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Your God Is Too Small: Ben Young with Special Guest Dr. William Dembski: Transcript

YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL

Q&A with Dr. William Dembski

July 27, 2008

Ben Young

In the final message of this series, Ben Young interviews Dr. William Dembski. Dr. Dembski is a mathematician and philosopher and is a senior fellow with Seattle’s Discovery Institute. Dr. Dembski has published articles in mathematics, philosophy, and theology journals and is the author/editor of more than a dozen books. In The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998), he examines the design argument in a post-Darwinian context and analyzes the connections linking chance, probability, and intelligent causation. Through a question and answer session, Dr. Dembski will discuss divine intelligence, creationism, the existence of God, how to reconcile science and the Bible, and the problem with evil and suffering.

YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL

Q&A with Dr. William Dembski

July 27, 2008

Ben Young

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about questions, doubt, certainty and uncertainty. It’s interesting when you look back into the Scripture and the Jewish tradition; both are steeped in asking questions, questions, and more questions…

When Jesus came onto the scene in the 1^st century, people had a lot of questions for Him. As a matter of fact, if you read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, you’ll find that Jesus was asked 183 questions. In return, He responded with 304 questions of His own!

So questioning is a part of the Christian and Jewish traditions. That is what we’re here to do today. We are here to have a time of asking questions; a time of question and answer, and hopefully giving some good direction. To do that this morning, I’ve asked a friend of mine to come and help me out, Dr. Bill Dembski. He is a research professor of philosophy at Southwestern in Fort Worth. He is also a senior fellow with The Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington. He has taught at Northwestern University, Notre Dame, The University of Dallas, Baylor and Southern. He is a graduate of The University of Illinois with a BA in psychology, and a Master’s in statistics, along with a Ph.D. in philosophy. He holds a Doctorate in mathematics from The University of Chicago, a Master of Divinity from Princeton, and has done post-doctoral work in mathematics at MIT, physics at The University of Chicago, and computer science at Princeton. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, BBC, NPR, PBS, C-Span, CNN, Fox News, ABC Nightline, and The Daily Show with John Stewart. He has written over ten books, and we can find many of them in our bookstore or on Amazon. His new book is called Understanding Intelligent Design. I call it Intelligent Design for Dummies. Some of those other books I’m sure you are familiar with are Intelligent Design, The Bridge Between Science and Theology, and No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence.

Welcome Dr. Bill Dembski!

Ben: What’s up? There will be no free lunch! Sorry to embarrass you with that Bill, that bio bit! It is
what it is!

Bill Dembski: It’s…got to live with it!

Ben: But it was good though! It didn’t make sense, because we’ve known each other for quite a while now, and I never figured out—how can you get all these degrees, and yet still be so young? Then at the earlier service, you said that you started at The University of Chicago at age 16. So that makes sense!

Bill Dembski: Well, that didn’t buy me too much. I think not getting married until I was 36 helped!

Ben: Not getting married until you were 36?

Bill Dembski: Ha, ha, ha! I don’t recommend that generally!

Ben: But some people need that to focus! What I want to do here is have a time of open questions and answers. We’re not going to go to that right this moment, because I want to ask Bill my own questions to start things off. If you have a question for Bill, we will have microphones you can run to, or you can text-message your questions.

I realize, given the nature of what we talked about in the past couple of weeks—maybe you’re here, and you consider yourself a hard-core skeptic; perhaps you would not want to stand up and ask a question. You can, I don’t care if you stand up and do it! Feel free to do that; but if you feel more comfortable sending a text-message question, you can do it that way.

Before we go into our Q & A, Bill, tell us a little bit about your own story and your own journey to the Christian faith. How did that happen?

Bill Dembski: I was raised in a very nominal, Catholic family. We went to church just a few times a year. I did go to Catholic schools in 7^th and 8^th grade, and also in high school. There I had to go to Catholic church services more often, but it was very nominal. I did not believe that Jesus was God, so I wasn’t a Christian. I remember a Catholic priest once really laying it on us in a Sunday sermon saying, “You must believe that Jesus is God to be a Christian.” I thought to myself, “I don’t believe this.” A year later, I went off to college. They asked for religious preference, and I put down Hindu! It was crazy, but this was before New Age was popular. That is basically where I was in my thinking. It was about two years later that my mother became a Christian and started praying for me, giving me lots of Christian literature.

I was pretty resistant to it, but I think what was really the turning point for me was God dealing with me and showing me just what it meant for Jesus to become human so that God could really relate to us and understand what we were going through. I was going through a hard time in my life, and I just didn’t see how God and I could connect. I always believed that there was a God, but I just didn’t see how to make that connection in Jesus, in the Incarnation, God taking on human form and suffering and what we were going through. That was really the turning point.

So it wasn’t intelligent design. My dad was a biologist. At the time I became a Christian, I believed in evolution; but it was after that I started investigating. But it was really the personal connection with God that made the difference.

Ben: All right, I want to ask a question to kind of get this out of the way, because there is a lot of confusion on this. What is the difference between intelligent design and creationism? Sometimes in the mainstream media, they want to equivocate creationism with intelligent design.

Bill Dembski: Yeah, in fact, they’ll even put them together—intelligent design creationism. That’s a buzz phrase out there. But they are different. Creationism certainly commits you to a doctrine of creation. You believe that God is the source of being of the world. Then when you add the “ism” on it, usually it means you take a particular interpretation of Genesis. Usually, when you hear creationism, it is young earth creationism. So God creates the world in six, literal twenty-four hour days, and the earth is only about 6,000 years old. That’s what is usually meant by creationism.

Now intelligent design, if I had to give you a definition, would be the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence. So what you’re doing is looking for signs of intelligence in the world. There are lots of things in the world that when we look at them, we don’t think that there is any intelligence necessarily behind them. You are driving through some mountains, and you see rock formations, for all you know, wind and erosion could do that. But if you’re driving through southwest South Dakota and you see a rock formation that looks like Teddy Roosevelt, Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, you’re not going to say, “Oh, isn’t it amazing what wind and erosion can do?” You know that there is intelligence behind that.

Likewise, there are lots of special sciences where we make that distinction between what are the effects of material causes, and what are the effects of intelligence. Archaeology says, “Is that a random chunk of rock, or is that an arrowhead?”

The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence says, “Is that radio signal coming from outer space the result of random radio noise, or is there intelligence behind it?”

Now it gets dicey when we apply that same question to biology, and that is where I apply it, because you ask, “Well who or what could that intelligence be if we’re finding patterns in biology that point us to intelligence?” Unlike these other cases where the evolutionist could say, “Well, that was just an evolved intelligence.” In biology, if there is a designer behind things, that would be an un-evolved intelligence. That shakes up the materialist band wagon. That’s why they come after us!

Ben: Viciously, I might add!

Bill Dembski: Well, yes, but that just makes the victories that much more fun when it happens.

Ben: That’s right! All right! Let’s open it up for Q&A. We have some microphones and some spotters here who will come to you. We also have text messages already coming up on our screen here. Let’s kind of limit our questions to theology and apologetics—questions related to the existence of God and the truthfulness of Scripture; how do you reconcile science and the Bible; and the problem with evil and suffering. As opposed to, “Should I be going out with Bill, or Christy?” That’s a worthy Q&A, which I am more adept at handling than Bill, I hope. We’ll do that another time. But right now, we’re going to try to limit our questions to theology, apologetics, science, if you would.

Ben: Let’s start off with a text message. Question: Does the Divine proportion mean anything?

Bill Dembski: Well, yeah! I’m assuming that the question has to do with this limit of basically Fibonacci numbers where you take, and you get. It seems to appear in a lot of cases and a lot in nature as well. I think they made a lot out of it in The Da Vinci Code. So yes, it means something. Does it indicate some design behind the world? Perhaps. That’s not really where I take these arguments; but it’s interesting that you have all these nifty things, these things we come up with mathematically as it were in our studies—just playing with numbers. Then we find that they are actually reflected in nature.

Audience Question: One of the main arguments I’ve heard against intelligent design, is that it can’t be science because it requires supernatural intervention.

The argument says that you can’t prove that with a scientific method. Therefore, intelligent design can’t be science, and it has to be banished to the realm of philosophy or religion. How do you counter that argument?

Bill Dembski: Yeah, that’s a common objection. I think you’ve got to distinguish effect to cause, and cause to affect reasoning. What we’re doing is looking at patterns in nature and then asking, “What’s going to be required to explain those patterns?” If you see the rock formation, Mount Rushmore, you know that you’re dealing with intelligence, even if you don’t know what the causal story is. We happen to know that Gutzon Borglum, an eccentric artist, spent the greater part of his life doing this. But even if you didn’t know that, you’d know there was intelligence behind it. Now the nature of that intelligence—really intelligent design doesn’t speculate about that.

It’s interesting, in the movie Expelled, Richard Dawkins, the arch-atheist in the English speaking world allows that we might be, or that life on earth might be, designed by space aliens. It can’t be God. That’s out of the question; but it could be space aliens. So intelligent design allows that, and I think it really requires prior philosophy to say that intelligent design can’t be science.

I think often the way it’s put in the press is that, “Oh, these things are too complicated; therefore, we have to invoke God.” So it’s kind of a God of the gaps. But really, what we’re finding is that material processes can only generate so much information; and so you need an information source. If you put it in information theoretic terms, I think it becomes straight-forward science. The nature of that source is something we can debate, but even that can be made sense of, I think, in scientific terms.

Audience Question: In an argument, how do you reconcile the time line in Genesis with dinosaurs, and prehistoric man?

Bill Dembski: There seems to be two approaches among creationists, now thought of broadly, people who hold to Christian doctrine of creation. One is an old earth approach, which basically takes the more recent view of science, which is that the earth and the universe is older. Usual estimates are about 4.5 billion years for the earth, and about 13 billion years for the universe. That’s where I come down largely for scientific reasons. The young earth approach would take a more literal six 24 hour days which translates to about a 6,000 year old earth. I think there are certainly theological arguments to be made on both sides. Probably the theological case is stronger on the young earth side.

I mean, if you look at the history of Biblical interpretation through the Reformation, from the church fathers, scholastics, through the Reformation, they were young earth creationists, by and large. The science is pushing me to an old earth view, but we are all committed to a doctrine of creation. How to make sense out of it? I think you have to do something like either day age, or go more figurative, or some sort of literary approach. One thing you do see in the Genesis account is that days one through three seem to correspond to days four through six. Day one, light is created. Day four, sun, moon and stars which reflect the light, and which would give the light are brought into being. Day two, you’ve got the separation of waters. Day five, you’ve got the beings that live in the waters above, which is the sky, the birds; and then below, the fish. Day three, we have the separation of land and waters. Day six, you’ve got the creatures that creep that are on the land. So there seem to be some literary things going on, even in Genesis 1. I think there is quite a diversity of opinion about how to interpret that.

Ben: Okay, let’s go to a text message question here. How do people before the birth of Jesus get into Heaven?

Bill Dembski: Well, I think Christian theology, and I think the Scriptures themselves seem to indicate that it is in virtue of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. In a sense, the effects of the cross are trans-historical. They go forward into the future. We’re saved on the basis of that historical event; but also it moves into the past. So the Old Testament saints are saved because they looked forward to Christ.

Ben: Wouldn’t you say too, their understanding was dimmer than ours; not that we have an exact certainty here 2,000 years after the event, but theirs was a little dimmer as far as understanding who the Messiah would be, and what He would be like.

Bill Dembski: Sure! In terms of their knowledge, they glimpsed these things as you said, dimly. But I think the requirement for faith and belief in God it seems was there, and walking uprightly…But certainly, the just shall live by faith. Abraham was justified by faith; so all of that seems to be reflected in the Old Testament, but finds fulfillment in the cross and Resurrection.

Ben: Right, and covenant theology would say that there are basically two covenants in Scripture. You have the covenant of works, which were Adam and Eve before the Fall. In other words, they had to maintain their righteousness given to them by their works.

Then there is a covenant of grace and that is every covenant subsequent to the Fall, which basically God is having to intervene on our behalf, culminating, of course, in the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Audience Question: In geology, they were basically telling us that the first creatures on the earth were trilobites, or some old, ancient form of bacteria; and then humans later evolved millions of years later. I just want to know, how is it that in creationism, or intelligent design that humans are about the same age as the trilobites?

Bill Dembski: Well, intelligent design isn’t committing itself. It really doesn’t speak to the age of the earth question. I would say probably most of the intelligent design proponents I know insofar as they’re Christians, and not all of them are Christians, are old earth creationists. There are some young earth creationists. But we’re looking for evidence of design, and in a sense, the design problem doesn’t go away if you’ve got 6 thousand, or 6 billion years. With the young earth creationists, if they can make the case for a young earth, in a sense evolution dissolves, because there just wouldn’t be enough time for it. But even if you give it a lot more time, the design problems are so intense for them that they’re going to have problems with it as well.

Now in terms of the history of life, if you look at it from a more standard geological perspective, it seems to be that you’ve got an earth that comes into being about 4.5 billion years ago. It is extremely hot, tempestuous, and can’t support life. After about 500 million years, life becomes a possibility. Within 100 million years, life as we know it—cellular life, with all its tremendous complexity—the whole DNA, protein, and that whole protein synthesis apparatus metabolism, all of it—everything that we see in life is there. I think most materialistic scientists who work in chemical evolution or origin of life will say it’s remarkable! How did it happen? There is no good theory of origin of life, materialistic origin of life theory. If they want to look for the place where God intervened, that would be the best place. Then for about 3.5 billion years, you’ve got just cellular life. There are single-celled organisms, and then you get multi-cellularity. You get animals with the Cambrian explosion. That happens real quickly in terms of geological time, about 5 to 10 million years. So you’ve got all these multi-celled organisms which are suddenly there.

So the evolutionist has a hard time. Our typical conception of evolution is sort of this gradual melding of one thing into another. The fossil record doesn’t seem to support that at all.

Ben: All right, let’s get a text-message question. Can you explain these statistical limitations that make evolution difficult to defend?

Bill Dembski: Well, that’s a good question, because I think that’s what really drove me to this whole debate. It’s what’s within the reach of chance; what’s outside the reach of chance. We all have intuitions about that. One way I try to illustrate what is going on in evolutionary theory, and why they think intelligent design is so crazy, is by imagining that you’ve have a million people. What’s the big park here? Memorial Park! If we fit a million people in there, and we were going to play a little statistical game—everybody has a coin, and they flip it. They’re standing, and if they flip heads, they remain standing. If they flip tails, they sit down. They keep doing this. What happens? The first time around, about five hundred thousand sit down. The next time around, about two hundred and fifty thousand. Next time, a hundred and twenty-five thousand. They keep doing it, and at the end, after about twenty flips on average; you’ll see one person standing. Now you don’t go to that person and say, “Wow! You’re really an amazing coin flipper! What’s your secret? How did you do it?” It’s just given the way things were set up; given the statistics of it; somebody was bound to get twenty heads in a row. It probably has never happened that any of you in this room have gotten twenty heads in a row, but it would very likely happen under those circumstances.

So likewise, the evolutionist says, “Given the properties of matter; given the evolutionary process; beings like ourselves are going to pop out, given enough time.” So they’re making in a sense a statistical argument. Well, if you’re going to make a statistical argument though, you’ve got to then start doing the actual analysis. It’s one thing to have toy problems, toy examples like this, but actually start looking at biological systems and seeing what is within the reach of chance and what is beyond the reach of chance. The burden on the intelligent design person is not to show that everything in biology is design. It’s just enough to show that some aspects of biology are designed.

Another challenge here is to take systems that are manageable. If you look at something like an eye, or some organ or something in your body; those are so complex though to get a handle on the design there is actually pretty hard, the statistical obstacles, as it were. So what we’re looking now at are much simpler systems; individual enzymes and proteins, and showing what would it take to evolve one protein into another. Evolution works by borrowing. Things can’t magically materialize. One thing has to transform into another, and then we can start asking, “How improbable is it?” What we’re finding are some vast improbabilities.

A colleague of mine at Biologic Institute outside of Seattle has done this analysis on a protein fold for one type of enzyme, and he’s getting improbabilities on the level of 10 to the minus 60, and 10 to the minus 70. So those are very, very small probabilities. The thing is, these improbability arguments are very important. We’ve all heard about the God of the gaps—we don’t know how something happened then we just invoke God! Well, you can do the same thing with chance. How do we discipline our use of chance? Well, small probabilities end up helping us to discipline chance. Now you’ve got to be careful there. Highly improbable things do happen. You get out a coin and flip it long enough and you’ll participate in the highly improbable event. But when that event also is some way specified, when it exhibits some salient pattern, and then we can’t refer it to chance. In biology, what makes something salient is biological function. So that’s a big argument. You’ve opened a whole can of worms, but that is very central to what we do in intelligent design.

Audience Question: How does the evolutionist deal with the science of DNA; that the single-cell amoeba became both the cockroach, and the blue whale? As you said a moment ago, how do they deal with the fossil records of a horse becoming something else, or the transition of it?

Bill Dembski: Well, it’s a good question. I think what drives this is not so much the scientific evidence as the philosophical presuppositions. I think prime philosophical presupposition is that God didn’t have anything to do with it, so let’s tell the best materialistic story. But the problem is, the best materialistic story doesn’t seem to match up with the evidence. There are these huge problems and gaps in the theory.

First is getting the ball rolling at all. How do you get life? That’s probably the biggest problem in science. How do you get brute matter? It is a revolution in this history of matter to get the first living form. What happened there?

There are scenarios out there—RNA worlds, various self-organizational scenarios, but they don’t begin really to grasp the complexities of what’s going on there. So then there are all these big jumps. How do you go from single cell, to multicellularity? How do you go from multicellularity to things like us with backbones? How do you get this great diversity of life forms? It remains unaccounted for!

There’s a standard story you have to tell if you’re a Darwinist. Everything has to be filtered through this natural selection, random-variation mechanism. So they can tell stories; they can tell imaginative stories. For instance, how did the eyeball evolve?

Well, it started as a light-sensitive spot. Then it cupped. That gave it selective advantage, because then you could see what direction the light was coming from. Then eventually it cupped enough so you got a pinhole camera, and this could get some sort of primitive image. Then finally you got a lens, and you got the full vertebrate eye, but you know that’s a just-so story. Eyes have to be built in embryological development. You have to have a whole bunch of new genes to build these things. Eyes don’t exist by themselves. They have to be integrated into a whole nervous system with a brain that can process the images. So all of that has to be there, and all of that is left by the way. But it seems that if you can find a club to beat belief in God, just about anything will do. This is the best they’ve got, but it’s not very good.

Ben: I saw a text message here on the screen. This is a good one here! Can you explain the Trinity?

Bill Dembski: Ha ha! I didn’t see that question on the screen.

Ben: You think I’m making that up! It was on there!

Bill Dembski: One of my strengths is that I know my limitations! I’m not going to go there!

Ben: Okay, I can accept that!

Bill Dembski: Micro and macro evolution is more manageable. Yeah, but uh…Actually, this is an interesting point: The difference between micro and macro evolution. There are evolutionary changes…

Ben: Oh, so you’re skipping the Trinity. You’re going to micro and macro evolution which you feel like is easier to answer than the Trinity? I can appreciate that!

Bill Dembski: Yes!

Ben: I appreciate your honesty! Thank you, Bill!

Bill Dembski: All right! So, may I answer the…

Ben: Yeah, you sure can! Yeah, I’ll answer the Trinity thing next week! Go ahead!

Bill Dembski: Well, there is an interesting distinction of micro and macro evolution because it is actually a distinction that was introduced by evolutionists around the 1930’s, or 1940’s when there was this big new theory of Darwinism, or this upgrade of Darwinism called neo-Darwinism. The thing is, we are able to observe small scale changes. That’s what micro evolution is referring to in organisms, so you can see for instance insects developing insecticide resistance; or bacterial developing antibiotic resistance; or finch beaks—finches on the Galapagos Islands—if there is a drought, their beaks will tend to get stronger and bigger so they can break the nuts that are harder, because there is not much water around.

But the interesting thing for evolution of course is not how you get bacterial resistance to antibiotics or finch beaks getting stronger; but how do you get those beaks in the first place? How do you get the finches in the first place? That is what evolution is supposed to explain. That’s the macro evolution. From an intelligent design perspective, there’s just this huge disconnect between the two. What the evolutionists are doing is just wildly extrapolating micro evolution to macro evolution.

Now if you turn this around and you speak to most evolutionists, they’ll say, “Well, they’re on a continuum, and that’s actually a bogus distinction because macro evolution is just micro evolution given a long enough time.” Well, you see where the argument is. I think there is good reason to think though that the extrapolation is not adequately supported at this point.

Audience Question: Being a parent, I’m going to bring it down just a couple of levels. We believe that God is all knowing, that He is the Creator of all things. Our nine-year-old son was reading one day, and he asked me why God created the Devil? He said if there was no Devil, then there would be no evil, and wouldn’t it be okay?

Bill Dembski: Actually, that is a good one. That may be above my pay grade, but it’s one I’m willing to go with, because I’m writing a book on it actually, the problem of evil. It’s called The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World. It’s under contract with Broadman and Holman. I think what you’d have to say, in terms of classical theology, is that God did not create the Devil to be evil. But then the question remains, “How is it that a good God creates a being with free will which misuses that free will?” Christian theology has always taught that there are angels that never went bad and never did fall. So why did that happen? I think at some level, it’s a mystery. But I think perhaps the best thing we can do is offer a psychological explanation. I think there is always going to be a temptation in creature-hood, if you’re a creature, to realize that you’re not God. Also, as a creature, you’re limited.

So the question will arise, “Well has God withheld something from you which He might have given you?” I think that was the temptation in the Garden. God withheld that apple, or whatever the fruit was from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eve felt cheated, and that was the occasion for her sin. No doubt, the Devil felt the same way.

So I think that gives us at least perhaps some insight; but why that should happen I think is a mystery. But once it does happen, once the creature does rebel, all Hell breaks loose. Then I think there are basically two options. God can either erase the problem, but in a sense that’s an admission that He didn’t know what He was doing in the first place. So then the challenge is rather to redeem that situation. Redemption it seems is not just going to be a quick fix. It’s because the creature is then complicit in its own fall and has to be brought to a place where the creature can see what he or she, or it did, and then return to God freely. The creature freely fell; it must freely return. It seems that is what Christ then accomplishes on the cross. This is very thumbnail; but I think it’s a very difficult problem theologically. Still more manageable though, I think, than the Trinity.

Ben: Right—I understand.

I want you to bow your heads and pray with me if you would for a moment. I know that it is Bill’s desire, as well as mine, for people to come to know the personal God who made them, and has provided a way for them to be redeemed and brought back to Him, and that is through Christ.

I know there are some people here today who are ready to stand up and walk down the aisles and say, “Yes! Yes, I believe in Christ. I believe God revealed Himself to us fully in Him, and I want to trust in Him, and I want to be brought back to God!” There are others here who are still in process. Or maybe you are like Bill was years ago where you are still asking questions and are still investigating. You find it to be intriguing, and you’re still questioning. Father, I thank You that You tell us to, “Come, let us reason together,” not come let us park our brains! Thank You that we can come to You with our questions as we quest, as we seek for truth, as we seek for answers, as we seek for a way in this world to live a life of meaning and purpose that would honor You…we pray in Jesus’ Name. Amen.

World Religions 101: When Buddha Meets Jesus: Transcript

WORLD RELIGIONS 101

When Buddha Meets Jesus

Ben Young

May 11, 2003

Around 525 BC, a little boy was born near India. This boy’s name was Siddhartha Gautama. He was born to very powerful and affluent parents. At his birth some people predicted that this young boy would either become a prince or an ascetic monk. As he grew up, his parents sheltered him from what they perceived to be pain and suffering in the outside world, so young Siddhartha stayed within the walls of this palace. As a young man he married, and one day he broke out of the confines of the palace and saw what he described as four very distressing sights. Now imagine, this guy has been sheltered his entire life from any form of pain and suffering.

The first stressful sight he saw was a sick man. It puzzled him: Why was this man sick? The second stressful sight he saw was an old man. Why did this man look this way? Why did he walk this way? Why was his skin wrinkling? The third stressful sight he saw was a dying man. And the fourth stressful sight he saw was a monk, known in the Hindu religion as a sannyassin—a beggar monk.

He went back within the confines of his palace, his wife became pregnant, and on the day she brought forth their child, he left and became that fourth stressful sign—an ascetic monk. He left the palace, trying to understand the riddle—the problem of pain and suffering—and trying to make sense of the ultimate meaning of life.

After begging and roaming the streets with nothing for many years, he was one day meditating under a boda tree. After an extended time of meditation, he got up, took a shower, put on normal clothes, and said, “My name is no longer Siddhartha Gautama; my name is The Buddha.”

Tonight we begin a brand new series called, When Buddha Meets Jesus. In this series we are looking at some of the different religions that we encounter in our world. Tonight we will look at Buddhism. Next week we will look at Islam; I’ll be talking to a guy from Iran who used to be a Muslim but has converted to the Christian faith. I will interview him about the Islamic beliefs and his story. In the third message we will look at the oldest religion in the world, which is Hinduism. And then finally, we will look at Mormonism, which is kind of an Americana spin-off of the Christian faith.

Now, let me say right off the bat that what we are doing in this series is an introduction to the religions of the world. It will be impossible for me to exhaust the teachings and doctrines of any particular faith anymore than I could exhaust the doctrines of the Christian faith in a 35-minute message—that is impossible. However, I do believe that in our time together we can look at the essential core teachings and the core beliefs of these various religious faiths. One thing I think will be clear to you is that all religions are not the same.

I like what Ravi Zacharias said: “Anyone who claims that all religions are the same betrays not only an ignorance of all religions but also a caricatured view of even the best-known ones. Every religion is at its core exclusive.”

So many times people want to criticize you, if you are a Christian, by saying, “Well, you Christians think your way is the only way.” You can’t escape exclusivity when you are talking about religious or philosophic views. You simply can’t escape it. You will see throughout this series that the religions of the world—Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Mormonism—though they may have some similar teachings, their basic core beliefs are radically different. The big take away I hope you’ll get from this series, as we look at a sampling of the various world religions, is that you will learn to discern the religious perspective of anyone you meet. That is my goal—that you will be able to encounter anyone, whether you talk to them on an airplane or on the street or if it is someone in your family, someone you work with, or if you fly to a remote country on the other side of the world, if you can understand some of the things we will talk about in the upcoming messages, you will be able to understand their perspective. Everyone is religious—religion being described as, having a worldview.

Now you may be wondering, “How in the world are we going to accomplish that?” This is how you are going to learn to discern the religious perspective or philosophic point of view of the various people you encounter; you are going to learn by what I call, getting a grip on the big four questions. You need to learn how to ask the big, write it out: F-O-U-R questions. You are going to be hearing these questions over and over and over again in this series.

Someone once said that repetition is the mother of all skill. I don’t know about you, but my brain is pretty dense and pretty slow; so for my brain to get something I have to pound it in over and over and over and over and over again. But I think once you learn this, it is going to be beneficial. It has really helped me out. It’s like one of those eureka experiences.

The first question that you need to learn to ask is, “What is Ultimate Reality?” In parenthesis you might want to put: “A God question.” This first question is one of the themes of The Matrix movies. If you can remember some of the dialogue of the first movie that was released in 1999, Morpheus—the Messianic or John the Baptist type of character—and Neo—the One, played by Keanu Reeves—discussed many times: “What is real?” Neo is going along in his life, just like we are, and he enters into this different reality behind the reality, and he starts asking all these questions, “Is this a dream, or is this reality?” When you start asking this question, “What is ultimate reality,” you are really asking, “What is the stuff behind the stuff?”

Now, before your brain explodes, relax. Someone may say, there is nothing behind the stuff; the only things that are really real are the things that we can touch, the things that we can taste, the things that we can hear. That is all that is really real. Nothing is really out there. That is one answer. Another answer to this question may be: gods. “There is a multiplicity of warring gods. That is the answer behind all the stuff that we see.” Someone may say that ultimate reality is Brahman—this one universal spirit, which we will look at in a few weeks. And of course, the Christian answer, and the correct answer, is: Ultimate reality is God Himself.

The second big question we all need to ask is, “How do you know?” If you say there is an ultimate reality—there is something or someone behind the things we can see, touch, and feel—then how do you know this? How do you know what you know? There are many ways of knowing. We can know things rationally, through reason. Have you ever heard the saying, “Well, that makes sense?” I can figure things out, learn things with my mind with reasoning and processing. You can also learn things empirically. That is what science is supposed to be about—doing different experiments and tests to verify things and having proofs and proving them time and time again. You can learn things empirically by what you see, taste, touch, smell, feel, and hear. You can also learn things pragmatically. Maybe you say, “I’m not into all that philosophical mumbo jumbo; give me what works.” That is the philosophy known as pragmatism, that is, a way of learning. If it works, then it is true, it is real. And the Christian way of knowing is primarily revelation. We know because God has spoken; He has revealed Himself through His Word, the Scripture, and through The Word, Jesus Christ.

The third question we will ask is, “What happens at death? What happens when you die? Some may say that when you die you get a second chance, a third chance, a fourth chance…you are reincarnated. Others say that when you die nothing happens; you are just worm food. You help feed the grass and flowers in some cemetery somewhere. Others say you dissolve into the oneness of this universe that we live in, and you become one with this force that we cannot see but is all around us. Others say, “Who cares what happens when you die; I am living for the moment. You only go around once in life. Matter is all there is, so go for all the gusto you can.” What happens at death is the third big question.

The fourth big question, is: “How should you live?” In light of these truths and these realities, how should you live? This deals with ethics. Some would say, “Obey the Ten Commandments.” Others would say, “Follow the eight-fold path.” Others would say, “You need to adhere to the Five Pillars of Islam.” Still others would say, You need to escape the cycle of samsara by having good karma.” So, how should you live your life?

When you are able to ask these four questions to a person and dialogue with them, you will be able to understand the governing force in their life (or governing forces). What you will discover many times is that people will not live consistently with these big four questions; there will be a contradiction between their view of reality and their view of knowledge and between their view of knowledge and their view of ethics (how they should live their lives).

Before we can talk about Buddhism tonight, we first have to seek the answers. How does Christianity answer the big four questions? And let me say this right off the bat: Christianity is the only standard. It is not like life is some big enchilada that some people want to put green sauce on and some want to put red sauce on and some want to put guacamole on top. It is not as if you can just pick your religion and pick whatever works for you. Some may say, “That is what is true for you; basically, religions are just all trying to do the same thing; you’ve got your view and I’ve got mine.” It doesn’t work that way. Christianity presents itself to us as a comprehensive worldview, a meta-narrative, a grand story for everyone, for every culture, for every background, for every time period that has ever existed. Christianity is the whole enchilada.

I am not trying to be deceptive here and say that I come from a neutral point of view and that I am just trying to look at these different faiths rationally. No, I believe that God has clearly revealed Himself to us in His Word, He has clearly revealed Himself to us in Christ and that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. This doesn’t mean that there is not truth outside of the Christian faith. It doesn’t mean that some of the principles and things taught by Buddha and Mohammed don’t contain bits of the truth. But Christianity is the ultimate standard by which we judge that which is right and that which is wrong.

Romans Chapter 1, verse 16 and following: “I am not ashamed of the gospel [the good news], because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.’ The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it known to them.” The gospel that we teach and preach is for every person, from every religious background because everyone knows the one, true God. But they take this knowledge of the one true God, and they stuff it and suppress it. Really, on one level, what we are looking at when we look at different religious and philosophical perspectives that are against the Christian faith, is how various people through the centuries have taken the truth of what they know is right and have twisted it and turned it to their own end.

Once again, Christianity is the standard by which we judge all other truth claims. And Christianity is the only religion, the only worldview that can make sense out of our experience and make sense out of the way we live life. So here are the answers to the big four questions according to the Christian faith.

What is Ultimate Reality? John Chapter 1, verse 1 says, “In the beginning was [the Logos] the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Ultimate reality for the Christian faith is the ontological trinity. The word ontology is about the study of being; so the very essence of who God is—God is the sovereign, happy, holy, triune God; He is one in essence and three in persons. When we are talking about the ontological trinity, we are talking about the pre-existent Christ. In the beginning was Jesus Christ (the Word), and Jesus Christ was God, and He was with God. Now this does not mean we are polytheists—that we worship three gods. No, we worship one God in three persons. God is a unity and a plurality and a diversity of persons. That is who He is; that is the God we worship. That is ultimate reality, and He defines everything else.

Second question: How do you know? John Chapter 1, verse 14 talks to us about that. It says, “The Word [that is the pre-incarnate Christ] became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” I love that. I pray that for myself, that when I teach, “God, make me like Jesus, full of grace and full of truth.” How do we know? We know through Jesus Christ. He is the starting point of our knowledge and all knowledge. Colossians chapter 2 tells us this. How else do we know? II Timothy chapter 3, verse 16 says, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” We not only know through God revealing Himself in Jesus Christ, we also know through God revealing Himself in the Living Word, the Bible, the Holy Scripture.

Does this mean that we as Christians don’t know things rationally—through reason and logic? Of course we do. Of course we learn through reason. Does this mean we can learn things empirically? Of course we can learn things empirically—by what we can see, hear, touch, and experiment. But, ultimately, our basis for our knowledge is revelational in character. A transcendent God, a God who stands, in one sense, beyond our experience, has spoken to us through His Son, through His Word, so that we may know Him.

Now, the knowledge that we have is a true knowledge. It is not exhaustive. A Christian is not someone who can say, “Well, I have all the answers.” No one can say this because God has not revealed to any one person all the answers. But we can know some very real things about who God is and how to relate to Him. This is the second question that we look at: How do we know?

The third question is: “What happens at death?” Hebrews chapter 9, verse 27: “Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment….” When you die in this life, you will face the judgment of God, and you will either spend an eternity in hell separated from God or in heaven worshiping God. Now, that right there tells us a lot. When you ask the question, “What happens at death?” it tells you where a person is coming from. It tells us a lot about where we are coming from as Christians. That is the problem with mankind—we are separated from a holy God. The solution to spending an eternity in heaven, and the solution to meaninglessness right now and a purposeless existence, is to place our faith in Jesus Christ. And when we do that, God tells us we are forgiven, we are cleansed, and we are adopted into God’s very family. And He lays out His plan, His will, His guidelines, for our very lives.

Fourth question: How should you live? Galatians chapter 5, verse 16 says: “So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.” We are to live in the power of the Holy Spirit. How do we get into the Christian faith in the first place? Is it because you are smarter or you are more moral than your pagan neighbor? No. Is it because you are smarter than your friend who happens to practice Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam? No. You got into the Christian faith, Ephesians chapter 2 tells us, because when we were dead and clueless—we didn’t know God from Godzilla on one level—He opened our eyes up, He awakened us, He gave us life, He gave us a relationship with Him, He gave us this worldview and this new perspective. How did that happen? By God’s Spirit coming in and opening our eyes and filling us.

How do we live the Christian life? The Christian life is not, “Try harder, try harder! Pull yourself up from your bootstraps! You can do it, really!” Though we do try hard and strain, the Christian life is one of power in the Holy Spirit. Outside of God, I am nothing. Without God in Christ, I can do nothing. Through Christ and His Spirit I can do all things. So we are to live a life of freedom, living in the power of the Holy Spirit, and working that out. That is how we are to live our lives and the Holy Spirit will continue that process of conforming us to the image of Jesus Christ and simultaneously pointing us back to the cross and outside of ourselves to the righteousness of Jesus Christ, which gives us our continual hope and acceptance before God. I wish I had time to unpack that more tonight, but we have to go and see what happened to Buddha under the boda tree centuries ago, in around 560 BC.

What happened to Buddha?

How would Buddha answer the Big Four Questions? What is Ultimate Reality? Here’s the problem when you study Buddhism and you look at Buddhist teachings. Buddha was not really concerned about ultimate reality. Buddha was coming out of a Hindu tradition, and he was kind of reacting to Hinduism. And he did not believe in Brahman. He did not believe in a soul or a spirit world. So in many ways, many people look at Buddhism as an atheistic philosophy. He was much more concerned only about existence in the here and now. Here is what Buddha said to a fellow monk named Ananda shortly before his death. He said, “You must be your own lamps; you must be your own refuges. Take refuge in nothing outside of yourselves. Hold firm to the truth as a lamp and a refuge. And do not look for refuge in anything besides yourselves. A monk must become his own lamp and refuge by continually looking on his body, feelings, perceptions, moods, and ideas in such a manner that he conquers the cravings and depressions of ordinary men and is always strenuous, self-possessed, and collected in mind.”

So when you X out God and when you X out a universal spirit, what you are left with are competing ultimate realities. What is really real in Buddhism? One answer could be matter—matter being all the things we can touch and feel; matter being the universe and cosmos. That is all that is there, right? That could be one answer.

Another answer could be suffering. Remember Buddha was primarily trying to deal with the issue of suffering in this life. So suffering, in one sense, could be ultimate reality—what is really real. Nirvana (not the singing group) could also be an answer. Nirvana, in a sense, is the goal of the Buddhist; it is described as a candle blowing out. It is when you can look into a mirror and no longer see a face or a person staring back at you. It is the extinction, if you will, of the self.

Second question: How do you know? How does the Buddhist say you know? He would say that it is primarily through meditation—meditating on the four noble truths. When he was under the boda tree, he was meditating there. When he said he received the enlightenment, he said he received four noble truths—he came to these conclusions:

The Four Noble Truths: Number one, Life is suffering. The second noble truth is, Suffering is caused by desire. Number three, Suffering can be overcome by eliminating desire or eliminating cravings. Now, how do you do that? Noble Truth Number Four, You do that by following what he called the Eight-Fold Path to Enlightenment. The problem is, he said, that all of life is suffering. This is what he said to some of his monks: “Now this, monks, is the noble truth of pain, duka: Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful, sorrow, lamentations, dejection, and despair are painful. Contact with unpleasant things is painful. Not getting what one wishes is painful. In short, the fine components of existence are painful. Now this, monks, is the noble truth of the cause of pain: The craving which tends to rebirth, combined with pleasure and lust, finding pleasure here and there, and namely the craving for passion, the craving for existence, the craving for non-existence. Now this, monks, is the noble truth to the secession of pain: The secession without a remainder of craving—the abandonment, the forsaking, and the release of non-attachment. ” That is the goal of the eight–fold path.

We have these desires for pleasure, for happiness, yet we have all these painful experiences in our life. How do you get rid of this desire that we have? If you get rid of that then you eliminate suffering by simply squelching or killing or eliminating your desire. You do that (as we will discover in the fourth question) by following the eight-fold path.

Now, question Number three: What happens at death? There are two options, from Buddha’s perspective. He says you are either reincarnated or nirvana—your candle blows out. Now, the problem I see between Buddha’s view of ultimate reality and his view of what happens at death is that there is a blatant contradiction. See, if you take out the soul and the spirit…Hindus believe in the transmigration of the soul—that the soul is reincarnated into other forms, other people, or other animals. If Buddha takes that out of the picture, then my questions to him would be, “What is reincarnated?” Once you die and become worm food, what gets reincarnated? Their answers may be, “Well, your desires get reincarnated; your psychological energy is reincarnated.” That is problematic within their view. So what happens at death? You are either reincarnated or nirvana—your candle blows out.

Number four: How should you live? Again, Buddha’s answer is to follow the eight-fold path. What is the eight-fold path? Number One: Right view – that is, to understand the four noble truths. Right thought—that is, to have good motives. Right Speech—that is to tell the truth. Right action—that is never to kill anything; do not commit adultery; do not drink. I guess a Baptist got hold of Buddha a long time ago. Number five: Right living – which means you must have an honorable profession. A Buddhist couldn’t be a butcher; killing pigs and animals like that is against their religious beliefs. Number six: Right effort. Number seven: Right thinking—that is, to be self-aware. Number eight: Right meditation – and that is achieved through raja-yoga techniques. What is interesting is that Buddha went against the caste system in Hinduism that ranked people. Yet in the eight-fold path, laypeople, like you and me, if we went against the Buddhist tradition could only fulfill five of the eight things in the eight-fold path. Six, seven, and eight are really reserved for monks alone. Even though he came and was critiquing a hierarchy, he ended up re-creating the same thing he was critiquing.

That is a thumbnail sketch of Buddhism. Now, let me tell you briefly why I like Buddha but why I can’t follow him. I like Buddha because Buddha was really serious about addressing the problem of pain and suffering. I would not say all of life is suffering, but a good chunk of life is suffering. I like the fact that his philosophy, his view, was all about how you deal with that reality. In my opinion, that is a very important philosophic question; it is a very pragmatic, very practical, question as well.

The reason I can’t follow Buddha is, his solution is inadequate; his solution falls short of the standard that God has revealed to us. What is his solution? It is a “desire reduction” program. To achieve Nirvana you have to eliminate suffering. I agree with what Dr. Peter Kreeft said, a philosopher at Boston College. He says this, “I can’t help viewing Nirvana as spiritual euthanasia—killing the patient, the self, the eye, the ego, to cure the disease of egotism and selfishness. Buddhism eliminates the eye that hates and suffers. But that is also the eye that loves.” He says it is kind of like killing the patient to cure the disease.

Jesus is not anti-desire. God is not anti-desire. The desires that we have—the desire for happiness, the desire for love, the desire for sex, for security—these desires are not in themselves negative or sinful or bad. Our desires go awry when we attach our desires to wrong things. I love the story about Jesus with the woman at the well. I call this story: “Jesus with the whore in John 4.” See, you will never forget where that is now. For those of you who have problems with me using that word, it is mentioned time and time again in the only correct translation of the Bible, the King James Version (Ben is being tongue-in-cheek here). In John chapter 4, Jesus Christ encounters a lady who has been looking or thirsting for love her entire life. She’s been looking to find acceptance and meaning in a variety of relationships with different men. While they are getting a drink at the well, Jesus doesn’t tell her that all desire is wrong, saying, “Your desire for acceptance, your desire for love is wrong.” He tells her basically, “You’ve been drinking out of the wrong well. You’ve been trying to find life and meaning out of this well that is the wrong well. I am going to give you some water today that is living water, and this living water is going to quench the thirst of your heart.” He didn’t say, “I am going to give you this mystical drink, and you are going to learn how to deny and kill all desire.” He said, “I am going to come into your life, and I am going to transform your desires.”

You see, the truth is, we don’t need an eight-fold path. We don’t need more rules and regulations and a self-improvement program. We need radical renovation and restoration. The gospel is not, “Try hard, do better, obey this book, and the boogey man won’t get you. Do good things, be nice, don’t drink, don’t cuss, don’t go with girls who do; don’t do these things. Do go to church. Do this; don’t do that…then God will love you.” That is not the gospel!

The gospel is not, “Look for the love. Look for that special thing inside of you.” That is not the gospel. The gospel is not what happened under a tree in 560 BC; the gospel is what happened on a tree in 33 AD when God became a man in Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ died on the cross. He actually did something about our pain and suffering. He actually entered into our pain and suffering and took all our guilt on Him. He who knew no sin became sin for you and for me. He was buried, put into a tomb, and on the third day He came out of that tomb. And if we place our faith in Him, God says we are forgiven, we are cleansed, we have new life. We become a son or a daughter of the living God.

And all this happened outside of us. It is objective reality, and we can know the embrace of the Father. We can know that God accepts us. We can know eternal life, not because of what we do but because of what Jesus did. And He comes, and He places His Spirit inside of our lives and teaches us His ways and teaches us how to live. And when we are suffering and we are hurting and when we are confused, God through His Spirit is not only in us, but He is also with us, comforting us. Jesus did not come to squelch and kill desire, He came to give us a life—an abundant life. That is the God who has revealed Himself to us and anyone, anyone, it doesn’t matter where you are from, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, how religious you think you are, how irreligious you think you are, if you come to Him, He can forgive you, He can cleanse you. He can give you this righteousness that is not your own. He can make you a son and daughter of God. He can change you. He can give you the acceptance you’ve been longing for.

[Ben leads in a closing prayer.]

Muscle Car Marriage: Part 2 – How to Raise Kids without Ruining the Upholstery: Transcript

MUSCLE CAR MARRIAGE

How to Raise the Kids without Ruining the Upholstery

September 5-6, 2009

David Hughes

This holiday weekend to include worship, and if you’re here and you’re like an uptight, I don’t know Episcopal person or something, Presbyterian, I apologize for everything you just saw. Just kidding, just kidding. Hey, actually, I think that’s a great truth. Little throwback tonight. Will Smith back, in the day before he was even the Fresh Prince. Sometimes parents just don’t understand. I’m a parent. I desperately want to understand. But sometimes it is hard. In fact, I think it’s a great weekend to talk about kids and parents. Because parents, one of the hardest things, one of the most laborious things you do, parenting. Amen? To do it right is hard work. It’s a loving task, but it’s a difficult task.

So welcome to Church by the Glades. We’re in the midst of a relationship study called Muscle Car Marriage. The topic tonight or the title is “How to Raise the Kids Without Spoiling the Upholstery”. And I’m so glad you’re here. So take your Bible and turn to 1 Samuel. Turn to 1 Samuel. Say it with me. The book of 1 Samuel. That’s in the Old Testament. I’ll help you navigate, a little trick. All the first and second books in the Old Testament are side by side by side. 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles. So you find 1 Samuel, and I’m going to tell you the story about Samuel in just a moment and kind of the unique family he grew up in. But before I do that, I need to ask your help. We have a wonderful set of challenges at Church by the Glades. Last weekend, between the seven worship experiences, we had near record attendance, the second-highest attendance on a non-holiday. We had 5,369 people visit the campus. (Applause) Yeah. Go, God. No, no, you, you, for inviting people. Wow, what a great job you’ve done inviting people. And last week in five of the services we had to scoot people. In two of the services we had to bring in additional chairs. And for all practical purposes, we’re pretty much done. It’s pretty much packed. I don’t see us growing to 6 and 7,000 with the current configuration. So a couple of options here. One is we can just stop inviting people. Let’s just stop asking people to come to church. No. Yeah, I agree. Because I believe the Bible.

The Bible says there’s a place called hell. And you don’t want anyone you love to go to hell. You don’t want anyone you don’t love to go to hell. And Jesus defeated hell, and I want people to come to our Christ and come to our king. So I say hell, no to hell and hell, no to that plan. So let’s keep inviting people. So what do we do? Well, if you’re newer, you may not know the longer-term next step is a new building. About this time last year, we spent about six weeks praying together, casting vision together. We’re believing God for greater things in the life of this church. We think our best days are before us. And part of that next step is a new building. It’s on that grassy area just past the muscle cars and coffee area. We have a team right now planning out a 2,000-seat auditorium, an additional kid’s space over twice our square footage in this new facility. I spent a good chunk of Friday with Pastor Rod, some smart engineers, this talented architectural team out of Palm Beach, our GC and his staff, these acousticians. Didn’t know what an acoustician was, but acousticians out of Dallas helping us plan out the video of the whole place. And they’re hammering out the drawings. The working drawings are about 80 percent done. So this thing is happening. Now we’re pricing this thing out right now at about 13 million dollars. Anybody have an extra 13 million hanging around? Anybody? Never know who might be here this week. If you do, we need to talk after church. But probably it’s going to be the rest of us normal people just sacrificing and dedicating and doing without and making this thing happen, and God bless you for being generous and giving towards greater things and seeing this dream become reality. So it’s going to be a huge help when the building is done. But best case scenario is probably about two years.

So what do we do for the next 24 months? Well, some time ago, the pastors began praying about this idea. Maybe a second campus. Somewhere far enough to reach some new people, but close enough to offload some of our folks here, maybe a new campus. And so we entered negotiations with a landlord in an area nearby. We had this place laid out, seemed like it would fit our needs. We needed a variance from the city, and this week the city shot us down. So we’re trying to plan a video campus. Live worship, live staff, child care, all the stuff you normally have, Starbucks, the whole deal, just the teaching would be done via high-def video, which except for you guys in the front, most of y’all watch the screens, anyways. So that’s what we’re going to do. It’s been very successful. We’re not pioneering this. Other churches have done this. But again, the city shot us down, so that is a dead deal. I won’t tell you what city did it, Margate, but anyways, one of the cities shot us down. And so God’s closed that door. So talking to some of my colleagues that are doing this successfully in other parts of the country, one of my brothers said why not just tell your people? Tell your people what you’re planning on, and invite them to pray. 5,000 people praying, bombarding heaven about God, we want to go somewhere, we want to see this thing continue to prosper and grow, we want to see one more precious person come to Christ. So Father, help us. And then kind of throw out this idea. If you own commercial property, if you have commercial something, 10,000 square feet or more with a bunch of parking, if you’re responsible for commercial property with a bunch — 10,000 square feet but only six parking spaces, we can’t do church there. But maybe you know something or whatever. If you do, we’re interested. Now, we’re not interested if you want to make a whole bunch of money. But if you want to give the church a sweetheart of a deal as far as a lease or a purchase, we want to talk to you. So if you know of something like that, we would just put the word out. Contact pastor Tom. Pastor Tom is not just a great teaching pastor. He’s our executive pastor. He runs this church day to day. And you can reach him at tom@cbglades.com, tom@cbglades.com. But praying and just keep your antenna. I love by early next year that we have a second campus and we can grow in two or three places as well as continue to build the new building. Amen? Amen.

All right. Let’s talk to parents and kids tonight. Parents and kids. Thank you. Someone got excited about it. Yeah. New building, growing, increasing. That’s all fun. All right. As I begin this teaching, this is a teaching tonight for kids and for parents, but I’ve got to give this little disclaimer. It’s only for imperfect parents. So raise your hand if you’re a parent. Keep your hand up if you’re an imperfect parent. Put your hand up. I know you’re one. Imperfect parents. See, if you’re a perfect parent — you can put your hands down — I’ve got nothing to say to you. You need to find some quiet moment in the next little bit and just sneak out, because I’ve got no word for you. In fact, if you’re looking for examples of perfect parents in the Bible, there’s one. God. In fact, you’re hard pressed in the Bible to find good parents. I mean, there’s very few good parents in the Bible. Now, if you’re looking for jacked-up families, dysfunctional families, fractured families, dumb parents, there’s plenty of those. In fact, some of the holiest heroes that were very successful on the battlefield, in the temple, were disasters in the home. I’m talking people with names like Abraham, David, Gideon, Solomon. But you’ll see God still shaping and growing up amazing young men and young women in messy families.

So we love to advertise here at Church by the Glades that this is a place for imperfect people. I’ve got my shirt on tonight. By the way, since you guys chose Saturday and not Sunday morning, where we’re slammed, if you want one of these shirts, I told the team $5 tonight, man. Bargain shirt if you want to buy your shirt and advertise your imperfection, all right? There you go. Not sure what colors they have. Whatever stock we have, you can have that if you want one of those shirts and advertise, be a big walking billboard for the church. But tonight is for the imperfect parents. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and adjust mine. It’s now imperfect parents allowed tonight. Because it’s hard. It is difficult to be a good parent, especially in this generation.

I want to study tonight a remarkable man, Samuel. In fact, Samuel was a colossus of the Old Testament, spanning the period of the judges to the warrior kings. A pivotal personality, an amazing man of God. In fact, there are stories when Samuel the prophet came to a village, everyone would freak out with excitement or awe or even fear because he represented the power and the presence of God. An amazing man. In fact, when you rate two Old Testament books named for you, I mean, you’re a serious person. And Samuel, there are two books named for him. But you’re going to see he was the product of a messy, weird family circumstance. Samuel’s mom was named Hannah. Say it with me. Hannah. That’s where that name came from. Popular name still. His father was Elkanah. Elkanah. Say that. Elkanah. Now, Hannah, chapter 1, you see her weeping a lot, you see her depressed maybe because there’s family turmoil. In verse 15, she describes herself as a woman broken in spirit. Why? Well, her husband had two wives. Not one, then the other. Two at the same time. And that was sadly common in this period in history. Now, that is a clear violation of God’s marital relationship plan in Genesis 1 where it’s one man, one woman in a covenant relationship for life. So when you do this, you violate God’s plan, you pay a relational price. And in this family, as you can imagine, there’s jealousy and rivalry and taunting and drama and heartache. To make things worse, Hannah is unable to bear children, and that can mean a heartbreaking thing in any circumstance in any time. In the culture back in this day, she was stigmatized for that. And she promised God, God, if I ever have a child, I would literally give this child to you. I would so dedicate this child that I would take this child to the temple and allow this child to live in the temple and be raised by the priest completely dedicated to your service.

That’s one of the places that we get the idea of child dedication from. We do child dedication, family dedications twice a year. Now, we don’t let you leave your kids with us. But symbolically you’re saying I dedicate this child to God. It kind of comes from this story and others. So then Samuel, his biological parents give him up, and he’s raised by a godly, kind priest named Eli. And Eli was not a very good parent. In fact, his own two biological sons are disasters, absolute moral failures. In fact, they’re in ministry, but they weren’t called to ministry. They’re just kind of in the family business. And the Bible says they’re stealing from the offering, they’re sleeping with every woman on staff at the tabernacle, the temporary temple of the day. They’re a mess. And one of the reasons they’re so messy was daddy Eli did not discipline them and love them correctly and brought all kinds of pain to Israel and pain to Eli’s family. But you know, sometimes in life God gives you a relational mulligan, you know, a second chance. And so here Eli as an old man has a chance with this young boy that his parents drop off at the temple. Samuel. And Samuel becomes, though his family situation is fractured and weird and dysfunctional, becomes an amazing man of God.

I think as you read the first chapters of 1 Samuel, all kinds of lessons for parents and for kids. And I want to speak to the parents especially first, because parents, we want to give our kids all the right and best things in life. Amen? In fact, we’re giving our kids stuff all the time, aren’t we? You find yourself just giving stuff to your kids? In fact, I made a list of the things we give to our kids. Just a short list. And we give our kids life as parents. You moms give birth, you give your body for nine months. We give them love, give them care, give them hugs, give them food, give them clothes, shelter. We nurture them, provide education, protection, correction. We give them spankings, we give them hope and help, we give them encouragement. We give them baths and haircuts and treats and toys. We give them instruction, we give them advice. You moms, when your kid is done chewing his gum, will give your hand. Have you seen moms do that? Like the kid’s like I don’t want to chew this anymore. Instead of finding the trash, mom will go here, I’ll take it. Men don’t do that, but moms do that. Men think that’s gross. But we give our kids stuff all the time. But I want to make sure as I’m providing for my kids I am giving my kids the most important thing. So I spent a little time the past few weeks trying to generate a list. I think as a Christian parent, the best things I want to pass off or provide or nurture in my children. Maybe you’ll jot these down, three or four things quickly if time allows.

First thing, I want to give my kids, that I want to see God wealth my kids is something I call a divine dream. A divine dream. I really can’t give them a divine dream. Only God can do that. But I can nurture the dream that God has in mind for my child. And God has a unique, customized plan and purpose, a divine destiny for my child and your child, in fact, for everyone in the room, because we’re all so extraordinarily unique. In fact, let me prove the point. Let me survey you guys. Couple random questions here. Raise your hand if this applies to you. Food. Not if you like to eat, but I mean this. If you’re someone when you have your food arranged on your plate, you don’t like your food groups to ever touch each other, you don’t want any sauce or — raise your hand if that’s you. You don’t want your food groups to touch. Howard, you don’t like your gravy to — hands up. Be proud, you non food touching people. All right. On the other hand, if you kind of love when your stuff all kind of slops together and runs together, raise your hand if you like it. You’re probably from the deep South if that’s you, right? Like that stuff kind of fusing together. I like it all together. How about this? How about this? College football launched this weekend. Yeah. All right. Yeah, yeah. If you’re excited about that, raise your hand or make your college team noise or sound. Give me a U or a gator or a chop. There you go. Whenever you are. Hook’em horns, whatever you are. Now, that’s a lot of people. Now, if you could give a rip, in fact, you’re actually discouraged that football started again because you’re going to lose your husband or boyfriend, raise your hand. You could care less. Look. A lot of people don’t even care. Don’t even care. Y’all need to get saved, actually. You guys need to fall in love with Jesus and care about college football.

How about this? I’m wearing jeans tonight. I’m wearing blue jeans tonight. If you’re somebody, you pretty much wash your jeans every single time after you wear them, raise your hands. Clean people here. Now, if you’re here tonight only discovering for the first time, wait, you’re supposed to wash blue jeans? Raise your hands. Look a bunch of hands going up. I’m supposed to wash these things? I just take them off and stand them up in the corner, right? I’ve got to wash them? You’re unique. So why do you think God would have a dream one size fits all? I believe his dream is unique for you. I believe his dream is big and powerful and pervasive and unique for my children.

Samuel, as you’re going to read through the story, he gets dropped off at the temple, and Eli begins to care for him. When you get to chapter 3, it’s this wild story. He’s sleeping. He’s a little boy. We’re not sure how old he is, seven, eight, nine. He’s sleeping by the ark of the covenant. In the quietness of the night, he hears a voice go, Samuel. Little boy, part of his job is to attend to the needs of Eli. Eli is mentoring him. He runs into Eli’s room, like a lot of our kids run into our room late at night. He shows up in Eli’s room and says sir, did you call me? Can I do something for you? And Eli wakes up and goes no, son. I didn’t call you, buddy. Go back to bed. Go back to your room. And he does. A second time, the voice of the Lord comes to Samuel and says, Samuel. He wakes up and runs into Eli’s room and says, sir, you called me again. He said, no, bud, I didn’t call you. And then when you drop down to about verse 8, it says “the Lord called to Samuel a third time, Samuel got up and went to Eli sand said, here I am. You called me”. Then Eli realized it was not me, that was the Lord calling the boy. See, God had a dream for Samuel, had a specific, unique dream for this young man to make him a prophet and a leader and a king maker and to be an incredible influence in his generation and the generations to follow. Two books named for him. But the seeds of that divine dream are sown in his youth. And I found that’s kind of God’s habit. No matter when you come to Christ, it’s the right time for you, but if you will give your heart to God when you’re young, God begins working very early in the life cycle to begin to form and shape his divine dream for people. Sometimes even pre-birth.

When Lisa was expecting, gosh, all of our kids, I loved to pray Psalm 139. I love this couple of verses here. Look what it says here. The Psalmist says, verse 13, verse 14, if you look at my home Bible. I’ve got all kinds of notes and dates and penned prayers as I prayed this over my preborn kids. “For you created my innermost being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you. I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” So here God’s getting involved in human life in the womb. Here God is shaping that child. I would take notes in my home study Bible. Father, right now we’re expecting a baby. I pray this baby is going to be whole and healthy. I pray right now today you’re involved as his little life is coming together. But Bible scholars, here’s a really tough, tricky question. Right before Psalm 139 in your Bible you will find Psalm 138. You guys are good. Psalm 138. In fact, in the way my study Bible is laid out, the pages at home, Psalm 139’s here, and right over here next to it is Psalm 138. And I noticed as my Bible laid open that one day, and of course, originally it was a scroll you’d unroll. They’d be side by side. In Psalm 138 verse 8 it says, “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me.” And I noticed these two psalms side by side, and I began to pray, God, don’t just form my baby, and I’m praying, God, what all parents pray, you know, that he be smart and be cute and 10 fingers and 10 toes and be nice, God, but I pray even here in the womb you begin to shape your divine purpose for my child. I dedicate this baby to your purpose, to your dream. See, I cannot give my child a divine dream. God does that. But I can nurture what God does. I want to see them embrace God’s dream. See, I don’t want to give them my dream. Some of us parents make that mistake. We try to live out our own personal unfulfilled dreams through our kids academically, athletically, as far as personal fame. If that’s you, just stop that. That’s twisted.

Also in America, we lie to our kids. Now, someone’s going to e-mail me. I’m going to make you mad right now. We tell our kids this lie. Sweetheart, you can do anything you put your mind to. You try enough, you believe in yourself, doggone it, you can do anything. That’s a lie. It’s a self-centered lie. Because they can’t. They can’t. Right? I mean, God shapes them a certain way physically, academically, their aptitudes. I know you think that’s not nice. No, no, no. They can do anything God has shaped them to do. And by the way, God’s dream is a huge upgrade over your dream, anyways. And so I want to speak that into their heart. Sweetheart, God is such a big — and very early.

Look at Jeremiah. Jeremiah chapter 1, verse 4 and 5, “The word of the Lord came to me saying before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart. I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” So here again, preborn. One of the reasons I don’t believe abortion is an appropriate moral choice, because evidently by the scripture, God gets involved in human life very early. And so Jeremiah’s called as a prophet, and Samuel’s set aside as a very young man, and you’ll see time and time again the psalmist in the womb. These dreams come early. Joseph in the Old Testament as a young man is the recipient of a divine dream. Remember that story? How two times God comes to Joseph and by way of a dream says I will exalt you, I will promote you, and you will protect your family. And if you read the next chapters, his whole life falls apart. He is betrayed, he’s sold as a slave, he is thrown into prison. And what does the dream do? It becomes catalytic. And that dream of his youth, that God-given dream, drives him past the hardship and the disappointment, pushes him past the haters and doubters and detractors. See, one of the reasons, one of the most important reasons I want my kids and I want the young people in our church begin to discover God’s big dream, that powerful dream, that dream becomes so compelling, so attractive, you’ll refuse to sacrifice God’s fantastic future on the altar of short-term, stupid decisions.

Now, here’s the way it’ll break down. I’m praying it breaks down this way for my kids. I’m praying Victoria will say to some boy someday, you’re not putting your hands on my body unless you put a ring on my finger, because God has a dream for me. God has a fantastic future for me. I will not disqualify myself. I will not take a chance on rendering that dream, listen, coming to full fruition by making this bad choice in the back seat of a car right now. I’m praying it breaks down this way for Charlie, that when he’s tempted, no, I’m not going to put drugs in my body. I’m not going to diminish God’s dream by damaging my mind or my body. I want to see what God’s going to do in my life. There’s power in that. Man, a dream will move you. Dr. King had a dream for our nation, did he not? It was catalytic. It was powerful. It moved us through the turmoil of the ’60s. And man, a dream, a dream. God has a dream for you. God has a dream for your child. Nurture that dream of God in that person. I don’t think Hannah had any idea when she dropped off her little boy that day with worship and weeping that God had big plans for Samuel. I want my kids to embrace the dream.

Second thing I want to give to my kids, I want to help my kids learn to listen to the word of God, to learn to listen to the word of God. Notice you develop an ear for things you’re attentive to? Things that you focus on? Some of you guys, when you drive, are on the cell phone. Some of you are thinking about your next meeting. Some of you are rehearsing a conversation you’re going to have at work or on the campus. A lot of us are just going to zone out and listen to the radio. In fact, who is a channel surfer in your car? Man, you’re just surfing, you’ve got all those presets. And I do that all the time. I’m not really paying attention to the music. But it’s amazing how that stuff kind of bleeds in, how you can recognize stuff even you casually listen to. In fact, let me put this to a test as well. I’m going to play a series of songs. If you recognize this song, as soon as you recognize the song, the moment you recognize the song on that note, shoot your hand in the air. I won’t embarrass you or call you out individually, but as soon as you hear the song. Ready? Let me give you an example. One, two, three. Music bunch of hands. What is it? What is it? Bon Jovi. Some of y’all in the back with your lighters already, like yes, Bon Jovi, Bon Jovi. This is good. Kind of a little old school here. All right. Speaking old school, change the genre. Ready? How about this one? Put your hands in the air the moment you recognize it. What is it? What is it? Vanilla Ice. Ice, ice — whatever happened to old Vanilla Ice? Reality shows, right? All right. How about something a little more current? A little more current. Let me fade that out. And the moment you — wait, wait, wait, wait. Turn that off, turn that off. It’s like barely a note came out, and you guys were like — put it back on again. It is yeah, Black Eyed Peas. Black Eyed Peas. Popular, current. Look how quickly you recognize that, you have an ear for that as soon as you heard that. Guys can fade it out. Thank you, guys.

Now, I want my kids to be that way with the word of God. I want God when he speaks when he whispers like in this story, that word is — and by the way, the same way the dream is unique and customized and scripted, so is his word. How amazing the God of the cosmos has a unique, personalized word for you if you have ears to hear it. In fact, one of the great things I see this old man do as a leader, drop down again to verse 8 and verse 9 in the narrative. Verse 8, verse 9. It says, “The Lord called Samuel a third time. Samuel got up and went to Eli and said here I am. You called me. Then Eli realized that the Lord was calling the boy, so Eli told Samuel, go lie down. If he calls you, say” — here’s what you do — “speak Lord, for your servant is listening.” Let me teach you how to listen to God, because God’s word is precious. In fact, it’s rare. There was no scripture back in that day. So when God speaks to you, just say God, man, I’m all ears. God, what is your word for me? What is your plan? Before you even tell me what it is, I’m telling you yes. You assume that posture of obedience before God, watch him unpack his beautiful plan, have a word for you. So I want to teach my kids to listen to God. I want to put them in environments where they’ll hear God’s word. So how does that break down? Easy. I’ll bring them to church, number one. If you brought your kids to church, you are so intelligent how you are blessing your kids. Now, some of y’all like me grew up with a drug problem. Ever tell y’all I had a drug problem as a young man? Anytime the church doors were open, my parents drug me to church. That was bad. That was a bad joke. Don’t laugh. That’s bad. But it’s true. It’s true.

My parents were deeply involved in church. Not dropped me off at church, they drug me to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday, Tuesday night visitation, covered dish dinners, all that stuff. At the time, I resisted. At the time, I didn’t fully understand. If they left the choice up to me, I probably would have chosen to stay home and watch cartoons or something. But they did not leave that choice to me. And I am so grateful today of the spiritual foundation they planted in my heart. My church taught the word of God consistently. We teach the word of God here in every teaching environment. But I’ll say this, my church growing up was a Bible-based, was a good church. Little dull from time to time, especially for a kid. Little dull, little boring. But the kids ministry here is very un-dull. Oh, my stars, the KidStuf ministry that happens in that building. If you’ve got your kids in this room, it’s the wrong place. For elementary age, put them over there. It rocks over there. It’s Nickelodeon on steroids over there, man. They find these compelling ways to teach the word of God, to serve up Biblical truth. And how smart is that? It’s hard. Labor Day, it’s hard to be a parent. So anyone that will partner with me in the process of parenting. They don’t baby sit. They will have your back, they will echo values and truth that you’re trying to teach your kids. So man, bring your kid to the church. They took Samuel, and they left him at the temple. They dropped him off at the tabernacle. Now, don’t do that. Take your kids home with you. But he immersed himself in the body life of the congregation, family of God. Church is important. Church is not an option in scripture.

We’re commanded, Hebrews chapter 10, verse 24 and 25, though churches are imperfect, messed up, we should immerse ourself in the body life of the church. The faith fusion, the spiritual synergy of the church we can find in no other place on earth. I believe in the church. So church is good. My parents took me to church. He was taken to the tabernacle, the temporary temple. But don’t just make it a church thing. And by the way, it’s a great thing here. And if you volunteer with our kids ministries here, you are awesome. I love our kid’s ministry volunteers. In fact, I think if Jesus was physically here tonight, he would not be teaching, he’d be over in the kids ministry, because Jesus loved to bless children and teach children. Amen? In fact, some of you guys are so talented and so warm and so friendly, you should spend one hour in this room and another hour over there just taking care and loving our kids. Or maybe here on Wednesday night. We’ve got the kids a little older, the middle school age, high school. Man, it rocks here. This place is electric. This room goes crazy. Thank you, young people. Giving you a little shout out there.

An amazing ministry takes place here. Maybe that’s the place you find to step up and serve and volunteer. So the church is one component. But there’s a second one. Parent, it’s you. See, we live in a day and age when parents are very tempted to subcontract out the kids, farm out the kids to experts, to instructors and tutors and coaches and kind of have all these subcontractors take care of our kids. Spiritually speaking, you don’t dare do that. We are here to back you up, but the spiritual training, this teaching the word of God we do together, parent and church, shoulder to shoulder, in tandem. You’ve got to do it with us, got to step up with us. And by the way, I said it’s a great idea to take your kid to the house of God, to take your kid to the temple. But you guys know where the temple is in the New Testament? The temple is you. The temple is you. I mean, you are the temple of God. It says in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 verse 19, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?” So as you walk around, you should be communicating God truth to your kids, be speaking the word of God, sharing what God is showing you. In fact, it blows me away that some parents that resist that idea, I don’t want to do all that, go through all that drama, talk about things of God, if your basketball coach comes to you and says Junior has potential, would you work with him on his left-handed dribble so he can drive, you’ll spend hours out in the street, sweating in the sun working on the left-handed dribble. He ain’t going to make it to the NBA anyways. But why not spend some time backing us, partnering with us.

As simple as this. If your kid’s in KidStuf tonight, on the way home say hey, what did you guys talk about? What was the funniest thing that happened? What did you learn? What was the value? What was the truth? Get involved with your teens on Wednesday and talk about it. Pray with them. I’m always dog tired when it comes to bedtime. I’m worn out, you know. But maybe the most precious part of my day is crawling next to my kids, man, getting in their bed with them and praying with them as we conclude our day together with our God. To train them. I love that verse, Proverbs 22 verse 6, “Train up a child.” Got to be in this thing together. So important we do that for each other.

In fact, you look at some of these holy heroes that were great men of God on the battlefield, great leaders in the temple, how they dropped the ball. David. David, one of the holiest heroes, but his kids were terrible. I found a verse in my own devotional life, just blew me out of the water. I’d never found this verse before. In 1 Chronicles 27:32, here’s what went wrong with David’s family. It says in this verse “Jonathan, David’s uncle, was a counselor, a man of insight and a scribe.” Then says look at this little detail. “Jehiel, son of Hachmoni, took care of the king’s” — now I just look at that. Wait, wait. Why was David farming out his kids? Why was David busy running around writing psalms and leading in worship and leading in battle and being busy at the palace, why was he doing all that stuff and giving the responsibility of raising his children to someone else? That’s most likely the problem. It is my job as their dad to raise them in the things of God, to help them understand that God wants to speak to them.

In fact, as you read 1 Samuel, you see in chapter 3 this little statement. I love this. It says, “The Lord was with Samuel,” verse 19, “as he grew up, and he let none of his words fall to the ground.” I love that statement. Samuel as he journeyed in life, as he matured would not let God’s words fall to the ground, would cling to the word of God. As parents, we must cling to and cherish the word of God, Psalm 119. We must live out the word of God, James chapter 2. So whatever else you have to drop, don’t drop the spiritual things.

See, I find a lot of modern day Christians, man, we cling to our careers, and we hold tight to our money, and we cling to our selfish agendas, and we fumble the word of God, and our families pay the price. I want to teach my kids to listen to God. I want them to know that God has a divine dream for them. I’ve got other stuff on my list, and I’m kind of out of time. I was going to tell you parents things like your kids need discipline. I mean, loving discipline, but consistent discipline will bless your kids. Taught many places in the Bible as a good parent I need to provide my kids with consistent discipline. One of the hardest things there is, because if you’re not a single parent, if you’re parenting in partnership with someone, probably one of you guys is more the disciplinarian, the other one’s kind of the softy. And you’ve got to be on the same page, and kids crave consistency, and some of us are Etch a Sketch parents. Y’all remember the Etch a Sketch? Where you draw a line, then what do you do? Erase it. You shake it and erase it. And we draw that line. Don’t you ever do that again. If you do that again, I will warn you a second time, right? We just draw the line, then we erase the line. And the kids crave consistency. As a good parent, we need to draw that line with love, not with loudness. And if they step across the line, there is some privilege or blessing they forfeit until they teach me they’re responsible enough to earn that right. And so I think as a good parent, we do that, we draw that line in tandem. We back each other up as parents, because kids need that consistency. They crave that. They won’t tell you that, but they do.

Now, I know it gets tougher as your kids get older. My oldest is nine. You parents with teenagers aren’t listening to a word I’m saying tonight, because you’re saying David, you don’t know. When you have — oh, I’s a whole — that’s okay. I’ve been talking to other people. I’ve been talking to great parents with teens. You’re looking for practical ideas. If I had time, I’d tell you all these practical ideas, things like I talked to one guy, man, I know this guy, they have awesome kids. They have four teenagers. He is a pastor. All four of his kids are respectful, they are honoring, they serve, they work hard in school, they are all God hearted. We’ve been with their kids, we’ve traveled with them. Man, these kids are awesome. So I’m talking to him, man, give me some ideas. What am I going to tell these parents of teenagers? He said oh, here’s a good one. Tell your parents with teens if they can afford it to buy all their teenagers cell phones, and as early as possible. Thought you guys would amen that at least. Come on, young people. Yes. Yes. Buy them nice ones, he said. Buy them really nice cell phones early. Said David, your kids are probably too young, but buy them all cell phones as early as possible. So that way, when they misbehave, you can take the cell phone back. Buy a cell phone that you really want for yourself, because you’re going to have that cell phone a whole lot. We know him. He’s taking the cell phones from his kids all the time. Because look, you messed up here, so you forfeited this blessing. That’s practical right there. In fact, I recommend this, parents, when it comes to your kids, collect that technology at some point in the day. 9:00, 9:30, man, just collect them all till tomorrow. In fact, I think you ought to check the log on the cell phone. Need to check the favorites on the cell phone. I think you need to check their room. I think you need to check their My Space and their Facebook account. Uh-oh, I’m getting some dirty looks right now. I think you should do all that. Should do all that.

Listen, because we love them. I know it’s a little messy, but I want to get involved. I want to know who they’re communicating, who’s speaking into their life. I want to know all that stuff. Now, they’re thinking what about privacy? Pastor David, don’t you believe in our privacy, our room and my — don’t you believe? Yes. I believe in your privacy. I respect their privacy. So you young people, when you grow up and have your own house and your own computer and your own phone, you buy all that stuff for yourself, I’m going to so respect, I’m going to so respect your privacy at that point. But until that, you know, that room is in my house. You’re a temporary resident in a room in my house. That’s my room. That’s not your room. That’s not your computer. I let you log onto my computer. That’s not your cell phone. I’m paying the — that’s my cell phone. Right? So because I love you, I want to encourage you and champion and cheer you when you do well. But I will hold you accountable, and I will understand as much about you and who’s speaking to your life and your relationships. I just think as a good parent I owe all that stuff to you. And so I would tell you things like that if I had time to tell you things like that, because that’s important, important stuff right there because our kids — don’t y’all be mad at me. I love y’all. I love you so much. I want to see your parents get involved in your life and to encourage you, because it’s so easy to make these dumb decisions. And I want you to so embrace the dream of God and his personal word for you that you power through those stupid decisions, you will not sacrifice God’s blessing and future on the altar of short-term pleasure and selfishness and the acceptance of your peers. It’s hard. It is so hard to be a parent.

Now, kids, I can’t let you off the hook. I’ve got to talk to the kids for a moment, because I’ve got a word or two for the kids because kids, I’ve got to cover it. It’s a passage in Ephesians. We’ve been studying Ephesians for three weeks. 1 Samuel tonight, but Ephesians is the primary relationship passage of study. We talked about husbands and wives, and now it’s parenting, now it’s kids. And kind of the way Ephesians, the relational passage, unfolds is chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6 kind of goes like this. As you read through those three chapters, it says number one, God is God. Next it says marriage is marriage. Then it says the parents are the parents. Then finally, the children are the children. Did I go too fast for anybody? All right? Y’all with me? God is God, the marriage is the marriage, the parents are the parents, and the children are the children. Because man, they’re so smart and they’re so cute, it’s so easy to build your whole family around them. And they’re so smart, they’ll creep into that corner office and end up being the family CEOs and run everything, and because they’re so cute, you want to let them do that. But as parents, it’s God and the marriage and then parenting and then the kids. They are beautiful, temporary residents in your home. And when it comes to the kids, finally in chapter 6, here’s what it says to the kids. And I want to just ask our young people to read this, because they might not read it. I’ll ask everyone to read this. Ready? Chapter 6, verse 1, verse 2 and we’re done. “Children, obey your parents in the Lord.”

Now, in case you go, but wait a minute. My parents are so out of touch. My parents just don’t get it these days. My parents are just clueless. “Children obey your parents,” this next little statement’s for all that thinking. “For this is right.” There’s actually some great kids over here whose parents don’t come to church, whose parents aren’t even Christians, and you guys say but my parents aren’t Christ followers, they make bad decisions, to be honest. Do I obey them? Yeah, you obey them, too. And that’s God’s kind of relationship rule. And God can leverage authority even everyone flawed, imperfect authority, and God refines us and grows us as we submit to authority. So that is the word to obey time and time again. God calls us all to obey. But obey your parents. That is the word. In fact, the Bible celebrates actually quick obedience. Not drag your feet, roll your eyes, cop a huge attitude and do it, but quick obedience is blessed in the Bible. I’ve told y’all before with my kids, we have a little statement in my house. If they’re dragging their feet, we say this. Slow obey is no obey. Slow obey is no obey. Now, listen, my kids can ask why. Kids like to ask why, don’t they? Why? Why? It’s okay. I don’t think God the father’s offended when I ask why if I don’t understand why something’s happening. I don’t think he cares. If you read, Bible scholars, the first recorded words of Jesus when he was an adolescent, first word is why. Did you know? Luke chapter 2. So it’s okay to ask. My kids, when I tell them to do something, are allowed to ask me why, but the timing is very important. They can ask me why only in the course of obeying me or after the act of obedience is complete. Then they may ask me why. Now, sometimes my best answer is because I’m your dad and I said so. But if at all possible, I’ll try to give them more rationale than that, I’ll try to explain. But it must be not before they obey, why, no, no. That’ll get them trouble. In fact, sometimes that’s dangerous to delay the obey.

Example, my little guys, couple of years ago, we were having pool time with dad, and Charlie and Victoria were on the edge of the pool. And I said to them, I got very serious. Kids jump in the pool right now. Jump in the pool. Obey me. Jump in the pool right now. In unison, they both went why? What they didn’t know was there was a wasp buzzing both of them, man, a wasp. And why? They almost got stung. In fact, truth be told, I wish it had stung one of them kids in the butt just as a lesson for the future. See, life can bite you and sting you if you delay the obey. Man, I didn’t have time to unpack all the reasons why. They needed to listen to me and be safe, and then I say here’s why, guys. In fact, that verse, let me put that verse on the screen again. Doesn’t just say obey. It gets tougher. It says, “Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is the right thing to do.” And look at this part. Honor. We live in a world that’s kind of low on honor all the way around, and people of God are called to honor, are called to give honor to each other, to submit to each other, to serve each other. But children, the command is not just to obey. It’s not just the action. It’s the attitude. And the attitude called for is to honor your mom and dad. And you’re called to honor them even if they’re not being honorable. Because we do have a lot of great kids that show up here on Wednesday night, and their parents have nothing to do with church or spiritual things. In fact, they discourage them. Some of their parents are making bad choices. Nonetheless, honor your parents, and God will leverage your honoring and your obedience for his purposes in his time. I’ve got to bring this thing in for a landing, need to wrap it with just a couple of thoughts.

A couple of years ago at a pastors’ round table, I met this young pastor who just planted a church. This guy’s so dynamic, an amazing communicator. He’s not even 30 years old, and his church is running like 6, 7,000 people. I mean, just knocking it dead. Three or four campuses. Great, compelling communicator. Gave his heart to Christ when he turned 16. Went to church some before and just played the game, but at 16, he gave his heart to Christ, and he was the real deal. And very shortly therefore, God called him to preach. So he’s like a Christian like a few weeks, he’s up preaching the word of God. And this kid can throw down. He’s a good talker. And he began to travel around little churches in South Carolina and speaking in these tiny churches. His dad was not a Christ follower. In fact, his dad was an alcoholic from a long line of alcoholics. And his dad was not even a very good dad. His dad would come home smashed and not be physically abusive, but very verbally abusive and a big bully. And one time, after Stephen had been preaching about a year and a half, his dad came to this little, tiny church, and Steve gave an old school, come forward altar call, you know, if you want to give your heart to Jesus, come forward. And after the service, we’ll have some pastors here. And some of you guys, you need to make that choice tonight. The God of the Bible’s highly relational, and he invites you tonight into a saving relationship with Christ. Maybe you need to rededicate your life to Christ and get things right with him. And so tonight you need to come and do that when the service is done. But they kind of did it where everybody sang a hymn. And from the back, his dad, his alcoholic dad, his difficult dad came forward to give his heart to Christ. And Stephen, of course, was thrilled. And talking to his dad later, he said dad, I’m just so thrilled that God used my preaching. What an honor for me that God used my preaching to bring you to himself. And his dad said well, the sermon was good and everything, Stephen, but really, it wasn’t the sermon. The seed of my salvation was planted some time ago. You’d first become a Christian, and I came home one night, and I had too much to drink, and I got loud and I got up in your face, and I was probably way out of line, but I was just all over you, and you fired back at me. We didn’t come to blows, but it was intense. You stormed out of the room. But a few minutes later, you came back to me, and you said dad, I don’t agree with what you said back a little bit before, but I need to ask your forgiveness and apologize to you because I’m a Christian now, and the Bible says I’m called to obey you and I’m even called to honor you. And dad, I have not been honoring you, and I’m sorry. And that will change from this point on. He said it broke me when you said that. Then over the next months as you began to honor me and I saw this change in you, I could not deny the reality of your God. And Stephen, the seeds of my salvation were sown by your honoring me when I did not deserve your honor.

Isn’t God a relational genius? And I have totally ducked the question tonight. So how do you raise kids without spoiling the upholstery? Truth is, you can’t. You just can’t. Kids are messy. See, back in the day, I was a single guy. Back in the ’90s, I had a muscle car. I drove a Dodge Stealth. At least a wanna-be muscle car. I thought it was very cool. I was single. I thought this will be a cool car. Might meet some sharp, professional, godly women might be attracted to me or maybe my car. Didn’t work. Didn’t reach those sharp, educated women. Now, my car, my Dodge Stealth tended to impress like the assistant night manager at Burger King at the drive-through at 2:00 in the morning. Like, oh, baby, I love your car, right? Not the kind I was looking for. But anyways, that car, because I was single, it was immaculate. It was so clean. I detailed that car. I waxed it. That car was spotless. But now I’ve got kids. And my kids tend to hang out in the back seats of my car. And them back seats, honey, they’re disgusting, aren’t they? Those kids, man, dirty and muddy and messy and petrified McDonald’s french fries, man. Kids are a mess. I don’t know how you raise kids without making a mess. Anyone you love, it’s going to be messy.

So two neighbors at the start of football season, one neighbor came out to his buddy and said why do you do that? Your lawn is beautiful most of the year, and then when football season begins, man, your boys will be out there and start playing football in your front yard with their cleats, and they rough house and they tear up your grass, and, man, they chew up your yard, and your yard looks terrible these months during the football. Why? Why don’t you care about your yard? To which the neighbor said no, you’re dead right. You’re so right. My kids do that. They mess up that yard. But you see, I’m not raising grass. I’m raising boys. And if you love someone, it’s going to be messy. You’re going to be imperfect, they’re going to be imperfect. You’re going to have to forgive each other a whole bunch, love each other, be redemptive.

But God wants to infuse our relationships with his greatness and his grace so that we’ll say yes to him. None of these principles are easy, and none can be applied on your own. It takes the Holy Spirit working through you, but you are the temple of the Holy Spirit, Christian person. If not tonight, you’re going to be smart and come give your heart to my Jesus, not by way of religion, but by way of relationship. A brilliant move. I challenge you tonight. Let’s love those messy people in our life. Messy people, messy kids, messy parents, messy in-laws, tough-to-love people, in Jesus’ name. Amen?

Amen.

Father, we thank you, we celebrate you. You are a good God. And anytime I want to be impatient or frustrated or stressed out with anyone, may I be reminded of the cross where you shouldered my sin and my selfishness. And oh, what cosmic frustration, what a liability I am to you relationally. But Jesus, the perfect one, died for me. May that add muscle to our relationships. God, it’s hard to be a parent. Oh, my goodness. We’re using car metaphors to get a driver’s license. You’ve got to study for a written exam, got to take a road test, pass a vision test, then and then only perhaps they give you a license. But I remember the day when I walked out of the hospital with Charlie, and I thought, oh, my gosh. I didn’t have to take a test. I’m a dad. He is mine. And a year and a half later, I walked out thinking, oh, my goodness, she is mine. And all the men in the room understand the difference there. She is mine. All the pressure of raising a beautiful daughter in this generation. Six months ago, I’m walking out going, we’re in this thing again with a new baby. But by your grace Father, this imperfect dad desires to love and lead my children and my home in the ways of God. Lord, we love you, we listen, we celebrate you. And all God’s people said.

Amen.

Losing My Religion: Part 4 – Just Leaves: Transcript

LOSING MY RELIGION

Just Leaves

August 8, 2010

Stovall Weems

The deception of false religion is that it always appears to have a form of godliness, but lacks of any true substance. Don’t miss this powerful message, as Stovall uncovers the truth about the appearances of religion, and helps us identify what is truly of God. Sometimes, you’ve got to “lose your religion” to focus on the things that produce Godly substance in your life.

Today, we’re continuing in our series “Losing My Religion”. If you haven’t been here the last few weeks, I encourage you to listen to the previous messages in this series, because each message has been building on the previous one. In fact, if this if your first time – I know you may be thinking, “I thought that’s what we were here for today? To get more religion, right?” But actually, we’re not. We’re here to get more of a relationship with Jesus, not more of religion. And that’s what this series is all about.

So far, we’ve defined religion as man’s attempt to get to God. And we looked at a guy named Nimrod, (who’s name actually means, “rebel”) who was the founder of false religion. And we read in Genesis, that when Nimrod did that – when he attempted to get to God through man-made efforts, all it did was cause confusion. He built the Tower of Babel. “Babel” in it’s original name, meant “gateway to God,” but then it came to mean, “confusion,” and that’s what religion does. You see, religion, puts itself out there as a gateway to God, but the end of it is confusion and strife and even war.

Also, over the last couple of weeks, we looked at the life of Jesus, and how every time He encountered religion, it was a major deal. Religion was Jesus’ greatest enemy. Religion was what He was always coming up against: the spirit of religion; the idea of religion. And it’s still like that today. There’s false religion in the world, and then there is just religion in general within the body of Christ. Last week we talked about how choosing mercy over sacrifice keeps us from slipping into a religious mindset. Again, it’s really important for you to go back and listen to the other messages in this series.

Today, we’re going to look at another story in the Gospel of Matthew. In chapter 21, Jesus teaches us a powerful lesson, once again, about religion. We’re just going to look at two verses Matthew 21:18-19. The setting of this is towards the end of Jesus’ ministry. In chapter 21 we read of Jesus’ triumphal entry. And what’s going on here is that Jesus has been ministering in Jerusalem. And you can read that whenever Jesus was ministering in Jerusalem, He wouldn’t stay there. He would always go right outside of Jerusalem, to a town called Bethany. It was in Bethany where Martha, Mary and Lazarus lived, (the brother and two sisters). Mary, Martha and Lazarus were real good friends of Jesus, and throughout His ministry, He would spend the night out there with them.

Here in this passage, it was morning now, and Jesus was going from Bethany back into Jerusalem, and He’s going to walk by the Mount of Olives. Here in verse 18, it says, “Now in the morning, as He returned to the city”—speaking of Jerusalem—”He was hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the road, He came to it and found nothing on it but leaves, and He said to it, ‘Let no fruit grow on you ever again.’ And immediately, the fig tree withered away.” Many of you might be familiar with this story where Jesus curses this fig tree. Now, how many of you will be honest and just say that taking this story as it is, at face value…doesn’t that seem a little bit extreme? Come on, be honest. I mean, I think Jesus is being a little extreme here. Either He didn’t sleep last night because of those parties Mary and Martha were always having. Mary probably always wanted to stay up late, worshipping Jesus, and Martha was always, fixing everything and hosting everyone. Or maybe He had just gotten so hungry to the point he was grouchy. I know some men can relate. I’ve noticed the men get food anxiety. Come on guys, can you relate? Men like their meals regimented. If they don’t know where their next meal is coming from, we start pacing. And if it goes too long, the grouchiness sets in. Anyways, Jesus was hungry, and He sees this fig tree by the road. Now, let me give you a little bit of background. First of all, let’s talk about fig trees. In Jerusalem, in this culture and in this area of the world, fig trees are in abundance. They’re everywhere. Even today, if you went over to Israel and the Middle East, in this part of the world, fig trees are in abundance. There will be several of them in one place and they’re actually a really big tree. They’ll grow to like 25 feet in height and they’re very, very fruitful. So anyways, to the Hebrews, figs were a staple part of the Hebrew diet. There were fig trees all throughout the countryside, and so obviously, when people were traveling and saw a fig tree, if it was the right time of the year and in the right season, they instantly knew they could get some breakfast or lunch or whatever.

So here in this passage, Jesus is on His way to Jerusalem and the Bible says He sees this fig tree and that the fig tree had leaves. Now here’s another interesting thing about the fig tree: The fig tree is one of the few plant-bearing trees where the leaves and the fruit appear simultaneously. In some seasons, the fruit would even precede the leaves. So if you were in this area of the world, and you saw a fig tree that had leaves, you knew it had fruit. It’s a really easy plant to read. So what was happening here was that Jesus saw this tree. He saw the leaves on it, so He obviously assumed, “Great, this tree has fruit!” But then when He gets to the tree, for some reason, this tree had leaves, but it doesn’t have any fruit. It’s got the appearance of a healthy tree, but it lacks the substance. Or spiritually speaking, I could say it this way, (the way a verse in the Bible says it): It has a form of godliness, but it’s lacking the power. In other words, this fig tree was all about appearance, but it had no true substance.

Every time Jesus encountered religion, whether it was while He was picking corn in a field, or whether He was confronting the Pharisees, He never just simply dismissed the issue and was like, “Oh, whatever” and moved on. He never did that. He always stopped, and would teach a powerful lesson about it, because religion is one of the greatest enemies to a genuine relationship with Christ. So once again, here with the issue of the fig tree, He is going to teach a powerful lesson. It has the appearance, but it has no substance. That’s the first thing that we always see with religion.

Religion has the appearance, but it has no substance. Or, as the Bible says, it has a form of godliness, but it lacks the power. It might look like a gateway to God, but the further you dig into it, it just becomes confusion. It might have all the pomp and all the ritual and all the ceremony; the leaders might wear all the religious garbs and things like that, but…. See, religion loves appearance, but you know what God loves? God loves substance. God’s not into appearance. God doesn’t look at the outward. He looks at the heart! And we see this once again, all the way back to Genesis. Think about when Adam and Eve first sinned. Do you know what was the first thing that they did? They tried to get a form and appearance that would be acceptable, where they could still have fellowship with God. They realized they were naked, and the Bible says they went to a fig tree, and took some leaves. What do the leaves represent? Leaves: No fruit. Leaves represent the form of—leaves represent religion. They went and made a fig leaf cover. How many of you know, that was a sorry fashion statement! I tell you what, from some of the things I see coming off the runway today, it’s not much better than that fig leaf covering. But anyway, they make this fig leaf covering to cover themselves. But what does God do? After God lovingly corrects them, He wants them to get rid of those leaves. In other words, you better lose that religion. And you’re going to need some tunics made of animal skins. God was saying, “You need a blood sacrifice to cover yourself, to bring yourself back in relation to Me.” It was a type and shadow that just the leaves—religion – won’t do. You’re going to have to have a blood sacrifice. The tunics they wore came from animal skin – an animal had to be killed. It’s a type and shadow of Jesus Christ, that He was sacrificed for us, and the only thing that brings us back to God is a relationship with Christ, not a bunch of religion!

Religion loves appearance- but it lacks the substance. So here’s what I want to say to you today: No matter where you are in your walk with God, listen – focus on what brings substance. As a church, as a pastor, as a lead staff here at Celebration Church, do you know what we focus on? We focus on the things that are going to bring substance. That’s what we always talk about, being real, being relevant, being genuine, being sincere. I’ll tell you what, you might like me, or you might not like me, but you can rest in this: What you see is what you get. The Stovall up here today is the same Stovall at my house. It’s the same Stovall at the office. Be who you are. We all have problems. News flash! We all have issues. We all have things that we’re believing for God to change in us. But we don’t want to get caught up in legalism. We don’t want to be a church that’s all about conformity. We don’t want to be a church that’s about exclusion. We want to be a church like we talked about last week. Where just like Jesus, He sat down, and He ate with (that means He came into union with) the notorious sinners, with people from all walks of life, those who were following Him, those who weren’t. The church should be a big tent atmosphere, where we come in, and we’re seeking God, and we’re finding God, and we’re being who we are, and you’re accepted for who you are.

Let me also show you this. Remember, in our relationship with Jesus, the purpose is not outward appearance. It’s not conformity. It’s not rituals and sacrifice. We talked about this last week. And you might be asking, “Okay, Stovall, so what kind of appearance should I have? What does a Christian look like?” Let’s look at John 15:16, here’s what Jesus wants. He wants substance. And the substance—you’re going to get this in a second—the substance is the appearance. The substance is the appearance. John 15:16 says, ” You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit.” So Jesus is saying, “Here’s My purpose. Here’s what you need to look like. Here’s what you need to do.” “I’ve chosen you so that“—He’s talking about purpose now—”so that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you.” So now let’s look at that fruit. What should be the appearance of a Christian? The appearance is the substance. Here’s the fruit, and here’s the good news: It’s not your fruit; it’s the fruit of the Holy Spirit. It’s not something that you have to earn. It’s something that comes as part of the package as you focus on your relationship with Jesus. Look at Galatians 5:22-23: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such there is no law.” In other words, there are no rules out there that should mess with these things. We talked about love over law. What is the first fruit of the Spirit? What? Love. Joy. Remember, we talked about how religion despises freedom? Religion won’t go in. Religion doesn’t like it when a party’s going on. Religion doesn’t like it when people get festive. Religion doesn’t like it when people get excited about their relationship with Christ. But look what the fruit of the Spirit is! Love, joy, “Joy”! Happiness! Festivity! Peace! Look at what it goes on to say, Longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness—guys, say, “Gentleness.” You thought I’d leave that one out. I didn’t. Self-control. What is the last fruit of the Spirit? Self-control. Do you know what religion does? Religion focuses on these in the opposite order. Religion is always focused on the self-control. It’s focused on the dos and the do nots. God says, “Listen, you focus on loving Me and getting closer to Me and having a relationship with Me. The self-control will be a byproduct. It’ll be a fruit!” So here’s what a Christian—a follower of Jesus looks like: someone that is demonstrating fruit. “Okay, Stovall, so how do I work this out in my life?” Focus on the things that produce substance. That’s why we’re so big here at Celebration Church on personal devotion; having that time with God, spending time with Jesus, focusing on those things, those values, fellowshipping with other believers, getting involved in serving, coming and hearing the Word of God, worship, all those things. These are the things that produce what? The substance.

Watch this. So why is Jesus cursing? Why is He taking this extreme reaction to this fig tree? He comes to the fig tree. The fig tree’s false advertising. It’s a religious tree. It has the appearance, but not the substance. Do you know what that is? That’s confusing. He’s hungry. He needs to eat from the fruit of the tree, and it has no fruit. In other words, the tree’s not serving its purpose. Do you understand, the world needs the fruit of the Holy Spirit, but guess who are the carriers of the fruit of the Holy Spirit? You and I. But religion misses the purpose. It forgets the big picture.

You know, my friend Robert Barriger from Peru is here, and Kerri and I used to do a lot of missionary work down in Peru. But I’ll never forget one time, one summer, I was exclusively working in the Amazon jungle down there, and it was just an awesome time. We’d go through all these tributaries, and we would plant churches, and we would preach the Gospel. And a guy that we were down there with, that was working for Robert, gave him this idea. This other guy gave this missionary the idea, “Look, man, you need to get an airboat. You could do so much. You could help those people so, so much more down there. You could go faster. You could do all these other things.” So he put all this energy into this airboat. And man, you should have seen the appearance of this airboat. It was unbelievable. It had a Cummins turbo diesel engine. You should have seen the fan on the back of that airboat. I mean it was loud, and it was huge, and we were all fired up about this airboat. You even had to wear headphones and goggles and all that. We were so excited. And we spent weeks talking about this airboat. And we had all these great intentions with this airboat. We were going to reach so many more people. And we finally get it out there on the river. We hit the throttle, man it was so loud! And we figured if could get the airboat right up against the bank in the shallow water, it wouldn’t sink too much, and it could eventually get on a plane. But here’s the problem. Guess who’s always swimming and bathing and washing clothes and fishing out in the bank? The locals! The Indians. And that river is not just a straight river, it winds like this. And so what we would have to do – and this was my job—we would hug that bank…rrrrrhhhhhaaaaa I mean, this noise! The Indians were terrified! They thought it was the end of the world! We would have to hug that bank, and my job was to be in the front of the airboat with my earphones on with my Apocalyptic ski goggles. And when we’d come around a bank, and when we’d see some Indians bathing in the river, I’d be like, “Get out of the way! Get out of the way! Run for your lives!” And you ought to have seen some of those poor local Indians in their favorite swimming hole or bathing hole – rahhh! Can you visualize what I’m saying? Machete on our back from hacking through the jungle – we were crazy! But it was the airboat! This airboat had to work! Look at the engine, and look at the appearance! But what we ended up doing that summer – it became about the airboat, and we didn’t realize that we were actually hurting the very people that we were trying to minister to! And that’s what religion does. It usually starts out with good intentions, self discipline or sacrifice—it starts out with good intentions, but it ends up just becoming a bunch of loud noise, and it misses the purpose, the original purpose, for what we’re supposed to do in the first place. Our original purpose was not to terrify all the Indians on the way to the village. Our purpose was to be down there and show the love of Christ to people. And just like that airboat, that’s exactly how religion is. Good intentions, maybe even loud, a lot of show, when instead of helping, it ends up hurting the very people that it was intended to help. We finally got rid of the airboat and renamed that ministry WOD Ministries: Wake of Destruction, because unfortunately, that’s what we did in the Amazon that summer. Can you thank God for learning from mistakes?

That’s what religion does. It misses the purpose. It ends up being about the thing. It ends up being about the doctrine. It ends up being about the way we do this. And it misses the entire purpose. So Jesus encounters this tree. It has appearance but no substance. It’s missed the purpose for why it’s there. It’s supposed to be there to feed people and help people. And then the last thing—and this was the nail in the coffin for this poor fig tree: This fig tree was alone. It was a lone fig tree on the side of the road. Now, if you understand plants, in order for plants to reproduce and grow and be healthy and produce fruit—a plant must have cross-pollination. This is why you typically see fig trees in patches. They’re in groups because they have to cross-pollinate to bear fruit. A fig tree has to be planted in soil with other fruit-producing fig trees, or it won’t grow any fruit. So Jesus comes and finds this lone fig tree. There’s no other fig trees around it. It can’t cross-pollinate, so it can’t grow. In other words, there was no hope for this fig tree. So when Jesus finally cursed the fig tree—appearance, no substance, confusing people, not fulfilling its purpose and no hope of ever producing fruit because it’s not around other fig trees, where it can cross pollinate, Jesus basically just put the thing out of its misery! And He taught us a lesson. Religion is about appearance, not substance. Religion misses the purpose. Religion tries to isolate believers. That is why it is so important that you are planted in a healthy local church with other fruit-bearing Christians, where you can cross-pollinate and grow. The local church is the soil where you plant yourself, and you cross-pollinate, so to speak, with other Christians where you can truly grow. Psalm 92:13: “Those who are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God.” In the local church. You plant yourself in God’s house, and then the Bible says, and then you will flourish in the courts of our God. Courts speak of design. They speak of plans. If you want God’s design for your life, if you want to know the plan of God for your life, you cannot be like this lone fig tree and just think, “I like all the churches, man, so I’m just going to visit a different one every Sunday.” No, man! Look, I’m not saying you have to pick Celebration Church. If you want to make this your home church, great. There’s a ton of healthy great churches in the Jacksonville area. But you’ve got to get planted in one if you want to bear fruit. There are too many Christians out there who are walking around with a lot of religious language, but because they’re not planted in a healthy local church, once you get up underneath, all you find is just a bunch of leaves.

Religion uses the rituals, the minor doctrines, the disagreements. Religion uses that to try to pull people out of healthy churches and isolate them and bring them over to what ends up being a barren place. You know, heresy is not the same as error. Error is just when something’s just not true, just something about it’s not true. Heresy is when you take a truth of the Bible, and take it to an extreme. That’s what religion does. And then religion will use that extreme—and you can actually find the basic truth in the Bible, but that truth is misappropriated and brought to an extreme and brought to a focus that it shouldn’t have. Religion targets and pulls people out of healthy local churches by doing that. Don’t fall for that trap. It’s the trap of religion.

Remember what Jesus said, “You’ll know them by their fruit.” For your life and the church that you’re in, is there love? Is there joy? Is there peace? I could go on down the list. Is it a church that focuses on the things that produce substance? Do they focus on personal devotion? Do they focus on teaching you? Are they providing a worship atmosphere? Do they teach you how to learn the Word of God, and not just hear it, but to be a doer, and a participator in it? That’s the kind of church you need to get connected to. That’s the kind of church that’s going to be a church that thrives, because it’s focused on a relationship with Jesus, and not a bunch of religion that might initially look like, “Wow, look at this tree, man! Look at all the pretty leaves!” But the more you dig into it, it ended up being just appearance, with no substance.

Focus on the things that bring substance.

Muscle Car Marriage: Part 3 – How to Survive a Crash: Transcript

MUSCLE CAR MARRIAGE

How to Survive a Crash

September 12-13, 2009

David Hughes

It’s so exciting, and no one ever has the thought when they buy their new car, someday, I hope to mess this car up. Yeah. I want to do all kinds of damage, dents and dings to my car, want to neglect my car. Or maybe I can just have one catastrophic crash, total this car out in one fell swoop. No one ever thinks, I want my brand-new ride to end up here in the scrap yard. No one ever thinks that about their new car, yet millions of cars end up here every single year. Marriage is the same way. No one ever begins a marriage, no one ever stands before a priest or a pastor thinking in the back of their mind, someday I want to mess this marriage up, I want to neglect this marriage, do all kinds of relational damage, dents and dings to this marriage. Or maybe I can make one catastrophic choice and crash this marriage, total this thing out. No one ever plans for that. Yet millions of marriages are scrapped every single year. Maybe your marriage is hurting right now. Maybe you feel like your marriage belongs here in the emotional scrap yard. Hey, I think God has brought you here today to give you a word of encouragement, instruction, hope, and perhaps even relational healing.

Welcome to Muscle Car Marriage and this session entitled How to Survive a Crash. Hey, and welcome to Church by the Glades. Good to see you tonight. Oh, no, I applaud you for being here. We’ve had great crowds during this series. This series has been fun. We have one more week of MCM after this week, so don’t miss next week. And we’ve been talking, if you’re first time here, we’re so glad you’re here, we’ve been talking to our single people, our parents, our kids, a lot of conversation about marriage. In fact, I was thinking this week marriage, every single marriage, almost every marriage, people begin that marriage with highest hopes, great promise, great potential. Yet study after study shows that almost half of first marriages don’t go the distance. They end up in the relational junk yard, they’re scrapped by someone. And the odds get slimmer as marriages multiply. The odds get worse for second and third marriages. And I was wondering why that was. Why is it so many marriages don’t go the distance, how many get scrapped. And I want to talk about that tonight.

In fact, the topic tonight is how to survive a relational crash. Maybe that big, disastrous decision you’ve made in marriage or your partner made or both of you have made, maybe somebody made a decision. Typically, they’re selfish, they’re stupid, and they’re sinful. And you’re wondering tonight can your marriage make it. How can you survive a relational crash? Well, take your Bible and turn to Song of Solomon, or maybe your Bible calls it Song of Songs. Old Testament book. And I want to show you one little verse out of this. And I will attempt to answer that question tonight, how can you survive a relational crash?

But before I deal with that, there are two reasons why cars get junked before their time. A car that the engineers designed to go a hundred thousand miles or 120 K or beyond, but it’s in the scrap yard long before its time, two reasons. One is sometimes there’s been this horrific crash, and that great crash has done great damage. But actually, most cars that end up in the junk yard before their time, it’s not been a big crash, it’s just been a whole series of small things. The little dents and dings, maybe a few fender benders over the years, multiplied negative impacts, maybe a careless owner who’s neglected that car, not maintained that car. And in fact, if you noticed the car out on the grass on the way up, we’ll give you a little opportunity this weekend to work out your relational frustration.

If you came to church a little stressed tonight, we have this car that a junk yard donated to us for the weekend, and we have some sledge hammers out there and some gloves and some eye protective gear, so knock yourself out and beat up that car all you want, all right? Have a good time. If you’re frustrated with somebody or yourself, go ahead and take it out on the car, not the person. I recommend ladies you beat the car, not the husband. Amen? Just saying. Beat the car, not the kids. That what I recommend. But that car was not totaled out because of a wreck. Wasn’t some tremendous crash. But by the time this weekend is done, seven services, 5,000 people getting a poke at that car, it’s going to look like it rolled over a cliff. And some of our relationships kind of look the same way. It’s not been one or two big, horrific things, but a whole bunch of small things over the course of time compiled to do tremendous damage.

Solomon in Song of Solomon chapter 2 verse 15 talks about this dynamic in poetic metaphor. By the way, parents, it’s one of the G-rated sections of Song of Solomon. There aren’t many, but this is one. And he makes this observation about a relationship. Again, it’s poetic. It says, “Catch for us,” he says to his wife, “Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards. Our vineyards are in bloom.” Now, the vineyard is their love, it’s their marriage, it’s their intimacy. It’s their marital romance. But he says got to watch out for little foxes in the vineyard of our love. You know, small little animals that burrow around the root system, these little vermin minute. If they go unchecked, if you don’t call the exterminator, multiplied, they do damage over the course of time. Not a big grizzly bear. It’s a little fox. And Solomon’s saying in this relationship to maintain and grow and maximize our marriage, we’ve got to be diligent to watch out for those small, destructive little foxes that’ll take this thing down over time. So I was just meditating on this passage this week, and I thought what are some of the little foxes in marriage? What are some of the little negative things if you’re not careful and prayerful that can over the course of time do great damage to your relationship? I want to share three, and then I’ll tackle the question of the night, how do you survive a crash, how do you survive that really big, disastrous relationship decision or event. But here’s some of the little foxes we deal with in marriage.

Number one, a failure to invest time. A failure to invest time. Married folks, remember back when you were dating? Man, long walks, long talks, huge phone bills, closing down restaurants. And then you get married, and maybe you have some financial goals and you’re working and she’s working and you’re working some overtime, then you drop a few kids into the equation with all those responsibilities, and they consume all the time. It’s like you don’t intend not to spend quality and quantity time together, it just gets hard. And I found as a married person, married now for 11 years, unless we’re highly intentional about schedule, Lisa and I become partners in the parents business. We’re just partners in the business and kind of keeping the family going and running and prospering.

I’m so grateful that early in my career as a pastor, a wise minister, he’d been in the ministry many years who had a great marriage came to me and said David, let me give you a little formula if you want to maintain your marriage and grow your marriage, as your church grows and prospers and competes for time. He gave me a little plan. Three Ds. In fact, three Ds, if you do the three Ds, you might avoid the big D. You with me? Three Ds. I’ve shared these before, but jot these down. This is actually a good plan, guideline when it comes to maintaining quality time, face time with your spouse. Dialogue, date, and depart. Read those with me. Dialogue, date, and depart. His recommendation was to me as an older man seeking to mentor me in the moment was you need to dialogue daily. Every single day you need to have some quality time talking to your spouse, interacting with your spouse. Maybe it’s very early in the day before the kids get up, maybe it’s late in the day when the kids go to bed. But some time every day just talking about life and problems and challenges and the good things and the dreams. A little time in daily dialogue.

Date, he said, weekly. Now, I know a lot of our married people, got married hoping we could stop dating, but guys we need to continue to date our mate, continue to date our spouse. And so I think every week if you can find that time, get away with your bride, have a date. For us, if it’s a choice between dinner or a movie, we choose dinner so we can talk, so we can have some face time together, not just sit in the dark together. Well, that’s fun, too. But date. And by the way, when I say date, I don’t mean double dates. That went out in high school. You and your bride.

And then depart. Depart quarterly or at least twice a year. I want to put an asterisk by this one because for my wife and I, it is big. We get away somewhere. And again, I don’t mean just getting away and taking a little mini vacation together, just the two of us, but sometimes it’s work related. I’m speaking at a church somewhere, at a conference, and I’ll take Lisa along, we’ll tag on an extra day in the hotel at one end or the other. And a couple of days alone, and we love our kids, we’re kid crazy, we tend to track toward that kid-centric family sometimes. But sometimes just together we reconnect, we discover why we fell in love. I recommend that simple plan for time to invest in your spouse. We’re using cars and classic muscle cars as our ongoing metaphor. As I’ve talked to the owners of some of these great old cars from yesteryear, there’s a common denominator. Some owner, maybe not the present owner, but a previous owner, some owner, to restore that car, to maintain that car has poured a ton of time and love into that ride. Relationships are exactly the same way.

Let me give you another little fox sometimes can do damage in your relationship. I want to call these unspoken expectations. Unspoken expectations. No matter who you are, how normal, how healthy, or how weird and dysfunctional your family of origin is, your family of origin kind of shapes your view of life, relationship, and marriage. Maybe you thought I want to be nothing like my family, but it is still kind of your framework as you come into a new relationship. So as you’re trying to figure out things like conflict resolution, how to discipline the kids, division of labor, family rituals, your family of origin’s going to imprint certain ideas on you as you come into marriage. You’ll have certain expectations as to the way this whole marriage relationship should go down based probably on your family of origin.

Example, single dude. Single dude grows up in a family, and his mom is highly domestic, dotes on him a little too much, and when he has dirty clothes, he doesn’t help do laundry or chores, doesn’t even take his clothes to the hamper. He just drops his dirty clothes on the floor. And mom who’s highly domestic and probably dotes on him too much just picks up those clothes and cleans those clothes and folds those clothes and puts those clothes a couple days later in a drawer neat and clean. So this guy grows up, single dude with this system. Dirty clothes go on the floor, couple days later, end up in the drawer. That’s a nice system, he thinks. Right? Dirty clothes on the floor, later in the drawer. Now, single dude gets married, and his expectations are just what he’s always done. Where’s his shirt? He takes it off, throws it in the floor. And clothes are piling up, and he doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t communicate, but after a while he’s thinking, man, she doesn’t even love me. Doesn’t love me, doesn’t care for me. She’s not very domestic. She’s not a very good housekeeper. Look at all my dirty clothes piling up. She doesn’t communicate. She’s thinking I am married to a slob. What’s wrong with this guy? This guy does not respect me, doesn’t want to help out, just throws his clothes in the floor. At some point, these two must communicate. She needs to say hubby, I ain’t your momma. You’ve got to help me with this. In fact, I recommend she doesn’t say it like that. I do recommend she communicates. And in fact, here are three very important ground rules as you come into this relationship with expectations. As you speak and communicate, you’ve got to communicate with love, with respect, and openness. When we talk about an issue, we don’t see eye to eye, I kind of expected A and Lisa expected B, as we have dialogue about that, as we communicate, those three rules, lovingly, respectfully, and with openness. And you’ve got to talk.

For a marriage to work, you’re different, from different families and you did dinner one way and they did dinner another way, and you did Christmas this way and they didn’t — all that stuff. You’ve got to talk about the small things and the big things with love, respect, and openness. Say it with me. Love, respect, and openness. Everybody. Love, respect, and openness. So very loving, very polite, very respectfully, open for feedback, not taking cheap shots at each other. Talk about these things. Small things, big things. Sex. Survey of married people, sex a small thing or a big thing? I’m saying big thing. Big thing. Amen? Amen. You’re allowed to answer. Big thing. Big thing. Big, big — got to talk about it because, listen, we live in a culture with the myth of sexual connectivity, sexual chemistry. The myth goes like this. If you’re right for each other, you just intuitively know how to sexually satisfy the other person. I mean, he’s going to understand intuitively, she’s going to know just instinctively. You’re going to know. That’s a bunch of hogwash. Guys, can I tell you, physiologically speaking, emotionally speaking, women are way more complex sexually than we are. And if you think intuitively he’s going to understand — no. When it comes to things even as important as intimate, as weird and awkward as conversation about sex, you’ve got to do it with love and respect and openness.

Let me give you an example. Buddy of mine got married sometime in the past, and this guy during his singleness, man, I respect him. He handled his singleness with great purity. He married as a virgin. He married a woman who’d been married before, had some kids. Obviously, she had sexual experience. I was talking to him I mean just a day or two before the wedding and the honeymoon. He had zero regrets. He was so glad he handled his singleness with purity God’s way. He was incredibly excited about the honeymoon. But he pulled me aside because, you know, I was married and said Dave, I’m so excited, but I’m a little nervous, you know, because she has a couple of kids, she has more experience than me, and I’m excited but I’m aware that she has more experience than me. Can you give me any kind of help? Like all of a sudden I’m like Doctor Ruth or something. Okay. I said well, how about this. On your honeymoon, you guys get together. First thing you do, why don’t y’all pray together? Why don’t you pray together, kneel by the side of your bed and just dedicate your marriage and every component and facet of your relationship to God. And then talk to her. Talk to her. I mean, just share your heart with love and respect, just be really open with her. I want you to say something like this. I want you tell her, hey, I’m very excited about tonight. I also am a little nervous about tonight. Because she’s going to know how you feel. She knows what’s going down already. She knows that she has experience you don’t. So tell her. Say I’m a little nervous about this, but we’re going to have a life together, and I want you to talk to me about sex. I want to go to school on you. I want to learn what pleases you, what excites you, what arouses you. I want to learn what — so you talk to me with love and respect, and you honor me. I’m so open. And then you say this to her, because I want to rock your world in bed for the years to come. Yeah.

There’s some ladies, you’re getting a little excited just hearing that conversation. You’re hoping your husband will go home and say words like that to you. See, in small things and big things we must communicate, because we all have these unspoken expectations, we have, and there are so many myths in our culture about connectivity and rapport and chemistry and if we were right for each other, he would automatically know, and if she were right for me, she would automatically intuitively know. So much of marriage is counterintuitive. We must talk with love and respect and with openness. Amen?

Third little fox that can do you in, I’m going to call this one unrealistic views of marriage. Unrealistic views of marriage. In our culture, so much of our views of marriage and romance have been shaped by fairytales and kids’ books and TV shows and movies. For example, marriage looks nothing like this. Keep your eyes closed. Trust me? I trust you. Open your eyes. I’m flying. Jack. Seriously, I mean seriously, I mean, that has nothing do with the reality of marriage. Number one, that’s Hollywood. It is a movie. Those are two actors. They’re not even really in love. They’re not even really named Jack or Rose. In fact, it’s not even really a boat in that scene. It’s computer special effects and a giant green screen. There is nothing real. And speaking of the movie, he dies in the end. And she promised to love him forever, never let him go. Then he dies, and she lets him go. And then it’s like the whole blue diamond thing later on, like, you know, she could have probably prevented the entire Great Depression, but she hung onto the blue diamond. At the end, she throws it in the water. Probably could have saved her daughter from a life of poverty, but no. Nothing real about that. And if you think your marriage is going to have the romance of Titanic, your expectations are going to collide with the iceberg of reality. It doesn’t go that way.

Look, God wants your marriage to be a good marriage, even a great marriage, a growing marriage. He wants to favor your marriage. But your marriage will never be perfect. Here’s the first reason why. You’re in it. See, you’re a highly imperfect person. You’re just like me. We’re highly imperfect people. And by definition we cannot be part of perfect relationships. You see, when your marriage is struggling, you tend to focus on the shortcomings of your spouse. I think that’s the wrong place to start. I think I need to focus on where I fall short. So let’s just own it to day.

In fact, I want all the married people in the house to turn to their spouse and say this marriage is not perfect because of me. Yeah, I mean that. Right now, let’s do that. Turn to your spouse right now and say that. This marriage isn’t perfect because of me. We’ve got to own that right now. Now, God wants our marriages to be good, to be growing, to be prospering, but they’ll never be perfect. You engaged people, man, I love you, but you are so dumb at this point in your relational journey. Because I hear you guys say all the time we’re perfect for each other, we’re just perfect for each other. No, you’re not. Stop saying that. Hey, God recognizes our relationships will never be perfect, but he wants them to grow and prosper. My relationship will never be perfect because of me, yet it can still be good by God’s grace. All right.

Hey, just some thought, some thoughts. Because these little things — thank you. These little things, these little foxes, song of Solomon 2:15, can cause a lot of damage. So be aware of these things. You’ve got to invest the time. Be careful about those unspoken expectations. You must communicate with love, honor, and openness. Love, respect, and openness. And then finally, there are some myths in our culture, very unrealistic views of marriage. Your marriage can be beautiful, blessed growing, but it will never be perfect because you’re in it. Amen? All right. Now, those are the small things. We could spend all night and the whole series on the small things, but you go ahead and make your own list. I want to talk about the subject tonight that catastrophic crash.

When someone in the marriage, maybe both parties in the marriage, they make a decision, there’s an event. Typically it is selfish, it is stupid and sinful, and it does incredible damage to that relationship. It is a crash. It is something horrible and horrific. I want to talk about those things. In fact, maybe you have been through that, maybe you’re going through this right now in your marriage. In fact, if that is you, you’re asking yourself this question tonight. Is my marriage totaled out? Is there any hope of repair or restoration in my marriage tonight? I want to try to help you answer that question. I can’t answer that question for you, but you before God can find the right answer to that. When I talk about this incredible crash event, I mean things like abandonment, abuse, and adultery.

Now, tonight I want to talk about adultery. I wish I had time to deal with all three of those, but I will say this about physical abuse. If you’re in a marriage right now and you’re being physically abused, get yourself safe. Put some space — if this is going on in your marriage, put some space between you and the abuser right now. If this person is one of those rare, weird people, a mean-spirited manipulator trying to use the Bible to bully you into staying, your pastor is telling you get yourself to safety. I’m not going to talk about abuse tonight, but God does not want you to be a physically abused person. I’m going to talk about adultery tonight because sadly, adultery is very, very common. And of course, in the context of marriage, adultery is very, very damaging. And it happens all the time. Surveys will bear that out, but just life experience bears that out.

Example, have a friend of mine, he’s been in South Florida doing ministry for a couple of years, but he’s from the Bible Belt. He’s a good guy, smart guy, has a deep Southern accent. And to be honest, when those guys come from Georgia and Carolinas down here, I always wonder how long they’re going to stick. Some do. Some fall in love with the greatest place to do life and ministry anywhere, South Florida. Others run back to Georgia as quickly as they can because it’s different down here. It’s a little edgier down here. It’s definitely — there’s not a Christian culture down here, at least a church culture down here, that’s as prominent as in the Bible Belt. Anyways, I’m talking to this guy and said well, how you doing down here, Mike? He said well, man, I know I’m in a different place because I’m driving my car the other day, and at Perry Airport, one of those small planes is taking off carrying the big banners they fly over the beach advertising nightclubs and restaurants and what have you, except this one’s not going to the beach. This banner plane’s flying over University zig-zagging over the traffic and the homes. He said I looked closely to see what it said. Here’s what it said on this long banner. It said Jose A., I know who you are banging. Get a lawyer. Now, now, listen, because this person had warned Jose to get a lawyer, I’m assuming that this person who bought the banner is his wife, right? And Jose is about to find out how damaging adultery can be, right? It can be damaging out there. It can do all kinds of damage in a relationship. I want to talk about that tonight. And I want to give advice. Again, I can’t tell you what God wants you to do, but I can give you some guidelines. There are many, many places where the Bible warns against the pain of adultery.

A friend of mine in ministry, he’s been invited by Nightline to get on TV and debate the pros of fidelity versus a group that wants to highlight and advocate adultery. That should be the easiest debate in the history of all time. The crowd at Jerry Springer boos the cheater, all right? But the Bible says throughout what damage adultery can do. One example is Hebrews 13:4. Read the part on the screen that’s highlighted. It says, “Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled, for fornicators an adulterers God will judge.” And I kind of hate to highlight negative, real strong, truths in the Bible, but I do teach the entire word of God. And I recognize as I unpack this truth here seven times this weekend, there’s going to be some folks in this room, and this is part of your relational history. There’ll be people here tonight and they’re married now, but they got together because they hooked up and one person was married at the time. I’m not here to judge you. We love you as a church comprised of highly imperfect people. We just own that. So take your past and be wise and just don’t do it again. But there’ll also be people here who are in the midst of doing this right now, people here who are on the edge of doing this right now.

So I want to go at this as clearly as I know how. How does it happen? How do people who are married people fall into the trap of adultery? I’m not even going to deal with that. Why? I taught on that in very clear terms about six weeks ago. And you can listen to that entire message online. In fact, you can now watch it online. Back in our Strip Club series in a very graphic, clear way I tried to explain how people slip into adultery, how good people who maybe never intended, not somebody’s who out there trolling for someone, but someone who kind of falls into this trap — keep it up there, guys, if you would — how the enemy sets this trap for people, how before affairs become physical, they’re emotional. And so you can go to our web site, and right there it says watch online right now. You can watch that teaching. In fact, you can watch tonight’s teaching about Tuesday of this week right online. If you’ll go to that top arrow where it says message series, what will come up is one of the options is Strip Club. If you’ll go to the one entitled How to Have an Affair. And I’ll warn you, if you were not here, it is clear. It is rated PG-13 as tonight’s teaching is. I wanted to make it as clear as I knew how. I made people very uncomfortable. In fact, we’re not going to show this episode on television on Channel 7, but it is available to you online. So if you’re wondering how this happens, I talked about it. I’ll show you how this happens, how no one is immune.

In fact, the first step, married person, is thinking it could never happen to you. So if you weren’t here that weekend, check it out online. But why does it happen? Let me talk about that. Why do people fall under this trap? Well, sometimes in a marriage there’s just one person who’s the innocent party. One person is unfaithful, the other partner is working out the marriage in love, and it just kind of happened. Often, though, it’s not that case. Maybe it is a situation where there has been maybe a series, maybe years of just small emotional damage done, little dents and dings, some of those little foxes over the course of time, and that relationship is struggling to a degree, and the person who commits adultery, the way they open up to that is they start looking for what I want to call an emotional or relational upgrade. They’re thinking I’m so unhappy with her. In fact, I’ll talk to the ladies. Because when I did Strip Club, I kind of did it from a man’s point of view. I’ll talk to the ladies. You’re thinking I’m unhappy with him, I’ve been married to him, he does not appreciate me, does not communicate with me. And the enemy, the enemy loves to mess up marriages, he especially loves to take down Christian marriages. And he will try to drop in your life somebody who has those commodities it seems like your spouse is missing in spades, and so maybe at the office for you, ladies, there’s this guy, and he’s kind and he’s attentive and he listens to your stories, and you just feel this connectivity for him, and you begin to imagine what it would be like with him if you weren’t with the guy that you’re married to, that old slug of a guy, but with this guy how much happier you would be. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a sexual fantasy, but just you imagine how much happier you would be because this guy is so attentive, he listens. And you’re kind of out there looking, because you have some dents and dings in your present relationship, you’re looking for that emotional or relational upgrade.

In fact, to make this clear, I was thinking about cell phones. Seems that cell phones, some of us are always open for that newest technology, right? Can y’all remember way back in the day when the first person you ever saw with one of these and how cool that person was? That person who had the — first person you saw with a brick phone. You’re like man, that is the coolest person in the world. Had like this eight-pound brick phone. I saw Todd Shambo in Golds Gym walking with a brick phone. I thought, man, Todd is cool. Todd’s a highly important guy. He has a brick phone. Today no one wants a brick phone. But once upon a time, this was the cool technology. But after a while, the brick phone got a little smaller and — no, the next generation of phones looked kind of more like this. This is kind of like the Miami Vice Don Johnson phone. Got to pull the antenna up, right? And who wants a brick phone now? I’ve got this new phone. So you traded in this phone if you had this phone and you got the Don Johnson phone. And then the phones continued to evolve down the course of time, and maybe you got like a flip phone like, you know, a Rachel calls Ross flip phone from Friends, and who wants this big old phone? I want this little, tiny phone. So you trade in the phone. And then finally — I don’t know what your phone is now, but some of you guys, man, I have an iPhone. I love my iPhone. It’s great. Easy technology. So whatever phone I had, I exchanged that phone for the iPhone.

So we’re always kind of open and trolling for that next coolest cell phone technology. What typically happens to you? Well, as you trade in one phone for the next phone, you normally do it before your contract is done. So there’s all these like penalties and, you know, charges. And as you start to see your bill, typically there’s unexpected expenses every single time. When you make that upgrade from this phone to this phone, there’s always that surprising expense. I have found when people commit adultery, there’s always some penalties, some relational expense and pain they didn’t ever count on. It always — I mean to a person they’ll always say this really cost me more than I thought. And I thought I was upgrading. And by the way — and again, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings in the house, but in my observation and experience as a pastor of seeing this happen way too many times, people think they’re trading in this for this. Oh, this relationship’s going to cost me. It’s going to be pain and expense and attorneys, and people are going to be hurt and my children — but I’m getting this. I’m getting this new guy who he listens to me, he’s attentive to me, and life with him, he’s the sexy iPhone. But you actually make the full exchange, and you end up with this guy, and after you start doing life together, try to build a life and pay bills together and blend together your children together, you find out this guy isn’t this. He’s just another brick after all. And you’re kind of sick, because you got the brick again and all the charges and pain and relational expense, and I’ve got another brick on my hands. We traffic in truth around here.

I just want to tell you, if you — and again, I’m talking to the ladies right now, but the same would apply to the guys. But if you’ve got that guy out there and he’s at the office and he is not your husband but he’s listening to you and he’s kind of pursuing you and he’s so attentive and he’s laughing at your jokes, straight up, he’s doing these things because he wants to get in your pants. And if you end up with him someday doing life with him, I’m betting this is what you get with a whole lot of extra emotional expense and relational pain. Why not protect yourself? Stay away from adultery, go back to your marriage, work on your marriage, work on the old brick at home right now, and watch God do something remarkable and redemptive and healing in your relationship. Affairs occur all the time, but typically deception is the enemy taking down a marriage. I mean, that’s why it happens. People got to be aware.

So what do you do? What do you do if this has occurred in your relationship? Well, Biblically speaking, adultery, Matthew chapter 5 is one place is grounds for a justified divorce. Jesus said that’s one reason you can seek a divorce that even he would recognize. In fact, I would say to you if you’re married to someone right now and they’re habitually unfaithful, you probably need to punt. Probably need to cut your losses and go unless God gives you a specific word. Now, if it’s a one-time occurrence, or maybe just one relationship and they’re repentant and they are sorry, Biblically speaking, you’re still free to leave if you want to, if you are the victim. Now, if you’re the offender, you’re not free at all. In fact, Biblically speaking, what you’ve done is empower the other person. But even if it’s a one-time thing, you are still free to leave, Biblically speaking. But you’re also free to stay. You’re also free to see God perhaps work a relational miracle and be redemptive and do something very powerful and do something glorious in your marriage. In fact, I would actually recommend that. So David, what are the steps? What if right now I’m in that situation? What if I am the offender? What if I am the person who’s committed the sin of adultery? What if my spouse has? Well, quickly I’ll wrap with this idea. There are three things you’ve got to do, three Biblical things.

The first thing you need to do is you’ve got to confess. If you’re the person whose done this, you need to tell your spouse. You’ve got to confess. Now, listen, I kind of prayed over this one hard, because I know this confession, if they don’t know, it’s going to cause that other person pain. And you’ve already made a big enough mess. But I think Biblically speaking, based on what the Bible says, what the Bible says alone, I would recommend you confess. Let me show you the verse. James chapter 5 and verse 16, it says, “Therefore confess your sins” — you always confess your sin to God, first and foremost. But “Therefore confess your sins to each other, and pray for each other, so that you may be healed.” And my hope for your marriage is God’s healing. Now, couple of thoughts about how you confess. Be honest, but don’t give out gory details. In fact, I recommend you probably confess in the presence of a third party who both of you trust and love. Have someone else there, a godly person, a Christian person. The pastors at this church, we have some pastors on staff. They walk people through that very awkward, very painful, difficult conversation. If your spouse comes to you and tells you this, don’t probe. You’re going to want to ask questions. You’re going to want details. I recommend you stay away from that, at least sleep on that a few nights, pray about that, because the more you understand, the more graphic, the more you must forgive. But confession is always the first step.

Second step is counsel. You’ve got to bring some wise, insightful discernment into this situation. Now, some of you with your marriages, you go to the wrong people for counsel. You keep going to your brother-in-law, man, been married and divorced four times. Oh, just punt her, baby, get rid of it. Wrong person. Go to someone discerning and godly in your life for counsel. If it’s something as serious as adultery, I recommend professional Christian counsel. There’s people we recommend here at the church. The pastors, we have pastors who will talk to you. By the way, I’m not one of them. I’m the worst counselor we have on the — you don’t want me as your counselor. But we have great counselors that will do that on our staff. But for something this serious, we tend to refer out to professional Christian counsel. Well, that’s going to cost me some money. A professional Christian — guess what attorneys charge? It’s expensive.

And then finally, the third step is you forgive. If you’re the offended party, if God leads you — forgive regardless, but if you want to see the marriage healed, you forgive, but you forgive with accountability, meaning this. You forgive that person, and we owe each other love, but you do not — listen, you do not owe trust. They’ve got to earn your trust again. You’re the offending party, man. You’ve got to rearrange your life and your schedule. And if you can’t maintain a friendship with that person, if that’s someone you met at the workplace, you may have to quit your Job. Put distance and space. You must do things to earn that — accountability. I think with those three steps as you pray and do it God’s way, listen, here’s hope, God can bring about great healing. I’ve seen God do works in marriages. I’ve seen marriages humanly speaking, I wouldn’t have bet a nickel on. But God has stepped in with two willing partners and done something so powerful and so redemptive. But it’s hard work. It’s a lot of hard work. But those are your three steps. Confess, seek counsel, and then you forgive with accountability. If you’re the offender, you earn that person’s respect again, you earn their trust over the course of time. Whatever it takes, you do, the hard work.

Muscle Car Marriage. Been talking about cars. Got one session left next week. On this idea, I was hoping to shoot a video with my friend. I have a friend of mine, he is literally a world-class car collector. This guy is very wealthy, and his thing is cars. In his collection he has over 60 cars. Has a customized, three-level garage at his home. He lives in Indy, kind of a car place, Indianapolis 500. Loves cars. Has these old classic Duesenbergs, Mercedes from the ’30s. Beautiful cars. Has a bunch of new rides, too. So the first time I ever went to visit his house, he showed me with great pride his car collection. Then I hopped in one of his cars, and we drove downtown kind of to a warehouse district, kind of in the hood. And he said let me show you these cars. I’m very proud and excited about these cars. And we went into this warehouse, this nasty old warehouse, and here he had about 8 or 10 Porsches, Ferraris, one Lamborghini, all totaled out. They’d all been in tremendous, catastrophic crashes. Each one of these rides were written off by the insurance company. Just the insurance company said they’re totaled, they’re junk, they’re useless. I said, why are you showing me these cars? He said, well, I just paid pennies on the dollar for these cars. I paid a tiny fraction of what they originally sold for, these messed-up cars. I said, why do you buy these junk, once upon a time beautiful cars? He said, well, about a year ago, I met this genius master mechanic. This guy is so good, he can work miracles. So I take him to the auto auctions where they auction off these high-end rides that have been through these horrendous crashes, and he’ll find — not all of them, but every once in a while, he’ll say that one right there, that one right there, buy that one. That one right there. That one, I know it looks like a mess. You buy that one and you give me enough time and tools and the parts I ask for, you give me the time, I’ll pour my love and my genius into these. And he restores these cars. It takes months. Restores these cars. They look showroom new. I mean, can’t even see dents or dings. I mean, amazing what this genius can do.

You know, at Church by the Glades, we have a genius, master relational mechanic, the Lord Jesus Christ. I’ve watched him do it. I’ve watched him take his holy, nail-scarred hands, when he has two parties, and they have made a mess, they’ve been through a crash. It was him or it was her or it was both of them. But they come to Jesus on his knees, and they say Lord, whatever it takes. We’ll do the hard work. We’ll take the time. He takes the tools of his grace, his power, and his forgiveness and does works of healing and restoration you would not even recognize. We serve that kind of great God. Amen?

So I don’t know — there’s going to be a lot of people here this weekend. I’m not sure who’s going to be a special guest or watching this weekend, but if Mr. and Mrs. Jose A. happen to be here this weekend, my brother Jose, cut that out. Stop doing that thing you’re doing. But even you guys are not beyond the power and the love of my Jesus. He is the master mechanic, and he’s here tonight to give you hope and healing. And all God’s people said –

Amen.

Father, we love you, we celebrate you. You are a good and mighty God. May we be so available for your radical grace and restoration. I pray your anointing over all our relationships, over our friendships, our family relationships, our parenting, our children, brothers and sisters in Christ, but over the marriages. The enemy wants to take down our marriages. And in Jesus’ name, he cannot have them.

And for the damaged marriages in the house, I pray tonight would be a new night and this would be a new day, in Jesus’ name. And for those that are messing up, I pray they’d stop and repent and find grace. We love you, Lord. And all God’s people shouted with joy amen. Go out there and beat up a car. Have a great night.

Muscle Car Marriage: Part 4 – Choosing the Right Model: Transcript

MUSCLE CAR MARRIAGE

Choosing the Right Model

September 19-20, 2009

David Hughes

Thank you for purchasing this message. If you would like more information about Fellowship Church’s resources or an Ed Young teaching series, just log onto our web site.

What’s up, Church by the Glades? Man, good to see you today. Man, so glad you’re here. If you’re a newbie, I’m David Hughes, one of the pastors. Welcome to our worship experience. This is the fourth of seven for the weekend. Glad you are with us right now.

If you have your Bible, turn to Genesis chapter 24. Say that with me. Genesis chapter 24. One more time. Genesis chapter 24. If you don’t have your Bible, read this when you get home sometime this week. And we’ve been covering relationships. This is the last installment of the series of talks called Muscle Car Marriage. A lot of talk has been about marriage, the primary target, married people, but I promised our singles one session would be dedicated to them. Now, if you’re married, don’t leave. I actually had a couple walk out last night when I said it was marriage. Somebody got up and left. Look, the number one relationship principle is don’t be selfish, right? Got to listen for other people. And by the way, if you’re married, a lot of these principles will cross the line of marriage, be very valuable and relevant to you today. But I want to talk to singles because, man, it’s weird and wonderful to be a single. If you’re out there dating and trying to navigate the dating waters and the singles scene, perhaps looking for that someone, that can be difficult.

So I want to get a little conversation going. I love dialogue. But I want you to have a little conversation with somebody around you. So right now, eyeball that person. Pick out somebody that’s going to be your conversational neighbor for one question. I want you to tell your neighbor about a date in your past. And wait a minute. Here are the rules. Going to take like 60 seconds, 30 seconds for you, 30 seconds for your neighbor, and I want you to pick one of the dates from your past. Could be your recent past or your distant past. Tell them, A, tell them about your most embarrassing date, or B, tell them about your most memorable date, or C, maybe your most recent date. Now, for some of y’all, embarrassing, memorable, and recent, that’s all the same date. I don’t know. But whatever it is — and by the way, if you are a married person and you pick out memorable or recent, make sure it’s with your spouse. Just a little hint there. Ready? As I begin, go. Find that person right now. Go. Just take 30 seconds. Be brief. My most embarrassing date or my most memorable date, or my date, I had a date last night. It was a disaster or it was wonderful. Go ahead. Just quickly a little discussion about that if you can. Oh, I hear laughter. All right. Ready? Five, four, three, two, one. Okay. Person number one stop. Person number two, go. Number two, go. Quickly. Quickly. That’s good. That’s good. Oh, awesome. Get ready to wrap. Ten, five, four, three, two, one. And in Jesus’ name, shut up. Just shut up right now. Stop right now. Y’all enjoyed that. You enjoyed that. Hey, give a hand for David, our keyboard player. David has done ministry with me for a lot of years. Good friend. And by the way, you know, y’all enjoyed that conversation. If you’re here and you’re a single brother and you happen to be sitting next to a beautiful single woman you didn’t know, I gave you a slam dunk opportunity right there. You should have said, oh, let me tell you about my most memorable date. It will be perhaps with you on Friday night. You could have worked that. You had a chance to kind of bust out a move there. So if you missed that moment, wow, sorry about that, bro.

I want to talk to singles today. It’s wonderful to be a single. But if you’re someone and you’re looking for someone else, there is a Biblical call and gifting towards singleness. The apostle Paul celebrated his singleness. He said for me, it was a preferable state. He said I’m free to serve God 24/7. Because if you are a married person, as much as you want to please and serve the Lord, you’re also taking care of your spouse and maybe meeting needs of children. And that is a beautiful distraction. So if you’re single, you’re not a second-class spiritual citizen. The Bible esteems that relational status. And there is a gifting to life-long singleness. Now, maybe you’re here and you’re single, going oh, I hope I don’t have that gifting, because I’d like to be married someday. And that’s cool, too. The Bible values and esteems marriage. So if you are single looking for that someone, you’re trying to date and figure out dating, and it might seem like the Bible’s not very helpful because they did not date or court as we do today in our culture.

Marriages were arranged back in the Biblical time. But in Genesis chapter 24, thank you, Genesis chapter 24, we’re going to see God kind of hook up, get together in marriage this amazing single man, Isaac, with this wonderful, brilliant, single woman, Rebekah. Now, it’s not easy. There’s going to be an arduous journey, a little mystery. I mean, it’s not easy to find the right person. In fact, Genesis 24 is a long chapter. God makes the whole universe, Genesis chapter 1, only 31 verses. But to get just one single man with the right single girl takes 67 verses in Genesis 24. It’s not even easy for God. But I want to give you some hints and some help if you’re looking for that special someone in your life.

In fact, we’re using, if you’re new, kind of car metaphors and car parables, and I would kind of use this idea or this image for you. I like to buy cars at dealerships that haggle. I like the ones that the sticker price is not the real price they’ll sell it for. And some of y’all hate that. You disdain that. You want one of those dealerships the price on the window is the price of the car, you just go in and figure out if you can — I know I like the one where they put you in that little cubicle for hours, and you’re sweating and you’re going back and forth, and they walk out, I’ve got to run this by the manager, you’re calculating. I love to come in, too, with all kinds of homework, do all kinds of research online, talk to buddies in the business, find out what that car should really go for. I mean, I like to come in prepared. Because if you walk into a dealership without doing your homework, without thinking it through, make an impulse buy, you’re going to get jacked. In fact, only one time in my life, I was so frustrated with my present car because it broke down a couple of times. Man, I just drove on to a dealership, said I want to trade this, get something new. And in like one hour I bought a car. I called Lisa, honey, I’m going to buy this car. No doubt, I got the worst deal I ever got on a car. That sales guy was drooling as he understood the dynamic taking place, because I really hadn’t thought it through, it was just kind of impulsive. That one’s flashy and new. I’ll buy that one right there. I got messed over probably. Now, if you do dating that way, choose a spouse that way, just being impulsive and emotional, not thinking it through, not taking it before the Lord, you may get jacked. You may want to exchange that model, and you can’t do that.

So the topic today is how to find the right model. What are the things I should be doing, thinking about as I’m looking for that special someone in my life? What should I do? Genesis 24 is the text. And I’m going to give you several ideas. And if you’re single or know someone single, write these down. Here’s number one. Here’s the first thing you should be thinking about. If I’m looking for someone, I want to make sure the big, honking, important stuff in life, I’ve got that in common. The big, honking, important things, I have those things in common with that person that I’m connecting with. Because I meet singles all the time that will say to me, oh, you know, David, I met this great girl, she’s awesome, we have so much in common. We both like John Mayer, Mexican food, and The Office. We have so much in common. And I’m like well, that’s great and everything, but those are little things in common. How about the big things? Do you share a common life philosophy? Do you share the same values? Are you moving the same direction? Do you have the same world view? Do you share faith? Do you have the all-important commonality of Christ commitment in your life? Are you in love with Jesus? Is he or she in love with Jesus? Is that like centric to your relationship? Do you have that in common? No, but we both like Mexican food and the Marlins. That’s not so important.

Now, see, back in this day, parents got very involved in finding the right person. So Isaac’s father is Abraham, that holy hero. So look what happens in Genesis chapter — _>> 24. _>> Genesis 24, first verses. It says, “Abraham was now old and well advanced in years, and the Lord had blessed him in every way.” Isn’t God good? “And he said to the chief servant in his household, the one in charge of all that he had, I want you to swear by the Lord, the God of heaven, the God of earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I am living, but go to my country and to my own relatives and get a wife for my son Isaac.” Now, interesting thing he says, because he lived in Canaan. His neighbors were Canaanites. He said look, servant, I want you to help find the right bride for my dear son, the child of promise, Isaac, but don’t get one of the girls from the hood here. Not one of the neighborhood girls. Now, he’s not being racist or prejudiced. He didn’t hate the Canaanites. He lived among the Canaanites. In fact, there were many good reasons he probably should have recommended that Isaac marry a local girl, a Canaanite girl. Why? Well, logistics would be easier. You know, extended family was a very big deal back in the day. Her family would be close by to maintain family connections. More importantly, in the mind set of this time in this day in this passage, business contracts were often solidified by marriage. Treaties were solidified by way of marriage or ratified. And so if he would marry a local girl, that would improve his standing in the community, probably be great financial and business opportunity there. But rather than do the convenient thing, the comfortable thing, the cash thing to make more money, he said no Canaanites. The reason why, the Canaanites were despicable people spiritually speaking. They worshipped idols, pagan deities. They would even sacrifice their own children to these demonic deities. He said no, no, no. No Canaanite for my boy. I want a girl at home that shares his love for Jehovah God. You’ve got to have that most important thing, right? That most important thing.

So maybe right now and you’re a single Christian girl and you’re dating this guy, he’s not a believer, you’re saying well, he’s not a believer, but he’s not that bad. I don’t think he’s ever like sacrificed a baby to an idol. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy. Well, the bar is very high for Christian singles on this issue of what you have in common. If you miss every other verse I talk about today, do not miss 2 Corinthians chapter 6, verse 14. It’s kind of a life principle among who and what you align yourself with. It’s broad, but here’s what it said. Read the part that’s highlighted. “Do not be bound together with unbelievers.” Here Paul’s saying to believers, man, don’t be bound together. The original translation means unevenly yoked, like a yoke of oxen. Don’t be bound together. Don’t be in tight alignment with people who don’t have the commonality of your faith. Now, what would constitute a relationship where you are bound or yoked together? Obviously, marriage, obviously, engagement. Well, Pastor David, can a Christian ever casually date a non-Christian, casually date them? I don’t know. You’ve got to wrap your heart around this verse. You see what God’s saying to you.

But here’s a 411, singles. You do tend to marry someone you date. And I have found when I started to date someone and start to fall for someone and have feelings for someone, when you start to feel loved, you get really stupid, don’t you? Your judgment goes out the — come on. Be honest. Your judgment goes out the window when the emotions ramp up. So be very careful. Man, make sure you have the commonality of Christ.

First thing I would recommend, you have the big, honking, important things in common. Check that off, yes or no. Second thing you should do, you should pray. You should pray. God, I’m looking for someone, God, I need your assistance because it’s hard out there to find that right man, that right — I need your help with this. One of the first things his servant does, he prays. You should pray, because dating is hard. Need all the outside help you can get. Some people ask me is it okay to use an online dating service for assistance? Sure, it is. Absolutely. But start with what I want to call theharmony.com. You with me? Some of y’all will find that very funny tomorrow. You think about that for a little while. Bring God into the process right here. Theharmony.com.

Look in verse 12, what the servant does. “Then he prayed, oh Lord, God of my master Abraham, give me success today.” I love the heart of the servant that says oh, this is a big thing to my master Abraham, who’s been so kind to me. You favored him, God. He’s trusted me with helping to find the right woman for Isaac, his dear son. So God, now I need your help. I need outside help on this. I invite you into this very important process. Why would you not pray about these things, be diligent in prayer, seek God on these things? In James chapter 4, it says you have not because you ask not. So make sure you’re asking God for his help. So okay, all right. Pastor David, so I’m a single, I’ll pray, I’ll pray and ask God’s assistance. I’m a single sister, so I’m going to stay right here in my living room and crochet and pray and crochet and pray and crochet and pray and hope God will just drop that righteous man into my life. Or maybe I’m a single brother. I’m going to pray, Pastor David. I’m going to pray that God bring me a single, godly woman. I’m going to stay right here in my momma’s basement and play video games and pray and pray and pray, oh, God, please drop that woman into my life. Well, let me give you something a little more proactive than that. The Bible talks about watch and pray. Jesus said to watch and pray. So not just pray, but then look for God’s person. In fact, read that with me. One, two, three. Look for God’s person. It’s an active praying. It’s a proactive process. I’m asking God, and then I want to put myself in environments actively where perhaps I might meet this person.

I love in verse 10 in this story. The servant, he journeys 400 miles. He goes all the way — 400 miles by camel back, about a three-week journey just to put himself in a new environment, not in Canaanite country, but a new environment where his odds of finding that right woman would be ramped up. See, he simply said I’m going to start with the ladies. Some of y’all are looking in the wrong places. I want you to look, ladies. I want you to look. Single girls, I want you to look. I want you to go on what I call a man scan. A man scan. But you’ve got to be in the right environment.

Example, my beautiful wife Lisa’s on the front row. I met her while I was serving, not just showing up even, but serving in a singles ministry at a church. I was serving in that ministry, I was involved. Now, I was there first and foremost for God. I was there to honor God, to learn about God, to serve God, right. But while I was there serving God, number one priority, I had my eyes open a little bit. I was just looking around. And one day a beautiful brunette kind of — I thought, hmm, that’s a beautiful — maybe I could pray with her, right? Ministry with her, right? So a man scan. Be open, but you must be in the right environment, single person. Single brother, I want to dial this down as carefully as I can. You’re probably not going to find that godly, righteous woman at Hooters. I could be wrong, but probably not. Must put yourself in environments, you must journey to environments where you’re more likely to find that person. So ladies, put yourself in that environment. Be part of our single adult ministry on Saturday night or volunteer or serve in a ministry at the church. Do it first and foremost for God, but have your eyes open. Never know what God might bring your way. Some of you are looking in the wrong places. And I’m just going to be really up in your face honest today, okay?

Some of you are not just in the wrong places, you’re also looking for the wrong kind of guy. You just gravitate towards toxic guys. You’ve got this thing for the dangerous guy. You’ve got this thing for bad boys. Oh, I like the bad boys. I like the dark, mysterious, dangerous, bad boys. I track towards — I can’t help it. I know I shouldn’t, but I just like that dangerous guy. Now again, I want you to be honest today. In fact, I want to give you a little quiz to see whether or not you gravitate towards bad boys.

Let me ask you a series of questions. Based on your answer, no need to answer out loud, I can tell whether or not you kind of have this thing for bad boys. Like one, who do you find the sexiest? A, Colin Farrell, B, Leonardo DiCaprio, C, Hugh Grant, D Homer Simpson? If you say A, Colin Farrell, kind of a bad boy, kind of dark. You might gravitate towards these dangerous, difficult guys. Here’s another one. Who’s the most appealing? A guy walking a puppy, a guy holding a baby, a guy holding a guitar? Oh, yeah. If it’s C, if it’s C, now, our guys that hold guitars, they’re good guys. They’re good guys. One’s even single, right? I’m not knocking musicians, but you may have a thing, that kind of bad boy.

Now, this one will really tell me, right? Who would you spend the entire day thinking about? A, a guy who calls you constantly, B, a guy who brought you flowers, C, a guy who hasn’t called you back, or D, a guy voted most likely to get arrested? If you said C or D, you’re tracking towards the bad boys. This will definitely tell me. Ready? Final question is would you go out with a guy with a bad reputation? A, yes, B, no, C, depends on how hot he is. If you said A or C, you track towards the bad boys. And listen, I get that thing. We all like the rebel, the out of bounds. But I’m here to speak truth to you. The reason you’re so frustrated in relationships is bad boys tend to make bad choices and tend to be bad boyfriends, bad fiances, and typically bad husbands. It’s because part of that bad boy vibe is they’re narcissistic, they’re self-centered, it’s all about them, they’re difficult and aloof, and there’s something about that aloofness that appeals to you, and it’s toxic. I mean, stay away from the bad boys. It’s probably going to make for a bad relationship and a bad marriage. I’m just saying.

Now, I’ve made some single sisters sad. She’s like oh, but I like them, but I know I shouldn’t like them. I like the bad boys, but I should do what God wants me to do. I should be looking for that Christian guy, that dull, domesticated Christian guy, that guy with the big Bible, that kind of anemic guy, that churchy guy. I know that’s what God has for me, so God, I’ll just — where is your boring man, oh God? No, no, no, no, no, no. If there’s one myth I seek to crucify, it’s the myth of the dull Christian man. That somehow, to be a Christian sucks all the testosterone out of life, that a Christian guy is this weak, wussy, wimpy, weeny kind of man. Oh, I love Jesus so much. No, that’s not what I means to be a man of God. That is a myth. That is not authentic.

I cannot wait for the series Epic. Because during Epic that starts in October, we’re going to study epic heroes, primarily men of God. They were warriors, they were righteous risk takers, they built kingdoms, they took down giants. I mean, God’s men, read your Bible, were men. And again, talking truth today, there is kind of a manliness scale. There’s some men that, men, some men that are kind of men, right? Right? If you equate being spiritual — all right. I’m just going to say it.

There’s a Chuck scale, a Chuck scale of manliness. My theory, Chuck scale. On the really manly side, we have Chuck. Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris is a man. When Chuck does push-ups, the earth moves beneath him, right? Chuck is a man. He’s high on the manly scale. Chuck Norris. But on the other end of the continuum I call the Chuck scale, we have Chuck Norris here, we have Chuck E. Cheese over here. Not even truly a man. Kind of a mouse. Kind of a little squirrelly guy, right? Now, all men fall somewhere between Chuck Norris and Chuck E. Cheese. You fall somewhere on the Chuck scale. You doubt me? May I demonstrate? Mr. T. Mr. T. Oh, he’s tracking towards the Chuck Norris side. Mr. T is on this side of the Chuck scale. Mr. T. Mr. Rogers, he’s a nice man and everything, but he’s definitely towards the Chuck E. Cheese side, right? I can keep going. John Wayne. John Wayne, he’s a man. Oh, I love John Wayne. John Wayne, Chuck Norris side. John Wayne, The Duke. Jon Gosselin, the dork. Now, he’s way over here on this side. Not taking care of his family, not honoring vows. I’m just saying, my opinion. My opinion. Oh, I can keep going all day long. Kimbo. Kimbo Slice. He’s a man. Don’t mess with Kimbo. Street fighter. He’s a rough guy. Kimbo. He’s a man. Chuck Norris. Kimbo. Kimbo. On the other hand, Kimbo, Kanye, picking on little girls in public, being mean to teenagers, that’s kind of mousy. That’s a Chuck E. Cheese thing in my opinion. My opinion. Now, if I just made you mad, you can e-mail me at pastordavidhughesdoesntcare.com, all right? I’m just saying.

So if you think, if you think to be a man is somehow to be mousy, to be a godly man is to be kind of anemic and weak, no. In fact, I hate how Hollywood always would cast Jesus in the movies of a generation ago. Anytime they did a Jesus movie, they picked the most anemic, just kind of down dude with zero charisma. I mean, Jesus, children gravitated towards Jesus. Jesus was a man, he was a carpenter, he was physical, pre Black & Decker, by the way. Jesus, when he saw villains robbing people in his father’s holy house, he dispensed them with violence. He was a man. Jesus was a man. Be a man like Jesus. Church, man up. See, our series about married men. Married men, we’re called to be what? Warriors for our family. Not warriors in our family, warriors for our family. To protect and provide for our family. The men of God should be men. Wait for Epic. We’re going to talk about it. So man up. Man up. So you think God has some wussy, weeny man, oh, welcome to Church by the Glades.

In fact, you know what God wants you to be, gentlemen? Wants you to be a godly bad A. I don’t know what you you’re thinking. I mean a godly bad Abe. A godly bad Abe. I’m not sure what you were thinking. A godly bad Abe. Abe. Like Abraham in the story. I don’t know what you were thinking. Abraham. Abraham. What were you thinking there? Get your mind out of the gutter. Abraham. Abraham was a bad dude. Abraham heard the call of a God he never met before, he left his ancestral home, and people never did that. He journeyed to a distant country, he put down roots, he built fame and fortune. He was a warrior with a personal army. Talk about bad? He’s fathering babies at age 100. Gentleman, you be a bad Abe. You be a bad Abe. Turn to another man in the room right now, brothers, and say you be a bad Abe. You be a bad godly Abe in Jesus’ name. Right? No wusses, no weenies. God doesn’t have that in mind.

But some of you girls, listen. You’re tracking for the wrong kind of guy. Tracking for some godless guy who pulls you away from your God. They’re difficult, they’re aloof, you have one bad relationship after another. Be smart. By the way, brothers, when you get to verse 22 as you read Genesis chapter 24, you’re going to see that the servant representing Isaac, when he finds the beautiful Rebekah, gives her gifts, gives her gold for her family and for her father and mother, gives her a little gold ring for her nose. She’s impressed by this, not because she’s materialistic. When she receives these gifts, you know what she’s thinking? Oh, my goodness. Isaac must have a job. Isaac must have a job. He must be gainfully employed. He has income. He has savings. He must have a life plan cooking, this Isaac guy. Listen, things like that and having a job, having the income, having your car paid off. Those things are drop-dead sexy for a brilliant woman, guys. The women are applauding there. So men, I’m not trying to bust on you. But some of you guys, your relationships fall apart because you’re just not serious about building your life, pursuing your career, trying to put some money aside, preparing yourself for marriage.

I’ll just be Biblical. Genesis chapter 2, before God gave Adam a wife, God gave Adam a job, to care for the garden. So get your life going, then God’s going to meet that person. So ladies, again, I’m not telling you to be aggressive, but eyes open. Little man scan going on. Now, gentlemen, I think based on this narrative, I think we are the pursuers in a relationship. Not the stalkers, but the pursuers. And I think if you’re here and you’re a Christian single guy, you should go on what I call a holy hottie hunt. A holy hottie hunt. That’s what’s happening here, man. They go 400 miles, travel, looking for a godly woman. A godly woman is worth a little drama and difficulty in your life. Go on a holy hottie hunt. Man, there’s a sanctified sweetie safari happening in this story. And you go looking for that lady, look for that godly woman. And as finally after three weeks travel over arid regions the servant arrives at an oasis, and he’s there by a well, and he’s saying God, I want to find the right girl. Help me connect and find the right girl. And he spots Rebekah. I love the way the Bible describes Rebekah. It says in verse 16, “The girl was very beautiful, and a virgin.” Attractive and pure. And this caught his eye. Well, that was cool. And man, it’s just a great story. So I think you have your eyes open, you look for this girl, this beautiful girl, this girl who’s pure of heart. By the way, as you’re looking, look for men and women. Look carefully.

A lot of people have issues they hide at first. I found a lot of marital problems are just personal problems with someone else in the room. Let me say it this way. When you’re single and you’re dating, check for the junk in the trunk. Check for the junk in the trunk. Check for the stuff. You’ve got to date them for a while. Got to watch them for a while. Don’t move too fast. Again, let me show you kind of a funny verse.

If you drop down to verse 21, it says, “Without saying a word, the man watched her closely.” Now, you can get arrested for this. Be careful how much you do this. But he observed her for a while, checked out her character for a while. This is so incredibly important, because sometimes we just move so fast in relationships. Some of you guys that are older, maybe you’re single again or single again and again. You meet someone, a couple of weeks into the relationship, you want to get married. I’ve met this great person. David, I want to get married. This person’s awesome. Known each other for two weeks. And you always have some story about your grandparents only knew each other ten days, been married like a hundred years. Look, there is no way you know that person in two weeks. There’s no way they know you. I’m not telling you to move slowly. Just don’t move too fast.

Now, speaking of moving slowly, some of you singles move too slowly. I’m not saying this if you’re 16, but if you’re 36 and you say oh, I’ve been dating them for ten years now, we got engaged back in 1983, we haven’t set a date yet. You need to figure it out. You’re moving too slowly. But check for the junk in the trunk. Kind of busted on the single girls for liking the bad boys. How about you single brothers, some of y’all like the difficult divas. You like to chase a challenge. You fixate on the flaky girl, right? Where’s that flaky chick? You fixate on her, and you’re like, oh, I like the challenging women. I like that woman that gives me — you don’t want to marry a challenge. It’s cool Rebekah was pretty. That’s not so important. I like as the servant watched her, he prayed this to God. God, look, I want to make sure I find the right girl, a girl of good character. And so God, I need your help. I don’t want to test you, but I have faith you can do this, God. I’m going to walk to this well, and I’m going to say I’m thirsty. If one of these lovely girls will say, hey, I’ll get you a drink, that shows me she’s kind. But to show me this is your woman, as you read chapter 24, he prays this, I pray that that girl offers me a drink would not just offer me a drink, she’d offer to water my camels, too. You go what’s the big deal with that? Well, a camel that had been traveling in the desert could consume 40 gallons of water. He had 10 camels. So any woman with a heart to take a small, little pitcher and go into a well and bring out 400 gallons of water, it says a lot about her character. Says she’s not selfish, says she has a servant’s heart. So as he watched her, it wasn’t just she’s beautiful. Oh, that’s great, she’s beautiful. She has character. She’s not self-absorbed, she’s kind, she’s a hard worker, vital. I mean, I want to find someone with a servant’s heart. I want to be someone in marriage with a servant’s heart.

James Dobson makes kind of an obvious observation. He says there are two different kinds of people in the world, givers and takers. Amen? Givers and takers. Says now, when a giver marries a taker, at first, it’s great. First it’s awesome because the giver is just giving all the time, the taker is just taking all the time. But eventually, that giver gets all worn out.

Muscle Car Marriage: Part 1 – Mint Condition: Transcript

MUSCLE CAR MARRIAGE

Mint Condition

August 22-23, 2009

David Hughes

You gotta love crab. Nick of time, too. Couldn’t take much more of those coconuts. Coconut milk’s a natural laxative. Things that Gilligan never told us. Pretty well-made fire, huh, Wilson?

So who saw that movie? Who saw Cast Away? It’s been on TV now, DVD. Good. Most everybody. Great movie. And you buy that whole scene, you buy that whole premise of Tom Hanks talking with his best friend. If you didn’t see it, he’s alone on an island, he’s isolated, and he has continual dialogue with what? A volleyball named Wilson. And Wilson becomes his best friend. The reason you watch that and go that is just ridiculous, you don’t say that, is because you recognize there’s something in the human heart that craves and hungers for relationship. And if you’re all alone or you’re kind of isolated in life and you don’t have an authentic relationship, you’ll manufacture a substitute, you’ll manufacture a virtual relationship, a facsimile, because there’s something in the human heart that we desire connectivity and conversation and intimacy and rapport.

Relationships. I propose the greatest thing in life is relationships. And I also propose perhaps the most frustrating and confusing thing in life, relationships. Amen? Relationships can be tough sometimes. If you need some help to navigate relational waters, you’re in the right place.

Welcome to Church by the Glades. Good to see you today. I’m David Hughes, one of the pastors. Oh, man, I’m so thrilled you’re with us. And you might be here for the first time, and I’ve got to ask you for a favor. We’re still trying to find some seats. Got a great crowd today. So if there’s any empty seats on those two outside sections, two outside sections, if you’ll kind of just fill in the gaps, move towards me, and the middle section, the big old middle section will give you thunderous applause as you guys scoot a little bit. Thank you. Thunderous applause, woohoo, or I’ll make you move, too. Good. That’s good. That should cover it.

Man, we sent out an e-mail this week that we needed everybody to go to Saturday or Sunday that night could, and we had great, great crowds last night. We had full houses last night. So those folks that can flex, it was dynamite for us. Relationships. Well, if you’re trying to figure out relationships, you’ve picked a great week to check out Church by the Glades. For the next five weeks, it’s called Muscle Car Marriage. What is Muscle Car Marriage about? We want to see God rev up your relational RPMs and see God add some octane of intimacy into your marriages. It’s going to be a great series. What are the next five weeks about? My prayer is it’ll be relevant. For our single people, in fact, singles, I’ve got one weekend dedicated just to you single people, one weekend’s entitled How to Select the Right Model, subtitled or Checking for the Junk in the Trunk. So that’s for you guys. Which weekend is it? Not going to tell you, but one weekend it’s for you. We’re going to talk about parenting one weekend. But a little marriage talk today because Muscle Car Marriage is about relationships and marriages and some really cool cars.

Florida Antique Car Museum. You should see this place. If you like history, if you’re a fan of collectibles from decades gone by, if you liked FDR, the great president of the war years that brought us out of the Great Depression, and especially if you’re a car buff, you should see the rides in this place. They have 38 fully restored Packards going all the way back to the year 1909. And these beautiful cars are not just for show. They go. They’re not all street legal, but they’re all in working condition. In fact, here’s a beautiful example. This is a 1955 Packard Caribbean convertible. Now, back in ’55, the Packard Corporation made about 500 of these, and they sold for just shy of $6,000. That was the most expensive American-made car back in the day. But one in this kind of condition today is worth between 100 and $150,000. Yeah, they have greatly appreciated. But here’s the sad thing. There’s only about 30 of these still in existence. Begs the question. What happened to the other 470 Packards from 1955?

Well, probably long ago they went to the junk yard, the scrap heap. Why? Their owners didn’t realize their value. See, they weren’t maintained, they weren’t properly cared for, folks didn’t recognize they become more valuable over the years. Hey, our marriages can be exactly the same. You know, your marriage is not just made by God to struggle through, just to go the distance. God has designed marriage to get better through the years. God wants your marriage to be a classic, to be in mint condition. So how do you get there? Well, there are certain ways we are to value and to maintain, certain Biblical disciplines we should apply as married people to help maximize our marriages. So here’s the goal of today and the weeks to come. I want to see God put more muscle into your marriage over the course of the years to come, for your marriage to grow more precious, to be in mint condition, to be a classic.

As you walked by, we have some current muscle cars out in the front patio area. We have some classics as well. And those classics do get more valuable, but it doesn’t happen by coincidence or happenstance. Their owners have been highly intentional. They’ve poured a lot of time, a lot of love, a lot of maintenance, they have protected those things, and if there’s damage, they repair it quickly. They become more precious over the decades and years. Your marriages should be the same. If you will give proper attention and maintenance to your marriage, if you will value your marriage, if you’ll repair damage and dings in your marriage, it can get sweeter over the years. And that’s what we’re going to talk about over the next few weeks.

So let’s start with the owner’s manual right now. I want to talk about some relationship rules that God has laid down. And who better than God and God’s word to check out when it comes to relationships? God created relationships. So if you have your Bible, turn to Ephesians chapter 5. Say it with me. Ephesians chapter 5. Everybody. Ephesians chapter 5. If you don’t have your Bible, go home and read this. We’re going to pick it up in a moment. As you’re finding that, let me give you a quick quiz, question. Please answer out loud. What is in American life the most owned book, yet the most unread book? The Bible. Wrong. The owner’s manual in your car. Someone said it down there. The owner’s manual in your car. The Bible’s probably second on that list, but the owner’s manual in your car. And I do have the owner’s manual in one of our two cars. This is my ride. I have a 2007 Chevy HHR, little black, kind of looking car. But don’t you laugh at my car. My car’s paid for. So there. It’s a paid-for car. I love any paid-for car. And here’s my owner’s manual. It has thorough information in here.

Now, look. There are some people, the moment you get a new ride, man, you go to the glove box, you find that owner’s manual, and you read it cover to cover. You’re probably a highly meticulous person or a mechanically minded person. Who’s someone here, you’re one of those rare people, you read your owner’s manual anytime you get a new-to-you car. Raise your hand if you do that. Look, look. There’s like three, four hands. Very organized, maybe kind of anal people. I don’t know. You’re reading that whole thing. Just kidding. Now, the rest of us didn’t raise our hands. When do we go find the owner’s manual? When? When? Yeah, when there’s a problem. When something goes wrong, we try to troubleshoot it. Number one, we can’t find the owner’s manual. If we do, it’s buried under all the stuff in the glove box, and then we’re trying to find what — we’re confused and frustrated. And we shouldn’t be that way with scripture. That’s why for many of you here going my marriage is okay right now, my marriage is cool right now, well, you need this information. God’s going to frontload you. When maybe you hit a season of trouble or pressure, God’s going to give you useful information. Others, it’s going to take your marriage to a new level. And many of us, let’s be honest, we need a marital overhaul right now. And God has brought you here. His timing is perfect to check out his manual. And again, the Bible says so much about relationships. But in Ephesians chapter 5 beginning in verse 21 it says great things to married people. Let’s read this together. And I know it’s not highlighted on the screen, but I want everyone to read the first word. Everyone to read the first word. One, two, three. Submit. It’s going to be a key theme today. Verse 21, it says, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Now, more specific now. “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body of which he is the savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Wow. All right.

So again, ladies, I want to start with you today, ladies, because this Biblical statement begins with your responsibility in marriage, so that’s one reason. But the more important reason is ladies, I just think you’re smarter when it comes to relationship than the guys. I just think you have a higher relationship IQ than most men. I think ladies just on average are more relationally sensitive and savvy than the men. So because you’re a little smarter and all the ladies said — Amen.

I’m going to start with you. And in verse 22, there’s a statement for the woman in the context of marriage. Let me put that on the screen right now. Ladies and only ladies, will you read the highlighted word. This is what God calls you to do in marriage. It says “Wives,”

“Submit.” “To your husbands as to the Lord.” All right?

So today we’re going to talk about submission. Today I’m talking about the wives submitting to her husband in the marital relationship. That’s the conversation today. And in case you haven’t figured out, I’ve realized I have now jumped into shark-infested with this topic today. So I want all the ladies, all the ladies, pressure is off. No one is going to beat you up with a Bible today. Want all the married ladies especially to take a big breath right now. Take a big breath. Take another big breath. Hold it. Now let it out and just relax. Relax. Again, man, if you can count on anything that I’ve come to this teaching today with great study and great prayer, and I love you and value you, and I’m just seeking to be your pastor and share with you good relational information today. But the Bible does say a woman is called in the context of marriage to submit to her husband.

Now, owner’s manual. The Bible is the owner’s manual for life and relationships. Now, I have the owner’s manual here for my car, a more or less current car, 2007 Chevrolet. But as you walked in the lobby, you saw that beautiful 1965 Chevrolet Corvette. You saw that classic Corvette. Beautiful ride in there. Mint condition. It belongs to a member of our church. He’s entrusted that to us for the next five weeks. Don’t let your kids crawl on that car. Amen. Don’t let your kids get Krispy Kreme on their hands and touch the car. Don’t do that, right? People are loaning those cars to us. They are trusting us with those cars.

But in that car, I called my friend Tommy. He owns the car. I said Tommy, you don’t happen to have the owner’s manual for the ’65 Vette, do you? He did. Right here is the original owner’s manual for the ’65 Vette. Is that not cool? That’s cool. Now, here’s the funny thing. It’s a way nicer car than my ride, both made by Chevrolet, but you notice a difference about the size of the two owner’s manuals over the years? Now, this one is much more concise. This one is much more complete, but one place you’ll notice a dramatic difference, in the current one, the 2007 HHR, there are 70 pages devoted to safety. Safety equipment, how to keep yourself safe as you drive, how to keep other people safe as you drive. 70 pages. By contrast, two paragraphs in the owner’s manual of the 1965 Corvette. In fact, the two paragraphs are about how to use the seat belt. Funny thing, as you walk back in the doors next week at Church by the Glades, go ahead and glance inside that example of a 1965 Vette. No seat belts. See, seat belts in 1965 were optional equipment. They were not mandatory equipment. Things have changed a whole lot, right?

I mean, today we’re very conscious of automobile safety, there are laws about using seat belts. Oh, my goodness, with our kids. I mean, we put them in the back seats, we strap them in carefully. With the little guys, they have car seats. Man, putting Zane in his baby car seat and strapping that thing in takes like 45 minutes trying to protect him and make sure he’s safe. Now, I’m going to out myself here as far as my age. When I was a kid, parents weren’t so careful about car safety with their children. My parents were good parents. It just wasn’t part of the culture. I remember if it wasn’t a full car, if it was just me and the driver, I didn’t ride in the back seat. I rode in the front seat. And by the way, my favorite place to ride, I did not use a seat belt. If I’m driving with dad or with mom or even my little grandma, I would stand next to the driver in the front seat. How unsafe was that? In fact, again, no seat belt. In fact, some of you as old as me, you know the safety precaution advice was if the driver had to kind of apply the brakes quickly, what would they do? They would do little arm out thing. Little arm. Here’s my four foot eleven, 85-pound grandma putting her little, tiny, frail arm out trying to keep me from launching through the glass, right? Not very safe.

In fact, my second favorite place to ride, if I had to be in the back, I’d go all the way in the back, and I’d lay down in the area behind the back seat but right there in that horizontal spot right where the back window was. You’d lay down right there, lay down. Some of y’all are nodding, you’re as old as I am. You’d lay right there. How dangerous was that? There were a few times my father hit the brake and it launched me to the floorboard, right? Wow, if you got rear-ended, I guess you’d just shoot out like a missile out of the back. I mean, good night. It’s surprising any of us are still alive. Didn’t think about safety back then.

But God thinks about your relational safety all the time. And married ladies, I think this idea of marital submission to the loving leadership of your husband will be found in the relational safety section of your Bible. I know to say submit, especially submit in marriage, seems very out of step and out of time, might even sound a little sexist or archaic. I mean, it is so foreign, that concept to our world. But ladies, I would encourage you to be open to this for several reasons. One, I think it’s logical. Logical meaning this. Question, how many people are involved in a Biblical marriage? Anybody know? How many people are involved? You can answer out loud. Two. Two. Two people. One man, one woman, one husband, one wife. I recommend two. Just saying, my opinion. You have like seven, that’s a problem okay? Just two. I recommend two. Now, when you have two people in any organization — or marriage is probably not an organization. It’s more of a living thing.

Occasionally, though you love each other, and though often you’re of one mind and one heart, you might have a moment of decisive impasse, maybe a moment that you can’t pray through it together. At that point, someone must assume the loving leadership, and the other person must submit to that leadership. And I just think that just makes sense. It’s logical. You may resist that, but it’s just logical. Because again, your marriage is a living thing. Now, the Bible uses the language that the husband has headship in the home. The headship in the home. See, a living thing without a head is dead. And any living thing with two heads is a freak. You don’t want that, either, right? So I would just present I think it’s logical this idea of marital submission. But more importantly than that, ladies, it’s Biblical. I have found most times that the Bible is so reasonable. I mean, God is brilliant, and the Bible is just a smart way to do life most times. I see what the Bible says to do about my money or my habits or my worship or my relationships. It just makes perfect sense. There are a few places in the Bible that God calls us to do, they do not make sense. They’re kind of counter-intuitive. But it doesn’t matter. If God speaks, I obey. And the Bible talks a ton about authority and submission.

In fact, one of the reasons I obey when the Bible speaks is it talks about the authority of God and the authority of Christ. And when Christ speaks, I obey. If I’m smart, if the word of God speaks, I obey. Do you agree? Amen? Good idea. When God speaks, we submit as believers to the authority of God. That’s not the only kind of authority that God will leverage in life. You’ll find in life God will use all kinds of authority systems, often imperfect and flawed authority systems to bring about redemption and refinement and growth in our lives. Example, jot these down if you’re fast. If you’ll check out say Romans 13 verses 1 through 7, you’ll find out God wants us as believers to submit to the authority of government. Is that only perfect governments that we fully agree with, that that is my party’s in power? No.

In fact, the government back in the day was the Roman government, far from a good or godly government. But Paul said as long as it’s not in conflict with the command of Christ, you must submit to government and pray for your leaders and honor your leaders and pay your taxes. I’ve been waiting for an amen on that one all weekend long. So far, it’s not come. I’m just saying the Bible says to do that. Look at this. In Hebrews 13:17, it says in the church we should submit to, you use the word obey, church leaders. There’s authority in the church. Look what it says here. “Obey your leaders and” — okay, that was weak. Maybe you’re afraid of this. “Submit to their authority.”

The Bible says there’s authority in the church, and God will leverage that. Why is that? Because church leaders are perfect and never make bad decisions? Of course not. But God honors us and grows us as we honor authority systems and we submit. But ladies, in marriage it shows up quite a bit. The passage we’re studying, Ephesians 5:22, it says, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord,” for the Bible scholars in the house, the Greek word there is the word hupotasso. It’s actually a military term. It has the idea of falling under rank. That as a volunteer, you surrender some rights and decision making to someone of a higher rank. It’s not just here in Ephesians. In Colossians 3:18, “Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting to the Lord.” And then 1 Peter 3, “Wives in the same way be submissive to your husbands.” It’s not like I picked out, you know, some random, obscure verse. This is a theme. When it teaches marriage, it teaches this issue time and time and time again.

Now, I’m sensing a little resistance in the room. Because someone’s thinking I’m talking about your value, that God sees men as more valuable than women. That is not what the Bible’s saying at all. In fact, the Bible says just the opposite. You backtrack one book to the left before Ephesians, you’ll find in Colossians it says in the divine economy we’re the same. In fact, here’s what it says in chapter 3. It says in God’s eyes there’s no Jew, no Gentile, no slave, no free, no male, no female, we’re all one in Christ Jesus. That was radical and revolutionary stuff in that Roman world, because they were all about distinctions and racism and classes. In the Roman world, they’re all about who’s Roman, who’s not a Roman, who’s a Jew and who’s a Greek. And there are free people and there are slaves, and women were treated like property. And the word of God says no. God values a woman every bit as much as a man. The ground is level at the foot of the cross of Christ. And that was radical stuff back in the day. This is not about your value. This is about functionality. This is about not how God esteems you. This is about your role in the relationship of marriage.

Now, again, I think it’s an issue of safety and protection. But there is resistance and push back. Because you know, well, there’s a small group of ladies here at the church, and you grew up in church, grew up in an old school church, maybe a legalistic church where this was taught in an oppressive way. One of my colleagues got up and basically beat you up with the Bible, and they present this doctrine like the man is the dominant leader, and a woman is a doormat. That is not what the Bible is saying. And brothers, you take this stuff home and use it that way, you’re making a terrible relational mistake. You’re violating the scripture. In addition, it won’t work. You come home all strong, you come home, baby, I’m the leader here, and you submit to — you try that. Know what you’ll do? Know what you’ll do? Listen, you will shut her down. You will shut her down relationally, you will shut her down emotionally, you will shut her down in ways, guys, you don’t want to shut her down. In fact, just to develop that idea a moment, young couple got married, they’re on their honeymoon, they kept themselves pure. You know, it’s the big night, and they’re all alone, and she’s a little nervous and excited, and all of a sudden, he takes off his pants, throws them at her. Says baby, put my pants on. Confused, she goes, put your pants on? Put my pants on. She puts on his pants and says these are too big for me. That’s right. My pants are too big for you. He said my pants are too big. You see, I wear the pants in this family. I am large and in charge. I’m the lord of my household. You will submit to me. I am the man. You got that? That’s the way we roll in this family. I wear the pants. She thought for a moment, took off his pants, took off her panties, threw them to him. Said try those on. He said I can’t get into these. She said that’s right. Just dedicated to telling truth at Church by the Glades. Just dedicated to telling the truth. And by the way, some of you middle schoolers, don’t you dare go to school tomorrow and tell that joke or when you get taken to detention, say my Bible pastor told that joke, I didn’t know. Don’t tell that joke. Don’t tell that joke.

So listen, guys. Listen. There’s truth to this. Be careful how you apply this. And if there’s resistance from some woman that you’ve grown up in a church where basically you were abused with this doctrine, I want to ask your forgiveness on behalf of pastors. That’s not what the Bible’s saying here at all. Now, the larger group that might resist this among the ladies in our church is it just seems so out of step with our culture. You’ve got to be kidding me. Submit in marriage? I mean, that just seems sexist, it seems primitive, it seems very archaic. I can’t do that. That’s not what I do in this culture. Well, you’re right. In Western culture, submission is not something we crave. In fact, we resist submission. In fact, we celebrate being rebellious in our world right now. We love to rave against the machine and rant against all kinds of authority, reject authority, be your own boss, be your own person, be your own man. I’m just telling you that’s out of the step with the word of God. In fact, if you’re a woman and you resist this idea and definition of marriage and your role in marriage, I would ask you this question. Don’t answer out loud, but who is shaping your view of your role of a woman especially as a wife? Who’s shaping your view of womanhood? Because it’s not God. And God would like to.

Let me share something kind of fun. Ladies, you are so unique, you are so beautiful, so blessed. Take your Bible and find Genesis. Everybody find Genesis right now. You all know where Genesis is, right? Genesis. First book in the manual. Easy one. Everyone can find that. And I think maybe the best stuff on marriage in all the Bible and relationships in all the Bible is back in Genesis. And we watched that couple make good decisions, make bad decisions, but I love what happens in Genesis. And ladies, I want to show you something. This is so cool. How you are unique in the entire creative narrative. There’s something that God does as he fashions the woman he doesn’t do with anything else in creation among all living things. Genesis chapter 2, verse 18. It says, “The Lord God said it’s not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” And guys, a lot of us just don’t do well on our own. Some of y’all are bachelors and you’ve got it going on, but the rest of us, we’re just wired to be married, and we’re a mess. Three days Lisa’s out of town, the house is a disaster, the kids are a disaster, I’m a mess. I mean, I don’t do well. I’m like Adam.

See God had wired Adam evidently to be a married guy. And so he’s going man, look, there’s no sin in the world. My boy Adam has a perfect relationship with me, he lives in Paradise. But it’s the first negative in the Biblical narrative. God says still not good. He needs someone. He’s alone. I need to do something special. So in the following verses, God makes the animals, brings the animals to Adam. Adam has the honor to name all the animals. How fun would that be, right? How fun to name all the animals. But when it’s all done, Adam says hey, God, I really like the labrador as a pet, but looking for that whole helper thing, I’m not seeing it here, and God agreed.

So look what happens in verse 21. And watch, ladies, the description of detail here. “So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he was sleeping, he took one of man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made the woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.” That’s where the whole father giving away the bride comes from. The first father to do that was God as he brought his daughter Eve to Adam. And of course, Adam was thrilled. Thou art bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. But notice a uniqueness in all the creative activity. See, God made animals, in fact, God made Adam from the same substance. Dust. If you read Genesis, he took dust and he made the animals. Took dust and he made Adam. I mean, guys, dirt. Some woman says he’s a dirty old man. Accurate theologically speaking, right? We’re all made from dirt. From nonliving things God made life. There’s only one unique and beautiful exception in the creative order of God. He makes the woman from flesh. Makes the woman from the rib. Close to the man’s heart, something very precious, and from life he makes life. And I love this part. Adam is sleeping when this happens. Not sure how that happened. Perhaps God had invented the recliner and NASCAR, watching golf, fishing show, something. Adam’s just sawing logs, and when he wakes him up, here is this woman. And for the first time in human history a man sees a beautiful, perfect, naked woman. Woohoo. It’s his wife. It’s okay. You can woohoo. That’s good. And she’s so beautiful and so perfect. And the reason is, listen, while Adam was asleep, God fashioned her, and listen, shaped her, her view of womanhood, her view of marriage with his holy hands.

See, if you’re resisting this, I would say well, who has shaped your view of marriage? Who has shaped your view of womanhood? Because it’s not been God. Because in God’s word more than once he shapes the marital responsibility and role like this for the woman. And again, ladies, I think you’re smarter than we are when it comes to relationships. Don’t resist this. Because if you’re resisting, you know what’s going on in the back of your head right now? You’re resisting because you’re thinking well, that’s not — that’s not what they say my role as a wife should be. And I would say well, who is the they? In our culture, you know who it is? It’s Dr. Phil. It’s Oprah. It’s the women, Whoopi and the women on The View shaping the view of marriage and relationships.

Look, we cannot take our relational cues from Jon and Kate, or we’re going to be messed up. And a lot of us, what we’re doing is the girls at the office, it’s our old college friends, it’s Glamour and Cosmo and People Magazine. Ladies, if you let Shape magazine shape your physical view of what you need to look like, you’re going to feel so frustrated and feel devalued. Why not let God shape your view of who you’re called to be? It’ll be beautiful and highly esteemed and valued and function in marriage. We’re called to submit.

Now, I wish I could tell you something else, but I’m going to go with God. God’s word always makes sense. God’s word works. It’s the owner’s manual for relationships. By the way, again, I want to say where it’s found in the owner’s manual? Safety section. Safety section. And when you think of submission, ladies, think of safety. In fact, theologically here’s the way I believe it works. When Lisa submits to my loving leadership in the home, she comes under the umbrella of my protection and the canopy of my authority as her husband. And listen, guys, again, they’re smarter than we are when it comes to relationships. If you do what the Bible says you’re called to do, you love her as Christ loves the church, you lead her in spiritual things, you provide for her, get a job. If you’re unemployed but you’re trying to get a job, I don’t mean you, but if you’re sitting around at home on the couch eating cornflakes, don’t want to work, get a job, protect her, serve her, serve her. Because again, preachers leave out verse 21. They jump right to verse 22. Wives, submit to your — no, no. Verse 21 says submit to each other out of reverence for Christ. So we should serve each other. Marriage should be a contest for the other person’s pleasure. So if I love her, lead her, provide for her, protect her, if I serve her and honor her, she’s relationally smart. She will have zero opposition to doing something that is obviously in her best interest. And as I got ready to teach this one, I knew I was swimming in the shark-infested waters this weekend, so I brought some godly women into the conversation, say here’s the way I understand this doctrine, here’s the way I understand this practice. What do you think? I talked to Lisa. Lisa, is this the way you understand it? And I thought her insight was so good. Lisa said well, honey, if you’re submitting to God as my husband and I’m submitting to you, she said the pressure’s off. Because you’re trying to make the right decision before God, and if you screw up, you’re in trouble, not me. It’s safe. It’s safe.

In fact, you know, if I really want to make it tense, let me talk about money for a moment. She said David, it’s like financial stewardship. When you understand that everything that we think we own we don’t own, but God owns everything, 1 Corinthians 10:26, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it,” we understand that, you know, the pronouns are wrong because we say our car and our house. It all belongs to God. It’s God’s car and it’s God’s house and it’s God’s savings and it’s God’s retirement account. All God’s. I just manage God’s stuff. All of a sudden, the pressure is off with the things the Bible tells me to do with my money, you know. Stewardship, giving money, offering a tithe. It’s easy to do to give God back his own money. Living on a margin, protecting savings, investing, all those things I do. But if there is an unexpected financial expenditure, I don’t have to sweat that, feel the pressure for that, because if it’s God’s money, it’s God’s problem, let him worry about it. See how authority works? Authority is protective. There’s a covering in that.

Safety section. It is a seat belt for you relationally speaking, ladies. You come under that canopy of authority, there is protection for you. And let’s face it, we live in a dangerous world. 1965 Corvette owner’s manual, two paragraphs about seat belts. That car has no seat belt. I propose it’s much more dangerous today than in 1965, especially relationally. And you’ve got to have safety. You’ve got to have protection.

I mean, things have no value without that. Here’s how I’m going to drive the point home. Tommy, the guy that lent us this car for the series, is going to allow us to give the car away. Everybody find your worship folder right now. Someone has a little sticker marked Corvette Stingray on your card. Go ahead, everybody find it right now. Go ahead, find it right now. Oh, I’m just kidding. We’re not doing that. Are you kidding me? Car’s like worth $60,000. He said you can have it four weeks, five weeks, be careful with that car. We’re not doing that. We’re not doing that. It would be fun if we could, but he didn’t let me do that. It would be fun if we could do that. But what if we did that, but there was a catch? What if the catch was, all right, you won the car, but here’s the catch. Before we gave the car to you, mechanically we had the brakes removed. No brakes. In fact, we mechanically fixed the car, you can never reinstall brakes again. You’ve got this incredible car. By the way this is a high horsepower car. It’s a fast car. Made of only fiberglass. It got a lot less valuable to you. I can’t take this in the salt grass. I can’t even drive it off the property. I’m going to have a problem. I’m going to have a wreck. I’ve got to have brakes.

Listen. Marriage should be a blessing and should be beautiful, but in the Bible, boundaries and blessing and beauty always come fused together. Safety section. God wants your marriage to be special, sanctified, there must be safety. Submission is the word for you. Now some of you guys, you’re loving this teaching. Oh, I didn’t want to come to church, but this is good. I’m taking careful notes on this. Word to the guys, I had planned for this to be kind of a message to the wives and the husbands, and guys, I didn’t have time for you. So you must come back next week. You’ve got to come back next week. Your part is next week, husbands. Little more to the wives and the ladies next week, talk to parents and kids next week, so got to come back next week. And listen, here’s just a word of warning. Any of you guys go home and try to use this as a club, use this as a weapon or ammunition with your wife, don’t you dare. Don’t you dare. Especially till you’ve heard your part. Are you kidding me? Don’t you dare. Don’t you do that. Because that’s just wrong.

By the way, some of the men are going to make excuses, ladies, next week why they can’t be here. Don’t you buy that stuff. In fact, brother, I want to call you out. You choose not to come next week, you are a coward. You are relationally gutless. You’re not a leader, you’re a loser if you don’t come next week. You are a big weenie if you don’t come next week. In fact, brothers, brothers, turn to the man near you and say don’t be a weenie. Don’t be a weenie. Don’t you dare be a weenie. Don’t be a weenie. I’ll see you next week. Don’t be a weenie. I’ll see you next week at Church by the Glades, man. I want to hear about my role and my responsibility, this incredible call we have on our life. I’m not going to beat the guys up, but I’m going to challenge you to step up and do what God would call you to do. Don’t you be a weenie. And by the way, ladies, they won’t say I’m just afraid to go to church. They’ll go no, honey, I really want to do those chores. I want to do the honey-do list. I want to spend quality time with the kids. Don’t you buy it. You bring them to church, all right? And guys, only thing I will say to you today, don’t you dare take this home and bully your wife. This has been so abused over the years. By the way, the Bible does not say to obey. Doesn’t say wives obey your husbands. That’s nowhere in the scripture. Now, it does say children obey your parents. And all the parents said woo, yeah, it says that. It says Christians, we should obey God at all times, obey the word of God at all times, to obey church leaders. There you go. So we’ll do that. Never tells a wife to obey the husband.

We had a wedding here a couple of years ago. A guest preacher came in and put that in the vows. Dude, I wanted to puke, man. That’s just not in the Bible. In fact, guys, it doesn’t even say you see that your wife submits to you. Like you could if you wanted to. In fact, guys, this is something God needs to touch her hearts. See, you’re going to be tempted to go home sometime this week and say weren’t you listening to pastor David? Didn’t you hear? He said submit. Where’s your submission to me? Don’t you say that. You are not allowed to say that. And you’re going to want at some point to say this. I wanted to say it to Lisa last night, but I didn’t have the nerve to say it. At one point, I’m like, honey, you were here. Were you not even listening to what I said last night? Because I have a strong, beautiful woman. Needs to be something God resonates in her heart. And watch God make our marriages magnificent.

So if your marriage is already a good marriage, God wants to take it to the next level. Always refining, always retooling. Just a little marital tune-up for you also. But there’s others here, man, your marriage has been damaged. Let’s repair that thing together. Others, your marriage is just lackluster. Guess what? God is not environmentally friendly. He’s not green when it comes to your marriages. He wants to add some muscle to your marriage. He wants to take you out of that four-cylinder little hybrid thing, power in your relationships right now and drop in a 502 big block. Wants to add some serious relational RPMs to your marriage. But you must come back and listen to what the Bible says about your marriage, because the Bible says our marriages as Christian people should be so extraordinary and so special that when unbelievers look at our marriages, they go wow, look at that marriage. Look at the passion. Look at the service. Look at the way they value each other. Look how incredibly in love they are. Look at the way — that must be the way Jesus loves the church, which is called his bride.

See, in this passage and other places it talks about the idea that Jesus loves us as a bridegroom loves the bride. He loves his church. He sees great beauty in his church. And there’s passion in that. There’s glory in that. And our marriages should be that exceptional. People look at us and go I get it. It should project the love of Christ for his church. And there’s great passion in that. So I want to see your marriage become that. Because I look forward to the day — it says in the Bible there will be a day that Jesus returns. It uses this language. That the bridegroom will come for his bride. Now, that metaphor might lose some of its power and its punch in this Western world, because weddings, let’s just be honest. I do a bunch of weddings. Weddings in America in the Western world tend to be more ceremony than celebration. In fact, I’ll just give you the insider’s point of view. I don’t care how in love the couple is, typically at the wedding somebody’s really tense. It’s the bride, it’s the mother of the bride, somebody’s afraid they’re going to forget what they do, and they rehearsed the whole thing and it’s kind of regimented and structured. Sometimes people pass out or puke. All kinds of stuff happens. The weddings are ceremonial, uptight, little staid.

Now, the reception, the celebration begins. The honeymoon, it really begins, right? That’s the celebration. But the wedding’s kind of stiff in American culture. When I talk about the bridegroom coming for the bride, it loses some power and punch and passion. But in the first century when this metaphor was first invoked, especially in Israel, life was very harsh, and the villagers would look for any reason to celebrate, and a wedding was the best time. There’s only one time in your life you had fun. It was your wedding. Weddings were a seven-day-long party with food and drink and singing and worship and prayer. And the whole village would gather, and extended relatives would come in from far away. And the climactic part of the celebration was on the final night, the bridegroom, the handsome bridegroom would deck out in his best robes, and in a parade through the heart of the village with torches and singing and worship, he would come for his beautiful bride, and the whole place cut loose. And that’s the celebration that the Bible describes when Jesus returns for his bride, the church. And you don’t get that vibe in most American weddings. But occasionally you see an exception.

In fact, I saw one on YouTube. There’s all kinds of weddings on YouTube, but I found one exception, a couple in Minnesota, Jill Peterson, Kevin Hines, their wedding’s somewhat unique. Just shot it on a little consumer cam, but I think it captured the idea of the celebration of the bridegroom coming for his beautiful bride. Give your attention to the screens. Kind of awkward, typical wedding beginning here. And some of the people could really dance. This guy, he could really dance. And some of them can’t really dance. Look at this poor couple right here. Kind of sad. Everybody’s having fun. Everyone is celebrating. He’s pretty good. Pretty good. If you can’t dance, just improvise a little bit. That would be the bride. I love this. Watch this. They’re doing the Matrix. Isn’t that great? And they’re good. They put some time in on this. Now get ready. Look at the beautiful bride, and notice the smile on her face. Just having fun. In lock step. Isn’t that great? Isn’t that great? That’s the celebration and joy of marriage, what it should be. And we miss that sometime in our Western world. But this couple didn’t. It’s been 20 million hits in five weeks on this YouTube wedding moment. And look, your marriage should be fun. There should be joy.

In fact, my prayer for you is God would retool or repower the joy in that relationship. And this would begin a new day. I know we live in a culture that is not friendly towards a godly marriage, but let’s be counterculture and do what the Bible calls us to do. Because I’m praying for you married people. I want your marriage to be magnificent. I want it to be something blessed and beautiful. When lost people look at your marriage, they go wow, that is the joy and love of Christ for his church.

So you’ve got to come back next week and every week as we surrender to God our relationships. And finally, if there’s somebody here and you don’t have a relationship with Jesus, that’s what this is all about. Because someday Jesus will return as a bridegroom for his church, the believers, the bride. And I don’t know if the angels are going to be wearing shades and playing Chris Brown’s Forever, but he’s coming back, and you don’t want to miss that. So I want to pray over the whole church family. So everyone please bow your head, everyone please close your eyes. I want to pray for everyone. If you need to make your Christ decision, come when my prayer is done and make that your choice today at the edge of the stage. There’ll be pastors here. But I want to pray especially for the married people. If you’re married, right now in the dark just reach over and grab your spouse’s hand and allow me to pray over you God’s blessing. Father, this is not an easy time in the history of the world to covet and protect and cherish marriages. But I pray, Father, for a great many here this weekend this will be a new day, you would add some muscle to our marriages, we would endeavor to protect our marriages, maintain our marriages, repair some damage, perhaps. That over the course of time, our marriages would grow more beautiful, more precious, mint condition. Jesus, only you can empower that, so Father, we give you this time, we give you the next week. I pray for anyone that needs to give their heart to Christ to join the beautiful bride, the church. Lord, we love you. We celebrate the fun of being married, as all God’s people shouted —

Amen.

God bless you. Have a great week.

Losing My Religion: Part 2 – The Trap of Religion: Transcript

LOSING MY RELIGION

The Trap of Religion

July 25, 2010

Stovall Weems

As followers of Christ, how do we avoid falling into the trap of religion? How do we avoid what happens to seemingly so many churches and movements of God that at once were thriving, but have now become a museum of the past? Learn to guard against the trap of religion in this powerful message by Stovall Weems.

We’re in a series called “Losing My Religion”. And if you missed it, I really encourage you to listen to the first message “Gateway to Heaven”, because this is one of those series that picks up where the previous message left off. It’ll be the same way for the next message as well.

We’re basically taking a look at the darker side of religion. In the last message, I talked about how currently, right now, there are 28 religious wars going on. We also studied the life of Nimrod, a Bible character in the book of Genesis, who was the founder of false religion. In fact, the name Nimrod actually means “rebel.”

We also looked at how that word – religion, basically means (and it’s what Babel was originally named, or what it originally meant) “gateway to God”. We talked about how religion is man’s way to God, but Jesus is God’s way to man. Jesus did not come to establish a religion. Jesus came to give us a relationship with God. And there’s a huge, huge difference between a relationship with Jesus and having a religion. In fact, many of us need to lose our religion so we can gain a relationship with Jesus.

Today, I want you to go to the book of Matthew, chapter 12. You know, religion was one of the greatest enemies of Jesus. If you read the Gospels, He was always battling religion and encountering religion, and everywhere e HeHwHe went, it seems like that religion would confront Him. And if you read the Gospels, you can quickly get a sense of what’s going on, and that is, that religion is out there, always trying to set up obstacles or put barriers in the way, to keep people from getting to God. But when Jesus came, Jesus’ ministry was basically removing all the obstacles. He removed the greatest obstacle—that was sin itself! He removed all the obstacles on the cross. And now there’s free access to God, and we can all come to Jesus, as we are, by faith. If you look carefully at the ministry of Jesus, it was really all about removing the obstacles. And one of the greatest obstacles that was out there was this thing of religion and here in Matthew 12, we find one of those many stories.

I’m going to read through verse 8, and then I’ll give you some background and context and tell you a little of what’s going on here. So starting in Matthew 12:1 it says, “At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. And His disciples were hungry, and He began to pluck heads of grain and eat. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath!'” Here are the Pharisees. Here is religion, once again, trying to find fault. Here is religion, once again trying to set up a barrier. And they said, “Look, you are not doing what is lawful on the Sabbath.” But Jesus said to them, He says, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the showbread which was not lawful for him to eat, nor those who were with him, but only for the priests?” Verse 5: “Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are blameless? Yet I say to you that in this place there is One greater than the temple. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” So let me tell you what’s going on here.

Jesus and His disciples, are very busy going around and preaching from town to town. Now, as in a lot of agrarian cultures, farming communities—we see this a lot in Africa. If you’re going from town to town, the road might go like this (straight up)…and then go like that(sharp 90 degree angle) But someone might have a field in the middle of that, and you can kind of cut through that field. It’s like a shortcut. And so what was happening here with Jesus and His disciples in this Scripture, was that there was a path through this field. There was a shortcut to where they were going, and they were walking through, and they were taking corn, and they were eating pieces of corn. Now, you might say, “Well, wait, isn’t Jesus stealing? Isn’t He taking somebody’s corn?” Absolutely not, because in the book of Deuteronomy, we read about this special provision. In fact, God actually said, there should be paths in people’s fields to provide shortcuts. And as a traveler or a sojourner, whenever you’re traveling, if you take one of those shortcuts, it is lawful for you to go ahead and eat whatever grows along the path. You can’t take a sickle. You can’t go in there and harvest it, but basically, when you cut through a field like that, it is lawful for you to take and eat whatever is growing on the path. So this is what Jesus and His disciples are doing. But they’re doing it on the Sabbath. And so, of course, here comes religion. Here comes the Pharisees saying, “This is not lawful for you to be doing on the Sabbath.”

Now, the Sabbath—there was a commandment about the Sabbath. God says to honor the Sabbath and to keep it holy, okay? In fact, one of the words for “Sabbath” actually means “to exhale.” Everybody do this: [sigh]. Doesn’t that feel good? But you know, back in Genesis, when it talks about the seven days in which God created the world, it says, “Then on the seventh day, God rested.” That word “rested” actually means “He exhaled,” or in some translations, “finished.” God took a break. And in the same way, God commands us that one day in seven, it should be a [sigh]. It should be a day where we take a break from our normal routine. It should be a day where we honor God. It should be a day that’s different from the other six. And so that was really the commandment. Now, there were a few things of course about not doing your regular work on the Sabbath and things like that. But what the Pharisees did, just like religion always does, they took that commandment and the few things surrounding it, and they added tons and tons of extra rules and regulations around this commandment: what you could and couldn’t do, how you had to wash your hands on the Sabbath, what you could eat, what you were supposed to pray, what you couldn’t pray—all of these crazy things and extra laws built around that one commandment.

One of those laws was that on the Sabbath Day, you could not go farther than 3,000 feet from your house. So my question is, what in the world are they doing in the cornfield? And Jesus is telling them, “You guys come up with so many rules and rituals and regulations.” He says, “You can’t even do them!” He says, “You put all these heavy burdens on people. They can’t do them. You can’t do them.” And so what Jesus is going to do here is, He’s going to bring the correct interpretation of this commandment, just like He would constantly be challenging religion and get them to look at the big picture of what the purpose of the commandment was, and what a relationship with God is all about.

Now, I don’t know what was going on with Jesus this day. It was just not the day to mess with Jesus. You know, He could have just easily gone on and said, “Deuteronomy says that we can eat the corn.” You know, “Leave Me alone.” But there was something about this confrontation—Jesus stops, and He just lets them have it. He says “One greater than the temple is here” and He brings out three passages of Scripture that make mention to priest, prophet, and king and provide the greater interpretation to what this really means.

You see, Jesus Christ, is the fulfillment of all those things – Priest, Prophet, and King. He’s the King of kings. The Bible says that He is our High Priest. And then the Bible also says that He is not just a prophet that speaks the Word of the Lord, but He is the Prophet. In other words, He is the incarnate Word of God. He is the Word—God Himself. And here, He’s telling them, “Hey, look, One greater than the temple is here.” And then Jesus continues on and gives them three illustrations of priest, prophet, and king.

The first one He talks about is King David. He gives them the illustration from the perspective of the king. He says, “Don’t you know the story of King David? (It’s in 1 Samuel 21). David was anointed king when he fleeing from Saul.” You can read about it yourself. Some priest came and offered him the showbread that was in the temple that technically, he was not supposed to eat. But David and his men, they were obeying God. They were starving. They were running for their lives. They were doing the best that they could. Jesus said, “Don’t you see how that’s acceptable? That’s not the purpose of the commandment. That’s not the principle that I’m trying to lay out about the Sabbath.”

Then He goes on, and gives the perspective from the priest. He said, “And haven’t you ever read”—where it talks about that the priests, technically, profane the Sabbath and are blameless? Why? Because on the Sabbath Day, most priests, they worked two or three times harder than they did the other days of the week. I can relate. Why? Because it was on the Sabbath, many times, that people would bring sacrifices or honor God, all those kind of things. Jesus says, “Don’t you realize the purpose of the Sabbath?” So He gives them the perspective of the king, He gives them the perspective of the priest, and then He gives them the perspective from the prophet, and He quotes the prophet Hosea.

This is out of Hosea 6:6. He says, “Don’t you know what this means?” God says, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” Mercy, and not sacrifice.

So here’s Jesus, fulfilling the ministry of Priest, Prophet, and King, the King of kings, the High Priest, the Prophet, the Son of God, the Word of God. And He comes in, He basically says, “Look, you need to understand this about the Sabbath, and this is basically all the commandments of God. You need to look at it from this filter: Number one, I desire mercy always over sacrifice.” Jesus could have also said it this way: “I desire relationship above ritual.” Or He could have said it this way: “I desire love above law.” So Jesus comes and lays this out, brings the perspective from the priest, prophet, and king. He says, “Look, I always desire mercy over sacrifice, I always desire relationship above ritual, and I always desire love above law.”

You know, last weekend, I talked from the perspective of world religion and religion in general. This weekend, I’m talking more about as Christians or as churches, and how do we avoid falling into a religious trap? How do we avoid, what happens to seemingly so many churches and so many movements of God, where at one time, there was this great, life-giving move of God going on, and then something happened. Now the very church that was experiencing this incredible move of God 200 years ago, is nothing but a building. You can even go today and visit it. It’s a museum. How do we avoid that? Well, here’s the first principle: We must always value mercy above sacrifice. Oh, I know you value that for yourself. I know you want mercy above sacrifice for yourself, but what about others? What about other people that don’t act like you, that don’t look like you, that don’t talk like you? Do you truly desire mercy for others? And think about that as it relates to the house of God?

Listen to this: I sent out a Twitter this week. You know, Tiwtter is a great way to spread the Word of God. It really is. You can retweet what people say. It’s a great way to witness and get out there in those social media streams. But I twittered and facebooked this week and asked the question, “What manmade religious standards have ever made you confused or feel unaccepted by a church?” Man, I got back a ton of comments. I summarized them here and picked out a few of the more common ones. Listen to this, there were a whole lot on rules of dress and outward appearance. In other words, you weren’t accepted unless—or you couldn’t be in a particular church unless you dressed a certain way and had a certain outward appearance. Listen to this one: “I couldn’t wear pants, makeup, or fancy clothing. Just looking attractive, period, was ungodly. Looking depressed was acceptable and the norm.” Oh, that’s a great testimony. Go around looking depressed. That really shows the joy of the Lord. Listen to this one: “Not only did we have to wear dresses, but they had these really long dresses, no skin, no pantyhose, no TV, no makeup.” Do you know what I’ve noticed about all these dress codes? Well, except for one of them – I’ll get to that one in a second. But all these dress codes, first of all, they’re all aimed at women. That’s kind of unfair. Hey, Preacher, before you go making a woman wear all this kind of stuff, how about you can only wear three-piece suits for the rest of your life? Do you know where we get all this stuff? There is one Scripture in Peter that talks about that a woman should not let all of her beauty come from her outward appearance and making herself up, that she should also let her beauty come from on the inside of her, which is what God commands all of us to do-to work on our spiritual man, to be spiritually healthy. So we take one verse, and we build an entire denomination around it!

What did Jesus say to religion? “You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You don’t enter in, and you prevent those from entering in.” And can I just say this? Listen, in this day and age, if a kneecap can turn you on – you’ve got a lot of bigger issues. I’m just saying. Am I being real or not? Come on, a kneecap? Am I going to tempt some of you women by showing y’all my kneecap?

Listen to this one: “I couldn’t wear pants, couldn’t cut my hair.” Here’s a different one: “There was no dancing, no swimming, no going to the pool, no going to the beach.” This one person, they said their church wouldn’t allow them to watch movies, so what they did was, they found a loophole. And they couldn’t watch movies or go to the movies, but if you were technically on your computer, that wasn’t technically at the movies, so you could watch a movie, as long as you were doing it through your computer.

You know what the thing is about religion? Let me tell you, watch this. Because people can’t bear up under religion, wherever there’s religion, there’s always secrets. That’s the thing. Where there’s religion, there’s secrets, because people can’t be who they are. They can’t be themselves. And this is why being accepting is so important, and it’s why understanding that God values mercy over sacrifice is so important. When people come in, especially into the house of God, here’s what happens. Today – consciously or subconsciously, all of you did this. (Now, if you’ve been coming here for a while, you probably didn’t). But let’s just say it’s your first time, or you’ve come to church here a couple of times. Here’s what human beings do. Consciously or subconsciously, this is our nature. When you came in church, once you kind of absorbed everything, what you did was, you looked around, and you thought, “Could I fit in here? Could I belong here?” That’s how we are as human beings. In other words, let’s say that you’re a young, single person in your twenties. When you came in here, if you were new, you were subconsciously thinking, “Are there other single people in their twenties?” Maybe you’re a married couple in your late thirties, and you have kids in elementary school. You’d come in, and would be looking around. Are there other young families, or young couples my age in here? If you’re an older couple, you did the same thing. It works the same way with race. If you’re African American, you came in here, you’re – are there other African Americans here? Can I fit in here? Especially if you’re a bi-racial couple, or something like that.

It’s really sad, some of these comments I got back on twitter. We have one comment, it says, “My mother was asked to leave a church because she had biracial children.” Ridiculous! We have biracial couples on our staff. Now, watch this: So how important is it, when people come in the house of God, and we’re supposed to be representing Jesus. We’re His hands. We’re His feet. How important it is for people to come in the house of God, no matter who they are, no matter what they’ve done, no matter what they’re dressed like, no matter what they smell like, to come in and not have any barriers in getting to God!

One guy said they weren’t allowed to have goatees because they were too trendy. Now, you tell me in the Bible where it says, “Thou shall not be trendy.” You tell me in the Bible where it says, “Thou shall not have a goatee.” You tell me that. You tell me that you’re saved by grace, unless you’re wearing a skirt that’s above your knee. I’m telling you, don’t cheapen the cross! Don’t cheapen Jesus’ sacrifice! This is what religion does, man! It just stacks on all these extra things. Do you know what religion says? It says, “Conform.” It says, “Be like us.”

I pray the day never comes where someone walks in Celebration Church, and we’re all the same color, and we’ve got all the same hairdo, and we’ve got all the same clothes. The Bible says in heaven, they’re every nation, every race, every tribe. So do you value mercy over sacrifice? Here’s another one—I’ve got to read you this one. Oh, I’m not done. I got like a couple of hundred of these between Twitter and Facebook. I’m just pulling out a few. I like this one: “We could not drink coffee or tea. I was scared to go to Starbucks with my nonreligious friends.” Can you imagine being with someone unsaved in Starbucks, and you’re not drinking coffee, not just because you don’t drink coffee, but because you say, “My church, that represents the heart of God, says we cannot drink coffee”? What that’s basically saying, is – if you drink coffee, you’re not accepted by God. That’s why we have a coffee bar right in the church. I’m telling you right now, drinking coffee is holy! And some of you that are not drinking coffee, you need to start drinking it, because you and your old grumpy self, all negative… Where does religion get these things? Where do we get these things? Listen, I’m not advocating crazy behavior or anything like that. But do we value mercy over sacrifice?

I’ll never forget, one time, I was preaching on a Sunday morning. And it came from right over there—where the staff sits. All of a sudden, I said something, and I heard this guy say, “Amen! Blankety-blank-blank-blank, Amen! Yeah!” Like, not in a negative way – he wasn’t cussing me out. He wasn’t disagreeing. It was positive! It was like he didn’t know how to express himself! At first, I thought it was one of our staff. But watch this. Listen. I’m not advocating—some of you are like, “Great, can I cuss you out now?” I’m not advocating that. I’m not advocating bad language. The Bible says don’t let corrupt communication come out of your mouth—do you see what I’m saying? But he doesn’t know that verse! So if someone’s around, when you hear that, you know, what is your first reaction? Mercy over sacrifice. Is your first reaction if you heard that, “[Gasp] Oh! Oh, I just can’t believe this. This is terrible. This is horrible,” and judge that? Or is your first reaction, “Thank you, Jesus, that we’re reaching the right people. Thank You, Jesus, that somehow that lost person felt comfortable enough in the house of God”? I’m not advocating crazy behavior, are you following what I’m saying? But I’m saying this: Do we value mercy over sacrifice? Are we willing to pull down prejudice? Are we willing for the church to be a bridge to God and not a barrier?

Think about this. Do you realize, some of these places that Jesus was in? it’s so funny. You know, you may have gone to Sunday school, and they tell stories of these gatherings with Jesus. And first of all, Jesus is always kind of like, [facial expressions] all nice, all pale white, like He’d been born up in Iceland somewhere. Okay…Jesus was not pale white, okay? But He’s sitting there in these Sunday school stories, and all the disciples are sitting around Jesus, and everybody’s just there, you know. And there might be a little boy off to the side, with a bucket of fish and loaves. Religion! It paints this picture, and we get this idea that this is how Jesus is, and this is how church is. The real deal is stories like this, where Jesus is sweating, and going from town to town and just trying to get a couple of spoonfuls of corn, and He’s getting rebuked by religion! Do you know what the real deal is? Think about some of those places Jesus was at. How about the party Jesus went to? Not just with all the sinners, not just all the partiers and the druggies and the gangsters. Not just regular people like all of you. Oh, no, these were the notorious sinners! These were, like, the famously bad people. Jesus went to a party with all of them. How do you think the language was at that party? Do you see?

Let me tell you something about Jesus. I believe this is why God chose to have Jesus born in Bethlehem. You know what Bethlehem was? Bethlehem was an outlaw town. It’s where all the raw people hung out. And that’s what you see about Jesus. He’s constantly getting into the rawness of humanity, and getting out there. He’s taking away barriers. He’s removing obstacles, and He’s saying, “Whosoever will, God loves you, and I died for you! Come to Me, all of you who are heavy laden, and I’ll give you rest! I’ll give you rest!” Jesus says, “My burden’s easy. My yoke is light. Come to Me. You’ll find rest for your souls.” That’s the real Jesus.

Do you know who the real Jesus is? He comes into Jerusalem—now, imagine this: Here it is again. He encounters religion in the temple, all kind of corruption going on, people doing dirty deals and all this kind of stuff. Imagine this if your one of the disciples—Jesus comes into the temple with all the people. Imagine if you’re a disciple, and you look over, and you see Jesus, and He’s braiding a whip. And all of a sudden, He gets this whip and just kind of [whip cracking sound]. You know Peter James and John were like, “He’s lost it, man. He’s lost it. He’s just had enough.” But the Bible says that Jesus goes in there with a whip and cleans out the religion, and suddenly the disciples remembered a Scripture that says “the zeal of My Father’s house has consumed Me.” Jesus basically went in there, and with a whip, turned over every barrier that was keeping people from truly worshipping God. And He taught us this principle: If you are really passionate for God, you will be passionate for mercy. If you are really passionate for God, you will be passionate about having mercy on other people.

I remember after I was saved for a while, that I got into this group. And they were real attractive in the beginning, because they were so zealous for God. It was kind of just real attractive to me. And they prayed a lot, and they fasted a lot, which, you know, we believe in here at Celebration Church. We pray and fast a ton. But this group was into all this stuff. But what I noticed was, like the more zealous they got for God, the more judgmental they got towards other people. And the more zealous they got for God, the more religious, or wanting to judge or put burdens on other people they became. Listen, that is a false zeal. If you’re truly zealous for God, you will be zealous about having mercy on other people. You will be like Jesus, and you will desire mercy above sacrifice. You’ll desire relationship above ritual, and you’ll desire love above law.

I remember one time this guy came on campus and he was preaching and I really admired him initially. I mean, he drug this cross around, now – I know a lot of people out there are carrying crosses. This guy drug this cross, and he started preaching in our student center. And he had all of our attention, and I was a new Christian, but man, he was preaching and students were listening to him, and some of the students, like, started to respond. And I remember thinking, “Wow, this could be like a move of God, man. All these students – wow.” So he started telling them to believe in Jesus, but then he started adding things to that. And he said things like, “Believe in Jesus, but, you know, you’re also going to have to drop out of school. And, you know, you’re also going to have to do this, and you’re also gonna have to do that”, and started adding all of these things. And he shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in their faces. I went up to him afterwards, and I said, “Look,” you know, and I told him a little bit of my story. How I was a bouncer in a bar and into drugs and all this stuff, and how God had saved me, and how I just didn’t understand why he was telling the students all those things. I’m like, “Man, God has saved me.” He looked right at me, and he said, “You are not saved.” Looked at me right in the eyes. He said, “You are not saved. You are not going to heaven, and you are not a true follower of Jesus.” I was like, “How can you say that? How do you know that?” He said, “I know it because of that polo shirt that you are wearing.” What? Come on, dog! It’s the late eighties! I got on the polo on with the collar up! Do you know what I’m saying? It was the eighties man! Come on, I was buff back then, man. I had those biceps working! He was like, “I know you’re not a true follower of Jesus because you’re wearing a polo.” So that’s it, huh? We’re saved by grace, as long as we’re not wearing a polo shirt. Where do people get these things?

You know, think about denominations. I mean, think about when we talk about ritual, or wanting relationship above ritual. When you read the Bible, and the way you relate to other people, you have to do it through a filter of Jesus, and the filter of Jesus is always gonna be mercy above sacrifice, relationship above ritual, and love above all. That’s how we read the Bible. That’s how we relate to other people. Do you realize there are whole churches all about the ritual of baptism. Now, baptism is very important. But guess what? Your relationship with God is more important! Whole denominations have split over how you baptize! All because of where in Matthew 28, Jesus says, “Baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” But then you get to the book of Acts, and all the baptizing recorded in the book of Acts is done in the name of Jesus! So there are whole denominations that have split because of this. I’m talking money spent, arguments, councils, committees, division, over do you baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit? Or do you baptize in the name of Jesus? Let me tell you what we do at Celebration Church to make it simple: We baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and in the name of Jesus Christ. We cover ’em all! There! Can we move on and reach people? Can we move on and advance the kingdom of God? Man!

Or how about music? Wars over music. Some religion says things like, “Well, a violin is more holy than an electric guitar.” Let me tell you something about music—here’s how music works, okay? It’s not the instruments that are holy. It’s the lyrics that are holy, and it’s the spirit behind those lyrics in wanting to express and exalt God. Okay? So watch. For some of you—here’s how we, as human beings, are wired, okay? Whatever you grow up listening to, like when you’re in middle school and high school and college – those sounds, along with however you’re wired – you hear those sounds, and your mind actually records those. And those are accesses to your soul. And so if you hear Christian music with Christian lyrics, but with those sounds that you prefer—do you see what I’m saying? You’re going to like that song. But not all of us like the same sounds.

There are some denominations that have said no instruments. You can’t be accepted. You’re not accepted if you play an instrument when you worship God. There’s some denominations or some churches that have said Southern gospel music is the only anointed music by God. So sorry, rest of the world: China, Asia, Africa, and all the other billions of human beings on the face of the earth. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s religion! Let me tell you something about music. Here’s what I mean. For example, today we have Blameless in the house. That’s hip-hop. Did you see the lyrics in that? Man, those lyrics exalt God. Now, for some of you, you didn’t necessarily like those sounds, but guess what? For some people here, they love those sounds, and they worship God to that music. Now, right after that, guess what? We sang an awesome hymn. Some of you didn’t know what a sea billow was, did you? Let those sea billows roll, baby! “It is well, it is well, with my soul.” Beautiful.

See, this is what Jesus is talking about when He says, “We—we sang the dirge, and you didn’t mourn. We played the flute, and you didn’t dance.” He’s rebuking religious people in this passage of Scripture. He says, “But wisdom is justified by our children.” He’s basically saying this: People that truly know God and understand mercy over sacrifice, relationship over ritual, and love over law, guess what? They can see God in both of them. They can see God in the old hymns. They can see God with just an acoustic guitar. They can see God in the hip-hop. They can see God in the rock. They can see God in the easy listening. Are you following me on this? Wisdom is justified. Don’t get religious and just think because you liked it, then this is the way it should be. No, I challenge you to value mercy over sacrifice, and maybe, every now and then, sacrifice your personal preference of music so that other people in the congregation can experience the mercy of God!

I want to conclude with this, and we’ll pick it up again next week. I want to end here with verse 9. Jesus says all of this that we’ve been reading, but then look at what happens here. This is what happens when a church or followers of Jesus fall into this religious trap. This is what happens when we begin to value sacrifice over mercy, when we value ritual over relationship, or if we value law over love—when we stop being accepting. If we stop being a “whosoever will” church. Look at verse 9.

It says, “Now when He had departed from there”—speaking of Jesus—”He went into their synagogue.” “He went into their synagogue.” Not God’s synagogue. Not a place of worship. Their synagogue. And that’s what religion does. It takes what was God’s, what was a bridge, and it converts it to man’s. It creates a barrier. In other words, no longer was that synagogue God’s synagogue. No longer was that place Jesus’ synagogue. Jesus says, you’re going the religious route? That’s their synagogue. That’s man’s. That’s manmade. That’s religion.

My prayer is that all of us in Celebration Church let this place never be our church. Let it always be His church. Let this place never be a place that puts up barriers in front of people. Let it always be a place that’s a bridge to Jesus, to our Heavenly Father. Let this place always be a place that values mercy over sacrifice, relationship above ritual, and love over law.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters: Transcript

BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS

ED YOUNG

FEBRUARY 20, 1994

This past summer, I had the privilege of watching a large group of golfers play one of the most difficult golf holes I’d ever seen in my entire life. The tee-box was built out on the edge of a cliff. The object of this par-3 hole was for the golfers to hit from the tee-box across a vast expanse, a gulf, a chasm, of crashing surf, onto a green about the size of a postage stamp.

I sat there one afternoon, mesmerized, as I witnessed golfer after golfer after golfer, from all backgrounds, all racial and ethnic groups. They would putter up in their golf cart, walk to the tee-box, and they could tell it was a very difficult hole. They would pick up a few blades of grass, like they’ve seen, maybe, Greg Norman do, and see where the wind was blowing and what direction. Then they would rush back to their cart, look in their bag, and pick just the right club to meet the conditions. Then they would walk confidently up to the tee-box, place their ball on the tee, take a couple of practice swings.

And then: the moment of truth. Whoosh. In a brief nanosecond, as the ball would leave the tee-box and accelerate into the heavens, they would have a look of confidence, a look of assurance. Then the winds would catch the ball, the ball would seem to hang in the air, and about 95% of the shots would fall miserably short. Like a rocket descending from the heavens into the depths of the ocean, it would travel. You should see and watch their countenances change. Their shoulders would drop, they would say a couple of words I cannot utter from this stage, some would look at their clubs like, “It’s the club’s fault! I’m going to get a new set of clubs.” They would walk off, and they would tee another ball up, and whoosh. It would hang, it would do the same thing.

What was happening here? What was going on with this large group of golfers? They were doing something very common. They were overestimating their athletic ability, their golfing ability, the power of their swing. They were underestimating the distance, the expanse, between themselves and that green, that small postage-stamp-type green.

Golf, though, is not the only area where we overestimate ourselves. We overestimate ourselves in the business world. I hear people say, “My company is bullet-proof! It’s impossible for us to ever falter or to fail.” Then a couple months roll by and they file for chapter 11. Some overestimate themselves in the classroom. You know a test is occurring tomorrow and you think, “I don’t have to study! I know this stuff, no problem! I can nail it! I can ace it!” What happens, though, is that you take the test, and when the test is given back – “A 57? Come on, what happened?” You overestimated you intellect on that particular subject. Some people overestimate themselves in the political domain. A man or a woman runs for a particular office. They think, “I’ve got it. The campaign is going well.” Then the returns come in and they are literally slam-dunked at the polls. We have this natural tendency, don’t we, to overestimate ourselves.

I’ll come right out and say it today; I’ll be very, very clear. The biggest area that we overestimate ourselves has to be in the spiritual domain. Most people think they are competing on the PGA level concerning their spirituality, regarding their relationship with God. But if the truth were known, most are at the local putt-putt trying to get a little tiny ball through the windmill. Remember that one?

Today I want you to know beyond a shadow of any doubt, before you exit this place, where you stand in the eyes of God. Are you overestimating yourself, or maybe underestimating the distance between you and God? Where are you, where am I, in the eyes of God? “How do you know, Ed, where you are in the eyes of God?” you’re asking me. You have to take four steps. When you take these four steps, you will know. You will have assurance of where you are in the eyes of God.

The first step in knowing where you are in God’s agenda is: you’ve got to realize that God loves you, and He offers you a wonderful plan for your life that is abundant and eternal. I said a lot there; I’ll go back. First, the first step we have to take. God loves you, God loves me. We matter to God. We are loved by God more than we can comprehend, and He loves us so much, He has designed a plan, a purpose, for your life and for my life. In fact, if we could make up some sort of a plan for our lives, if I could say, “Okay, everyone take out a pen or a pencil and write out on your bulletin the ultimate plan for your life,” we could write up some pretty hot things, couldn’t we? “I’d like to make this amount of money, I’d like to have this and travel here, and this relationship would go well.” We could write out, selfishly, an incredible purpose for our lives. You could take that plan, that I would write out and you would write out, and compare it to the plan God has for you in heaven. God’s plan would blow yours out of the water. That’s how abundant, that’s how awesome, God’s plan is for you. He loves you and He wants you to discover His plan.

The plan is abundant. In fact, Jesus said in John 10:10, “I am come that you might have life, and that you might have it,” here’s the kicker, “more abundantly.” Not just a life better than most people, not just a decent life, not just a good day or a couple of good months. An abundant life. The word abundant is a beautiful word. It’s pronounced perisos in the Greek. The picture behind this term is of someone pouring a glass of water, and they get so excited when they’re pouring the water, it overflows onto your hands, and it gets your dress or your shirt cuff wet. That’s what abundance means. It’s more than we can handle. It’s a picture of the waves hitting upon the seashore over and over and over and over again. It’s a life full of meaning and purpose. That’s the abundant life. That’s the kind of life God intends for you, He intends for me, to live.

And the plan doesn’t stop here in this short stint. It keeps going in eternity. In fact, it never stops. God wants us to begin that plan here, and to continue that plan in a perfected environment in heaven. I always say heaven is not a place where we just sit back in a la-z-boy, drink Snapple, and channel-surf. It’s a place of ultimate enjoyment, ultimate fulfillment. In fact, next Sunday I’m beginning a message series entitled, “What in Heaven’s Going On?” We’re talking about angels and heavenly beings. I’ll stop right there and we’ll continue that thought next week. That’s kind of a teaser out there. But heaven is somewhere that’s eternal, and God wants you to live there.

Isn’t that great? God loves you and He offers you a great plan for your life. Why, then, why aren’t people experiencing this abundant life, this plan? Why aren’t they experiencing the peace that passes all understanding, a clear conscience, power and strength? Why? Well, I’ll tell you why. Guys, how many of you have ever been stood up on a date? Lift your hand. Come on, raise your hand. How many of you have been stood up? Here’s what happened. You saw someone, that girl. She caught your eye and you thought, “Whoa, wouldn’t that be incredible if I could ask her out? Man, that would be the ultimate.” So you get up enough nerve: “Uh, will you go out with me? Yes? Uh, okay. I’ll call you back and tell you all the details.” You call her back, and you have planned this great date. The ultimate date. The flowers, the music, the carriage ride. A great night. What happens a couple of hours before you’re going to pick this, what you call, “babe,” up? She phones you and she says, “Um, Bill, I can’t make it tonight because I have to wash my hair.” It feels terrible, doesn’t it? You think, “Oh, I had all of these plans, all of these wonderful things we were going to do, and you stood me up.”

In a real sense, we have stood God up. What a plan, what an eternal date, He has planned and He has purposed for your life and my life, but we’ve stood him up. We say, “God, I’m going to go my way. God, I’ve got to wash my hair. God, I’m going to try this path or this direction.” We take our little self-centered fingers and grasp the wheel, and we say, “I’m going my way.” That’s precisely the reason why most people are not experiencing God’s abundant plan. That’s precisely the reason most people don’t confidently know that if they were to die right now, they would go to heaven and spend it in eternity with Jesus.

It’s because, here’s the second step, man is a sinner and his sins have separated him from God and the plan, the agenda, that God offers. In other words, there is a Grand-Canyon-like chasm separating man from God. At the bottom of this chasm there are sin-infested, sin-troubled waters. Here’s what God’s word says about our sin, about man’s condition. Isaiah 59:2: “Your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sin hath hidden His face from you.” You see, we don’t have some Pinocchio-type existence with God controlling the strings. “Okay, Ed, now it’s time to preach a sermon. Now it’s time to pray. Now it’s time to read your Bible.” When God made us, He designed us in His image, and we have a freedom of choice. We can choose to love Him, we can choose to follow Him, or not. In fact, the Bible goes on to say in Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned,” that’s not just most people, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” There’s a chasm, a Grand-Canyon-like gap – get this in your mind, now – that separates man from God.

No one taught you, or instructed me, in how to sin. In preschool and daycare programs across the country, there is not a little class that teachers teach you: “How to Sin in the Preschool Life.” “Well, here’s how you cheat, and here’s how you think impure thoughts. Here’s how you be selfish and steal toys from others.” It’s a natural thing. It’s inborn. We were born in rebellion from a holy God. We have God, He’s holy, and He cannot lower His standards, yet man is a sinner. Even a little itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny sin is abhorrent in the eyes of God. The Bible says there are ways that seem right to man, but they only lead to destruction.

Man’s smart, though. I mean, we are pretty ingenious, because we have devised certain methods over the ages, and we’ve thought these methods would somehow reach God, would somehow bridge the gap, would somehow take us over these troubled waters. I want you to meet one of them. The first one is named Good Works. Good Works? Let’s meet Good Works, let’s give him a round of applause. Good Works! Yes! Good Works – he is a man with a vertical jump. He’s trained with Michael Jordan over the past four months. You see, you thought Michael was training for baseball. He was, but really he was training this guy, Good Works, because I think if his vertical jump is powerful enough, if he can get enough air, surely, on his own merits, he can cross this Grand-Canyon-like gap. He says, “I’ve given to the United Way. I’m a good person. I really am. You know, I don’t cheat on my wife, I pay my taxes, I’m honest. Hey, I haven’t had a beer in about a month! Hey, I’m a good guy, here! I’m clean, you know? I’m good. I’m just a good guy.” Well, Mr. Good Works, let’s see how far you can jump. A lot of people think, “Good Works surely can take me from man’s side over to God’s side.” Okay. Come on, now, you’ve got it – surely –

He didn’t make it. He fell short. The Bible says, if we’re relying on our good works to get us to heaven, to get us to God, “All have fallen short,” the Bible says, “of the glory of God.” All have fallen short.

There’s someone else, though, that you’ve got to meet. Surely this person can do it. Where’s the religious person? Do we have a Religious Soul here with us? Oh, look, this guy’s a big one! Come on down! He’s religious. “Well, you see, I’m Catholic,” or “I’m Baptist,” or “I’m assembly of God,” or “I’m Lutheran,” or “I’m Methodist.” He is relying on his denominational background to get him to God. He’s been baptized, he’s been sprinkled, he’s been immersed, he’s been pasteurized. You name it, this man has done it. He’s at the church every time the church doors are open. He prays a lot. He even taught Sunday School a couple of years ago. Surely, surely, if you’re religious, you can do it. Let’s put our hands together one more time. Go! Hey! You’ve got it! Come one now!

Whoa. That was even a bigger crash than the first one. You know, Jesus had one thing to say about religion. He was against it. We say this all the time, but I can’t say it any better. You spell religion D-O, it’s a man-made system of do’s and don’ts. You have to jump through all these hoops in order to somehow appease a holy Gold. I don’t care how many hula-hoops you jump through: you can’t do it. We learned about six months ago that Mother Teresa and Billy Graham both have gone on record saying, “We’ve fallen miserably short before a holy God.” I don’t think there’s a soul here that’s going to pass Billy Graham or Mother Teresa in regard to good works, do you?

There’s someone else here, though, that you’ve got to meet. This person is a philosopher. Mr. Philosophy, come on down! Oh, nice green shirt there. This person devises intricate philosophies. He reads from the great minds and he’s got this thing figured out. Philosophy is kind of like this. It’s people who say, “You know, there are many different roads that lead to the same path, and as long as I’m sincere, well, that’s enough.” This morning I had a cup of coffee. What if I put arsenic in that coffee, and then I took a sip of the coffee with the arsenic? Pastor Ed would die. I would sincerely drink the coffee and sincerely be wrong. You can be sincerely wrong. People who say there are many different roads that lead to the same path – if you take that mentality it’s like saying I could walk into a phone booth anywhere in the USA and just dial a number of the top of my head, and I would get my residence. There’s only one number that gets to my home, your apartment, your condominium, your place, and that is a specific number. The Bible says there’s a specific way to get to God. Surely Mr. Philosophy can make it. Try it, you can do it. He has a pretty good vertical jump, too. I’ve watched him here. Watch him. He came close in the first service!

Oh! He missed it too. Sin-troubled waters down there. Here’s what the Bible says. Romans 6:23. We don’t like to hear this verse any more. This is a tough verse. The Bible says, “For the wages of sin is death.” The word death means eternal separation from God. They just closed the door right there on their eternity. They missed it. They lost it. We deserve a Christless eternity. We deserve to spend our lives in eternity in hell. Why, you ask? Because God is holy, He’s perfect; we are sinners. We cannot come into the presence of God, because we only have to have holiness to get to God’s presence. We have to live a life of perfection.

Here’s the third step, though. This is a beautiful step. You matter to God so much, I’m talking about men and women, boys and girls, around the world. We matter to God so much, He couldn’t even entertain the though of people He loved being separated from Him to spend a Christless eternity away from Him. He couldn’t stand this chasm, these sin-troubled waters, keeping us from Him. So in the third step, God sent Jesus Christ to be our Bridge Over Troubled Waters. Our bridge over troubled waters. God sent Jesus to do this. You see, we can’t cross the troubled waters on our own. The only way we can get across sin and know God is to walk across the bridge.

1 Peter 3:18: “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins.” In other words, when Jesus Christ died on the cross for all our sins, God arranged the sins of the world to be transferred from our shoulders to Christ’s shoulders. “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins.” Jesus took our death penalty. We deserve capital punishment because of our iniquities. God, because He loves us, sent Jesus to take the punishment. Sin demands a price paid, and Jesus was that price. “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might,” here’s the catcher, “bring us to God.” So Jesus, this bridge is Jesus, goes over the sin-troubled waters. He extends his hands to you and to me and says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” No one gets to God except by me. You can’t earn your way. You can’t philosophy your way. You cannot good-works your way. You cannot denominationalize your way. You have to walk across the bridge, and that is how you connect to God. That’s how someone becomes a Christian. Very plain, very simple, yet it’s the most important thing you’ll ever hear in your life. I’ll read John 14:6 one more time. “I am the way,” Jesus said this, not an option or an alternative, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” If you want to know Christ personally, if you want to have meaning and fulfillment, eternal life, and know what He has for you, you have to – the ball’s in your court – you have to move your own feet, you have to walk across the bridge over troubled waters.

That brings us to the fourth step. You have to take the step, and you have to say, “Jesus Christ, to the best of my ability, I believe what you did for me and that you rose again. I accept this, I receive what you did for me on the cross 2,000 years ago, paying the price for all my sins, past, present, and future. I give myself to you.” The moment you say that, you are a child of God. It’s like giving up control, is what it is.

About three weeks ago my wife and I went to see the Dallas Cowboys play. I’ve not been to very many Dallas Cowboys games, but we picked a couple up from our church who has season tickets, thankfully. They said, “Ed, do you mind if we take your car? We have a suburban, and if we drive our suburban,” they told me, “oftentimes suburbans get picked up and stolen from the parking lot.” So I said, “Sure.” So they began to get into the car, and I said something. I said, “Kerry, listen. I have a terrible sense of direction. Also, I’ve only been to about two or three Cowboys games in my history here. Would you mind driving?” He goes, “Oh, no problem!” so I handed him the keys, and he gets behind the wheel of my car, whoom, starts it up, and off we go. We go this intricate route, and all this traffic and stuff because of the playoff game, and we parked in a great spot.

I thought about becoming a Christian, the moment I handed him the keys, because that’s what we do. Our vehicles were designed for Jesus to drive. I sat in the copilot seat. Our wives in the back, kind of suburbia-style. We give the keys to Jesus, let Him get behind the wheel, and let Him drive, and our lives will cruise. If we don’t, we’re going to be in for some serious wrecks and some serious problems along the road.

What am I saying? I’m saying that to become a Christian you have to do four things, four steps. The first step is, I’ll take the first step, realize that God loves you and He offers you an abundant and eternal plan for your life. The second step: tell the truth about your condition. You’re a sinner before a holy God. You’ve messed up, you’ve fouled up, you’ve cheated, you’ve lied, you’ve stolen. Sin is sin. We talked about it last week. Third, you’ve got to believe, to the best of your knowledge, that Jesus died on the cross for all your sins. But, see, belief is not enough. Some people say, “I believe in Jesus!” The Bible says Satan believes in Jesus so much he trembles. That’s more than some of us. The fourth step: it’s our choice. We have to receive it and walk across the bridge, and then, because of what Jesus did for us, not what we can do, because of what Jesus did for us, we are saved, signed, sealed, and delivered.

I want you to concentrate on the screen behind me for a couple of moments, as you watch a man named Peter Cott talk about how he grappled with walking across the bridge.

Video: I was first exposed to Christianity when I met my wife Pam seven years ago. The thing I love most about it is that she has always given me a light and she was always interested in me being there. I remember when we first met, the first thing I said to her was, “I’m Jewish, and I’m not going to convert, and I’m never going to go to church, so please don’t expect that.”

Over the next few years I had been introduced to the Fellowship of Las Colinas, and Pam and I started to go. It began to be a real eye-opening experience for me, because the Fellowship of Las Colinas was saying, “I’m interested in learning about you. I’m interested in you coming here.” Over the years at the Fellowship I began to accept the fact that there might be something out there that would be more powerful than me, and that I would enjoy that. Ed called me about three or four weeks ago, and I think he sensed it, and I sensed it, that I was coming to a conclusion and I was enjoying the prospect of giving up this much control. If I had things to choose to give up control to, this was something that was wonderful for me. It was a great idea.

As Ed and I sat and had lunch, I think we both realized that this was going to happen, that this was the time for me to move my life forward. I wasn’t giving up Judaism, I wasn’t leaving or running away from anything, I was moving into something more complete, more spiritually based for me. So Ed looked at me straight in the eye after a couple of hours at lunch and gave me his equivalent of, “It’s time to fish or cut bait. What are you going to do?” He asked me if I would accept Jesus, and I said, “Gladly,” and so I wanted my wife Pam to be with me. She couldn’t; she was working and had customers in her store, so we ended up in Ed’s car, sitting side-by-side on a car phone, and I prayed and accepted Jesus in my life. Ed and I had just one of the most touching experiences I know I’ve ever had.

I’ll always remember the Sunday I came forward at the church. My parents were there, and being Jewish they were skeptical, but they loved me and they gave me support. It was easy to do it. When I went down, I looked at them, and I told them that I loved them and it was because of that support that I knew I was making the right decision.

After I made the decision, they told me that it was natural to be baptized, and that baptism was going to be in the next week. They told me I was going to be baptized at an outdoor pool, so I had a lot to look forward to. That Sunday was probably the warmest Sunday we’d had in five or six months. It was a wonderful day, and I knew I was in the right direction then. When I was baptized, I was put under the water and brought back out, and everybody clapped, and it was a family environment. I mean, everyone really enjoyed it, and I was glad that that happened.

After the baptism my dad asked me, “How did I feel becoming a Christian?” I could remember a movie, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” about Indiana Jones in his search for the Holy Grail. At the end of the movie he had to pass through three gauntlets to get to the grail. The third gauntlet found him at the foot of a huge cavern, and at the other side was the grail. There was no apparent way to get to it. I remember Indiana Jones praying for a way to get across, and he put his foot out, and when he put his foot down and took this leap of faith, a bridge appeared underneath his feet, and he walked across and he got the grail. So I said to my dad, that reminded me of when I was with the pastor in his car ready to accept Christ and searching for the bridge. I took that leap of faith, and that’s what it was for me. I would encourage anybody who is in my position to take that leap of faith and walk across the bridge.

Ed: You know, maybe it’s your time to walk across the bridge, to say, “Jesus, I’m tired of playing games. I’ve tried this way and that way, and I want what happened to Peter Cott to happen to me.” Jesus wants to meet you right where you are. You don’t have to clean up your life any. He specializes in taking dirty, sin-stained lives and cleaning them as white as snow, if you’ll only ask Him.

I want you to do something for me. In your bulletin, there’s a card. It’s kind of a manila-colored card, and it has a picture of a man on one side, a bridge, and then the chasm, the gap, the sin-troubled waters separating him from God. The bridge, as you know, is Jesus. Today, if you want to cross that bridge, if you want to cross that bridge, I’m going to ask you to take a couple of moments and just sign your name on the dotted line. That symbolizes that you’ve crossed that bridge between you and God. You can keep this card for the rest of your days. In a couple of moments, I’m going to tell you what I want you to do to this card, but one more time, I want you to listen to the words of Peter Cott as he explains about walking across the bridge.

Video: I would encourage anybody who is in my position to take that leap of faith and walk across the bridge.

What Makes God Smile?: Transcript

WHAT MAKES GOD SMILE?

ED YOUNG

AUGUST 6, 1995

This past Sunday afternoon I was playing outside in the front yard with my two oldest children—LeeBeth, who is eight, and EJ, who is three. Suddenly I heard a tap, tap on the window and from inside I saw Lisa, my wife, motioning us to come inside. So we walk inside and she points to our one year old twins. They were dressed in matching outfits, and, at that moment, involved in a toe-to-toe, WWF wrestling match. It was hilarious. They were laughing and giggling at each other. One would get the other in a head lock, a full body slam, it was all going on and we had a great laugh last Sunday afternoon.

This Tuesday evening my wife and I had dinner with a friend of mine who is closer to me than a brother. We had a wonderful experience with he and his wife. My friend recently has been diagnosed as having cancer. To watch him interact with his wife and his two babies, to think about the implications of cancer, to hear discussed the chemotherapy treatment really saddened me. It kind of broke my heart to be with him.

This Thursday morning I decided to get up real early and finish my message. So I gather up my sermon notes and the Bible and leave the house before anyone gets up. I decide to stop at a local coffee shop, I order a giant, heaping, scalding hot cup of flavored coffee with a bagel, no fat cream cheese added. I put this stuff in my car and am thinking that I will eat and drink when I get to the office. I was wearing a shirt that I wanted to stay pressed and nice because I had an appointment to have my picture taken later on that day. I arrive at the office and as I am trying to open the outer office door with my key, coffee balanced on the Bible, you guessed it, it tilted. The scalding, hot coffee hit my chest, ruined my shirt, soaked my pants, and even went in my shoes. Didn’t a woman recently sue McDonald’s for that? I’m kidding!

When that coffee hit me, I was angry and just to be blunt, I had my set of car keys with me that had the alarm mechanism on it which I threw down with all of my strength. I said a few unintelligible words. Since no one was there, no one can help me remember those garbled words. I did kind of break the alarm mechanism. So, I had a very interesting week. It is amazing to think about the range of emotions that we go through over a seven day time period, isn’t it?

I don’t have to spend very much time in this message trying to convince you that we human beings are emotional creatures. We have feelings. Today, though, I want you to grasp the fact that our God has feelings too. Our God is an emotional being. His emotions are perfectly balanced. The Bible says God experiences jealousy at certain times. God experiences anger. God experiences delight. All of those emotions in a perfect balance. We have the capacity for feeling because we are created in the image of a God who has feelings. For some of you that is a shocking statement because you think of God as some bold, old, cold, immovable, unflappable, stone-like stoic who is oblivious to the emotional needs of your life and mine. However, God’s word says on page after page after page, our God is concerned about us. And He is concerned about our emotions.

To illustrate this fact I want to ask you a question. How many of you are parents? If you are a parent, raise your hand. We have a lot of hands going up. Parents, would you say that you are emotionally connected to your children? If so, lift your hand. I think that is pretty obvious. Now we have a lot of singles here. If you are single, lift your hand. Wow. Singles, what I want you to do this week to see how emotionally connected parents are with their children, you jump in your cars and you drive around the Metroplex. For instance, next Saturday morning, drive by some soccer fields and baseball diamonds and watch the moms and dads cheering their kids on, and you will see the emotional involvement that I am talking about. The Bible says that God is as emotionally involved in the lives of His children as we parents are emotionally involved in the lives of our children. And sometimes the compassion that I have for my children just takes me off-guard.

Recently EJ runs up to me and I was busy and I said, “EJ, I’ve got to go, I don’t have time.” “Daddy, please let me tell you something.” “EJ, I don’t want to talk about the Power Rangers any more, I’ve got to leave.” And then he looked up at me with those big, brown eyes and said, “Daddy, I love you.” And talk about being devastated, I was smitten with emotion and compassion and other tender feelings. Multiply that exponentially and you still don’t scratch the surface regarding how much God loves you.

David says these words in Psalm 103:13: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.” In the book of Hosea 11, God’s children were disobedient to Him and God knew that He had to bring discipline on His children. And one would think that God would be sterile about it, kind of take out the heavenly slugger and say, “You have been wrong.” Bop. Hosea says, figuratively speaking, the stomach of God kind of churns, it gets in knots when He thinks about having to bring discipline on those who matter to him. God does discipline us. He disciplined His children in Hosea, but He goes through this as He is thinking about us because He loves us so dearly.

The extent of God’s emotions is great. It still amazes me how evolutionists claim that we get our emotions from just a bunch of gases exploding together. To me it takes more faith to believe in that than to believe that we are created in the image of a God who put this makeup into our lives.

Today, though, because we have time limitations I want to take a snapshot of one aspect of God’s emotional nature. And this aspect is what brings God delight? What brings God joy? What makes Him smile? What can I do today, what can you do today to really bring delight to the face of God? The Bible says God smiles. In fact when He created the heaven and the earth, the plants and the animals, God stepped back and He said, “It is good.” On the sixth day when he made man in His image, He stepped back and He said, “It is very good.” The children of Israel claimed The Promised Land and God was happy. He was joyful. When His Son was baptized in the icy waters of the Jordan River, God said from heaven, “This is My Son in whom I am well pleased.” God shows delight.

But before I tell you what you can do to delight God, I want to clear up some confusion that you might have regarding this subject matter. There are basically two camps of confusion that large masses of humanity live in concerning pleasing God. They think if I stay in this camp then I am pleasing God or if I stay in the other camp I am pleasing God. Really you aren’t.

The first camp that is confusing and muddy is called the Rules, Rituals, and Regulations Camp. That is the person who says, “If I go to church now and then, if I sort of stay faithful to my spouse, if I give to the United Way, if I vote Republican, if I coach Little League, report almost all of my income, God will smile at me, He will wink at me, He will pat me on the head. While messing up my hair, He will say that He is thrilled with me, delighted with me, that I am great and make Him smile.” And you say, “Ed, I am just a company man. I cover my bases. I kind of throw God a bone now and then to appease Him, pacify Him. God and I have a special deal worked out, you see.”

One day Jesus ran into a group of people who were in this camp. Jesus looked at these individuals and they kept all of these rules, rituals, and regulations. Hundreds of rules, rituals, and regulations. One of their rules detailed how long the fringe should be on their garments. These people were called the Pharisees. And Jesus said, “Guys, you are like whitewashed tombs. You look good on the outside, you are painted up, you have your regalia on and you are nodding at the right time and you are carrying your scrolls around and being so pious and spiritual, but on the inside there is some decay going on. There is some rotting taking place that you are not dealing with.” Rules, rituals, and regulations.

Later on Jesus talked to this same group of people and He said, “See this cup right here? This cup is a dirty cup. You don’t just clean the outside, you clean the inside too. Pharisees, you have got some ugliness, some dirt, some grime, called moral foul-ups and mistakes and sins you need to deal with. You see knowing God happens on the inside, then it comes from the inside out, not the outside in.” They missed the boat. In the Old Testament we see a group of people going religiously to a house of worship and the Bible says they were dressed nice, they looked nice, they were just nice folks. They heard different messages, they sang songs, and then they would leave but there was no change in their lives whatsoever. And God said, “I hate your solemn assemblies. You go to church, you go to this house of worship, but there is no real meat to it. You are not putting the word into action.”

You think rules, rituals, and regulations will do it? It is a forum for frustration. You see external compliance won’t do it, it happens when you internally cooperate with the spirit of God. The moment you open up the lid of your heart and ask Jesus Christ to infiltrate you life, the first thing He does, He places the person of the Holy Spirit into your life. The Holy Spirit will nudge you, He will remind you, He will guide you and it is your choice, it is my choice, to either internally cooperate with Him or not. That brings delight to the heart of God. Are you in this camp of confusion?

The other camp of confusion is called the Information Super Highway Camp. A member of this camp will reason, “I know how to delight God, I’ll accumulate vast amounts of knowledge about God, I’ll go from conference to conference, bible study to bible study, church to church. I’ll have sheepskins and certificates on my walls giving evidence to the fact that I know a great deal about God.” And these people, as they are traveling from place to place, kind of stick their hand out of the window and shout, “God, I am delighting You, aren’t I? I learned more about eschatology today. I am delighting You. I know a lot about You.” And the Bible says God is just shaking His head knowing they are missing the boat. Because people like this, and we meet some here, go from this church to that church to another church because no single human pastor can satiate their quest for knowledge, especially this one as I am routinely reminded. They would rather talk about theology than about life change.

To delight the heart of God you have got to move head knowledge into heart knowledge and begin to live it out. Once we live that knowledge out we are delighting God. I am not saying we should run around being spiritually ignorant. I am not saying that at all, nor is the Bible saying that. But the Bible is saying that true life change takes place when we take the word and live it out. Jesus said this to the Pharisees in John 5:39, “You diligently study the scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the scriptures that testify about Me, yet you refuse to come to Me to have life.” You refuse to come to Me to have life.

In other words, some people use the Bible, they dissect God like some biological experiment, they use the Bible as a kind of facade, as a spiritual force field, because they don’t want to deal with the real issues. They would rather talk about all of these subjects instead of talking about the things that they need to remove from their lives, like maybe that destructive, lustful thought life or that materialistic attitude or that critical spirit or that temper that is out of control all of the time. “Well I don’t want to talk about that, let’s go ahead and dissect the weak verb in the Hebrew. That’s what I want to talk about. Don’t talk to me about lust.” But they believe they are delighting God because they know more and more about Him. Does that sound vaguely familiar?

The reason I know about some of these camps is because I have been in these camps before. And I though I was really maturing. But I have discovered that activity for God does not delight God as much as fellowship with God. It is just humbly walking with Him day after day after day.

Let’s now get to the fun stuff. How do I translate head knowledge into heart knowledge? You think it would be easy, wouldn’t you. Here’s the head, there’s the heart—whoop, there you go, I’ve got it. Well it is a tough process. I know a lot more than I live out, don’t you? I know a lot, I’ve been a pastor for a long time, I’ve gone to seminary, studied Greek and Hebrew and I know a lot. But the tough part is living it out. That is the tough part.

There are four things we can all do right now, I’m talking about today, that will delight the heart of God. And when I say these things, they will sound a little bit different to you, so be ready.

DO A 180

Number one: Do a 180. Do a 180. That is going to delight God, when you do a 180. The Bible calls a 180 “repentance.” A 180 means that you are going this direction and then you turn directly around and walk the opposite direction. In Luke 15:10, Jesus speaking, “There is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” That means if it is just a tiny, little white lie and you say “Lord, forgive me for this, I’m going to turn from that sin and turn to You,” a heavenly hoe-down breaks out. Isn’t that exciting? I can’t really do the two-step very well to demonstrate, especially in these shoes, but a heavenly hoe-down breaks out.

Rejoicing. There is a giant cake in heaven, figuratively speaking, with your name on it, invitations have gone out and they are waiting for you to repent. And there are two groups of people here who need to repent. The first group would be those who need to come to know Christ personally. Today, needs to be your day to become a Christ follower. This is not something I can do for you; you have to do it for yourself. Maybe you have been kind of testing the waters spiritually for awhile and it is time to jump in. And maybe today is your day to say, “Jesus, I want to tell the truth about where I am before you and I realize all of these mistakes and foul-ups and I want to turn from them.” The moment you turn from them and receive what God did for you through Jesus Christ, you receive eternal life, you receive forgiveness, you have a home in heaven, and you are part of the family of God.

Once you say, “Jesus Christ, take control of my life,” you, at that moment, are a Christ follower and that is a 180 and it is the most important 180 you will ever take in your life. I don’t care what the sin is, what you have done, Jesus wants to meet you right where you are. Maybe you need to do that right now if you consider yourself a seeker.

Maybe some seekers here are not ready to make this step today and that’s fine. That is cool; that is OK. Continue to investigate the claims of Christ. Talk to a believer about it. Talk to one of us about it. Maybe talk to someone who brought you here today. It is worth six months of your life to see if Jesus really is who He said He is.

Now the second group of people who need to do that 180 are those of us who have been believers for awhile and we have something in our lives that is kind of holding us back from really soaring and really delighting the heart of God. It is that sin, and you know what it is. I know what it is that I have to work on, that I have to deal with more than any other. The problem is a lot of believers take these sins and make them pet sins. This is my pet over here. It is just between me and the sin. Yeah, God knows about it, but I’m not really going to deal with it because I have a good time. And you see, sinning is fun. If it wasn’t fun to sin then we wouldn’t want to do it.

Now there are some major league, eternal consequences for sin and also some humanistic consequences for sin, but it is fun. Don’t say, “Well, it is terrible to do this or that.” No, it is just fun. And we make a pet of sin. And I kind of relate it to this. One day as a child I did something that my parents told me not to do, I got a snake as a pet. My parents hate snakes, I happen to really like snakes. I had this snake and I wasn’t sure if it was poisonous or not. This lack of information was not very wise. I took this snake out and showed it to all the neighborhood kids, like I was Marlon Perkins from the Discovery Channel. “Look, see I can hold this shake.” I had yard gloves on and I was really brave. Then I thought I would show them how tame the snake was. I had one of the other children take the glove off of one of my hands and right when I put my bare hand next to the snake’s face, that pet of mine turned and bit me. The snake hung on my finger. So I shake and shake my hand and finally it falls off. I just freak out. I am thinking, “Oh no, it could have been a coral snake or a pit viper.” However, it was not poisonous. My parents were not pleased that I had the snake and that it nearly torn my finger off. In fact I still have a little scar there where the snake got me.

You can make a pet of sin and it is fun for awhile. It really is, just like I said. One day, though, out of nowhere, one day, it could be ten years from now, twenty years from now, out of nowhere that sin will turn and bite you, and you will go, “Oh, no, what have I done?” So some believers here need to deal with some attitudes, some habits that are keeping you from being the kind of person that God wants you to be.

And we are so serious about this, for the next six weeks, I am delivering a series of sermons concerning things that need to be dealt with so that we can really soar. We are calling it “The Recovery Channel.” We all need to recover from something. We are going to talk about everything from gambling to overeating to anger to lust, you name it, we’ll talk about it. And if you have some guts—I hate to be so frank—please show up over the next six weeks because God is going to do some great things in all of our lives as we talk about dealing with sin and doing a 180.

WATCH WHAT YOU EAT

Number two: watch what you eat. If you want to delight the heart of God, you had better watch what you eat. People say that all the time. Watch what you eat. Check the fat. Check this. Check that. Jeremiah said it best. Jeremiah 15:16, “When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight, for I bear Your name, O LORD God Almighty.”

How many of you are going to go out to lunch or brunch or whatever you want to call it after this service. I think we would all say, “Yeah, I am.” What if you were there eating with your friends and family and just put all the food into your mouth and kept it there? You never swallowed it. People would think, what is wrong with this human being. When you put food in your mouth, you eat it, you swallow it. We have a desire to eat food. It nourishes us; it gives us strength to live. As we dine on God’s word—humbly walking with Him, talking to Him, loving Him through singing songs to Him, through writing letters to Him, through reading His word—we can’t just keep the words in our mouths, in our heads, they must be swallowed. Head knowledge must be turned into heart knowledge. We must live out the great plan and purpose that God has for our lives.

LISTEN AND OBEY THE VOICE

Number three. The third step in delighting the heart of God: listen and obey the voice. Listen and obey the voice. I said earlier, when the Holy Spirit invades your life, you will have to internally cooperate with Him. The Bible says in 1 Samuel that obedience is better than sacrifice. Obeying the voice of God is better than all our external compliance to these rules, rituals, and regulations. And to kind of bring it down to where we live, here is how the Holy Spirit works. Here is how we obey His voice.

Let’s say I am with a group of people and I have a chance to slam someone, I mean to stab them in the back. My good friend, Bill Kaiser, is here. Bill raise your hand. There’s Bill. Let’s say I wanted to slam Bill Kaiser—now Bill doesn’t have anything that needs to be slammed—but let’s say we are with a group of people, and I think of something I can say that would really make fun of him. But while I am thinking about it, the Holy Spirit warns me that I don’t really want to do that. He reminds me that Bill is a human being that matters to God, that I am getting ready to slander him. He urges me not to do that just for a laugh or some other reason I haven’t thought through well. That little voice I am talking about, that is the Holy Spirit.

Now I have a choice at that moment, Bill. I can either say, “Hush,” and go right ahead with what I was going to do. I would then feel guilty afterward. Or I could acknowledge what the Spirit is urging and decide to cooperate. That is internal cooperation. That is listening to and obeying the voice of God. You see activity for God is not as important as fellowship with God. A humble walk with God is what delights the heart of God. We all have gifts and abilities and one of my gifts is to speak. And I love to speak. But that is not really what delights the heart of God in my life the most. I know it is not. What really delights the heart of God is when all the crowds have gone home, the lights are off, and I am by myself or I am with my family or with my friends or whoever. How am I walking then? How am I talking then? How am I thinking then? That is what delights the heart of God. A lot of you are following God and you think that you don’t do anything spectacular, that no one really sees. That is not true. God does. Obey the voice of God.

MOVE INTO A HOUSE

Number four: Move into a house. Move into a house—the house of God. The Bible talks about worship and it talks about gathering together in community, with fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. And that is the ministry of the local church. Jesus said the manifold wisdom of Him would be made known through the church, not through the United Way, not through the Salvation Army, through the church. And all those organizations are fine and dandy; the church, though, is called the bride of Christ. The church is so important to God that He sent His only Son to die for her.

If you have ever gone to a wedding, the bride is the one. I mean, let’s get serious. The groom is there and that is fine and dandy, but the bride is the one. The church is the one and if you feel led to become a part of a church by the Holy Spirit of God, I want to welcome you to this church. God might want to put you in another church. There are some phenomenal churches all around us. There are many Christians who are living solo lives, who are not members of any church. So, if you want to delight the heart of God, you get involved with the church, the bride of Christ. Use your unique abilities within it and your life will soar, and you will have delight and you will feel the smile of God from heaven.

You have your assignment. Four steps. The head to the heart. We can do it because God will give us the power to do it.

Redundant or Abundant: Transcript

REDUNDANT OR ABUNDANT

JULY 25, 1999

ED YOUNG

Power in weakness. Strength in the storms of life. Adventure, exhilaration and excitement. Want to sign up for some of that? I do. I really do. And amazingly, that is the kind of life that God intends all of us to live. Christ condensed it in a single sentence when He said in John 10:10, “I came that they might have life and might have it abundantly.” What was Jesus driving at? Jesus was saying, don’t just exist, really live. It is not redundant but abundant.

When I say the word abundant or abundance, what comes into your mind? I want to share with you what this word actually means and to do this I have got to use some bottled water. I need a volunteer to really make this happen. Every time I say I need a volunteer, it is amazing how people lose eye contact with me. Let me see, whom can I pick on. I am going to pick, once again, my good friend, Thomas Cross, right here on the front row. I know Thomas well, he is not embarrassed to come up here. I would never embarrass anybody.

Thomas, you are going to help me illustrate abundance. Now you know, Thomas is definitely abundantly tall, he used to play professional basketball years ago. Thomas come right over here. I am going to take this water bottle and unscrew the cap and give it to you. We are talking about abundance now, what Jesus was getting at. I want you to begin to pour water into the glass and I will tell you when to stop. Jesus said that He came so that we might have life and have it abundantly. And the word abundance means overflowing. Life to the full. I am talking about something that is so awesome, something that is so great that it spills over into every area of our lives. (Glass filled to overflowing.) Thank you, Thomas, very much.

Some of you might be saying that your life is not an abundant life, that it is not overflowing. It may not be really happening for you. If that is you, we are going to have fun this morning. The secret to abundance is found in these objects that I have brought up here today. The glass and the water, the door and the crowbar.

This past week I spent some time with an interesting gentleman. This man was in his early sixties. He used to run a pub in England where Clapton and Hendrix and Sting performed. From there he moved to the Seashell Islands off the eastern coast of Africa. He has lived in Mexico also. Now I love to pick up on idiosyncrasies of people, especially the way they talk and walk. While I was talking to this gentleman who had long flowing, gray hair, I noticed that he would say something over and over again. Every other sentence would be; wow. Wow. I would say something, just a normal comment. He would go, wow. That’s like wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. He said it so much, I started saying it. Wow.

If your life, if your walk with the Lord, is not characterized by wow, then something is wrong. Now I know that we have some people here who are not in on the Christian life. But for those of us who are walking with the Lord, it should be wow.

Well, let’s back up a little bit to John 10:9. In John 10:10, Christ talked about abundance. But look what He discussed in verse 9 of chapter 10. “I am the door…” Not a door, the door. He used the definite article. “I am the door…” Why, I ask you would Jesus choose to compare Himself to a door? Well, back in Biblical times people understood what shepherding was all about. Several months ago I did an entire series on the Twenty-third Psalm, where we dissected the whole deal about the sheep and the shepherd and how the Psalmist used that to relate to our connection with God. You can pick that series up in the bookstore. But, when Jesus said that He is a door, He was referring to a sheepfold and a shepherd. Shepherds would tend their sheep and as the sun was setting, they would have to create a little makeshift corral known as a sheepfold. They would use some shrubs and rocks but leave a little opening at the front of the sheepfold. Once the flock was inside the sheepfold, the shepherd would lie across the opening when he would sleep. He would literally become the door. So when Jesus said, “I am the door…” He was talking about Himself being the good shepherd, laying down His life for His sheep, becoming the door.

What if Christ had said, I am the mountain? All of us couldn’t scale it. What if He had said, I am an obstacle course? All of us couldn’t negotiate it. What if He had said, I am a combination? All of us couldn’t have cracked the code. I am so happy, aren’t you, that Jesus compared Himself to a door, something very simple, very basic. A door is not to be admired. Wow! A door is to be used. And it is all about the door. The door denotes a separation, doesn’t it? Scriptures says that we are alienated, there is something between ourselves and God. And this barrier of badness is called sin.

God, who loves you and me so much, carved a door in this barrier called sinfulness by giving us His only Son to die, be buried and rise again. God did that. I didn’t deserve it. You can’t merit it. He just did it because He loves us and because He wants us to go through the door and get in on His sheepfold and in on the great life He has in store for us. So don’t ever forget the door.

Now some of you think that you have gone through the door just because you know the doorkeeper. Some of you think you are through the door because you know the people inside the sheepfold. That doesn’t mean that you have walked through the door. I want to ask you a question that will show how really, really old I am. How many of you remember the game show called Let’s Make A Deal starring Monte Hall? I think it may still be playing on some of the cable channels. Let’s Make A Deal was a wacky show. People dressed up in wild costumes. The host, Monte Hall, would make deals with them. Everything was building to the big deal of the day. The big deal of the day was a choice between door number 1, door number 2 or door number 3. They had a beautiful model, Carol Merrill, showing you the different doors. The person would pick a door. Inevitably the person would pick the wrong door. It would swing open and Monte Hall would say, “Oh, you blew it. You messed up. You have a four-week supply of Johnson Turtle Wax. You should have chosen door number 3. Behind that door was a Ferrari and a trip to the Fiji Islands. Sorry. Thank you very much for playing Let’s Make A Deal.”

Jesus isn’t saying He may be door number 1, might be door number 2 or perhaps door number 3. Christ is not saying let’s make a deal. He is saying, I am the big deal of the day. I am it. I am the door.

He continues, “…if anyone enters through me…” Anyone. I don’t grocery shop very much. But several nights ago I took Lisa about 9:30 to Tom Thumb. I told her to go in and I would wait in my truck. I was sitting there watching people. I just looked at those electronic doors. They are amazing. Wow! I watched people walk up to them. I watched a white guy walk up and once he got near the electronic door, it opened and he went in. I watched a black lady walk up to the door. It opened and she went in. I watched someone who didn’t look like they had very much walk up to the electronic door and they went in. I watched one old Texan with the big gold Rolex walk up. He went in. Whoever walked up to the door, the door opened, and they went inside.

Anyone, any time, anywhere can walk through the door. It is our choice. It is our option. Jesus said, “I am the door, if anyone enters through me he shall be saved and shall go in and out and find pasture.” Saved refers to safety. In and out refers to confidence. Finding pasture refers to satisfaction.

Let’s break each one down for a second. What does it mean to be saved? Have you ever heard someone say, “Hey, I got saved.”? What in the world are they getting at? Being saved is usually used in a futuristic type way. “I am saved. I have got a ticket to heaven. I am in the club, in the sheepfold. I am saved.” Yes, being saved does refer to the future, but also it refers to the past and the present. Salvation refers to the past. Suddenly, by receiving Christ and going through the door, I can break the penalty of sin. In others words, I don’t have to worry about these skeletons in my closet rearing their ugly head. I don’t have to worry about all the mess-ups that have accrued on my account last year and five years ago and twenty-five years ago. I don’t have to worry about that. So, once I am saved it is a past thing. Also, it is a present thing. I am saved from the power of sin. As I walk with the Lord day by day, doing life in His sheepfold, temptation has less of a pull on me. I don’t find myself falling in the same traps, for the same strategies, the same stuff that Satan throws my way. So, in the present, I am saved from the power of sin. In the future, I am saved from the presence of sin. We are all going to leave sin one day if we have entered through the door. When we move from this life to the next, we will live forever with the Lord, away from the presence of sin. That’s what it means to be saved.

How about to go in and out? Again, think back to the sheepfold. Think about the sheep grazing in the sheepfold. Well, the shepherd is the door and for the sheep to go in and out of the sheepfold, they have to cross over the shepherd. The sheep realized that the shepherd was the man, the boss, their caregiver. It gave them a confidence, a power. Do you have that? Are you walking in that? Because, if you have entered through the door, if you are saved, you should go in and out. This in and out phrase also refers to traveling in ancient times. If you could travel from one country to the next in safety, it meant that everything was hunky-dory in your nation. It meant that you had a powerful leader. You could go in and out, in and out. And Jesus said, I send you out in a world full of wolves. Does that sound like your office? Does that sound like your school? Does that sound like your family? Jesus said it. We will be saved. We will go in and out.

Also, we are going to find pasture. Soul satisfaction. The hole in our heart will be filled. And if we could see the pasture our Good Shepherd has for us, we would not believe it. Pasture has to do with nourishment. The shepherd can lead the sheep to the grass but the sheep have to eat. Jesus tells us where to feed. We are to feed corporately on the word of God like we are right now. Also, we are to feed individually. We have got to nourish our souls. We have got to feed on scripture, on worship, on Christian relationships, on the things of God and then and only then will be discover the overflowing life. Not redundant but abundant.

The door. Why, though, are so many people struggling with what I referred to? Why are so many people struggling with going in and out and finding pasture and really being nourished? Why? Why? Why? Jesus answered that question for us. Let’s read on. He talked about the thief. That is why I have a crowbar here. He gives us Satan’s mission statement in John 10:10. Now before I read on, you might be wondering if I really believe in a personal devil. After all I have been to high school, through college, done post graduate work and you wonder if I actually believe in a sinister evil force out there that wrecks havoc on our planet. Yes. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look around here and go, whoa, there is some personal bad force out there. Yes, I believe in Satan and the realm of the demonic. Yes. And Jesus tells us what he is all about. He tells us his strategy, his mission statement. “The thief comes only to steal…” That means he lies in wait. “…to kill…” That means open combat. “…and destroy…” That means that he is plotting and scheming in your life and mine. He wants to steal, kill and destroy.

Jesus said, I came that they might have life and have it abundantly, a life overflowing. The thief, though, comes to steal, kill and destroy. He doesn’t want us to live a life of fullness. He wants us to live a life of emptiness. (Pours out all the water.) Emptiness. That is what he wants for you. That is what he wants for me. Emptiness. And he uses his cosmic crowbar, doesn’t he, to really get after us?

I want to talk to you a little bit about something, something very, very vital. Everything God has created is good. Yet, Satan, the thief, has a counterfeit for everything that God has fashioned. For example, let’s take food. I love food, don’t you? Have you ever thanked God for the fact that we can taste? What if everything tasted like asparagus? I love asparagus, but I am glad that there are other tastes. Food should be fuel for our bodies. The Bible talks about our bodies being a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit. And we should put good things into our bodies. I thank God for my sense of taste. You should to. Well, the thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy. He takes food, something good, something God has created and we have obesity. We have people with cancer and heart conditions just because of the trash they put in their bodies. We have bulimia and anorexia. The thief comes to counterfeit, to steal, kill and destroy something good God has created.

Think about our self-esteem. God, if you read His word, is right on concerning our self-esteem. We are to see ourselves the way God made us, nothing more and nothing less. See this lady right here? Would you raise you hand just for a second? Right there on the front row. Would you raise your hand? God made you the way you are for a reason. He gave you your look, your personality, your gift mix just for this time in history. You should see yourself the way God sees you. See this man right here? Same thing. This lady right here. Same thing. This skinny, loud-mouthed guy, myself, the same thing. Same thing. Well, the evil one comes along, the thief uses his cosmic crowbar and he wants us to have a poor self-esteem. So he counterfeits our self-esteem and says, don’t see yourself the way God sees you. See yourself the way others see you. Worry about what your neighbor thinks. Worry about what you friend thinks. Worry about what this group thinks. Worry about what the magazines tell you. That is a formula for frustration. The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy.

How about our possessions? God has given all of us material goods. As I said awhile back, some of us have small piles and other medium piles. Still others have Bill Gates jumbo piles. It is all from God. And God says that possessions are good when you understand where they came from and you are good stewards of them. Well, the evil one comes along and he uses the crowbar again to counterfeit what God has created. The evil one wants our possessions to possess us. He tells us, “You did it. It is yours. Have a tight grasp on your things.” The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy.

Sexuality. God is pro-sex. He thought it up. He invented it. He wants us all to have abundant sex. What is abundant sex? It is doing sex within God’s guardrails, one man and one woman in the context of marriage. That is what sex is reserved for. Well, the evil one comes to steal, kill and destroy with pre-marital sex, homosexuality, child molestation, just go on down the line.

How about our emotions? God has given us emotions. Have you ever thanked God for the opportunity we have just to laugh? Isn’t it great to laugh? It is even great to get angry. The Bible says get angry but don’t sin. We should get angry about certain things. If you are not angry now and then, something is wrong. The thief comes to steal, kill and destroy. The thief says, laugh at someone else’s expense. Make fun of them. Rip them apart. Laugh at the off-color joke. The thief also says rage on this person. Just let your temper go wild. Throw things. Hurt people.

The arts. We serve a creative God. We are made in His image. We are to be creative and it makes God’s heart beat fast when we draw and paint and sing and create in our own unique ways. There are some creative, good television shows out there, especially fishing shows. There are some excellent movies out there. Creative. The thief comes to steal, kill and destroy. Take a look at what is on right now at the movies. “Eyes Wide Shut” The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy. “American Pie” The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy. “Southpark” The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy.

“Well, Ed, you don’t get it, man. Some of the shows that you just referred to, there is some good in them.” That’s the way the evil one works. He doesn’t do all bad. He mixes a little bit of truth with all of his lies and trash. He has always operated that way. Hey, father, would you let your children play around with a serial killer? I am flabbergasted when I hear of parents and what they are exposing their children, and jr. and sr. high school students to. I don’t get it. I don’t want to waste your time and mine giving you graphs and charts of how our society is heading. We are definitely living the life and lifestyles that are preached to us by Hollywood. And I am not saying do not ever go to a movie that has a couple of cuss words in it. I will not get off on some legalistic trip. But we have got to talk about, to stand up regarding these issues.

God is doing a work in my life in this area. As you know, in June I went for a couple of weeks to Gulf Shores, AL to lead our Beach Retreats. We took about 500 students down there. We had a blast. I talked about parental issues. I talked about how to study the Bible. I talked about the abundant life. I talked about how these young people mattered to God. And I absolutely loved spending time with them. Well, after the Beach Retreat I returned to the Dallas/Ft. Worth area and Lisa and I went out on a date. I had not seen her for awhile. I suggested a movie with Austin Powers, “The Spy Who Shagged Me”. I thought that would be hilarious. And believe me, Michael Meyers is funny. You know, the teeth and the outfit and all that. I was sitting there watching and after about 15 minutes I began to question if that movie was good for me. I know a lot of people who are outside the family of God, so not much surprised me, I had heard it before. But I wondered if I should be sitting there exposing myself to the trash, to a movie which has taken a gift of God, our sexuality, and laughed at it and made fun of it. It is the old garbage in, garbage out deal.

Then I wondered what kind of example I was setting. Here I had just been talking to all those young people about the Christian life and doing sex God’s way. I got up and walked out. I am glad I did. I missed some funny lines, I know. Remember, Satan always mixes truth in with the lies. Now, don’t leave here and say that Ed told you to never go to a movie again. I am not saying that. We can’t live our lives with blinders on, with earmuff on. Some people freak out on that stuff. I am not talking about that. We are to live in the world but not of the world. But I am saying that the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy. We have to think about our choices. We cannot let the evil one overtly take his crowbar and crowbar marriages, and families, and children, and relationships because of the trash to which we expose ourselves.

Also, we have got to get serious about security. This guy is not playing Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit or Tidally Winks. He is not playing Twister. He is playing for keeps. He wants to steal, kill and destroy. It is amazing how we are into security these days. We have LoJacks in our cars. We purchase dogs to protect our property. Some of us live behind walls and gates. We don’t want to be a victim of crime.

What kind of security system are you putting over your mind, men and women, your children, your business, your relationships, your heart. Once you put the system in, fill it with good things, things that honor God, things that reflect Him. And that is precisely why we have so many different program opportunities here at the Fellowship Church. We want to give you options. If you are a single parent, a single adult, a student, a young person, a married person, white collar, pink collar, knee-high or tree-high, whatever, we want you to serve here and make this your social life and your relational base. You need to understand the glass, the door and the crowbar.

Looking over my life, I am 38 now, I stand back in amazement because I could not have signed up for a more exhilarating life. I have been hurt a good bit. I have been banged up. I have had difficult days. I have had questions. But through it all, as I have walked with the Lord, lived out being saved, going in and out, finding pasture, building security to thwart the temptation and the fiery darts of the thief, it has been incredible. I could not have scripted a better life. Quite frankly, I cannot see how young people at the zenith of their lives can turn their backs on the Christian walk. If there was a better way to live, I would do it. I would find it. But I am here to tell you there is not a better way to live. Sign up for this life. Enter through the door. Live out these principles because God is saying it is not redundant but abundant. Abundant. Abundant. Abundant.

Christmas Wrap: Transcript

CHRISTMAS WRAP

CHRISTMAS EVE SERVICE

ED YOUNG

DECEMBER 25, 2000

The Christmas season is a lot of fun, with a lot of festivity and a lot of action. I think some of the main action in the Christmas season has to do with wrapping. We love to wrap things. We wrap gifts with colorful paper, ribbons, and bows. We wrap ourselves up in warm clothing. We wrap our arms around relatives when we first see them, at least most of them. We wrap our houses with these Griswold-type lights. No one in America wraps their houses like Texans do. You go to other parts of the county and they have little bitty lights, and two or three lights. Everything is bigger in Texas, they say.

We also wrap our mouths, I think, around a lot of food. We love to eat. Usually, after about a week or so of this feeding frenzy, we wrap our bodies around exercise equipment as we try to burn off the weight we have wrapped around our waistlines and hips. Yes, we love wrapping. It’s something about the Christmas season.

This wrapping, though, is not exclusive to the 21^st Century. It’s not just for high-tech times. I think if you go back and look at the 1st Century Christmas, you will see a lot of people wrapped up in a lot of stuff. Now, I am not talking about just superficial stuff. I’m not talking about clothes, ribbons, and bows. I’m talking about the deep stuff of life, because those people, during that first inaugural Christmas, were wrapped up in some deep stuff, some stuff that many of us can connect with.

So, over the next couple of moments, I want to introduce you to some heavy hitters of the Christmas story. As we look at these heavy hitters, I think you can identify with them, because you will say, “Hey, I am sort of wrapped up in the same stuff that they were wrapped in.”

The first group of people I want to talk about are no strangers to you and me: The Wise Men. The Wise Men were wrapped up in a search. They were looking for something, and they had traveled thousands of miles, and talked to many people. They were following that star, and the star ultimately pointed them to the Christ child, the babe of Bethlehem, God in flesh.

Maybe you are searching for something right now. I think a lot of us are searching. During this holiday season, we are searching. You can look back and think about the different venues of your life. You have tried to find meaning and purpose through this venue and that—some of the venues pretty, some not so pretty—yet you have this emptiness in your spirit, this longing for satisfaction. You can identify with the Wise Men. If that is you, then I think you have found the answer. If you stay here, test waters, kick tires, and really seek, I truly believe you will establish a vital connection with the living Lord. Who is that star in your life pointing you to Christ? Could it be a neighbor? Could it be someone who invited you to this service? Could it be a situation you are dealing with right now at work? I don’t know.

I talked to a friend of mine several days ago, and this guy came to a point in his life where he bowed the knee and asked Christ to come into his heart. He gave himself to the Lord. This decision happened because of a long process of doing the Wise Man or Wise Woman thing. It happened through a long process of following an earthbound star. Another guy in this church was this guy’s earthbound star who invited him here. After testing waters and kicking tires, after following that star, then he made the commitment.

Do we have any Wise Men and Wise Women searching for the meaning of life? Are you wrapped up in the search?

Someone else is wrapped up in something. This guy was a wild man. His name was King Herod. King Herod was basically wrapped up in himself. He thought about himself. After all, he was the king. He was sitting on the throne of his life and he ran the show. He legislated everything he did. He said, “Don’t talk to me about this or that. I will do what makes me look good, what makes me feel good, what gives me pleasure.”

The Wise Men came to him and they said, “Hey, King, where is this Christ-child? Where is the King?” It freaked King Herod out. In Matthew 2:3, “When King Herod heard this, he was disturbed.” What an understatement. This egomaniac, who thought the world revolved around him, this meistic personality said, “What king? Say what? Hey, guys, why don’t you find this king? When you find him, tell him I will show up and I will worship him.”

Of course, he was lying, this King Herod. But could it be that some of us are doing the King Herod thing? Isn’t it easy to be self-centered? It’s easy for me to be self-centered. I don’t know about you. We’re basically sinners, selfish people. Just think about a baby. A baby is selfish. They think about themselves. We are born that way. We have to fight this battle with selfishness.

Maybe during this Christmas season, or maybe during your semiannual moments of introspection as you look through the rearview mirror, you ask yourself, “Could it be that I am doing the King Herod thing?” As you look back, maybe you see a marriage or two you burned through because of your selfishness. Maybe you see a business relationship or two you burned through because of your selfishness, or maybe a friendship you’ve burned through because of your selfishness. In a real way, you have to say, “You know what? I am sitting on the throne of my life. I am calling the shots. I am doing the King Herod thing. I’m wrapped up in myself.”

There is someone else in this Christmas story who is wrapped in something, the Innkeeper. Now this dude was something. He had it going on. Business was flourishing. Mary and Joseph had traveled—check this out—80 miles to Bethlehem. Why? Because of a census.

Ladies, picture this. Mary, on the back of a donkey, nine months pregnant, 80 miles. When they bolt into town, they are trying to find a place to stay. This Innkeeper, whose business was just going gangbusters, said to them, “Hey, we don’t have a place for you. Everything is jammed.” He was so concentrating on the bellman toting luggage and the valet people parking the camels that he thought, “Okay, you guys just go in that stable in the back. Yeah, I see you’re pregnant. You guys just hang out there. That’s cool. That’s fine.” Obviously, he had this mentality. The Bible says this about the Innkeeper in Luke 2:7, “There was no room for them in the inn.”

The Innkeeper was wrapped in busyness. He was busy with the business. Isn’t it so tempting and alluring to get wrapped up in busyness? Most of us have been going at warp speed lately. We have had the throttle to the firewall, haven’t we? Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. Those of us in the business world are thinking about end of year stuff, the stock market, a new business here, a new venture there, our client base, bonuses, and we are just immersed in all this stuff. We are wrapped up in busyness or business. Some of us who are carpooling and taking kids here, there and yonder, we are just busy. We can be so busy with the business of life that we end up separating ourselves from important stuff, like our spouse, our children, even doing the Heisman trophy thing away from God. “God, I am just too busy for you. God, I’ve just got too much going on. God, my business deals, man….” That’s the Innkeeper.

There is another group of people who are wrapped up in something, the shepherds. The shepherds were pulling an all-nighter. Can’t you see these guys between sips of espresso just checking out everything, glancing at a sheep now and then, but just looking at the stars. All of a sudden an angel appears before them. I love this classic line that the angel said, “Fear not.” If an angel ever appears to me, I hope they say, “Fear not.” Fear not.

“What were they wrapped up in, Ed?” Let’s let the Bible tell us. Luke 2 again, “An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shown around them and they were terrified.” In modern day vernacular, we would say, “They were wigged. They were freaked.” Or back where I am from, the Deep South, the angels had rattled their cages. They were fearful. They were terrified. A lot of us are wrapped up in fear right now. We don’t look like it because we are wrapped up in our finest. We just got home from the Gap or Old Navy. We are looking good, you know, Christmas time.

Some of us are fearful of failure. Down deep, you wouldn’t realize it, but we are. We are thinking about trying something new for the New Year, maybe a new thing business-wise, or relationally, or maybe trying to get involved in church. We are thinking, “What if it doesn’t work? What if I fail? What if I fall flat on my face?” Some of us deal with that kind of fear.

Others fear death. The stats on death, folks, are pretty overwhelming. One out of one die. We are all going to die. We live like we are not going to die, though. That is what is so funny, but we are going to die. All of us are slowly rotting away. Some will die next year, ten years from now, twenty years, thirty years, fifty years if you eat bean curd and drink carrot juice. We are all dying. Some of us live protected-type lives. We go, “I can’t take that risk. I can’t fly on that plane, or I can’t drive in that car. I can’t go out at night because what if something happens to me? What if I die?”

Some here are also wrapped in another type of fear. Some of us fear loneliness. This could be the first Christmas season you are spending alone, because of a death or maybe a divorce. It is tearing you apart. Again, on the outside, you look fine. You are packaged. You are wrapped. Everything looks hunky dory. Down deep, it is eating your lunch.

So a lot of people were wrapped up in a lot of stuff during that first Christmas. But someone else was wrapped up in something—God. During this first Christmas, the Bible says God was wrapped in skin, in epidermis. Let me stop here and press the pause button and ask you something. Isn’t this weird? I mean, God packaging his Son in skin. What weird wrapping. What peculiar packaging. That’s kind of strange.

Let’s be honest. Would you expect God to wrap himself up like that? God, wrapped in skin, then on top of that, Mary wraps him in a bunch of old barn blankets, swaddling clothes. On top of that, he is placed in a feeding trough and he is surrounded and wrapped in manure-laden hay? Some of you right now are going, “Ooh, don’t even go there, Ed, come on. I want the Christmas card Jesus. I want the clean Jesus. I want the Rembrandt Jesus. Not the raw Jesus.”

Well, friends, Jesus came to this earth and was born in a dark and dirty environment. We try to sterilize Christmas. We try to westernize Christmas. We try to Martha Stewart-ize Christmas. Jesus was born in a very ugly environment. Peculiar packaging. A weird way to wrap something. Speaking of packaging, we love to package stuff. Have you ever asked yourself this question when you are buying something for someone: “Does the packaging match the product?” Pretty good question. I have some examples.

Wow, an electric guitar. Rocking Rhythms electric guitar, to be specific, plays rock or heavy metal. Pre-recorded riffs from live instruments make you sound like a pro. This package tells me that if I take this guitar out, I can play like Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen, Eric Clapton, or The Edge if you are a U2 fan. I think I might just try it out right now. What do you think? It’s a beautiful color. I think I have seen one like this on VH-1. What do you think? [Ed plays poorly]

Obviously, I did not sound like a pro. If you have kids, this will last you a couple of days, maybe? I don’t think the packaging and the product go hand in hand. I don’t think they really match. I think the packaging overstated this deal a little bit.

Let’s look at something else. Bubba for President. He is the wisecracking Presidential candidate for the year 2000. All you have to do is squeeze either paw and it’s good for the economy. Are you ready? [Toy talking: “My fellow Americans. I’m Bubba. I am running for President. Come close. I want to tell you something. Closer. Closer. I am your candidate. If elected, I promise to make… so, you’re a democrat.”]

Okay. Once again, obviously, these packages make these colossal claims they cannot back up. God’s packaging is strangely understated, wouldn’t you agree? The question begs to be answered. Does God’s product, the person of Christ, and the packaging go hand in hand? Yes, they do. Jesus was born in a dark and dirty stable. He put on skin because of our sin. Our sin is dark and dirty, isn’t it? Jesus came into a raw existence. He was fully God and fully man. He can identify with you and me. We don’t serve a sequestered Savior. We serve someone who has been there. It’s great to think about the packaging, but the product is the deal.

Speaking of packaging and products and all that, I think it is funny to look at the different ways and different styles of gifts. Some of the gifts we buy this Christmas are giver-driven. A friend of mine loves cars. He gave his wife a brand new car. What is so funny is that this car he gave his wife is a car he wanted. She told Lisa and I the other day, “Ed, Lisa, I have only driven my new car twice.” Have you ever done that before? You bought a gift for someone and you were thinking, “Okay, I’ll buy it for my wife, but really I’m going to use it. I’ll just buy it for her.” Golf clubs. A shotgun.

Other gifts are recipient-driven. We say, “I wouldn’t buy this for him, but my son wants it. I’ll just go ahead and buy it. It’s kind of weird to me, but okay. Here you go, Son.”

The ultimate gift is relational-driven. It does two things. Number one, it reflects the personality of the giver. Number two, it meets the needs of the recipient. That’s the ultimate gift. So you heard it right here. The ultimate gift reflects the personality of the giver and meets the needs of the recipient. If you want to go back this afternoon and take back your gifts and try to get the ultimate gift, you can do that.

I think I achieved this recently. I really do. My wife turned forty years of age a couple of days ago, and I gave her several gifts. The first gift I gave her—and I took some serious grief over this by one of my friends—was a series of pictures of myself. One of my friends in particular was going, “What is this, Ed, Glamour Shots? Where is your boa and your make-up, I mean, come one. What a gift to give your wife on her 40th birthday. That’s it?”

I think it was a good gift, because, obviously, pictures of me reflect my personality, the giver. Number two, it meets Lisa’s needs. Why? Don’t laugh now. She has always wanted pictures of me. She does not have a lot of pictures of me and now she has this series of pictures of me. I think that is a pretty good gift.

That, believe me, pales in comparison to the ultimate gift. God has given us Jesus. It reflects who he is. Why? Because he is God. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, three in one, one in three. It also meets our deepest needs. We need a Savior. We need a Savior. We can put a band-aid over our problems. We could put a band-aid over our loneliness. We could put a band-aid over our fear, a band-aid over all this stuff, but only Jesus will meet our deepest needs. We are not going to find it in a new spouse. We are not going to find it in a new car. We are not going to find it in a new house or a new gift. We are not going to find it there. We are only going to find it in Christ.

Every year when we tear open our gifts, and we don’t usually spend a lot of time looking at the wrapping, but every time we tear open our gifts, we usually leave one gift under the tree. We don’t mean to, but we usually leave one gift. Is it that way for you? If it is, great. When that gift is finally recognized, we say, “Oh, we forgot one. There it is, by itself, under the tree.” There is nothing like a wrapped gift. It just kind of begs to be opened, doesn’t it? It’s just kind of sitting there, “Open me, open me, open me.” We run up to it. We see who it’s from, “Oh, it’s to me. Cool!” We unwrap it, and then, “Yeah, alright!” Then we try it on, or do whatever.

God has left the ultimate gift under a bloodstained tree outside of Jerusalem. That gift is Jesus. We can’t keep, though, the Christ-child in the manger scene. We can’t keep him wrapped in skin and, on top of that, wrapped in a bunch of barn blankets and surrounded by manure-laden hay. We want to do that because we are more comfortable that way. After all, who is afraid of a baby? We like Jesus in that little room, in that little house because he will not invade our lifestyle. He will not invade our spending habits. He will not invade our thought life. He will not invade our marriage. He will not invade our business. He will not invade the way we treat people. He will not invade our temper. He will not invade our hang-ups.

“Oh, I’ll just keep Jesus right there over in the manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes.” Well, let me tell you something. If that is your deal with Christmas, you are missing Christmas. Don’t just give him a quick glance, a westernized, Martha Stewart-ized glance. You’ve got to understand that Jesus left the cave, he left the stable, he grew into a man, he lived a perfect life, he was tempted yet he remained sinless. And he died on the cross for everything you have ever thought wrong, done wrong, committed wrong—past, present and future. The work has been done. Christmas is the total package of Jesus Christ. He is under that bloodstained tree and he is saying, “Open me. Open me. Open me.”

Several weeks ago, we were having a communion service. One of our six-year-old twins was seated beside my wife, and Laurie turned to Lisa and she said, “Mommie, let’s pretend like that they didn’t have to kill Jesus.” Powerful words from a six-year-old. Let’s pretend they didn’t have to kill Jesus. Large blocks of people live their lives that way. “Let’s pretend like my sins did not have to nail Jesus to the tree. Let’s pretend like they didn’t have to kill Jesus. Let’s just keep him there sequestered in that nice little stall.”

But you have got to respond to the gift. You have got to respond to it. Jesus wants to wrap you in love, in grace, and in tenderness. I don’t care where you are, what you are involved in, right now, he wants to do it. The moment you ask him to come inside your life, he will clean you up.