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The following message is preached by Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman from the pulpit of the historic First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The message is entitled "The ABC of ESP." The scripture reading of the morning is from the book of Nehemiah, reading a portion of

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the second and then of the fourth chapters. I begin at chapter 2, verse 1. In the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was before him, I took up the wine and gave it to the king.

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Now I had not been sad in his presence, and the king said to me, "Why is your face sad, seeing you are not sick? This is nothing else but sadness of the heart." Then I was very much afraid.

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I said to the king, "Let the king live forever. Why should not my face be sad when the city, the place of my father's sepulchers, lies waste, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?" Then the king said to me, "For what do you make request?"

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So I prayed to the God of heaven, and I said to the king, "If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, that you send me to Judah, to the city of my father's sepulchers, that I may rebuild it." And the king said to me, the queen sitting beside him, "How long will you be gone, and

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when will you return?" So it pleased the king to send me, and I set him a time. Moving now to the fourth chapter, I again begin the reading at the verse numbered 1. Now when Samballat heard that we were building the wall, he was angry and greatly enraged,

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and he ridiculed the Jews. And he said in the presence of his brethren and of the army of Samaria, "What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore things?

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Will they sacrifice? Will they finish up in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish and burned ones at that?" Tobiah the Ammonite was by him, and he said, "Yes, what they are building, if a fox goes

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up on it, he will break down their stone wall. Hear, O our God, for we are despised. Turn back their taunt upon their own heads, and give them up to be plundered in a land where they are captives.

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Do not cover their guilt, and let not their sin be blotted out from thy sight, for they have provoked thee to anger before the builders." So we built the wall, and all the wall was joined together to half its height, for the people had a mind to work.

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But when Sanballat and Tobiah and the Arabs and the Ammonites and the Ashtarites heard that the repairing of the walls of Jerusalem was going forward, and that the breaches were beginning to be closed, they were very angry. And they all plotted together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion

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in it. And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them, day and night. And then finally, picking up the narrative at the 16th verse, "From that day on, half of my servants worked on construction, and half held the spears, shields, bows, and coats

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of mail. And the leaders stood behind all the house of Judah, who were building on the wall. Those who carried burdens were laden in such a way that each with one hand labored on the work, and with the other held his weapon.

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And each of the builders had his sword girded at his side while he built. The man who sounded the trumpet was beside me. And I said to the nobles and to the officials and to the rest of the people, 'The work is great and widely spread, and we are separated on the wall, far from one another.

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In the place where you hear the sound of the trumpet, rally to us there. Our God will fight for us.' So we labored at the work, and half of them held the spears from the break of dawn till the stars came out."

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And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his holy work. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Once upon a time, long ago, in a land far away, there lived a man named Nehemiah.

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I came to know him intimately in 1971, and it happened in this way. It was early February of that year, and I was flying from Cincinnati, Ohio, where I had just completed a series of preaching revival meetings, back to my town of service, Los Angeles, California.

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We were about 30 minutes into the air when the pilot came over the communication system and reported that he had received word that there had been a major earthquake in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, and he would keep us apprised as to any other news he heard.

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I was very interested in that, because the church I served was in the San Fernando Valley. But the pilot didn't say another word about the subject for the remainder of the four-hour flight. When I arrived at the Los Angeles International Airport, everything looked to be normal.

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One of my associates met me, and as soon as I saw him I said, "Bob, I understand that there was an earthquake in the valley this morning where we had all affected." He rather brusquely pushed my question aside and said, "Well, let's get the luggage and get in the car first."

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After we had gotten the luggage and gotten into the car, he turned to me and said, "I'm afraid I have some bad news. The church has been destroyed." It took us about 35 minutes to drive to the church.

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We crossed the police lines. Our 13-story tower was shattered, some holes in it big enough for people to walk through. All of the office wing had been completely destroyed. Twenty-seven classrooms were destroyed.

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Our sanctuary, which was two and a half times the size of this one, had fallen in upon itself. Our church nurseries and libraries were gone. The total damages were estimated at $1.8 million. Those are 1971 dollars.

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We worked all day. The police, the fire personnel, other emergency assistants, the ministers, and many of the members of the church who, learning what had happened, came to take things and store them in their homes, for we had to get things out of the building as quickly as possible.

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At the end of the day, everyone had gone except the police who were guarding the area. I went across the street to a small Christian education building which we had there and which had not been harmed by the quake. I sat down on the porch of that little building and looked across at the broken and shattered

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structure which had been the house of God's people in that place. And the emotions of the day came to their climax, and I wept. And as I sat there weeping, the Spirit of God reminded me about Nehemiah. And every day since that time, or certainly most every day, I have thought about Nehemiah.

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For he was a remarkable man who had what I call ESP, extra-spiritual power. He was a Jew, but a man who served in the court of a Persian king, Artaxerxes. He received word that his hometown, the place of his father's, Jerusalem, had been utterly destroyed.

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The walls were broken down. And on hearing this, he wept. He knew that Jerusalem was being attacked by enemies within with all kinds of foreign intrigue, and also that battering rams had been used against its external defenses.

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And there grew in his heart a desire to rebuild the city of his father. And using his extra-spiritual power given him by God, he accomplished his goal. And as I sat there weeping that night in Southern California, it occurred to me that I would have to try to do what Nehemiah had done.

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I was called upon to keep together a congregation of more than 3,000 people, and at the same time to tear down an old building and to put up a new building. And so I began to study that very night the book of Nehemiah, the growth in faith of Nehemiah, the practice of the discipline of believing of Nehemiah.

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And I learned what I call the ABCs of his ESP, and I want to share those principles with you today. Why? Not because you are facing broken buildings and shattered construction, but because I

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know there are some who are hearing my voice, the walls of whose lives are broken down, people who are undergoing terrific external pressure or perhaps internal difficulties which are besetting them. In any case, they confront that which is broken or breaking, and they need to know the ABCs

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of Nehemiah's ESP. Let me share them with you now. A. Assess your situation. That is, take a moment to study the circumstances which confront you and also recognize that

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in that study you must look at yourself. Nehemiah sends people to reconnoiter in Jerusalem, and then he goes to see the Jerusalem situation himself. He gets the facts, but not only about Jerusalem.

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He also spends time in prayer and in fasting. That is, he examines his own needs. He looks at the situation, and he looks at himself. Many people, when they confront shattering circumstances, make the mistake of not taking

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time to look at all the facts. I heard about some baggage handlers who were taking the luggage off of an airplane, and a little animal cage came down the chute, and inside of it was a poodle, and the poodle was dead.

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They thought, "Oh, my, somebody is out there waiting for this dog, and when it comes through the door it's going to be dead. What are we going to do?" And they went and they looked, and they saw a dear older lady standing out there.

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And they thought, "Oh, she's the one it's going to. What will we do?" They spoke to the manager of the line, and he said, "Well, go out and tell her that the dog was delayed and will come in on the next flight.

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That will give us a little more time to try to solve the problem." So they went out and told her. She said, "That's fine, but please bring my dog to me as quickly as you can." They said, "We'll deliver him as soon as he arrives."

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And she went. Then they went back in and they called the attorney that represented the baggage handlers. They said, "What are we going to do?" He said, "Well, what kind of dog was it?"

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They said, "A poodle." "How big?" "Oh, very, very small puppy." "What color?"

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"White." "Oh, well," he said, "then you have no problem. If it's a very small puppy, it probably doesn't know its own name yet, and it probably hasn't been trained yet.

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So just go out and get a duplicate little white poodle puppy and take the collar off the dead one and put it on the live one and deliver it to the lady's house. She'll never know the difference." So they switched the animals and they walked up to the lady's front door with the little

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puppy in the little animal cage. And she answered the door, looked at the cage and said, "That's not my dog." And they said, "Well, how do you know it's not your dog?" And she said, "Because my dog was dead."

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Now you see, if they would have taken a moment to have ascertained the facts before moving, the results of the circumstances would have been much happier. But a lot of people, when they get into stressful circumstances, retreat into a kind of psychic anesthesia.

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They don't engage the problem, they seek to somehow isolate themselves from it. And my friends, believe me, knowledge is always a much more powerful weapon than ignorance. Yesterday we had a very happy service here in the sanctuary when Michael and Selma Hernandez renewed their vows taken initially 50 years ago.

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Not more than six weeks ago, Michael was very ill in Montefiore Hospital. A series of health problems were resetting him. But they went to the hospital and they went to the best doctors that they could locate. Sometimes the doctors didn't agree in what they were saying, and that meant that Selma

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and Michael and their sons and the daughter all had to focus their best thinking and gather all the information they could to wrestle with the situation. And during this time they were laboring to keep Mike's spirits up. One of the things that he was supposed to do was walk every day, and it was very tiring

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for him. But his wife outsmarted him. She would go in every morning with a little portable radio and she'd sit up there and she'd make him dance with her around the room and out in the hall.

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People came by and took pictures of it. I've seen some of them myself. But it kept him moving. And when these conflicting opinions came together, they made, after prayer and searching their

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own minds, the decisions that they thought were best. And it all led to a surgical procedure, which was a very serious one. But they went into it with knowledge, all the knowledge that could be gathered. They went into it with faith, all the faith that they could muster.

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And Michael came through that surgery and is well now, and was here for this happy circumstance yesterday and the events that followed after. And as we were walking out of this room, just about 5.30 last night, I turned to him and I said, "You know, I don't think you ever had any doubts that you were going to be here,

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because every time I'd ask you how you were feeling, you'd go, 'Give me that thumbs-up sign.'" And he reached down and he took my hand and he said, standing right there, "Reverend, when God is in your heart, all things are possible."

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A combination, you see, of using the best medical advice, devoting themselves to the disciplines of returning health, but mixing with that always faith, those things which God had imparted to them. That's the principle, you see.

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Assess the circumstance, the broken walls, yes, but also the gifts that had been given by God. Never forget the faith he has given you, and never forget the faithfulness with which he will watch over you.

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This is what builds extra spiritual power. The second principle, B, beware of negative people and their influences. There were three men there near Jerusalem, one named Sanballat, another Tobiah, and a third named Geshem, who tried to stop what Nehemiah was doing.

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First, they did it through diplomacy. They whispered that he was trying to organize a rebellion. Secondly, when that didn't work, they tried ridicule. Why if a fox runs along those walls they're building, the walls will crumble down.

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And when that didn't work, then they tried threats of nothing less than murder itself. The scriptures teach us that the tongue is like a raging fire, and the tongues of these individuals were trying to reduce the power that belonged to Nehemiah, his gift from God, they were trying to turn that to nothing but ash.

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But Nehemiah was wise enough to beware of those who brought such negativity. They're everywhere. We encounter them in every dimension of life, including, sad to say, the life of the Church. The Church is a place for sin-sick people, and therefore the sins that exist out in the

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world also exist in the Church. You hear people say sometimes, "I can't belong to a church because there's too much hypocrisy there." My reply to those people always is, "Please tell me about this group that you do belong

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to in which there is no hypocrisy, and I will come and join you." The Church is a human institution in large measure, made up of people with all the weaknesses that one finds in other places. The only difference is that the people in the Church acknowledge this and are seeking

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to overcome it. But Sanballat and Tobiah and Geshem are here. I know what it is to be whispered about. I've experienced the ridicule.

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I've had the lies told. I've known each and every one of these things, just as you have if you've ever taken a stand on any issue. My friends, believe me, no matter where you find yourself when you're seeking to rebuild

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the walls, there are going to be some people who want you to spend all of your days playing with the tinker toys of their past when you're trying to build an Eiffel Tower of the Spirit. Beware of these people. Do not fear them.

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There's nothing in all of the book of Nehemiah that suggests that he feared these people. They recently did an extensive study of fear at the University of Michigan, and they discovered that about 60 percent of the things that we fear never come to pass, that about 20 percent of them do come to pass, but they're already in our past.

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They're part of yesterday; nothing more can be done about them. About 10 percent of the things which confront us and which we fear are so petty that they're unworthy of serious attention. But about 5 percent of the fears that we have are legitimate.

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They are things about which we ought to be alarmed and concerned and on the defense. But then they said, "Of that 5 percent, there's only about half of them that you're really going to be able to do anything about." It's amazing, isn't it?

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People fear so many things, and yet it's only about 3 percent of those things that they can do anything about. So don't waste any of your time in fear. Be alert to what is going on about.

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Fear of those who would cover you with their dark negativity, but don't worry about it. You remember the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington in 1980. I flew over that crater in a helicopter about two years afterwards. It was an astonishing thing to see.

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It reminded me of that old game pick-up sticks, where you would hold the sticks, you know, at the beginning of the game, and you'd open your hand, and they would all fall out. And that's the way it looked, only there were millions and millions of trees all knocked down from the center of this great crater, which had blown away half of a mountain.

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And all the branches and leaves had been stripped from these trees by the power of this blast. It was an amazing thing to see. And the prophets of doom and destruction were all about. There were those who were saying that the whole economic future of the state of Washington

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was ruined for the next 100 years. And what has happened? Well, they've made millions of dollars selling bags of that ash which came up out of that volcano because it's a marvelous fertilizer.

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They've made millions of dollars selling photographs of the catastrophe. They've made millions of dollars with those helicopter rides that people take to go out and over and see the circumstance. They have found that the wildlife has come back in astonishing numbers, ten times more

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rapidly than they thought it would. The soil is now so nutritious because of what came out of the earth that trees and plants are growing with a rapidity which is astonishing. The salmon, which they thought were lost, have found new estuaries up to which they

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might swim to spawn. Millions of bored feet of lumber were made available to the loggers, and they didn't have to take the branches or the leaves from them. They were there, ready to be taken away.

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Even the cracks in the mountain through which the steam comes from the volcano had been turned into geothermal units which produce the power that drive great turbines and produce energy. All of these things, you see, came out of this circumstance.

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And where are the people who sat about and said, "The whole economy of Washington is lost for the next century"? Where are the Sanballats and the Tobias and the Gesshams? I suppose they're off giving their prophecies, dark and foreboding as they are, to somebody

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else who's willing to listen. Basic to extra-spiritual power is this. Assess the circumstance and yourself, and beware of the negative. And the seed is this.

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Remember that cooperation is the key, and not competition. First Nehemiah got Artaxerxes, the king, to cooperate with him and let him go back to Jerusalem. Then he got the people in Jerusalem to cooperate with him and to work together on the project.

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And they really did work together, for when the enemies began to gather, the cooperation amongst the people was an amazing thing to see. And they would have to be on guard and laboring at the same time, so one man would have his hod and his trowel and his chisel and his hammer, and the next man would have his sword

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and his spear and his bow and his shield and his arrow. And they would stand side by side. Out of their symbiosis came their success. They fought as "we," not "me."

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And that's what made the difference. Grant Teef has been the football coach at Baylor University for many years, and he was in the middle of a season which was not going well and very, very tired, and he said to one of his assistant coaches, "Let's take the afternoon off and go rabbit hunting.

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One of my former players keeps inviting me to come down to his spread and hunt rabbit there. Let's go down and do it and relax." The assistant coach said, "Fine," and they got in the car and they rode down.

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The assistant coach stayed in the car while the coach, Teef, got off and went up to the front porch and knocked on the door, and his former player came to the door. "Oh, coach, I'm delighted to see you. Wonderful to have you.

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Did you come to hunt?" "Yes, I did." "Well, that would be all right. Coach, you can come any time, but I must say I'm especially glad that you came today."

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"Why?" "Well, coach, I want you to do something for me. I know you're here for some pleasure, and this will just take a minute, but you can be a big help to me."

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"Well, what is it?" "Well, we just received word from the vet this morning that the mule that we've had for 22 years is dying, and it's in pain, and I've got to put her out of her misery, and I don't have the heart to do it, and, coach, I want you to do it for me.

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I'd like you to shoot my mule." And the coach said, "Oh, I couldn't do that to your mule." He said, "Coach, you meant a great deal to me in my life. You had great influence on me.

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I love you just as if you were my father, and I know that you will do it in the way it ought to be done." So the coach said, "All right, you just stay here." And he went back out to the car, and as he was going to the car, he thought, "You know,

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this is a good chance to have a little fun with my assistant coach." So he walked up to the car, and the assistant coach said, "Is everything all right?" And he said, "That ungrateful character, he's invited me to come down here all these times to hunt, so I finally come down, and what does he do?

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He tells me I can't hunt. He tells me he's too busy for us to hunt." "Well, I'm not going to go away empty-handed. I'm going to take my gun and go and shoot his mule."

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And the assistant coach said, "Oh, don't do that." He said, "Yes, I'm not going away any other way." And he reached in, and he took the gun, and he walked up, and he shot the mule. And then he turned, and he was walking back toward the car, keeping his face somewhat

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turned because he didn't want the assistant coach to see that he was laughing. This sermon continues on side two. While close to the car, two shots suddenly rang out, and he ran up to the car and saw the coach hanging out the other window with his gun.

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He said, "What are you doing?" And the assistant coach said, "I just got two of his cows. Let's get out of here as quick as we can." Some pretty tragic things happen when you don't cooperate, when there isn't an understanding

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there before action is undertaken. I had a young student who's just been graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary tell me a few months ago that sometimes when an assignment was given in a rare book of which the library might have had only one or two copies, the students would go and find that the first

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students that had gotten there would steal the book and take it to their room so that they could be the only ones who would use it. Or they'd cut out the key pages and take them to their room so that the other students would not have access to them.

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Now that's a shocking thing. A shocking thing anywhere, certainly a shocking thing in a seminary. But what is most dismaying to me is this. Anybody who would do a thing like this is altogether unfit for Presbyterian ministry.

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For the genius of Presbyterian ministry is cooperation. Oh yes, we Presbyterians will stand up and fight on an issue, and we'll lock horns and wrestle over it. But then we take a vote after we pray for God to speak through that vote.

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And Presbyterians, when they have heard that vote, then go along with it. They cooperate, unless it leads them to violate their conscience, unless they believe that by going along they will imperil the salvation of their own soul. But anything less than that.

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We cooperate. That's the genius of the faith. The scriptures teach us this. The early councils in Jerusalem described in the New Testament were councils in which

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theological questions and decisions with regard to mission direction were made, questions of orthodoxy and also of orthopraxis. And this influence has come down through the Church. The great creeds and confessions of the Church, symbolized by these banners in the chapel,

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every one of them is the fruit of cooperation and compromise. And it was this Presbyterian spirit that moved into the life of this country. I don't care which of our great documents you refer to, the Articles of Confederation or the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or any

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other major legislation, it did not spring full-blown from the mind of one person. There was always debate and argument, and then out of this came compromise and cooperation. And by cooperation, I don't mean being willing to go halfway. That's not what the Bible means when it speaks of cooperation, of caring love.

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Any marriage in which the man and the woman will each only go halfway is doomed to failure. Any friendship in which the friends will only go halfway will never succeed. Any church, any government, any task that you seek to undertake, to which you are committed only halfway, will not make it.

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The spirit of Christian cooperation and compassion and caring and love, that extra-spiritual power-type cooperation, means you go all the way, all the time. And out of this comes that which enables you to rebuild the walls. So I sat there that night in Southern California and wept at what I saw, and thought about

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Nehemiah and began to learn from him, to assess the circumstance in myself, to beware of the negative, and to cooperate utterly in the spirit of love. And as the pastor of that church, I tried to do those things. And the old building came down, and the new building, built at a cost of $2.6 million,

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went up, and the congregation grew and flourished during these years. Oh, Sen Ballot and Tobiah and Geshem were there. We were fought all the way on one issue or another, but on the day in which the church was dedicated, we had the pledges in hand to pay for the whole thing, all the payments

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that were due up to that time had been made, and we had $800,000 in the bank. And the text on which I preached then is the same text which I bring before us today. It doesn't make any difference whether you're trying to build a city or a church or a spirit, or whether you're trying to restore broken walls or broken buildings or broken hearts

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or broken souls. The necessary principle is the same, extra spiritual power. When it's yours, by God's grace, you can say what it says in Nehemiah chapter 6. So the wall was finished, and when all our enemies heard of it, all the nations round

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about us were afraid and fell greatly in their own esteem, for they perceived that this work had been accomplished with the help of God. The ABCs of ESP mean the help of God, and people who move in the strength of that help live happily ever after.

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Let us pray. Our Father, we pray for all of those who experience at any point in their lives or in the lives of those that they love, brokenness. The brokenness of sadness, the brokenness of unemployment, the brokenness of loneliness,

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the brokenness of illness, the brokenness of bereavement, whatever the brokenness is, O God, grant that by the testimony of thy servant Nehemiah, echoed here, these people might be led to the exercise of that extra spiritual power, which will enable them with your gracious help to rebuild the walls.

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To this end, we commit all our builders for Jesus' sake. Amen. [BEEP]