Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: For our closing worship this afternoon we will be using the (inaudible) hymnal (inaudible) number one. (inaudible) this day whom ye will serve.
As the Lord made God follow Him (inaudible). Oh come let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker for He is our God and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of [hen?]. Let us stand and sing together hymn number 295.
Let us pray. O God who are infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. Glorious in holiness, full and love and compassion, abundant in grace and in truth, all Thy words praise these in all places of Thy dominion and Thy glory is revealed in Jesus Christ Thy Son. Wherefore we praise Thee Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
one God blessed forever. Amen. Let us confess our sin before our [waking?] God by using the Prayer of Confession found on page 39 in the Book of Common Worship.
Let us pray. O mighty and most merciful God, we acknowledge and confess that we have sinned against Thee in thought, word, and deed. That we have not loved Thee with all our heart and soul
(inaudible). We seek to know God, forgive (inaudible) what we are and (inaudible) shall be (inaudible) so that we may (inaudible) of Thy commandments. (inaudible) through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Hear the gracious
words of our Lord Jesus Christ unto all that truly represent and return to Him, "Come unto Me all ye that labored and are heavy [laden?] and I will give you rest. Him that commeth to Me I will (inaudible) cast out." The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us all. Amen.
Our scripture lesson this afternoon comes from John's gospel, the twenty-eighth chapter beginning at the twenty-fourth verse. Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came.
So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will not believe." Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut
but Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not be faithless but believe. Thomas answered, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen
and yet believe." Amen.
CASTEEL: It's been a great year with evangelistic fellowship. I know that it's been a very great privilege for me to be able to participate in our program that we've done -- that we've put on for you this year. I think we've gained as much from it as you have. The opportunities to go out into your churches and to get to know you have been a very rewarding experience for us, and it's kind of in terms of this that I'd like to point my remarks today. You never have an experience with people in which
we come to know each other in some way and another when you don't really learn something about yourself and learn something the other person too. There's a real sense in which the knowledge that we have of the world around us, the important things, the things that are most important to us, it's a kind of knowledge that comes to us in getting to know each other. And so I'd like to talk for a moment today about something that could be just, perhaps, a little bit touchy,
about some things, perhaps, that I have learned about you as high school students who live in the world that we live in today. Things that have impressed me about you. Things that you feel, the things that, perhaps, that you're thinking now. And I think it's real important that we become very honest and very straightforward about this. Because unless we can see ourselves as we are, where we are, can this gospel of Jesus Christ, about which we've heard today and
we've heard so many other times, how can this become really meaningful to us? If Christ doesn't mean something to me where I am honestly in the world today, and as I see myself, does He really mean anything? I was talking to a young fellow during our spring vacation when I had an opportunity to go home with a friend. He's a senior in high school, and we were sort of talking back and forth about the thing he was interested in, the things that --
well he was doing. And I was just sort of -- we were sort of talking back and forth and we got on the subject as to where he was going to go to college. And I said something like, from, in sort of kidding back and forth, from the knowledge that I have of you now in a way we really know each other, I would say that you should go to such and such a college. And he looked at me straight in the face and he got a real serious look, one of the few serious looks that he showed me during the time that I knew him, and he said, "You really don't know me.
You don't know anything about me. You don't know anything about the things that I really feel. The things that we'd been talking about, they aren't the real important things to me. They're pretty surface." He said, "You think I'm a pretty nice guy, don't you?" And I said, "Yeah, I kind of like you." And he said, "You know I'm not really too nice a guy. As a matter of fact, I am really conceded." And
this kind of took me back I was kind of wondering exactly what he was trying to point to. And we started -- we kept talking along about this and I was really surprised that he was bringing up all these little personal things. And then the more we talked the more and more I realized the fact that as I was talking to him and telling all these -- him all these things about what I thought he should be doing with his life and this and that, I was really missing the boat. Because we were talking in these sort of generalities that so often pervade our
conversations and the things that we pretend are most important. And we never really get personal. We never really expose that part of us that is the part that really bothers us about ourselves. That part that people never see. That part that we don't want people to see. We live in a world of the law of the attractive, if we could put it that way. We go around making ourselves as attractive as possible to other people, because
we want to be liked. I think you all know this feeling. We want people to like us and we're afraid if they see this about us, or that about us, they're going to reject us. And the one thing we can't stand is rejection. But we, for some reason or another, at the age at which we find ourselves lots of times won't admit this. We're a strange combination of being bugged, if we can use that word, on one hand, and attempting
to be very, very cool and casual on the other hand. If you know what I mean. We don't want anybody to know that there's anything that bothers us deeply; we kind of want to act real casual about things. Lots of times I've met a high school student and talked to him and been with him and wondered after talking to him that if an atomic bomb went off next him, whether he would even be phased by it. That he had this great desire not to have anything bother him where he was. He wanted
to be cool and casual and not allow anything to kind of penetrate in and bother him and touch him deeply. We don't really want to feel anything too deeply. Because if we feel something deeply that means that we have to be involved in it in some way or another. That it might really change us in some way. And that's a scary possibility. It's not something that we really want to happen right now. Or maybe we do but we're kind of afraid of it.
But we are bugged. We're bugged in a very real way by a lot of these things. And we're bugged about the things that we usually don't admit to each other. We have our little fellowship meetings and we come together and what do we talk about? We talk about predestination and evolution and the race question and well, you can add to the list of those. These are usually the topics of our conversation here. And we always talk in terms
of 'they' or 'we' trying to generalize it enough, but we very rarely say anything about ourselves personally, do we? I've known a lot of people who really feel it's their minister's responsibility to talk about the race question. But I wonder if they were really faced with this problem of prejudice themselves, whether they'd really admit it. Admit that they really had prejudice. Do you have prejudice? Is
it something that bothers you? I think maybe it does. I think maybe there are a lot of things that bother us deeply and personally that we won't even admit to ourselves. If we're bugged, we're bugged below the surface, below the surface of our coolness and casualness and the impersonal sort of atmosphere that pervades all of the things that we do. But boy, we've got to admit this fact that we are bugged. And we've got to admit it in the sense that we're willing
to come to grips with it and find out exactly are these things that we're bugged about. Let's talk about a few of them. I think for most of us one of the very greatest things that bothers us about ourselves is wondering whether or not we're really normal. And this moves into many different areas. Physically, for instance. Is my nose too big? Do people
like me? Because my nose is too big. Or walking down the street and you realize when you looked in the mirror in the morning that you had this big pimple in the middle of your cheek and you wonder whether people are noticing the pimple on your cheek. And you're really bothered about this because you know that people might notice it. I can remember when I was in high school; I went for about a year without wearing my glasses because I didn't think that I was terribly attractive with my glasses on. And so I was willing to be blinder than a bat for a whole year just because I didn't want
anybody to know that I was, well I had problems with my eyes and that I was kind of unattractive without my glasses on. And it's funny, I mean, these are little things but these -- aren't these the things that really bother us? What about emotionally? You ever wonder about your attitude towards things like sex? Do you feel the same things about sex that everybody else does? Does it bother you in the same way? About an inadequacy or a sort of a funny
attitude that -- or feeling that you have every once in a while that doesn't seem quite right, and you've read a book somewhere that said maybe it's a little wrong to think things like that. Boy, they sure bothered me. And I think they bother you too. We talk about sex a lot but very rarely do we get very honest about it. What about intellectually? I can also remember back when I was in high school, I never wanted to be either too smart or too stupid. Because if I was too smart I
was labeled as an egghead, you know, I wasn't quite normal; my head was bigger than everybody else's or something. But I didn't want to be too stupid either, because if I was that well then I just wasn't up with everybody else and so that kind of made me feel funny too. But all of these ways in which, perhaps, we can be labeled abnormal or a little bit different than everybody else it really bothers us, it really bugs us, these are the things, I think, that keep us awake at night. I don't stay awake worrying about
Vietnam, but I do stay awake at night worrying about whether I'm normal. What people think of me. What about these boy-girl relationships that seem to be so big when we get into this area of life when we start considering dating and things like that? This is where I think we really try to make ourselves the most attractive. We really worry about what that girl thinks of us and a term we use in college is a big snow
job. Do you use that around here? You really want to snow the girl, you want to just pile it so high over her that there's not possibility except for her to believe that you're the most wonderful thing in the whole world. And the girl does the same thing. She really wants to make herself attractive. But this can be a real problem too. I remember, and this has become a great confession, but when I was in high school for a long time I would never date anyone more than three times in a row. Because I was afraid
that, perhaps, on the fourth date the girl might see through the venire. Might see the real Terry Casteel. And I just couldn't stand that possibility, because if she did I could see no reason in the world why she might not tell me to forget it and get lost. The snow might melt away and there would be little old me in all of my nakedness, if you could put it that way. What about these conversations we have with other people? Most of the time
we spend talking with others we talk about somebody else. I've heard that girls do this a lot more than guys, but I don't believe it. Because I've been around guys enough to know it's true of them too. It's more of a butcher shop session than anything else. We sit there and we take somebody and we kind of dissect them off into little pieces and we analyze that and, well they've got such and such a problem, you know? We've got them all nailed down and got it all worked out and so and so
is a bad guy because of this and we've got everybody with this big huge problem. And lots of times this is a very unkind thing and you end up at the end of your little session believing that the only people normal in the world, the only people who are really worth knowing, are the people who are there. But have you ever stopped and considered the possibility of being in on one of these discussions when you are the topic?
What do people say about you? What is their big, chief consideration as to why you aren't really in? Why that's a frightening thing to consider. But when we start getting honest right down to this point, we find things a little bit different than perhaps we did when we were only willing to see life in the other perspective. One more bug, if we can mention it.
And that's the bug that we kind of get from our parents. I know that you talk about this a lot, but I think that it's an important thing. Because up to this point in your life your parents have probably been the one controlling factor as far as your development and such is concerned. Who you are now has an awful lot to do with who your parents are, because they've done an awful lot to bring you up and to make you into the kind of person that you are. But you're at a point now where, where you're beginning
to kind of rebel against this. Maybe you've been doing it all the way along. But what about that point when the church retreat comes up and they're looking for chaperons and nobody wants mom and dad to come along? Why is that? Well I think one reason is -- well let's point to two reasons. One is sort of a parental authority that's always been kind of held over your head. You're afraid that if mom and dad are there that you wouldn't really be free to do all of the things that you
want to do. Parents have always represented that one authority that stands over us and says, "Well you do this." And there doesn't have to be any reason, you just have to do it because they said to. Well that's one thing. For another thing, your parents can see right through you in a way you don't think your friends can. And you get out there and you start playing this big role that we usually play with each other, and mom and dad are standing there watching you on the side and you get real uncomfortable you know.
Mom and dad know I'm being a real phony right now, you know. And so you feel real funny about this. And so our parents at this time in our growth and development pose a real threat to us in many different ways. And we want to talk about this just a little bit more in a minute, but have you noticed about all of these bugs that we've been talking about, how they're all related to this realm of the personal? You're
worried about yourself, really. You're worried about yourself and your relationship to other people. To what other people think of you, their attitude towards you, and your attitude towards them. You're relationships with them are the very most important thing to you right now. You want to be loved, you want to be held in some kind of esteem by your friends, and you'll do anything you can to get that. But isn't it interesting that the Christian faith,
as no other religion that I know of, meets us right at this point of the personal. What is significant about the Christian faith that we don't find in any other religion? The fact that God comes to us in a person, the person of Jesus Christ, and God meets us there. He doesn't meet us in the abstract where we can just sort of push Him off into a corner of our lives. He meets us in the personal. He meets us
as a person. Now we're getting into a difficult thing to talk about. Because we always get to the point where we can really analyze our own situation, we can talk about our problems, we can even sometimes get pretty honest about it and see them as they really are. But then we get to the point where now we have to start talking about Christ has to do with the whole thing, you see. And this is where we always run into trouble. What does the gospel have to say to this say? Well let me, before we start dealing in the realm
of answers, let me point out a couple more problems. Problems that are now sort of emerging on the scene now that we sort see ourselves a little bit better. These are problems, I think, that come to us in our scripture lesson as we've had it here for us, the story of Thomas. Thomas was a person who wasn't going to be satisfied with this secondary authority. The man, Jesus, had died on a cross and as far as Thomas was concerned He was dead.
He had died. And everybody was going around saying, "OK, OK, OK. Guess what, I saw Him, He's still alive. He's risen from the dead. He promised He'd come and He has." And so old Thomas says, "Well I don't know about that. People just don't rise from the dead. That's the most absurd thing I have ever heard." What do you say to that? Well I think it's a great temptation to say the same thing.
Are we going to accept things on the authority of somebody else all our lives? Mom and dad say it's true. Fine, fine. But pretty soon, whether you've done it yet or not, you're going to start questioning these authorities. You're going to question everything that your parents have told you as you move on through high school, and especially as you get into college. What mom and dad said, well for one thing you're going to find a lot of things that mom and dad think that really aren't necessarily true. And that's
just because nobody really knows everything. You're going to start questioning the things you've read in books all the way along. If this man Jesus Christ is really going to be meaningful to me I have to know Him myself. I can't just be satisfied with what somebody else says about it. If He's going to be meaningful I have to know Him. The authority has to be something between Jesus and me. Not between Christ and somebody else. All right,
this is a problem, I think. The problem that all of these authorities that have always been set up along the way, things that have been said about Him, things that have existed about Him are going to start to crumble away. And then where do we stand? All right, one more problem, and this is something that Mr. [Barnhouse?] spoke about this morning, I think, very, very well. That the world of knowledge as
we so often confront it, and you spend a lot more time in school than you spend in church, and this is somewhat of a disadvantage, I think, if we look at it in one way. We start dealing in the area of empirical knowledge -- can't even say it. In other words, we're dealing with facts, objects, say. Anything is an object. We have a ball in our hands and we know that this is an object that we can see and we can feel and we can touch, say. And so the knowledge that we begin to grapple with
there is knowledge that we see. Things that we can touch and feel, things that come to us and can be verified by experimentation, things that we can know, you know. Well, the knowledge of Jesus Christ isn't exactly like that. And this is, I think, what the scripture is trying to point out to us here. You see we don't exactly have the advantage that Thomas did, because Jesus is someone whom we can't see
with our eyes, someone whom we cannot touch with our hands, someone who can't be proved with facts, if we can put it that way. He's known in a different way. He's known by faith. Kind of a vague thing too, isn't it? But it's an important thing, it's extremely important. We have to -- there's something that we have to accept here by faith. He says, "You who has not seen and yet believed, blessed
is he." If we're going to know this man Christ we're going to have to know Him in a new kind of way. A kind of way that quite a bit different than the way we usually know things. We have to know Him by faith. Let's talk for a moment about that. I really liked Mr. Barnhouse's illustration where we had his father in the car with him. Do you remember that? And his father stood up and was looking up above and he saw ahead in a car saw
that car moved out into the other lane. He was willing depend upon what his father saw, rather than what he could see from where he was. And this is a real good illustration of faith, I think. A willingness to except the fact that someone has seen better than we have. Another way of seeing it, perhaps, is about learning how to swim. I don't know many of you, I'm sure that you know how to swim or you've gone through the task of learning how,
but I remember hearing about a young fellow who was learning to float on his back. He was out in the pool and he was thrashing around trying to float on his back and every time he got out there he got real tense and just sunk to the bottom just like that. Maybe you've had that experience. His dad went out there with him and he said, "Son, if you're going to learn how to float on your back, you're going to have to relax. That's the only way that you can do it." And the kid said, "No dad, I can't do that. As soon as I relax I'm going to sink to the bottom and I'll drown." And he said,
"Well you're just going to have to have faith in the fact that if you relax you'll float." And so his dad took him out there again and his dad held his hand and he said, "All right son, lay on your back and relax." And he did. And he floated. And he got up and he said, "Dad I can swim, I can swim!" And to me this is a great illustration of faith. You see we don't really know ahead of time. We know by someone else has told us, perhaps.
That if we relax we can float, but we kind of have to take a jump, a leap, we have to be willing to take the risk, you see we don't know it directly in that sense. But it's something that stands off just in the distance, and we have to be willing to relate ourselves to that in faith and not necessarily by sight. And that's a very difficult thing to do, but it's essential.
And it's very essential as we see it in our relationships, and maybe we can illustrate it again in here. And by this we'll close. How many you have really had a friend, someone who has really known you? I think this is a real problem for us. I think this is one of the reasons why the Christian faith is so difficult often for us to understand. Because we never really have known anybody, we've never really had a personal relationship with
somebody that was a place where we could see each other in totality, where we were willing to accept each other. Where we were willing to love each other in spite of all of the little problems that we had, instead of just being related because the other person was kind of attractive and this sort of a thing. You see a real relationship is one where there's a lot of forgiveness, and perhaps the keynote of any relationship, real relationship, is forgiveness.
We're willing to forgive the person, the other person, for the things about them that are not necessarily attractive. We love people in spite of who they are, not because of who they are. Have we really had a friend? Have we really known anybody in this way? Well this is the way that Christ wants to know us. And this, in a sense, is the only way we can really know Him. People are kind of like
icebergs, if we can use that analogy. They're about nine tenth below the surface. The one tenth you see on top is the tenth they're willing to show to us. The part that they're trying to get across because they know that part is the most attractive part. But there's all that other great mystery there. And it is a mystery. The more and more I get to know people the more and more I'm fascinated by the fact that there is a great mystery there. There's something that really can't be
put into words. It's the mystery of love. Anyone who has really loved someone else knows that it's something that you really can't put into words. And this is the reason it's so difficult to explain. It's the reason I'm having such a hard time finding words right now. Because it's a, it's a mystery. It's not something beyond us, but it's something that is, in a sense, beyond the way in which we use words to explain things. It's something that you know by experiencing it
and not something that you can just communicate through words necessarily. And so I would say this, you're a person who wants to know Christ better or just wants to be introduced to Him. How are you going to do this? Well I think that we do it, perhaps, in many different ways, but I'll just relate this from my own experience. Jesus Christ has become real to
me as I have gotten to know someone, in this kind of a deep relationship that we've been talking about, who knows Him. As I am related to one who is a Christian to whom Christ is very real Christ can become real to me. It's almost as if the deeper and deeper you get to know this person, if they know Christ, the more and more as if there's three people there instead of two, and that there's a way in which this
third person really wants to know you too. And this is really sort of a sort of, as I say, a mysterious thing but it is real. And this Christ who comes to us in this mysterious way is the Christ who is a person. Also, I would suggest this -- that this is the way in which the gospel accounts in the writings of Paul have become most meaningful to me.
That I know that these men who have written these accounts are men who have known Christ as a person, and they're men who have had this personal experience. As I am willing to depend upon the Holy Spirit speaking to me, as I read the scripture, I'm not reading about just someone who lived a long time ago, but someone who is still alive today. Someone who continues to live in this spirit,
not necessarily as we can see Him but very real and very honestly, and as I am willing to face Him honestly He comes to know me. And He becomes real to me as a person: one whom I can know, one who knows me far better than I know myself. One who loves me. Loves me far more than I can love myself, just because of all the things that I know about myself. One who cares for me;
one who can see far more into my future and into the possibilities of my life here on Earth than I can see; one who has a message for me about that life, who speaks to me personally, and calls me as He called his disciples a long time ago to follow Him, to trust in Him, and to respond to His love. Should we close on a word of prayer?
Let us pray. Our Father and our God we thank Thee for this time that we've had here together. We thank Thee for the activities of the day, for the way in which You have richly blessed us with fun, with opportunities to meet each other, with
opportunities to learn more of Thee. Father, most of all, we pray that your Son, Jesus Christ, might be one whom we can know personally. Father, allow us to be open to Him and honesty. To be willing to be honest about ourselves and about the things that really to bother us about life, and
Father to allow Him to speak to us there. Father, be with us in our struggles concerning being normal and worried about what other people think of us. Father, help us to realize that though we have difficulty in accepting ourselves and have difficulty in a world that often rejects us that our one certain acceptance is in Thee. Father, we ask that you would go with us now
as we return to our churches and to friends and to our families. And Father, we pray that Thy spirit might be with us and that Christ might be real to us and with us there. For it's in His name that we pray. Amen.
(inaudible)
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: O Lord, bless us and keep us. The Lord with His faith shined upon us and be gracious unto us. The Lord lift up His countenance upon us and give us peace through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.