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How to Make a Great Comeback A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman Attention to the reading of God's word as it is recorded in the Psalm numbered 28. Unto thee will I cry, O Lord, my rock; be not silent to me, lest, if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit.

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Hear the voice of my supplications when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle. Draw me not away with the wicked and with the workers of iniquity, which speak peace to their neighbors, but do mischief in their hearts. Give them according to their deeds and according to the wickedness of their endeavors. Give them after the work of their hands; render to them their dessert, because they regard not the works of the Lord, nor the operation of his hands. He shall destroy them, and not build them up. Blessed be the Lord, because he hath heard the voice of my supplications. The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped. Therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth, and with my song will I praise him. The Lord is their strength, and he is the saving strength of his anointed. Save thy people and bless thine inheritance; feed them also, and lift them up forever.

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May God bless to us and to our understanding 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. All devotees of the world of sport were much saddened a few weeks ago to learn of the tragic death of Rocky Marciano, the heavyweight champion of the world, in a plane crash in Illinois. It was on September 23, 1952, that Marciano won the title from Jersey Joe Walcott. He held it for four years, gave a crack at it to everyone who wanted to try to take it away from him, and was never beaten in any contest.

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Finally, on April 27, 1956, he retired from boxing, the only heavyweight champion in the world's history to retire undefeated and undisputed. Many times Marciano was asked if he would consider making a comeback. His reply to that question was always the same. "When you're at the top, when you're the undisputed champion, where would you make a comeback to?" That's a good point, isn't it? When you're at the top, when you're the champion, when you have not been beaten, when your record is absolutely sure and undefiled, you don't really have to make a comeback, do you?

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But that's not the way most of us are in the ring of life. Most of us aren't undisputed champions. Most of us know what it is to be beaten. Most of us know what it is to have our backs on the canvas or be up against the rope or sometimes plum-knocked right out of the ring. A battered pugilist, staggered into the corner, only to hear his manager say, "Let him hit you with his left for a while. Your face is crooked." Well, that's the way most of us feel in the face of all the battering brutalities of life, all the difficult fights and scrapes and circumstances in which we find ourselves, oft times through no fault of our own involved.

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In the midst of this, we're not undisputed champions. We're folks who want to make a comeback. And the scriptures give us the secret on how to make one. And the words are recorded in the psalm which I've read in your hearing. But before referring to those words, let me give you a bit of background. David the king's oldest living son was a lad named Absalom. And David loved Absalom with all his heart. But the son did not return the love of the father. In point of fact, he was a treacherous and a vicious boy who had set himself to the task of taking his father's throne, of organizing a rebellion to overthrow the king.

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David was delighted when he heard that Absalom was described as the handsomest man in Israel. But David did not know that Absalom was using his good looks to attract youth away from their allegiance to their king. David was pleased when he heard men say that the judgments of Absalom were looked upon with awe and respect when he rendered judgment in the courts of the land. That was because David did not understand that Absalom did not hesitate for a moment to toy with justice in order to aid his friends and gain their support for the moment when he sought to take over his father's throne.

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David had the joy that any father's heart knows when he heard people speak well of his son. But David did not understand that his son was using his popularity in a deliberate and insidious attempt to take that which did not rightfully belong to him. And at long last, the time for insurrection and rebellion came. And Absalom turned against the father who had loved him and given him everything.

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And Absalom turned against God, for David was the anointed king of Israel, and to turn yourself against the anointed of God is to turn yourself against God. So against David and against God, Absalom marched. And David and his friends were driven from the capital city out into the wilderness. And things did not look good for the king.

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He was on his back, up against the ropes, almost out of the ring. And then it was that he sat down and wrote the psalm that we call number 28. "Deliver me from those who would pull me down into the pit. Deliver me from those who speak smooth words but work trickery and mischief behind my back.

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Deliver me from those who practice treachery and strike out against the anointed of the Lord." It's a plea for the blessing and the mercy of God. It's a cry, "Help me with a comeback!" And God does.

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And after David has won his throne again and ensured his sovereignty in the land, he sits down and adds a few more verses to the psalm he had begun in the days of defeat and despair. And those two verses which he adds constitute the secret on how to make a great comeback. The words are these, "Blessed be the Lord, for he has heard the voice of my supplications.

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The Lord is my strength and my shield. In him my heart trusts. So I am helped and my heart exalts and with my song I give thanks to him." There's the secret.

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And if you want it in a single phrase, that phrase would be this. If you want to make a great comeback, there are certain things you have to start and certain things you have to stop. For example, you have to start thinking about the God who's thinking about you.

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Averill Harriman, who's now 75 years of age, was asked recently how he retained his amazing vigor and vitality. He's always hopping about the globe, undertaking major responsibilities for our government. And his immediate reply was this. "If you want to have vigor and vitality when you're 75 years old,

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then make sure you have very good ancestors and a lot of enthusiasm." Well, that's an apt and a witty response. And the two propositions are rather closely related to one another because the kind of family in which one is reared,

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the kind of support and encouragement and undergirding which a family gives to an individual, has much to say about the kind of enthusiasm which is his. The two propositions are related one to the other. The difficulty is that none of us are in the biological position of being able to select our own ancestors.

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Unless, of course, you go back to the ultimate ancestor. Unless you go back to the Father who is almighty and eternal. Unless you go back to that One who made us and breathed into us the breath of life. It is the free choice of any man to accept the fatherhood of God.

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And in the moments of the acceptance of that fatherhood, saying, "I am your child. Speak and I will hear." In that moment, you begin to think about God. And you discover that He's been thinking about you.

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Have you ever had the experience of planning a project or wanting to do something that you think no one else has ever done and then all of a sudden discovering that someone else has completed the task and done it more completely than you would have been able to do? That happens to me all the time.

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For example, back in my state of Pennsylvania, there are a great number of animals that are killed on the highways by motorists. And every time I would drive by one of these animal carcasses, I would think to myself, "I wonder how many animals are killed by motorists

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on the highway of this state every year." And I pledged to myself that someday I would take a census on this subject. It would be an interesting thing to know. Well, I received a letter from a friend of mine who lives in the east.

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And he tells me that one of the officials of the county of Mercer, one of the large agricultural counties of Pennsylvania, has taken just such a census, and more thoroughly than I had ever imagined. And my friend sent along to me the list he had prepared.

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Twelve pigs, fifty-one pheasants, two hundred and twelve rabbits, twenty-four dogs, forty-four cats, one hundred and eighteen chickens, one turkey--that rather surprised me, considering the relative stupidity of turkeys-- two weasels, twenty-one possum, twenty-two woodchucks, twelve raccoons,

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forty-one skunks--this has been a very malodorous year-- twelve ducks, two deer, one fox, three geese, and, believe it or not, four cows. And at the end of the surveyor's list, this entry, "and fifteen miscellaneous small animals."

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And my friend, after quoting this list to me in his letter, said, "Isn't it great to know that to God there are no miscellaneous small animals? Not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge. The very hairs upon our heads are numbered."

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Do you remember that scene when the disciples are out on the boat on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus is off in the mountains of prayer in communion with his Father, and a great storm comes up, and the men become desperately afraid, and they cry out, "If only the Master were with us!"

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Now, we can understand how they feel, can't we? We get caught in a decision-making situation. Some major familial crisis is before us, or some business enterprise in which we're involved, or perhaps it's the decision about what direction our life is going to take,

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who will become husband, who will become wife, and we cry out, "If only the Master were here!" Or we're caught in the midst of an emotional trauma, and we find the strings of our hearts drawn so tight they almost break,

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and we're tense and under stress and in an awesome tension, and we cry out, "If only the Master were here!" Or we're being attacked by temptation, and the forces of evil are ranged on every side, and we find ourselves bending and beginning to break,

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and we cry out, "If only the Master were here!" We know how the disciples felt in that boat on that stormy lake that night. But do you remember the end of that story? This Jesus, who's off in communion with His Father and the Holy Spirit,

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becomes aware of the plight of the disciples, and so He goes to them, and the record reads that in the fourth watch of the night, He came to them walking upon the water, and here in the intimacy of divine communion, an intimacy so high, so sublime, so infinite,

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that we can't even begin to imagine it, there, there was continually and unendingly a consciousness of the need of each of the children of God. And Jesus came to them. That's what David means when he says,

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"Blessed be the Lord, for He has heard the voice of my supplications." If you want to make a comeback, the first thing to do is to start thinking about the God who's been thinking about you. The second step is to stop feeling sorry for yourself.

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David puts it this way, "The Lord is my strength and my shield," referring, of course, to the protective, the undergirding, the everlasting defense which God extends to all of His children. When you contemplate for one moment the fact that Almighty God Himself

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has decreed that He will be your source of strength and your shield in time of trouble, there's precious little room in which for you to begin to feel sorry for yourself. About 13 years ago, it was my privilege to minister to a young teenage girl named Marcy. She was a nice girl with a fine mind, a pleasant personality, but not overly attractive.

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And as a result, she didn't get invited to all the parties and dances that she would like to have gone to. On one particular occasion, she came into my office weeping bitter tears because she had not been invited to the Snow Ball, which was the annual Christmas dance. I learned a long time ago never to laugh at puppy love because it's very real to the puppies.

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So I didn't laugh. And as I listened to her pour out her tale of woe, it became very obvious to me that she was convinced that God had never evidenced to her His love. She was the most forlorn and the most bereft of all creatures.

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So I put her at a table with a paper and a pencil, and I said, "Now, write down first what happened to your brother Tim." Tim had had poliomyelitis. This was in the days before the vaccine was being used widely and effectively.

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But he was brought through because of the prayers of God's people to a complete healing. "Then write down the paper about your father, who, because he gave himself totally to his business and was not a good steward in his physical capacities, had a massive heart attack. And then again, because of the prayers and the supplications of God's people,

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he was brought through this so that he now became a better steward, a better husband, a better father, and a better businessman." "And then put down the kind of mind you have and the opportunities for entertainment which are afforded to you because you don't have to spend the time slaving over the books

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that a lot of people do." And soon she got the idea, and it wasn't long until she had covered the entire side of the page with evidences of God's goodnesses to her. And then she turned to me and she said,

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"I guess I've forgotten what God has done and was just feeling sorry for myself." Well, a few weeks ago I was preaching in the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, early part of my vacation, and after the service there were a line of people to give greeting. And as I looked down the aisle, there she was, about 30 people down.

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And she was standing beside a very handsome young man. I crossed my fingers. [laughter] She came up and she introduced me to her husband, Ben.

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And I discovered that he is a very fine young attorney in one of Pittsburgh's most prominent law firms. And as I took his hand and shook it, I said to him, "There are others in this room who are as fortunate as you are, but there are none more fortunate, for you have taken unto yourself a wife who is not going to feel sorry for herself."

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Please turn your cassette to the other side. And Marcy looked at me with a smile of recognition. The first step in a comeback is to think about the God who's thinking about you. And the second step is to remind yourself of the goodnesses God has extended to you

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so that you no longer wallow in self-pity. And when you've done those things, then you begin to demonstrate the fruits of an exultant heart. David goes on to say this, "I am helped and my heart exults." And what is the fruit of an exultant heart?

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The fruit of an exultant heart is service. David says, "I am helped, my heart is helped, so my heart helps other hearts." Again and again in the counseling chamber, when I am confronted by someone who feels that they've been knocked flat on their back in the midst of the boxing match, which life is,

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again and again in that kind of a circumstance, I have been led to say to that individual, "Stop focusing upon yourself and start focusing on somebody else. Give yourself to the ministry of lifting. The best exercise for a broken heart is bending over and picking somebody else up."

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Mary was lifted out of the depths of an awful sin by Christ, so what does she do? At that moment when the Lord is contemplating the agonies of His cross, which are only days ahead, she shatters her alabaster box and pours upon His feet the precious oil of anointing. Four men are so touched and helped by Jesus, but what do they do?

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Why, they tear a hole in a roof in order to be able to bring another friend to this Christ who has done so much for them. Matthew meets the Master at a tax table, and the chains of silver shekels are broken. So what does he do? He devotes the entire remainder of his life to helping other people shatter those same chains.

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Father Damien is caught up in loneliness and despair and fear, and he's lifted out of this by the Christ who saves, by the Christ who lifts and redeems and makes new again. So what does he do? He exposes himself to the lepers until he himself becomes a leper.

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So anxious is his helped heart to help others. Kramer and Niemöller and Bonhoeffer, they're incarcerated in Nazi prison camps. Oh yes, they could put their bodies in a cage, but they could never capture their spirits. And the spirits of those men touch so many that in Germany until this day you mention their name in a whisper.

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For they became the ministering angels of God. Helped? They helped. You know, a woman whose husband suffered an awful death from cancer, and when it was all over, she'd been knocked out of the ring.

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And so she set herself to make him to come back. She thought about the God who thought about her, and she stopped feeling sorry for herself, and then she began to show the fruits of an exultant heart.

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She reached out to help somebody else, and you know what she did? She took unto herself the task of driving to the hospital day after day cancer patients who were going in for radiation treatments and who were so weak that they themselves could not drive.

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And it was there, out of that experience, offering herself to others who were knowing the agony which her loved one had known, there that she really began to make her come back. You see, when you're flat on your back, you can look around you and see other people who are there, and in the moment that you see them and discover their need,

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you find God's hand reaching your hand and beginning to lift you up. Reach out and grab another hand. No one ever comes back alone. You must be bringing somebody with you.

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I am helped, and my heart exults. And this too. Stop focusing on your failures. David says, "In him my heart trusts."

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Now, the word "trust" is a word that's built upon yesterday, but it looks toward tomorrow. It is the fruit of the experiences that you have had, but it is that fruit applied to the responsibilities and the obligations and the challenges which you are about to confront in the living of your days.

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Trust is an attitude that is built on the foundation of the past, but it's a cathedral that reaches toward all the glorious possibilities in the future. So don't focus on your failures. Trust, which means to look to God for your future.

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I suppose more stories have been told about Branch Rickey than almost any other person involved in athletics in this century. One of my favorites is told by Norman Peale of New York. It seems on one occasion he was sitting in Rickey's box at the old Ebbets Field in Brooklyn,

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and they were cheering on the then Brooklyn Dodgers. And a man hit the ball and ran to first, but he didn't get there in time. The ball beat him to the bag and he was out. And Rickey exploded.

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He could have made it if he'd really wanted it, if he'd really tried. Boy, there's a sermon illustration for you, preacher. And Peale looked at him and said, "What's the illustration?" "Well," he said, "the illustration is this.

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The man hit the ball and then started toward first, but he didn't really want to get there. Didn't you see his jaw was full of tobacco? Why, en route to first, he took time out to expectorate." Peale smiled, and then Rickey smiled and said, "Here's your text, and here's your sermon.

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This one thing I do, get to first base and then spit." Well, there are a lot of people in life who never get to first base because they spend all their time spitting out the bitternesses, the despairs, the disappointments, and the discouragements of their yesterdays.

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They focus on failures that are behind them and don't trust that God who was ready to open to them all kinds of new and exciting tomorrows. And one last thing, one last thing. As you're making this comeback by the grace of God, take the time to sing about it.

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David says, "And with my song I give thanks to Him." I'll interpret that this way. If you're six feet tall, don't stand up as though you're five foot ten. Stand six feet tall and sing.

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Sing to all the world about what has happened to you. Tell it abroad for there are thousands of others who want to hear about your comeback. You know, occasionally I encounter those who kind of tiptoe up beside me and looking up with fluttering eyelids and dewy eyes give me their witness.

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And it's full of tender words like loving and precious and dear and affectionate. And you know, I really think those people are so angelic they can't really begin to understand the hell in which I find myself. When they come to me in that way, I'm reminded of that line from the song in "My Fair Lady"

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where Professor Higgins says, "Oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way across the floor." See, you can't be more ecstatic than that girl on television who says, "My wash is whiter than white." If your witness is going to be a thing of solemnity, you cannot surpass the solemnity of that professionally trained voice that says to us on television,

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"This toothpaste has been given the seal of approval of the American Dental Association." That is said with greater solemnity, I'm convinced, than Martin Luther said at Vorms, "Here I stand, I can do no other." The only witness that's going to be heard, the kind of witness that's going to win,

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is the witness that's sung, that's the product of a buoyant heart. The mark of every Christian is joy. What did Jesus say to His disciples on His last night with them? "These things have I said unto you, that my joy might be in you, and that your joy might be full."

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That's the kind of witness which is to be ours, a singing witness. Well, believe it or not, it'll be exactly one year tomorrow that I preach from this pulpit for the first time, my candidating sermon. And after it was over, I went to a motel over here, and you voted.

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And later that afternoon, a member of the pulpit committee called to tell me that you had done me the signal honor of inviting me to be your pastor. And he also related to me an interesting experience he had had after church that morning. It seems he was standing on the sidewalk out front, and there were three older ladies standing there,

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and they were talking, and he was listening to their conversation. And the first thing on which they agreed was that they had all voted against me. And the second thing that they agreed upon was why. It seems that in the course of my sermon, I had told a funny story, and they laughed.

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And they didn't think that appropriate. Well, I will say to you this today. I can give you a hundred good reasons why you could vote against my standing in this pulpit. But that isn't one of them. For if we as Christians cannot know a joy and a happiness, a thrill and a laughter,

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which is greater than anything the world knows, then I don't know who can know that joy and that happiness and that thrill and that laughter. So this is the way I close what I have to say to you this morning, and I make no apologies for it. There was a fellow who came from Germany to get a job here, and he went up to an employment counter in a railroad station, and he said, "My name is Hans Schmidt."

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The man behind the counter said, "Are you an American?" "Oh, no, I'm not an American." He said, "How long have you been in this country?" "Oh, I just got here yesterday."

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And he said, "Well, tell me, where did you learn how to speak the English language?" "Oh, I learned on the short ways." Well, it's a good story, and I like to tell it because it's funny. And because for 14 years of my life, I had people witness to me over the short ways.

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And then one night, a man, just a nice guy, sat down, and he told me what he had been and how Jesus Christ helped him make a comeback. He told me how he started to think about the God that thought about him. He told me how he stopped feeling sorry for himself. He told me how he gave himself to the service of others.

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He told me how he stopped focusing on his failures and instead focused on his future. And he told me what a joy it was for him to sing his song. A gleam in his eye and a spring in his step that so captured me that when I went back to my room that night, alone, with only a candle and the Holy Spirit, I gave myself to that Christ.

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And I discovered it's true. That's the way. He's the way to a great comeback. Our Father, we're not undisputed champions. Some of us are really on the ropes.

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Teach us the truth that thy word contains. Write it so indelibly upon our hearts that we might be able to come back, to have the strength to do all things through Jesus Christ, our Lord. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.

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The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you his peace.