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[Music] How to be ready for anything. A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] This is one of those days in which we want to think some deep thoughts together.

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There are circumstances and situations which intrude into our lives that we are not always able to understand. I know these kinds of things happen to me. I imagine that they also happen to you. When that kind of situation confronts us, are we going to be ready? That's the theme I'd like to explore in the next few minutes with you.

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I'm very grateful that you are willing to listen to this tape. And it is my earnest hope and prayer that some word that is said here will be used by God's Holy Spirit to bless your life. God be with you, my friend.

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[Music] In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth. To a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary.

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And he came to her and said, "Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you." But she was troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.

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He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever. And of his kingdom there will be no end."

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And Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I have no husband?" And the angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called Holy, the Son of God. And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived the Son.

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And this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For with God nothing will be impossible." And Mary said, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word."

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And the angel departed from her. And may God bless to us this reading from his word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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Amen. Permit me to ask you this question. Are you ready for anything? Now I beg of you, do not push the question off into the realm of the theoretical.

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Let us not enter into this this morning as a kind of philosophical or theological discussion. I want to talk out of the center of myself to the center of yourself. I want to ask you very plainly, are you ready for anything? If some circumstance, experience, event were to suddenly intrude into your life tomorrow

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that would be utterly different from anything that you expect or anticipate, are you ready to handle it? Now I recognize that this is a big question. I received word this last Wednesday of a wonderful man, 88 years of age,

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my friend for many years, Harry McHenry, who died back in Pennsylvania. Leaving his wife, they had been married over 60 years. They're the kind of folks that everybody called "Mom" and "Pop." The McHenrys were popular with everybody.

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And I was very pleased to hear that Mom McHenry is getting along fine, even though after all these years together, Pop is now gone from her side. Well, let me ask you, if that circumstance confronted you tomorrow, would you be able to handle it as Mom McHenry is handling it?

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This last Thursday I was in Desmond's, a men's haberdashery here in Glendale. I noted that the young lady behind the counter was weeping. I asked her why. She explained that the day before, her husband had been laid off,

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one of the casualties of the energy crisis. She didn't know what they were going to be able to do in the holiday season. Well, suppose some circumstance like that were to suddenly tumble into the middle of your family experience.

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Are you ready for something like that? I had a friend who was a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. He went to the doctors and was told he was seriously ill. He said, "I'm a priest. I'm ready for anything.

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Please tell me the truth. What are the real facts?" He said, "You have terminal cancer and you have less than six months to live." He went home and shot himself. He wasn't ready.

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In a similar circumstance, would you, would I, be ready? Now, there is a very real sense in which, of course, we can't answer this question. The interesting fact is, none of us know exactly how we will behave in any given circumstance until we are in the midst of that circumstance.

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Or we may make plans and we may have hopes. We may have some idea of how we would behave, but none of us has the ability to prophesy the future, and so we would not be able to tell exactly how we would react

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if something of this kind were to intrude into our experience. Not only that, but as our days go by, the way in which we would respond would change. That is, we might respond very effectively tomorrow.

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We might be victor over the situation tomorrow, but would we be as easily victor over the situation 20 years from now? The young lady weeps because her husband has lost his job, but she is very young and they have no children.

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Twenty years from now, when the family is gathered all about them, if a similar circumstance were to occur, would she be doing more than we think? Or Mom McHenry back there in Pennsylvania, losing her husband after 60 years of marriage, might not her experience have been altogether different

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had he died two weeks after they were married? As times change, we change, and as we change, our ability, the manner in which we respond to circumstances changes also. So when I say, "Are you ready for anything?"

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I understand that in a literal sense, you're not going to be able to answer that question for yourself any more capably than I would be able to answer it for myself. About that we can't be certain.

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But I can offer you something this morning of which I can be absolutely certain. I can offer to you three infallible principles, which if you apply them in your life, will make you ready for anything, no matter what it is, when it becomes a part of your life.

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These principles are infallible because they all center in God, and God is infallible. These principles never change because they are based upon God, and God does not change. He is the same yesterday and today and forever. So I cannot tell you how you or how I will respond when tomorrow comes,

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but I can give you right now three infallible, guaranteed propositions, which if you will adhere to them, will enable you and enable me to be ready for anything. The first principle is this. To always remember that God prepares.

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Back in 1957, I was serving as a seminary intern in a large church in Pennsylvania. On a certain summer day, most of the ministerial staff was away on vacation. There was one minister there serving at the time, and he was suddenly taken ill, food poisoning. And the church secretary came into my office and advised me

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that he had had a funeral scheduled for two o'clock this afternoon and that I would have to take it. I'd never been taught anything about doing funerals. I'd only been to two funerals in all of my life, and in both of those funerals I had been a mourner and was not studying the technique of leading funerals.

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I said to her, "I just can't do it. I'm just not prepared." This lady had been the church secretary for over 20 years, and she looked at me with a steely eye, and she said, "Young man, you are a man, and the one who is mourning is a man. And he has lost his mother, and you have a mother, so you know what it is to love a mother.

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And he is a Christian, and his mother is a Christian, just as you are a Christian, and your mother was a Christian. And I would point out to you that you've been reading the Bible for years, and you've been sitting at the feet of one minister after another across over 20 years now. And you're going to seminary where professors are trying to pack your boat for the voyage of your whole life.

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God has put an awful lot into you for this moment. Now go and do what you have to do. You have been prepared." And I went and I did it. And I still have the letter that that man later wrote to me.

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"God, you see, had been moving in my life in ways of which I was unconscious, so that I was ready for that moment when it came." God always so prepares us. God readied David for the loneliness of kingship by ministering to him in the solitary pastures around Bethlehem.

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God built to white-hot heat the prophecies of Amos as he readied Amos in the burning wilderness of Tekoa. God touched the tongue of Isaiah with angels so that he could speak as no other prophet spoke, by leading him through the finest academic institutions of his day. God forged the brazen nature of a Paul in the crucible of Jewish legalism.

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God, you see, always prepares us for that which is to become a part of our experience. I can think of no exception to this rule. And I can think of no more magnificent illustration of it than the way in which God prepared Mary. She was just a simple first century Jewish girl who grew up in a town called Nazareth,

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a cultural backwater if there ever was one, the town not located on any trade route, remote, separated. If you were to go to Nazareth today, you would see there the largest church in all the Middle East, recently completed, built to honor Mary.

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It's a huge, immense, grandiose thing. And I can remember thinking as I stood in the midst of it how altogether different from the sweet simplicity of this little Jewish girl of long ago. Nazareth was a kind of seed pod in which she grew and God prepared her,

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but there came a time when God was ready to prepare her more specifically for the task which was hers. And at that time, he sent an angel very directly into her experience. Ever thought of what a wonderfully gracious thing it was for God to send that angel to Mary? Would it not have been horrible for that young girl to have wakened one morning

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and discovered herself to be pregnant and to know that she had never been with a man? Can you imagine the effect upon a poor, chaste virgin, upon one who had sought in every day of her life to be obedient to the law of God to suddenly discover one day that she was with child?

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It might very literally have driven her insane. But she never had to face that kind of circumstance. For God first prepared her. God always sends his angels to prepare her.

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The world's record for the high jump is now held by a young man who lives here in Glendale. That wasn't always so. It was held for a good number of years by a man named Walter Davis. At eight years of age, Walter Davis contracted poliomyelitis.

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It settled in his legs. He was terribly crippled. Like most little boys, he liked to run and jump, and so the braces were encumbering. And after the braces came the crutches, and after the crutches came the therapy, therapy, therapy, endless therapy.

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Somewhere along the way, in the midst of all the exercise and the pain of trying to reclaim what his legs were once able to do, he got the idea that he would like to be a crack star. And because he enjoyed jumping so much, he actually conceived the notion that he'd like to be the world's greatest high jumper.

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Imagine that, a young boy recuperating from polio with such a vision. But he worked at it. He had a calm confidence in God which never wavered, and he committed himself to reaching out toward that goal. And along the way, he met a girl named Margaret, and she loved the Lord Jesus Christ, too.

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And the two of them were married, and that made quite a team, God and Walter and Margaret. And the day came in 1941 when that young man came up against one other young man, a Navy boy. They were competing for the world's championship in the high jump. At that time, the record stood at 6 feet 11 inches.

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The Navy boy was unable to complete the jump, and now it was up to Walter. And he tried once, and he failed. And he tried twice, and he failed. And as he sprawled out there in the sawdust after the second jump,

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he's written that he looked down at his legs, and he spoke to them as if they were somebody else. He said, "God has been with us every moment up till now. "God has been with us in the braces, God has been with us with the crutches,

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"God has been with us in the cane, God has been with us in the therapy, "God is with us in the marriage, which is ours, God has been with us in every bit of our lives. "We have been prepared. Now we're going to do this." And he did.

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And for a good number of years, Walter Davis held the world's high jump record. He had spent time, you see, with the angels that make us ready. And so he was ready for the anything which challenged him. That's the first principle, to remember that God always prepares.

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Now, derived from that principle is the second principle, which is this. Since God always prepares, we must always be prepared to be prepared. That is, we must be ready to receive the angels that God sends into our lives to ready us. There are some people, you know, who fight off the ministering angels of God.

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You remember Jacob on the banks of the river Jabbok. He was going to see Esau, the brother he had cheated so many years before, and he was afraid of how Esau would react. He had a guilty conscience and he needed to have one.

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And there in the darkness, he was suddenly grabbed by someone. And they wrestled all through the night, and he was unable to see the face of this one with whom he was wrestling. He thought it was Esau, his brother. And then as the dawn came up, he suddenly recognized that he was wrestling with none other than an angel of God.

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And he begged that angel for a blessing, and the angel gave him a new name and a new personality. And Jacob called that place Peniel, which means "here I saw God face to face." Now there are a lot of us who resist the circumstances in life in which the ministering angels of God are trying to bring us into face-to-face contact with God.

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There are many things that we imagine to be our enemies when in fact those things are coming to bring us blessing. Mary did not make this mistake. She was ready to receive the angel of preparation when it came.

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There are those who say that this whole experience of Mary and the angel, as it is recorded in Scripture, is apocryphal. That it never really happened. They say, "Why, for a girl like that to meet an angel would have been such a terrifying experience. She would have fallen over in a faint, and that would have been the end of the conversation."

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It's obviously not true, but that argument is not sound. For as you study the conversations of Mary, few as they are recorded in Scripture, you find her conversations studded again and again with quotations from the Old Testament. Here was a girl who knew her Old Testament, the Bible of her day.

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She had studied it carefully. Its phrases had become part of her vocabulary and part of her life. And in that Old Testament narrative there are many angelic visitations. It would not then have come to her as some astonishing surprise to have been encountered by an angel of God. That's a very important principle to hold on to.

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Because she had immersed herself in the Word of God, she was better able to receive the angels of preparation that came to her. This book is not a dull compendium of historical narrative from long ago. It's not just a collection of religious theorems and propositions.

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It is the eternal reaching in to our experience. It is nothing less than the revelation of God. It is a listening point which stands on the shore of the now and looks across at the infinite. We penalize ourselves terribly if we do not make use of this book,

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for this book you see readies us to hear and experience the preparing angels that God sends in to our daily lives. The angel said to Mary, "Fear not, thou shalt conceive and bear a son, Jesus, and he will be the son of the highest." And when she heard that, two reactions came to Mary. The first one, the promised Messiah is coming at last,

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like a stone that is dropped into a pool and the ripples from it go to the farther shore. Just so that idea, when dropped into her mind, sent her mind jumping back over all of the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. Maybe she remembered that word in Isaiah, the seventh chapter, about how a young maiden shall conceive and bear a son. "My son is to be the son of God. My son is to sit upon the throne of David. My son."

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"My son." And this was the second great impact. "But I am betrothed." "What will Joseph think?"

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"What will my mother and father think?" "What will the people in the village think?" This was a legitimate concern, for in those days, betrothal was considered to be as binding as marriage, and to be pregnant in the midst of a betrothal, and not by your husband, was adultery,

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and adultery was penalized by the pit and with stones. The penalty was death. So Mary had legitimate reason to be concerned, and that was the second thing that happened to her. She hears the word of the Messiah and rejoices, but then she hears, "My son." And she's filled with awe, and with some fear.

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But still she says, "Behold, I am the hands-aid of the Lord." She is prepared to be prepared. She is ready for whatever God is going to bring to pass in her life. Some years ago, a minister and his wife were driving on the parkway east out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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They were quarreling. It was 1030 on a Sunday night, it was dark and cold, and he was drunk. And she was trying to get him to stop so that she could take the wheel. A bitter conversation ensued. The radio was on, and in order to argue better, he reached over to turn it off,

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and as he reached over, he heard a voice say over the radio, "I will tell you something now which will guarantee that your life can be changed." And instead of turning the switch, he held it for a moment, and the person speaking over the radio continued,

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"I will wager everything that I am and everything I have on this, that if you will do what I am about to say, then the circumstances in which you find yourself can be changed, and you yourself will be changed." And he pulled his hand away,

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and he and his wife rode the rest of that automobile journey in silence and listened to that voice on the radio. It wasn't much of a sermon. "I ought to know." And when they got home, they went to their bedroom, and as they were undressing for bed, he turned to her suddenly and he said,

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"Do you believe that?" And she, still angry with him, said, "What?" And he said, "What that preacher was saying on the radio." "You're a fine one to ask a question like that," she said, "reverend."

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And then she saw the tears rolling down his face. And for the first time in many years, those two got down and they prayed together. They yielded themselves right there in that moment to the ministering angels of God. "God, make us ready." And they have followed those angels across the years since that time,

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and sometimes the journey has been very difficult. It was especially difficult when the angels led him out of the ministry and into another area of service, but they have followed, and I can say of them today that every time I see them, I'm reminded of that little couplet that goes,

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"If you live close to God and His infinite grace, you don't have to tell it, it will show on your face." They're living in the company of angels. And now, because of their yieldedness, they're ready for anything. Now, the third and the last principle derives automatically from the first two.

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The courage to so yield to the preparing angels of God. The ability to do that without paralyzing fear comes from the recognition of this third principle, which is that you receive power from the God who is present in the time of preparation. Mary says to the angel, "How shall this be?"

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And the angel responds, "The Holy Ghost shall come upon you, and the power of the highest shall overshadow you, and with God nothing will be impossible." And now, for the first time, Mary understands the greeting of the angel, which she had not understood at first. The first words which the angel had said to her were, "Hail Mary, the Lord is with you."

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And she pondered as to what that meant. And now the recognition of it came singing home into her consciousness. No matter what she was called upon to bear by way of preparation, God was with her in it. And that's what made her strong.

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The angel offered to her no theological rationale. He offered to her no biological arguments. He said nothing whatever to her about what her future was to be. He said very simply, "God will be with you, the King of angels, at your side."

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And in the strength of that, Mary was able to do what she did. There's a little island west of Sumatra called Neos, and there's a tribe of Indians who live upon that island who, when they want to describe the nearness of God, have an expression

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which translated literally means, "God is only a hand's breadth away." And it is said that this concept of the nearness of God is so overwhelming that criminals in that tribe will oft times commit suicide. They are so awed by the presence of the God who is judging them.

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Now if one can be so awed by the presence of a God who is judging one, how uplifted can one be by the presence of a God who is so near and so loving? And that's what Mary felt. [bell rings]

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Please turn your cassette to the other side. [silence] Body. Body.

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To be surrounded by the presence of God. The three principles put together then come out like this. God always prepares us. Be ready to be prepared by God. Yield to it. Don't resent it. Don't battle it.

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Accept it. Build it into your experience and know that even as you are enduring the preparation, God stands with you. And these truths were brought home to me in a beautiful way just this last Thursday. I was having lunch with a couple who even at this very moment are seated in your midst.

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And in the course of the conversation, they told me of their granddaughter. Their first grandchild, she died some time ago, 28 years of age, cancer, leaving a husband and two small children. Now that's a hard thing to hear and a harder thing to bear.

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All of us want to see our children, our grandchildren grow up about us. We want to see them found their own families and have their children crawling up into our lap. We want to see their days achieve all the rich fruitfulness that is in them and then gradually wane away to autumn and only when the colors begin to fade.

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Let them be harvested for God, the kingdom of heaven. But here's a life that was cut off at age 28. And that leads you to say, "God, what a waste and God, was it really necessary and God, how can you be so cruel?"

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And yet I didn't hear any of that from these grandparents at all. Instead of that, they put into my hands a little work of art. It was a silver frame and inside it a lovely bouquet, beautiful. And I looked at it and the lady said to me, "You notice anything interesting about that?"

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And as I studied it, all I could say was, "Well, it certainly is uncommonly beautiful." And it was. She said, "It's all weed." I said, "What?"

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She said, "It's all weed. There are no flowers there. It's all weed." And it was so. It had been made by their daughter, by the mother of this 28-year-old granddaughter who died. She'd been out in a field in Wyoming one day and she saw about her weeds.

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And as she looked at them, she remembered that verse in the first chapter of Genesis which says that when God made everything, he called it good. And she began to collect these weeds and she arranged these weeds into bouquets which were beautiful. She saw wonderfulness, you see, even in the weeds.

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Now that's a great thing for us to hold on to, my friend. To be so confident of the presence and power of God in our lives that no matter what springs up within the garden of our experience, even when it be a weed that Webster describes as a useless and unsightly plant that's of little value,

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even when the weeds grow up grimly in our garden, we can discover in them the beautiful angels that are preparing us for the living of our days. And as I looked at those grandparents, I saw them as angels who had prepared their daughter. And as I thought of that daughter, I knew from what they said of how she had prepared her daughter

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so that that 28-year-old granddaughter could confront cancer, talk about being ready for anything, could confront it and defeat it. And her mother after her rising above that and her grandparents also knowing that now they have a link with eternity and a tie with the infinite which they didn't have before

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and that all the fruit that was promised in this life has been harnessed, harvested in the kingdom of heaven and not one bit of it has been lost. I looked across that table and I held in my very hands the proof of what I'm proclaiming today. In Gethsemane there are always angels if we will be but sensitive to them.

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That's the way it was with Jesus. He took 11 friends, 8 stayed at the gate and 3 went to the inner glade, but those 3 fell asleep. And when the time came for him to pray, "O Father, will I be ready for anything?" And anything for him meant the cross and all the horror of it.

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"O Father, if it is necessary, will I be ready for anything?" And then the calm assurance knowing that God always prepares, "Thy will, not mine." I'm ready. And then Luke writes, "And angels appeared to him and ministered to him."

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They're always there helping to get us ready. So, what is an angel? A messenger? A circumstance, an event?

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It's a being created by God who stands but a little lower than God and higher than us? It is that one whom God sends into our lives, Scripture says all of us have them, guardian angels. Who proceeds to weave into the course of our days those things which will make us ready for whatever life's experience will call upon us to know. That's what an angel is.

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I have never seen one. Yet this book tells me, and I believe it for this book has never failed me, that they are compassed about us like a cloud of witnesses. And that even at this moment, they hover unseen in our presence.

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So, tarry angels. Don't hurry off, though there must be longing in your hearts to know again all the beauties of heaven. Stay and let me plead awhile with anyone here who is not yet prepared. Do not go, don't spread your wings to write in the book of life or death forever, but give me one moment more

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to ask anyone who has not yet done it to offer himself or herself heart and mind and soul and body. To give yourself to the God who prepares. Hold, angels. Do not yet fly, for if one should make that decision today, then not only will your heart be filled with joy,

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but you can set the whole corridors of the eternal ringing. For Jesus said, "There is joy among the angels of God over one sinner that repents." So wait but a moment more. Do not go.

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For someone now may decide. And then, then you may go singing sun words and crying out to all the company of glory, "Good news, good news. I have found one more who by the grace of God through Jesus Christ is now ready for anything."

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Let us pray. Oh God, King of the angels, prepare us. Grant that we might yield to the preparation. And oh God, King of the angels, be with us in our time of readying.

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For Jesus' sake. Amen.