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[Music] The Hunger for the Highest, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. Now let us continue in our worship. As we think together of Paul's letter to the Philippians, the third chapter,

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beginning the reading at the verse which is numbered eight. "I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him,

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not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of sharing in his suffering, becoming like him in his death,

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and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already attained all this or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it,

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but one thing I do, forgetting what is behind, I press on toward the mark of the high calling of God which is in Christ Jesus. And may the same spirit who inspired the great apostle to write these words incline our hearts to the understanding of them.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Since this is the time of final examinations, I would like to begin with a question. It is a multiple choice question.

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I shall list for you some of America's greatest attorneys and jurists, and I would like you to select from the list the name of that one who left law school at the end of his first year of study. Patrick Henry, member of the Continental Congress, governor of Virginia,

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completed 1,100 cases in only three years. John Jay, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. John Marshall, one of the two most famous Chief Justices of the Supreme Court. William Wirtz, who began the practice of law when he was only 20 years old

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and became Attorney General of the United States. Roger Taney, who was Secretary of the Treasury and then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Remember, you're to pick out the one who dropped out of law school at the end of his first year.

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Daniel Webster, one of our greatest jurists and later Secretary of State. Salmon Chase, Senator, then Chief Justice, known especially for his legal defense of runaway slaves. Abraham Lincoln, Attorney, 16th President of the United States. Stephen Douglas, you remember him from the Lincoln-Douglas debate, a representative and a senator.

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Clarence Darrow, one of our most famous attorneys, known particularly for the Leopold Loeb trial and most especially for the Scopes trial, the monkey trial of 1925. And finally, Robert Story, who was born in 1893 and was the President of the American Bar Association from 1952 through 1953.

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Which one of these men dropped out of law school at the end of his first year? If you guessed Clarence Darrow, your answer is correct. This brilliant attorney entered law school, had a very undistinguished year, and then dropped out of school. Of none of the other ten names, could it be said that they dropped out of law school?

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Because, you see, none of the other ten ever went to law school. The fact of the matter is that some of the greatest pages in America's jurisprudence were written by men who never sat in a school of law. Now, how can that be?

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I would suggest to you it is because these men were, without exception, men of high character. Now, character, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the sum of a person's mental and moral qualities. It's more than the sum, it is the mental and moral qualities that are carved or etched or impressed into a personality. And these men, each and every one of them, had the grandest order of mental and moral faculty.

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In other words, they had something infinitely more important than education. They had good character. None of these men ever aimed for anything low. They hungered only for the highest.

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The question I would like us to think about tonight is how we can become like them. How we can grow in Christlike character. And I would begin by noting this, that in order to grow in character, one must believe in the duty of character advancement. We are all alive, and because we are alive, we are constantly changing.

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Even if we make no effort to change ourselves, time and circumstances will change us. We are incapable of permanence. The question to be asked of us then is never "are you going to change?" but "how are you going to change?" In what direction are you going to move?

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It seems to me then that we need, if we are going to grow in Christian character, to regularly put to ourselves some very deep questions. We need to ask ourselves, "Am I better now than I used to be?" "Am I more compassionate and sensitive and caring?" "Do I think about God more?"

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"Am I regularly concerned about my relationship to him?" "Do I, in the living of my life, seek always to obey him?" You see, the first thing that's required in doing something is to decide that something needs to be done. So when we ask ourselves these questions, we are determining what needs to be done in us.

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And that desire to do something, to advance our character, is the first step in the hunger for the highest. The thing for which we most regularly criticize the Pharisees of Jesus' day was not for the absence of mental or moral qualities. They were amongst the most brilliant and moral people of their time. What they are criticized for is the fact that they saw in themselves no room for improvement.

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They fell for the most hideous heresy of them all, which is the heresy of perfectionism, to believe that there's no room for growth. Now this attitude has no place in the life of the Apostle Paul. Paul regularly examined his life.

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In epistle after epistle, you see him studying the course of his own day. He was very much aware of his own sins. He was very conscious of his own lowliness. And it was precisely this that led him always to be pushing on, which is one of the things that made Paul such a very winsome witness.

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When he approached someone to call them to faith, such as the Philippians, to whom he's writing in the passage before us tonight, he does not begin by saying, "Look at me and you will see exactly what you are to be." Instead he says, "Judge yourselves as I judge myself. I have not yet attained, but forgetting those things which are behind, I press on.

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I am stretching forward to the fullness of God in Christ Jesus." It was precisely because Paul recognized his need to grow that he was thrown into greater dependence upon God. And contrarywise, the individual who does not see the necessity of any growth within himself or herself, that person does not turn to God but focuses on the self.

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Growth in Christian character then begins when we recognize our need to grow. For when we recognize that need, then we also recognize that we need God. And in seeking out God, we are hungering for the highest. Now the second thing we need for growth in Christian character

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is the need to believe that what we ought to be, we are able to be. I think I'm within the mark when I say that the most widely read book in Christendom after the Bible is Thomas Akempa's The Imitation of Christ. I thought for a while it might be Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress,

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but that book is read almost exclusively by Protestants. Akempa's The Imitation of Christ, however, has floated like sweet incense through all the aisles and the alcoves of the universal church. The book is built on Jesus' words, "He that followeth me will not walk in darkness."

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And the book calls the reader to the imitation, to being like Christ. And it is precisely that that Paul seeks here in the Philippian letter, and that he calls the Philippians and us to seek after him. We are called to be like Jesus.

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And it seems to me that it is important to recognize that God would not call us to be what we are not able to be. I'm sure all of you are aware of the fact that there is an age-old struggle going on between the secular humanists on one hand and the theologians on the other hand.

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The secular humanists maintain that man is capable of anything that he really wants to do. The theologians, on the other hand, say that man is incapable of good and that without God he is without any hope in the world. I find myself most often siding with the theologians

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simply because I get tired of listening to the brags of the secular humanists. But I cannot feel completely comfortable with the theologians because when they talk about the utter depravity of man, I remember that God made Eden and Israel and Christmas and Easter and Pentecost,

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all of these things, as his gifts to man. Man therefore must be worth something. A realistic view of man cannot deny the reality of sin. There is sin in all of us.

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But it seems to me that a realistic view of God's grace requires us to admit that God must value man else he would not bestow upon him love as he does. The truth, it seems to me, is a mixture of the two.

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That God loves man in undeserved grace because God sees in man what man is oftentimes incapable of seeing in himself. The possibilities for magnificence. The truth of this comes out, I think, when you discover the individual

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who depends more and more upon the grace of God. Out of that person comes magnificence. Yet as the magnificence grows, you find that person depending not more and more upon themselves, but more and more upon God.

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The two work together in some marvelous unity. And what God says to us in Scripture again and again is this. The divine imperative is this. "You are to be like my son."

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That voice, that word, thunders from the testimony of the Scripture and the tradition of the Church. When we hunger for the highest, it is to hunger to be nothing less than like Christ himself.

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"Be ye therefore perfect." And I don't believe that God would call us to that if we cannot either in time or out of time reach that goal. Because, and this is the third characteristic of the character-advancing Christian,

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because we believe that God will do his part in our lives. This is the great foundational truth of Paul's words. Paul says, "It is not I that live, it's Christ that lives in me, and the life I live, I live by faith which is of the Son of God."

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What Paul is announcing is that I move ahead in the advance of my character, I believe that I can be like Christ, and I hunger after that goal because God is working in me. I once watched a four-year-old girl trying to move a table.

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And her mother said to her, "Honey, you can't move that table, it's as big as you are." And she replied, "Oh yes I can, Mommy, because I'm as big as it is." Well, there are some people who look at the problems of life and say, "I can't do that because it's as big as I am."

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There are other people who look at the vicissitudes and difficulty of life and say, "I can do that because I am as big as it is." And the people who say that are, it appears to me, those who move in the power of God, those who know that God moves and works in them, those who have faith.

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Now as soon as I use the word "faith," of course, I give some people problems, because a lot of people are not sure about what faith is. I think the best description of faith that I ever read was in the writings of the great convert to Catholicism, Newman.

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Newman said faith was not a mystery, and faith was not a sudden or dramatic occurrence, and faith was not the result of some great insight on the part of man. Faith, he said, is simply a habit of the soul. I like that phrase because you see, every year a number of students on the campus,

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here or elsewhere, will come to me and they'll say, "How can I have faith? I don't seem to be able to shake off unbelief. I'm somehow hypnotized by unbelief." Perhaps they've come from very Christian homes, but when they get into the campus environment, something happens to their faith and it disappears away.

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They recognize that the religion they brought with them from high school was essentially an emotional thing and rarely had enough intellectual integrity to wrestle with the deep doubts in their lives. Some people tell them that they can find faith if they'll just go to a few Bible study groups and pray, but they quickly discover that that does not work.

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These are very honest people. They are many times the very best students. They're offended, and I believe rightly so, by the maudlin and disrespectful Christianity which is so often found on campuses. They're asking profound questions like, "If Jesus Christ is real, why can I not experience him?"

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"If he is real, why do I not find his power in my life?" "I find myself one day able to believe everything and on the next day not able to believe anything." But when I hear those questions, I can identify with those people because all of those questions were once my own. And what I say to those people is what Newman wrote a long time ago.

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"Faith is nothing more than a habit of the soul." "Faith means building into your life certain practices which move from the habitual to the convicted." For example, you think more about Christ than you do about the problem of your relationship to him. Or again, you do things to others that you would do to them if you really loved them.

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Or again, you do every duty which is yours with absolute faithfulness. Or again, you admire the admirable wherever you find it, and you rejoice in good wherever you find it. And again, whenever you are tempted to an explicit evil, you give yourself to the doing of a specific good. And you learn, again, not to be impatient, that God moved into a life most times so subtly that you are unaware of his movement

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until suddenly there is in you a sign of his presence, and that sign is power and resolution. I speak to you tonight out of 35 years in the Christian faith, and I believe that this is what faith is. See, everything that we do leaves a mark on our lives. Everything we do counts. And just as drink after drink after drink after drink will make a drunkard,

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so obedience after obedience after obedience after obedience will eventually move to the conviction and the foundation of faith. Just as you in college will sometimes in the midst of your studies ask yourself if you're really being educated, and then someday will suddenly discover that you have that competence which only belongs to an educated person. So when you work out the disciplines of faith in your life and work them out constantly and habitually,

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eventually, eventually, God becomes real in you. [Bell rings] Please turn your cassette to the other side. That is character advancement. That is what leads to the dependence that God will do his part in you.

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This brings me to the fourth characteristic of the character that's hungering for the highest, and that's this. One must be willing to follow the directions of God no matter where they come from or where they lead you. I said earlier that the first thing you need if you're going to have a growing character is the desire to grow. You must shun perfectionism, the idea that you're perfect.

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As soon as you think you're right, you'll start to get rotten. As long as you think you're green, you'll continue to grow. Growing comes through God from a variety of different perspectives. Back in 1801, when Napoleon was leading his forces from Moscow and so many of the French were dying in the icy Russian snows, the man who wrote the most detailed record of the retreat was a man named Colleen Corr.

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He was the Duke of Vincenza and Napoleon's master of horse. And he tells of how the troops would stumble out of rank and fall into the snow and try to go to sleep, and he would go and try to awaken them, get them to get up and move, because if they fell asleep, of course, they were squeezed to death. And they would look at him and they would beg him in God's name to let them sleep.

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Even when sleep meant certain death. Well, growth in Christian character requires that your soul never go to sleep, that you remain awake and alert, that you deny yourself the false comfort of being frozen into your own ideas. The icy death which comes from believing that you and you alone have all the truth.

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Beware when your soul cries out to someone, "In God's name, don't speak to me! In God's name, don't shake up my preconceptions! In God's name, don't disturb my presuppositions!" Beware. That's the cry of a freezing soul. You know the difference between an intellectual and a pseudo-intellectual?

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An intellectual seeks to ask the right questions. A pseudo-intellectual claims to have the right answers. An intellectual loves the truth. A pseudo-intellectual loves to be thought of as always being right.

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The intellectual knows that what he doesn't know is greater than what he does know. The pseudo-intellectual believes that he's the master of his field. The intellectual is always fair in the presentation of views other than his own. The pseudo-intellectual sets up straw men and then delights in obliterating them.

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The intellectual understands that there are limits to reason. The pseudo-intellectual deifies reason. The intellectual understands that truth can come from anyone, that it is no respecter of persons, and he is therefore open to the counsel of all. But the pseudo-intellectual speaks only and listens only to those who agree with him.

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The intellectual deals in ideas. The pseudo-intellectual deals in dogmas. The intellectual understands that nothing is final. And the pseudo-intellectual tries to make every provisional into a finality.

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Paul, perhaps the greatest genius of the first century, was always open to hearing, open to debate, open to conversation, open to searching, no soul drowsiness here. And I say tonight that any of us who want to grow in Christ-like character must be looking for those books and those people and those phrases that will send a shudder of doubt through our deepest conviction. For in that shudder of doubt we'll ask questions and be more assured or move to levels we have not reached before. The principle is to keep the heart closed on Christ and the mind open to all the possibilities.

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And just one last thought. The person who would grow in Christian character must anticipate, accept, and rise above failure. When I was in college, I was part of a fraternity which one year had an absolutely terrible athletic record. We lost everything.

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And one of the brothers in the fraternity used to say after every loss, "Well, guys, anyhow, we did our best." And I used to hate it when he'd say that. I hated it so much I hate it now 30 years later. Because it wasn't true.

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The fact of the matter is we never do our best. We might be confronted by some challenge which calls us to levels that are higher than any we've ever reached before. We struggle to the top of the hill and we say when we get there, "I've done my best." But all we've done is our best until that time for ahead of us there is another hill that is higher.

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And we start climbing that hill. And when we struggle to the top of it, when we reach that goal, we say, "I've done my best." But all we have done is our best until that time for across the valley there is another hill. The fact of the matter is we can never say that we have done our best until the very end of our lives.

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Not only that, but in climbing many of these hills and going down into these dark and shadowed valleys, we many times are going to fail. So I do not hesitate to say that I have not yet done my best and that I have many times failed. And I don't think that's bad. Not because I think not doing your best or failure is good,

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but because the recognition that you have yet to reach your best means the best is yet to be. The most splendid is still ahead of you. You know, Jesus says to us in the Gospels, "In the world you will have tribulation." And the word he uses for tribulation, "sibbo," means literally the pressing of the grapes for the wine.

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And when that was translated into the Latin vulgate, the word they used was the word which referred to the threshing, the separating of the wheat from the chaff. In other words, what Jesus is saying to us is this. In life you're going to be pressed and threshed and pulled apart,

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and it's precisely those things that are going to lead to your greatest failure. It's those things that will separate the valuable from the worthless in you. It's those things that will separate the good from the not-so-good in you. You'll notice that when Paul says to the Philippians, "I have not yet attained,"

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there's no whiningness in that. There's no sobbing and crying in that. He says it as a ringing affirmation. "I have not yet attained, but I forget those things which are behind, and I press on."

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Paul knows, you see, that it's much greater to be overwhelmed by a truth than yourself to overwhelm something of insignificance. It is much more significant to fail at something important than to win at something that's very unimportant.

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I know when I say this that there are going to be failures and that we will not be able to do our best, but some people say, "Well, then I'll drop out." I can't accept that. First of all, it's cowardly.

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It's like wanting to belong to a team, but having a prior agreement that the team can never lose again. And it's also not Christlike. For Jesus came into this world with eleven men from Galilee or thereabouts

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and set out to overturn an empire in the world, and in that process there were many times of dismay and despair, and he never stopped. We are to have a spirit like his that's part of our goal, that's part of the highest we're hungering for.

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We want to have the spirit of the unattained, for it's when you have the spirit of the unattained that you hunger for higher attainment than you've ever known before. That's what excites you to move ahead.

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It's all like that Norwegian legend about the sea captain and these two boys that were out on a small boat fishing, and they had a good catch, but while they were fishing, a storm came in and separated them from the shore so they couldn't see the shore.

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And they were lost and they could not find the way home. And while they were out there on the water, the kitchen in their little cottage back on the shore caught fire, and the whole cottage burned to the very ground.

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And just as the embers were dying out, the little boat with the father and the two sons made it to the shore. And the mother, the wife, ran down and she said, "Carl," to her husband, "we have lost everything we had. It's all burned."

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And he didn't say anything. He said, "I said we have lost all of our possessions. They are all burned." And he looked at her and he said, "Two hours ago we were lost on the water.

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"We could not see. We had given up hope for our lives. "And then through the mist we saw a light, "and as we watched it grew brighter and brighter. "And we followed that light, and it brought us to safety and to the shore.

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"That light was the burning of our cottage. "It saved our lives. It led us home." So in our lives there will be failure, and repeatedly the recognition that we have not done our best,

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but in our midst of our most blazing catastrophe, we will find the things that save our lives and that lead us home. We have not attained, and for that very reason, we press on. I ask you then tonight to believe these things,

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to believe in the duty of advancing your character, to believe that what you are to be, you are able to be, to believe that God will do his part in your life, to believe that it is important that you be open to his direction

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from whomever and wherever it might come, and to believe that even your failures will help to lead you home. This is the testimony of Scripture. This is the testimony of the Church.

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This is the word of the communion of the saints. This is truth. No one could offer me enough to tell you a lie, for I love you very, very much.

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O God, fill us with a divine insatiability. Grant to us a constant hungering and thirsting after righteousness. Call us to moral and mental grandeur, till our characters are like the character of him whom we own as Lord.

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It's in his name that we pray. Amen.