Join me this week in an approach that is different from my usual teaching. Let’s pray through Psalm 25 together.
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Advent really has three main purposes. First, it helps us remember and celebrate how God came into the world as a human being, two thousand years ago. The church-term for this is “the Incarnation.” The second purpose of Advent is to help us look forward to the time when Jesus will return to the earth, bring history to its conclusion, and bring us into the New Creation. In fact, if you happen to come across this message during some other time of the year, it can still be relevant to you, because in a very real way, we are always living during advent. Since we are waiting for Jesus to return, every day and every year is, in a sense, during advent.
You might say the first purpose is about the past, and the second is about the future. But Advent is also about our present. Advent reminds us to receive Jesus into our daily lives, here and now.
Psalm 25 is one of the readings for the second Sunday in Advent this year (technically, it is part of the Sunday evening lectionary). Psalm 25 is really about the third purpose of Advent – receiving Jesus into our lives in the present. There are also themes in this psalm of waiting for God with anticipation.
Normally, I like to do what is called “expository preaching.” If you’ve heard two or more of my sermons, you’ve probably heard my expository preaching. It’s what I do about 90% of the time. This time, I feel like the Holy Spirit was asking me to step outside my comfort zone, and take a different approach. So, rather than my normal approach, I want to invite you to pray this psalm with me, and reflect upon it during this season of waiting and expectation. If you sometimes struggle to pray, I recommend praying with a psalm, like we are about to do here. If you struggle to come up with words, or know what to say when you pray, using scripture to pray could be very helpful. Since we are using the very words of the Bible, we can also know that our prayers are on track.
I encourage you to listen to the sermon this time, even if you normally read it. I’m not sure the written version captures this as well, although it may be better for some people.
I encourage you, after reading this message, to go back through the psalm yourself, and pray it your own way. Consider doing that two or three times this week as part of your prayer life.
1 To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul.
Yes, Lord, I do!
2 O my God, in you I trust;
let me not be put to shame; let not my enemies exult over me.
I trust you, Lord, but not as much as I should. Please help me to trust you more. Lord, please protect my loved ones, and me, from the Evil One, and from all the forces of evil.
3 Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame; they shall be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.
Thank you for this promise, Lord. Help me trust it, and cling to it.
4 Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths. 5 Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long.
Lord, please increase my desire to know your ways. Let me live moment by moment in your truth. Give me patience to wait for you, and for your promises. I wait for your salvation to come to those I love who are not following you right now.
6Remember your mercy, O LORD, and your steadfast love, for they have been from of old.
7Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for the sake of your goodness, O LORD!
Even after receiving you, I continue to sin. I confess my self-centeredness, my pride, my gluttony. Please forgive me! I trust that you do so, not because I deserve it, but because of your goodness to me, and to the world, through Jesus.
8 Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in the way. 9 He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way.
Help me Lord to be humble enough to be taught by you, and led by you. Help me to be humble even when I see others around me who are not, and who still seem to succeed. Teach me to live in your ways, day by day.
10 All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies. 11 For your name’s sake, O LORD, pardon my guilt, for it is great.
And thank you, Lord, that you forgive me because it is according to your nature. Your forgiveness is not contingent on me in any way. I praise you for that!
12 Who is the man who fears the LORD? Him will he instruct in the way that he should choose. 13 His soul shall abide in well-being, and his offspring shall inherit the land.
Lord, do instruct me to choose the things that you choose. Please do let my soul abide in well-being. Help me to trust these promises even when I don’t see them.
14 The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear him, and he makes known to them his covenant.
Thank you, Lord! I receive this promise!
15 My eyes are ever toward the LORD, for he will pluck my feet out of the net.
Lord, keep my eyes fixed on you.
16 Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. 17 The troubles of my heart are enlarged; bring me out of my distresses.
Lord you know my troubles. My daily pain, my lack of self-discipline, my concern for my family, and the future. I lay all my troubles in front of you. Be gracious, O Lord!
18 Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins. 19 Consider how many are my foes, and with what violent hatred they hate me. 20 Oh, guard my soul, and deliver me! Let me not be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.
Yes Lord! I agree with all of this, with your Word. Forgive me, deliver me, guard me. Do all those same things for my loved ones.
21 May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you. 22 Redeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles.
Thank you, Lord that your promises to Israel are also promises to all who trust in Jesus. Give us hope and patience as we wait for you this advent season. You see what a crazy and dangerous place the world is right now. Come soon, and redeem your people. Protect us as we wait. Let the uprightness and integrity of Jesus guard our hearts, minds, and bodies. AMEN.
David understood that his life was part of God’s story, told for God’s purposes. He even understood that it was the Lord, not himself, who was the hero of his life-story. So, when everything that he worked so hard to gain seemed to fall apart, David continued to trust in God. Even in obvious-seeming situations, he did not assume he knew what God wanted. The Lord invites us into the same sort of relationship that David had. When we trust him, we find we can be at peace, even in difficult times.
To listen to the sermon, click the play button:
For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.
To download, right click on the link (or do whatever you do on a Mac) and save it to your computer: Download 2 Samuel Part 5
2 Samuel #5. 2 Samuel 5:12-25; 1 Chronicles 11:15-19; 1 Chronicles 14:1-17
I want to revisit something we skipped over rather quickly last time. 2 Samuel 5:12 says this:
“Then David knew that the Lord had established him as king over Israel and had exalted his kingdom for the sake of His people Israel.” (italics added for emphasis)
I think this is a key to most of this chapter, and actually, to the entire life of David. David did not consider his monarchy to be his doing, or his kingdom. David did not consider his life to be about himself. The Lord was the main character in the story of David’s life. Even after he was anointed, for fifteen years David wasn’t king, because God didn’t want him to be king yet. When he finally became king, it was because God wanted him to be king. The Lord did it, for the Lord’s own glory and purposes. It wasn’t about David. It was about God.
The incidents that follow this verse confirm that David maintained this attitude, especially about his kingdom.
5:17-25 appears to describe the same event as 1 Chronicles 11:15-20, and also 1 Chronicles 14:1-17. What happened is this. When Saul was king of Israel, David was his enemy. For the Philistines, that meant that Israel was divided, and less of a threat. Plus they gained a great victory over Israel in the battle when Saul was killed. But seven years have passed. David alone was now king over a united Israel. The Philistines rightly perceived this as a threat to them, so they immediately went looking for David, to bring him to battle and kill him if possible.
The Philistines invaded by coming up a valley that led from their lands by the coast, up into the highlands that were controlled by the Israelis. They did this once before, early in the reign of Saul. The valley the Philistines used against David is called “Rephaim.” There is no place with that name anymore, but scholars feel pretty sure that the lower end of the valley comes out on the plains by modern-day Beit Shemesh – or, as it is called in Samuel, Beth Shemesh. There are two main branches in the higher part of this valley, one that begins to the north of Ancient Jerusalem, and one that starts at a point to the south of Jerusalem, just north of Bethlehem. My personal opinion from reading the text is that the Philistines were in between Jerusalem and Bethlehem (see picture below). In fact, 1 Chronicles 11 says that when they invaded up the valley of Rephaim, they took over Bethlehem and kept a garrison of soldiers there.
Some scholars feel that all this happened before David captured Jerusalem, but it isn’t clear. One reason to think it was before the capture of Jerusalem is that Jerusalem was such a fortress, David didn’t need to go to a different stronghold. However, David, being the great tactician he was, may have decided he didn’t want his troops trapped in the city where he could not effectively do battle, and so he took them down to the south of the Philistine advance. There is no way to know for sure, although the account of the battle in 1 Chronicles 14 puts it this way:
8 When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed king over all Israel, they mobilized all their forces to capture him. But David was told they were coming, so he marched out to meet them. (1 Chronicles 14:8, NLT)
So, whether it was before, or after Jerusalem was captured, it appears that David took his army back to one of his old haunts – the Cave of Adullam, where he had previously hidden from both Saul and the Philistines (1 Samuel 22). We don’t know exactly where the cave was (in fact it probably refers to a number of caves in the same area. But from what the Bible says, and from the existence of actual caves in the region, it was probably to the south and west of Bethlehem, and to the south of the Philistine forces in the valley.
15 Once three of the thirty leading men went down to David’s rock at the cave of Adullam when the army of the Philistines was camping in the valley of Rephaim. 16 While David was in the fortified camp, Philistine troops were in Bethlehem. (1 Chronicles 11:15-16, GW)
It seems that David went to the cave of Adullam before the Philistines got to Bethlehem. So, when David attacked, it was from an unexpected direction. Instead of meeting them head on, he attacked on their right flank.
Let’s pause here and consider a few things.
After probably fifteen years of running, hiding, eking out existence and barely surviving, David became king of Judah. After seven years as king of only one tribe, his own tribe of Judah, he finally received the fulfillment of the Lord’s call on his life. Finally, he became king of all Israel.
The confetti had hardly settled to the ground before he was invaded. In short order indeed, David was right back to hiding in caves. Maybe an economic analogy would help us understand how this could have affected David. Think of a person who spent half her life in poverty, working steadily at a plan to build wealth, but seeing few results. None of the breaks ever seemed to come her way. After years, she finally reached the upper middle class. At last, seven years after that, she made her first million. Three weeks later she was flat broke again.
It had to be an awful feeling for David to find himself back in the caves where he hid from his enemies fifteen years or more before. If he was like me, he would have spent a lot of time whining to God about how he had done everything that was asked from him, and why couldn’t he ever catch a break? If he were like me, he would explained to the Lord that he had already been here and already learned this lesson, and what was the freaking point of this kind of hardship anyway? But David was not like me. He was like I want to become. He was like the person the Holy Spirit was showing the world through him – the true Messiah.
So when David went to the cave, he continued to trust the Lord. He asked God a simple question: What do you want to do here? What are you after in this situation?Shall I go and fight these guys or not?
Before we continue the main narrative, there’s a cool story about something that happened while David was in the cave during the invasion. There is no doubt that he did experience distress – he was a human being, after all. The enemy were camped in his own home-town (Bethlehem, in case you have forgotten). It was a hot and dry day, and David said (this was as close as he got to complaining) “I wish I could get a drink from the well at Bethlehem.” I think he was expressing that he was hot and thirsty. I think he was also upset that Bethlehem – his own town – was an enemy camp. He’s basically saying: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful, right now, if we could just walk up to that beautiful cold well in Bethlehem and have a drink? Wouldn’t it be great if there were no invasion at all?”
David was a fearsome warrior, and he led a bunch of other very powerful warriors. Three of the mightiest took David at his word, and broke through the Philistine lines and brought David a drink from the well at Bethlehem. David’s response is interesting:
They brought it back to David, but he refused to drink it. Instead, he poured it out to the LORD. 19 David said, “I would never do such a thing in the presence of God! How can I drink the blood of these men who risked their lives? ” For they brought it at the risk of their lives. So he would not drink it. Such were the exploits of the three warriors. (1 Chronicles 11:18-19)
When I first read this, I thought, “I’d be angry if I were one of those three warriors.” But actually, I think what David was saying was this: “I am not worthy of such a costly drink. I can’t claim it. Only the Lord is worthy of that kind of effort and self-sacrifice.” He was actually honoring the men more by pouring it out than by drinking it. He “poured it out to the Lord.” He was saying that the lives of these men were precious to the Lord. There was a actually a type of offering called a drink offering, where a drink (usually wine) was poured into the ground. The idea was to say, “this is God’s, not mine, and I pour it out to show that everything I drink ultimately comes from God.” So David did not consider himself worthy of that kind of sacrifice from his men, and he directed their attention to the Lord. Life wasn’t about him, it was about God. God was the one who gave them the strength and flat-out guts to do this amazing deed. He was the one who was to be honored, not David.
The hero of this entire story is the Lord. David consciously realized this, and made statements to draw attention to the Lord, rather than himself. We think of God as loving and gracious and giving and kind – like the best possible parent. And yet, he is also thebest, the only true Greatest Of All Time. No NBA superstar has more game than the Holy Spirit. No downhill skier can take a mogul like God. No warrior can be more ferocious and cunning than Jesus. No writer can craft a better story, no historian can plumb more significance from events than the Father. No musician can play a concerto or improvise a lick better than the Lord. Our Triune God is not just the writer and director of the play – he himself is the star performer, and he is brilliant at all he does.
I don’t know about you, but at my age, I don’t go in for hero-worship. Actually, I never did. Human heroes always suffer from significant flaws, and we get disappointed when we really give them our admiration. But there is one Person who is worthy of our hero-worship. David understood that, and he also understood that it wasn’t him. The amazing feats we see in other people – or the amazing things we can do ourselves – are just tiny reflections of the overwhelming awesomeness of God.
So David heard that God wanted to drive the Philistines out of Israel, and David obediently attacked. The Philistines were defeated, and David named the spot, “The Lord Breaks Out” (that’s what “Baal-perazim” means). Not “I have gotten victory.” Not even, “God helped me get a victory,” or even yet, “God got victory – for me.” No – it was God’s victory for God’s purposes and God’s glory. David and his men got to be the fierce warriors that they were created to be – but it was all about the Lord and for the Lord.
The Philistines made a second try. I love the fact that David did not assume that he should do the same thing again, just because it was the same situation. Instead, once more, he asked God what he wanted to do. The Lord did want him to fight again, but he gave David a different specific battle plan, along with the promise that God would be marching out in front of him, doing the real work of winning the battle.
So what do we take away from all this? The first thing I need to get straight is this business that my life is here for God’s plan, God’s purposes and his glory. None of what I am supposed to do is about me. God is amazing and gracious, and so even while he makes use of our lives for his own purposes, he blesses us in the midst of that. David got to be the king and lead like he was made to lead; he got to fight like the warrior he was created to be.
I get to study the bible and think and use my brain and then share it with people who are willing to listen to me. I get to sit here and tap on my keyboard and express the thoughts that the Lord gives me to express. I love it – I really do. It isn’t my message, and it isn’t about me, but I get blessed when I let God do his thing with my life. You will get blessed when you let him do his thing with your life – which is almost certainly going to look different from everybody else, because God has a unique purpose for each one of us. When I say “blessed,” I don’t necessarily mean financially or physically blessed – we Americans, especially, think that’s the main kind of blessing (it’s not). But you will experience the grace and favor of God if you let him be the hero of your life’s story. You’ll appreciate the story he writes through you.
Second, I need to remember that one kind of hero-worship IS acceptable. I need to pay more attention to how skilled, talented, smart, funny, tender, fierce and truly excellent God is. He deserves my worship and admiration. He is the best – at everything.
Third, when life takes a turn for the worse – as it did for David, many times in his life – I need to remember that this is all in God’s hands. If he wanted to hide this great leader of men, this fearsome warrior, in a cave, that was his business – David was his man whether on the throne, or in a cave. If God wants to allow hardship in my life, I will certainly pray for it to be cut short, and I will certainly believe that he will bring better times too. But I will also trust in the meantime that he knows what he is doing and I am ALWAYS in his hands.
I also want to take this away from the text: God is the one who fights the battles I have to be involved in. Most people are probably not called to physical warfare, like David was (although some people certainly are). But sometimes we are called to make a stand for something that is important to God. At other times the Lord calls us to engage in some project, or to work at a certain place, or be involved with certain people, and so on. We can consider all these things “battles” for the purposes of applying this text.
There are some battles we don’t have to fight. Sometimes we go to war without asking God, and so we end up fighting for ourselves. But David went to war only when God directed him. And when he did that, it was God who fought his battles for him. So if you are in a battle that you have to be in, one that you are supposed to fight, remember, it is God who really achieves the victory. All we need to do is show up and let him use us. I take great comfort in that.
The flipside is important, too. We don’t need to fight any battles except the ones the Lord has for us. It’s a good lesson to learn from David that we should ask the Lord before just launching into some kind of endeavor. Even though it may have seemed obvious, David kept asking the Lord before engaging in battle. We might find that we have fewer battles to fight if we only engage when the Lord is telling us to.
When we realize that God is the main character in our story, the one true hero, it takes a lot of pressure off us. Our part is to respond to God, to let him work in and through our lives. But he’s the one telling the story of our lives, and he’s the one who is responsible for how it turns out. I don’t mean that there are no consequences to our actions. But I do mean that if we do our best to be faithful to him, we can be at rest about how things turn out. We can be at rest even when we fail at times to be faithful, because God’s nature does not change:
11 The saying is trustworthy, for: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; 12 if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us; 13 if we are faithless, he remains faithful— for he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2:11-13, ESV)
David was the rightful king of the Israelites. He was God’s choice for them. He had already fought for them, and he was their own flesh and blood. In the same way, Jesus is our rightful king. He is God’s choice for us. He has already conquered the devil on our behalf. For our sakes, he became human—he is our own flesh and blood. Give him permission to be king over every area of your life. If you can’t quite give him permission to take a particular area of your life, give him just a crack, and see what happens.
To listen to the sermon, click the play button:
For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.
To download, right click on the link (or do whatever you do on a Mac) and save it to your computer: Download 2 Samuel Part 4
2 SAMUEL #4. 2 SAMUEL 5:1-12
After Saul’s war-leader, Abner, died, his coalition fell apart. Saul’s last surviving son Ish-Bosheth was murdered, and then finally the leaders of the other 11 tribes of Israel came to David to ask him to become their king.
The material for the book of Samuel was recorded more or less as it happened by Samuel, Gad, and Nathan. It was put into order and made into this book during the time of David’s grandchildren. We don’t know who put it all together, but we do know that they were willing to show David’s faults and failings. There is another book in the Bible that describes some of the same events that are found in 2 Samuel. That book is 1 Chronicles. Whoever wrote 1 Chronicles did so more than 400 years after David’s time. The author of 1 Chronicles clearly used some of the book of Samuel, but he was interested in different things, and he had a different purpose in writing, and so sometimes we get more detail, sometimes less. From here on out in this sermon series, we will occasionally refer to chapters in 1 Chronicles to fill in details.
1 Chronicles 12:23-40 describes more about the names and tribes of other Israelites involved in making David King over the whole nation. In Chronicles, specific leaders and groups of leaders are named, showing that a large number of influential people from all twelve tribes came to make David king. Chronicles records that they feasted and celebrated joyfully.
Back to the text in 2 Samuel. These leaders gave three reasons why they wanted to finally receive David as their king. First, they said, “you are our flesh and blood.” They were saying, “you aren’t a foreigner, that we should fight you – we are all Israelites after all. Judah is part of Israel.” They were recognizing that Saul’s attitude was wrong.
Second, the leaders said to David, “you were the one who used to lead us out to battle, and bring us back safely.” They are remembering his faithful service to Saul, which perhaps David thought had gone forgotten and unrewarded. David had already been their leader in the past, though that service was not officially acknowledged up until now. As a leader, he had accomplished great victories, and brought the troops back more safely than he would have in defeat.
Finally, they were acknowledging that God himself had chosen David to be their king. They were at last submitting to God’s plan for his people. They said: The LORD also said to you, ‘You will shepherd My people Israel and be ruler over Israel.’ ” They are acknowledging at last that God had a call on David’s life, and it was God’s will for him to be their king.
Verses 6-12 of 2 Samuel 5 tells us about Jerusalem. Up until that time, Jerusalem was controlled by a pagan tribe of people known as the Jebusites. They were a sub-tribe of Amorites – one of the non-Israelite tribes that the Israelites were supposed to conquer and drive out. However, there were steep ravines to the south, west and east of Jerusalem, and at the top of the slope, the walls began.
It was a formidable fortress. The Israelites had defeated several kings of Jerusalem and had burned the city itself once (perhaps before it had walls), but they had never managed to capture it and hold it. Now, with walls, the Jebusites are confident that no one could take it. We should understand that it was much smaller in those days. The Jebusite City of Jerusalem covered only about 12 acres on the very top of the end of the ridge. This area is now known as Mount Zion. In the following years, the city spread out greatly, and in modern times, Mt Zion is just one hill in the very large metropolis that is Jerusalem.
In spite of its reputation and history of being impossible to conquer, one of David’s first acts as king of all Israel was to attempt it. David shows here that he is smart and cunning, as well as courageous and strong. Water for the city was collected from the spring of Gihon, which was near the bottom of the Kidron valley, on the east side of the city. The fortifications around those springs (shown in the picture above) were built by David, after he conquered the city. The Jebusites did not bother to guard the spring.
There was a shaft, or tunnel, that went through the hill down to the spring, so that the Jebusites could get water without going outside the city walls. David learned of this. It is quite possible that he observed Jebusites drawing water there, back when he was worshipping God at the tabernacle, when it was kept across the Kidron valley, at Nob (now known as the Mount of Olives). In any case, he determined that the way to take the city was to infiltrate men up the water tunnel. It was a very narrow space, and the men would certainly have had to go one by one, gathering at the top before the assault. That is what David did, with his nephew Joab leading the way and killing the first enemy. By doing that, Joab cemented his position as commander of David’s armies. The city fell without any destruction to the walls, and David made it the new capital of Israel.
These are the actions of a brilliant leader. First, it was terrific military strategy to make use of the water shaft, and attack the Jebusites from within the city. Second, Jerusalem was still an impregnable fortress, an excellent choice for the seat of government in troubled times. Afterward, David built towers covering the entrance to the water shaft, so no one would take the city the same way he had.
Third, it was an extraordinary diplomatic move. David was from the tribe of Judah and up until this time, his capital was a city of Judah. Saul had been from Benjamin, and had made his hometown into the center of power. But Jerusalem did not belong to any of the tribes – it was held by the Jebusites. So when David captured it, it became a city for all Israelites. No tribe could claim it, and no tribe would be offended that it was the capital city. It belonged to no one, and yet at the same time, to everyone. It was not quite centrally located, but it was close.
By the way, some secular archaeologists dispute the existence of David (they choose to ignore the incredible documentary reliability of the Old Testament). However, a water shaft from the spring of Gihon leading up to Mount Zion was discovered in the 1860s. It doesn’t have David’s name on it, of course, but once more, the Bible told us of it before archeologists discovered it. In the 1980’s archaeologists were convinced that this shaft was dug after the time of David. But more recent work suggests that the water tunnel originally occurred naturally, long before David’s time.
The point is, the book of Samuel describes things that are actually still there. In a sense you might say that if the bible is right, there should be evidence of a water shaft in that location, and sure enough, there is not only evidence, but the actual tunnel itself.
As always, I think it is helpful when we read the Old Testament, to ask “where is Jesus here? How does this reveal Jesus to me?” Well, Jesus, is the rightful king of every Christian. That is God’s desire for us. He should be the ruler over everything in our lives. But even though David was chosen by God to be the king, he waited patiently until the people accepted that and submitted their lives to him joyfully. Even though the Lordship of Jesus is God’s will for us, we have not all submitted to that. Jesus is waiting patiently for us to submit all areas of our lives joyfully to him. Does Jesus determine how you spend your money? Does he determine how you spend your time or energy? Is it the words of Jesus that you speak to your family and friends and co-workers?
Jesus should be king over our lives for some of the same reasons that the Israelites gave for submitting to David. Jesus is fully God, yes, but he is also our flesh and blood – he is fully human, just like us. Hebrews 2:14-18 says:
14 Now since the children have flesh and blood in common, Jesus also shared in these, so that through His death He might destroy the one holding the power of death — that is, the Devil — 15 and free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death. 16 For it is clear that He does not reach out to help angels, but to help Abraham’s offspring. 17 Therefore, He had to be like His brothers in every way, so that He could become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. 18 For since He Himself was tested and has suffered, He is able to help those who are tested. (Heb 2:14-18, HCSB)
Jesus is our flesh and blood. He belongs to us and we to him. In Jesus, God became more accessible, more understandable, by taking on, forever, human nature. He has a right to be the king of humans, because he is a human. He can sympathize with us and understand our struggles.
Second, Jesus is the originator and creator of everything. He is our protector and sustainer. He has already helped us, already served us, already kept us safe. He has already suffered and died on our behalf. By virtue of how he has already served us, he deserves to be our Lord.
Finally, it is God’s desire that we surrender entirely to Jesus (Philippians 2:9-11). He is the rightful and chosen king of our lives. This is God’s desire – that we allow Jesus to live his life through us, as the owner of our lives. If you feel a little frustrated for David that it took the Israelites so long to accept what God was doing, consider accepting what God wants for your own life!
What about the conquering of Jerusalem? Does that tell us anything about Jesus and his work in our own lives?
Sometimes we really want Jesus to be king over all our lives, but there are parts of our lives that seem like they will never be changed. Maybe you think you will never be able to stop drinking. Some folks struggle with other particular sins that they feel they can never conquer. Perhaps you think, “I am a person who easily gets depressed. That’s just who I am. Nothing is going to change that.” Or, “I’m angry. That’s just my nature, and it’s never going to change.” We might feel like there are parts of our lives that Jesus simply won’t be able to conquer, places where we just can’t let him be king. Maybe you feel like that about some loved one in your life. You think “Jesus can never get into his life.”
The Jebusites thought they were invulnerable. They had an impressive fortress. But one crack, big enough to fit one man at a time, led to their downfall, and then the city belonged to the king. Jesus is a warrior like David. He is wise and cunning like David. If there is just one little crack, one place where you can say “yes” to Jesus, he can exploit it, and use it to conquer the evil in your life. He can get to people that you think are invulnerable to him.
So if you are concerned about someone else in your life, I say trust him. Ask him to do his work on your loved one. And if the problem is in your own life, I say, simply give him a “yes.” Find some way to say “yes, Jesus. I don’t think I can ever give up drinking [or whatever], but I give you permission to try and take over that part of my life.” Watch what he can do if you just give him the tiny crack of your willingness.
So, where you can, welcome Jesus as your king. Surrender your life to him, submit to him. Let it be his life from now on. And where you can’t do that, where there is a fortress around your heart, just give him a tiny crack. Just be willing for him to make the attempt.
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This week I just want to do a brief summary of the lessons on the Serenity Prayer. We’ve talked about a lot of things, and while I don’t expect everyone to connect with everything, I also trust that at least some things have been helpful in your journey with God. As I quickly go through the lines of the prayer, I’d like to ask you to consider these questions:
What is one new or refreshed way of thinking about my life in Christ that I have seen through this study?
What is one practice, habit, or discipline in my life in Christ that I have begun to practice or would like to begin practicing after this study?
What is one area we talked about that I’d like to know more about, whether in this group, or in my own personal times of studying God’s Word?
Ok, let’s walk through the lines as we did week by week. And if your most important takeaways were different from what I summarize here, I think that may well be a good thing. We serve a God who speaks to us both as a community and as individual children.
God, grant: The character of the God we pray to shapes the way we pray and how we expect Him to answer. And we recognize our dependence on God, not just for our salvation, but for our day-to-day sanctification.
The serenity to accept the things we cannot change: Life is outside our control, and that’s not only ok, it’s actually good. We can turn to the God who is in control and trust Him as we learn to accept life on life’s terms. We also recognize the truth that we are limited beings, not gods ourselves.
The courage to change the things we can: Living faithfully means doing hard things and costly things at times. We operate in trust that God is at work, and that He will give us what we need to make the changes in ourselves that He is asking us to make. We set aside fear-based decision making and the need to blame others and bravely face what we can do something about.
The wisdom to know the difference: We look for wisdom from God, not from ourselves. That wisdom will come through His Word, through Christian community, and through our time in prayer. It will generally be found in humility and peace.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time: We don’t stay trapped in the past, or live in anxiety about the future. We try to pay attention to what God is doing in our lives right now and respond to Him in the present. We enjoy what He has given us today for our daily bread more than we focus on what we had in the past or hope to have in the future.
Accepting hardships as a pathway to peace: Hardship and suffering are part of the normal Christian life. We can fight against that reality, or we can look for ways to accept what we have and find contentment in the presence of God with us in the middle of the pain.
Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as we would have it to be: Jesus was able to live a holy and righteous life of perfect submission to the Father in the middle of a very broken and sinful world. If we want to navigate this world well, as He did, we need to adopt the same tools of prayer and acceptance.
Trusting that He will make all things right: Trust does not just mean agreeing with an idea, it means taking actions that show that idea. And God gets to determine what “right” looks like. If that doesn’t match our definitions, we choose to trust Him and revise our definitions.
If we surrender to His will: Choosing to follow Jesus means I die to my self and give control of my life to Him. I don’t have to like His will. I don’t have to understand His will. I choose to give up my rights to Him and obey His will.
That we may be reasonably happy in this life: There are things about living God’s way that work even in this life. They won’t give us perfect happiness, but happiness is not really our goal anyway; it is a by-product of having good and God-centered goals for our lives.
And supremely happy with Him forever: Following Jesus is ultimately not about this life anyway. It is about life in a kingdom that is coming and will last forever. We live in all these ways (because God makes it possible for us to do that) because we believe that our lives after the resurrection are going to be incredible in union with Christ. We are learning to live now in ways that will make sense then.
Before we pray the Serenity Prayer together one last time (at least in this study), let me share again the questions I asked at the beginning.
What is one new or refreshed way of thinking about my life in Christ that I have seen through this study?
What is one practice, habit, or discipline in my life in Christ that I have begun to practice or would like to begin practicing after this study?
What is one area we talked about that I’d like to know more about, whether in this group, or in my own personal times of studying God’s Word?
And now let’s pray.
God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardships as a pathway to peace.
Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as we would have it to be.
Trusting that He will make all things right if we surrender to His will – that we may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever.
What kind of happiness should Christians desire? How does that come into our life as we follow Jesus? What does the bible say about the happiness of those who follow Jesus?
To listen to the sermon, click the play button:
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Matthew 5:1-12; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14
Imagine with me for a moment that you are talking to a friend or relative you haven’t seen in several years. It may be at a family get-together, or a friend’s wedding, or a high school class reunion. You talk for a few minutes about life, catching up on the events of the last few years, and then the other person asks you a question: “Are you happy?” How would you respond? What does it mean to be happy – even reasonably happy? This week, as we continue to meditate on the Serenity Prayer, we will take a look at that question. But first, let’s pray.
Over the last several weeks, we have been asking God for several things: serenity, courage, wisdom, the ability to be present and enjoy this moment, acceptance, trust, surrender. And now we finally get to the end result. What is it that we are hoping all these things produce in our lives? There are probably several right answers to that question, but the Serenity Prayer provides an answer connected to happiness – reasonable happiness in this life, and supreme happiness in the life to come. Next week we will talk about our happiness in the life to come, but this week we are focused on the here and now – what does it mean to live a life that is reasonably happy?
One of the first things we need to confront is one of our culture’s idols. Our culture has idolized happiness. It has become a critical – maybe the critical – way to evaluate any decision. If you do X, will it make you happy? I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t consider happiness at all, but it needs to be way down the list. Too many people have walked away from callings, responsibilities, marriages, and even God Himself because they didn’t feel like they were happy where they were. I’m not saying this to heap coals of guilt on anyone who has made those decisions in the past – I’ve made some of them myself. If that’s a part of your story, grace upon grace to you – God is faithful to forgive. But if we want to live the life that God is giving us through Jesus Christ, if we want to walk out what He has been offering us as we pray this prayer, we need to make decisions moving forward that are not primarily directed toward our happiness.
You see, happiness is actually not an aiming point. It’s not a goal. It is, instead, a byproduct of pursuing the right aims, of moving toward the right goals. If we set out to find happiness, it will almost certainly elude us. But if we set out to find the things that God is calling us to, if we set out to live the life He is offering us, then at least at times, we are going to encounter happiness along the way. Not always – as the prayer says, we are “reasonably” happy in this life. Something more and better is ahead of us, and we will talk about that next week. But in the meanwhile, we can expect to have some measure of happiness in this life – particularly if we are looking for something else.
What should we look for? Well, I am going to point us to the Beatitudes: Jesus’ first public teaching in the gospel of Matthew. Jesus’ disciples gather to listen to Him in what we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus begins by telling them what the good life looks like. In most translations, these beatitudes begin with the word “blessed.” And frankly, I generally like that, because of what I’ve already said about how misplaced our pursuit of happiness can become. But the handful of translations that choose the word “happy” to begin these statements aren’t doing a bad job either. I’m not a Greek scholar, but I’m fairly well-trained in the language, and it’s a valid choice for the Greek word makarios. But what does it mean to say that Jesus begins by speaking the blessing of happiness over His listeners?
Let me detour for just a minute here. I’ve spent this year reading through the Bible with three close friends, and one part of my intention in doing that is to listen to the whole story with fresh ears. In doing that, there are some words that I’ve recognized that I may have a more partial understanding of than I’ve thought. It is ridiculously easy for us to bring our own meanings to the text of the Bible, and so I’ve been asking the Holy Spirit to clarify the meanings of some key words based on how God is using them in telling His story. And I’d like to do that with “happy” in the Beatitudes. If we start with our definition of happiness and try to make what Jesus says fit into it, we are probably going to miss at least some of what He is saying. But what if we start by saying, “Jesus is about to teach us what really brings happiness,” and then let that shape how we understand what happiness is and means, and how it functions in our lives? I think if we do that, we may come closer to realizing that reasonable happiness in this life. Let’s read this text. (Matthew 5:1-12) As I read, I’m going to intentionally use the word “happy” in place of the familiar “blessed,” (as the Good News Translation does).
“1Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain; and after He sat down, His disciples came to Him. 2 And He opened His mouth and began to teach them, saying, 3 “Happy are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4 “Happy are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 5 “Happy are the gentle, for they will inherit the earth. 6 “Happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. 7 “Happy are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 8 “Happy are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 9 “Happy are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God. 10 “Happy are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 “Happy are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in this same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Obviously, we could do an entire series on the teaching of Jesus in these verses. But for our purposes, I want to focus on just two of them, and help us see how understanding what Jesus is saying about happiness in those two verses can help us understand what it will mean for us to be reasonably happy in this life, and how it may challenge our internal definitions and desires for happiness. And I believe what we discover in those two examples can probably be applied to the others as well with time, meditation on God’s Word, and prayer.
Of all the statements Jesus makes here, the one that seems most counter-intuitive if we think in terms of happiness is verse four, “Happy are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” As I tend to define it, happiness and mourning are almost polar opposites. If I am mourning, then I have lost something – or more likely, someone – that I did not want to lose. I am grieving that loss. And this is where I believe we need to begin to redefine our picture of happiness. Is Jesus calling us to be happy because we have experienced loss? No. Why does He say we can be happy? Because we will be comforted. Paul talks about this in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14,
13 Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. 14 For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.
Neither Paul nor Jesus is telling us that we should not be sad (although that false message has crept into some aspects of American Christianity). What they are both telling us is that our sadness is different, and even includes a dimension of happiness, because we believe that our mourning isn’t the final answer.
There is a strong connection here to what we have talked about in the last two weeks, “Trusting that God will make all things right if we surrender to His will.” Why can our mourning bring us to happiness? Because we believe that God is able to make things right. That doesn’t mean we sit back in our loss and do nothing. Think about the three parables of loss in Luke 15. A sheep is lost, a coin is lost, a son is lost. The shepherd who lost his sheep goes looking for it in the countryside until he finds it. The woman who lost her coin turns the house upside down until she finds it. And what about the father who lost his son? Well, he doesn’t go looking. Finding people and restoring relationships with them is more complicated than chasing down a sheep or a coin. But the father was watching as he waited. Even watching and waiting can be active in the kingdom of God. And what happens in each of these parables when what has been lost is now found? They have a party! The anxiety, fear, and frustration of the search has been replaced by joy that spreads through the whole neighborhood! A part of what Jesus calls us to in this Beatitude is to believe, even as we mourn, that a party is coming. And to let that belief bring us some modicum of happiness, even as we mourn.
That blend of happiness and pain is obvious in another of the Beatitudes: “
11 Happy are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.”
Let this sentence challenge how you (and I) have been defining happiness. If happiness is primarily a product of my circumstances, then this sentence makes no sense. I don’t enjoy being insulted, excluded, lied about, and left out – not to mention the more physical persecutions and punishments that were waiting for many of Jesus’ listeners that day. If happiness means feeling good about what is happening in my life because I’m getting what I want, then I couldn’t possibly be happy in the middle of this kind of response from people around me. But what if I have been learning to accept hardships as a pathway to peace? What if God has been teaching me how to accept with serenity the things I cannot change? Because my ability to change what someone thinks of me or how they treat me is pretty limited. If I make it my goal in life to ensure that no one says anything evil about me, then I’d be better off going down to the beach and yelling at the tide to keep it from coming in. But what if I learn to accept life on life’s terms? To surrender to God’s will that allows me to suffer in these ways, and trust that He will make it right…eventually?
And that’s what Jesus goes on to say in the next verse: “12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in this same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” How do we find happiness in the middle of persecution? One, we recognize that a day is coming when God will make this right. We are confidently hoping to enjoy the Presence of God forever (what reward could be greater?) And two, we see that we are finding our place among the people of God. This is what has always happened for people who are devoted to God and committed to Him above everything else. Whether we are going around making prophetic proclamations or not, when we live as citizens of the coming kingdom, we are setting ourselves up to be mocked, scorned, and ridiculed. And the good news is, we are in good company! The painful opposition we face is the same painful opposition the faithful people of God have almost always faced.
I believe if we took the time, we would see the same theme running through each of the Beatitudes: that we can be reasonably happy in this life because we trust that living as citizens of the heavenly kingdom is a part of our learning to live the eternal lives that God is preparing for us and preparing us for. Now, it won’t “work” in this world. We will see other people accumulate more wealth, get more honor and recognition, satisfy desires that are not kingdom-oriented, benefit from stirring up conflict, and get what they want in the short term. And at times, that will be painful for us. But we can find reasonable happiness in knowing that God is the one who will ultimately be responsible for our well-being, and we are preparing ourselves for eternal life with Him by living now in ways that really don’t work in the kingdom of this world, but will work admirably in the kingdom of heaven that has begun to break into this world, and will eventually, when Christ returns, overwhelm it.
Now, that is only going to produce reasonable happiness. We aren’t going to be ecstatic and bubbly all the time – honestly, I wonder about the well-being of people who come across that way. But we also aren’t dragging around with our faces cast to the ground, morosely hanging on until Jesus comes back. And our ability to be reasonably happy is connected to our willingness to surrender, as we talked about last week from Philippians 4. Paul was able to be reasonably happy because he had learned to accept life on life’s terms – to experience contentment in whatever circumstances God had given him as he lived out his calling in a broken, sinful world. Paul could see Jesus at work in the circumstances of his life, whether they were good or bad, and because Jesus was at work, Paul could engage his life as a child of God. The abundant life that Jesus promises us in John 10 isn’t just coming one day in the resurrection. It has already begun. And since it has already begun, we get to experience, at least in part, the joy that will one day be ours forever.
It’s probably been obvious as we go through the message today that we can’t really talk about our reasonable happiness in this life without talking about our supreme happiness in the next. They are inextricably connected – our happiness here is rooted in the happiness that is to come. And we’ll talk about that more next week.
With that said, let’s close again this week with the Serenity Prayer. I hope you’ll join with me as we pray. As I mentioned earlier, I have changed the wording to make it a communal prayer.
God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardships as a pathway to peace.
Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as we would have it to be.
Trusting that He will make all things right if we surrender to His will – that we may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever.
May God teach us to experience reasonable happiness this week as we wait for Him. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.
To download, right click on the link (or do whatever you do on a Mac) and save it to your computer: Download Serenity Prayer Part
If I Surrender to His Will
2 Timothy 3:16-17; Daniel 3:16-18 Philippians 4:11-13; Matthew 26:39-44; John 5:19
As we get close to the end of the Serenity Prayer, last week and this week are really where the rubber hits the road for me. I can rightly ask God for all kinds of help with the serenity, courage, and wisdom I need to live in the present, enjoy the moment, and accept the hardships that come with life. But if I don’t trust Him, as we talked about last week, my ability to receive those gifts and put them into practice is going to be very limited. And if that trust in God doesn’t lead to my surrender to His will, as we will talk about this week, then I am risking a life of idolatry. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s pray together and then find out.
This phrase – if I surrender to His will – has two parts. We’re going to start with what I consider the easier one first and then tackle the harder one. If I am going to surrender to God’s will, then obviously I have to know what His will is. But it won’t take long to realize that there are lots of different opinions on what God’s will is, and on what He must want. Some of those contradict each other, so they can’t all be right. If I want to know God’s will, how do I do that? How do I sort through the competing claims to understand what God wants in my life?
Let’s start with the foundation – if you want to know God’s will, begin by reading the Bible. And I would say, the whole thing. Learn the whole story, from creation to re-creation. And continue to read it again and again and again. God has revealed so much about His character, His desires, and yes, His will for us in the inspired Scripture.
“16All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, 17that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)
God has revealed Himself to us thoroughly in His Word, particularly when we read it as believers who are united with the Word who was made flesh and filled with the Spirit of God. And while the Bible does not typically contain answers about which job we should take, or which car to buy, or whether to choose this restaurant or that one for dinner (or to stay home instead), God does use His Word to lay out the parameters for His will as we make daily decisions.
I like the analogy of a football game (for those of you who are not football fans, I do apologize, but the analogy really works). In the Bible, God has laid out the dimensions of the field, defined what is out of bounds, and set a general framework of rules for the game. But that does not tell us who should play which position, what style of offense and defense we should play, or whether or not to go for it on fourth and two. God’s specific will for us has to be worked out in the context of our lives – think of Him as the head coach in this analogy – but His specific will is going to be revealed somewhere within the background of the playing field He has already set in place. We play the game of life as He designed it to be played.
You may feel like I’m spending a lot of time on something that should be obvious, but I can tell you that in over 20 years as a pastor, I’ve found that sometimes people are certain God is wanting something that He has already told us He does not want. I’ll give an old example from my days on the mission field. The pastor of the most dynamic, vibrant church in town came before the congregation and announced that God had told him to divorce his wife because she was not sufficiently supportive of his ministry. Not because she had broken their marriage vows. Not because she had abandoned him, or was abusing him, or was caught in addiction and refusing to get help. But because she had a different picture of church ministry than he did. I can tell you that while I’ve had to wrestle with some difficult and convoluted marriage dilemmas over the years, there is nothing in the Word of God anywhere that allows a Christian man to divorce his wife in order to further his ministry. It’s just not there. And while that is a dramatic and obvious example, I could list many others over the years of people who believed God was leading them to do something that He clearly was not. We need to know well the revelation of God in Scripture so that we can identify the times when our ideas about what God might want come into conflict with what He says there. “Did God really say…?” is the oldest trick in the book – and if we know the Book, we have a better chance to recognize that.
The next thing I believe we need in discerning the will of God is community. Even when I know what God says in His Word, I find it easier than I’d like it to be to justify, manipulate, or otherwise finagle the words of Scripture to find a verse that I can pull out in support of what I want. That’s where I need God to build a healthy church family of people around me who know me and love me well enough to help me discern what it is that God wants. We talked about this some when we talked about wisdom in week four, but I don’t think we can say it enough. God has always put His people into communities, large and small, so that we can listen, pray, talk, and discern the will of God together. We are designed to live the Christian life in community – it is inherently a team sport, not an individual one. And often the ideas that I have in my head about what it is that God wants sound much different when I say them out loud to a trusted brother or sister. I can fool myself into thinking that God wants what I wish He wanted; when I bring other people into the picture, they can often see much more clearly. In fact, if I could change one thing about the Serenity Prayer, I would change it from an individual prayer to a corporate one. And since this is just a prayer that someone wrote, not Scripture, I actually can do that, and in fact, when I pray at the close of these last few lessons, I will pray the prayer communally – “we” instead of “I.”
Third, look at what God is doing in your life. What doors is He opening? Which ones has He shut? What gifts and resources has He given you? And as Henry Blackaby describes in Experiencing God, look back over your shoulder. How has God used you in the past? What are the marker stones He has laid down in your history? How do the circumstances of your life inform what God may be asking you to do (or to stop doing)?
And finally, pray. I don’t mean wait until the end to pray – pray throughout this process. Pray as you read the Word of God, and ask God to show you what He wants you to see. Pray as you talk about your decision with brothers or sisters, and ask God to highlight things that are said that can point you in the right direction. Pray as you look at your circumstances, and ask God to bring things to mind that can be directional markers. And pray as you process all those moving pieces of community, history, and what is in your own heart – processing them against the backdrop of God’s eternally accurate and valid Word.
At the end of all that, as we said in the discussion on wisdom, you may still not have certainty, but your odds of honoring God with your decisions have gone up tremendously. And you have come to know Him better as you have spent time seeking His will. Now comes the hard part: surrendering to that will.
Surrender is not a word that immediately conjures up lots of positive associations in our mind. It’s connected to things like this: give up, lose, defeat. We place a high value in our culture on winning, hanging in there, succeeding. So why do we have this word in the middle of our spiritual lives that indicates that we are not enough? That we have to quit? Well, it’s a matter of what we are quitting. In order to surrender to God’s will, what we have to give up is our own will – our right to decide for ourselves what we will do and how we will do it. In C.S. Lewis’s book, The Great Divorce, Lewis says this: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’” God has given us free will. We have the ability to make choices. But He has given us that ability so that we can, in turn, offer it back to Him. We can decline the option to make our own decisions and, instead, surrender that option back to the One who gave it to us. Let’s look at the three examples of this from Scripture.
Our first example comes from the Old Testament book of Daniel. It’s a familiar story. In Daniel chapter 3, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar sets up a golden image and decrees that at its dedication, everyone in attendance must bow down and worship the golden image. Three of the officials in attendance were captives from Judah: Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. We know them better by the names the Babylonian officials gave them: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. When everyone else bowed down to Nebuchadnezzar’s idol, those three refused. They were brought before the king and given a chance to “repent” of their defiance – they got another chance to bow. Now, in this case, discerning the will of God was not particularly challenging. It was pretty obvious to godly Jews that worshipping other gods was a significant part of what had gotten them exiled in the first place. These three men knew what God’s will was. But their response of surrender is impressive, and an excellent model for us to imitate. Here is their reply: “
16 Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego replied, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you. 17 If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God whom we serve is able to save us. He will rescue us from your power, Your Majesty. 18 But even if he doesn’t, we want to make it clear to you, Your Majesty, that we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you have set up.” (Daniel 3:16-18, NLT)
This is what it means to trust that God will make all things right if we surrender to His will. It includes the acknowledgement that God’s will may not be what we want. The three men wanted to live. They were confident that God had the ability to preserve their lives, and they hoped that He would. But even if He did not, that changed nothing about their obedience, their surrender to His will. If obedience to God meant death, then they would take it and trust that His will for them was still good. After his attempt to kill them by burning them to death in a great furnace, even King Nebuchadnezzar grasps what they are doing and why (at least for a little while). In Daniel 3:28, he says, “Praise be to the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and rescued his servants! They trusted in him and defied the king’s command and were willing to give up their lives rather than serve or worship any god except their own God.” The three young men gave up their ability to direct and protect their own lives because they trusted that whatever God did, it would be better than choosing their own will over His.
These three men faced a literal, concrete idol. But idolatry comes in many forms. At its heart, idolatry is placing anything other than the One True God at the center of our lives, our wills, our decision-making. Most of us are not going to bow down to a golden image any time soon – but what are the powers and principalities that may sneak onto the throne of our lives? Where do we bow to our comfort? Our security? Our longing for life to follow the plans we have made? Or even our desire to exercise the right we have to make decisions for ourselves? That, too, can be an idol, and place us at the center of our own lives. We are not the center, and we are not designed to be the center. God, and only God, can occupy the throne – anything else is idolatry.
Now, surrendering to God’s will is not always a matter of life or death, like it was for the three men in Daniel (at least not immediately). Sometimes, it is simply about accepting the direction God has for our lives, even if it makes our lives more difficult. You’ve noticed by now how interconnected the lines of this prayer are. Surrendering to God’s will may mean accepting the hardships He allows as a pathway to peace. Paul talks about this type of surrender in Philippians 4:11-13, Paul says,
“11 I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. 12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. 13 I can do all this through Him who gives me strength.”
In this passage, Paul is in the middle of thanking the Philippians for the support they’ve recently sent him. He’s glad to get money, clothes, food, or supplies that will make his stay in prison more bearable for him. At the same time, he is not insisting that he must have these things in order to be okay. If God’s will allows Paul to be in prison, he will accept it. If God’s will sets him free, he will accept it. Paul trusts God enough to give up his freedom, his position, his status, and even the meeting of his daily need for food, if God’s will allows him to be in those situations. He has thoroughly let go, quit, resigned, and surrendered his will to the will of his Master, Jesus.
And it is Jesus who most clearly illustrates for us what it looks like to surrender His will to the will of His Father. We see it clearly in the garden. Three times, Jesus asks His Father to take away the cup of betrayal and execution if it is possible. And each time, after He expresses the passionate desire of His heart, He ends His prayer by choosing to surrender His will to the will of His Father. (Matthew 26:39-44) But this act of surrender on the eve of His death was nothing new. In fact, Jesus had lived His entire life in surrender to the Father. As early as 12 years old, He is saying to His parents (in response to their frantic search for Him) that His priority is to be about His Father’s business. Even though it creates tension with the Jewish expectations of a twelve-year-old boy, Jesus was already laying down control of His life and giving it to His Father. This continued throughout His ministry. John’s gospel highlights this with multiple mentions of the way Jesus paid attention to the timing and leading of His Father. Nothing happens in the gospel until the time has come. And John makes it clear that the time does not come when others want it to, or even when Jesus Himself wants it to, but when the Father knows it is the right time. He highlights this in Jesus’ discourse with the Jewish leaders in John 5. When they challenge Jesus’ actions of healing on the Sabbath,
“19 Jesus gave them this answer: ‘Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by Himself; He can do only what He sees His Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.’” (John 5:19)
How total is this surrender! Everything Jesus does, He does by looking to the Father and taking direction from Him. He says it again in verse 30:
30By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and My judgment is just, for I seek not to please Myself but Him who sent Me.” (John 5:30)
Jesus’ life is not lived for His own benefit or at His own direction; it is lived at the direction of the Father and to please Him. And His language echoes what He will say to His disciples in John 15:5,
“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in Me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from Me you can do nothing.”
Our lives will not bear fruit if we live them out of our own will, but when we live them in union with Jesus, when we surrender to the Father’s will as He did, then incredible things can happen! And also, lots and lots of mundane, boring things that very few will see or value, but that surrender brings glory to God just as much as the dramatic gestures. In fact, don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s only important to surrender to God in the big moments. Our decisions in those big moments are shaped by the quiet, day-to-day decisions we have made to give up the right to live life the way we want in order to live it as God has directed us to live.
As we close, please remember that this is all a prayer. I am not encouraging any of us to try to work harder to surrender or force ourselves to give up. That is largely fruitless, at least it has been in my life. Instead, I am asking us to pray that God will do this for us. If I am going to surrender to His will, it will be because His Holy Spirit is at work in me empowering me to surrender. That’s an odd phrase – getting the power to give up power – and I believe it is absolutely vital to living the life that God has for us in Christ Jesus. It’s time for us to raise the white flag, admit that we have failed to run our own lives well, and we will fail again, unless God takes our lives and our wills into His hands and we surrender them to Him – day by day, hour by hour, decision by decision. And when we do that, we can trust Him to bring about what is Good.
With that said, let’s close again this week with the Serenity Prayer. I hope you’ll join with me as we pray. As I mentioned earlier, I have changed the wording to make it a communal prayer.
God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardships as a pathway to peace.
Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as we would have it to be.
Trusting that He will make all things right if we surrender to His will – that we may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever.
May God give each of us the gift of surrender this week. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.
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James 3:13-18
Brothers and sisters in Christ, welcome back for another look at the Serenity Prayer and how God can use it in our lives as part of His work in transforming us into the image of Christ. Two weeks ago, we talked about serenity – the ability to accept with peace and confidence the reality that life is sometimes difficult and painful. Last week, we talked about courage and the need at times to take action in response to those circumstances. This pretty naturally leads to the question, “How do I know when to serenely accept something and when to courageously take action to change it?” And this week, we will look at at least a partial answer to that question. We are going to talk about asking God for the wisdom to know the difference.
What does it mean to have wisdom? We will look to the Biblical text in just a minute, but before we do that I want to distinguish between wisdom and knowledge. Knowledge is information, facts, data. These days, you can learn in five minutes on your phone what would once have taken hours at the library to look up. Is that good or bad? Probably some of both. But my point here is that some knowledge is pretty easy to obtain. How much did it rain in London yesterday? Who holds the world record for the 100m dash? When was Louis the 14th King of France? How can I get to this address? But having information and knowing how to use that information – those are two different things. Wisdom is more concerned with the second.
For instance, knowledge can tell you where you can purchase a certain piece of equipment for your home or business, how much it will cost, even how long the warranty will last. But it takes wisdom to know if now is the right time to make that purchase. And particularly when it comes to human relationships, knowledge may be important, but wisdom is far more helpful in navigating those relationships. So, one way to look at wisdom is by saying, “How do I use the information and tools that I have?” And as Christians, we are asking, “God, how do You want me to use the information and tools that You have given me in order to bring You glory?” This includes the tools of serenity and courage – things that He has been giving us in response to our prayers.
Wisdom is something that appears to be pretty high on God’s radar for us. The Bible is full of references to wisdom and descriptions of wisdom, including entire books of the Old Testament like Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Several of the psalms also connect with that theme of wisdom. But I want to start with a New Testament reference to wisdom. The book of James, traditionally assigned to James the brother of Jesus, is clearly influenced by his knowledge of the Jewish wisdom tradition. As with most of the New Testament, the Jewish background that prepared the way for the Messiah takes on new depths once Jesus has come and paved the way for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. So, while the language that James uses would have been very familiar to his readers, who were primarily early Jewish Christians, he is adding depth to their understanding now that the Messiah has been revealed. In some ways, this is similar to what Jesus was doing with the law when He preached the Sermon on the Mount – building on a foundation that God has laid in Israel and taking it farther than Israel had dreamed it could go.
Let’s look at one of the passages in James that describes wisdom. We’re going to read from James 3:13-18.
“13 Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. 14 But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. 15 Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. 16 For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. 17 But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. 18 Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.”
There’s a lot packed into these six verses. If God gives us wisdom, what is it going to look like? One of the first attributes James mentions is humility. There’s one place where the difference between knowledge and wisdom comes sharply into focus. I love the way C.S. Lewis describes humility in Mere Christianity at the end of the chapter The Great Sin, which is about pride:
Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.
Honestly, I’m tired of hearing Christians – myself included – go on and one about how smart we are, how we have the right answers to everything, and how everyone ought to just stop and listen to us. We may have the right knowledge – but in that case we are still lacking in wisdom. And that can be hard when I do, in fact, have some right answers. But James is right to point us to humility as a key component of wisdom. If my response to a situation is built on how good it is going to make me look, or boosting my ego, that solution is not based in wisdom (at least, not in Godly wisdom). One of the most brilliant Bible professors I ever knew, a man who was fluent in multiple ancient languages, the contexts in which the passages were written, and the history of their interpretation, would often begin his answers to a difficult theological question by saying, “I might be wrong, but it seems to me…” His humility was profound.
James goes on to talk about the dangers of envy and selfish ambition. Paul says almost the same thing in Philippians 2:3. He is calling the church in Philippi to imitate Christ in unity, and he also makes the connection between humility and selfish ambition:
“3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves.”
Am I seeking to get my own way in a situation? Am I trying to make sure I come out ok? Then I am probably not operating in wisdom. James associates that kind of wisdom with disorder, wickedness, and even the demonic. So, what is Godly wisdom like? We’ve already talked about humility, and the important role that it plays. Let’s look at a few more of the characteristics James mentions
Full of mercy and good fruit. Mercy is so central to God’s character. And wisdom will often call on us to show mercy to others rather than demand what we may deserve in a situation. Our responses are to be full of the attitude that God has toward us – rich in mercy, slow to anger, and desiring repentance where there has been wrong. Wisdom, like love in 1 Corinthians 13, is not self-seeking and does not keep a record of wrongs. And I think James is intentionally connecting this to good fruit. Merciful actions toward others will often result in good fruit – and especially when we are engaging other believers. Of course, sometimes we don’t see that fruit until years later, if ever. But wise choices on our part should be ones that open doors to good outcomes in the lives of the people we are engaging.
Impartial. Wisdom doesn’t play favorites. If we use the information or influence we have to steer the outcome of a situation toward what we want (instead of seeking what God wants), we are operating in that realm of competition to get what I want – we are engaging like the world does. James goes on in the next verses (which start chapter 4) to talk about how the world fights for what it wants, but that is not God’s way for us. And it can be so easy for me to convince myself that what I want is really what is best anyway. That’s why I need God’s wisdom – and in just a few minutes we will talk about some ways to help us sort through our own agendas, needs, and preferences to hear the wisdom of God more clearly.
Sincere. Wisdom is honest in its dealings with others. Wisdom does not play the game of pretending to believe one thing so that we can manipulate a situation to get what we want out of it. God’s wisdom doesn’t need to be sneaky and deceptive in its dealings. When we are behaving wisely, we mean what we say, and we follow through on it as best we can. No promising one thing while intending to deliver another.
And finally, peace. Wisdom leads to peace. Now, what is James, as a Godly Jew, thinking of when he uses his word for peace? The Hebrew word for peace is “shalom.” We often use “peace” to describe a situation where there is an absence of conflict. We sent the kids to their separate rooms so that we could have a little peace. But shalom is deeper. Shalom is not just an absence of conflict – getting everyone to put down their weapons. Shalom describes a situation where the conflict has gone away because the causes of the conflict have been appropriately and healthily dealt with. In other words, the peace that is a part of Godly wisdom is not just accepting whatever happens, no matter if it is right or wrong (that is not the serenity that we have been asking God to give us). But this peace is the peace that comes when things are well-settled. And that may actually require some healthy conflict in order to get to a place of real peace. Wisdom will move in the direction of peace – eventually. But wisdom does not always mean just doing what it takes to “keep the peace.” With God, things often are more difficult in the short-term, but He is looking toward a very long end – eternal even – and He is willing to have conflict now to bring true and lasting peace.
My wife and I have had our struggles over the years with doing this well. I’ll give you one example that may seem small, but it points to a bigger problem. When we first started dating, I really wasn’t good at remembering flowers for special occasions. Well, one time I brought her some chrysanthemums. And she was so glad that I bought her some flowers that she made a big deal over them, and I decided that must be her favorite flower. For the next ten years or so, any time I got her flowers, I bought chrysanthemums. It turns out, those weren’t particularly her favorite. But she didn’t want to upset me or discourage my flower-buying, so she didn’t say anything. And I thought all was well until she eventually told me the rest of the story. Now I sometimes buy her chrysanthemums, but I also buy roses, or lilies, or whatever I see that makes me think of her. And in that small area of our lives, we are closer to shalom. But we only got there when she took the risk – found the courage – to bring up an area that could have caused conflict. By the way, there are much more significant examples of conflict in our marriage over the years – I just decided to tell a simple one.
Okay, there’s several of the attributes of wisdom. But, in addition to praying, what else can we practically do to help us make wise decisions? Here are three things that I have found helpful in making wise decisions.
First, slow down. Yes, some decisions have to be made in the moment, but even then, there is rarely a time where I am faced with a significant decision, and I can’t take a moment to breathe and ask God for help, rather than simply react. This is especially true for me when I’m feeling strong emotions about whatever is going on where I need wisdom. Alcoholics Anonymous has a great line for me to remember: “We pause when agitated or doubtful and ask for the right thought or action.” If I want wisdom, I generally need to stop, take a breath, remember that God is running the universe, not Wade, and see what He has to say.
And most of the time, I don’t have to make a decision on the most important things in that moment. I usually have time to stop, to think, to pray. And what has become really important for me is having trusted friends that I can ask for input. When I am facing a difficult decision, it is easy for me to be blind to my pride, selfishness, hidden agendas, and mixed motives. And taking my own advice about what is wise has led me to some of the stupidest decisions of my life. When I talk to my wife, my fellow pastors, my most mature friends, and others, I can gain a perspective on the situation that is not skewed by what I know I want. And I am much more likely to receive the wisdom that God has for me.
About two years ago, Jayme and I were trying to make a difficult decision about how to handle a situation with our children. We both stopped and prayed. We took time to think about it. And after months of doing that, we were still in different places about what God wanted us to do. So, we came together to Tom and Kari and laid out our perspectives as best we could. Jayme (my wife) and I agreed ahead of time that we would trust Tom and Kari and take their advice. I didn’t like their answer. They agreed more with Jayme. And we have followed their input since then. I still don’t know that I like it – but I agree that it was wise to listen to them. Involving other people takes courage, because I am surrendering my right to be in charge and trusting that God will use His people to help me.
Here’s a different example, also family-related, where getting input from the Holy Spirit through other believers has led me towards the serenity to accept something I can’t change instead of the courage to change something. I run into this with my kids regularly. They have a problem. I have an answer. And my answer is probably right. But one of the wisest pieces of advice I’ve ever been given – and this applies to more than just my children – is, “Wade, stop answering questions that people aren’t asking you.” Wow! That requires a lot of the humility James talked about. I have to stop thinking of myself as the fount of information and answers and trust that God is at work in the situation, and sometimes the wisest thing for me to do is Shut Up! I don’t like that. And it may not always be the perfect answer – but it is often a good one.
And that’s suggestion number three. Some of us, including me, can get hyper-focused on making sure we have the wisest answer, and then we get bogged down and don’t do anything because we are not completely sure which way to go. I am convinced that God is more interested in the long process of developing relationship with Him than He is whether we get a specific decision exactly right. So sometimes, we pause, we take input, and then we make the best decision we can, trusting that even if we got it wrong, God is able to work with us and in us and around us to bring things back on course. He certainly did that with the history of Israel. And He has certainly done that with me.
So, when do we accept a thing we cannot change, and when do we courageously act to bring change? We ask God for wisdom. We look for answers that lead to humility, mercy, and true peace. We take a breath, ask others for help, and take action trusting that God can work in our imperfect decisions.
I’ll close again this week by praying the Serenity Prayer, and if God leads you, please feel free to join me in learning and praying this prayer.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardships as a pathway to peace.
Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it to be.
Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will – that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever.
Well, now we have gotten through the more familiar part of the Serenity Prayer. Next week we will start into the less-known part. May God bless you with serenity, courage, and wisdom until we talk again next week.
For some people, the player above may not work. If that happens to you, use the link below to either download, or open a player in a new page to listen.
To download, right click on the link (or do whatever you do on a Mac) and save it to your computer: Download Serenity Prayer Part 1
Last week, we finished the book of First Samuel. We will pick up with Second Samuel in a few weeks. In between, I’m really excited to host a short series of messages by Wade Jones. Wade is my daughter’s father-in-law, and one of the pastors of a church about thirty miles away from us here in Tennessee.
Wade will spend the next few weeks talking us through the Serenity Prayer. Although the prayer itself is not from scripture, Wade will use plenty of scripture as we go. One reason I’m excited about this is because I think it will get very practical, very relevant to living day-to-day as we follow Jesus.
A note to to those who will listen to the audio version:Wade is a good preacher. Before this, he had never recorded a message except in front of a live congregation. So, during this first message, he said he felt a bit stilted—he was worried about making too much background noise. But I’ve already heard the second one, and he seems to have gotten into the flow quite well for that one. My point is: have patience. I think this will be good stuff for us.
Without further ado, here’s Wade!
SERENITY PRAYER #1: GOD, GRANT
Greetings, brothers and sisters of ClearBible! My name is Wade Jones. I’m one of the pastors at Priest Lake Christian Fellowship, where we pray for your church family at each service. Perhaps more importantly, I have been blessed for many years by the friendship of your pastor, Tom, and we have become family – not just metaphorically, as my son Matthew is married to his daughter Alana. I talked with Tom recently about a teaching series I’d done at Priest Lake, and he asked me to share it with your fellowship as well, which I feel honored to do over the next several weeks.
The substance for these messages will come from the Serenity Prayer. It’s unusual for me to spend this much time on writing that is not specifically from Scripture, but I have made an exception in this case, in part because this prayer specifically has greatly blessed my life and walk with God, and I hope it will prove to bless yours as well. My father had the words of this prayer on the wall of his study at home when I was child. Later, when I came into the world of 12-step recovery, I learned that this prayer was (at least in part) important to that community as well. Praying this prayer has become a regular part of my spiritual disciplines and routines, and God often speaks to me through it. Today will mostly be an introduction to this series, so bear with me through the first part.
Depending on what your spiritual background and tradition is, the idea of praying a prayer that someone else wrote may feel awkward or impersonal to you. And certainly, you have the freedom to pray as the Lord directs – I have no intention of insisting that you use this prayer in the same ways that I have. However, I have found that it is at times useful to pray words that others have written, and I want to spend a few minutes talking about that before we get to the prayer itself.
Often when we pray, we speak conversationally with God, using whatever words and phrases come to mind. That kind of extemporaneous prayer is a wonderful thing. I practice it regularly. At the same time, I find that I sometimes have difficulty putting into words what I am thinking or feeling, or knowing how to come to the Father with what is on my heart. Four different approaches have helped me in those times. Sometimes my best response is to pray in tongues (and talking about that might be a whole different series). At other times, I will turn to the Psalms, and pray the prayers that Jesus would likely have learned in his home and in the synagogue. Yet again, I may sing my prayers with hymns I learned as a child or the most recent worship tunes, and let the words of those texts express my heart’s cry. And I will also turn to prayers that have been a part of classic Christianity – some for hundreds of years, some for decades. One of those last prayers is this one: the Serenity Prayer.
The origins of this prayer are unclear, and go back to classical philosophers. Certainly, the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr used part of this prayer in the 1930s, and he attributed it to a German theologian named Friedrich Oetinger. But as with many good sayings and quotes, there are several different theories and attributions for it. No matter who wrote it, the important part is what it says, and whether or not the words of the prayer fit with the teaching of the Bible and can help us as the Holy Spirit works in our lives to bring us closer to living the life the Jesus has given us.
This prayer has also become very important in recovery circles. I’ve been in 12-step recovery for over 20 years, and almost every meeting I’ve attended has started with the beginning and most familiar part of the prayer. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” There’s quite a lot to unpack there, and we will focus on those lines over the next three weeks. But the prayer goes beyond that to say this: “Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardships as a pathway to peace. Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it to be. Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will – that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever.”
With that background, I want us to spend the rest of this week’s time focusing on just the first two words of the prayer: “God, grant.”
There are many types of prayer: prayers of praise and adoration, prayers of confession, prayers of intercession, prayers of petition – even prayers of complaint! (If you’re not sure about that last category, there are several psalms I can show you.) The first words of this prayer show us what kind of prayer it is. This is a prayer of petition, of requesting. We are asking God for something. And so, let’s talk about what it means to ask God for something.
Let’s start with God. This prayer is addressed to God, which is just a generic term, although we often think of it as a proper name. For us, we mean specifically the God of the Bible, the Creator of heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them; the God who revealed Himself to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the God who spoke to Moses, giving him the law and using him to lead Israel out of Egypt; the God who spoke through the prophets, did miraculous works through kingdoms and exiles and returns, and the God who has revealed Himself most fully in Jesus the Messiah, His beloved Son. When we approach this God, what does it mean for us to ask Him for something?
Here’s one important piece. When we come to God to ask Him for something, that means that we know Him well enough to expect that we have the invitation to ask Him. I don’t just go up to strangers on the street and ask them to give me something good. But when I come to someone I know and love, and someone I trust loves me, I am free to ask with hope and expectation. Jesus talks about this in Matthew 7:7-11:
“7 Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. 9 Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”
What does this passage tell us about asking God? First, Jesus actually directs us to do this. It’s a straightforward instruction. Ask, seek, knock. But not just ask anywhere, or seek for anything, or knock on any door. Look at the last verse of the passage. “How much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him!” Jesus is pointing us to the Father as the one who can give us the things that we need for life. And He compares the Father’s response to the response of parents. While there are cruel and painful exceptions to the general rule, most parents want and try to give our children what they need when they ask for it. When it’s time for dinner, we give our kids food they can eat, not rocks or serpents. But Jesus says the Father in heaven’s goodness in giving is so much greater than ours that the kindness of parents is evil by comparison. That’s pretty strong! We could talk a lot about what and when and how the Father gives, but the point I want to emphasize here is that it is good and right and even necessary for us to go to the Father to ask Him for what we need. That’s what He expects; it’s what He wants.
What would keep us from going to Father God to ask for something? Well, the picture we have of God will certainly influence that. And often that picture has been distorted by things that we have experienced, or even by beliefs that we have absorbed from the world around us – often without realizing it. If you experienced a parent who was unpredictable, untrustworthy, or unkind – one who might in fact give you a stone or a snake – that can distort the image of who God is. And it can become a vicious cycle. We don’t trust God to give us what we need, so we don’t ask Him, so our life gets worse, and then we trust God less, so we ask Him even less – and it just goes downhill from there. On the other hand, when we can push through whatever barriers the enemy has erected in our relationship with our Father (or when He tears those down for us), and we ask Him for His help, we will receive it. It doesn’t always look like we might choose – sometimes dinner includes broccoli because it’s good for you – but it will in fact be good. And the more we experience His goodness, the easier it becomes to trust and ask Him again.
This is part of what the Hebrews writer is saying in Hebrews 11:6: “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” Don’t hear this as a reprimand – it’s an encouragement found in the middle of a long list of deeply flawed people who were nevertheless blessed by Father God. Do you believe that God exists? If you don’t, you aren’t going to ask Him for anything, are you? And do you trust that what He gives is good? That He will reward those who seek Him? We will talk more about trust later in this series, but for now, think about trust as enough willingness to ask God for help. Or maybe it isn’t willingness, but desperation.
One more note about God before we turn to the second word. James 1:16-17 says,
Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.
The ultimate Source of anything good in your life is God. If it’s a good gift, it comes from Him, even if it passes through other channels to get to you. The air you breathe? A gift from God. The car you drive? A gift from God. The work that puts food on your table? That’s a gift from Him as well. The people in your family, your community, your life? Those are His gifts as well. If it’s good, and you have it, you have it because God has given it to you.
Now on to the second word – and we are not going to go word by word each week, but these two initial words set the context for us to understand everything else that we would pray in this prayer. “Grant.” Or give. Provide. The Person we are asking for something is God, and in asking Him we are acknowledging that He has something we lack and need.
That can be hard for us for at least a couple of reasons. A few minutes ago, I mentioned beliefs that we have absorbed from the world around us. Here’s one: “God helps those who help themselves.” Do you remember where that is found in Scripture?…That’s right – it isn’t! Benjamin Franklin popularized it in America, and while he did many good things, his religious beliefs are not generally ones we want to take for ourselves. And he was expressing a belief that goes back to Greek myths about their gods and goddesses and the ways they interacted with people. Again, not a good source for us to build our understanding of the Christian God on. But many of us have internalized that as a part of our faith. We thank Jesus for salvation through the cross, and then proceed as if the rest of life and godliness are up to us. I’m reminded of the prayer Jimmy Stewart prayed at the dinner table in the film Shenandoah: “Lord, we cleared this land. We plowed it, sowed it, and harvested it. We cooked the harvest. It wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be eatin’ it if we hadn’t done it all ourselves. We worked dog bone hard for every crumb and morsel, but we thank you just the same anyway, Lord, for the food we’re about to eat. Amen.” Wonder what picture of God Jimmy Stewart’s character had? It doesn’t appear to be the same as what Jesus revealed. But it is one that can easily slip into our thinking, and so we don’t ask God because we believe it is really all up to us anyway. We adhere to salvation by grace, but then act as if sanctification and daily Christian living are things we are supposed to do for ourselves.
Peter, however, in 2 Peter 1:3-4 says,
“His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
Now, we aren’t passive in all this. Peter goes on in the next verses to tell us to make effort to put these gifts into practice. But they begin as gifts – things God is doing for us that we cannot do for ourselves.
That brings us to a third and final (for this week) barrier to asking God to grant us something. Sometimes, our pride gets in the way. At times I don’t like acknowledging how badly I need God. A cultural message of self-sufficiency and independence, being able to do things on my own, has infected our faith. In fact, I need God desperately. Not just for the big things, but even in the small details of my life – sometimes in those more. I love the bumper sticker that says, “Do I really need Jesus to go to Heaven? Man, I need Jesus just to go to Wal-Mart.” And yet, it’s easy for me to adopt the attitude of a toddler who insists on doing it myself rather than admitting that I need help. And when I say, “God, grant” I am beginning with an admission that what I am and have is not enough, and that I am coming to the One who does in hope and expectation that He can give me what I need for this day.
I want to end each week by praying the Serenity Prayer, and I hope that over time, as you listen, you may decide to learn it and pray it as well.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardships as a pathway to peace.
Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it to be.
Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will – that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him forever.
Thank you for letting me be a part of Clear Bible, and New Joy Fellowship for a season. May God bless you and keep you as you go through this week. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.
When David’s bad decisions started to burn him, he didn’t try to control things. He didn’t despair, and he didn’t get angry or blame others. Instead, he accepted his own part in the mess, turned to the Lord, and clung to Him in obstinate, persistent faith. The life of faith isn’t about performing perfectly, or even performing well. It is about grabbing hold of the Lord in trust, even when you might not understand what he is doing, and holding on for dear life, through good and bad, through the evil brought about by others and the messes brought about by yourself. This, and this alone, is what made David such a great man.
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1 Samuel #30. 1 Samuel Chapter 29:1-30:8. David in Jeopardy (again).
A few weeks ago we observed that though David went to live among the Philistines without consulting God, things seemed to go well for him. But starting this chapter, and culminating in the next two, we will learn why it was a mistake. Remember, even though David made this mistake, God was gracious and continued to work for David and through him.
At the beginning of chapter 28, David was put in a very difficult position. He had deceived king Achish of Gath into believing that he had been attacking Israelites. So when all the Philistines together began a campaign against the Israelites, Achish invited David along to fight against his fellow Israelites. In fact, it sounds almost like a test of loyalty. He essentially said to David, “you know of course, you and your men must come along with me.” David answered: “Good. You will find out what I can do.” Notice, he doesn’t say who he is going to do it to. I think David secretly meant, “Good, you’ll find out what kind of warrior I am when I have to fight you.” Achish, believing as he did that David had truly defected to the Philistines, did not catch the possible double meaning. Instead, he felt that David passed the test of loyalty, and he even wanted David to become his lifetime bodyguard. So David was on his way to the war between the Philistines and Israelites – but he was on the wrong side.
I need to briefly set out the strategic situation, because it will be important later on. The Philistines decided on a new tactic in the war against Israel. Rather than attack directly east into the mountainous region of Israel, the Philistines marched north along the Mediterranean coast to one of the flattest places in Israel, known as the Jezreel Valley. This valley is a kind of lowland gap that bisects mountainous Israel roughly from the Mediterranean coast at the northwestern of Jezreel, all the way to the Jordan River valley at the southeast end of the Jezreel gap. If the Philistines were able to fight through here, they would separate large chunks of Israel from each other, and they would have access to the fertile Jordan Valley. To get there, David and his men (along with the king of Gath and his men) would have to march about 130 miles to the north.
Now, I want you to picture how it was for David and his men. In the past, David consistently refused to hurt Saul. He, and his men have never attacked fellow Israelites. But now, suddenly, they are marching to war against Saul and the people of Israel, allied with their long-time hated enemies, the Philistines. I can’t imagine that David’s men were happy about this.
They had two choices. First, they could do what they appeared to be doing, which was, to remain allies with the Philistines, and fight on their side during the battle. This choice could create considerable emotional and spiritual turmoil. They might find themselves facing friends and relatives, and truthfully, I doubt they would have believed in the righteousness of the Philistine cause for war. If they did this, they would be true traitors, and Saul, for all his unfair suspicions in the past, would be proved right in the end. If they won, they would have destroyed their country, and no one in Israel would ever accept David as king again. If they lost, of course, many of them would be dead, but those who weren’t killed in battle would be executed as traitors by the victorious Israelites.
Their second choice was to betray the Philistines in the middle of the battle. But that would be problematic for several reasons. First, it would show them as faithless to the Philistines who have treated them fairly for more than a year. Also, if they did that, they would be immediately fighting behind enemy lines, surrounded by the enemy army. Casualties would be very heavy. Another thing is that the other Israelites might not understand what David’s men were doing, and if they were able to fight through and link up with Saul’s army, the Israelites might start fighting them anyway. Remember there were no cell phones or radios for them to communicate their intentions to the Israelite army. Finally, Saul’s history shows that even extreme demonstrations of loyalty do not convince him for long. There is no guarantee that turning on the Philistines would actually win Saul’s favor. Saul might even take the battle as an opportunity to kill David, even if he knows that David is helping him.
We don’t know what David would have done – it is not clear in the text. I suspect that he had some vague thought of turning on the Philistines, and rallying the Israelites. We’ll never know, however, because some of the other Philistines interfered. David was allied with king Achish of Gath. But there were five Philistine kings altogether. Each Philistine King ruled over a city and some surrounding territory. When the other four kings saw that Achish had David and 600 Hebrew warriors with him, they objected strenuously. They felt they couldn’t trust him, and so reluctantly, Achish sent David back to the town he had given him, Ziklag. David objected to Achish, and I’m not sure if the objection was genuine, or merely to maintain the deception that he was truly loyal.
In any case, it seems to me that the Lord arranged things to get David out of a very difficult position. David had placed himself there by deceiving Achish about who he was raiding over the past year. It was his own fault that he was between a rock and a hard place. But the Lord extricated him anyway. This is more evidence of God’s incredible, undeserved grace. So David and his men did not take part in the battle, but traveled home to Ziklag. We don’t know if they went all the way to the Jezreel valley, but they must have gone some distance, because it took them three days to get back.
When they arrived they received a horrible shock – their homes were burned to the ground, and all their wives, children and possessions were gone.
The Amalekites had been very wily. They had seen that the Philistines and Israelites were focusing all their attention on one another. So when the armies were gone, they raided all through the southern territories of both peoples, finding only defenseless towns and villages, because all the men had gone off to war.
This was as horrible as it sounds. Imagine your own home burned to the ground and your family kidnapped. David and his men were naturally devastated at the loss of their families. It says:
Then David and the people who were with him raised their voices and wept until they had no more strength to weep. (1Sam 30:4, ESV)
When the grief was over, anger kicked in. But it was chiefly anger against David. His men had fairly good reasons to complain. David had led them to settle with the Philistines in the first place. David had not let them be at peace in Ziklag, but had insisted on raiding the Amalekites, arousing their ire. David had decided to deceive the Philistines into thinking they were allies. Therefore it was David’s fault that they had marched away with the Philistine armies, leaving their families defenseless. The men talked not just of mutiny, but of stoning David to death. Stoning wasn’t considered murder – it was considered a righteous punishment for gross wrongdoing.
Try and get inside the mind of David for a minute. There is no doubt that he himself had made a mess of things. He didn’t have many good options to start with, with Saul chasing him, and people betraying him, but even so, all his choices of the past 18 months had led to this mess. He had lost his own family. He had lost the families of his faithful men, and all the possessions they had finally been able to accumulate after years of homelessness. Now his men were turning on him.
There were several options for David at that point. He could have said, “Yes, go ahead and stone me.” That would have been the response of despair and giving up. Or, he could have gotten angry. War leaders in those days had a great deal of authority over their men. He was, after all, God’s anointed. He could have rebuked his men, and blamed them for some of what happened. After all, there is no doubt that they had been happier in Ziklag than wandering homeless in the desert. He would have been within his rights to execute the ringleaders of the rebellion. He could have tried to fix the problem himself immediately, trusting in his own strength and wisdom to pull off some kind of miracle.
Instead, it says:
But David strengthened himself in the LORD his God. (1 Samuel 30:6)
The word “strengthened himself” is the Hebrew word transliterated “chazaq.” It means to seize upon, to lay hold of with obstinate persistence. The sense it gives us is that David focused and fastened his heart, mind, soul and strength on God and God alone, and held on for dear life. He did not immediately try to fix anything or even to defend himself. He just held on to the Lord.
David almost certainly wrote Psalm 62. We don’t know when in his life he did so, but this moment would certainly fit. Hear him strengthen himself in the Lord:
1 For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation. 2 He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be greatly shaken. 3 How long will all of you attack a man to batter him, like a leaning wall, a tottering fence? 4 They only plan to thrust him down from his high position. They take pleasure in falsehood. They bless with their mouths, but inwardly they curse. 5 For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him. 6 He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken. 7 On God rests my salvation and my glory; my mighty rock, my refuge is God. 8 Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us. (Psalms 62:1-8, ESV)
Once more, we see evidence of David’s faith-filled heart. There is no doubt that he had already made some very bad decisions in his life. He was in a mess created by some of those unfortunate choices right now. But his instinct was always to turn back to the Lord.
That is the life of faith. Make sure you understand this. The life of faith isn’t about performing perfectly, or even performing well. It is about grabbing hold of the Lord in trust, even when you might not understand what he is doing, and holding on for dear life, through good and bad, through the evil brought about by others and the messes brought about by yourself.This, and this alone, is what made David such a great man.
We can see how David’s focus on the Lord brought him back on track. He already knew that the Amalekites were God’s enemies. Clearly, they had already attacked, and this was war. In the views of that time and culture, it was certainly David’s right to pursue them and bring them to battle if he could. In addition, it was probably also the natural response to be angry and seek revenge; it would feel right. So, it would be easy to assume that they should pursue the Amalekites. But David, after strengthening himself in the Lord, also humbled himself, assuming nothing, wanting earnestly to hear from God. Therefore before doing anything else, he inquired of the Lord.
As I’ve mentioned before, “inquiring of the Lord” most likely involved a sacrifice and a worship service, and possibly even a fellowship meal. It wasn’t a quick thing. You had to sings songs and say some liturgy. You had to butcher the animal, and then cook it, along with other food, and then serve it out to everyone and eat. Going from killing to eating an animal the size of a sheep or goat is a matter of some hours. But David took the time to worship the Lord, and to lead his men to do the same before anything else was done. All this time, it would be natural to think: The Amalekites are getting further and further away. But David did it anyway, because he thought that getting right with the Lord was even more important than the tactical advantage of a quick pursuit.
Think for a moment about your typical response when you are in difficulties. Do you tend to trust yourself to come up with a solution? Do you want to control the situation and work it out, essentially save yourself? If you are in a situation where time is short, do you begrudge any time to pray and listen to God?
Or maybe your response is depression and despair. You might tend to think the worst will happen to you, so you may as well get resigned to your fate. Perhaps you even blame yourself and accept that you deserve the disaster because you brought it on yourself.
Possibly, you take another approach – you blame others, and get angry at them when things don’t go well. It helps you feel better, or more righteous, to say it is someone else’s fault.
I think we all tend toward one or more of these things when trouble comes. I want to encourage us, however, to be more like David. He didn’t do any of these. Instead, he fastened his hope and trust on the Lord. Like a bulldog latching on and not letting go, he focused on God with all his soul, heart and strength. All the energy that he might have put into controlling the situation, or blaming others or blaming himself, he instead put into holding on to the Lord.
Don’t put your energy into blame, or self-abuse. Don’t even put your energy into fixing things. Put all your focus into obstinate faith. This is just as important when you know your problems are mostly your own fault.
What is the Lord saying to you through this part of scripture today?
Saul was committed, above all, to being in control of his own life and getting the results he wanted. When it appeared to him that God wouldn’t give him what he wanted, he turned to the devil for it. Demanding self control or results is a dangerous path to walk down for anyone. The alternative to the need to be in control is trust in God. Let this scripture lead you into a deeper level of trust in the Lord.
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1 SAMUEL #29. 1 SAMUEL 28:1-25
Remember all that we have learned about king Saul. One of the most important things we discovered is that he was a religious man, but not a man of faith. Time after time, when he felt he could somehow use or exploit God, he did so. But when he was confident in himself, or when he felt that God had nothing to offer him, he ignored God. He had the trappings of religion and he used them to try to control others and manipulate God. But he did not live in a day to day walk of faith, trusting God in all things, relating to him, loving him. The depths of Saul’s spiritual poverty are revealed in 1 Samuel chapter 28.
Saul, having no real trust in God, was terrified when he saw the Philistine army that came against him. Now consider something. Every time Saul was involved in a battle with the Philistines up to this point, God saved the Israelites. The Lord used Jonathan in chapter 13, and David in chapter 17, and several other times. But none of that seemed to make any difference to Saul. He was just as scared and faithless as he had always been.
I want to pause and say something about that here. Sometimes we think that if God just did a miracle for us, then we would really trust him. If we saw the Lord do something really great, then we wouldn’t doubt, then we wouldn’t disobey or draw back in fear. But that wasn’t the case with Saul. God’s previous miracles didn’t matter. The same was true with the first Israelites who came out of Egypt. They saw many miracles. Their food and water were daily miracles. And yet it did not help them to have faith and surrender to the Lord.
Jesus addressed this issue in his own ministry. Though he did many miracles, often people came and demanded more miracles on the spot – basically asking him to prove himself to them—again. Jesus addressed this in Luke 11:27-29:
27 As He was saying these things, a woman from the crowd raised her voice and said to Him, “The womb that bore You and the one who nursed You are blessed! ” 28 He said, “Even more, those who hear the word of God and keep it are blessed! ” 29 As the crowds were increasing, He began saying: “This generation is an evil generation. It demands a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. (Luke 11:27-29, HCSB)
John records that many miracles (‘signs’) still did not convince people who did not want to be convinced:
37 Even though He had performed so many signs in their presence, they did not believe in Him. (John 12:37, HCSB)
On one occasion, when Jesus told people to trust in him, the people demanded that he prove himself with another miracle—and this was only the next day after the feeding of the five thousand! (John 6:22-31). In another place, Jesus told a story about a poor man named Lazarus, and a rich man. At the end of the story, the rich man found himself in hell. He begged that someone be sent from heaven to tell his family the truth about the afterlife. Jesus concludes the story like this:
31 “But he told him, ‘If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded if someone rises from the dead.’ ” (Luke 16:31, HCSB)
When people in the New Testament say “Moses and the Prophets” they mean “the Bible,” since that was all of the Bible that they had at that time. What Jesus is saying is this: if you don’t trust God’s Word and the promises in scripture, no amount of miracles will cause you to trust.” The problem can’t be fixed by a miracle. That is both hard and good for us to remember. Seeing is not believing. With God, believing is seeing.
So Saul, in spite of all that he has seen God do, was a religious pretender, not a man of real faith. All of the amazing ways God had worked throughout his life did not give him real faith. Therefore, now, facing the Philistines, he was quaking in fear. It says that he “inquired of the Lord.” As before, Saul didn’t go to the Lord unless he thought God could do something for him. So now, he inquired of the Lord only out of fear and a desire to manipulate God. It doesn’t tell us what Saul was asking God. I think it is most likely that he made an animal sacrifice to the Lord, and was hoping for some prophecy that God was pleased with the sacrifice, and would give Saul the victory. But he didn’t hear anything by way of the “sacred dice” (the Urim and Thummim) or through the prophets, or from dreams. Basically, Saul was demanding another sign here (that is, a miracle) before he would really trust God. He had God’s help all his life, but he still wouldn’t trust the Lord without some kind of additional sign.
God was working on Saul all of his life. Remember how he called him to be king? There were several miracles in connection with just that. Remember how he gave Saul the victory at Jabesh Gilead? Remember how even after Saul proved to be useless to God, God kept pursuing Saul’s heart, trying to get him to turn to the Holy Spirit for relief? Saul has had decades to surrender his heart to the Lord. The Lord never quit trying to win him over. I think this lack of a sign was one more chance for Saul to surrender his heart. The Lord put him in a crisis where he had the same two choices he had always had: 1. Trust God, or 2. Manipulate God and other people to control his own destiny, and get the outcome he wants. Before this, Saul had always chosen #2. He didn’t know it, but this was now his last chance to surrender his heart to the Lord.
Tragically, Saul once again chose to try to control his own life and outcomes, rather than trusting God. When he didn’t hear from the Lord, trust was not even an option. Saul felt that he simply must find some way to manipulate God into saying what he wanted to hear, or doing what he wanted God to do. So he sought out a medium, or witch, or spiritist, or whatever you want to call it.
Deuteronomy 18:9-14 says this:
10There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer11or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead,12for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD. And because of these abominations the LORD your God is driving them out before you.13You shall be blameless before the LORD your God,14for these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, the LORD your God has not allowed you to do this.
These practices were part of the reason for Holy War, which Saul failed to carry out as king. Not only were the people of God not supposed to do these things, they were supposed to wipe out those who did. Such things separate people from God and put them under the influence of hell. Saul did make some attempt to stamp out the practice of the occult, but obviously he wasn’t entirely successful. And now he was willing to deliberately abandon faith in God, abandon his own previous laws against these things, and seek help from a medium through “communication with the dead.”
Here is the final proof of Saul’s internal condition. Religion was just something to be used and manipulated. Clearly, for Saul all that mattered is that he got some kind of good result, and if he couldn’t get what he wanted from God, he was willing to seek it from the instruments of the devil.
So Saul and a few of his men disguised themselves and went to the witch. The disguise was actually pretty pathetic. The woman lived not far from the battlefield. Her visitor was the tallest man she’d ever seen, and he wanted to talk to the ghost of the prophet Samuel. It didn’t take a genius to figure out it was Saul. So at first the woman thought it was a trap. Then when she was convinced, she pretended that the ghost of Samuel told her who Saul was. All that is reading between the lines, but I feel pretty confident about it. You can’t disguise your height, and the Bible tells us that Saul was the tallest man in the whole nation of Israel by far. The witch would have had to be pretty stupid to not think it was Saul.
Now it is natural to wonder, what really happened here? Was the woman a charlatan who made it all up? Was there really a spiritual presence there? And if so, was it really Samuel?
To answer that, we need to consider what the Bible says about life after death. Certainly, the entire New Testament teaches that at the end of time, there will be a judgment day. Those who reject Jesus will be thrown into a lake of fire with the devil and his demons. Those who receive him will be physically resurrected to an eternal, joyful existence.
But there is that period of time in between. Samuel was in that period, as is every person who has died up until today (except for Jesus). Some people believe that in that “between-time,” you are unaware of existence until judgment day, at the end of time. Others believe, as I do, that there is a period of time when dead people are not yet resurrected into new bodies, but their spirits are either with Jesus in joy and freedom, or in hell. The presence of Moses and Elijah with Jesus in Matthew 17, suggests this very strongly. Jesus painted this picture of life after death in his story of Lazarus and the rich man. Revelation 6:9-11 shows people who have died, yet are aware and are waiting for the final judgment day and the resurrection. Actually several passages in Revelation suggest that there is life with Jesus between death and the physical resurrection that will occur at the end of time.
Therefore in order to believe that it really was the spirit of Samuel, we have to believe that some people on earth – mediums, fortune tellers etc. – have the power to pull people out of the presence of God and back to earth so we can talk to them. I don’t buy it for a second.
However, could God have allowed this to happen for some reason? In my opinion, that just brings up another reason to believe that this was not really Samuel. God chose not to answer Saul when Saul wanted some reassurance. He did not answer through the “holy dice,” or through the prophets or in dreams. If God would chose not to speak to Saul through these holy and righteous means, why would he then work through the unrighteous means of a medium – basically rewarding Saul’s wicked behavior, and giving the impression that, actually, God does work through such things?
Even beyond these most significant facts, there are other things in the text which suggest that this was not Samuel. Saul himself could not see the spirit – he had to ask the medium what he looked like. Her reply was very vague: “An old man wearing robes.” That’s pretty much how I picture Samuel myself. Saul accepted this description as true, but there is nothing in it that actually identifies Samuel personally.
Finally, there is the message that Saul got from this apparition. Once again we need to question why God would speak through this illegitimate means after not answering by any legitimate route. But secondly, listen to the tone of the message. It is angry, bitter and hopeless. There is no encouragement. There is not even any opportunity for repentance. Not too long after this, Saul was wounded and committed suicide, rather than fight on with courage. I personally believe that his encounter contributed to that act.
I do believe that there was something spiritual going on here – something creepy and utterly evil. Remember the other Saul, in the New Testament, the one who repented and came to Jesus, and later was known as Paul? He encountered a girl who could tell the future. But it was an evil spirit that gave her the power of limited fortune telling (Acts 16:16-19). I met someone once who used to be involved in fortune telling, and spirit-communication for money. She became a Christian and rejected all that.
We asked her what was involved in it. She said that sometimes she was just tricking people by being observant, and making vague statements combined with educated guesses. But she also told us that sometimes she was aware of a spiritual presence which gave her information – a presence which she now realizes was a demon.
I personally believe that Saul unknowingly sought (and received) an audience with a demon, masquerading as Samuel. Saul was rewarded with the kind of thing you would expect from a demon: condemnation and hopelessness. By turning to witchcraft and séance to try and control his life, he was turning his back utterly on God and seeking help from hell. And he got exactly what you might expect from hell.
So where to do we go with this text?
First, if this isn’t too obvious, don’t play around with séances, spirit-guides, mediums, psychics and so on. The best case scenario is that you are being fooled by a con-artist. The other possibility is that you are dealing with something that comes from the pit of hell, and you are inviting demonic influence into your life if you fool with it. The Bible says that sometimes Satan (and presumably other demons) masquerade as angels of light:
14 And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. 15 So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds. (2 Corinthians 11:14-15, ESV.)
In the context of this verse, “his servants” is about human beings who are trying to lead people astray. But if it is true about humans who have turned from God, it seems likely to be true about demons also. As we can see, the result of fooling around with this for Saul was dramatic and self-destructive. The Bible tells us everything we need to know about God and human nature. It doesn’t tell us everything in the universe there is to know. There are unresolved questions about supernatural things. But the Bible is clear about mediums and seances and so on: they are not for the people of God. It is like playing with explosives.
I also find some reminders here about religion. There are many people like Saul who go to church and talk the religious talk as a way to manipulate God or influence others. It became a way of life for Saul, and ultimately it destroyed him. God never gave up on him, but by his empty religious spirit, Saul took himself out of God’s jurisdiction. I hate religion. I love Jesus, but I hate religion. I think maybe God hates it too. Religion is about appearance and manipulation. Real faith is about surrendering your heart to the One who created you, and cares about you more than anyone else in the universe. Saul had plenty of religion. David had faith.
I also think there is a warning here about being willing to get results, no matter how. I remember, some years ago, hearing a fellow Christian talking about Madonna, the singer. Some of you might be too young to remember, but she started out with a “good girl” image. She didn’t get a lot of success that way. When she switched to being all about sex, she became wildly popular. My Christian friend said: “You gotta admire her for doing what it takes.” I don’t think so at all. We don’t have to admire that, and I think we shouldn’t. Sometimes there are things that are more important than getting the results we want.
Americans tend to be in favor of “whatever works.” Sometimes, that’s a good trait, but sometimes, it isn’t. If drugs and alcohol work to cheer me up, should I abuse them? If I’m unhappy in my marriage, should I have an affair? If I need more money, should I cheat and steal? “Whatever works” is a very dangerous philosophy to have. In the end it destroyed Saul.
There is also a caution here about how we view miracles. The Bible teaches us that they are real. I have personally seen miracles. I love it when God does them. But my faith does not depend on God continually doing more of them for me, and I know I cannot demand them from God whenever I choose. We sometimes think (like Mike and the Mechanics) that all we need is a miracle. Not so. All we need is the Lord, and to get him all we need is faith to believe he is there, and to trust him. Miracles are real, and great, but if we won’t trust God unless he keeps doing more miraculous things for us, I think we are in trouble. Jesus himself warned against that attitude.
I think there are many times when we get ourselves into situations like Saul’s. We come face to face with a problem. We can try to manage and control life ourselves; or we can trust the Lord and surrender to him. I pray that we make the second choice, not the first.
I guess the main message is the same message we hear over and over through scripture: Trust the Lord. Base that trust on his word and his promises, not on anything else. And base your life on the trust you have for Him.
Clear Bible 