Bobby Schuller - You Are Not A Wallflower
I want to give you an opportunity before I jump right into my message to make a decision to follow Jesus Christ. You know, in life, we have to make decisions, and very often, we don't. Remember when I was in high school and I sort of made this firm decision in my own life. Before that, I would have called myself a Christian for sure. I would have thought, "Yeah, I'm a Christian". I, you know, et cetera. But it wasn't something that I woke up for in the morning. All of us have this God-shaped hole, Pascal says, and until God fills it, everything else will corrupt it. I wanna encourage you, maybe you call yourself a Christian.
You're like, "I don't really know God. I don't really go to a church. I don't really read my Bible," and you're wondering what's wrong. I wanna encourage you today to just make a decision today to follow Christ with all your heart. If you do that, your life will never be the same, and if you do that, I want you to text me the word "HOPE" to the number on the screen, and we will pray for you. We actually do, we do that in our staff chapel every week. We pray for the people that tell us that they came to faith, and it's a powerful thing for us too. We love praying for you, so please do that.
Today, I'm gonna talk about the importance of the will to love, not the will to live, the will to love. It's a famous and beloved essayist and short-story writer. George Saunders was invited to give a graduation speech at Syracuse, and when he got up there, he said, "You know, there have been a million of these sorts of speeches given at these sorts of events, and usually you get an old guy like me and he comes up here and he tells you all these life lessons that you have and things that you can do, whatever you put your mind to, and these types of things, and that's good and all, but I think, when you talk to an old guy, the best thing to ask him is, 'What's your greatest regret in life?'"
And he said, "I wanna answer that for you today". He said, "First, let me tell you what I don't regret. Here's something I don't regret. All of the horrible jobs I've had in my life, and I've had a few, including being a knuckle puller at a butcher shop". Whatever that is. He said, "I don't regret them many, many times I have been poor and didn't have my next meal". He said, "I don't even regret the time that I was in the Sumatra, and I jumped, as a young man, into a river to go swimming, and then I looked up only to see 300 monkeys pooping in the river, and then I got sick for seven months".
He said, "I don't even regret that, and I don't even regret the time when I was playing hockey in high school and after I swung my stick, my hockey stick went flying into the audience and hit the girl that I had a crush on. I don't regret that either". He said, "Here's what i regret: the times in life where I failed to be a kind person". He said, "The times, I call them failures of kindness". He used an example of a girl. He said, "In the 7th grade, there was this girl, kind of a wallflower".
Her name was Ellen, and she was an awkward kid, didn't have really any friends, and she had those cats-eye glasses that kids used to wear before they were cool, you know, and back then only old ladies would wear them, not kids actually, and people, she would chew her hair a lot and was really quiet and would look at her feet all the time, and people would tease her and sometimes even bully her and call her names, and she had a lot of hard days at school, and he said, "I would imagine Ellen going home to her mom, her parents, and her mom would say, 'Hey sweetie, how was your day today?' And she would say. 'Oh, it was fine.'"
And he said, "I was not one of those bullies. I never picked on her. I never called her a name, but I never paid her any attention. I never said anything to her, and one day, she moved away, and I never saw her again". And he said, "And you know what I regret now that I'm in my 60s, and I'm getting on in my years"? He says, "I regret way back then in 7th grade that I didn't be nice to Ellen, that I didn't go out of my way to say something or become her friend or give her a smile, ask her how she's doing".
And many of you have regrets like that too. I know I do. I've got lots of regrets like that, where it's not even like you were a mean person, but you know there was somebody who could have used your help, who could have used a hug, who could have used a nice word or a friend or someone to sit with them or put their arm around them. I remember once, I maybe told you the story, but I was not far from here at the beach, and I was walking back to my car, and I was walking down the sidewalk through the flower streets, and on the sidewalk, there's nobody around, there was a man about my age in a suit, and he was weeping and sobbing.
As I got closer to the man, I mean, I'm a pastor, right? This is what pastors do. I thought to myself, and I even felt the Holy Spirit tell me, "Stop and pray with that man. Stop and talk to him. Put your arm around him. Ask him how he's doing. Ask them what's wrong". And so, I thought about it. I thought about it, and just kept walking, and I went maybe about another block, and I thought, "What am I doing"? And so, I literally ran back back around the corner, and guess what? He was gone. I've never seen him since.
So you have these moments like this where, even now, years later, I think every time I walk by that spot, and I do a lot. It's by my favorite beach. I think about how I neglected the Holy Spirit, and I let down this man that needed a friend. You see, in life, you don't regret the lost jobs as much as you think. You don't regret the lost crushes. You don't regret the monkey poop. You regret these moments where even though it might have been a little awkward or a little weird, or it might have been out of your comfort zone and you would have stopped and talked to somebody, comfort someone, encouraged someone, you didn't.
These are some of the things that will carry with us and remember, but we don't have to. See, the opposite of that is so true. Whenever we actually do stop, when someone's behind you in line at Starbucks and they tell you they're having a bad day and even though it's weird, you say, "Can I pray for you"? Or you say, "Can I buy your coffee"? It's amazing how those moments change our attitude, our emotional well-being, our thoughts, our feelings the whole day. You see, find yourself driving slower, being nicer to other people, things rolling off your back. Your work becomes more productive. Isn't that strange that when we're salt and light in the world, a lot of other things just sort of naturally get better in our lives.
We call that salt and light. Jesus reveals to us in his famous sermon that we're salt and light. That's who we are, but the weird thing about this is the salt can lose its saltiness, and the light can lose its loftiness. Isn't that strange? How does salt lose saltiness? And some of you, you remember a time when you used to be nice and salty and not in the way, you know, it's salty, and light and light, and full of love and kindness to other people, and maybe you lost it, and now you're saying, "I long for a will to live. I just don't even want to get up in the morning. I feel tired all the time". I saw a T-shirt the other day that said, "My favorite childhood memory was my back not hurting".
That was a good line. You know, maybe you feel that way. Your back hurts all the time. That's all you can think about. You just, and it's very often. It's hard to just get out or get motivated or go to work. And so, what we think we want is this sort of will to live, this will to go on with life, this will to get up, this will to do, but really, what we need is a will to love. When we love people, when we have a reason to become bigger, better, it gives us more power to do those things. I want you to have a bigger life than the one you already have.
All of us have one of two decisions we will make in life: to be everything we can be or to be less than we can be, to do all that we can do with the time that we have or to do less with the time that we have, to become all that we were born in our DNA and all of our dreams and all those things or to be less than that, and I want you to be it all. I want you to be the whole kit and caboodle. I want you to wake up in the morning and be all that you can be with all the time you have to all the people you can be to the best of your ability, and I know you can.
Here is the difference. It's not the will to live. It's the will to love, that I am getting up today because there are people who need salt and light. That is what I'm born to be and born to do. You are not a wallflower. Let other people be a wallflower. That's not you. Let other people do nothing. That's not you. When somebody says, "Somebody else will do it," let somebody else they're talking about be you. When somebody says, "Oh, somebody else will comfort them. Somebody else will hug them. Somebody else will say something nice. Somebody else will pick up the phone. Somebody else will write the letter," and if you said, "Well, who's that somebody else?" let that somebody else be you.
Let you become the kind of person that that's what people think of: the person who goes the extra mile for someone who's in pain and in need. If anything, needs to be Christian, that's what it is. It's in Matthew chapter 25 that Jesus gives us this great metaphor of salt and light. He's there on a hill. Maybe it's a warm day. It's near the Sea of Galilee. You got to see it last summer. I was there. I preached from there. Beautiful water, wildflowers. But there are probably hundreds or even thousands of hurting people. Many of them are sick. Many of them are afraid, poor, old, single moms. They come to Jesus 'cause they're in desperate need of help. They need salt and light, and Jesus says to them, Matthew chapter 5, it's so weird.
Jesus doesn't say, "I am the salt of the earth," and he is, but he says to these people, "You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It's no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the whole house. In the same way, let your light shine before men that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father, who is in the heavens".
Okay, now, it may sound normal to you to be called salt, but to me when I read this the first time it sounds weird. Like, what if somebody's like, "Hey, I want you to know something. You're pepper. Hey, buddy, you are cloves". All right. What is it about salt? So in Jesus's day, during the Roman Empire, salt is super important for a lot of reasons. We're divorced from it in history because we invented this thing called the 'frigerator. I have two of them: one in my house, in my house, my kitchen, and one in my garage for all, like, the extra stuff. That's America for you, right? In those days they didn't have 'frigerators or ice machines or anything like that. They had salt.
So if you have food that perishes, you take it and you dip it in some brine, and you pickle it or you, you know, brine it and hang it up, so you have salted pork, which basically beef jerky and this type of thing. That's how you preserve meats and different types of foods and vegetables that otherwise would perish, and you can have them for a long time. So in those days, you really almost couldn't build a city without salt. And beyond this, can we just agree that salt is so delicious? Like, anything that's supposed to have salt on it that doesn't somehow becomes bland.
Can you imagine fries losing their saltiness, tortilla chips losing their saltiness? Never. We go to a Mexican restaurant, I will invite myself to be the saltmelier. It's a sommelier that's into salt. I just invented that. Saltmelier. And I will ask you if I can put some tortilla chips on our salt. Stupid joke. Anyway, salt is delicious. It makes sweet things taste better. That's why people are putting salt on cookies now. It seems crazy. It's perfect. Salt also cleans things. We're kind of not as familiar with that, but it's a cleanser. If you have a sore throat, maybe your mom gave you some warm water with some salt on it. You gurgled it, and your sore throat went away because it kills the bacteria, not always but sometimes.
And so, for this and many other reasons, salt in the ancient world is very valuable, and it becomes a form of exchange. It becomes, everybody, say your favorite word: "money". Stop, all right, stop. It's valuable, and it's money. Actually, the Roman Empire, Pliny of the Elder tells us, paid their soldiers in handfuls of salt. You get one hand of salt per day that you work, and that's why the word soldier comes from, in Latin, sal. Anybody here speak Spanish? What does sal mean? Just add a T: salt. And dare. Anybody dare? To give.
So, sal dare is someone who gives salt, a soldier, sal dare, and I'm probably going too long. Hannah's not here, so I have no one to flag me down and say, "Just bring it back". Is where the expression "you're worth your salt" comes from, and it's also where the term "salary" comes from. So salt is this idea that it's not only delicious and it's nourishing and it's the foundation for a growing people and it's cleansing, but it's money, it's valuable, it's precious in God's sight, and Jesus says, "You're the salt of the earth. Don't lose your saltiness". Don't lose your saltiness. And just think of that. All these hurting people who say, "I need help. I need to get out of a rut. I need some money. I need to pay my rent. I need help," Jesus turns the whole thing on their head.
As people are worrying about their own situation, he tells them you already have all that you need to be salt and light to someone else, and if all of us were salt and light to each other, everything would be different. And so, he says to you, the best way to get on with your day, to get a will to live is to get a will to love and to be passionate about others. The best way to become the person you were born to be is to do it for someone else. You might hear a man say, "I rise above all of my hardships or depression or anxiety. I rise above to help other people get out of their ruts". You might hear someone say, "I go to meetings, and I lead those meetings so that I stay sober".
You might hear somebody say, "I'm a personal trainer so that I stay fit". And you might even hear a pastor say, "I'm a pastor so I'm forced to read the Bible". I recently heard someone say, "You know, most pastors only read", some study, "most pastor only read their Bibles once a week to prepare their sermons". And I thought, "Well, that's pretty good. I wish my church was full of people that read their Bible once a week". Once a day is great, but once a week is a start, isn't it?
If the only reason you wanna become a pastor is to be forced to read your Bible once a week, I think that's a good enough reason. If that's the reason you wanna be a pastor, I wanna encourage you. Do it. That's a good reason. So you see, there's things that we do in life that we understand that the best way to learn something is to teach it. The best way to become something is to become it for a student, to become it for the people you're leading, to become it for your children or for your colleagues or your neighbors. And this is the secret sauce.
This is why Hannah Schuller famously says the Bible is a cheat sheet to life. It is. When you recognize that you're salt and light, you get all the salt you need. When you recognize you're salt and light, you get all the light you need. When you recognize that you are the answer to someone else's prayer, you get the answer to your own prayer. That is the miracle of the kingdom of God. When we have our hands like this to fight or to hold on, you also have your hands like this. You can't receive anything, so you gotta open your hands and you gotta open your heart. So salt and light, he says, "You're the light of the world".
That's a powerful statement. If I asked you, Pastor Bobby, to a congregant or a view of "Hour of Power" who's the light of the world, you're almost for sure gonna say Jesus, and you're right. But who does Jesus say the light of the world is? He says it's you. Whoa, hey now, that's a big compliment, that God thinks you are the light of the world. He says, "Don't hide your light under a bushel". What does that mean? Anybody here seen "Aladdin" before? Vaguely? Or you know what the genie in the lamp is? Remember that lamp, that weird-looking shape thing? This is a actual lamp. This is what he's talking about. These lamps, you put oil in that hole in the top, and then the other hole you have a wick, and then just like a candle, and it stays lit.
And so, typically, at nighttime in your house, house is made of stone typically in the desert, and you'd have 15 to 20 of these maybe around your house, and the whole house would be illuminated, but the problem is when you have to light one of these, it's a pain in the neck. If you've ever gone camping and you've tried to start a fire without matches or a lighter, it is a pain, and I have tried, and this is the problem. When they leave, they blow out all the lamps except one because lighting a lamp, I mean, like, doing this thing with a stick or like flint takes forever, and it's a pain in the neck.
So they leave one lamp on, and then they put this bushel over it, and I know it looks like that's gonna start a fire, but it doesn't. Or they can sometimes do a clay pot, and they leave it there so that if anything in the room or something falls on it or leaves get on it, it won't start a fire. So this protects it, and then they go, you know, she leaves the house and go visits her sister, and then they have dinner, and then they talk about the other sister. You know what I mean? She's been going on what Mom has to say about that, and then she leaves her sister's house and comes home, and it's cold in the house, but you don't have to start a fire. She takes the bushel off the one lamp and uses that one lamp, and she goes around and lights all the other lamps in the house and maybe lights a fire.
So what happens is this is an ancient light switch. She comes into the house, pitch dark. Pull the bushel off, boom. The house is full of light, and this is the image Jesus is using for the people that he's talking to. He's like, "You are like this light, but you got the bushel on, and it's dark in the world, and all you gotta do is just take that bushel off and watch what it does to the people around you". Many of us, we don't see ourselves that way. We think we're just a lamp that's blown out, but he said no. No, you're already lit. You've already got all you need. You've got all you need to say. Just take the bushel off and see what God can do.
As Jim Cox used to say, 90% is just showing up. Just show up and do what you can, and watch how much of a difference it will make in the lives of other people. So take the light off. You need light in your life? Be light to someone else. It's interesting. You turn the light bulb on, the light bulb gets the most light, doesn't it? The room gets some light, but the light bulb gets the most, and that is the amazing thing is that when you really do lean into this idea, you just find that everything in your life gets lighter, better, more interesting, less boring. There's just something about choosing today, I will be a light for my neighbor that it makes, for me, all the light, all the salt I need is there. Isn't that good news?
God's got enough light and salt for you and for your kids and your grandkids and for your spouse and your friends, and he's got even more than that. And so, we decide to be salt in life forever. We're just overflowing. All right, I'm almost done. Hang in with me. Just a few things. Why? Why so often when we're given an opportunity do we walk by the weeping man in the suit? Why do we ignore Ellen with the cat glasses when we have the opportunity, and we regret it later, why? Here's what it is. Seneca famously said, "We suffer more in imagination than in reality".
We overthink just think, think, think, think, think, think, and then the moment passes. We don't act, and here's the first thought that almost all of us are gonna have when an opportunity to be sweet or kind to someone comes up. The first thought that many of us are gonna have is, "It's a little weird". Am I right, or am I wrong? It's a little weird, but someone who's suffering, who's in pain, is not going to experience it as weird most of the time, and sometimes they will, and that's the rotten part... is most of the time, they don't, and then we think, "Well, it's weird, and then what if I say the wrong thing or what if I make it awkward"? Don't worry about it. "What if I fail"? Don't worry about it. But then you think, "Man, I'm kind of tired, and it's the end of the day, and I really need to get back. I'm probably gonna hit traffic on the way home. I'm kind of tired".
And then we fall into someone-else syndrome. Someone else will help them, but here's the weird thing. If when you're in the line of the grocery store, you decide to pay for the person behind you or in front of you, or when you're at work and you notice that your colleague's having a rough day and you ask him why, or when you're out and about at the mall or whatever it is that you're going and you see someone that needs some help and you do something about it, you immediately become a bigger person somehow. It's like your whole, like, imagine your life is like a fuzz ball or something. It just gets bigger. There's something weird, and even if you fail, but especially if you succeed, everything else in life gets better.
The traffic gets better. Your boss gets better. Your work gets easier. You sleep better. This is a Bobby Schuller promise. This is a bobby Schuller promise. This is what so many of us are missing and need right now is this: to just say, "Who cares if it's weird? I'm just gonna do it". God will challenge you this week, by the way. He's gonna challenge you, and you're gonna have a moment, and you'll have about three seconds to make a decision, and then the moment will pass. I'm preparing you because it's coming. So who do we reach? You know, many of us, we think, "Okay, God's calling me to go to the other side of the world". No, God calls you to love your neighbor, your neighbor.
What's your neighbor? Your near dweller. I'm gonna, I like to go with about 15 feet, something like that. Imagine you have a 15-foot hula hoop that's like a laser hula hoop, and anywhere you go, anybody's inside your laser hula hoop, that's someone. You're like, "Well, some people in that loop", no, no, everybody that goes into your hula hoop space of 15 feet, that's somebody you gotta look for. It's called a near dweller, or a neighbor. For example, a woman might say, there's a real story, actually.
A woman says, "I was feeling guilty and like I should go to an orphanage in Africa, and I just saw how hard it was in Africa. I should go there". And maybe some people should, but she said, and then she realized, "But my kids need me, and their friends need me". So which is better? Jesus says to love our neighbor. So often we think, "Oh, it's gonna fail". But what if it doesn't fail? What if you succeed? Here's another thing to think about. When you're living life with your 15-foot hula hoop, try and do it in a way that is unhurried and relaxed. It is very, very hard to love people if you're in a hurry and all stressed out.
I heard somebody say this, and I had the exact same experience. I often ride my bike here to the church from my house. There's a beautiful bike path, goes all along the river, and it goes all the way to my house, and it takes about 45 minutes or so to ride my bike from here to there and there and there. Well, one night, I forgot that I had promised Mrs. Schuller I would be home at a certain time, and I had my bike, and like, I realized, "Oh no, I'm running late".
So I peddled as hard as I could, and I was like, "I'm gonna turn this 45 minutes into, like, 15, 20 minutes". And I went as hard as I could. I was sweating, and the sun was coming down. I was going as hard as I could. And going from regular speed to full speed, I cut off about four minutes. And I was like, "You know, my bike ride is one of my favorite things of the day. The birds are chirping on the waterfall". I didn't see a single, you know, I didn't see anything. I'm just like, "Oh, I gotta get there". And it was kind of a big lesson for me in life. How much time are we really saving on the freeway, the fast walking, the fast-paced go, go, go, go, go? How much time are we really saving? And the answer is not much.
Almost always it's not much, but what is the cost? Almost always it's a lot. It's a lot. Your adrenaline's up. You don't see people that are hurting. Anyone that gets in your way, you have this phrase that comes in your head, "Fool, fool, fool, fool, fool". All right, Jesus says, "Be careful when you start saying, 'You fool,' in your heart". But when you're hurried and someone in the grocery line is looking through the purse for their card, and you're in a hurry, what's going through your head? You fool. When you're at the airport and someone's taking too long, get their laptop out of their bag, and then they actually ask, "Do I take my laptop out of my bag"?
And it's already out of your bag, just put it on the thing. What are you saying in your head? You're like, "You fool, you fool, you fool". That's what a hurry does. Hurry turns everybody into fools. They're a fool, she's a fool, she's a fool. How can you love people like that? And the answer is you can't. So we gotta slow down and relax. Here's another one. Everybody's gotta love bank. This is a good one. I know it's a really cheesy statement, but if you wanna make withdraws from someone, you gotta make deposits, and just like with real money, whenever you make a deposit, it's not as much as you think, and whenever you spend money, it's a lot more than you think.
Some of us are in debt and behind on our payments, shall we say. So you might take some work to get back to zero, and that's okay. Everyone receives love differently. Not everybody loves the way you do, and just trying to discover how someone receives love is in and of itself a loving thing to do. Oh, and by the way, there are some people that don't want any of your love. There are some people like that. Some people don't like salt, and some people don't like light. They're called slugs and bats, you know? Slugs don't like salt. Bats don't like light. It's just how it is.
You say, "It shouldn't be that way. They should want love. They should want light. They should want salt". Slugs don't like salt. Bats don't like light. It's how it is. Don't deal in shoulds and shouldn'ts. It's how it is. You move on. Most of the world needs that stuff, and when you do it, you see their life changes, but your life changes too, and that's the good news. You are salt and light. Take the cover off. You're not a wallflower, not you. Let somebody else be a wallflower. It's not you. You're here to be salt and light to people who need it, and I know you can do that today.
Lord, we thank you. We love you. You are the salt and light in our lives, and when nobody else is around, we always know that we have the goodness of your grace, mercy, love, and friendship. It never fails. It's in Jesus name we pray. All God's people said amen.