It is a Spirit thing and let me tell you something about the Spirit, I am talking about the Holy Spirit, the third person of the God head or the Trinity. The Holy Spirit never calls attention to Himself. He never asks us to worship the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit always points us to Christ.
He is our convictor, our counselor, our guide. He is pointing us to Jesus because remember, friends, it is all about Jesus. We were sought and bought by His blood and if we receive that, it is our first act of worship. Then we begin to climb the mountain of worship and while we climb we have got to be producing fruit. Our Lord said that He would know His followers by the fruit they produce.
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The Rapture means that those of us who are in Christ, those of us who still are living on this planet will be raptured to heaven one day. We will meet the Lord in the clouds. And people who are left behind will try to explain it. In fact there is an entire series in our bookstore written by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LeHaye called Left Behind. If you want to read something exciting about what I just said, buy that series.
But somebody left behind will just try to explain it away, but we will be in heaven. This is not referring to the Second Coming. The Second Coming will happen after the Rapture and after the seven year Tribulation which is hell on earth.
When we were in Israel, we stood on a mountain overlooking the Valley of Armageddon where a river of blood will flow 200 miles during the final great battle.
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And the second one is called the character checkpoint. You have got to check the character. “How, Ed, do you assess someone’s character when you are dating?” Ask two questions. Here is the first question. Is he or is she honest? That is the first question you had better ask. And you had better be thinking about it when you are dating, is he or is she honest? Deception, dishonesty is public enemy number one in a relationship, no question about it. Let me illustrate. I am going to mention two couples and when I mention these names, if you know them, just whisper the word to your neighbor. What comes to mind when I mention this couple? David and Bathsheba. Whisper it. Adultery. Sampson, the Biblical body builder, and Delilah. Deceitfulness. You see, dishonesty.
Is this person hiding something from you, did they exaggerate, tell white lies, kind of stretch the truth. I talked to someone a couple of weeks ago who said, “You know in the dating phase, Ed, I saw my husband kind of stretching everything and lying but he said it is just the way everyone does. It is kind of a man thing. And now I am married and am finding out so many areas where he just lied to me.” How sad, how sad.
If you are dating someone and you are thinking about marrying them, don’t miss this one. S L O W. Say it with me – slow. One more time – slow. Like Mr. Rogers says, “That’s good, I knew you could.” Go slow. I am talking about time. Here is what I would say, this is Ed Young talking, here is what I would say about time. I don’t care how old you are, you need to wait at least, at least a year before you get married.
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In too many circumstances your son hears Mom say, “Yes, Jesus is the way, the truth and the life”, but five minutes later he hears Dad take Jesus’ name in vain in the work shed. God insists on it. We’ve got to be reading off the same page.
Another reason He insists on spiritual compatibility is that He wants us to be able to tap into a common resource, see it there, a common resource when adversity comes. And I want to tell you something, your marriage will be tested. Your parenting skills will be tested. The winds will blow, how will you react? How will you act? I have complete confidence in knowing that Lisa, my wife, can tap into the same power source that I can. And she has supernatural resiliency because she knows Jesus Christ personally. I have seen her rebound from a miscarriage, from the doctors telling us our two year old son has neurofibromatosis. And it goes on and on and on. You have got to have it, if you don’t your marriage will end up in a backlash like my fly reel did when I was twelve years of age.
Let’s now move to the second checkpoint. Some of you are thinking this, you are thinking, “OK spiritual, share the most important thing, common values, OK, tap into the same resource, everything is cool we can end the message now because if someone is right with God it means they will be right with me.” That is not true. That is not true. You can have a miserable marriage with someone who knows Jesus Christ personally. You can have a miserable marriage with someone who is at the same depth and has the same desire as you spiritually. There are other things out there that you have to test. There are other checkpoints.
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I thank God for my wife because she shares the same depth and desire that I do spiritually. I look back on our courtship and our marriage. I left a very secure position, a full scholarship at Florida State University to move back to Houston to work full time for meager wages and to go to school full time, to live in a tiny apartment. She left all of the security from Tallahassee, Florida, and moved to Houston. She helped put me through seminary, both of us were working. Then I became one of the associate pastors of a very large church. Everything looked great. And God led me up here four years ago to a church without a typewriter, no staff members and the budget, my salary, was projected. Lisa, all along the way, was right there with me saying, “I feel it, Ed, let’s go for it, I know God is leading us.” We could not have done it. Our marriage would not have survived if she would have been strong and I would have been weak or I had been strong and she would have been weak spiritually. So think about that gauge. Think about that spiritual compatibility component.
But there is another reason why God insists on spiritual compatibility, He wants you to have common values in raising children. You talk about a difficult time to raise children, it’s now. And we have four of them. And I think about the drugs, the violence, the illicit sex that bombards children day after day after day. It’s not time, parents, to set little Johnny out adrift on the seas of relativism while Mommy and Daddy are still trying to make their minds up on what kind of parental values should be adhered to.
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That is the first reason, God’s explanation regarding being bound together with a believer. We have got to be able to share the most important thing to us with the most important person. The marital relationship takes precedent over all other human relationships. Think about it. Someone becomes a Christian, we have had that happen hundreds and hundreds of times here over the last four years of our church’s history. They come to a point in their lives where they receive Jesus Christ, where they realize that Christianity is that personal encounter with the living Lord, Jesus becomes their Savior. He becomes number one, He becomes their friend, then He becomes the most important thing in their life. And He begs to be shared with friends, with family and especially those people that we date. Especially those people that we date. God insists on spiritual compatibility. How tragic it would be to have someone in a marriage and you couldn’t share the most important thing with them. Don’t you see God’s love in this directive?
It is also important to marry someone and to date someone who shares the same depth and desire that you share spiritually. You are going to run into problems if one spouse is in the baby pool with floaties on, spiritually, and the other with the Cousteau dive team exploring the ice caverns of antarctica, spiritually. What is going to happen when God leads the strong one maybe to sacrifice some resources, some time to the church, or maybe to make a career change, to obey a prompting. “One will say let’s go for it, I know it is right.” The other person, who is in the shallows, who is in the baby pool spiritually, will say, “Well, let’s be practical. Everything is stable right here. Let’s don’t make waves. I like these floaties.”
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And sure enough, Joab figured everything out and the troops backed off and Uriah was killed. Uriah is history now. David thinks, “Okay, man, I’ve gotten away with it.”
But he knew down deep he knew in his heart of hearts that Joab knew. But Joab was his General. Surely he wouldn’t confront David. And David knew that God knew, but he didn’t do anything about it. He just kept that guilt and that pain and that remorse. He was imprisoned by it for about year.
And maybe some of you right now can identify with that. Maybe some of you right now are carrying around guilt, pain, and remorse because you have taken the leap off the ledge of moral compromise and you’re sleeping in the wrong bed. You’re hooked up with someone who is not your spouse.
Or maybe, just maybe, you’re on the ledge but you’ve not taken the dive off. But you’re cultivating that relationship. You’re comparing this person to your spouse. And the next step is to do physically what you’ve already done emotionally and mentally.
David, a man after God’s own heart, was imprisoned by guilt and pain and remorse. He was carrying it around. Then he brings Bathsheba in to be his wife and a year melts off the clock.
Consequences
David’s spiritual advisor, Nathan, is talking to him one day. David’s background was a shepherd and he loved sheep and all this. And Nathan said, “David, did you hear the story about the sheep? And David said “No.” Nathan said, “Well, there was this really wealthy guy who had herds and herds of sheep. And one of his big time clients had just flown in on a private jet and, David, this guy wanted to feed him lamb. But instead of using one of his sheep, he stole the lone sheep that a family had reared from a baby sheep. And he killed that sheep and fed it to this wealthy guy. He took the only family pet from these poor people. Can you believe it, David?”
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My father, though, became angry at me and he banded me for life from the ping pong table. He said, “You’ll never play again!” But this past Christmas I did buy my kids a ping pong table and guess who showed up last week at my house? My brother! And we went upstairs and we locked eyes, but we didn’t play. I don’t know what it is about Ben. I don’t get mad if anyone else beats me, but Ben? I don’t know. It must be that whole brother thing.
Well, think about your situation. Maybe you’re dealing with a toxic spouse. May you’re dealing with someone who spews molten lava all over you at work. Maybe you’re dealing with a coach who messes you around. Maybe you’re dealing with a teacher or a friend and they have this anger problem.
There is a good side to anger and a bad side to anger. Anger basically is neutral you could say. But from our perspective, which is God’s view, anger is a gift from God. Say that with me. Anger is a gift from God. The Bible says this about anger. Turn to Ephesians 4:26 and 27. I’m going to warn you—these verses are dangerous for your emotional health.
“Be angry…” Don’t you like that? The Bible says that. “Be angry, and yet do not sin…”
Go throughout the Bible and see how often God got angry. Jesus got angry.
[The passage continues] “Be angry, and yet do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not give the devil an opportunity.”
So there’s a helpful way to deal with anger and a harmful way, a good way and a bad way, a saintly way and a sinful way.
If I allow myself to get involved in sinful anger, the Bible says, I give Satan an opportunity. In some translations, it means that I actually help him into my life. I give him a boost. And I don’t want to do that. You don’t either.
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I have read them about four times here in this church. This will be my fifth. Are you ready?
II Corinthians 6:14 & 15. “Oh no Ed, not that one.” The Bible says to believers “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.” Now automatically some seekers here are saying, now wait a minute. God, He is being discriminatory. God is saying His children are too good, they are too high on the spiritual plane to relate and to bond with unbelievers. It doesn’t sound like God is really a loving God to me. I’ll continue. “What fellowship can light have with darkness? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?”
If you receive this verse, Christians, and apply it in a nanosecond, God has reduced the dating playing field from 100 yards to about the size of a postage stamp. Four-fifths of the possible candidates have been eliminated. Isn’t that something? Why would God do such a thing? It sounds kind of odd, it sounds like God is being cruel, capricious and discriminatory but instead, instead, I want you to see at the end of this message God is not being cruel, capricious or discriminatory, He instead is being loving, gracious and merciful. Because God loves you so much, single adult, He could not stand the thought of you being in a relationship to someone with whom you could not share the most important thing in your life. That is how much God loves you, that is how much God loves me. And briefly I want to give you some explanations on why God insists on spiritual compatibility.
The first. See the word share. Take your pens and pencils out and be ready to write. God wants us to be able to share the most important thing in our lives with the most important person in our lives.
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It seems like it’s the American thing to do to be in debt, doesn’t it? I’m American, I’m in debt, and that’s cool. That’s just the way it is. It’s great to be in debt. If you’re not in debt, it’s like you’re abnormal. People are like, “What? You’re not in debt and you live in America?”
Americans love to spend money, and many of us are drowning in the seas of debt. Many of us have opened the door of debt and we have gotten behind the door and now debt has locked us in and we’re screaming, “I’m in debt! Help me get out of debt!” And we’re in this terrible situation and it’s stealing from us. It’s stealing our joy; it’s killing our relationships—our relationship with God and also our spouse; and also, it’s destroying our future.
Now, many of you who are hearing me right now are thinking, “Ed, I’m feeling you. I am in debt. It’s messing me up.”
I read this past week that the average American household has $7000 worth of credit card debt. Are you ready for that? $7000! That’s a lot of money. Just think about that for a second. If you had $7000 of credit card debt and you make just the minimum payment, at 18% interest, it will take you 46 years to pay that off. 46 years!
At Fellowship Church, in all of our campuses, we will have about 20,000 people showing up. If it’s Easter or Christmas, we will sometimes have 45,000 people. That’s a lot of people. Well, let’s say for example you take 5000 family units from Miami and also from Dallas. And let’s say these family units owed $7000 to their creditors, specifically credit card debt. And let’s just say that those 5000 families made the minimum payment. If you take all those payments together, just the interest only payments, those 5000 families are paying $7 million a year just in interest. $7 million dollarinies! That’s a lot of paper, isn’t it? Think about what we could do with that money.
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