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Ad astare per aspere. A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] [Singing] Let us give attention to the New Testament reading of the morning.

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Paul's letter to the Romans, the eighth chapter, beginning at the verse number 26. "In the same way the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.

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And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will. And we know that in all things God works for good to those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

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For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined he also called, and those he called he also justified, and those he justified he also glorified.

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What then shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also along with him graciously give us all things?

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Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died, more than that, who was raised to life, is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.

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Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written, "For your sake we face death all day long, and we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered."

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But no, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, who is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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And may the same God who gave us these words incline our hearts to the understanding of them. The ancient Romans had a saying. As a matter of fact, the ancient Romans had a lot of things. But they had one particular saying or aphorism,

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which they might have used in responding to the Apostle Paul when he wrote to them the words which I have just shared with you. When he said to them, "God works together for good in all things to those who are loved by him," the Romans might very well have replied, "Yes, ad astare per aspera." We go to the stars, but with difficulty.

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I'd like to think with you about Paul's words and the possibility of that Roman response after we have prayed together. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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About 30 years ago, there was a very popular television personality here in America known as Ozzie Nelson. Ozzie Nelson on one occasion told the story of a youngster who visited his home. The youngster was the friend of Ozzie's son, Rick. This little visitor's name was Walter.

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Ozzie was playing in the backyard with the two boys playing ball when Walter said to him, "Gee, Mr. Nelson, you throw a ball very well, although you do not throw it as well as my father does." They sat down a little later at the table for dinner, and Ozzie Nelson carved the roast. And the little guest, Walter, said, "Gee, Mr. Nelson, you really know how to carve a roast.

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You almost carve a roast as well as my father does." That night, Ozzie Nelson told the two boys a bedtime story, and by his own confession, it was the best story he could come up with. And at the end of the story, Walter looked at him and said, "Mr. Nelson, that was a great story. But my father is the greatest storyteller of them all."

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The next day, Ozzie Nelson took little Walter home, and he met Walter's mother at the door, and he said, "It's very nice to meet you, but I would really like to meet your husband. He must be a remarkable man." And she said, "Oh, I'm sorry. Has Walter been talking about his daddy again? His father was killed on Corregidor. Walter never knew his daddy.

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That's the reason he idealizes him so." Well, there are some of us whose fathers are not what we would like them to be, and so we idealize them so. But the heart of the gospel is this, that our Father God is so wonderful that he is utterly beyond our idealizing. There is no dream we can dream of him which he does not surpass.

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There is no expression of love on his part which we can imagine, which is as nothing when compared with the greatness, the infinity of his love and grace and compassion. God loves us so much that he is even willing to pray for us. That's the way Paul begins in writing to the Romans here.

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He says in the 27th and 28th verses that when we are unable to pray for ourselves, God by his Holy Spirit and his Son prays in our behalf, praying prayers that are deeper than our words could ever go. We often don't know what to pray for.

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That's because we do not know the future and therefore cannot properly prepare for it. And that's because we often do not know what is best for us. And it's a glorious truth to understand in the face of that, that God's love is so grand that he will pray on our behalf and then answer his own petition

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in order that his beautiful idea for each of our lives might be fulfilled. And that's another expression of his greatness, that God has a beautiful idea for each of our lives. That idea of course is that each one of us will be everything that God has given us the capacity to be. That's what Paul goes on to say here in the 29th and 30th verses.

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He says that we are to reflect the image of Christ, that the glory which is to belong to Christ is also to belong to us, that he is the firstborn of many brothers, and that we are to be his brothers, and we are to be like him. Now that does not mean that we are to be carbon copies of the Lord Jesus.

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That does not mean that we are to go about in robes and sandals. What that means is that Jesus was the most perfect, the most utterly fulfilled of all human beings. We see in him the perfection of humanity. And God wants each of us to live up to all the capacities, to all the glories, to all the beauties that he has put in us.

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He wants us to come to fullness just as Jesus did. He wants us to know his glory and his power just as Jesus did. He wants you to be you, he wants me to be me, and we are to be all that we can be by God's grace. There's a marvelous freedom in that.

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We are called to be all that we can be, and in doing that, we fulfill God's beautiful idea for our lives. Whenever I think of that, I remember the lady who used to come by to teach us art when I was in grade school. Her name was Mrs. Zoe, and she would come in every four weeks to give us an art lesson. That shows you that art was not considered to be very important in school then.

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It still isn't considered to be very important. That's one of the reasons for the cultural poverty of our society. But we had an art lesson every four weeks. And one day she came in and she drew on the board a tree.

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It had a sort of a green ball at the top and a straight brown trunk at the bottom. And she said, "Now I want you to draw my tree." And we all set to work. And we duplicated her tree, all except one, Howard.

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Now Howard was the best artist in our class, and he drew a magnificent tree. It was a tree seen in autumn with all the colors of the rainbow in it. And it went all over the page. It actually shimmered when you look at it.

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It was an impressionist drawing, not a photographic drawing. All second-grade drawings are impressionist drawings. And Mrs. Zoe looked at his tree and she criticized it. And I shall never forget his response.

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He said to her, "When was the last time you sat in a tree?" Now I suppose that in her youth, Mrs. Zoe had climbed a tree. But that was a long time ago. And Howard was up in trees every day.

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And he drew the tree as he saw it. But that's not what Mrs. Zoe had said for him to do. She said, "I want you to draw my tree." God is not like Mrs. Zoe.

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God does not hand to us any rigid blueprint. God instead calls us to draw things in terms of the utterly unique and different blessings which he has placed in each one of us. He does not seek a kingdom of clones.

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He wants us to come to the fullness of our difference. That means we go different ways and there are different challenges. Ad astare per aspera. But it's to the stars, even with those difficulties.

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That's his beautiful idea for us. And notice that in this beautiful idea, God never is destructive of human freedom. You know, some people in reading this passage of Scripture go on to the 29th and 30th verses where the word "foreknowledge" and the word "predestination" appear.

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And they take those two words and they develop from them an extended theology. Now, it's very sad that they do that. Because Paul is lapsing here into lyric poetry. And it is never wise to try to build a philosophy out of that which is essentially poetic.

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There are many interpreters of Scriptures, you see, who make the mistake of believing that Paul was more of a Stoic than he was a Christian. The Stoics, who were a popular philosophy at that day, believed that there was an agency of God called the Logos that came into life

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and directed the course of all things. The course of the stars in the sky and the course of every individual life. Nothing could happen in freedom. Everything was determined before the foundation of the world

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and all of this was done by the Logos. And there are some who try to argue that that's what the Apostle Paul is saying in this passage of Scripture. But it is not so. For were he to say this, it would be in contradiction to what he says in so many others of his letters.

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It would violate the understanding of God he gives to us. It would violate the understanding of human freedom which he gives to us. It would violate the opportunity to accept the Gospel which he gives to us. This concept that all things are ordained, everything, from the beginning of time

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is terribly destructive to human personality. I think of a young lady in Minneapolis who believed so. And then she was jilted by her lover and she went into a dreadful depression and into a deep despair. She could not sleep at night.

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And her days were an endless agony of spirit. And she thought, believing this theology, that everything that was happening to her was God's will. And she came to hate God. And in response to that hatred, she made an attempt upon her own life.

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I really believe that one of the greatest expressions of the forgiveness of God that we ever encounter is when he forgives us for blaming him for wars and murders and rapes and crippled children and detached retinas and Mongolian idiots. Jesus is the best picture that God ever had taken.

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Can you see Jesus starting a war, blinding a child, calling pain and hideous horror into the life of a young woman? It's blasphemy to suggest such a thing. God is good. He is not the author of evil.

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To believe this doctrine is to relieve man of all moral responsibility. We can say, "Why, we're not at fault for anything. Anything that goes wrong, God ordained it so. He gets the blame, not us." And this doctrine also, and perhaps most seriously, makes a mockery of Holy Scripture.

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Some people will say to me when I speak like this, "How dare you to question or judge God's plans?" Well, I don't have any status by which to question or judge God's plans, but I do have the Scriptures, and I believe that the Scriptures are God's Word,

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and I believe that the Scriptures can be trusted, and the Scriptures say that God is good and that God is love and that God is justice. Now, if you tell me that good and love and justice means crippling children and blinding women and starting wars and fomenting rebellion, if you tell me that that is what good means,

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well, then good, I suppose, could also mean telling a lie. If good could mean that, good could mean anything. And if when you say to me that God is good, that means he can lie, then that means the Scriptures lie. And I have built my life upon the Scriptures, and I have never found them to lie to me.

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So when the Scriptures say that God is love and good and true and faithful and gracious beyond our imagining, I believe it. And part of goodness and love and graciousness is freedom. So God doesn't order us, he woos us.

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God doesn't coerce us, he caresses us. His providence is the promise of his presence with us, moving with us in every circumstance of life. Life is rather like a great supermarket, and we have our baskets, and we may fill those baskets as we will, but God moves with us up and down the aisles.

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And when we come to those things which are too high for us to reach, God in great grace gives us those things. Indeed, as we grow in our faithfulness, we will come to the place where we will say to him, "God, give to me whatever you will," and he will pray for us and will give to us,

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as Paul says at the beginning of this passage, the things that we most need. But our freedom is always our own, for goodness requires that. And that means that some people walking through the supermarket can choose to fill their baskets with some very ugly things.

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The fact that God's beautiful idea for our lives is not destructive of human freedom means that freedom can be misused. And that's where the suffering and the pain and the hardship in life come from. Not because God is ugly, but because we sometimes are.

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Not because God wounds people, but because we can do very despicable and wounding things. You see, we are free to be all that we can be, which means we can choose to be as little as we want to be of what we could be. And because we live so close to each other, when someone chooses to be ugly and wounding,

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those about are inevitably hurt. Two weeks ago, a very dear old friend of mine sent his son off to Temple University in Philadelphia as a young student. And the young man was coming out of a pizza parlor on the Temple campus,

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and a perfect stranger, a man he had never seen or met before, walked up and shot the young man three times in the stomach, and he was dead within two hours. And when I wrote to my old friend, I began by promising him my prayers.

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And then I thought to myself, he might be very angry at God now because of what has happened, and maybe the promise of prayers doesn't mean much. So I went on in my letter to say, "You know, Ron, you had to send your son Mark off to Temple. You had to give him the freedom to go to that place

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in order to develop his mind and his spirit and his body to be everything that he could be. You had to allow him that freedom in order for him to reach the stars. But you knew, even as he went for those stars, that there was always the possibility of difficulty. Ad astare, per aspera.

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Hideous and obscene things happen in life, and you knew as soon as you let him away from you that while he could climb, he could also be hurt. Just so, God sends us forth into the world, and he wishes for us only those things which are good, and he stands ready to give them to us.

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And with our freedom comes the possibility that we will choose to do those things which are an assault upon him and an assault upon others. But Ron," I said, "one thing I've learned in my life is this, that those who protest most about the ugliness and the hardness of life

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are often those who've experienced the least of it. It has been my discovery that those in the stands often rail about the uglinesses that can be part of the human experience. But those who are down in the arena on the stands,

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those who are the sons and the daughters of real affliction, they most often demonstrate a very great faith. And you know why? Because their suffering initiates their souls into one of the deepest secrets of God.

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And that secret is this, that God can make every hardship and suffering of life into part of his beautiful idea for us. That's what Paul means when he says here in verse 28,

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"Know that in everything God works for good to those who love him." Paul is not saying that everything that happens is good. Human freedom prohibits that. But he is saying that God can use everything for good.

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God can turn the scars into stars. Christians are not exempt from the hardship of life. Christians get divorces. Christians go bankrupt.

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Christians are rushed into intensive care units. That which separates Christians from others, that which makes them grandly and uniquely different, that which gives them a gutsiness that other people do not have, is this,

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that they trust even in those circumstances in the providence of God. And what is providence? The best definition of providence that I've ever read is from the pen of Paul Tillich.

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Paul Tillich said, "Providence does not mean divine planning by which everything is predetermined. Rather, providence means that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation which cannot be destroyed by any event."

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God can take the pain of our lives and use it to build character. The great virtues of courage and fortitude and endurance often come out of hard moments. You don't sharpen a knife by rubbing it against a sponge.

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You sharpen a knife by rubbing it against a hard stone, and it's the hardness that makes it sharp. So it is in our character development. Martin Luther King came to a time in his life

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when all the circumstances were against him, and he sat in his kitchen one night, sobbing in despair, his head in his hands. And finally, he fell on his knees and he began to cry out to God.

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And he says in his autobiography that he felt in that moment of pain the presence of God as he had never known it before. And God said to him, "Stand for righteousness, and I will stand with you." And King moved that night to a new level of spiritual experience,

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but it came out of the pain. This is what James means when he says, "Count it all joy when you suffer various temptations, for out of the temptations defeated, you see,

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comes new level of character." God sometimes uses suffering to build our sensitivities, to make us more Christ-like. I read just a year ago of a new young singer

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who came from Europe to make her debut here in America, and one of the critics said she has a beautiful voice and she uses it with technical perfection. What she needs is this.

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She needs for someone to break her heart. What he was saying was she needs compassion, she needs tenderness, she needs those things which only suffering can bring.

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Isn't it an interesting thing that in our English language the word "strain" can mean stress or tension, and also a piece of beautiful music or a string of songs. Could that word mean that these two things are related?

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I think it does. Often the greatest music comes out of the greatest stress and strain. It says this even of Jesus. One of the most remarkable sentences about Jesus

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in all of the scriptures is this. "Son of God, though he was, yet learned he by all he suffered." No matter what sackcloth we're called upon to wear because of our sin, God can weave it into the garments of celebration.

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No matter what wintry center we discover in the dead blossoms of life, God puts into that wintry center the promise of springtime. That supermarket we talked about for a few minutes ago

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where God walks up and down the aisles with us, reaching the things on the highest shelves, taking charge of our lives if we invite him to do so. Let me put one other line to that description.

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God never allows anything on the shelves of the supermarket that can't be used for good purpose in our lives. Nothing can happen to us which does not have within it the possibilities of definite gain.

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Never say about life, "Anything can happen." Anything cannot happen. God will not allow anything to happen which has in it more evil

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than he is able to rise above and transform into good. "Ad aspare per aspera," to the stars, even though with difficulty. That's what Paul means when he writes, "In everything,

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God works for our good." And then rejoicing in the truth of that, he concludes what he writes to the Romans here and says, "So we are more than conquerors,

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and if God is for us, who can be against us?" And nothing can separate us. Life, death, things present, things past, things to come, principalities, powers, nothing can separate us

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from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Therefore, my word for you this day is to hold fast to the God who wants to make your life beautiful.

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Never permit yourself to be frustrated by life. Never fight life or resent life. Never believe that God authors evil. He stands ready to help us out of it.

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As we sail on the sea of life, we are inevitably going to encounter storms. But do you remember that passage in the Gospels when the disciples were out on the boat

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and the storm came up? It says that Jesus saw them toiling in rowing, and he came to help. So we, in the moment when we're toiling the most

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with our rowing, can expect the presence of our Savior Christ, and he brings gain out of the strain. [bell rings]

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Please turn your cassette to the other side. The trick is to learn to look at life like that young girl who married a young second lieutenant. The young man was assigned to duty

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at a base in California's Mojave Desert. His wife, of course, went with him to the duty, but she hated the desert. She saw it as nothing more than a place of wind,

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sandstorms, and heat over 115 degrees. She wrote a letter of despair to her father. "Dear Dad," she said, "I'm coming home. I just can't stand it here."

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He answered her with a telegram immediately, and it read, "Dear Daughter, two men sit in prison bars. One sees mud.

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The other, stars. Love, Dad." Well, she read the lines over and over, puzzled about them,

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and that night she went out to look at the stars. She had not done that since coming to the desert. Some of you may be aware of the fact that there's just no place in the world

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where the stars appear to be brighter than in the desert. She simply had not noticed them before. But now she began to look at the stars and began to look at other beautiful things in the desert.

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She even went to a nearby Indian village and made friends with the people there, and they began to teach her how to weave baskets and do other bits of Indian lore.

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And believe it or not, by the time her husband's tour of duty was over, a period of two years, she had come to love the desert so much

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that she wrote a book about it and wept when it came time to go. You see, it was all a matter of whether she was looking at the mud and the mire in her life

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or at the stars. Her dad counseled her to mine the stars, and our Father in Heaven gives us the same counsel. He says to us, "It may be difficult,

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but with me you can always make the stars. Keep your eyes, your heart, your spirit aimed starward, and we will make it together. I will cause all things to work together for your good

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because you love me and I love you." And when I think of that, it reminds me of the epitaph of John Brashear and his wife Phoebe.

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John Brashear came from a poor and an ignorant background. He had to drop out of school at the end of the sixth grade, but he was a man of strong faith, and he gave himself to teaching himself,

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and he gave himself to great goals. He became a grinder of lenses. Indeed, he became one of the best grinders of lenses in the history of the United States,

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and the supreme example of his work is the great Thaw Refracting Telescope in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is still the leading astrometric telescope in the world.

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If you visit that observatory today, you will find that John Brashear and his wife rest in peace just a few yards from his greatest accomplishment, the Thaw Telescope.

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And on the stone before their grave are these words, words which John Brashear himself wrote. "We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."

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Well, that's just the way it is for the children of God. They see the scintillating stars of God's love and God's providence, and seeing them, they never are fearful of the night. May it always be so for you, fellow Christians.

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Hold fast to the God who will make your life beautiful. Ad astare per aspera. And may God bless you, this simple witness in his name. Amen.

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[Heartbeat]