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[Music] Find Profit in Your Problems. A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. The scripture reading of the evening is from 1st Samuel, chapter 21, reading just three verses from the chapter. Verse 1, verse 8, and verse 9.

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"Then came David to Nob, to Ahimelech the priest. And Ahimelech came to meet David, trembling, and said to him, 'Why are you alone, and no one with you?' And David said to Ahimelech, 'And have you not here a spear or a sword at hand? For I have brought neither my sword nor my weapons with me, because the king's business required haste.' And the priest said, 'The sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom you killed in the valley of Elah, behold, it is here,

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wrapped in a cloth behind Ephod. If you will take that, take it, for there is none but that here.' And David said, 'There is none like that; give it to me.' And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. You pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen." Most of you, I am sure, are familiar with the song sung around 10,000 campfires across the years,

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"Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile." But I wonder if you are familiar with the fact that the man who wrote that song died by committing suicide. When he confronted the troubles of life, it was not enough to smile, smile, smile. Some of you, I am sure, are familiar with an old hymn. It appears in almost every hymnal.

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"This is my Father's world, I rest me in the thought of rocks and trees and skies and seas. His hand the wonders wrought." That song, too, has been sung about 10,000 campfires. But I wonder if you are aware of the fact that the man who wrote that song also died a suicide. In a time of difficulty and depression, it wasn't enough to feast his eyes on the wonders of nature,

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or to write a hymn, or even to think about the fatherhood of God. The plain fact of the matter is that most people don't know how to deal with disappointment, don't know how to handle defeat and discouragement and depression. They don't know how to make use out of abuse.

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They don't know how to turn a typhoon into a tailwind, or to gain some profit from their problems. So that's what I'd like to talk about for a while tonight. And I would like to talk about it specifically in terms of the experience of David, which we just read about in the scriptures. David's world is crashing in about him.

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The man he counted as his friend, Saul, has become his bitter enemy. He has become, in fact, an enemy of the state. And those who previously applauded him are now hunting him to kill him. David flees the palace, running, quite literally, for his life.

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And as he travels, he comes to a place called Nob. And when he gets there, recognizing that in his flight he has had no opportunity to bring anything with him, he asks the old priest of that place, a man named Ahimelech, "Have you any spear or sword here?" And Ahimelech replies, "I have only the sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom you, David, killed in the Valley of Elah.

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It is wrapped in a cloth behind Ephod. It's the only one I have. If you want it, you may have it." And David replies, "There is none like it. Give me the sword." Now notice, please, what David is doing. He is taking that which was previously used against him as a weapon by his enemy,

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and using it now in his own defense. He is taking that which was originally intended to do him harm, and he is using it to bring to himself blessing and the possibilities of a safe escape. He is taking what was originally intended to hurt him, and transforming it into that which is to help him.

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He is finding in an obstacle an opportunity. All of this is tied up in his saying, "There is none like it. Give me the sword." See, the plain fact of the matter is that every experience we encounter in life has two ends. One end may be sharp and hurtful, like the blade of a sword,

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but the other end is, as it were, the grip or the handle or the hilt of the sword. And we can grip any experience which comes along by its sharp end, thus hurting ourselves, or by the safe end, and transform that experience into something which doesn't hurt us, but which helps us. Let me illustrate that in this way.

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In the year 1464, the citizens of Florence, Italy, hired a man named Augustino di Duccio to carve for them a statue of David. He went and brought a great block of Carrara marble and began to carve away at it. But all he managed to do was ruin it. He drilled at it, sawed at it, broke it, but never succeeded in making anything beautiful or significant out of it.

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And finally, after some two years of effort, he died. For 25 years, the marred and scarred block of marble sat in Florence. And then the citizens hired a sculptor by the name of Rossellino to begin work on that same block of marble and to attempt to fashion from it a statue of David.

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And he threw himself with diligence into the task, but unfortunately did not have the skill to deal with it. And he only succeeded in making this great block of stone even uglier than it was before. It came to be known as the Ugly Giant. On August the 16th, 1501, the citizens of Florence hired a relatively unknown sculptor by the name of Michelangelo

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to take the Ugly Giant and to try to make out of it a David of beauty. Now, mind you, the commission by this time was almost a joke. The piece of stone had been so bored, so buffeted, so broken, so hacked at and chopped that there was nothing about it which seemed to give it any capacity of being redeemed.

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But Michelangelo was one of those people who saw in every situation not necessarily an obstacle, but an opportunity. And he set to work on that great marble block. And two years later, he produced the great masterpiece, David. It is a wonder of the world of art, a statue of David which stands 13 feet 5 and 3/8 inches tall.

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Michelangelo said, "Give me the sword." And he took it by the positive, the affirmative end, and made of it something at which sensitive souls still wonder. Now, it's interesting when you look at Michelangelo's statue of David, you notice that there's no representation of Goliath there. Usually in artistic representations of the conflict between David and Goliath, you see David standing on the head of Goliath or something of that kind.

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There's no reference to Goliath at all in Michelangelo's David. Why? He doesn't look back, you see, on the ugliness of the situation from which he has derived this beauty. He doesn't look back at the sharp point of the incident. He looks instead at that which is beautiful and triumphant which can be affirmed out of it.

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And he gives us a figure, not an Olympian figure, not some Apollo figure, but a tough young Florentine, a tough young Italian of the day. Someone very much like Michelangelo himself. You get the point, I hope. Ahimelech, the priest, kept the sword of Goliath wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod in his little sanctuary

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and periodically would bring it out and look at it and remember the enemy who had held it. David says, give me the sword and takes what was negative and makes out of it a weapon that has positive power and purpose. Just so the people of Florence kept this old ugly block of marble around and periodically looked at it with regret. But Michelangelo says, give me the sword and takes the obstacle and transforms it into a magnificent opportunity.

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David. Every circumstance that you encounter in life, no matter how disappointing or discouraging it might be, has two ends. An end that can hurt you and an end that can help you. Now, this isn't any kind of cheap pep talk I'm giving you.

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It's a basic part of the human experience and the human experience has been fashioned by God. For example, here's a man named Manot. He's trying to discover the values of various foods in feeding dogs and he goes broke. The only thing he can afford to buy the dogs is the cheapest meat of the day, which is liver.

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So he feeds the dogs exclusively on liver. And this is a defeating situation. But what does he do? He says, give me the sword. And he begins to study what liver will do to those dogs.

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And he notices a significant improvement in the quality of the blood of the animals. And it was out of that research that we learned, as human beings, when we have anemia and other blood deficiencies, to take liver shots. Or here's a man named Fleming, who is working with finely prepared cultures of bacteria. One night he makes a mistake and leaves a window open.

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And a breeze comes through the window of St. Mary's Hospital where he's working, and it carries with it certain foreign particles that infect these cultures. When he sees them, he's filled with dismay. But then, reaching out for the positive dimension of the problem, he says, give me the sword.

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He turns his microscope on those cultures, and he begins to notice that a certain mold is killing these bugs which have come through the window by the millions. We call his discovery today penicillin. Or here's a fellow who works in a plant over in Cincinnati, Ohio. It's a Procter & Gamble plant.

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And his job is to run a great big vat in which soap is prepared. One night he goes away and forgets to turn off the vat. And all night long the thing grinds. When he comes the next morning, the soap has become hard, the machinery is jammed.

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He's filled with discouragement and disappointment. He turns off the machinery, scrambles down into the vat, and begins to shovel the hardened soap out. He throws it through a window. He's had a truck pulled up outside, and he's throwing it into the truck.

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It so happens that it's raining. Some of the soap misses the truck and falls into a puddle. And this same workman looking through the window sees this. And seeing it takes hold of the experience by the positive end.

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He says, "Give me the sword." Because you see, when that soap hit the water, it did something that he'd never seen soap do before. That soap today we call ivory, the first soap which would float. Or here's a man who's trying to take the stickiness out of rubber.

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He conducts thousands of experiments. One night he smears sulfur on a piece of rubber and by mistake leaves it sitting next to a fire. He falls asleep. The stench and the smoke of the burning rubber soon wakens him.

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And he's filled with discouragement. But now he thinks to himself, "I at least ought to examine what has happened to this rubber in this process." He's saying, you see, "Give me the sword. What can I get out of this circumstance?" And as he examines it, he discovers a new process which he names after the god of fire, Vulcan.

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It is, of course, the process of vulcanizing. And the name of that man was Charles Goodyear. The first people to grow grapes in California were the Franciscan monks. They grew a grape called the muscat, from which we get the wine muscatel.

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Back in 1872, there was a terrible drought in California, and many of the grapes withered and shriveled up on the vine. The monks didn't know what to do with them. They sent them to the market with the hope that they'd get something out of them. A grocer saw them. He didn't know what to do with them either, but he decided to try and peddle them as Peruvian delicacies. Very quickly, they were sold out, and the sun-made raisin company had begun.

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Every one of these, you see, is an instance in which a person confronted a depressing, defeating situation, and then having confronted it, took it by the positive end and made out of an obstacle an opportunity. Now, you see, what David did with the sword, and what Michelangelo did with the stone, and what Menach did with the liver, and what Fleming did with the mold,

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and what that guy in Cincinnati did with the soap, and what Charles Goodyear did with rubber, and what that grocer did with those raisins, you can do. You can say to any obstacle that is before you, "Give me the sword," and taking it by its positive end, you can make out of it something which will profit you.

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Now, notice the second principle. When David says to Ahimelech, "Do you have a sword here?" Ahimelech says, "Yes, I have the sword of Goliath." And David says, "There is none like it. Give it to me." Now, when David says, "There is none like it," he's referring, of course, to the fact that it's a very large sword.

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Our calculations have shown us that Goliath was approximately nine and a half feet tall, which is not an unheard-of height in that time. This is probably quite accurate historically. And some of the weapons of Goliath are described in the Bible, and they're very, very large.

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So when David says about this sword, "There's none like it," he's undoubtedly reflecting on its size. And the thought is going through his mind like this, "If I can handle a sword of this kind, if I can get used to the weight and the awkwardness of a weapon like this, then any other weapon that I'm ever asked to handle will seem like nothing when compared to it."

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See, David understands that the greater the problem, the greater the benefit you'll get out of it. The tougher the problem that you deal with, the tougher the person you'll be. You've watched ballplayers before they step up to the plate. They don't swing just one bat, unless it's a heavily-weighted bat.

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Usually they'll take a number of bats in their hands and swing them. If they can handle all of the weight and the awkwardness of those bats, when they step to the plate with just a single bat, they'll be able to handle it with special agility. Well, it's precisely this that David is doing with the sword.

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Now, Michelangelo is generally regarded to be the greatest artist of all time. He was the supreme among sculptors. He was a magnificent painter. He was a superb architect. He was a very fine poet. He was the Renaissance man. The only one who really comes close to him in the annals of art is Leonardo da Vinci,

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and most are agreed that Michelangelo stands first as the greatest artist in history. Now, on more than one occasion, he was asked to what he attributed his skill, and Michelangelo always answered in the same way. He pointed out that in his whole life he had dealt with stone.

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He was born in the little Italian town of Caprese, which is high up in the Apennine Mountains. Just even today, it's nothing but a little cluster of stone houses, and when you're in the town, no matter which direction you look, northeast, south, or west, you see nothing but stone.

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Michelangelo told Vasari, who was his first biographer, "I took in my love of stone from the milk of a stonecutter's wife." All of his life, for 75 years, he cut stone, beat stone, loved stone, hated stone, finished stone. Sometimes he smoothed it, and other times he left it in great rugged masses.

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He said that he spent his life dealing with the stone of Alpine hills. And he also pointed out that sculpture was different from every other art in this. In every other art, you add something on, but in sculpture, you take something off. Now, when you add something on, you can always remove it.

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But when you chisel something away from the stone, you can never put that back again. And what Michelangelo was saying was, "I've dealt with the hardest materials. I've spent my life working with the most difficult of artistic subjects. And because I have worked with that which is difficult, I have been able to produce that which is excellent."

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The harder the task you take on, the more capable, confident, and powerful person you're going to become in dealing with it. That's the reason you see that there's many more suicides amongst rich people than there are amongst poor people. When you live a life that is full of nothing but whipped cream, you soon get very sick of it. But if you live a life in which you're wrestling, then life becomes challenging and exciting and dynamic.

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And out of that comes strength. The Italians, when they first saw Michelangelo's Statue of David, called it "Manu Fortis," which means "the strong hand." And the hands of the statue are immense and powerful. One hand is down at the side of the statue, and the blood vessels of that hand are filled with blood.

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The other hand is up at the statue's shoulder, and the blood vessels in that hand are almost invisible, because gravity, you see, has carried the blood away from the hand. Now, that's just a trifle. But perfection is made up of trifles, while perfection itself is not just a trifle. You look at the strong hand of David as Michelangelo fashioned it, and you get the idea that strength comes out of effort.

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This is the hand of a working man. It's not a soft hand. It's a hand that is used to doing battle with things. In the year 1504, eight young boys attacked this Statue of David by Michelangelo. They stoned it and tried to upset it.

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They were apprehended. Some said they did it just as a prank. There were others who said that they did it because it shamed them. They were, you see, when confronted with the magnificent strength of this statue, rather embarrassed by their own weakness. That happens to a lot of people.

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See, there are a lot of people who go through life like barnacles. Now, when a barnacle first comes into existence, it has the ability to swim. It can move about the sea. It can ride with the currents. It can move against the currents. It can glide with the surf. It can escape and seek to elude the denizens of the deep.

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It can have a life of freedom and excitement. But very early in its experience, it fastens itself to a piling or to a hull or to some other object and spends the rest of its time developing a hard shell, which isolates it from the difficulties of life in the sea. And then all of the course of its days are spent knocking food into its mouth with its hind feet.

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Now, you see, there are a lot of people who isolate themselves from the difficult moments of life. And by isolating themselves, they become not stronger, but weaker. "Give me the sword," says David. "There is none like it." And because David said this, he was a man of power.

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"Give me the block," says Michelangelo. "There is none like it." And out of this, because it's stone, because it demands excellence, he develops excellence in response. This last weekend, I was in a distant city, and I met a man who illustrates what I'm talking about. Some years ago, when he was in the military, he wakened one morning to find himself paralyzed from his chest down.

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They tried to discover what was the difficulty. They could find nothing. Within a few weeks, the paralysis had disappeared, but a few years later, it occurred again. And then a few years later, once more. And each time, surgery was performed to attempt to discover the difficulty.

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Eventually, they did learn the nature of the difficulty, a malformation of the blood vessel system in his spine. But unfortunately, they also discovered there wasn't anything that they could really do about it. And the third of these seizures left this man totally paralyzed on his right side. But when I arrived in this man's city, he met me at the airport, having driven his own car there.

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He helped me carry my luggage to the car. He then took me to the motel where he had made all of the arrangements in advance. He was an elder in his church and was heading up the spiritual renewal weekend which was going on, and he presided over every one of the services that were part of that weekend.

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Some of them were 7 in the morning, some of them were 8.30 at night. He was present and presiding in every one of them. Not only that, but the weekend was the most successful one that had ever been held in the history of that church. And this was principally so because of his efforts.

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In addition to all of this, this man is an outstanding husband and the father of three beautiful girls. And as if all of this were not enough, this man is the chief administrative officer of one of the most heavily populated counties in all of the United States. Now, this man is a Christian, and because he loves God and moves in the power of God,

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I think that no matter what he would have gone into, he would have known success, and he would have known those things which make him very precious to other people. This would have happened regardless of his being handicapped or not, but precisely because he is handicapped, there is about him an especially powerful witness.

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Everyone who sees him is challenged by what he is, and I ask him, "What is it like to go through the kind of life you live with one side dead?" And he said, "It makes me more sensitive. It makes me more compassionate. It makes me more tolerant. It makes me appreciate every blue sky I see.

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It makes me want to put blue skies into everybody else's life. It has made me a better man." What he is saying, you see, is big problems make big people. So the first two principles to remember about dealing with discouragement are these.

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Every problem has in it the possibility of profit. And second, the bigger the problem, the bigger the profit that can be derived from it. I want to hurry on to mention one more principle and then I'm done. You will notice that David, when he flees the palace of Saul and comes to Ahimelech at Nob,

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is immediately beginning to take the steps that are necessary to deal with his problem. In other words, he stops in Nob only long enough to catch his breath. But even in that brief moment, he's thinking. He wants to know what he can do. "Have you any food here that I can take with me?

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Have you a weapon that I can use?" In other words, he moves immediately to use any opportunity that's available. David understands that what you do not use, you lose. Now he's ready to move out and to move aggressively as he does because he has a confidence in himself.

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And he has that confidence in himself because he has confidence in God. David moves with the positive purpose which is his because he understands himself to be a child of God and to be moving within the will of God. This is the real secret of David's power.

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I don't suppose there's any artist in history who had a higher view of man than Michelangelo. It's very interesting to notice, for example, that in all of his works of art, he never depicts a man as wounded. He sees man in the same terms that the Bible does, as the crown of creation.

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And he never depicts the crown of creation damaged in any way. For example, in the most violent of all of his sculptures, the conflict between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, a sculpture which has great intertwining of figures and conflict is evident in every inch of it, there's not a single person that has been wounded or hurt.

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And it's also interesting to notice that centaurs are in this picture. Now you know what a centaur is. A centaur is a cross between a man and an animal. But when Michelangelo was called upon to represent centaurs,

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he concealed the animal part of the creature because you see to him, it was degrading to view a man as being in any way an animal. He always pictures man in the most magnificent terms. This is the reason he always represents man in the nude.

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The crepusculo, the twilight, you see a lounging figure of a man, perfectly proportioned in every way. Man is so beautiful to Michelangelo that he doesn't cover him up. He wants all the glory of man to be shown. He's the only artist, for example, to ever give us a representation of a nude Christ.

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It's interesting, if you go to see the statue of the nude Christ of Michelangelo in Rome, you'll find that the Roman Catholic Church has hung a loincloth, a golden loincloth on the statue, which points, I think, to a very sub-Christian and inadequate view of sex on the part of the Roman Catholic Church. But at the same time, one recognizes the majesty and the excellence of the statue.

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What Michelangelo is saying is, "I know Christ is divine and this is glorious, but I also know Christ is a man and being a man is glorious. So I will reveal him in all of his glory, his deity, and his humanity." And then look at his representation of David.

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Here's a youth, powerful, hard. He's not perfect. If you look at his face in some detail, you discover that the left eye is a little bit larger than the right eye, the lips are not symmetrical, the eyebrows are a little too heavy and shaggy,

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the forehead is compressed unevenly, the eyes are very liquid and fiery, the sinews of the neck are at the same time relaxed and tense. But you only have to look at the face to know that here is man, man as the creation of God. In the statue, the sling is very unimportant. You hardly even notice the sling. Why?

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Because Michelangelo understands that when David went out to do battle with Goliath, the important thing was David and David's dependence on God, not the sling. The important thing was a man and the God who made him. And this is what Michelangelo emphasizes in every work of art which is his.

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About 26 years ago this month, William Faulkner, the great American author, received the Nobel Prize for literature, and in his acceptance speech he said, "Man will more than endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,

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but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance." Now I don't know all that William Faulkner meant when he said "immortal." But to a Christian, to be immortal means this. You're made by God, you're redeemed by God, and you can be directed and guided in your life by God.

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And that means, when you understand it, that you can use every gift God has given you, and because you use them, you don't lose them. You know how you can't hoard the capacities which are yours? You say to yourself, "I'm not going to use my memory now because I want to save it so I can use it in my old age."

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By the time you get old, you won't have a memory. If you say to yourself, "I'm not going to use my muscles now, I'll wait until such a time when I need them more." Well, when you need them more, you won't have any muscles. You cannot save, you cannot hold to yourself.

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It is in expenditure, it is in running the risk of adventure, it is in using that you gain. And when you do not use, you lose. When you miss the opportunity, you miss it indeed. Think of Michelangelo and his chisel.

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Every time that chisel went into the stone, some part of the stone went away that could not be replaced. So every blow with the chisel was a risk. But Michelangelo was so confident, he used a three-bladed chisel. So he could make three cuts at the same time.

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And in some of his unfinished statues, you can see the marks of that three-bladed chisel. Now, where did he get the courage to cut like that? Why, simply in this. He understood himself to be a child of God.

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He understood himself to be gifted by God. So he would use those gifts. The three keys to victory over disappointment and discouragement in life are these. Every obstacle can become an opportunity.

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The tougher the problem, the tougher you'll become in dealing with it. And you must use or you will lose. Which is to say, you must be who you are. You must say, "There is none like it. Give me the sword."

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Why? Because I'm a child of God and I'm ready to move ahead in the strength of that. When Michelangelo finished his great statue of David, they had a big fight over where they should put it. And the debate occupies many pages in the town council minutes of Florence. Interestingly enough, they never asked Michelangelo where he thought it ought to be.

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Today, it's in the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, but it's somewhere else also. It's in the heart and the mind of any person who's ever stood and looked at it. It's been damaged across the years. It stood outside for many decades, and the rain and the snow wore away at the hair and also at the finish on the shoulders.

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In 1527, there was a riot in Florence, and someone threw a bench at it and broke the left arm off. And when it fell to the ground, it broke into three pieces. They were later restored, but if you're close to the statue, you can see where the repairs have been made. See, it isn't really important now, I suppose, what happens to the statue,

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because the conception of Michelangelo has been anchored in 10,000 times 10,000 minds. See, Michelangelo was a man who loved God. It's evident in everything he ever did. In the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he tells the story of the love of God.

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In the great dome of St. Peter's, he speaks of the majesty of God, but perhaps most eloquently and tenderly. In the next to the last sculpture he ever did, it's called today the Florentine Pietà. It's the statue which Michelangelo did for his own tomb. And it's significant not only because of that, but because he put himself into the statue.

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The body of the dead Christ is being lowered into the grave. Mary, an unknown person, are on the two sides. And in the center, holding the figure of Christ in his arms, is an old man who represents Joseph of Arimathea, the one who gave the tomb in which Christ was buried.

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But the face of Joseph of Arimathea is the face of the aged Michelangelo. It is as if he is saying in this sculpture, "I have loved my Lord in all of my life, and I love him too in my death. As I held him close to me in my living, so I hold him close to me in my dying.

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And as I offered to him every gift he gave to me, so I offer to him my grave, that even here he might have the preeminence." It was because he thought and lived like that, that Michelangelo rose to a greater height than any artist who has ever lived.

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After he carved the David as a young man, he carved many greater statues. But none of those statues summed the whole nature of man like the statue of David did. David is described in Scripture as a man after God's own heart. And that's what Michelangelo tries to show us.

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Man, God's child, reaching out for God's heart. He's alive. His neck is strong. His veins swell with blood. His belly muscles seem to contract. His chest moves as if it's breathing. The nipples are shrinking and erect. The whole body quivers.

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His one foot begins to move out from the pedestal on which the figure stands. And yet, with all this power in him, he hesitates. And the look on his face indicates that there's some conflict within him. It is as if he's not quite sure. Will he be everything God has given him the grace to be?

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Will he take all of life's swords and use them for goodness? Will we be children of God after his own heart? Will we be strong because we wrestle with great matters? Will we use our gifts so that we do not lose them?

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Will we be what Michelangelo saw as a possibility within every man? Victors because we're God's people doing God's will? Will we be the noblest fruit of the infinite creative genius of God? Let us pray.

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O God, carve into our lives the lines of love. Chisel out of us everything that makes us less than we ought to be. If our hearts are of stone because we do not know thee, by the power of thy Spirit, touch our hearts that they may become living flesh which honors thee.

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O God, thou hast made us but a little lower than the angels. Mend us, mold us, bend us, break us. But Father, make us worthy of that place in creation which thou hast reserved for thine own children. And the Lord bless you and keep you.

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The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you, by his Holy Spirit, the power to be everything he wants you to be. Amen.

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(water running)