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[Music] (dramatic music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music)

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- The Yoda Factor, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. (dramatic music) - Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's word as it is recorded

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in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, the first chapter, beginning the reading at the verse numbered 26. For consider your call, brethren.

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Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world

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to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not,

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to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteous,

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and sanctification and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, let him who boasts boast of the Lord. And may the same God who illumined the hearts

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of those who wrote these words send light into our hearts that we might understand them. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son

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and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I think it is generally agreed that Carl Sagan is America's most well-known and probably most distinguished astronomer.

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Sagan has recently suggested that we are part of the generation which stands on the threshold of the last frontier, the frontier of outer space. I think this is true,

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and I think the truth of it is evidenced by the fact that we are all fascinated by our new steps, small as they might be, out into the universe beyond our world.

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One of the things that intrigues me the most about this new frontier is that it has about it a democracy that no other frontier has had. When Columbus set out for the new world,

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he took with him a very small company of men. When those intrepid explorers fought their way across the Arctic or the Antarctic, they were a very small group indeed.

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But when we sent our space cameras out to Saturn recently, that Lord of the Rings, the grandest and most spectacular appearing of all the planets in our solar system,

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when we sent that space vehicle to fly by and photograph what it saw, literally within minutes after those pictures were taken, they were available to all of us on our television sets.

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We saw them just moments after the scientists who had planned and executed the mission saw them. We are then very much there with regard to this frontier. And I think that contributes to our fascination

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with the new avenues of adventure that are opening to us. And all of this, of course, explains why we are seeing so much science fiction on our bookstands and in our motion picture theaters.

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Space flights of fancy seem to be without limit in this time. Now, the most popular expressions of science fiction, of course, are the two films, "Star Wars"

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and its sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back." More people have seen these films than any other films that have ever been produced. George Lucas, who thought up these stories

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and developed them for the cameras, says that in the "Star Wars" chronicles, he is trying to search out ultimates, to ask questions like why we are here,

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where we are going, how big things are, who and what God is. Now, whether Lucas succeeds in probing these questions wisely or not, I leave to you,

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one thing is certain, what he does, he does in a marvelously entertaining way. And I have found that as I have viewed these films, there have been moments in the stories

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when my spirit has been stabbed into consciousness of some marvelous truths, truths that might very well come from the pages of Scripture. We just read the words of Paul,

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that God sometimes chooses things that are foolish to shame the wise, and things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are.

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That happens to me when I begin to think about, well, Luke Skywalker, for example. Now, here's an attractive young spaceman

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who has a great desire to be a Jedi Knight. Now, the Jedi Knights are the Knights of King Arthur of that galaxy long ago and far away. And the Grand Master, the wisest of all the Jedi Knights,

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is a character named Yoda, who seems to be a kind of Lancelot, Galahad, and Ser Gowan all rolled into one. And Luke is told that Yoda lives on the planet Dagobah,

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and that if he will go there, Yoda will teach him how to be one of the noble Jedi Knights. And so Luke goes, accompanied only by his little android friend, R2-D2,

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and they land on the planet only to discover that it is a vast miasma, a bog, a stinking, smelling swamp with fetid, heated temperatures and slithery reptiles all about.

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The plane on landing is sucked down by the swamp beneath the murky waters. And Luke and R2-D2 are lucky to make it to the shore. Luke comments that he cannot imagine

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why Yoda would live in such a place. And as he and R2-D2 are discussing this, they suddenly become aware of the fact that someone is looking at them.

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That someone is a little creature about two feet high with dark green skin, a few thin strands of long white hair, two arms and two feet, three toes at the end of each,

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a marvelously expressive pair of ears which seem to convey a vast amount of wisdom and feeling, and two very large eyes which are remarkably young when measured against the wrinkled face

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of which they are a part. Luke asks this creature if he will take him to Yoda. The creature replies, "Why do you wish to see Yoda?" Luke answers, "Because he is a great warrior."

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The little creature answers, "War never made anyone great." Luke says, "Will you take me to Yoda?" The creature agrees to do so, but then there are a series of delays.

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He wants to eat first. He wants to try to get away with stealing a flashlight from the space vehicle. He tries a whole series of things,

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all of which frustrate and irritate Luke and R2-D2. They want to get on to meet Yoda, and these delays, these interruptions frustrate. Finally, Luke presses home the question,

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"How long will it take us to get to Yoda? "How long, how long, how long?" And the little creature answers, "Not long, not long, "not long."

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And in the way he says it, Luke for the first time grasps that this little creature is in fact the great Yoda, the 800-year-old master of the Jedi.

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Now, when that truth was revealed to me on the celluloid, I immediately had two reactions. The first one was that this was altogether reasonable. If there are civilizations on other worlds,

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the climatic conditions there will be quite different from what we know, and the evolutionary process might very well create creatures just like Yoda. The second thought that came to me was,

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"How much this parallels life as it really is, "for how many times we encounter things "that we see as interruptions, "things that are holding us back, frustrations,

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"only to discover that these frustrations "and interruptions become moments "and instances of great value." See, the fact is God often sneaks up to us

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in seeming interruptions. He uses weak moments to shame what seem to us to be stronger times. He uses things that seem to us to have no value

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to give us very precious gifts. You're a very unique person if you haven't had the experience of running into some frustration or interruption

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which really bothered you, just as Luke was bothered by this tiny creature, only to discover that out of that, which really annoyed you, came that which was very good.

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Do you remember the day when the children came to see Jesus and the disciples saw them as interruptions and pushed them aside? Jesus takes one of those interruptions, little children,

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puts the child in the very midst of them and says, "If you do not become one of these, "you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven." Out of an interruption,

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he makes one of his most beautiful and sublime teaching. A couple of weeks ago, I had a telephone call from a young man I'd never met. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

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He told me that he grew up in Philadelphia. His parents gave him a Christian upbringing, but when he reached an age of independence, he decided to separate himself from them

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and from that upbringing. And he not only separated them in terms of his behavior, he also cut them off in terms of going to the other end of the continent, to Dallas, Texas.

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And there he lived a lifestyle which was dissolute and the extreme. He was married and divorced. He slipped into the alcohol scene

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and then into the drug culture and the very hardest kinds of drugs. And all the time that he was living this life, so utterly unlike what he had been brought up to know,

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his parents, every week, would send him a tape recording of one of my sermons. They're distributed by a company on the West Coast. And he hated to get those tapes.

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He never listened to a single one of them. He threw them all in a box in his cupboard. And he said, "I planned on collecting enough of them that I might be able to sell them somewhere for something."

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And he said the worst thing was that occasionally his parents would call and they would say, "Did you listen to that tape we sent you?"

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And he said, "I saw that as an interruption into my lifestyle and I resented it with everything that was in me." And then that lifestyle of his tumbled in.

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And he lost his job and he lost his health and he lost his hope. And one night, he pulled out of the cupboard that box and he played those tapes one after another,

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hour after hour after hour. And somehow the Holy Spirit moved through those tapes and brought him to a renewed confidence in Christ. And he found a fellowship of other Christians

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and he moved with them away from alcohol and drugs and into a new job. And after these things had happened, he called me just two weeks ago to tell me all of this,

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to thank me for the ministry, and to give me his address so that if I was ever in Dallas, Texas, I could stop by to say hello. The sentence in the conversation that fascinated me

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the most though was this. He said, "You were a real pain until you became a blessing." Well, for Luke on the planet Dagobah, Yoda, that 24-inch high creature with green skin

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and three toes on each hand and each foot, who kind of hopped when he scampered. Or for Gary in Dallas, Texas, who was encountered by another evolutionary eccentricity

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who was tall and as round as the moon and had no hair on top and a lot in front, and who was going around and around and around on a tape. For both of these, God came to them

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in a moment of interruption. I call part of that the Yoda factor. But go back to the story. Knowing now that this little creature is Yoda,

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Luke begins his instruction. He is trained in the lore and legend of the Jedi, how to use a laser sword, and most important, how to bring himself into accord with the force,

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the great power and energy of light. And at one point in the series of lessons, Yoda takes him to a cave, a very dark cave, dark not only from the absence of light,

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but dark because there is evil there, and cold, cold not only because it is without warmth, but because it is utterly without tenderness or love. "What's in there?" Luke says.

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Yoda replies, "Only what you take with you." And with those words ringing in his ears, Luke enters the cave. The darkness is so intense

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that he feels the weight of it on his skin, and slithering things move across his face. It is as if he is moving into a gigantic sticky web. And suddenly, in the midst of the cave and the web,

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he finds himself face-to-face with Darth Vader, who is, of course, the personification of everything that is evil in the "Star Wars" stories. Darth Vader lunges at him, but Luke leaps to one side

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and brings his laser sword down on the helmet of Darth Vader severing his head from his body. And when this happens, the body of Darth Vader immediately disappears,

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but the head still in the helmet rolls around on the ground and finally comes to rest at Luke's feet. And as it stops, the helmet cracks open,

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and Luke, looking, sees not the face of Darth Vader, but his own face. And suddenly he recognizes that the evil he has been fighting is the evil in himself.

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And as he stumbles from the cave, he remembers the words of Yoda, "You will meet in the cave only what you take with you." - Please turn your cassette to the other side.

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- To the other side. - Thank God for those Yodas in our lives who help us to see our real selves. The evil that we hide within us,

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the selfishness that is there, the cowardness that is there, the pridefulness that is there. We resent this.

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We abhor it when those who have this Yoda factor bring us into a confrontation with that which we not only seek to conceal from others, but even from ourselves.

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One of our former graduates who's with the Peace Corps in Gabon wrote me recently and told me of how he watched a native of that country

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eating rotten wheat from the bottom of a filthy bucket. And seeking to dismay this old man and to lead him away from doing such a thing, he went and got some of this wheat

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and put it under the lens of his microscope and focused the scope so that all the crawling vermin could be seen, and then invited the old man to look through the scope.

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And the old man did. And he was immediately enraged and proceeded to smash the microscope into pieces and went back to eating the wheat.

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When people put us under the scope, when people bring us to those moments when we see ourselves as we really are, we oftentimes resent it and seek to repel it.

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When we ought to thank God for it. Because every road back to God begins when you learn how far you are from him. You remember the story of David in the Old Testament?

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He commits adultery and then seeks to cover it up with a murder. And God sends to him one with the Yoda factor, Nathan. And Nathan preaches a sermon

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about one who commits a theft and then a murder to cover it. And David says, "Who has done this thing?" And Nathan answers, "Ato, haish, thou art the man."

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That was a painful moment for David. But David would not get on the road back to God until he was brought face to face with how far from God he'd come.

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Or in the New Testament. Do you remember that time when the woman comes to the well and meets Jesus and Jesus says to her, "Go and bring your husband."

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And she says, "I have no husband." And Jesus says, "That is true "for you have had five husbands "and the man you are living with now is not your husband."

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And she tries to change the subject to some theological issue. But Jesus, who's been called by a poet, the hound of heaven, pursues her.

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That's the Yoda factor. He chases her into the cave of her experience where she has to face the Darth Vader in herself. That was necessary

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because every road back to God begins when you know how far from him you've come. Thank God for people who have this ministry in your life. Their foolishness destroys our secret and treacherous wisdom.

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Their simplicity penetrates our clever self-deceptions. Their weakness shames our false strength. It's the Yoda factor. Now just one more glance at the story.

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Luke is anxious to get his spaceship out of the swamp. And Yoda challenges him to use his powers of concentration in alignment with the force, the energy and power of life, to levitate the ship and to bring it to the land.

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Luke says, "I'll try it." Yoda replies, "Do, do. "This is not try, do." Luke tries.

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He brings the concentration that is his to bear without result. "It's too big," he says. Yoda answers, "Size means nothing."

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And then bending his ears toward the plane and extending his little three-toed hand and getting a very winsome look on his face, he lets the force flow through him.

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And the plane, you will remember, rises from the muck majestically, moves gently to the land and settles there. And Luke says, "I don't believe it."

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And Yoda answers, "And that is why you fail." Now, George Lucas says that Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are to give us a vision of what the world ought to be.

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The world I see in those films is not the world that I want. But when Lucas speaks to us through this word of Yoda about faith, about believing, I am at one with him.

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Frankly, I don't like the words faith and believing anymore. They come so easily to our lips that they have become glib and without meaning. I prefer the word commitment, not just trying.

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As Yoda says, "Not trying, but doing." That's what commitment is. It is going beyond belief to action. It is that which is not calculating and thought out,

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but was filled with a passion and an impulsivity which comes from an utter confidence in God. I've been helped to understand this by Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian physicist chemist,

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who in his book, Personal Knowledge, says that the greatness in a person cannot be measured or understood by science. It comes, rather, from what he calls

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unfathomable intimations within us that call us to a leap of faith and commitment. We are, because of the accidents and the circumstances of our lives,

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not equally able to do all things. But, he says, we can all commit ourselves to the utmost that we know. And in the doing of that,

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we enter into a kind of sacramental character which binds us in what he calls a holy oneness. Polanyi did this in his own life. He stood against the Nazis when they came to power.

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He later turned away from his career, an internationally renowned one in science, to give himself totally to philosophy. What he says is that in the pursuit of the goal,

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utterly, we discover who we are. My number two nephew, the one who bears my name, is presently a freshman at Purdue University. Before he went off to school, we decided in the family

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that it would be well for him to spend some months in the woods. We think it important that the kids know nature and the things of nature.

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So, we shipped him off to Wyoming for six months in the woods there. During his time there, he shot a 990 pound elk. The antlers on this creature are so large

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that when the bony base is put on the floor, I can extend my arms at shoulder height a full 47 inches in order to be able to grasp the ends of them. On Christmas afternoon, Kurt Bruce sat down with me

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in front of a fire to tell me of how he got that elk, of how he was in the woods alone, tracked the elk for one hour, saw it, shot, hit it, but was unable to stop it.

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The creature ran to the top of a high ridge and Kurt Bruce pursued him. There were 24 inches of snow on the ground. That took another hour.

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At the top of the ridge, he got another shot, hitting the elk again, but again, not stopping it. The elk crashed down through the valley to the edge of an ice covered river.

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He went out upon the ice, but his great weight broke a hole in the ice so that he went through, but his strength was such that he swam,

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and as he swam, broke his way through the ice to the other shore. Kurt followed him, walking out onto the ice at another point.

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Now, Kurt is five foot nine inches tall and weighs 150 pounds. He thought he could cross the ice. The ice broke under him.

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He fell into the water. He threw his rifle to the shore and felt the current pulling his legs out from under him, reached out, grabbed a bush, which tore loose from the shore,

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reached out, grabbed another, which held fast. When he got out of the water, his pant legs immediately froze to his skin, but he picked up his rifle,

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went farther up the stream to a ford, crossed, and pursued the elk for another hour into some elk grass, which is some trees, and there in those trees, he shot the creature again,

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was charged by the elk, shot again and again, and then the prize was his. It was a one-hour walk back to the road where his friends found him and took him home,

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his legs like wooden stumps, utterly without feeling and with great pain. When he finished the story, he said to me, "Uncle Bruce, you know, as I look back on it now,

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"it seems impossible. "I never would have planned it that way. "In fact," he said, "if I would have thought about it, "I never would have done it,

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"but I didn't have time to think about it "because I was doing it." And that's the sentence, and that's the lesson out of the adventure.

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I hope my young nephew will never forget. Thinking about trying it is not commitment, but doing it, being so caught up in the doing of it that the goal overwhelms you

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and the passion for the goal captures you, that is commitment. Faith is not some sophisticated theological obscurity. Faith is simply living in accordance

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with the possibilities. It's giving yourself to the habit of the pursuit of the adventures of God. It's prayer and humility turned into action.

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Ore et labore. It's of this that Jesus speaks when he says, "According to your faith, "be it unto you."

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Yoda puts it this way, "You do not believe, that's why you fail." Well, one of our students, when he learned I was talking about the Yoda factor tonight,

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said, "Well, that's just a kind of a gimmick." He excused me in advance of perpetrating some homiletic hopscotch. And I plead guilty.

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He reminded me of a friend of mine who's on the faculty at the University of Southern California. He doesn't believe that there are any people

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living on other planets. He says, "We know that many other heavenly bodies "are far older than our own. "And if the evolutionary method which God uses here

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"has been used by him there, "then it is reasonable to assume that creatures "who live there are far more advanced than we are. "And therefore, they ought to have been in contact

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"with us a long time ago, if there's really anyone there." Well, I'm not so sure about that. There are some people who think they already are in contact with us.

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In our midst. I don't believe that. But those people out there, who's to say they'd be interested in us?

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Or perhaps they have a communication process which is so advanced we can't begin to understand it. Some savage living down in the Amazon basin is surrounded every moment of the day

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with telegraph and radio signals, but because he is utterly unsophisticated, he does not know of their existence. Just so, perhaps we are surrounded constantly

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by the messages of other civilizations from other worlds and are utterly unaware of it. Maybe the radio impulses we receive from those pulsars and quasars,

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impulses we do not understand have in fact a technological origin. Maybe there is some ethical system in the other galaxies which says, "Don't play around with infantile civilizations

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like the earthlings." Maybe we've been quarantined by all those people to see whether we're gonna kill each other or learn to live together in peace.

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Maybe when you become sufficiently sophisticated in the things of space, you don't go gallivanting off to other planets. Maybe our reaching out to other worlds

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is simply a mark of our planetary rude adolescence. Maybe they just don't want to pollute the cosmos. Who knows? I don't know if there's a Yoda anywhere,

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but I'm grateful that a film speaks to me of how God ministers to us in our interruptions and calls us in those ministries to a recognition of our own sin

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so that we recognize how far we are from God and thus start hurrying home. And gives to us a picture of faith which reminds us that faith is commitment

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that captures you so that you follow it and give yourself to it in utter confidence and infinite hope. I got all that from Yoda.

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First Corinthians 1:27 says, "God uses the foolish to shame the wise. "God uses the weak to shame the strong. "God uses what is low and despised

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"to shame the powers that are. "God uses the things that are not "to bring to nothing the things that are." Well, in the light of words like those,

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it seems to me there's lots of room for a little fellow like Yoda. Let us pray. Oh God, deliver us from being so stuffy

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that we can't be simple. From being so caught up in the facts of life that we cannot be taught by its fictions. Deliver us from being so utterly charmed by what we know

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that we remain unfascinated with what we do not know. Interrupt us. Intrude yourself into our lives. In those moments, remind us of our weakness and our sin

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so that we will cling all the more tightly to Thee. And being confident in and of that grip, give to us a great commitment. We want to have faith

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that's forceful for Jesus' sake and for our sakes and for the whole world's sake. (faint static)

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