Do you eat to comfort yourself during times of crisis and tension?  Do you lie to others about how much or when you eat?  Do you stash away food for yourself?  Are you ever ashamed about how much or what you have eaten?  Are you embarrassed by your physical appearance?  Have important people in your life expressed concern about your eating habits?  Do you sometimes think your eating is out of control?  Now I am not a clinical psychiatrist, but I have done enough research to tell you that if you answered yes to four or more of these questions, you are a prime candidate as someone who has a serious control issue in the area of food that you need to deal with.

Thursday of last week the US Government released some alarming statistics.  One out of three American adults are overweight.  One out of eight American children and teenagers are overweight.  Ninety to ninety-five percent of all eating disorder victims are female and a vast majority of them are overachievers.  Between the years 1980 and 1994, the percentage of children that were overweight or obese rose 6%.  In that same time period, the percentage of adults rose 9%.

Despite the advent of Fit TV, Jenny Craig and a fitness industry that rakes in over 10 billion dollars a year in this country alone, we are still making desperate attempts at control in our lives.  Folks, we can’t do it.  I can’t do it.  You can’t do it.  We must relinquish ownership of this house, our bodies, to the God who created us.  The issue of control.

Once that issue is dealt with, we are ready to move on to the second.  We have to identify the purposes of the house.  Now every house is built uniquely and differently.  Some homes are built to be show places.  Others are merely shacks of shelter.  But most fall somewhere in between.  To illustrate this I want to do something a little bit out of the norm.

The first dimension of courage is spiritual courage.  Take out your outlines.  They are in the bulletin.  We provided all the scripture verses for you. – Ed Young Ministry.