The Story - Chapter 11

God is very interested in getting to know you and getting you to be able to know him. It's a great concern for him to reveal himself to people in this world, but it's sometimes difficult for God to reveal himself because he's not visible for us and that makes it hard for us sometimes to get to know him. But the story of the Bible is a story about how God has helped us to get to know who he is. Now you get to know people around you by watching the things that they do. You see how they react in certain circumstances. You know if they have a temper or not. You see if they react in certain circumstances. You know if they're kind or not. All these things help us to be able to shape the person that we're trying to learn who they are. Now the Bible is a story of God revealing himself to us. That's the word revelation. He's revealing himself to us. He has a passionate desire for the people he's created to know who he is and what he's like and how to be able to be a friend to him. The Bible started out, people didn't know very much about God because they hadn't seen the things that he had done. But step-by-step through the Bible, by the actions of God and the messages that he sent through his speakers, the prophets, we got to see more and more about who God is like. God is mysterious in many ways because he's above and beyond anything in this world that we can imagine. We can't relate to the kind of wisdom and power that he has. But there are some things that we can understand about him and get to know. And God is passionate about making sure that he shows himself to us. He wants you to know who he is. Now when you read through the Bible, you discover some things sometimes that are startling about God because it's not quite the way that we understand him. So you have to see in the scriptures that it's a process and a progress on God's part. When you first meet someone, you may say, that's a very nice person. They're pleasant and they're kind and they're attractive and they look like they dress nice. And then as you get to see them in certain circumstances, you may say, whoa, that's not the kind of person I want to be around at all because of things that they do. God is revealing himself a little by little. And sometimes in the Old Testament, they're not quite able, God is not quite able to present all that he is. There's another limitation to our understanding who someone is or understanding anything. For example, if you want to teach somebody about math, you don't start with trigonometry. You start with basic math. 2 plus 2 is 4. Addition, subtraction, multiplication. And then you build on that. Whatever you learn, the next step helps you to learn the next one. We've all been around children two years old and you do something and they say, why? Well, it's too complicated to explain to a two or three-year-old child what you're doing or why you're doing it because their mind is not yet at the place where they can grasp all the things that you're talking to them about. I read a story, a lady one time wrote her son came home and he said, where did I come from? She was shocked. She thought, I didn't intend to have this conversation with my child until he was 15 years old. But here he is, a second grader. Where did I come from? So she thought about it and she thought about it and she decided she'd finally need to tell him. She came in and sat down and began to explain the facts of life to her son. And she got all through. He said, Bobby said he came from Detroit. Sometimes it's hard to explain things to people because they're not yet at the level to be able to grasp what you're talking about. That's what makes it difficult sometimes. So when you're reading through the scriptures, every part of the scripture shows us a little bitty piece of God. What he's like, how he does things. The passage that you've been looking at in the story this week in chapter 11 has one very troubling thing in the beginning of this story as you start reading it. It sort of shocks us when we look at who God is. And if you have your Bibles, it's in chapter 16 of the book of Samuel if you want to read that. There are several passages in this same passage, not all of them in the story, that reveal the same thing about God. Chapter 18 verse 10 was the passage you have in the story. And here it's telling about David and Saul. And Saul was the king that God had withdrawn his power and presence from. And it says the next day an evil spirit from God came forcefully upon Saul. And he was prophesying in his house while David was playing the harp as he usually did. Saul had a spear in his hand. He hurled it saying to himself, I'll pin David to the wall. But David eluded him twice. Now that's page 151 in your story, the psalm on the story. But in this passage in the Bible, there's even several times in which the same thing occurs. In fact, in chapter 16, beginning with verse 14, it talks about Saul and how this evil spirit began to work in his life. And we're not troubled by the fact that there's an evil spirit in the world. But what's troubling to us is how it's communicated to us in the scripture. In fact, chapter 16 verse 14, now the spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him. Saul's attendants said to him, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you. Let our God, our Lord, command his servant here to search for someone who can play the harp. He will play when the evil spirit from God comes upon you and you will feel better. So Saul said to his attendants, find someone who will play well and bring him to me. One of the servants answered, I've seen the son of Jesse of Bethlehem who knows how to play the harp. He's a brave man and a warrior. He speaks well. He's a fine-looking man and the Lord is with him. And Saul sent the messenger to Jesse saying, send your son David who is with the sheep. So Jesse took a donkey and loaded it with bread and skin and wine and a young goat. And he took them to his son David, with his son David to Saul. David came to Saul and entered his service and Saul liked him very much and David became one of his armor bearers. And then Saul sent word to Jesse saying, allow David to remain in my service for I'm pleased with him. Whenever the spirit of God came upon Saul, David would take his harp and play. And the relief would come to Saul and he would feel better and the evil spirit would leave him. What's troubling to this is that we read in the stories of scripture about God as being love and kindness to us and then we suddenly come to a passage where it says, an evil spirit from the Lord came to torment Saul. It sort of makes us think, you know, that God might not be our best friend or might not be the person we'd want to trust our lives to. If in circumstances like this, he would treat us this way. But one of the things we're learning is how does God show us who he is? He shows us himself in times sometimes in which we don't understand all that there is to know about God. The people in this story had not yet been able to learn something that we know very, very well. When we read through the Bible, we understand and you go out anywhere in the community and you talk to people and you say, where does evil come from? And they say, well, evil comes from the devil. You see, we know a lot about the devil. But I don't know if you're aware of how limited the scripture is about talking about Satan and the devil. For example, the word devil appears 31 times in the Bible and all of them are in the New Testament. There's not any mention of the devil in the Old Testament. The word Satan is mentioned in the Bible 49 times, 46 times. And of those, almost all of them are in the New Testament. There are 14 in the Old Testament, 11 of them in one book, the book of Job. Now, whenever they were trying to figure out what's going on in the world, they didn't have the knowledge that we have. Why? Well, they weren't yet at the place to be able to understand about God and who he was. In the book of Job, it describes the world as being ruled by God and he has with him all the other gods in the world as sort of forming a government. It's called the councils of heaven in biblical studies. And there, God is talking to Satan as if Satan was one of his friends. And Satan says, God says, Job is one of the greatest servants that I have. He's just a wonderful man. And Satan says, I'll tell you what, he wouldn't serve you a minute if you didn't bless him so much. I'll show you that he really doesn't trust you. So God says to Satan, you can do anything you want to him, you just can't kill him. So Satan goes into the world and takes everything away from Job that he has. All that he owns, his family, everything. In this picture, it appears as if Satan and the devil, the devil and God are in somehow or other connection with each other. When you get to the New Testament, an entirely different picture is shown. There, Satan, when he comes to Jesus, is Jesus' arch enemy. You see, in the Old Testament, they thought all spiritual things, everything outside the human body, came from one source, God, who was the sovereign ruler of the world. Now, when we get to see the story of Jesus' life, we see there is a brutal battle between the devil, Satan, and God. And God has to show us in the New Testament that there's a whole different way by which we come to understand what is going on in the world. It is not God who brings evil on the life of a person. So in the book of James, James writes, when tempted, no one should say, God is tempting me. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when his own evil desire, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death. Don't be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chooses to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of first fruits of all he created. You see, you learn something about the Bible. You can't just pick up one passage of scripture and read that and think that you've pictured the whole passage of the old nature of God. What God does is he reveals himself to us a little bit at a time, from the beginning of scripture all the way through. That's why oftentimes you'll hear people say, to read the Old Testament, you need to read the New first and find out about Jesus, and then go back and look at that, because the full picture of God is shown in Jesus. And you take the character of Jesus and you place it in the story of Samuel, 1 Samuel, and then you will get a full picture of what's taking place. You will know that the God who does not tempt anyone to evil has not come to Saul and tried to get him to be destructive. You see, the spirit of evil caused him to want to kill David. The Spirit of God does not tempt us to do evil. They didn't know any more about the spiritual nature than to simply understand and describe exactly what they saw. Now, let me tell you why that's important to you. You're going to have in your mind a lot of things about God that are true, and a lot of them that aren't, if you grew up in this world. Because you hear people talk about God, and they talk about what he's like and the things he's done, and you will get some terrible pictures about God if you listen to the people around you, and that's all you know. And if you pick up the Bible once in a while, and you read a little passage here, and a little passage there, and something somewhere else, you'll get a different picture of God than you should. It's just like if you followed someone around, and you only talked to them when they were mad at someone. You'd get a whole different picture of their life by just seeing those small parts of what took place. What God wants is to reveal himself to you. He wants you to know who he is. He wants you to know what he's like. So he's made sure that the record of who he is from the beginning of the world all the way to the end is confined in this book. So that everything you think God is saying to you has to be measured against this. You can't just take one or two passages and say, well I'm going to use this one to describe what God is doing to me. It's the whole book. God wants you to know who he is. But you can't know the nature of a person by just one or two conversations with them or finding him in a particular setting. So what God has done is stretched over thousands of years. Pictures of him in certain circumstances and what he's done. And then he sent a human being, Jesus the Christ, to walk around on earth and deal with bad people, good people, people who want to kill you, people who want to help you. He shows you in every kind of circumstance of life exactly what God is like. Everything about God that we can and need to know in this world is packed up in Jesus. That's why reading the Gospels is such a critical thing. When someone comes to Christ, I say start reading the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Go back and read them again. And when you get down the picture of Jesus and you know what God is completely like here, then you can start reading the rest of this book. Because when you read the story of Jesus and you read these stories in the Old Testament, you look at that and say, God doesn't do evil. Jesus never did that kind of thing. And then you have to say, there has to be a reason why it was written this way. It doesn't reveal the nature of God. It reveals the limitation of humans to know God. Now, what we learn in this story about God is He wants us to know Him. He reveals Himself to us. And then there is something else very, very important in this section. This chapter 11 of the book of the story tells about David being anointed as the king. It talks about him and the place that he was to play in God's kingdom. And one of the things that one of the writers said was that when God looked at David, He didn't see a little boy, He saw a king. Now, I don't want you to misunderstand what he's talking about when he says that. Because a lot of times we think when we look at ourselves about our limitations, things we can't do, the failures that we have, and we discount ourselves. And we think, if I was like the people in the Bible, you know, God would love to call me and have me work for Him, but I'm not like Abraham, and I'm not like David, and I'm not like all these other great people in the Bible. You see, here's where our thinking gets faulty. Because what God does from the beginning of the Bible all the way through is look for people who cannot be great. He picked Abraham, this man, in the first beginning of the nation of Israel. He was simply an ordinary man. He had high limitations to himself. He was a dishonest man in many circumstances. But what God saw in Abraham was he was a man who would believe Him. And so He said to him, I want you to leave where you're going, and I want you to go to the place I'm going to show you. And Abraham trusted God so much, he just did that. See, what God looks for in people is not greatness, but He looks in us to see if we will do what He tells us He wants us to do. What God wants is to take an ordinary person, maybe even someone that's less than average. He wants to take that person and by his power demonstrate who God is. Anybody, you know, can do something wonderful and great if you have wisdom and power and strength and ability. I read a story one time about Leif Trevino, who was a great golfer. He used to make money betting people. He could beat them playing golf. And he was doing so good in his hometown that everybody knew, boy, don't go out and bet with him, no matter what kind of handicap he gives you, he'll always win. So he decided that he would tell people, I'll play you golf and I'll bet you I can win, and I won't even use a golf club, I'll use a Dr. Pepper bottle. And so he would go out to the course and take a Dr. Pepper bottle and hit the golf ball with it, driving with it and putting with it. And you're looking at him and you say, you can't win doing that because that little thing's not going to be as good as my thousand dollar clubs to hit the ball. But a great golfer can beat you with a Dr. Pepper bottle if he's good enough. God does not need geniuses in his kingdom because he's already smarter than the geniuses. He doesn't need someone with a great shining personality because he has plenty of personality for all of us. He does not need skill because he has more skill than anybody in the world. What he needs is someone who will say, God, whatever you tell me to do, I will do it. And so beginning in the story in scripture, God looks around the world, not for the biggest, most intelligent person, the most powerful person, but he picks the little ones. He picked Israel, he said, because you're so insignificant on the face of this earth. I could have picked the Egyptians, they're big and powerful. I could have picked the Persians, I could have picked anybody, but I picked you because you were little and insignificant. And I said, I will make you a nation that impacts the world. And through that little nation and the birth of Christ, Christianity spread around the world, powerful, forceful. And so when it came time for God to pick his king that he wanted in the nation of Israel, he didn't look around at the most attractive person or the most powerful person. Instead, what he looked at was someone who would fit his purpose. In chapter 16 of the book of Samuel, this story is told, but the Lord said to Samuel, Do not consider his appearance, that is, of the person that is going to be the king, or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. And Jesse called him in a dab and had him pass in front of Samuel, but Samuel said, The Lord has not chosen this one either. Jesse then had Shammai pass by, but Samuel said, Nor has the Lord chosen this one. Jesse had seven of his sons pass before Samuel. But Samuel, the man who was to choose the king, Samuel said to him, The Lord has not chosen these. So he asked David, Are these all the sons you have? There is still the youngest, Jesse answered, but he is tending the sheep. Samuel said, Sin for me. We will not sit down until he arrives. So he sent and had him brought in. He was ready, his fine appearance, his handsome features. Then the Lord said, Rise and anoint him. He is the one. So Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers. And from that day on, the spirit of the Lord came upon David in power. He was a little boy. No one considered him a potential king. But he had one thing about him all of his life. He wanted to do what God wanted him to do. He was worse than any of you in this room. Sometimes in his morality. He had someone killed so he could marry his wife. I don't think anybody here would do that. He was not a man of perfection. But he was a man who was told that he was wrong, was willing to humble himself and admit it. And say, OK, God, I did it. But I want to start over. God is not looking for perfect people in this world. What he is looking for is someone who is willing to say, Lord, I give you my life. Whatever I know you want me to do, I am going to try to do it the best I can. And if I fail to be obedient to you and you tell me of my sin, I will stop and say I did. And I'm sorry, Lord, forgive me. God picks people who can't but are willing. And he makes them able if they do. What God is looking for in the world are ordinary people who look at themselves and say, I'm not worthy. He wants ordinary people who say, I can't preach. I can't teach. I don't think I can tell anybody about Christ. And he makes them able. I can't tell you how many times people stand in the baptistry and they say, I just am not a public speaker. I can't do this. And they stand there and the words of God come. It's not that they suddenly got better. It's when you say to God, I will do what you want me to do. He will give you every single thing that you need to do it. Thoughts, words, power, persistence, strength, all of them come from God who enters the life of a person who is insignificant and unable. You know why? He wants to play the greatest game of golf with your life that's ever been played. He wants to show the world how powerful he is by taking your life and making it spiritually powerful. He doesn't want people to look at you and say, well, if I was that smart or I was that strong or I had that ability, I could succeed. He wants people to look at you and say, how in the world did you overcome your drinking? How in the world did you overcome your drugs? How in the world did your life change so much as it has? And he wants you to say, God changed me. God has done these things that you see because just like in the Bible, he wants the world to know what he's like. He wants the people around you to know what he's like. Don't ever look inside of yourself and say, I can't, when God asks something of you. Look inside of yourself and say, I can't, but this is going to be exciting to see how God enables me to do it anyway. That's what he wants from us. God is in the work of revealing himself to people. He does it in this book and he wants to do it in you. What have you been thinking that maybe God wants you to do? But you've backed off of it a little bit because you said, I look inside of myself, all I see is a person that can't. If David had looked inside of himself, he'd have said, all I see is a little boy. I can't be a king, but what the scripture said was, when David came and he was willing, the spirit of the Lord came on him and all the things that David did in his life that were good were the result of the power of the spirit of the Lord. And the spirit of the Lord will never come upon you until you say to him, I am unworthy, I am a sinner, my life is messed up, I don't know how I'll ever get out of this, but whatever there is left of me, here it is. I will read the Bible to learn what you want me to do, I will start trying to do it, and no matter how many times I fall down and fail, I'm going to get up and take the next step again, and I'm going to do that until the day I die. That's what God wants. And he wants all your friends to look at you and say, I cannot believe the person you have become. How did you do it? And he wants you to say, it is God who has done this in me. He wants you to be that tool that is not possible to do the things that he wants you to do. And then he wants you to do them, and the whole world look at you and say, how great God is. The Bible is a book whereby God reveals himself to the world. You are a tool through which God wants to reveal himself to the people who know you. Would you let God have your life today? It doesn't matter how little you know about God. It doesn't matter how messed up your life is. It doesn't matter how impossible it seems. If you will say this morning, in this hour, Lord, I give myself to you. God will take you. He will pour his spirit in you. And as you begin to learn what he wants you to do and what he doesn't want you to do, he'll give you the ability to do the right things. And your life will change. Your attitude will change. Your relationships will change. Everything will change. And you will become a living Bible to the people around you. And you say, well, I can't do that. Well, of course you can't. You're not expected to. But God can. And the more worthless you think you are, and the more impossible this seems to you, the greater God wants you. Because he knows that he can take you and make you into a child of God. Would you bow your heads, please, for a moment? I want to ask you if you've ever said to God, I give you my life. And from this moment on, my purpose is to live in obedience to you. If you've never done that, I want to ask you to do it. Now, I'll tell you, you'll think of a lot of reasons why you shouldn't. But there's only one reason why you should. That is, God has said to you in your mind, the thoughts come, I should follow Christ. That's God's personal invitation to you. Then when you think of that, you think of all the reasons why it won't work. This is the ideal opportunity for God. He wants to take you and show his power to make a difference. All he needs is one thing. Will you let me make you the king? David could have said, I'm not going to do this. But he had one quality. He said, if you want me, I'm yours. Do you have that quality? In the quietness of this moment, while the piano plays, I want you to simply say to God, I give myself to you. This is the ideal opportunity for God. He wants to take you and show his power to make a difference. If you want me, I'm yours. Do you have that quality? Now I want to ask you if you've made that promise to God today, that after the service over you talk to Roz Crane, she'll tell you what to do next. You can talk to me and I'll tell you what to do next. If you heard in this time God say something to you he wanted you to do, he wants you to say, I'll do it. Would you stand please for a moment of prayer. One of the most encouraging things in all the Bible, Father, is that you accept unworthy people. You choose unworthy people. You choose people with limitations, failures and flaws. And you choose them to be your servants. And you choose them to show your power, your holiness and your greatness in human beings. So we live in this world regardless of our circumstances with great hopes because we know your power is greater than anything out there to stop us. I want to ask this morning, anyone who heard this, if they said to you, I give you my life, that you would keep telling them the next step they take and the next and next until their life becomes a brilliant beacon of your presence to all those around them. In the name of Jesus Christ we give thanks to you for choosing people who this world sees no value in, but you see as priceless. In the name of Christ we pray, Amen. 12 of your friends, but we need to know so that they can cook the right amount of turkey and stuffing. So please come. Oh, you need to bring a side dish or a dessert too. Sorry, I forgot. The love of God is broader than earth's vast expanse. It is deeper and wider than the sea. Love reaches out to all to bring abundant life. For God so loved the world, his only son he gave. Share his love by telling what the Lord has done for you. Share his love by sharing of your faith. And show the world that Jesus Christ is real to you every moment, every day.