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Word Record- WHAT'LL I DO ABOUT MY LIFE?
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link should stream the real audio file all the real audio files are about 900 kb in size (I have Netscape and it does
not stream
Three big questions confront every young person. They are: What shall I make out of Existence? Whom shall I marry? And, where shall I invest my life? They are all questions that make you come down off the fence of objectivity where modern education has often encouraged you to sit. You need to be as wise as you can in deciding all three of those issues, but in answering them you can't go on being tentative and sitting on the fence. One. What shall I make of existence? All of us who intend to live at all must make some choice between the negatives of skepticism and the positives of some kind of faith. You re- member H. L. Mencken's famous credo: "The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10, 000 revolutions a minute; man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it; religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride. 11 But the great Spanish philosopher, Unamuno, says, "to believe in God is to long for His existence. Further it is to act as if He existed. And it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action.” G. K. Chesterton once said, "I had it in the beginning and I'm more and more coming back to it in the end--my original and almost mystical conviction of the miracle of all existence and the essential excitement of all experience.” Which will you have--Mencken or Unamuno or Chesterton? The choice has to be made. You can choose one view or the other, but you've got to take one of them if you're going to live, not merely observe life. Try to assess it by what other people make of it who do dare to live. And,
Second. Whom should I marry, if any? At first this looks like a very
personal subjective matter. Shall it be Mary or Jane? Shall it be Joe or
Bill? It turns out to be really another question--on what basis shall I
make my choice? And on what basis do I want my partner to make a choice?
Human love and attraction are very powerful and very joyful realities in
life. But from within that relationship, however close, you're going to
have to make a decision- -decisions that will depend, not on love and
loyalty to one another only, but on the values in which you really
believe. The decisions are going to be more difficult as you diverge in
your basic values. The real reason why marriages contracted on a
Christian basis succeed rather better than those that are on a purely
natural basis is that Christians have a place of reference in which
inevitable differences can be resolved by prayer and the search for
God's Will. And,
Third. Where shall I invest my life? This is the third and big question
and it's primarily about this that I want to talk with you now. We must
begin, I think, with two great urgencies today and let them play upon
the decision we make about our life's work. The first urgency is the one
that lies always in the heart of God. If the Christian gospel is true,
God is a loving God, He cares for people--for all people, everywhere. He
cares for people in America and He cares for people in Africa. Wherever
people have been moved by the passion of concern for other people that
was within Christ they have gone out to seek and meet every kind of
human need; they've gone out to non-Christian peoples, not only with the
beliefs of the gospel, but also with the services and the kindnesses of
the gospel. A few years ago some of us got together and formed a
movement called "World Neighbors" which seeks to carry out our
Western know-how to underprivileged peoples overseas- -carrying it in
the Christian spirit- -packaging the religious elements, as it were, in
deeds. Dr. Frank Laubach, the apostle to the world's illiterates was the
inspiration behind this. We're at work now in more than 1200 villages,
mostly in Egypt and India. This is not a program of relief; this is a
program of self-help. If we had done enough of this in time past the
communists would not have made such appeal to the underprivileged
masses. And if we set out to do this even now on a huge scale we would
both fulfill our Christian duty and save millions of people from the
false promises of communism. But there's a-second urgency today and it is our world situation. For all who believe in freedom, the situation couldn't be more serious. And yet, most Americans are at this moment lulling themselves almost to insensibility as to what's happening. They will not remember that dictators tell the world what they're going to do and as they gain power they do it. Hitler did that. The communists have done it on a much wider scale. The world never before saw any Page
2 thing like the combination of
political and scientific power that is in the hands of the Russians
today. Many countries have been able to plant a few spies and saboteurs
in other countries to work for their own interests, but never before has
a country trained and sent out tens of thousands of agents dedicated to
world revolution and planted them almost everywhere on the glob(!. With
our inveterate optimism, the deep-rooted belief that America could whip
anybody on earth, we keep saying hopeful things and we go about our
materialistic way of life as if nothing were happening. I'm not sure
that our leaders or the press or a great deal of our education is giving
us the real low-down. Everybody had his head down pursuing his own
course. And who's giving us the real big picture and asking us to gage
our lives to the crisis and the needs which it represents? I talked a
while ago with a Roman Catholic Monsignor who has held a very high
position in one of the now-occupied countries of Europe and he said to
me soberly that he thought the communists would either take the world or
destroy it. I hope he's wrong, but I'm not sure he is. I believe that we
are where we find ourselves today partly because we have misused two of
the greatest human blessings people can have- -freedom and peace. We
misuse freedom because to our forefathers freedom was a philosophy and a
passion and a crusade. But freedom is for us precisely adopting no
philosophy- -feeling no passion--taking part in no crusade. In such
freedom conditions develop which make the emergence of some kind of
force necessary. And generally that force lessens the freedom. Some time
ago TIME had a quotation from Helmut Thielicke of West Germany when he
spoke to a group of students and he said, "Are we still worth our
freedom? We who do nothing but consume freedom instead of producing
it?" You see, we've forgotten that freedom primarily means freedom
to obey God. Actually we try to obey God or else we obey ourselves.
Luther said, "Men serve God or an idol. 11 And we have misused
peace. We thought peace was normal--war abnormal. We thought peace was
meant to be a time to get ours--to build up power or reputation or
fortune for our- selves. Our technical civilization and our secularistic
education have made material success the dream of the average American
youth. And so, thus misguided, American youth has had to spend years in
military service. Many have given their lives. Many more will yet be
forc ed to do so because we have used peace selfishly. There ought to
have been pouring out of our schools and colleges men and women animated
by the desire to serve and meet urgent human needs driven by the
Christian motive. We needed, not scores of them, but thousands of them.
Doctors, agriculturists, engineers, teachers. They should have been sent
out, not by the church boards only, but by foundations and private
industry and corporations also. We need people here at home who realize
that Christianity is the only faith and philosophy that freedom has.
Democracy presupposes a Divine Being to whom we owe loyalty and
obedience. Now we believe this is best worked out by the separation of
church and state, but this does not mean that the real well-being of the
Nation is not almost wholly dependent upon what voluntary organizations,
notably education and the church, can do to create sound and honest and
industrious and responsible people. We need to use whatever is left to
us of time and of peace to pour out our concern and our help to the more
helpless peoples of the world and to establish our own people at home in
Christian faith and character and service. We face a world crisis. I
don't think it will be resolved in our lifetime. We need to live on a
crisis basis, not on a comfort basis. We are forced to take part in one
of two revolutions --the communist revolution based on atheism and
materialism proceeding by lies and by force --or the Christian
revolution based on faith in God, and the Christian view of man and
proceeding by service and by persuasion. The late Archbishop of
Canterberry said that there are only two kinds of people in the world
who know what they're after- -the communist and the convinced Christian.
The rest of the world, he said, are amiable non-entities. You can't make
up your mind what to do with your life in a vacuum of personal desire or
even aptitude divorced from these facts in the world. Now it's the
Christian faith that God has a plan for our lives. It isn't going to be
imposed on us but we can seek and find it--we can also ignore it and
miss it. It's like the architect's blue-print for the way things ought
to be-- plumber may put the pipes in the wrong place- -carpenter may use
rotten wood--that's up to the builder and to them. God is the architect-
-we Ire the builders. If we follow the plan we get order and rightness.
If we depart from it--well, we get what we've got in the world now. God
has a Will for every life and every situation. Page
3 Lincoln
once said,” I Find that when the Almighty wants me to do or not, He
has a way of letting me know it." Now I don't believe God's a bit
more interested in my being a minister than another man being a farmer
or a stockbroker if they are His Will for him. I believe He is
interested in all men and all life. I think He is concerned about
people, about how they live, about what courage they come by, what they
make out of life by faith. It's a common fallacy to think a man has to
be called to the ministry or some kind of Christian service, but if he
wants to sell bonds or practice law or run a factory, that's his own
business. Why? Is that a mature tested view? I think it's half-baked. If
our job is to obey God and serve mankind as He wants us to do, I think
you'd better be just as sure that God wants you in business or teaching
or manufacture, as I must be sure God wants me to go in the ministry. I
think God is interested in life, just the same--no, not just in
religion. And yet I must remind you that religion is a very important
part of life. Our real warfare
today is a spiritual warfare for men's minds and loyalties. If there are
tens of thousands of devoted and determined missionaries for communism
all over the globe as there are, we need some mighty good men and women
holding up the other side. With all the privileges some of us have
had--and the great relative strength and wealth of America--I think a
great many of young people that may be listening in at this moment ought
to wind up in some kind of specific Christian service, including the
ministry of the church. Somebody has got to be dedicated to spreading
the very tangible so-called intangibles of God and faith. If I had a
thousand lives I'd put them all in the same place where I've put the one
I do have. Not only because I think I've had about as glorious a time of
living as anybody I know, but because the primary need for men who can
help other men to find God and faith is so great. Now that takes time
and individual attention--lots of it. You think you're going to do this
in your off time but are you?
Now, how does one
know what he should do? Let me make some suggestions: One, put yourself
in God's hands with as deep a self-surrender as you know how to make.
Offer to Him Let go of whatever hinders think. Look life square in the
face. See and talk with people who know God and who know life. Don't ask
them to decide for you, but learn from them. And fourth, pray to know
God's will for your life. Follow it where you know it in small things
and you'll be much surer about it when it comes to life in-vestment.
Fifth, ask Him to make His will and His call known to you. The call is
often a recognition of need. A while ago a very lively missionary from
Africa was in Pittsburgh talking about his work. A young engineer was
listening and he said, "how do you recognize a call to this kind of
work?" And the missionary said, "you've got your orders from
the Commander-in-Chief, are you 4-F?" That young man's out there
with him today building roads and air strips and buildings. Sixth, when
the course seems reasonably clear, --nothing else pressing—and having
used all the lights you’ve have, launch into it with all you've got.
The work given you by God is your parish just as my church is my
parish. And you're meant to do the same things in it. Care for people
and serve them and help them to find God and faith. Seventh, Keep your
eye all the while on the Big Picture. Few are out for materialistic
success--they just find there isn’t any world left for them to be
selfish in. "He that saves his life shall lose it. He that loses
life for Christ's sake the same shall save it. I know what some
of you people are looking forward to--a little white house with green
shutters. A little two-car garage; nice little wife; four little
children; nice little retirement plan when you're fifty-five so you can
take nice little trips you've always wanted to take, then come home and
sit in a nice little chair on the porch in summer and by the fireside in
winter. You know what the end of -that story is? Its a nice little mound
on a hillside with a couple of nice little stones and some names and
dates on it. You’ve pampered yourself into mediocrity when you might
have forgotten yourself into immortality. Don't make it necessary for
God to say to you when it's all over what King Henry IV of France said
to one of his generals who had missed a battle: "Hang yourself
brave Crillon. We fought at Arques and you were not there.”
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