Recovery Channel.  Last week we talked about the first aspect of recovery.  We said that we all have problems.  We all have hurts, habits and hangups that we deal with, from anger to grief, guilt to alcoholism, gambling, you name it, we deal with it.  And we all need to recover from something.  And we said that we are powerless over our problems.  In essence, we turned to each other last week and said, our buildings are on fire.

Let’s jump back to this imaginary scenario for a second.  You are standing on top of the observation tower, the flames are engulfing you, smoke is everywhere and out of the corner of your eye you see someone walking around on the skyscraper next to you.  The person takes out a little cannon and detonates it.  A three inch wide steel cable explodes from it, traverses the distance between the two buildings and wraps around the air conditioning unit on your building.  You look over and to your amazement the figure from the other skyscraper jumps onto the cable, does some spins and a little dance step, walks across the cable and waves to you.  He runs back to his skyscraper and right beside the cannon he finds a wheelbarrow which he places on the cable and returns to your building.  He evades the flames and smoke from your building and pushes the wheelbarrow right in front of you.  He sits down, folds his arms and says, “Get in.  It is your only way to safety.  I want to help you.  Get in.”

Last week we said that we are powerless over our problems.  We said our buildings are on fire.  We also said last week that we believe God has the power to fire a cable from His building to our building and we said that we believe God has the strength to cross that cable with a wheelbarrow and to take us out of our insanity, to remove us from our problem.  To change a hurt, a hangup or a habit.

Today, in this session we are talking about step three of the recovery channel.  It is the wheelbarrow step.  The Bible says that God of this universe has shot a cable from His building to our building and the cable is called the cross and Jesus Christ has pushed the wheelbarrow across the cable.  He is standing there gripping the handles, looking you square in the eye and saying, “You matter to me.  I love you.  You are powerless over your problems.  I have the power to take you out of the mess.  Get in.  Get in.  Commit your problem; commit your life to My will, to My purpose.  Make that decision.  Please do it.”  So today, we talk about the good ole wheelbarrow.

Some of us have gotten into the wheelbarrow.  Some of us have said to ourselves, “Yes I am powerless, God you are powerful, I commit my life to you and will get into the wheelbarrow.  I know I can’t change my life alone and I give it all to You.  You push me, You take me out of this mess.”  Some of us have definitely done that.  Others of us, though, if you are like me, we have said no to Jesus.  We have looked at Him square in the eye and we have said, “No, Jesus, I don’t want to get into the wheelbarrow just yet.”  And I want to give you a couple of reasons why we say no, why we refuse Christ’s offer to jump into the wheelbarrow and let Him deal with all of our baggage that He wants to deal with.

First, we underestimate our condition.  We underestimate our condition.  And our condition is critical.  We do this by denial, by plain old denial.  Jesus crosses the cable, walks up to us with this wheelbarrow and He says, “Get in.”  Here is what we say, “What do you mean get in, Jesus?  I appreciate You and I believe in You and I love You and all that, but what fire?  I don’t smell any smoke.”  And while you are saying that your Nike tennis shoes are melting, your eyebrows and hair are being singed.  “What fire?  What do you mean?”  Denial.

This past week someone who is very close to me confronted me in love about a sin in my life.  And my first response was this.  “What?  You’ve got the wrong person.  I am not really dealing with that.”  And about twenty-four hours later I thought to myself, “You know, Ed, you’re in denial over this.  You are dealing with this.  This is tripping you up.  You had better put it in the wheelbarrow.”  The Bible has a word for denial.  In II Corinthians 2:2, the word is blindness.  Blindness.  In II Corinthians 4:4 it says this, “Satan, who is the god of this evil world, has made him blind.”  He has made you blind, he has made me blind, unable to see the glorious light of the gospel, or unable to understand the amazing message we preach about the glory of Christ, who is God.  We are blind and the evil one blinds us.  Yes, Jesus has crossed the cable.  Yes, He has asked us to get in the wheelbarrow, yet a lot of us are in denial, we are blind.

Recently I have gotten into a new activity with my kids.  Frog hunting.  It is not frog gigging, I want to protect the wildlife and all that.  There is a little pond by our house and we walk down to the pond at night with a Fischer Price flashlight and there are some behemoth, Goliath-like frogs on the banks.  And these frogs are bigger that those Budweiser frogs, huge things.  The other night one of them had a goatee, matter of fact.  Anyway.  We shine the light on the frog and the light blinds the frog, which I knew beforehand but the kids just learned that night.  You can walk right up to this big, old bullfrog and he is just frozen there.  And if you wanted to, we didn’t do this, you could actually pet the frog.  I am like a frog a lot of times.  And if you are honest with yourself, so are you.  We are blind, we are blind to what is going on around us.  We don’t realize there is a fire going on, the smoke is so thick it is about to choke us, we are in denial.  In denial.

There is another reason that we don’t understand our condition.  It is found in Hosea 4:4.  Blame.  We deny and we also blame others.  Hosea 4:4 says, “Don’t point your finger at someone else and try to pass the blame to him or to her or to your boss or to your spouse, or to your teacher.  Jesus wheels the wheelbarrow up to us.  We don’t deny the fire any more, we blame others.  We point to our friends and family members standing on the structure and say, “It is because of her, it is because of him.  If they would get their acts fixed, if they would really change, if they would quit torching my life, then I could be OK Jesus, so I am not going to get into the wheelbarrow because they are messing me around.  It is them.”  And this blame thing is as old as Adam and Eve.  Genesis 3:12.  Adam and Eve had sinned before God.  God confronts Adam.  And here is what Adam said.  God, wait a minute.  Me?  She did it, she is the one who took the grape from your cosmic produce section.  I didn’t do it, God.  Blame.

Another reason that we don’t understand our condition is plain old-fashioned fear.  We are fearful to get into the wheelbarrow.  The Bible puts it this way in

Mark 8:36&37, “And how does a man benefit if he gains the whole world and loses his soul in the process, for is anything worth more than his soul?”  A lot of us are like the man I heard about who fell off a cliff.  He was falling and he sees a branch on the way down and he grabs the branch.  He looks down, 1,500 feet, and he looks up, 500 feet.  He screams out, “Would someone help me?  Would someone please help me?”  And suddenly the clouds part and the voice of God says this.  “Let go of the branch and I will catch you.”  This man thought about it for a second and he said, “Is there anyone else who can help?”  Now, we laugh at that.  Oftentimes, though, God is last resort.  We are fearful to fall into His arms.  We are fearful to get into His wheelbarrow.  We think to ourselves, “I could turn into a religious freak.  He could push me somewhere I don’t want to go.”  And the evil one comes in and gives us all of these lies, all of these excuses not to deal with lust, not to deal with the gambling problem, not to deal with this co-dependency thing, not to deal with the grief, not to deal with the temper, not to deal with this or that.  And we get afraid.  It is time that we face our fears.  Like someone told my wife and I that she did, we need to just take a step and fall into the arms of the Lord. A close friend of mine told me that his life and his battle over cigarette addiction never, ever worked until he came to the point where he got into the wheelbarrow.  So it is there for you.  We are just talking about the decision making phase.

Another reason we don’t get into the wheelbarrow is because we are not desperate enough.  It is because we are not desperate enough.  Christianity is for desperate people.  It is for those people who are at the end of their rope, it is for those people who realize that they are standing on a small portion of a towering inferno.  God will allow our sins and our hurts and our habits and hangups to get the best of us, and He will keep knocking the props out until we turn to Him.  It happened to Jonah.  Jonah didn’t turn to God until he was in the belly of a hugh fish, the digestive juices eating away his skin, all the slime and the gross stuff.  Then, the Bible says, Jonah prayed.  Jonah came clean.  And sadly as I look back on my life, I realize that most of the time we don’t change until we experience great pain.  And God will tweak the pain dial hotter and hotter and hotter until we come to our senses.  Why don’t we come to our senses now?  The little problem that you try to explain away and not deal with, why don’t you come clean on it now instead of waiting until you are standing on top of a towering inferno.

I Timothy 2:4&5.  God is on one side and all the people are on the other side and Christ Jesus, Himself, is between them to bring them together by giving His life for all mankind, by wheeling the wheelbarrow across the cable called Calvary to you and to me.  Are you desperate?  Some are saying that they are ready to get into the wheelbarrow today.  And that is great.  Some of us are not ready yet.  All you have to do is give us some more time and maybe a little bit more pain.

Another reason we don’t get into the wheelbarrow and we don’t understand our condition is the fact that we feel huge amounts of guilt.  Guilt.  Big time guilt.  And I love how Psalms 40:12 puts it, David writing.  “Problems far too big for me to solve are piled higher than my head.”  Did you check our the drama today?  Do you feel like a plate spinner?  Honkey-dory.  I love that. ” Meanwhile my sins are too many to count and have all caught up with me.”  It is just what I have talked about.  They have all caught up.  And I am ashamed to look up.  Some of us see Jesus and we see His eyes of compassion, His eyes of change, His eyes of forgiveness, His eyes of love.  We look at Him and we say, “I don’t know, Jesus, I am not sure.  I have so many bags, so much guilt, so much pain.  You don’t know how far out in the rough I am.  I am in the deep weeds.  I am tripped up, scarred up, messed up.  I can’t take it.  I don’t know if this wheelbarrow can support all of my baggage.”  Jesus said, “I have died for that baggage, I want to take that baggage.  I want that transaction to take place where you give it all to Me and then I will give it all back to you.”  You see, we don’t gain control of our lives until we lose control, until we give up control to the One who knows how to push the wheelbarrow.  And it is funny.  Some of us think we are so suave and debonair and so smart, we are sipping lemonade as we are on top of that building, and Jesus comes to us and says, “Get in.”  We say, “Wait a minute Jesus, I’ll just dowse the flames with lemonade.  I can put the fire out by myself.  I can do it.”  Do you realize your condition today?

Another reason that we don’t get into the wheelbarrow is, we don’t understand the nature of God.  We don’t understand the character of God.  The Bible says that we are made in the image of God.  Yet, from the beginning of time we have fashioned God into our image.  What have you fashioned God into?  Into the image of what?  Your anger, a principal at the parochial school that you attended, a boss, a pastor, a priest, a politician?  What have you fashioned God into?  The children of Israel did this, God’s chosen people.  Here God was giving Moses not the ten suggestions but the ten commandments and at that same time God’s children are fashioning something to worship and making God in their image.

When I was at Florida State University I was the only athlete who majored in the fine arts, drawing and painting and sculpting and all that stuff.  And one of my favorite things to do was to draw portraits of people and to exaggerate their facial features.  For example, my face.  I have a long face, you know, kind of a high forehead, a little gray right here, kind of bulking looking ears.  I would exaggerate those things when I was drawing myself.  What I would do with my friends, I would take their faces and exaggerate them and always put them on a body builders body.  Here these guys were normal looking yet I would put them on a Arnold Schwarzenegger body, or some other muscle bound, hulk looking figure.  And my friends would get these things and laugh.  I would give them to people at parties, and celebrations and things like that.  We had a really good time with it.  All I was doing, though, was changing faces on someone’s body.  And the face didn’t match the body.  We look at Jesus and He is standing here with the wheelbarrow and He is saying, “Get in, get in.”  Here is what we do.  We put a different face on the face of Jesus.  And if you do that, I don’t blame you for not getting into the wheelbarrow.  Put the face of Christ on Christ.  Put the face of Christ on Christ.  Do you understand who God is?  Do you understand the nature of God and how much you matter to Him?

This process of getting into the wheelbarrow is really a four step process.  You have got to understand four things to get into the wheelbarrow.  I want you to take out a pen or pencil and write the word STEP vertically because I am taking about the third step of the recovery channel today.  When I get into the wheelbarrow four things need to happen, four principles, four precepts, if you will, need to really occur in my life.  The S stands for the word Savior.  I must accept Jesus Christ as my Savior.  The Bible says in the book of Acts 16:31, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.”  You have heard people say, I’ve gotten saved.  Go back to the building.  Your building is on fire, the flames are tearing you apart, God has shot the cable across, sent Jesus Christ.  When you are saved, He actually invites you to come in.  You come into the wheelbarrow, He takes the wheelbarrow, evades the flames and He runs across the cable and you are saved.  Once it happens to you once, that’s it.  You don’t keep on getting saved. “Well, I’ve got to save you again.  You mean you have sinned?  I’ve got to save you again.”  If that happened, if that occurred Jesus would have to die on the cross day in and day out.  One time only is enough.  So when I get into the wheelbarrow I have got to understand that I accept Jesus Christ as my Savior.

T stands for teacher.  I have to accept the Bible, God’s word, as my teacher.  II Timothy 3:16 says this.  “All scripture is designed to teach.”  We should never, ever stop learning because the moment we stop learning that is the moment we really stop living and progressing in the Christian life.  We have got to learn.  We have got to commit our lives to learn.  The Bible should be our teacher.  It has to be our authority.  I has to be our absolute.  And to crystalize II Timothy 3:16, the Bible says all scripture is inspired by God.  In the original Greek, that word inspired means God breathed.  I am going to tell you something.  God doesn’t have bad breath.  His breath is perfect and His breath will help you and will help me.  Christ as my Savior, I accept that.  The Bible as my teacher, I accept that.

1. Energy.  I accept God’s power as my energy.  I accept God’s power as my energy.  The Bible says in Philippians 4:13, “I can do (some things – no!) everything God asks me to do with the help of Christ, who gives me the strength and the power.”  What I want to do though is say, “OK Jesus, I will get into the wheelbarrow but I will tell You where to go.  No, no, no, I don’t want to go across the cable, if you take a left here, I think there are some stairs that I can take.  No, You are going too fast, you are going too slow.  I don’t know.  Jesus, move out of the way for a second, You follow me and I will show You where to go.”

P stands for purpose.  I accept God’s will as my purpose.  God has a dynamite purpose, to steal a phrase from Jimmy Walker.  See all you baby busters.  Jimmy Walker, who is that?  Remember that show, Good Times?  One of my favorite shows.  He used to say dynamite all the time.  I though it would work.  If I was talking to a bunch of boomers it would.  We have too many baby busters here for that to work.  It is dynamite.  And the Bible uses the word abundance in John 10:10 and the word abundance,in the Greek, means a life better than you could ever imagine.  The picture behind it is waves hitting on the seashore.  If you have ever been to the seashore, you have seen the waves keep coming.  They don’t stop.  Sets of waves, over and over and over again.  There is also a picture of pouring water into a cup, and you keep pouring the water and the water spills out over the cup on your hands, on your body, on the table.  It is a life so phenomenal, so incredible, so exciting, so adventuresome that we can’t grasp it all.  That is the will of God for you.  Is it perfect?  No.  Does God know we will sin?  Yes.  Is it going to be bumpy in the wheelbarrow?  No doubt about it.  But it is going to be exciting.  Think about it.  Going across cable after cable after cable with Jesus pushing.  The third step of recovery is a decision process.

Just for a quick review.  We have done three things the last two weeks.  We have said that we are powerless over our problems.  We have said that Jesus Christ has the power to heal and change.  And today we have said, it is a decision that we have to make, to get into the wheelbarrow, to give control of our lives over to the will of God as we understand Him.  And we are getting a better understanding of who God is through Christ.  Read his biography right here in the Bible.

Now, I want to say something to Christians here, people who are Christ followers.  We are notorious, Christians, for stopping after step three.  We do a dance called the Christian three step.  “Swing your partner round and round, the Christian three step is the best you’ve found.  Oh, yeah, I am powerless God.  You are powerful.  Amen.  Praise God.  I’m going to get into the wheelbarrow and commit my life to you.  That is it.  See you later.  Let’s go to a new topic, Ed.  Thank you very much.”  I am not a great dancer, I can tell you that.  It is something that I can’t do, and that is wild, my living in Texas.  I have never in my life two stepped, and also I have never three stepped.  There is a dance called the three step too, did you know about that?  How many of you can two step?  How many of you can three step?  My wife and I were at a place about a year ago and we saw a couple who could really do the two step and the three step.  It was like they were free on the dance floor.  They were moving back and forth.  And I was thinking, golly, that has to be so great to dance like that.  It looks so easy.  But as I talked to people who know how to two step and especially three step, I was assured that there are some really intricate moves that need to be learned to perfection.  If you have it down, you can do it.  If you don’t have it down, you will kick your partner in the shins day in and day out.  For the last two weeks there has been a lot of shin kicking going on as we have tried to apply these steps, these first three steps.  But I am going to tell you something.  When you apply these three steps, as you live them out, you will be able to move on God’s dance floor like that couple I saw about a year ago dancing to some serious country western music.  The decision is great.  That is fine and admirable.  Don’t stop here.  In the next four weeks we are going to talk about some more steps.  And these next steps are really the litmus test of this third step.  Next week it is going to get scary in here.  We are going to do a moral inventory check.  We are going to go through seven areas of sin, seven areas of rebellion that we all deal with.  A lot of times these seven areas are causing a bigger problem in our life.  So we are going to go under the water next week and check out what’s below, what is driving this, what is making me do this.  So be in prayer for us as we study and pray for next weeks message.  But the whole issue is, I keep going back to it, I can’t get away from it, the old wheelbarrow.

Parenthetically let me say one last word.  Don’t miss this.  I know some of you are saying OK, Ok, I understand that I am powerless, God has the power, I want to commit my life to His will, I know what I will do.  I’ve got it.  Instead of making a decision now though, I’ve solved the problems in my life first and then I will make the decision.  I will problem solve and get this straightened out and then I will make the decision.  Please, please, I beg you, inspired by the word of God, don’t do that.  If you are a manager do you say OK we are going to make a decision but before we make a decision at work I want to solve all the problems.  It is crazy.  You make a decision and then you solve the problem.  Today you made the decision to get into the wheelbarrow.  Jesus Christ will take care of the problems.  You first decide to get in.  So, what is it going to be?  Are you going to get in or are you going to continue to be burned up and choked by that thick, black smoke of your towering inferno?

FAMOUS LOST WORDS SERMON SERIES

COMMITMENT

ED YOUNG

SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1995

A couple of years ago I decided to do something that was a little bit radical.  I decided to commit to run a marathon, a 26.2 mile race.  As I was training for the marathon I talked to a number of people and they all said that I would have a blast except when I hit the twenty mile marker, at which point I would hit the wall.  They said my body would shut down, I would want to quit.

Sure enough, I start the race.  Everything is going fine until about the 20 mile marker, I hit the wall.  Everything in my body was saying, “Stop.”  My toes were saying, “There are too many blisters.”  My ankles were saying, “This hurts.”  My knees were saying, “I want some relief.”  I really did want to stop the race because, frankly, I was hitting a quitting point, a wall, a barrier.

We have got to face the facts.  No matter what we do in this life, spiritually, relationally or vocationally we will hit walls.  We will come to points where we want to throw in the towel, where we want to walk away, where we want to get some relief, where we want to keep our options open.  The reason is, it is easier to quit than to commit.

I am going to talk to you today about a foundational character quality, commitment.  Commitment means pledging yourself to a position no matter what the cost.  Pledging yourself to a position no matter what the cost.  When I think about commitment, my mind rushes to Daniel.  Daniel was a young man committed to the Lord.  He pledged himself to this position no matter what the outcome.  Daniel was captured and deported to Babylon, he was away from his friends and from his family members.  There were only a few associates that he knew.  He committed himself in a very ungodly environment to pray and to continue to develop his relationship with the Lord.  The King of Babylon loved Daniel, he respected him.  And because the King respected him and because he was a foreigner not from Babylon, people began to resent Daniel.  Some palace plotters went into the palatial study of the King one day and they said, “King, you are not a man, you are the man.  In fact, you are such a great man, we think you should set forth an edict that everyone should worship only you.  And if anyone worships anything else we think, King, that they should be thrown into the lion’s den.”  The King said, “That sounds great to me.”  He had a big ego.  The next day, Daniel walks outside on his rooftop, he kneels to pray like he has always done.  He knew the implications of his prayer.  The palace plotters said, “King, look there is Daniel praying.”  And the King said, “Oh no, what have I done?”  I can’t go back on my word, I have got to throw my man, Daniel, into the lion’s den.”  Read the text.  Daniel was not promised a deliverance prior to entering the lion’s den.  He wasn’t.  And this lion’s den was not full of lions named Simba and Nala singing Hakun Matada.  That didn’t take place there.  These were mean, menacing, ugly, fang-baring lions who tore people apart.  But Daniel was committed.  He could have said right before he was thrown in the lion’s den, “You know, King, I really wasn’t praying, I was catching rays up there.  I really wasn’t praying, I was fixing my hair.”  He was committed to the Lord and God delivered him, He shut the mouths of the lions.  A man who pledged himself to a position.

Why is there so little commitment these days?  We don’t like to be committed.  We would rather throw in the towel than stay in the game.  We would rather walk out than work through.  We would rather make excuses than give reasons to stay with it.  Why?  Our society applauds our lack of commitment.  Our society glamorizes it.  Think about television.  You surf a little bit through the channels and you see a man working.  He has to meet a deadline in the next hour and the boss comes in and gives him yet another report and another deadline.  The man turns to the camera and he says, “I cannot take it any more.”  The veins are sticking out of his forehead.  “I’m going to go in and I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”  So he storms into his boss’ office and the music is reaching a fever pitch level.  You are sitting on the edge of your recliner watching.  “I quit.  You make me sick, boss, you are not concerned about me.”  And the man spins on his heels and walks out.  The credits roll and the advertisers pitch beer and antacids and we think, “Wow.  All right.  A lack of commitment.  I would love to do that one day to my boss, to my teacher, to my coach.  To tell them off.  To quit in their face.”

You turn to another program.  You see a marriage situation, maybe a soap opera.  I know we don’t have anyone here who watches soap operas.  Just a hypothetical situation.  You are watching a soap opera and you have a conflict going on and the wife says, “I’m tired of you.  I want a divorce.  You make we sick.  You have bad breath.”  And she turns and she walks away.  The music again is reaching the fever pitch level.  The commercials roll and there you have it.

You see they don’t show you the man who is now unemployed because of his lack of commitment.  They don’t show you the rippling effect of divorce because this woman was not committed to her marriage.  They don’t show you the children now without a dad.  They don’t show you that.  A lack of commitment.

You can talk about the AIDS virus, and the new ebola virus, but lack of commitment is a disease that has reached epidemic proportions.  We just want to sit back and let it kind of cruise, put it on automatic pilot.  We don’t really want to pledge ourselves to a position anymore.

The bottom line for this lack of commitment disease can be traced back to the book of Genesis.  Genesis 3.  Adam and Eve had it great, a perfect environment.  All they had to do was some yard work every day.  And God said, “Adam and Eve you are committed to Me.  I love you and I know you love me.  I want to ask you to do one thing.  I am going to test your love.  Please do not touch the tree or any fruit on the tree in the middle of the garden.”  “OK, God.  We are committed to You, God.  We love you, God.”  The evil one comes on the scene and the evil one begins to attack their lack of commitment, he will do it in your life and my life too.  The evil one’s favorite thing to tell you and me is “Hey, don’t commit.  Wait until tomorrow.  Wait until the next day.  Put it off.  Make excuses.  Give reasons.  Keep your options open.  Arrive late.”  “Hey, Adam and Eve, did God really mean for you not to touch that fruit?  You see, if you touch the fruit, you will become like God.  That’s why He said it.”  And they did it and from that moment on we have been struggling with the lack of commitment.  A lack of commitment.  A lack of commitment.  The root of the lack of commitment is basic raw, southward bound, selfishness.  What’s good for me?  I want my needs met.  I have got to do what is best for me.  It’s me, and it’s a very meistic, me-centered world today.  I have got to make me feel good and me look good and me come out OK.

Commitment, though, Biblical commitment swims against the current of our society.  It is pledging yourself to a position no matter what the cost.  Commitment.

The good news, though, today is, God wants us to be committed people.  God really does.  And God will never ask any of us to commit ourselves to anything that we cannot fulfill.  Because God, if we will ask Him to, will empower us to commit, will empower us to break through the walls and be the kind of people that He wants us to be in this society.  But our world cannot be impacted, nor can it be changed, relationships healed or churches really move on until we say I am going to commit.  I am going to commit.

I want to share with you a quick three step process on commitment, something that we can all apply.  Step one.  We have to pledge ourselves to the big three.  If you want to be committed you have got to pledge yourself to the big three.  A lot of us are very good at committing to things but committing to the wrong things.  Take for instance the man who is so involved in the golf game that he never goes to church, he doesn’t spend quality time with his family or his kids, because he is into golf, being a scratch golfer one day.  He will look back on his life when he is sixty and he will say, “You mean I spent about fifteen hours a week on the golf course hitting a little white ball into a little hole and now my marriage is a mess.  My kids don’t even know me.”  Committed to the wrong things.

I know other people and they are so committed to their house and building a nice, beautiful house and so emersed in that that they neglect everything else in their life.  Committed to the wrong things.

You have got to choose the big three to commit to.  First, spiritual commitment.  The Bible talks on and on about spiritual commitment.  God, don’t miss this point, God is the initiator of commitment.  He committed Himself to Abraham.  He committed Himself to Moses.  He committed Himself to David.  And finally, He committed Himself by commissioning His son, Jesus Christ, to live a sinless life, to die on the cross for our sins, to rise again.  He committed Himself with this new covenant.  Just think about it.  God has committed to you and to me just for our showing up.  We don’t have to do one thing.  Not give one cent to the church or to the United Way, or smile.  Just for being here, just because our hearts are beating, God is committed to us.  And that is an awesome fact to think about.  Yet many of us have never committed our lives to Him.

I want to talk to those of you who are investigating the Christian life.  We have many investigators who come on a given weekend.  If you are investigating Christianity, commit yourself to that.  Pledge yourself to a position.  “I am going to see if Jesus really is who He said He is, and whether He can change my life or deal with this relationship.”  Give it some time, at least six weeks, to see if He is real.  Engage in conversation with, maybe, someone who brought you, or talk to one of us.  You owe it to yourself.  Some of you right now might be ready to make the best step of your life, to receive Christ personally, to commit your life to Jesus.  I am not talking about a religion here.  I am not talking about being a Baptist, a Catholic, a Methodist, a Pentecostal.  I am talking about a relationship with Jesus.  The way to do that is to come to a point in your life where you realize your moral column is really messy.  Even if you have told only one white lie, in the eyes of God, you fall miserably short of God’s standard of goodness.  The Bible says in Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned.”  Not some, all have sinned.  Jesus Christ was sinless.  Everyone else, all of us, have sinned.  We matter so much to God, He is so committed to us that He sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross for our sins, everything that we have done past, present and future and if we receive that, if we commit our lives to Christ, the moment we do that, we are a new person.  Our home is in heaven.

If we are relying on the performance plan to get to heaven, we are not going to make it.  I talked to a guy this week and I asked him, “If someone walked up to you and asked how could he get to heaven, what would you say?”  He said, “Well, I’m a good guy.  God and I had this deal worked out.  I have not been to church in about six years, but you know, I need to watch my language and be nice to my children.”  I said, “Friend, I hate to say this to you but I have got to, if you are relying on that, you are not going to go to heaven.”  And a lot of you are relying on the performance plan to get to heaven.  It’s not going to work.  Commit your life to Christ.

Have you ever though about when Jesus was dying on the cross for our sins?  Jesus was committed to do that.  When the nails were going through His hands and feet, when they were plucking out His beard, when they were torturing Him, all hell screamed in His ear, QUIT, stop it, call the angels down, it’s too tough.  He didn’t do it though because He is committed to you and me.  He had you, He had me on His mind when He was going through that suffering, humiliating death. Even the Father in heaven turned His back on the son during this time.  Jesus was committed to it, He pledged Himself to that position no matter what happened and He rose again.  Spiritual commitment.

We also need to be committed to the church.  The Bible says that the church is the bride of Christ.  We have too many church hoppers, shoppers and boppers,  not committed to anything.  “I’ll stay here for awhile and if I meet a hypocrite, I am going somewhere else.”  Or, “I didn’t agree with what someone said in some message and I’ll just never go back.  “Have you ever eaten in a restaurant before?  Have you ever had a bad meal?  I did this week.  Did I say, “Well, I had a bad meal, I’ll never go to that restaurant again.”  Find a church, commit to it, if it is this church we would love to have you.  If another church, they would love to have you.  Make sure the church is a Bible believing church and that you get involved.  You have got to be in church, the Bible says, regularly.  That means at least once a week.  If you are not coming at least once a week, if it is not a priority to you, something is wrong in your life.  I’m talking to Christians here.  Something is wrong.  “Well we have this lake place.”  Something is wrong.  “We have this vacation home.”  Something is wrong.  “I’m into sail boat racing.”  Something is wrong.  If God is God, if Jesus is Lord of your life and you are not regularly worshipping Him, if you are not excited to go to church, something is wrong with the commitment quotient in your life.  We ask for church membership here for a Biblical reason.  Christ is committed to the church.  We ask for church membership because of a cultural reason.  It is the antidote to our society.  We ask for church membership for a practical reason.  It defines who can be counted on.

Don’t just come, though, once a week.  A lot of you show up and you go, “OK, I have not been spiritually fed for a week.  OK, Ed, Stan, feed me.”  A weekly gorging.  “I’ve got enough, now I can hit the world, you know.”  We have got to worship together, that is a priority but that is not spiritual maturity.  You can’t feed off someone else.  I have got children, many children, at different ages of development.  I have got an eight year old, a three year old and twins who are eleven months.  It is kind of wild to feed our eleven month old twins.  Broccoli mixed with chicken and green beans with all this stuff and you know it gets everywhere.  You feed and feed and feed them.  Lisa and I do not want to do this for the rest of our lives.  What is our desire?  Our desire is to teach our children to what, feed themselves.  That is God’s desire for you.  Too many of you are still on a baby food diet spiritually.  Feed me, feed me.  The next Bible study, the next sermon, the next praise and worship time, just feed me.  And we have got to be fed that way, corporately.  Real maturity happens, though, when you are fed corporately and then you learn individually how to feed yourselves.  Prayer, devotions daily.  Then you become mature.  When you begin to get outside of yourself and serve others within the context of the Body of Christ, that is when you grow.  Spiritual commitment.  I am not talking about just a weekend deal, attendance at weekend services, participation in Bible study, and in a small group using your abilities within this church or in another church.  That is spiritual commitment.

The second of the big three is relational commitment.  Committed in relationships.  Let’s talk first of all about a husband and wife.  There are going to be relational sticking points in your marriage.  There are going to be times when you want to walk out, when you think the cost is too high, when the wall is too big.  You have got to crash through that.  You have got to break through the wall, you have got to say, “God, I committed myself to You when I was married.”  Too many of us take that lightly.  We say, “Hey, you know, I said this ten years ago but I really didn’t mean it.”  And we start playing games with ourselves.  “Do you know I was kind of pressured into marrying her.”  Guys, we are the worst at this.  Men are pathetic as far as commitment goes.  Isn’t that right, ladies?  Dating relationship?  “Well, when you start putting a commitment on me, well I might date someone else now.”  “I’m going to move.”  We are freaked out over commitment.

I don’t do weddings hardly anymore because that is all I would be doing now with our church as big as it is, I wouldn’t be able to preach.  However, when I was on staff at a church in Houston I used to do about 150 weddings a year.  I would talk to couples in marriage counseling sessions and this is the most hilarious thing.  Prior to their marriage, the guy and the lady are in my office and I start talking about what we are going to do in the marriage ceremony.  I talk about commitment.  It never fails.  The woman is shaking her head, yes, and the guy is looking totally astonished.  It is like it just hit him.  I don’t know what it is about us.  We have got to be committed relationally.  Committed in our marriages.  Because if you are not committed in your marriage, when you hit this wall you are going to say, “Ah, a wall.  I’m going to divorce you.”  Then you will marry someone else, “Ah, a wall.”  And you will marry someone else, “Ah, a wall.”  And we take this lack of commitment, this fear of the wall into every relationship.  We have got to blast through it with God’s power.  Once we blast through it, we will grow and develop.  I have never seen growth and development take place when someone just kind of quits, throws in the towel.

I looked back on my life as I was preparing for this message this past week.  I thought, Ed, what do you regret that you have quit in your life?  There are three or four things.  I look back and do you know what I really regret?  I regret not staying with the drums.  I have natural rhythm and I could play the drums well for a third grader.  I quit though.  And I would love to play the drums, kind of like Phil Collins.  What have you quit?  Look back on your life.  What have you quit relationally?  That spouse maybe.  That child maybe.  Maybe that uncle, maybe that parent.

Children you have got to be committed to your parents.  Have you thanked your parents for what they have done for you?  Even children who are in their twenties and thirties and forties and fifties, have you thanked your parents?  Have you called them up and said, “Mom, thank you for carrying me around in your womb for nine months.”  “Mom, Dad, thank you for providing for me an education, or clothes”  Have you ever thanked them for that?  Are you committed to your parents or do you always joke about them and tease them and talk behind their back.  “Oh, can you believe Dad.  Can you believe Mom.”

And, hey, baby boomers and busters are infamous for bashing their parents.  “I am the way I am because mom put my diapers on too tight, that is just the way I am.  That is the reason I am the way I am, it’s my parents.”  Some here have really been damaged by your parents, I realize that, in other ways that we will talk about later.  I realize that.  But, God put your parents in His authority, in His chain of command over you to mold you into a great person for Him.  And they are not perfect.  My parents were not perfect, neither were yours.  Thank your parents.  Relationally commit to them.

You have got to commit spiritually, relationally and also vocationally.  Are you committed to your job?  We are always looking for a better lie, another option.  We are not committed to our vocations anymore.  I’ll just work long enough to get a pay check then I can snowboard on the weekend, or surf or windsurf or whatever. I read about our generation, about character qualities that we have and this commitment thing keeps coming up over and over and over again.   Are you committed, though, to your job?  I am not saying to never move somewhere else, or never go to another company, or this or that.  But I am saying, when you are working at a particular place, you act like you are going to stay there for the rest of your life.  “I’m committed to this.  I’m going to be loyal.  I’m going to be here through think and thin.”  Usually we quit prematurely right when the breakthrough happens.  Usually we see the wall and we think that the wall is too imposing, too big.  And then we miss what God wants us to do in our live.

I faced a quitting point in the first year of this church.  I have never told anyone this but Lisa.  I came here and it was overwhelming to me.  And it was tough.  I spent many sleepless nights praying and saying “Lisa, did we miss God’s call here?  Did I miss it?”  I know it was the evil one saying “Ed, give up your commitment.  Ed, throw in the towel.  Ed, go somewhere easier.”  Because I was working too hard, doing a lot of things that I shouldn’t have been doing as far as the church was concerned.  I was making the church too much a part of my life.  The church is great but that is not my top priority.  First is my relationship with the Lord and second, my family.  And I could have said, “I quit, I have had enough of this church in Las Colinas.”  But Lisa said, “Ed, you made a commitment before God.”  And I did.  I made a commitment before God to stay here for the rest of my life because I believe great churches are built by consistency in leadership.  And that was a major test that I went through in the first year I was here.  And I blasted through the wall not because I am some great endurance-driven guy.  God gave me the strength and I see what God has done in my life through this commitment.  But it is tough.  It is really tough to blast through a breaking point.

Vocational commitment.

So we have got to pledge ourselves to the big three.  Now we are cruising.  The second step.  This will be short.  Write out a commitment card.  Write out a commitment card.  This afternoon write out a commitment card to Jesus Christ, that is your spiritual commitment.  Write out a commitment card to your church, this church or maybe another church.  Write it out.  I am committed through thick and through thin.  I am going to be here.  I am going to be a part of worship, a part of the small group program.  My time, my talents, my treasures.  Write a commitment card out to your spouse or to your parents or to your children or maybe a friend.  Commitment.  And declare that commitment at least four times a year in creative ways, to your employer, your spouse and even the church.

The third step.  Connect with committed people.  I see this over and over and over again.  I just got back from South Padre Island where we held our Youth Retreat, suffering for the Lord down there.  Every night Stan Durham and I would put on services for the young people.  And sometimes the services would last an hour, other times they would last three hours, believe it or not.  We had a great time of interaction with our Junior High and High School ministry, something that I am committed to because that is our future.  I am really involved in that area of our church.  When I talk to these young people, and I have done this since I have been eighteen years of age, I am thirty-four now, when I talk to these young people the same thing always comes up if we are dealing with issues and problems.  Next to their personal relationship with Christ it is always an issue that they are hanging out with the wrong people.  Always.  They are hanging out with people who drag them down.  And the same thing is true with you and with me.  I don’t care how mature you are spiritually, if your best friends and those people, single adults, that you date, if they are not Christ-followers, they are going to drag you down.  “But I am helping them.”  They will drag you down.  “But they are my best friends.”  They will drag you down.

I am not saying , nor is the Bible ever saying we should not befriend those who are facing a Christless eternity.  I have hundreds of friends who don’t know Christ personally.  But my best friends are Christians.  My best friends are people who have a long track record of commitment because I have learned that if you have a long track record of commitment, I want to connect with you because that helps the commitment quotient in my life.  It will help yours too.  Do you have friends who are committed or friends who kind of flounder around, friends who are spineless, friends when peer pressure begins to circle like a group of tiger sharks, they back out?  Some of you need to go home today and back off some friendships and relationships.  You may need to end some dating relationships.  And say, “God, I am going to be committed to connecting with people who have the same commitment that You have and that I have.”  Don’t mess up in this realm.

Women, those of you who are single.  I see you mess up in this area so much.  Twenties, thirties, the biological clock starts ticking.  I am not married.  And then anyone who comes along and wears pants……”Here comes the bride…here comes the bride”.  And then about a year later you go, “This guy is not committed to anything.  What was I thinking about?”  Be patient.  Be patient.  Be patient.

How about your friends.  Are they really committed people?  Deuteronomy 6, you’re talking about an excellent text.  The children of Israel were waiting to close the most valuable real estate deal in the history of the world.  They were to claim the Promised Land.  And God told them right before they were stepping into the Promised Land, “Wait a minute, you are going to face some ungodly people.  They are going to surround you.  You can be friends with them but you cannot get involved in what they are involved in.  Watch out.  Be careful.”  “All right, God, we are committed to You, we love You.”  And the Israelites skipped their way into the Promised Land.  What happens?  They associate themselves ever so slowly, you know Satan kind of inches us closer and closer, and then one day they had no commitment.  Is that you?  Listen to these verses about commitment.  Psalm 37:5.  “Commit your way to the Lord.  Trust also in Him and He will do it.”  You see, Niki didn’t come up with “do it” first, the Bible did.  In Hebrews 10:25.  Jesus says, “Do not forsake our own assembling together.”  Galatians 1:4.  Jesus said, “I gave myself for your sins.”  In Luke 14 Jesus used an excellent illustration about tasteless salt.  He said the problem with some of you, you are like tasteless salt, you have lost your punch.  You are not committed to anything.

You know I love health food but one of my weaknesses is those ice cold Cokes, man, I love Coke.  And now and then, and I hate this when it happens, I will walk in and open our refrigerator and there is a Coke.  And I can tell that maybe LeeBeth has had a little bit of it, and I am thinking, oh boy, I can have a glass full of Coke.  So I pour it in this tall glass with ice and I cannot wait to drink it.  The Coke sometimes is flat.  Isn’t that gross?  I spit it in the sink.  I hate flat Cokes.  I like Cokes with a lot of bite, a lot of spizerinkdom.  Some of you are like flat Coke.  “Yeah, I’m here, but I’m not committed.  I am just going to be like a flat Coke.  I look OK on the outside, but I am just kind of flaaaaat.”

Please get serious and apply these principles.  I need to work on this.  We all do.  Please do it.  It will serve you well.  We are almost out of time here but you know I kind of left you hanging about the marathon.  You are wondering, did he finish?  Before the race, I talked to a single friend of mine and he name was Richard Darden.  Richard knew a lot about running in marathons.  I asked Richard if he would mind running the last seven miles with me in the marathon so that when I hit the wall he would be there to coach me through.  He said, “Ed, no problem.”  He said, I will have a white sweat suit on, look for me and I will be there.”  So when I hit about the nineteenth mile I was blistering at about an eleven minute pace, and I see Richard.  He comes up to me and says, “Ed, you are cramping.”  And I said, “I know it.”  He said do this and focus here and start to use your legs like this and your arms.  He challenged me and he encouraged me and after about ten minutes with Richard something came over me and I was able to sprint the last seven miles of the race, six minute miles.  I had never run six minute miles before in my life.  Why did I do it?  Because I had a great coach.

You are running this race called life.  You are a Christ-follower.  Jesus is omnipresent, He is right there by you.  And a lot of you don’t even realize He is by you, and a lot of you don’t even think about asking His advice.  He wants to coach you when you cramp up, He wants to teach you when you face the wall, He wants to help empower you to blast through the wall, to run the race.  And every time you blast through the wall, a victory is gained in heaven and in your life.  There is a cosmic celebration going on, the saints are giving you a standing ovation because they are cheering for you to break down the walls.  You can’t do it, though, without Jesus and without the C word.

FAMOUS LOST WORDS SERMON SERIES

EXCELLENCE

ED YOUNG

SUNDAY, JUNE 25, 1995

An American Indian tells the story about a brave who found an eagle’s egg one day.  He took the egg and put it in the nest of a bunch of prairie chickens.  The  eagle grew up thinking it was a prairie chicken, and it did what most prairie chicken’s do.  It walked around on the dirt, pecking seeds and insects.  This eagle grew to be very old.  Then one morning the eagle looked up in the sky and saw the most majestic bird he had ever viewed in his entire life.  And he took his giant wing and punched his prairie chicken friend and said, “What in the world is that in the sky?”  And his prairie chicken friend responded by saying, “That’s an eagle up there, the most majestic of all fowl.  Don’t worry though, you can never be like him, you’re just a prairie chicken.”  So the eagle, who thought he was a prairie chicken, lived about two more years, then he died.  What a tragedy.  Built to soar, built to move out, built to be the greatest bird in all of creation, but conditioned to live life as a prairie chicken.  Does that sound kind of familiar?

Maybe you are saying to yourself, “Ed, I am in that situation.  I can identify with the eagle.  I have talents, I have abilities to move beyond my self-imposed limitations but for some reason or another I have not chosen the path of excellence.  I am doing enough just to get by.  I am stagnated in the status quo.  I am a normal, average person but I want to soar with the eagles.  I am tired of being a prairie chicken.”  No matter what you do, whether you teach, preach, sell, keep a home, work as a student, you, if you are totally honest and transparent with yourself, want to live a life of quality and excellence.  But again there is some reason that you don’t.  It is much easier to chill out than to really be the kind of person that you know you should be.  It is much easier to have those long, unproductive lunches and attend seminar after seminar on how to do it, rather than sitting behind your desk and doing it.

We are infatuated, though, with this whole subject called excellence.  The bookstore shelves are sagging with the weight of all of the volumes written about quality and excellence, in pursuit of this, and I’ve got to have that.  You never read any books about pursuing mediocrity or how to get less that the best or how to love being below average.  Those are not attractive titles.  We want to discover how to live a quality life.  So having said all of that I want to direct your attention today to the greatest book ever written on excellence.  And no, it was not written by Steven Cobey, Ken Blanchard nor Peter Drucker, it was written by God, Himself.  It is called the Bible.  Because from the book of Genesis, which is the first book in the Bible throughout the text until we conclude the Word of God in the book of Revelation, it is a book about excellence.  I am going to share with you some principles concerning excellence.

Recently, I traveled to the jungles of the Yucatan peninsula to do some fishing.  And I am talking about literal jungles where jaguars and pumas and army ants and snakes and a lot of wild things surrounded my friends and I.  I began talking to some Mayan folks who had lived there their entire lives and they shared with me an experience that really took me aback.  They said that one day they realized that about 400 yards into the jungle there was a beautiful lake.  The jungle was so thick, the mangrove trees were so dense, they knew it would take some energy and effort and endurance to hack their way through the bush to get to this beautiful lake.  And they described to me how it took day after day, month after month, to finally get to the lake.  They talked about negotiating their way around snakes and mosquitos and poisonous plants that would eat their skin alive.  They indicated, however, that once they got to the beautiful lake, it proved really worth it.  The lake was teeming with wildlife and was gorgeous.  The fishing was excellent.  They described to me in detail, though, how tough it had been to cut that path through the jungle.

Today we are going to use the sword of the spirit, because the Bible is called the sword of the spirit, to cut a path through mediocrity.  And this path is going to take some work.  This path is difficult.  There are many times in my life, I am sure this is true for your life also, where I want to kind of throw down the sword, put my machete aside and say, hey, it’s too tough, it’s too difficult.  But God says, “Ed, go for it.”  God says, “Person, go for it.”  He wants the best for you and the best for me.

Let’s look at three principles of excellence.  The first principle.  Excellence is based on God.  We have to start here.  That is the foundational principle of excellence.  Excellence is based on God.  And after I share each principle with you, I am going to give you a way on how you can engage in excellence.  But let me start with this general principle, excellence is based on God.  We serve an excellent God.  We sing songs which state that God is excellent, God is beautiful, God is perfect, God is Holy.  Nowhere in the Bible do we have an average God, a decent God, a God who does enough just to get by.  Exactly the opposite is true.  We serve a God who does the best for us.  When He saw the barrier caused by sin, He sent Jesus Christ, the sinless savior, to live a perfect life and to go to Calvary and to rise again for your moral foul-ups and for my moral foul-ups.  He didn’t give us kind of a half-way savior, He gave us someone who was perfect, someone who lived a life of excellence.  Nowhere in the Bible do we see Christians characterized as just normal, every day, run of the mill people.  In the Bible Christians were energetic, they were visionary, they had endurance, they had courage, they were committed to excellence.

You didn’t have a bunch of prairie chickens pecking their way through the New Testament.  You had eagles.  One of my favorite verses of scripture on excellence is found in the book of Colossians.  Colossians 3:23-24.  Listen very carefully to these words.  “Whatever you do, work at it with all of your heart, as working for the Lord.”  Let me stop right here.  Whatever you do, work at it with all of your heart like you are working for the Lord.  A lot of you are in difficult situations at work and to be candid you would say, “Ed, the person I work for is a jerk, I just cannot stand this person, this person is a tyrant, this person is unfair, etc., etc.”  This, I believe, will help you live a life of excellence because you are tempted to do just enough to collect that paycheck instead of really busting it for the Lord.  Your ultimate boss, the Bible says, is Jesus Christ.  And once you realize that, the light should turn on and then the workplace can become an avenue of worship.  Whenever we express love to God, whenever we glorify God, we are showing God that we are worshipping Him.  The way we work, our attitude, our language, our commitment to quality all speaks volumes to those people outside the family of God and that person who seems so difficult to work with.  Look past that person to Jesus Christ, you are reporting to Him.  So the efforts and the quality should not be for this person, it should be for the Lord.  It should also be to set an example for those folks around you.

Think about your work ethic, for example.  When people see you and they see your average work ethic, they are seeing an average God.  And God is not an average God.  When people look at some of you and you kind of work below average and kind of do just enough to collect that paycheck, they think Jesus is kind of just enough to help in a certain situation but He can’t take care of all of one’s needs.  Jesus is not concerned about being a quality God Who follows me and loves me and pursues me daily.

This was hammered into my mind this past week.  Monday at lunch I went to a Yogurt shop in the neighborhood.  I walk in and the man working there was moving in slow motion.  We are talking about ABC Wide World of Sports slow motion.  “How’s it going, man?”  I said, “It’s going well.  I would like some yogurt, banana with non-fat granola.”  “Was that non-fat granola or Reeses peanut butter fingers on there?”  “Granola, please.”   “That will be $3.19.”  So I begin to pay, give him $4.00 but I couldn’t leave it here.  I was talking about excellence, I was thinking about it so I said, “Friend, I want to ask you a question if you don’t mind.”  “Yeah, whatever.”  I said, “How do you like your job here?”  He said, “It’s all right.  I’ve been here for about a year and this is easy compared to my last job.”  I said, “Easy?”  And he said, “Oh, yes, man, this is easy and I kind of like it.”  And I thought wow, doesn’t that speak some major, major words to areas in my life and I think areas in you life.  And I had to share that account with you once it happened to me.

Surely you have come across people like that and surely you have been tempted and you have done some things like that guy did.  You kind of take the easy way out.  I want you today to say before God, I am going to commit my life to excellence.  I’m going to obey Colossians 3:23-24.  Let me continue reading.  “Whatever you do, work at it with all of your heart as working for the Lord, not for men since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward.  It is the Lord Christ whom you are serving.”  Here is one quick way how to engage in excellence under this general point, excellence is based on God.  Don’t just sit there, do something.   Don’t just sit there, the Bible says, do something.  If you are a Christ follower, you should be a doer.  You have got to discover what your natural bents are, your natural talents.  And more often than not, God will call you to do something that goes along the lines of where you giftedness is and once you find out where you giftedness is, don’t just sit there, go for it, try something.

A couple of years ago, I am ashamed to say, I received a gift and this gift was a CD player.  And this CD player is in my office across the street.  And with this CD player came a remote control.  I have only used this CD player about ten times in two years, that’s terrible, isn’t it?  Because I can’t study with the music on and I just study and kind of forget about it.  Well, when I got the CD player, I turned it on and the remote control worked.  I am terrible about mechanical things.  When, however, I put the batteries in the remote and it worked, I was pleased with myself and once I saw it worked, I put the remote into a drawer of my desk and closed it.  About eight months later I was kind of in a musical mood so I put some music on, I don’t know whether it was Phil Collins or Michael W. Smith, who knows, but I put it on and it wouldn’t work.  And I’m saying, can you believe this thing is broken already.  Well I had enough smarts to take the remote control apart and take a wild guess what I found.  The batteries, even though they had been stored in a very safe and warm and comfortable place were corroded.  Corrosion is gross and they wouldn’t work.  The batteries were made to energize, to do something.  We are batteries.  We are not made to sit in a comfortable place and to relax, we are made to do things, to cause energy to occur empowered by the Holy Spirit of God.  Don’t just sit there, do something.  What is it that you need to do that you are not doing?  What is it you need to try?  What is it you that you need to step out in faith and risk doing?

Our church, because we are committed to an excellent God, is committed to quality and excellence right here.  Not opulence or not perfectionism but excellence.  And for some reason, I have talked to people over the years and they see something of quality that the church does or maybe another Christian organization, whether it be Promise Keepers or Christ for the Nations or World Vision and they say, “You know what, that’s a really nice program, that speaker is really quality, she really does a great job in this realm, but you know the whole organization just doesn’t look Christian.”  And I want to say to myself, now what does that mean, doesn’t look Christian.  A lot of people have this mentality that all Christian organizations should be nickel and dime operations, dingy and dark worship centers with tone deaf choir members and staff and pastors who have no talent and who are just lazy and sit around.  That the church should have a bunch of shag carpet, terrible sound systems, and la, la, la, la.  The Bible calls us to excellence.  We should set the standards for excellence.  We serve an excellent God, thus we should show people how excellent God is.  That’s why we are serious about it here and we feel that anything that communicates the nature and the character should be done with excellence.  We spend large blocks of time making a lot of this happen.

I want to do something totally different right now in my sermon.  I want to show you something.  And before this tape rolls, listen to me.  I want to show you what our membership does just to make this weekend stuff happen.  We have four weekend services, one Saturday night at 6:00 pm, three on Sunday, 9:00, 10:05 and my favorite one the 11:10 am service which is my last service.  Our members, I am not talking about paid staff, you would not believe what these folks do behind the scenes.  What I am going to show you lasts about a minute and this indicates just some of the weekend activity.  Sit back, relax and let’s roll the tape.

In fact, let me show you something additional right quick.  Now this is our bulletin here and I want you if you want to get involved in something excellent with some of our members and all of what they are committed to, I want to show you how you can get involved.  Each of you has gifts that are unique, that are unbelievable.  On the back of this card that says How Do You Join This Church, under all the information we ask you to fill out, if you would like information from the church on any of these topics, How To Become a Christian, Starting Point Class, Nursery, Drama, whatever, there is an appropriate space for you to check.  The staff reads these cards and you will be contacted regarding your interest.  For example, you may check Nursery and Preschool.  You may think I am a single parent, or maybe I have four children like the Youngs do and all that stuff, I want some information on the Nursery and Preschool.  When we talk to you about the Nursery and Preschool, not only will we tell you about it, but we will also ask if you wouldn’t be willing to help in that area since that area is exploding on our church.  Three times a weekend we have children’s church and let me tell you something.  Children’s church is the church.  They have such a good time and we have, I think, the greatest children’s pastor in the country, Mike Johnson, doing that.  We will get you involved in certain areas, maybe athletics, maybe whatever.  So write down some of your gifts and we want to get you plugged in and involved because you have excellent gifts, we serve an excellent God and we want to communicate Him in an excellent way.

So we got it.  Excellence is based on God.  Don’t just sit there, do something.

The second principle is this.  Not only is excellence based on God, excellence is based on goals.  Excellence is based on goals, the second principle of excellence in the Bible.  Goals.  Philippians 3:13.  The Apostle Paul says this:  “This one thing I do.”  Paul said that, he didn’t say these thirty things I dabble in, Paul said this, say it with me, this one thing I do.  And in verse 14 he said, “I press on toward the goal.”  I press on toward the goal.  Excellence is based on goals.  Do you set goals?  That is not a humanistic, worldly thing to do.  The Bible is a goal oriented book.  Do you have goals, in your marriage, in your dating relationships, in the market place?  And I said goals, plural.  And I want to share with you this way to engage in excellence.  The first one was, don’t just sit there, do something.  This is the second way to engage in excellence under principle number two, excellence is based on goals.  Are you ready for it?  Hold on to your theater seats.  Set mountain range objectives.  Set mountain range objectives.  When you think about goals, when you think about objectives, when you think about getting the job done, don’t just set one goal.  For example, spiritually you might say, I want to read through the Bible in a year.  And you go out a buy a book on how to read through the Bible in a year and you do it and once you get to that point, ha, I’m through, I can relax, I can stagnate, I can just veg out.  You need to have another goal.  Or you say, it is my calling in life to find the man that I can marry.  And you work and you court and you date and finally, there he is.  And you say, ha, I have achieved the goal, I have climbed the mountain, I have got him, now I can just relax.  Or maybe, as far as your career, you are thinking, if I could only close that deal, or make that amount of money or do this or do that, then I can just relax for the rest of my life.

Goals are important but you have got to set multiple goals.  Don’t just look at one goal.  Once you climb one mountain, once you reach one goal, have the next goal in mind.  So once you read through the Bible in a year, what is the next spiritual goal?  Once you get married, what is your goal relationally?  Once you achieve that success financially or in the business world, what is your next goal?  What are you going to do next?

This happens to me everyday.  My wife and I have been running for the last two months every day.  And my wife is a natural runner.  I consider myself mildly athletic, but Lisa can go.  She is about 5’9″, she has really long legs and she pushes the twins in a double wide jogging stroller.  I push EJ, our three year old.  So here we go like a convoy.  When we jog every morning about 7 am, we run anywhere from 3 1/2 to 4 miles together.  It is a good time for us to talk, see how we are doing.  We know there are two giant hills we have to climb and we have to descend.  This past week one of the twins fell out of the stroller.  Please note, she is just fine.  We just sort of brushed her off.  Ha ha, the rigors of goal setting.  However when we hit that first hill, a tough hill, we don’t normally say, well OK let’s stop running.  We made it to the first hill, let’s just stop.  No, no, no.  We are thinking about the next hill.  And once we cross over the next hill, and finish we are considering already what time we will run the next day.  And we need to take this principle and let it bleed over into our goal setting.  Remember once you achieve your goal, once you are climbing the mountain, once you are pushing the jogging stroller up the hill, think about the next one.  If you don’t you can burn out, you can fall into depression, you can kind of flounder around doing nothing with your life.  If you don’t believe it, read the story of a man named Elijah in the Bible.  Elijah, you’re talking about a great victory, God delivered him on Mt. Carmel against the prophets of Baal.  He won the victory, this solitary man.  This prophet won.  And you would think after this victory, Elijah would be getting high fives and celebrating.  He didn’t though, read about him in the Old Testament.  Elijah found himself nestled in kind of a fetal position beneath a juniper tree trying to cradle his achey, breaky prophetic heart.  What was his basic problem?  He didn’t have something else in store.  And later on, of course, God restored him, “Elijah, wake up, how about another goal, come on now.”  So don’t relax, don’t chill, set those mountain range objectives.  You know the difference between excellence and mediocrity is about ten minutes?  Ten minutes more working through that relational conflict, ten minutes more work with that client, ten minutes more lifting weights.  Ten minutes more reading your Bible, ten minutes more talking to God in prayer.  Ten minutes more.  Are you willing to do it?  God wants you to do it.  God want me to do it.  I am not talking about being a perfectionist.  I am talking about striving for excellence.

And this next principle will really solve all the problems for those of us who struggle with perfectionism.  Here is the third principle.  Remember excellence is based on God and excellence is based on goals.  And finally, and this will seem paradoxical, excellence is based on failure.  That doesn’t really make sense, does it?  Excellence is based on failure.  It is.  The biggest fear that a lot of us have from living a life of excellence is the fear of making a mistake.

I think about three years ago I did a sermon series entitled the faces of fear.  I talked about the three greatest fears that man deals with, the fear of dying, the fear of living alone and the fear of failure.  The fear of failure, frankly, has kept me from doing a lot of things concerning excellence.  I’ll think that I could step out there and do that, but I might mess up and I am a Pastor of a church and they will see me just really fumble the ball on the one inch line.  So I will just play it safe.  Haven’t you done that before?  We all have.  I don’t want to make a mistake.  I don’t want to look dumb, or stupid or weird.

The Bible is packed with story, after story, after story about men and women, God-following people who messed up.  And here is the good news, perfectionists, God used the people for excellence despite their failures and their mistakes and their sin.  And every time I study this, every time I think about this, every time I meditate on this it inspires me to try new and different things.  I mean I can identify with a guy like Samson.  I can identify with a guy like Jonah.  Think about Samson.  Samson was a he-man with a she weakness.  He was a gifted man.  Samson, though, went against the advice of his parents, young people.  His parents told Samson that the Bible says not to associate with those ungodly Philistine women.  You need to marry a God loving wife, a Hebrew.  But Samson, believing that he was the strongest man in the world, thought that he could do what he wanted to do.  Although he was a leader, he began to let down his guard and he got involved with a prostitute, then Delilah.  He was captured by the Philistines and he, though he had so much potential, had his eyes gouged out and was put in prison.  One would think it was over for Samson.  Forget it, lights out, no more.  But despite his major league mess up, God used this man to lead in one of the greatest victories experienced by the nation of Israel in its history.  Samson.

We can identify with someone like Jonah.  Jonah was a man called by God to preach to Ninevah.  God was getting ready to judge Ninevah but because people mattered to Him, He was going to use Jonah to preach to the Ninevites.  Jonah said, “God, no way.  I’m not going to Ninevah, you can forget about that God.”  And Jonah began to run.  He is the quintessential running man.  He jumps aboard a boat and a great white whale eats him.  He prays inside the belly of the great white whale, and the whale spits him up and he says, “God, I have changed my ways now, I’m going back to Ninevah and I am going to hold this giant crusade.”  And he holds this giant crusade and, check this out, the entire city, the entire city turns to God.  I am not talking about twenty people or one hundred people or a thousand people, an entire city.  And Jonah, this prophet, after that great spiritual anointing, he walks outside of the city, turns around and says, “God, OK, take one cosmic sweep of Your hand and wipe them off the map.  Even though they are all saved now, God, I don’t like them being saved.  I’m really getting depressed and angry and upset.”  Even though Jonah had these problems, he was still listed in Hebrews 11 in the Hall of Faith, and Jonah’s prayer of deliverance was quoted by Jesus Christ himself.

You can look at Sarah, you can look at Hannah.  Go on down the list.  Despite these major errors, God uses the people for excellence.  Don’t let a mistake hold you back.  I love what Charles Kettering said.  “You never stub your toe while standing still.”  You never do.  And you are going to stub your toe, you are going to mess up when you do great things and you commit your life to excellence.  And here is how to engage in excellence, the third engagement in excellence principle under the third general principle, if you are taking notes.  Here it is.  Bring a huge motherload supply of bandaids if you commit your life to excellence, because you are going to foul up and mess up and stumble and fumble and foul out and everything when you try things.  God wants you to try.  He knows you are going to mess up and He will use these mistakes for His glory.

I look back on our church and I have seen how many mistakes we have made, for instance, when we start a different program.  A couple of years ago we tried to do four services on Sunday morning alone.  Some of those things flat out didn’t work.  And we look at it as an education not a bunch of things full of mistakes.  It is kind of the Dr. Seuss principle.  You know Dr. Seuss don’t you, GREEN HAM AND EGGS, that guy.  We have all read his books.  Dr. Seuss, after he wrote his first children’s book, took the book to twenty-three publishers.  They all rejected it.  The twenty-fourth received it and it only sold about six million copies.  Thomas Edison’s assistants walked into his office one day and they said, “We have tried 700 different experiments and they don’t work.  They are a failure.  It’s horrible.”  And Edison said, “Hey, these aren’t mistakes.  Just think of it this way.  We know more about the subject than anyone.  We are 700 steps closer now to solving the problem and finding the cure.”  God hits those straight licks with crooked sticks.  Are you trying things?  Do you have those bandaids ready?  It is going to happen but God will use those things for great glory.

To shut this message down, I want to tell you about someone you have probably heard of.  And this person, His name is Jesus.  Jesus was committed to excellence.  Jesus had the courage to confront the religious leaders of His day.  He had the wherewithal to heal on the Sabbath.  He called Himself the Son of God.  He had the audacity to hang out with second class citizens like tax collectors and prostitutes and Samaritans.  And then, He loved His enemies who were persecuting Him and finally He said this to His followers.  “You will be able to do greater things than I have done.”  That always kind of puzzled me.  Jesus said that we would be able to do greater things than He had done.  How can we do that?  In a nut shell, we have got to commit to the kind of excellence that He committed His life to.  So.  The choice is yours.  Are you going to be a prairie chicken or an eagle who soars to the heights of doing great things for God?