Click the Picture to View the Video

Church might be the last place congregants would expect to talk about this subject, but a brash new crop of preachers are starting to aggressively tackle the taboos of intimacy from the pulpit, or in some cases, from the roof of their church.

Evangelical Pastor Ed Young and his wife Lisa of Grapevine, Texas, said Christians have been unenthusiastic and unimaginative about this for far too long. To demonstrate their point, the couple had an elaborate “bed-in” event, in which they had a crane lift a bed onto the top of their Grapevine congregation’s church and settled in for the next 24 hours to talk about their favorite topic.

“I think in the Christian world, there are so many people who are uneasy about this,” Ed Young said. “Most married couples want to have this, but they’re not having enough.”

“For far too long, the church has been completely silent about something God has not been silent about at all,” said Lisa Young.

In their radical new book, “The Sexperiment,” the Youngs challenge heterosexual Christian married couples — LGBT and unwed singles need not apply.

“The first place to have that talk is in the home,” added his wife. “The second place to have that talk is in the church.”

Their “bed-in” was modeled after an event first put on in 1969 by gleeful blasphemers John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The Youngs said they are trying to take the topic back from a popular culture that has perverted it.

“The sad thing is that our culture is throwing all these cues, all words, all these pictures of what this represents to our children, to couples to spouses, to husbands and wives, and it’s not working out well for marriages,” Lisa Young said.

The Youngs point out that the topic is discussed throughout the Bible. For example, in the rather risqué Song of Solomon 4:3, two lovers rhapsodize about each other’s lips and mouth: “Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy talk is comely: thy temples are within thy locks as a piece of a pomegranate.”

And there’s even a passage in Song of Solomon 4:16 that includes coming into the garden and eating the pleasant fruit, which has been interpreted by some Biblical scholars as a reference to oral : “Arise, O north, and come O south, and blow on my garden that the spices thereof may flow out: let my well beloved come to his garden, and eat his pleasant fruit.”

While the Youngs insist their “Sexperiment” is about improving marriages, not a how-to guide, another book written by a different pastor and his wife from Seattle comes very close to just that.

Click the Picture above to View the Video and read the full story.

So what is the solution if you are an over-talker?—and I struggle with this too?  What should we do?  Number one, I think we should put a big old stopwatch in our brain.  How many of you have one of those Nike sport watches, the ones that when you run they are also a stopwatch?  How many of you have a watch like that?  Lift your hands.  Those are cool aren’t they?  I can never figure those things out.  But they are very cool.  Put one of those around your brain and around your mouth.  So when you are talking to your friends, ask yourself this question: When was the last time I heard the other person’s voice?  How long have I been talking?  Put a stopwatch to it.

The other night I was with some close friends and I was so excited to be with them, I just started talking so much that I had to say to myself, “Ed, stopwatch, brain, mouth.”  I just dialed down and I began to listen.

Don’t interrupt people, either.  Over-talkers, we love to interrupt people.  We think we know where everybody is going and we just interrupt.  One little break and we are jumping on the train.  Don’t do that.

Here is something else.  Let me get more serious.  We need to ask ourselves why do we over-talk?  Why?  You know why we over-talk?  I sincerely believe this.  I believe most of us talk too much because we don’t trust God enough in the communicative process.  We don’t trust him in our communication enough.  We don’t trust him with our marriage enough, our family dynamics enough, our friends enough, or our working situation enough.  We just don’t trust God enough.  If you look at the real why behind it, there are certain things driving over-talkers.

Dr Ed Young – I will read it again.  “Pairs of clean and unclean animals came to Noah.”  They came to Noah.

Let’s go back to our boy, James.  James 2:5-7.  He has already told them don’t discriminate.  He has already told them when a rich man comes in, you just freak out and give him the front row seats.  The poor man you forget about and tell him to sit in the back somewhere.  Now look what he does.  He says, “Listen, my dear brothers.”  Now he is going to really slam them.  It’s not just brothers, it’s dear brothers.  In some translations, it says, “My beloved brethren.”  Oh, boy.  You can tell James is getting angry at this sin of favoritism.  He hates it.  We can learn something here.  There is a relationship between love and hate.  We should love the sinner but hate the sin in his or her life.  We must do that.  That is what Jesus did.

Speaking of love and hate, I think it was this past Wednesday, my seven-year old daughter, Landra, one of the twins, got into a brief skirmish with our oldest, LeeBeth, who is fifteen years of age.  Yes, we even have skirmishes around the Young household.  I know it’s hard to believe.  Pastors are not perfect and their families are not perfect.  Anyway, at this brief little quarrel, Landra, our seven year old, wrote LeeBeth a note and put the note on top of her plate right before dinner.  I intercepted the note and wrote down what Landra wrote to her.  Here is what she wrote to her fifteen year old sister after the fight.  Are you ready?  “Dear LeeBeth, I hate you.  Love, Landra.”  I told you there is that relationship between love and hate.  Maybe, just maybe, in Landra’s seven year old brain, she was hating the sin in LeeBeth’s life while she was loving her at the same time.  I am not sure.

Dr Ed Young - Build the boat.  He built the boat.  And then God did this.  Pairs of clean and unclean animals came to Noah and entered the ark.

“Starting at guard for the Success Spoilers: he stands 6’3”.  His name: Dan Deception.  Michael, I want to warn you about the deception of success.  At the other guard; he stands 5’11”.  His name: Trey Trap.  Mike, watch out, guard against, the trap of success.  At center: he stands 7’3” tall.  Al Amnesia.  Watch out for the amnesia of success, Michael, and also, you folks here.  All of you are successful with regard to the world.  If you have more than one change of clothes, you are wealthy in the world’s eyes.  At forward, Tim Temptation.  Be careful, Michael, of the temptation of success.  Finally, the leading scorer on the team.  He stands 6’8”.  Roy Responsibility.  Michael, don’t shun the responsibility of success.  Deception.  The Trap.  The Amnesia.  The Temptation.  The Responsibility of success.  The coach of this team: Coach Lou C. Furr.

“Let’s do a quick scouting report on each player.  Let’s talk about Dan Deception for a second, Michael.  Dan Deception.  Dan Deception loves to work in your life and in my life, because Dan wants us to measure success by the applause of the crowd.  Especially, he loves us to measure success by how much cash we have.  We spend all our time and energy amassing these beautiful portfolios, because we’re deceived into thinking that if we have money, that equals success, that equals satisfaction, that equals happiness.

Dr Ed Young: God did that for him.  That means to me that I should just do what God wants me to do, I shouldn’t worry about the details I can’t control.

During the Christmas season, like no other time of the year, people seem to be drawn to the eternal.  We seem to be pulled toward the supernatural.  Most of us down deep are tired of living in the natural world and when we think about Christmas and the miracle of Jesus Christ, we are drawn to it.  The Bible explains it to us in Ecclesiastes 3:11 when it states, “God has set eternity in the hearts of men.”  We have the baby Jesus born in a cave with the angels worshipping Him and the angels knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that this little defenseless baby is the creator of the universe.  And God Himself tapped the angels on the shoulder and allowed them to bring this message to a group of just ordinary, hard working shepherds.

Luke 2:10.  “But the angel said to them…”  I want to talk to you about angels because there is a lot of misinformation and a lot of muddy stuff going around concerning these beings.  I have made up an acrostic out of the word angel.  Write that vertically on the back of your bulletin.  A stands for aware.  Angels are aware of what is going on in our lives.  I Corinthians 4:9 states that we are a spectacle to angels.  This word spectacle refers to an arena where a play, a drama or an athletic event is going on and people watch.  The Bible says that angels watch us live our lives.  Jesus said in Matthew 18:10 that each one of us is assigned a guardian angel the moment we are born.

A couple of years ago some good friends were traveling with me in a van.  We were in a small town called Port O’Connor, Texas.  The speed limit was 20 mph.  We were heading to a restaurant and suddenly we saw a truck, traveling about 80 miles per hour, run through an intersection without stopping.

Let God take care of those, I just do what I need to do, what God is telling me to do – Dr. Ed Young

So, God added the vision.  Then he added something else.  He can’t just stop at vision.  It’s fine to talk about vision, but he also added something else.  He added leaders. Vision plus leaders, difference makers.  When the church brought me here, it was just starting.  I was the only staff member. We had a rented typewriter and were meeting in rented facilities.

A small group of people looked at me and they said, “Ed, how are you going to do this church when you are the only staff member?  How?”

It was a great question.  I said, “You know what?  You’re going to be my staff.  That’s right.  You’re going to be the staff of Fellowship of Las Colinas.  I mean, I can’t pay you.  We don’t have the money, but you’re going to be the staff.”

They looked around and Preston said, “Me?”  I said, “Yes, Preston, you.”

Doris was like, “I’m working in the corporate world.”  I said, “Yeah, Doris.”

Owen told me, “I have an insurance company.” I said, “Yes, Owen.”

I said, “You’re going to be the staff.  You all are the staff.”

“Okay,” they said, “that’s cool.”

I said, “You know, we’re going to make some decisions here.  We need to commit not to miss a Sunday (because at that time we only had church on Sunday).  We need to commit to attend every Sunday morning for the next 18 months.  We’ve got to get this thing off the ground and going.  We’ve got to become autonomous and self-supporting.  We’ve got to do it.  I’m willing to do it, are you?”

And they responded, “Yes.”

Is that unbelievable?  I mean, you are talking about awesome leaders?  Many, many others are here too, but I’m talking about Owen, Doris and Preston. The commitment level was huge.  Leaders—they owned the vision and they still own the vision.  They put flesh beneath the vision.  It’s so important to understand that principle, because every time God adds a vision, he adds it to the lives of leaders.

And what I have done in my life before is, when God is instructing me, “Dr. Ed Young, you be faithful and here is the basic task right here, Ed, you are responsible for this.”

Look at verse 9.  After he had killed the lion and messed around in Timnah, he decides to go back into the vineyard to check out his trophy.  Maybe he wanted to show some of his friends the lion that he had killed.  The Bible says that he walked over to the carcass.  He heard the sound of bees.  “So he scraped the honey into his hands and went on, eating as he went.”  Now in order to do that, he had to touch something dead.  He just broke the second of the Nazarite vows.  Can’t you just see this guy, covered with the honey he was eating, walking on home?  And when he got home the Bible says that he gave some of the honey to his parents but that he didn’t tell his parents where he got the honey.  I love what old Warren Wiersbe says.  “Samson was a man of faith, but he was not a faithful man.”  Everything was exterior, wasn’t it?  Everything was up front.  There was nothing down deep.

So in verse 10, he decides to throw a party.  He is going to have a big bachelor party and none of his Israelite friends, if he had any, even came to this party.  His parents did.  They were nice enough to go along to the Philistine city.  In Biblical times, most people would get married at the groom’s household, but because Samson’s parents were against the marriage, they went ahead and did the deal in the Philistine country.

And women, you thought that soap operas, talk shows and romance novels were exciting.  They can’t touch this stuff.  They can’t come near it, can they?  Samson throws this big feast.  Underline the word feast in verse 10.  In the Hebrew, it means a drinking bout.  Here again, the Nazarite vow comes into play.  I don’t get a picture of Samson during this bachelor party standing in the corner sipping Perrier and lime, do you?  No.  Samson was doing the drinking thing.

Dr. Ed Young- I’ll say, “Oh, God, I can’t be responsible for that because look at all these details, there is no way.”

If you missed last weekend, you missed something that we have never done before at the Fellowship Church.  We brought on this stage a live sheep.  And the sheep bahhhhed at the right time.  The sheep was really cool.  I had never been that close to a sheep before.  It was a lot of fun.  But you should have seen what happened back stage.  Pastor Owen Goff had this sheep on a leash.  He said, “Pastor Ed, I am going to walk this sheep before the service so he can do his business.”  So he had the sheep was walking back and forth outside.  Then Owen let him inside and the sheep tried to eat some electrical cords.  He got him away from the cords but then he tried to eat some plants.  Then one of our staff members gave the sheep an Altoid.  The sheep looked up and said, “curiously strong.”  No, he didn’t speak.  But a sheep will eat anything.

Human beings will try anything.  “Oh, I had better taste this.  I have got to experience this.  I have got to check this out.”  Even though we know that doing some things one time can be addictive, destructive or even deadly.  Yet, we serve a Shepherd, a God who has been there, a God who has paved our paths, who has forged our future.  He is a God who is preparing diligently some pastures so that we may experience amazing grazing.

I thank God for all the times that I have seen Him protect me.  But I also thank God for those times that I don’t even know about.  I thank Him for all of those times when He has gone ahead of me and gotten all of those plants out of the way so Ed Young can have amazing grazing without any poisonous grasses or weeds around.

I love what the writer of Hebrews said.  Hebrews 4:15.  “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses but we have one who has been tempted in every way just as we are yet was without sin.”  You never know the full force of temptation until you resist it.  Christ knows the full force of temptation like we will never know it.

Dr. Ed Young – I ran a marathon, in my early twenties, and I was mindful of the marathon this Friday as I looked at a picture of myself and two of my friends who ran it with me.

We have changed worship times and worship styles.  We have changed a bunch.  I think that we have the most flexible, friendly church that I have ever seen.  You guys are incredible.  I cannot believe the change that you have experienced and adapted to in a mighty, mighty way.  It takes flexible people to grow a fantastic church.  We are flexible.

There is a tendency, which will be especially true for us when we move to the new house, to become more inflexible, to do life and church in a rut, to slowly get inside the box.  But God has shown me over the years that He is a flexible, rut-ruining, outside-the-box God.  You will not find an inflexible, in-a-rut, inside-the-box follower of the Lord in the Bible.  They are not there.  Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, even Jesus himself—they were flexible, always stretching, always doing different and new things.  So I will prepare you now.  We have to become more and more flexible.  It takes flexibility to continue to do what God wants us to do within our purpose statement, to worship Him, to evangelize those without Him, and to disciple those who have just made a personal commitment.  So, flexibility is foundational.

The fourth lesson that I have learned is that creativity is a crucial component in the church.  People have asked me, “Ed, did you guys plan this style and plan this church?”  No, we did not.  I had no idea eight years ago what our church would look like and how we would be doing church.  As long as the church is Biblically-driven, the style doesn’t matter.  Certain churches attract specific people.  Certain people are attracted to a certain style.  But we must keep the Bible as our authority.  But having said that, I sincerely feel that any time Christians get together, sharing and worshipping, we should be the most creative people around.

Dr. Ed Young wants you to keep running, keep enduring, be like our man, Noah, and when you crash through the wall you are going to look back and see it was paper.  So Noah stuck with it 120 long years.  What endurance.

Lisa’s family, on the other hand, you talk about organized?  Her dad  would get the AAA road maps out and highlight the route months in advance.  He would know where they would stop and what they would eat. He even knew how long they would stay at a particular tourist attraction.  As you can imagine, when we planned our first vacation, we had organization frustration.

Moses dealt with organization frustration.  If you have ever dealt with it, you are in great company.  Big Mo dealt with it.  Whenever I talk to you about organization, I want you to remember what organization is.  This is very important. It’s key if we are going to hit the sweet spot.  Organization is a decision based on a process.  Let’s say that together… organization is a decision based on a process.  Let’s look at a four-word process of order and organization through Moses’ life.

If you are taking notes, the first word I want you to write down is the word “realize.”  Moses realized that he needed some serious help.  We all have to realize that.  I need some help in my own life organizationally.   If we are going to be honest here, so do you.  We need help.  Realize that.  That’s what Moses did.

Let’s turn our Bibles to Exodus 18:13-16.  Moses was experiencing organization frustration.  He was trying to lead two million Jews to the Promise Land.  He was God’s man of the hour, but he was messed up organizationally.  Look at verse 13, “The next day, Moses took his seat to serve as judge for the people.  They stood around him from morning until evening.  When his father-in-law, (His father-in-law was Jethro) saw all that Moses was doing for the people, (see he wasn’t doing it for God, he was doing it for the people), he said, Moses, what is this you are doing for all these people?  Why do you alone sit as judge, while all these people stand around you from morning till evening?”  What and why?

I want to just quit, I want to give up.  But the Holy Spirit will be right there encouraging you, go for it. – Dr. Ed Young