A hostess, when complimented on her flower arrangement, remarked significantly, “Oh, flowers excite me!” as though she deserved no credit for doing so much with what she enjoyed. “Flowers excite me.”

What excites you? Where do you go for your excitement? I know a man who chases a fire truck. Some teenagers turn to hot rod races. Some people get their favorite excitement at the poker table. Then, there are the movies and the TV boxing and wrestling matches and detective mystery who-dunits, opium, whiskey, wine, women and song.

What excites you? Our excitement is pretty important, you know, to all of us. We just about have to have it. “We may live without friends, we live without books”, wrote Bulwer-Lytton, “but civilized men may not live without cooks.” But truer still than Bulwer-Lytton’s words; man, civilized man or uncivilized, cannot live without excitement. Though there are some sedate souls and sophisticated spirits who never seem to get excited and who seem to fit the Bishops’ description of his unsuccessful clergyman — “He’s untroubled by a spark” — actually all human nature, so long as it’s live and kicking, craves excitement of some sort. On a visit to an army post, I was watching the men on the parade ground marching in the hot sun, and later looked at them lolling around drab quarters in fatigue uniform with stolid, emotionless faces. To a soda girl in the post P.X., I said: “Looks like the morale problem here might be rather grave. Why aren’t these men bored to death?” Quick came the answer from the soda girl: “They are.” We must have excitement.

Even in our reach for excitement, the example of Jesus is helpful. See him come tired and hungry to the wall of Jacob in Samaria. So fatigued is Jesus that while the disciples go on into the nearly village to buy bread, He remains alone to rest in the shade of the palm trees about this ancient watering place. Soon there comes a Samaritan woman, carrying on her head a water jar to fill at the well. Jesus asks her for a favor of a drink. This opens up a conversation which turns rapidly from water drawn at the well to waters of everlasting life; from a discussion of comparative religious practices of the Jews and Samaritans, to a searching of the woman’s own soul. As a result of that brief interview, this Samaritan woman of evil reputation experiences a spiritual about-face and hurries off to the village to gather a crowd to come see this prophet. And Jesus — what does He experience by this interview? Why He, who had at the outset been weary and hungry to the point of exhaustion — now receives His returning disciples bearing food for Him with a wave of His hand in refusal.

“Master,” they say, “Eat.” To their surprise, He says: “I have meat to eat that ye know not of.” Puzzled, the disciples ask: “Hath any man brought Him aught to eat?” “No,” says Jesus, “My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me and to finish His work.”

Now this passage of Scripture should be very instructive to us on this subject of excitement. Two facts about human excitement are highlighted. The first is this: Our most absorbing excitement is achieved through giving expression to our deepest interests and talents. Our best source of excitement is really built in. Excitement is not necessarily something we need to search for in exotic — out-of-the-way places and experiences. With Jesus, people were His consuming passion. He had a unique interest in men of all kinds: the good and the bad, the poor and the crippled, the proud and great, the humble and simple, the happy and sad. Little children stirred Him deeply, and to women Jesus gave a courtesy and a sympathetic understanding which was more revolutionary in His day than we are able to comprehend in our day because the place of a woman then was as man’s chattel slave, while today she is honored and esteemed principally because of 2000 years of Jesus’ divine evaluation of her true worth.

Jesus’ absorbing interest was people, and consequently, though tired and hungry when He came to Jacob’s well and found a woman with a terribly mixed up life — burdened with problems of her own existence to which she had not the first glimmer of a solution — the deep wells of the Savior’s being were stirred. Troubled, mixed up lives were like mystery thrillers to Him. This woman’s knotty personality problem made Him forget His weariness. He sensed her desperate need. He knew she was a woman who had led a wicked life and that her soul was dry and parched. But her spontaneous generosity when He asked for a drink of water, gave Him a possible clue to why she had fallen into sin, and stirred His interest. Jesus was always more interested in the cure of sin than in its condemnation. Another Samaritan woman, if a Jew had asked for water, might have refused it, but she did not. Here, perhaps was another poor soul, like the Magdalene, in trouble, because “she was impulsive, intensely loving, and splendidly generous. Perhaps it was her habit to act first and think afterward, trust people who were not trustworthy, and get let down, and find it almost impossible to refuse a nobody anything, even though what they asked for they had no right to ask and she had no right to give.” (Eliz. Goudge — For God so Loved the World)

And so, the absorbing, exciting venture was on, and Jesus, though a little while before was so hungry and tired and fatigued that he couldn’t make it on into town with his disciples to buy bread, now, after the interview has no appetite for the food they bring. Like the little boy who cannot sleep nor eat on the day before the circus comes — Jesus’ excitement which came from giving full reign to his deepest interest — people and their problems — has robbed Him of His appetite. “I have meat to eat that ye know not of. My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me and to finish His work.”

In a recent book on sainthood — Quartet in Heaven by Sheila Kaye-Smith — the author makes the interesting observation that our word holiness is derived from the Anglo-Saxon halig, which means whole or complete, and so the quest for sainthood, for holiness in living for everyone is just the quest for the attainment of wholeness or completeness in personality — the fulfillment of the divine plan or purpose for each life. Therefore, the most satisfying excitement any one can find is just the expression of what is deepest down inside us which craves to come out.

What is your talent? Your all consuming interest? A young woman at Westminster choir school gets up at 3:00 o’clock in the morning to take her turn at practicing because there are so many students and so few organs.

Seeking the perfection of the talent with which we are divinely endowed, this is the most exciting and absorbing thing we can ever find to do. Each must, by prayer and self-analysis, search this out for himself. “You and I have meat to eat that the world cannot know of. Our meat is to do the will of Him that sent us (to fulfill His plan in our lives) and to finish His work.”

Martha Graham, the expert on the modern dance, says: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening which is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.”

At a ministers’ and physicians’ conference on alcoholism here in Memphis last week, one of the leaders was discussing the causes for the rapid increase in alcoholism among women. He said this significant thing: “Women have had a struggle to find a unique place in society. . . Women have sought to keep peace at any price with their families and society. They are susceptible to alcohol because they are pleasing everyone else but not satisfying their basic needs of being themselves.”

Wholeness, is what the human personality craves more than anything else.

But there is another side of this business of excitement — something more than the human side of consecration of whatever talent we have to its fullest expression in the service of others. There is also the divine side of it — best called inspiration — that something extra added by the mysterious grace of God which heightens the effectiveness of our best service and adds the exhilaration of an eternal excitement. This comes only when we are engaged in pouring out our spirits best offering unto man and for the glory of God. Inspiration is what God gives to match our consecration and here is to be found the most exhilarating excitement human hearts can know. It is not of the earth, earthly, but of heaven, heavenly — a divine gift.

I saw on Wednesday of last week, Ernest Arnold, the director of our Protestant Radio and Television Center in Atlanta. He was aglow with the unbelievable expansion and development of this work. The Center, which was started 10 or 15 years ago on a shoestring and a prayer, is now flourishing.

“What’s happened to you?” I asked him. “Why all the excitement?”

“A man came in here about three years ago,” he said, “and asked for 30 minutes of my time.” He stated that he had listened to one of our broadcasts, wanted to see the Center, and to talk with me a little while about what we were trying to do. I was busy, but I took the time. The fellow stayed for two hours. It turned out he wasn’t even a Southern Presbyterian, but a Congregationalist from Maine, and about 80 years old. I began to get impatient. There were things I had to do. Finally, when he arose to leave, the man asked: “What do you need most in your operations right now?” I told him about a piece of equipment which would cost about $5,000. To my surprise, he took out a checkbook and a growing interest which has resulted in gifts to our work totaling three quarters of a million dollars.

“And why,” I asked, “did this aged stranger from Maine voluntarily get so involved in a Southern Protestant Radio Center?” Because he said it afforded him the opportunity of helping transmit the Christian message into all the world, and he felt strangely impelled to get behind that. Today the man says: “I’m having more exciting fun than I’ve ever had in all my life, and my only regret is that I didn’t get into this ten years ago.”

When a man takes what he has: talent, wealth, time, interest, concern, and consecrates it to God, then God matches that with inspiration — His own eternal additive, which is beyond and above the human, and the result is something intensely exciting.

O my friends, come to Jesus Christ! D.L. Moody used to say: “Give your life to God. He can do more with it than you can.” Consecrate what God has given you to enjoy to do to the glory of God in the service of man. Do you wonder what that is? Consult your local minister, or any trusted counselor. Pray about it. Then, make your decision — offer your consecration. God will mix in His inspiration, and you will come up with the headiest brew ever man drank.

I love to think of them at dawn

            Beneath the pale pink sky

Casting their nets in Galilee

And fish hawks circling by.

 

Casting their nets in Galilee

Just off the hills of brown,

Such happy, simple fisher folk

Before the Lord walked down.

 

Contented, peaceful fishermen

Before they ever knew

The peace of God that filled their hearts

Brimful, and broke them, too.

 

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail,

Homeless in Patmos died.

Peter who hauled the teeming net

Head down, was crucified.

 

The peace of God, it is no peace,

But strife closed in the sod.

Yet brothers, pray for but one thing,

The marvelous peace of God.