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The scripture reading of the morning is from the first book of Kings, the 20th chapter. I begin the reading at the verse which is numbered 22. "Then the prophet came near to the king of Israel and said to him, 'Come strengthen yourself and consider well what you have to do, for in the spring the king of Syria will come

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up against you.' And the servants of the king of Syria said to him, 'Their gods are gods of the hills, and so they were stronger than we. But let us fight against them in the plain, and surely we shall be stronger than they. And do this, remove the kings each from his post and put commanders in their places, and

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muster an army like the army that you have lost, horse for horse and chariot for chariot. Then we will fight against them in the plain, and surely we shall be stronger than they.' And he hearkened to their voice and did so. In the spring Ben-Hadad mustered the Syrians and went up to Aphek to fight against Israel. And

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the people of Israel were mustered and were provisioned and went against them. The people of Israel encamped before them like two little flocks of goats, but the Syrians filled the country. And a man of God came near and said to the king of Israel, 'Thus says the Lord, because the Syrians have said, "The Lord is a god of

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the hills, but he is not a god of the valleys," therefore I will give all this great multitude into your hand, and you shall know that I am the Lord." And they encamped opposite one another seven days. Then on the seventh day the battle was joined, and the people of Israel smote of the Syrians a hundred thousand foot

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soldiers in one day. And the rest fled into the city of Aphek, and the wall fell upon 27,000 men that were left. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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When you were kind enough to extend to me an invitation to be your pastoral servant, I felt altogether inadequate for the ministry, but I also felt a very strong call to it, and call must always take precedence over any feelings of inadequacy. There was one area of this church's ministry, however,

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which filled me with particular anxiety, and that was related to the running of the camp. Well, for four years now I've been involved in our camp ministry to one degree or another, and while I am still very much a novice in the field, I have at least learned this one thing with absolute certainty, that God is a

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God of the hills as well as a God of the valleys. Let me put a little flesh and muscle on the skeleton of that thought. Ben Hadad was the leader of the Syrians. They came up against the children of Israel and attacked the capital city of Samaria, and Samaria was located in a mountainous region, and the Syrians were

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defeated by the children of Israel. Now, when the Assyrians returned to their own place, licking their wounds, they decided that they had been defeated for two reasons. First of all, because they were not able to use their battle chariots which were quite impressive, very likely the most impressive military weapons

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anywhere in the world at that time. The other reason they decided they lost was that the God of Israel was a sort of hill country deity, and they had been fighting against him on his own territory. So they decided what we must do is we must come up against Israel again, but this time we must fight in the

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plains and in the valleys, for their God has no reach beyond the hills. Now, Israel was somewhat loath to come up against the Syrians again because, as I have said, those battle carriages were instruments of power and of death, and they also knew that they would be fighting on the plains, and they had some anxiety about

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that because this was the Syrians' home territory. The Syrians would have the home field advantage. But a prophet of Israel, who is not named in the scriptures, came to the leaders of the people and said, "You will surely defeat the Syrians, and they will be delivered into your hands." And the reason is that

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they have said that the Lord is God of the hills but not of the valleys, when in truth God is the God of the hills and of the valleys. And just as this prophet predicted, so the battle was won, and more than 125,000 of the Syrians were slain. Now, I think that intellectually we all know that God is a God of the hills and

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of the valleys. We understand that God is with us in the mountains or when we're pushing our ways through a shopping mall. We know that he is with us in the high moments and the low moments of life. We understand that he is just as concerned about Tuesday as he is about Sunday, and that he is related to our

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dinner table just as he is related to the communion table. We know that he is with us in joy and also with us in sorrow. We understand intellectually that God is the God of the hills and the valleys. But in my experience, the greatest practical evidence of this that I have seen has been in the area of

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camping ministry. Let me try to make that point by offering to you twin truths. First is this. God is the God of the hills. Now in the Old Testament that idea is brought forward again and again. It says things like "thy righteousness is like the high hills," or "the hills shall break forth into singing thy praises," or

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"the mountains shall bring forth thy peace," or "I shall lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help, my help cometh from the Lord." And what is taught in the Old Testament is echoed in the New Testament. Have you ever thought of how many of the major moments in our Lord's life were in

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mountainous places on hills? Calvary itself was a hill. We talk about the Sermon on the Mount, or we think about the Mount of Transfiguration where Jesus was glorified before Peter and James and John. God is the God of the hills, and I think that's one of the reasons that most camps and conference and retreat

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centers are located in the mountains. A lot of people go to those places as an act of religious retreat, and that's always struck me as a rather odd phrase because they really don't retreat so much as they advance in the things of the Spirit. The Christian Camping Association did a study a few years ago

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and determined that fully 80% of the adult Christians in America say that their first meaningful spiritual experience was at a camp or conference center. Now I've seen those kinds of things happen. I remember at one conference, for example, a young man met God in the place of deliverance at the

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mountain we call Calvary. The speaker was in the midst of a sermon and this young man, a college boy, came up to me and he said, "I've got to talk to you right away," and I said, "Well, the speaker's almost done. When he's finished we'll talk." "No," he said, "I've got to talk to you right away. Now when you've worked with college kids

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for a while, you learn to understand that everything is an emergency." And so I said, "Now I'm sure it will wait for 10 minutes. You just have a seat in the back of the room and I'll be with you as soon as we're finished." Well, I watched him and he went to the back of the room, but he paced back and forth. Great anxiety. So

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finally I got up and I went back and I took him by the arm and we left the building and went into a nearby cabin that was empty and I said, "Now what's the problem?" He said, "The Holy Spirit is dealing with me right now and he's calling me to Christ and I want to obey and I don't want to let this moment pass

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in case I should never have the moment again." And so right there we knelt down on the floor of that cabin and he confessed his sins. He was heavily into drugs and fornication and academic indolence and a lot of other things. He confessed them, he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord, and the beauty of that has

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been evidenced in every day of his life since that time. A lot of people in a camp or conference setting meet the Lord, the God of the hills, on the hill called Calvary, the place of deliverance. And a lot of people at camp and conference experiences meet God on the mountain of direction. That would be the mountain of

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the Sermon of the Mount. You know, we don't know exactly where the Sermon on the Mount was preached. Traditionally it's believed that it was on a rolling hill above Tiberias looking out over the Sea of Galilee, but we don't know for certain that that was the place. But there are many people who have been to

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camp and conference centers who can identify for you precisely the moment they received direction for their lives in some message they heard preached there. A young man in this presbytery, pastor of one of our largest churches, leading a beautiful Christian life himself, having a beautiful Christian

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family, and leading his church in a truly splendid way, called it my attention not long ago to the fact that he had first heard me preach when he was nine years old in the fourth grade. And what was even more amazing, he told me what I'd preached about. "You call me Master and Lord and ye say well for so I am." That

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was the text. And I was inviting these young people to let Jesus Christ be the leader of their lives and to take direction from him. And he did it, then and there, in that camp and conference time. Now the Sermon on the Mount is the most perfect, the most utterly incomparable utterance in history. That's

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what Lord Tennyson himself said. But God deigns to use sermons that are much weaker and poorer than that magnificent utterance of our Master. He even uses the words of people like me. A lot of people, you see, have gotten their direction from lesser mounts than the Sermon on the Mount. And many of these lesser mounts

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have been on campsites where God is still changing people and giving them direction through the foolishness of preaching. And some people encounter God in terms of his magnificent glory. They discover that glory. They have their transfiguration experience while they are in the high country with God. Just

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like Peter and James and John did. You will remember that Peter and James and John were so thrilled by what happened to them there on that Mount of Transfiguration that they did not want to go down into the valley. Jesus led them there and they followed, but they didn't want to go. Just so there are a

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lot of people who want to keep going back to that campsite where they had their early experiences. There's an announcement in our bulletin this morning about people who have gone to our camp 50 and 60 years ago who are being invited to come back for an alumni weekend and they'll come. It always

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reminds me that story of the fellow who was hired to paint the yellow line down the middle of the road and after he'd been there three days the foreman took him aside he said, "You know your first day was great, you went three miles. And your second day it was pretty good too, you went two miles. But this day, your

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third day, you only went one mile so I'm going to have to fire you." And the fellow looked at him said, "That's not fair. Every day I'm farther from the paint can." Well, there's a sense in which people even when they get farther from the paint can, farther from that transfiguring experience they had at

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camp, they still want to go back there for the refreshment and the beauty of that moment. I was sitting at a meeting of Pittsburgh Presbytery about five weeks ago and I guess I had a rather discouraged look on my face and one of the senior clergymen of the Presbytery, a man whom I hold in very great respect

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and affection because he was my counselor at a camp that I went to at Westminster College over 40 years ago, this man walked up to me and he said, "I guess it's no bed of roses being pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, being right downtown there and with all that radio and television responsibility. Just

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remember, no matter what, I always care. And remember too, what happened at Westminster a long time ago." And when he reminded me of that transfiguring experience, my heart soared. I wasn't here last Sunday. I was up inviting some young graduates from Westminster to offer themselves to Christ's service throughout

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all of their lives. But I was there also because I loved to go back to that place and to look at that dormitory, which incidentally was called Hillside Dormitory, and remember how I discovered the glory of God there. "God is in the hills, I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, whence cometh my help, my help

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cometh from God." The God of the hills. But there's a twin truth. God is also the God of the valleys. Now when some people think of valleys, they think of very beautiful places. They think, for example, of the Red Rock Canyon out of Sedona, Arizona, or of the Yosemite Valley in California, or maybe of the Rhine Valley

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with its verdant and neat and orderly vineyards on both sides. When the Bible speaks of the valley, it usually uses the word in terms of darkness, hardness, pain, difficulty. It speaks of the Valley of Achor, which means trouble, or it speaks of the Valley of the Shadow of Death in the 23rd Psalm, or it speaks of Joel's

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words, "Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision." The truth is that God is in those valleys, even though they are places of darkness and distress. Take that Valley of Achor, for example. In that valley, a man named Achan committed a sin against God and brought judgment upon Israel. It was a place of great defeat,

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and Israel thought of Achor as a place of defeat. And a lot of people are in that valley, defeated in life. You know, the major problem which exists on most college and university campuses today is the problem of cheating. And all kinds of studies have been undertaken to understand why certain young people

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cheat so much. And what has been discovered is that if a young person has a high view of herself, if she understands her personality to be developing and that she is becoming what she ought to be becoming, those kind of people very rarely cheat. But those at the other end of the spectrum, who are

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very down on themselves, who see themselves as shortchanged in the things of God, those who find themselves at the bottom of the popularity totem pole or the personality totem pole, these are the ones that most often cheat. And those in the middle function almost as a kind of control group, some cheating and some not.

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The message is, you see, that low people do low things. And I've discovered that to be very true in my ministry. People who have spent time in the hills and known the joys of those moments are much less likely to be defeated in the valleys. If they've had that delivering experience or that directing

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experience or that discovery experience in the hills, they're much less likely to get in trouble, even in the dark and shadowed places of life. Now sometimes they do. And of course those who have not had those mountaintop experiences, they often find themselves in those valleys and they don't know any way to get out.

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There's a kind of a sad but a humorous story of a sergeant in the military who was asked by an Episcopal chaplain to conduct the worship service because the chaplain was called away on an emergency. So the sergeant got up and he began to read through the service to the assembled men and he read through the

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act of confession and they read it with him. And then he read the act of absolution, absolving them of their sins. And when he got to the end of that, he noticed in very small print that it said that only an ordained priest of the Episcopal Church could utter these words. And he wasn't an ordained priest of the

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Episcopal Church. He didn't know what to do. Then he thought, "Well I may not be a priest but I am a sergeant." So he looked out at these people and said, "All right you sinners, as you were, as you were." And that's the trouble. A lot of people trying to get out of that valley find themselves ending up just as they were.

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But the gospel is that the God who is there for that beautiful retreat is also there in that baleful defeat. Hosea says that the Valley of Acor will become a gateway of hope. Isaiah says that God will change the place of trouble into the place where herds lie down to rest. You see the God of the hill of Calvary

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comes down into the valleys and he says, "Whosoever will, let him come, acknowledge me, acknowledge his own inadequacy, her own inadequacy, take my leadership and my lordship into their lives. Follow me. Trust not into your own understanding and I will lead you out of the valley to victory." That's the gospel. And it's so

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with the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Across the 30 years of my ministry, I don't know how many times I've walked the soft green sod of cemeteries. I've seen hundreds of caskets lowered into the earth, big ones and little ones and flag-draped ones. I've held on to husbands and wives and children and seen

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people buried in their graduation gowns and in their pulpit gowns and in their military uniforms and in flannel shirts and blue jeans. I've spent a lot of time in the Valley of the Shadow and I've learned that those handle that valley best who have spent some time in the hills. I was thinking this last week of

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Corrie ten Boom, that great Dutch Christian. She and her sister Betsy were thrown into a concentration camp by the Nazis because they were saving the lives of Jews and they went to the concentration camp called Ravensbrück and if you remember your history of the Second World War, you'll remember that's

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one of the places where so many hundreds of thousands were gassed and then incinerated. And Corrie and Betsy faced death every day. Seven times they were stripped naked before their Nazi guards and began the march toward the gas chambers. And seven times the line stopped before they got there and they

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comforted themselves with the knowledge that Christ too was stripped naked in his suffering. And they promised themselves that when they got out of prison they would tell how God was there with them in that hell of a valley. Betsy being the more fragile died but Corrie came through and the message she

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went around the world preaching was yes he's a god of the hills but he's also a god of the valleys. Those who've never met him in the hills can meet him in the valleys. People still find God in foxholes. Oh Henry, that short story writer who lived such a dissolute life, when he was dying one of his friends

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trying to make things a little easier turned down the lights and he cried out "Don't turn off the light, don't turn off the light, I don't want to go home in the dark." Well the gospel is that whether you've met God in the hills or whether you meet him in the valleys, you experience either place his perfect love

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and his perfect love casts out fear. What of the valley of decision? Joel writes "multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision. So many face such question marks in their lives and you can't put them off. Many people try to put them off but it doesn't work. Two men

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on a houseboat on a strange river tied up one night. Somehow during the night the ropes came loose and the boat drifted. The next morning one of them went up onto the deck, looked around and yelled downstairs "Wake up, wake up, we're not here anymore!" And that's what happens when you try to put it off. Suddenly you

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find that you're drifting and that you're purposeless. But the gospel is that God is with you even in those moments of decision. With you, you can go back and reclaim that experience that you had in the hills with him in some camp or conference and retreat of your youth. You can go back and make that new

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for yourself again or if you have not known him there you can reach out to him in the midst of your confusion. He presents himself as a star and he presents himself in a stable. Both. So the message is you see that we must not surrender to the Syrian heresy. That God is here but he's not there or he's there

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but he's not here. He's with us in the hills. The hills of deliverance and direction and discovery. And he's with us in the valleys. The valleys of defeat and of death and of decision. He's there for each and every one of us. So reach back and take what you had yesterday or begin this very hour the walk with him that

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can be yours. For he is the God of the hills and the God of the valleys. Call ye upon him while he is near and all will be well. For it is true now as it has always been true. You and God can be a majority. Let us pray.

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In the silence of these very personal moments I'm going to ask that if you if you long this morning to go back and reclaim that experience of faith which was once yours. That excitement and vitality of believing that you had once but which you find shaken and weakened now. If you

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want that for yourself. Then I ask you to see your left hand as God's hand and your right hand as your hand. And even as you're sitting there place your right hand into your left hand and hold on tight. And if you have no Christian past to look back upon. If you wish this morning to reach out for the very first

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time and to take this one at his word. This one who promises that he will cleanse you and refresh you and uplift you and make you new. If you want to claim that. Then I invite you to see your left hand as the hand of God and your right hand as your hand. And place your right hand into your left hand and hold

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on tight. Oh God clasp close those who reach out to you as of old. For those who reach out to you now anew for the first time.

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Bring the memories of your grace to the former. Bring the cleansing power of your Holy Spirit to the latter. Remind those who need to be reminded of your loving presence and flood them with the strength of your spirit. And claim those who think that they can only be as they were.

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Claim them and lead them to talk with brothers and sisters in Christ or the ministers ready to serve them. Don't let this be for them some momentary thing. Some emotional jag. Something of the instant. We seek that which is infinite for them. We pray that thou will lead them into such an experience of thee

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that they will become new creatures. Thou has promised that thou art closer than our own hands and feet. So be in our hands those of us who hold on. you

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