Paris Reidhead delves into the nature of man, emphasizing the importance of understanding what kind of being man is. He explores the concept of man being made in the image and likeness of God, highlighting the value and potential God has invested in every individual. Reidhead discusses the power of the human mind, its creative abilities, and the significance of thoughts, memories, and habits carried into the Christian life. He stresses the importance of recognizing the intrinsic capacity and abilities of man, including the mind's potential to imagine, plan, and achieve great things.

What Kind of Being is Man? Part 4 By Paris Reidhead* I would like to read the entire Psalm, that is particularly the 4th and 5th verses that I would have you see: “Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth! Who has set Thy glory above the heavens. 2Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained strength because of Thine enemy that Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. 3When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, 4what is man that Thou art mindful of him? And the son of man that Thou visitest him? 5For Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hath crowned him with glory and honor. 6Thou madest Him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands. Thou hast put all things under His feet. 7All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, 8the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas. 9Oh Lord, our Lord how excellent is Thy name in all the earth.” (Psa. 8:1-9) Shall we bow our hearts together. Father, we ask Thee to bless as we think about Thy Lord. Be Thou the teacher, illumine our minds. Guide the one who speaks, and as we listen help us to listen in applying the truth to our own hearts and lives. Accepts now our thanks for this time of fellowship together and for what Thou will do in us that through us Thou may bring glory to the Lord Jesus. In His name we pray. Amen. The purpose of this series of studies was to understand man. I made the observation back in July that to my judgment, the next area of Christian argument or debate or polemic was going to be not so much in the field of inspiration of the Bible which has been the battleground over which we’ve been moving and fighting for 75 or perhaps 100 years, but it was going to change. It was going to have to do with the nature of man. What kind of a being is man? And I pointed out then and remind you of it now that most of the great denominational division which were said to be on theological grounds, actually might better of been described as being on anthropological ground. If you discuss with the Calvinist the distinctions in his mind between the teachings of Calvin and Arminius, it isn’t so much what kind of a being God is, of course that is a vital part, but the kind of a being man is. And the same would be true if you went to those who follow Arminius and let them describe what they believe as they would see what those who call themselves Calvinist believe. And then again if you were careful in distinguishing between things that differ you might arrive at the place of saying that the basic delineation is not so much the matter of the nature of God as it is in the nature of man. What kind of a being is he? And this is the question of the Psalmist, What is man? We do have a brief review. I think many of you were not with us last Sunday or in the previous sessions. There were three questions that we asked. Why did God make man in the first place if He knew that he could sin? And the answer which is given at great length in one of the first tapes is that God made man in His image and in His likeness that man might be a fit and an appropriate object of God’s love. You can only love that which is like us. And God made us thus and described us thus as being like Himself in that we might be the object of His love. And then the question was made why did God make man so that he could sin? And the answer is that what is sin? Well sin is the committal of the will to the principle or the ruling passion of supreme choice of the life to please oneself as the object of being. In its essence, an unregulated and inordinate and an improper self-love. A purpose to make one’s own pleasure and gratification and satisfaction, the end of being. And it is described as we saw last week as being treason and rebellion and anarchy and transgression. And the sinner, himself, is described as the enemy of God; the carnal mind is enmity against God. Now we have seen that this touches every area of the life and every aspect of the personality. We’ve also considered the nature of repentance. Repentance is the basic recognition of the crime of committing one’s will to the pleasing of self, and the renunciation of that crime, a change of intention and purpose from sin which is the committal of the will to please self to a redirected and a properly directed use of the will to please God and to seek His glory and happiness and pleasure with us. And on the basis of repentance because we are told it is repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ on the basis of this, then the repentant sinner reaches out to savingly embrace the Son of God. Now what does he carry? The next question we have to ask is this. What does this repentance believing, converted sinner carry with him into the Christian life? Now we’ve tried to see, as I’ve just outlined, some of these very, very important questions. Perhaps your experience is parallel to mine and so many others that shortly after we’re saved, shortly after we knew that our past was pardoned and we had in the joy of that experience, felt that we were through with this thing of sin. We found that we were betrayed by ourselves. That we had carried into the Christian life something which was going to work ill and harm. Perhaps that was your experience. It certainly was mine. And I’ve related to you in another session of this experience. But what does the sinner carry into the Christian life? Are they repentant believers, the Christian who had been a sinner but now has become a child of God through faith in Christ. Well, let’s see some of the things. First he carries memory. The day after you were converted you carried with you the memory of the past. That had not been obliterated. That had not been removed. You could remember your crimes, your sins of yesterday or yesteryear. The memory of the past. It was part of the baggage that you carried from this past into this new relationship as a child of God. But there’s something else. You not only carried memory but you carried the habituated responses to temptation. From you earliest childhood you had been acquiring habit patterns. You had the tendencies that you’d inherited, this nature, that is described as fallen, and wicked and sinful. But in addition to that you had all the example of the environment around you. So from your earliest youth, even before your memory, before that which you can vividly recall as individual incidence. You had been acquiring habit patterns. It began way back in the playpen. Your mother took you to visit her sister and your little cousin had a playpen and some toys and they said let’s see what they do together. They’ll play nicely together. Except that when you took your cousin’s little truck that he wanted, he reached over and pulled your hair and took the truck out of your hand and hit you on the head with it. And so they discovered that they had all of the elements of international warfare right there between cousins. It’s been going on between cousins in the Middle East for a long time ever since. But this business of habitually responding to your environment, to temptations, to pressures, to tests, you carried with you into the Christian life. If perhaps before you met Jesus Christ, your means of dealing with criticism was to criticize, find fault with the other and emphasize that having that as one of the commandments of the sinner you know - do unto others before they do unto you. And so you would then have acquired this habit. And if somebody said something against you, your response was to have stored up in your mind things that in such an occasion would be useful to say against them. Now, when you came to Christ you renounced sin and this was included. But now three weeks after you’ve been converted, you’ve carried into the Christian life this tendency. And so if criticism comes and just about that fast after you’ve received it, you say but you about them and have you ever heard ... and so there it was. And just a little while later you’re stricken with remorse. Oh, God I promised you I wouldn’t do this. I wouldn’t respond this way, but I did. Or perhaps instead of that, when problems came and you were, had in the past responded by a swear word. That may have been your means of relieving your tension and your pressure. And you’re hammering on the wall now and you’re putting a picture nail up and you hit the fingernail instead of the picture nail and you say what you said when three or four week before. And, I thought you were a Christian. Well, what’s happened? You’ve carried into the Christian life responses, patterns; the domino theory really works in human experience. One thing triggers another and still and third and a fourth and so on. And the first thing you know why this has happened. That you carried into the Christian life. You attitudes, your learned responses to pressures and difficulties. Your tendencies to such things as self-pity or smoldering resentment, or festering bitterness, these were things that had characterized you in the previous relationship when you were estranged from God and a sinner. And now you’re a Christian so you’ve carried that into the Christian life. Well, these are problems, and sometimes the preoccupation with these problems becomes so absorbing, so demanding, that some Christians who had a period of failure after their initial experience of conversion, feel that the whole reason for being as a Christian is to find some means or method or discipline of victory over themselves, because this seems to be the highest good, and this seems to be virtually the only reason or purpose for their Christian life - victory. I think this would characterize those that have escaped from the world and the flesh and the devil and have gone out into monasteries and into convents only to discover that all three were there, just about as accurately as they had been a little different form, but they were there none the less. But this desire to abnegate the flesh and to acquire personal, practical holiness characterized the Anchorites, who would go up on a broken column and sit there on four square feet of space and they would just stay there because by this means they were punishing themselves and in some way they were trying to find victory over their disposition. Then in history we had one other method of dealing with it. The flagellant. These were converted people that after their conversion, they discovered they carried into the Christian life this traitor of which I’ve spoken. And so they would go into the market place and they would talk to the people and try to single out the Christians and they would tell about the temptations they had and the inability of dealing with them and handling them. And then they would say we must, we must bring the flesh under. And so they would take out a cat o’nine tails, similar to what they thought had been used by the soldiers on Christ. And there in the presence of the crowd they would wipe themselves until they tore the flesh from their back. And they were saying now this is what we must do to bring under these traits and tendencies and dispositions that we carried with us from our unconverted life into the Christian life. In other words, I’m saying that here’s man we’ve seen much of what he is, but we’re seeing him come to Christ, forgiven of the past, assurance of salvation, walked into the door of the Christian life, and there he discovered that he has problems with his temperament and his traits and his attitudes and his habits and he then acquires the feeling that dealing with these is his primary reason for being. And that can become so demanding, so absorbing on the one hand, that it does occupy all of one’s time and energy. On the other hand, it can become so intimidating that it has the effect of destroying all sense of confidence that one can be useful to God or one’s expectancy of God being pleased to use them. And it’s because of the incidence of this in the experience of the Church that men in other days and in this day have sought to find a message of victory. And I think this is one of the reasons why in the last 30 years for instance, there’s been so much more emphasis on our identification with Christ, our union with Christ. You see, Paul dealt with this problem. There was one group of people that he dealt with that said, look, after you’re saved you’re going to sin, and then you confess you sin and God forgives your sin, and God gets glory because He’s been gracious and forgiven your sin. Therefore, the more you sin, the more opportunity you give God to be gracious. And this was called antinomianism. And Paul dealt with it. “What then shall we continually sin that grace may abound?” (Rom. 6:1) And can you hear his sandaled foot hit the ground? “God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein?” (Rom. 6:2) That’s one answer. Antinomianism. Then there was another answer. And that was Judaism. There were those who said in Paul’s time yes, after you’re saved God forgives all the past. Certainly, Christ died for when? Afterwards, after you’re converted you then find that there’s sin in your life. Then you’ve got to go back to the temple and bring the sacrifices and bring the offerings because that’s the means of penitence and the means of grace. And of course then, Paul had to deal with that. And that’s the Epistle to the Galatians as he’s dealing with these Judaizers who are going to try to they’ve got two extremes, antinomianism on the one hand and Judaizing on the other. And what’s Paul’s answer? Well, the answer is identification or union with Christ. In Romans 5 you have Christ died for us. In Romans 6 you have Christ died as us. And in Romans 8 you have Christ in us. And this is how he deals with the antinomianism on the one hand and the Judaizing on the other. He’s saying look, the Lord Jesus didn’t just die to save you from hell, and He died to save you from you. He didn’t die just to save you from an eternity in that place of punishment. He died to save you from the tyranny of your habits and attitudes and traits and dispositions. Now, you must understand this. So in Romans 6:6, knowing this you know this you dear people at Rome who are tending toward antinomianism, “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Christ.” Why? “That the body of sin might be destroyed or annulled. That henceforth we should not be the slaves of sin.” So what’s He talking about? He’s saying this, look the Lord Jesus didn’t just die and rise again from the dead and ascend into heaven to forgive your past, and leave to go on in a life time of unmitigated misery and failure. That wasn’t His purpose. He wanted to save you not only from the past but He wanted to save you from the penalty of sin and the power of sin and one day He’s going to save you from the presence of sin. And you’ve got to understand then that the purpose of this full salvation, if you please, salvation from the past and salvation from the temptation. And obviously when we’ve talked about this in the past and some of you have been here many times when I’ve been speaking about our union with Christ. That there were two people on the cross. Christ was on the front of it dying for you. But since He was there as your representative and substitute, then in God’s eyes, from heaven’s view, there were two people on the cross, Christ on the front of it, you on the back of it, crucified with Christ. He didn’t just for you, you died with Him. Why? So that you could be released from those habits that you carried into the Christian life and those tendencies and those traits and that disposition, and all that would hinder and hobble and shackle. It’s interesting that Scofield in his Bible he uses four words for redeemed. I don’t pretend to be a scholar at all because I just am not. I know a little Greek and a little Hebrew. The little Greek runs a restaurant and the little Hebrew runs a clothing store. But my first Bible was from a, was a Scofield Bible. And in it some place he has the word redeemed, and there’s four words as I recall - agorazo (I don’t think that’s even pronounced properly but you don’t know as much as I do see, so then I’m alright, I’m an expert if I know more than you do). So agorazo means to buy in the market place, to go down where people were held as slaves and buy them. And then there’s another word translated redeemed, he puts an ex on the front of it - exagorazo - to buy in the market place and take out of the market place; buy from. In other words, we were slaves of sin and He came where we were and He negotiated for us and He died for us right there, but not to leave us there, exagorazo. To redeem us means to take us out from our bondage and our slavery. Then there’s a third word translated redeemer. It’s lutroo, to loose. Can you see this one that’s shackled and tied with rags and He’s been bought in the market place and brought out of the market place and there the ropes are cut, the irons are severed and He’s released. He’s been loosed and He gave Himself for us that He might loose us from our sins, from our attitudes and our habits and our traits and our dispositions that are going to cripple and handicap us. And then there’s another word, and I’m probably not pronouncing this properly either, but it’s called I think its apolutrosis which means to permanently set free, never to be sold back into slavery again. In other words, if the slave goes back it’s because he likes it and hankers for it; he doesn’t have to. Nobody is going to make him go back; he goes because he wants to. Well, that’s a marvelous word isn’t it? Redeemed. All four words are used giving us this complete insight into the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus Christ. But how many there are that say that yes I know my past is forgiven so they go on silenced by their failure and intimidated by the habits over which they find no victory. And just tyrannized by the realization that their lives are so inconsistent before those who know them best, that they can’t open their mouths for Christ. And He doesn’t want that. “Whom the Son makes free” we are told, “is to be free indeed.” (John 8:36) And so it’s terribly important for us to understand that the Lord Jesus wanted to release us. And His death on the cross was that He might release us from all that had characterized the dominion in which we were held when we were under Satan. And that’s victory, victory over ourselves, victory over our attitudes and our habits again I say. That’s Romans 6. Then Romans 7 is an illustration of Romans 6. He gives some examples of it. Then he comes to Romans 8 and here’s the glory and the beauty of it. Romans 8. Romans 5 to remind you is Christ died for us when we were sinners, when we were ungodly. Romans 6, Christ died as us. And Romans 8, Christ wants to live in us, Christ living in us. Now, if you understand that, then you understand how important man is to God. Some people as they listen to the gospel as it’s preached or as its written, get the idea that the Lord Jesus came from heaven, lived in time, died and rose again and went back to heaven so that He could have our sins forgiven here. We stumble along at a poor dying rate and the blessing begins when we die. I’ve watched congregations for years and they sing, “When by His grace I shall look on His face, that will be glory for me.1” And you know from the expression of the face and the tone of the voice that they don’t expect to have any glory until then either. That’s when it’s going to start and they’re reconciled to it. And someone was giving a testimony in prayer meeting. A little old lady got up and she said forty years ago I was saved and I am going to hold out to the bitter end. And she wasn’t 1 “Oh, That Will Be Glory” by Charles H. Gabriel, 1900. kidding. It was bitter, because if you have to go on every day doing things that you don’t want to do and grieving Him whom you love, then the Christian Life can have inquire many of the elements of tragic bondage. And the Lord Jesus didn’t want that. When He left heaven His destination wasn’t Bethlehem where He was born. That was where He spent awhile. His destination wasn’t a refugee’s home in Egypt He was there several years. When He came from heaven His destination’s end, journey end wasn’t Nazareth in a carpenter’s home. That wasn’t where or why He came. That was just a way stop. On His itinerary. It wasn’t Capernaum, the city that He loved and where He was received and called His city. It wasn’t His destination. When He came His destination wasn’t Jerusalem. That wasn’t it. It wasn’t even the cross or a tomb. That wasn’t His destination. When He ascended into heaven and sat down at the right hand of the Father, that wasn’t His destination. He’d been there from eternity past. He didn’t need to make this long circular trip to do that, that’s where he’d been. You know what His destination was when He left heaven? Your heart. Your life. He made that long pilgrimage into time, into Bethlehem, into Egypt, into Nazareth, to Capernaum, into Jerusalem, to the cross, to the tomb, to heaven so that He could live in you. That’s the only way He could remove all the legal barriers that stood in the way of His fulfilling the reason for which He made you. Now for you to gather from the Scriptures that the purpose is to take you there. When the Word is so absolutely clear that so He could come here, to live in you, to walk in you, and dwell in you. Now does this give you a little insight into the nature of man? How important he is? “What is man that He made him a little lower than the angels that you might crown Him with glory and honor.” What is it? That Christ might live in you. What greater glory is there than that Christ should dwell in our hearts through faith? “Wherefore Come out from among them and be ye separate says the Lord and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive ye and be a Father unto you, and I will dwell in you and I will walk in you. Ye shall be my sons and daughters sayeth the Lord Almighty.” (II Cor. 6:17,18) The Apostle Paul said “I am crucified with Christ.” (Gal. 2:20) And he could have added I am buried with Him, I am quickened with Him, I am raised with Him, I am seated with Him, “nevertheless I live yet not I but Christ liveth in me.”(Gal. 2:20) In the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith in the Son of God. What was it? What was the faith in the Son of God? Well, I think it was this, that if you knew that you couldn’t redeem yourself and pay for your past sins; you’d have sense enough to know you couldn’t live the Christian life to His glory, by your own energy. And you’d say Lord Jesus I can’t, but You can. And you present your body to Him and say now Lord I want you to live in me. Crucified with Him to have victory over the flesh, buried with Him to have victory over the world, quickened, raised, seated with Him to have victory over principalities and powers. Present your body to Him so that He could live in you. What is man? Man was to be the tabernacle of God that dwelling place of God and that great temple that took 40 years for Herod to build was all those years it took Solomon to build and later that was nothing. But a picture of us, you and what will be one day when the church is perfected. By the way, the only prefect church you will ever find, if you are criticizing some church on this side, you had better stop. Because the Bible tells us where the prefect church is and if you want He may send you there and put you in it. You looking for the prefect church, you know where it is? It is in Heaven. Yeah, that’s where it is coming from coming down out of Heaven, as bride adorned for her husband. And some of you are so anxious to get to the prefect church, alright, keep on He will put you there. If you told me the prefect church was somewhere I’d say I can’t even bother. I wouldn’t cross the street to find it. Because if it was when I got there, it wouldn’t be any longer. I am not going to spend my time with that. Now, what a marvelous life it is the life Christ living His life in you. Now, that’s part of what this is all about, one of the aspects of it. So from an Christian point of view, we were converted, we repented of our sins, we received Christ, we carried habits and attitudes, traits and dispositions into this new life in Christ and now we’ve discovered that we’ve got to have help and our help comes from our union with Christ. Our victory comes through our identification with Him. And then our normal life is for us to invite the Lord Jesus to live in us His own life. Now that has to do with a Christian. Let’s look back. What is that that we share with the unconverted? That which is standard equipment to every man who comes into the world. Let’s look at that for a moment. We don’t want to sell man short. What is part of the inventory or the standard equipment, as I say it? There has never been a model change as far as man is concerned, you know. God is just been repeating it with all the faults and difficulties and problems. There has never been a model change. I get interested in the new cars. Everyone is going to be perfect, but so was the one last year. And so was the one before that. And so was the one before that. At least God isn’t pretending. Here He is this is the way He has been. And I’ve search every new model as they came along and I’ve found they all have the same defect. I’ve recalled them for repairs. There isn’t one of them that is road worthy. Their steering wheel is out. Their motor is out. Their wheels are out. Everything about them even too loud a horn. There is nothing right with them. And they all have to come back to be remanufactured, remade, recreate. But having said that, what’s wrong with them? What’s right with them? Let’s getting acquainted with that for a moment. What is right with man? What has he done? Well, first he is given to us, made us in His image and likeness. And that is some respects; of course, fellowship with God was despoiled and broken by sin. But that fact that we were intrinsically made in the image and likeness of God remained, because man is still worthy of the redemptive work of Christ or valuable at least in the eyes of God. So He was willing for Christ to die for sinners. Now, what does this sinful man have as part of his equipment? Well, let’s look for a moment. First, he has a mind. I know we don’t know much about that. We are learning a little bit. There are a couple of factors that are important and I want to dwell on them for a few moments. Every human being carries with him a mind. Unconverted people can write poetry. Unconverted people can paint beautiful pictures. Unconverted people can write beautiful music. Unconverted people can design magnificent buildings, and construct fantastic bridges. Unconverted people can get a vehicle to the moon and safely back again. And they have, therefore, tremendous abilities that have been invested in them by God. We have to recognize this and we have to appreciate this. We deprecate man morally because of his crime and we must not feel because we have so much emphasis on the fact that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God,” that somehow sin has destroyed, annulled, annihilated, those factors of enormous value, worth, and importance. (Rom. 3:23) So man has a mind, a creative mind. Bacon said, “God has given to man a second degree of creation.” God made the tree and man makes the furniture. God made the iron and man makes the tool. God made the sunset and man makes the poem. God made the birds sing and man writes the music and the instruments in which to play it. “God has given to us the second degree of creation.” That is the ability to use our minds because everything begins with the mind. I was just reading a book by Norman Vincent Peale some years ago and he was telling about his friend Napoleon Hill. And Napoleon Hill had written a book. The printer was saying, “You’ve got to get me a title for it.” He couldn’t come up with one. And Norman Vincent Peale told him he said the publisher said, “If I don’t have a title from you by Monday, such and such, I am going to print the book and the title will be Use your Noodle and get the Boodle.” That’s good. So a great deal of thought, a great deal of thought effort and attention Napoleon Hill came up with, Think and Grow Rich, which really translated means Use your Noodle and get the Boodle. Isn’t astounding, isn’t amazing this so called think literature of which there is a great deal, is the children’s bread and they’ve kicked it under the table using an analogy from the Scriptures, for when the woman, the Syrophoenician woman, came that’s for the children she said yes, but the dogs can eat bread that falls from the children’s table. He said great faith you have. Well, I’m saying the basic thing that’s in that Think and Grow Rich, is Scriptural. “Whatsoever things are pure, and true, whatsoever things are lovely, have virtue, whatsoever things are of good report, ....think – you do it, the imperative – on these things” (Php. 4:8) The only thing that God gave you totally and absolutely control over is your mind. You can’t control what you see, because I may get in the way of you and something nice, you see. You can’t control what you see. You can’t control what you hear. Certainly, you can’t control what you smell. And you can’t control what you feel. Somebody may come up when you’re seating there at a stop light perfectly innocently and hit the back of your car. You can’t control what you feel, what you hear, what you see, what you smell. But God gave you total and absolute control over what you think. That’s the only thing that He said, “Gird up the loins of your mind” and “bring every thought into the captivity of Christ.” (I Pet. 1:13); (II Cor. 10:5) God gave you the power to use your mind, to control your mind. I had the pleasure of playing golf last year with my one doctor friend. The doctor I had been seeing for a long time. You got to get exercise. You got to get exercise. You got to get exercise. I get up in the morning and I go like this, if I work I’m in business. That’s all I use all day long anyway, you know. So that’s my physical exercise. They said that wasn’t enough that I had to do something more than that. So I went up to dear doctor Carlton Campbell up in Connecticut, “Look, you’ve learned how to work, you never learned how to play and if you don’t learn how to play you aren’t going to be able to work very long. You can’t do that. You got to learn how. You got to relax. You have got to do it so on and so on.” I called my doctor here I been a missionary in Africa very kind to take me as the only general patient he’s got, I guess. And I said, “I was visiting a doctor over the weekend, in Connecticut.” He said, “That I should do something.” And I asked him, “If golf was something.” He said, “Yes, if you did it right and walk.” And so I said, “Would you as my doctor consider that.” No, I said, “Would think my doctor, which is Cap, my doctor would consider golf exercise?” He said, “Yes. And if you ask your doctor I think he will go with you. He will play with you.” So every Thursday as often as we can, which is 2 or 3 times a year or oftener as the case may allow, we play golf together. And it has been an astounding thing to me as I have worked with Cap Oliver as I have learned in talking with him how large a percentage of the sicknesses that come before the doctor are psychosomatic. Do you know what he said? I don’t know if this right, you can argue with him, I am only his little parrot here. He said, “Between 50 to 80-85% of all of the patients they see are there with psychosomatic illness. It doesn’t mean it’s imaginary. You know, like ulcers, it isn’t what you eat, but what is eating you. And, that the body is so largely affected by the mind and it’s the only thing we have control of is the mind. And with that part of us that sees, that imagines, that visualizes what isn’t. It’s that part of us that can say, that I pointed out last week, by the end of this century; by 1970s we will have a man go to the moon and return safely. And then organize material and money and resources and people and effort and proceed to accomplish it. And man is the being that did this, not converted man, not victorious man, not Christian man, just m-a-n man, whose given by God the enormous ability to say something, see something, imagine something and then to proceed to do it. Now, we’ve got to understand that. We’ve got to give man back to himself the dignities that he has and recognize the powers that he possesses. And we’ve got to see it because it’s tremendously important for us to realize that all man, all mankind has been given this tremendous power to imagine, to see what isn’t there as though it already were there and then to take the appropriate steps to organize resources and materials and equipment to bring to pass what’s been seen. Now this is the intrinsic capacity and ability of man and how tremendously important it is. I remember years ago in 1944. No it was 45, we were getting ready to go to Africa and the mission cabled and said a possibility that you could do some pioneer linguistic work in the Sudan? And we want you to go out to Briercrest Saskatchewan, Canada for the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Well, we went and Briercrest that was something. Oh may that was something. It was an old hotel. It had one bath on each floor. Well, usually one bath on each floor, but there was plumbing trouble so occasionally that wasn’t the case and had pitchers and bowls in each room. And you know cardboard walls that if somebody changed their mind, three doors down the hall, you heard them. This is where we were gathered for the Summer Institute of Linguistics. And we forgot all about the accommodations. We had to haul the water by tank truck for 20 miles because there weren’t any wells in town. And it was a tremendous experience to get acquire with “Uncle Cam” Cameron Townsend2 and to learn that he and two or three others had had a vision and a burden that every tongue should hear the gospel. Ed, how many languages have the gospel now? (audience member speaking) 1500. Back in the days when I was of the number that hadn’t had it, we were working on 50 I think that were getting the gospel that hadn’t had it. 1500. And what I’m saying is here was a vision, here was a plan, here was an idea, and here was a concept. And now what is it 17 to 1800 people committed to the concept full time now? (audience member speaking) See there you are. You can’t get away just like yesterday at 1700. Now 3300 missionaries at the Summer Institute of Linguistics committed to the fulfillment of a vision. Now, when it began years ago, Uncle Cam and some of his associates were associated with a ministry of identification and victory in the Keswick ministry. That’s how they first came to Minneapolis when I was just a youngster. And out of that association there came the concept that there could be an effort to get the gospel into every language in the world. Everyone should have some part of the gospel in his own tongue. 2 William Cameron Townsend (1896 – 1982) was a prominent twentieth-century American Christian missionary who founded Wycliffe Bible Translators and Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL International), both of which have long had as their emphases translations of the Bible in minority languages and the facilitation of literacy in minority languages. Pastor and Mrs. Reidhead attended before they went to Africa as missionaies. Now, that was just words. It was just an idea, a fantastic idea, an impossible idea, and it couldn’t be accomplished. But it’s being accomplished. When it began it was just, just a fleeting thing through the mind, just a little idea in the mind. And if you can see and understand that every human being has this, the ability to imagine and then the ability to store information. We call it the electronic brain and it’s very useful. But it does in a sense parallel the brain. But of course no electronic, no computer equals it, so I’ve been told by some who ought to know. Again, I get all my science from the Reader’s Digest, so if you don’t agree with it, neither do I. At any rate, I read recently, I think it was in the Digest that if they made a computer as big as the human mind, it would take the Empire State Building to house it. It would take all the power they could generate from the Niagara River to operate it. And it would take all the water of the Niagara River to keep it cool. And you’ve got that between your ears. That’s right. You’ve got that right there between your ears. But you see, the average person, we are now told, uses somewhere around 2 to 3% of the brain power. Just 2 to 3% of the potential of the human brain is used by the wisest of men and the best taught. Most of us probably get along on two tenths of one percent you know, one-third of the basic English vocabulary and four expletives that fill in for the blanks and they can’t remember the other word. But the capacity of the human brain, the ability to store information, to withdraw information, organize information, utilize it, all of this God has given to everyone to whom He’s given this marvelous gift of human life. We need to recognize this. We need to understand this. We need to realize that not all of that, and again I don’t think anybody knows a great deal about what I’m going to say, but I probably know as much as anybody. Nobody knows very much. And I’ve read enough books to know that the authors ... you know like the economist the other day down there at the summit, now wasn’t that great? It’s marvelous. Like one of my Hebrew-Christian friend said up in N.Y. He said, “We would get a committee of 15 together, we’ve got 22 opinions, some of them had two.” And that was what I thought about it at that summit session. Marvelous, total agreement that there was no agreement. That was the only thing that came out of it. So on this matter of the mind; it’s about the same way. Absolute agreement that nobody knows what he’s talking about. So I’m just an expert. Someone has said that the frontal lobes up here are the part of us (I don’t know why they say it but I’m going to quote it, because you’ve got to put it somewhere maybe it’s the back lobe), but let’s talk about the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe is that place that part of the mind where one evaluates, criticizes, chooses, selects, and sets standards. One part of the mind. Recallable knowledge. You know that so little of what we know, everything we’ve learned is there, but so little of what we’ve learned and seen available on recall. I have a marvelous memory, but it’s awfully short. I can spend all night studying German and the next day in test, I can’t even remember gesundheit, you know. But later on when I don’t need it at a party or something then it all comes back to me. So how many times do you have a change to say in French pass the butter? My aunt left her pencil on the table. I’ve been waiting 20 years to get that in to a conversation. So it’s there. It’s just not recallable; it’s just not available upon demand. Now, all of these experiences from the time you have before are there, are stored. But we know a little bit. We know that when you have a supreme choice, a supreme purpose, some objective, you sort of programing, you’re put it into the human mind like they program a computer to bring out what they want. And if you say for instance I’m getting sick, I’m going to get terribly sick, I’m going to die, and you doubt not in your heart, it will be even as you say. You know, I mean this is the thing that’s there. You have given instructions to your mind, all of it, conscience, and subconscious, whatever you want to call it. You’ve given instructions to it. You said I want to die. So it’s going to cooperate. You find every reason in the world why you should. I want to be sick. You follow? You see what I’m getting at? I want to be sick. We had a missionary that did not want to stay at this station in Doro. She’d been there. She’d had it up to here. She couldn’t stand it. It was just more than she could take. And the mission board had its field staff meeting at their station and they said, “Evelyn, we want you to stay another year. It’s important. And then next year you can go to the Capital and work there.” So she sweetly smiled and said, “Alright, whatever the Lord wants.” But the next morning when she woke up, you couldn’t touch her body. She was in excruciating pain. And it wasn’t make believe. There was a doctor there that said, “She is in pain.” She didn’t know she was being touched in that the pain was so excruciating, she couldn’t stand it. She had some terrible disease. So, it attacked her overnight. So they said, “Alright. Well she can’t stay. We’ll have to make other plans.” So they bundled her up and they fixed a bed in the truck they put a shade over it and they slowly drove out. The post boat came. She got on it. The day after the post boat was there she took a few steps. She could eat a little bit. When she got to Khartoum, she ran down the gangplank and threw her arms around a girl. Now, what was it? Well, you call it hysteria if you wanted to use the term. What had happened was that her mind had found an answer to the fear she had of another year there and had produced the condition that had every physiological symptom. But when the threat was removed and the condition was changed, she didn’t do it deliberately. No one would accuse her of it. But she did it nonetheless because this is how the mind functions. It works that way. And this is that great thing that God has put into everyone that breaths the breath of human life. So, when a, let’s apply it in another level. Let’s apply it in another area. When someone has the concern to get the gospel out to a country that’s never heard it. To get translators into an area. To build a business. Let’s take kind of a rule: anything that the human mind and I don’t know who said this, can conceive and believe, it can be achieved. Anything the human mind can conceive and believe, can be achieved. Or again, any idea, firmly fixed in the mind through repeated affirmation, automatically becomes a plan or a blue print which the body uses, the person uses, God uses if it’s in relation to Him, but it’s used because the plan or blue print which is used to achieve the objective has been named in this idea. Now, this is the mind and every human being has it. We’ve got to realize that this is the most Godlike part of us. The part of us that thinks. The part of us that imagines. The part of us that plans. The part of us that organizes. We’ve got to see that if we’re going to understand what is man. Next week we’re going to take another word and that is what about man’s words. We’ve talked about thoughts, the mind God’s made. What about the word? Father, we ask you to bless through our hearts and our lives some of the things we’ve thought about today as we begin to get insight to the kind of beings we are and how You made us and why You made us. We ask it in Jesus name. Amen. * Reference such as: Delivered at The 4th Presbyterian Church, Discerners Class, Bethesda, MD on Sunday, August 3, 1980 by Paris W. Reidhead, Pastor. ©PRBTMI 1980