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The following message is preached by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman entitled "On Being Intimate with the Invisible." The Scripture reading of the morning is from the Gospel according to John, the 14th chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 1.

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Jesus is speaking. Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms.

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If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself that where I am you may be also. And you know the way where I am going.

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Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.

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If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. Henceforth you know him and have seen him." Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied." Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long and yet you do not know me, Philip?

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He who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells

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in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me, or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word.

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Stay with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I would like to think with you for a few minutes this morning on being intimate with the invisible. The scriptures say that God is a spirit, and a spirit by definition has no body.

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A spirit is invisible. The scriptures say that no one has ever seen God and no one will ever see God. And that creates difficulties in communication with God because it's hard to talk with an invisible person.

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Some people, for example, when they think of talking to the invisible, get led off into the abstract. We all recognize that there are many times when we talk to people we can't see. We don't see the person, for example, that we're talking to on the telephone or on a

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tape recorder or listening on the radio or playing a video game or entering into a conversation with some automatic teller in a bank. But we know, even though we don't see this other person, that there is a person there somewhere who put those words out for us to hear and to respond to.

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But when it comes to prayer, we're talking about one who is altogether other from us, who is truly invisible. And when one begins to think about that, one begins to wonder what God is like. It becomes a kind of cosmic question mark, the force.

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Some of you will remember Ralph Allison's book entitled The Invisible Man. It's been made into a film a number of times. It's about a man who becomes invisible. And everyone who encounters this invisible man has one great desire, to see what the

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invisible man really looks like. Well I think that's a desire that exists in all of us. We want to see the invisible. And when we talk to God who is invisible, to a certain degree that puzzlement confuses

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our focus. This is the reason that most people enjoy realistic art rather than abstract art. The realistic art looks like something that they have seen, that they understand, that they can relate to.

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The abstract art on the other hand, oft times is very confusing and they've never seen anything like it before. It creates more confusion than it does peace. So there are some people who when they think of being intimate with the invisible God,

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get led astray into abstractions. And then there are some people who find talking with the invisible to be rather spooky and fearful. There are some who when they encounter something that they do not understand, also fear it.

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At Halloween, this season of the year, we have fun houses and things raising money for charities and the like, where disembodied voices speak. Well, we may laugh about that, but the fact is that the invisible, the altogether mysterious, sometimes fills us with a certain awe and hesitation.

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There was a very famous magician well over a hundred years ago whose name was Robert Houdin. And Houdin had a trick which he developed called a spirit cabinet. A cabinet was constructed on the stage before the audience.

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The floor was laid and then three walls and a top. The front was wide open and facing the audience so that everyone in the audience could look directly in to this cabinet that had been built and which was about eight feet square. Then Houdin, the magician, would go and sit in the middle of the cabinet.

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And at his command, things would appear and disappear and move back and forth and all kinds of unusual phenomenon occurred. And it was noted that some people really believed that he had ghosts and spirits at his command that he could call to do whatever he wanted them to do.

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And it frightened these people. The same technique that he used in that trick, and it was nothing but a trick, is still used by many spiritualists and mediums and fakers today. But whenever some folks encounter that kind of thing, rather than promoting faith, it

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promotes fright. And then communicating with the invisible can also lead toward an unhealthy anthropomorphism. Now an anthropomorphic view of God means to see God as a person. That is, to try to imagine God in human terms.

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And because we cannot see him, many have a tendency to do that. They see God as a kind of grandfather type with a long white beard. Or they see him as a celestial bellhop who must be ready to jump at their slightest command. Or they think of him as someone up in heaven who keeps score over all of our good deeds

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and all of our bad deeds. Now that kind of thing can become very, very destructive. Because in such an instance, we're looking at God not as he is, but rather in terms of the figments of our own imagination.

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Now there's nothing wrong with anthropomorphism in itself. The Bible uses a lot of anthropomorphic language. Jesus talks about going to the hands of his father. The Psalms say that our sin is an offense in the nostrils of God.

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It also says that God will cover us with his wings. And in another place, the world is described as the footstool of God, implying that he has feet. So anthropomorphic language is used in scripture, and it can carry meaningful messages.

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But when we become involved in our own ideas about what God is like, well, that can become not encouraging to communication, but rather discouraging to it. The very invisibility of God then can lead us to vague, abstract thinking about him, to fear or anxiety, or to quite wrong ideas about his nature and personality.

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So God comes to our aid. He helps us be intimate with him in spite of his invisibility, and he does this in three ways. First of all, he gives us his name.

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Now when I was a youngster, I was taught that you did not address an older person by their first name unless that person invited you to do that. I happen to think that's still a pretty good idea, but it's not very common in our time. Have you ever noticed how many people these days will call you by your first name when

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you've never even met them before? Someone will call on the phone and say, "Hello, Bruce. I want to talk to you about…" You've never heard of this person.

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Or you'll call to speak with someone else and the secretary will say, "Well, just a second, Bruce. I'll see if he's available." And you've never met this…

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[Pause] [Pause] I want to be able to say, "Please call me Bruce. All my friends call me Bruce."

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When someone takes my name, I don't have the opportunity to give it to them. Now my understanding of the name here parallels that of Scripture. When the Bible says, for example, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," what it means quite literally is that we cannot take to ourselves and use

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for our own purposes that which God has given us or withheld from us, as the case may be. It's his name and he can do with it as he wishes. Well, God has chosen to give us his name. We can say, "Yes, God and I are on a first-name basis.

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His name is Jehovah." Now don't get hung up on that old name. It's naturally an old name. He's an old God.

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After all, he has come out of eternity, and therefore that name is a very aged one. But it is no different than if he were to say to us, and I say this with all reverence, "My name is Joe. God says, 'My friends call me Joe.

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Please call me Joe.'" That's one of the things God does to make intimacy with him easier. The second thing that he does is to come to us in the person of his son, Jesus. In the gospel according to John, we read that the word of God became flesh and dwelt among

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us. Jesus said in the scripture passage read a few minutes ago, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." Paul writes to the Colossians, "Christ is the image of the invisible God."

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The author to the Hebrews says in the first chapter, "Jesus is the exact representation of the radiant glory of God." God says to us, "You want to know what I'm like? Then look at Jesus."

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You know, right in the center of London there's a large square called Trafalgar Square. It honors that great naval battle back in 1805 when Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson led the British fleet in defeating the Spanish and the French fleets. And so at the center of this Trafalgar Square, there's a great column, very, very high.

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And at the top of it, there is a statue of Lord Nelson. The difficulty is that he's so high up that you can't see his face or any of his features. So in 1948, the British government made an exact reproduction of that statue, only they put it right down on the sidewalk.

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Now the statue is still in its place of lifted up glory in the center of the square, but there's a sidewalk version right there for every woman and man who walks by to see. Now Jesus is the sidewalk version of God. Jesus is God saying, "This is what I'm like.

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Here, you can see me face to face." So God increases our intimacy with him by giving us his name and also by giving us his son, but he does it in a third way. Through the lips of his son, he tells us how to be personal with him.

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Jesus teaches us how to personalize our communication with God in prayer. You know, the most sublime intimacy with God that we can have is the intimacy of prayer. And Jesus teaches us how to make that intimate in spite of the invisible nature of God. He makes several suggestions to us.

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First of all, Jesus says, "Treat God as a person and not as an object." You remember when he says, "Do not do your good deeds in order to be seen by men. Don't pray out on the street corners in order that the crowds might applaud you." Now most scholars, when they approach this passage, think that Jesus is here speaking

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against hypocrisy, and that may be at least in part true. But the central thrust of Jesus' word here is precisely this. Don't use God to gain your own goals. Don't pray on street corners so that you can get the applause and the recognition that

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comes from others. What you're doing by that is you're turning God into some kind of an object to be used to gain your own personal goals. God is not an object.

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Would you want someone to go around and begin using your name just in order to gain their own selfish purposes? God does not want to be treated as a non-person. I'll confess to you, I get a bit queasy inside when I hear people treat God as if he were

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a good luck charm or some senile old uncle who'll give us anything we want. Usually you hear people call upon God like he was an 800 number that you dial whenever you had a particular need, or as if he were Aladdin's lamp, just rub him and the genie will come and do whatever you want him to do.

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You don't treat people that you care about like that. When I hear people howling their prayers to God, putting all their begs in one asket, I find myself to be embarrassed for God because he's being depersonalized. He's being made into nothing more than a divine device.

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And Jesus says, "You never use your friends like that." So in our prayers, we must never think of God other than as a person, not as one who is at our command like some device in the kitchen drawer at home, but rather as one who is in an intimate, personal relationship.

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Now the second thing that Jesus says to us is this. When you pray to God, pray in private. Close friends want some quality time together. They want some time when they can share with vulnerability and openness.

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Now public prayer is good. The scriptures commend it. There's nothing wrong with it. But Jesus says, "When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your

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Father." Now this is a figurative picture that Jesus is giving us. If Jesus' home was typical of the homes in the first century, then it would have only had two rooms.

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And we know there were seven members of his family. So there weren't any places that he could go in the house to close the door and be alone. That was a pretty crowded household. What Jesus is saying is, "Find a spot."

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Maybe he went out to some place on the hills, but find a spot, some place that's separated and apart. You can find such a place if you really want to. I know a lot of people today who carry on their prayers in their cars while they're

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driving where no telephone can ring and no outside disturbance can come. This last week, I was walking between the rows of cars to get my car in the Mellon Square, and here was a young man sitting on a packing case between two cars reading the Bible, one of the garage attendants.

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And I walked up to him and I said, "I'm sorry to have interrupted you." He said, "That's all right. This is the only quiet time and quiet place I can find." There he was in the midst of a garage having his personal private time with God.

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You can shut the door if you really want to. And it's good to have a set time. It can be in the morning. That's what Jesus did.

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He would get up a great while before dawn. Or it can be in the evening. I remember being amazed when I read that Martin Luther used to get up at four o'clock in the morning for prayer.

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I wasn't so impressed when I realized he probably went to bed when the chickens did every night. But nonetheless, there was a disciplined time. And by the way, when you read about the prayer experiences of great Christians out of the past, don't be discouraged by that or overawed by that.

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It took Luther 25 years to learn to pray as he did. It takes time to develop this intimacy with God. And if I may offer a personal word, I personally think it is better to have your prayer time in the morning than to have it in the evening.

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I think that because my jeweler said to me on one occasion that you should wind your watch in the morning rather than in the evening. Because when the spring is tightly wound, there's less possibility of it being damaged. Less so to go out into the day with your spring of your spirit tightly wound.

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That seems to me to prepare you for the living of life more than to come at the end of the day when you are exhausted and perhaps have been defeated in one way or another in the preceding hours. The important thing is to have a private place and a private time when you can be vulnerable

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before God, when you can whisper to him about your love. Be like Robinson Crusoe. Do you remember it says that at night, Robinson Crusoe would get into his little house and he would pull up the ladder so that no one or no thing could crawl in after him.

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And then, it says, in safety and rest, he would go to sleep. We all need a time in each and every day when we pull up the ladder and rest in safety with God. And then Jesus also says to us, when you pray, use your own language.

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Speak naturally. You know, Queen Victoria made no secret of the fact that she liked Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli more than she liked Prime Minister William Gladstone. And on one occasion, she explained why.

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She said, "Whenever Gladstone speaks to me, he addresses me as if I were a public meeting. But when my dear Dizzy," that's what she called Disraeli, "when my dear Dizzy speaks to me, he talks to me like a person." Well, Jesus says, don't pile up meaningless phrases when you pray.

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Don't focus, he says, on the length of your words. Let me give you two examples of very good prayers that I've heard recently. One was from an eight-year-old boy who prayed as follows, "Lord, you better sit down before I tell you this one."

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And the other one was from a five-year-old girl who said at the table, "Dear Jesus, I would like to thank you for this broccoli, but you know I would be fibbing." Now you see, there's an openness and a naturalness there which is part and parcel of intimacy. You don't have to pray in King James English.

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If you have difficulty phrasing your prayers, use some of the books of prayer that are provided. They will stimulate your thinking. And make a list of the things you want to pray for. Many, many people ask me to pray for things.

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I can't remember them all, so I write them down, and I wouldn't think of going into my prayer time without those lists. And don't fret if you don't have anything to say. It's beautiful to spend a quiet time in intimacy with God.

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Thomas Merton, one of the great saints of the 20th century, said that an apple does not become red and juicy and sweet by flexing its muscles or gritting its teeth or squinting its eyes. He said the apple just sits there in the sun.

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And sometimes that's the best thing we can do in prayer. Just sit there in the warmth of God's love. He will work his wonders as he wills. I long with all my heart for you to have a great intimacy with God.

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Prayer is the avenue to that intimacy. Keep it short and simple and sincere. Remember God has given us his name and he's given us his son. And his son has taught us that we are to treat God as a person, that we are to spend private

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times with him, and that we are to be ourselves. I came across earlier this week the story of a man. He and his wife were going to have a baby, but before the baby came, he was called off to military service.

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And he did not return from service until some three years later. So the baby, little boy, was almost three years old before his daddy got home and he saw his daddy or his daddy saw him in person. Now during the time when the father was away in the service, each night the mother would

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take the little boy to his bed and she would help him into his pajamas. And then they would kneel down on the floor beside the bed and they would say their prayers, including prayers for daddy far away in the war. And when the prayers were over, she would say, "Now kiss your daddy goodnight and then

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go to sleep." And he would jump up and kiss a photograph of his father, which was there, and then tumble into bed and sleep. When he was about three years old, his father got home at last, a joyous reunion.

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And on the first night that he was home, when it came time for the youngster to go to bed, the mother not only went upstairs, but of course daddy went too. And daddy helped his little boy change into his pajamas and daddy knelt down beside the little boy and his dear wife there at the bedside to pray.

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And the little boy said his prayers. And when he was done, the mother said, "Now kiss your daddy goodnight and go to sleep." And with that, the little boy jumped up, ran over, kissed the photograph, went back, jumped in bed, and went to sleep.

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And the father stood there with open, empty arms. My friends, God is home. He is home for each and every one of us. And his arms are spread wide for us.

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Don't let yourself get caught up in rituals or procedures. Don't think you have to kiss pictures. Be with him as you would be with anyone that you truly love. For the real point and the purpose of prayer is to be intimate with the invisible.

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It's not to say, "God, give me. God, give me." It is rather to pray, "God, let me be. Help me to be your friend."

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Let us pray. Dear Heavenly Father, let us be. Help us to be your friends. Amen.

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Amen. ( equipped solution for hydroponics ) ( static )