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By giving attention to God's word as it is recorded in the first book of Kings, the ninth chapter, we begin the reading at the verse number 10. At the end of twenty years, in which Solomon had built the two houses, the house of the Lord and the king's house, and Hyrum king of Tyre had supplied Solomon with cedar and

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cypress, timber and gold, as much as he desired, King Solomon gave to Hyrum twenty cities in the land of Galilee. But when Hyrum came from Tyre to see the cities which Solomon had given him, they did not please him.

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Therefore he said, "What kind of cities are these which you have given me, my brother?" So they are called the land of Kabul to this day. Hyrum had sent to the king one hundred and twenty talents of gold. And may the same spirit that led the author to write these words incline our hearts to

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their understanding. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Paul Tillich, the great theologian, said on one occasion that the trouble with most

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people in the Church was not that they are not Christian, but that they are not Christian enough. Now I think one of the areas in which we see this is in the joy quotient which most people display in their lives.

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Christians are to be joyous personalities. We serve a Lord who announced that he came to bring good news. Everywhere he went throughout the course of his ministry, his very presence drove the shadows of gloom away.

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He described himself as a rare treasure, or as a pearl of great price, something that makes someone very happy. He was accused during his lifetime of attending too many parties. He described his fellowship of disciples as a kind of wedding group, and he gave thanks

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for things like lilies, and food, and friends. This Jesus you will remember, this one who is our Lord, this one in whose name we are met said, "These things I have said to you that my joy might be in you, and that your joy might be full."

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As Christians we are to be joyous personalities. I find myself in total agreement with Charles W. Elliott, who was once president of Harvard University and who wrote, "Faith, hope, and love are cheerful things, and ought to be made to appear so by those who preach them.

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Life is not always bright, but religion ought to be." The pleasures of faith ought to be demonstrated in our joy. Now it has occurred to me that the reason most people lack joy in their Christian experience is because of what we might call peevishness.

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Now peevishness is a lack of satisfaction. Peevishness is that attitude which deprives one of any gratitude for one's situation or circumstances. Peevishness is a kind of mental sclerosis.

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Now you know what atherosclerosis is, the hardening of the arteries. It is possible to have a hardening of the arteries of gratitude and of appreciation, to be completely oblivious to the many good things which crowd life, and rejecting those things to live in a kind of joyless state.

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Now an example of that to me is King Hyrum, whose story I just read to you from the first book of Kings. Solomon was a bit short of cash, and so he went seeking gold, and Hyrum loaned him quite a pile of it.

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In exchange for that gold, Solomon gave to Hyrum twenty cities. Now sometime later, King Hyrum came and looked over these cities and found them not to be satisfactory. He was unhappy with them.

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Now mind you, these cities were in the area which we would today call Galilee. Now Galilee, even now in the twentieth century, is a very beautiful place. But in the days when this gift was given, it would have been even more beautiful than it is today, for terrible ecological sins have been committed against it in the intervening

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centuries. Solomon gave to Hyrum what was a very beautiful place, but Hyrum called it "kabul," which means literally "like nothing." He was peevish about it.

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He didn't get out of it the joy and the satisfaction which should have been his. Now this attitude of peevishness you see in a lot of folks' lives. But let me give you another story by contrast. An acquaintance of mine who is in the ministry in Southern California was summoned to his

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office door one morning by a knock. He went over and answered the door and saw something he had never seen before in all of his life. There was a young woman sitting in a motor-driven wheelchair.

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She was encased in a kind of cocoon of leather and metal. She had leather cords on her legs and metal straps up the side, and these fastened to great braces at her knees and then up the sides of her legs. And then there was a metal belt around her waist and a metal plate here and a strong

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metal ring which held up her head. And her whole head was encased in a kind of mesh of leather cords. And there were also metal strips and cords that went down both of her arms. She explained to him that she was a cerebral-palsied quadriplegic.

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And he went to her right away expressing his sympathy. "Wait a minute," she said. "I always had a lot of sympathy for myself, much more than I needed. And then I became a Christian.

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And somebody taught me that Jesus once said, 'If you have faith as much as a grain of mustard seed, you will be able to move mountains.' So I went to my doctor and I said to my doctor, 'Look, I want to go to school, and I can't go to school unless I can get around.

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So do you think that we could design something that would enable me to walk? I mean, there'd have to be something there that would hold my legs because they'd fly around uncontrollably. There would be something there that would hold my head still because it moves all the

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time when it is not held still.'" And she described this, and the doctor designed for her that cocoon in which she was now encased. "And watch," she said. And she got up with a great creaking of metal and clanking of the braces.

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She got up and walked across the room to where my minister friend was seated. And as she held out her hand to him, she said, 'And I've just completed my Master of Arts degree at San Diego State.'" Now I asked a friend of mine, when I told him that story, how he felt.

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And he said, "I feel very, very small." And I think a lot of us probably feel that way, or at least we ought to, when we confront a woman, a young woman who has to bear this kind of situation and wear this kind of thing in order to accomplish the things in life that she wants to accomplish.

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But she doesn't. She does not look at her life and say, "Kabul! It is nothing." Oh no.

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There's no peevishness in this girl at all. She gets up and she begins to move out of Kabul, out of nothing, toward a life which had value and purpose and which is an inspiration to us and a shame to some of us. How do you get out of Kabul?

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How do you get out of thinking that your life is nothing? Well, the first thing you do is obviously to remember that you belong to Jesus Christ. Changes began to happen in this girl's life after she became a Christian. Now I am not saying that people who do not own Jesus Christ as Lord are without power

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in their lives. There are many powerful and dynamic people in life who are without faith. We all know that. But I am saying this, that it is my observation that those people in life who are most power-filled,

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who are most moving in synchronization with the mighty flow of God, those people who have about them that kind of drive which overcomes, they are most often Christian people. They are moving in the knowledge that they belong to Jesus Christ. There was a young man and an old man in a boat.

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The young man was rowing, the old man was facing him. It was in the evening. And as they went along, the old man reached up and he plucked a leaf from a tree and he said to the boy, "What do you know of botany?"

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And the boy said, "Nothing." And the man said, "You've lost 25% of your life." And as they went a little farther, he reached down into the bottom of the boat and he picked up a stone and he said, "Young man, what do you know about geology?"

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The young man said, "Nothing." He said, "You've missed 50% of your life." It was evening, as I said, and the stars were beginning to make their appearance. And he looked up and he said, "Young man, what do you know of astronomy?"

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And the young man said, "I know nothing." He said, "You've missed 75% of your life." Now just at that moment, a dam upstream broke and a great mountain of water was moving toward them.

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And the boy, rowing this way, could see it, but the man with his back to it could not see it. And so the boy yelled out to the man, "Do you know how to swim?" And the man said, "No."

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And the boy said, "Then you have just lost all of your life." You see, there are some things that are nice to know and which do enrich life, but there are other things which are absolutely basic to the living of life itself, and Jesus Christ is the first of those.

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There are many things you don't have to know to have a life that is full, but if you want to have that life which is abundantly full, then you must know Jesus Christ. "I have come," He said, "that ye might have life and have it abundantly." This is indispensably and indisputably true.

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And Jesus Christ is the beginning of the journey toward gratitude, toward appreciation toward God, toward moving out of privilege, out of cabal. Hudson Taylor, that great missionary to the Middle Kingdom in China, whose work is still bearing fruit even though it was done well over a hundred years ago, had a period when

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he rejected faith, it was when he was in college. He was standing during that period in his father's study one night and he saw on the table a tract, and he picked up the tract and it was entitled "The Finished Work of Christ."

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And he read that tract and it came home to him then, as it had never come home to him before, that Jesus Christ had won the battle of life for him, that that life battle had been absolutely taken over by Jesus Christ, that there was nothing in his life that he could not know victory over in and through Jesus Christ.

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He was captured by the fact that on the cross Jesus said, "And men, it is finished. Every battle is won. Every temptation can be defeated. Every vicissitude can be overcome with victory.

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Why? Because I have finished the battle. It is finished." Now I run into Christians all the time, and you do too, and you say to them, "Do you know

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that you are forgiven of God and that you are moving in the power of God?" And they say to you, "I think so." I want to say to all of those people this morning, don't suffer from that drag and that lag.

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When something attacks you in life, say, "Through Jesus Christ that thing is finished." If there is some temptation that comes to you, look at that thing and say, "In the name of Jesus Christ I say to you, it is finished." When you confront even death itself, and look at the end of this life and the beginning

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of the life that is eternal, you can say about this life that victory is yours because on the cross Jesus Christ could say, and you could echo after him, "It is finished." That is cause for joy, to know that nothing can defeat you because everything has been finally and forever won by him.

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When you get that spirit, you start to move out of Kabul. Now you want to add to that spirit the quality of enthusiasm. The word enthusiasm comes from two Greek words, "enthos," it means literally to be in God. And a lot of people are very peevish in life because they are not in God, because they

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don't have enthusiasm. I am the only minister in the Presbyterian Church who is taller when he is lying down than when he is standing up. All of my life I have been given diets.

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I suppose I have been given a hundred diets across the years. I have been given diets repeatedly by people who have never in their whole lives lost as much weight as I have. I have lost well over a thousand pounds, but not at one time.

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This morning I want to turn the tables and I would like to give to you a diet. I call this my seven-day enthusiasm diet. Most people are not enthusiastic enough, so I am urging you to develop enthusiasm through this seven-day discipline.

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When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself all the good news that you know. Think about all the opportunities for service or to do things for Christ or the things that you can rejoice in Christ which are going to be yours that day. Now when you go downstairs to the breakfast table, throw away that canned orange juice.

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Take an orange, feel it, smell it, and put it on the counter and take a knife and cut it in half right through the middle and feel it suck as that knife goes through and that golden juice begins to spill out the sides. Open that orange and look at the two sides.

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Cut off a thin slice and hold it up to the light. It's more spectacular in design than any rose window you'll ever see in any cathedral in the world. Now take one half of that orange and holding it over a glass, start to squeeze it.

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Listen to that pulp as it plops down into the glass and see that golden pool assemble there and watch those little bubbles of flavor as they come up right before you. Now pick up the glass, bring it to your mouth slowly, smell it again, and then drink it slowly, letting it trickle down your esophagus and settle in your stomach like absolute delight.

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Now I realize you can't do that every morning, but most of you are not enthusiastic enough and you need a little shock treatment to get started and that's the reason I'm proposing this enthusiasm diet. A lot of people, you know, they get up in the morning, they walk in, they look in the

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mirror, their face looks like the dark side of the moon. They give up everything for the whole day. They move into a minor key and they never get out of it. You've got to stay on the diet.

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Like the two fellows who were in a military prison and one was glad and one was sad. And the one who was sad said, "Oh, I'm with AWOL, I'm going to be here for 30 days." And the other fellow, the glad one, said, "Oh, well, I murdered a general and I'm only going to be here for three days."

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And the sad one said, "Well, how is it that I can be AWOL and get 30 days and you murder a general and only get three days?" And the fellow said, "You see where they're going to hang me on Wednesday." See, it's all in the attitude with which you approach the thing.

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Most of you will not be familiar with the name of Eric Weiss. Eric Weiss became much better known by his stage name, which was Harry Houdini. He was one of the greatest magicians of all time and the greatest of all escapologists. About 80 years ago, 4,000 people crowded into the London Hippodrome one morning to watch

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Harry Houdini perform. The Daily Illustrated Mirror in London had issued a challenge to Houdini. They'd found a man who'd spent five years developing a special set of handcuffs. There were six locks on each cuff and nine tumblers on each cuff.

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And the challenge was for Houdini to put on those cuffs and then escape. Well at the appointed hour, 4,000 people gathered to see it. And they had a kind of a box on the stage, about up to his waist, and he stood in the box and they put the cuffs on him.

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And then he knelt down in the box out of the sight of the audience. 20 minutes went by and he stood up and everybody thought, "He's gotten out of them." But no, he was still cuffed. He said he didn't have enough light.

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So they turned the light up a bit, down into the box he went. He was down there this time for 15 minutes, came up with a big smile on his face. Everybody thought it was a big applause, you know. He was still cuffed.

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He said his knees were getting sore, he needed to limber them up a bit. He did a few deep knee bends, down into the box again. He was in there for 20 minutes. He came up this time, still wearing the cuffs.

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People by this time anticipating every move he was making. He said, "I wonder if I could take off the cuffs long enough to remove my coat. It's getting very warm. And then put the cuffs back on and we'll go on."

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"No," they said, "the deal was once you had them on, you would get out of them or else." With that, Houdini reached to his vest pocket and got a penknife, got it up to his teeth and opened it. Holding it between his teeth, he then reached down and got the bottom of his coat and gradually

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pulled his coat up to the place where he could reach it with the knife. And he cut through the coat with the knife until he could throw the coat aside. Everybody clapped like crazy. Who ever thought he'd be able to get out of his coat in circumstances like that?

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And back down into the box he went again. Well, it was one hour and ten minutes altogether before he came up out of the box. And when he came up, the cuff links were gone. The cuff links, the handcuffs were gone.

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Houdini was the highest paid entertainer of his day. And he said of his ability as a showman, "My brain is the key that sets me free." He admitted later that he could have been out of those cuffs in ten minutes. But he deliberately kept going up and down out of the box, doing all of those other things

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to get the people excited, to get them more and more keyed up for what was going to come. He understood the value and the importance of enthusiasm. Nothing will help you move out of Kabul any more quickly than this. When you go to sleep tonight, the last thing you should say to yourself is the happiest

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thing you know. Forget those things which are behind. Press on toward the things which are before. Remember it is finished.

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I can do all things through Jesus Christ. And as Thanksgiving grows in you, peevishness disappears and you're on your way out of Kabul. Now the last thing to remember is this. You've got to give yourself away.

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The reason a lot of people lack joy in their lives is because the only thing that gives them pleasure is something that happens to them. Now because there's only one of you, it's only when something is going to please that one of you that you will be pleased.

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If you change your life perspective so that your greatest joy is in seeing other people be happy, because there are many more of them than there are of you, there will be that many more occasions for happiness. If the measure of your spirit is going to be only what is going on inside of you, then

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when you are discouraged, happiness will not be there. But if the measure of what's going on in your spirit is in the lives of all those whom you touch, then even though at one given moment there may be discouragement in you, there will be joy and happiness in many of them.

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And that joy and happiness will become yours. You know that verse of Scripture. "Whosoever would save his life will lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall surely find it."

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Let me give you a very literal 20th century paraphrase of that. I would paraphrase it like this. "If I could kick the guy in the seat of the pants who is responsible for most of my unhappiness, I wouldn't be able to sit down for a week."

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The fact of the matter is when you focus only upon yourself, then the unhappiness that you know you create for yourself. Some years ago, a good number of years ago now, the Salvation Army had its international convention here and General Booth, who founded it, was still alive but too ill to come.

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He was in England. He said he would send them a cablegram and he did. And on the last day of the conference, they read his cable. The message from the founder of the Salvation Army, that organization which does so much

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in the service of others, the message was one word long. The message was "others." If you give yourself away to others, then in the joy of others you will find your joy. One of the most remarkable Christians of this century was Gertrude Bahanna, and I had the

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pleasure of knowing her, this great saint of God. I said to her on one occasion, "Gert, how are you?" She said, "I'm wonderful as usual." She said, "I'm especially wonderful recently because I found a new way to be happy."

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I said, "What's that?" She said, "Well, I do a lot of traveling by car and I always have to stop at gas stations and I'm at the age where I have to use the restroom a lot and I hate dirty restrooms." And I got to thinking about that and I thought, "Other people hate dirty restrooms too."

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And Jesus is present in the least of the brethren, we all know that. That means he's present in us, so he must be unhappy when he walks into a dirty restroom in the lives of those other people. So she said, "I have begun cleaning dirty restrooms.

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Whenever I encounter a dirty restroom on the road, I take the time to clean it up and I derive great joy out of knowing that all those who will come in after me and my Lord Jesus who will come in, in and through them, will find happiness in what I've done." Now you may snicker at that, but I've tried that and that works.

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I don't travel much by car, but I travel a lot by airplane. When I started over ten years ago, whenever I go into the restroom on an airplane and I find it dirty, and many times people are very slovenly in such places, I just take a few minutes to clean it up before I go.

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And you know it feels good to go back to your seat and look at the pleasant look on the person's face who comes out after you. You begin to magnify, you see, the possibility of the joy because your joy is not just in yourself, your joy is in what you're doing for the other person.

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Which brings me to Carrie McClure. Carrie McClure was the first church treasurer I ever had to deal with. She was 84 years old and a wonderful lady. She used to talk about the infernal revenue department.

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Well one day when she was 82, she slipped in the church, fell, broke her wrist, very painful break. I took her to the hospital, spent the day with her there in emergency and x-ray and all those kinds of things.

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That's what I missed the most in the pastorate, not being able to be with my people at the times when they need me the most. That leaves a kind of hole in one's ministry. But I was there with her that day in those early pastoral days.

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She had her little hat on crooked because, well I put it that way, she couldn't put her hat on because of her wrist and I put it on and you could see the pain in her eyes. But you know what she said as we drove into the emergency entrance of the hospital? She said, this little old spiritual powerhouse, Carrie McClure, she said, "Well, I wonder

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what things God has for us to do here today." She knew nothing about Kabul. And if you want to get out of Kabul, then remember, it is finished, you belong to Jesus Christ.

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Cultivate enthusiasm that is living in God and give yourself away to the service of other people. There's a caravan leaving for Kabul, leaving from Kabul right now. Anyone want to lift?

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Let us pray. Our Father, teach us that if we live in the midst of a life which is nothing, it is only nothing because we have made it so. Grant to us the grace, our Father, to recognize the victory which is ours through Jesus Christ,

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our Savior, and to live in the enthusiasm which that knowledge gives to us and discover our greatest happiness in offering our lives to the service of others, like the Jesus in whose name we pray. Amen.

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