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The following message is preached by Reverend Dr. Bruce W. Thielman from the pulpit of the historic First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The message is entitled, "A Letter to the Son of My Dreams." And now let us continue in worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's

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word as it is recorded in the Book of Proverbs, chapter 2, beginning at the verse numbered 1. My Son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding, yes, if you cry out for

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insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.

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He stores up sound wisdom for the upright. He is a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice and preserving the way of his saints. Then you will understand righteousness and justice and equity, every good path.

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Your wisdom will come into your heart and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul. Discretion will watch over you, understanding will guard you, delivering you from the way of evil from men of perverted speech who forsake the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness, who rejoice in doing evil and delight in the perverseness of evil, men whose

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paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways. You will be saved from the loose woman, from the adventurous with her smooth words, who forsakes the companion of her youth and forgets the covenant of her God. For her house sinks down to death and her paths to the shades.

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None who go to her come back, nor do they regain the paths of life. So you will walk in the way of good men and keep to the paths of the righteous. For the upright will inhabit the land, the men of integrity will remain in it, but the wicked will be cut off from the land and the treacherous will be rooted out of it.

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And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Dear Son, You are, of course, only the child of my dreams. And some there are who would say that to pray for such a dream child is the course of folly. But it is never foolish to talk to God. And so I pray for you, and I write about what I pray.

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Four things I seek of God for you. First, I pray that you will love God as you come to know him through the Holy Spirit active in your life. Notice that I say, "as you come to know him," as the Holy Spirit directs your life.

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Love, if it is to be real, must be alive. I do not seek for you some static devotion, but rather a dynamic piety, something that claims not only your heart, but also your mind. This is a very dangerous day for the Church.

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It is attacked without, but it is also attacked within. There is an incipient anti-intellectualism abroad within the councils of faith, and I urge you to avoid it at all costs. Never make the mistake of putting dogma before love or exalting the past over the future,

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for this is not only a distortion of the Christian faith, it is the desertion of it. Faith is a living thing. It wrestles with the issues of God. It is patient before that which is unresolved.

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My dear one, never make the mistake of believing that you can sharpen your mind by narrowing it. The Bible is not a hitching post; it is a signpost, and the rigid upholders of fundamentalism prefer a present that has only a past, but the course of faith is always forward, into

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the future. So I plead with you in your coming to know God and loving him that you stay away from fellowships that forbid any speakers who differ from the presuppositions of the group, that you avoid those gatherings that elect again and again to places of leadership those with

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a slavish devotion to yesterday and no hopes for tomorrow. Avoid as it were the plague, those who exalt only the old ways and lack the courage for the new ways. For you cannot, if you have a living faith, wrestle with the great loving issues of God

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unless you know astronomy and physics, unless you read and seek out the truth that comes to us from a multiple perspective and discipline. How can you hope to understand the creative ingenuity of God if you do not know how galaxies are formed?

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By what right would you speak of time or of providence or of predestination or of eternity when you do not understand the nature of time as Einstein has explored it for us and taught it to us? How can you claim to have an inspired vision of God if you've never seen the reverence

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expressed by Einstein or Niels Bohr or Schrodinger? We talk a lot in our time about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, but my son, there are Christian ayatollahs too who try to find the answers to twentieth-century questions by hurrying back into the sixteenth century.

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And that is static and dead. That condemns one to a life of endless repetition when the Christian love for God is to be a life of endless expedition. I pray that you will be spirit-directed in your devotion, and the spirit is like the

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wind, it blows where it wills. I pray for you a wind-blown heart, and I pray it urgently. For as I, across the years, have had intimate contact with hundreds and hundreds of young people, I have discovered that it is the children of fundamentalists who most often go wrong,

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who most often reject the faith, and sometimes their own family and friends. And why? Because they suddenly discover that what they have been taught is the fruit of ignorance and fear.

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I make you a promise. If you come to me for guidance, I will not always be able to give you the right answers, but I will always give you the right questions. And if you're the kind of boy I hope you are, that will be enough to set your curious mind

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and spirit soaring. That will be enough for the spirit to blow through all of your life, thus to bring you into a living love for God. Proverbs chapter 2 says that one must seek the knowledge of God like silver and search

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for it like hidden treasure. Then will one find, not found, then will one find, always ahead, always more to find, the beauty and the holiness of God. My son, I also pray for you a love of self which rests upon your understanding of how

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God loves you. I have always been fat, and with my weight has come awkwardness and a lack of coordination. And I remember as a boy when we many times would line up to play games, and I would be the last to be chosen, and sometimes not chosen at all.

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One captain on one side, one captain on the other side, and they would choose from the neighborhood menagerie, almost always in the same order, and I would find myself last. And sometimes I would beg to be chosen and would not be chosen. And I would want to run and hide, but I never did.

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My son, I pray that when the times come that you are not chosen, that when the times come when others look down upon you, that you will never run and hide. Because what others think of you is not what is important. It is what God thinks of you that is of infinite value.

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The world will give you a number. It will give you a social security number and a passport number and a telephone number. It will give you numbers. But God will never think of you in terms of your passport picture or your fingerprints.

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He will call you by name. Jesus, the purest expression of God, for he was God, said once that the people who believe are the salt of the earth. That was a very interesting thing for him to say, for you see, in the language that

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he spoke, the word "salt" is "malach," but the word for "king" is "malach." And the word to ascend the throne is "malach." All three words very much the same. Jesus did not write his words, he spoke them.

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And the play on words, the words with double meanings because they sounded the same, was a basic part of communication in that time and place. So what Jesus meant when he said that you are the salt of the earth is that you are not only that which brings flavor and preserving power to life, but that you are royalty, a

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child of the King of all kings. God knows your name. You are coming, my son, into a world where many people try to hide with drugs. And when they are on these drugs, they say that they are having a high.

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Only those seek a high who are living at a low. Only those want lifted up who feel put down. And you cannot find real personhood in any combination of pills. That's the reason I want you to understand your infinite value to God.

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You know, and these names will mean nothing to you now, but someday perhaps, Charlie Chaplin was ridiculed as a comic because they said his style was nonsense. And Pablo Picasso was not taken seriously as an artist because they said he was non-conformist. And Mohandas Gandhi was ignored by the power brokers of the world because he was non-violent.

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And Thomas Edison was fired from his first two jobs because they said he was non-productive. And Einstein was flunked out of a Swiss school because they said he was non-intelligent. And Jesus was crucified because some people said he was non-religious and non-moral and non-essential, and all the people who said those things are today non-remembered.

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Listen to what Proverbs says, "The wisdom of the heart and the knowledge which pleases the soul comes from the experience of God." So I pray for you a marvelous knowledge of how he loves you so that you will properly love yourself.

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And I also wish and pray for you, child of my dreams, that you will come to love hard work and have a generous stewardship of its rewards. Work is good. They worked in the Garden of Eden, joining in the creative activity of God.

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Jesus said, "My Father works until now, and I also work." We are called upon to work. Now the worth of work depends on its purpose. A slave finds his work to be drudgery because he's not working for his own purpose but for

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that of his owner. On the other hand, the one who has a great goal or ambition will work diligently at achieving it, for it is his aim and it is his purpose, and the labor will seem to him as nothing. Now the grandest aim and the grandest goal to have in your work is to be a blessing to

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others. That's the reason I pray for you that you will both love labor and that you will also be a steward of it, that it might serve others. There's not much of that spirit abroad in the land at this time, for many people are

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possessed by their own selfishness, even sometimes at the expense of their children. The next generation will be the first generation in American history that is worse off than the generation which preceded it. That's not opinion, that's a fact.

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Why? Well, adults in America today are saving less than in any of the industrialized nations of the world. The National Committee on Excellence in Education has said that the next generation will not

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surpass, will not equal, and will not even approach the educational level of the generation which preceded it. Fifteen percent of our national budget goes to interest on the national debt. It buys nothing whatever for the future.

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Industry is cutting back on research and development in order to increase its immediate profits. It wants it now. From the private sector, we see more and more individuals who manipulate paper in order to have their own personal reward, and that reward adds nothing to the productive capacity

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of the country whatever. It is as if we are robbing the future in order to pay for the present. Now there are some who will say that we are doing this in order to take care of the poor, but the fact is that only 15 percent of the entitlement programs of our government go

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to the assistance of the poor. The vast majority of those monies, 85 percent of them, go to help those who really don't need any help, a kind of welfare, if you will, for the well-off. That's not generous, and that is not wise, and that is not of God.

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My son, I will seek to give you everything I can. I will labor that your future might be a grander one than my own, but I plead with you, even as I make that pledge with whatever little nobility of character I have, I plead with you that you will scorn the counsel of those who, as Proverbs says, speak perverted speech

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and do not walk in the ways of light but rather in the ways of darkness, who do not forsake crooked paths but who lose themselves in the devious. Learn to love work, and let your work and its fruits be a shining sign of your love for others.

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And finally, heir of my hopes, I pray that you will have a love for humanity which transcends all national loyalties. A young friend, whom I'd like you to know someday, gave me a book just a few weeks ago of pictures taken of the earth from outer space.

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When I was a boy, such a book would have been impossible, but now here were photographs of this planet of ours taken from out there, a kind of blue jewel flecked with white clouds, a glistening globe set against the aching blackness of space. I was struck with its smallness and its rarity, and also with the fact that it's a ball, and

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a ball has no corners behind which anyone can hide, and it has no flat surfaces that can easily be divided into my part and yours. When one looks at the world, it looks as if it's been made to bring its inhabitants together, but there are many who fail to see this.

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The world today is in great jeopardy. More than a dozen nations have planet-shattering weapons. Red rain falls from our skies and slays our woodlands. Holes in the ozone layer threaten that precious balance between the sun and the earth.

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Poisons infiltrate our underground water tables and our atmosphere. Bacterias produce disease germs for what they call security, and we stand on the very edge of the most cataclysmic catastrophe of all of history. And yet, people who will blow their horns and become excited about the rude behavior

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of some driver on the highway will never raise their voices about the radioactive garbage that is being strewn through our skies. We need people who will speak for the whole earth, for all of humanity, for the great problems of the day, problems of war and peace, of energy and pollution, of drugs, of poverty

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and of hunger. These are global problems that can only be solved by a world that works together. And so I pray that you will believe in the unity of humankind, that you will commit yourself to peace, which also means to justice, and that your commitment, more than mere words,

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will be a matter of deeds. If you do this, then you will stand with the greatest saints and the greatest philosophers and the greatest poets and the greatest scientists who understood one and all the moral unity of humankind and were patriots for the whole world.

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Walk with them and you will, as Proverbs says, "walk in the ways of good men, the upright who will inhabit the earth, men of integrity who shall remain therein." It is for these things that I pray for you, that you will have an active and intelligent love for God, not some more abundant commitment to the past, but a spirit-driven devotion.

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And out of that devotion, I pray, you will so experience the love of God that you will come to a proper love for yourself. And I further pray that that love you have for yourself will show itself in the dignity of your labor and that that labor will be for others and that those others will include

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all the people of the whole round earth. Now my time is gone, and I imagine, son of my dreams, that your time is gone also. Still, in my imagination, I bend down and kiss your forehead and say to you, "Good night and good morning and a clear dawn.

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With all the love one heart can hold." Your dad. Let us pray. Oh God, bless all the children that are, all the children of the world, and use us so that

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they might come to know thee, to love thee, to love themselves, and to love each other. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.

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