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[Music] The Mind of the Master, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. First, the reading of scripture by Mr. Douglas E. Bond. [Music]

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Hear now the word of God as it is recorded in Paul's letter to the Philippians, chapter 2, beginning at the verse numbered 1. "So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any incentive of love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy,

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complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

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Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death,

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even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

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And may God the Father, who inspired these words, instill in us an understanding of them. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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It was Parents' Day at a small college in a small college town, and the local saloon, seeking to capitalize on the event, ran an advertisement in the school paper which read, "Attention, students! Bring your parents here for luncheon.

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We'll pretend that we've never seen you before." The college chaplain was very alert, and so the next day he ran an advertisement in the paper which read, "Attention, students! Bring your parents to chapel. We'll pretend we see you every week."

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There's no pretense about it. Whether you're here for the first time, or one of many times, or whether you're here every time, we're very glad you're here. It's the greatest of joys to be able to share with you in the beauty of worship,

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and to talk with you from this sacred desk. This morning I would like to talk with you about something very important, namely, the way we think. You see, the way we think influences the way we live. Now, when I speak of thinking, I am not talking about philosophizing.

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I'm not talking about deep and intense meditation. I'm speaking, rather, of the way we think as we view life, the general attention we pay to the course of our days. It is our habitual thought pattern that creates character.

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There is a very real sense, you see, in which each and every one of us lives in two worlds. We live in the world as it is about us, and we live in the world in terms of how we think about it. For example, three men walk into a forest. The first man is a poet, and as he looks at the trees,

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he might think of the great empires and kingdoms that have come and gone in the time it took those trees to tower toward the sky. The second man is a naturalist. He looks about him, he identifies by name the ferns, the trees, the moss that grows upon the trees.

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He hears the call of a bird, recognizes it immediately. He notices the scratch of a bear's claw on a fallen trunk. Things the poet does not see, he sees. But the thoughts the poet was thinking, he does not think.

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The third man is a lumber man. He walks into the woods, he sees the trees. Immediately he gauges their diameter, their height, and his mental muscle tells them how many four feet of lumber are available here.

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It is the same external world, but it is different for each of them because of the way in which they think about it. Cain and Abel lived in the same environment, but because their thoughts were different, their experience was different.

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Judas of Ascariot and John the son of Zebedee both walked with Christ and heard Christ and saw all the things that Christ did. Yet the outcome of their lives was totally different, one from the other. Why? Because of the way in which they thought.

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So I asked the question this morning, "How ought a Christian to think?" And I find my answer in the counsel of the Apostle Paul. Paul says to us, "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus." Paul says to us, in other words, that we are to have the mind of the Master.

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But that only pushes our question back another notch. For what was the mind of the Master? How did Jesus think? I think the scriptures teach us of this.

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And the first thing they teach us is that Jesus had a mind which was abandoned to God. In that passage from Philippians, Philippians 2, verse 5, Paul says, "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who counted equality with God not a thing to be hung on to,

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but emptied himself and took upon himself the form of a servant." Now what Paul is saying to us in this passage is that Jesus, fully divine, still was totally obedient to his Father, so obedient to his Father, that he laid away all the splendor of glory in order to be born in the straw in Bethlehem.

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He utterly surrendered himself to the will of his Father. He abandoned himself to God. That's the first characteristic of the mind of Jesus. Abandoned to God.

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There's an interesting illustration of this that comes to us out of the tradition of Zen Buddhism. There was a Zen master named Nan-In, and on one occasion he was approached by a student who wished to learn from him the principles of Zen. And this student began to talk of his desire and of his background

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and of his hopes and aspirations for the future, and he went on and on. Nan-In could say hardly a word because of the constant conversation of this student. Finally, the Zen master said, "Would you like a cup of tea?" And the student said he would.

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And the master put an empty cup in front of the student and began to pour tea into it. He filled it all the way to the top, and then he continued pouring so that the tea spilled out all over. And the young man coming for advice said to him, "You must stop pouring. The cup is already full. You can't get any more in until you take something out."

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And Nan-In looked at him and said, "So it is with you. You are so full of yourself that I cannot put anything in. If you wish to learn, you must come with an empty cup." A person who abandons herself to God is one who comes to God with a cup emptied of self,

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a cup ready to be filled and filled only with the things of God. There are many people who long for a deeper experience of God, and in search of that deeper experience, they search the scriptures, they read the lives of the saints, they join fellowship groups, they memorize Bible verses, they practice very strict devotional discipline.

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But all of these things give us but drops of God, fragments of God. These are people that hurry from door to door trying to find some little bit or scrap of God with which they can more fill themselves. They hurry from stream to stream trying to find a sip of God.

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When God is only to be found when one surrenders to the ocean of obedience, when one drowns oneself, throws oneself into total abandonment upon God. The knowledge of God is to be found in the experience of God, and the experience of God is only found in obedience to God.

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There are perhaps in our midst today some who yearn for a deeper piety. They wish they could bring their talents more into response to the things of God. When they hear Christians talk about the truths of God, they find themselves confused. The eloquence of the faithful leaves them far behind.

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To these people this morning, I would tell a great secret. I offer to them not a chart or a map or a compass of the spiritual realm. No, far more than that, I offer you the spiritual realm itself. It is not something that you will find in yesterday.

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It is not necessary for you to study the course of the centuries. You do not have to learn what God told men of old and then learn to repeat that flawlessly. It is far more important that you learn what God has to say to you, and you learn that when you obey.

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That is the secret, to obey. This does not mean that in every moment you will see clearly. Obedience to God sometimes brings you into great darkness, and this is because of the brightness of God.

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Now that may sound like a contradiction in terms, but in fact it is not. God is so bright, so brilliant, so scintillating in magnificence that when you contemplate Him in total obedience, it is like looking at the sun. After looking at the sun, when you look away, you can see nothing else.

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But when in obedience you so look upon the brightness of God, like the Apostle Paul struck down on the Damascus Road, you cry out, "Lord, what will you have me to do?" You see, when you are blinded by the beauty of God, then you need help.

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It is a positive blindness. It is a purposeful blindness. It is a blindness that reaches you to say, "God, if I don't follow you, then who can I follow?" And it's when that obedience comes that the knowledge of God is made full. The first characteristic of the Christian thinker is to have the mind of the Master,

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and it's a mind abandoned to God. Simone Weil put it like this. If it were possible to be saved by disobeying God, and to be damned by obeying Him,

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then the Christian would still choose to obey God. But there's a second characteristic of the mind of the Master. Jesus had a growing mind. We read in Luke chapter 2 at verse 52

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that Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man. Now, there are many who assume that when Jesus came to the earth, He brought with Him all of the omniscience of God, that He knew everything. That is not true.

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Jesus emptied Himself, laid aside His omniscience, and gradually took it to Himself throughout the course of His life. When Jesus was playing hide-and-seek as a teenager in the streets of Nazareth, the game was not a bore to Him because He always knew where everybody was hiding.

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When He went to the synagogue school, He didn't just pretend not to know when He sat at the feet of His teachers. No, Jesus grew in the development of His mind, grew so that people were astonished when He spoke with such authority,

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and they did not hesitate to call Him "Teacher," and the whole Old Testament was at His command, for quotation. The Christian mind, like the mind of the Master, is a growing mind. And it seems to me that the best way in which to nourish the growing mind is through reading.

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Abraham Lincoln was asked on one occasion, long before he achieved national political prominence, what the most important invention of the mind of man was. And he replied immediately, and quite correctly, I believe, "The written word."

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No other mechanism of man can leap across time or space as the written word can. In a book, you can move immediately to walk with Plato in Athens, or to understand the heart of Nicolangelo as he writes in Sonnets in Florence, or to walk the stage with Shakespeare in London Town.

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Books take you through time and space. Therefore, the Christian, it seems to me, should immerse himself in the world of books. I'd like to offer some very practical suggestions as to how you can make that world a richer one for yourself. First of all, I think it important that we always be reading more than one book at a time.

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Most of us have very short interest spans, and therefore, if you have a number of books going in a number of different fields, when you become bored with one, you can move easily to another. I always have at least five books going at the same time.

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A second thing to remember is this. Don't read just new books. I know some people who will pick up a book and look at the date of publication, and if it isn't recent, they put it aside.

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That's a very foolish thing to do. It's foolish because in the first place, most books that are being written today are quite worthless. As a matter of fact, if I had to choose between an old book and a new book, I would almost invariably choose the old book,

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because if the old book is still around, it must have proved its worth. We don't know about the worth of the new book yet. One then wants to sink oneself in the world of books, and not just new books, also old books.

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Something that's true is true no matter what date on which it was written. Here's a third thing to remember. Keep a list of the books you read. I've been doing that for 30 years now, and I find that's a very beneficial thing.

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In the first place, it enables you to measure how much you read in one year with other years. Are you keeping up to your own standards? Are you bettering those things? In the second place, it keeps you from riding hobbies.

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If you keep a list of what you read, you will learn whether you are spending too much time in some subjects and not enough in the other. Are you really reading on both sides of the questions of life? And the third benefit of keeping a list is this.

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It enables you to plan your reading. Reading needs to be planned. You don't read the same thing on a vacation that you read when you're at work. You don't read the same thing in the morning that you read in the evening.

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Many people tire of reading or never become interested in reading simply because they have not learned to relate their reading to where they are in their year and in their monthly and their daily schedule. So keep a list.

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Another thing to do is to read your own books. Don't read books from libraries and other people's books. The purchase of good Christian books is a good stewardship. And when you have such a book, you can market, you can argue with it, you can agree with it.

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You should always read a book with a pencil, and you can only do that when it's your book. This is the great benefit of reading over television. Television lasts but an instant. It's before you, and then it is gone.

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You have no opportunity to respond. With a book, you can enter into a running commentary. There are some books on my shelf in which I have written such personal things that I would only loan them to my very closest friend.

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Read your own books and mark them as the Spirit leads. And here's another thing. In your readings, include the great devotional classics. There are some people who not only have the great experience of God,

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but the ability to tell others about it. Search out those people. Read the Confessions of Augustine. Read the Little Flowers of St. Francis.

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Read the devotions of John Donne. Read the serious call to a devout and holy life of William Law. Read the Testament of Devotion of Thomas Kelley. Read the Imitation of Christ by Thomas of Tempus.

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Read the Cloud of Unknowing. Read the Journal of John Woolman. Fill yourself with these things. Also, a sixth suggestion, read biographies and autobiographies.

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Alfred North Whitehead, the great philosopher, said on one occasion that moral education is impossible without the vision of greatness. And the place where we get the vision of greatness is by thinking the thoughts of great people after them.

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You would be amazed at how much you can expand your own horizons when you stand on the shoulders of someone that's truly great. [Bell rings] Please turn your cassette to the other side.

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And one last suggestion. Stay away from speed reading like it was a plague. Speed reading is on the same intellectual level as rushing on roller skates through an art gallery.

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Reading is to be a slow and a deliberative and an assimilated process. Good growth is slow growth. And we are to have growing minds. That's one of the characteristics of the mind of the Master.

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And here's a third characteristic. Christ's mind was a serving mind. In John 13, at verse 34, we read, "Jesus, knowing that he had come from God

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and knowing that he was going to God, girded himself with a towel." Now, you know the rest of that story, how he washed his disciples' feet. But John is very careful to point out why Jesus did this. He did this because he understood his origin and his destiny.

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Now, you might think that this would have led Jesus to have had contempt for others. But exactly the opposite was the case. When someone has to do with God, they will be led inevitably and invariably to have to do with others.

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St. Francis was an aristocrat of the aristocrats. He came from an extremely wealthy background. But he began to do with the things of God. And one day, riding along on a horse, he saw a leper.

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Now, under ordinary circumstances, he would have immediately fled that scene. Instead of that, he got down from his horse, went over and threw his arms about this wreck of humanity. Why?

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Because he was becoming more God-possessed, he became more possessed with the idea of reaching out and serving others. The ethic of Jesus is a serving ethic. Now, I know there are those who claim Jesus, but who deny his ethic of service.

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They will say, for example, that this ethic of service he gave, he only gave because he thought he was going to return very quickly. He certainly would have never given out such an ethic if he knew he was going to be such a long time in his return.

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Or they say that this ethic was all right for the rural environment of the first century in which Jesus lived and taught, but it is not appropriate for a metropolitan man today. Or they will say, one must remember that in those days, Christ and the followers of Christ were a small minority.

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That ethic is all right for a minority, but you cannot expect to run a whole nation of foreign policy and economic policy on the service ethic of Jesus. Or they will say that the ethic of Jesus was ahistorical.

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That is, that he came to speak to us about our spiritual lives, but not about the practice of our daily ethical experience. Or they will say that his life was a life of such grace and mystery that we cannot begin to imitate it, and therefore his ethical instruction may be ignored.

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But the whole testimony of Scripture runs against these people. The enunciation of Jesus, his birth in the manger, his commissioning at his baptism, his testing in the wilderness, his sermons, particularly his first sermon, which was the platform of his entire campaign,

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the prayer he taught to his disciples, the center of his teaching, the theme of most of his parables, the discipleship as being defined as taking up your cross and following him, his epiphany in the temple, every one of these things speaks to this truth,

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that the test of spirituality, genuine spirituality, is service. In the Old Testament it is put like this. "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?"

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And in the New Testament it comes to us through the living word himself. He says to us, "He who would be the greatest among you, let him be the servant of all." And be careful you understand what the definition of the word "greatness" is in that sentence. There's a lot of difference between greatness and mere cleverness.

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We, for example, go to a circus and watch the juggler as he keeps the balls in the air and bounces them off the floor and throws them behind his back, and we think to ourselves that he's remarkably clever, but we would never, if we use the word correctly, call him great.

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To be clever is to have a talent or skill and use it in an adept way. You might do that with balls as a juggler, you might do that with ball bearings in a factory, you might do that with billions as a financier, as a captain of industry. And that kind of thing can take great skill and talent, and it deserves to be respected and applauded.

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But that is mere cleverness. Greatness is when cleverness is put to the purposes of God. That is greatness. And we are called to that, to be the glove on the hand of God.

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When Niccolò Paganini, the great violinist, performed for the first time in Paris, he performed at the Royal Opera House, and all of French aristocracy was there. And as he glided out onto the platform with that strange walk which was his, he began to tune his violin, and one of the strings broke, and the audience laughed.

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And as he continued to tune, another string broke, and then another string broke, and the audience was in consternation. But Paganini, looking at the audience, gave it one of those grim smiles which he did. And then, placing his bow to a single string, played music that was almost divine.

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Some of us are one-string people, and some of us have many strings. But none of us will make the music that is divine until we become the instrument in the hands of God, until the infinite genius of the maker and sustainer of everything begins to pour his melody through us. And the song is always the same. It's the song of service.

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And what happens to you if you do these things? What happens to you if you abandon yourself to God? What happens to you in a country where the average citizen reads less than one book a year if you give yourself to serious reading and study?

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What happens to you if you abandon the rat race and try to beat everybody else out and instead give yourself to helping those who need to be helped because of their sin or the sins of others? What happens to you if you do those things? Well, you'll be called insane.

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And that's exactly what they said about the mind of the master. In Mark 3, verse 21, these words, "And when his friends heard him, they went out to seize him; for they said, 'He is beside himself, the eccentric Christ.'" "Eccentric" means to be off-center.

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"They called him mad." Now, lots of people claim Christ. Labor claims Christ. Management claims Christ. The poor claim Christ. The rich claim Christ. The right claims Christ. The left claims Christ. The middle claims Christ.

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In the midst of all of those, there are some people who, rather than claiming Christ, are claimed by him. People who live claimed by Christ, abandoned to God, with growing minds and sacrificially serving spirit, are all branded the same by these other people. They're called religious cranks. They're called fanatics.

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They're called crazies. They're called bleeding hearts. But this leads me to ask a question. What is sanity? It seems to me that the definition of sanity is relative to the time and the circumstances in which one lives.

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And it also seems to me that a Christian cannot accept the definition of insanity that is given by a society so ungodly that it looks upon Christ and his followers as being off-center. Thomas Merton wrote of Adolf Eichmann, that Nazi fiend who murdered so many in the ovens of the German concentration camp. And he pointed out that when Adolf Eichmann was examined after being captured by many psychologists,

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every single one of them determined him to be sane. Oh, certainly, some of the Nazi leaders were psychotics, but most of them were not. On the contrary, they described Adolf Eichmann as being level-headed, as being in self-control, as being prudent, as having a deep sense of loyalty, a profound desire to cooperate.

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Now, if that is what the world calls sane, if Adolf Eichmann is sane, then it's the sane people of whom I'm most afraid. For they're the people who sit at the control boards of our missiles, ready in a moment's notice to bring upon the whole face of the earth a festival of destruction.

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I'm not worried about some psychotic pressing the button. We've got all kinds of barriers to see that no psychotic ever gets to the button. But I don't worry about him. I worry about that calm, level-headed, prudent individual who will hear the word come down the chain of command

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and, without ever pausing to ask a question, will cooperate and blast the whole world to hell. The one we call sane. When spiritual values are irrelevant, then the definition of insanity of such a society is also irrelevant. We live in a world that must question its own presuppositions,

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in a world that needs to laugh a bit at its own arrogance and ridicule its own pretensions, a world that calls Christ insane, a world that calls the people of Christ insane. That world is mad. And that's the reason the Christian deserts that world, isolates himself from that mentality,

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closes with everything he's got, mammon and the principalities and powers. He lives like Bonhoeffer and Niemöller lived in Germany when they stood against the Nazis. He lives like Kagawa lived in Japan, offering himself a sacrifice, or like Blind Gadada in Ethiopia. He gives himself as Livingston gave himself in Africa, or Schweitzer with his three PhDs at Lamborghini.

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He offers himself as Merton offered himself in Georgia, or Augustine in North Africa. They called Luther crazy, and they called Calvin crazy, and they called Knox crazy, and they called Count Zinzendorf crazy. They ridiculed Martin Luther King as one who was insane.

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They said Roger Williams in Plymouth Bay was confused in his thinking, and John Bunyan, the world branded, as out of his mind. And John Bunyan wrote in his journal in his prison cell, when he thought he was going to his death, "At first I was afraid of dying, but then I became ashamed of my fear and I laid it aside.

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Now I am ready to climb the scaffold and blindfolded leap out joyfully. And if God saves me good, and if God does not save me, then I shall still be venturing with him." That's the man they called insane. To have the mind of the master is to have a mind abandoned to God,

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a mind growing in wisdom, a mind anxious to serve, and a mind the world will call disturbed. And that's what I wanted to share with you this morning. You know, Alexander Wolcott, the great wit and critic, wrote a letter to a friend once. He'd just read the great healing chapter in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov,

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and this is what he wrote to his friend. "It always chokes me up and fills me with a love of mankind, which sometimes lasts all the way till noon of the following day. These words this morning have not been great, but they are the fruit of my heart

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and my earnest prayer is that they will find residence in you and live there far beyond noon of tomorrow." Let us pray. [Prayer is offered]

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O God, bless this simple witness in your name, for Jesus' sake, for our sake, and for the whole world's sake. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you.

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The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves his peace.