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This is Glendale Presbyterian Church People Moving Power. This tape includes the reading of scripture and a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman titled "How to Get Folks to Like You." At the conclusion of side number one of this cassette, be sure to turn immediately to side number two for the remainder of the message.

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This tape is copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Any public or commercial use, in full or in part, requires the advanced written permission of Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. The private use of this material for the spiritual gain of yourselves or others is heartily encouraged. And here for a personal word

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before the message is Dr. Thielman. Hello. Every Sunday morning, hundreds of persons crowd into the Glendale Presbyterian Church. They are wonderful people and I enjoy very much being with them. It is a thrill to preach to this congregation. From time to time, individuals speak to me about the

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occasions on which they have visited with us here. And they always say that they find the congregation to be remarkably good-humored and happy and enthusiastic and effervescing with positive Christian spirit. It's a congregation that is well liked. What I have to say to this congregation today

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and what I would like to share with you concerns how to get people to like you. To be quite frank about it, I don't think most of the people in this congregation really need this message, for they have learned these secrets. But there are some who still need to learn them. I don't know where you stand on this matter, but

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all of us want to be liked. So I hope that something which I and my study and the Holy Spirit, through his inspiration, will lead me to say in the next minutes, "Might make you a more likable person, for with being liked comes tremendous joy." Let us continue then by giving attention to these words from the second chapter

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of Acts, beginning with the verse which is numbered 41. "So those that received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they devoted themselves to the Apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders

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and signs were done through the Apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and

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generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved." And may God bless to us this reading from his holy word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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There are some people who are not satisfied with the way they are living. They want their tomorrows to be different from their yesterdays. They will not be happy if they only receive more of the same. They don't want everything that is to be an encore of everything that already has been. It is to precisely these

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people that this series of sermons is dedicated and directed. I want to talk to people who are seeking a fabulous future. There are five steps to that future. The first of these we noted last week. It is to be born from above, to enter into the family of God through the grace of Jesus Christ, to repent of all sin, and to

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receive the free gift of a new life which is pure and powerful, to enter into a new dependence upon God as Father and on other Christians as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. Now some of you very decisively and publicly made the step of beginning that new life last week. Some of you perhaps made that step

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privately within the chambers of your own thought. Some of you may still be wrestling with the issue. And if you happen to be one of those still wrestling with it, I want to suggest to you that as you leave here today, you stop at the book table and get either John Stott's Basic Christianity or Keith

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Miller's The Taste of New Wine. These books will help you in your thinking. Because it's important, you see, that you make this step. The other steps which we will be talking about in the next week cannot be even attempted or thought about until this first step has been accomplished. There is no two, three, four,

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or five until there is number one. Until there is that act of commitment, that decisive being born from above with which the Christian life, the fabulous future, always begins. But once you've had that birth, you immediately confront a question. Once you become a Christian, you must ask yourself what kind of a

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Christian you're going to be. Are you going to be one who is liked or one who is not liked? Now make no mistake about it, there are both kinds. Robert Louis Stevenson went to church on one occasion and came home and wrote in his diary, "I went to church this morning and was only slightly depressed." Well, there are some

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Christians who are pretty depressing personalities, always grabbing your lapels, bits of sawdust falling out of their ears. They usually think of themselves as being very mature. They are Christians, make no mistake. I am not implying even for a moment that their commitment is not authentic. They are the

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children of God, but rather than being mature, they're shockingly immature. Their faces are always wrinkled like little children wrinkle their faces. Oftentimes they're squawking about things like little babies do too, and they spend most of their time in one way or another sucking their spiritual thumbs. Those

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kind of Christians are not liked, and I think it can be assumed without argument this morning that we want to be the kind of Christians that are liked. So the question becomes, how do we get people to like us? And because that is a spiritual question, we can go to the Word of God for the answer. And here in the second

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chapter of the book of Acts, we are told that the disciples found favor with all people, that is, that they were liked. And we're told in the verses which immediately proceed that announcement why they are liked. The lifestyle of these disciples is explained. I read it to you just a few moments ago, and in

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that lifestyle we can discover the secret of their being liked. And the first thing that we notice is this. The liked life is a lifted life. The passage says that they were together in prayer, in worship, and in praise, that they joined together in acts of reverence and acknowledging the blessing and the peace

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of God. In other words, they were constantly lifting their lives into the context of the divine, not only when they were in church, but when they were together in any kind of situation, they were experiencing the presence of God. Once in the very first year of my ministry, there was a knock on the door

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of my study, and I said, "Come in," and the door did not open. And I went over and I opened the door, and there was standing Dr. David McCune. He was a medical doctor, a remarkable man in my former congregation. He was 80 years old then. He hadn't opened the door because he had in his hands an aquarium. The aquarium, the

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water, the fish, the plants, the sand, it was all there. Everything was going except the light on the top. And knowing Dr. McCune as I do, if he'd have put the plug in his mouth, the light would have gone on. He came in, he plopped it right down on my desk, and he said, "You're too uptight." I said, "Well, that may be so, but

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what does that have to do with an aquarium?" Well, he said, "Look at those fish. You see how they swim around? They're relaxed, they're comfortable, they're very much at ease, they're not upset about anything." It's true, that's just the way they were. Now, he said, "We should be just like that. We are swimming

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in the water of the Spirit of God, and we ought to be just as relaxed and just as comfortable and just as unconcerned, because as the fish lives in water, so we are to live in the presence of God, and you're too uptight. So when you're on the telephone, I want you to sit and look at that fishbowl, and I want you to think

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about that fish." Now, you know, that was 15 years ago, and every year since that, if you went over to my office right now, you would find not only a great big fish tank across the room, it has a whole lot of fish in it, but you find one little bowl which sits right next to my telephone, where there's a great silver fish

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inside of it with a red head and long gossamer fins, who swims around in there all day long, perfectly at ease. That's the way we are to be, swimming, as it were, in the promises of God. There's a little book that just recently been put out called the Jesus Person Pocket Promise Book, and it contains 800 promises of God.

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I take this with me, just like I take the Bible now, because you can turn to any situation in your life and open this book, and there are all the promises of God. And you know, the more we remind ourselves of those promises, the more strengthened we are, the more relaxed we are. Now, if you're uptight, people will

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be uptight with you, but if you are relaxed, people will relax with you. So one of the ways in which to get people to like you is to fill your life with the atmosphere of worship and of reverence and of resting in God. We had a man in our congregation who died about a year ago. He knew he was dying, and many

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of his friends did too, and they went to see him, dozens of them. And it's difficult to visit someone like that when you know that your goodbye will be the last goodbye insofar as this life is concerned. But somehow when you went away from his presence, you didn't feel bad, you felt good. And one of the members of

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our church said something to me I shall never forget. He said of this man after he had gone to see him, "I just wanted to go to have the breath of him about me one more time." Isn't that beautiful? To have the breath of him about me one more time. Well, I know just what they meant. I heard this fellow say on one occasion

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that he had to remember to thank God that night for this marvelous fudge. He found God in fudge and daffodils and sermons and other people. Everywhere he went, his life was dependent upon God so that he became the breath of God. It's not an accident, you know, that in the Bible the word "inspiration" means

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literally "God-breathed." Inspiring people are the breath of God because they move within God. They have lifted lives. And if your life is lifted, you'll lift others. And people will like you because people like to be lifted. Now here's the second thing we notice in this passage. The light life is a life of learning. It says

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in the passage that they gave themselves with devotion to the teaching of the Apostles and to fellowship with one another. In other words, they pursued. That's what the word "devoted" means. It's a very aggressive word. They pursued actively the teaching, the learning that they could get from the Apostles and

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from one another, from what they experienced in the context of their Christian communion. They were always reaching inside of each other to do nice things. Let me share with you a great secret. It's not secret because it ought to be, it's just secret because most people don't recognize it. And let

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me do it etymologically. You all know the word "personality." The word "personality" is from the Latin "persona." And the persona was a mask which was worn by an actor on the stage. If he felt sad, he wore a mask that was very sad. If he felt glad, he wore a mask that was very glad. And this mask would depict the feeling he was

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trying to represent to the audience. Now, this persona explains what personality is. It is the mask that we wear. It is the attitude that we reveal to other people. Now, Shakespeare says, "In his life one man plays many parts." And just so, we play many parts. We wear many masks. Sometimes we show people our happy mask. Sometimes

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our sad mask. Sometimes our angry mask. Sometimes our victorious mask. But the personality is the mask, that which is revealed on the outside. Now, here's another word. This word is "individuality." And the root of that word is the word "indivisible," which means it cannot be divided. It cannot be broken down. It

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cannot be reduced to any simpler terms. It is already at the essential level. When you are talking about a person's individuality, you are talking about their inner selves, their essential selves. Not the mask, which appears on the outside, but the deep reality that is really them down in the heart of them.

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Now, here's the secret. When you deal with people, don't deal with their masks, with their personalities. Don't be put off when they're angry. Don't be dismayed when they're disappointed. Don't react to people's outward appearance, to the demonstration of their feeling at any given moment. Instead, seek to reach

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inside of them to touch their individualness, their essentialness. Deal with the person there and open yourself so that they can reach inside of you and do the same thing. When that happens, you will learn about them and learn from them, and they will learn about you and learn from you. You don't believe that?

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Let me share with you a letter that I received from a teenager in our church this week. Just one paragraph out of the letter. I think the adults in our church should get together more. The reason this has come to me is this. My mom was driving me yesterday, and I said that she should read a book I was reading. She

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then confessed how she hates her own disposition and thought there was something wrong with her. The Lord spoke through me, I'm sure, and I expressed to her about the old and the new nature, walking in the spirit or the flesh. This I had just learned from a sermon on Galatians by Don Matheson and from a

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seminar by him at Forrest Holme. As it is, this time of open discussion made me realize how much adults need to be committed to each other, just as the kids in our church are. Somebody said that you can go to a church with a problem, listen to a sermon, it may be an excellent one, but still walk away with

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that problem. Besides, I want to see my mom like herself. That's what Jesus can do for her, and a fellowship of believers would be just the place for it to happen again and again. Now what's this letter about? This letter is about a mother who opened herself and revealed her essential inner feeling to her son, and

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her son opened himself and began to share. Here's an instance of a son teaching a mother, but a mother also by her openness teaching something to her son, and both of them through this letter teaching something to me, to say again and again and again that this kind of fellowship, this kind of sharing is to

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happen between this pulpit and this congregation, between any of us. And they gave me this package and they asked me to open it, and I did, and inside of it was a mat, which over there is called Velour du Cassis. Now this mat is made by the women of the Bantu tribe, and by them only. This particular mat took

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one year to make, and contains one and one-half million stitches. Each fiber of which there are thousands in a square inch is put in separately and then cut off separately. It is not like a needle and thread, one long thread. Each fiber is individually placed, seated, and then cut off. The dyes are made by the men, and the

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secret of making those dyes is unknown outside the Bantu tribe. There are 11 basic patterns of which this one is called the drums of Nkobi, who was a great chief of the Bantu people. When they do this, incidentally, they do not make any pattern on the backing, on the mat, and then sew it in. The girls are

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so accomplished at making this, they just start at one end and go right straight through. No pattern is followed, and it comes out perfect as you see it here. The missionary told me that this was their gift to me for coming to their home. I was amazed. I thanked them in every way I could think of, and then they turned to

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go. The missionary addressed some words to them in Chiluba. They replied. Then he said some more, then they replied. Then he spoke a little more warmly, then they spoke a little more warmly. Then it got a little bit hot, and they got a little bit hot, and the level of the conversation started to grow in intensity. Now, I

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didn't know a word that was being said, but I could tell that a debate was in process, and it was going on right before my eyes, and I couldn't imagine what had happened. We had been together. We had worshipped together. We had prayed together. We had praised together. We had taught one another. I had learned from

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them, and they had learned from me. We had questioned one another. We had sought the Apostles' teachings. We had seen signs and wonders of love. Here were people that had come from opposite sides of the world, walking down the street holding hands, signs of real affection. Everything that was present in the New Testament

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Church was there, and yet here was this conversation going on, the nature of which I didn't understand, but it seemed to be getting hot. And then, just as quickly as it seemed to get hot, it suddenly got very, very cool again, because the missionary said, "Okay." And then the black man smiled, and his wife

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smiled, and they shook hands around again, and they were gone. And as soon as they were gone, I said, "What was that all about? What happened?" Well, he said, "They walked over here tonight, and they were going to walk home again now, and I offered to take them in the Land Rover, and they didn't want to ride. And I

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insisted on taking them home, and they said no. Bringing the gift and going home again was part of the gift." You see, they had walked to that house and back to their home again that night, a distance of a little over 16 miles. Now, the world looks at that and says, "Amazing." But, brothers and sisters, that is the way

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it's supposed to be. When the kind of loving, lifting, life-fulfilling, learning relationship belongs to us because we're in Christ and in each other, well, you're liked. And that's the second step on the way to a fabulous future. Let us pray. O Lord Jesus Christ, dwell in us so richly that people on seeing us can't

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help but like us. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody yet loves his peace.

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[Music] So come.