What do you do with your future?
Are you entering 1957 as an unguided missile?
Multitudes are, including many Christians, and before the
year has concluded they will have done an
unestimated amount of damage.
The entire human family faces this coming year
with mingle feelings, different degrees of uncertainty, misgivings,
and insecurity.
What does the future hold for me is
a reasonable question that every normal individual is
bound to ask himself.
If this morning I had a crystal ball
into which I could peer and could determine
every event that will take place in the
future, I'd be the most popular person in
Los Angeles.
Washington would be calling me, the White House
would be in touch with me, I'm confident
of that, and the capitals of the world
would make contact, and every car driving out
to Santa Anita would come by my place.
My friend, this morning, many are posing as
prophets, and they say, I predict so-and
-so for this coming year, but no man
can know the future, no man stands in
a unique position like that at all.
I said last Lord's Day when we were
speaking on the subject, what do you do
with your past?
That there was an axiom that we could
put down, and it was this, the past
cannot be changed.
It's likewise axiomatic that the future cannot be
known.
As we scan the highway looking toward the
dawn of a new day, we cannot see
clearly anything that's in the future must be
very hazy to us today.
In fact, there is a total blackout as
far as to be able to determine what
the future holds, and the scripture makes that
very clear to us.
The writer to the Proverbs in the 27th
chapter, the first verse wrote, Boast not thyself
of tomorrow, for thou knowest not what a
day will bring forward.
And you will find that Isaiah had a
great deal to say along this line.
Over in the 56th chapter of Isaiah, the
12th verse, he wrote language like this, Come
ye, say they, and he's speaking now of
evil men, I will fetch wine, and we
will fill ourselves with strong drink, and tomorrow
shall be as this day, and much more
abundant.
And so many as they look into the
new year predicting prosperity, well, they were right
last year, they were right the year before,
and the year before that.
But my friend, they could be right and
they could be wrong this coming year, for
no man knows the future at all.
And that's what James says in the 4th
chapter, the 14th verse, and if we have
a text at all, this must be it.
Whereas ye know not what shall be on
the morrow, for what is your life?
It's even a vapor that appeareth for a
little while, and then vanisheth away.
You see, it's not that the future is
unknown, it's not that time today is like
a runaway truck going down a grade on
the ridge route, careening from side to side
without brakes or a steering wheel, and the
only thing sure is that it'll crack up
at the bottom of the hill.
Time's not like that.
There is someone today at the controls.
There is someone who does know the route.
There is a mighty hand upon the steering
wheel of time today, my beloved.
God knows the beginning.
And the writer to the Psalms expresses it
in a very, very significant manner when he
says from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.
And the Hebrew is really more picturesque than
that.
It's really this, from the vanishing point of
eternity past to the vanishing point of eternity
future, thou art God.
And this morning, this calm about his throne
as he enters into the future, because known
unto God is everything that is in the
future.
So you see today, the difficulty is not
that the future is unknown.
The future is not unknown.
But it's man that is uncertain.
Man is the unknown quantity in the equation
of life.
Man is the one that you have to
put down as X, not the future.
Will you listen to James again?
Whereas ye know not what shall be on
the Why don't we?
Well, because the difficulty is in here, my
beloved.
For what is your life?
It's even a vapor that appeareth for a
little time and then vanisheth away.
My beloved, this morning, your life and my
life is just like a vapor that appears
on the hillside, and the oncoming sun drives
it away.
And here in Los Angeles, it's just a
little bit of smog.
That's all we are.
It appears for a little while and then
it just disappears.
And Isaiah put it like this.
He was quoting the Lord when he gave
it, by the way.
The voice said, cry.
And he said, what shall I cry?
All flesh is grass, and all the goodness
thereof is as the flower of the field.
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the
Spirit of the Lord groweth upon it.
Surely the people is grass.
And my friend, this morning, your life and
my life is just like the grass that's
out in the front lawn.
It won't take much of a frost to
kill it.
It won't take much to drive it away.
It won't take much to make it disappear.
Your life and my life, this morning, is
like a little bit of mist on a
hillside.
It's like a little grass in the valley.
It's all in the world that it is.
And Scripture describes it further by saying it's
like the flight of a bird, the passage
of a bird out of darkness through a
window into a lighted room and then out
another window into the darkness.
It's like the passage of a ship in
the night.
That's your life and that's my life today.
And because of that, you and I look
into the future and God says to us,
we know not what a day will bring
for us.
This morning I want us to make a
very brief analysis of our life.
That is a verse of Scripture I want
to turn to.
Someday I want to return to this verse
and preach on it when we have more
time, because it's filled with a wealth of
meaning.
Will you listen to it?
It's 1 Thessalonians 5, 23.
And the very God of peace sanctify you
holy.
And I pray God your whole spirit and
soul and body be preserved blameless under the
coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We can make a brief analysis of man
this morning.
What is your life?
Well, our life is body, soul and spirit.
We're a triune being.
And let's look at these three departments of
man.
Let's look at these three different sections into
which that you and I are divided today.
First of all, the body.
The word Paul uses is interesting.
It's the somatic, soma is the word he
uses.
It's the somatic side of us today and
we're hearing so much of it.
The physical and the material.
And the emphasis is right here today.
Everything in this life today is geared, the
entire program of the world is directed toward
the physical man.
Television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, there are pastes
and powders and perfumes and pills for the
physical man.
There are liquids and soaps and shampoos and
tonics.
And each one of them contains a miracle
ingredient.
And that if you use this particular one,
it'll probably make a new man out of
you.
And you'll get a raise next month for
your work.
You can get all of these things, they
come in boxes, they come in bottles and
tubes and in plastic containers.
You can pour them on, you can sprinkle
them, you can rub them, or you can
get the large economy size and go swimming
in the gooey stuff.
And these things are so designed that they
were going to make you physically take 15
pounds off around the waist and add 20
years to your life.
My beloved, the body is important.
It's certainly one-third of man.
And it's interesting to look at it.
We're told today that it's made up of
15 chemical elements.
And some waggish chemist years ago figured it
out that if you took man all apart
and took each one of these 15 chemical
elements and sold them on the market, 15
years ago they would have sold for 98
cents.
But don't let that disturb you because everything's
gone up.
And today they would sell on the market
for $1.67. That's what you were worth
today.
And this waggish chemist went on and found
out there's enough phosphorus in us to make
the head on 11 matches.
He found out that there was enough lime
in us to whitewash a chicken coop.
And we sometimes say, my, so-and-so
has a lot of iron in his system.
Well, he only has enough to make three
shingle nails.
And sometimes some fella comes to the conclusion
that some little girl is all sugar.
Well, may I say to you, there's not
enough sugar in her to sweeten a cup
of cold coffee.
My friend, this morning, man physically is not
very much.
And he's not very important physically.
Actually, he disintegrates right back into the earth.
Dost thou art to dust, shalt thou return.
But may I say to you this morning,
God has put a value even on the
physical man.
And for the Christian today, he said to
the Christian, your body is the temple of
the Holy Ghost.
But only one-third of man, at best
or most, is physical.
And when you look at that, you must
turn to the words of our Lord when
he says, is not the life more than
meat and the body than raiment?
The whole philosophy of the world is expressed
in a verse of scripture.
Over in the 22nd chapter of the prophecy
of Isaiah, the 13th verse, will you listen
to this?
Behold joy and gladness, slaying of oxen and
killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine.
Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we
shall die.
That's such an important verse that Paul in
the 15th chapter of 1 Corinthians, he quoted
it.
He quoted it in order to be able
to say that no Christian can live by
that philosophy of life, because these bodies that
we're living in today are crumbling, they're falling
down, they're fading away.
John Quincy Adams, at the past 90, ex
-president of the United States, was taking a
walk one day in Boston, Massachusetts.
He met a friend.
His friend says, how are you today, Mr.
Adams?
He says, well, I am fine, but this
house that I live in is growing very
feeble, and I suspect I'll be moving out
of it before long.
Oh, I don't mean to be a pessimist
today, but look around you this morning, and
this great congregation we have here, one out
of 100 will not be here next year.
You won't be here, my friend.
Isaiah again says in the second chapter of
the 22nd verse, cease ye from man whose
breath is in his nostrils.
Again, it's very picturesque language that Isaiah uses.
Cease ye from man whose breath stands tiptoe
in his nose.
My friend, you breathe it out.
You don't know whether you're going to pull
it back or not, and one of these
days you won't.
And this morning, because of that, as we
look into the future, it must be with
an iron element of uncertainty, for man physically
is not something you can depend upon.
Then Paul says to the Thessalonians that there's
another department of man.
He calls it the soul.
The word in the Greek is the word
psuche.
We get our word psychology from that, and
it is the psychological part of man.
Somebody says, well, I thought the soul and
the spirit were the same.
Well, they are used interchangeably in some passages,
in fact, in many passages of Scripture.
But the Scripture also divides the soul and
the spirit.
The word of God is quick and powerful
and sharper than any two-edged sword, dividing
asunder the soul and the spirit.
And only God's word can divide the soul
and the spirit.
I wish this morning we had time to
go into these two.
I just mentioned them in a cursory way.
There is a distinction and a difference between
soul and spirit.
The soulish part of man is that part
of man that's the mental part.
It's his mind.
It's the that puts man on a cultural
level, above all the creatures that are in
this world today.
It is the thing that's disturbed the evolutionists
lots more than the body, to find in
the bodies of certain animals great big brains,
when man's brain is not as large as
some others.
It's hard to explain, but you see man
is a soul, a living soul.
And right now there's a battle going on
in the collegiate circles that doesn't pertain to
most of us today.
I noticed that during the holidays that the
college professors and presidents got together.
And in one convention, one president, he certainly
did tee off and express himself.
He deplored our present methods of education with
the emphasis today on specialization.
He says today that we are taking men
and making them specialists.
We take away from them every subject but
the subject they're specializing in.
And we're making today engineers and physicists and
chemists and atomic scientists.
But these men have no broad basis of
education and culture, and it's leading to abnormality.
We're merely turning out machines today that are
like geniuses.
They are robots.
And that the international business machine company can
probably turn them out just as well.
Oh my friend, this morning there is a
part of man that appreciates the better things
of life.
There's a part of man that thinks.
Man, a thinking being, is defined.
Few use this grand prerogative of mine, how
few think justly of the thinking few, how
many never think who think they do.
Man is a thinking being, my beloved.
And he gives estimations.
He determines values.
He puts a price tag on everything he
comes in contact with.
He says what's important to him.
He makes decisions, my beloved.
This is the man that moves through life
today.
But our Lord had something to say about
him.
I turn to a parable that he gave
yonder in the twelfth chapter of Luke.
Let me read this to you.
And he spake a parable unto them, saying,
The ground of a certain man brought forth
plentifully.
And he thought within himself, saying, What shall
I do?
Because I have no room where to bestow
my fruits.
And he said, This will I do.
I will pull down my barns and build
greater, and there will I bestow all my
fruits and my goods.
And I will say to my soul, Do
you notice it's his soul now, not his
spirit?
I'll say to my soul, So thou hast
much goods laid up for many years.
Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
But God said unto him, Thou fool, this
night thy soul shall be required of thee.
Then who shall those things be which thou
hast provided?
What a picture of man today that makes
all of his plans for the future.
Man gathers together and accumulates that which he
thinks is worthwhile, puts his price tag on
them, gives his own value to them, and
then sits back and says, Everything is taken
care of for the future.
And not knowing, my beloved, that God requires
his soul of him.
And in the case of this man, it
was that very night.
Because we do not know what a day
will bring forth.
We cannot boast ourselves of the morrow, for
we do not know what the morrow holds
for us.
And then, my beloved, finally man is a
spirit.
When God created man in the Garden of
Eden, it says that God breathed into his
breathing places the breath of life.
The breath there is spirit.
It is the pneumatose, the pneumatic, if you
please, part of man.
And you say to me this morning, What
is the spirit of man?
I do not know how I would have
explained it fifty years ago, but I think
this morning we can reach out and put
our hands on an illustration that will make
it clear what the spirit of man is.
When I was in Chicago some time ago,
there was in the service a very fine
-looking young Army officer.
What rank he is, I do not know.
When they get past a sergeant, I have
trouble knowing just what they are.
But he was way up yonder and he
attended all the meetings.
I got acquainted with him and I found
out he had charge of these Nikes that
were all around Chicago.
I do not think he betrayed a secret
when he told me a little something about
them.
They are guided missiles that he can sit
at a desk with a great many gadgets
in front of him.
He can turn a switch and he can
push a button.
He can turn a lever.
He can make certain movements and adjust it.
And that little fellow, and a big fellow,
he will lift up and start out.
And he will go exactly where he wants
him to go.
It is a guided missile.
And he says that inside that guided missile
there are some more little cubes and wires
and little gadgets in there.
And it is because of those little things
in there that he here can guide the
missile.
My friend, when God created man, he breathed
into his breathing places the spirit, his own
spirit, so that now instead of being down
here and guiding a missile God up yonder
could guide man down here.
But something happened.
Something happened to the missile.
And that is the reason this morning I
opened by saying, are you entering the new
year as an unguided missile?
Multitudes are.
Because man in the garden of Eden broke
loose and that spirit died within man.
God could no longer press a button and
guide man.
God could no longer speak to man and
lead him.
But this man went out in rebellion against
God.
May I say that when Niki goes wrong
in the air, it is tragedy.
And it means the destruction of Niki.
When man went wrong, it was tragedy.
But honestly, it did not mean the destruction
of man at all.
For God was busy, even in the garden
of Eden, to restore the communication and bring
man back into fellowship and to be able
again to push a button and guide man.
I turn to the 8th chapter of Romans.
If you think I have stepped over the
bounds this morning in an illustration and let
you listen to the language of the Apostle
Paul in the 8th chapter of Romans, will
you listen to the 8th verse?
So then they that are in the flesh
cannot please God.
Man in the garden of Eden, when he
fell, a spirit within him died as far
as God is concerned.
No longer did he have contact with God.
He's in rebellion against God.
And it can be said this morning, they
that are in the flesh, they cannot please
God.
Because even if you wanted to, my beloved,
which we don't, but even if we did
want to in our natural condition, we could
not respond to God when he pushes the
button.
There's no contact.
Listen again, because the carnal mind is enmity
against God, for it's not subject to the
law of God, neither indeed can be.
God says man's broken loose.
No longer can I control him.
He goes through this world an unguided missile.
But now God says, and as he said
yonder to Nicodemus that night, even a religious
man that you and I would have passed
any moment.
But our Lord said to him, ye must
be born again.
You've got to get a new nature.
You've got to be in Christ.
You'll become a new creation.
And old connections are broken and now new
connections are made.
And again, you can respond to the creator.
And that's the reason you must be born
again.
Now he says, if you are born again,
they that are after the flesh do mind
the things of the flesh, but they that
are after the spirit, the things of the
spirit, if you've been born again, the spirit
of God bears witness now with our spirit
that we are the children of God, the
sons of God, my beloved.
God gave us everything that we need except
a steering wheel.
And God never put a steering wheel on
any of us.
And the reason is that he wants to
guide us by remote control.
He wants to lead us in direction.
Little wonder this morning we stand as creatures
on the threshold of a new year, peering
into the future with uncertainty and ignorance and
even in darkness.
Why?
Because the one at the steering wheel is
up yonder, not you or not me.
And some folks attempt desperately to penetrate the
future and some even will plunge defiantly into
the future on their own, an unguarded missile.
Is that the way you're entering this year?
Scripture says that.
There is a way that seemeth right unto
a man, but the end thereof are the
ways of death.
Oh, we like sheep have gone astray, we've
turned everyone to his own way.
And the Lord hath laid on him the
iniquity of us all.
The trouble this morning with all of us
fundamentally is, is those three little words, his
own way.
We don't want to go God's way.
We want to go our way.
The Lord Jesus said, I am the way,
the truth and the life.
No man cometh to the Father, but by
me.
Paul said yonder in Lystra, who in times
past suffered all nations to walk in their
own ways, but now God says, you've got
to come my way.
And with what assurance today our Lord is
speaking to you and me out of the
upper room and saying, I am the way,
the truth and the life.
No man cometh to the Father, but by
me.
Those are dogmatic directions.
That statement, as a UCLA student said to
me several years ago, he says, that statement's
too dogmatic.
I agree with him.
It's dogmatic.
Truth is always dogmatic.
I like it that way myself.
I remember the first time I went up
to the Firs in Bellingham, Washington, we drove
up and I'd been to Seattle by train,
but had never driven before.
We spent the night in Portland, and the
next morning there was a great deal of
fog.
And when we drove out on Highway 99,
I don't know what happened, we got off
of it some way out of town, or
even before we got out of town, seemed
to me like.
And we drove around, couldn't get our way
back.
I said to my wife, I said, I
don't see how in the world we ever
got on the wrong road with both of
us driving, me at the steering wheel and
she sitting in her custom place.
But we did.
We got off the main route.
And finally I said, there's not one thing
to do, that's to go back and start
all over again.
And we turned back into Portland and we
started over again.
Went into a filling station, asked a young
fellow in the filling station if he knew
the way to Highway 99.
He had a broom in his hand.
He pointed at that broom in five different
directions.
And he said, he finally asked him, I
said, do you, do you know?
I asked him first, how long you been
here?
He said, two weeks.
I said, you then don't know.
He said, really didn't.
I went across the street, an older man
was there opening up the filling station.
I said to him, do you know the
way to get on Highway 99?
He says, I certainly do.
You go down here, three blocks, there's a
streetlight, you turn right and you continue that
right, till you come to another streetlight, then
go left, and you're on Highway 99.
I said, are you sure?
He looked at me in amazement.
He said, he was.
He was.
The Lord Jesus says, I'm the way, the
truth, and the life.
No man cometh to the Father but by
me.
And friend this morning, have you come this
way?
Have you come to the one that knows
the way into the new year?
You don't, I don't, no man knows, but
he knows.
Let me give one final word, and then
I'll not detain you any longer.
One final word from scripture.
I didn't give all the quotation from Isaiah
40.
Verse 8 says, the grass withereth, the flower
fadeth, but the word of our God shall
stand forever.
Man's is grass, and the grass withers, but
the word of God abides forever.
This, friend, is the only road map we
have.
God has given us only one road map,
and it's his word.
Oh, I wish this year that I could
get you closer to the word of God.
I have one ambition as the pastor of
the Church of the Open Door, and that
is to get more people into the word
of God.
Oh, I don't mean this stuff of sticking
it under your arm and carrying it on
Sunday morning and saying I believe it's God's
word.
I mean to really dig in and know
what it's all about.
I wish I could get you out on
Thursday night.
I wish I could get you into the
word of God that you might see his
road map.
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, that's you,
that's me, but the word of our God
abided forever.
We stand on the threshold of a new
year.
Paul says, I can stand with you.
Forgetting those things which are behind, reaching forth
unto those things which are before, I press
toward the mark for the prize of the
high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
As you face the new year today, are
you looking to Jesus Christ?
Unsaved friend this morning, have you come to
him, the one who is the way, the
truth, and the life?
The one that can bring you into contact
with God and bring you to the Father
and bring you to God and restore that
relationship?
And my Christian friend this morning, are you
plunging into this year as an unguided missile?
Are you looking to him today, looking unto
Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith?
Shall we pray?
Briefly this morning as we come to the
Lord's table, examine your
own heart and life, and in the quietness
of this moment, oh, it's so easy to
put up a front.
It's so easy to use subterfuge.
It's so easy to say things that are
not true.
But today, what are you going to do
with your future?
Are you entering the new year as an
unguided missile?
Is he at the controls today?
Have you turned your life over to him?
No wonder today that multitudes have hearts filled
with fears, anxieties as they look into the
future.
We don't know where we're going.
We know not what a day will bring
forth.
He does.
Put him at the controls of your life.
Let him push the buttons.
Let him turn the switch.
You've never let him in to your heart
and life.
You never come to him.
Do it this morning as we come to
this table with heads bowed, eyes closed, God's
people praying.
I'm wondering if you're here today, friend, on
the threshold of a new year to register
a decision and say today, I've been at
the controls too long, and I'm not getting
anywhere, and I certainly don't know the future.
This morning, the best I know how, I
want to say to him, Lord Jesus, take
my life, take over, direct me, guide me,
become my savior, become my Lord.