Let's imagine a Greyhound bus draws up outside
Garden Court.
And we all file right out that door
and down and get into it.
And off we go, down University Avenue, onto
Highway 94, and on.
And after a little while, somebody says, where
are we going?
And somebody else says, does anybody feel hungry?
There's food back here.
So we all break out the food and
we have a really good lunch.
And then somebody says, why are we on
this bus?
But somebody else says, let's sing some songs
and let's play some games.
So we sing some songs and we play
some games.
Now, the situation is strange enough for an
afternoon.
But think of the neurosis that sets in
after three days.
And then think of the situation after we've
been in that bus for 20 years.
And some of us are beginning to wonder,
now, okay, at the beginning, maybe it didn't
matter where we were going, we were all
having such a good time.
But now we're not all having such a
good time.
Some of us have got sick and some
of us are enemies of each other.
And some of us are trying to protect
ourselves in one corner against some others in
another corner.
And some of us have too much food
and some of us haven't enough food.
And some of us have died and have
been thrown off the bus.
Now, surely, surely, it's time to find out
where we're going.
And, of course, exactly how it would happen,
I'm not sure.
But as children are born to us, they
begin to ask the questions that we used
to ask when we first got on the
bus.
And they say, why are we on this
bus?
Where are we going on this bus?
And the parents just tell them, keep on
laughing.
Just keep on cleaning those windows.
And bit by bit we begin to realize
that actually every one of us is trying
to pretend that it doesn't matter where we're
going as long as we keep ourselves occupied
doing things in the bus.
And, of course, some of us find the
situation so absolutely maddening that we feel we
have to get out of such a meaningless
position somehow or other.
And there is, of course, only one way
off.
And that is the way those who died
find.
They were thrown off the bus.
And so one of us, unthinkable though it
is, writes a book on how to commit
suicide.
And, of course, we all think that could
never, never happen.
Except that those of us who know the
story of the publishing of that book know
it has already happened.
Of course, what drove us to look for
a book like that was the meaninglessness of
the other writers on the bus who wrote
books purporting to explain why we were there.
And their books were so dumb.
How to win by intimidation.
How to be happy though married.
How to make a fortune in real estate
or in bus seats.
And we just felt, this is dumb.
All you're doing is telling us how to
occupy ourselves while we're on this bus, but
it doesn't tell us why we're on it
or where we're going.
It just tells us how to spend our
time while we're here.
And more and more, of course, we all
began to feel the meaninglessness of the whole
situation.
And it's interesting, you know, you've probably already
done it.
All you have to do is to transpose
the scene from a greyhound bus to a
sphere spinning through the space of the universe
at hundreds of miles an hour.
And you've got the predicament of the human
race.
Now let's imagine that a person suddenly appears
on the bus, not through the normal birth
experience that the other children had, but he
appears miraculously on the bus.
And he says, the bus belongs to my
father, he's the owner.
And then he takes some of us aside
and he explains to us why we're on
the bus and where we're going and why
we do exist.
You can imagine how invaluable would be the
books written by the few of us that
listen to that kind of information.
And so it is, loved ones, so it
is here on this greyhound bus.
We realize the terrible truth that none of
us on the bus can actually explain where
the bus is going precisely because we're on
it ourselves.
We can't be outside it and look at
it and see where it's going.
And we can't explain who owns it or
who keeps it going because we're on the
bus.
And that is the prison in which we
find ourselves.
And so the books that any of us
write are limited to telling us how to
spend our time while we're on it.
But they cannot tell us where it's going
or why we're here.
The only books that can are the books
written by the friends of this unique man
that boarded the bus some years ago.
Now, where are those books?
Where is that explanation?
Oh, without any question, in those first eleven
chapters of Romans, they differ from all that
Berker and Russell produced, all that Plato produced,
all that the greatest travelers on the bus
have ever written because they explain why we
exist from outside our existence.
And those first eleven chapters of Romans are
the clearest and the most profound explanation of
the meaning of our lives that we have
on our earth.
That's why we spent these ten years studying
those chapters in Romans.
If you understand those and if you've entered
into the life that they describe, the world
can give you little more than that, except
maybe a little elaboration or illustration.
And today, of course, is an interesting day
for us because we come to the very
last couple of sentences in that unique explanation
of the meaning of our lives.
We come today to the last verse that
concludes that clear explanation.
And maybe you would look at it, loved
ones.
It's Romans 11 and verse 36.
And, of course, in the miraculous way that
this man Paul was inspired by the Creator
to write, he summarizes the whole explanation of
the meaning of our lives with three prepositions.
Verse 36, it's page 986, Romans 11 and
36.
And he talks about the Father of Jesus.
For from him and through him and to
him are all things.
For from him and through him and to
him are all things.
That's it.
That's the meaning.
The first preposition is ek, or as it
appears in that verse, ex autu, from him.
And that's the first truth, that we can
breathe a sigh of relief and relax.
Einstein was right.
The order and design of our world shows
beyond all doubt that it is not the
result of the casting of a dice.
That's the way Einstein puts it.
The order and design of our world shows
clearly that God did not cast a dice.
That what we experience here is not simply
the result of time plus chance.
We can breathe a sigh of relief because
Darwin was right.
Even if there is any evolution or no
evolution in the world, still you remember at
the very end of The Origin of Species,
he says, what a glorious way that our
Creator has found to produce our world.
That however he made it, there had to
be someone who created at the very beginning,
the first proton, the first neutron.
Whether after that it evolved or was again
created in great stages by him is in
a sense irrelevant to the fact that there
had to be a personal mind to create
the first cell from him.
Everything has come from the dear Father of
Jesus.
The Zoroastrians and the Sassanians are wrong.
It was not created by some demiurge or
some impersonally la vitale.
It was created by a dear Father who
is the Father of Jesus.
Everything, everything.
That means Bing Crosby's Blue of the Night.
That means Jack Benny's Stare.
It means Danny Kay.
It means Perry Como.
It means all the comedians that we've ever
heard.
They came from God.
Because that's what it says.
From him are all things.
All things.
Everything that is filled with laughter and filled
with jokes, he made smiles.
And he made funny bones.
And he made tickles.
And he made laughter.
And he made singing saints.
From him are all things.
Yet it's amazing, isn't it, how we kind
of take that into our minds but we
still have the idea that our God is
somehow a stern and foreboding kind of creature.
And can you see, loved ones, that from
God are all things means that all the
happiest things that we know come from God.
And it's interesting, the more you and I
obey and love him, the more we see
the deeper meaning of from him.
Because ek really means out of him.
Out of the heart of God's nature have
come all things.
Not just from him, but out of the
heart of his nature.
Even though we believe the world is not
simply an emanation of God, it is a
creation, yet God himself put part of his
own nature in all the things that he
has made so that actually the things that
he has made show us what he himself
is like.
I don't know if you like country western
music.
I don't.
But I like one song by Tom Hall.
All dogs and children and watermelon wine.
Do you know that one?
It's a dear song.
And God is the one who made all
dogs and children and watermelon wine.
And they come out of his very heart.
And when you see the faithfulness and the
loyalty of an old dog, the dear heart
that made that old dog must be more
faithful and more loyal than the old dog.
And when you see little children so trusting
and so joyous, don't you see that the
dear person who made them must have more
happiness in his own heart?
He must be more trusting.
He must be more open.
He must be simpler than they are.
And watermelon wine?
Oh, he must be more exciting, more exhilarating,
more carefree than the greatest wine that ever
was drunk.
He has to be.
The Creator who made these things made them
out of his very own heart.
And so, loved ones, every time we look
at those things, we see a shadow of
the perfection of those things in our Creator.
That's what it means, from him are all
things.
And actually, it means you too.
It's interesting, but it's hard to find any
of us who have not something good in
us, isn't it?
Now, you might differ from me a little
on this.
I would dislike the Hitler character as much,
I think, as anybody in this room.
But it's interesting, if you look at those
old movies, and you see even that person
who is regarded as one of the most
hateful and the most evil men that ever
lived, and you see him receiving a bouquet
of flowers from some little German girl in
the early days, you sense there is even
in that heart some tenderness, some kindliness.
Loved ones, so it is in all of
us.
There probably isn't one of us here who
hasn't some kindliness or tenderness in some deep
part of our hearts towards someone or something.
That's what it means, from him are all
things.
There isn't one of us here in this
room who have not something of the remains
of God's image and character still manifesting itself
in us.
That's where all good comes from in the
world.
Now, I agree with anybody here that it
is true that many of us have lost
the freedom and the freshness to be ourselves
that we had when we were little children.
I agree with that.
Old Wordsworth, you remember, says, Heaven lies about
us in our infancy.
Shades of the prison house begin to grow
around the growing broi.
At length the man perceives it fade away
and die into the light of common day.
I think those lines would be felt by
many of us, it would be true.
It is true that sometimes when we go
out into the freshness and the cleanness of
a spring morning, we can feel kind of
shop-soiled and worn and unclean inside.
And sometimes we feel, yeah, we have lost
some of that freshness that God gave us.
And when we look at swallows soaring so
freely in the air, and we look at
the lightness of summer breezes, and we look
at the glinting of sun on the lake
water, we see that somehow nature seems to
have retained some of that.
And we begin to realize that there is
a lot of this creation that exists through
Him, through God.
Somehow the birds seem to be able to
do their thing because they have a deep
confidence that there is someone who loves them.
They seem to be free to forget themselves
and to do what they were made to
do, to sing joyously or to soar magnificently.
And somehow we begin to see that there
is a great part of the universe that
does exist simply through God, through His continuing
to energize these creatures and these things with
His own life.
And we begin to see that it's His
punctuality and faithfulness in maintaining the laws of
the universe that enable the sun to come
up on the dot every morning.
Somehow we begin to realize it's because He
holds together the protons and the neutrons that
make up the wings of the birds and
that holds together the resistance of the air
that enables them to soar against the winds
and the currents.
And we begin to sense, yeah, all things
exist through Him.
If He dropped His little finger, they'd all
fall apart.
And then maybe, you know, some of us
say, yeah, well, I mean, you said all
things, but you just did point out the
contrast that we often feel between the heaviness
and the burdensome nature of our own lives
and the lightness and the spontaneity of these
natural things that you're talking about.
Surely, you can't say through Him all things
when we find ourselves not reacting like that.
Accept, loved ones, that every twinge of a
muscle that you and I feel, every line
of worry in our faces, every strain that
we experience at any time through the day
is also the yearning and the message of
God's Spirit to tell us that we could
live like the birds.
And so even those of us who don't
rest upon Him exist through, first of all,
His grace in not destroying us and throwing
us off the bus.
And secondly, through the very messages that come
to us through our anxiety and our worry
and our sleepless nights, He's still getting through
to us there is a better way to
live than this.
There is a way to live above these
things.
In other words, all things exist through God's
expressing to us through His Spirit that it's
possible to live as free as the birds,
that it is possible for God's Spirit to
remake us so that we experience the simplicity
and the trustfulness of children again, so that
we experience again the liberation and the freedom
and the exhilaration of soaring swallows, that it
is possible to experience the cleanness and the
freshness of the waves on the Hawaii beaches.
It is possible to express and experience again
the exhilaration of salmon that leap in the
waters.
It is possible because the same Holy Spirit
that enables them to act like that way
is available to us, really.
And that the reason we are so heavy
and burdensome is because we're living like the
people on the bus.
We're spending all our time and all our
energies and all our thoughts on how to
make the life on the bus, which is
not at all our home, as comfortable and
pleasant as we can.
Instead of spending all our energies trusting the
dear Father to take us wherever He wants
us to go in our lives and concentrating
on doing what He has made us to
do, whether it pays us or whether it
doesn't pay us.
And the Holy Spirit is constantly speaking to
all of us those things.
So, even old Odins, you know, in headaches
and in worry, vaguely life leaks away.
Even those headaches and worry are God's dear
Spirit trying to say to us, there's a
better way.
If you trust me, the Holy Spirit, and
you begin to take me as your friend
and begin to take me as the Lord
and the master of your life and begin
to think what I guide you to think
and do what I guide you to do,
you'll begin to live like the freshest part
of God's creation.
Through Him are all things.
And, of course, the real reason for our
whole existence is in that final preposition.
It's the Greek word ais, ais, out on.
To Him, unto Him, and possibly even into
Him.
That's why we're here on earth.
For that Spirit of God, so to begin
to mold our own lives and our characters
that we are fit to live in heaven
with our dear Father and His Son.
That's it.
He made us to be His friends, to
live with Him forever in an infinite universe
that has more exhilaration and more beauty in
it than we have ever touched.
That's why God made us.
That we would live with Him in friendship
and in love.
It's interesting that the Greek word can mean
into Him.
Not that we would be absorbed and lose
our individuality as the Middle Eastern religions would
have it, but that we would be involved
intimately with Him.
We would come into Him and be part
of Him and yet retain our own individuality
and in that way express more of His
glory in more diverse ways.
That's why we're here, loved ones.
It really is a veil, a veil of
soul-making.
It is.
And this world is not our home.
We are just a passing through.
And the bus is going somewhere.
And we have just a fairly short span
of life.
Most of us just about 70 years.
To let the Holy Spirit of God that
holds everything in existence begin to remake us
so that we become like His Son Jesus
and begin to live that free life that
He lived.
And that's why we're here.
Now, it doesn't matter how burdened you are.
It doesn't matter what a prisoner you are.
You might have thought that shades of the
prison house begin to close around the growing
boy.
At length the man perceives it die away
and fade into the light of common day.
It doesn't matter how imprisoned you feel you
are.
In the limitations of your own personality or
in your own habits or your own thought
patterns, it doesn't matter.
The dear Creator who made you first is
able to remake you as He has done
many of us in this room.
And the secret is He does it through
your beginning to respect the dear Holy Spirit
that holds in existence all that we see
around us.
Really.
He is the real meaning of Einstein's equation.
He is the real energy that is the
heart of the whole universe.
And He is able to bring a new
life into you.
He is.
And really all a person has to do
is to recognize as real these things that
we've talked of this morning and to begin
to live your life on the basis of
them.
And most of all, to begin to speak
to this dear Spirit of God who is
able to change you.
Lord Jesus, we sense that something great has
happened to us in your death and resurrection,
but we've been trying to make it real
by our own willpower.
We see now that that's impossible.
The swallows do not fly by their own
willpower.
The daffodils do not bloom because they want
to.
They do it because of the Holy Spirit,
your very own self, your very own life
energy.
And oh Holy Spirit, we realize that you
are a person and that our Lord Jesus
called you Him.
And He said that He, the Holy Spirit,
will lead you into all truth.
He will take of the things that are
mine and impart them to you.
Holy Spirit, we need to be freed in
our own lives.
And we need to begin to live as
people who are released from the prison that
we have been in for years.
Holy Spirit, we would look to you now
and begin simply to trust you and to
acknowledge you and to be prepared to listen
to any slight indication or impression that comes
from you.
So we intend to do that, Holy Spirit.
We ask you to remake us by making
real in us the great resurrection that took
place in Jesus.
We ask this for His glory.
And now the grace of our Lord Jesus
and the love of God and the fellowship
of the Holy Spirit be with each one
of us now and evermore.
Amen.