00:00:00.000 - 00:00:50.000

[Music] How to Make Life Worth Living A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman [Music]

00:00:50.000 - 00:01:10.000

This morning, here in Southern California, it is pouring down rain. But still, hundreds of people will find their way to this church to worship. They're here because they are trying to discover, or because they have already discovered, the secret to life.

00:01:10.000 - 00:01:30.000

That the real secret to successful living is Jesus Christ. He draws them here, or the search for Him draws them here. I think that it's fair to say that you're listening to this tape, because you too want to know the secret to life.

00:01:30.000 - 00:01:45.000

I think I know that secret. I'm sure I know that secret. I guarantee that secret. And I share it with you now, in great joy, and for you, my friend, with the highest hopes.

00:01:45.000 - 00:02:17.000

May God bless you in your hearing. The scripture reading of the morning... The scripture reading of the morning is taken from Paul's letter to the Philippians, the first chapter, beginning at the twelfth verse,

00:02:17.000 - 00:02:43.000

and continuing through the twenty-sixth verse. I would ask you to please be upstanding for the reading of the word of God. I want you to know, brethren, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole Praetorian Guard, and to all the rest,

00:02:43.000 - 00:03:03.000

that my imprisonment is for Christ, and most of the brethren have been made confident in the Lord because of my imprisonment, and are much more bold to speak the word of God without fear. Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from goodwill.

00:03:03.000 - 00:03:20.000

The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. The former proclaim Christ out of partisanship, not sincerely, but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then?

00:03:20.000 - 00:03:39.000

Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed. And in that I rejoice. Yes, and I shall rejoice. For I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance.

00:03:39.000 - 00:04:03.000

And it is my eager expectation and hope that I shall not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage, now as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

00:04:03.000 - 00:04:18.000

If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard-pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.

00:04:18.000 - 00:04:37.000

But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I shall remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus

00:04:37.000 - 00:04:54.000

because of my coming to you again. And may the same God who inspired Paul when he wrote these words illumine our hearts to their understanding. Amen. Please be seated.

00:04:54.000 - 00:05:29.000

Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Is life worth living?

00:05:29.000 - 00:05:52.000

Or, to make the question more personal, is your life worth living? An astonishing number of people are answering that question, "No." Every four minutes, for example, a citizen of these United States

00:05:52.000 - 00:06:19.000

attempts to take his own life. With that attempt at suicide, he is asserting that his life is not worth living. Every 15 minutes, the individual trying to take his own life succeeds, so that today, in 19 of our states, suicide is one of the top ten causes of death.

00:06:19.000 - 00:06:48.000

Even more dismaying than this is the fact that suicide is more frequent among college students than in any other age group within our society. Last year, 1,084 American collegians committed suicide. It is an astonishing thing to contemplate that these people are answering the question,

00:06:48.000 - 00:07:18.000

"Is your life worth living?" with a decisive, indisputable "No." And they're doing it before they have lived much of life. Last year in this country, 652 high school students committed suicide. And last year in this country, 92 children, 13 years of age or younger,

00:07:18.000 - 00:07:37.000

deliberately took their own lives. Now, those who compile statistics such as these say that one should multiply every one of these figures by two. Since most families are ashamed to admit such a thing as the fact that a child might commit suicide,

00:07:37.000 - 00:08:03.000

they conceal the reality of it. And if that is true, then that means that last year in America, approximately 4,000 young people, 22 years of age or younger, when asked the question, "Is your life worth living?" killed themselves.

00:08:03.000 - 00:08:21.000

Why? Well, there seem to be four principal causes for suicide. One is a sense of guilt and the inability to get rid of it. Two is a sense of hopelessness.

00:08:21.000 - 00:08:38.000

No way to battle through to success in life. One is a sense of meaninglessness. No purpose, no goal in sight. No understanding of what the reason for their being is.

00:08:38.000 - 00:09:06.000

And finally, loneliness, separation, being isolated. These four factors, guilt, hopelessness, meaninglessness, loneliness, these are the things that lead people to say, "No, my life is not worth living." Now, if you go to a doctor and you ask him if life is worth living,

00:09:06.000 - 00:09:23.000

he may reply that it depends upon your liver, or he may mention some other organ. The argument being that if your health is good, yes, life is worth living. But the plain fact of the matter is that most people who commit suicide are perfectly healthy when they do so.

00:09:23.000 - 00:09:42.000

And indeed, the medical profession being generally a healthy profession, it is interesting to notice that the rate of suicide amongst doctors is higher than in any other profession in our country. If you go to the economist and ask him what it is that makes life worth living,

00:09:42.000 - 00:09:54.000

he might say it's the living. That is, if your income is more than your outgo, if your earnings are higher than your expenditures, then life will be worth living.

00:09:54.000 - 00:10:10.000

But the plain fact is that suicide is much more common among the rich than it is amongst the poor. The level of affluence tends to increase the likelihood of suicide and not to decrease it.

00:10:10.000 - 00:10:33.000

Now, if you go to the Christian and ask him what it is that makes life worth living, he won't talk to you about your liver, and he won't talk to you about your living. He will talk to you instead about the life and your relationship to it. And when a Christian speaks of the life,

00:10:33.000 - 00:10:56.000

he is referring to Jesus Christ, who described himself as the way, the truth, and the life. For the Christian, you see, the secret, the worth, the great value of life is to be found in the closeness of relationship there is between the individual and this one who is the source of everything worthwhile in life,

00:10:56.000 - 00:11:17.000

Jesus, the only begotten Son of God. Take a man like Paul, imprisoned here in Philippi, separated from his loved ones, frustrated in the course of his mission and his ministry. Still, when someone asks him if life is worth living,

00:11:17.000 - 00:11:36.000

he expresses himself in the peon of praise, which I shared with you a few moments ago, and in the midst of that he inserts this nugget of affirmation, "For me, life is Christ." What Paul is saying is nothing less than this,

00:11:36.000 - 00:11:55.000

that Jesus enters into life and touches precisely those things in life which lead many people to say life is not worth living. Jesus speaks to guilt. Jesus speaks to hopelessness. Jesus speaks to meaninglessness. Jesus speaks to loneliness.

00:11:55.000 - 00:12:11.000

Paul, for example, discovered that in Jesus Christ he was given a conscience he could live with. Most people have a sense of guilt. They carry within them a deep acknowledgement

00:12:11.000 - 00:12:30.000

of the fact that they have not lived up to what they might have lived up to, or they are engaged in some relationship with others which is false and deceitful, or does not do those things which would benefit the brotherhood of man, or they look back upon events in their yesterdays of which they are now ashamed,

00:12:30.000 - 00:12:43.000

find them burdensome in the extreme. Most men and women have a sense of guilt, and most men and women don't know what to do with it. So they carry it about with them like some great weight.

00:12:43.000 - 00:13:01.000

Loren Eiseley, the noted anthropologist, tells of coming upon the cadaver of a dead eagle lying on the edge of the sea, and fastened to the claw of the eagle was a trap. The story was something like this.

00:13:01.000 - 00:13:14.000

A hundred miles away in the mountains where that eagle lived, it had settled one day out of flight onto a slope and inadvertently placed its foot into this trap. The trap was strong enough to grasp the claw of the eagle,

00:13:14.000 - 00:13:28.000

but the eagle was strong enough to tear the trap loose from its moorings and to fly off with the trap hanging from his claw. For over a hundred miles he flew, but every time he would try to come down for food

00:13:28.000 - 00:13:42.000

to snatch some small unwary animal, the trap would get in the way, and thus he could not gain food. And the weight of the trap, this steel thing hanging onto his claw, gradually wore away at his strength and his endurance

00:13:42.000 - 00:13:56.000

until finally, starving and exhausted, he fell at the edge of the sea and died. Now the weight of guilt is like that trap which holds on to the lives of so many

00:13:56.000 - 00:14:14.000

and weights those lives down until at last they fall exhausted and broken and dying. Now Jesus, when he comes into a life, takes away the sting and the burden of that trap.

00:14:14.000 - 00:14:31.000

When one turns one's life over to him, one discovers in him a forgiving love which transforms every dimension of the human experience and gives a new power, a guiltlessness,

00:14:31.000 - 00:14:49.000

which makes life worth living. Let me illustrate that by sharing with you a couple of paragraphs from a letter I received some weeks ago. I had been delivering a series of sermons in a state other than our own,

00:14:49.000 - 00:15:06.000

and this person wrote to me following that series of messages. I'm going to begin right in the middle of the letter. "I had been very dissatisfied with myself, but I never did anything about it.

00:15:06.000 - 00:15:22.000

I was very self-critical and insecure. I tried false conceit to hide my inadequate view of myself and my sense of guiltiness, but I felt even worse. I was always afraid that people would not like me

00:15:22.000 - 00:15:42.000

if they knew what I really was. I tried to act the way I thought they expected me to. While I was at the meetings, I met a guy from West Allis, Wisconsin. He and I talked a lot, and he straightened me out with myself.

00:15:42.000 - 00:15:59.000

He said that Jesus loved me, false and all, but this really bothered me. I didn't feel worthy. I felt cheap. And then there was that night when you told us about the love of Jesus

00:15:59.000 - 00:16:16.000

and finished by saying, 'I love you. Is that okay?' I almost broke into tears right there in the auditorium. I felt like getting down and crying like a baby, but I didn't. After the evening was over, I walked around the lake alone.

00:16:16.000 - 00:16:33.000

I prayed like I've never prayed before. I cried my eyes out. I must have looked pretty stupid, a 16-year-old boy muttering to himself and crying. But that doesn't bother me, because God listened to me.

00:16:33.000 - 00:16:53.000

Now I'm back in LaGrange, Illinois, and I'm trying to keep with me what you and all those others said to me at camp. It won't be easy, but I know now that I have help, because, you see, I understand that I am forgiven.

00:16:53.000 - 00:17:13.000

Anyway, I thought I'd write and tell you what a help you've been to me. Thanks again, sincerely. I was no help to him, except in the sense that I was used of the Holy Spirit to bring him to a recognition of this truth,

00:17:13.000 - 00:17:36.000

that there can come a moment in a life when you can list all of those things you have failed to do and all of those things you have done which you wish to God you would never have done, and you can hand that list to this Jesus, who is as eternal as this very moment, and he will look it over very carefully,

00:17:36.000 - 00:17:59.000

and then, in your repentance, tear it up and throw it away. Jesus Christ cleanses. He gives a conscience you can live with, and that solves the problem of guilt and makes life worth living.

00:17:59.000 - 00:18:26.000

Jesus also, when he comes into a life, gives a creed that you can live by. There is a French existentialist philosopher by the name of Jean-Paul Sartre whom I am convinced in the long scheme of things will not be considered to have made much of a contribution to the world of philosophy. One of his more irrelevant comments was made in a book called "The Age of Reason,"

00:18:26.000 - 00:18:48.000

and in that book, which discusses our own time, he argues that we are now in a period in history in which people no longer base their lives upon what they believe, but rather only upon those things which they can determine by scientific inquiry. Now, I submit to you on the very face of it that that is absurd.

00:18:48.000 - 00:19:12.000

There probably has never been a time, at least in modern history, when people have given themselves to strange and weird beliefs any more than they have today. Millions spent every year on horoscopes and astrological formulations, while last year in this country, $31 million was spent on the occult and practices occultic.

00:19:12.000 - 00:19:33.000

All of this, you see, is an effort to build one's life upon some kind of belief. The tragedy is that when you build your life upon your belief, you will end up in hopelessness if what you believe is not worth believing in. Belief in itself is worthless.

00:19:33.000 - 00:19:53.000

What makes belief has value is when that belief is in something which can be trusted, something which can be believed in. If that is not so, you are without hope. I can remember very vividly a cold winter evening in 1957

00:19:53.000 - 00:20:18.000

when I attended a Communist youth rally about nine miles outside of Edinburgh, Scotland. I suppose seven or eight hundred British young people were there. It was held in a boxing arena. The speaker spoke from the boxing ring in the center of the large room. When the program was over, it was announced that an offering would be taken to pay the cost of the evening,

00:20:18.000 - 00:20:34.000

and hats were passed. And after the hats were passed, they were brought down to the front, and the money was poured out on the floor of the boxing ring and counted. And while it was counted, I can remember them standing and singing a song called "The Red Star Over All."

00:20:34.000 - 00:20:52.000

At the end of the singing, it was announced that the money which had been collected was insufficient, and it would be necessary for them to pass the hat again. And so they did, and every one dug a little bit deeper. And after this was done, they brought the hat down to the front, and they counted the money.

00:20:52.000 - 00:21:13.000

And this time they stood and they sang "The International." And when they were finished, it was again announced that the funds were insufficient. So they passed the hats a third time, and I saw those British students, committed Communists, reaching into their pockets and taking their transportation money,

00:21:13.000 - 00:21:36.000

the money which would pay for the rides they would get from there nine miles back into Edinburgh on that winter night. I saw them put that money into the hat to meet the expenses of that evening. Now you can't help but be impressed with that kind of commitment to a creed, with that kind of belief in something.

00:21:36.000 - 00:21:57.000

But the great tragedy is that what they have given themselves to in believing is essentially hopeless, and therefore they will end up in life hopeless. There are, you see, three tests to the validity of a creed. The test of history, the test of character, and the test of power.

00:21:57.000 - 00:22:20.000

Now apply the test of history to Communism, and you see a history written in blood. Whether it be in Georgia, or the Ukraine, or Hungary, or Czechoslovakia, or Chile, blood. Apply the test of character to Communism, and you find that it does not exalt the spirit of a man, it debases him. It does not encourage his initiative, it destroys it.

00:22:20.000 - 00:22:50.000

It does not cause him to reach higher, but instead causes him to focus within himself upon that which is least productive. And if you apply the test of power to Communism, you find that in the end it is a dissension riddled thing. It has been an economic failure, it has been a moral failure, it has been a political failure. These young people were giving themselves to that which in the end was profitless.

00:22:50.000 - 00:22:55.000

[Pause]