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Fall Asleep to the Full Story of David _ From Forgotten Shepherd to King - A Sleep Bible Story · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Close your eyes, Let the weight of the day fall away,
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  Speaker 1: Let your shoulders drop, Let your breath find its own
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  Speaker 1: quiet rhythm. Tonight. You do not need to figure anything out.
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  Speaker 1: You do not need to be strong or composed or
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: ready for anything. You do not need to have the
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: right answers or the right version of yourself available for
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: any one to night we tell the story of a
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: boy that nobody thought to invite inside, a shepherd, a
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: youngest son, a child so easily overlooked that when the
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: most important visitor his family would ever receive came to
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: their door, his own father did not think to call
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: him in from the fields. A boy, a sling, and
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: a giant. But the real story goes much deeper than that,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: because David was not simply the one who killed Goliath.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: He was the poet who wept in caves and turned
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  Speaker 1: his tears into songs that people are still singing three
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: thousand years later. He was the warrior who could run
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  Speaker 1: toward a giant without flinching and fall into the worst
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: kind of failure without warning. He was the king who
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: lost everything that mattered and found in the ruins of
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  Speaker 1: his own choices that grace was still standing there and
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  Speaker 1: out of all the people who ever lived, God chose
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  Speaker 1: to call him something that has puzzled and comforted people
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  Speaker 1: across every generation since, a man after my own heart.
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  Speaker 1: To night, we will walk with David from the quiet
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  Speaker 1: hills of Bethlehem to the roar of a valley where
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  Speaker 1: two armies held their breath, from the palace to the cave,
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  Speaker 1: from the throne to the darkest chapter of his life,
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  Speaker 1: and back again, slowly to grace. If you are carrying
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  Speaker 1: something heavy to night, this story belongs to you. Let
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: everything go and listen. Chapter one, The Forgotten Sun. There
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  Speaker 1: is a town in the hill country of any Judah,
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  Speaker 1: so small and so quiet that most travelers passing through
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  Speaker 1: it would not have thought twice about stopping Bethlehem. It
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  Speaker 1: sat surrounded by terraced hillsides of wheat and barley, dotted
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  Speaker 1: with olive trees old enough that no one alive remembered
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  Speaker 1: who had planted them. In the dry months, the hills
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  Speaker 1: turned the color of pale straw. In the rainy season,
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  Speaker 1: they softened into something almost green. Shepherds had walked these
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  Speaker 1: slopes for generations before David was born, and they would
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  Speaker 1: walk them long after he was gone. It was not
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  Speaker 1: a place where anyone expected history to begin, and yet
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  Speaker 1: this is exactly where God chose to start. In Bethlehem,
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  Speaker 1: there was a man named Jesse. He was a respected elder,
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  Speaker 1: a landowner of modest standing, a man with eight sons, which,
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  Speaker 1: in the ancient world carried a particular kind of weight.
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  Speaker 1: Sons meant strength, sons meant legacy. Uns meant your name
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  Speaker 1: would continue in the earth after you were no longer
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  Speaker 1: in it. Jesse had every reason to hold his head high.
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  Speaker 1: His oldest, Eliab, was tall and strong, the kind of
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  Speaker 1: young man people noticed when he entered a room. After
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  Speaker 1: him came Abinadab, then Schummer, then five more, seven sons,
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  Speaker 1: who carried the visible future of their father's house. And
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  Speaker 1: then there was the youngest. He does not even receive
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  Speaker 1: a proper introduction in the story. At first. He is
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  Speaker 1: simply described as the one who was out with the
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  Speaker 1: sheep while his brothers trained and ate and occupied the
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  Speaker 1: spaces that mattered in a household. He was somewhere on
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  Speaker 1: a hillside alone, watching animals that could not watch themselves.
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  Speaker 1: His name was David, and nobody was thinking about David.
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  Speaker 1: I want you to stay with that for just a
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  Speaker 1: moment before we move on, because it is so easy
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  Speaker 1: to rush past this detail in the urgegency to get
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  Speaker 1: to what comes next, and yet it holds something worth
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  Speaker 1: sitting with. David was not in the fields because he
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  Speaker 1: was unworthy. He was not overlooked because God had lost
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  Speaker 1: track of him. He was out there because that was
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  Speaker 1: where the youngest son went in that world, the lowest status,
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  Speaker 1: the jobs nobody else wanted. He watched the sheep. But
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  Speaker 1: what his family could not see was that those years
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  Speaker 1: on the hillside were not empty years. They were not
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  Speaker 1: wasted years. They may have been in ways none of
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  Speaker 1: them could understand at the time, the most important years
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  Speaker 1: of his life. Think about what was happening to David
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  Speaker 1: out there. The silence, first of all, real silence, the
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  Speaker 1: kind that a crowded and busy life never allows, the
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  Speaker 1: kind that presses in close at night and makes a
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  Speaker 1: person feel both very small and somehow very near to
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  Speaker 1: something larger than themselves. Then there was the danger. A
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  Speaker 1: shepherd in the ancient hill country was not simply an
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  Speaker 1: animal sitter. He was a protector. The landscape around Bethlehem
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  Speaker 1: was home to predators, and they were not distant threats
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  Speaker 1: David would later tell King Saul that he had faced
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  Speaker 1: a lion and a bear, that when either came and
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  Speaker 1: seized a lamb from the flock, he went after it,
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  Speaker 1: caught it by its coat, and fought for what was
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  Speaker 1: under his care. He described it plainly, without drama, the
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  Speaker 1: way a person described something that simply had to be done,
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  Speaker 1: and they did it at close range, with his own strength,
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  Speaker 1: with whatever was in his hands. And each time he survived.
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  Speaker 1: Each time he stood breathing hard in the dark of
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  Speaker 1: the Bethlehem Hills, with the threat behind him and the
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  Speaker 1: flock still safe, something was growing in him, not quickly,
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  Speaker 1: not with announcement, but steadily, the way things grow when
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  Speaker 1: the conditions are exactly right and no one is hurrying them.
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  Speaker 1: Then there was the sky above him at night. Night
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  Speaker 1: after night, the stars came out above Bethlehem in the
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  Speaker 1: way they only come out, far from noise and light
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  Speaker 1: and crowds, and David looked up and something was happening
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  Speaker 1: inside him that he may not have had words for. Yet.
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  Speaker 1: He was learning to talk to God, not in a temple,
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  Speaker 1: not surrounded by ceremony and the careful language of religious performance,
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  Speaker 1: out here on a hillside under the open sky, in
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  Speaker 1: the middle of an unremarkable night, with nothing around him
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  Speaker 1: but the sound of animals moving through the grass. This
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  Speaker 1: is where the songs began, Long before David ever wrote
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  Speaker 1: them down. The words were forming inside him, rising slowly
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  Speaker 1: the way water rises in a deep well, out of
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  Speaker 1: the silence and the danger, and the longing, and the
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  Speaker 1: strange nearness to God that comes when everything else has
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  Speaker 1: been stripped away and there is nothing left but the
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  Speaker 1: truth of who you are and who He is. He
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  Speaker 1: was not yet famous, He was not yet anything the
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  Speaker 1: world could measure. But God could see him. And God
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  Speaker 1: had not looked away for a single night into this
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  Speaker 1: quiet and unhurried life. Something arrived that would change everything.
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  Speaker 1: The prophet Samuel came to Bethlehem. Samuel was not simply
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  Speaker 1: a religious figure. He was the most respected voice in
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  Speaker 1: all of Israel. When Samuel moved, people paid attention when
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  Speaker 1: he spoke, Kings listened. When word reached the town that
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  Speaker 1: he was coming, the elders went out to meet him
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  Speaker 1: with visible anxiety. Do you come in peace? They asked?
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  Speaker 1: In peace? Samuel said, I have come to sacrifice to
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  Speaker 1: the Lord. Consecrate yourselves and come with me. Among those
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  Speaker 1: he invited were Jesse and his sons. But Samuel carried
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  Speaker 1: a secret. God had spoken to him. God had told
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  Speaker 1: him that he had rejected Saul as king of Israel,
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  Speaker 1: that ung the sons of Jesse in Bethlehem. He had
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  Speaker 1: already chosen who would come next. Samuel did not know
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  Speaker 1: which son. He only knew that he would know when
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  Speaker 1: he saw him. So when Jesse and his sons arrived,
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  Speaker 1: Samuel looked first at Eliab, the oldest, the tall one,
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  Speaker 1: the impressive one, and something in Samuel lifted. Surely. He thought, surely,
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  Speaker 1: this is the one. But God said something to Samuel
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  Speaker 1: in that moment that has never stopped being true. Do
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  Speaker 1: not look at his appearance or at the height of
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  Speaker 1: his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord
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  Speaker 1: does not see as man sees. Man looks at the
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  Speaker 1: outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. Samuel
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  Speaker 1: steadied himself. He looked at Iliab and moved on. Then
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  Speaker 1: Abinadab stepped forward. Not this one, then shammer. No. One
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  Speaker 1: by one, seven sons of Jesse passed before the prophet
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  Speaker 1: of God. Seven times. The answer came back the same
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  Speaker 1: seven times. Samuel said, not this one. And then he
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  Speaker 1: turned to Jesse with a question that must have seemed
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  Speaker 1: almost puzzling. Are all your young men here? Jesse paused,
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  Speaker 1: and then, with the casual indifference that is somehow the
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  Speaker 1: most painful detail in the whole scene, he said, there
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  Speaker 1: remains yet the youngest, and there he is keeping the sheep.
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  Speaker 1: There he is keeping the sheep, said the way you
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  Speaker 1: mention something that does not really require mentioning. And after thought,
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  Speaker 1: the youngest out with the animals, surely not relevant to
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  Speaker 1: whatever this is. Samuel looked at Jesse, Steadily, send and
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  Speaker 1: bring him. We will not sit down until he comes here.
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  Speaker 1: So they sent for David, and while they waited, I
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  Speaker 1: find myself wondering what went through him. When the messenger
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  Speaker 1: reached him on the hillside, come quickly leave the flock.
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  Speaker 1: The prophet Samuel is here and he is asking for you.
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  Speaker 1: He would have been dusty, rough handed, smelling of animals
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  Speaker 1: and open air. He was not prepared for whatever this was.
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  Speaker 1: Nobody had thought to prepare him. The text pauses briefly
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  Speaker 1: to describe him rudy, with beautiful eyes and a good appearance.
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  Speaker 1: There is a quality of life in those words. He
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  Speaker 1: was not a pale, sheltered child. He was outdoors and present,
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  Speaker 1: and alive in the particular way that years of open
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  Speaker 1: field living makes a person alive and present. He walked
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  Speaker 1: in from the fields, and when Samuel saw him, God spoke,
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  Speaker 1: arise and anoint him. For this is the one. Samuel
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  Speaker 1: took the flask of oil he had carried with him
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  Speaker 1: to Bethlehem, and he poured it over the head of
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  Speaker 1: the shepherd boy, over the forgotten youngest son, over the
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  Speaker 1: nobody from a quiet town in the Judean Hills, who
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  Speaker 1: had not even been considered worth inviting inside until the
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  Speaker 1: prophet specifically asked for him. The oil ran down his hair,
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  Speaker 1: down his face. The room was still, and something happened
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  Speaker 1: that no one present could see. The spirit of the
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  Speaker 1: Lord came upon David from that day forward, not the
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  Speaker 1: spirit of ambition or conquest or strategy, the spirit of
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  Speaker 1: the Lord settling on a shepherd boy in Bethlehem, like
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  Speaker 1: something coming home to the place it was always meant
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  Speaker 1: to rest. But here is what I do not want
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  Speaker 1: you to miss. Here is the detail that says something
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  Speaker 1: true about how God tends to work. After the anointing,
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  Speaker 1: after the oil, after this invisible and world altering moment,
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  Speaker 1: David went back to the sheep. No throne appeared, no crown,
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  Speaker 1: no army lined up outside waiting to follow him, no
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  Speaker 1: visible change in anything at all. He was still the
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  Speaker 1: youngest son, still the shepherd, still the one nobody thought about,
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  Speaker 1: and he went back to watch the flock. Stay with
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  Speaker 1: that for a moment to night. The anointing did not
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  Speaker 1: arrive with immediate promotion. The calling did not come with
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  Speaker 1: a change of address. The most significant thing that had
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  Speaker 1: ever happened to David happened quietly in a room not
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  Speaker 1: many people were watching, and then life simply continued as before.
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  Speaker 1: David tended his sheep, he watched the stars appear over Bethlehem.
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  Speaker 1: He played his harp in the darkness and sang his
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  Speaker 1: songs to the God he had been learning to trust
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  Speaker 1: in the silence of the fields. He did not know
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  Speaker 1: what was coming. He did not know about Goliath, or
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  Speaker 1: the palace, or the grief or the greatness that was
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  Speaker 1: waiting for him on the other side of years he
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  Speaker 1: had not yet lived. He only knew what he had
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  Speaker 1: always known, that God was near, that the same presence
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  Speaker 1: that had been with him against the lion, and the
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  Speaker 1: bear was the same presence that had just quietly and
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  Speaker 1: without fanfare, poured oil over his head, and that was enough.
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  Speaker 1: There is a psalm that many have long associated with
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  Speaker 1: these early years, a psalm that carries what sounds like
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  Speaker 1: the finger prints of someone who knew what it meant
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  Speaker 1: to actually tend sheep across real terrain under a real sky.
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  Speaker 1: It begins with the only words that a newly anointed
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  Speaker 1: shepherd boy in Bethlehem, not yet a king, not yet
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  Speaker 1: anything the world could see, could possibly have found true
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  Speaker 1: enough to say, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall
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  Speaker 1: not want. He knew what a shepherd was. He knew
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  Speaker 1: the patience of it, the vigilance, the cost of caring
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  Speaker 1: for something vulnerable through country that wanted to kill it.
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  Speaker 1: And he knew, in the way that only years of
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  Speaker 1: quiet listening can produce, that God had been doing exactly
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  Speaker 1: that for him all along. The forgotten Son had been
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  Speaker 1: found not by his father, not by his brothers, not
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  Speaker 1: even in the deepest sense, by the prophet who had
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  Speaker 1: been sent specifically to look for him by God, long
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  Speaker 1: before Samuel arrived in Bethlehem, long before the oil, long
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  Speaker 1: before any visible evidence of any of it. God had
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  Speaker 1: seen this boy on his hillside, had heard the songs
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  Speaker 1: forming inside him, had been preparing something in him that
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  Speaker 1: the world was not yet ready to receive. You are
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  Speaker 1: not too small to be seen. You are not too
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  Speaker 1: ordinary to be chosen. You are not too forgotten to
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  Speaker 1: be found. If David's story teaches us nothing else, in
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  Speaker 1: its very first pages, it teaches us this. The Lord
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  Speaker 1: does not look at what we look at. He does
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  Speaker 1: not measure what we measure. And the places we tend
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  Speaker 1: to write off as empty and purposeless and overlooked are
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  Speaker 1: sometimes exactly where He does his most patient, and most
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  Speaker 1: care full, and most extraordinary work. Rest Now, the story
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  Speaker 1: has only just begun, but already something remarkable has happened.
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  Speaker 1: A boy on a hill side, a prophet with a
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  Speaker 1: flask of oil, and a God who sees what no
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  Speaker 1: one else bothers to look at. Sleep well tomorrow. The
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  Speaker 1: world will not yet know David's name, but God has
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  Speaker 1: always known it. Chapter two, The Anointing. There is something
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  Speaker 1: quietly difficult about being chosen and then waiting, not waiting
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  Speaker 1: for a few days, not a few weeks, but years,
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  Speaker 1: while the world moves forward around you, and you remain
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  Speaker 1: exactly where you were, doing exactly what you have always done,
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  Speaker 1: with nothing outward to show that anything at all has changed.
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  Speaker 1: This is the season David entered after Samuel left Bethlehem.
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  Speaker 1: The oil had dried, the prophet had gone home, his
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  Speaker 1: brothers had returned to their lives, and David, the anointed
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  Speaker 1: future king of Israel, went back to watching sheep on
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  Speaker 1: a hill side outside of town. If you have ever
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  Speaker 1: been given a promise that did not arrive on any
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  Speaker 1: time line you could see, you understand something of what
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  Speaker 1: David carried in those years. There is a particular kind
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  Speaker 1: of loneliness in it, the loneliness of the person who
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  Speaker 1: has been told they are meant for something and then
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  Speaker 1: finds themselves in the same ordinary place as before, with
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  Speaker 1: nothing to point to, no evidence to offer, no way
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  Speaker 1: to explain it to any one else, just a quiet
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  Speaker 1: knowing and a very long wait. But while David waited,
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  Speaker 1: something was unraveling in the man who currently sat on
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  Speaker 1: the throne. King Saul had started with genuine promise when
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  Speaker 1: God first chose him. There was something real about his humility.
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  Speaker 1: He was tall and capable, the kind of man people
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  Speaker 1: naturally followed. But when Samuel first told him he would
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  Speaker 1: be king. Saul did not reach for the crown. He
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  Speaker 1: pulled back, Am I not from the smallest tribe. Is
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  Speaker 1: my family not the least of all the clans of Benjamin?
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  Speaker 1: Why are you speaking to me like this? He seemed,
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  Speaker 1: in that first moment, like a man who thought too
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  Speaker 1: little of himself, rather than too much. But power changes
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  Speaker 1: the conditions of a life, slowly, quietly, almost without the
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  Speaker 1: person noticing, until one day the man who once said
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  Speaker 1: he was the least of the least is standing in
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  Speaker 1: the ruins of his own obedience, explaining to a prophet
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  Speaker 1: why he thought his judgment was better than God's direct command.
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  Speaker 1: Saul had disobeyed God twice. Both times he had a reason.
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  Speaker 1: Both times it made sense to him in the moment.
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  Speaker 1: Both times the explanation came easily and sounded almost reasonable.
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  Speaker 1: And both times Samuel had spoken words that no king
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  Speaker 1: wants to hear. Because you have rejected the word of
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  Speaker 1: the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king.
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  Speaker 1: Saul still wore the crown, he still commanded the army,
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  Speaker 1: he still sat on the throne. But something had shifted,
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  Speaker 1: something invisible and irreversible, and in the space left by
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  Speaker 1: that shift. Something else had moved. In the text describes
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  Speaker 1: it directly. A distressing spirit troubled Saul. He became restless, volatile.
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  Speaker 1: There were days when a shadow fell over him that
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  Speaker 1: nothing and no one could lift. When the darkness pressed
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  Speaker 1: in from the inside, and the whole court watched from
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  Speaker 1: a careful distance, helpless and afraid, His servants came to
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  Speaker 1: him with a quiet suggestion, Let our Lord command his
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  Speaker 1: servants to search for a man who is skillful in
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  Speaker 1: playing the harp. When the distressing spirit comes upon you,
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  Speaker 1: he will play, and you will be well. Music is
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  Speaker 1: something that could reach into a troubled spirit and offer
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  Speaker 1: what words and strata could not. His servants believed this,
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  Speaker 1: and Saul listened. Find me such a man, he said.
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  Speaker 1: And then one of the servants said something that set
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  Speaker 1: everything in motion. I have seen a son of Jesse,
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  Speaker 1: the Bethlehemite, who is skillful in playing. He is a
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  Speaker 1: man of valor, prudent in speech, and a handsome person.
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  Speaker 1: And the Lord is with him. Five words carried more
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  Speaker 1: weight than all the others. The Lord is with him.
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  Speaker 1: Saul sent messengers to Jesse, bring me your son David,
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  Speaker 1: who is with the sheep. Jesse prepared a gift for
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  Speaker 1: the king, bread and wine and a young goat, and
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  Speaker 1: he sent them with David the youngest, the shepherd boy,
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  Speaker 1: still carrying the dust of the fields and the smell
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  Speaker 1: of the open hill side. David arrived at the court
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  Speaker 1: of King Saul. Think about what that journey must have
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  Speaker 1: felt like. He had spent his entire life in the
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  Speaker 1: hills around Bethlehem. He had never stood before a king.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: He had never seen the kind of ordered formality that
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: surrounds a royal household, the guards and the officials, and
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  Speaker 1: the quiet ceremony that turns even ordinary moments into something
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  Speaker 1: performed and watched. And yet the text does not describe
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  Speaker 1: David as overwhelmed or nervous or out of his depth.
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  Speaker 1: What it describes is simpler and more remarkable. David came
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  Speaker 1: to Saul and stood before him, and Saul loved him greatly.
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  Speaker 1: Loved him greatly, not tolerated, not approved, loved. There was
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  Speaker 1: something in David that drew people toward him, something in
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: the quality of his presence that made those around him
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: feel something shift when he entered the room, even a
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: troubled king, even a man whose spirit was already darkening
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: felt it when David walked in. Saul made David his
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: armor bearer, the man who stood closest to the king
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: in battle, the one trusted with the King's life. David
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: had walked in from a hillside, and within days had
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: been given the deepest trust a soldier could receive. And
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: then the distressing spirit came again. The darkness settled over
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Saul the way it always did. His servants watched from
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: a distance. David took his harp and played. We do
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: not know what he played. The text does not tell us,
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: but it tells us what happened. Saul was refreshed, The
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: distressing spirit departed from him, and he was well. What
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: armies could not do, what advisers and ceremony and the
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: whole apparatus of a royal court could not do, a
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: shepherd boy's music did it. I want to pause here
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: because there is something in this moment that I think
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: is worth sitting with before we move on. David spent
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: years on a hillside developing a gift that his family
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: seemed to value. Very little, no formal training, no audience
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: worth mentioning. He simply had something in him that he
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: kept using in the only context available to him, the
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: open fields, the night sky, the God he was learning
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: to know in the silence, and that gift which looked
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: like nothing, which seemed suited for hillsides and sheep and
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: not much else, turned out to be the precise thing
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: that opened the door to the palace. God wastes nothing.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: The years that look empty are often being filled quietly
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: and without announcement, with exactly what the next season is
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: going to require. The gift that seems private and small
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: and unsuited for anything significant is sometimes the very gift
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: that carries a person into the room where everything changes.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: David did not engineer this. He did not find the
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: right people or say the right things. He played music
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: the way he had always played it, the way he
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: had learned to play it alone in the Bethlehem Hills,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: and God used it to carry him exactly where he
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: was supposed to go. But there is something else present
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: in this scene. I want you to notice before we
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: move on. Saul loved David. The love was real at
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: this point. But a man who has lost his footing
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: with God and knows it, even if he will not
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: say so aloud, is a man who carries a particular
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: kind of interior torment, And when such a man looks
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: at someone young and gifted and spirit filled standing in
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: his court, the contrast must have been its own kind
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: of suffering. David was everything Saul had once been. Everything
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: the kingdom needed, everything Saul could feel himself no longer
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: able to provide for now that produced love. Saul drew
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: David close because David made the darkness lift. But love
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: built on what a person does for you is a
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: fragile thing, and fragile things under enough pressure becomes something unrecognizable.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: David did not know this yet. He was young. He
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: was in the palace, He was loved by the most
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: powerful man in Israel. He played his music, he served faithfully,
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: He watched and learned, And somewhere beyond the palace walls,
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: in a valley neither of them had seen yet, a
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: giant was already practicing his speech. Rest Now the music
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: is still in the air. The darkness has lifted for
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: to night. But this is not the end of either
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: of these stories, not even close. Chapter three, The Harp
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: and the Darkness. Before we follow David to the battlefield,
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: I want to take you somewhere quieter. First, somewhere. Most
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: tellings of this story hurry past, because if we rushed
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: straight from the palace to the valley of Elah, we
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: miss something essential about David, something that explains not just
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: the courage he was about to show, but the source
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: of it, the deep route that held everything else upright
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: when the storm came. We need to go back to
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: the hill side, not as a back drop this time,
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: as the place where everything that mattered was actually formed.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: The hills around Bethlehem were not comfortable. They were wild
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: and exposed, and they demanded something from a person. In summer,
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: the heat pressed down and the ground cracked, and the
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: sky offered no mercy. In winter, the rains came in
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: hard off the Mediterranean, and the cold settled into the
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: valleys and refused to leave. A shepherd did not observe
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: his flock from a comfortable distance. He lived with them,
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: walked with them, slept near them on the ground. He
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: was alone, consistently deeply alone. And in that aloneness something
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: was growing in David that could not have grown anywhere else.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: It began with the silence. There is a kind of
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: silence that most lives never encounter, not the temporary quiet
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: between sounds, not the pause before the next conversation begins,
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: but the genuine, extended, pressing silence of a person alone
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: in open country, with the whole sky above them and
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: no human voice anywhere near. It is the kind of
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: silence that at first feels empty, and then, if you
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: stay in it long enough, begins to feel inhabited. David
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: stayed in it night after night, season after season, and
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: he discovered something in it that would mark everything he
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: ever wrote and everything he ever did. He discovered that
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: the silence was not empty, that the presence he had
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: been told about in the traditions of his people was
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: not an idea or a doctrine, but something actual and
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: near and available to a person willing to be honest
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: in the dark. He began to talk to God the
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: way you talk to someone who is genuinely there, not performing,
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: not reaching for the right religious language, just opening his
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: mouth and letting whatever was actually in him come out,
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: the fear and the gratitude, and the longing and the
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: occasional overwhelmed wonder of a young man under a sky
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: too long charge to fully take in. This is what
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: the psalms carry, not just poetry, though the poetry is real,
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: but the accumulated residue of years of this kind of conversation,
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: real and unfiltered, and held back by nothing. Then there
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: was the courage that the hillside built in him. When
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: David talked to Saul about the lion and the bear,
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: he did not tell it like a hero recounting a triumph.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: He told it like a shepherd explaining why his flock
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: was still intact. The animal came, it took a lamb.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: He went after it. He caught it and fought it
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: at close range with his own strength, with whatever was
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: in his hands. He brought the lamb back. That is all,
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: but think about what that actually required. Think about the
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: size of a lion, the speed of it, the absolute
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: certainty of danger when something that large turns on you
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: in the dark. And then think about a young man,
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: nan alone on a hillside, who made the decision that
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: a lamb under his care was worth going toward rather
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: than away from. This was not recklessness. This was a
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: shepherd who had been tested and had held and each
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: time the threat passed, each time the flock was safe,
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: and David stood breathing in the dark of the Bethlehem Hills.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: Something was deposited in him, not confidence in his own strength,
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: exactly something quieter and more reliable than that, the layered
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: experiential knowledge that when he walked towards something dangerous in
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: the care of his flock and in the presence of God,
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: he did not walk alone. This is how real courage forms,
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: not in a single dramatic moment, in dozens of small
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: moments spread across years that nobody is watching, each one
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: adding to something that eventually becomes unshakable. And then there
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: was the music itself. David had been playing his harp
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: on the hillside long before he ever played it in
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: a palace, long before the distressing spirit and the throne
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: room and the king who loved him greatly. He played
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: because it was the most honest language he had for
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: the God he was discovering in the silence, every chord
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: a kind of prayer, every melody a lifting of something
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: interior towards something beyond. And then he arrived at the palace,
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: and the music he had made for God alone turned
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: out to be exactly what a king in darkness desperately needed.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: When David played and the distressing spirit departed from Saul,
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: something was being demonstrated that ran deeper than the immediate comfort.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: Music coming from a genuinely oriented heart, music that carried
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: the residue of real encounter with God, created something in
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: the atmosphere of a room that other things found difficult
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: to remain in. We should be careful here not to
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: overstate what the text tells us, or claim more certainty
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: than the ancient account provides. But the connection is presented
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: plainly and directly. David played, the darkness lifted. Something real
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: happened when the music filled the air. And David had
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: been learning this language for years in the only classroom
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: that could have taught him. The open hillside, the night sky,
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: the long, unhurried years of playing to no audience, but
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: the one who always was Now. I want to draw
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: something out of all of this before we move on
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: to the valley. There is a pattern running through these
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: early years of David's life that I believe is one
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: of the most important things in the entire story. Everything
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: developed in obscurity, he would one day use in significance.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: Every lesson learned in private would be tested in public.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: The courage built in the dark against a lion would
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: stand behind him in daylight against a giant. The faith
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: grown in silence would speak its most defiant words in
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: a valley in front of two armies. The music learned
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: alone on a hill sie side would drive darkness from
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: a king's troubled mind. The hillside was not a waiting room.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: It was a workshop, and the craftsman working in it
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: was not David. I want to bring this close for
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: a moment because I think it speaks to something many
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: people listening tonight may recognize. You may be in a
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: hillside season right now, a place that feels small and unimportant,
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: a season where nothing seems to be happening and nothing
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: significant appears on the horizon. You may have gifts that
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: nobody seems to value, abilities you have been developing in private,
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: with no recognition and no sign that any of it
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: is going anywhere. I want to gently suggest the possibility
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: that you are in exactly the right place. The obscurity
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: is not necessarily punishment, The waiting is not necessarily abandonment.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: The silence is not necessarily emptiness. The hillside is where
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: David became the man who could walk into a valley
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: and see a giant through the eyes of faith rather
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: than fear. It is where the shepherd learned everything the
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: king would eventually need to know. It is where the
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: songs were written that have found people in darkness for
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: three thousand years and given them something real to hold.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: Do not be too quick to leave the hillside. God
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: is not absent from the places that look empty. He
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: is often most present there, most deliberately at work, forming
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: in a person, quietly and without announcement, the things that
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: the next season of life is going to require. David
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: left the hillside. Eventually, the palace called him, the battlefield
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: called him, the throne called him, But he never forgot
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: what he found there. The God he met in that
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: silence was the same God he would cry out to
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: in the worst moments of his life. The courage built
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: on those hills carried him through everything that followed, and
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: the music, the songs played to the stars and the
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: dark and the God who listened those became the psalms.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: The harp is still playing tonight. Let it carry you
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: somewhere quiet, somewhere near, somewhere close to the God who
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: sees what is forming in you in the hidden places,
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: and is not in any hurry to waste a single
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: day of it. Rest Now the valley is coming. The
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: giant is waiting, But David is not afraid. And to night,
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: in the presence of the same God who walked those
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: hillsides with him. Neither are you. Chapter four. The Valley
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: of Ella. There is a valley in the ancient land
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: of Israel that runs east to west between two long
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: ridges of pale limestone hills, opening eventually toward the coastal
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: plain where the Philistines lived and ruled. It is called
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: the Valley of Elah, named for the terebinth tree that
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: grew there. Ordinary terrain, a dry creek bed running through
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: the center, the kind of landscape that would appear in
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: no history book if not for what happened on its floor.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: On one of those ridges, the army of the Philistines
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: had gathered. On the other, the army of Israel stood
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: and watched them, and in the valley between them, something
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: was happening that had frozen an entire nation in place.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: To understand why, you need to understand who the Philistines were.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: They were not simply a neighboring people with a territorial dispute.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: They were one of the most formidable military powers in
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: the ancient Near East. At that time. Their metallurgy was advanced,
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: their weapons superior, their tactics experienced and organized. In most
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: direct comparisons, they held significant advantages over the Israelite army.
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: They had been a thorn in Israel's side for generations,
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: and they knew it, and they had brought with them something.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: The text introduces with deliberate, careful weight. His name was Goliath.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: He was from a city called Gath. Ancient tounts describe
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: him in terms that strain the imagination. The measurements recorded
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: in the manuscripts vary between different textual traditions, and scholars
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: have long discussed what to make of them. What every
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: tradition agrees on is this Goliath was in a category
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: of physical humanity that most people go their entire lives
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: without encountering. He was the kind of presence that when
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: you first saw him, something in your body responded before
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: your mind could form a coherent thought. His armor matched
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: his scale, a coat of bronze, mail of extraordinary weight,
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: leg armor of bronze, A javelin on his back with
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: a shaft the text compares to a weaver's beam, thick
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: and dense. The iron point of his spear was heavy
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: enough that most men would struggle simply to lift it,
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: And walking ahead of him a shield bearer whose entire
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: purpose was to carry Goliath's shield so that Goliath's hands
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: remained free. Every morning, for forty days, this man walked
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: down into the valley. Forty days. Let that number settle
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: before we move on. Forty mornings in a row, forty
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: times the sun rose over the ridge, and the army
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: of Israel assembled and looked down into the valley and
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: watched the same thing happen. Goliath walked out. He took
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: his position, and he spoke, why have you come out
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: to line up for battle? Am I not a philistine?
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: And you servants of Saul? Choose a man and let
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: him come down to me. If he is able to
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: fight with me and kill me, then we will be
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: your servants. But if I prevail against him and kill him,
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: then you shall be our servants and serve us. Then
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: the line that cut deepest of all, I defy the
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: armies of Israel. This day. Give me a man that
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: we may fight together. I defy the armies of Israel.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: Not a unit, not a regiment, the armies, the entire
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: military force of an entire nation defied every morning by
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: one man standing in a valley, and the challenge going
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: unanswered every single time. The text does not soften what
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: this produced. When Saul and all Israel heard these words,
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: they were dismayed and greatly afraid. Dismayed and greatly afraid.
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: The King of Israel, the army of Israel. Forty mornings
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: of the same fear, forty times of looking at the
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: same man and finding somewhere inside that there was simply
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: nothing equal to this moment. These were not cowards in
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: any simple sense. These were soldiers with real experience of battle,
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: some of them with real scars. But there is a
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: kind of threat that reaches past training and past experience,
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: and past everything a person has told themselves about who
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: they are. It finds something older and more honest underneath,
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: something that does not respond to encouragement or strategy. Goliath
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: was that kind of threat, and for forty days no
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: one moved. Now, while all of this was happening in
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: the valley, three of David's brothers were there, iliab abinadab Shamma,
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: the three who had stood before Samuel, the three who
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: had seemed so obviously qualified, was standing on that ridge,
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: with everyone else watching, not moving. David was not there.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: David had gone back to Bethlehem, back to his father's sheep,
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: back to the ordinary rhythm of his life. Between the
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: palace and the hillside. He moved without apparent urgency or impatience.
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: And then Jesse called him. Take food to your brothers.
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: He said, carry these provisions to their commander, see how
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: they are doing, and bring word back. An errand the
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: kind given to the youngest. David rose early. He left
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: the flock with a keeper. He set out toward the valley.
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: He arrived at the camp just as the army was
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: moving into position. The battle cry went up. The lines formed,
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: Ridge facing ridge, valley between them. David left his supplies
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: with the keeper and ran to the battle line to
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: find his brothers. He was still talking with them when
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: Goliath came out, right on schedule, same as every morning.
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: The champion from Gath stepped forward, shield bearer ahead of him,
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: the voice carrying across the whole valley floor, and the
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: Israelite soldiers when they saw him did what they had
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: done every morning for forty days. They drew back. They
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: were greatly afraid. The men near David were murmuring to
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: each other, not about how to fight him, about the
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: reward the king had promised to whoever would great riches
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: the king's daughter freedom from taxes for his father's house.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: The offer had been on the table for forty days.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: It had attracted no takers. David heard all of this,
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: and he asked a question, what will be done for
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: the man who kills this philistine and removes this reproach
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: from Israel? For who is this uncircumcised philistine that he
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: should defy the armies of the Living God? Who is
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: this philistine? Not? Look at the size of him? How
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: could anyone possibly stand against that? Not? Is there anyone
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: brave enough to try? But who is this man who
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: does not know God? Standing in a valley shouting at
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: an army whose God is the Living God? This single
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: question reveals everything about how David was seeing the situation
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: differently from every other man on that ridge. Every other
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: man looked at Goliath and then looked at himself. When
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: he measured himself against Goliath, he came up short. David
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: looked at Goliath and then looked at God God. When
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: he measured Goliath against the God of Israel, it was
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: Goliath who came up short. This is not a small distinction.
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: Do not let it sound simple. That kind of seeing
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: does not come automatically or easily. It comes from years
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: of learning to trust in the dark, from standing alone
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: with a predator in the night and discovering that God
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: was present in it, from long seasons of faithfulness in
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: obscure places where faith was the only resource available. David
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: could see clearly in this valley because he had learned
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: to see clearly on his hillside. His oldest brother Eliab
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: heard him talking, and his reaction is one of the
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: most recognizably human moments in the story. He was angry,
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: the particular anger of an older sibling watching the younger
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: one walk in and immediately say the thing that makes
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: everyone else look like they have been doing this wrong.
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: Why did you come down here? Who have you left
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: those few sheep with? I know your pride and the
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: insolence of your heart. You came to see the battle.
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: Pride and insolence. That is what eliabsaw, a cocky little
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: brother performing courage for an audience. David answered quietly, what
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: have I done now? Is there not a cause? Is
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: there not something worth saying? When an entire army stands
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: on a ridge doing nothing because a man in the
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: valley is shouting at their god. He turned away from
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: his brother. He kept asking the same question to anyone
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: who would listen. Words spread. Eventually it reached the king.
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: Saul sent for him. David stood before Saul, the man
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: who had loved him greatly, the man he had played
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: music for in the dark, and he said something that
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: nobody else in the camp had said in forty days.
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: Let no man's heart fail because of him. Your servant
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: will go and fight with this philistine. Saul looked at
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: him and said the only reasonable thing. You are not
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: able to go against this philistine, for you are a youth,
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: and he has been a man of war from his youth.
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: By every measurable standard, Saul was right. David was young,
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: untested in organized combat, a shepherd who played music. Goliath
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: had been a professional soldier longer than David had been alive.
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: But David did not argue about his own qualifications. He
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: argued about something else entirely. Your servant used to keep
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: his father's sheep, and when a lion or a bear
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: came and took a lamb from the flock, I went
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: after it and struck it down, and rescued the lamb
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: from its mouth. And when it rose against me, I
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: caught it and fought it at close range with my
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: own strength. Your servant has struck down both the lion
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: and the bear, and this philistine will be like one
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: of them, because he has defied the armies of the
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: Living God. The Lord who delivered me from the poor
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: of the lion and from the poor of the bear,
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: he will deliver me from the hand of this philistine.
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: He will deliver me. Not I can beat him, not
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: I have a strategy that will work. He will deliver me.
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: The same God who had been present on the hillside
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: in the dark, the same God who had shown up
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: when there was no one else to call on, that
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: God present here in this valley on this morning. Saul
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: was quiet for a moment. Then he said, go, and
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: the Lord be with you. The decision was made. A
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: shepherd boy with no armor and no military record would
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: walk into the valley to face the man who had
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: paralyzed an entire army for forty days. By every human measurement,
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: it was not a fair contest, and that was precisely
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: the point. Rest Now the valley is still. Both armies
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: are on their ridges. The morning has not yet come,
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: but when it does, everything changes. Sleep well, we will
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: be there when the sun rises. Chapter five, Five Stones.
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: The morning came. David rose before the light had fully
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: settled over the valley around him. The camp was waking slowly,
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: fires being lit, men pulling on gear, the low murmur
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: of voices. Still rough with sleep, David was already moving.
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: The night before, Saul had tried to dress him in armor,
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: his own bronze helmet placed on David's head, his own
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: coat of mail fastened around David's body, his own sword
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: put in David's hand, and David had taken a few
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: careful steps and stopped. The equipment was too heavy, too unfamiliar,
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: designed for a different body and a different way of fighting.
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: He had never trained in this, He had no instinct
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: for how to use it in a real moment of crisis.
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: I cannot walk in these, he said to Saul. I
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: have not tested them, and he took them off. This
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: moment deserves more attention than it usually gets. There would
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: have been real pressure to wear the King's armor, enormous pressure.
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: Saul was offering his own equipment his own protection, his
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: personal endorsement. To refuse it was to walk into the
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: valley with nothing between David and Goliath's spear but his
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: own skill and his own God. David refused it anyway
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: because he understood something that many people learn only after
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: painful experience. The tools that work for someone else may
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: not be the tools for you. The strategy that brought
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: another person through their crisis may be exactly the wrong
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: strategy for yours. And going into the most important moment
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: of your life wearing equipment you have never used is
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: not safety. It is a different kind of danger. Knew
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: how he fought, He had learned it over years of
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: real encounters in real situations. He used a sling. He
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: was accurate, and he was fast, and he understood the
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: geometry of distance and timing in a way that came
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: from thousands of repetitions in the open field. That was
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: what had been placed in his hands. That was what
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: God had spent years preparing in him. So he went
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: to the valley as himself, no armor, no sword, his
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: shepherd's staff in one hand, his leather pouch over one shoulder,
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: his sling at his side. He stopped at the creek
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: bed running through the valley floor. He bent down and
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: looked at the stones, smooth ones worn by moving water
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: into the rounded shape a sling requires to fly true.
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: He picked several up and felt their weight, their balance,
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: their surface against his palm. He chose five. Five stones.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: Now I want to stay here for a moment, because
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: this detail has prompted more reflection than almost anything else
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: in the story, and I think it is worth our time.
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: If David's trust was complete, if he genuinely believed God
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: would deliver him, why five? If one is all God needed,
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: why prepare for more? Different readers have found different answers here.
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: Some suggest the other four were kept in case Goliath's
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: brothers came to avenge him. Others read it as the
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: practical instinct of a trained fighter who knows that even
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: the best attempt can go wrong, and that in a
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: real encounter you want options. But here is what I believe,
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: and this is my own reading of it, shaped by
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: everything we have seen of David so far. David's faith
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: was never the passive kind. It was never the kind
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: that says, if God wants this to happen, it will happen.
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: So I will simply wait and do nothing that is
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: not faith, that is something else wearing faith clothes. David's
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: faith was the kind that trusted God completely and then
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: did the work that said he will deliver me, And
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: then bent down and chose five smooth stones, because five
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: was what a trained and serious man in that moment
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: would choose. That walked into a valley in the name
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: of the Lord, and also brought every skill that years
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: of preparation had developed. He chose five stones not because
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: he doubted the outcome, but because he understood that God
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: tends to work through prepared people. That the faith which
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: moves mountains is not the faith that stands back and
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: waits for the mountain to move by itself. It is
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: the faith that picks up what is available and acts
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: because it believes the God behind it is faithful. He
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: put the stones in his pouch and walked toward the valley.
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: Goliath saw him coming from a distance, and Goliath was offended.
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: As David drew closer, the giant looked at him, this
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: young man, with no armor, no sword, no military bearing whatsoever.
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: Something in Goliath curled with contempt. Am I a dog
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: that you come to me with sticks? He saw the
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: shepherd's staff and used it as an insult. They sent
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: a boy with a stick. This is the best Israel
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: can offer. Goliath cursed David by his gods. He called
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: on every power at his disposal, and then he made
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: his declaration. Come to me, and I will give your
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: of the field. Not just defeat, not just death obliteration.
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: Your body will not be buried. Your name will not
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: outlast this day. You will be consumed and scattered and gone.
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: David listened to all of it, and then he spoke,
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: you come to me with a sword, with a spear,
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: and with a javelin. But I come to you in
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day,
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: will strike you and take your head from you. And
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: this day I will give the bodies of the Philistine
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: army to the birds of the air and the wild
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: that there is a God in Israel. Then all this
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: assembly will know that the Lord does not save with
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: sword and spear for the battle is the Lord's, and
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: he will give you into our hands. Read that slowly
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: you come to me with a sword, a spear, and
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: a javelin. David named Goliath's weapons honestly, he did not
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: pretend they were not there. He looked at the sword
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: and the spear and the javelin, and he acknowledged each one.
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: But I come to you in the name of the
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: Lord of Hosts, not a weapon, a name, the name
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: of the god who commanded armies no human eye could see,
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: whose authority extended over everything that exist. That is what
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: David carried into the valley. And then the line that
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: reveals why he was there at all, that all the
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: earth may know that there is a God in Israel,
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: not for personal glory, not to prove something about himself,
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: not even primarily for the military victory of Israel's army,
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: so that something true about God would be made visible
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: on the floor of this ordinary valley, so that the
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: watching world would see something it could not explain by
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: the strength of the man it was watching. The battle
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: is the Lord's, then David ran. The text says this specifically,
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: and I think it matters that it does. He did
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: not advance with measured composure. He ran toward Goliath with
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: everything in him, toward the spear and the contempt and
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: the forty days of unanswered challenge, running the way a
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: person runs when they have stopped calculating and started trusting.
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: He reached into his pouch, His fingers closed around one
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: of the five smooth stones. He fitted it into the sling.
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: The leather began to move, slowly at first, then faster,
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: the stone gathering speed with every rotation. He released it.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: The stone flew in a fraction of a second, it
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: found what it was aimed at. It struck Goliath in
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: the forehead, and the giant fell forward, on his face
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: to the ground. The valley was silent. On one ridge,
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: the Philistine army stood and stared. On the other, the
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: army of Israel stood and stared. Every eye in that
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: valley fixed on the same impossible thing. The champion from Gath,
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: face down in the dirt, felled by a stone from
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: the sling of a shepherd boy who had run toward him.
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: David ran to Goliath. He drew the giant's own sword
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: from its sheath. He had no sword of his own.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: He used Goliath's and the Philistines ran not in orderly
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: retreat in panic. The sight of their champion on the
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: ground broke something in them that armor and training and
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: numbers could not hold together. They turned and they fled
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: toward their own cities and the army of Israel. The
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: men who had stood on that ridge for forty days,
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: unable to move, rose up with a shout and pursued them.
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: What had changed not the enemy's numbers, not their weapons,
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: not the military balance between the two sides. One thing
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: these men had witnessed, something they could not explain by
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: human strength alone. And that one thing had restored what
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: forty days of fear had been slowly extinguishing, a faith,
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: a believing, the living knowledge that the God of Israel
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: was real and present and active. On this particular morning,
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: one act of courage in the name of God in
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: the valley between two armies had released the courage of
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: an entire nation. Now I want to bring this close
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: to wherever you are to night, because Goliath is not
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: only an ancient story. Goliath is the thing you are
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: facing right now that seems too large for you, the
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: situation that has been standing in your valley morning after morning,
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: delivering its verdict about what is possible and what is not,
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: the voice that has been saying for days or months
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: or years that the gap is too wide, that what
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: you have is not equal to what is required, that
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: some things simply do not change. The question David's story
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: is asking to night is not whether you are strong
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: enough to face it. The question is what you are
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: looking at when you look at it. Are you measuring
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: your giant against yourself? Or are you measuring your giant
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: against the God who has been with you in every
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: hard and dark place you have ever passed through. David
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: was not stronger than Goliath. He was not more experienced.
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: He did not have better weapons. He had one thing
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: that Goliath did not. Have a history with a God
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: who showed up, the lion on the hill side, the
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: bear in the field, the accumulated evidence built across years
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: of ordinary faithfulness in places nobody was watching, that when
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: he walked towards something impossible in the presence of God,
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: he did not walk alone. That history was his real armor,
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: not the bronze helmet s soul had tried to put
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: on his head, the lived tested personal knowledge that God
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: was present and faithful and could be trusted in the
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: valley as surely as he had been trusted on the
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: hill side. Five smooth stones, one sling, a running shepherd boy,
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: and he only needed one. He only ever needed one.
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: Rest now, beloved. The giant is down, the valley is quiet,
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: the army is moving, and the enemy is running. And
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: somewhere in the morning sun a shepherd boy is standing
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: with the evidence of what God can do still in
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: his hand. Sleep well. The battle that seems impossible to
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: night is not beyond the God who sees you in
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: your valley. It never was. Chapter six, The Cost of Greatness.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: There is a kind of pain that comes not from failure,
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: but from success, not the pain of losing, the pain
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: of winning, and discovering that the light attracts things the
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: darkness never did. David learned this young, and he learned
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: it fast. The day he returned from the Valley of Elah,
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: everything was different. The army had chased the Philistines across
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: the plain and returned victorious. The crisis was over, the
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: champion was dead, and the name moving through the camp,
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: through the towns, through the whole country the army passed
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: on its way home, was the same name everywhere. David
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: the women came out to meet the returning soldiers. This
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: was the tradition when the army came home from battle,
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: the women came out with singing and dancing and joy
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: that gave public shape to what the whole community felt.
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: The men were home, the enemy had been turned back,
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: life could continue, and as they celebrated, they composed a song,
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: the way people in oral cultures always marked important events
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: in rhythm and melody and words simple enough to remember
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: and repeat. The song went like this, Saul has struck
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: down his thousands, and David his ten thousands. It was celebration,
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: pure and simple. The women were not trying to wound
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: any one. They were singing what their hearts felt in
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: the moment, honoring both their king and the young hero
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: who had stood alone in the valley. But Saul heard it,
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: and something in him shifted in a way that would
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: never fully shift back. The text describes it with painful precision.
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: Saul was very angry. The saying displeased him, and he said,
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: they have ascribed to David ten thousands, and to me
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: they have ascribed only thousands. What more can he have
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: but the kingdom? What more can he have but the kingdom.
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: That sentence is not simply wounded pride. It is a
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: recognition somewhere beneath the anger, underneath the sting of the comparison,
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: there was a knowing, the kind that comes when something
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: you have been managing not to see steps directly in
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: front of you and refuses to move. Samuel had spoken
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: this to him before, The kingdom will be taken from
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: you and given to a man after God's own heart.
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: Saul had been living with that sentence for years, and now,
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: watching the crowd sing about David while riding through the
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: same streets, the fear that had lived in him in
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: the abstract finally had a specific face. From that day,
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: the text says, Saul kept a jealous eye on David.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: The next day, the distressing spirit came upon Saul again.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: David was there, playing his harp the way he always had,
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: the music that had always calmed the darkness filling the room,
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: the scene that had become a kind of routine. But
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: this time Saul had a spear in his hand. He
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: threw it. He threw it a second time. David moved
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: aside both times, and the text makes clear this was
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: not a single uncontrolled moment. That Saul immediately regretted. He
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: threw the spear. When it missed, he threw it again.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: David was afraid, of course. He was the man who
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: had loved him greatly, the man he had served faithfully,
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: the man he had played music for night after night
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: to ease of suffering. David had never caused, had just
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: tried to kill him twice. Saul moved David out of
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: close service and gave him a military command instead. On
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: its surface, it looked like promotion. David became commander over
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: a thousand men. In Saul's thinking, it may have been
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: something else. A man sent to enough battles can be
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: killed by the enemy without any one having to take
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: responsibility for his death. But David was successful in everything.
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: He undertook. Every campaign Saul sent him into he came
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: back from, and every return made him more beloved by
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: the people. And the more beloved he became, the larger.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: Saul's fear grew into something it had not been before.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: Into this increasingly dangerous situation came a person whose presence
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: in David's life was like a rope thrown to some
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: one in deep water. Jonathan Jonathan was Saul's son, the
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: crown prince, the man who, by every right of succession
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: and every logic of self interest, should have seen David
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: as a threat, as the person standing between him and
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: the inheritance that was supposed to be his. And yet
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David,
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. This friendship
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: is one of the genuinely remarkable things in the entire story,
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: not because it was easy or convenient, because it was chosen.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: Jonathan understood who David was. He had been present for everything.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: He could see where the story was heading, and what
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: it meant for his own future. He chose David anyway.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: He took off his own robe, the robe of a
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: crown prince, and gave it to David. He gave him
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: his armor, his sword, his bow, his belt. These were
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: not simply generous gifts. They were acts of profound symbolic weight.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: A crown prince giving his garments and his weapons to
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: another man was saying something without words, something like I
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: see what God has chosen. Whatever this costs me, I
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: choose it too. In a palace full of people whose
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: loyalty lasted only as long as it cost them nothing.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: Jonathan stood out like a lamp in a dark room.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: But Jonathan could not protect David from everything. Saul's behavior
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: became increasingly unpredictable. There were periods of warmth when he
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: seemed almost like his earlier self, and then the darkness
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: would return and the spear would be in his hand again.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: David navigated this carefully. He did not retaliate. He did
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: not use his military popularity to build opposition. He served
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: faithfully in every role he was given. It was not enough.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: One night, Saul sent men to watch David's house and
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: kill him. At dawn, Mikhail, David's wife, and Saul's own
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: daughter warned him. She helped him escape through a window
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: in the dark. David ran. He went first to Samuel.
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: He told the man who had anointed him everything that
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: had happened. He stayed for a time in safety, but
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: Saul kept coming. David found Jonathan, and they spoke the
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: truth to each other in a way that the situation
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: had made rare. David said what he already knew, but
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: needed someone else to confirm. There is but a step
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: between me and death. Jonathan devised a plan to test
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: his father. One final time, the test confirmed the worst.
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: At a meal, when Jonathan spoke in David's defense, Saul
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: irrupted with rage. He turned on his own son with
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: words that burned. Then he raised his spear at Jonathan,
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: his own son. Jonathan went out from the table in
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: grief and anger. He went to the field where David
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: was hiding and gave the signal they had arranged. The
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: moment it came, both of them understood what it meant.
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: David could not come back. It was over. They held
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: each other in the field, and the text says David
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: wept the most, which is one of those small, unbearably
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: human details that makes the scene impossible to read from
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: a distance. Two young men standing in a field, understanding
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: that the world they had known was about to separate them,
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: that the friendship which had been the safest thing in
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: an increasingly dangerous year was about to become something they
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: would carry at a distance, without knowing when or whether
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: it would be whole again. Then David left. What followed
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: was years long, years of caves and wilderness strongholds and
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: constant movement to stay ahead of Saul's pursuit. David gathered
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: around him the people who were in circumstances something like
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: his own. Men in debt, men who were distressed and discontented,
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: the overlooked, and the desperate. Four hundred of them at first,
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: eventually six hundred. These were not the men a general
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: would have chosen. They were the people that ordinary life
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: had discarded, and David became their leader. I want to
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: stay with this for a moment, because it is easy
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: to pass over it on the way to the battles
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: and the throne. David, the anointed King of Israel, spent
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: years in caves and wilderness camps with people the world
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: had given up on. He fed them, and led them,
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: and fought for them. He took men who had been
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: called failures and turned them over time into some of
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: the most loyal and capable soldiers. The ancient world had
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: seen what history would call David's Mighty Men. Began here
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: as outcasts, following a fugitive through country that wanted to
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: kill them all. This did not happen despite David's wilderness years.
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: It happened because of them. A man who has known
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: the cave understands the people in caves. A man who
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: has been given up on understands what it costs to
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: be seen clearly by some one who has every reason
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: not to bother that. There were two moments during these
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: years that revealed the deepest thing about the man David
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: was becoming. Twice he had souled completely within his reach.
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: The first time was in a cave at Hngeddi, when
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: Saul entered the very cave where David and his men
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: were hiding. David crept close enough to cut off the
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: corner of Saul's robe, without Saul knowing he was there.
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: His men urged him, this is the moment, do it.
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: David refused. He would not lift his hand against the
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: one who had been anointed by God, even now, even here.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: The second time was in the wilderness of Ziff. David
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: slipped into Saul's sleeping camp at night, stood over the king,
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: took the spear from beside his head and the water
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: jug that was there, and walked back out. His companion
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: whispered urgently, let me strike him one blow. He will
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: never threaten you again. David said no, not from fear,
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: not from lack of opportunity, but from an understanding of
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: something that most people who desperately want power never grasp.
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: He had been promised the throne, and a promise from
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: God does not require you to seize by force what
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: God has said he will give. To take the kingdom
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: through violence would have made him the kind of king
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: he did not want to be, would have introduced into
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: Israel a way of transferring power that would haunt the
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: nation for generations. Would have meant arriving at the throne
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: with something on his hands that he could not wash off.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: David wanted to arrive with clean hands. This is, I believe,
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: the most underappreciated quality of David during the wilderness years.
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: Not the courage of the valley, as extraordinary as that was,
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: not the skill with the sling, but this, the long, grinding,
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: unglamorous discipline of trusting God's timing. When he had every
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: practical opportunity and arguably every justification, to take matters into
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: his own hands, he waited, He kept his hands clean.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: He led his community of broken people through the wilderness.
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: He mourned the friend he missed, he longed for the
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: life he had been promised and had not yet received.
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: And in the cave, in the dark, in the hours
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: between the running and the leading and the watching, he
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: wrote the cave was not only a hiding place. It
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: was a sanctuary, and from that sanctuary, in the darkness
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: and the fear and the longing and the occasional overwhelming
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: gratitude for still being alive, he poured out his heart
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: to God in words that would outlast everything else about him.
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: The cost of greatness, it turns out, is not only
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: the obvious things, not only the battles and the physical
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: hardship and the years of not having what was promised.
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: It is the invisible things, the years of being misunderstood,
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: the loneliness of leading people through something you cannot yet
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: see the end of yourself, the grief of loving someone
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: as David loved Saul, and watching that person choose destruction
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: again and again when the way back was still open.
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: It is the cost of becoming without short cuts and
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: without a visible time line, the person the promise always
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: said you would be. David paid that cost in full. Rest.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: Now the wilderness is long. The nights in the cave
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: are cold, but somewhere in that darkness a fire is burning,
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: and around it a man with a harp is playing
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: songs that will still be finding people in their own
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: dark places. Three thousand years from to night sleep well,
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: the songs are already being written. Chapter seven, Psalms from
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: the Cave. There is a kind of prayer that only
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: gets written in the dark. Not the composed prayer of
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: some one standing in a place of safety and calling
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: it faith. Not the confident declaration of a person whose
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: circumstances are comfortable enough that trust comes without much cost.
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: The other kind, the barely holding together kind, the kind
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: that comes from a person who has run out of
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: other options and finds themselves in a cave, literally or otherwise,
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: with enemies outside and questions inside, and nothing between them
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: and God but the raw truth of where they actually are.
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: These are the prayers that became the psalms. Many of
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: David's most enduring poems are connected in the ancient tradition,
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: to the wilderness years, to the caves and the strongholds,
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: and the long nights of uncertainty and running and not
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: knowing how long any of it would last. We cannot
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: always establish with certainty exactly when or where a particular
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: psalm was written, but the quality of honesty in them,
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: the texture of what they carry, bears the unmistakable mark
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: of someone who wrote from real and difficult places, not
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: from a comfortable distance from inside. And this I believe
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: is precisely why they still reach people. When you are
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: in your own dark place, you do not need the
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: words of someone who has never been there. You need
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: the words of someone who sat in the same darkness
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: and found that God was in it too. David was
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: that person. One psalm carries an ancient inscription that places
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: it directly in this season of his life, Psalm one
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: hundred and forty two. The heading reads a contemplation of
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: David a prayer when he was in the cave, the
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: cave the actual cave, not as metaphor as location, and
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: it begins like this, I cry out to the Lord
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: with my voice, with my voice to the Lord, I
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: make my supplication. I pour out my complaint before him.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: I declare before him my trouble. I pour out my complaint.
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: He is not composing himself before he prays. He is
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: not reaching for the correct religious language or presenting the
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: acceptable version of his interior life. He is pouring the
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: images of something liquid being emptied from a vessel that
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: has been holding it too long. Everything that is in
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: him is going toward God. The fear, the exhaustion, the longing,
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: the grief of running and hiding and leading people through
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: country that is trying to kill them, all, all of
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: it released. Then he says something that stops me every time.
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then you knew
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: my path when my spirit was overwhelmed. He does not
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: reframe the overwhelm before he names it. He does not
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: rush toward the lesson or find the silver lining before
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: he has sat with the darkness long enough to be
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: fully honest about it. He says it, plainly and directly,
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: My spirit was overwhelmed. This is what was true. And
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: then underneath that one more thing. You knew my path.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: Not you showed me my path, Not you cleared my path.
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: You knew it even when I could not see it.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: Even when the darkness was complete and my spirit was
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: overwhelmed and I could not feel your presence anywhere near me,
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: you already knew where I was going. This is the
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: faith that does not require resolution before it can speak.
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: The faith that says, I do not understand what is happening.
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: I cannot feel the ground beneath me. And also underneath
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: all of that, you have not lost track of me.
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: I am still within your knowing even here The psalm
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: ends with a cry for deliverance and a promise of
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: praise when it comes, but it does not clean itself
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: up before it gets there. It stays in the cave
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: long enough to be completely true. Now I want to
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: take you to a psalm that most people have heard
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: so many times they may have stopped actually hearing it,
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: Psalm twenty three. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: not want. These words have been spoken at funerals and
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: weddings and bedsides, and in the quiet of ten thousand
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: ordinary knights, by people who needed something true to hold.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: They are among the most widely recognized words in the
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: history of human language. But I want to ask you
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: to hear them to night as what they may have
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: originally been, not a polished religious sentiment composed in tranquility,
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: but a declaration made by a man who knew from
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: actual experience what the word shepherd meant. David spent years
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: watching sheep. He knew the work of it from the inside,
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: the patience, the vigilance, the cost of caring for something
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: helpless through terrain that wanted to kill it. He knew
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: what it meant to be responsible for a life that
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: could not protect itself. And so when he wrote the
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: Lord is my Shepherd, many have long understood him to
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: be drawing on those years of lived experience, making a
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: claim rooted not in abstract theology, but in something he
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: had actually done and actually seen. He makes me lie
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: down in green pastures. Those who have spent time with
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: sheep will often note that sheep do not rest when
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: they are afraid. They do not settle when something is
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: threatening them. The flock lying down in peace is the
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: flock whose shepherd has done the work of creating conditions
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: safe enough for rest to be possible. He makes me
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: lie down, present, tense, not some day when things improve. Now,
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: even here, even in the wilderness years, even in the cave,
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: there is something in the care of God that makes
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: rest possible for the one who trusts him. He leads
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: me beside still waters, not the loudest or most dramatic source,
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: Not the water that impresses from a distance, the still water,
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: the quiet place, the water that actually reaches the thirsty
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: ones without frightening them in the process. He restores my soul.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: The Hebrew word carries the sense of bringing something back
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: to where it was before it became depleted. The soul
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: that has been drained by running and hiding and leading
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: and grieving. God brings it back, not part way back. YEA,
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: I will fear no evil. David knew valleys. He had
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: stood in one and watched a giant fall. He had
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: walked through others, less famous, but no less real, valleys
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: of despair and confusion and genuine danger, And in each
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: one he had found the same thing. The Shepherd was there,
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: not at the entrance, promising to meet him at the exit,
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: not watching from the ridge above, there in the valley,
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: walking through it alongside, for you are with me, not
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: for I am strong, not for I have figured out
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: how to survive this, for you are with me. The
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: source of the courage is not inside, David. It is relational.
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: It is the presence of someone in the valley alongside
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: you that changes what the valley means. Your rod and
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: your staff they comfort me. The rod for protection, driving
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: away what would harm the flock. The staff for guiding
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: and for rescuing the one that had fallen into a
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: dangerous place. Comfort comes from tools of active care, not
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: from the absence of danger, but from the presence of
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: someone equipped and willing to deal with whatever the danger
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: turns out to be. You prepare a table before me
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: in the presence of my enemies, not after the enemies
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: are gone, not once the wilderness is over and the
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: safe place has been reached, In the presence of my enemies,
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: while the threat still exists. The feast is set, and
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: the abundance is given before the resolution arrives. This is
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: the God David had come to know in the silence,
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: the one who fed you in the desert, gave you
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: rest in the cave, set a table in the valley
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: while the enemy was still visible on the ridge above.
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: of my life, all the days, not the good ones, only,
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: not the days after the wilderness is over. All of them,
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: the cave days and the running days, and the grieving days,
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: and the days when everything felt lost, and the days
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: when everything was found again, all of them. David believed
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: this not because his life had been easy. He believed
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: it because he had tested it against the lion, against
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: the giant in the cave, with enemies outside the entrance,
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: every time he had needed it. Goodness and mercy had
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: found him, not always in the form he expected, not
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: always looking like comfort or rescue or relief. Sometimes goodness
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: had looked like a harder path that built something the
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: easier path never could have. Sometimes mercy had looked like
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: a door closing on something he wanted that would have
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: destroyed him if he had gotten it. But it was
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: always there, following him every day. Now, let me take
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: you to one more psalm from this period, Psalm twenty seven.
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: The Lord is my Light and my salvation. Whom shall
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life.
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: Of whom shall I be afraid? Whom shall I fear?
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: Of whom shall I be afraid? David is asking the
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: question and then answering it. He is, in the truest sense,
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: preaching to himself, taking the fear that is genuinely present
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: and acknowledging it directly, and then bringing it into the
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: presence of what he knows about God, and letting what
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: he knows about God be larger than the fear. Yes,
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: there are people who want to kill me. Yes there
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: is a king with an army and years of pursuit
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: already behind him. Yes, the danger is real, and also
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: the Lord is my light. The Lord is my salvation.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: The Lord is the strength of my life, given that
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: of whom exactly am I afraid. This is not the
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: suppression of fear. It is the discipline of bringing fear
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: into the presence of something larger, of refusing to let
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: the fear have the last word when there is another
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: word available. A few verses later, the psalm turns honest
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: in a different way. When my father and my mother
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: forsake me, then the Lord will take care of me.
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: Father and mother the most foundational of all human relationships.
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: Even if they fail, even if every human support disappears completely,
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: then the Lord will take care of me. This is
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: not triumphalism. This is not the bright, uncomplicated faith of
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: some one who has never suffered. This is the hard
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: one knowing of a man who has lost a great
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: deal and discovered that what remained was sufficient, painful, genuinely mourned,
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: and sufficient. Then the so arm closes with a word.
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: David was clearly speaking to himself as much as to
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: anyone who would one day read it. Wait on the Lord,
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart. Wait,
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: I say on the Lord, The word appears twice, not
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: by accident and not by repetition, for its own sake,
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: because waiting, real waiting, the kind that holds on without
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: a timeline or a guaranteed outcome, is among the hardest
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: things a human being can be asked to do. And
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: David knew it, he was doing it himself, and so
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: he said it twice. Wait he shall strengthen your heart.
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: Not wait because the waiting will end soon. Not wait
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: because you will get what you are waiting for in
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: the exact form you expect. Wait because the one you
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: are waiting for is faithful, because his strength is available
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: inside the waiting itself. Because the waiting is not empty,
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: but full of something that cannot be received any other way.
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: David wrote these words in a cave, running from a
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: king who wanted him dead, and you are hearing them
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: tonight because they were true, not just true for David,
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: true in the way that only things rooted in the
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: nature of God can be true across every culture and
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: every century, and every variation of human suffering that history
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: has produced. The Lord is your shepherd. He makes you
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: lie down, he leads you beside still waters. He restores
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: your soul even tonight, Even in whatever cave you find
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: yourself in, even in whatever valley you are not sure
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: you can cross, even here, he is with you. Let
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: that be the thing you carry into sleep to night.
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: Not the resolution of your problems, not the answer to
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: your questions, not the end of your wilderness. Just this,
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: He knows your path, even when your spirit is overwhelmed,
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: even when you cannot see where you are going, He knows,
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: and he is with you in the valley at the table,
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: through the darkness, to the very end of your days.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: Goodness and mercy shall follow you, all of them, every
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: last one. Rest now beloved. The cave is quiet, the
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: harp has stilled. The man who wrote these songs has
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: closed his eyes. And outside the stars are out over
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: the wilderness of Judah, and somewhere, just beyond what any
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: eye can see, a shepherd is keeping watch. Sleep well,
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: You are not alone in your darkness. You never were.
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: Chapter eight, The Throne. There is a moment in every
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: long story when the waiting finally ends, not with trumpets
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: or ceremony or the whole world stopping to take notice.
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: More often, it ends the way a long night ends, gradually,
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: the darkness thinning at the edges, the first faint suggestion
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: of light appearing somewhere on the horizon before most people
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: are awake to see it. For David, the ending of
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: the long wait began with a death he had not
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: caused and had not sought. Saul died on Mount Gilboa.
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: The Philistines had gathered a massive force and pressed hard
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: against Israel. The battle went badly from the start. Saul's
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: sons fell in the fighting, Jonathan among them. The archers
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: found Saul and wounded him severely, and Saul, unwilling to
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: be captured and humiliated by the enemy, fell on his
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: own sword. The king of Israel died on a mountain,
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: with his sons around him and his army broken and running.
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: When the news reached David, his response was not what
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: many might have expected. He did not celebrate, He did
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: not express relief. He did not say, finally, the man
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: who tried to kill me for years is gone, and
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: now what was promised can begin. He wept, he tore
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: his clothes, he fasted, he mourned, and he composed a
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: lament for Saul and for Jonathan that the text preserves
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: in full, not because it was diplomatically useful, but because
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: it was true. He called Saul beloved and pleasant. He
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: mourned Saul and Jonathan together, noting that they were inseparable
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: in life and in death. He wept over Jonathan with
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: words that have become some of the most quoted expressions
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: of grief in all of ancient literature. And he commanded
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: that this lament be taught to the people of Judah.
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: He did not keep his mourning private. He wanted the
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: nation to grieve well. This is the man who became king,
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: not hardened into coldness by years of being hunted, not
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: sharpened into ruthlessness by years of surviving, but a man
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: who could still weep for the person who had tried
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: to kill him, who could still honor the king who
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: had become his enemy, who understood that how you receive
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: what you have waited for says as much about you
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: as the waiting itself did. David was anointed king over
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: the House of Judah in a city called Hebron. He
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: was thirty years old. Thirty years old. He had been
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: anointed first as a boy in Bethlehem. Oil poured over
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: him by a prophet while his family watched in a
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: room they had not thought to invite him into He
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 1: had been promised something then that had taken more than
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: a decade to become visible. Years of service and betrayal,
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: and running and caves and wilderness camps, and the long
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: discipline of trusting without a time line, And now in Hebron,
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: the promise was beginning to take its visible shape, but
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: not all at once. After Saul's death there was a
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: period of division. One of Saul's surviving sons was established
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: as king over the northern tribes, and for some years
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: Israel was a house to de Judah followed David. The
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: north held to the remnant of Saul's house. David did
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: not attack them. He governed faithfully. In Hebron, he grew stronger,
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: the other side grew weaker, and through a series of
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: events involving the ambitions and betrayals of those around the
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: rival house, the opposition to David's kingship collapsed. The elders
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: of all the tribes of Israel came to Hebron. They
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: reminded David of what had always been true. You were
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: the one who led us even when Saul was king.
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: The Lord said to you, you shall shepherd my people
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: Israel and be ruler over Israel, and they anointed him
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: king over all Israel. He was thirty seven years old.
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: The second anointing, the full anointing, the one that matched
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: what Samuel had spoken in a quiet room in Bethlehem
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: over a shepherd boy who had walked in from the fields.
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: Twenty years between the promise and its fulfillment, not months
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: twenty years. David needed a capital, a city belonging to
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: no single tribe, one that could serve as the center
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: of a united nation. Jerusalem. It sat on a ridge
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: in the hill country, held for generations by a people
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: called the Jebusites, who considered it impregnable. When David brought
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: his forces there, the defenders mocked him from the walls.
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: We are so secure here that our weakest defenders are
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: enough to stop you. They were wrong. David took the
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: city through a strategy the defenders had not anticipated. Jerusalem fell.
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: David called it the City of David. He built there,
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: he fortified it, He established it as the heart of
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: the kingdom. And then he did something that revealed what
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: mattered most to him. He went to bring the Ark
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: of the Covenant to Jerusalem. The ark was the most
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: sacred object in Israel, the golden chest that represented the
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: presence of God dwelling among his people. It had been
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: in the house of a private family for decades, largely
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: neglected during the troubled years of Saul's reign. David had
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: not forgotten it. He assembled a great company and set
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: out to bring the Ark home. The procession moved with
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: music and celebration, with singing and instruments, with the kind
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: of joyful noise that David understood in his bones. There
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: was a difficult and sobering moment along the way when
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: a man reached out to steady the ark and died
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: for it, and the procession halted, and David was afraid
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: and grieved and confused by what had happened. He left
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: the Ark in the care of a household along the
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: route and returned to Jerusalem without it. For three months,
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: the ark remained there, and the household that cared for
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: it was blessed in every visible way. David heard this,
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: and after three months he went back for the ark.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: This time, the procession moved with both care and overwhelming joy.
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: Sacrifice offered at intervals along the way, and as the
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: ark came into Jerusalem, as the city opened to receive
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: what had been absent from its proper place for so long,
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: David did something that startled at least one person watching.
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: He danced, not the restrained movement appropriate for a king
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: on formal display. He shed his royal robes and wore
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: only a simple linen garment, and he leaped and danced
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: before the Lord in the middle of the street, in
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: full view of everyone, with no concern whatsoever for what
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: it looked like or what anyone thought of it. His wife, Michal,
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: watched from a window, and the text says she despised
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: him in her heart. When David came home, she confronted
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: him with cold sarcasm. How glorious was the King of
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: Israel to day, she said, uncovering himself in front of
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: the servants like a common man. David's answer was direct
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: and complete. It was before the Lord who chose me,
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: rather than your father or any one from his house.
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: It was before the Lord that I danced, and I
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: will be even more undignified than this, and I will
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: be humble in my own sight, before the Lord, not
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: before the crowd, not for the approval of observers, for
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: the audience that had always mattered most to David, the
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: only audience that had been present on the hillside when
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: nobody else was watching. He was not performing, he was worshiping,
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: and he was not embarrassed and not ashamed, and if anything,
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: he was willing to go further. This is who David was,
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: at the center of his power, at the peak of
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: his success. Still the shepherd boy who played music to
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: the stars, Still the person whose deepest instinct was not
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: to perform for the crowd, but to pour himself out
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: before God without calculation. The Ark was home, the kingdom
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: was established, and God made David a promise. Through the
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: prophet Nathan. God spoke words that went far beyond anything
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: David had imagined when he first thought about legacy. David
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: wanted to build God a house, a templar, a worthy
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: and permanent dwelling place for the Ark and for the
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: presence of God among his people. God said, you will
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: not build me a house, but I will build you one.
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: Not a structure, a dynasty, a lineage, a throne that
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: would endure not for a generation, but in the language
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: of the promise, for ever, your house and your kingdom
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: shall be established, for ever before you. Your throne shall
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: be established forever. Now. I want to stay with this
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: promise for a moment, because it reaches beyond itself in ways.
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: The rest of the Bible spends centuries exploring the promise
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: of a forever throne. A forever king from the line
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: of David was understood by later generations in Israel as
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: pointing towards something that no ordinary king could finally fulfill.
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: The writers of the New Testament saw in this promise
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: the trajectory that led to a particular descendant of David,
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: born in Bethlehem, of all places, the same small overlooked
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: town where a shepherd boy had once sat under the
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: stars and learned to talk to God in the dark.
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: Christians have understood for two thousand years that in him
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: the promise finds its deepest fulfillment, the son of David,
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: in whom the forever throne becomes not a political reality,
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: but something larger and more enduring than any earthly kingdom
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: could hold. David could not see all of this from
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: where he stood, but he prayed toward it, he sang
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: toward it, he built toward it with everything he had,
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: understanding that what he was building was larger than himself,
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: and that the final piece of it would be placed
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: by hands that were not his. He sat in his
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: palace after Nathan had spoken, and he went in and
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: sat before the Lord, not to ask for more, not
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: to petition or negotiate, not to present his plans and
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: request assistance with them, just to sit in the presence
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: of the God who had found him on a hillside,
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: who had carried him through the valley, who had been
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: present in the cave, who had waited with him through
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: the long years, and had given him at last everything
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: he had promised. And he said, who am i, o,
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: Lord God? And what is my house? That you have
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: brought me this far? Who am I after everything? After
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: the giant and the palace, and the wilderness, and the throne,
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 1: and the ark dancing in the street, and the promise
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: of forever? Who am I that you have brought me
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: this far? The shepherd boy was still in there, the
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: youngest son, the one nobody thought to invite inside, still
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: present inside, the King, still marveling, still knowing with a
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: knowledge that power had not yet eroded, that none of
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: this was earn and all of it was grace. This
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: is the heart God called after his own, not the
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: courage alone, not the military genius, not even the music,
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: but this, the capacity to sit in the middle of
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: extraordinary blessing and still feel the wonder of it, still
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: feel the smallness of self in the presence of divine generosity,
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: still know clearly and honestly that the story did not
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: begin with David and would not end with him, and
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: that his part in it was gift, not achievement. The
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: throne was established, the promise was given, the kingdom was
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: at peace. Rest Now Jerusalem is quiet to night. Somewhere
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: in the palace, a harp leans against a wall, and
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: a man who was once a shepherd boy is sitting
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: before his God in the silence, grateful, overwhelmed, and still,
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: after everything, wondering how he got here. Sleep well. The
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: best of the story has been extraordinary. But the chapter
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 1: just ahead is the one David himself would have chosen
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: to leave unwritten. Chapter nine, the Darkest Night. Every great
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: life contains a chapter the person living it wishes had
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: never been written. Not the chapter of suffering they did
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: not choose, Not the wilderness or the cave or the
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: years of being hunted. Those chapters, as painful as they were,
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: belonged to things that happened to David. This chapter is different.
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: This one belongs to what he chose. I want to
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: tell you this story with the honesty the Bible brings
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: to it, because the Bible does not protect David from himself. Here.
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: It does not soften what he did or rush past
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: the worst of it to reach the redemption. On the
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: other side. It lets the weight of it sit fully
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: before it offers anything lighter. And I think that is
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: because the weight is the point, not to condemn him
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: across three thousand years of history, but to show us
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: something true about the human heart, that the same person
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: who ran toward Goliath in the name of God can,
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: under different conditions, walk towards something that diminishes him in
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: ways the battlefield never did. That greatness and failure are
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: not always opposites. Sometimes they live in the same person,
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: in different seasons, under different conditions. It began in the spring.
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: The text marks the season with deliberate care. In the
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: spring of the year, at the time when kings go
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: out to battle. David sent Joab and his servants with
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: him and all Israel, and they besieged the enemy. But
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: David remained at Jerusalem at the time when kings go
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: out to battle, David stayed home. It seems like a
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: small thing, but it is the first step of a
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: journey that ends in catastrophe. He was where he was
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: not supposed to be, doing less than he was supposed
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: to be doing, at the moment in his life when
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: his power and his comfort were greatest and his vigilance
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: was lowest. Prosperity can do what adversity could not. The
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: wilderness had made David stronger, the palace had made him comfortable,
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: and comfort for a man of his particular gifts, turned
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: out to be more dangerous than any enemy he had
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: faced in the field. One evening, he rose from his
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: bed late in the day and walked on the roof
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: of his palace. From there he could see much of
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: the city below him, and from the roof he saw
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: a woman bathing. She was beautiful. David sent someone to
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: find out who she was. The answer came back. Her
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 1: name was Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: Uriah the Hittite. The wife of Uriah the Hittite. Everything
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: David needed to stop was right there in the answer.
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: Her husband's name, a man who, who, as David would
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: have known, was with the army in the field, fighting
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: the battle that David himself should have been fighting. David
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: sent for her anyway. I want to say something carefully
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: here because I think it matters. The distance in power
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: between a king and any citizen in the ancient world
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: was absolute. When the king sent for someone, they came.
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: The text does not present what follows as a story
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: of two people meeting as equals. It presents a king
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: using the full weight of his position to take what
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: was not his to take. That moral reality matters for
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: how we understand everything that follows, including the weight of
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: what David was responsible for. Some time later, Bathsheba sent
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: word to David three words that must have landed in
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: him like stones. I am with child. David had a problem,
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: and here is where the story becomes truly dark, because
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: what he did next reveals how far a person can
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 1: travel from whom they used to be without understanding that
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: they are moving. He sent for Uriah. He called the
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: soldier back from the front. He spoke with him about
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: the campaign. He asked questions and listened with the practiced
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: attention of a man performing concern. Then he told Uriah
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: to go home, rest see your wife, because If Uriah
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: went home to Bathsheba, the child could be explained, the
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: whole terrible thing could be covered over, and life could
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: continue as though none of it had happened. Uriah went
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: toward home, but he did not go in. He slept
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: at the entrance to the king's house with the king's servants.
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: He did not go to his wife. When David was
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: told this, he summoned Uriah again, Why did you not
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: go home? Did you not come from a journey? And
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: Uriah's answer is one of the most devastating moments in
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: the entire story, not because it was designed as an accusation,
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: but because it was simply the honest expression of who
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: Uriah was. The ark and Israel and Judah are dwelling
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: in tents, and my Lord Joab and the servants of
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: my lord are encamped in the open field. Shall I
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: then go to my house to eat and drink and
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: to lie with my wife, as your soul lives. I
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: will not do this thing, as your soul lives. He
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: swore by the life of the king, who was at
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: that very moment trying to arrange a cover for a betrayal.
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: He appealed to the honor of the man who had
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: dishonored him. In the most fundamental way possible. He spoke
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: of the ark and of his fellow soldiers, with a
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: conviction so genuine and so uncalculated that it is almost
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: unbearable to read. Euriah was the better man in this moment,
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: and David knew it. I want to pause here and
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: acknowledge something the story itself does not linger on, but
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: that deserves to be named Bathsheba was a woman in
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: an imposson position. She had no power to refuse a
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: king's summons. She was then left to navigate the consequences
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: of what was done to her, to mourn her husband
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: when he died, to carry a grief that was not
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 1: of her making. The text tells us she mourned Uriah.
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: That single detail is worth more attention than it usually receives.
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: She was not simply a circumstance in David's story. She
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: was a person with her own losses and her own life,
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: And the weight of what David did falls most heavily
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: when we remember that David tried once more to solve
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: his problem. He kept Uriah in Jerusalem. Another day, he
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: invited him to dinner and insured Uriah drank. Surely now, surely,
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: in the looseness of that he would go home. Euriah
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: slept again among the king's servants, and David, finding no
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: other way out, made the darkest choice available to him.
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: He wrote a letter to Joab, his miller commander. He
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: sealed it, and he sent it by the hand of
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: Uriah himself, so that the man carried his own death
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: sentence back to the battlefield without knowing what he was carrying.
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: The letter said, set Uriah in the forefront of the
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: hottest battle, and draw back from him, that he may
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: be struck down and die. Joab did as the king commanded. Uriah,
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: the Hittite, the loyal soldier who would not go home
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: to his wife because his brothers were sleeping in open
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: fields and the ark of God was in a tent,
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: was placed at the most dangerous point of the battle.
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: The men around him withdrew. Uriah died. When the news
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 1: reached David, he received it with the composure of a
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: man who had already made his peace with what he
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: had decided. He sent word to Joab, do not let
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: this trouble you. These things happen in war press the
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: zig When Bathsheba heard that her husband was dead. She
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: mourned him. When the morning was over, David sent for her,
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: and she became his wife. And then the text says
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: something that falls into the narrative like a stone into
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 1: still water. But the thing that David had done displeased
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: the Lord, one sentence after all of it. Now, I
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 1: want to be careful about how we understand what happened here.
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: David's fall did not occur because he was secretly always
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 1: this person underneath the shepherd and the warrior and the poet.
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: It did not happen because the faith was never real,
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: or the anointing was a mistake. It happened because he
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 1: was human, because power accumulated over time changes the conditions
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: of a life in ways that require constant vigilance to resist.
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: Because the gifts that make a person capable of great
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: good can become instruments of great harm when they turn
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: from God toward the gratification of self. He had stopped
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: asking what God wanted. He had started in this terrible
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: season asking only what David wanted, and the consequences were
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: catastrophic not only for Bathsheba and Uriah, though they were
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: catastrophic for them, for David for his family, for the nation.
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: The violence he introduced into his house would breed more violence.
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: The seeds planted here would grow into every corner of
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: his family's life in ways that would cause him more
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: suffering than any enemy he had ever faced. God sent
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: a man named Nathan to David. Nathan was a prophet.
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: He was also clearly a man of extraordinary courage, because
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: what God asked of him required walking into the presence
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: of the most powerful man in Israel and telling him
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: the truth about himself. Nathan came to David and told
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: him a story. There were two men in a city.
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: One was rich, with flocks and herds beyond counting. The
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: other was poor, with nothing except one small, ewe lamb.
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: One He had raised her from birth. She had grown
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: up with his children, eaten from his table, drunk from
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: his cup, slept in his arms. She was like a
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 1: daughter to him. A traveler came to visit the rich man,
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: and the rich man, unwilling to take from his own
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: vast flocks, took the poor man's one lamb and prepared
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: it for his guest instead. David's response was immediate and fierce.
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: The man who did this deserves to die he said,
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: he shall restore fourfold, because he had no pity, no pity.
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: Nathan looked at him and said, four words that have
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: echoed through every century since they were spoken. You are
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: the man. The silence after those words must have been
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: unlike anything David had ever experienced. Nathan continued. God spoke
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: through him directly and without softening. He named what he
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: had given David, the anointing, the deliverance from Saul, the
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: house of Israel and Judah. If that had been too little,
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: he would have given more. Why then, you have struck
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: down your Riah, the Hittite, with the sword, and have
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: taken his wife to be your wife. You have killed
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: him with the sword of the Ammonites said, plainly, you
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: used the enemy's sword to do what you would not
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: do with your own hand. But the result is the same.
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: You killed him, Then the consequences the sword will not
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: depart from your house. What was done in secret will
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: be answered in the open. David sat with all of this,
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: and he did not deflect. He did not explain, He
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 1: did not reach for a defense. He said five words,
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: I have sinned against the Lord, five words, perhaps the
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: most important five he ever spoke, not a speech, not
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 1: a careful statement, not a negotiation, just the truth offered
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: plainly to the faith of the man God had sent
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: to speak it. Nathan said, the Lord has also put
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: away your sin. You shall not die. The forgiveness was immediate,
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: real complete, but the consequences remained. The child born of
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: this union became gravely ill. For seven days, David lay
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: on the ground and fasted and cried out to God
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: for the child's life. His servants were afraid to tell
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: him when the child died. If he grieved like this
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: while the child was alive, what would happen after? When
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: David heard the child had died, he rose from the ground.
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: He washed, he anointed himself, he changed his clothes. He
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: went to the house of the Lord and worshiped. Then
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 1: he came home and asked for food. His servants were confused.
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: You fasted and wept while the child was alive. Now
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: that he is dead, you rise and eat. Why David's
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: answer revealed something deep about his understanding of God. While
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: the child was alive, I fasted and wept, for I said,
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 1: who knows whether the Lord will be gracious to me
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: and the child will live. But now he is dead,
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 1: why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: I shall go to him, but he will not return
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: to me. I shall go to him even here, even
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: in the shadow of consequences he could not undo. There
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: was a forward orientation in David that the worst of
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: his own choices could not finally extinguish, a belief that
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: death was not the final word, that the child he
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: could not bring back to himself he would one day
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: go to. This is not a man at peace with
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: what he has done. He will carry it for the
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: rest of his life. The psalm, he writes in the Aftermath,
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: will make that clear, and we will walk through it
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: together in the chapter just ahead. But it is a
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: man who understood, even in the wreckage of his own choice,
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: that the story was not over, that God was still God,
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: that mercy was still available even here. Rest now. This
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: has been a heavy chapter to carry. But the weight
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: is not the last word. It never is. What comes
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: next is the most honest prayer ever written, and I
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: believe it was written for knights like this one, for
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: people carrying exactly the kind of weight you may be
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: carrying right now. Hold on, what comes next is for you.
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: Chapter ten, Psalm fifty one there is a prayer that
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: has survived three thousand years, not because it is polished,
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: not because it presents a version of the spiritual life
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: that is tidy or manageable or easy to live with,
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: but because it is true, completely and uncomfortably and devastatingly
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 1: true about something that every human being who has ever
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 1: lived understands from the inside, the experience of knowing you
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: have done something genuinely wrong and not knowing whether you
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 1: can ever fully come back from it. Psalm fifty one
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: was written by David after Nathan came to him. The
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: ancient inscription tells us this directly. This is not a
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 1: general meditation on the human condition. It is a specific
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: prayer written by a specific man in the specific wreckage
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: of the worst choices he ever made. And because it
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: is so specific, because it comes from such a real
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: and particular place of genuine ruin, it has become the
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: prayer of every one who has ever sat in the
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 1: rubble of their own life and needed to find words.
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: Let us walk through it slowly to night. He begins
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: not with confession, but with an appeal, Have mercy on me,
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: o God, according to your loving kindness, according to the
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: multitude of your tender mercies blot out my transgressions. He
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: does not begin by explaining himself. He does not leave
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: with mitigating circumstances or a careful accounting of what led
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: him here. He begins by looking at God and saying,
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 1: I am not appealing to my record. I am not
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 1: appealing to my past faithfulness or anything I have ever
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: done that might give you a reason to hear me.
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: I am appealing to your nature, your loving kindness, your
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: tender mercies. The Hebrew word behind loving kindness is hessed,
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: one of the most important words in all of Scripture,
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: the word for the covenant love of God, loyal, steadfast, unbreakable,
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: the love that does not leave when the person being
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: loved fails, the love that is rooted at its deepest level,
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 1: not in the deserving of the one being loved, but
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: in the character of the one doing the loving. David
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: is saying I have nothing to offer. I am coming
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: with only this one thing, that your mercy is larger
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: than my failure. That jorg he said, is not contingent
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: on my consistency. And then he begins to say what
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 1: needs to be said, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: and cleanse me from my sin thoroughly, not enough to
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: make things look acceptable from a distance, all the way
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: through into the places nobody else can see, but that
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: David knows are contaminated. For I acknowledge my transgressions, and
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: my sin is always before me, always before me. He
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: cannot stop seeing it, not with the passage of time.
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: It is with him constantly. He is not writing this
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: psalm to perform contrition for an audience. He is writing
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: it because the weight is so real and so constant,
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: that he has to give it somewhere to go. Against you,
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: you only have I sinned and done this evil in
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 1: your sight? This line has prompted careful readers to ask
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: difficult questions for a very long time against you only
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 1: what about Uriah? What about Bathsheba? One way to understand this,
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: and it is how many readers across many centuries have
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: approached it, is that David is not saying no human
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: beings were harmed. He is saying something deeper about the
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: nature of sin itself, that every act which harms another
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: person is, at its deepest route, a rejection of the
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: God in whose image that person was made, a turning
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 1: away from the one to whom all things belong. David
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: is not minimizing the harm done to Uriah and Bathsheba.
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 1: He is seeing all the way to the bottom of
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 1: what he has done, all the way to the orientation
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: of heart that had to turn away from God before
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: any of the rest of it could happen. Behold, I
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: conceived me. This is not an excuse. David is not
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: blaming his birth or his humanity for what he chose.
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 1: He is making an honest statement about the human condition.
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 1: What he has done is not a strange anomaly in
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: an otherwise pure nature. It is an expression of something
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: broken that runs through all of us. He is refusing
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 1: to treat himself as an exception, refusing to say I
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 1: cannot understand how someone like me could do something like this.
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 1: He understands completely. He is a human being, and this
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: is what human beings are capable of, including him. Behold,
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: you desire truth in the inward parts. Truth in the
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 1: inward parts, not in the performance, not in the public presentation,
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: in the hidden places, the parts of a person that
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: only God can see. This is what God has always
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 1: been after, not external compliance not correct ritual observed from
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: a distance from the heart, but the interior reality, the
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: hidden truth, the person who exists when no one is watching.
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: David had failed God in the hidden place, and now
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: he is asking God to do what only God can do.
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: Come into the hidden place and create something different there.
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: Create in me a clean heart, o God, and renew
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: a steadfast spirit within me. Create. The Hebrew word is baah.
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: Many scholars note that in the Old Testament this word
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: is consistently associated with a kind of making that belongs
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: specifically to God bringing into existence something that was not
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: there before. The same word used in the opening of Genesis.
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
• 1:57:45
  Speaker 1: David is not asking God to repair his heart. He
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: is asking God to make a new one, because he
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 1: has looked honestly at himself and concluded that repair is
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: not sufficient. What is needed is something that does not
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: yet exist in him and that he cannot generate for himself.
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: Make something new in me, something I cannot manufacture on
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: my own. Do not cast me away from your presence,
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: and do not take your Holy Spirit from me. This
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: is the fear underneath everything, not the public shame, not
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: even the grief of what has been lost, the fear
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 1: that what he has done has put him outside the
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: reach of God's presence, that the spirit which came upon
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: him the day the oil was poured over him in Bethlehem,
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: might be taken from him the way it had been
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 1: taken from Saul. He has seen what that looks like.
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 1: He lived in Saul's palace and played music for a
• 1:58:40
  Speaker 1: man from whom the spirit had departed. He knows what
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: moves into the space that the spirit leaves behind. Please
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: do not let that be me. Restore to me the
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: joy of your salvation and uphold me by your generous spirit.
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: Restore a different word from create, because the joy of
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: salvation is not something David never had. It was there
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: on the hillside, in the valley, in the cave, in
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 1: the dancing, before the ark. He had known this joy,
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: and now it was gone. Bring it back. Give me
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: back what I used to know, the lightness, the certainty,
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: the sense of being held by a God who was
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 1: genuinely and actively present. And then David makes a promise,
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 1: Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners shall
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: be converted to you. Then, after the restoration, after the
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 1: clean heart. After the joy returns, I will tell others,
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 1: not hide what happened, not maintain the image of a
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 1: king who never fell, but use what he has been through.
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 1: Let the experience of having been in the deepest darkness
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 1: and finding that God was even there becomes something that
• 1:59:59
  Speaker 1: helps other people find their way back from their own
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 1: dark places. This is perhaps the most unexpected turn in
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: the entire psalm. David is saying, I will not let
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 1: this be only a monument to my failure. In God's hands,
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: somehow it will become something that lights a path for others.
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: And then the line that upends everything about religious performance.
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it.
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: You do not delight in burnt offering in a religious
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 1: culture built around sacrifice. This is a striking claim. The
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 1: sacrificial system is not what God finally wants. What God
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 1: wants is what the system always pointed toward but could
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 1: never itself provide. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 1: a broken and a contrite heart. These, O God, you
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: will not despise a broken and a contrite heart, Not
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: a per record, not an unblemished history, not a man
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 1: who never fell a broken spirit, the posture of a
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 1: person who has stopped pretending, and stopped performing, and stopped
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 1: managing their image before God, and has simply come as
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 1: they are, honest, without anything to offer but the truth.
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 1: You will not despise this. God will not look away
• 2:01:23
  Speaker 1: from a broken and contrite heart. He will not refuse it.
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: He will not say you waited too long, you went
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: too far. What you have done is beyond what I
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 1: am willing to work with. The broken heart is not
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 1: what disqualifies a person from God's presence. It is quietly
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: and counterintuitively, precisely the thing that makes a person most
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: able to receive what only God can give. Nathan had
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 1: said it, the Lord has put away your sin. But
• 2:01:54
  Speaker 1: Psalm fifty one shows us what it cost David to
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 1: receive that. What it required of a person who had
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: done something genuinely terrible to come to the end of
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: himself and find that grace was still standing there. It
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 1: required exactly this. Not performance, not resolution, not assembled evidence
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 1: of improvement, just this, a broken spirit set down before
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: a God, whose mercy is larger than the worst of us,
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: whose hess does not end when we do, whose response
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: to the wreck of a human life that comes to
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 1: him with nothing left to offer is not what we deserve,
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 1: but what he has always been. I want to speak
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 1: to you directly now because I believe this chapter is
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: what some of you needed most to night. Maybe you
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: are carrying something, something you have done that you cannot undo,
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: something that replays in the quiet moments when there is
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: nothing left to distract you from it. The version of
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: yourself that made that choice, the person who was harmed,
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: the gap between who you wanted to be and what
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: you actually did. Hear what Psalm fifty one says to
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 1: that you are not too broken to be received. Your
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 1: failure is not larger than his mercy. The thing you
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 1: cannot stop seeing in front of you is not outside
• 2:03:13
  Speaker 1: the reach of a God whose hesseed is not contingent
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 1: on your consistency. Create in me a clean heart, O God.
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: He can do that. He did it for David in
• 2:03:24
  Speaker 1: the ruins, In the full knowledge of everything that had happened,
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 1: and everything it had cost, and everyone it had hurt,
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 1: he created something new. He still does. If you have
• 2:03:35
  Speaker 1: never prayed Psalm fifty one for yourself, let these words
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 1: be yours tonight. Not a historical prayer from three thousand
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: years ago, yours, your broken spirit, your contrite heart, laid
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 1: before the same God, who has not changed, whose mercy
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 1: is still larger than your failure, whose loving kindness is
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: still not contingent on your consistency, whose response to you,
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: even to night, even now, even here, is not what
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: you deserve, but what He has always been. Create in
• 2:04:10
  Speaker 1: me a clean heart, O God. Rest. Now the prayer
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: has been prayed, the weight has been set down, and
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 1: in the quiet of this night, Grace is doing what
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 1: only grace can do. Sleep well, Beloved, You are not
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 1: too broken to be held. Chapter eleven, The Legacy. There
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: comes a moment in every life when the great question shifts.
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: For most of the first half of life, the question
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: is what will I do? What will I build and
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 1: become and accomplish and be known for? But there comes
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 1: a time different for every person, when that question steps
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 1: quietly aside, and a deeper one takes its place. What
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 1: will remain when I am gone? David reached this question
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 1: in the final years of his life. The kingdom was established,
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: the wars were largely behind him. The decades of running
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 1: and fighting and building and failing and being rebuilt had
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: laid their full weight on him. He was old. The
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: body that had carried him through the hills of Bethlehem
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 1: and the Valley of Ella and the caves of the
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 1: Wilderness was finally showing him its limits. But his heart
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: was not finished, and the dream that had lived in
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: him since the day he first looked at Jerusalem and
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 1: thought about what it could become was still burning. He
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 1: wanted to build a temple for God. He had brought
• 2:05:37
  Speaker 1: the Ark to Jerusalem, he had given it a place
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 1: of honor, but a tent had always felt insufficient to him.
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 1: He lived in a house of cedar, while the Ark
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 1: rested in fabric and poles. He said to Nathan, look
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 1: at where I live, and look at where the Ark
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: of God dwells. Nathan heard the longing and initially encouraged him,
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 1: But that night God spoke to Nathan and sent him
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: back to David with a different answer. You will not
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 1: build me a house. Not because the desire was wrong,
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: not because the love behind it was false, but because
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: David had been a man of war, and his hands
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: had shed blood across decades of battle. The temple, the
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 1: House of God, was meant to be built by different hands,
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: by a man of peace, by the son who would
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: come after him. Your son will build my house. David
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: received this with a grace I find quietly remarkable. He
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: did not argue, He did not feel rejected. He did
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: not treat the redirection as withdrawal of love. He understood
• 2:06:43
  Speaker 1: something that many people who have ever been told no
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: by God struggle to understand. That a no to your
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: specific plan is not always a no to the desire
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: underneath it. That sometimes God redirects the dream rather than
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: dismissing it. That the person who can not build the
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 1: temple can still gather everything the builder will need and
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: hand it to them with blessing. So David prepared in
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 1: the last years of his life with a thoroughness that
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 1: the text describes in careful detail. He gathered everything the
• 2:07:15
  Speaker 1: temple would require, gold and silver and bronze, and iron
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 1: and timber and precious stone, in quantities almost beyond counting.
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: He organized the priests and the levites, and the musicians
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 1: and the gate keepers, assigning roles and responsibilities. Decades before
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 1: the building would even begin. He drew up the plans.
• 2:07:35
  Speaker 1: He had spent his life as a man of action.
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 1: In these final years he became a man of preparation,
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: pouring his energy not into what he would personally accomplish,
• 2:07:46
  Speaker 1: but into what the next generation would be equipped to do.
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: And from his own personal treasury he gave with a
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 1: generosity that moved the whole assembly to give generously in return,
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 1: freely given, joyfully given, given, with the understanding that this
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 1: was privilege, not obligation. When everything was in place, David
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 1: called the leaders of Israel together and placed the plans
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 1: in the hands of his son, Solomon. Solomon was young.
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 1: The text does not minimize this. He was young, and
• 2:08:18
  Speaker 1: the task before him was immense. And David looked at
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 1: his son and spoke words that fathers have been speaking
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 1: to their children ever since, in every generation. When the
• 2:08:29
  Speaker 1: world hands one person what the previous person spent their
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 1: life preparing, be strong and courageous and do the work.
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 1: Do not be afraid, and do not be dismayed. For
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 1: the Lord God, my God, is with you. He will
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 1: not leave you or forsake you until all the work
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 1: for the house of the Lord is finished. He will
• 2:08:49
  Speaker 1: not leave you or forsake you. These were not simply
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: encouraging words. They were testimony the witness of a life.
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: David was not handing sol and a nice sentiment about
• 2:09:01
  Speaker 1: the nature of God. He was handing him the accumulated
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: evidence of his own experience. This is what I have
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: found to be true in the valley and the cave,
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: and the palace, and the ruins of my own worst choices,
• 2:09:14
  Speaker 1: and in the grace that was waiting on the other
• 2:09:16
  Speaker 1: side of all of it. He will not leave you.
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: I know this because he did not leave me. Now
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 1: I want to tell you about something else David did
• 2:09:25
  Speaker 1: in these final years, something quieter than temple preparations and
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 1: royal speeches, something that reveals, perhaps more than anything else,
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 1: the heart that was still beating at the center of
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 1: who he was. He went looking for Jonathan. Jonathan had
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 1: been dead for years, fallen on Mount Gilboa. But David
• 2:09:46
  Speaker 1: had made a promise to Jonathan when they were young
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 1: men in a field outside Jerusalem, when the future was
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 1: still unwritten, and Jonathan had given everything and asked for
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 1: nothing in return except that David remember his children. David
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 1: sent some one to find out whether any one remained
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 1: from the House of Saul to whom he could show
• 2:10:05
  Speaker 1: kindness for Jonathan's sake. They told him about a man
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 1: named Mephibosheth. He was Jonathan's son, five years old when
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 1: his father died. In the chaos and terror of that day,
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 1: his nurse had grabbed him and fled, and in the
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 1: fleeing she had fallen, and the child with her. He
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 1: had been lame in both feet. Ever since, he lived
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 1: in a place called Lo de Bar, a name that
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: in the Hebrew carries the sense of nothing, no pasture,
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 1: a place of nothing. The grandson of a king, the
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 1: son of the most loyal friend David had ever known,
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 1: living forgotten in a place whose very name described what
• 2:10:45
  Speaker 1: his life had become. David sent for him. When Mephibaschev
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 1: came before the king, he fell on his face and
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 1: prostrated himself. He was afraid. He was the remnant of
• 2:10:57
  Speaker 1: a defeated house, with every reason to expect the worst.
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 1: David said to him, do not be afraid. Then he
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 1: said what the covenant had always been moving toward. I
• 2:11:07
  Speaker 1: will show you kindness for the sake of your father, Jonathan.
• 2:11:11
  Speaker 1: I will restore to you all the land that belonged
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 1: to your grandfather's saul, and you will eat at my
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 1: table always, always, not once, not occasionally, always a permanent
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 1: seat a place at the table for the rest of
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 1: his life. Maphibosheth could barely take it. In what is
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 1: your Servant? He said that you should show regard for
• 2:11:36
  Speaker 1: a dead dog, such as I a dead dog. This
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 1: is how he understood himself, the discarded remnant of a
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 1: defeated house, not worth the king's attention. David saw something
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 1: entirely different. He saw Jonathan. He saw the covenant made
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 1: in a field when they were both young men and
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 1: the future was still uncertain. He saw the road ube
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: and the weapons Jonathan had given him, the loyalty that
• 2:12:03
  Speaker 1: had cost Jonathan everything. He saw the promise, and he
• 2:12:07
  Speaker 1: kept it. Mephibuscheth ate at the King's table, the text says,
• 2:12:12
  Speaker 1: like one of the king's own sons for the rest
• 2:12:15
  Speaker 1: of his life. Now, I want to say something about
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 1: legacy that I believe David's story quietly insists upon. We
• 2:12:22
  Speaker 1: tend to measure legacy by what was built, by the
• 2:12:25
  Speaker 1: structures that remain, by the institutions established and the monuments raised,
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 1: and the visible things that outlast a life. The temple
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 1: Solomon built was magnificent. Everything David had gathered and planned
• 2:12:39
  Speaker 1: and prepared made it possible. It stood as one of
• 2:12:43
  Speaker 1: the great wonders of the ancient world, and it was
• 2:12:46
  Speaker 1: eventually destroyed, not once, but twice. The last stones were
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 1: pulled down and scattered, and the ark itself was lost
• 2:12:55
  Speaker 1: to history. But the psalms are still here. The words
• 2:12:59
  Speaker 1: David wrote in caves and on hillsides and in the
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 1: ruins of his own worst season, The prayers he composed
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: when there was nothing else available, The songs he sang
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 1: to the God he had been learning to know since
• 2:13:11
  Speaker 1: he was a forgotten boy on a hillside in Bethlehem
• 2:13:15
  Speaker 1: three thousand years. Every language, every culture, every variation of
• 2:13:22
  Speaker 1: human suffering that history has produced, and in the middle
• 2:13:25
  Speaker 1: of all of it, in hospital rooms and prisons and
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 1: places of grief, and on ordinary evenings, when something unnamed
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 1: is aching inside a person who cannot explain why the
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want have mercy
• 2:13:41
  Speaker 1: on me, o God, According to your loving kindness, I
• 2:13:45
  Speaker 1: will lift up my eyes to the hills from where
• 2:13:49
  Speaker 1: does my help come? The Lord is my light and
• 2:13:52
  Speaker 1: my salvation. Whom shall I fear? This is the legacy,
• 2:13:58
  Speaker 1: not the throne, though it was real. Not the military
• 2:14:02
  Speaker 1: victories though they were significant, Not even the temple, though
• 2:14:07
  Speaker 1: it was magnificent, but the living words of a living
• 2:14:10
  Speaker 1: encounter with a living God, preserved across centuries and still
• 2:14:15
  Speaker 1: doing what they were always meant to do, finding people
• 2:14:19
  Speaker 1: in the dark, giving them something true, reminding them that
• 2:14:23
  Speaker 1: they are not alone. David did not know this would
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 1: be his legacy when he wrote those words. He was
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 1: not composing for posterity. He was pouring out his heart
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 1: because he had to, because there was nowhere else for
• 2:14:37
  Speaker 1: it to go. And God kept what David offered and
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 1: made it last longer than anything David built with his hands. This,
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 1: i believe, is one of the most hopeful things in
• 2:14:47
  Speaker 1: the entire story. The things you offer honestly and fully,
• 2:14:51
  Speaker 1: even from broken places, even from the cave and the
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: wilderness and the ruins of your own worst choices. God
• 2:14:58
  Speaker 1: keeps those things. He does not waste them, He does
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 1: not let them sink into the ground unremembered. The honest offering,
• 2:15:07
  Speaker 1: given from wherever you actually are, is the thing that
• 2:15:10
  Speaker 1: outlasts everything built from a position of strength and security
• 2:15:13
  Speaker 1: and having it all together. What we offer broken can
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 1: sometimes last longer than what we build whole. Rest Now,
• 2:15:21
  Speaker 1: the old King is tired. The plans have been given.
• 2:15:25
  Speaker 1: Mephibusheth is at the table. The words are written and
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 1: will be read for longer than any one in that
• 2:15:32
  Speaker 1: palace could imagine. One chapter remains, and in it we
• 2:15:36
  Speaker 1: will ask the question. This whole story has been quietly
• 2:15:39
  Speaker 1: building toward. What does it actually mean to be called
• 2:15:43
  Speaker 1: a man after God's own heart? And what might it
• 2:15:46
  Speaker 1: mean for you? Sleep well, we are almost home Chapter twelve,
• 2:15:55
  Speaker 1: The Man after God's Heart. We have come a long
• 2:15:59
  Speaker 1: way to night, from a hillside in Bethlehem, where a
• 2:16:03
  Speaker 1: shepherd boy sat under the stars and learned to talk
• 2:16:05
  Speaker 1: to God in the dark, through a valley where a
• 2:16:08
  Speaker 1: stone flew and a giant fell, and two armies held
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 1: their breath, into a palace and out of it, through
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 1: caves and wilderness, and the long grinding years of waiting
• 2:16:19
  Speaker 1: up to a throne, and into the darkest chapter, and
• 2:16:23
  Speaker 1: back again, slowly through the door that Psalm fifty one opened,
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 1: Through plans handed to a son, and a seat at
• 2:16:31
  Speaker 1: the table given to a man from a place called nothing,
• 2:16:34
  Speaker 1: we have walked the whole length of one of the
• 2:16:36
  Speaker 1: most extraordinary human lives ever recorded. And now I want
• 2:16:41
  Speaker 1: to sit with you in the quiet of this final chapter,
• 2:16:44
  Speaker 1: and ask the question that has been underneath everything from
• 2:16:47
  Speaker 1: the very beginning. Why did God call David a man
• 2:16:50
  Speaker 1: after his own heart? Because he did before the Giant,
• 2:16:55
  Speaker 1: before the throne, before any of it was visible or
• 2:16:59
  Speaker 1: proven or accomplished. God told Saul through Samuel that he
• 2:17:03
  Speaker 1: had found a man after his own heart, a man
• 2:17:06
  Speaker 1: who would lead Israel in Saul's place, A man after
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 1: my own heart. What does that mean? What does it
• 2:17:14
  Speaker 1: actually mean for a real person, with a real life,
• 2:17:17
  Speaker 1: Because there is a version of this phrase that sounds
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 1: beautiful and means very little, a greeting card version, a
• 2:17:24
  Speaker 1: version that implies a kind of spiritual perfection, a life
• 2:17:28
  Speaker 1: lived on a steady upward trajectory of godliness and virtue,
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 1: a heart so naturally oriented toward God that failure barely
• 2:17:37
  Speaker 1: finds a foothold. That is not David's life, not even close.
• 2:17:42
  Speaker 1: David committed adultery, He arranged the murder of an innocent man.
• 2:17:47
  Speaker 1: He made decisions that cost lives, he was responsible for protecting.
• 2:17:52
  Speaker 1: His family, was in many respects broken. He was impulsive
• 2:17:57
  Speaker 1: and sometimes harsh, and capable of extraordinary tenderness and extraordinary failure,
• 2:18:02
  Speaker 1: sometimes in the same season of life, and God called
• 2:18:06
  Speaker 1: him a man after his own heart. So what is
• 2:18:09
  Speaker 1: actually being said, What is the quality in this particular
• 2:18:13
  Speaker 1: shepherd boy, this particular warrior and poet and king that
• 2:18:18
  Speaker 1: earned this description. What did God see when he looked
• 2:18:22
  Speaker 1: past seven sons of Jesse and said that one. I
• 2:18:26
  Speaker 1: want to offer you what I believe after walking this
• 2:18:29
  Speaker 1: whole story together, and I want to name it as
• 2:18:33
  Speaker 1: my own reading of it, the reading I find most
• 2:18:35
  Speaker 1: honest to everything we have seen, while holding it with
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 1: the humility that any interpretation of something this profound deserves.
• 2:18:43
  Speaker 1: The first thing I notice is that David always came back,
• 2:18:47
  Speaker 1: not immediately, not without cost, not always quickly, but always.
• 2:18:54
  Speaker 1: Every time David moved away from God through sin or
• 2:18:57
  Speaker 1: fear or pride, or the slow drift that happens to
• 2:19:00
  Speaker 1: any one who gets comfortable enough to stop paying attention,
• 2:19:03
  Speaker 1: he eventually turned around. He turned around in the cave
• 2:19:07
  Speaker 1: and wrote psalms that have given people language for their
• 2:19:10
  Speaker 1: own dark places ever since. He turned around after Nathan
• 2:19:14
  Speaker 1: confronted him and wrote Psalm fifty one. He turned around
• 2:19:18
  Speaker 1: from the seductions of comfort and power, not without leaving
• 2:19:22
  Speaker 1: damage behind, but he turned. There was something in David
• 2:19:26
  Speaker 1: that could not finally stay away, a kind of home,
• 2:19:29
  Speaker 1: sickness for God that eventually, no matter how far he
• 2:19:32
  Speaker 1: had traveled, brought him back toward the only thing that
• 2:19:35
  Speaker 1: had ever felt like home. A man after God's own heart,
• 2:19:39
  Speaker 1: as I read it, is not a man who never wanders.
• 2:19:42
  Speaker 1: It is a man whose heart cannot finally be at
• 2:19:44
  Speaker 1: peace anywhere else, who knows, even in the middle of
• 2:19:48
  Speaker 1: his wandering, that he is in the wrong place, who
• 2:19:51
  Speaker 1: has tasted enough of the real thing to recognize every
• 2:19:54
  Speaker 1: substitution for what it is. Not a heart that never
• 2:19:58
  Speaker 1: moves away, but a art that always moves back. The
• 2:20:02
  Speaker 1: second thing I notice is that David was relentlessly honest
• 2:20:06
  Speaker 1: with God. Read the Psalms with this in mind. What
• 2:20:10
  Speaker 1: you find is not a collection of polished religious statements
• 2:20:13
  Speaker 1: composed from a place of spiritual security. You find the actual, unfiltered,
• 2:20:18
  Speaker 1: interior life of a real human being, laid out before
• 2:20:22
  Speaker 1: God without protective covering. The joy in them is almost reckless,
• 2:20:27
  Speaker 1: the grief is almost unbearable. The anger is real, the
• 2:20:31
  Speaker 1: doubt is real. There are moments where David all but
• 2:20:35
  Speaker 1: accuses God of being absent when he was needed, and
• 2:20:38
  Speaker 1: then the faith that refuses to let go, not because
• 2:20:42
  Speaker 1: the circumstances have resolved, but because David knows who he
• 2:20:45
  Speaker 1: is talking to, even when he cannot feel the answer
• 2:20:48
  Speaker 1: coming back. He treated God as someone real enough to
• 2:20:52
  Speaker 1: be completely honest with, and this I think is one
• 2:20:56
  Speaker 1: of the deepest marks of a heart oriented toward God.
• 2:21:00
  Speaker 1: Not theological sophistication, not spiritual performance, but the willingness to
• 2:21:06
  Speaker 1: bring what you actually have rather than what you think
• 2:21:10
  Speaker 1: You should. Have to trust that the God who made
• 2:21:13
  Speaker 1: you knows what is in you anyway, and that the
• 2:21:15
  Speaker 1: only real waste of a prayer is pretending to be
• 2:21:18
  Speaker 1: someone you are not. The third thing I notice is
• 2:21:21
  Speaker 1: that David understood what God was actually after he said
• 2:21:25
  Speaker 1: it himself in Psalm fifty one. You do not desire sacrifice.
• 2:21:31
  Speaker 1: You do not delight in burnt offering. The sacrifices of
• 2:21:34
  Speaker 1: God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart.
• 2:21:39
  Speaker 1: These you will not despise. David understood in a way
• 2:21:44
  Speaker 1: that many deeply religious people never fully do, that what
• 2:21:47
  Speaker 1: God wants from human beings is not religious performance, not
• 2:21:51
  Speaker 1: ritual compliance, not the external markers of devotion, while the
• 2:21:56
  Speaker 1: heart remains somewhere else Entirely. God wants the heart, the
• 2:22:02
  Speaker 1: actual one, the interior one, the complicated and honest and
• 2:22:06
  Speaker 1: sometimes broken, real one, not the presented version, not the
• 2:22:11
  Speaker 1: version prepared for public consumption, the one that exists when
• 2:22:15
  Speaker 1: no one is watching and nothing is required. And David
• 2:22:19
  Speaker 1: gave God that heart, with all its complications, with all
• 2:22:23
  Speaker 1: its failures. He gave God the real thing and kept
• 2:22:27
  Speaker 1: giving it back every time he drifted away and eventually
• 2:22:30
  Speaker 1: came back again. This is what makes him a man
• 2:22:33
  Speaker 1: after God's own heart. Not the quality of the heart,
• 2:22:37
  Speaker 1: but the direction of it, the persistent, returning, honest orientation
• 2:22:42
  Speaker 1: toward God that characterized the overall arc of his life.
• 2:22:46
  Speaker 1: Not because he was always close, but because he always
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 1: knew the way back and always eventually took it. Now,
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 1: I want to bring this as close to you as
• 2:22:57
  Speaker 1: I possibly can, because I do not believe this story
• 2:23:01
  Speaker 1: was preserved for three thousand years so that we could
• 2:23:04
  Speaker 1: admire a historical figure at a safe and reverent distance.
• 2:23:09
  Speaker 1: I believe it was preserved because God is still looking
• 2:23:12
  Speaker 1: for the same thing. Not perfect people, not people whose
• 2:23:16
  Speaker 1: record is clean and whose history is uncomplicated. And whose
• 2:23:20
  Speaker 1: faith has never bent under the weight of a real
• 2:23:22
  Speaker 1: and difficult life. Not people who have everything sorted and
• 2:23:26
  Speaker 1: all their habits perfectly formed, and all their relationships entirely whole.
• 2:23:31
  Speaker 1: People whose hearts move toward God, people who, when they drift,
• 2:23:36
  Speaker 1: feel the distance and eventually turn round. People who bring
• 2:23:40
  Speaker 1: their actual selves into prayer rather than the version they
• 2:23:43
  Speaker 1: wish they were. People who have understood through experience and
• 2:23:48
  Speaker 1: not just through teaching, that what God is after is
• 2:23:51
  Speaker 1: not their performance their heart. Maybe that is you tonight.
• 2:23:56
  Speaker 1: Maybe you have been carrying a story that does not
• 2:23:59
  Speaker 1: feel like the kind of story God could use. Maybe
• 2:24:02
  Speaker 1: you have a chapter you wish had not been written,
• 2:24:05
  Speaker 1: a cave you are still sitting in and cannot see
• 2:24:08
  Speaker 1: the way out of a Psalm fifty one moment. You
• 2:24:11
  Speaker 1: have not yet found the words to pray your way through.
• 2:24:14
  Speaker 1: Hear what David's life says to that God did not
• 2:24:18
  Speaker 1: choose him because his story was clean. He chose him
• 2:24:21
  Speaker 1: because his heart was oriented in the right direction. And
• 2:24:25
  Speaker 1: that orientation, that persistent, returning, honest, stubborn movement toward God
• 2:24:31
  Speaker 1: was enough, even through everything, even through the worst of it,
• 2:24:36
  Speaker 1: it was enough. Your story is not disqualifying you. Your
• 2:24:41
  Speaker 1: failures are not the final word about you. The chapter
• 2:24:44
  Speaker 1: you wish had not been written does not determine the
• 2:24:47
  Speaker 1: ending of the book. What God is asking for is
• 2:24:50
  Speaker 1: not a better record. It is the same thing he
• 2:24:53
  Speaker 1: was asking for when he looked past seven Sons of
• 2:24:56
  Speaker 1: Jesse and asked whether there was any one still out
• 2:24:58
  Speaker 1: in the field. The heart, your actual heart, however it
• 2:25:03
  Speaker 1: is to night, whatever condition it is in, however far
• 2:25:08
  Speaker 1: it has traveled from where you know it should be,
• 2:25:10
  Speaker 1: Bring it, just as David brought his broken and honest
• 2:25:16
  Speaker 1: and not entirely put together, and still finding its way
• 2:25:19
  Speaker 1: back after every time it got lost. Bring it. The
• 2:25:22
  Speaker 1: last song David composed, recorded near the end of his story,
• 2:25:26
  Speaker 1: contains these words, is not my house right with God?
• 2:25:31
  Speaker 1: Has He not made with me an everlasting covenant ordered
• 2:25:34
  Speaker 1: in all things? And secure? Is not my house right
• 2:25:38
  Speaker 1: with God? Not? Is not my record clean? Not have
• 2:25:43
  Speaker 1: I not done everything correctly? But is not the covenant? Secure?
• 2:25:49
  Speaker 1: Is not the relationship intact, not because of my perfection,
• 2:25:54
  Speaker 1: because of His faithfulness and the answer. After everything, after
• 2:25:59
  Speaker 1: the whole long, complicated, extraordinary, painful, glorious life of David
• 2:26:04
  Speaker 1: of Bethlehem is yes. Yes, the covenant is secure, the
• 2:26:10
  Speaker 1: promise is standing. The house is right with God, because
• 2:26:15
  Speaker 1: God is faithful when we are not, because his hessid,
• 2:26:19
  Speaker 1: his steadfast covenant. Love is not contingent on our consistency.
• 2:26:24
  Speaker 1: Because the shepherd does not abandon the sheep. When the
• 2:26:26
  Speaker 1: sheep wanders, he goes after it, He brings it back,
• 2:26:31
  Speaker 1: he carries it home on his shoulders, and then he
• 2:26:34
  Speaker 1: makes it lie down in green pastures. This is the
• 2:26:38
  Speaker 1: God of David, the God of the valley and the
• 2:26:41
  Speaker 1: cave and the palace, and the ruins and the restoration,
• 2:26:43
  Speaker 1: and the long journey from a hillside in Bethlehem to
• 2:26:46
  Speaker 1: a legacy that has lasted three thousand years and is
• 2:26:50
  Speaker 1: still to night, finding people in the dark and giving
• 2:26:53
  Speaker 1: them something true to hold. This is your God. Not
• 2:26:58
  Speaker 1: a god who requires you to have it together before
• 2:27:00
  Speaker 1: he receives you. Not a god who measures your worth
• 2:27:04
  Speaker 1: by how well you are currently doing. Not a god
• 2:27:07
  Speaker 1: who loves you in proportion to your performance. A God
• 2:27:10
  Speaker 1: whose love is not based on your performance. It is
• 2:27:13
  Speaker 1: based on his promise, whose mercy is larger than your failure,
• 2:27:17
  Speaker 1: whose faithfulness is longer than your wandering, whose heart, if
• 2:27:22
  Speaker 1: we can say such a thing, and I believe we can,
• 2:27:26
  Speaker 1: is always moving toward you the way yours was always
• 2:27:29
  Speaker 1: meant to be moving toward him. A God who looks
• 2:27:33
  Speaker 1: at broken things and sees restoration, who looks at the
• 2:27:36
  Speaker 1: forgotten and the overlooked, and the ones living in lo
• 2:27:40
  Speaker 1: de bar in places whose very names mean nothing, and
• 2:27:44
  Speaker 1: sends for them and sets a place for them at
• 2:27:47
  Speaker 1: the table, who looked at a hillside in Bethlehem, at
• 2:27:50
  Speaker 1: a boy nobody had thought to invite inside, and said
• 2:27:54
  Speaker 1: that one that heart, bring it to me. That is
• 2:27:58
  Speaker 1: what David's life is asking you to do to night.
• 2:28:02
  Speaker 1: Not to be David, not to be a giant killer
• 2:28:05
  Speaker 1: or a psalm writer or a person of extraordinary historical consequence.
• 2:28:10
  Speaker 1: Simply to do what David did at the beginning and
• 2:28:13
  Speaker 1: the middle and the end of everything. Turn your face
• 2:28:16
  Speaker 1: toward God, bring your real self, your actual heart, your
• 2:28:22
  Speaker 1: honest questions, and your genuine fear, and your real grief
• 2:28:25
  Speaker 1: and your true longing, and trust that the God who
• 2:28:28
  Speaker 1: found a shepherd boy on a hillside in Bethlehem when
• 2:28:31
  Speaker 1: nobody else was looking, the God who was present in
• 2:28:34
  Speaker 1: the valley and the cave and the palace and the ruins,
• 2:28:37
  Speaker 1: and the slow, faithful restoration. That same God can find
• 2:28:41
  Speaker 1: you too, He already has. Let us pray, God of David,
• 2:28:47
  Speaker 1: God of the hillside and the valley and the cave
• 2:28:50
  Speaker 1: and the palace, God of Psalm twenty three and Psalm
• 2:28:54
  Speaker 1: fifty one, and the last song of an old king
• 2:28:57
  Speaker 1: looking back across a life that was not clean but
• 2:28:59
  Speaker 1: was yours. Thank you for this story, for preserving it
• 2:29:03
  Speaker 1: across three thousand years, with all of its complications and
• 2:29:07
  Speaker 1: its failures, and its extraordinary grace in tact, for not
• 2:29:11
  Speaker 1: protecting David from himself in the telling of it, because
• 2:29:15
  Speaker 1: in not protecting him you showed us something true about
• 2:29:18
  Speaker 1: what you do with the broken things that come to you.
• 2:29:21
  Speaker 1: Thank you that your love is not based on our performance.
• 2:29:25
  Speaker 1: That your faithfulness is longer than our wandering. That the
• 2:29:28
  Speaker 1: way back is always open, That a broken and a
• 2:29:32
  Speaker 1: contrite heart is not rejected but received. For everyone listening
• 2:29:37
  Speaker 1: to night who is carrying something heavy, For everyone with
• 2:29:40
  Speaker 1: a chapter they wish had not been written, For everyone
• 2:29:43
  Speaker 1: in a cave or a valley or a place of nothing,
• 2:29:46
  Speaker 1: waiting for something they cannot yet see. Be near the
• 2:29:51
  Speaker 1: way you were near to David, not watching from a distance,
• 2:29:54
  Speaker 1: but present in the valley, at the table, in the cave,
• 2:29:59
  Speaker 1: walking through every step alongside the one who cannot walk
• 2:30:02
  Speaker 1: it alone. Remind us to night that we are not
• 2:30:05
  Speaker 1: too broken to be held, not too far gone to
• 2:30:08
  Speaker 1: be found, not too ordinary to be chosen. That you
• 2:30:12
  Speaker 1: are still the God who looks past what every one
• 2:30:15
  Speaker 1: else sees, and looks at the heart. And that the
• 2:30:17
  Speaker 1: heart you see to night, however it is, however far
• 2:30:21
  Speaker 1: it has traveled, is still the heart you are looking for.
• 2:30:25
  Speaker 1: Bring us home the way you always have, with patience
• 2:30:29
  Speaker 1: and with faithfulness, and with a love that does not
• 2:30:31
  Speaker 1: let go. Thank you for David, for the psalms, for
• 2:30:36
  Speaker 1: the valley and the cave, and the throne, and the ruins,
• 2:30:39
  Speaker 1: and the restoration, for the seat at the table given
• 2:30:43
  Speaker 1: to a man from a place called nothing. For the
• 2:30:45
  Speaker 1: stone that flew true in the valley of Elah. For
• 2:30:48
  Speaker 1: the oil poured over a shepherd boy in Bethlehem. For
• 2:30:52
  Speaker 1: the harp that drove back the darkness. For the prayer
• 2:30:55
  Speaker 1: that began. Have mercy on me, O, God, according to
• 2:30:59
  Speaker 1: your loving kindness, For all of it. To you be
• 2:31:03
  Speaker 1: all glory now and always through everything and beyond everything. Amen,
• 2:31:11
  Speaker 1: sleep now, beloved. You have walked the whole length of
• 2:31:15
  Speaker 1: one of the greatest stories ever told, from the forgotten
• 2:31:19
  Speaker 1: hillside to the valley of the Giant, from the cave
• 2:31:22
  Speaker 1: to the throne, from the darkest night to the prayer
• 2:31:26
  Speaker 1: that opened the door back into light. And what you
• 2:31:29
  Speaker 1: have found at the end of all of it is
• 2:31:31
  Speaker 1: the same thing David found. That the God who started
• 2:31:34
  Speaker 1: this story never stopped writing it, That the shepherd who
• 2:31:38
  Speaker 1: found a boy on a hillside never stopped watching over him.
• 2:31:42
  Speaker 1: That the love that began in Bethlehem under the stars
• 2:31:45
  Speaker 1: carried him through everything. The lion and the bear, and
• 2:31:48
  Speaker 1: the giant and the spear, and the cave and the palace,
• 2:31:51
  Speaker 1: and the ruins and the restoration, and the long, faithful,
• 2:31:54
  Speaker 1: ordinary years of building something for someone else to finish,
• 2:31:58
  Speaker 1: all of it held in hands that do not drop
• 2:32:01
  Speaker 1: what they carry. You are held to night not because
• 2:32:05
  Speaker 1: of your record, not because of your consistency, not because
• 2:32:10
  Speaker 1: you have managed to keep your heart perfectly oriented toward
• 2:32:13
  Speaker 1: God every single day without fail but because He is
• 2:32:16
  Speaker 1: faithful when you are not, because His love is not
• 2:32:19
  Speaker 1: contingent on your performance. It is rooted in his promise,
• 2:32:25
  Speaker 1: and his promises do not expire. The night is deep,
• 2:32:29
  Speaker 1: the story is complete, and somewhere beyond what the eye
• 2:32:32
  Speaker 1: can see, on hills greener than Bethlehem, and in a
• 2:32:36
  Speaker 1: city more golden than Jerusalem, a shepherd boy who became
• 2:32:40
  Speaker 1: a king is doing what he always did best, playing
• 2:32:43
  Speaker 1: music before the Lord, and the Lord is listening. Sleep well,
• 2:32:49
  Speaker 1: beloved child of God. The giant is down, the cave
• 2:32:53
  Speaker 1: is behind you. The covenant is secure, and you are
• 2:32:57
  Speaker 1: held deeply, faithful fully, completely, forever and ever. Amen,