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The scripture reading of the morning is from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 4, beginning with the verse which is numbered 13. Better a poor but wise youth than an old and foolish king who will not accept advice. The youth may have come from prison to the kingship, or he may have been born in poverty

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within his kingdom. I saw that all who lived and walked under the sun followed the youth, the king's successor. There was no end to all the people who were before them, but those who came later were not pleased with the successor.

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This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. And may God bless to us this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

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It is a rather odd and curious verse tucked away here in the book of Ecclesiastes. An old and foolish king will no longer take advice. We might translate that literally, "An old and foolish king thinks he knows it all." Now we've got to be careful here to notice that it is not his age which makes him the

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way he is. All of us have known older people who are quite willing to accept advice. We think of older people who open themselves to new and exciting adventures. Stravinsky was writing some of his most innovative music in his 90s.

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Einstein was still forging ahead in the area of physics in his 80s. We think of someone like Lord Bertrand Russell, who was still giving himself to quite extreme radical causes when he was well into the 90s. I've spent more than a quarter of a century in ministry now, and some of the most adventurous

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and avant-garde Christians that I know are older people. So this king's problem is not that he is old. The problem is that he is an old king. That is, he's been giving the orders for a long time.

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He's been giving the orders for so long a time that he has come to believe that his orders are invariably and infallibly correct. His problem is that when anyone gives him some advice contrary to his opinion, he immediately brands it as wrong simply because it is contrary to his opinion.

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Too much royalty in the mace. Too much pride. And also he's foolish. He's foolish because he not only has allowed himself to be trapped by his own pomposity

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and arrogance, but he is also unaware of the fact that this has happened to him. He is in very truth a dead soul being carried about in a living body. An old and foolish king who will accept no advice. One thinks immediately of Saul in the Old Testament.

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This story is spread across 16 chapters of 1 Samuel. He was the first king that God chose for Israel. And he was so humble when he was chosen that he went and hid amongst the baggage. He was too shy to present himself to be crowned.

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And after he was crowned, he went on to lead his people into some very significant military victories. But then pride began to move into the man. He began to do those things which he was not to do.

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He offered sacrifices which he was not ordained to offer. And he specifically and deliberately and knowingly disobeyed God. And so we read in 1 Samuel chapter 16 that the spirit of God departed from him. And his story ends, a man obsessed with jealousy, betraying his own family, and in the end dying

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a tragic suicide. He started out just fine, but caught up in a world that was no bigger than his own hatband. He became an old and foolish king who would accept no advice. This is the problem which Jesus had with the Pharisees.

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He came to them speaking with authority beyond theirs. He demonstrated his power through his miracles and his mighty acts. And he was received by the common people with gladness. But the Pharisees, you see, had ruled the religious roost for a long time.

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And they didn't want anyone to question their privilege or their power. And so when he sought to speak to them of their sins and of their need, they replied, "Be ye Abraham's seed," taking flight, you see, into the traditions of their elders. And so they missed the glory that was to be found in him and the saving too.

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And we have encountered this kind of thing in the church. I am sure that you have known, as sometimes your experience in the church, an individual or an organization or an institution within the church, that because of certain past successes which it has had, becomes old and foolish.

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That is, it becomes obsessed with the idea, "Look how successful we were yesterday. We in fact must be the be-all and the end-all." And they will accept no advice, no criticism, no reproof. I remember once being part of a committee that was assigned the task of going to a certain

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mission agency to speak with it about the irrelevance of its mission efforts. All this agency did was to fly over remote areas in South America and throw tracts announcing the gospel out the window. And these tracts fell on the heads of natives, most of whom couldn't read.

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It was an essentially useless ministry. And we tried to show these people that this was so, and they answered us in so many words, "We be Abraham's seed." There had been days of greatness in the history of that mission agency, but then, at that

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time, when we sought to talk to them, why, it would have been easier for a breeze to blow through a billiard ball than for a new idea to have gotten into their heads. It's a word of warning, an old and foolish king who will not take advice. Now, I can't help such persons this morning.

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You see, part of the nature of this problem is that when you're locked into it, you deny that it's so. And so, if they will not accept advice, there is no word I can speak from this pulpit this morning that will be of any value to them whatever.

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But perhaps there are those who are not yet old and foolish kings wrapped up in the royalty of their own persons, to whom some helpful suggestions might be of value. So I offer this morning what I would call five preventative principles. And the first one is this.

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Never become defensive when someone offers you advice and counsel. Now I'm sure you're getting mail today just like I am. It's computerized. They try to make it look personal.

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And the letter says something like this, usually pushing a magazine subscription. We know this magazine will only be of interest to very sophisticated Americans. You've got to be intelligent, good-looking, charming, wise, all the rest of it. And that's the reason we're coming to you.

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You fix the picture. Now that's, of course, a direct appeal to our egos. And that kind of appeal is all about us all the time. It's very easy for us to come to believe that we are, in fact, a special edition of the

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human story. It reminds me of the Jewish gentleman who went into a fast food restaurant, and there was a Korean fellow sitting there, and the Jew went over and hit him in the face. And the Korean said, "Why did you do that?"

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And the Jew said, "Remember Pearl Harbor." And the Korean said, "I am not Japanese. I am Korean." And the Jew said, "Korean, Chinese, Japanese, they're all the same to me," and went over

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and sat down. So the Korean got up and walked over and hit the Jew in the face. And the Jew said, "Why did you do that?" And the Korean said, "Thinking of the Titanic."

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And the Jew said, "Well, you must be out of your mind. The Titanic was sunk by an iceberg." The Korean said, "I know that, but iceberg, goldberg, greenberg, they're all the same to me."

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Well, the fact of the matter is that we are all the same to one another. And the truth is we are not a special edition of the human story, and that's the reason we need to hear counsel and advice when it is given, even when the counsel and advice is wrong.

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Because when we hear wrong counsel or wrong advice, we are at least forced to go through our own conclusions once more, to review the things which led us to a contrary position. And such a review can be of great profit. I might add here especially that those who are in positions of authority, those who have

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climbed the totem poles of society in one way or another, need most particularly to hear the advice and counsel of others. They, having reached the position of prominence, have much greater responsibility, and therefore they must be all the more willing to hear and to seek to understand.

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Barbara Tuchman, one of our fine historians and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, in her book of a few years ago, A Distant Mirror, which is a history of the 14th century, tells the story of the Battle of Necropolis. Now, in that battle, the French under Cyr de Cossy and the Hungarians under Sigismund

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were fighting the Turks, who were led by the sultan Bárdas Dess. Now when it came time for the battle, the Hungarian leader Sigismund was smart enough to realize what the Turks' battle plan was, to send in just a few troops, and once all the Christians were battling with those few, to come in from the side with a much larger

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army. So Sigismund suggested that they send just him and his troops, his Hungarian-Wallachian troops, into battle. Keep the French back, because they had the finest soldiers.

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Hold them back. And then, when the Turks came in with their big army, the French could follow, and they would carry the day. But the French under Cyr de Cossy were unwilling to follow this plan.

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Who ever heard of a Hungarian giving advice to a Frenchman? And since they had the finest soldiers, they must go first. It would be, they said, a mortal insult to go into the battle behind anyone. And so they did as they desired, and the forces of the Turks, aided by 1,500 Serbian horsemen,

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utterly defeated them. Took 3,000 of them prisoner, and decapitated every one of them. And the battle had awesome results. It led to the fall of Constantinople, and Islamic domination of Eastern Europe for 500

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years. And Sigismund, the Hungarian leader, wrote after the battle these words, "We lost the day because of the pride and the vanity of the French." A lot of people lose a lot of battles because they're too proud and too vain when someone

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offers them advice and counsel. Don't be defensive when others seek to help you. Second principle, don't focus on what you've accomplished, but rather on goals that are not yet met.

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I went to Westminster College, which is a fine school then. It's an even better school now. And one of the beautiful things about Westminster is you can go for a walk from the campus any direction at all, and very soon you're in beautiful countryside.

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And I used to like to walk east of New Wilmington, where the college is. And there was, in the middle of a field there, a gate. Now the road that went through this gate had disappeared a long time ago, but the gate was still there.

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There was no fence to the right, there was no fence to the left, just the gate standing out there. And there was an old poster on it, very tattered, but you could still read it, which said, "Keep this gate closed."

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It's a kind of a silly anachronism sitting out there all by itself. But what I'm suggesting to you this morning is that many times when people come to offer us advice and counsel, we become just as silly and anachronistic as that gate. We look back to the things we've done yesterday.

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We call to mind all of the victories that have been ours. We listen so much to the applause of our past that we are unwilling to hear the counsel of the present. I mean, I'm the one who did so-and-so, and who are you to give advice to me?

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The fact of the matter is that new and exciting ideas don't usually come blowing trumpets. They sneak up on us. We must be alert to them. Do you know how they got the first span across the Niagara Gorge for Niagara Falls?

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They had a contest amongst little boys as to who could fly a kite across the gorge. A young man by the name of Homeman Walsh won it. This was back in 1848. He flew a kite across the gorge, and they got that kite on the other side, and that

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left that little string. And then to that string, they tied a heavier rope and pulled it across. And then to that rope, they tied a still heavier rope and brought it across. And then to that rope, they tied a cable and they drew it across, and then a heavier cable,

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and from there, the bridge was built. It all started with a slender kite string. New ideas often come into our lives on very frail and tender filaments, and if we are caught up in listening to the applause of our victories from yesterday, we will not

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notice them when they come, and that's a tragedy. We must not trip over the royal garments we've won in earlier conflicts so that we miss the opportunity to get valuable counsel today. It's an old and foolish king who will no longer take advice.

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Here's a third principle. When you are being criticized or reproved, pay no attention to the source. I mean by that, listen as carefully to your enemies as you do to your friends. Your enemies will usually be more honest.

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They have a way of speaking to us which reveals the warts and all. When I was serving my first church, the local newspaper, opposed to one aspect of my ministry, put a particularly stinging article in the paper that was critical of me. And I remember talking to my father about it, and my dad said this, "Son, remember,

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half the people won't read that newspaper. Half the people that do read that newspaper will not notice that article. Half the people who do notice the article won't believe it. Half of those who do believe it will forget it within 24 hours.

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Half of those who do remember it can't stand you anyway." So he said, "Don't worry about the article, but read it carefully yourself and remember it, for you may learn a great deal from it." We need to hear what our enemies have to say to us.

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This incidentally is one of the reasons why we as Presbyterian believers have always stood against those who attempt to limit that information which we have available to us. That's the reason we've stood against the book burners and those people who would take certain volumes from the shelves because they say things that we do not want to hear.

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We know that as people we need to hear what we don't want to hear. And when we start burning books and banning the publishing of this or that because it does not fit our particular views, we soon produce a crop of writers who have no ideas and publishers who have no moral courage and teachers who will listen to whomever screams

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the loudest. And the result of that is the production of incompetent kids who are unable to compete with the complex matters of this world. We need to hear opinions which differ from our own.

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We can learn from our enemies. Never pause, never hesitate to look through the doorway of another man's point of view and never stop marching at the end of your own personal revolution. And here's a fourth principle.

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We must always keep our hearts open to God's correction. We must never let our righteousness become such a rigid thing that God himself cannot correct us. The scriptures are full of episodes in which God corrects people.

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He corrected Abraham and he corrected Moses and he corrected David. You remember when Nathan the prophet was sent to challenge David and he corrected Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Paul. The scriptures say, "Whom the Lord loveth, he chastened."

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I had a seminary professor, Dr. Addison Leach, who used to point out that every meaningful Christian will be persecuted at some time in his life. And then he asked us this question, "Do you know why they will be persecuted?" Answer, "Because they deserve it."

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And that's often true. You know, in the southern part of our country, fully 40 years before the Civil War, there were those who stood up and sought to bring the voice and the wisdom of God to that situation of slavery.

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And what did the South do? It shoved out those who so spoke. It burned the books that announced that truth. It banned the preaching of ministers who held up the Word of God in that place.

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It stoned newspaper editors who said what needed to be said. It even censored all the mail that came into or went out of the South so that at no point could no view other than theirs be heard. And all this time, God was speaking through His fervent servants, speaking the correcting

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Word. And they never heard it, and as a result went down to ignominious defeat and a hundred years of subjugation within our society. When we fail, because of our pride to hear the correction of God, we will fail to find

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happiness and we will also fail to live up to our fullest potential, whatever that potential might be. And I have one last prescription, and that is we must always be open to the new things that God is trying to say to us.

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I've always been very much drawn to the mystical tradition in the Christian church. It seems to me that the mystics walk closer to God than anyone else, and it's very interesting that they so often speak of God in terms of the sea. Now in the Bible we find God spoken of in terms of the sea many times.

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That's because, you see, the Hebrews were not a seafaring people, and the sea was to them a place of great mystery. They did not understand it. They were in awe of it, and so it was natural for them many times to speak of God in terms

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of the sea. And the mystics do the same thing. You know, even to this day, the sea is the part of the earth about which we know the least, where the most mysteries are.

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And God is a great sea, utterly beyond our understanding. There is no way that we can plumb His depths. There is no way that we can fathom all of the nature of God. None of our theologies, no matter how old or how honored, encapsulate God.

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None of our puny philosophies can caliper Almighty God. When a person is committed so irrevocably to his own views that he will hear no new word from God, that person is without humility. And humility is necessary for reverence, and reverence is necessary for obedience.

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The Scriptures speak often of the necessity of growth. We're to put our hands to the plow and not turn back. We are to endure to the end if we will be saved. We are to run the marathon race.

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We are to press on toward the mark. We are to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. I've always loved the story of a tourist who was being taken through Washington, D.C. by a taxi driver, and they drove past the National Archives, which have carved in the

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front of them the words, "The past is prologued." And the tourist said, "What does that mean?" And the taxi driver said, "It means you ain't seen nothing yet." Well, when it comes to God's revealing Himself, He has new things to say.

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God did not stop talking when His book went to print. And we must be open in order that the Holy Spirit might move freely within us. Samuel Butler, the premier satirist of the Victorian age, wrote a book called The Way of All Flesh.

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And he tells in it of a preacher's family. They lived in a house, and up in the attic there was a swarm of bees. And the bees came down through the ceiling into the drawing room. Now the wallpaper in that room was made up of big bunches of red and white flowers, and

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the bees thought they were real. So the bees would fly over and try to get pollen out of those flowers. And when they couldn't get it out of one bunch, they'd go to the next bunch. And when they couldn't get it out of there, they'd go to the next bunch.

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And they would go all the way up to the ceiling and then move over, and all the way down to the floor and then move over, and all the way up to the ceiling, that way around the room. And Butler said that was an apt picture of the religion which was practiced in that home.

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Up and down, up and down, back and forth, back and forth, and always dealing with paper flowers, with things which we have written down, which things we have mastered, without opening ourselves to the breezes of God and to the brightness of his sun and to the spectacle of flowers that are alive with his sweetness.

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This is the reason the Apostle Paul says, "Don't let any man think more highly of himself than he ought to think, for he is in fact nothing." This is the reason the Apostle Paul says at another place, "If a man thinks he knows something, then he does not know as he ought to know."

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This is the reason the Apostle Paul says at another place, "Take heed when you think you stand lest you fall." No old and foolish kings who will not take counsel or advice have heard anything I've said this morning, but there may be others who have.

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And it might remember them and value them to recall that we must never become defensive when we receive counsel. We must not focus on the victories of yesterday, but the opportunities of the present and the future.

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We must pay attention to our counselors, even our enemies. We must be open to God's correction and his punishment when we need it and warrant it. And we need to be receptive to the new things which the Holy Spirit of God wants to teach us.

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Sort of like that girl that got a new sports car and she wanted to try it out, so she took it out on the road and was driving it at 80 miles an hour in a 55 mile an hour zone. And pretty soon the motorcycle policeman was right beside her on his motorcycle. So when she saw him there, she pushed down on the throttle a little bit more and brought

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it up to 100. And so he stepped down on his and he brought it up to 100 too. And then she stepped it all the way to the floor and shot off in a cloud of dust at 140 miles an hour.

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And she went that way for a couple of minutes and then she paused, waited, and the policeman didn't come. So she thought she'd go back to find out what was the matter. And when she got back there, she found the policeman and his motorcycle spread all over

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the highway. Terrible destruction. And she went over to the policeman and she said, "What happened?" And he looked up at her and he said, "Lady, the last time you pulled away from me, I thought

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my motorcycle stopped so I got off to see what was the matter." Only adult would do that. Only an old and foolish king would get off his motorcycle because he thinks he's already done everything he can.

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Fear called upon to keep it to the floor and it's he that endures in such a way that will in the end be saved. Let us pray. Oh God, bless this simple witness in your name for Jesus' sake.

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