00:00:00.000 - 00:00:27.000

Glendale Presbyterian Church People Moving Power brings you Dr. Bruce W. Thielman with a message, "How to Say No Positively." First, a personal word to our tape listeners. As I was walking over to the tape room this morning to record these words for you, I was reminded of the fact that you might be listening to these

00:00:27.000 - 00:00:49.000

words many years after they are uttered. Tapes stay around a long time and a lot of things might have changed between this occasion on which these words were recorded and the moment in which you are listening to them. The great thing about that is the fact that the Word of God endures forever and that every word

00:00:49.000 - 00:01:13.280

proclaimed from the pulpit today is as true in the ultimate sense as it will ever be. No time will come when any word of Jesus is discovered to be false. So we offer to you truth across days or weeks or months or years and we do it with the prayer that God will bless you, my friend.

00:01:13.280 - 00:01:41.240

Let us continue in our worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the Gospel according to John, the sixth chapter, beginning the reading at the first verse. Will you please be upstanding for the reading of the Word of God.

00:01:41.240 - 00:02:05.760

"After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias. And the multitude followed him because they saw the signs which he did on those who were diseased. Jesus went up into the hills and there sat down with his disciples. Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand.

00:02:05.760 - 00:02:28.440

Lifting up his eyes then and seeing that a multitude was coming to him, Jesus said to Philip, 'How are we to buy bread so that these people may eat?' This he said to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. Philip answered him, 'Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.' One of his

00:02:28.440 - 00:02:53.680

disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, 'There is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they among so many?' Jesus said, 'Make the people sit down.' Now there was much grass in the place, so the men sat down, in number about five thousand. Jesus then took the loaves and when he had given

00:02:53.680 - 00:03:19.240

thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated, so also the fish, as much as they wanted. And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, 'Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost.' So they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by

00:03:19.240 - 00:03:45.040

those who had eaten. When the people saw the sign which he had done, they said, 'This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.' Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the hills by himself." And may God bless to us this reading from his

00:03:45.040 - 00:04:23.760

word. Please be seated. Let us pray. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. There are two instances in Scripture in which it is related that water is

00:04:23.760 - 00:04:55.160

changed into something other than water. In the Old Testament we read of how Moses changed the water of the Nile River into blood. In the New Testament we read of how Jesus changed the water at a party into wine. Now in a certain sense these two episodes encapsulate the significant difference between the Old

00:04:55.160 - 00:05:24.000

Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament emphasized the law of God and the disciplined responsibility of all men to fulfill that law. We might symbolize that with saying that it was a bloody task, a sacrificial task, a terribly painful and arduous task. The New Testament, on the other hand,

00:05:24.000 - 00:05:51.160

emphasizes the grace of God as it is made known to us through Jesus Christ. That, in fact, Jesus Christ fulfilled the law and so gives to us the blessing of that fulfillment that it is just as if we had never violated that law. He pours into the stream of our living the sweet wine, if you will, of the victory which

00:05:51.160 - 00:06:24.840

belongs to Christians. Our question then for this morning is this. Does your life give evidence of the wine of the love of God? Do you have about you that sweet bouquet which is associated with the power of God flowing in your experience? We might put it this way. Are you a joyous person? Now Jesus wants all

00:06:24.840 - 00:06:51.360

Christians to be joy-filled. He said to his disciples in the last occasion that he had to teach them before his crucifixion, "I have said these things to you that my joy might be in you and your joy might be full." Why is it then that so many Christians don't seem to have the wine of this joy in their experience, but

00:06:51.360 - 00:07:17.040

instead live a life that is better typified by reference to bloody sweat and hard endurance? Well one of the things which I believe leads many Christians away from joy is the tyranny of time, the pressure which comes with the endless course of our days and the activities that are packed so

00:07:17.040 - 00:07:39.360

solidly into those days. If you know anything about wine, you know that you best enjoy it by taking it one sip at a time and savoring the taste. If you know anything about wine, you know that if you drink too much of it, you soon aren't even able to taste the wine that you are drinking. The drunkard does not even know

00:07:39.360 - 00:07:59.520

what he is drinking. After he has consumed so much in overindulgence, there is no sensitivity of taste left over. Well I believe that there are a lot of people who jam so much into their days, who cram so much into their schedules, who accept so many responsibilities that tie themselves to so many dependencies

00:07:59.520 - 00:08:26.800

that force themselves into the pressurized container or cage of so many things that they lose the taste of the wine, that they lose the bouquet of the wine, of the joy of being in the presence of God. Now I know that as soon as I say that, some people respond by saying silently in their

00:08:26.800 - 00:08:45.040

hearts, "Well you may be right, preacher, but the plain fact of the matter is that if you ever saw the number of responsibilities that are mine, and if you knew all of the people that are depending upon me, and if you knew the pressure that my job puts me under, and the pressure that so many other

00:08:45.040 - 00:09:08.640

responsibilities which are mine, if you could understand these things, then you would know it's much easier to talk about defeating the tyranny of time than it is to do something about it. Yes, I'll admit my my life is bloody, to use the symbol you've suggested, but how do you change that? Well I think we get a

00:09:08.640 - 00:09:28.720

hint if we look at this passage of Scripture which I read to you just a minute or two ago. The passage is so familiar that I don't have to go into it in detail, but I want to point out one aspect that comes before it and one aspect that comes after it which we are not always aware of. The fifth chapter of

00:09:28.720 - 00:09:52.920

John records how Jesus heals a paralyzed man. Following that healing he enters into a debate with the Pharisees. Following that debate he goes off into the mountains for a period of rest and renewal. He then comes down out of the mountains to minister to a great number of people who have been following after

00:09:52.920 - 00:10:13.240

him out into the wilderness. And here we have the episode in which he feeds the five thousand with five loaves and the two fishes. But immediately after that experience, when the mob presses about him to make him king, once again he goes off into the mountains for a period of renewal and refreshment. I would submit

00:10:13.240 - 00:10:35.320

to you that if you carefully chart out the life of Jesus you will discover that regularly and faithfully throughout his life process there were times when he, as it were, went into reverse. There were times of retreat, there were times of separation. The challenge, and then following the challenge, off into the

00:10:35.320 - 00:10:55.560

mountains for renewal and for refreshment. Understand that when Jesus turned around and went off into those mountains for these times with his father, when those moments came, there were still paralyzed people waiting to be healed. There were still blind people waiting to receive the gift

00:10:55.560 - 00:11:14.760

of sight. There were still the spiritually ignorant who were waiting for the spiritual truths which Jesus had to share. There were many there who had demands that they wanted to put before Jesus, and desires and hopes and dreams and prayers which they wanted to offer to him. But Jesus turned his back on them and

00:11:14.760 - 00:11:41.100

went off into the mountains for these periods of renewal. Why? Because he understood that if he didn't regularly say "no" to all of those pressures and go off and have this time of renewal, that he would not be able to say "yes" to those people as many times as he was able to say it to them. I think Jesus understood that the

00:11:41.100 - 00:12:08.600

person who is always available isn't worth very much in his availability. So he would say "no" with a positive purpose. He would withdraw from all the pressure to a time of rest, to gain the strength that he would need when he next went back into the pressure again. Do you remember the story of Jesus visiting in

00:12:08.600 - 00:12:29.480

the home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus? Martha busied herself with all of the preparations and procedures that would go on when anyone as distinguished as Jesus would be visiting there. She threw herself into a whole round of activities. Mary, on the other hand, she came and sat at the feet of Jesus to

00:12:29.480 - 00:12:48.920

hear what he had to say. And Martha comes and protests. There's all these things to be done and look, she's just sitting here. And Jesus says "Mary has chosen the better part." Now it wasn't that the preparations were unimportant, and it wasn't that the preparations did not need to be done, and it wasn't

00:12:48.920 - 00:13:08.560

that Mary was lazy. It was the simple fact that at that moment what was most necessary was communion with Jesus and the renewal, the infilling power that came from that. That was the essential. That was the thing that was to be claimed at that moment in order that when it came time to do the other things,

00:13:08.560 - 00:13:31.160

the power would be there to do them. In other words, there had to be moments when you receive joy, the wine, the communion of God into you, so that when you get into the times of pressure, there is still about you the same joy which was so typical of the life of Jesus. Now I would submit to you that Jesus had two

00:13:31.160 - 00:13:58.520

principles in his life, illustrated over and over again in his experience, which tell us how he was able to have these times of privacy, and how he was able to use them in such a way that they filled him with the joy, the bouquet of the Spirit of God. And both of these principles rest on this word "no," said positively. First,

00:13:58.520 - 00:14:21.120

Jesus said no to disorder in his own life. Abraham Lincoln often referred back to an incident that happened when he was a boy in Illinois. He was watching a blacksmith one day, and the blacksmith took a piece of iron which had been heated, took it from the fire, put it on the anvil, and began to hammer it into a

00:14:21.120 - 00:14:40.040

horseshoe. Then he changed his mind and decided he would make it into a hook instead. So he began to hammer it into a hook. Then he changed his mind and decided to make it into something else, and six times in the next few minutes he changed his mind. Every time, of course, the iron was getting a little bit cooler,

00:14:40.040 - 00:14:59.360

a little bit cooler, a little bit cooler. Finally, the iron was no longer malleable. It was no longer responding to his hammer. So he just took the piece of iron and threw it into a bucket of water and said, "Well, at least I can make a fizzle out of it." And that's all there was. Well, there are a lot of people's

00:14:59.360 - 00:15:22.360

lives who are filled with nothing but fizzle and frustration, precisely because they don't have a plan. They don't have things ordered in their lives. They're like that man who suddenly couldn't make up his mind what he was going to do. Jesus always said no to that kind of disorder in his experience. He had an

00:15:22.360 - 00:15:42.040

ordered, planned, organized life. And this came home to me with great power when I was in seminary. I was given the assignment once of marking out on a map of Palestine the journeys of Jesus. Now I'll confess to you that up to that time I had really thought them to be rather indiscriminate and that he just

00:15:42.040 - 00:16:02.720

went anywhere he happened to want to go, a kind of a first-century itinerant very picking preacher who just followed the crowd wherever it happened to be going. But when I took the time to chart out the way in which he walked, I found that it was a very carefully designed series of concentric circles which

00:16:02.720 - 00:16:21.480

slowly and systematically covered every major population center in the Palestine of that day. And in the times when Jesus was giving himself particularly to the teaching of his disciples, those journeys led him through areas where the population was lower in order that they might not be interrupted and he might

00:16:21.480 - 00:16:51.120

have the time for teaching that he so much wanted. In other words, every step of that ministry was organized and planned. There was no disorder in it. And one of the significant things that you notice about this ordered ministry of Jesus is that Jesus always dealt with just one thing at a time. Back in November I had

00:16:51.120 - 00:17:11.080

to fly to Missouri to do a four-day engagement on a campus back there. I left plenty of time to drive from Glendale to Los Angeles International, but when I got there I discovered what many people, other people, had discovered that morning, namely that the TWA had gone on strike. So here were all of us who had tickets

00:17:11.080 - 00:17:30.200

on various TWA flights, all lined up in front of the TWA desks trying to get reservations on other airlines to go where we wanted to go. And the lines were very long. And I had the opportunity for about the 15 or 20 minutes that I was in line to watch the young man who was standing on the other side of the

00:17:30.200 - 00:17:49.880

counter dealing with all these people in line. He was very calm, very cool, very collected, very pleasant smile on his face. The fellow who was about three or four in front of me was an older man, and after he had his ticket changed, the last thing that the clerk behind the counter said to him was, "You will now go to gate

00:17:49.880 - 00:18:11.560

62." And the older man said, "62?" He said, "Yes, 62." The older man took one step away from the counter and he turned back and said, "Did you say gate 62?" And the young man said, "Yes, gate 62." So the older man turned and he walked maybe six or seven steps from the counter. Meanwhile, the clerk had already begun waiting on the next

00:18:11.560 - 00:18:32.680

person in line. Then the older fellow turned and walked back and he said, "Did you say gate 62?" And this time the young man didn't even look over. He made no response at all. He continued his service of the passenger that was there in front of him. And the old man turned and walked off. And when I got up after I'd been

00:18:32.680 - 00:18:58.200

waited on, I said to this young man, "I want to congratulate you on the very effective way in which you deal with the public." He said, "Sir, I don't deal with the public. I deal with one person at a time." Now that was the secret of the effective, cheerful, and very dynamic way in which he was dealing with all those

00:18:58.200 - 00:19:18.880

people. He was taking them one person at a time. Jesus did that. Now there were times in his ministry when he was interrupted, but those were very few. In most instances he focused on one thing. If it was healing, it was healing. If it was teaching, it was teaching. If it was debating, it was debating. But it was one thing at a time. Now

00:19:18.880 - 00:19:42.720

when, you see, Jesus said no to disorder in his life, that is, when he did not let his plans go awry, but followed those plans carefully, and when in the pursuit of those plans he dealt with just one thing at a time, there was sufficient time left over for him to go off into the mountains for a period of renewal

00:19:42.720 - 00:20:06.160

and refreshment. The time is available if the rest of your time is spent in an ordered and a disciplined manner. But to do that you've got to say no to disorder. Now, an important thing to notice is this, that when Jesus went off for these times, which he had won by virtue of the discipline and the plan he was following,

00:20:06.160 - 00:20:31.440

he said no to anything that tried to move into those times to jam them and cram them just like the rest of his life was jammed and crammed with all kinds of responsibilities brought to him by the people who needed him. A lot of people make the mistake, you know, of planning a time of refreshment and renewal, and then

00:20:31.440 - 00:20:50.480

they pack that thing with so many things they want to do, so many places they want to go, so many books they want to read, so many things they want to write, and before it's all done, the time of renewal is just as loaded as the time when they were fully engaged in the task which was there. We have a very strong

00:20:50.480 - 00:21:11.640

Calvinist heritage in our country, and we Presbyterians are responsible for that. And the Calvinist ethic emphasizes working and thinking. Now, I'm not knocking that, because most of the advance which we have known in our Western civilization is a direct result of that Calvinist ethic and the working and thinking which

00:21:11.640 - 00:21:31.680

are basic to it. But that can be carried too far. That can be carried as far as they carried things back in the days of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. They had people working so many hours a day that they bent their backs permanently. Well, that ethic, if it's followed too rigidly and too

00:21:31.680 - 00:21:51.280

literally, will bend your mind just as much as it bent those backs, so you can't get out of the squirrel cage. You can't get out of the experience of working and thinking and working and thinking. And when you take your renewal times and make them working and thinking, even working and having fun, and some people

00:21:51.280 - 00:22:15.080

work awfully hard to have fun, you know, well, then you're defeating your purpose. One of the reasons we had such difficulty keeping up with our boys who were taken prisoners by the Viet Cong in the last conflict was that the Viet Cong lived in the jungle, and they took our prisoners and they

00:22:15.080 - 00:22:31.240

put them in bamboo cages, tiger cages. They were five feet long and four feet high, and when they would move in the jungle, move their camp from one place to another, they would just put those cages on their shoulders and carry the prisoners from one place to another. And we were never able to trace them down

00:22:31.240 - 00:22:50.440

because of that. Well, when you insist on taking the pressure out of your everyday responsibility and putting it into your times of renewal, you're simply moving your cage from here to there, but you're still in the cage, and that's destructive. Jesus said no to that, and you can see that he said no by some of the things he

00:22:50.440 - 00:23:26.320

did. He always went off, for example, into the hills. He went to the world of nature where he could spread his wings, where he could lift up his eyes and be renewed. Those of you who've been Presbyterians for a long, long time will recognize immediately the name Clarence Edward McCartney. He's one of the great, if not

00:23:26.320 - 00:23:51.800

the greatest, preaching ministry in the history of our denomination in America. A man who had fantastic intellect, an encyclopedic mind, and was so graceful in the pulpit that he left people in awe of him. Preached all over the world, wrote 57 books, administered the affairs of a very large and very prominent

00:23:51.800 - 00:24:11.600

congregation, led the conservative forces in the great struggle against modernism in the 1930s within the Presbyterian Church. Now here was a man who had pressure in his life. I was privileged to meet Clarence Edward McCartney and to be with him on three different occasions, and I'd heard him

00:24:11.600 - 00:24:32.840

preach many times before that, but to meet him three times. One of those times he had come to our campus to preach, and following the service, three of us were given the job of driving him home. He was at that age when he didn't drive. Now when you were with Clarence Edward McCartney, you didn't talk a lot. It

00:24:32.840 - 00:24:58.720

wasn't that he was austere or forbidding. It was just that the man was so smart and so much above the common walk of life that when you were around him you kind of kept quiet, almost in awe. So we were driving him home and there wasn't a great deal of conversation in the car, and we were driving down Route 19 and

00:24:58.720 - 00:25:20.160

all of a sudden Dr. McCartney said, he had a deep voice like an organ, he said, "Pull the machine over to the curb." So we pulled the machine over to the curb. He got out of the car and he walked over to the berm of the road, and we all got out and walked over with him. We didn't know why, but when Dr. McCartney walked over, you

00:25:20.160 - 00:25:50.080

walked over with him, and we walked over with him. And there spread out in front of us was a Pennsylvania valley. Now you've got some magnificent valleys in California, but there are magnificent valleys in Pennsylvania too. Deep green valleys, the kind of green which is God's favorite color, and little white farmhouses. And

00:25:50.080 - 00:26:18.920

beside the white farmhouses, always red barns, and black pincho roads that lead back through the meadows to those farmhouses and those barns. And the hills in the distance in the evening in Pennsylvania get blue. Sometimes they refer to it as the Blue Ridge. It almost looks like smoke is coming from it. And the

00:26:18.920 - 00:26:48.320

cows are kind of rust colored, and they move against that green. And you can see the blue clover that stands up under them and almost plays a game. It reaches up and tickles their bellies as they walk across the pastures. Ponds everywhere, and in most ponds, ducks. And the white clouds are big cotton candy-like clouds, and the

00:26:48.320 - 00:27:17.280

sun comes through them in the evening in bits and pieces so that it dapples the ground. And in the evening like that there's an aroma. The wounded earth and the cut straw hay, and the clover which leaves off its teasing long enough to scent the air, and sometimes just a hint of a rain is to come. So

00:27:17.280 - 00:27:56.280

there we stood and looked out over this valley. Three odd F-A-W-E-D collegians, and Dr. Clarence Edward McCartney. And all of a sudden, Dr. McCartney, he was only about five foot six or seven, a big wide man, "Fairest Lord Jesus." He sang all four verses of that hymn standing there by the side of the road. All four verses. You know, we all stood there like that. And then I've forgotten it. Here was this man, grasping this moment,

00:27:56.280 - 00:28:35.160

reaching out into all this beauty, standing there and soaking it up and thinking about the beauty of Christ. There are the woodlands, there are the meadows, but there's still Jesus Christ. Caught up in that moment, you see. He didn't allow anything to interfere. He forgot we were there. But I've never forgotten that night. And I think it's good when you're in moments like that, in the world of nature where all that splendor is about you, to memorize what you see. I have a process of remembering. Go through your senses. First what you see, and then what you hear, and then what you smell,

00:28:35.160 - 00:29:08.600

and what you taste, and what you touch. Remember each one of those things, because sometimes you're not going to be able to get out into nature, but you can close your eyes and you can recall that scene just as it was, and you can soak yourself in all that beauty. That was basic to Jesus' process of renewal. What I'm saying to you is this. When God hands you the wine of renewal, don't settle for gallo. Go for the champagne. And that you encounter out in God's world.

00:29:08.600 - 00:29:45.360

And the other thing that's very interesting to observe in Jesus' times of renewal is this. They were always quiet times. Did you know that noise can kill? They're now developing the technique of killing insects with noise. I'm told that you can kill a cockroach in less than 30 seconds with a certain noise. And they're hoping that this is the way they're going to control the insect population. Noise can not only do that to insects, it can do that to people. I'm very spoiled in that I have a very nice office over in the old part of the building.

00:29:45.360 - 00:30:06.600

And it's very quiet in that office. And I can sit in there and work in uninterrupted quiet. But on Friday when I was working on the words I'm sharing with you now, it wasn't so quiet there. They were knocking a hole in the wall in the room next to my office, and they were putting concrete downstairs, and the guys were down there working all day and they were laughing and talking and chatting back and forth.

00:30:06.600 - 00:30:33.600

It got so bad I had a splitting headache and I couldn't even think of what I was about to say. I finally got up, went out of the office and went across and sat in the park. And then did a few errands. Now it was noisy out there too, but it was a different kind of noise than was there in my... the noise was utterly exhausting me. So when we come to these times of renewal, they must be quiet times. Jesus most often went by himself.

00:30:33.600 - 00:31:01.600

That's the reason we have quiet times in our hour of worship. We start our hour of worship five minutes early. Why? So that it'll be quiet to you. You can give yourself only to the simple harmonies of the organ. No other noise. That's the reason we have a quiet time in prayer. In order that this renewal can occur. There should be a quiet time in everybody's life every day. I don't care whether you have to get up an hour earlier or go to bed an hour later.

00:31:01.600 - 00:31:48.600

There still should be that quiet time. It is basic to your needs. Pressure is in part noise. It leads to bloody, joyless living. The wine comes out of the silence. That means you have to say no to the noise. That's what I want to share this morning. But think about this. Think about the fact that no one can force you to do anything. Have you ever meditated about that? We hear someone say, "I was forced off the road." Now they weren't really forced off the road unless somebody ran into them with their car.

00:31:48.600 - 00:32:13.600

And if someone ran into them with their car and knocked them off the road, then that isn't something that they did. That's something that somebody else did to them. Somebody else acted and knocked them off the road. That wasn't their action. But if the other car doesn't hit them, they have the choice of driving off the road or perhaps staying on the berm of the road or speeding up and getting back onto the road or running into the other car. But they've got a choice.

00:32:13.600 - 00:32:42.600

And if they say they were forced off the road and yet weren't actually pushed by the other car, then that was their choice. They weren't forced. You meet a burglar in an alley and he says, "Your money or your life?" You have a choice. You do. He cannot force you to hand over that money. You've got a lot of choices there. You can run. You can try to trick him. You can jump at him. You can call for help. You can hand over the money. You can die.

00:32:42.600 - 00:33:19.600

But the choice is yours. Now if he hits you over the head and then while you're knocked out there on the sidewalk, takes your wallet, then you've got no choice. But that's his action, not yours. You are not acting in that circumstance. He is. No one can force you to do anything. And that means that if your life is so full of bloody pressure that you can't know joy, it's your own fault. It is your own fault. All you have to do is decide to say no to disorder.

00:33:19.600 - 00:34:03.600

And then in the little times that you save or renewal because of that, to say no to things that try to make those times into less than they ought to be. Jesus is ready to help you. You won't have to argue him into it. It was an important part of his own joy and can be a very important part of yours. That drip, drip, drip of pressure can be changed into the free-flowing power of God. See, things haven't changed. He's still the shepherd and we are still the sheep.

00:34:03.600 - 00:34:52.600

And he is so ready to pour into us the wine of his beauty. All we have to be ready to say is, "Lord, my cup runneth over." Let us pray. O Father, teach us to defeat the tyranny of time by saying no with the positive purpose of experiencing, savoring, enjoying the bouquet, the flavor of communion with thee.

00:34:52.600 - 00:35:08.600

And discovering in that the joy that Jesus wants us to have. We ask this in his name. Amen.