What good Texas preacher would get up and not say something about Vince Young this past week?  It’s 4^th and 5, with 19 seconds on the clock, about 12 yards out from the goal line with the National College Football Championship weighing in the balance.  It doesn’t get any better than that!  Scrambling some 12 yards, he capped off almost 500 yards of gain in one game!  Not only sealing the deal for the Texas Longhorns and their national championship, but also setting a national championship game record for personal rushing.  What do you think was behind all that?  There’s no way in the world that that one run just happened.  Don’t you believe that there was just a little bit of practice behind all the things that took place the other night?

The next night Jay Leno invited Vince Young to his show.  Leno asked Young about some of his early childhood disappointments and heartbreaks.  It was impressive that Young almost all but brushed them aside, to talk instead about his mother, who taught him to practice discipline in the face of disappointment.  When he disobeyed her, she would put a rake in his hand and make him go outside and rake leaves as discipline, he recalled as one example.  There was far more to that victory the other night than what showed up on the screen for those few brief seconds.  There were years and years of practice of some of life’s most basic disciplines in that event.

This morning, if we say that nobody gets good at anything without practice, we’ve said nothing new whatsoever.  That’s all but self-evident.  What is not so self-evident is that, just like everything else we do, faith also takes practice.  The message this morning is built around one particular verse in this chapter from Philippians 4, verses 1-13.  In the New International Version, the words are translated like this (Paul, writing to the Philippians church):  “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me -- put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.”

It is, perhaps, one of the least appreciated truths of scripture, that faith takes practice.  Yet, in this particular text, each and every time the word “peace” is mentioned, it is mentioned as the byproduct of something else that has been practiced.  Doesn’t it make sense that the lack of peace we sometimes live with, many times live with, may well be the result not of God’s failure to have the best intentions for us, but of our unwillingness to practice some of faith’s most basic disciplines?  The victory of peace that so eludes us, a sense of well-being, a sense that we’re safe, a sense that God is for us, even if the whole world is against us, the ability to sleep at night and face each day with a sense of inner calm, the ability to respond to the anger and even the meanness of other people instead of reacting to it -- all of that, that we might call peace, eludes us unless we practice some basic faith disciplines.

Like, healthy thinking.  Several years ago, Nancy and I inherited a trash can, believe it or not.  As things as shaking out right now, that stands to be the best we can hope to inherit, even after all the wills are read.  But, up until then, we had been a one-trash-can family.  We went on vacation, and when we came back, we had an extra trash can.  Someone had thrown it over our fence into our back yard.  It wasn’t ours, but apparently it had blown down the alley.  Someone, thinking it was ours, just tossed into our back yard, meaning to give it back to us.  It was ugly, broken.  I didn’t like it.  The next day, I put it out for the trash collectors, only to learn that trash collectors don’t think of trash cans as trash.  When I went back to bring the trash can in, I ended up with two trash cans.  We’ve had two ever since then.

The thing that’s been really interesting to me is, now we need it.  Up until then, we’d only needed one trash can; now, we need two.  It’s like the volume of our trash has grown in direct proportion to our willingness to accommodate it.  If someone threw another trash can over our back yard fence, I suspect in a couple or three weeks we’d need three trash cans.  Even before downloadable pornography even existed, twenty centuries ago, one of the greatest disciplines of peaceful living, the Apostle said, involved the practice of healthy thinking.  If you will, in computerese these days, downloading healthy thoughts.  “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”  That not only involves the willingness to be careful about what we put into our minds.  Healthy thinking also involves the capacity to have a good garbage disposal system.

That’s one of the things prayer was meant to be for us.  To help us dispose of mental, spiritual garbage.  The Apostle writes, “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer with supplication and thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God.”  In everything!  In our best thoughts and worst thoughts.  In our most noble thoughts and our most despicable thoughts.  In everything, healthy thinking means letting our needs and requests be made known to God.

A dear friend of mine and I have been talking lately about how little we understand prayer.  Three and four decades into our faith journey, we just feel like novices.  It’s such a difficult thing to grasp.  What does it mean to be a person of prayer, really?  How do you do it?  When do you do it?  The Apostle Paul once lamented, “We do not know how to pray as we ought” (Romans 8:26b).

What I’ve come to discover is that there are different ways to pray.  When it comes to prayer, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all prayer life.  I used to feel guilty because I was told in some discipleship courses that I should pray early in the morning.  I never could quite pull that off with any consistency.  Then, I was told, “You can pray late at night if you don’t make it early in the morning.”  But, I never get anything productive done after about 9 o’clock at night.  My life needs change.  My circumstances change.  My prayer needs change.  What I have learned to do is pray as I go.

Isn’t it true that the people you really love the most, you stay in touch with every day?  A lot?  It’s not just a one-time letter at Christmas you get or send; it’s a daily conversation you have with these people.  The practice of prayer involves the willingness to practice healthy thinking by making certain that we’re in daily conversation with God about the things that would otherwise become garbage in our minds.

Some people refer to this as the Information Age.  I choose to refer to it as the Information Overload Age.  Not that many years ago, very few people on this planet had access to a daily newspaper.  Just ten years ago, very few if any of us in this room even had email addresses.  Now, we not only have the Internet, we have the capacity to take the Internet with us virtually anywhere we go, anytime of day or night.  Fifty miles outside of Riga, Latvia, last summer, I was able to access the Internet and read our church’s web page, that far away.

Our capacity to get and store information has grown exponentially.  So it is that one of our greatest challenges as disciples of Jesus will be the discipline in the face of increasing difficulty to be very determined and intentional about what we choose to retain in our minds and what we choose to let go.  In fact, we could legitimately sum up the scripture we’ve read this morning like this.  “Disciples of Jesus are people who think intentionally.”

I hold in my hand a little thing called a flash drive.  You can plug it into the side of your computer and download the information and save it.  In case something happens to the computer, you’ve got everything transferred to another computer.  This is a 2-gigabyte flash drive.  My very first computer, in 1989, was about the size of this tabletop and had only a 20-megabyte hard drive.  This flash drive has a 2-gigabyte capacity, 100 times greater than my entire hard drive of my first computer.  My first computer would hold about 5,000 pages of data.  This little thing, many times smaller, will hold one-half million pages of data.  Yet, with increased capacity to store data has also come the capacity to access more data than I can and should store.  It’s my responsibility to choose what to keep and what to throw away.  No one, but no one, is responsible for that but me.  I can keep good things and pictures and memories on this thing, or I can download despicable things.  It’s up to me.

So it is with our hearts and our minds.  For example, when it comes to people who have hurt us and offended us, some people say the best way to deal with that is just to forgive and forget.  A mental discipline, they say, of choosing to forget.  The problem is, there’s no way to do that.  Forgetting the pain that other people have caused us is not as simple as erasing our hard drive.  In fact, it’s not possible to forget those who have really wounded us deeply.  What’s more, Jesus never once commanded us to do that.  Nowhere in scripture can you find Jesus saying, “Forget your enemies.”  What he did say was, “Pray for those who despitefully use you” (Matthew 5:44).  Every remembrance of someone who has hurt us we should take as the Spirit’s prompting to pray for them.  We cannot change the past but we can reframe the past by taking it out of the old frame of anger and hurt and desire for retribution and reframing that event in the grace of God by praying for those who have hurt us.  We get to choose what we think about.

It’s been hard for me to learn, but I have come to discover that I don’t have to have an opinion about everything.  I don’t have to have an idea for everything.  That my mind and my heart only have so much capacity for storage, and it is my responsibility before God how I choose to think.

I don’t know, for example, what to think about this conflict in the Middle East.  I was so broken-hearted this week to hear of a prominent Christian leader saying that Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s stroke was the judgment of God for giving away God’s land.  He based his pontification on some obscure text in the book of Joel, totally ignoring what Jesus about peacemakers being the blessed ones.  I don’t know what to think, though, about the Israeli conflict.  Who’s right?  Who’s wrong?  What if some of both is true about both?  But, what if, this year, instead of trying to think about who’s right and who’s wrong, instead of giving our energy there, or in our personal conflicts, always trying to prove this or that, what if we simply prayed for peace?  What if we prayed for peace in our relationships, peace in our world?  If the only thing praying for peace does is make us more peaceful people, by transforming the way we think, then this world will already be a better place.  We have to practice peace by practicing healthy thinking.

We must also practice peace by practicing contentment.  “I have learned,” the Apostle said, “to be content.”  “I’ve gone to school.  I’ve passed some of the tests.  I’ve failed some others.  I’ve made some C minuses and some A plusses.  But I have finally learned,” he said, “what it means to be content with whatever I have.”  You know, talk about cutting against the grain of upwardly mobile American culture.  Is Paul saying, “I’ve learned to settle for less than the best”?  Or, for second best?  Right before that, the Apostle said that the Philippians had been so gracious to him, in responding to his needs.  Then he jumps quickly, kind of like Vince Young, brushing off the disappointments of the past, saying, “Not that I’m referring to these needs.  That’s not the issue I’m trying to talk about.  My needs have come and gone.  My needs have changed.  But I’ve learned, despite the barometer of my needs, the secret of maintaining an inner contentment.”

The question is not how the needs of our lives change, but how we choose to respond to those needs.  We can panic and grasp; we can refuse to settle for second best, no matter what it costs anyone else for us to have the best.  And, when we do, this is the result.  As James wrote, “What causes fights and quarrels among you?  Don't they come from your desires that battle within you?  Your greed?  You want something but don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures (James 4:1-3, NIV),” because [my paraphrase] you think you’re entitled!

We can do that kind of clawing and grasping, or we can practice contentment.  Faith, hope, and love are all gifts.  Contentment is the one spiritual gift we have to learn.  Or, not.  What if we don’t learn?

One of the most difficult movies I’ve seen in a long time is Steven Spielberg’s movie, Munich.  It’s a story about the Israeli athletes who were murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics.  The movie is built around the events growing out of the choice of the Israeli government to seek out the eleven terrorists who were responsible for plotting the murders.  There is one particular character whose job it is to seek them out and kill them all.  It’s a true story.  It really happened.  In the end, the terrorists got what they deserved, got what was coming to them.  But, an interesting repercussion of the Israeli’s revenge that the assassin of the murderers lives the rest of his life in fear of those who will seek to kill him in retribution for those he killed because they had killed someone!

Where does it all end?!  Where does all this insanity and this war, and this quarreling, and this killing end?!  If we think evil is going to end when those who did what they did get what they’ve got coming to them or that evil is going to end when we finally put a needle in the criminal’s arm in the death chamber, we are kidding ourselves.  Someone, somewhere, has to break the cycle of evil, or we will keep destroying each other in ways both big and small, to no effect except that we will continue to become more and more like those we hate.

“Let your gentleness,” the Apostle says, from a prison cell, where he was unjustly held for the holiest of causes, “Let your gentleness be known to everyone.  The Lord is near.”  What did he mean?  Did he mean the Lord is coming soon, or does he mean the Lord is close by?  What difference does it make?  Both in time and space, the Lord is near.  If we really believe that, won’t that change the way we relate to others?  Instead of fighting and grasping and clawing to get ahead, for what we believe is rightfully ours, won’t that make us more peaceful and respectful and gentle?

I started first grade in Lafayette, Louisiana, when I was five years old.  I was way too young to start school.  I really wasn’t ready to leave home for first grade until I was about 30, or something like that.  But, every day, I had to ride the bus to school, and that was just a big chunk of separation anxiety for me to bite off at that age.  My teacher seemed to know that.  One day, she called me up to the desk at the beginning of the day, and she said, “I have something very special to tell you.  Today, instead of riding the bus home, your mother’s coming to get you.”  I don’t remember why Mom was coming to get me that day.  But, instead of having to ride that big old yellow bus home, my mother was coming to get me.  It changed my whole day.  I was the happiest kid in the class, because the person I loved the most was coming to get me.

If we really believe that, no matter how much we give away, or how much we lose, we really can’t lose, because the Lord is near, if we really believe that, won’t that change the way we treat each other?  We cannot give a gentleness to others we don’t have.  And, our spirits will not be gentled until we know the Lord is near.

Another way of saying this is that we cannot practice compassion for others, gentle compassion, unless our souls have been gentled with compassion.  A couple of weeks ago, I was going to play golf with Jerry Spivey and some other people.  The golf carts were parked up by the clubhouse on a concrete patio of sorts.  Before we teed off, I went to throw some trash away.  As I dropped something in the trash, I turned to step away, back toward the golf cart, and my foot caught this rock, about the size of Gibraltar, and I started to fall.  Now, everything I’m about to describe to you happened in about 1.5 - 2 seconds.  But, as I relive this memory in slow motion milliseconds, this is what I thought. 

As I started to fall, I thought, “I’m going to be okay.  I’m going to get my right foot out here in front of myself, get stable; I’m not going to fall.”  The second thought I had, very quickly, was, “No, I am going to fall, but I’ll be okay.”  The third thought I had, as I got closer to the ground, was, “I’m going to fall, and I think this is really going to hurt.”  Sure enough, I couldn’t even get my hands out in front of me, and I fell with my arm underneath me, and my head slammed on the concrete, giving me an instant headache!  As I lay there on the ground, I thought, “Wow, that really did hurt!”  The next thought I had was, “I really hope nobody saw that.”  I stood up and walked back to the golf cart just as Jerry Spivey walked up and said, “Good roll, Schmucker!”

I cannot tell you how many times I have gotten a phone call here at the office, when someone would say, “Mrs. So-and-So fell.”  Or, “Mr. So-and-So fell, and they’ve taken him to the emergency room.”  Every time I get one of those calls, I’ve always feared for what that means.  As people get older, simple falls can be life threatening.  Now, I have personal experience with falling.  I remember the helpless feeling of knowing there was nothing I could do about it, and it was going to hurt, and I was going to be humiliated.  I’m telling you, I will never again take a call about somebody falling, without feeling for them a deeper sense of compassion.

Contentment does not grow out of always winning and never falling.  It grows out of practicing the peace that comes with gentle compassion and the gentleness of Jesus for all who have fallen.  Even when, especially when, their falling takes us down, too.

Contentment doesn’t mean settling for second best, as though that would be the worst we could do.  Contentment is something we discover on the way to helping achieve what is best for all God’s children.  No matter what it costs us.  That’s compassion.

About 20 years ago, something like that, I repeated a joke to some friends that I had heard.  I repeated the joke for the same reason we always repeat jokes -- it was funny.  It had the win-win possibility for me as a preacher in that it was also clean.  So, I repeated this joke.  The only problem was that the humor of the joke was rooted in a racial stereotype.  I passed it along, I thought it was funny, we all had a great laugh!  About two weeks later, no joke, I found myself in the very same dilemma I had described humorously in the joke about another race two weeks before.  This time, it wasn’t funny, because the joke was on me.  I don’t tell jokes like that anymore.  One reason is because, when it comes to humor, especially humor, there’s a very, very thin line between “racial” and “racist.”  Another reason is because I have discovered with some Christian maturity that, are we all not a part of the same race?  The human race?

Yet another reason is that, in my stumbling and my falling, I have learned through great humiliation that the moment we lose our compassion, even for the sake of humor, the moment we lose our compassion for another brother or sister for whom Christ also died, we stand on the brink of stumbling at the very same place for which we have judged others in their stumbling.

Before this year is out, most of us in this room most certainly will ask, in one way or another, “Why did God let me fall?  Why did it hurt so badly?  Why have I been the one humiliated?”  I’m going to tell you right now -- there’s no answer for that question.  Not in this lifetime; maybe never.  The only question we can ask and answer is, in our stumbling and in our falling, in our winning and our losing, in our gain and our grief, the only question we will be allowed to both ask and answer is whether or not we will practice the peace of God by practicing the way we choose to think and whether or not we practice the contentment of God’s gracious compassion. 

If we practice peace that way, the promise of God is that his peace will guard our hearts and souls, no matter what.