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#86 Peace of Mind Through Possibility Thinking III (20/07/03) By Robert H. Schuller What a wonderful morning
this is. I'm enjoying it because I'm celebrating my 53rd wedding
anniversary today. Major correction: it's not I, it's we are celebrating
our 53rd. She's as happy about it as I am. And she's very happy
to be alive; so am I. There were some close ones in these 53 years
but God has blessed us in most remarkable ways. We are celebrating
a theme called peace of mind through possibility
thinking. And you're going to get the message loud and
clear through the messages of which you might call sermons here
from myself and my son. And if we miss the boat you will catch
it loud and clear through our guests. Next Sunday morning,
to be a hostage of the guerrillas in the Philippines for all those
many months. And then to see your husband shot, to make it out
alive, it's a testimony you won't want to miss, I'm telling you.
You'll realize that faith does make a difference. Yes, we've got
such exciting Sundays here but back to today. When you look at the
title of this series, "Peace of Mind
Through Possibility Thinking," you might say but isn't
that a contradiction? And it is because life's ultimate truths
are all contradictions. You know the body and the spirit, contradictions.
The Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, a contradiction. Justice
and mercy, the ultimate philosophical contradiction. Life's a
matter of contradictions. Some people would call them paradoxes.
And Jesus taught in contradictions because nothing
creative happens until somebody dares to stand in between a contradiction.
You see it in great architecture. I happen to be in architecture.
When you bring soft carpet up to rough rock or cement that's unpolished,
that's a contradiction in tactile touch. Well I learned a little
of this not in my 4 years of college or 3 years in graduate school
but I learned it after I started living in the real world. And
I'll never forget that when I graduated from theological seminary
I'd been in school for almost 20 years, 19 plus. Some of you are
graduating from college this month, some of you are graduating
from high school this month, some from the 8th grade. But when
you graduate from the graduate school you probably know you've
completed your years that you will invest in formal education.
And when I got out of theological seminary I was 23 years old
and I felt free at last. Wow! No more term papers to write. I
wouldn't have to do any more writing. Good thing because I had
an "F" in one course in college and that was in English.
And my professor said, "Stick to talking, you're gifted,
but don't try writing." Well, out of school.
All my diplomas, wow! I had my degree in my pocket and a wife
on the arm. Pretty neat. Well then I took a call to what would
be my first church and only other church than this one. It was
a little tiny church in a suburb of Chicago. It had 35 members,
18 against 17. And they were split and they were angry and I didn't
know that when I agreed to come. I was stuck. Well, it was a terrible
thing. And after 10 months of marriage the first baby arrived,
Sheila. Born in the hospital in Illinois, not far from the church,
and I had to take care of the house. And I had to make sure it
was all picked up when Arvella would come home in a few days with
a baby. I'd never done anything like cleaning house. So I looked
around and I said to her, "how do you clean the carpet? It
looks like it needs cleaning." She said, "you use the
broom." "Straw broom?" "Yeah." "Okay."
"And you try to sweep it up carefully and get a dustpan.
You can do that. You've got a college degree. So I tried it. I was
the one that for ten months said to her, "we can't afford
a vacuum cleaner." And I was sure we couldn't afford a vacuum
cleaner. We could do it with a broom. I tried. Dust all over the
place, it was a mess. I went out without telling my wife in the
hospital where I was going, and I went to the store and arranged
a twelve-month payment plan on a vacuum cleaner. So when, yeah,
so when she came home from the hospital with a baby, what a homecoming
gift I had for her, a vacuum cleaner. Well, got her home
in the house about two o'clock with the baby, and she said, "well,
you'll have to make dinner tonight." I don't know what I
had done the other nights, I think I went to a local coffee shop
and ate something. I got to make dinner tonight, cause it's not
just myself, its my wife. And so, I went in the kitchen and for
the first time, maybe the last time too, if I stop and think of
it, I know I will not win your respect if I admit to that but
anyway, I'm different. I went to the kitchen. I found a can of
pork and beans, or straight beans, I'm not sure. And then in,
we didn't have an icebox, but we had a little.. I mean we didn't
have a refrigerator we had like a little icebox you put ice in
it and there was some ground hamburger meat in there. I remembered
eating a dish sometime, somewhere in my life where beans were
mixed with the hamburger and it was good. So I got out a frying
pan, made it hot and threw in the beans. Then I threw in the ground
hamburger. That's not the way to do it. If you're listening to
me, I calculate that what the right way would be to put the raw
meat in first. Is that the idea, until its kind of cooked right.
Then you throw in the beans and they get warm and you mix it up.
I put them both in at the same time. And I'll tell you, the hamburger
never caught up with the beans. Those beans were smoking. They
were black. They were smelling. And the meat was still pink. Never
caught up. And the smoke was billowing when the doorbell rang.
Can you ever imagine the tension that can be caused by the doorbell
ringing at the wrong time? There stood the denominational executive
of my denomination, coming to pay a visit. Well, there were no
hotels or motels so the first thing I had to do was invite him
in and tell them we had a room for the night. To which he and
his wife smiled and said, "thank you. We were planning on
that." I saw him lift his head, Well what are you looking
for? And then I knew he was smelling something, no he wasn't looking
for anything. And made silent gestures to his wife, they sat down.
And then Arvella came with the baby and the baby was crying. I
think they were there maybe in all, ten minutes. The baby was
crying; the beans were still burning. And Arvella knew she didn't
have sheets for the one bed that would be available for a visitor.
I call that tension. And after ten minutes, suddenly, he looked
at his wife and he said, "you know, I think I forgot something.
I think we'd better leave. We have another appointment."
And they walked out of the house. And that's that. What am I telling you?
When I graduated from 4 years of college and 3 years from graduate
school I realized I was free at last! No more tensions. Then came
the real life. Wow! I experienced tensions that I had never known
existed on planet Earth. And I just want to share how I've been
focused on tensions for the 53 years that I've been a minister.
I've summed up the tensions and let me just try to sum them up.
I once called them the terrible "T's". First tension was
inability. I have to do something. I can't get anybody
else to do it and I don't know how. Inability
tension, we all have it one time or another. I had it with
pork and beans and raw beef. Inability. Another terrible "T":
inferiority. I'm not good enough,
I'm not smart enough, I'm not talented enough, I'm not handsome
enough, I'm not attractive enough, I'm not educated enough.
Inferiority. Well and then the next terrible "T"
is what I called adversity. You run
into problems and they run into you and they're real, they're
not fantasized, they're not imaginations, they are real problems.
Maybe in relationships, maybe in marriage, maybe in business but
life's made up of challenges and adversities. And I've had to
live with them all my life up until today, still am. The next terrible "T"
is instability. Instability is the
temptation to pull out, pack up, quit, switch jobs, change locations
and maybe partners in marriage. I've never had that temptation.
My wife and I have never once had any inclination toward instability
in our marriage. And I must say, by the grace of God, and I can
tell you how that happened, I have for all my life been spared
from the instability of wanting to leave this job for another
one or this church for another church. Now I'll never forget one
time when Norman Peale invited me to come to New York and be on
his staff at the Marble Collegiate Church. That did not tempt
me though it was probably the most generous offer ever made to
me from a professional standpoint. But as a pastor I see it's
the instability of people, not willing to make deep commitments,
that's instability. And so when I wrote the possibility thinking
philosophy one of the first things I wrote was a creed, the Possibility
Thinkers Creed, which reaches a climax with the words, "I'll
never quit." I'll never quit." Instability, and then
last, but surely not least, the tensions that come through
scarcity. Not having enough money for food. We lived that
way more than once when we entered the ministry. Scarcity,
not having money for what you'd call vitals today. I know that.
But I thought I was free at last from tension with diplomas in
my pocket and a wife on my arm and a job in a little church of
35 members in Chicago. I was due for the greatest shock. The greatest
shock was, graduates, listen to me, if you're graduating from
college or university, listen. The greatest shock I had was no
more report cards. No more test scores. I didn't know how I was
doing. Great thing about college was it was 2 semesters when I
went there and after only a few months the card came and I knew
what grade I got. Now I'm in a profession and it doesn't send
you report cards. I'm a pastor of a congregation but they don't
vote on my score. I don't know how to score and I can't live in
a mystery. Surely not this kind of a mystery because I can accept
anything. Winston Churchill said this, and I learned it from him,
he said, "I can accept anything, the worst of news, but what
I cannot accept is a mystery." Very true. Well how did I handle
it? I don't know. Until that Sunday I came here to begin a new
church. And it was Sunday, March 20, 1955. Next Sunday, March
27, I would hook up a little trailer to my car, put a little tiny
electronic organ on that trailer, and pull it to the Orange Drive-in
Theater and hope somebody would be there and I'd be starting a
new church. That trailer, that organ and the 28-year-old preacher
with his 26-year-old wife standing outside smiling for my neighbor
who said, "So you're going to the drive-in? We ought to record
that with a picture." And he did. Sunday before, March
20, free, so we went to Hollywood Presbyterian Church to Dr. Raymond
Lindquist preach and I'm sure, if you know me, you've all heard
this but it bears repetition because it is so defining. You can
imagine when I went to that church 7 days before we would start
a church where all of these potential tensions would come together:
inability, inferiority, adversity, instability,
scarcity, they would all bundle themselves into one negative
ball. And I sat there, opened the bulletin, and the pastor's title
was "God's Formula for Your Self Confidence."
That I did not have. And when Dr. Lindquist said, "My text
this morning is be confident of this one
thing that God who has begun a good work in you will complete
it." Wow! That gave me confidence
and that confidence was
faith in living. I've signed it to my name probably a couple
a hundred thousand times. It's confidence. What does this mean?
It means you turn your tensions into challenges.
Every tension can be a creative challenge. And that means you
set a goal. Ha-ha! There is a report card. I found a report card.
I would set goals, make them public, put it in writing, declare
it to the people and we could measure that goal. We could manage
that goal. We could manipulate that goal. And if the goal was
achieved I got a passing grade. That's all I wanted. Two choices:
a passing grade or a failing grade. And so we got into
a life that was goal setting, driven by a positive attempt to
turn a tension into a challenge and turn the challenge
into something that would give me a score. Peace
of mind through possibility thinking. Wow! We had graduation here
this week and all of the 8th grade graduates had a big party in
the Academy and of the seniors that graduated everyone had to
take a moment and say this is my greatest accomplishment, my greatest
achievement, the greatest goal. Among those 8th grade graduates
was Meta McDonald. We gave her the Scars into Stars Award here.
What hair she has she puts up straight, ribbon and she had fancy
stuff in it and just a beautiful girl, but smaller than the others
because of all these years of chemotherapy. And when the kids
got up each one said what they were most proud of, of the grade
I got in math, or the way I caught that pass in the football game,
and they rattled off these, each one had their own thing. And
then she got on stage and she said, "The thing I'm most proud
of I survived cancer." And she said that every one of us
has to give away 2 roses to people who've helped us. I have 2
roses. I give one to my father and mother and I give one to my
grandmother who always came to the hospital, starting when she
was just in the 3rd grade and lying there in a fetal position.
And I stood and held her with my hand and prayed for her. Third
grade, 8th grade, 2 roses, one to the grandmother and one to her
parents. And then she said something,
with that I close, she said I wish I had a thousand roses to give
away. I'd give one to every person who prayed for me. How do you turn tensions
into challenges that became creative goal setting? Connect with
God and that's the beginning of a beautiful life. Let's pray. O God, we thank You
that You meet here in this place through the testimonies of people,
through scripture and through song, and through the stillness
of a Spirit that is beautiful. And we thank You that You allow
tensions to come because You want us to grow and You want us to
be challenged and You know that we can be bigger and better and
more beautiful than we are. And so we thank You. So we face trials,
troubles, and we've learned to face inability, inferiority, adversity,
instability, even scarcity with quiet confidence knowing that
You will work everything out well. Amen.
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