An Attitude Adjustment: See the Best
Dr. Tom Pace

August 28, 2016
Philippians 4:8-9

We continue our series called “A New Attitude.” Remember, we’re following in the footsteps of Patti LaBelle. “I’ve got a new attitude.” We’ve been reading Philippians 4, and today we’re going to read our second passage of Philippians 4. We’re going to read out of the King James Version, because I love the rhythm of that version in this passage. We’re going to read it in unison so you can read along in your Inside-Out handout.

^“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you.” (Philippians 4:8-9 KJV)

Let’s pray. Gracious God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear the word you have for each one of us today. Open our hearts that we might feel, break them open if necessary. And then, Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
Last week after this service about five of you came out into the Commons and mentioned that throughout the sermon my stole was askew. Just like that. Now I just want to know why, in an otherwise absolutely perfect sermon, you noticed the single blemish along the whole thing. Some of you said, “I couldn’t concentrate on the sermon, because your stole was messed up.”
That is the essence of what we’re talking about today. Now someone did say, and to their credit I’m very grateful, they corrected the basic premise of my sermon, which was that the verb rejoice was intransitive which it is. But I said it took an indirect object which it does not. Someone said, “You don’t have it right, Pastor.” And I said, “You could have told me that after 8:30. It would have been nicer than after 11 when I’ve done it four times.”
And what’s the worst part of it is that not a single one of the rest of you even noticed. You failed seventh grade grammar, just like I did.
So we’re talking about two sort of attitude shifts that we are working through as we read Philippians 4. The first was this idea of rejoicing in the Lord. That’s what we talked about last week. That rejoicing is completely devoid of focus on circumstance. You rejoice in the Lord no matter what. You rejoice for better for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Because what you’re saying is this relationship I have with God in Christ is so vital, so real that no matter what else is going on in my life, even if it’s horribly painful, even if it’s so difficult, even if it’s immense grief, because I have this I can rejoice.
Today we want to talk about a different verb that also has to do with joy and that’s the verb enjoy. So rejoice is one thing. It has nothing to do with circumstance. But enjoy has everything to do with circumstance.
Enjoy is how we deal with the world around us. Remember we’ve talked before about the cross having two axis. There’s a vertical axis. We have a relationship with God in Christ. “Love the Lord your God with all your mind and soul and strength.” And then the other is the horizontal “Love your neighbor as yourself,” looking around you at the world around you. And we remembered that the vertical holds up the horizontal. If you want to get the horizontal right, you have to get the vertical right.
Today we want to talk about this horizontal axis. How do we approach the world around us? And my basic premise today is that you will see what you are looking for. If you are looking for the best you will find the best. If you are looking for the worst you will find the worst. And Paul says, “If there is anything good, anything noble, anything true, anything pure, anything lovely, anything pleasing, think about these things.” So we want to talk about how we look at the world around us.
First we see the very best in the world. The passage in Genesis 2 tells the story this way. And God creates Adam and Eve, and he creates this garden for them. And the Scripture says, “And it was pleasing to the eye and good for food.” It looked good and it tasted good.
And God said to Adam and Eve, “You can eat of any tree in the garden.” In fact there’s a qualifier. He said, “You may freely eat of any tree in the garden. Enjoy! It’s awesome! But don’t eat of that one – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, by the way. Don’t eat of that one. But you can freely eat!”
Isn’t it funny how we’re always talking about that tree? That one tree we don’t get. That one tree we can’t have. We keep thinking of God as always saying, “No!” But God’s a “Yes saying God,” saying “Look at all this. It’s for you. It’s for you, enjoy it! Celebrate it!”
God has given us all of these things to celebrate and enjoy, and too often we worry about those things we don’t have.
I heard Melinda Gates interviewed a couple of weeks ago. And her interviewer pointed to the letter in the Gates Foundation annual report. And I really liked what it said. Let me read a portion of it, “By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient. You may think that such striking progress would be widely celebrated. But in fact Melinda and I are struck by how many think the world is getting worse. The belief that the world can’t solve extreme poverty and disease isn’t just mistaken. It’s dangerous.”
When we begin to focus on the negative, we start this downward spiral of despair and hopelessness and we start to give up and wash our hands of it.
Many of you know if you’re regulars here, you’re familiar with what I call the St. Augustine principle. Now St. Augustine was a great saint of the church. He was well revered. But St. Augustine is a grass. It is not a saint. And I am talking today not about St. Augustine but St. Augustine the grass. So the St. Augustine Principle is how do you get the Johnson grass out of the St. Augustine grass. How do you do it? It’s really simple. You fertilize the St. Augustine. You feed and fertilize the St. Augustine, and it gets healthier and healthier, and it chokes out the Johnson grass. One of our members named Johnson said, “Did you have call it the Johnson grass? Couldn’t you just call it weeds or something like that?”
So there’s another way. You can take the Round-Up and put it on a Q-Tip, and you can go and find the Johnson grass, and you can wipe it on the little piece of Johnson grass. Broadleaf weed killer won’t do it. You’ve got to do that a little bit at a time, and you could start that. Then about an eighth of the way through the lawn you’re thinking, “This is done, I’m stupid. I’m not going to do this anymore.” The way to do it is not to focus on the Johnson grass but to focus on the St. Augustine. Just keep feeding it, keep feeding it and watch it grow and take over.
We are surrounded by so many good things, and when we see something that is good and real and pure and true - there’s a saying in business that you replicate what you celebrate. So when you see good things happening you like to talk about them. You like to tell stories about them. We like to lift them up. We like to keep feeding them. We want them to take over. Of course there’s brokenness, and bad stuff.
There’s a few songs that I love, really I like all of them. The first one is “Yesterday” the song by the Beatles. “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.” Yesterday things were awesome! Today not so much. Or the song from “Annie” where it goes “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow…You’re only a day away.” Tomorrow’s going to be wonderful. Today not so much. We somehow think yesterday was better and tomorrow’s better but today not so much.
When I was at camp as a kid we’d sing a wonderful song from 1964. It went, “Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine, I’ll taste your strawberries, I’ll drink your sweet wine, a million tomorrows may all pass away, ere I forget all the joys that are mine today.” Friends, you’ve been given the garden! Notice the wonderful blessings that are available to you and enjoy! Choose to celebrate. Feed them.
The second thing is to see the best in others, other people. Here’s how a lot of us tell the Christian story. We tell the Christian story this way. We’re sinners, we’re depraved and we can’t save ourselves so God sent a Savior who saved us from our sins and can redeem us and make us into good people.
All of that is good. Nothing wrong with any of it, except that it starts too late. The story does not begin in Genesis 3 with sin. The story begins in Genesis 1 with creation. Each of us was created good, made in the image of God. And after God created us, God celebrated and clapped his hands and said, “Yeah! This is awesome! What a great job I did!” And we forget that. Somehow we can’t see that in other people.
I listen often to Pastor Steven Furtick. He’s not of our tradition at all although I do understand that he did come to Christ in a United Methodist Church. He has a church called Elevation Church in North Carolina. I don’t agree with a lot of things he says, but I listen to him every week because he’s so fun to listen to. Really, the truth is that there are really only two categories of preachers. There are boring, and not boring. Those are the only two categories. And we can sort through them in lots of different ways about theology. But the basic category is boring, and not boring.
Well, he’s in the not boring category so I listen to him every week. He told this story about his father. He had a relationship with his dad that was okay and pretty good, and then as his dad got older, his dad got angry and bitter and sad. He had some health issues and Steven and his sister would send caregivers to take care of him and he’d fire them immediately. Then when he’d come to see him he’d curse at them. He just got so angry. Steven tried to be compassionate, but as time went on he had had just about enough of his father’s abuse. So he didn’t even see him for two years.
Then one day before Father’s Day, he was talking to his father-in-law and was talking about how sad it was that he couldn’t be with his dad on Father’s Day, that the relationship was too broken. His father-in-law said, “Well you might just remember the good times.” Just sort an easy thing like that –“Remember the good times.”
So Steven began to think about that, and he decided he was going to write down on a piece of paper a good memory for every year his father had been his father. He was 32 years old at the time. So he decided to write down 32 memories. So he started by remembering how when he as a kid his dad had coached his baseball team. He said, “I was a terrible baseball player and all my friends were, too. So we were a terrible team. We were the Pirates. None of us could hit, and I could hit even worse than the rest of them. I was always so humiliated, because when I came up to bat I’d swing and I’d miss. I’d strike out at T-ball.” You don’t strike out at T-ball.
He continued, “As I got older my dad taught me how to bunt. He said, ‘Just put the bat out, boy, and it’ll hit the bat eventually.’ And sure enough it did. So I wouldn’t strike out anymore. I’d hit, and then I’d go and run, and they’d think I did it on purpose. It was so great. So I wrote on the paper ‘Bunting.’”
“Then I remembered that my dad was into fishing, and I didn’t like fishing. I was into rock music, and my dad didn’t like rock music. But once my dad took me to a punk rock concert before I was old enough to go on my own. He sat there with those orange ear stoppers in the whole time. So I wrote down on the paper, Punk rock concert.”
“I wrote 32 memories down and it took me a long time to remember them all. I went to see my dad on Father’s Day and handed him that piece of paper along with a Father’s Day card. I said, Dad, I just want to thank you for all the good times.”
“Then I saw tears coming down his cheeks.”
Look, if you look in the face of the people around you, you will see how much they resemble Jesus. They’re brothers and sisters of Jesus, part of the royal family. You can see it in their face and their eyes. If you look in the eyes and face of your brother or sister or mother or father or son or daughter or colleague or teammate or neighbor or friend or enemy, even if you look in the face of your enemy. They resemble Jesus and if you look hard enough you can see Jesus in them. You can see the gifts the Holy Spirit has planted in them. It may not be in full bloom but they’re there. “If there’s anything good, anything noble, anything beautiful think on those things.”
The great preacher John Claypool, who was a Baptist who became an Episcopalian, had a great phrase that I loved. He said that a parent’s greatest responsibility is to take delight in his or her children. I think that’s so great. And now I’m a grandparent, and our only responsibility is to take delight in them. We don’t have to do anything else. “I don’t have to do diapers. I’m sorry, honey. But isn’t he cute?” So just see the goodness in the people around you.
The third part is this. It’s pretty straight forward, to see the goodness in yourself. That’s kind of the hardest I have to tell you. At least it is for me. That’s because there’s always a voice telling you that you’re not good enough. You’re really not good enough. They might find out that you’re faking. They might say, “You can’t do that.” We tend to think of ourselves as not enough.
At the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit a few weeks ago there was a woman named Danielle Strickland who spoke. She’s an officer in the Salvation Army church. It’s actually a sister church of the United Methodist Church, the Salvation Army is. A lot of people don’t know that.
She didn’t look a Salvation Army officer. She looked like a soccer mom. She’s lots of fun. She was telling the story about how she had a son named Joshua who was about six or seven. She had a friend over visiting and Joshua came running out. He had a towel around his neck and was saying, “I’m Superman!” They all went, “Yea, Josh – you’re Superman!” Then he came out later and said, “I’m the Incredible Hulk” and had his Incredible Hulk costume on. They said, “Yea – you’re the Incredible Hulk!” Then he came running out, and all he had on were his tidy whities. And he went, “Ta Da!” And they said, “Who are you?” And he said, “Ta Da! I’m Joshua! I’m me. This is me! I am great!”
Yeah, we beat that out of them as they get older, don’t we? We don’t want them to know that.
I was so impressed by Simone Biles after the Olympics recently. So they said, “Are you going to be the next Michael Phelps? Or Saint Bolt?” And she said, “No, I’m the first Simone Biles. That’s who I am.” I watched her when she was getting ready to do some of her vaults. You’d see her lips go, “You got this! I got this!” It’s as if she were saying, “I’m telling myself, I can do this.” And boy, could she. But there’s always that voice.
Over the past few weeks we’ve been in the business of doing some renovation. Have you noticed we’re doing some renovation? I don’t know if you saw that. There’s some construction going on. And that meant that we had to move our desks so they could put some new carpet in. And that made you have to clean out your desk drawers.
There are two approaches to that. You can just dump the stuff in a box and then dump it back. Or you can go through it. One of our staff was going through his desk drawers and he found three letters in the desk drawer that had been buried in all the junk. They were, for lack of a better word, hate mail. They were unsigned but just told him how incompetent he was and what an embarrassment he was. He looked at them again and asked himself this question, “Why do I keep those?”
Why do we do that? Do you put them in the drawer so you can you can just get them back out and stick your finger in the wound and remind yourself that you just don’t have it? It seems so silly, but I’m going to tell you that I’m looking out at you, and there are probably some of you who don’t do that. But I’m going to tell you that the vast majority of us… we don’t feed the St. Augustine we feed the Johnson grass. We just keep pumping it up, because we think that’s what we’re supposed to do. It makes us humble.
Friends, you were created by God to be good. That is the core nature of who you are. And even though you’re broken, Jesus has redeemed that core nature in you. And by the power of the Holy Spirit you are good.
Look, I’m saying that of course occasionally you’ve got to take a look at your life and find the places that you make mistakes, where you fall short and to try and do better and work at that. Of course you have to have hard conversations with other people about holding them accountable for places they fall short. Of course we have to face the difficulties in the world around us and try and solve those problems.
But when those voices become louder than the words of praise and gratitude that God placed in our hearts, then we’re not making anything better. We’re just reminding us of how bad it is. We’re not joining in God’s work of redemption of restoration.
So just look at the people around you this week and say, “You’re part of the royal family. You look a lot like Jesus to me.”
We’re going to close by reading together Philippians four verses 8 and 9. We’re going to read it from The Message. It’s in your bulletin there, in your Inside Out handout. We read it the first time in the King James Version and this time we’re going to read it in The Message. Let’s read together:


^“Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.” (Philippians 4:8-9 The Message)
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.