If I Were Young

Well, I have been very blessed to be here this week, and there's nothing that attracts my attention more as a subject as the heart, and I will be talking a little bit about that in my message this morning.

Most of you know William Carey, or know of him at least. He was a missionary who served for 41 years in India, never took a furlough. He went there, he ministered, and he died there. Very unusual missionary. He's often called the father of modern missions. What most of us are not aware of is his children.

His oldest son was Felix Carey, a very talented young man, very talented linguistically like his father, very talented in medicine, and was a young man with a lot of promise. And he promised to be a missionary, and when he was 21 years of age, he was sent to set up a mission in Burma.

But unfortunately, he had not paid attention to some of the things we're going to talk about this morning, and he lacked his father's religious zeal and his perseverance. And after six years of hardship and heartbreak, and the man did have his share of that, he lost his first wife in childbirth, he lost his second wife, and two small children in a shipwreck, and he also lost a third wife, and he was married and died before his last child was born. So this man did have his difficulty, but so did his father. His father's wife went insane after he arrived in India.

His print shop burnt down and destroyed years of hard work preparing a dictionary in Bengali and also a translation or two in various of the languages. That all went up in flames. And then he had people who misunderstood him and turned against him within the mission and also back home in Britain. And his father endured all of that, never missed a beat, had an attitude that God had called him to his work and stuck to his commitment to India. But this son did not. He gave up and agreed to be appointed an ambassador to Burma. Instead of being a missionary, he agreed to serve the government. And Carey wrote to a friend asking prayer for Felix.

Pray for Felix. He has degenerated into an ambassador of the British government when he should be serving the King of Kings.

He ended up as a pawn in a game between Burma and Bengal, dogged by drink, drugs, and debt. Fortunately, the last few years of his life, he did recover himself, went back to his father's mission, and helped tremendously with some translations and died at the age of 37. But he wasted most of his life by bad choices.

Like Felix Carey, you young people have choices to make, and I assure you that God has destined all of you to great success. That's his purpose, and he has it all planned if you follow his plan. But it won't just happen.

Like Daniel, you must face your choices with purpose in your heart. And so I would like to just leave you with seven things, and this congregation has heard some of these and some of the illustrations. You just have to bear with me because I know a lot of people have not. And so I'm going to really do a talk I gave years ago in our early Bible schools called, "If I Were Young, What Are the Seven Things That I Wish I Had Heard More Carefully As a Youth?" And hopefully, you can remember these seven things. Now, try to make them quickly because we're moving along here with time.

The first thing that I would say, and probably the most important thing, is I would pursue a long-range goal. Now, I can't use the whiteboard this morning. I would like to illustrate that on the board because along that way to the long-range goal, which is Christ-likeness, there are choices that have to be made if you're going to get there.

But there are many little short-range goals that just go off to the side just a little bit. You maybe can even justify them and say, "These do belong to the kingdom. This is a pursuit of Christ-likeness," but they're just off to the side.

They're not 100% on the mark. They're not completely true to what you know in your heart you should do. And you know how that is. You only have to be off to the side just a little bit, and you just play that on out, and you're way far wide of your mark.

That almost happened to me a number of times in my life. I'll give you one of them. I was a young man, a young schoolteacher. I loved to tell stories. I loved to teach children. And a radio broadcaster noticed that and invited me to come on his radio program as a regular storyteller for the children.

I was flattered. I was only 21 years old. My parents said no. They said, "We do not condone the use of the radio, and if you do this, you will do it against my wishes." And I honored my parents and did not do that. I went into service elsewhere.

A few years ago, I attended the funeral of one of the persons involved in that ministry, and I looked at the people who were sitting there, and I said, "You know what? If I had done this, I probably would be with that group of people, and I would be far from the mark that I would have wanted as a young person."

So you have to make good decisions. If you're going to get to that long-range goal, you're going to have to make sure that you don't go off to the side with some short-range immediate gratification that you maybe can justify.

But keep your eye on that long-range goal and say, "Does it line up with that?" Esau despised his birthright. What he didn't realize was the blessing was connected with the birthright. He thought they were separate. He thought he could despise the spiritual leadership of the family and all the promises that went with that spiritually and get the material blessings, which as an oldest son, he was to get a double amount.

But he realized too late that the blessing went along with the birthright, and he lost it. By contrast, Abraham looked for a city which had foundations whose builder and maker was God, and it says, "Not even having received the promises, he saw them afar off," and he was pursuing that at the end even though he did not completely realize them. Now, Lot wanted that same city, but he ended up in Sodom.

And instead of descendants that we could all say were wonderful people, he became the progenitor of the Moabites and the Ammonites, and you know who they were. And then there was Moses who probably had more than any other person bequeathed to him, Egypt, the greatest nation in the world with the most wealth and the most learning and the most resources, and he could have had it all. But it says he esteemed the reproach of Christ, something no one in the flesh would want. He esteemed the reproach of Christ of more value than all the treasures of Egypt.

He kept his eye on the goal.

A Christ, of course, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross. See, the cross was on that line to the goal, and he had to endure the cross to get to the goal. Paul said, "I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." The Bible says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish or cast off restraint."

You have to have a vision to inspire you to the discipline that's going to be required to get to that goal. I often talk here about the word worship. The word literally means worthship. It has to do with the thing that is the most valuable to you, and the sooner you figure that out, the better. To Moses, the thing that was most valuable to him was that heritage of his people.

For many people, it is not what they say it is. Many people would say, "My number one value is Jesus." But if you listen to them talk and you see what they get excited about and you see what they spend most of their money on and where they spend most of their time, which is a giveaway of what their values are, you would see it's not what they say, and you probably could pinpoint it. It's maybe money. It's maybe vacation. Maybe it's some sport.

Whatever we value most, that's probably going to determine whether we get to the goal. So I'd pursue a long-range goal. I'd set my eye for the goal, and I'd make all my little decisions line up with that goal.

Number two, I would get wisdom. Now, we talked about that this week, and it was in your memory. You memorized actually my favorite passage, which is in Proverbs, which is Proverbs 4. And it says, "Wisdom is the principal thing.

Therefore, get wisdom." And of course, if you study Proverbs, wisdom is personified finally in one of the later chapters to be actually the person of Jesus. And it says Jesus in Luke 2:52, it says, "He increased in wisdom." That word increased is an interesting word. It means to drive forward as if by beating. So he had to put some effort, Jesus himself, into the wisdom that he acquired.

It won't just happen automatically. The story is told of a young man who wanted to be wise. He went to a philosopher, and he said, "I would like for you to tell me what is the secret to wisdom?" And they were near the seashore, and the wise man said, "Well, come with me." And he walked him out deeper and deeper into the water, and when he got out about this deep, he took his head and pushed it down.

And he held it there for a long time. The man came up desperate and angry. "Why did you do this to me?" And he said, "Well, what did you think about when your head was under the water? Air. Do you think about anything else? No.

Just air." Well, when you want wisdom as badly as you wanted air, you will become wise. The Bible says, "If you seek for wisdom as you would seek for silver." Suppose somebody told you there was $5 billion worth of silver buried in your back lawn.

You'd probably dig and dig and dig and dig if it took you years to get to that silver. And we're not talking about information. In Western society, the idea is to be an intellectual, to have a lot of information, and you go to this university here and you get yourself an education and you learn a lot of information.

The Hebrew people didn't look at wisdom that way.

They looked at wisdom as being able to live life well. That was what a wise person was, somebody who could live life well. And they didn't think in terms of getting a lot of information in their head.

They believed in learning by precept. Just do what you're told.

What your parents tell you, what God has said. Don't try to figure it out. Don't try to get all the information together about it. Just go do it. It's the shortest path to wisdom. And it's interesting in Proverbs 4, you quoted it this morning, that you should get wisdom. And then with your getting and understanding, the idea is once you learn by precept, simply by doing what you're told, simply by doing what you have read in God's word, then spend a little bit of time trying to find out why. In fact, probably the best way to find out why is in the doing.

And so the Jewish concept of wisdom was all about doing, learning from people who are older than you, learning from God as the best way. It's not information. We have many informed fools walking around in our world. There's the economist who knows all about economy, has a PhD in economics, but he goes bankrupt.

We have the psychiatrist who commits suicide. We have the marriage counselor who's divorced. We have the pastor theologian who runs off with his secretary. We have the motivational speaker that doesn't know how to live with his wife.

When I was a boy at home, we had a neighbor, and he was a lawyer, but he had a son who wanted to be a farmer. He looked at all these Mennonite farmers around him, and he figured that was the quickest path to what he wanted.

And so he went to Penn State and got a PhD in agriculture. And then his father was rich enough to buy him a farm in our community, and we all watched him farm.

Well, it was sort of stupid the way we went about farming, putting manure on our land. Who knows what's in that manure? What you need to do is take soil samples and figure out all the things that your soil needs, and then you put fertilizer on with all those ingredients in, and you sell your manure to the neighbors to put on their land.

Well, he didn't farm very long. We all benefited. No, we didn't know what was in the manure. Nowadays, they know. They're more sophisticated than we were back then. Most people didn't have a whole lot of a clue what was in that. We knew there was a lot of potash in it and some nitrogen and some potassium. But we didn't know much about what was in that manure. But we did know that if you put manure on your field, you got good corn. And how did you know that? You learned it from your dad. You learned it from your grandfather.

You didn't go get a bunch of information. You just did what you were told. That's what we're talking about. The Bible says, "Go to the ant thou sluggard. Consider his ways and be wise." Now, if you gave an ant an IQ test, what do you think his IQ would be?

Not very high. But that ant knows how to manage its life.

It knows how to order its life successfully. And that's what wisdom is.

We don't know all the facts. We never will know all the facts. We probably will not very quickly get together the facts that you need to know to make. And by the way, you're in the part of your life where you're going to make some of the most important decisions you will ever make, and you'll live with them the rest of your life. And you owe it to yourself to get all the wisdom you possibly can to make those decisions. It's not going to be by reading a lot of books. I mean, you can read some and learn some things. It's not going to be by going to college. It's not going to be by any of those methods that Western society thinks are so important.

It's going to be by listening to the people who have the wisdom. David knew that. He said, "Oh, how love I thy law. It is my meditation all the day. Through its precepts, I'm smarter than my teachers. Through its precepts, I'm smarter than the ancient philosophers. I'm smarter than Socrates.

I'm smarter than Plato," just by listening to God because God knows everything. And he told us everything we need to know, not by giving us information about it all, but by putting it in a condensed form, which we call commandments.

And he says, "You just do this, and you will find out that it's true in the doing." And so that's why David said, "I love your law. It's perfect. It does everything that I need to have done in my life just by obeying God."

So he says, "Through thy precepts, I get understanding." That means a precept is simply something that you are told is the right thing to do. That's what a precept is. And David says, "Through your precepts, I get understanding. I learned just so much about life just doing what you told me to do because God knows everything." And basically, what he said is, "If you knew what I knew, you would do what's in this book." This is a condensation of all of God's wisdom about life here on this earth in the form of precepts and commands.

The other thing you can do is observe history. Observe history. The prophets had a very good concept of life because they were great historians. Go read the prophets. I never figured out a percentage, but I'm going to guess at least three-fourths of what's in the prophets is history.

They learned what to do in the present by getting a clear picture of what people did in the past and what happened.

And there's where I had a tremendous advantage. I had a dad who spent most of his waking hours talking about cause and effect till it was almost more than we could handle. But my dad had all kinds of cause and effect figured out, and he drilled it into my head that for every effect, there is a cause.

In fact, one of his favorite statements was, "Everybody makes his own problems." So I knew what he would think when I got into problems. All right. I was down at the National Archives some years ago, and out there in one of the plaques in one of the walkways, they had a quote from Shakespeare, "The past is prologue." Prologue means the beginning of something.

The past is prologue. Study the past. It is your most clear key to the future.

Then listen to older people. I've often said, "I wish I had a gift to take every one of you and put you 30 years into the future and let you take a look at what happened to all your decisions.

And then I would like to have the power to put you back where you are." I can't give you that. But if you want it, you can have it. That's just about how much older your parents are than you.

If you want that perspective, listen carefully to people who've been down this road before.

And then finally, listen to the gathered body. The gathered body has a unique blend of gifts and insights and understanding. And as the gathered body considers something, you have all that brought to bear on the decision. And nobody should take lightly what the gathered body is saying because God speaks through that body. Ephesians says, "Everyone is given a gift of grace till we all come to the unity of faith of the knowledge of the Son of God and to a perfect man and to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." I'm always inspired by what happened at Schleidheim. It was the first meeting of our Anabaptists where they tried to hammer out their differences.

And if you read what happened there, they came in tremendous disagreement. Some of them were not non-resistant. It was not a very likely gathering for any kind of unity to finally emerge, but it did. And they came away from that meeting absolutely convinced that if a group of people are honest with God, he will reveal his will to them through the body. So by all means, take seriously what God says to you through the body.

Number three, I would obey the law of blessing. I'm going to read it to you. "If thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God to observe to do all," and I always have that underlined in my Bible, "all which I command thee this day, all these blessings shall come upon thee and overtake thee." Now, if you overtake somebody, it means that they're running and you're running after them and you grab them from behind.

He says, "If you will do all the things that I tell you, you can't help but be blessed. My blessings will run after you. My blessings will overtake you. You will be blessed no matter what."

He said to Joshua, "This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate therein day and night that thou mayest observe to do all that is written therein." Now listen how this is worded. "Then thou shalt make thy way prosperous." Joshua, you will make your own way prosperous.

He doesn't say that I'll make your way prosperous. He says, "If you do everything I tell you to do, you will make your own way prosperous because God's success is self-enacting. If you get in line with his laws, they go to work for you."

And he says to Joshua, "If you will do all that I tell you to do, you will make your way prosperous and you will have good success."

God is a good God. He wants to bless us if we could only understand that. A couple of verses I like on that subject. "The Lord will give grace and glory. No good thing will he withhold from them who walked uprightly." Isn't that a fabulous promise? "The young lions do lack and suffer hunger, but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing."

That's in the Bible. That's a promise.

"Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of the Lord." I guarantee you God's will is perfect. I guarantee you that he will bless you if you will do all that he tells you to do.

Number four, I would take the disciplined way.

We're living in a day when people don't like that word. They don't like the idea of discipline. They don't like the idea of law and order. Every argument is made against any kind of law. It's called legalism. It's called dead formalism. It's called you name it.

But the Bible says, "Enter in at the straight gate." That means you're going to have to you're going to have to divest yourself of some things. This is going to take some effort. "Enter you in at the straight gate for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat because straight is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." If I were to put this up on the board, I would have this wide gate, and then it would narrow.

And then I'd have the narrow gate, and I would show that it widens. And that's life. Discipline, true discipline. Now, there are false disciplines that people impose upon themselves. But if it's true godly discipline, it leads to freedom.

It's the only way to freedom. I sometimes draw a picture of a pond on the board and draw a little fish there. And he's going around in that pond, and after a bit, he says, "That's a pretty small pond. If I could just flip myself out of this pond, then I'd be free to have larger horizons."

Well, if he flips himself out of the pond, does he become free? No, he becomes dead.

There's no freedom outside the boundaries that God has set. But that little fish can just enjoy himself forever, and there's enough space there for him to enjoy himself in that little pond.

And so it's true in every area of life. If you want to be a good typist, you're going to have to spend a lot of time disciplining yourself to get your fingers on the right keys and move them efficiently. I sat beside a boy in typing class. Most of us at the end of typing were typing 75 words a minute. At the end of typing one, he was typing 15 words a minute.

He blamed the typewriter. He said it was the typewriter Moses had to type the Ten Commandments.

He blamed everything. But I sat beside him, and he never obeyed the teacher. The teacher said, "Do not look at your fingers. Learn to move your fingers without looking." And he always looked. He never learned to move his fingers without looking.

So obviously, he never made a good typist. If you want freedom on the piano, you're going to be doing lots of practices that aren't really terribly exciting till you learn where to place your fingers and how to efficiently get them there. And then you have freedom. You've all seen people with an instrument that looked like they were just having a wonderful time all over that keyboard. Well, behind that was hours and hours of confining, constraining discipline, learning a foreign language.

The first year isn't a lot of fun. You'll have to learn a lot of vocabulary. You have to work a lot on grammar and all of that. But once you start to get that into your system in a disciplined way, then you have the freedom to use that language.

Art, the same thing. The person who walks up to the wall and puts something on there that actually looks like something with a few strokes of a few pieces of colored chalk. Behind that is hours and hours of perspective and color and light and shadow.

I mean, I could take a couple of pieces of colored chalk up there and make and you'd all have to say, "What is it?" And I don't know if I would know for sure.

But that's the kind of freedom most people want. They don't want the discipline. They just want to be able to go do it. That's not the way life is. Behind all genuine freedom is discipline. So I'd take the disciplined way. In every choice you make, there will be an undisciplined way, and there will be a disciplined way in every choice you make.

And I would figure out which one's the disciplined approach, and that's the one I would take. Okay? Beware of the undisciplined way. I spent years teaching high school students saying that over and over again. Beware of the undisciplined way.

Nothing happens automatically in this life except sin. It's the only thing that happens on its own. Everything else is a matter of discipline. Number five, I'd maintain a total surrender to Christ. We heard that the other night. Yes.

Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord. Christianity begins with an unconditional surrender by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Bible says, "No man can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit." That's a work, a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts to be able to say no, many people could say the word. Jesus said in the last day, they're going to come and say, "Lord, Lord." He's going to say, "Oh, I was never your Lord." I mean, that word is being passed around all over the place. Lord, yes, I love Jesus. All of that's being said. But if you really say it and it really takes possession of you, that's a work of the Holy Spirit.

Okay? And you will say like Paul, "What will thou have me to do?" And you'll be poised to do whatever God says for you to do. Christ cannot salvage a life that is not totally surrendered. Now, I know that when you begin, you don't know what all that means, but the surrender is total. I say to people the similarity between a person who is two days old as a Christian and someone who's 80 years old as a Christian, the similarity is they both are totally surrendered.

The person who's walked with Jesus for 80 years knows a whole lot more about what that means than this person does. But this person is just as poised to do God's will as this person is. I often illustrate it with surgery. Suppose you went to the hospital and you went there for a kidney transplant.

And you said to the doctor, to the surgeon, "Now, I don't want a general anesthesia because you and I are going to discuss this as we go along.

For each cut, we're going to have a discussion. And if we agree, you'll cut. And if we don't agree, you won't." How many of you think a surgeon would start an operation with that approach? Of course not. If it's me at least, I don't know beans about replacing somebody's kidney.

And any suggestion I would make to the doctor that would be something other than what he knows would guarantee that I would die on the table. And so he has to have you totally out of the picture so that he can do every cut the way he wants to do it, the way it needs to be done for that to be a success. If he doesn't have that, he might as well not even start because it'll end in a disaster.

And so that's why an absolute total surrender to Jesus the whole way through, like you heard the other night so eloquently given, is so necessary. If you start to introduce your own ideas, you're introducing tragedy into the operation.

And by the way, surgeons cut, and when they're done cutting, you hurt. But surgeons don't cut to hurt. They cut to heal. Hurting is part of the process of healing. Here's a young man who's living with a young lady who's not his wife.

And we're talking about his future, and he's serious about surrendering to Christ. And I have to say to him, "Now, wait a minute. I have to tell you that if you're going to follow Christ, that means you need to deal with this relationship."

And pretty frequently, they say, "Oh, if that's what it is, then I'm not interested. No, I can't do that. No, can't do that." Well, we don't say it in those kinds of situations because we don't normally get into those kinds of situations. But people do it all the time.

They won't let Jesus cut where he needs to cut. He cannot salvage by the way, the word salvation means salvage. He cannot salvage the life. He cannot make it the way he wants it to be or the way you would want it to be if you understood what's necessary.

An interesting example of what happens with a total surrender is Japan. On December the 7th, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and a few months later, the US entered the war. MacArthur demanded a total surrender, and that's why that was such a difficult situation there because the Japanese tried every way they could think of to hold on to a little bit.

They tried one thing after another. They tried to negotiate, and MacArthur just said, "Nope, it's total surrender. It's total surrender." And finally, they dropped the two bombs, and they got the total surrender.

MacArthur was in charge of Japan for seven years, and they hated him because he did everything they didn't want to have happen. He demilitarized the country, outlawed all weapons. He established a peaceful, democratic government, took away their revered and sacred, worshipped emperor, and he took the land. I'm not sure.

It probably was done equitably. It was purchased, perhaps. I'm not sure how that was done. But the land was redistributed so small farmers could own their plots of land. And they became bitterly hateful toward MacArthur. They thought he was destroying everything that they aspired to have.

But as the seven years went on, they began to see the benefits of what he had required. The small farmers saw the benefit of having their own plot of land. People saw the benefit of a democratic government. And by the end of those seven years, MacArthur was a hero in Japan.

And I don't know. You don't remember. I do. If it said made in Japan, it was junk. That changed. With American advice and expertise of that total surrender, they became a very prosperous nation with state-of-the-art technology. That's sort of a picture of what Jesus wants.

He wants a total surrender so that he can do a beautiful work in your life. Okay? Number six, I just have this point and one more. I'd keep my heart with all diligence. That's my favorite verse in the Old Testament. Keep thy heart with all diligence for out of rear of the issues of life. Well, what is the heart?

Well, the Hebrew understanding of the heart was it was the seat of desire. It was the subconscious effect of all the conscious decisions and actions you did. They all registered down in your heart subconsciously as a desire.

Okay? If you never ate a banana, you would not have any desire for a banana. But having eaten one, you've created a desire. And that's true of all desires. The heart is the seed of desire. Another quote from my dad that he said over and over again, "You make your decisions, and then your decisions make you."

If I put the word habit up there, which is what we're talking about, and we decided to get rid of it, and we've gotten rid of the H, we'd have a bit left. If we got rid of the A, we'd have bit left. If we got rid of the B, we'd have it left. I mean, you just almost can't get rid of that word by racing letters off of the board.

That's how desire is. And that's why Proverbs says, "You guard that with all your might because out of that comes everything else." Everything we do, everything we say comes originally from a desire that rises up into the conscious mind and then expresses itself.

Learn to see with your heart. I like Caleb and Joshua. They talked about seeing with their heart. Well, there's 12 spies went into the land of Canaan, and they all saw the same thing. Nobody saw something that the others didn't see.

So they come back, and they all agree, "This is a wonderful, prosperous land." But here's where the disagreement was. 10 of them said, "It's a land that eats up the inhabitants thereof." Now, I don't know what was happening. I don't know if they were fighting each other and killing each other, if there was a famine or well, there wasn't a famine the way they described it, maybe a plague. I don't know what was happening, but the people in that land were dying.

And Logic said, "If we go in there, we shall all die. The people in that land are dying."

But Caleb and Joshua said, "Wait a minute. You completely misunderstand. Their defenses departed from them. That's why they're dying. God is getting this land ready for us." Now, how were they able to see that when the other 10 could not? Because they believed that God told them to go in and take the land. And so they saw everything through that filter. They saw it with their heart.

The others did not have God's promise in their hearts, so they looked at it logically and came to an altogether different conclusion. Keep your heart with all diligence. It's going to be the most important lens through which you view all of life. It's going to be from your heart. If your heart is wrong, you're going to be like the 10 spies. You're going to see information that should give you everything you need, and you're going to interpret it wrong because your heart isn't right. You're going to see what you want to see.

Okay?

The biblical pattern is not to see and believe, but to believe and see. I call it a habit of the heart. I believe God, and therefore, what I see is based on what God has told me. That's how I interpret everything I see. So the heart is extremely important. Okay?

This heart is extremely important. If you don't keep the desires of your heart right, what you're going to do is you're going to see everything from the standpoint of what those desires are, and you're going to rationalize, and you're going to say, "Well, this is right when you know very well it's wrong because your heart is wrong, and you're seeing everything wrong, and you're coming to wrong conclusions. You're pursuing a wrong course, and you arrive at wrong places." So keep your heart. Keep your heart with all diligence out of it or the issues of life.

And finally, I'd be a lifelong learner. Blessed are the poor in spirit. A person who's poor in spirit is a person who's open to learn. He can look at the facts and see them for what they are. Most people see them distorted for what they want them to be.

But a lifelong learner is a person that does what a scientist has to do. A scientist has to sit down before the facts as if he doesn't know anything about this subject, no biases, no preconceived ideas, no idea what conclusion he wants, and look at the facts and let them speak for themselves.

Louis Pastor is a good example of this. Louis Pastor was the first person to look through a microscope and say, "Ah, now I know why people get sick. There are little things there, little pathogens." Before that, it was superstition. People had all kinds of ideas about vapors in the air and all kinds of stuff as to why people got sick. And Louis Pastor said, "Oh, well, the best way to prevent illnesses being passed is to wash hands." We've heard a lot about that, haven't we? Well, that started with Louis Pastor.

So he went to the doctors, and he said, "Now, the reason one-third of the people die in your hospitals is because you are not washing your hands between the examinations, and you're carrying these little things that I see in my microscope," which they hadn't seen from one person to another, "you need to wash your hands between examinations." And they ridiculed him because they were doctors. He was not a doctor. Louis Pastor was a chemist. "What do you know about this? We're the trained ones. You are not." And they would not listen to him. It took years for the germ theory to gain ground because people would not listen to someone that they didn't think gave them the conclusion that they were so sure they were right about.

So be a lifelong learner.

If you gave God a blank page, and you said to God, "Would you write your will on that page? I would like to know your will, and then I'll go down through the list." I'll tell you what would happen.

God would say, "Do you see that little line at the bottom? As soon as you sign your name, I will start writing the list. But until I have your commitment that you're going to do everything that's on that list, I'm not going to write anything."

So we're back to this total surrender.

Jesus says, "Follow me. Follow me." Clarence Fretz, who was the principal of the school where I first taught, was a missionary to Luxembourg. On his way back to Luxembourg from Furlow, he was on a ship with a missionary to Africa from another denomination.

And they got to talking, and he discovered that that missionary was nonresistant, but he had grown up in a denomination that did not teach nonresistance.

And he said, "Well, how did you come to believe nonresistance?" Well, he said, "This is how it was." He said, "The last time I came across the Atlantic from my Furlow, I opened up my Bible, and I read that verse that says, 'Give to him that asks of the in him that would borrow the eternal not away.'" And I said, "Well, no, that doesn't make any sense. If I did that in Africa, they'd rob me blind."

So he said, "The next morning, I tried to get my mind somewhere else in the Bible, but that verse just every morning, that's where my attention went to that verse." And so I finally said to my wife, "Well, let's do it.

Let's just do it. Let's see what happens." So he said, "We got back to Africa. Somebody came and said, 'We want your chair.' Sure. 'We'd like to have your table.' Sure. 'About your bed.' Yeah, you can have that.'" And it happened exactly like he thought.

Pretty soon, there was nothing there, and they were sitting on the dirt floor of their little hut.

And they said, "Now, what do we do?" This is a true story, by the way. This was told firsthand to Clarence Fretz, my friend. Meanwhile, down in the village, they were laughing at the missionary. They were seeing how stupid he was for giving all his stuff away just for the asking. And they had days of just laughing about this and having a good time. And you know how that is. After a while, you're done laughing, and there's no more to laugh about. And then people started to get a little bit serious. They said, "You know what?

The hero in this story is him. Anybody can do what we did. It took something different from us, our selfishness, to do what he did. There's something about what he taught." And his testimony to Clarence Fretz was, "I had taught year after year after year without any success for those people. But after that incident, they said, 'You came here, and you taught us about a God who gives everything he has.

We didn't understand that message. Now we do.'" And he said, "From that point, my mission work began to succeed." And he said, "That we applied to that scripture." Then he said, "We started to see these verses on putting your sword in your sheath and not resisting evil men." And we were taught that made no sense, but we decided, "Well, you know what?

Maybe if we do what God tells us to do, that'll make sense too." So that's the approach they took to life. My point is, be a lifelong learner. Jesus says, "Follow me. We all with open face beholding a glass in the glory of the Lord, the glory of the Lord are changed into the same image from glory to glory."

So here's my conclusion. Be steadfast applying these seven principles. Be like William Carey, not like Felix Carey. William persevered despite discouraging circumstances.

The story is told of a group of minstrels in a far country who traveled from town to town presenting their music to make a living. Times were hard, and people didn't have much money, and very few people came to pay to hear their music.

And then one night, it snowed, and the minstrels all said, "Look, we've only had a handful of people at our meetings, and no one's going to come tonight. And the few people that do come, it's just not worth it. We're just not going to do it tonight. We're going to call off this concert."

There was an older man there who wasn't saying anything, and they said, "What do you think?" Well, he said, "We made a commitment that we're going to have this concert. And I think we should have this concert even if only one or two people come, and we should give it all we have and give the best concert we possibly can give." So that's what they did.

They had the concert, and they all agreed afterward, and there were only a couple of people came. They all agreed afterward that was the best concert they had ever presented.

They noticed the old man was standing off to the side with a smile on his face, and they said, "What's funny? What are you smiling about?" He said, "I have a note, and it reads, 'Thank you for the beautiful performance.

You're king.'

At the end, your audience may be small. The rewards may seem meager, but it'll be worth it all when you hear the king say, 'Well done.' So I'd pursue the long-range goal. I'd get wisdom. I'd obey the law of blessing. I'd take the disciplined way. I'd maintain a total surrender. I would always say yes to Jesus.

I'd keep my heart with all diligence. I'd be careful about the desires, and I'd be a lifelong learner. I wouldn't generate a bunch of biases that make it impossible for me to hear something I don't understand. Shall we bow our heads for prayer?

Father, we thank you for your wonderful word that equips us. The scripture says, "We are thoroughly equipped. Your word is good for instruction, for discipline, and righteousness." And I just pray, Lord, that you would help us to commit ourselves to these principles, to take the disciplined way, to obey the law of blessing, which is the law of obedience, to take a long-range view of things. Help us, Lord, to just keep these principles in our hearts and help us if we ever go to the mission field like Felix Carey did, that we will be prepared.

Help us to understand the tragedy if we're called to such a work and we're not prepared by these things that we talked about. Bless our food. I thank you, Lord, that we live in a land of abundance. Bless the people who have worked to prepare it and help all of us to eat with moderation and give the glory to you in everything we do and say. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.