1 Samuel 25 The Beauty of Grace

to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his series in 1

Samuel, Timely Prophet, Tragic King. Let's listen in. Well, good morning,

Recast Church. I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here, and I want to welcome everybody to this gathering of God's people.

If this is your first time with us, a special welcome to you as well. I recognize that it takes an effort to visit a place for the first time, and so I'm just grateful that you have given us a chance and I want to encourage you to make yourself at home.

There's coffee, there's juice, there's donuts back there, and so take advantage of that. Those are free, and then restrooms are out the barn doors, down the hallway on the left if you need those at any time throughout the morning.

We've been working our way through the book of 1 Samuel, and it has been rocking me. I don't know if it's rocking you as well, but I can just say that from my perspective as I've studied it,

I seek each week to study the word of God, to let it impact my life, and then what I do on Sunday morning is just getting up here and sharing an outflow of what

God has been speaking to me, and so we've been going through this one chapter at a time, and some of these chapters are long.

The chapter that we're gonna be looking at this morning is a bit long. We're gonna read it here in a moment, and you might go, Don, is this story hour?

What is this? At the same time, I just want to point out that many of you might prefer a style of study that goes slower and really picks apart each verse.

I would encourage that and commend that to you. Go ahead and go back into 1 Samuel. If there's things that have grabbed your attention, you're like,

I want to study that more, Don. Slow down. Go back on your own and study that, and there's a time for you to take things slower and deeper, and then there's times for us to look at the survey and take off entire chunks of the narrative and get the flow of the story.

Many times throughout the historical portions of Scripture that are telling us the stories of history, the meaning is in the bigger chunk.

The meaning of what is meant to be conveyed to us is actually found in those larger stories of how

God works in people's lives and how he works with us. So this morning, we're going to be taking the entirety of chapter 25 of the book of 1

Samuel, and it's predominantly one large story that follows up on, obviously, the story of last week. So where we were last week matters in this text this week.

You see, last week showed David respond with integrity when faced with a shortcut to the throne.

David last week showed us the title of the message was gritty integrity and intensity of integrity.

He had a chance to kill the current king and rise to power at his own hand to deliver the throne to himself by his own power.

But instead, against all the advice of his fellow soldiers, he refused to strike down the

Lord's anointed. You see, David proved himself last week to be the kind of guy who's not into shortcuts that involve sinning against God.

But this week, we see a different side of David and the intention of the three chapters, chapter 24, chapter 25, chapter 26, have a flow.

They're kind of a big component of the life of David because what we see is integrity, lack of integrity, integrity.

That's what we're going to be looking at today is the centerpiece of that is a lack of integrity that we see that seems to fly in the face of what we read last week and what we're going to read next week.

And it's going to be kind of confusing to us if you're not a student of human nature and you're not honest with yourself, then this text isn't going to make sense because you're going to want people to be consistent.

How many of you want people to be consistent? Just be honest. I want people to be consistent. And sometimes my eyes then are blinded to the reality or I intentionally blind myself to the reality that people are not consistent.

How many of you have experienced that in your life? You would acknowledge that you want them to be, but they're not. You yourself want to be consistent and you often are not.

We see a different side of David this week. Last week, David was given the opportunity for vengeance and he refused to take vengeance.

He chose to not seek revenge against one who has done wrong to him time and time again.

But this week, he's going to be offended. Somebody's going to offend him and give him a personal affront and he will set out immediately with wrath to take vengeance.

Now, I personally, just being honest with all of you, I take comfort in a text like this. Because I see that David was a lot like me.

And I think that if you're honest with yourself, you're going to see that David is a lot like you as well. He was a man conflicted internally by sin.

There were moments in David's life where he soared near the heavens. At times, he was honoring

God and shining as a model of integrity, standing there holding the corner of Saul's robe, saying, I will not take vengeance.

I will not strike down the Lord's anointed. And then at other times, like in our text this week, he plunged near to the fires of hell itself.

At times, he was burned up inside with rage and wrath because someone offended him.

Can anybody relate to that? Anybody relate to movement of anger in your heart against somebody who has offended you or offended your family or said something poor about you?

Well, that's what we're going to see of David this week. And that's one of the reasons we can never hold up a human as a pattern for our lives.

I can never, as a preacher, stand up here with integrity and say, live like David or live like Noah or live like Joseph or live like Moses or live like fill in the blank.

Because how many of you know that if I tell you that, there's parts of their life I don't want you to emulate? There are parts of their life that God does not want you to emulate.

As a matter of fact, there was only one, and we needed a perfect human as our example, and God was gracious to send us one, in Jesus Christ, his son.

He is the only one that I would encourage you to pattern your life after. On the flip side of that, how many of you know that there are movements of integrity in people's lives that we can take on as examples?

There are movements of a lack of integrity, an ungrace that we can see in somebody's life that we should take in as an example.

And so this lapse in integrity by David on the pathway to his kingdom reminds me of the

New Testament passage that I cling to regularly, because as we see David, this mashed up integrity, lack of integrity, showing grace, not being gracious, as we see that, we could be moved in our hearts this morning to discouragement.

How many of you have ever looked at your own sin and been discouraged? I hope that everybody could raise your hand on that and say, yes, I have been there.

And so where do we find hope? And I just wanna start off with hope as we're gonna kinda see the spiral of ungrace in David's life.

I wanna start off with this encouragement from the New Testament, a passage that I cling to regularly when

I think about my own walk with God. And it's the end of this tiny book called Jude.

Not many people probably have read Jude or even really been very thoughtful about it. It's a very short book.

I'd encourage you to just dig in. It's something that you can really take on. It ends like this. Spoiler alert, this is the end of the book of Jude.

Jude 1, only one chapter. Jude 1, 24 through 25 says this. Now to him, speaking of God, now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only

God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever, amen.

Who is the one who is able to keep you from stumbling? Is it you? Is it your strength?

Is it your ability that will present you blameless on that day before the Lord? In whom did

David trust for his integrity? In whom did David trust for his hope for eternity? You see, our

God is the one who is able to keep us on course. My hope is placed in him to present me blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy on that final day of judgment.

David couldn't trust his own integrity, but in our text, we will see David indeed restrained from doing the wickedness that his heart is moved to do, restrained by the

Lord Almighty. And God will send a discerning, beautiful, and imperfect woman to David to restrain his hand from slaughter here in the text.

And so let's open our Bibles to 1 Samuel chapter 25. We're gonna read this in its entirety. Again, it's gonna be longer.

I encourage you to hang in there, follow along in your Bible. Let your mind wander to these things, not wander to whether something's in the crock pot or whether you remembered to set the furnace or whatever it is that might distract you, but let's think about these things as we read them and go ahead and in your mind's eye, with your imagination, try to picture these events happening.

1 Samuel 25, recast God's very word to us, the powerful word of God.

Now Samuel died and all Israel assembled and mourned for him and they buried him in his house at Ramah.

Then David rose and went down to the wilderness of Paran and there was a man in Maon whose business was in Carmel.

The man was very rich. He had 3 ,000 sheep and 1 ,000 goats. He was shearing his sheep in Carmel.

Now the name of the man was Nabal and his wife, the name of his wife, Abigail. The woman was discerning and beautiful but the man was harsh and badly behaved.

He was a Calebite. David heard in the wilderness that Nabal was shearing his sheep. So David sent 10 young men and David said to the young men, go up to Carmel and go to Nabal and greet him in my name.

And thus you shall greet him. Peace be to you and peace be to your house and peace be to all that you have.

I hear that you have shearers. Now your shepherds have been with us and we did them no harm and they miss nothing all the time they were in Carmel.

Ask your young men and they will tell you. Therefore let my young men find favor in your eyes for we come on a feast day.

Please give whatever you have at hand to your servants and to your son David. When David's young men came, they said all this to Nabal in the name of David and then they waited.

And Nabal answered David's servants, who is David and who is the son of Jesse?

There are many servants these days who break away from their masters. Shall I take my bread and my water and my meat that I have killed for my shearers and give it to men who come from I don't know where?

So David's young men turned away and came back and told him all this. And David said to his men, every man strap on his sword and every man of them strapped on his sword.

David also strapped on his sword and about 400 men went up after David while 200 remained with the baggage.

But one of the young men told Abigail, Nabal's wife, behold, David sent messengers out of the wilderness to greet our master and he railed at them.

Yet the men were very good to us and we suffered no harm and we did not miss anything when we were in the fields as long as we went with them.

They were a wall to us both by night and by day. All the while we were with them keeping the sheep.

Now therefore know this and consider what you should do for harm is determined against our master and against all his house and he is such a worthless man that one cannot speak to him.

Then Abigail made haste and took 200 loaves and two skins of wine and five sheep already prepared and five sayers of parched grain and 100 clusters of raisins and 200 cakes of figs and laid them on donkeys.

And she said to her young men, go on before me, behold, I come after you. But she did not tell her husband Nabal and as she rode on the donkey and came down under cover of the mountain, behold,

David and his men came down toward her and she met them. Now David had said, surely in vain have

I guarded all that this fellow has in the wilderness so that nothing was missed of all that belonged to him and he has returned me evil for good.

God do so to the enemies of David and more also if by morning I leave so much as one male of all who belong to him.

When Abigail saw David, she hurried and got down from the donkey and fell before David on her face and bowed to the ground.

She fell at his feet and said, on me alone, my Lord, be the guilt. Please let your servant speak in your ears and hear the words of your servant.

Let not my Lord regard this worthless fellow Nabal for as his name is, so is he.

Nabal is his name and folly is with him. But I, your servant, did not see the young men of my

Lord whom you sent. Now then, my Lord, as the Lord lives and as your soul lives, because the

Lord has restrained you, because the Lord has restrained you from blood guilt and from saving with your own hand, now then let your enemies and those who seek to do evil to my

Lord be as Nabal. And now let this present that your servant has brought to my Lord be given to the young men who follow my

Lord. Please forgive the trespass of your servant for the Lord will certainly make my Lord a sure house because my

Lord is fighting the battles of the Lord and evil shall not be found in you so long as you live.

If men rise up to pursue you and seek your life, the life of my Lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living and the care of the

Lord, your God. And the lives of your enemies he shall sling out as from the hollow of a sling. And when the

Lord has done to my Lord according to all the good that he has spoken concerning you and has appointed you prince over Israel, my

Lord shall have no cause of grief or pangs of conscience for having shed blood without cause or for my

Lord working salvation himself. And when the Lord has dealt well with my Lord, then remember your servant.

And David said to Abigail, blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel who sent you this day to meet me.

Blessed be your discretion and blessed be you who have kept me this day from blood guilt and from working salvation with my own hand.

For as surely as the Lord, the God of Israel lives, who has restrained me from hurting you unless you had hurried and come to meet me, truly by morning there had not been left to Nabal so much as one male.

Then David received from her hand what she had brought him. And he said to her, go up in peace to your house. See, I have obeyed your voice and I have granted your petition.

And Abigail came to Nabal. And behold, he was holding a feast in his house like the feast of a king.

And Nabal's heart was merry within him for he was very drunk. So she told him nothing at all until the morning light.

In the morning when the wine had gone out of Nabal, his wife told him these things. And his heart died within him and he became as a stone.

And about 10 days later, the Lord struck Nabal and he died. When David heard that Nabal was dead, he said, blessed be the

Lord who has avenged the insult I received at the hand of Nabal and has kept back his servant from wrongdoing. The Lord has returned the evil of Nabal on his own head.

Then David sent and spoke to Abigail to take her as his wife. When the servants of David came to Abigail at Carmel, they said to her,

David is sent to you to take you to him as his wife. And she rose and bowed with her face to the ground and said, behold, your handmaid is a servant to wash the feet of the servants of my

Lord. And Abigail hurried and rose and mounted a donkey and her five young women attended her. She followed the messengers of David and became his wife.

David also took Ahinoam of Jezreel and both of them became his wives. Saul had given

Michael his daughter, David's wife, to Palty, the son of Laish, who was of Galen.

Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your word.

I thank you for the model and example that we have of the reality of your servants. Father, winning one week, losing the next, following after you and your values and then failing just ever so quickly.

And so, Father, if our hope is placed on us, we have very little to rejoice in. We have nothing really to offer in thanks because we're still trying our best to please you and to honor you.

But, Father, I pray that you would release us this morning in our thoughts and in our minds to reflect on the cross and the hope that we have of grace given.

Grace that will guide us, grace that will keep us, grace that will lead us deeper into you and that will indeed one day present us blameless before you.

That our hope does not rest in our ability to cling to you, but in your ability to cling to us.

And, Father, from that place of hope, I pray that our worship would rise to you with enthusiasm, with joy, with delight that is consistent with this awesome message of your grace.

A grace that is brought to David through this strange circumstance with Abigail, but,

Father, a grace that's been brought to us through your son, Jesus Christ. She serves as somewhat of a model of one who brings a grace into an ungracious situation and changes everything.

And so, Father, I pray that from changed hearts, we would rejoice and lift your name high together in this gathering, in Jesus' name, amen.

As you take your seats, I encourage you to get comfortable and keep your Bibles open to 1

Samuel 25. We're gonna be walking through that chapter and kind of referencing it during the course of the message.

And right away at the beginning of our chapter, there's just this one sentence, verse here that kind of starts us off, and it's a little bit surprising.

At the start of our text, we get a passing comment that Samuel died. Now, we're gonna be talking about Abigail in this entire scenario of what's going on there.

And so it can be kind of surprising that like, oh, by the way, Samuel died. The book is named after him, and yet the book gives very little detail about his passing.

And I think there's something kind of interesting just to observe about that. Samuel's life was indeed of value in the kingdom of God.

He was a prophet. He was called up in his generation, raised up to speak the word of God to kings and to leaders in his community.

And he was just a strong individual in his generation, but nobody, however much they accomplish on this planet is indispensable.

And I think it's interesting how the scripture records his death just to say, yeah, and he died, and they celebrated his life, and then he's buried, and that's it.

And so there's a reality to which we need to understand that at the start of this chapter.

Just give it as much attention as the scripture does. He died, they gathered together, remembered his life, mourned over him, buried him, and he's gone.

Our text this morning is so long that we get bogged down if we didn't give the remainder of the text an outline. And so let me outline this for you.

Verses 1 through 11, if you're taking notes, go ahead and jot these down as the big headings. Verses 1 through 11, the response of ungrace.

We're gonna see Nabal respond with a lack of grace to a request. Then we're gonna see in verses 12 and 13, a smaller chunk, but the spiral of ungrace, how ungrace begets ungrace.

So if we respond with a lack of grace and generosity and kindness to others, they will in turn respond.

And often, how many of you know that things escalate? You ever been in a prank war with somebody, and things can get out of hand pretty quick, and the next thing you know, the police are called.

So ungrace begets ungrace, and that's verses 12 to 13 is the spiral of ungrace.

Verses 14 through 31 is the restraint of grace. When you have this spiral going on, the only thing that can break that cycle of ungracious and ungracious and ungracious is grace breaking in.

And so we're gonna see the restraint of grace breaking in through Abigail in verses 14 through 31, and then we're gonna see how the response of grace, in other words, grace begets more grace.

Ungracious, unkind response begets an unkind response, but a gracious, kind, generous response begets a gracious response.

And then our text wraps up with the consequences of ungrace from verses 36 through 44. So it sounds like a bit much, but before we, as we dig in, the narrative's gonna roll by pretty fast, and it's a pretty interesting story.

So let's start with the response of ungrace that we see here in this text. Kind of setting up some things here from the early parts of this chapter, in the first couple of verses,

David left Engedi and settled in the wilderness of Maon, near a settlement called Carmel.

And there is a resident of this area, we're introduced to his wealth before we're introduced to him, and this is not unintentional.

The author does this for us to demonstrate what is most important about this man. In his own eyes, in his own estimation, he would rather his wealth introduce him.

He doesn't really care much for his name. He's just like, I'd like everybody to know how wealthy I am. And so we meet his wealth before we meet him.

He was very rich, 3 ,000 sheep, 1 ,000 goats, extreme wealth during this time, and it's sheep shearing time in Carmel.

And so he's had to hire a bunch of people. Usually Israelites didn't do the sheep shearing, you would hire kind of foreigners or different people, and it was dirty business, but it was also very lucrative.

And so we're introduced to his name in the text, interesting name, his name is Nabal. He was a surly, harsh, mean man who was badly behaved.

Lest you think that he's gonna get a bad rap here, we're gonna see as we go through this text what validates the reality that this is just not a flat -out wicked guy, he's not good.

But he had a lovely wife who was, according to the text, wise and discerning. Her name is

Abigail, which means the Lord is joy or the Lord is my joy, one or the other. And his name is the

Hebrew word straight up for the simple word fool. The word Nabal means fool.

Now it doesn't seem likely that his parents hate him so much that they sent out a birth announcement showing his weight, length, and we chose the name fool.

He just kinda looked like a fool. He looked like a Steve, he looked like a Marcia, or she looked like a

Marcia, she looked like a Michelle. He looked like a fool, so we just named him fool. No, it's not likely that's the case.

This was likely what he was known by, not -so -nice nickname, and he seems to let it stick.

He's that kinda guy. It seems to be like he's okay with that. You wanna call me fool? Look at my wealth, look at who

I am. You can call me whatever you want, but I'm livin' it. So it's sheep -shearing season, a time for festivities.

Men would be in amiable spirits. Everything would be upbeat. Think like the holiday season here for our culture.

Sheep -shearing time was like that. Goodwill towards mankind, generosity, the wealth is flowing, celebrations, parties, all different kinds of things going on, and it was just a good time of the year in Israel.

In an agricultural society that was pastoral in the sense of taking care of sheep and shepherds and all of that stuff, this was the payday kind of time of the year.

Accounts would be reconciled, and the wealth of a year would come into the marketplace in the form of wool.

And so there's abundance during this time and a lot of commerce and trade, and as I said, festivities.

And so David sent a 10 -man delegation to Nabal to greet him and ask for any compensation for security services his men had rendered to Nabal's shepherds.

Now, he instructed his men to go in kindness, in verse six, and to season their speech with peace to Nabal.

Look at verse six with me. And thus, David speaking to his 10 servants who are gonna go, thus shall you greet him.

Peace be to you, and peace be to your house, and peace be to all that you have. Peace, peace, peace.

Threefold peace to Nabal. He's greeting him with kindness, with generosity and gentleness.

Now, I wanna point out what's going on here, unless you think that David is running some kind of mafia racket. I protect your people, you know, so you gotta give me a cut, you know?

So, is that what's going on here in the text? Well, the wilderness is a dangerous place, okay? So, multiple times in the text is this assumption.

You need to take it at face value to understand the culture, to understand what's going on here. There is an assumption in this text that without the presence of David's men as a security force,

Nabal would have a lot of assets show up missing. A lot of things would just be lost were it not for David's men in the presence of his shepherds.

That's the assumption. So, the wilderness is a dangerous place, whether you've got roaming bands of nomadic barbarians and different people who are just looking to get ahead, or looking to slaughter, or looking to take.

And so, Nabal's shepherds, the text tells us multiple times, they missed nothing. David's men were a sure security force surrounding the shepherds of Nabal.

So, David is requesting, merely requesting, whatever the very wealthy Nabal might have to spare.

Do you have anything you could spare during this generous time? It's a feast. It's a time of festival. I know that your accounts are being reconciled.

Do you have anything you could share with my men since they served you faithfully over the last year?

David even suggests that Nabal check with the shepherds. He says to ask them, ask your shepherds if indeed what my men did for you was of service.

Was it actually a genuine helpful service to your shepherds? Ask them, he says.

You don't have to take my word for it. I'm not just trying to come and money grub from you, or trying to get a racket.

If they genuinely helped, then could you help us? Had Nabal actually taken the offer for David to check in with his shepherds, we see later in the text in verses 15 through 16 that if he had checked in, he would have got a glowing report of how indeed

David's men had benefited Nabal. David's men had indeed, according to the shepherds and according to his servants, had been of immense service to the shepherds.

In verses 15 through 16, his men, David's men are described as a wall around the flocks.

They protected them night and day around the clock like a personal security force for the shepherds.

And it's even clear that the shepherds intentionally kept the sheep close to David all the time we were with them.

Implying that the shepherds literally tried to stick close to David's men as they were in the fields and bringing their sheep to water and bringing them to pasture because they knew the protection that they were obtaining from David's men.

But here in the text now, we get down to the main point of this first section, and that is here comes the ungracious response.

Miserly, poorly behaved, brash, foolish Nabal can muster no generosity.

There is not a shred of generosity in his heart. The 10 men are dismissed by Nabal, but not before he offers a intense criticism towards their master.

Who is this David? Who does the son of Jesse think he is? Now, don't take this as a legitimate question like as in Nabal was ignorant of who

David was and he just wanted to know. This is an insult. This is a, who do you think you are,

David, that you would come to me and expect scraps from my table? And not only that, he knows who his dad is.

Did you catch that in the text? The servants didn't say David, the son of Jesse. It shows that he knows the answer.

Who are you? Who do you think you are, son of Jesse? You're not my son. Go to your dad and ask him for something.

Don't come to me. He knows who he is, but also equally, Nabal knows why

David is in the wilderness. He knows some of his backstory because he follows up his question with a stark and insulting statement.

Many servants these days are breaking away from their masters. Many servants these days are giving up gainful employment to wander out of the wilderness and beg from the likes of me.

You're just another one of 1 ,000 people holding cardboard signs at an exit ramp.

You're just, who should be working, says Nabal.

You see, the insult is, this is the insult that way too many wealthy people, like you and me, hurl at those in poverty.

This ought to be convicting to us. Many people are in need because of their own foolish decisions.

Well, shouldn't they be working? Couldn't they have stuck with their job? Couldn't they have fill in the blank?

Couldn't they have done this? I mean, isn't it their poor decisions that they're homeless, that they're destitute, that they don't have anywhere to turn?

Here Nabal proves himself foolish, but lest we pour all the foolishness on Nabal, consider ourselves.

That's the point of scripture. That's why it's here for us to read. Nabal is in essence accusing

David of leaving a great position of serving Saul and now coming to beg scraps from him.

It is an insult upon insult. And Nabal with dark, greedy ungrace in his heart betrays his own attitude towards his wealth in verse 11.

Look at the possessive pronouns in verse 11. They're the part that teaches us.

Possessive pronouns, shall I take my bread, my water, my meat that I have killed for my shearers and give it to you?

Oh, come on, for real? Get a load of this David and his 10 servants. You see,

Nabal's materialism shows in possessive pronouns and so does ours. Yeah, that was a possessive pronoun too.

My car, my job, my house, my wave runner, my bank account, my, my, my, my.

Think that through. Nabal was a fool. And I think the calling for all of us this morning is gonna be consider, just consider where do we stand in that word?

Nabal was a fool full of ungrace. He rebuffed a man who had voluntarily blessed him.

David didn't have to help, he chose to. And David isn't scrounging or running a racket.

David rendered a service and is just asking for anything that the dude can spare. And I wanna point out the nature of ungrace in this.

The way that ungrace strikes our hearts and can show itself in this lack of generosity or miserly attitude.

Notice, and I believe this to be firmly true, any shred of generosity would have been welcomed by David.

Was he not satisfied with five loaves of bread offered to Ahimelech, offered by Ahimelech earlier?

Five measly loaves of bread for his hundreds of men that were serving with him.

And Ahimelech says, all I got is five loaves of bread. And he's like, oh, okay, I'll take it, that's great. I mean,

I believe firmly here that if Nabal had said, 10 loaves of bread is all I've got.

Really, all I can spare right now, he would have been satisfied. Even I believe to the degree that kind words of denial probably would not have provoked

David's anger and wrath. Even just to say, I got nothing. I've got so many shearers right now that I have to feed, so many mouths to feed.

I'm sorry, but maybe come back and check in next time. I thank you so much for the services rendered to my shepherds, but I've got nothing

I can offer right now. I don't think David freaks out like this. And I think what we're seeing here in the text is a little bit of one of the

Proverbs in play, Proverbs 15 .1, a proverb that I memorized a long time ago. A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.

One that, if you struggle with anger, I'd recommend you memorize that one. But the reality is we know that if we respond with harshness, what do we usually get in return?

Harshness. If we respond with ungrace, we usually get ungrace in return. And let this be a self -evident application from this first point of our outline.

Let this be what you write down and consider and think about. Let me just say, just straight up, what the text is indicating, show grace and kindness and generosity to others.

Show grace and generosity and kindness to others. But let me be careful to say, is this a, lest you think

I'm saying, pull yourself up by the bootstraps and just get it done, let me suggest to you what

I believe to be firmly true and what is not self -evident. This is not a self -evident truth.

We need a heart change to truly produce grace and generosity in our lives.

My call to you this morning is not just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and be more gracious. How many of you ever had anybody lash out at you?

Was it your natural response to respond with grace and kindness? It usually isn't, is it?

How many of you recognize the necessity for a supernatural work in your life to respond to grace when others insult you and malign you and push you away with miserliness and a lack of generosity?

I believe that if you don't find grace and generosity as a natural inclination, then let me just bring you back to Jesus Christ, who has been so generous and gracious toward you at the cross.

He gave his everything in love for you. But you see, even at that, Jesus is not just an example to follow.

Well, Jesus, how many of you know you can't reach that standard on your own? Just to say Jesus was generous, be generous too, that's not even enough.

Jesus is more than merely an example to follow. He is the one who died to give you a new heart that beats with grace, that beats with forgiveness and a radical generosity towards others.

If you don't have that kind of heart, then let me encourage you to come to the cross this morning, where God can give you a new heart that will hunger and desire for what is right.

And even when you fail, even when you respond with harshness, you will want to come back and apologize and make that right and repent and run from that kind of response.

Just like David will here in a minute. In our text, though, we see that ungrace yields to a spiral of ungrace.

That's the logical direction that things go. And in verses 12 through 13, we see that ungrace leads to further ungrace, bad behavior often incites worse behavior.

David, the man of faith, David, the man of integrity from last week, David, the man who in Scripture is called a man after God's own heart, was not immune to the temptation of pride when insulted.

And when his 10 men came back with the report, oh, does he get irate. David, who went to Nabal with the threefold offering of peace, now is ready to offer a threefold word of sword.

Peace is exchanged for sword. He commands all his men to strap on their sword.

He sets out to ride with 400 of his soldiers. Doesn't even think he needs all 600 to avenge this affront to his character.

David, who refused to avenge himself on King Saul last week, is now ready to avenge himself over some petty insults issued by a fool.

A fool issues an insult and he's ready to go to war. Now I wanna point out, just in case you're confused,

David is not in the least bit justified in his response here. I don't know if you've read this that way before, if you've read this text before, if you've thought very deeply about whether or not this is a good response or a bad response, it is not justified, it is not good.

He's about to commit murder. The text calls it blood guilt. He will admit that he is about to be saved from committing murder and blood guilt.

He is filled with a white hot wrath and he is taking matters into his own hands, even seeking to save himself and his own reputation.

He's shamed and he wants to see the source of the shame gone. I believe that a beneficial application to the second point is to highlight the way that ungrace quickly spirals out of control.

I think that in itself can be an application for us. Give ungracious and miserly reactions to others around you.

Snap at them and show them contempt and watch how quickly things escalate. Ungrace is a recipe for misery and exponentially rising tensions.

I think you could have said that before you came in here, but take this on as scripture telling you, God pressing this on your heart.

Nabal insults David, David writes out to slay every man in his household. That escalated pretty quickly, didn't it?

Sure did. Consider where ungraciousness will lead you. Consider where it takes you.

And then respond by going to the cross and asking God for the strength and the right responses by his spirit living within you.

The third movement in the text is in, the largest one, is in verses 14 through 31. We see the restraint of grace breaking through and it breaks in through the wise and discerning wife of the fool,

Abigail. We see that the only thing that can really change an ungracious movement among people is grace, goodness, kindness, unmerited favor coming in.

You see, the unsung hero of this text isn't even given a name. Now you're gonna go, Abigail is the heroine, but here we actually have somebody that's unnamed that it was kind of interesting to think about.

They're here in the text and they factor in pretty importantly. So I mean, without this man, this young man's servant who comes to Abigail and reports to her,

Abigail doesn't even know to do anything. So in verse 14, a young servant of Nabal came to Abigail and gave her a report of her husband's ungracious dealings.

With David's men. He validates that Nabal responded foolishly. He believes that David will indeed, he doesn't know for sure because he's not in David's camp, he's in Nabal's camp, but he believes firmly that after what he heard

Nabal say to David's servants, he says, this is gonna come back on our heads. David is surely not gonna let this go and he is indeed going to determine harm to the household of Nabal and all of his family.

So Nabal and the young servant even admits he has come to Abigail. Why is he going to, not going straight to his master, why is he going to the wife of his master?

He's doing so because Nabal is such a worthless man that he says one cannot even speak to him. You can't even reason with this guy.

In case you think that the text is being unfair to Nabal, everybody who knows him personally, we just gotta trust the text on this, everybody who knows the man admits that he's a complete and utter tool, okay?

Fool tool, kind of rhymes, it's a fool tool. But he's a very wealthy tool.

And how many of you know that wealth and foolishness are a just dangerous, deadly combination? And that's exactly what

Nabal has here for our example. Extreme wealth and foolishness to boot.

So Abigail immediately acts to seek to counteract her foolish husband's ungrace and miserliness with grace and generosity.

She's going to seek with haste to bring grace into the situation. To bring generosity into a situation where there has been miserliness and an unwillingness to give and to surrender.

So without her husband's knowledge, she packs out a significant gift bag. 200 loaves of bread.

Now compare that again with the five loaves of bread given to David by Ahimelech, and this is a significant amount.

Two skins of wine, five field -dressed sheep, about 20 gallons of parched grain, 100 clusters of raisins, and 200 fig cakes.

Hot commodities during this time, very expensive were the raisins and the fig cakes, valued in the desert because they would last long.

They were well -preserved and they could last for a long time without refrigeration and all that. And so to actually have something sweet in that culture was not very common.

So this is a big gift. And grace and generosity, as we see it displayed through Abigail in this text, has a lot to teach us this morning.

And so I wanna just kinda highlight as we move through some statements that are defined, that grace is defined as, or movements of grace in this text.

The first is that grace moves quickly to make amends. Grace moves quickly to reconcile and to resolve.

Now how many of you have ever had somebody offend you and you let it fester and you let it sit? You're just like, that's gonna go away. And it didn't go away.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Grace, when we encounter grace, it moves quickly to reconcile.

It moves quickly to make amends. Moves quickly with haste to go and say, I wronged you.

Will you forgive me? My goodness, so many problems could be resolved in our culture.

So many problems could be resolved in our marriages and our families and our communities. If we would just make haste to be the grace that God desires us to be by admitting when we've made an offense to somebody and saying,

I'm sorry, will you forgive me? I was wrong and what can I do to make restitution?

How many of you think that that would go a long ways towards peace in our communities and in our families and in our culture? It would do amazing things.

Grace moves quickly to make amends. Grace shows humility. Grace must show humility.

If you're gonna go and admit that you wronged somebody, say, she came and she fell down before David and bowed in humble respect.

She's gonna call him my Lord all throughout the text. She's gonna show herself to be his servant and put herself under him in terms of just saying,

I owe you and my family, my household. She's gonna be representative for her household and say, my household owes you.

We've made an affront to you. We have. So grace moves quickly to make amends.

Grace shows humility. Grace is willing to take on itself the wrong of others. Oh my goodness, that is so hard for us.

When you're not the offending party, but just consider, hold with me for a second because you're like, I shouldn't take, I mean, they did the wrong.

How could I do this? But in the household, there's this sense of community and communal responsibility and she takes that on herself as the woman of the household.

Consider how Christ willingly took on sins that were not his. Abigail is not guilty here, but requests to be considered the guilty party that she might be the mediator and stand in the place for her husband.

And verse 25 needs to be approached cautiously because all of this might be resting in the back of your mind, especially those of you that are married in the room.

Is Abigail a complete and utter model of what a wife ought to do? Well, Abigail certainly in verse 25 throws her foolish husband under the bus agreeing with his name.

People call him Nabal and such he is. He is indeed a fool. But I think, you know,

Abigail is not perfect. And again, I would not hold her up as an example to do everything exactly as she has done it, but I want to just point out some of the discernment and wisdom of this woman.

If Abigail comes to David with defense of her husband right now, what happens? Does this end well?

Oh, probably not, right? Do you think David is ready to hear a defense of Nabal? Do you think he's ready to hear his virtues extolled and how awesome he responds to people and how he's always right?

No. So it's likely that she in her wisdom acknowledged that to say to some degree, yes,

I agree that my husband has responded as a fool is helpful here. But it's also equally important to recognize that Jesus says, he uses the

Aramaic word, not Nabal, but raka, and he says anybody who says raka to their brother, anybody who calls them fool is liable to murder.

And we know that that's not a good word to be throwing around toward people. But in Abigail, we see that grace offers restraint from sin.

Wow, this is powerful. Grace offers restraint from sin. In verse 26, she sees that the

Lord has sent her to protect David from murder, from blood guilt. She has kept him from sinning.

And the Lord is the one behind that protection. The Lord, she says, the Lord has sent me to you to restrain you from doing this thing.

Take just a moment right here to consider how many ways the Lord has restrained you and preserved you from sin.

I encourage you to take just a second and count the ways, man, this afternoon, if you get a chance to just sit down for a minute and meditate on this, or maybe early in the morning sometime this week, to sit down and count the ways that God has protected you and restrained you, and then give him glory and praise for protecting you.

God really does this thing. A lot of us have been raised to think it's all up to us.

No, it's all up to him, and we give him all the praise and honor and glory when we say no to sin. He is the one who is able to keep us from stumbling.

He is the one who will present us blameless in his presence before his great glory. Grace can restrain us.

Grace offers, again, grace offers gifts in exchange for insults. Nabal and ungrace could only offer insults and gruff dismissal.

But Abigail and grace brings a generous gift to David in verse 27, and in verses 28 through 29, we see further grace asks for forgiveness, and grace seeks words of kindness and gentleness.

Not necessarily flattery, but words of kindness and gentleness. The contrast between the ungrace of Nabal and the grace of Abigail continues to roll.

She demonstrates an uncanny faith in the Lord's work with David. She believes that he will indeed be a king in her speech to him, and that his life will be preserved while the lives of his enemies will cast away like a rock in the pouch of a sling slung away.

She sees victory in David's future, I think because the Lord is with her. The Lord is guiding her. And this section of the grace that restrains concludes with the reality that grace appeals to the value of a clear conscience.

Grace will bring you toward a clear conscience. Grace will bring you towards a good future. In verse 31, we see that a final value of grace is held high if David will only respond to the grace being offered to him by God through Abigail.

If he will respond to that grace, he will protect himself, the text says, in verse 31, from the grief and pangs of conscience that will certainly come upon him for shedding the blood of Nabal and his household.

You see, what this really is saying is that the grace of God comes to us in temptation. God's grace, his spirit speaking into your heart, and he says, future you just called and said that they wish you wouldn't do that.

Future you just said, I don't really want that and I wish you wouldn't do, fill in the blank.

You see, future you will suffer, and the God of grace knows that future you will suffer if you give in to that temptation.

And it's part of our role in living gracious and generous lives with one another to encourage each other away from sin and its consequences.

Despite our culture that has this upside down, we need to be people who will lovingly but firmly reason with each other about the consequences of sin and the reality of judgment that is coming.

And let me encourage you then, let me follow my own preaching here and what I see in the text, and that is to stand up here boldly in front of you and say, do not bring on yourself the grief and pain that that sin, that sin that is calling out to you right now, that sin that is gonna call out to you throughout this next week, don't give in to it.

It brings with it grief and pain and destruction. Reject sin and choose grace.

And let my voice this morning, even up here, be a voice calling you to choose grace instead of sin.

And in verses 32 through 35, we see then the response of grace, how David responds, ungrace begets ungrace, but grace begets grace.

And Abigail shows the way that grace can break into a cycle of ungracious responses and alter the course. Grace offered and grace heeded is a beautiful thing, beautiful like Abigail bringing discernment, kindness and generosity and restraint to David.

And David's dark and vengeful heart is softened by the grace of restraint that is offered to him through Abigail. He praises

God, he blesses Abigail, she saved him from committing a serious sin on this day.

And Abigail stands as a model for men and women everywhere of the power of God's grace.

She is not perfect, but she is used by God in her wise discernment and her kind generosity.

And I think it's disappointing to me that Abigail's story is often relegated to women's books. Follow the women of the

Bible and the books that women like to buy and it's focused on that.

And the fact of the matter is, she is not merely a model wife or a model woman, she is a model person that every one of us in this room can learn from Abigail and ought to exude the grace that she offers and the generosity that she offers and the humility that she offers in this text.

By the power of God, she stands as an example to every single one of us.

Well, David dismissed her in peace and accepted her generous gift. And I want to just ask you again, just to reflect on this, how do we become gracious and generous people?

By receiving the grace offered to us in Christ. We cannot make ourselves generous or cause ourselves to respond with grace.

We need Jesus to break into our present with his love and forgiveness that can set each and every one of us free.

And in verses 36 through 44, our text wraps up with the consequences of ungrace. Abigail comes back from saving the day to find that Nabal is throwing himself a party fit for a king, as a fool is probably often tempted to do.

And as fools are known to do from time to time, he was very drunk. He was crazy drunk.

Drunk to excess. And in the morning, Abigail told him everything that happened the night before, lets him sleep it off.

And then probably late morning, she tells him, hey, I saved our entire household last night by going to Nabal.

And I mean, by going to David and trying to set things right. Some commentaries actually believe, and I wonder if it's not true, that his coronary, that his heart attack did not come from her telling him how close he was to death, but when she told him the exorbitant gift she had given to David.

Think that through. You did, you know, you gave him, and it's over, right?

I wonder, I wonder, knowing the way that this guy is described by people who knew him, we go with eyewitnesses on this, the people who knew him are like, this dude was messed up.

Servant, couldn't even go to him and reason with him or talk to him. So what was it that got to his heart?

And he had a coronary or some sort of stroke or something. He died 10 days later, and he didn't just die 10 years later.

You look at verse 38, and it is very clear that the Lord struck him down.

God judged Nabal. Not David, not David's sword. God judged

Nabal, and that's the direction that it should go. God being your avenger, God being the one who takes up your battles for you, not you taking up your battles for yourself, or even you taking up his battles for him.

Very capable of managing himself. I pray that I might live in such a way, by the way, and I think you might as well, to live in such a way that as few people as possible celebrate when my death announcement goes out.

Anybody with me on that? Raise your hand if you kind of would like to live in a way that there's very few celebrations about your death.

But David rejoices that the Lord has avenged him. You see that in the text?

David blessed the Lord. I mean, he finds out Nabal's dead, and he's like, wow, Lord, you did it. That's great. I didn't have to do it myself.

He didn't need to take matters into his own hands. The Lord has vindicated him. And I just want to point out that here in this, you know, with the text flow, ungrace be getting deeper ungrace, grace breaks in, which results in more grace.

The text ends in a bit of a downer. David adds Abigail to his other two wives.

The text, it sounds in this text like Aan Noam came along with Abigail, but he's already married.

He's already got two wives by the time we get to this chapter, Michael and Aan Noam. It's just basically retro stating that, yeah, he's already married to Aan Noam.

He adds another wife, Abigail. And Saul, of course, in the text, it ends with Saul giving his wife,

Michael, who he assumes David has abandoned. So he gives his wife, Michael, to another man, leaving

David with two wives. And I just want to point out he's going to have more wives over the course of 2

Samuel. But polygamy isn't good. I just want to get that straight statement.

It doesn't turn out well for families. You see that, follow it in the text and see how it goes. It doesn't go.

And scripture never holds it up as God's standard or even God's acceptable method. David was indeed a product of his culture.

You need to recognize that. And the text ends with one more reminder that David, despite his integrity and willingness to be won over by grace, doesn't have it all perfect.

David is not a perfect man because there's only one who is perfect. Only one was tempted but never sinned.

Jesus Christ is the only giver of grace. He's the only place you can go.

He's got the corner on it. He's got the monopoly on grace. You can't find it anywhere else.

And you're going, wait a minute, Don. I thought we were supposed to be dispensaries of grace. Well, we are, but you still have to go to him for it.

Do you get what I'm saying? Only in as much as you're connected to the grace of God in Christ can you offer grace and generosity and kindness to others.

How many of you know that if you come to God without grace, you have enough work on your own to make yourself look better than everybody else that you're going to respond ungraciously to others?

If you misunderstand this entire thing about the Christian faith and you think it's all up to you, you think that you're earning

God's favor, then my goodness, I better push you all down so that I look better in God's eyes.

Do you get what I'm saying? I want to make sure that I look the best that I can and that means celebrating when you fail. That means being ungracious.

But it's only in the cross of Christ that we're set free to cheer for one another, to hope for one another, to actually believe good for one another.

What is the launching place of a firm ministry? Firmly on the rock of forgiveness and being set free by Jesus Christ.

Only once you know that your sins are covered on the cross can you then go out and minister grace to others.

Are you getting what I'm saying? Once you realize you're taken care of, you got the oxygen mask on, you're gonna be okay, now you can help others.

You get it? And that's the grace that we're talking about here, the ability to go out and minister to the needs of others because of what

Christ has done. Jesus is the place where we go to get the grace that we can supply in turn to others.

We are just merely recipients. And if you've received that grace and the kindness, the generosity of God through his son

Jesus and his death on the cross for you, then let me encourage you to come to one of the tables and take the cracker to remember his body that was broken for you.

Take a cup of juice to remember his blood that was shed for you. And then as the text of scripture indicates, we should do this in remembrance of him.

Do this in remembrance of the one who gave everything to bring you the gracious generosity of his heavenly father.

And if you belong to Jesus, then think about these applications. Go out and spread the grace that you have been given.

It's been given you an abundant supply, share that with others. Live out humility, live out generosity, speak words of kindness, guide others towards the restraint of sin, and do so as you continually go back to God, go back to Christ, and dip your ladle in the grace that he gives so that you can share it with others.

Well, let me just say this as an end here. It would be great if every one of us went out to live out grace.

It would be great if everyone went out to live out humility. But let me say that that's not enough. Without you opening your mouth to share where the grace comes from, you just look like a really great, really great lady, a really great guy.

Without being able to point back and say, you know what, this is grace that I've received from God. Because I'm forgiven, because I've got new life, therefore

I can serve you with the gratitude of what God has done for me.

Can I share that with you? Without opening our mouths, we just look like the gospel is us.

The gospel isn't us. The gospel is God and his forgiveness to us. Explain that this grace doesn't originate with you, but it is grace you have received from the

Lord Jesus. Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your grace. I thank you for your mercy. The generosity that you have applied to us, the kindness, undeserved kindness that you have given to us.

That you stand as just this example for us so much higher, so much better than Nabal.

Nabal is our flesh. Nabal is our work and our effort.

And so Father, I thank you that we have Christ who has demonstrated grace and given us grace so that we can go out and impact the world around us.

Father, I pray that that would be reality and that as we come to these tables, that you would allow this to be a reflection on how we couldn't do it ourselves and we need.

And every one of us who gets up and stands in line and takes the cracker and takes the juice is showing everybody else in this room that we are needy people.

We are not self -sufficient. We don't have it all together. And we needed the death of your son to be made right.

And let that move us to humility, to kindness, and to service of others in Jesus' name, amen.