Interview: Ed Young on 'Sexperiment' and Why His Preaching Style Is Not Gimmicky
One of the sadistic sides of porn is that the reality is that with one click of a mouse you can see millions of images of people. There is no way that a spouse can compare with those images. Why? Because those images are totally and completely out of context – out of context. Those people that you're lusting after, there's zero intimacy. You're trying to compare someone who is in a covenant to someone who is outside of a covenant. They may be dealing with mortgages, fatigue, car payments, with kids. It is dark and it leads to destruction and chaos and devastation in life and first of all in marriages.
I would say that porn is one of the biggest causes of problems of all the marital mayhem that we see in the world today. There is no question about it. Yet, it is alluring. Couples say, "Let's look at porn and it will spice up our sex lives, ect." And yea, at first it does but always, ultimately, it can bear some things and then you have things that are said and things that progress from that.
God tells us to stay away from that. He tells us to "flee." The word "flee" means to run from that. The stats are alarming to see believers, even pastors, who view porn. It's something that we have to be intentional about with filters and vigilant about to make accountability. But it's definitely an addiction.
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CP: Your preaching style has been to approach topics by doing things out of the box from driving a Ferrari onto your church stage to doing the 24-hour bed-in on the church roof. Outside people may see this as gimmicky and naturally it attracts a lot of attention to you. How do you use that attention in a way that gives glory to God?
Young: I would say it's not gimmicky but it's God-driven. We've never tried to do something where we say, "Oh yea, let's do something where we try to be crazier the next week." Again, we are simply doing what Jesus did. He was a multisensory communicator. He uses words and pictures to tell stories like none other. That's what we're doing. It's as simple as that. Our philosophy is actually a couple of thousand years old. We are just doing what he did.
Almost of 70 percent of his words in the Gospel were words of application. In other words, the so-what principle of doing the stuff. Thirty percent were words of information. The church kind of got that backwards. We talk 70 percent of information and 30 percent of application. A lot of us have it backwards. That's why we do that.
So the Christian should be the most creative, the most multisensory teachers and leaders and everything else. For people to criticize that, they don't even know the Bible. They're not even reading the Bible in my opinion.
CP: How would you like Christians or the Church to think about sex five years from now?
Young: They should be thinking about it the way Scripture says. It's nothing new. It's a reliance that God invented it. He gave it to us in marriage for pleasure secondarily before procreation. But it should be practiced within the guidelines and guardrails of marriage. That's basically it.
I pray that people see the divine purpose of sex. Marriage is the only human relationship that is analogous to Christ's relationship with the Church. And if the Church is on fire then you have intimacy between the bridegroom and the bride. Where there is intimacy, there is reproduction, there is joy. The same is true of marriage.
CP: What will you and your wife Lisa be doing on Valentine's Day?
Young: I don't know what we are going to do on Valentine's Day.
(Lisa speaks to him from the next room)
You know what, she just said, "Every day is Valentine's Day." She said that, I didn't say that. Why wait for once a year?
If people will read the book and apply the principles, I think their marriage will go places they never have dreamed possible. I really, really believe that. It's time to get this message to every married couple in the world.
I want to tell every married couple in the world to take a week to have sex for seven straight days.
