Sexperiment – The Sexperiment by Ed Young

I finally catch a glimpse of a man in an orange vest up on the corner.  My patience is not where I would like it to be.  I got out of the car, walked to the gentleman, and asked him what was going on.  He said that he was from Fellowship Church and that the church was opening its new building on 121.  He said the line of cars was a caravan from the old location to the new one.  So I inquired about the number of cars involved.  He said, “Several hundred.”  “Wow, I guess I am going to be late for my ride.”  The caravan went on.

I finally got to the race, set up my bike and started to ride, and the Lord started working.  “Deb, you got mad at church people.”  So I peddled some more.  “You know you have been looking for a church.”  “Yes, Lord, I have been.”  I was raised in a church, and my father made sure that three times a week I was there and thumped on the back of the head if I fell asleep.  I drifted as soon as I was old enough to make my own decisions.  I was out of there.

Ed Young stated that now I will fast forward to 1998, without mentioning the number of years I was away from the church.  But 1998 started out tough.  It kept working on me, try Fellowship, try Fellowship.  It took about two or three weeks until I started coming to service.  Ten rows from the back and about half way over was Deb’s favorite seat.  I could just kind of blend in.

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I walked around briefly, and finally I went outside alone, knelt at the baptistery, and prayed for Christ to come into my life.  I might add that that night I told Tory that regardless whether my health stayed the same, worsened, or got better, that I would be baptized at the next opportunity.  And that was October 24, and shortly thereafter, we became members.

ED:  Tell us what has happened in your life since then.

TORY:  Well, one of the first things they tell you when you join the church is how much effort it takes to put together one of these services each weekend.  Nine hundred volunteers, or something.

ED:  Yes, to do everything from the worship service, the sound, the lighting, children’s ministry, our student ministry, the greeters, the parkers, all of that takes about 900 volunteers.

TORY:  So the first thing we decided to do was begin giving back.  We joined the people who first impressed us, the parkers and the greeters.  Actually, this is our weekend and we missed serving; but we will make it up on Easter, I guess.  We also volunteer in children’s church and the children’s choir at Christmas time.

Since we started coming to church, we have only missed two weekends.  When we missed, we bought the tapes.  I think that is very important.  People always asked me throughout college and law school, “Well, how do you graduate with honors?”  I always answered, “You don’t cut class.”

Ed Young says that’s right.  That is so inspiring to me and to many here and also very challenging.  Something supernatural takes place when God’s people gather together in houses of worship and someone sings and someone opens up the book to teach about the truth of God.

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Bruce was baptized, and if that wasn’t compelling enough to me, the crowd reacted lovingly.  I could see that through their strength and their love in Christ they fully accepted Bruce.  I found Bruce afterward and thanked him personally.  It led me right up to the line of Christianity, but my heart still wasn’t there, and I wanted to be irreversible in my commitment.  So I began to study more about Christ through readings other than the Bible.  But before I could come to a conclusion through my reading, God spoke to me in another way.

In September of last year I became fairly ill with an intestinal problem.  As the problem worsened, doctors were trying to determine what was wrong.  They could not find a cause and were treating me with medication at first.  My conditioned worsened and they were preparing to do some exploratory surgery, but unfortunately I had a severe hemorrhage in my left eye.  The hemorrhage was also unexplained.  Even though I had very good doctors, they said it was rare for someone my age, that an eye hemorrhage usually happened to someone in their eighties.  They treated the problem with guesswork, which amounted to blood thinners, which kept them from doing further work on my stomach.  So my condition worsened and worsened.

Ed Young says that they said that in a matter of days, I could be blind, stay the same, or get better; that there was nothing they could do and nothing they could predict.  They also could not predict whether it would spread to my other eye.  We continued to come to church, and I continued very heavily to pray and to wonder where my life was heading.  During a message, when you were preaching on tithing, I became so overwhelmed with my weakness and with the effect of the drugs that I stepped outside.

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ED:  You know we hear as many favorable comments about our parkers and greeters and hospitality people as any area in our church, and if you are a part of those teams, hey, our hat goes off to you.  You know when you see someone involved on those teams, just stop and say thanks for being out there, for being on the front line.  They really are difference-makers.

STEVE:  We did come in and hear Randy speak.  Then we continued to come and heard you speak and Preston speak.  Everything about the church was very compelling.  The music was compelling.  The speeches were compelling.  The people’s enthusiasm was compelling.  However, I wasn’t going to say I was committed to Christ if I couldn’t feel it in my heart.  I believe it was last August when you delivered a message which started out with you recounting all the unlikely events that God had led you through which resulted in you attending a baseball game.  At the game you sat in the box eating an unlikely meal and you met the wife of a man.

Ed Young says that particular moment, I had a very unusual feeling that I knew what you next sentence was going to be.  And sure enough you said that the man was a Jewish man.  I sat silently.  My wife and I were in the balcony, but for that particular moment, I felt like I was the only person out there listening to this story.  It was almost equally directed to me as to the man, Bruce Levinson.  Moments later Bruce came on stage and he was baptized.  I couldn’t help but think that every thing you had said had led you to Bruce and led Bruce up here, and that the next step, still unknown to you, was leading me up here as well.

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How many of you like to tell someone, verbal, you don’t necessarily hug first, you want to say honey, I love you or you are special to me.  How many talkers do we have?  Wow a couple.  This is a hugging church.  Some people express love by just giving opportunities, my father is a lot like that.  He will just give us a couple of airline tickets; “Ed, take a friend and go to this exotic location.”  And that is Dad communicating his love to us.  How many people do we have doing that, giving opportunities?  A few.

That is kind of a rarity.  How about time?  Some people communicate love by just saying, I’m going to hang with you, we are going to relax right here.  I’m going to kick back with the old hurt leg and that just shows I love you.  Time.  How many time people do we have?  How about gift-givers, you know the gift-givers, people who communicate love through trinkets and toys and things.  OK.  Here is where we have to know what we are doing, parents.

Ed Young says that for example, let’s say we have a teenage daughter and her language of love is hugging.  She needs that affirmation.  She needs to be held.  And Dads, we don’t hug this daughter in a meaningful way.  When she gets to be thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of age, this scares me to death.  She longs and yearns for that physical touch and she will end up falling into the arms of the first guy who just looks at her, winks at her or whistles at her.  And often that ends up in  a horrible, horrible scenario.  We have got to learn this language.

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Ed:  I said, “No, no, they don’t make me tithe.”  I said, “I have to tithe, though, because I came to a point a long time ago where I realized that God owns it all.  That’s my act of worship.  I’m tangibly saying and showing myself, and God, and others that He is number one.

Tracy and I are walking, living, breathing examples of the fact that you cannot out give God.  Lisa and I have been on this giving pilgrimage for 22 years over and above our tithe. But also, we’ve faithfully brought in the tithe to the local church.  I can tell you some great stories about giving.  When Lisa and I first got married, I was making maybe $21,000 – $22,000 dollars.  We had two cars.  And Lee Beth came along.  We felt led to give one of our cars to the church I was a part of.  We just gave the car.  We had one car for several years.

I gave my retirement one year to that church.  I’ve given my retirement here to Fellowship Church several times.  I’ve given another car away several years ago.  You cannot out give God.  I’m not telling you to start giving away cars and emptying your retirement.  I’m not saying that.  That is kind of bone-chilling giving.  God led me to do it and I did it.

Ed Young stated that I am telling , though, to tithe, to bring the tithe, because God showed me something really, really rich in this whole area one time.  I don’t want to get into the whole story, but I had the opportunity to spend a night on a yacht with this very affluent guy.  And I’ve never been on a yacht before.  And when I looked at his boat I was just flabbergasted because it was pretty much like a floating mansion, you know?

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I want to tell you about two people right quick.  I’ve watched a person over the last several years and I’ve watched this gentleman in the throes of making a DMD, a defining moment decision.  I saw this person, though, mess up, and let me tell you how this person messed up.  This person had around him some men who loved him, who loved the Lord, who spoke truth into his life.  All the sudden, though, I saw this person kind of unplug and disengage for a while.  Didn’t see him for a while, didn’t talk to him for a while.  One day this person shows back up.  “Hey man, guess what?  I’ve done ‘blank’.”  And everybody was like, “Say what?  Why didn’t you talk to me?  Why didn’t you talk to me?  Did you think about this, that, this, that…” You could see it on his face.  Oh, too late, he had already made it.

Sexperiment stated that know someone right now who is in the middle of a DMD, defining moment decision.  He has some great Christian people around him and I’m watching him right now disengage, just kind of unplug.  And I’m going to have to talk to this guy.  It’s not going to be fun, but I’ve got to.  When you start to pull away from people who love you, who want the best for you and you start doing some of this Lone Ranger stuff, “High oh Silver, away” you’re going to get in trouble.  You’re going to make dumb Lot decision.  I hate to be so graphic but I’ll just say D-U-M-B, dumb Lot decision.  We’ve all made them.  Come on, man, let’s just talk here for a second, all right? Every time I talk about Sodom and Gomorra, though, I have to talk about the judgment of God.

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