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All of God in Christ Jesus. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. A few weeks ago I shared with you from this pulpit some thoughts titled

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"Nothing recedes like success." And those thoughts were built upon the same passage of Scripture which I have read again for you this morning. When I was studying that passage in terms of the Christians seeking after success, the Spirit also said to me that this passage has much to do with the development of

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Christian character. And as I became more involved in that thought, I determined to return to this text today even though we have been here just three weeks ago. I want to think of the passage in terms of character. Now character is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the combination of the mental and the moral

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qualities which distinguish a personality. The attitudes and the way of living which are so etched or so engraved or so carved or so impressed upon a life that when you see that life these things immediately become obvious. Christian character is of course to have mental attitudes and a moral practice

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which is at the highest level. Indeed that's the mark of Christian character. The Christian is always hungering for the highest. What then can we derive from Paul's teaching here about the development of Christian character? Well first of all he makes it very clear that one must believe in the duty of

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character development. Now we are always in the process of change. The very passage of time changes us. There is no such thing as permanence in this life. The question becomes then not whether we will change because we are changing, but in what direction we will move as we change. This is the question which

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presents itself and it seems to me that this should lead us to interrogate our own lives, to ask questions of ourselves and of our growth in the things of Christ, to say to ourselves, "Am I better than I was a year ago? Do I have greater self-control, greater sympathy, a more profound passion than I had at the

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beginning of this year? Do I think more about God and my relationship to him? Is this before the eye of my consciousness more frequently? Do I find that my tasks in the Lord are being done with a greater power and ease because I am depending more upon him? Am I becoming less self-centered, more unselfish in

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the living of my days? Am I quicker to obey the Lord when I am sensitive to his leading?" The first thing, of course, in doing anything is to decide what it is that you're going to do and these questions help us to know what we need to do to grow in Christian character. See, this was the great problem of the

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Pharisees. The Pharisees were the spiritual and moral leaders of their day. There's no question about that. The difficulty is that they had reached a level of satisfaction with their own performance which led them into the heresy of perfectionism, which is one of the most tragic heresies of them all. To

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believe that one has come so far that there's no place else to go. They never asked themselves the kinds of questions, you see, which I have just suggested. Now the Apostle Paul was himself a Pharisee, but he continually subjected his life to self-examination and he saw that he was not perfect. He says in this passage

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that he recognized that he was weak, that there was sin in him, that he had in fact not attained. So he said, "I will press on." When one is self-satisfied, one is self-worshipping, but when one has one's eyes on the highest and hungers after it, presses on, goes for that which he's not yet attained, then Christian character

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develops. You all know of Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States. If you visit the little cemetery outside of Princeton University in New Jersey, you will find a corner of the graveyard where all of the presidents of Princeton University are buried, and off to one side, not in that honored line, but off to

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one side, is the grave of Aaron Burr. Now Aaron Burr was born of a noble family. His grandfather, Jonathan Edwards, was probably the most brilliant mind that this country has produced until this very date. Aaron Burr's own record at Princeton University, his academic accomplishments, has never been surpassed.

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There are those who have equaled it, but none have ever surpassed it. But here was a man so satisfied with his own abilities and capacities, and they were great abilities and great capacities, but so satisfied with these things that he said publicly while he was a student at Princeton University that he had no need

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of God or of the things of God. You know how he pursued his career in politics, how he shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel. You perhaps do not know that after that he had to leave Washington because he was in such disfavor, and he came to Pittsburgh, spent some time here, then went further down the Ohio River, finally

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left this country where his name was a name of dishonor, went to England and France hoping to build a new life, did not succeed there, returned to New York City incognito under another name, opened a law practice on Nassau Street there. The practice did not grow, became so bitter that his wife left him. He used to

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go down to the Narrows every day and watch for a certain ship called the Patriot because he believed that his daughter would return to see him, but the Patriot never came, his daughter never came to see him. Finally when his old legs would carry him no longer, he had her picture put on his wall. So it was

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the first thing he saw from his bed in the morning, it was the last thing he saw from his bed at night, and he died there looking at that picture alone. Now here was a man who was so satisfied with himself that he had no hunger for anything higher than that which he could do within and of himself. He had no need

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of God, he had no goals that were of the glory of the kingdom of heaven, he saw in himself no duty to develop his character. And he dies tragically alone and now his bones lie in a shaded corner of a cemetery marked by a stone given by an anonymous donor and nothing more. The first thing that's essential in the

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development of Christian character is to understand the duty of developing one's Christian character. Now the second thing, one must believe that God is ready to do his part in one's life as one seeks to develop one's character. His indwelling spirit enables us to accomplish what we might not otherwise accomplish. This is

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what Paul means when he says, "It is not I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me." I once saw a four-year-old trying to move a table and her mother said, "You're never going to be able to move that table, it's as big as you are." And the little girl replied, "Yes I am, mommy, because I'm as big as it is." There's a

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subtle difference in those two sentences and that sentence of that little girl is the Christian spirit. For the Christian spirit understands itself to be as big as anything it confronts, not in and of itself, but because God dwells within. That's the source of courage and that's the source

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of power. I've always been enamored of the writings of John Henry Newman and in an essay on faith, he talks about how many people debate the nature of faith and are puzzled by the nature of faith. Some look at it, he said, as some tremendous step, some see it as some mysterious act, most look at it with some

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kind of awe and confusion, but actually faith, says Newman, is nothing more than a habit of the soul. I've never been able to forget, nor do I want ever to forget that line, that faith is a habit of the soul. Faith is not a theology. Faith is not commitment to a series of dogmatic utterances. Faith is an attitude of one's

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soul with regard to the Lord Jesus Christ. Time and again I have been led to talk with people, and I'm sure many of you have had this same experience, talking with people who almost seem hypnotized by their unbelief. They say things like, "Well, I want to believe, but I just can't believe." Or, "I look at the way

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some people behave and they claim to believe, and I don't want to be like those people." And let's admit it, there are some who claim the name Christ, whose behavior is not that which we would want to see emulated. And there are some people who say, "I've entered into the various disciplines, I go to Bible

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studies, and I attend worship, but I just don't feel faith growing in me." I have great sympathy for those people, because I have known some of that own experience in my own life. But what I want to say to them is what Newman wrote a long time ago, that faith is a habit of the soul. The way in which one

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experiences growing faith is by acting as if one already had it. I mean by that that you think more about Jesus than you think about any problem you might have in relating to him. That you start loving people as he would have you love them, whether you've accepted him yet as your Lord or not. If you do every duty which

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is yours to do, and do it with faithfulness, if you rejoice in good things, and praise and admire the things that are of noble report, if whenever temptation comes, you not only fight it, but go out and specifically and deliberately do something that is overwhelmingly good. If you struggle to

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let your life be an experience of patience, then you will find in this process of doing these things that faith will become part of your experience. When you go to college or to any other school, you don't know what day you can say that you're an educated person. I mean the day they hand you your seapskin does not

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automatically make you an educated person. And if I ask you what day along the course of your study you felt educated, you couldn't tell me. Or at least I doubt if you could tell me. The fact is when we involve ourselves in the educational process, we involve ourselves in the habit of learning. And somewhere

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along the line, we suddenly recognize that we've developed some competence in our field, which is education. Well just so in faith, don't look for mystery, the mysterium tremendum. Instead build into your life those disciplines of devotion, that habit of the soul, which enables it to happen. First time I went to Europe, I

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went on the Queen Elizabeth the first. Now that was a very big boat. That was the biggest ship afloat at its time. It was a thousand feet long. It had 16 decks, 16 elevators, five and a half miles of mahogany passageways, carried 3,000 passengers and a crew of 1,700. My dad and mother went with me to New York to

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see me off. And my dad said, "Now I want you to go all the way to the top deck as soon as you're on. Then we'll be able to see you very clearly up there and you'll be able to see us too and we can wave goodbye." So after they had seen my stateroom and then gone off, I immediately went all the way to the top.

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And I could see them down there and they could see me up there. Now what my father knew, but which I didn't know, was that when the Queen left New York Harbor, she always saluted the city. And the way that she saluted it was by sounding her funnels. That was a saying that when the Queen spoke, all of New York listened. And

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that was literally true. When those mighty funnels would sound with an incredibly deep, diapason note, you could hear it from one end of New York City to the other, above all the roar of those millions of people and what was going on there. You could hear that sound. And halfway through New Jersey as well. Now

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the funnels were on the 16th deck. I was standing right beside them when I was waving. And my dad knew all about that. And I became aware of this whirring sound. It's like something like a whisper at first. And then the whisper grew until it was like a mighty torrent of wind and then suddenly out it came. The deepest,

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roundest sound I've ever heard. I was flattened against all, couldn't move, absolutely flattened by the sound. And I think that's what it's like to have the experience of God in your life. You climb up as high as you can. That's the habit of the soul. And what you discover is first a whisper and then a sound like a

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wind. And then there comes into you a deep, diapason note of conviction and certainty of the reality of God's presence and the power of that so stops you, so thrills you that you are never ever able from that moment on to forget it. Second principle in Christian character development is to know that

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God will do his part. Now the third principle. One must be willing to follow where God leads. When Napoleon was leading his forces in retreat from the gates of Moscow, the most detailed account of that retreat was written by the Duke of Vincenza, Colencore. And he tells in his narrative of how the men

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would fall asleep in the snow. And he would go to them and try to get them to get up because to fall asleep, of course, in the snow was to freeze to death. And he would plead with them and they would order him away, "Just let me rest a while." And rest, you see, sleep inevitably meant death. Well just so, satisfied sleepy

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souls die. And that's the reason it's very important in the development of Christian character that we beware of frozen attitudes, frozen ideas, icy theologies. The philosophy of Sunday school class a long time ago should have been much improved upon as we grow in the things of faith. Christian character

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requires responsible Christian thought. God speaks in new ways at new times to new people and we're constantly changing. We are always new people. Do you know the difference between an intellectual and a pseudo-intellectual? An intellectual looks for the right questions. A pseudo-intellectual hands out what she

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claims to be the right answers. An intellectual loves the truth. A pseudo-intellectual loves to be thought to be right. The intellectual knows that what he knows is very little compared with what he doesn't know. But the pseudo-intellectual believes that in the matter at hand there is nothing else to

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be known beside what she knows. The intellectual states the position of others, those who disagree, fairly. The pseudo-intellectual sets up straw men and women and then chops them to pieces. The intellectual understands that there are limitations to human reason. The pseudo-intellectual deifies reason,

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especially her own. The intellectual is open to listen to anyone. The pseudo-intellectual listens only to those who agree. The intellectual is committed to ideas. The pseudo-intellectual is committed to dogmas. Now the Apostle Paul was an intellectual. He was the greatest genius of the first

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century. He, in his process of development, laid off any concept of the righteousness of the law which was part of his past and he hammered out concepts of mission to the world, mission to the Gentiles, theological ideas which were the gift of the Spirit and it was because he was open to these things that

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he was enabled to write them down and it is from them that we benefit even until this day. He says, "I have not attained," and presses on. Intellectual drowsiness is the prelude to intellectual death. So read books you don't want to read. Talk to people whose ideas are different from your own. Explore phrases that challenge

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your convictions. Go to see the films that you ought to see because sometimes they will send through you a shudder of doubt, but you never have to be afraid of doubt. Doubt is only truth knocking at the door of your mind to see if anybody's home. I remember when I went to do graduate study abroad, one father in

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Christ said to me two things. Remember two things. First, keep your heart closed on Christ. Second, keep your mind open to all the possibilities. And the last thing to do in seeking to develop Christian character is to anticipate, accept, and rise above failure. When I was in college, our fraternity had a particularly bad

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year in athletics one year. We lost everything and we had one guy in the fraternity who would say at the eating club that night when we would be all sitting there dirty and bruised and defeated, he would say the same thing every night. He would say, "Well guys, anyway, we did the best we could." I came

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to hate that phrase so much I even hate it to this very day because the fact of the matter is we have never done the best we could. I don't care what your age or your background, you've never done the best you could. The Christian life is a life of climbing a hill and when you get to the top of that hill, what do you see?

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You see another hill beyond that's higher than the one you've already climbed. Another range which challenges you in your search toward righteousness. Some of those slopes are very perilous and very dangerous and not all of those slopes will we successfully climb. Jesus says in this world you're going to have

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tribulation and tribulation means literally the crushing, the pressing of the grapes. So sometimes we're going to be pressed down by hard things, difficult moments, the vicissitudes that leave us bloody and bowed, but it's out of this very process that we will learn to distinguish the valuable from the

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worthless and the serious from the trivial and the solid from the ephemeral. One of my friends in this congregation said to me that he thinks the sin that Paul was never able to forget was the sin that he was involved in the death of Stephen, the first martyr. You remember how that's recorded and he probably never

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got over that. I'm not sure about that. Paul had a tremendous sense of the forgiving grace of God, but perhaps this was more than he could get over, at least in terms of his memory. One thing is for sure, he says to the Philippians and he says it in other places in his writings, "I've not yet attained, but I'm going to

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persevere and the reason I'm going to persevere to make Christian character my own is because Jesus Christ has made me his own." My friends, it is better to fail at great things than it is to succeed at little ones. And even our frustrations as we seek to pursue our hunger for the highest can motivate us to do more than

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we believe we can do. There's a little story which comes out of Norway, it's centuries old, about a fisherman and his two sons who were out on the boat fishing and they were having a very good day. They did not notice the fog coming. The sea began to rise, their ship was filled with fish, and as they looked

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about they could not discern which way to row toward the shore. Now at the same time that this happened, on the shore the wife and the mother of these three was cooking and her kitchen was called outside. Went outside, something happened in the kitchen, it ignited the kitchen and the whole house caught fire and it

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burned to the ground. Shortly after the fire, the fisherman and his two sons landed on the shore and the wife and mother ran and she said, "Carl, we have lost everything we had. The fire has claimed it all." And he said nothing. She said, "Carl, didn't you hear me? We have lost all. The fire has taken it away." And he

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said, "The sea was rising and the fog was so thick we did not know which way to row. And then we saw a gleam of light and as we watched it, it grew brighter and brighter and we decided to row toward the light. The fire, the burning of our home, is what led us to safety for our lives." And the lesson in that is that

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even our blazing failures can be that which helps to bring us home. How does one develop Christian character? One believes in the duty of developing it. One believes that God will do his part in one's life. One believes it's important to follow wherever God leads, especially in the area of new ideas. And

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one believes that even failures can help the spirit climb. You can believe that because it is the testimony of Scripture and of the church. You can believe that because that is the testimony of the ages of faith. And you can believe that because I tell it to you. No one could ever offer me enough to tell you, of all

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people, anything less than the truth. Pray with me. "O Father, help us hear your call to come higher. Fill us with a hunger for that which is the very highest. Let us be satisfied with nothing less than that

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which is altogether lovely, pure, righteous, holy, forever. Dwell within us so that what we seek we may someday find when we join with thee in that perfect bliss and fellowship which will be forever and forever. It's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.