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The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled "It's Always Too Soon to Quit." Let us continue in worship by hearing God's Word written as it is recorded in 1 Samuel chapter 31. "Now the Philistines fought against Israel and the men of

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Israel fled before the Philistines and fell slain on Mount Gilboa. And the Philistines overtook Saul and his sons and the Philistines slew Jonathan and Abinadab and Malchushua, 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

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his armor-bearer, 'Draw your sword and thrust me through with it, lest these uncircumcised come and thrust 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

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upon his sword and died with him. Thus Saul died and his three sons and his armor-bearer and all his men on 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

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cities and fled. And the Philistines came and dwelt in them. On the morrow when the Philistines came to 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

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their idols and to the people. They put his armor in the temple of Ashtaroth and they fastened his body to the wall of Beth-shan. 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

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from the wall of Beth-shan. And they came to Jabesh and burnt them there. And they took their bones and buried them under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh and fasted seven days. May God bless to us this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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Occasionally I come across, either in my reading or my hearing, truly memorable sentences. I make a note of them. Some of these are memorable in a comic sense. For example, just a few weeks ago I heard a person say, "The Arabs and the Israelis ought to sit down and settle these questions in a Christian manner." And then

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there was an occasion, again just a few weeks ago, in which I said to a man, "Do you believe in capital punishment?" And he replied, "Yes, I do, as long as it's not too severe." Sometimes these sentences are more serious in their nature. I came across one just this week. "People who say that things cannot be done should not

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stand in the way of those who are doing those things." And then this sentence, "We are all too ready to open the door to death." That sentence was written by Dr. Sidney Girard, the distinguished psychiatrist. He suggests that life is always putting a series of questions and challenges to us, and as long as we have

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the answers or the courage and the strength to confront these challenges and vicissitudes, we live and live successfully. But when the questions become too tough, when our self-confidence is shaken, when we begin to doubt any purpose in life or purpose in ourselves, then whether we know it or

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not, we open the door to death. You've seen this many times in older people. As long as they have a reason to live and the ability to cope with what life confronts them with, they have a beautiful life. But the moment that they become convinced that they can no longer cope and that there is no reason for

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them to continue, that very moment they start to die. And because there are enough lethal microorganisms in every one of us at any given moment to kill armies of individuals, it becomes very easy when a spirit is depressed and despondent for those microorganisms to begin their work in the person who is

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confronting death and to help that person, as it were, self-destruct. And the result is they're dying. Sometimes the death is very quick, a suicide. As you know, every four minutes an American tries to take her or his own life. Every 15 minutes, the individual attempting suicide is successful. In 19 of our

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states, suicide is amongst the top 10 causes of death. We now have an organization called the Hemlock Society to help people plan their own dying. And one of the bestsellers in our country this very day is a book by Derek Humphrey called Final Exit. It's a book that concerns how to commit suicide. It sells

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for $16.95 and over a hundred fifty thousand have been purchased. Even more youngsters than ever before are taking their own lives. Other people do not die so quickly and abruptly. They have instead what one might call an extended suicide. They retreat into alcohol or drugs. They become a workaholic. Or

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perhaps they mix these things together and in their despair they work all their days and then spend their nights with a six-pack of beer and the television set. And that is all. And that's just a long way to die. None of this of course has to be because for all of us there are up moments and down moments in life. For all

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of us there are times when we are licking life and there are times when life is licking us. The point is that it's always too soon to quit. Look at the experience of Saul. He's on Mount Gilboa. His armies are being defeated. His sons have been slain before his very eyes. And he chooses, mind you, he chooses, he

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deliberately opens the door to death. He asks his armor-bearer to slay him and the man will not do so. And so Saul falls upon his own sword and he dies. He quits. And it's a very sad scene, not only because of his death but because it's always too soon to quit. Whether you're talking about Saul or any one of us, it's

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always too soon to quit because the royal in us is still ours. I don't want to belittle the circumstances that Saul confronted. It must be a terrible thing to see your sons die. And he had been grievously wounded by the archers on the enemy Philistine side. And they were getting closer to him and his armies

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were in full retreat. But still I would point out that Saul chose to die to do what he did. And the fact is that if I were this morning to ask you seated in this room, those of you who know great pain and suffering and heartbreak, if I were to ask you to stand and to tell us all what you're going through, there

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would be two reactions when all were done. On the one hand, most of you would be overwhelmed with sympathy for these people who must endure so much, and most of you would be thrilled with their heroism because they suffer as they do and never breathe a word about it. And how is it that they are unable to do

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this? Because they understand that they belong to God and that God is not an Indian giver, that he has put royalty into their hearts by virtue of their being one with him through Christ. He gives them gifts and grace as surely as he created them from the dust of the ground. And knowing that, they will not

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quit. Fritz Kreisler, one of the great violinists of history, studied the instrument from the time he was very small. But when it became time for him to begin his professional career, he could not find a job, not even a position in

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the last row in the smallest orchestra in the land. No one wanted to employ him as a violinist, and so he laid aside the violin and he went into the army, and after the army, he undertook a number of other occupations. But there was always in him this gift of music. And so one day he went to his teacher and said, "I want

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you to teach me as if I knew nothing. I shall begin again, and I promise you, I shall not quit." And he went on to become one of the greatest violin virtuosos of all time. My friends, we cannot lose our gifts. We can only fail to use our gifts. And it's always too soon to quit, because there are those who care about us and

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who care about the royalty and the gifts that God has put in us. You will remember last week when we were studying another aspect of Saul's life together, that Saul felt that he was being conspired against by those who were closest to him. He says in 1 Samuel chapter 22 that no one is honest with him and no one, he says, is

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sorry for him. But that wasn't true. Look at what happens here on Mount Gilboa. When Saul says to his armor-bearer, "Slay me," his armor-bearer would not do it, for he held the person of the king in such reverence and awe that the very suggestion of such a thing filled him with fear. And after Saul had taken his

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own life and his body hung on the walls of Beth-shan, the men, the valiant men of Jabeth-Gilead, which was the first city that Saul freed after he became king, the first city he released from the Philistine yoke, those men traveled all night just to rescue that body and the body of Saul's sons. And they brought

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them back and they laid them away with honor. And we read in Samuel the mourning of David, the pages run wet with his tears, and all Israel lamented the death of Saul. But you see, Saul wasn't thinking of anybody else. He was focused utterly on himself, and that's what led him to extinguish the flame of his own life.

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I read about a man who was a paraplegic. He had a very successful telephone business, which he ran out of his own home, so successful that they had to move to a larger house, and he and his wife moved into a new neighborhood. It was the week before Halloween, and the people on the block held an annual block Halloween

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party, and they decided to make this a welcoming party for their new neighbors. And they invited them, of course, to come to the event. And this paraplegic man didn't want to go. He preferred the security and secrecy and privacy of his own home. He didn't want to be out where others would turn him into some object

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of pity. And beside, he said to his wife, "What costume could I wear which would conceal who I am? I'll be in a wheelchair." And his wife agreed, but she said, "If they've been good enough to invite us, then we must go." And so they went, and the party was held in the backyard of one home, and she was in costume, and he was

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in the costume in his chair. And as she pushed him around the corner of the house into the backyard where the other partiers had already assembled, they were all in costume, each and every one, and each and every man was riding in a wheelchair. And suddenly, this crippled one recognized that he'd almost missed

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the party out of his own self-pity. He'd been tempted to quit. And when we're tempted to quit, we need to look around because there are those whom we know or those whom we may not know, those who consciously or unconsciously, those whose lives some way in the providence of God are going to be woven into our lives in

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such a way that if we go, they are going to be hurt. That's one reason we must hang on, because others need us. So I say it's always too soon to quit. And finally, it's always too soon to quit because God never quits on us. Did you ever hear the word "Tully"? I was talking to a young couple that liked to camp, and they said

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they were camping out in the Tullys. I said, "We're in the world of the Tullys." Well, they edified their poor, stupid minister that Tully was one of the most remote areas in the Roman Empire, far in the north. And when the Romans wanted to suggest that someone was really far away, they described that person as being in

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the Tullys. In fact, they even had a phrase, "Ultima Tulli," which meant, "Beyond this, there is nothing." Well, on Mount Gilboa, Saul saw himself as being in the Tullys. With nothing else beyond. But he was wrong, because always with us and beyond us, in no matter what circumstance of life is ours, there is God. And God will

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never quit on us. Have you ever looked through the pages of Scripture and noted the names of those who wanted to die? Moses asked that his name be scratched from the book of life. He wanted to die. Jeremiah prayed that he might escape life. He wanted to die. Job cursed the day that he was born and damned the man who

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carried his birth announcement. He wanted to die. The psalmist cried out, "Oh Lord, take away my life!" He wanted to die. Elijah crawls under his cloak and under a juniper bush, and there he prays to God that he might surely die. But none of these did die. And why? Why is it that none of these finally quit? Because they

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all knew, down deep inside they knew, that God had never quit on them. Eric Fromm, the great psychiatrist, says that you can divide people into two groups, biophiles and necrophiles. Biophiles are those who love life, and necrophiles are those who are only too ready to open the door to death. The

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people of God must be, if they are to be at all like their father, biophiles, ones who want to know all that life has to offer and to experience what God is going to do with them through the life which is theirs. It's when you recognize this that the victory of your soul begins. I suppose the saddest night in

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the life of Woodrow Wilson was March the 19th, 1920, for on that day the Senate of the United States refused to vote our nation into the League of Nations, a goal toward which President Wilson had been working for two years. His health broken, Wilson was in the Lincoln bedroom in the White House, in the very bed where

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Lincoln himself had slept. His physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, was sitting to his side. At about three o'clock in the morning, Woodrow Wilson, this man who said that the greatest honor of his life was not being elected president of Princeton University, was not being elected governor of New Jersey, was not being

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elected president of the United States, this man who said that the greatest honor of his life was the day he was elected to be an elder in a Presbyterian Church. Woodrow Wilson said to Dr. Grayson, "Take my Bible from the stand, please. Open it to 2nd Corinthians 4 and read to me verses 8 and 9. We are

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hard-pressed, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but we are not in despair. Persecuted, we are not abandoned. Struck down, we are not destroyed." And after those words were read, Wilson replied, "I will not quit because God does not quit." Oh, I hear someone say, "Last week we noted how God said through Samuel that Saul

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was going to die there on Gilboa. Nothing could change that." Well, I beg to differ. In the first place, there are records in Scripture where God changes his mind, and in the second place, there are ways to die and there are ways to die. Samson died as he pulled the temple down upon him, but he died a death of strength and of

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testimony to his commitment to his God. He didn't follow his sword, and Saul should not have done that either. The Scriptures say of God that the bruised reed, the bent piece of grass God will not break, and the most dimly burning light he will not quench. Well, this is the end of the sad story of Saul. It is

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tragically the story of many, though it ought not to be the story of any. For if we hold fast to the truth that we are by creation and the grace of God and Jesus Christ and the gifts of the Holy Spirit the royal children of God, and if we pause to think for even one moment about the fact that there are those of whom we

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may not at all be aware or those of whom we are totally aware who need us, and if we remember that God keeps on keeping on with us, then we'll know it's always too soon to quit. There is a legend which comes out of the church in Europe. It's more than a thousand years old, and it's now part of many faith traditions.

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According to the legend, a great celebration was being held in heaven, and the angels and the archangels and all the saints who had gone to be with God and his angels in glory, the hosts of heaven and those who were part of the church triumphant, were gathered together for this great festival of rejoicing. And

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then someone discovered that Jesus was not there with them, and so they all went looking for him. And eventually some found him. He was standing at the gates of heaven, looking down the road, and they said to him, "Lord, why are you standing here looking down that long road?" And Jesus answered, "Why, I'm waiting for Judas."

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Judas was the only other suicide mentioned in all of Scripture, even for Judas, who quit. God was not ready to quit. So stick to the fight when you are hardest hit. It is when things seem worse that you must not quit.

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Let us pray. Our Father, we cannot measure the suffering of others, and therefore we will not scorn them because of anxieties or fears, discouragement, depressions, or despairs that settle upon them. We would pray instead that thou would give to

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them and to every one of us such a vision of our own glory as the children of God, of our own necessary part in God's providence, and of the faithfulness of our Father in heaven, that they will never, ever quit. We pray our prayer in the name of the waiting Jesus, amen.

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