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Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in Paul's letter to the Philippians. Please notice the fourth chapter, not the first chapter as listed in the bulletin, but the fourth chapter beginning at the verse numbered one. "Therefore, my brethren whom I love and

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long for, my joy and crown, stand firm thus in the Lord my beloved. I entreat you Odea and I entreat Syntyche to agree in the Lord. And I ask you also, true yoke fellow, help these women for they have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers whose names

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are in the book of life. Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say rejoice. Let all men know your forbearance, the Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God which passes all

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understanding will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned

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and received and heard and seen in me do, and the God of peace will be with you. And may the same spirit that inspired these words incline our hearts to their understanding. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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This is National Youth Sunday and on this day I am to speak to the young people of the church. And yet I will confess to you that this appears to me to be a very difficult assignment because there is such a wide gap between adults and young people today. Let me, speaking to you young people, give you

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three illustrations of what I mean. Think first of the home. When I was a boy families were generally larger than they are today and the extended family, aunts, uncles, grandma, granddad, they lived nearby, not spread all over the country as they are now. I can only remember one of my schoolmates whose mother and father

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were divorced. But one out of every three homes today is a single parent home. 44% of you young people are already living in homes where divorces have occurred or are in the process of occurring. Another thing about my house that was different than many of yours is that my mother was always there. Today

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three-quarters of the mothers in the land, 75% of them, have a job outside the home. So it's safe to say I think that the home was more protective in my day than it is in yours. For a second illustration on what separates us, look at the school. The school that I went to was looked upon as preparation for life

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in the adult world. But the school that you go to is most likely already hard pressed up against the adult world. I cannot, for example, think of a single instance of vandalism against the school which occurred while I was going there. Yet today schools spend one-half billion dollars each year, more than they spend

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on textbooks, to repair what has been done by school vandals. I cannot recall from my youth a single time when a teacher was assaulted by a student. But a hundred thousand American teachers were assaulted by students last year. Students themselves were assaulted at a rate of 85% more than in previous years. Rapes

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are up 40% since I was in school. Murder among students is up 18%. Robbery, 37%. The claiming of weapons from students, up 55%. I never, in all of the time I was in school, was asked to take a pill. No one ever came to me and suggested that I smoke grass. As a matter of fact, I cannot even remember being persuaded to go out

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and get drunk with the boys. Academic standards were quite different when I went to school also. Your rate of absenteeism from school today is 25% higher than it was when I went to school. And the A or the B that you get in class was not worth as much as the A or the B in my day because of academic inflation.

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And I think it's interesting to note that there is, by actual study, 50% less homework today than there was when I was in school. Now all of these things, including quite a change in curriculum, because your curriculum is far more eclectic and worldly than anything I ever knew, all of these things say to me

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that when I went to school it was a safe place. But you, in school, are put up against the hard ruthlessness of life. And it's interesting, I think, to notice that because there's less homework you have more leisure time than I had. And that brings me to my third illustration, which is television. I was 14 years old

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before our family got a television set. When I graduated from high school, only 13% of the homes in America had TVs. Today it's 98%. And you, as young people, make up the largest audience. If you are 16 years old, on average, you have already watched 20,000 hours of television. If you put that together into 24-hour days,

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it means you would watch television for 24 hours around the clock for 20 months. You actually, if you're average, spend more time with television than you do with your parents or your friends. And the shows that you see on television are quite different from the shows I saw. I saw things like "Father Knows Best," Jim

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and Mary Anderson, who lived in a middle America home and who settled all problems with smiles and wise words. And other popular shows were "Leave It to Beaver" and "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" and "The Donna Reed Show." You watch "The Golden Girls" and "Miami Vice" and "Hill Street Blues" and "Cheers" and

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"Three's Company" and "Who's Boss?" And these shows, you see, have a tendency to emphasize the seamier sides of life. I never saw that on television. As a matter of fact, these shows propose that virtue is under attack in every dimension of American life. Take violence, for example. When I was a boy, the violence that you

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saw on television was historic violence. I mean, it was gun smoke and Wyatt Earp and people who lived a long time ago, cowboys and Indian stuff. But today, the violence is that which occurs on the street. I don't know how much influence television has on each and every one of us. I'm not sure that anybody knows that.

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But I do know that you as young people are far more casual with brutality than I am able to be. Look at your music videos. "Monsters," "Sadism," "Torture," "Michael Jackson's Thriller," "Sticks," "The Twisted Sister." You could name more groups. And I'll be perfectly frank and say that when you see these things and are

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entertained by them, I'm a little bit scared inside. But by this time, my point is obviously quite clear. My home was different from most of your homes. My school was different from the schools that you go to. My entertainment was different from the entertainment that you know. So how can I speak to you? How

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can I say anything that will communicate with you? I'm reminded of the father who said to his son, "Now, son, when I was your age," and the boy replied, "Dad, you never were my age." And there's a lot of truth in that. Because the fact of the matter is, I never was a teenager in a world such as you inhabit. So I don't plan to

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offer you my words this morning. Instead, I want to go to the Scriptures. I want to go to what the Apostle Paul said to some people he loved very much. I love you very much, and so I want to echo now his words, which come not just from your generation or from mine, but because they are inspired by the Holy Spirit of God,

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come to all of us with the Council of truth. I think these words will span the gap. Paul wrote, "Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these

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things." Now Paul is saying here, in broad terms, three things. He's saying, first of all, that we ought to think about the things that last. He mentions truth, for example, and truth never dies of old age. What is true is always true. He mentions loveliness. Loveliness is a form of beauty, and beauty is an expression of

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truth. He talks about excellence, and excellence inevitably perseveres. What he is saying here is that we are to think on eternal verities. We are not to surrender to the tyranny of the moment, to the things that are here today and gone tomorrow, to fads and to fancies. We are to love God with all of our minds.

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That is, we are to dedicate our thoughts and our study to the pursuit of those things which are blessed of God. We are not to yield to every wind of doctrine that blows in our direction. Ideas compete, and we are to evaluate the ideas which come before us and decide only with those ideas which are winners. And

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that means one has to read, one has to study, one has to be alert. It discourages me when I learn that your scholastic aptitude test scores are declining. It bothers me when I encounter a situation in which I read that textbook authors are being told to make their textbooks easier so that the kids won't have to

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work so hard to master them. I want you to be involved in those things which will give you strong minds, not weak ones. Minds that will seek out the truth, and when they find it, latch on to it and never let go of it. You know, in George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss," there's a character named Maggie, and she's very

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depressed, in deep anxiety and despair. And one day she happens to find in her home a very old book, all tattered and worn. She'd never seen it before. She takes it down, and she discovers that it's Thomas Akempis's "The Imitation of Christ," which is the greatest book to come to us out of the Middle Ages. The

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pages, as I said, were worn and tattered, and as she turned them, she noticed that someone, sometime, had gone through the book and underlined certain passages. It was long ago. The ink had now turned brown. And she sat there and read the portions of the book that had been underlined by this unknown ancestor of

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hers, and she felt herself linked to truth. She felt herself linked not only to the truth of the book, which had come from centuries before, but she found herself also linked with those ancestors of hers who believed in and were committed to the truth of that book. She found herself tied to that which made

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her feel strong again, and she went on, renewed and re-inspired. Paul says, "Think on the things that last. Learn the truths that have come from across the ages and that persevere. Learn the truths that your fathers and your mothers of long ago lived by and died by, the things that are of good report." Now the second thing

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that Paul says is, "We are to think on those things which are greater than ourselves." See, none of the things that Paul mentions in this list is a selfish virtue. I mean, if truth is means anything, it is truth when you speak it to someone else. Justice means nothing if you do not dispense it to others. What is

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purity if purity is not expressed in your relationships with other people? What is the point of something being lovely if it is not seen by other people? Paul is speaking here of virtues which are not solitary. In other words, what he's doing is calling us away from me-ism. Me-ism. That, according to many

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scholars, is the most serious problem that you young people face today. Me-ism. Arthur Levine, who's a very noted sociologist and educator, wrote a report a few years ago for the Carnegie Council on Higher Education, and he called that report "When Dreams and Heroes Died." And he points out in this report that the

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problem on campuses, both high school and college, which he sees as being most serious, is students who are interested in only what benefits them. Me being interested only in what benefits me. He calls that socially divisive. He says it's an isolating disease. He said it breaks down the well worth and

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valuable idea that common people can join together in common solutions to their common problems. He says me-isms poisons the democratic process. And me-ism is very dangerous. When we see the increase in cheating in schools today, or when we see more and more students dropping out of organizations which are

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designed to help other people, what's commonly called student apathy, we are seeing me-ism. And it's a perilous thing. I remember hearing Dr. Robert Coles, who was chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard University, telling about how two summers ago he went to South Africa and he took his two

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sons with him. And the two sons taught in a public school in Soweto, which you will remember from your current events is a large black township in South Africa. And these two sons of his taught English and mathematics. And they talked to the black young men and women there in South Africa and were very much impressed with

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how these young people were ready to lay down their lives in order to win the freedom they do not have under apartheid. As you know, this is not an idle speculation. Many young people have already laid down their lives for this goal in South Africa. But the other students were ready to do it also. And

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his boys were very impressed with this dedication, what they were ready to do to win freedom for all of their people. Well, they came home. And shortly after they were home, Dr. Coles took his sons to a store where they were to buy school supplies for the next semester. And on the way they passed the county courthouse.

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And standing outside of the county courthouse were two friends of his sons. And as they rode by, his son said to him, "They're waiting for the court to convene. They've been brought up on charges of vandalism and drug sales." "You know, Dad," one boy continued, "it's really strange. These guys have everything. And yet

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they're being brought on trial for vandalism and drug sales. But the young black men and women that we talked to in South Africa have nothing. And yet they dedicate themselves with all the passion and purpose which is theirs to win freedom for their people." Men and women of the younger generation, let me say

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something to you which is a fact. An irrefutable, indisputable fact. The greatest and the noblest goals that have ever been accomplished in human history have been accomplished by individuals who weren't out for themselves, but who were out for others. Possessed with goals and purposes bigger than their own

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interior world that included others. Look across the roster of history. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Jesus, Paul, Francis, Gregory, Charlemagne, Louis Pasteur, Madame Turi, Albert Schweitzer, Father Damien, Johann Sebastian Bach, Pascal, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln. The list goes on and on. They fought bigger than

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themselves. And what Paul says to us in this passage is that we are to always be thinking in terms of ideas that are bigger than our inner worlds and include others as well. And the third and the last thing that Paul says is this, "We are to think on these things, these eternal verities which involve others as well as

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ourselves, and more than just think about them, we are to make them our own." What does studying truth mean if you don't tell the truth? What does studying honorability mean if you're not an honorable person? What does studying justice mean if you don't deal justly with other people? What does learning

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graciousness mean if you express no grace to others? What Paul is saying here is that study is to work itself out in action. We're not just to collect ideas like so much debris in our minds. We are to give ourselves to the pursuit of these ideas. You know, sometimes we see little children walking around in their

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parents' clothes, a little girl wearing her mother's big floppy hat or a little boy clomping around in his dad's shoes. And we kind of laugh. That's funny. Well, that is entertaining. But I'll tell you what isn't entertaining. What isn't entertaining is seeing young people holding to ideas which they've never

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really decided on and acted on for themselves. They're ideas which they have only inherited from their parents. I remember when I was teaching for a decade on a college campus. Again and again I would encounter young people whose only reason for being Christian was that their parents were. Whose only

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reason for being Democrat or Republican was that their parents were. All of their attitudes were nothing more than an echo, nothing more than a mimicking of that which they had seen in their parents. Do you know what you believe and do you know why you believe it? Is it by chance? Is it by convenience? Is it by conviction?

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If it's not by conviction, it is an anemic commitment. What Paul is saying here is we're to think on these things and to act on them personally. To make them part of a luggage of our lives. To carry them with us everywhere we go into life. Now you don't start out with these things full-grown. You can't start out

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with a whole encyclopedia of ideas and convictions. You start small and build from there. Are you building? Charles Reed in his novel "The Cloister and the Hearth" has a character named Gerard who's imprisoned in a high tower at Targo. And in his tower there's only a small window and one night an arrow comes flying

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through that window. He thought someone was trying to assassinate him. Then he finds the arrow and attached to the arrow is a thin thread of silk. And he pulls on that silk thread and eventually there comes up through the window a very small cord. And he pulls on that small cord and eventually there comes up

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through the window a stronger cord. And he pulls on that stronger cord and up comes a rope. And with that rope he makes his escape from the tower. Well this is what Paul calls us to do. To start out in the development of our convictions but to make those convictions part and parcel of our own lives. I don't care if

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the most that you can say today is "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." If that's all that you can say you really and personally believe, then start living that. And you will move on from that to convictions which in the end will strengthen and bless you and all those you encounter. So what Paul is

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saying to us is to think on the things that last, to think on the things that are greater than ourselves, and to act on the basis of those things. Love, justice, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is pure, whatever is gracious, whatever is lovely, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy

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of praise, think about these things. These aren't my words to you. These are Paul's words to us. And your generation and my generation are to be obedient in the pursuit of them. And not just for a little while. You know in the Brothers Karamazov, that great novel, the last chapter is called the healing chapter.

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It's a very emotional chapter, very beautiful chapter. And Alexander Wolcott, one of America's best-known literary critics and wits in the early part of this century, once wrote in a letter about that chapter in the book. He said, "It always chokes me up when I read it and fills me with love for mankind which

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sometimes lasts until noon of the following day." What Paul calls us to is a commitment that goes far beyond noon of the following day. He calls us to this kind of thinking, to this kind of sharing, and to this kind of acting, to giving ourselves to whatever has a good report, not for 24 hours, but until the sun sets

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for us, until the darkness of death descends upon us, and until we know that morning's dawn, which is the beginning of eternal life. For the word of Scripture is true. He or she that endures to the end will be saved. Let us pray.

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Oh God, we thank thee for our young people. We thank thee for their health. We thank thee for their beauty. We thank thee for their grace. We thank thee for their enthusiasm. We thank thee for their ideals. We thank thee for the challenges that they bring us and the challenges that they meet. We thank thee for all of

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those things that make them, not only our children, but thy children. Oh God, by thy Spirit, claim us and claim our young people and call us to give ourselves heart, mind, soul, body, to those things which by thy Spirit are called excellence. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen.

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