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Welcome to Message for the Moment, a cassette series containing the messages of Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. The message on this cassette is entitled "How to do right when everything goes wrong." And now, here's Dr. Thielman. Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word

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as it is recorded in the letter to the Romans, the eighth chapter. I begin the reading at the verse number 28. "We know that in everything God works for good with those who love Him, who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. And those whom He predestined, He also called;

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and those whom He called, He also justified; and those whom He justified, He also glorified. What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all, will He not also give us all things with Him? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn?

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Is it Christ Jesus who died? Yes, who was raised from the dead? Who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword, as it is written,

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"For thy sake we are being killed all the day long, we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered"? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation

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will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 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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We believe here in a practical Christianity. Christianity at its best is not abstract theology. It is not an esoteric biblicism. It is not that which adds a burden to life, but rather that which gives a power for the living of life.

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I deeply believe, and I know you believe with me, that the principles of the Christian faith are every bit as dependable as the principles of chemistry, or physics, or any other area of study that you might wish to identify. This morning, Ben, I want to think with you about the principles of Christianity that apply to a situation when you're trying to do right and everything goes wrong.

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Three little boys were arguing among themselves as to which of their daddies was the richest. The first said, "My daddy's a farmer and he's the richest because he owns all the land around here." The second said, "Well, my daddy's a banker and he's the richest because he owns all the money around here." The third boy said, "Well, my dad's a teacher and he owns hell. He's the richest."

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And the other two boys looked at him and said, "What makes you think that your father owns hell?" And he said, "Well, the other night he came into the house after going to the PTA meeting, and he said to my mother that the PTA gave him hell." Well, there are times when we all feel like we're caught up in hell.

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Your business is going well, then suddenly a competing product comes on the market and you find yourself awash in red ink. Your family affairs seem to be going nicely, and then you find one of the teenagers on drugs, or the mother or father announces that he or she wants a divorce.

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The job is going nicely. You think you're making progress. And then one Friday afternoon, to your great surprise, there's a pink slip in the envelope. You're feeling relatively well. You go to the doctors for a checkup, and you are given the news that you have, up to this point unknown,

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a deadly and perhaps terminal disease. You are fighting against temptation and doing well, and suddenly everything seems to tumble in, and all of your victories disappear away in some terrible defeats. What do you do when everything is going wrong?

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I would suggest two principles, and the first of these I would call the defensive principle. And that is, you must keep mentally cool. When there's a great deal of upset outside of you, it is important that you do not let the upset outside of you inside of you.

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Most people make the mistake of reacting to difficult situations emotionally, and an emotional response oftentimes magnifies the difficulty of what confronts you. Here are two men who are sent to jail, both unjustly. One ends up hanging himself.

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The other sits down, John Bunyan, and writes one of the great classic works of Christian literature, Pilgrim's Progress. Here are two men who both lose their jobs. One enters into a time of despair.

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He questions his masculinity. He begins to question his worth. Tensions arise between him and his wife, and between him and his children. He soon finds himself with a defeated spirit in every hour of every day. The other man recognizes that he had a job before and did a good job at it.

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And now circumstances have changed, and so he's going to have to start again. It may be beginning again, but he has done it before, and so he sets himself to doing it again. And he goes at it with an attitude which is a positive attitude. It's cool. It's collected. It's deliberate.

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And when he goes in for an interview, he is, of course, much more impressive to the one who's interviewing than the one who comes in with a defeated and a disruptive personality presentation. Here's this depression. Many of you remember that. Two men both lose their money. One man throws himself out of an office window.

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The other man starts out a new business a lot smarter than he was the first time around. The difference, you see, between the men in these circumstances is the matter of inner attitude, how cool they are, how collected they are, how calm they are. Now, make no mistake. I'm not speaking here of submission.

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We are not supposed to simply assume that everything occurs to us in life because of God's will. We're not supposed to just lie down and let events roll over us. The hurts and the hardships of life are not willed by God. They're the bitter fruit of man's wickedness and behavior in the world.

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And because we are woven together by the filaments of fellowship, because we're all caught up in the web of human confusion, when one person does something wrong, it impacts on another person. So there is much hurt and hardship in the world, but it is not God's will.

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When someone swindles you, they're not swindling you to fulfill the will of God. So we're not simply to submit. We are to fight. But the most essential thing in a fight is to remain calm at the center. That's the reason Scripture says to us, "The Lord is our shepherd, and we shall not want."

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"Why art thou cast down, O my soul? Hope thou in God." "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." Or the word of Paul before us this morning, "What then shall we say to these things?" "If God be for us, who can be against us?"

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Do any of you remember Harold Medina? Harold Medina was a judge a number of years ago now who had 11 communists put on trial at the same time in his courtroom. The government was trying to demonstrate that they were attempting to overthrow our American government.

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Now the strategy of these communists was to try to get the judge, Harold Medina, to misstate himself, to misspeak himself, to make some kind of blunder which would enable them to have the whole trial declared a mistrial. And they set out deliberately trying to unnerve him.

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They called him at all hours of the day and night. They sent him letters. They sent letters and made calls to other members of his family. And they began to chant in the courtroom these words, "Medina will fall like Forrestal." See, they had found out somewhere or other that Medina suffered from aprophobia.

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He was afraid of heights. Now you young people won't remember that name was the name of Forrestal, but we had a secretary of the Navy once in the United States named Forrestal who tragically committed suicide by leaping out of his hospital window.

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And what these communists were trying to do in the courtroom of Harold Medina was to upset him. "Medina will fall like Forrestal." And they cried it out again and again. They did not, however, know that Medina was a Christian.

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And he would regularly retire to his chamber and give himself what he called "faith infusions." He would lie down on a couch and he would repeat to himself again and again, "What then shall I say to these things? If God be for me, who can be against me?"

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And in the strength of that defensive principle, he remained strong, and that trial is looked back upon now as one of the model trials in contemporary American jurisdiction. Or let me give you another example. I've always been fascinated with the character of Benjamin Franklin.

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There's a new biography out on him by Ronald Clark which is worth your reading. Now, of course, it's a long and a classic biography. I've always liked the short biography of Franklin that was written by a fourth-grade boy. He was given the assignment of writing about Franklin,

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so he sat there and squirmed a bit and chewed on the end of his pencil, and then he wrote, "Benjamin Franklin. He was born in Boston, he got tired of it and went to Philadelphia. When he was in Philadelphia, he got hungry, so he bought a loaf of bread.

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He was walking up the street with the loaf of bread under his arm when he saw a woman. She smiled at him. They got married, and he discovered electricity." Well, in its own way, it can improve upon that.

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Ronald Clark goes into more detail. He points out that Benjamin Franklin came from a poor family. Though he was not himself a Calvinist in his own view, he was raised in a Calvinist tradition. He came to be the most educated man in the colonies.

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He invented bifocals and the Franklin stove and did much research with electricity. Many of the words associated with electricity that we use, words like "armature" or "battery" or "condenser," were originally coined by Benjamin Franklin. He established the first fire company in America.

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The first hospital was started under his instigation. He's the one who taught the French in defending Lafayette. He's the one who talked George III into repealing the Stamp Act. He's the only American in history to have signed the Declaration of Independence,

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the Treaty of Alliance, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution of the United States. He talked the British into giving us four more degrees of land when they separated America from Canada than the British had originally planned on giving us, with the result that we got northern Minnesota and North Dakota and Montana and the state of Washington.

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He was a remarkable man. Now, if you look at the principles on which he built his life in his autobiography, you will find there that first and foremost amongst them is this word of his, "Be calm in all circumstances."

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Now, he was simply echoing a principle that Socrates stated long before. Socrates wrote, "Whom do I call educated? Those who meet all occasions manfully and act in accordance with intelligent thinking." And Socrates was far behind the testimony of Scripture,

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for the Bible says, "He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls." The Bible says, "Be still and know that I am God." The Bible says, "In quietness and in confidence you will find your strength." So when the Christian confronts things that are going wrong all about him,

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he says to those things, "What then shall I say to this? If God be for me, who can be against me?" That promotes inner calm. That's the defensive principle. Now, over against that, there is a second principle,

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which I will call for our purposes this morning the offensive principle. And it can be summed in one word, "attack." For the benefit of you young people, there was a time in the Second World War, in the European theater, when our military forces were in great peril.

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We refer to it today as the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans, led by their Panzer Division, managed to drive quite a wedge into the Allied forces. All of the Allied forces were in retreat except for one portion, and that was the portion conducted and led by General George S. Patton.

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Patton said at the time, "Always attack. It will confuse the enemy." And that spirit of his is what turned the tide in the Battle of the Bulge. You see, when you confront upsetting situations, there are really only two alternatives before you.

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The first one is to be controlled by the situation. The second one is to control the situation, to make it move as you want it to move. That will never happen if you are in retreat. What you need, you see, is enough of the defensive spirit to remain calm inside,

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and enough of the offensive spirit to attack. Both are necessary. If you attack and are emotionally disturbed inside, your attack will be irrational and not productive.

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If, on the other hand, you remain cool and do not attack, but simply try to withdraw within yourself, you will not win the victory. These are twin principles. They must be held in tandem. I remember when I was nine or ten years old, I started doing magic shows.

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I was actually paid money, wonder of wonders. Now, I used to suffer from those magic shows. It would start about three days before each show. I would become very sick.

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I would, from my whole inside, would turn to jelly. My stomach would get so hot that I could put my hand on the outside of it and feel the heat. It was a terrible process. One night, my dad was driving me home from one of the shows.

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He regularly took me and brought me back again, and he said to me, "Son, you're going to have to get over this bellyache thing. You're either going to beat it, or it's going to beat you. So hit it hard."

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I didn't realize it then, but years later, I learned in college, my father was enunciating what Ralph Waldo Emerson said. Emerson said, "Do the thing that you fear, and the death of fear is certain." That means attack.

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I confront much the same difficulty every Sunday morning. It is a very often thing to stand here, to know that my words are going out over six radio stations from coast to coast, to know that there are people sitting out there, listening,

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whom I do not know and never will know. I mean, how can I begin to understand the attitudes, the fears, the hopes, the frustrations, the anxieties, the doubts, the tensions that all of these people bring? And when I climb up these twelve steps every Sunday morning, my hands are sweating.

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I take off my glasses because I perspire so much that they become slippery on the sides of my head. It's a great deal of tension, but I've learned that the way to deal with something like that is to attack. You don't go out the door. You climb the steps. You move into the place of conflict.

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I know this sounds like a simplicity, but it's very true. Get cool inside and then attack. What then shall I say to these things? If God's before us, who can be against it?

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Now notice the context of these words. Paul says, "The God who did not spare his own son, but who offered him up for us, surely he will give us all things." When Paul says that, he is echoing a verse in the twenty-second chapter of Genesis

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where God says to Abraham, after Abraham was willing to offer Isaac to God in obedience, God says to Abraham, "You did not spare your own son for my sake." What Paul is saying to you is this. Remember Abraham, the greatest example of faith that we know.

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The testimony of his faithfulness and loyalty was he was willing to offer his son for the love of God. Now God, he says, is saying the same thing to us. And his faithfulness and loyalty to us is testified to by the fact that he is saying, "I did not withhold my own son."

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And anyone who offers so much for us can be depended on for anything. Yes, there will be wounds in the battle, but the wounds can become battle-ridden. Yes, there will be delays, sometimes hard ones, but eventually those delays can become wings, candles for faith. Yes, there are worries and there are fears, but if you attack them and work with them,

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you can forge them into a sphere of righteousness. Yes, sometimes there will be losses and sometimes you will be attacked by doubt, but those things can become, when worked with, stepping stones or better than that, a helmet for your protection, wearing a white plume of hope.

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Sometimes you'll be very short of breath in the conflict, but you'll always have enough wind to sound the horn of battle again. Why? Because it's God before us. Who can be against us?

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I fear not the hell we confront. Jesus said, "The gates of hell will not be able to stand against me." I read just recently of a woman named Phyllis Zamochi, who's from the Midwest, but she does business periodically in New York City,

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and she was there and called up a friend of hers, and they went to the theater one night, and after the theater they stopped into an after-theater restaurant, and they sat and talked till 2 o'clock in the morning, and when they came out, she said to her friend, "Well, I'm going to take the subway back to my hotel,"

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and the friend said, "I don't think you ought to do that. It's pretty late. You'd better take a taxi." "No," she said, "I'll go by subway." She went down to the subway platform, and she was immediately anxious because there's not another soul there. Trains run very infrequently at that hour.

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But one eventually came along, and she got on, not another person in the car. And then she traveled to her point of disembarking, and she got off there, and again, no one on the platform, but the fear, the tension was growing in her, and as it did, she saw five young men step out of the shadows directly across the staircase that she was to go up.

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She thought to herself as she walked toward them, "Should I run?" No chance of that. They were younger and faster. "Should I scream?" No one down here would hear me. "Should I try to fight them off, five strong young men?"

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"Hey, sister, I'm kind of late, aren't you?" one of them said. Another said, "You want some company, baby?" She began to feel tension inside, so she stopped, and she settled down, "concerted down," the Southerners say, "concerted down inside."

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And as she did, she remembered a word from her pastor's sermon the week before, the word out of the Old Testament, "The Lord is a buckler to him that walks uprightly." Well, at her most upright, she was only five feet six inches tall, but she decided to follow that advice, and so she walked right straight toward those young men,

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and when she got to the foot of the steps, she said, "Please let me pass." And the two boys on the right and the two boys on the left both looked at the fellow in the middle, who was obviously the leader of the group, and he smiled, and she said to them again, "Please let me pass."

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And he looked at her and said, "That's it, lady. Walk tall." And he stepped aside, and all the way to her hotel, she kept saying again and again to herself, "If God be for us, who can be against us?" My friends here this morning, or anyone who's listening to a broadcast anywhere,

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or anyone who is listening to the tape of these words, maybe two dozen years from this Sunday on which they're being uttered, life sometimes is hell. It may be hell in your business, or your family, or your job, or your health, or your finances,

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or your life direction, or your conflict with temptation. Whichever hell is yours, don't just lie down and let it roll over you. Don't try to hide your head in the sand and deny it. Don't try to just laugh it off, and don't submit to it in any way.

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Instead, attack it. Go to the person who can help you. Go wherever you can get whatever you need to meet this problem. Face the thing that you fear with those who can assist you.

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It is not necessary for you to face it alone. You can stand with others in the faith, or others with the knowledge that can help you, and you can stand with God. And if you face the thing you fear, the thing you fear will die.

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Give it everything you've got. You know, in the William Penn Hotel up the street here, there's a seaside parlor in the basement. I stopped in on Wednesday.

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The owner of the seaside parlor has a little card just about this big on the cash register. You would never even notice it if you weren't standing right in front of the cash register, which I happened to be one day. And there it said on that card a single line,

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"God is greater than any problem I will meet today." That is absolutely true. God is greater than any problem you will meet today, or tomorrow, or anywhere at any time. If you will remember that and act accordingly,

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you will be doing right even when things go wrong. Let us pray. O God of grace and God of glory, all our hope is finally in thee. But thou art so great that the hope in thee is to know,

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through whatever pain or hurt or anxiety may come, is to know finally, that we pray thee for thy faithfulness, and we offer to thee our faithfulness, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.