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[Silence] [Background noise] [Unintelligible] [Unintelligible]

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[Unintelligible] [Unintelligible] [Unintelligible] I think that's what happened last Sunday too, that tape was...

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[Unintelligible] [Choral singing] [Music] [Dorothy

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yellsолод] Through many dangers, toils and snares. ♪ Who is he who takes us all ♪ ♪ And sets us free ♪

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♪ From every trial ♪ [Music] [Music] [Music]

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[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

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[Music] [Music] Let's all say amen again. Amen.

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What man of you, if he had one sheep, and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, would not lay hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep? Measuring a man. Of how much more value is a man than a sheep?

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Get out the tape and measure. What is the measure of a man? This is a pertinent question, Jesus asks, which is concerned with human measurement.

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It is concerned with an assessment of the value of a person. The value has been placed on man based on chemicals in his body According to current market prices The monetary value of a man according to this way of measurement

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In 1936 a man was worth 96 cents With the inflation that we now have and this inflationary spiral in which we're all caught up We're worth a little more

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Man is now worth five dollars and sixty cents A little compilation of available studies on height Because we like to think of a man as To what the measurements are height how much how tall is a man of much is he in the waist and so on

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But according to this new compilation And the studies which are now available Concerning height It is indicated that men who are about 30 years of age

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Average and an inch taller than their father's generation, and two inches taller than their grandfather's. In 1900, only about 5% of the population

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was six feet tall or better. Today, more than 30% are six footers. And during the same period, women have grown an average of two inches, from five feet two inches to five feet four.

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So when we consider the matter of physical height, what's the proper measurement of a person? What makes a man? How do we measure a man?

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In fact, what makes a real person? We're accustomed to placing a market value on sheep. How much more is a person worth than a sheep? We determine the worth of sheep by fluctuation in the market.

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The value of sheep is based on supply and demand. We determine the value of livestock by the weight and by the breed. In the case of sheep, the value may be determined

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by the wool that's produced. But Jesus' question here is addressed to persons who are deeply involved in raising cattle. "What man of you," he says, "if he has one sheep

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"and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out. If heroes could identify with this situation, the value of one sheep provoked deep concern

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because it affected one's pocketbook. It not only provoked concern, but motivated the owner to action designed to save the sheep. How do we compare a person with a sheep?

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Get out the tape and measure. We consider, first of all, physical measurements. There is a tendency on our part to determine the worth of people according to physical standards.

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Some persons are down on short men and up on tall men. That's true of many women. And there are men who are down on fat women and up on small women.

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So we measure our acceptance of people by physical standards. I don't like a short man. Someone says, "Give me a man who's tall and handsome."

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And a likewise statement is uttered concerning a woman. We value our property. We insure it. And the insurance is based on the value we place upon it.

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What value can we place on a man? How much more is a man than a sheep? The news just a few days ago, the story concerning

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a black man who was given LSD while in the armed services in an experiment without his knowledge. It completely messed up his mind.

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Not only messed up his mind, it messed up his life. And he has been engaged, as the story went on to say, in a series of court battles. And it was announced that he had won a settlement of $1,700,000

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That's the value placed on his life. What value can you place on having a sound mind? What value can you place on having a healthy mind? There is no value.

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A million, seven hundred thousand dollars wouldn't begin to pay for having a good, sound mind. That was a man who was in trouble. In fact, he had a very serious deformity.

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He had a withered hand. And even in the synagogue, he was in church, but he was in trouble. He needed help. He had a withered hand.

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He needed cure. The Pharisees were there, but they were not there to help. They were there just to see what Jesus would do. They were there to find fault.

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But the word "Pharisee" means "interpreter" in the sense of a skilled expert of the law, or perhaps more likely a separated one. So here are these persons who are supposed to be interpreters of the law,

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who have separated themselves from ordinary people to concentrate on keeping legal regulations, here they are, just to find fault. And this role that the Pharisees occupied,

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they thought it was a rather good role, they're only concerned about the keeping of rules and regulations, and they have become so caught up in the keeping of rules and regulations that they have lost that living relationship with God, with eternal goodness.

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They were just caught up in ritual. They're concerned about ritual cleansing, washings. There were certain procedures by which they had to hold their fingers up in the water a certain amount and had to be measured in a certain way,

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would be poured down upon their fingers until it ran down upon their wrists. And then they would turn their fingers down and the water had to be poured down

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until it ran down from their wrists in a certain way. And all of this was supposed to have certain significance, and yet they did not really care about people, rituals, rules, regulations.

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And sometimes we can get so caught up with ritual that I've got to do this at this particular time in this particular way that we seem to crush people in that ritual.

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And then we can get so caught up in rules and regulations that well, and we can become so indifferent. You see, well, this is just a rule and I don't care who it hurts or cripples,

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I've got to follow the rule. Well, rules are really designed to help people rather than to hurt them and to crush them. So when we consider this matter of ritual, Jesus here is rising above ritual. He knows the ritual. He knows that the Pharisees have a ritual that they go through. He knows that they bow in certain ways and they do this and they do that. He's very familiar with the ritual.

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He knows the rules and regulations. In fact, he knows the rules and regulations better than the Pharisees They're only concerned about the letter of the law. But here is one who's concerned about the spirit of the law and He is concerned more with

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relations to people Than he is with ritual rules and regulations What are our relations? so

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we seek to answer this question. The answer to this question is not when we begin to measure a man. We don't measure that person merely by how often he may be in church, and that's good, but that's not good enough.

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We don't measure that person by how often he attends prayer meetings, that's good, but that's still not good enough. We don't measure that person by how often he drops something in the collection plate That's good. So some of us some of us have been worked up to the scribes and Pharisees Because Jesus said that's not good enough

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But what really counts is those things that have to do with That which is beyond The material You can't measure a man

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by what he weighs. I stepped on the scales the other day and the nurse said, "Well, you are six feet three." I said, "Well, that's what I have with my shoes on." But that's not really how tall I am.

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"You weigh 203 pounds. Is that really the measurement?" Many times you can have your weight to go up and down. But what's the measure of a man? Those things really don't matter.

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Oh, I've seen many people get all tangled up in their lives because here is a person who says, "Well, I've got to have a man who's tall and who's handsome." And this lady got one who's tall and handsome,

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but that's all he was. [laughter] He was just tall and handsome. [laughter]

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Paul in Amsterdam. There's a lot more than that. Father, the physical attributes, those things don't really determine the measure of a man. The mind's the measure of a man.

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The mind is the measure of a man. It's what that man feasts, it's what thoughts he entertains, It's the dreams that he has. It's the aspirations that he has. Those things are really the measure of a man. (audience murmurs)

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Measuring a man, measuring a man. In Franklin County Courthouse in Virginia, is preserved the will of a man who owned Booker T. Washington.

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And since slaves constituted what he considered the most important property that he had, he had a certain value attached to those slaves. And besides the name of Booker T. Washington,

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he had his worth, $200. You look back at the life of Booker Washington, who came forth as a great educator in his day and was instrumental in building that great institution

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we know today as Tuskegee, from which thousands have been trained and gone forth to educate many others. And yet when you look and say, what's the worth of Booker Washington?

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He says $200. Well, that's as far as he could see. He was blind as to his real worth. And how many of us so many times are blind

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as to the real worth of a person? blind as to the real measurement of that individual, as to the measurement of that person in terms of the intangibles,

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the intangibles, the intangibles. Oh, we hear a great deal about the intangibles here in Texas today. They're talking about taxing the tangibles.

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And we tax the tangibles, we can tax those things like the material things that you can really touch. can you can get your property taxed and you can get other things taxed that are material but then we've been concerned about the intangibles your stocks and your bonds

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well when we think about the intangibles in a spiritual way we're talking about that which is beyond the physical this body will disintegrate this body will wither away But there is something that is beyond this body and to somehow measure your life and measure a person by what is invisible and spiritual and beyond that which does not pass away. Jesus says, "Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth does not corrupt and where thieves cannot break through and steal."

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Spiritual measurement, yes. Every person has intrinsic worth. It's important that we seek to achieve our potential. Oh, men of Ebenezer, it's not enough to have men's days,

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wonderful as it is. Male chorus singing, wonderful, well, that's wonderful. But it's not enough for one day. It just shows what we can do.

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It shows what our potential is. It just gives a little glimpse of what it is, but that's not enough. We ought to try to achieve our potential. For how many days? Just a short span. And yet we have tremendous possibilities that God has given us.

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And we ought to stretch ourselves. We ought not be like this man with the withered arm,

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the withered hand. We ought to stretch ourselves to see how much I can do, how far I can reach out to others, how high I can reach toward that which is heavenly and holy, to stretch ourselves. For a man's reach off to the speed of grasp of what's the heaven for, we ought to stretch

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ourselves. That's what it means to live a happy life, to be contented, to be enjoyable. Means to stretch, it means to grow, it means to become more and more to that which is our potential. So with what measure, you measure. How are we measuring people? Well, how we measure them tells also something about us.

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Our standards of measurement. "For with what you measure out to others, the same will be measured to you," Jesus says. There's a man who

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was in business and he was

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up in the mountains and he had no scales and he only used that weight of a pound that was given to him and he had a pound that he had gotten from someone else, a pound of sugar. but instead of having a pound of sugar, the man who sold it to him only had 15 ounces. And so he was selling butter, and so the man bought butter from him, the man took it home and weighed it, brought it back, he said,

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"I'm not going to buy any more butter from you. I weighed your butter by the scales and it only weighed 15 ounces." He said, "Well, you see, I don't have any scales here. I just weigh mine by that pound of sugar that you sold to me.

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[laughter] That's the way life is. Whatever we measure, look, whatever we're, we'll figure out in the lives of others. It somehow comes into our own.

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How do you measure? What's the measure of a man? We ought to try to see to it that we... we put a little something extra on the scales.

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My good friend brother, M.K. Higgs, says that when his father was teaching him how to weigh in the store when he was a boy, that his father said, "Now there are many who come into the store, they take the things out of the store and they weigh them again. So when you weigh it, see how much is a pound, he said put a little extra there, weight the scale so you'll get a little more. And so they had good business because they were giving out good weight, a little extra,

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a little more. Well we ought to put a little extra in it, we ought to give a little more, we ought to try to give God our best. Because God has given the best to us.

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He's given us the best in Jesus Christ. What's the measure of a man physically? What's the measure of a man mentally? What's the measure of a man physically?

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How can you measure one's life? Strange thing happened to Alfred Nobel. Alfred Nobel, he picked up the paper one day and he read his own obituary.

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He's the inventor of dynamite. He was a man who had spent his life amassing a fortune from the manufacture and sale of weapons of destruction. But when he looked at the paper that morning

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and read his own obituary, it had been printed there as a result of a simple journalistic error. His brother, Al-- his brother had died. And the reporter had confused it

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and had written it up as if Albert Nobel had died. He'd been rather careless and reported the death of the wrong brother. Well, this disturbed Albert Nobel a great deal.

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And the shock was so overwhelming that he decided to reassess his life. One thing was sure, he saw how the world looked at him, how the world measured him.

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The world measured him as a dynamite king, a great industrialist who had made an immense fortune from explosives. And this was all, as far as the world saw it,

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this was the general public's conception of his life. He recognized that none of his true intentions were there. None of his intentions to break down the barriers that separated men and ideas.

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There was nothing there that recognized his commitment to life's eternal values. He was only portrayed as a merchant of death. That's the way he was to be remembered.

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But you know, when he read his obituary and was so shocked that Nobel decided that he would make a change in his life. And what he did was to decide how

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he would dispose of his fortune. And he made arrangements for the disposal of his fortune. And it was based on the fact that the most valued prizes would be given to those who had done the most for world peace.

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And so we have the Nobel Peace Prize because a man read his obituary and decided to change his life. You know, I always get rather concerned

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about reading obituaries because whenever we sit down to write an obituary, we've lived a long time, but we can crowd it into such few words.

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So what if they were to write our obituary today, what would it be? What would it be? How would our lives be measured?

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How tall was he or how tall was she? Well, don't worry about whether you're five feet five or whether you're six feet two. That's not what I'm talking about. But you ought to be so tall as to bump the sky.

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So tall is your love of God. So tall is your love for that high and noble Roe Tall. How wide? Well, you ought to be so wide that you just keep reaching out to others. Just keep going around and around and shifting gears.

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And then to have a depth of love and understanding. That's the measure of a person. That's what it means to be a true person. That's the kind of person God made us to be. To be a true man, to be a true woman, to be a true person.

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You know a lot of people get all caught up in a lot of things that I don't think really matter. We get all caught up in whether a woman wears slacks, and whether a man wears a dress. We get all caught up with that. But I suppose that when Jesus lived, they all had on a robe.

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They looked very much alike. And what really matters is our relationship to God. That's what God's gonna look. He's not gonna say, "Now, what kind of suit did you wear when you preached every Sunday?" "What color was your robe?" That's not gonna be what you're gonna be asked at the first, and when you get to the pearly gates.

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That's not the question. "Well, were you able to wear a different outfit every Sunday?" That's not gonna be the question. That really doesn't matter because clothes become threadbare, and they rot, and they ruin. But what really matters is that you love the Lord. Did you love people?

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Did you do everything you could to help them? Did you lift them up when they were bowed down? That's really the nation. And that's what Jesus is calling us to do, softly and tenderly.

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