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[Music] What to do when folks laugh at you. A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] Now may I share with you from God's Word, reading from the Psalm which is numbered 119,

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and beginning specifically at the verse which is numbered 49. Psalm 119 at verse 49. "Remember your word to your servant, for you have given me hope. My comfort in my suffering is this, your promise renews my life. The arrogant laugh at me without restraint, but I do not turn from your law. I remember your ancient laws, O Lord, and I find comfort in them. Indignation grips me because of the wicked

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who have forsaken your law. Your decrees are the theme of my song wherever I lodge. In the night I remember your name, O Lord, and I will keep your law. This has been my practice. I obey your precepts." And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to the understanding of them, and to Him be the honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That's a lie. The plain fact of the matter is that words can hurt, and they can hurt very deeply. I came into this world fat. I weighed nine and three quarters pounds when I was born,

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and as far as I know, I've been gaining weight ever since. I was the fat, awkward, uncoordinated kid on our block. And I can remember all of those times before I was big enough to hit a ball far, or strong enough to run in front of some kid who was carrying a ball and offer to him some kind of interference. I can remember many times before that

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when I was the last kid picked in pickup games because of my weight and my awkwardness. I suppose that ten thousand times before I was ten years old, I heard these words, "Fatty, fatty, two by four, can't get through the bathroom door, so he does it on the floor." Followed by gales of laughter.

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What do you do when folks laugh at you? Now, unless you're some kind of frustrated Bob Hope, or unless you'd like to be the king of clowns like Emmett Kelly in the circus, then you know the unpleasantness of being laughed at, of making a mistake in public, some blunder in your speech, a language you were supposed to have mastered a long time ago,

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some particularly ignorant thing that you do, and unfortunately do it very conspicuously, brings the laughter of others. And it is unpleasant to be the object of that laughter. Far more seriously, you offer a word of witness for Jesus Christ and are ridiculed, or you take some stand for the things of God and people poke fun at you.

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What do you do when you're laughed at like that? In December of this last year, I was visiting in one of the congregations of Pittsburgh, and I met a man who had held an executive position in a prominent firm for some 26 years. He told me that he had just been fired from his company.

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They were instituting a new advertising policy which he thought to be fundamentally dishonest. And so, using the executive position which was his, he took a stand against it. He thought he might be able to alter the policy. Instead, he was fired. He said to me, "It was not being fired that hurt me.

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It was not the unemployment, even when I have two kids in college. It wasn't all of those years of seniority being lost." No, he said, "What got me was that when I took my stand and said I was taking it because of my faith in Jesus Christ, they laughed at me."

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What do you do when folks laugh at you? The psychologists tell us that the three most destructive human emotions are fear, guilt, and doubt. When people laugh at you, you can become afraid. When people laugh at you, they can make you feel very guilty about what you have done which has prompted their laughter.

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And when people laugh at you, they can make you have very deep and fundamental doubts about your own worth. So the question is not a frivolous one. What do you do when folks laugh at you? Well, one thing, of course, that you can do is laugh with them.

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There are some things that we do which are comic. We do make some rather silly mistakes sometimes, and laughing at ourselves can humanize us and can help to ease the embarrassment or the difficulty. It is not, you know, sub-Christian to laugh.

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There are some people who seem to believe that if you have Jesus Christ in your heart, you cannot have a smile on your face. But that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the Christian faith. You heard perhaps of the deacon who was to meet a minister who was coming into town by train. He'd never seen the man, and he was trying to pick the minister out from the crowds coming off the train,

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and he walked up to one particularly sour-looking individual, and he said, "Are you a minister?" And the fellow looked at him and said, "No, it's my indigestion that makes me look this way." We sang here in worship just a few minutes ago one of the great hymns of the church, "All people that on earth do dwell," and in that hymn are the words, "Hymn, serve with mirth. His praise, forth tell."

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Back in the 16th century, some Calvinists were so upset with that idea that they changed the words of the hymn so that they read, "Hymn, serve with fear. His praise, forth tell." But that's to sell the faith short. The scriptures themselves are full of humor. They talk about the laughter of God.

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God has so made us that we alone in all creation can laugh, and God has surrounded us with some things to laugh at. Have you ever seen an ostrich swallow or a whole tree full of monkeys? And sometimes some of the funniest things that go on about us, well, they're things that we ourselves do. And when folks laugh at us, well, it wouldn't do us any harm to laugh with them.

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It can be a kind of corrective to our conceit. I was listening to two students talk on our campus, and the one was telling a joke to the other. He said that in a certain jungle there was a cannibal butcher shop, and one cannibal walked up to the butcher shop and said, "What do you have today?"

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And the butcher said, "We're having a special on missionary brains. We have some fine Lutheran brains at $5 a pound. We have some excellent Methodist brains at $5 a pound, and we have some very good Presbyterian brains at $32 a pound."

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And I thought to myself, "Well, this young man's telling the story right." And the customer said, "Well, why is it that Methodist and Lutheran brains are only $5 a pound and Presbyterian brains are so much more expensive, $32 a pound?" And the butcher looked back at him and said, "Well, did you ever stop to think

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how many Presbyterians you have to kill to get a pound of brains?" Well, that brought me back down in a hurry, and I deserve to be brought down. It was good to laugh at myself. I was preaching once in a little town in Ohio called Byanna, Ohio,

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and I was speaking on a text out of James chapter 3 where it says, "Brethren, out of the same mouth proceedeth both blessing and cursing. Such things ought not so to be." And I titled my sermon "Double Talk."

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And I pulled up in front of the church, and there was a big sign that said, "Double Talk" by Bruce W. Field. Well, that did me some good. When I left my church in California to come to Grove City,

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I announced it on Sunday morning in worship, and there were many people who spoke to me at the door and said they wished I wouldn't leave. And I was feeling very high about this. It's nice to be so wanted and so desired.

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There was one lady who came--the tears were actually rolling down her face. She said, "Oh, Bruce, you can't go." I said, "Well, I've got to go. I really feel that it's time to leave." "Oh, you can't go." I said, "I feel a call."

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She said, "You can't go. I've been here for seven preachers now, and every one is worse than the last." Well, that brought me down in a hurry. To recognize that sometimes we're laughed at quite legitimately

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and to laugh with the laughter--well, it's humanizing. One of our students was sitting in his room this last winter, and there was a knock at his door, and he said, "Who's there?" And a voice in the hall said, "Dr. Thielman."

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And the student said, "Oh, it's not Dr. Thielman. Who is it?" He never comes into the dorms. And the voice in the hall said, "Oh, yes, it's me. It's me, Bruce Thielman. It's me." And he said, "Now I know you're kidding because Dr. Thielman would never say it's me.

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He would say it is I." And then the student got up and went over and opened the door, and there I was standing in the hall. Well, when things like that happen, it's good to laugh with them.

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What do you do when folks laugh at you? Well, sometimes you laugh along. The Bible says, "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine." And sometimes laughing at ourselves is just the dose we need.

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But what about when the laughter isn't kind? What about when it's serious and cutting and mean-minded and severe? What do you do when people laugh that way? Well, one thing, of course, you can still believe in yourself.

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And you can believe in yourself because you are a child of God. You know, when you are laughed at, you stand in a very noble company. Job, described in Scripture as the finest man living in his time, said, "I am mocked and derided every day."

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David said, "My enemies say to me, 'Ha-ha!'" Jeremiah records that not a day went by in which he was not ridiculed. Elijah was laughed at by little children simply because he was bald. Once King David sent a delegation of peace emissaries to King Hanun,

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and King Hanun laughed at them and ridiculed them, and in order to make them objects of derision, had their beards cut half off and their clothes cut half away, sent them home naked from the waist down.

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There have been a lot of people across the years who have been doing good and wholesome and right things and have been laughed at. And it's of those people that the psalmist writes. When he writes, and I read these words to you just a moment ago,

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"The proud have laughed at me in derision, but I have not turned away from thy law." You see, when one understands that one belongs to God and that God belongs to us as the children of God, when one grasps that, when one is not addicted to the approval of others,

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but rather understands that the only court of judgment which has any final validity for the Christian is the court of God, and that that God is a God of love, who loves us, each and every one of us, as if we were the only one in all creation to love.

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Well, when one holds fast to that, then the laughter of others passes away. The fact of the matter is no person can make you feel inferior unless you permit them to do so. I want to repeat that.

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No person can make you feel inferior unless you permit them to do so. Think of it like this. Suppose that you were visiting a mental hospital, and you were walking down the hall,

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and out of the door to your right comes a little old soul who's been in that hospital for many years, and her mind is gone. And she stumbles up to you, and she says, "God came to me this morning, and he told me that the twelfth person to come down the hall today would be divine.

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And you are the twelfth person. You are the holy of holies. May I bend down and kiss your feet?" Now, how would you feel if that were to happen to you?

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I think you would feel very nervous and uncomfortable. And you would feel that way because you know yourself, and your understanding of yourself would lead you not to accept the judgment of this poor old confused person.

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Now, when someone laughs at you, they may be laughing at you out of the same kind of mental inadequacy that that old soul's laughing at you. Or they may be laughing at you out of their complete ignorance of you.

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Or they may be laughing at you not because of your hang-ups, but because of their hang-ups. What is important is that you have a sufficient understanding of yourself as a daughter or son of God, and of your worth in the eyes of God,

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that you are not intimidated by the wrongful laughter of others. See, we must never let ourselves become applause junkies. If we become addicted to applause, then any time applause is withheld from us, we're going to cave in.

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And people will learn very quickly that they can manipulate us by their approval or disapproval. And they'll try to pull all kinds of emotional blackmail on us. We must not permit that to happen.

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And the way in which we do not allow that to happen is to keep our frame of reference always in the Godward direction. If we stand before God and in His love, and we understand ourselves to so stand,

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when we have a grip on God, we can get a grip on ourselves. Think of it like this. I'm sure you've had the experience at one time or another

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of severely criticizing someone. Maybe you snapped out of the disobedient child. Maybe you've said something to a loved one that was truly unkind. Maybe you've criticized an employee in a way that was not just.

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And later you've thought about what you said. And you've recognized, first of all, that you are not infallible. You can make mistakes. And you've recognized also that you are not the ultimate court of justice.

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You are not the one who makes the final decisions for everybody else in life. And you recognize in addition to this that you have exaggerated what you had to say. Had you not been so upset at the moment, you would not have said what you said, or you would not have said it in the way in which you said it.

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And you've recognized also that there is not, in your unkind words, some atomic capacity that can utterly devastate somebody else. Well, if you understand that about the judgments that you sometimes visit upon others, is it not equally easy to understand that when someone lashes out at you,

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lashes out in laughter or unkindness or scorn or ridicule or derision, that they too are not infallible? They also are not the final court of justice? They also have a tendency to exaggerate?

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They also have no atomic capacity in those words which can utterly flatten and disturb you unless you let it happen to you. No one can make you feel inferior unless you permit them to do it to you. [Bell rings]

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Please turn your cassette to the other side. Victor Frankl, the founder of the school of psychiatry called Logotherapy, says that for all of us, life is very much like walking out onto a stage. And there's a very bright spotlight shining on you.

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And it's so bright that you can't see the audience. When you look out toward the audience, you just see a large black spot. You can't make out anyone there. You know there's an audience there.

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And the fact that there's an audience there encourages you, it uplifts you, it motivates you, it enables you to do your best, it moves you in the direction of excellence. But you can't see the audience. And then when the play is over, the house lights come up

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and you discover that the audience is God. And God is applauding. God loves you. And how do you know God loves you?

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Because when the lights go up and you see God, you see the audience. He's hanging on a cross. That's the extent of His love. God loves each one of us more than we love anything in all of life.

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Nothing is as important to us as each of us is important to God. Now when you center on that, that God is the audience and that God is for you, then what difference does it make if some stagehand guffaws when you miss a line? What difference does it make if some bit player belittles you

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because of the way you handle a particular scene? What difference does it make if some self-appointed critic titters about some blunder or error which is yours when God, the audience, stands applauding?

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Years ago in France, there was an old man who was hired to be a tutor to the son of the king. And the greatest difficulty he had dealing with this young man was in terms of obedience. How do you discipline royalty? He finally set upon the idea of taking a small piece of purple ribbon,

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the royal color of France, and pinning it on the boy's tunic right over his heart. And he said, "Your Highness, every time you act in a manner that is unworthy, I shall make my appeal to the purple.

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I wish with all my heart that this morning I could put my arms around each and every one of you and pin over your heart a piece of the purple. You are a royal son, a royal daughter of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

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And no one, nothing under heaven or on earth, can ever take that away from you." So when people laugh, "Remember who you are. You wear the purple." And one last thought.

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What to do when folks laugh at you? Well, you remind yourself that God always has the last laugh. There's a great scene in Eugene O'Neill's play, "Lazarus Laughed," in which one of the characters in the play describes

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what he saw the last time that Lazarus and Jesus met on earth. He says, "They approached each other, and Lazarus knelt down, and Jesus blessed him and called him, 'My brother.' And they smiled at each other.

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And then Jesus moved on, and Lazarus watched him as he went, and Lazarus began to laugh softly and then louder. And such a laugh it was, my ears became drunk with the sound of it. So sweet was the whine of his laughter, that even though I was frightened,

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still I was laughing too." Now what's being said to us in the speech of this character is this. God always has the last laugh. The worst thing that can happen in life is death.

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And even when it comes to death, there's the laughter of Lazarus. And Lazarus laughs because he belongs to God. God laughs even at death. Harvey Cox, in his book, "A Feast of Fools,"

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says that there are times when life crowds in on us, and we are hemmed about by hatred, and our own personal apocalypse is descending upon our heads. And at that moment, he says, what we need to listen for is the laughter of God.

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It was to that laughter that Ezekiel referred when the Samaritans attacked the children of God, and Ezekiel said to the Samaritans, "You shall be laughed at in derision." And when the children of God were taken into Babylon,

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they were so unhappy that they could not sing God's song in a strange land, and they hung their harps on the trees. There came a time when God vindicated them, and they were taken back to the place of freedom again,

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and the Scriptures say their mouths were filled with the sound of laughter. And in Psalm 2, the enemies of God are described as raging heathen, and they imagine vain things against God. And then the Psalm continues,

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"But he that sitteth upon the throne shall laugh." And the Scriptures tell of how Moses and David and Nehemiah and Deborah laughed because God's laughter is with them. The whole New Testament is filled with that kind of laughter.

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Words like, "O death, where is thy victory? O grave, where is thy sting? Let it be to God, he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." Can death separate us from God? No. Can life separate us from God? No.

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Things present nor things to come? No. Height nor depth? No. Any creature? No. In all of these things we are more than conquerors.

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Nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's the laughter of the people of God, and they're laughing in the laughter of God, whose laughter is always last, always final, and always victorious. I love that scene in the book of Job, way at the end of the book in the 39th chapter,

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when the great animals that God has made are being described. And my favorite description is of the horse. It says that the horse is powerful and majestic, that he has a neck like thunder, and he moves with great leaps, and he snorts majestically,

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and he paws the earth with his hooves, and he rejoices in conflict, and he does not fear his enemies. And the end of the description is this. When the trumpets sound, he says, "Ha, ha!"

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I love that, because that's the way we are to be. Strong in the strength of God, snorting the praise of God, pawing the earth in our confidence, not afraid of the enemies of God, and in the very midst of the trumpets, being able to laugh with God.

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Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! Pete Massaro was a young naval officer on one of our PT boats in the Vietnam War. And one night, the PT boat hit a wave in an odd way. He was thrown against a stanchion, his right leg was injured,

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and he was hurled into the sea, and the boat went off into the darkness. He managed to hold out in the waters until the morning. When the morning came, he lifted up his leg so that he could see it in the first slanting rays of the dawn,

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and he saw that he had been seriously wounded, and his leg was bleeding. And almost at the same moment that he discovered that, he saw in the water not thirty feet from him the fin of a shark. He began to pray.

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He did not pray to be saved, because he did not believe there was any way in which he could be saved. He only prayed that his confidence in God might not be shaken, and that he might be taken to God quickly,

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and the glories of heaven might be his. And as he prayed, he saw before him a cardboard statue of Jesus, which had stood in his Sunday school classroom many years before. He could even see the inscription, which had been across the bottom of the statue,

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which read, "Behold, I come quickly, blessed is he that believes." And as he looked, this image of Jesus seemed to be coming to him across the water. And so he began to swim as vigorously as he could toward this coming appearance of Jesus. And as he swam as hard as he could, the shark was frightened away.

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And he continued to swim. He said that he swam with a strength he didn't know he had, and as he was swimming, he suddenly saw coming at flank speed a destroyer, which had seen his splashing in the water and was coming to rescue him.

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And they lowered the boat, and he was lifted by strong arms to safety. Now you may say, if you want to, about that, that that was a saving miracle of God. I don't know. I don't pretend to know much or understand much about miracles. What I do know is this.

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Pete Massero knows himself to be a child of God, and he's caught up in the love of God. And that has made such a difference to him in his life, that even in the face of death, he didn't show fear.

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He did not pray even to live. He simply rejoiced in the confidence which was his because he was God's man, and he was on God's side. And when Pete Massero tells that story that I've just told you,

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he does it with a smile. And why not? The last laugh was his then, and the last laugh will be his as it will be ours always,

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because we're on God's side, and he's on ours. What do you do when folks laugh at you? Well, sometimes you laugh with them, because it humanizes you, helps you to clean up your act.

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What do you do when folks laugh at you? Well, you remember that you belong to God, and he belongs to you. You do not respond to the applause of others, and you recall vividly that no one can make you feel inferior

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unless you permit them to do so. And what do you do when folks laugh at you? You remind yourself of the solemn and hilarious truth that the last laugh always belongs to God and to the people of God.

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So let the tinny little trumpets titter on your right, and let the great snarling golden trumpets of scorn and derision sound on your left, and let the subtle silver trumpets of sarcasm and ridicule be on every side. When you're God's woman or God's man, even in the midst of the troubles,

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you can say, "Ha-ha!" Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gifts. Let us pray. O God, when we are sad, remind us that ours is not a faith of tearful chidings,

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but of cheerful tidings. Fill us with the good news of Jesus Christ. Remind us that across our very souls the words are written, "Born to win." And so fill us with the confidence of our convictions

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that we might, even when folks laugh at us, rejoice. And again I say, rejoice. For we pray this in the name of the Son who makes it all so. Jesus Christ our Lord.

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Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]