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[Music] Glendale Presbyterian Church people moving power brings you Dr. Bruce W. Thielman with a message, Caravan from Kabul. [Music] First, a personal word to our tape listeners.

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If you have ever spent any time in the Middle East, you have probably seen at one time or another a caravan moving across the sands. This is not a scene out of a Hollywood film. It's the way people still move in that part of the world. It is slow, but it is steady, and it is adapted particularly to the climb in which that transportation is most appropriate. Sometimes we get into arid, dry places in life. In those circumstances, we need to caravan into the place of joy and fulfillment.

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I would like to share with you how I feel that caravan is best experienced. I hope these words will be of help to you. I hope that through them, you will receive the best blessings of God. Let us continue in our worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of the Word of God. As we find it in the first book of Kings, the ninth chapter, beginning the reading at the verse which is numbered ten.

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You will be upstanding for the reading of God's Word. 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 cypress timber and gold, as much as he desired, King Solomon gave to Hyrum twenty cities in the land of Galilee.

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But when Hyrum came from Tyre to see the cities which Solomon had given him, they did not please him. 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. And may God bless to us this reading from his Word.

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You please be seated. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Lent is a time of preparation for the cross, a time of penitence and of confession.

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And we are focusing this year upon repenting of the sin of joylessness. To be without joy is to be in sin. Paul Pillick, the great theologian, has said that the difficulty with most of us is not that we are not Christian, but that we are not Christian enough.

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And in this area of joy we are talking about not having in us the radiance of Christ as we ought to have it. Now let us make no mistake about the fact that Jesus was a joyous personality. He began his ministry by saying, "I have come to bring you good news." Later, when John the Baptist inquired as to the course of the ministry, Jesus sent messengers to him saying,

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"The blind are receiving their sight, the lame are beginning to walk, and everywhere the good news is being heard." Everywhere that Jesus went throughout the course of his ministry, he chased away the shadows of illness, the shadows of tension and pressure and inner turmoil and disturbance, the shadows of sickness of the soul.

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When his enemies chose to attack him, they accused him of going to too many parties. When he was asked to describe the company of his disciples, he described them in terms of a wedding feast. And if you have ever been part of a wedding party, you know what a good time that is. And always upon his lips we find expressions of gratitude for everything from the lilies that grow in the field

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to the mission which was his to the friends who gathered close to him in his ministry. And thanksgiving and praise are always the fruit of a joyful heart. Jesus was a joyous personality, and Jesus said, "I want my joy to be in you and your joy to be full." And to the degree that we do not demonstrate that, we are in sin.

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I like what Charles Elliott, former president of Harvard University, once wrote. He said, "Faith, hope, and love are cheerful things and ought to be made to appear so by those who preach them. Life is not always bright, but religion ought to be." And that's true. Our faith, as it is lived out in our lives, ought to be a dynamic and exciting thing.

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Now one of the attitudes which robs us of the joy which is to be ours is the attitude which I call "pedishness." Now that's an ugly word because it's an ugly attitude. To be pedish is to be dissatisfied, to think your life is just full of nothingness, valueless, worthless. It's to have a kind of psychosclerosis.

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You know what arteriosclerosis is. That's hardening of the arteries. Psychosclerosis is hardening of the attitude of ingratitude. It's hardening inside so that you look at your own life and you're not satisfied with anything that's there, and the grass of the other yard is much greener, and you wish you were there or there or there or there,

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but any place but where you are. Whenever I think of pedishness, I always think of good old King Hiram back there in the Old Testament. Solomon ran short of cash, so he got some gold from King Hiram, and in exchange for it, he gave him 20 cities in Galilee. And Hiram made the deal without seeing the cities.

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Later he came, he looked at them, and he didn't like them. He called the place Kabul, which means nothing, worthless, of no value. Now I don't know if you've ever been to Galilee, but Galilee, even today, after terrible ecological sins have been committed against it,

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is still one of the loveliest places on the face of the earth. And Galilee then must have been so much more beautiful even than it is today. And Hiram looked at that, and he said, "It's not adequate, it's not enough, it's worthless, it's of no value, whatever. It is Kabul."

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And there are a lot of people who look at their lives and say, "Kabul." Now compare that with the attitude of a young girl who called the minister of a church located very many miles from where we're seated at this very moment, and asked for an appointment. He gave it to her.

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And when she came to see him, he was astonished when he saw her. She was seated in a wheelchair, and she was encased in a virtual cocoon of iron and leather. He asked her what this situation was, because he was looking at a girl whose feet were bound together with leather,

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whose ankles were fastened together with iron. She had iron straps up both sides of her legs, an iron band at her knees, and then the iron band continued up the side of her legs till it was fastened to an iron belt around her waist.

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She was so covered with these materials that all he could see of her face was her two eyes, a mask of leather and iron. She raised her arm and she said, "Hi." And when she raised her arm, he could see steel strips that went up the arm

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and were fastened with leather straps, and it was the same way on the other arm. She said, "Don't be too astonished. I am a cerebral palsied quadriplegic. When I was born, the doctors told my parents that I would never be able to walk,

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and further, that I would never be able to undertake the rigors of education. And my parents believed that, and I did too, until I became a Christian. When I became a Christian, I learned that if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, nothing will be impossible to you.

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So I went to a doctor and I said, "Doctor, I would like you to build for me some kind of a brace which would enable me to walk." And before the doctor could say no, I said to him, "Now my idea is this. If you could just fasten my two legs together so that they wouldn't fly around,

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and if you would put a steel band under my neck to hold my head steady, and then put steel strips down to a metal plate on my chest to hold it up, and then if you could get some kind of an iron brace across my arms so that they wouldn't fly around all the time,

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well then I think I might be able to walk." And when the minister heard this, he was overwhelmed with pity. And he got up and he started across the room. She said, "Wait."

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And with a great clanking of iron and creaking of leather, she got up out of the wheelchair and she walked across the room to him and she said, "I've just completed my Master of Arts degree at San Diego State University." Now if anyone was entitled to look at their life and say,

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"It is Kabul, it is nothing, it is valueless, it is worthless," wouldn't she have that prerogative above and beyond any of us? Yet she never said it. On the contrary, she took the caravan out of Kabul.

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She refused to say, "I am nothing," and said instead, "I will be something." And that caravan she took is one any one of us can join. The first thing you have to do to join it is to remember that you belong to Jesus Christ. Now notice that nothing happened in this girl's life until she became a Christian.

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Christians are the most power-filled people in the world. Now I fully recognize that there are individuals in the world who are not Christian who have a great deal of power. But in general, as I look at the world's population,

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it seems to me that the people who accomplish the most of real value and worth, and I call that the significant measure of power, the most powerful people in the world, are Christians. Did you hear the story about the little boy and the old man in the boat going across the river?

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Rowing the boy was. And a leaf drifted by on the current. And the man reached out and he picked it up and he said, "Son, what do you know about botany?"

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The boy said, "Nothing, sir." He said, "You have missed 25% of your life." A little bit later they came to a shallow place. And as they went through the shallows, the man reached over and into the water

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and he picked up a stone. And he said, "Son, what do you know about geology?" The boy said, "Nothing, sir." And he said, "You have missed 50% of your life."

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By now they had come to the deepest part of the river. And as they were crossing it, the man looked up and he saw the evening star, which had just come out scintillating in the sky. And he said, "Son, what do you know about astronomy?"

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The boy said, "Nothing, sir." He said, "You have missed 75% of your life." Just then the boy happened to look up the river and he noticed that the dam had broken and a huge current of water was flowing down the stream,

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which was going to capsize the boat. And the boy turned and he looked at the old man and he said, "Sir, do you know how to swim?" And the old man said, "No."

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He said, "Well then, sir, you have lost all of your life." You see, there are some things in life which it's nice to have, but they're not necessary. There are other things in life which are absolutely necessary.

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But there is no thing in life which is as necessary as being in personal relationship with Jesus Christ. For among all the other blessings that come out of that relationship is the flowing of power into your life.

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Now, every word of Jesus that is recorded in the Scripture is twice precious. I would not have any of them be taken away. But if you ask me to pick out the 10 or 12 sentences of his, which I think are most precious,

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surely one of those sentences would consist of exactly one word. That word which Jesus uttered from the cross, he said, "Tel-telestai." We translate that, "It is finished." Now, what Jesus was saying at that moment was this,

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"I have taken upon myself all of the sins of those who accept me as Lord." "I have taken upon myself all of their defeats, all of their failures, all of their disappointments, all of their discouragements, all of their heartaches. I take them upon myself,

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and I say that it is finished. The bill is paid, the account is closed. The past is done with." "And I seal the pledge with my own blood."

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Now, when a person enters into vital relationship with one who can say about all those things in life and say it with power and meaning, "They are finished!" That, you see, gives you a totally different perspective on life.

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Those despairs and anxieties and fears, they're many times what lead us to say, "We're nothing, we're worthless, we're valueless." It's not a week of my ministry goes by that I don't meet someone who is caught up in a deep sense of guilt.

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And I say, "Have you accepted Christ as Lord?" "Yes." "Do you believe that in his death upon the cross, he took upon himself all of your guilt, everything of which you have to be ashamed and in despair? Do you believe that?" "Well, yes, yes, I do believe that, but I don't feel forgiven."

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Now, what there is here, you see, is a kind of emotional lag. There's a kind of a heart drag here. This person is really not willing to forgive himself. Would to God that this person would say to himself every day of his life,

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as many times as it needed to be said, "It is finished! It is finished!" "It is because of Jesus Christ who said it, whose word I can trust and believe, it is finished!" And then having said that, move on.

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That would break, you see, this psychosclerosis of being locked in on the things in life which so often make us feel worthless. When you belong to Christ, like that cerebral, palsied, quadriplegic little girl, you can break out of that and say, "It is finished!"

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And move on. In God. Now, that brings me to the second thing which is necessary if you're going to get out of Kabul. Those two words "in God" are the key. In the Greek language, the words "in God" read "en theos."

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And those two words are the root of the word "enthusiasm." "En theos," "enthusiasm." You can almost hear it there. To be enthusiastic is to be in God. The second thing you have to do to get on that caravan out of Kabul

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is to cultivate the quality of enthusiasm. Two years ago, I went on a diet. I've gained about a little over a third of it back, but I went back on it again last Sunday, for those of you that are worried about it.

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And I'm grateful that you are. It is tragic that you have not spoken to me about it. I'm diverting from my theme here, but those of you who clapped, you should have said something to me about it a long time ago.

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You should have said something to me about it a long time ago. I apologize for that divergence, but that's where my heart was at the moment, so I had to say that. Anyway, but I'm grateful, and keep saying it to me. In any case, over the course of the last two years,

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I have received a lot of free advice on diets. At the last count, I have received 32 different types of diets, all from people who have not lost nearly as much weight in their lives as I have. I'm grateful for this. I appreciate it.

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But this morning, for the first time, I am going to give some diet advice. I am going to give you diet advice which I have worked out in my own life. A seven-day enthusiasm diet. That means that for seven days, you will approach everything in your life enthusiastically.

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The first thing you'll do when you get up in the morning is tell yourself every bit of good news you can think of. And then everything that you approach during the day, you will approach dynamically and enthusiastically.

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Now, that's not easy to do. You see, we get out of bed and we look in the mirror, and our face looks like the backside of the moon, and our spirits go just like that, and we live our whole day that way.

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Now, I'm proposing that we turn that around, and every time we find ourselves approaching something in a negative, deleterious way, that instead we begin to practice an aggressive enthusiasm.

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Now, you can do that if you want to. Did you hear about the two men who were in a military jail? One man was very sad. He said, "I was AWOL, and I have to spend 30 days in jail."

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And the other fellow had a big smile on his face. He said, "I just murdered a general, and I'll only be here three days." The first guy looked at him and said, "That's not fair. I was just AWOL, and I'm here 30 days,

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and you murder a general, and you're here only three days." He said, "Yes, on Wednesday, they're going to hang me." But you see, it's your attitude. He was smiling about it.

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It's the manner in which you approach things that makes the difference. Now, one of the most enthusiastic men who ever lived was Harry Houdini, the great magician. Please turn your...

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He appeared in the Hippodrome in London, England. He had received a challenge from the Daily Illustrated Mirror, a London newspaper. This newspaper had taken a master mechanic and set him to work designing a pair of handcuffs from which Houdini could not escape.

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He was from Birmingham, this mechanic, and he worked for five years on the project, and he came up with a pair of handcuffs that had six locks on each cuff and nine tumblers to the locks. And at 3.15 in the afternoon on March 17, 1904,

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they put those cuffs on Harry Houdini. Four thousand people packed the London Hippodrome to see if he could get out. He had a box on the stage. It had no top. He never let people watch him when he was escaping.

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And he would stand up in this box like this, and then he would get down behind the box just as I have done. Fifteen minutes he was down, he came up, and when he came up he held his hands like this,

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and everybody started to applaud. They thought he was free. But when he brought his hands up, he was still in the cuffs. He said, "I need some more light." So they gave him some more light. And he knelt down in the box again. He was down there for 20 minutes this time.

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When he came up, he held his hands like this, and everybody thought he was out. He had a big smile on his face. And they all started to applaud. And he brought his hands up and showed them he was still in the cuffs.

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And he said his knees were bothering him because of the roughness at the bottom of the box, and he needed to do some calisthenics. So he stepped out of the box and he did some deep knee bends, you know. And meanwhile they got a cushion and they put it in the box for him to kneel on.

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And he got back in the box. And he went down again. Twenty minutes later he came up, and this time they were sure he was out. But he brought up his hands and they were still in the cuffs.

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And he said, "I wonder if you would be willing to take one cuff off of me long enough for me to get my coat off. It's very warm." And he said, "Nope, they're on, and they're going to stay on until you get out of them." With that, Houdini reached up and managed to get a pen knife out of his vest pocket.

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He opened it with his teeth. And he put the handle of the knife between his teeth. Then he bent over so far that the tail of his coat fell over his head. He reached up with his hands and grabbed the tail of his coat and pulled his coat over his own head down in front of him.

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And holding the coat with his still cuffed hands and holding the knife between his teeth, he proceeded to cut the coat into ribbons. Then when he had cut it into ribbons, he threw it away. "Since you won't make me cool, I'll make myself cool," he said.

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And they went crazy with applause. They went crazy with a roar of enthusiasm over the determination of this man. He went back down to the box. An hour and ten minutes had now passed.

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But just before the 111th minute was up, Harry Houdini came up out of the box with the handcuffs in one hand. And the place went crazy, and he won the amount of money which had been set aside. He bought him a new suit. And he went on to become the highest paid entertainer of his day.

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Now, what was Harry Houdini's secret? Many people have written about Harry Houdini, and all of them that have have said together that Harry Houdini's great secret was typified in something which he wrote every time he signed his autograph. I have here a deck of cards, which I don't know if you know, but I was on the stage as a professional magician for 11 years when I was younger.

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And I was given these cards at one point. These are signed by all the world's greatest magicians, Thurston and Keller and Herman and all those. And one of them is Harry Houdini. And this is what he wrote.

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"My brain is the key that sets me free." And all those who write about Houdini say that the great thing about his thinking was his tremendous enthusiasm. Everything that he went, he even admitted later that he kept coming up out of that box like that just to hear everybody clap. The applause enthused him, you see.

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It let him go again, and he went at it with absolutely everything he had. That is the key, enthusiasm. When was the last time that you, before you went to sleep at night, took the time when your head was on your pillow to review all of the events of the day and to pick out the happiest one? What's the happiest thing that happened to me today?

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That's a wonderful discipline to do that focuses on enthusiasm. You see, when you do that, what happens is this. Because you belong to Christ, you're rid of these failures and defeats. It is finished.

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"Forgetting those things which are behind, I press on," Paul says. And then, by cultivating enthusiasm, which is to be in God, in Thaos, enthusiasm, then you can say with Paul, "I can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens me." And when those two things begin to happen in your life, you're moving out of Kabul. You're part of a caravan.

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Now, there's one more thing. You've got to learn also to give yourself away. To give yourself away. I discovered something a few years ago, namely, that if I were to take the man, the one man in all the world, who gives me the most problems, who gives me the most unhappiness and heartache,

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if I were to take that one man, and I can name him, and give him the hardest, swiftest kick in the seat of the pants that I could possibly give him, I would find that I would not be able to sit down for a whole week. And I venture to say that what is true of me is true of most of you. We are the ones who hold ourselves back.

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And I find that the thing that we do which holds us back the most is this. We focus on making ourselves happier instead of making other people happier. Now, when you focus only on yourself, then only what makes you happy will make you happy. But if you find your happiness in what happens to other people, since there are so many more of them than there are of you, you automatically become much more happy.

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You have expanded your potential for happiness and joy. This is what Jesus meant when he said to us, "If you're going to save your life, you'll lose it." It's only when you start giving it away that you're going to find it. We've got to learn to give ourselves away.

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Now, don't make the mistake of thinking that I'm saying that you give in order to get. I hear that in stewardship sermons all the time, you know. Give to the Lord and you will get back. The only trouble with that is that's not really giving, that's trading.

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So you give in something and then God's supposed to give you something. That's what's wrong with a lot of marriages, you know. A man and a woman aren't really giving to each other, they're trading. You know, "I'll do this for you if you'll do that for me," and it goes on.

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That's not the basis of a really happy marriage. I'm not talking about giving in order to get. I'm talking about giving and deriving your joy from the very giving of joy and happiness to other people. This is where it comes from.

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I mentioned from this pulpit a couple of weeks ago that the most dynamic, exciting, enthusiastic, thrilling person I knew was 78 years old. Well, I learned some time ago that she has found a new way to bring a new kind of happiness into her life. And this is what it is. She's always hated to go into dirty restrooms in gasoline stations.

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And she got to thinking about that. And she thought, "If I hate to go into dirty restrooms, then other people must hate to go into dirty restrooms too." And since Jesus has said that he is present in the least of the brethren, that must mean that when Jesus, in the presence of the least of the brethren, comes into these dirty restrooms, that he doesn't like it either.

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So, she said, "I have made it my practice to clean every dirty restroom that I find in gasoline stations. I do it for the person who comes after me and for the Jesus in them. And I'm getting so much happiness out of doing it." Now, I know that works because I've been doing that myself now for almost a year.

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Not in gasoline stations, because I don't drive that distance, but in airplanes. I'm in airplanes all the time. And you would be amazed at how filthy some individuals will leave the lavatory in an airplane. And I don't like that.

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So, when I get in there and find the lavatory that way, following Gert's example, I have been cleaning the airline's restrooms. Now, sometimes this makes a little line out in the hall with people waiting to get in. But the look on the face of the next person is worth it.

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It's in the practice of the giving that we derive the joy. You know, in the church where I was privileged to serve before I came to Glendale, we had a financial secretary who retired when she was 84 years old. And she retired to take another job.

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Her name was Carrie McClure. She was a Scots lady. And everybody loved her. She was a joyous, exuberant personality. She used to talk about the infernal revenue.

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And she had a lot of other expressions. Everybody loved Carrie McClure. Thoroughly Christ's woman. Well, one day, Carrie wasn't watching what she was doing,

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and she fell down the stairs in the church and she broke her arm. And I helped to pick her up, put her in the car, and drove her up to the emergency room of the local hospital. And I spent the whole day with her there,

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getting the x-ray and the cast and all. See, that was a very small church. And I could do that. I could spend the whole day with somebody who was in need.

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I miss that terribly, not being able to do that anymore. But, anyway, I spent the whole day with her. But what I remember about that day was the way it started. For as we pulled into that driveway,

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and up to that emergency room, Carrie, and her hat was on crooked because I had set it on her head, you know, she couldn't use her hand. And her wrist was terribly, you know, it was all--

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from the break, you know, it was crooked. And the pain must have been terrific. She turned to me and she smiled and she said, "I wonder what God has for us to do for people here today."

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And, of course, there it was. That was the secret to the joy, the exuberance, the beauty of that personality. She just gave and gave and gave and gave.

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I better not talk about her anymore because I'll get all cracked up. If you want to get out of Kabul, do these things. Remember that you belong to Jesus.

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It is finished. Cultivate the grace of enthusiasm. Live in God. And give yourself away.

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There's a caravan from Kabul leaving right now. Anybody want to lift? Let us pray. Father, at the moment when we look at ourselves and say,

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"We're worthless, there's nothing here that's worth very much," help us to remember Christ on his cross and his saying, "It is finished." And, Father, at the moment when we contemplate the grass

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on somebody else's lawn and think it's so much more verdant and beautiful and productive than our own and are tempted to say of ourselves, "Kabul, it is nothing and worthless," at that very moment, Father, then give us such an enthusiasm,

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such a sense of being in you that we will go at the plot which is ours with everything we've got. And, Father, with what we get out of that plot, teach us to give ourselves away.

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And in losing our lives, to find not only our lives, but our joy. We pray it in his name. Amen.