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Let us continue in worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's word as it is recorded in the book of Philippians chapter 4 beginning the reading at the verse number 10. I rejoice greatly in the Lord that at last you have renewed your concern for me.

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Indeed you have been concerned but you had no opportunity to show it. I am not saying this because I am in need for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need and I know what it is to have plenty.

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I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation whether well fed or hungry whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength. And may God bless to us this reading from his word.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Mr. Grant Tief is the well-known coach of the Baylor University football team.

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He tells on one occasion of an assistant coach who came to him and asked him if they could go hunting together. Tief thought that would be a good idea and agreed. And he remembered that one of his former players had said coach if you ever want to go hunting

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come and hunt on my farm. And so the coach and the assistant coach drove off to this fellow's farm. When they got there the assistant coach remained in the car while Grant Tief went up to the door.

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And the former player came to the door saw his old coach welcomed him most warmly drew him into the house. And the coach said I've come to hunt on your farm. That's wonderful coach.

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You've got the run of the whole place. And then just as Tief was turning to go out to tell the assistant coach waiting in the automobile the player said coach I wonder if I could ask you to do something for me. Did you see that old mule out by the front of the house when you came in?

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Yes I did. Well that mule has been in our family for more than 30 years. And we received word from the vet this morning that the animal is dying and is going to know great pain if I do not put it out of its misery.

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And quite frankly coach I can't do it. I wonder if you would shoot the mule for me. And Grant Tief said I've never done anything like that in my life. I would really hesitate to do.

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He said coach you're one of the best friends I've ever had. I'd like you to do it. He said all right I will. And he left the house and was starting back toward the car when he got the idea for a

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joke. And so he changed the expression on his face to one of anger. And he walked up to the car and he said to the assistant coach that ungrateful upstart I coached to him and helped to make him everything he is and he offered me the opportunity of

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hunting on his farm and we drive all the way down here and he won't let us do it. But he won't get away with it. I'm going to shoot his mule. And the assistant coach said oh you wouldn't do anything like that.

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He said I'm going to do it. And he reached in and he took out his gun and he walked over and he killed the mule with a single shot. And then he turned and started to walk back toward the car again keeping his face somewhat

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averted because it was all he could do to keep from breaking out in laughter. And as he got near to his car suddenly two shots rang out and he ran to the car and he said what did you do? What did you do?

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And the assistant coach said I just got two of his cows. Now let's get out of here. Well it started out as a joke. It ended up being a jolt.

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And that's often the way it is in life isn't it? We think we have accomplished some great victory or goal or triumph and before our very eyes it turns into a defeat. Or we think we have known some great defeat or loss and suddenly somehow it becomes a

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significant victory. Often times things come to us in disguise. And that is what I believe led Rudyard Kipling in his great poem If, one of the classic poems of our western world, a poem about a father giving advice to his son, that's what led

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Kipling I believe to put in that poem these lines. If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. What Kipling is talking about you see is that triumph sometimes comes to us masked as disguise. But on the other hand defeat often comes to us impersonating victory.

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Both victory and defeat often come to us looking like the other. So Kipling writes if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same it's good advice. And because it's good advice it squares with the teaching of scripture.

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Let me hold before you for example this morning two brief Old Testament scenes which illustrate this point. The first concerns Joseph who was the son of Jacob. Evidently Jacob's favorite son.

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The brothers of Joseph resented this so as you know they beat him and sold him into slavery. He worked hard in Egypt and became a junior executive in the employ of an Egyptian named Potiphar. Potiphar's wife was attracted to this young Jew and tried to seduce him.

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He resisted her approaches and so she pretended that she had been attacked. She faked the evidence and he was convicted and thrown into a deep dungeon. Now he is not only a slave he is a slave in chains. In the dungeon he becomes known as an interpreter of dreams.

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Pharaoh has a dream and he is brought to Pharaoh to interpret the dream. Pharaoh is impressed with Joseph and elevates him to the position of second in authority in all the land. Now a great famine comes up and the family of Joseph the very ones who sold him into

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slavery come down begging for food. He reveals his identity. He shows to them great grace. He gives them the food they desire and then he says to them this.

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What you meant to me for evil God meant to me for good. What looked like a defeat sold into slavery then into a deep dungeon turned out to be in fact great triumph. And Joseph honored his own name and saved his adopted country and has become an example

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to those who have read his story for generations afterwards. Now let me give you a second scene from the Old Testament. This one concerns David. David at the height of his success when he is the master of all that he surveys except

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the wives of other men. He falls in love with such a wife. Her name is Bathsheba. He attempts to get at her by ordering her husband Uriah off to war.

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He claims the girl but a little problem arises. She conceives and is pregnant. In order to try to avoid this the clever the thinking king brings Uriah back. He expects that Uriah will spend some time with his wife and then the pregnancy will

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be attributed to the husband and not to the king. But Uriah is a very loyal soldier. He will not claim any of the comforts of home that the troops in the field do not know and so he does not go near his wife.

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But David is not put down with this. His capacity for monarchial machinations seems to be unchallenged. So he sends Uriah back into the battle carrying a message for his commander and the young man does not know it but he is carrying his own death warrant.

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The message says put Uriah at the front of the charge and then suddenly withdraw from him leaving him to face the Philistines alone. And that is exactly what happened and Uriah died on the spear of a Philistine. And David had Bathsheba and thought he had a great victory.

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And then four things happened. First Nathan the prophet told the whole story to the court thus bringing embarrassment and shame upon the king. Second the son that Bathsheba bore died.

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Third a strain of sexual criminality moved into David's family which corroded it for generations to come. Later one of his sons would attempt to rape a half-sister of his. Like father like son.

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And finally the greatest desire in David's life was frustrated. He wanted to build the temple of the Lord and God says to him you may not build it for there is blood on your hands. It appeared to be a triumph.

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It was an ignominious defeat. All times victories end in defeats and defeats end in victories. That's the reason it is important for us to be able to meet with triumph or disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.

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But how do we deal with these things? How do you treat these imposters? I would like to suggest to you three principles. The first thing is this.

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The true identity of any event that occurs in your life is relative to the perspective from which you view it. I've always loved the story of the Norwegian father and son who were out fishing in their small boat and they had a very good catch and the fog came in and separated them from

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the land and they were lost. And while they were trying to find their way home, back on shore, the kitchen of their little house caught fire and the wife and mother tried to stop the blaze but it soon was out of control and the whole house was ignited and it burned to the ground.

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And just as the last pieces of wood fell into ash, the father and the son in their little boat made it to the shore. And the woman ran to them and said we have lost everything, it's burned, it's gone. And neither of the men made any response.

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"Don't you hear me?" she said. "Everything we have is charred ashes." And the father looked at her and said, "A few hours ago we were lost out there on a wide sea and then we saw a golden glow and we decided to row toward that glow and it

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got brighter and brighter. The flames that burned our house saved our lives." You see the perspective from which you view a circumstance makes a great difference in the identity of that circumstance and your identifying of it.

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I think of this in terms of the story of Peter, James, John and Andrew fishing and they hadn't caught anything and Jesus comes along and says, "Now I want you to put out your nets again." And that was a big job.

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It's a heavy task to haul out wet nets and then to throw them back and pull them one more time. And they had been without success but Jesus encouraged them to put down their nets in another place and they yielded to the persuasive power of a new perspective.

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And their catch was immense. Their nets were full of flimsy flipping things and they cried out, "Wow!" In Aramaic of course. And what they had discovered is that one can capitalize on one's catastrophes if one realizes

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that a change in perspective often changes the identity of what you're confronting. Here's a second principle. The true identity of an event is relative to the use you make of it. John Wooden was the head basketball coach at UCLA for many years and he wrote a book

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called They Call Me Coach and in that book he has this line, "Things turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out." And that's a wise word. Any situation that confronts you is going to confront you with a variety of options.

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The option you choose, the use that you make of the situation, will do much to determine its final identity. Disuse a good circumstance and the results will be tragic. On the other hand, use well a bad circumstance and you can bring forth something that's good

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and beautiful. I think for example of Tom Dempsey, the famed place picker for the New Orleans Saints. I think he still holds the record for the longest extra point kick ever made, 67 yards. Now Tom Dempsey is a great big man, but interestingly enough he has no fingers on his left hand

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and his right foot is terribly deformed. He has in fact only half a foot. Now how does a man with half a foot and no fingers on his left hand hold a football and then kick it and kick it better than anyone else has ever kicked it?

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Well the answer is this, it's in his attitude. Tom Dempsey is a believing Christian. He moves out of a filled spirit, he has a God-centered life. The word can't is not an easy part of his vocabulary.

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He believes that he can do all things through the Christ who strengthens him. Now empty spirits don't approach things in that way. You may have heard of the woman who went up to the Presbyterian minister and said, "I've tried Methodism and Episcopalianism and Lutheranism and none of them have been any good, so I've

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decided to try Presbyterianism now," and the minister looked at her and said, "Oh well, it really doesn't matter, you can put any label at all on an empty bottle." And so it is. Empty spirits don't deal with things in creative and positive ways, but spirits that move in

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the power of God, that's a different story. In Nebraska two summers ago I was shown a great boulder which had been split in half by a cherry tree that grew through it. Now according to the local legend, a little boy was eating a cherry one day and when he

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was through he stuck the seed down into that crack and he forgot about it. But nature didn't, it caressed that little seed, it watered it, it nursed it, and the seed grew and eventually broke that great rock into two places. Now the power of a God-directed life is like that.

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It takes hold of a situation, no matter how ugly that situation may be. It sends its roots down into it and makes good use of it. It breaks it open. It turns a tragedy into a triumph.

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The way that you make use of something will help to identify what that something really is. And the third principle I would pass along to you is this, that the true identity of an event is always relative to time.

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There was a minister who went calling and he knocked on the screen door of the house and a voice said, "Come in." And he was one of those people that didn't go in just on an invitation, he wanted someone to come and open the door for him.

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So he knocked again and the voice said, "Come in." Well this time he tried the screen door but it was locked. So he went around to the back and he knocked on the back screen door and the voice said, "Come in."

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So he opened the door and he went in and he found himself in the kitchen and he also found himself facing a snarling German shepherd dog that had him pinned up against the wall. And as he looked about in panic, he saw at the other end of the kitchen a parrot on a perch saying, "Come in, come in."

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And he looked over at the bird and he said, "You dumb bird, can't you say anything else?" And the bird looked back at him and said, "Sick of you, sick of you." Now you see when that man was locked out, he thought he was in trouble. That's when things were good.

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When he got in, he thought things were going well. That's when he was in trouble. Time changed the whole situation. Not long ago I was in the Atlanta airport and there were many thunder squalls in the

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area and so they kept us on the ground. Finally they said it was all right to go. We got onto the plane, went down to the end of the runway and a wind squall hit. Not rain, not thunder, but wind.

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That plane actually trembled. The pilot turned the plane around so that it was facing into the wind. And then he gave us some counsel over the intercom and this is what he said. We just, we'll wait right here until the storm is over.

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But I would remind you that it is the nature of storms to pass. And that's true. But it takes time, you see, to let the storm pass. Any circumstance that you confront will look different to you as time passes.

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Some things, if you do not deal with them quickly, the opportunity will be lost. Other things require your waiting a bit to see what is the best way in which to move. Haven't you said at one time or another, you know when that happened, I just didn't realize how important that event was going to be in my life.

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I didn't know it at the time, right. Sometimes we have to let time pass in order to see things for what they really are. Now to me the greatest example of these three principles is the example of the Apostle Paul. The letter to the Philippians was written while he was in prison.

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And in this letter he says to the Philippians, "I have learned in whatever situation I am therein to be content." Now I'm sure he was content most of all, he says it because Christ lived in his heart. And also because his sails were filled with the wind of the Holy Spirit.

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And also because he had friends there who were ministering to him. And also because he knew that the kingdom was going forward through his epistles and his ministry to individuals even while he was in jail. All those things helped to comfort Paul.

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But there was something else as well. I believe that Paul fully understood that situations that look like defeats can be made into victories. That just capturing something at the moment does not reveal what it truly is.

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I think Paul knew that you need perspective, that the use you make of a situation, and he used every moment while he was in prison to God's glory, will change that situation. And he knew that time in the end would make the difference. He knew that you can't say at the end of any day, "This has been a good day," or "This

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has been a bad day." Because it takes a little longer than that to assess the worth of things. I wonder if Paul, when he was writing these words, thought back, for example, to his education. He was educated in the University of Tarsus.

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He then studied in Jerusalem, walked where the prophets and the kings had walked before him, sat at the feet of Gamaliel, the greatest teacher of his day. He was called the beauty of the law. He learned the law, and the law enslaved him.

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It frustrated him. This education, which most people would have wanted and which he had, was in fact a great burden to him. It led him to be vengeful in his spirit toward others.

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It led him to persecute the Christians. It led him to be a co-conspirator in the death of Stephen. What appeared to be a triumph, this education, was in fact a tragedy. Or did he think back to his Damascus Road experience, when he was knocked into the dirt

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by a light brighter than the Syrian sun, and groveling there, hears the voice of Christ say, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" and gets up blind, and is led into the city that he was going to as a proud conqueror and persecutor, led into it stumbling and halt and dependent and utterly without sight, and put into a room apart.

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And there, in that room, confronting what seemed to be an awful defeat, he not only regains the sight of his eyes, but insight in his spirit. His whole theology, everything he ever lived or wrote after that, is nothing but an explication of what happened to him there, that the God who was big enough to throw him down in anger

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was also big enough to lift him up in love. It looked like darkness. It was really light. Or did he think about his second missionary journey?

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The beginning of that journey, he visited churches he started before, but then he wanted to go into Bithynia, a large province on the shores of the Black Sea, heavily populated. But every time he tried to go, something stopped him. He was frustrated, he felt defeated, he couldn't get to Bithynia.

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But right behind him was the Hellespont, which separated where he was from Europe. I wonder if Paul realized that he was standing then in that very charmed circle in which civilization began, that only four miles from there was Troy, and a few more miles than that the place where Xerxes, the Persian monarch, sat on his marble throne and reviewed three

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million troops with which he planned to conquer Europe. And across that Hellespont was Greece with all its wisdom, and Rome with all its power, but Greece was not wise to salvation, and Rome had no power to gain heaven, and Paul had that wisdom, and he had that power from God.

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And I wonder if he fell asleep at night listening to the Lappin of the Aegean Sea, wondering why he was being stopped, until God called him to cross that Hellespont, that tiny sliver of silver, and to bring the gospel to Europe. A great victory for Christ, a great victory for Paul, and a great victory for us, for

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we are the children of the Western world. I have learned, he said, to be content in any situation. I can meet with triumph or disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same. My friends, our lives are crowded with events.

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We must not thoughtlessly accept them. It is foolish to do so, because things come to us pretending to be what in fact they are not. So measure things from different perspectives.

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Use everything that comes for good. And remember never to count things in terms of minutes or hours, but always in longer and truer times. If we do this, then in Jesus' name we can take all that life offers and deal with it

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in such a manner that we need never be ashamed. Let us pray. Our Father, we thank Thee for the adventure of our days. We thank Thee that Thou hast put us in times and places where things are a doing.

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We pray that Thou wilt make us wise, that Thou wilt teach us by the example of the greatest of saints, that Thou wilt make us not children of the moment, but children of eternity, that Thou wilt teach us to use whatever confronts us in ways that are well pleasing to Thee, and that Thou wilt grant to us always the willingness to change our perspective, that

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we might better see what You would have us see, so turning every defeat into a victory. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. Amen. [Music]

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