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THE UNTOUCHABLES SERMON SERIES

HOMOSEXUALITY

DECEMBER 13, 1998

ED YOUNG

I know that many of you have walked into today’s service with a myriad of mindsets regarding the topic.  Some of you are secretly hoping that I will unleash holy hatred on the homosexual community.  You kind of want me to abuse them, point them out and banish them to the uttermost, darkest and hellish areas of the supernatural.  I know some of you are secretly thinking along those lines.

Others here, because of a gay friend or a family member, are sort of poised to pounce on any word that I say.  You want to selectively listen, to take something out of context and to quickly conclude as you leave Fellowship Church that the God of the Bible, Christians and this church are homophobic, hard-hearted and intolerant.  You want to do that.  Others here are apathetic.  You don’t really care that much about the issue.  You want some information on it and are not really sure where you stand.

I know there are a percentage here who are involved in the homosexual lifestyle.  I want you to know something from my heart.  I know when you walked into the doors of this worship center that you knew what subject matter was on the plate, yet you showed up.  I know it took a lot of courage and I really respect that.  I want you to know something; in fact, I want every group here to know something. You are outrageously loved by the God of the universe.  Isn’t that wonderful news?  We are loved so much we can’t really comprehend it.  In fact, we would blow a fuse if we could realize the depth and the breadth of the love that God has for us.  However, part of love is hearing and articulating the truth.  The Bible says to speak the truth in love.  And the truth is not always pleasant, fun or an easy thing.  Sometimes it hurts.  Sometimes it challenges.  Sometimes it confronts.  So I want to confront you and challenge you, no matter what group you find yourself in, to take your prejudices and your presuppositions and put them aside.  Back burner them right now.  And I am going to ask you to open up your heart, your mind and your hands to God and to hear what He has to say about this issue which He talks about so frequently in His book.

So as we prepare to listen and to do business with God, let us pray together.  God, right now, as we open Your book I ask that you would open our lives.  I ask, Lord that you would deposit your truth in our lives and also I ask that because of this service, we will never, ever look at our lives, at walking with you, or relationships the same way as before.  I thank you now for what is going to happen as a result of this time together.  For Christ’s sake, Amen.

If you just mention the word homosexuality, people get tense.  Look around right now.  Sadly, what we know about homosexuality comes from slang terms or off-color jokes.  Most of us don’t know the truth about it.  I lovingly and firmly refuse to accept the fact that homosexuality falls in line with God’s model and God’s math of sex.  God says it time and time again in His word.  Sexual intercourse is for one woman and one man in the context of a mutually satisfying, lifelong commitment called marriage.  In other words, homosexuality is a sin.

Seven times in the Bible it is called a sin, four in the Old Testament and three in the New Testament.  I cannot accept the fact, biblically speaking, that homosexuality is a normal, status quo way to go.  A lot of us here have trusted Christ.  And when we have made this decision to trust Christ, we also trust Him relationally, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually.  And we trust His wisdom concerning sexuality.  So I want us to ask and answer some popular questions about homosexuality.  To do this we are going to use the same grid that we used last weekend when I began this easy series called THE UNTOUCHABLES.  Last weekend we talked about racism, now homosexuality and we will wrap up next weekend with abortion.  Easy preaching, easy teaching.

Let’s start with the first question.  Why?  Why would someone engage in homosexual activity?  That is a very important question.  In all of my research over the years of my ministry and over the last several weeks, I have pinpointed several major influences.  Researchers cite these influences time and time again in books, articles and interviews.  Here is why a lot of people choose the homosexual lifestyle.

The first influencer is environmental.  It goes something like this.  Let’s say that a young guy was born into a family that is out of balance and out of whack.  There is a mismatch going on.  Let’s just say for illustrative purposes that the mother takes the reins of the family team.  Let’s just say that she becomes the domineering and controlling coach.  She has got the whistle around her neck and she is all over this little boy.  Dad is distant.  Dad is over there in the bleachers.  He is off the playing field.  This little guy wants to exhibit his masculinity, he wants to see what being a man is all about but coach mom will not let him.  She is on top of him, screaming at him, yelling at him and one day this little guy just yells for masculinity.  He yells for affection.  He turns to his father and say, “Dad, I want to love you.  Dad, I want to know you.  Dad, show me what it means to be a man.”  But his cries fall on deaf ears because his mom is yelling and screaming and dominating him to such a degree that the dad can never hear him. You bring a little guy into a situation like this and you have vulnerability going on and you open the door for homosexuality.  I read this past week that most gay men and women go back to the mismatch in the family dynamics that were destructive and led to their lifestyle choice.  Environmental, that is a major influencer of homosexuality.

Now the next influencer that I want to talk about is the most popular, especially with the gay activists and the media spin-doctors.  It is the genetic influencer.  Homosexuals say, “I was born this way, let me live this way.  I cannot change.  Genetics, I was just born this way like blue eyes or brown eyes, left handed or right handed.  I just have this gay gene.”  Friends, there is no conclusive, medical evidence that supports this.  Granted, there could be some genetic disposition going on in certain cases but there is no such thing as a genetic gene.

Dr. Geoffrey Satanover from MIT and Harvard says this.  “What the majority of respected scientists now believe is that homosexuality is attributable to a combination of psychological, social and biological factors.”  These researchers, especially Satanover, brings up basketball to illustrate the point of how ludicrous it is to say that there is a gay gene.  Satanover says, “Well, what if you said there was a basketball gene.  You won’t find one.  You will have some predisposition toward height and muscularity and toward quickness and toward a vertical jump, but just because you have this predisposition does not mean that you are forced to become a basketball player.  It is a choice.”  Let’s say there was a gay gene.  You aren’t forced to engage in the homosexual lifestyle.  It is a choice.  Let’s say you are predisposed to chronic headaches or PMS.  Would that give you a license to engage in socially unacceptable behavior?  Well, I just don’t have a choice.

What if I was predisposed to anger and alcoholism?  What if I said to myself that I have just got to rage at everybody I see and I have got to drink a fifth a day?  I don’t have a choice.  I have just got to do it.  Interwoven and given to human beings is the freedom of choice.  Yet this is a very popular excuse.  It is an excuse for the homosexual community to ease its guilt and remove responsibility.  It sounds really good.  And it sounds good for a lot of sinfulness.  This condition, like racism, is not genetic, it is sinetic.

The third influencer that I want to hit is one that I would say is the most prominent as far as causing and leading someone into the gay lifestyle.  It is the experiential influencer.  Take what we talked about already.  Take the other influencers.  Then take a young man or a young woman testing the waters of puberty, testing their masculinity or femininity.  Put into the mix an abusive same-sex parent.  Put into the mix a trusted friend or relative.  Put into the mix a homosexual act and then you have that yearning and burning desire for masculine or feminine affection.  Then you have the desire for the person to leave the out of balance family dynamic and you have got someone whose sexuality is up for grabs.  Read the reports.  Talk to the people as I have.  And they will tell you that this experiential influencer is the major cause.  One study that I read said that 85% of gays say it was the early childhood experience that led them into the gay lifestyle.

Why do people engage in homosexual activity?  I touched on three influencers.  Now, let’s go a little deeper and answer another question.  What activities do homosexuals engage in?  What activities do they practice?  You are not going to hear this from the gay activists or the media spin-doctors because they want us to believe that homosexuals live a monogamous, happy life that mirrors the lifestyle of the heterosexual community.  But that is not true.

A Bellin-Wineburg study states that 2% of homosexuals would be called relatively monogamous.  We are talking about 98% being promiscuous, and I mean promiscuous.  Have you seen the side screens?  It is estimated that 43% of gay men have sex with over 500 or more different partners, 75% with over 100 or more partners.  Now the Bellin-Weinberg study was a study on human sexuality done by two people who were not Christ-followers.  This is not biased stuff here.  They found that 28% estimated over 1,000 partners.  Oftentimes people will say that lesbians are not as prolific, but they found that 41% of lesbians admitted to having sex with 10 to 500 lifetime partners.  So what we are talking about here is disturbing stuff.

The media will try to portray homosexuals as some guys or girls holding hands walking down Main Street in bright clothing and that’s it.  But that is not really the case.  Granted, there are some monogamous homosexuals.  But at the most it is a little over 2%.

Right now I want to prepare you for something.  We need to know what deviant behavior homosexuals are involved in.  I am not going to tell you, but I am going to allow a physician to tell you.  This physician has studied homosexual activity for the last 20 years.  This video I showed about four years ago.  It is extremely, extremely graphic but you need to know what goes on in actuality.  This is Dr. Stanley Montief as he talks about some of the homosexual acts that are practiced.

“One hundred percent of homosexuals engage in fellatio which is either insertive or receptive oral sex.  About 93% engage in rectal sex, which is anal intercourse.  And, of course, the rectum was not built for intercourse and so when you carry out anal intercourse you manage to tear the rectum because the sphincters are expanded in many instances.  It is not a healthy activity.  And it is because you tear the rectum that there is such a high incidence of disease in these cases.

About 92% of the homosexuals engage in something called rimming.  Rimming is simply licking in and around your partner’s anus.  It involved actually placing your tongue into the anus.  You couldn’t do this without some ingestion of feces.  Then you have something called fisting.  Fisting involved about 47% of homosexuals.  It involved taking your fist and your arm and inserting it into a man’s rectum so that he would have sexual pleasure and you would have pleasure by inflicting this upon him.

Then 29% engaged in something called golden showers.  What are golden showers?  A man lays on the ground naked and other men stand around him and urinate on him.  Then there is something called scat.  About 17% of homosexuals engaged in that.  That was actively eating human feces or rubbing feces on your skin or rolling around on the floor on feces which is called mud rolling.”

Disturbing activity, to say the least.  And against the backdrop of what you just heard, I want to talk to you about the published activities and the propaganda and the agenda of gay activists.  We need to know what they are doing and what demands they are trying to place on our society, our world, our government and even the local church.

Again, look to the side screens.  The first demand is that the sex lives of homosexuals and heterosexuals are similar and conventional.  Now I ask you, the acts described by Dr. Monteif, would you call those similar and conventional sexual acts?  I don’t think so.  A second demand is for homosexuals to be able to marry and adopt children and become established as families.  I pose to you, Fellowship Church, how do you think it would be for little boys and little girls to grow up in homes that are practicing the things you have just heard.  Yet they are trying to force this agenda in our public school system and they are trying to force hiring quotas even on local churches.

Let me hit one more of these demands.  Homosexuals want to be awarded full minority status.  I don’t think that there is a person here who wants to deny anybody his or her basic civil rights.  But think about this.  They are saying that they should be awarded full minority status due to sexual behavior.  If that were the case, why don’t we have minority status for adulterers, sado-masochists, or rapists.  It is ludicrous, deceiving, demanding.  But we are talking about a well-organized and affluent political ship.

So that brings us to the third major question.  What should our response be to all of this?  What should we do?  I want to speak first of all to those here who are involved in the homosexual lifestyle.  Here is the great news.  Three words.  You can change.  I will say it one more time.  You can change.  God can transform you, He can remake you, He can renew you.  You can change.

The Bible says in I Corinthians 6:9-11 some powerful and life-changing words.  It says,  “Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor the drunkards nor the slanderers nor the swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God…”  I love this next line,  “…And that is what some of you were.”  The Apostle Paul was saying, you were idolaters, you were adulterers, you were thieves, you were slanderers, you were homosexuals.  That’s right, the Corinthian Christians, that colossal group of moral foul-ups who made up this church, used to be all those things.  They were, but, Paul continues, “You were washed and you were sanctified and you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God.”  If it was just a genetic thing, no one could change.  Yet, thousands of lesbians, thousands of gay men leave the lifestyle, turn to Christ, get washed and sanctified and justified.  They marry and never get involved in the lifestyle again.

A friend of mine who I met a decade ago was named Victor.  Victor was affluent, articulate, young and a major leader in the gay community.  One day Victor got washed.  One day Victor bowed the knee to Christ.  One day he was sanctified and justified and he left the gay community.  And I watched Victor bring dozens and dozens of his friends from the gay community to the church and I watched him introduce them to Christ and I watched them leave the lifestyle.  One day, though, Victor told me some disturbing news.  He told me that he had AIDS and shortly thereafter Victor died.  I believe that Victor is watching us right now from heaven.  I believe that Victor is saying to a lot of people involved in the homosexual lifestyle, to a lot of people who are tempted by it, you can change.  It works.

Did you check out the songs that we did today, those sing-alongs?  Those sing-alongs were written by a homosexual man, Dennis Jernigen.  He came out of the homosexual and into a personal relationship with the living Lord.  You can talk all day about self-help groups.  You can talk all day about trying to stop the temptation.  You can talk all day about trying to leave the lifestyle but the only thing that works is being washed, being sanctified and being justified.  We are going to help you, homosexuals.  We are here to love you and we are here to encourage you.  And I want us to stand with fellow strugglers.  I don’t care if you are a liar.  I don’t care if you are a thief.  I don’t care if you are a homosexual.  I don’t care if you are an adulterer.  I don’t care if you are a fornicator.  I want to stand with you.  I am not too concerned about what you are involved in.  I want to stand with you, introduce you to Christ and show you what this lifestyle change can do in your life.

Remember, the Christian life is an event followed by a process.  But homosexuals, hey, you need help.  You need help.  H stands for hope.  True hope is found in knowing God.  E stands for encouragement.  You’ll find encouragement here with fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.  L stands for love.  Once the love of God assaults you and overtakes you, then and only then will you see life the way Christ wants you to see it.  And P stands for prayer.  It is going to take prayer.  And I will not broadbrush it.  Homosexuals, it will take more courage, more prayer, more endurance than you have ever had in your life.  This is going to be the most difficult obstacle you have ever crossed, but with the help of God you can do it.

And let me tell you why it is so difficult.  There is nothing like sexual sin.  Sexual sin is a multi-level and multi-faceted activity.  Whether you are involved in sex outside of marriage with the opposite sex, whether you are involved in adultery, or homosexuality, it is a multi-faceted thing.  And only a multi-faceted God can help you change.  Only He can do the work.

Also you are going to need a local body of believers.  You are going to need the church.  You are going to need people to come along side you and support you.  But I am going to tell you something.  You can do it.  Think about Victor.  Think about Dennis.  That is what I say to the homosexuals here.  You can change.  We love you.  You matter to God, but we love you enough to speak the truth and to tell you how to make the step.

Now let me say a word to the Fellowship Church.  What should we do?  Unleash holy hatred to the homosexual community?  No, that is not what Jesus did.  Should we be kind of apathetic?  Should we take things out of context?  What should we do?  We need to do two things.  We need to connect and challenge.  We need to connect, to build relationships with people who are involved in the gay lifestyle, around the neighborhood, at the workout facility, within this church, within every realm of life.  And we need to build relationships and connect with love.  I am talking about an outrageous amount of love.  Can you do that?  God tells you to do it.  God tells me to do it.  We are not to worry about what people are involved in, just to connect and love.  And then we have got to challenge.  We have got to say, lovingly and firmly, I love you but here is what the Bible says.  This is not an acceptable alternative to God’s sexual math or life.  You can’t make it work.  It doesn’t fit with God’s agenda.  So we have got to build those bridges and then we have got to challenge and confront.

We are not supposed to trade insult for insult, to call names and go back and forth.  Christ never did that.  We are never to do that.  But I will say this.  Sometimes you will have to take some accusations.  Sometimes you will have to take people spreading false rumors about you.  Sometimes you will have to take that.  That is what happens when you connect and challenge.  But if you hold true in love and stand on this Word, God is going to take care of you and He will show you what to do.

So the information has been given about this untouchable subject.  I don’t know about you, but as I said last weekend, part of walking with Christ is asking the tough questions and being ready for the raw answers, then processing the information and living it out.  Live it out.  Do what the Bible says.  And God will be glorified and many, many people that you’ll see will change.  They will change.

VIRTUOUS REALITY SERMON SERIES

WINDOWS ’95 – DAVID & BATHSHEBA

ED YOUNG

OCTOBER 15, 1995

The world watched as media mogul, Bill Gates, unveiled Windows ’95, the most intensive and extensive computer program organizer to date.  It caused quite a stir in the computer industry.  Today I am going to unveil a new version of Windows ’95.  It is called Windows 995.  995 BC.  Today this new version of Windows, I promise you, will cause quite a stir in your life as well.

We have been looking at the Biblical character of David for the last few weeks.  David is going to make a mistake in this excerpt of scripture that we are going to look at.  This mistake almost cost him his entire career.  We have seen David through some great moments, how he handled opposition, his response to true friendship, his response to revenge.  Today, though, we see him at a weak moment.  We are going to see how to respond to sexual temptation.  How do we respond to sexual temptation?  And we are going to learn, not by following David’s example, we are going to learn from his example.  We are going to see several responses that we need to apply in our lives when we are faced with sexual temptation.  I didn’t say if we are faced with sexual temptation but when we are faced with it.  I don’t care who you are, we all deal with this temptation.

Let’s jump right in.  If you want to respond properly to sexual temptation, the first thing you are going to have to do is beware of boredom.  Beware of boredom.  Boredom gives the evil one a great opportunity to tempt us in the realm.  The Bible says in II Samuel 11:1. “In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war….”  The spring was a beautiful time in Palestine, it was a time when people got into battles because the roads were dry, the rainy season was over.  At the time David had been on the throne for about two decades, he was in his early 50s, at the peak of his career, spiritually a man after God’s own heart.  Politically he had brought the twelve tribes together, they were focused as a nation.  The man was worth millions and millions of dollars.  He was number one, riding the crest of the waves.  “David sent Joab out with the king’s men and the whole Israelite army.”  Here is where he got into trouble, though.  “…but David remained in Jerusalem.”

An idle mind is a dangerous mind.  David should have been on the battlefields, but he abandoned his purpose and he kind of put his mind into neutral.  A couple of years ago I was fishing with a friend of mine in Port O’Connor, TX.  We were fishing in a ship channel.  We would cruise up near some rocks, put the boat in neutral and the engine would idle.  He told me to keep a look out for the giant ships coming through the channel because, if I didn’t notice a ship early enough, the wake thrown up from the ship could knock us into the treacherous rocks.  I am going to tell you something.  If you hang out, if you just become stagnant, if you always are bored, that situation is going to give Satan an opportunity to get at you.  David, the Bible says, remained in Jerusalem.  He was probably thinking about the past, all the victories, all of his successes.  Maybe he spent time in his trophy room looking at all those great physical things that he had brought back from battle, Goliath’s sword and things of that nature.  On afternoon David was bored and fell asleep.  When he got up he walked around the top of the palace, which obviously was the tallest building in Jerusalem at the time.  And David, I’m sure, was taking in the sights of Jerusalem.  He was thinking to himself that he was the man that brought all of it together.  He began to pat himself on the back and this is where the temptation hammered David.

Number two.  After we are aware and watchful of being bored, we have to turn from temptation.  David was not able to do this, turn from temptation.  The Bible says this in II Samuel 11:2-4. “From the roof he saw a woman bathing.”  Now some of you are saying, “Hey wait a minute.  What is this girl doing taking a bath on top of a roof where people could see her.  Give me a break.  Was she doing some nude sunbathing as well?  That is kind of odd, isn’t it?  There are not very many people who take baths on their roof tops.”  It was common in Biblical times for women to take baths on top of the roof in the afternoon, because most of the men were either in battle or they were in the fields.  Cisterns were located on the rooftop to catch rainwater which the afternoon sun would warm.  It was like taking a hot bath.  David should have been in battle.  And the Bible says that he saw a woman bathing.  The temptation was just beginning to crystalize itself.  David hadn’t messed up here.  He just saw a woman.  And we see many members of the opposite sex who are attractive.  That is not the sin.  Here is where the sin began to occur.

“The woman was very beautiful.”  This word beautiful in the Hebrew is a very interesting word.  It comes from two Anglo-Saxon words which are rendered Sharon Stone.  Just kidding.  This word beautiful, honestly, is an intensive Hebrew word.  It is found only this one time in the entire Bible.  The woman was very beautiful.  And here is where David started getting into trouble.  He saw her.  He should have turned from the temptation but he looked again and saw she was very beautiful.  He began to paint pictures in his mind of this woman, then of this woman and King David getting together sexually.  That is when the sin began to occur, in the mind.  She was beautiful.  “And David sent someone to find out about her.”  He could have stopped at any stage here but he played with it, he thought about it, he focused on it.

We have twins who are fifteen months and they play in our driveway constantly.  The driveway slants and if they don’t watch out, the twins playing in their little cars could start going down the hill, and while they can stop at the top of the hill pretty easily, further down the hill they would get in trouble.  We have to run and grab the car so that the car will not go out in the alley where either one might get hurt.

When sexual temptation starts, the best time to stop is when it begins.  It is to turn away from the temptation.  It is not good to entertain it, to focus on it, to play with it, to send it on down the hill and then when you are half-way there declare that you need to stop.  More often than not things are going too fast, and it is difficult to stop.  David sent someone to find out about her and he found out her name was Bathsheba, and he found out that her husband was named Uriah.  Uriah was one of David’s main men, one of his hand-chosen thirty five, a man who had been in every battle with David.  Uriah was a man who loved David, who was loyal to him, a man who was, at that very moment, on the battlefield.  Then David sent messengers to get her and he slept with her.  You read the life of David.  David prayed about everything, he prayed before he walked into battle, he prayed before he developed a friendship, he prayed before he established a capital city, he prayed before he chose a leader.  He didn’t pray about one area of his life and this area took him down, his relationship with women.  In all of David’s writings, in all of the Psalms, you read about him throughout the Old Testament, he never prayed about his relationship with the opposite sex.  When I first read this I thought why didn’t Bathsheba say no.  She was married, she could have said no that she was not going to go to bed with him.  She could have spun on her heels and walked home.  But, back in Biblical times, if Bathsheba would have said no, David could have killed her on the spot.  Dead.  Thus, she slept with David.

Look at II Corinthians 10:5.  You saw the drama today.  “We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”  Do you do that?  Do you take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.  Satan is a master painter.  He paints pictures in our minds and the pictures he paints in our minds are not evil.  The pictures he paints in our minds are not sin.  It is what we do with the pictures that turns it evil or into sin.  If we look at that picture and realize what he is doing, and we take it captive, rip it apart, see who is actually painting it and throw it out, that is what the Bible says we should do.  Conversely, if we take that picture and say it is a pretty good looking picture, Satan, here is some more oil paint, here are a few more brushes, make it a little bit more detailed, put a little music with it.  It is a matter of time before we actually are putting flesh on the canvas and then we are living it out.  So we have two options, either to rip up Satan’s canvas or to give him some more supplies.

I Corinthians 10:13.  “And God is faithful, He will never let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.  But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.”  That is a comforting verse, isn’t it?  To stand up under it.  If we get into a tempting situation, God will make an escape route available to us.  The problem is, we get into these situations and we see the escape route and say no, no, no.  Men, you can’t go to a topless club, women, you can’t read romance novels day in and day out.  You can’t go to those R rated movies with explicit sex scenes and wonder why you fall into sexual sin.  It seems like just one day, wham it happened.  It doesn’t happen like that.  David didn’t get up and say, “Today I am going to commit adultery, I’m going to ruin my life, I’m going to have sex with Bathsheba.”  It was a slow thing.  You see, Satan does not move us by yards, or by feet, he inches us along.  Just let down you morals a little bit, Ed, just watch that show just for a second.  Just a little bit.  And one day you were in one place and you wake up way over there, and you are committing sexual sin.  Turn from temptation.

Number three.  Confess and come clean.  David’s worse nightmare became a reality because in a couple of months Bathsheba sent him a little E mail and it said, “David, I am pregnant.  Hugs and kisses, Bathsheba.”  Oh, oh, watch out King David.  David was brilliant though.  Remember he had the musical capability of an Elton John, the poetic giftedness of Shakespeare.  Name anyone who was gifted in the arts and David was that good.  Even athletically, he was an artist plus a great athlete, he could split a hair at 30 feet with either hand with a sling shot.  He killed and bear and a lion with his bare hands.  This man had it all.  He was smart.  He decided to do the Watergate thing, to cover it up.  So David sent word to Joab, the general, to send Uriah to him.  He brings Uriah in and sits him down for a talk.  After the talk he tells Uriah that it is getting late and that he needs a second honeymoon with his spouse, Bathsheba.  “Go home for the night and let everything take it course.”  He thought he had the perfect plan, he thought he had covered it up.  Uriah, though, was so loyal he didn’t go home.  Uriah slept outside with David’s servants because he said that he could not think about making love with his wife when all of his men were out in the field fighting for Israel.  David couldn’t believe it, he wondered where Uriah had learned such loyalty.  Of course, Uriah had learned loyalty from David.

David moves to Plan B.  He invited Uriah over to eat and got him drunk.  He ordered his servants to help Uriah home.  Regardless of being drunk, Uriah still would not approach Bathsheba and slept outside with David’s servants again.  Uriah drunk was better than David sober.

Then it says in II Samuel 10:14-15 something that is staggering to read.  “In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it with Uriah.  In it he wrote, ‘Put Uriah in the front line where the fighting is fiercest.  Then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die.”  That is exactly what happened.  Uriah, and many of David’s other men were killed because David had to rub Uriah out.  It was making him look bad.  There is always something true about sexual sin.  Sexual sin effects and harms and destroys, always, the innocent bystander.  Always, always.  You can’t have pre-marital sex and have it be just a sexual thing.  You can’t commit adultery and have it be just a sexual thing.  I have talked to too many couples, too many singles, too many high school students and they all tell me the same thing.  “Ed, if I could only turn back the clock, man, I wouldn’t do it.  My children, my spouse, this girl I dated back in high school or in college, or I am with now.  I wish, I hadn’t done it.”

After I am aware of my boredom, I am turning from temptation, I need to confess my sin and come clean.  David should have confessed his sin.  The Bible says in I John 1:9, “If we confess out sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us for all unrighteousness.”  You see David sinned greatly before God and God wanted to forgive him greatly.  Later on he did.  David should have come clean.  He should have confessed his sin, but he didn’t, he kept it a secret.  He committed adultery with Bathsheba, Uriah was dead, he married her and for twelve months he thought he had gotten away with the perfect crime.  Until one day David’s close friend, Nathan, walked into his office and asked if David had heard the story about the little sheep.  He knew that would get David’s attention because David loved sheep, he was a shepherd for years and years.  He told David that there was a rich man with a bunch of sheep, and a poor man who had one little ewe lamb.  The little ewe was the pet of the family, slept with the children, was fed out of a bottle.  One day the rich man had an important business associate come to town and he invited him over and instead of killing one of his lambs for a meal, he took the little ewe lamb from the poor man and killed it.  David became violently angry.  He said that man should pay the poor man four times over, or even be killed for his action.  Then David locked eyes with Nathan.  Nathan took his hand and pointed to David and said, “You are that man.  You are that man, you committed adultery and you have killed Uriah the Hittite.”  You talk about really being rattled and rocked and brought to your knees.  David experienced that.  Confess and come clean.

Number four, consider the consequences.  You see when David was tempted, he should have thought about the consequences, he should have looked past the temptation to what was going to happen, the coverup and then those consequences that never left his house.  God will forgive sin, but He will not remove the consequences of sin.  Here is what happened because of David’s sin.  The Bible says in II Samuel 12:10, “Therefore, the sword will never depart from your house.”  Let me tell you what that meant to David.  God cleansed him and forgave him and forgot his sin, but the child born to David and Bathsheba died at three months of age, David’s son Amnon raped his half sister, then Absalom, another of David’s sons killed Amnon and to top that off, Absalom tried to take the throne from his father and he was killed in battle.  “The sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.”

II Samuel 12:13. “Then David said to Nathan, ‘I have sinned against the Lord.'”  Do you see that?  Every time you sin, no matter what it is but especially sexually, you sin against the Lord.  So when you have sex outside the marriage bed there are always three people involved, you, the person you are having sex with and the Lord.  He is always there.  And when you think about that, when you think about putting Jesus with you in the bed of adultery, when you think about putting Jesus with you into the bed of premarital sex or homosexuality or lesbianism, that will change entirely the way we live.

David said, I have sinned against the Lord.  Then Nathan replied, “The Lord has taken away your sin.”  The Lord easily at this point could have turned his back on David but He didn’t and this is the grace and the beauty of God.  Four points, four responses to sexual temptation.

Now let’s bring this whole message down to the practical side of life, let’s bring it down to where we live.  I want to give you some guidelines, some specific guidelines, concerning sexual temptation.  First, monitor your media intake.  One movie that has an explicit sexual scene can feed lustful thoughts for weeks.  “But the movie was so good.  I love Michael Douglas.  Sharon Stone has something else about her.  I really don’t think about it.  I’m married.”  Who are you trying to fool?  I was born at night, but not last night.  God knows.  How about the channel surfing?  Different talk shows, the made for TV movies, Showtime, HBO, Cinemax.  Any exposure to pornographic materials is like throwing a lighted match into a pool of gasoline.  Romance novels?  Monitor your media intake.

Secondly, choose your friends carefully.  The first place where adultery begins is usually with close friends.  The second place adultery and sexual sin begins is usually in the work place, since everyone is dressed up, looking nice, often with expense accounts.  The third place adultery happens is usually with the relatives of the spouse.  Choose your friends carefully.

The third and final suggestion, set some guidelines that will keep you away from much of the temptation that Satan will bring up in your life.  Now I want to share with you very candidly and carefully some of the guidelines I have set up.  I have shared these with you before and I will share them with you again.  One.  I will never meet another woman privately or publicly unless she is my wife.  I will never go out to lunch with another woman.  I never counsel a woman alone in my office.  Never, ever, ever.  Two.  I never ride alone in a car with a woman.  Three.  I don’t travel alone.  These are some guidelines that I have set up in my life because I want to remove myself from any area that could cause temptation, any area that could give Satan a chance to get a toe hold.  And if we keep ourselves out of those situations, we have knocked away most, not all, most of his artillery.  I have been faithful to my wife, Lisa, since we were married and I plan on being faithful by God’s grace until I go to be with the Lord.  Both of us were virgins when we got married.  There are people who say there is no way you can be a virgin.  That is a bunch of junk.  Because if I can do it, and I am a normal man being involved in a very secular world like I was and am involved in, you can do it too, but only though God’s grace.

You see, committing adultery and sexual sin really scares me and it scares me because I love Jesus Christ so much.  I really do.  I love God.  Another reason that committing adultery frightens me is because I don’t want to do anything to hurt my relationship with Lisa nor with all of my children.  I shudder at the thought of being able to look at them and confess that I sinned sexually.  A third reason that I am really frightened is because I fear God.  I fear Him.  Now a lot of people, myself included, we love to memorize positive scripture verses about God, the forgiveness, the grace, the love, the compassion, the mercy.  But how about this one I put down on your outline.  Hebrews 10:31.  “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”  It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of God.  That is talking about the wrath of God.  That is talking about the judgment of God.  Because God is a God who is fair.  If I got involved in sexual sin, I am not sure what God would do to my ministry, to my family, to my life.  Just read through the Old Testament.  Moses took all this garbage from the children of Israel for forty years and he got mad at God, struck the rock and God said that He would not permit him to enter into the promised land.  David had a one night stand with Bathsheba, killed her husband.  The sword never left his household.  A couple of other people were irreverent and He struck them dead.  I am not sure what God will do.  And it always scares me when people say, “Well I know what God will do and what God will not do.  Well my loving and forgiving God would never, ever do anything like that.  Plus, I know someone at work, Ed, this guy jumps from sack to sack to sack, he is making money, he is doing well, he even drives a Mercedes.”  You know God doesn’t always settle His account in seven days or thirty days or forty days or five years or ten years.  Sometimes he waits until the throne to settle His account.  You see I don’t want your blood on my hands.  I don’t want you to stand before a holy God and have God say, “You mean you were not taught?  Yes, you were taught I was loving, that I was forgiving but you were not taught I was a God of wrath, too, a God of judgement too?”  I don’t want your blood on my hands.  I want to look at God one day and say, “God, I taught them, I told them, here it is.”  This is not my most popular sermon, this is not my favorite thing to talk about but this stuff is real.  The great news is, don’t miss it.  I don’t care if you are the most spectacular violator of sexual sin, the great news is, if you confess your sin, if you come clean, if you consider the consequences and turn from those sins, I don’t care where you are, God will forgive you and forget your sins and He will change your life.  But, He is not going to remove the consequences.

The choice is up to you.  The choice is up to me.  Sexual temptation is there.  Will we abide by these principles and precepts?  Will we respond like God wants us to respond?  Will we take every thought captive?  Or will we feed those mind pictures and let Satan inch us and inch us and inch us.  Hey, let me tell you something, twenty minutes, an hour worth of passion is not worth a lifetime of misery.

THE RECOVERY CHANNEL SERMON SERIES

HOW TO GAIN CONTROL

ED YOUNG

AUGUST 20, 1995

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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