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This is Glendale Presbyterian Church, People Moving Power. This tape includes the reading of scripture and a sermon by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman entitled, "It is Always Too Soon to Quit." This is the fifth and last in a series on Saul, the first king of Israel. As soon as the voice stops on this side of the tape, be

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sure to turn immediately to side number two for the remainder of the message. This tape is copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Any public or commercial use in full or in part requires the advanced written permission of Dr. Thielman. The private use of this material for the spiritual gain of

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yourself or others is heartily encouraged. If you would like a catalog listing other tapes available, write to People Moving Power at the address on this cassette. Let us continue in our worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the first book of Samuel, the

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31st chapter, beginning at the verse which is numbered one. Let us be upstanding for the reading of the Word of God. "Now the Philistines fought against Israel and the men of Israel fled before the Philistines and fell slain on Mount Gilboa. And the Philistines overtook

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Saul and his sons and the Philistines slew Jonathan and Abinadab and Malchusiah, the sons of Saul. The battle pressed hard upon Saul and the archers found him and he was badly wounded by the archers. Then Saul said to his armor-bearer, 'Draw your sword and thrust me through with it, lest these uncircumcised come and thrust

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me through and make sport of me.' But his armor-bearer would not, for he feared greatly. Therefore Saul took his own sword and fell upon it. And when his armor-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he also fell upon his sword and died with him. Thus Saul died and his three sons and his armor-bearer and all his men on

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the same day together. And when the men of Israel who were on the other side of the valley and those beyond the Jordan saw that the men of Israel had fled and that Saul and his sons were dead, they forsook their cities and fled and the Philistines came and dwelt in them. On the morrow, when the Philistines came to

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strip the slain, they found Saul and his three sons fallen on Mount Gilboa. And they cut off his head and stripped off his armor and sent messengers throughout the land of the Philistines to carry the good news to their idols and to the people. They put his armor in the temple of Ashtaroth and they fastened his body

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to the wall of Beth-shean. But when the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead heard what the Philistines had done to Saul, all the valiant men arose and went all night and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons from the wall of Beth-shean. And they came to Jabesh and burnt them there. And they took their bones and buried

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them under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh and they fasted seven days. May God bless to us this reading from his word. Amen. You may be seated. Let us pray. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

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Dr. Sidney Gerard, the noted psychiatrist and author, has suggested that most men are too quick to accept life's invitation to die. He sees all life as a conversation, a dialogue between the individual life and life lived in general terms. And he suggests that as an individual goes through the course of

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his days, there are times when he is victorious and there are times when he is defeated. There are times when he thinks he could lick the whole world and there are times when he feels anything in the world could lick him. Now in these down times, in these despairing moments, he understands life to be extending to

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us a kind of an invitation to die. And Gerard goes on to say, "Too many men are too quick to accept that invitation." Think for example of the very elderly person who is living a significant life. They may have collected a great number of years, but as long as they still understand their own worth and their own

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value, the point in their existing, they continue to live vitally and dynamically. But let some despair, let some understanding that they are no longer needed, let some act or series of acts occur which lead them to believe that they've been put on the shelf. And at such a moment they hear life's

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invitation to die and a great number of them, as you very well know, go on from that moment to do just that, to die. Every one of us has within us at any given moment a sufficient number of lethal microorganisms to kill a whole army. But we go about our way in healthy form, strong and undismayed. But let us enter

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into some down period when the stream of life seems to be going against us, to some time when we are being defeated or conquered. And if we begin to accept the sadness which is about us, to yield and surrender to it, well then the self-destruct mechanisms start working within us and pretty soon organisms

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which were not bothering us before begin to make us sick. And in extreme instances they take us all the way to death. Girard even argues that life insurance, life expectancy tables do this. He suggests that a lot of people feel just fine until they read a life insurance report which says they should have been dead a

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year ago and accepting life's invitation to die, they begin immediately to pull away from life and in that process they do their dying. Now some people accept life's invitation to die very suddenly and very dramatically. Every four minutes an American attempts to take his life in suicide and every 15 minutes an American

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succeeds in the attempt. Every 15 minutes. In 19 of our states, suicide is now listed between number one and number eight in causes of death. There's even a national organization called Requiem Incorporated which will assist you in arranging your suicide in a way designed to fool the life insurance agencies. It's

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an illegal organization of course, but in at least one instance which I was able to document, they ran an advertisement and for that one advertisement run here in Southern California, they received over 25,000 responses. And most tragic of all, the age group in which suicide occurs most frequently in our society is

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between the ages of 18 and 25 years. That's a very sad thing to understand that there are so many people ready to accept life's invitation to die that they would take their own lives. But it's true. And some people accept the invitation to die not suddenly or dramatically, but rather extended over a

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long period of time. The end result is the same, it's just as fatal, it's just that they take a longer time to do it. The individual who gets discouraged, who gets his self-image tarnished, who sees no reason to continue, who sees himself as unnecessary, without point and purpose, simply opts out. He gives up his

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projects, he gives up his intentions, his goals. Perhaps he tries to drown himself in alcohol, or he spends all of his days popping pills in one way or another trying to to get out of life. He pulls down his colors as it were, he loses his grip on life, and he does that in perhaps very subtle ways. It might just

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be surrendering to the routine of work, coming home every night, planting yourself in front of the television set with a six-pack, and waiting for death to come. That may be the way it happens, but the spirit of it is exactly the same. It's quitting. It's quitting. Life invites us to quit, but too many people accept the

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invitation too quickly. I love you very much. Last Thursday evening I was sitting talking to a man, and I said I've never known a group of people in all of my life that I love like I love you. I preach all across this country and in other parts of the world, sometimes to very few and sometimes to great numbers,

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but there's no congregation to which I love to preach like this one. You have lifted me, you have supported me, you have encouraged me, you have chastened me, you have upheld me, you have done everything to me and for me which any congregation of God's people could ever do for their pastor. I love you very much, and that's

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the reason I must say to you this morning, and I must say to you again and again, my brother and my sister, it is always too soon for you to quit. It is always too soon for you to accept the invitation to die. Nothing in life can defeat you unless you decide to accept the defeat. Nothing in life can destroy

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you unless you are willing to be destroyed. As a Christian, it is always too soon for you to quit. Look at this scene on Mount Gilboa. Israel's being defeated. Saul's three sons have been killed. He is himself sorely wounded. In the midst of that circumstance, he decides to quit. He decides to take his

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own life. He asks his armor bearer to do it. The armor bearer won't, so he sticks his sword in the ground by the handle and then falls on the blade. We learn later in the Scriptures that this actually didn't succeed in killing him. He wounded himself most grievously. He could not possibly have lived, and he turns to a

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passing Amalekite, and the Amalekite finishes the job. Now that's a sad scene. Anyone who studies it with any seriousness can't deny that. But I want to say to you this morning that as I look at that scene, it comes singing across the centuries to me, not with a message of despair, but with a message of

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victory. Because you see, Saul quit, but he didn't have to quit, and he was wrong in the quitting. And I think if you look at the passage for a moment, you understand that that's so, and you can then apply it to your own experience. I would submit this, for example. Saul didn't have to quit because that in him

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which was royal was still his. I admit the scene on Gilboa was horrible. There was in it unrelenting dismay. I'm not trying to soften the details in any way, but I would point out to you that every gift, every treasure, every skill, every talent that God had given to Saul in all of his life still belonged to Saul on

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Mount Gilboa. He had lost not a single one of them. When he decided to quit, therefore, he quit in the face of all the royalty that was still his. If I started right over here in this corner this morning and went back and forth across the rows of this sanctuary one after another, and had you get up and speak to

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the whole group and tell the hardships and the sufferings and the difficulties and the brokenheartedness which you experience in your life, if we were to do that from the front row to the back while we'd be here till tomorrow afternoon, and when it was all over we'd have two overwhelming impressions. The

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first, we would be brokenhearted at knowing how much our brothers and sisters in Christ are called upon to bear and to suffer in their secret private lives. But secondly, we would be amazed at the magnificent heroism of people who carry awesome burdens yet never show it, who go through life

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radiating confidence and strength and inspiration to those who meet them while all the time bearing awesome burdens inside. I know you. I would venture to say I know you as a people better than anyone else in all the world. You have invited me repeatedly into the secret places of your lives. I know what many of

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you are carrying. And I say to all of the rest of you, you would be astonished. You would rise up in silent tribute and respect for the people of your number who keep on keeping on right at the moment when there seems no reason to do so. Why? Because these individuals understand what God has given them and

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they hold fast to that. They don't do what Saul did. They stand strong in the midst of the royalties God has written on their hearts. Read a story about a family that moved into a new suburb. That meant the youngster had to go to a new school, run the gauntlet of being the new kid, and every day for the first couple

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of weeks some bully stole his lunch. His mother said, "I'm going to call the school and straighten that out." He said, "Oh no, mother, please don't do it." One day he came home. His clothes were almost all torn off and his lips were bleeding. She said, "Does it I'm going to call the principal?" "No," he said, grinning through his broken

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lips. "No," he said, "I imagine that Jackie Gilman's wife's mother's already called because he looks worse than I do." She said, "Jackie Gilman? Why, he's twice your size. I don't believe you when you say you beat him up." And he looked at her and he said, "Mother, don't you know that I'm only little on the outside?" Well, there

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are an awful lot of people in this fellowship of God's people who may look little on the outside, but they stand strong because they're giants on the inside. They're loyal to that which is royal in them, which has been given them by God. They will not turn away from it. They will not surrender it. They will not

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quit in the face of it. A long time ago, my dad was a newspaper reporter in Washington, Pennsylvania, just a small town, and there was a big event in Washington that particular year. The world's greatest violin virtuoso, Fritz Kreisler, had come to perform, and my dad was given the responsibility of going

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to interview him, and he was scared to death. He tried to find the great man, finally found him in the local theater rehearsing, but he wasn't rehearsing on the violin, he was rehearsing at the piano. My dad hesitated to approach him and sat down way in the back of the theater. There was a little pussycat found

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him back there, and he was sitting there with this cat trying to get up enough courage to go down and talk to the great virtuoso. Kreisler, being the sensitive man that he was, stopped playing and looked up and said, "Someone's here. Who is it?" My father then had to identify himself, and he came down the

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aisle. Kreisler said, "Come on up here. If you want to talk to me, let's talk right here. Come on, you've got a job to do." And proceeded to give dad a wonderful interview, encouraging him, telling him to use the skills which were his, laid out the whole story, and when it was over he said, "By the way, young man,

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what's your favorite piece of music?" And my dad said, "Oh, my favorite piece of music is the meditation from Thais by Masnay. Mary Ann played it as an introit this morning." And he said, "Thank you." That was that. That night, dad of course went to the concert, and the great Fritz Kreisler played the violin as

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perhaps no other man has ever played it. And when he was done, he said, "Oh yes, I have one encore I'm going to play for a young man I met this afternoon." And then he played the meditation from Thais from my dad. Now I learned something about Fritz Kreisler just this last week I never knew before. He had started out

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learning to play the violin. His parents had gotten him going on it very early in life. They had paid for his lessons, but he never was very good. As a matter of fact, he not only was not a solo violinist, he tried to get into orchestras and couldn't even get the last chair in the violin section of very average

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orchestras. Finally gave it up and went into the army. It was a failure as a soldier. Tried a few other things and didn't succeed at those things either. Finally, he recognized that God had given him some gift with regard to the violin, but it was going to take an awful lot of stick-to-itiveness if he was going to

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capitalize on it. So he went to a noted violin teacher and he said, "I want you to teach me and I want you to teach me starting at the very beginning as if I've never learned anything about the violin at all and I'll make you only one promise. No matter what you require of me, I will not quit." And he went on to become

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the greatest violinist of his day and perhaps of any day. What's the lesson? The lesson is this. God has put things in you. No matter what circumstances surround you, those things are still there and as long as they are there, it is too soon to quit. And Saul was wrong there on Gilboa too because Saul forgot that

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there were still people who cared about him and the kingly in him. Saul had a great capacity for feeling very sorry for himself. In the 22nd chapter of 1 Samuel, he addresses these words to those about him, "All of you have conspired against me. None of you deals honestly with me. None of you is sorry for me." An

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infinite capacity for self-pity. That belonged to Saul and believing that no one cared, he quit. But he was wrong, you see. Dead wrong. We know that Israel cared for all. Israel went into mourning when he died and the people fled when they saw that the king was gone. Even his armor-bearer so loved him and held him

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in awe that when Saul asked him to kill him, he wouldn't do it. The word is feared but it means awe and a sense of reverence. He saw Saul as the anointed of God. He would not lay a hand on him. And David, when David and the valiant men under him got word that Saul had died, they went into a song of mourning which

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is so heartbreaking it still runs wet on the page of Scripture. And tonight when these 24 instrumentalists and this choir go into that lament at the very end of the oratorio, it almost breaks your heart. It is so intense. They missed him so. And after he was gone and the Philistines took his body and in an act of dishonor

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nailed it to the wall of their town, then it was that the men from Jabash-Gilead, that was that little village which you remember way back at the beginning of the Saul story, had been threatened by the Philistines and Saul went in and saved them. They didn't forget what Saul did. They gathered themselves together

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and under cover of darkness and at great risk, they went down to Beth-shean and they removed those bodies lovingly and they brought them all the way back and gave them honored and decent burial. Saul was wrong when he thought nobody cared. For there were many who cared and cared a great deal. The difficulty was Saul

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didn't care. Saul didn't care about anyone but himself. That's what suicide is, you know. Suicide is the extreme in selfishness. It's the most selfish thing you can do. It is to see yourself isolated from everyone else and then looking at yourself deciding to cancel all of your options. That's a supremely

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selfish thing to do. Whether you do it in an instant with a gun or whether you just opt out on life, whether you just forget that you were baptized, that there were parents who gave you bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh, that there are loved ones who have stood beside you. Oh, they may not be standing there now

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but there's still a society that needs you and the things you have to offer. You are priceless. You are beyond valuing. People care about what's kingly in you. Never, never believe that it's time to quit. Because there are people who need you. I learned just the other day of a young

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couple. He was a paraplegic. Paraplegic is one confined to a wheelchair or a bed, no use of hands or legs. And he had managed to build quite a business over the telephone. It was a business he operated from his home and the business grew so rapidly that it became necessary for them to move from the rural

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community that they lived in to a suburban area. And he didn't want to do this because he was very, well, very, very much ashamed of his state. There was no reason for him to be but he was this way and he didn't like sympathy and he didn't like pity and he thought that people were bored by him and that

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people were disturbed when he came around and people were made to feel sad when they saw someone in that kind of a state and he didn't want to see people. He never wanted to see people but moving into this new environment required him to be seen of people all the time. He tried to stay indoors but some of

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the neighbors got to know him anyway and about three weeks after they were there they announced that there was going to be a Halloween party for everyone on the block, a costume party, and he refused to go and his wife said, "You're going to go. These people have welcomed you and you're going to go." "I'm not going to go.

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What point would there be in my going?" "These people have invited you. They want you to be there. They care about your being there. You're going to go." "Well, it's ridiculous. You can put me in a costume if you want to but everybody's going to know who I am because I'll be riding in a wheelchair. How are you going

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to costume a wheelchair? How are you going to do that?" She said, "There's no way to costume a wheelchair but we're going. We're going." So she put him in a costume and she put him in his wheelchair and she wheeled him there and they walked through the door of that house into the family room and he looked around and

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every man in the room was in costume and every man in the room was riding in a wheelchair. Now, suppose he hadn't gone. Suppose he'd have said, "No one cares. I'll just stay home and feel sorry for myself while everybody else is at the party." He saw himself at the end of his rope. Nobody cares. If he'd have looked around

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a while he would have discovered what his wife forced him to discover. It wasn't the end of his rope. It was the beginning of it. So when you get to the place in your life and I tell you this because I love you, but you think you're at the end of the rope, tie a knot there and hang on because you are Christian.

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It's always too soon for you to quit. People care. One last thing. It was too soon for Saul to quit because, you see, God never quits. The Bible talks about a lot of people who were tempted to quit. Moses, he actually said, "Take my name out of the book of life." More than once he said that. Elijah, he went and sat under a

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juniper tree and asked God to take his life away. "I want to die." Job, he cursed the day on which he was born and damned the man that carried his death or his birth announcement. The psalmist, why their words go up to the heavens and down to the very depths of hell complaining about circumstances and

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asking for some way to get out of it all. Jeremiah prays that he might be given a place of escape from life. "Give me a hole to crawl out of the world at." The Bible always faces life really as it is. It does not cover any of the details. It faces the brutality and the hardness and the hurt of it. All of these individuals

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are recorded as doing just that, but none of these people quit. None of these people did what Saul did. Why? Because they knew if God is for you, who can be against you? They knew that God never quits. There was an older woman who went to see her pastor. Life had caved in on her. The one dearest to her was gone. She

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could find no reason to live. She talked to a lot of her friends without success. She'd even had some professional counseling and it hadn't profited her anything. So she went to her old preacher and he talked to her and he talked to her, but it seemed to have no effect. He encouraged her in every way he could

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think of and it had no positive effect on her at all, absolutely none. And he finally sat back in despair, looked at her. She sat there, her face looking like a lost battle, weeping, her arms thrown over the edge of the chair in complete dejection. And as she looked at him, she happened to look up over his shoulder

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onto the mantelpiece, and looking there, she sat straight up in her chair and she said, "That's it. I've got it now." He said, "What do you mean?" She said, "I mean there's nothing for you to say. There's nothing else you have to say. I've got it now. It's all right. What have you got?" She said, "Well, it's that plaque there on the

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mantelpiece. You see it?" And he turned and looked at a plaque which he'd had there for many years. On it, two words. "He remains." It was a brief translation of Lamentations 5 where the scriptures read, "But thou, O Lord, remainest." He remains. As long as he remains, then I can remain. She'd caught hold of this truth, you see,

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God never quits. Woodrow Wilson was one of the greatest presidents in the history of this nation, and when he went off for the peace conferences in Europe, he was cheered. But there came a day when the cheering stopped. That was the day when he asked the United States to enter the League of Nations. The battle

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broke his health. The climax came on May the 19th, 1920. He was so ill that he was in bed in the White House, unable to get up, in the great Lincoln bed. Word came that the Senate had refused his recommendation that we enter the League of Nations, and he wept. The only one who was with him was Dr. Cary Grayson, his

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personal physician. He was unable to sleep, tossed and turned. Finally, about three o'clock in the morning, he said to the doctor, "You see the Bible there on my desk? Get it and open it to 2 Corinthians 4, 8 and 9, and read it to me." The doctor went and got the Bible and opened it and read these words, "We are

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troubled on every side, but we are not distressed. We are perplexed, but we are not in despair. We are persecuted, but we are not forsaken. We are cast down, but we are not destroyed. And why were these things true for this man? Because he knew that God remained. God never quits." Oh, if only Saul had understood that. I don't

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know what a difference it would have made in the end of the story. Perhaps he would have still been captured by the Philistines. Perhaps they would have taken him into Philistia and made sport of him like years before they had done to Samson. But perhaps also if that had happened, there would have come a

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returning of faith to Saul as that had happened to Samson, and in the end a great victory for Saul as Samson had the great victory, pulling the temple down on Dagon and all of his worshipers. I don't know how the story would have ended, but I do know that if Saul would have turned to the God who never quits,

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that God would have stood with him. For you see, the scriptures say, "A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will never quench." And that's the end of the story of Saul. It's the story of many men, but it doesn't have to be the story of any man. You see, it's always too soon to quit,

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because what God's put in you is in you still. It's always too soon to quit, because there are people depending on you, caring about you, and the kingly in you. It's always too soon to quit, because God never quits. Bob and Ruth Foster belong to our church here. They went off to Casper, Wyoming, where Bob teaches in

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high school. A few months ago I received a letter from him in which he told me of how this last winter they were caught in a sudden ground blizzard. The car was stalled, no one knew where they were, there was no way they could get out. They thought they would freeze to death before they were found, but they happened

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to have in the car a cassette player and some tapes from our tape ministry, which they receive every week. And they picked out one titled "How to Fight Your Fears," preached from this pulpit, I think about a year ago. The message of that sermon was the same then as I'm sharing with you now. Use what's yours, understand

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who's with you, and depend upon God. They wrote to tell me that they had done those things, that they were saved, and that they praised God. Well, I want to tell you something. When a pastor gets a letter like that, he's thrilled beyond the telling of it. For you see, there are disciples who believe, and believing they

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live. And I stand on legs like iron when I see you go out as Christians who know because of Christ it is always too soon to quit. Let us pray. Oh God, at that moment, when life tumbles in, right then, fall upon us with such grace that we might rise in the midst of ruin and stand strong when

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nothing else stands. So fill us with confidence in thee that we might never be finally afraid, and always be in fellowship with you, the God who never quits. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]