Patience requires an investment.  Every time I am patient, every time I am mature, my trust fund grows and grows, and I can live off the interest and the dividends.  It’s going to have a huge pay off, and we will talk about that later.

Let’s talk about this investment of patience.  Look at verse 7, the last part.  Now James has said be patient.  That is the first command.  Then he brings up this illustration, the farmer and the dell.  “The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hi-ho the derry-o, the farmer in the dell.”  I read that song on the Internet this week.  That song will wear you out. It will whip you.  It goes on and on.  I think it illustrates the patience of a farmer.  That’s what James says.

James says, “Be patient, then, brothers, until the Lord’s coming.  See how the farmer waits for the land…”  Farmers don’t just sip Diet Cokes and watch Oprah.  They wait and they are patient, but it’s an active patience, not a passive one.  A farmer is working the soil.  A farmer is planting the seed.  A farmer is always caring for his or her property.  They’re working.  And James says you have got to realize that patience is not passive.  Patience, James says, is active.  “See how the farmer waits for the land to yield it’s valuable crop and how patient he is for the autumn and spring rains.”

God is plowing up your life and mine.  Sometimes he plows it up, or allows it to be plowed up, and he plants trials here and there and yonder.  We wait patiently as we pray, as we talk to him, as we involve ourselves in the body of Christ.  Like a farmer, we can’t see what is going on subsurface, yet we serve a subsurface God.  God is producing a valuable crop in your life and mine underneath the soil.  We have got to get ready for the harvest, James says.

Ed Young Fellowship – That’s not it.  Courage is multi-dimensional.  It’s multi-dimensional.  It should bleed over into every area, every slice of your life and my life.  And Daniel demonstrates three dimensions of courage.

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My mother loves nursery rhymes.  Name any of the big ones, Old King Cole, Jack Sprat, There Was An Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe, and she can recite them right off the top of her head.  During the first 48 months of my life she repeated these nursery rhymes to me over and over again, before bedtime, naptime, mealtime, any time.  As a kid, I bought into these rhymes.  I believed them.  However, as I matured, I  came to the realization that these rhymes were made up, orchestrated by someone with a very creative mind.

I don’t have any illusions when reading about a political figure named Old King Cole.  I don’t think that I will ever be driving down a freeway and look to my left and see an Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe.  They are phony, false, just for children.  However, many in our midst are still reciting nursery rhymes and believing them.  Those who are unmarried, single adults, say pre-nuptial nursery rhymes as they walk down the carpeted aisle in holy matrimony.  It is amazing.  It is mind-boggling, yet many single adults believe and recite pre-nuptial nursery rhymes.

Now before I jump on that train and talk more and more about pre-nuptial nursery rhymes, let me throttle back a little bit and share a couple of things with you.  I am launching a brand new series of talks today called The Ulti-Mate, Finding the Love of Your Life.  Since 9 out of 10 of us will get married at least once in our lifetime, since 50% of the metroplex and Fellowship Church are single, since thousands of parents desperately need to train thousands of children in the finer art of spouse selection, I thought we would roll up our sleeves and tackle this topic.  Next to the decision to follow Christ, your choice of whom you will marry is the most important earthly decision you will ever make.  And the best way to enhance your marriage is to do work before the altar.  Now back to pre-nuptial nursery rhymes.

Ed Young Jr. - He didn’t have the same background that they had.  And they tried and they tried and they tried.  But he was a man who exemplified true ethical conduct.

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Mary was the only person present at Christ’s birth who was also present at His crucifixion.  Mary was the woman who saw Jesus come into the world as her son and leave the world as her savior.  There are one or two billion “Hail, Mary”s said daily.  Why do more than ten million people make the trek to Guadeloupe and pay homage to “our mother”?  Why is it that more little girls are named after Mary than any other historical figure?  Mary is one of the most intriguing and misunderstood personalities in the biblical record.  Some people magnify Mary.  And many people who magnify her are ignorant regarding what the Bible says about her.  The Bible never says that we are to venerate Mary.  The Bible never says that we are to worship Mary.  The Bible never says that Mary was sinless.  Others minimize Mary, I think, in a reaction to those who magnify her.  They think of Mary as little more than a figurine in a nativity scene.  Or they think of Mary as a long bomb at the end of a football game.  Or maybe they sing her name as they are singing some old hits from the Beatles like “Let It Be” or “Lady Madonna”.

The Bible says that Mary was an ordinary woman with extraordinary gifts given to her by God and she presented herself usable to Him.  I know we have many people in different stages of a spiritual pilgrimage.  Some of you are seeking.  You are investigating Christianity.  Others of you have been disillusioned by organized religion and you are just checking out church again.  Still others have just made a faith decision.  Many here have been walking with God for a long, long time.  Today I am going to talk about one of the most exciting truths of scripture, being used by God himself.  God could use angels.  God could drop leaflets from heaven.  But for the most part, as you check out His historical record, you see that God uses people like you and like me to further His purposes on the planet.

Fellowship Church Grapevine - Let me give you a hint on scripture study.  Look at Daniel 6:4 again.  See the name Daniel in there?  Substitute your name.

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It has always intrigues me, though, how we will go to any extremes in order to find the ultimate gift, won’t we.  Especially for our children, we will shop and shop and shop.  I believe this desire we have to shop during the Christmas holidays, is a microcosm of a greater shopping need that most of us are engaged in 365 days a year.  Some of the men are saying this.  “Wait a minute, Ed.  I don’t like to shop.  I am allergic to malls.  I am not shopping 365 days a year.  Come on.  I don’t shop ‘til I drop.”

Just hold on to that line of thinking because I am going to challenge you and show you that you do.  We all like to shop.  And beneath this shopping desire is a desire to shop for a Savior.  You see, our loving, transcendent God wants us to open our lives to Him.  We matter so much to God that He sent Jesus Christ to be born of a virgin, to live a sinless life and to die on the cross for all of our sins.  God did that because we matter so much to Him.  And instead of saying, “God, I want to live life your way.  I want to come into a relationship with You.”  Instead of responding to God’s love, what do you think autonomous men and women do?  We white knuckle our carts.  We thumb our noses at God.  We say, “God, I don’t need a personal shopper.  I can determine my own destiny and we begin to shop down the aisles of life for meaning, purpose, happiness, a clear conscience and we think we can find that.

The first aisle that we shop down is an aisle called position.  Have you ever shopped down that aisle?  I have.  We have got to get the corner office.  We have got to get the promotions and the parties and the perks.  We have got to get a number of degrees.  And we pile them into this cart and amazingly we look at the cart and still see a crater in the cart.  The cart is empty.  There is something missing.  And we go up and down the aisle of position searching for something.

Church Ed Young -  Just write your name above Daniel and where it says in his conduct of government affairs, put your occupation whether it be a pastor, an attorney, a doctor, a salesperson, a teacher, a homemaker, and then read the verse this way.

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That brings us to the third and final ingredient. Yes, the outlook is right. Yes, the environment is needed. But this last one is desperately needed for this recipe. Open and honest communication. Open and honest communication. It’s kind of like the story of the husband and the wife who were sitting at the breakfast table. The husband was reading the sports page and the wife said, “Whatever happened to our sexual relations?” The husband threw down the sports page and he said, “I don’t know. Did we receive a Christmas card from them?” It’s sad to say but that’s about as much communication sexually that we’re involved in.

I believe only 5 to 10% of the husbands and wives here have ever sat down and really talked about their needs, their wants, their desires specifically in the marriage bed. I’ve seen this happen a number of times. Lisa and I have been out to eat with a couple and the husband will get up, go to the restroom. The waitress will come by and she’ll say, “What would you like to eat?” The wife will order for her husband and she knows exactly what he wants, how he likes his coffee, his nachos, you name it. It’s just amazing! Talk to a husband, he can tell you his wife’s favorite color and all these different things in non-threatening areas. But if you begin to interview them about what many think is a threatening area, sexuality, “No. We don’t really know that much”. Most of us think we know more about our spouses’ bodies than we actually do but we don’t know that much about them at all. Secondly, most of us are very poor mind readers. What happens when the lights dim and the clothes come off? We feel so vulnerable. We feel so afraid to talk. If we’re afraid to talk, two things will happen. We’ll live our lives and our marriages in frustration; or if we do talk, we will have a great marriage and the physical aspect will be dynamite.

Fellowship Church Grapevine – Here is how I would read it to myself, applying the scripture:  “The administrators and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Ed in his conduct pastoring the Fellowship of Las Colinas, but they were unable to do so.”

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Now we go to letter G.  G stands for give.  We’ve got to give criticism carefully.  Criticism — again, I know it seems crazy — criticism in the right way, confrontation in the right way, builds a person’s self-esteem.  I’ve got to give correction carefully.  I’ll never forget, five years ago I was sitting on the beach in Padre Island.  I had taken a church camp down there, and and there were about 700 young people.  I was talking to a senior in high school, and this guy began to cry.  I said, “Bill, what’s wrong, man?”  He said, “Ed, my parents don’t love me.”  I said, “I know your parents!  Yeah, they do!”  He said, “No, they don’t.”  I said, “Name one reason why your parents don’t love you.”  He said, “Because they let me get away with murder.”

What was he saying?  He was saying that discipline is one of the acid tests of value.  You see, our kids are screaming out for discipline, careful correction.  They want, parents, for us to confront their character faults.  They keep testing and they keep inching their way across the line, and if you don’t say anything, it’s devastating.  They’re out in the deep weeds with regard to their self-esteem.  How often do you confront their character faults?  When you speak the truth in love to them, when you tell them they are out of line, it builds a self-esteem.  Children will think in their minds, as you’re disciplining them they’ll think, “Whoa.  I really must have value for mom and dad to take this much time, energy, and effort to keep me out of the weeds.  Wow.  They don’t want me to shipwreck my life.  Yeah.” Will your kids tell you that?  No.  I’ve never heard mine say, “Mom, thanks for grounding me.  My self-esteem really needed a boost.”  E. J. doesn’t say, “Ed, thanks for tapping my hand, because I was really sagging in regard to my self-esteem.”  It doesn’t happen that way.  But, the Bible says, your children will come back and call you blessed, and thank you and affirm you for doing that.  Now, I’m not talking about becoming a Bobby Knight disciplinary freak, but I am talking about setting parameters.  When they cross the line, there are consequences.

Ed Young Jr. – Could someone say that about me?  Could the people that work with me say that?  Could they say that about you?  Or would they say, “We were really able to find some major, moral problems and ethical foul-ups in this person’s life.”

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One day, during the middle of finals, the owner and his wife showed up at the door unannounced.  At first blush, I thought that they had some nerve, that they could have called first.  But then I remembered it was their house.  They kind of began to inspect the house.  The husband told me he appreciated what I was doing in the house and yard.  He asked, however, if I could take care of one corner, straighten up a room or two and organize some other items.  Then they left.

Several days later I got a call from him.  He told me that they were not sure what they were going to do with the house.  They were giving consideration to moving back into it.  Maybe they would take it off the market, but at any rate, they would be spending more time in the house.  So he asked me to find another place to live.  I told him it would be no problem, that I had some friends who were looking for a roommate and that I could move in with them.  I did put two and two together and it struck me that I had blown an incredible opportunity.  You see, when he came by and checked out the house, he had been disappointed at the state in which he found it.  So I had to move out of a free lake house because I hadn’t taken care of it.

This morning, as we take up the issue of gluttony, as we continue this series on the seven deadly sins, that house stands as a perfect representation of my body and your Body In God’s Economy.  You see, our bodies are given to us free and clear of charge.  It is not like we are born into this world and then at age eighteen we receive an invoice.  God says that your body is a gift and that all it will cost you is the upkeep and the maintenance.

Fellowship Church Grapevine – Ethical courage.  We need ethical courage in the marketplace.  You are talking to the client on the phone and you say, “It cost us $2,500.”, but in actuality you know you paid $1,800 for it.  “The check is in the mail”, but the check hadn’t been cut.

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Number three, become a strong finisher.  Why should I be a strong finisher?  I’ll tell you why.  Because Jesus is the ultimate finisher and he is standing at the finish line.  He says, “Lock eyes with me.”

Look at Hebrew 12:2, “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of faith, who for the joy set before him, endured the cross despising the shame and has sat down at the right hand of throne of God.”

So Christ is saying, “Don’t look to the right.  Don’t look to the left.  Follow me.  Look at me.  I endured the cross for you.  I had you on my mind when I was spilling my blood on Calvary.  I will give you endurance.  I will give you power.”

When it comes to endurance, it’s all about stepping aboard the ark.   That’s what it is about.  The Bible says the ark is a picture or an illustration of the cross of Christ.  The ark was made of wood.  The cross is made of wood.  The Bible says in the Old Testament the ark was covered with pitch, a tar like substance that sealed the ark.  “Covered with pitch” is also used in the New Testament to refer to Christ atoning for our sins.  His spilled blood, his work on the cross, seals us for eternity.  The ark saved Noah and his family from destruction.  The cross will save you and me from destruction.  The ark only had one door.  What did Jesus say?  “I am the door.  I am the way, the truth and the light.”  So, he gives you and me a choice.  He says, “Either come on board or not.  Either step to the door or not.”

When we do, we, my friends, will be empowered with endurance — the ability to stampede through stopping points.

Father, thank you very much for this message.  I pray that we apply its truth in every recess and realm of our life.  In Jesus name we pray, amen.

Ed Young Fellowship – “Yeah, I talked to him yesterday about this,” and the truth is you hadn’t talked to this man in a year.  Ethical courage.  Do you have it?   It’s time for us to stop this easy stuff, this jump in the raft, go with the flow type mentality, just who cares, what does it matter, just kind of throwing courage out and going along with the current.

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