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No other way will work.  I can’t do it alone.  You’re going to have to hammer me and i’m going to have to submit to you like that part and owen.”  We’ve got to let god do that and that’s tough.  That process takes from now until we graduate to be with the lord, but that’s the way to become a difference maker and moses found it out at desert university.  Becoming a difference maker.  Moses.  There’s hope.  I don’t care what you’ve done.  There’s hope.

But you’ve got to be involved in god’s desert strategy and you’ve got to say, “God, here’s where something I’ve buried; here’s where something i’ve failed you.  I want to become a difference maker for you.”  It’s there for the taking.  It’s your option.  It’s my option and god will do the rest. Follow along with me as I read Matthew 7:13-14.  “Enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction and many enter through it.

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He takes it, pulls out a giant hammer and wham.  I said, “what are you doing?  You’re going to ruin it.”  He beats on the thing for fifteen minutes.  “Pastor, would you hold part of this while I beat on it?”  I was watching my hand, “bip, bip.”  We put it back on, i should say, not we, Owen put it back on the backboard and the thing worked, like that.  And it did work well – it was bent!

And I thought about desert university because if we enroll in desert university, we say, “god, I am a tool and I want to be an instrument to be used by you in a wonderful way to become a difference maker, and if i want to become a difference maker, I’ve got to submit to you and you’ve got to take a hammer and hammer on me year after year, day after day, month after month if I’m going to do it.

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And over the years, as we grew, we said, “We’re outgrowing all this stuff.  And we began to grow in Irving, Texas. It was a total God thing.  And then we started looking for some land, and we heard about the Resolution Trust Corporation dumping land. And there was 159.2 acres this tract of land that they were offering.  And they were offering a seal bid type scenario.  These companies were bidding and they submitted sealed bids, and a lot of these companies could have written a check for the land no problem.

But here’s little Fellowship Church saying, “Okay, here’s our bid.”  And we bid 2.5M dollars. And amazingly, the guy that made the decision for the government was a believer and he picked our bid. One problem though. We didn’t have any money.  We found out we had to make a down payment, so our church prayed and went through this great time of sacrificial giving over and above our tithes and offerings and we were able to put a down payment on the land.  But we still owed 1.875M on 159.2 acres in Grapevine.

Grapevine Mills Mall wasn’t even a thought then.  Johnny Morris hadn’t even considered putting Outdoor World over there.  There was nothing out here. A year later, without a sign on the property, we sold 22 acres for 1.875M dollars. Don’t ever sit there are tell me that God is not in the real estate business! You look at Fellowship Church and it’s a total and complete God thing. It really is. Of course, now we have this amazing facility. And on a good weekend we’ll have 20,000 people show up. And now we have three different satellite campuses. We have a television show that is nationally televised as well as in Europe.

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I’m talking about zero, the worst.  I’m trying to fit it together and Mac Richard has one of these deals.  He tries to put it together for me.  We get it kind of halfway looking right, but it didn’t really work.  So what do i do?  When you have a problem, there’s only one to call; innovative Owen Goff is the man who does it all.  Yes, Owen Goff, my associate pastor, you’re talking about mechanical genius, the guy is incredible!  He brings his toolbox into my house, and he goes, “oh, pastor, I think you have a bent part here in the back part of the backboard.”

I said, “what are you talking about, Owen?  The thing looks fine to me.”  But when you take it off, and Owen is a strong guy, too, he doesn’t look like it, but he is, I’m being honest, we unscrew it and we get this part off, and I’m saying, “Owen, where is the thing bent?”

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Your life and my life is a seed.  The Bible talks about the law of the harvest.  If I plant corn I’m not going to reap mangos.  It’s just the law of the harvest.  Whatever I sow, that’s what I’m going to reap.  And if I’m sleeping I am not going to be doing very much reaping.  We have time.  I just talked about it from Scriptures.  We have time.  But the only time we’re guaranteed is now.  We have time to leverage, to do great stuff for God.  Don’t sleep your life away.  Take advantage of the time.

Did you hear in the book of Acts chapter 20 that the disciples met together, the church met together on the first day of the week?  What’s the first day of the week?  Sunday.  Why Sunday?  That’s the resurrection.  I give God the first day of the week, that first element of time and that first day of the week as corporate worship as I obey Hebrew 10:25.  God is going to bless the rest.

I give God the first time, my first offensive energy boost to the Lord, in my quiet time through Scripture reading and prayer.  God is going to bless the rest.  I give my talent and abilities to the Lord.  I leverage them within the church.  Guess what? God is going to take my talent and my ability and multiply it exponentially. I give my resources, the first fruit of what I made to the local church.  I bring the first ten percent to his house.  Guess what? God is going to bless the rest.  It’s the law of the harvest; it’s the law of the first.

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Bruce Levinson, he would probably put himself right here.
If I gave you this pen, where would you put yourself?  Would you have yourself on that continuum?  Where would you put yourself?
We have a problem.  Mother Theresa has a distance that she can’t make up on her own. She can’t perform her way to God’s standards.  She is in trouble.  Billy Graham on this continuum, hypothetically, is in trouble; serious trouble. Woo! I am in real trouble.  All of us are in trouble, because distance is distance.  Bruce Levinson, he is in trouble.

So, the performance plan.  We think, “Yeah I will bat one thousand; I will play error free baseball.  Woo, woo, woo!”
It is all about woo.  Woo makes God to say, “Give it up, give it up.  It is not going to happen.”

So what did God do?  Here is what God did. This is a giant chasm.  Us: that is you and me.  Us.  God.  God’s standard right?  Perfection, 100% righteous.  We have a problem; we have sinned, and sin has caused this cosmic chasm between ourselves and God.

One bad mood, one off day, one sin of omission and commission and we have this cosmic chasm separating ourselves and God.  So, what have we done?  In our humanist view we say, “Ok, I will be very philosophical and surely I can get to God by doing that.  I will be religious.”
“Man, my father was a pastor in the Church of Christ.”

“My grandmother, she prayed every day and I read my Bible.”

“I will go to Africa and help with this whole AIDS thing and I will go on missions trips and I will serve in the church”
All of those things are dandy. Good for you. But you are on the performance plan.

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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.

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In Matthew 6, Jesus told his disciples the pattern of prayer.  Jesus said in verses 9-11, “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be they name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” On earth as it is in heaven. Now as believers, we can bring heaven to earth.  We can bring there to here by thinking right, feeling right, and acting right.  We can bring heaven to earth through our sexuality.

It could be an act of worship.  What a responsibility!  Isn’t that just something that’s really cool? The other day, I talked to a guy who had done something. When I asked him, “Man, why’d you do that?”  He said, “For the hell of it!” Well, that’s weird. For the hell of it?  What was he saying? He was saying, “I can bring hell to earth.” As a believer, I can bring heaven to earth.  But also, I can bring hell to earth.  Pornography, for example, is an assault on Genesis 1.

Pornography says we’re animals.  Pornography has one basic presupposition—people are products, objects to be stripped, to be used and abused.  That’s why there’s guilt, torment, pain.  That’s why it screams for more and more.  That’ why, as you keep going, you have rape and child pornography.  It’s bringing hell to earth. So we have a choice.  We can either think right or we can think wrong.  Where’s your head?  Sex is between the ears before it’s between the legs.  That is where the sexual revolution begins. Now in verse 26, the rhythm of this creation account breaks.  If you could read it in the original Hebrew, the writer wanted it to break to show the uniqueness of what it means to be a man or a woman.

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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.

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