The Persistent Pursuit

ReCAST Church of Mattawan

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsack is preaching from his series,

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The Warrior Poet King, Study of 2 Samuel. Let's listen in. Welcome to Recast Church.

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I'm Don Filsack, the lead pastor, and I want to welcome all of you to this worship gathering in the name of Jesus Christ this morning.

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How many of you are glad to be together with others who love Jesus? Amen. I'm so glad to be together. I'm going to start off by introducing the message like I usually do, and then we're going to sing some songs.

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Some of you, this is your first time here, and you're like, is he going to preach right now? I've actually had people think that. Like, when I get up here, they're like, oh, wow, he's just going for it.

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I'm going to introduce the message, then we're going to sing some songs, and then I'm going to come back, and we're going to kind of walk through it more in depth and in detail.

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But have you ever noticed that life is full of cycles? Those of you that are older, you already know that, right? It just comes in cycles at us.

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We know that it is. We were here just a week ago, and here we are again, and Lord willing, we'll be here next week, and the following week, and the following week.

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We are creatures of habit. The older we get, the more routines become pronounced in our lives, right? We kind of tend to begin to like those patterns and those well -worn ruts.

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But more than this is the reality that the clothes get dirty. We throw them in the washer, throw them in the dryer, fold them, put them away, wear them again, they get dirty.

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Cycles, right? Cycles. The dishwasher is always in a state of either needing to be loaded, started, or unloaded.

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Anybody? Always one of those is the case, right? And then there are the seasons. I haven't mowed my lawn recently.

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I don't know if any of you have, but we know that's coming, right? Anybody, a hearty amen to that?

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Looking forward to a little bit of outside time this time of the year. It's nice. We enjoy the seasons, enjoy them coming around.

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But the reason I'm talking about cycles is that I believe our text shows a spiritual side, a spiritual side of cycles that comes to us as an implicit encouragement to persist in cycles of pursuing

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God. To persist in cycles of pursuing God. Our text this morning looks like two identical scenarios that face

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David. Two different times that the Philistines are going to challenge David in battle for the identical same valley.

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Two times that David is going to inquire of the Lord. Two times that the Lord answers.

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And two times that the Philistines are defeated at the hands of King David, but maybe even more so to say at the hands of the

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Lord Almighty. But there is something that stands out significantly in these parallel accounts.

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God's answer to David differs the second time. Same scenario, same situation, same valley, same enemies.

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But his instruction differs the second time. See what I'm going to point out in this message and what

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I want us to think about before we even read it is that David didn't have a disconnected kind of relationship from God.

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He didn't rest on past communication with God and say, I'm okay, he talked to me once. He didn't take

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God's answers as once for all communication, but he leaned into God in relationship. We see in our text that David persistently pursued his

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God and so should we. He was in relationship with him. He inquired of God even when the same exact situation came up a second time.

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So we learn something about David here in the text, but we also learn something about God in the text. We do not serve a silent, detached, and distant

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God. We serve a God who is able to communicate with us and is indeed involved in the lives of his people, those he loves.

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So now that we know a bit of what to look for in the text, let's open our Bibles or our devices or your scripture journal to 2

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Samuel 5 verses 17 through 25. So it's 2 Samuel 5, 17 through 25, and let's read this together, recast

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God's holy and precious word, exactly what he desires for us to hear this morning in the gathering together of his people.

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When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed king over Israel, all the Philistines went up to search for David.

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But David heard of it and went down to the stronghold. Now the Philistines had come and spread out in the valley of Rephim.

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And David inquired of the Lord, shall I go up against the Philistines? Will you give them into my hand? And the

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Lord said to David, go up, for I will surely give the Philistines into your hand.

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And David came to Baal -perazim, and David defeated them there. And he said, the

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Lord has broken through my enemies before me like a breaking flood. Therefore the name of that place is called

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Baal -perazim. And the Philistines left their idols there, and David and his men carried them away.

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And the Philistines came up yet again and spread out in the valley of Rephim. And when David inquired of the

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Lord, he said, you shall not go up. Go around to their rear and come against them opposite the balsam trees.

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And when you hear the sound of marching in the tops of the balsam trees, then rouse yourself. For then the

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Lord has gone out before you to strike down the army of the Philistines. And David did as the Lord commanded him, and struck down the

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Philistines from Geba to Gezer. Let's pray. Father, I thank you that you are a

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God who is faithful to communicate to us, first and foremost and most fundamentally and most obviously through your word.

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It's even in your word that we come to understand a relationship with you. It's in your word that we understand a communication that comes from you, revealing who you are and how you desire a relationship with us to go.

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So Father, I pray that the byproduct of our gathering this morning would be more than just taking in a service, more than the opportunity to just rub shoulders with others, but most importantly an opportunity to see you in new light.

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An opportunity to see you in your word and see you calling us further and deeper into relationship with you.

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Father, I pray that that would be a reality for each and every one of us. From the one here who has known you the longest to the one who knows the least about you, that all of us would grow in our faith this morning, that you would just tick up a notch in terms of our relationship with you, our understanding of who you are.

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And Father, that you would allow the gospel to come to bear in our minds and in our hearts. The good news, we are sinners broken to a person in the room, no one righteous, not a single one of us.

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And yet you came to rescue us. You sent your son to die on the cross to take the penalty that we deserve for our sins.

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So Father, I pray that you would make that reality come alive for us. For those of us who have trusted that and believe that, Father, I pray that it would ignite our hearts in worship to you this morning, that we would rejoice together in gladness and that our voices would lift up in song because we have been redeemed and bought back from our sinful ways by our

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Savior Jesus Christ. And it's in his name that I pray, amen. All right, yeah, you can go ahead and be seated.

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But like I say every week, if at any time during the message you need to get up and stretch out, if you need more coffee or water back there, if you need to use the restrooms, they're out the double doors down the hallway on the left -hand side.

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So you're not going to distract me if you get up. You might distract me if you shouted me down or something like that, but much shy of that and I'm on a roll.

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So keep your Bibles open to 2 Samuel 5, verses 17 through 25. Again, if you lost your place there in your device or whatever it is, make sure you've got that open in front of you so you can see that the things that I'm saying are coming from God's word.

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These are not things that I just kind of invented and wanted to talk to you about this morning. These are things that God's word dictates that we talk about because we're marching through the book of 2

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Samuel. Now, some people naturally thrive off routine and you can think about how you function in life.

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Some of you just love routine and you like to kind of do the same things. You go to the same place, order the coffee from the same waitress every week and you just kind of have these routines.

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Some people absolutely love change and there is a few rare people somewhere in the middle, but that's not very common.

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I personally find routine to be monotonous. I'm grateful for a calling that involves a variety of different kinds of meetings.

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Not one Monday looks the same from the next. I get to study different texts every week, communication that varies significantly from week to week.

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How many of you would say you have a job like that and you love it, like you've got some flexibility in the way that things are organized and stuff like that?

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How many of you do the same thing almost every day? How many of you are okay with that? Some of us are, like we just don't mind that routine and that's good.

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God puts us together in different ways, right? But in our spiritual lives, we see a frequent calling to persistent pursuit of God in prayer.

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We need to persistently take in his word to grow in our faith. We need to create some cadence and routine in our lives.

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We need to set our lives into cycles of that weekly routine cycle cadence of gathering with God's people on the

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Lord's day. You guys have done that this morning and so that's great. That demonstrates that you've got at least some notion that this is something that's valuable that God has given to you for your own benefit and blessing.

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But our text this morning spotlights two different events in the life of David. They're similar events and they have so much similarity that some scholars have posed a theory that these are one event recorded for us twice.

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But there's all kinds of really solid, good textual reasons to be confident that these are two separate battles, two separate accounts that are recorded to highlight

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David's persistent pursuit of God and equally God's continued care for his people through David.

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Verse 17 is set after David has conquered Jerusalem and he now possesses the fortress of Zion which sits up on a hill and he's made that his capital.

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Jerusalem is now the capital of his kingdom. He's united all 12 tribes of Israel under his leadership.

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God has brought him to the throne. God who promised that in his youth and through a lot of twists and turns of his life brought him to the throne over Israel.

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And when the Philistines caught wind of the anointing and coronation of King David over a unified

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Israel, they put out an APB. He is number one on the Philistines' most wanted list and they are sending out everybody they can to try to get a hold of David.

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I don't think it's for good intent. They don't want to question him. They want to put him to death. And let me share a brief explanation of the

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Philistines because I realize that I've mentioned them a lot in previous several weeks without much explanation of who they are and it might be helpful for us to have just the smallest and shortest of history lessons on who in the world are we talking about when we're talking about the

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Philistines. Most historians believe that they were primarily a seafaring people out on the

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Mediterranean Sea living on islands. They settled the east coast of the Mediterranean after some voyages and trips.

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The reasons are numerous why people see them as seafaring but a lot of their culture was oriented around the water and around the sea and so that's part of the reason.

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One major reason is that their primary God that they worship, their primary deity was named Dagon. He was half fish and half man.

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Merman, Father, right? They were more technologically advanced than the

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Israelites. They settled the coastal plains and lived along the shores of the sea, a fertile area where there was good crop growth there and all of that kind of stuff and they were loosely divided among five primary settlements.

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Each settlement, each primary city had its own king but Israel holds the hill country and up into the mountains and then down into the

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Jordan Valley to the east of them and so that made the Philistines were restricted in their travel and restricted in their trade because these people had come in and moved in really close to them.

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So when you see the Philistines attacking Israel, it isn't just that they were bullies. Now how many of you hear the story of David and Goliath?

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He comes out and taunts Israel and it's like what kind of a jerk is this and why is he acting this way and certainly we ought to beat up on him and stuff like that.

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Now they certainly could be bullies and they were at times and seasons but battles historically have been about trade routes, resources or advantageous territory.

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That's the primary reason. There's other things like things get really dark in the human heart and there's such a thing as genocide and superiority and all of that kind of stuff that can come to bear in there but most of the time when people expend their resources for battle, there's a cause behind it.

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I'm not going to get political at all right now but we know that when war ensues, there's a cause for it.

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Somebody thinks it's a good idea but further some of you have been to Israel and you could speak more to this from experience but if you were to set a map of Israel, I have always loved this because we have a little bit of an advantage living in West Michigan when we conceive of the territory of Israel.

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If you were to set a map of Israel to scale over West Michigan, we can roughly think of Grand Rapids as the area near the

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Sea of Galilee. You can think of Kalamazoo as approximately where the

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Jordan River empties into the Dead Sea in the south and then you can kind of see the coast there would approximate the coast of the shore of Lake Michigan.

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So we have kind of an image there of the basic gist of distances when you're talking about Israel.

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Isn't that kind of cool how that works? So it gives you a little bit of a perspective on what we're talking about when we're looking at the

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Old Testament and really what you need to understand is the Jordan River then basically approximates 131 going up the side of Michigan there.

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Fits really nicely and so what you have is you have the Philistines basically settled in the area from St.

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Joe to Saugatuck. So that's where they live. They live over there and about five miles in from the lake shore is about the area of possession of the

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Philistines. These places, I hope that that keys in for you the reality that these places are not far apart when we're reading about them in the

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Bible. It was surprising to me when I realized almost all of the events of the Old Testament took place in a region about the size of southwest

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Michigan but one major distinction between southwest Michigan and Israel is that there's a central spine of mountains that runs right down.

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Right down you can kind of see the darker color is the mountains, the raised area. The Jordan River runs through a major valley on the planet, a major scar across the face of our planet that runs all the way from basically the

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Sea of Galilee down into Africa, down into Kenya. It's called the Rift Valley and it just goes and goes and goes.

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So the Red Sea is a part of that and so you can kind of see the mountains that are up there to the left.

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So the Philistines were looking for David so he went down into the stronghold. I believe that's the stronghold of Zion that he's just occupied.

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So this implies that he was somewhere up in the high places west of Jerusalem, maybe overlooking

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Philistine territory and taking it in when he was made aware of the APB and so he went down to Zion from a higher location in order for safety.

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The fact that the Philistines organized for war in the Valley of Rephaim shows that they are intentionally trying to provoke

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David. There's a little bit of location going on there. The Valley of Rephaim is just a few miles south and west of Jerusalem.

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It would be a primary way up through the mountains into Jerusalem from the southwest direction and so what's going on is when the

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Philistines set up camp there and kind of muster for war, they're encroaching on Israelite territory and cutting off a road out of Jerusalem.

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So now Jerusalem has to do something about it in order to continue to trade to the south and west of them.

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So what I want you to understand is what we're trying to get at here is imagine that Saint Joe wants to attack

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Kalamazoo. So they muster at Paw Paw. That's about the distances that we're talking about.

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That doesn't help a ton, does it? Saint Joe attacks Kalamazoo, we're ready for him. That's not in my notes but I think we would be.

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Some of you work in Saint Joe, you're like, I don't know, I don't know how this is gonna go. But verse 19 snaps into focus the reason we're reading nine verses instead of just one.

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Because honestly, when you read some of these historical accounts, sometimes I would imagine that many of us would scratch our head and go, why all this detail?

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When it would suffice to just basically say a sentence or two and move on. At face value, it seems like the events of this entire passage could be summarized in this one sentence.

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David defeated the Philistines twice at the Valley of Rephiam, end of story. That's the story in a nutshell.

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That's what we've got going on here. That's the only movement we have in this text from beginning to end. They muster at Rephiam twice.

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He beats their tail and they go running twice. End of story. But the point in this passage is found in the details today.

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In verse 19, we see that David inquired of the Lord. And he asked two questions. The first time that they muster there at Rephiam, he asked two questions of God.

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Two important questions. Should I go up and attack the Philistines? First question.

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Will I succeed? Second question. And I absolutely adore and love the honesty of these two questions because often if we're honest, we think that the spiritual question is the first and the less spiritual is the second.

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But if we're honest, we often ask of God with the purpose of the second question in mind. What am I getting at?

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Our questions for God are not truly and deeply often about finding out what God wants.

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But they're more about finding out if it, whatever it is, will go well for us.

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How often do you pursue God just to know what he wants you to do so that you'll just do it? And how often do you pursue

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God because you wanna know if it's gonna succeed? Getting me? Isn't that often the nature of our questions that God will go to him if we wanna know how it's gonna go for us?

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Are you really interested in knowing that God wants you to go to U of M medical school only to get burned out and leave a year later?

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I mean, what if he says, yeah, I want you to go to U of M. And I want you to learn through the pain and suffering of failing out of something.

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Like, I mean, would you sign up for that? Do you wanna know that? You go to God and say, what do you want of me? Well, I want you to go do this.

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Would you wanna know if it wasn't gonna succeed? The question, where do you want me to go to college? Who do you want me to marry or any of the major life decisions?

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Where do you want me to work? Do you want me to move? Do you want me to switch jobs? Is actually a bit more accurately asked, where will

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I succeed? Is that not really the nature of many of our questions? And yet David, I hear in the text modeling for us,

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David is not ashamed to ask that follow -up question. Who do you serve? Do you serve a God that loves you?

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Do you serve a God who is with you, who is guiding you into what is good for you, even if it means some pain and difficulty for a season?

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Do you serve a God who has your best interests in mind? Yes, you do. If you serve the Lord God Almighty and Jesus Christ, his son.

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He asked the question, should I attack? And secondly, will I be successful? Now I wonder if David was actually ready for a yes and then no answer.

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Yes, you should go up. No, you won't succeed. This happened to Saul, by the way, lest we think that that's an impossible answer.

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David, I mean Saul, King Saul at the end of his life was just grasping at straws. He was pursuing

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God and God was closed off to him because he had sinned and he had broken covenant with God.

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And so God says, I'm closing you off. I'm raising up somebody else to lead. And so Saul in desperation, strange account, but he actually goes to a necromancer, somebody who speaks to the dead like a medium, like a sorceress.

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And he goes and he speaks to her and she brings up the soul of Saul, of the prophet Samuel from the place where the book gets its name, 2

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Samuel. And he asked, should I attack the Philistines? And Samuel kind of like, dude,

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I was resting. What you doing? Basically says, dude, no, you don't need to attack the Philistines. Tomorrow the

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Philistines are gonna attack you and you're gonna join me. You and your sons are gonna join me. You'll be here with me. Now, would you wanna know that?

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't worry about it. You don't need to take the aggression. They're gonna come get you. You're gonna be dead tomorrow.

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Saul went into that final battle for his life knowing that the prophet, the dead prophet, weird, the dead prophet had prophesied over him.

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You're gonna be dead tomorrow. What? Well, let me state again as I have in previous sermons that what

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David does here in inquiring of the Lord is a very specific Old Testament method of discerning the

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Lord's guidance. So he had Abiathar the priest with him. He had an actual priest of God with an ephod.

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An ephod comes with two fixtures on it. It had a pocket in the front with two tiles in it called the

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Urim and the Thummim. Now, the way that this worked is it was divinely sanctioned lots that were like divinely sanctioned dice, if you will, to throw to determine the

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Lord's guidance. Now, that's foreign to us and it's different and yet we know proverbially that God says every casting of the lots comes from God.

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The decision of the lot comes from Him. And so this was divinely sanctioned in Old Testament law and what they would do is they would take a cup, put these two tiles in and say,

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God, give us Urim if you desire for us to go up. Swirl the cup, swirl it, swirl it, swirl it.

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What's gonna happen if you swirl something with tiles in it? One's gonna pop out. First one to pop out, if it's

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Urim, you desire for us to go up. Does that make sense? That's the way that would, pretty simple, pretty straightforward means of determining the will of the

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Lord. And that's exactly what I believe that David is doing here. But I wanna be clear that God is no less able to guide us in the here and now.

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But equally, nobody can force God to speak. You can't force

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God to speak. We need to ask God, we need to ask Him to reveal His will and then we act.

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Nothing indicates that in the absence of God speaking that David would have been sinful to either attack or wait out the

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Philistines. To attack or not attack is not a issue of spiritual sin unless God reveals what

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He is to do. What we actually see in this passage are two important things that I wanna highlight for you in David going to inquire of the

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Lord. The first is just simply that David asks. Do you see it? David inquires of God.

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He asks God for direction. This is good for us to take on and apply in our lives. It is, hear me carefully church, it is an unqualified good for us to talk with our

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God, is it not? Unqualified good for you to pray and talk with Him at any moment at any time.

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But the second observation I wanna say is that God chooses to respond. He doesn't need to respond but He can respond in a way we understand if He wants to steer us in a direction.

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How many of you trust and believe that God is able to communicate to you if He wants to get through to you? He's able, He can absolutely.

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The calling to us all in our lives in relationship to God is to humbly come to God in prayer expressing a genuine willingness to follow

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Him in whatever He desires for us to do. We tell Him which way we're heading then we ask

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Him to communicate with us in clarity if He desires to do otherwise than what we're planning and then we move forward in humble action.

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But seeking the Lord's guidance is not a science and He is not a computer program, He is not a vending machine as we're gonna see in just a few verses.

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But in our text in this situation God does indeed give David affirmation and He does say, go up for God will hand the

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Philistines to King David and to His forces. And so David confronted the

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Philistines at Baal -perazim in the valley of Rephaim and he defeated them there.

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The text tells us. Now we see the result of this is the defeat of the

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Philistines in this instance. God said, go up, you will succeed. He goes up and He does succeed.

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And He gives God the credit for His victory in the text. Do you see it? He gives God the credit and He renames the place

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Baal -perazim which means something like the Lord broke out against His enemies. Where the word breakout is like the idea of a dam bursting forth in the water breaking down a dam and all of a sudden just a rush and a torrent of water comes through the breach and the dam bursts and everything is gone.

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In English, I think we could have named this place and a good translation of Baal -perazim is

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Lord Bursty McBursterton. There you go.

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Thank you. A little bit of humor there but honestly taking it a slide down I wanna be serious for just a moment because sometimes humor comes best at the front of something very serious.

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It's worth asking this question, church. Do you have a God who could rightly be called the one who breaks out against His enemies?

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Is that an appropriate title for the God that you serve? A God who bursts forth like the waters of a dam breaching and all of a sudden boom and the rocks fly and the water floods and everything is swept away.

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Sounds like a flood I've heard of before kind of tamed down for like little kids nurseries and stuff with little fluffy animals and coming in two by two but is yours a

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God who would flood and break out against His enemies? Is your God a smasher of foes?

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That is not a popular title for God right now. The title for Him in the text.

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Maybe we've mixed up in our minds the way that He is indeed. We're studying it as a church. We're going through it in community groups.

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Hopefully many of you are connected in community groups and many of us are studying through the book Gentle and Lowly right now, right? And He is indeed gloriously, majestically, mercifully, gentle and lowly toward those who run to Him for mercy, who run to Him on the basis of what

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His Son did for them on the cross. But this same God who is indeed gentle and lowly towards His own, an adopter of us into His family, but He is a fearful prospect to those who stand in opposition to Him.

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Those who would line up in the valley against Him will be the recipients of His great wrath.

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But those who come to Him for humble help, He will gladly adopt into His family.

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And so the application is don't spend your days on earth camped against this one. Don't spend your days camped against this one.

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Run to Him for grace and He will welcome you in and wash away your guilt and give you a place in His eternal family.

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But further, of course, church, we have a distinct calling in our time to bring more in, to bring more away from that wrath and more toward the gentleness of God.

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Have we allowed the fire of hell to be cooled in our hearts by fear, by the swirling and raging of our culture that says you can't talk like that, church?

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You can't speak that way. You can't share your faith with others. You can't proselytize.

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You can't seek to win more. Are you hearing that in our world? Shut up, church.

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That's what the world wants to say. And the message from God today is

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I'm breaking out against your neighbors. I'm gonna break out against family members that aren't in with Christ.

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I'm breaking out against them in the end. Talk to them. Share the glorious good news with them.

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Have we stopped grieving over the wrath of God toward those who are in opposition to Him, church? What does it do in our hearts when we think of our coworkers, our next door neighbors, or even family members who will face the

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God who breaks out like a flood against His enemies? What are we doing in our hearts and what are we doing with our mouths and what are we doing with our time?

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Do we believe it, church? Do we believe His wrath is coming to those who reject Him? Then how can we stay silent?

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How can we fear that they might make fun of us or that we might get labeled at work? More than a mere victory,

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God broke out against His enemies on this day. But there's another application here worth our attention.

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David routinely gives God credit for victories and we see that over the course of his life. We see it in his Psalms. We see it when he reveals his heart.

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His soldiers are holding the swords. I want you to hear me on this one for a minute. It takes a little bit of buildup. His soldiers are holding the swords and the shields.

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Their muscles are sore at the end of this battle. There are fatalities and injuries to be cared for at the end of this battle with the

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Philistines. And David says, what? Yahweh gets the credit for this victory.

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Now, how many of you would just take a moment to think about that and consider that? How many of you want to sign up for David's army?

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He's not saying, thank you guys for your sacrifice on the battlefield. He's saying, God won the day today. I would call that risky gratitude because here's the risk.

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We run the risk of offending the worker by giving the credit for their successes to God.

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Do you hear what I'm saying? There's a bit of a risk involved in that. How much longer is the army gonna go on with David giving the credit to God for their sore muscles and the work and effort that they put in?

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We can offer thanks to people for sure, but we need to reserve ultimate thanks to God who is at work behind the swords and the muscles and our battle plans.

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Verse 21, the victory is complete. The Philistines have left their gods behind in battle. And you might be a little bit confused at David taking the idols.

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Anybody when I first read that go, what's he gonna do with those idols? Why in the world is David taking the idols that the

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Philistines left on the battlefield? But according to 1 Chronicles 14, 12, you can jot that down, look it up later.

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1 Chronicles 14, 12, David collected those idols, took them away and burned them in a massive bonfire.

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This battle is a demonstration that Yahweh is greater than their little wooden gods.

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And now we start over in the text. And the Philistines once again muster at the Valley of Rephaim. What is the definition of insanity?

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Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. And whoever came up with that adage by the way has never used a computer.

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Do you know what I'm talking about? Have any of you ever done the same thing and on the 17th time it works and you're going,

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I didn't do anything different. All I did was reboot it again. So I don't know.

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Maybe technology is insane making, I don't know. But yeah,

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David collected them, he burned them and now they're starting over again. They're mustering again. This is not a second accounting of the same identical event.

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It is indeed a second time that they gather. I'm sure that the Philistines come at Israel and David a second time thinking that they have some kind of new strategy that's gonna work.

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They now know where the Israelites are gonna attack from. And so they're confident in their battle plan. This time around,

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Dagon will surely be victorious. This time, maybe they bring a different artifact into the battle with them or something that they expect or they've got better trained archers or I don't know what they're thinking but they gather again there.

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They've gotta do something about David. He is a significant threat to their existence. And so again,

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David inquires of the Lord a second time. I want that to settle in. I just said

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David, they're gathered in Raphaim. They're in the same location a second time. Same circumstance.

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Same situation. Same people. Could you fault David if he had leaned on God's past instruction?

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Would you have faulted him for going, yeah, same situation. God said yes once. He'll say yes again. Let's just go do it.

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Do you get what I'm saying in that? Could he not have leaned on past interaction with God?

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We have a tendency to see patterns, do we not? And run with them. But David is no different.

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And I'm confident that he looked down into that valley of Raphaim and said, I think I've seen this before.

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I think I know what to do. I talked with God about it. Should be all right. And I don't think that I'm merely making much about nothing in this text.

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I think it stands out in the text that he asks a second time because it's significant. David had a relationship with God, with the living

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God. Read his Psalms to see his heart. Read the Psalms to see his faith and his dependence upon God.

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He was persistent in the pursuit of God. And even when confronted with the exact same scenario, he did not presume upon God to do the exact same thing.

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He knew God is not some computer program that spits out the same output when you give him this input.

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He had experienced God as personal. He had experienced God as involved. And he had experienced his heavenly father as always worth consulting.

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So this time, God speaks differently. Don't go up against them.

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Come down from the heights in the southern edge of the valley. Surprise them and drive them north instead of west.

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They won't see it coming. He gives them the battle strategy. And he further tells them to wait until he gives

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David the signal. He says the signal is gonna be the sound of marching in the tops of the balsam trees. You're gonna be laying there at some point.

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Go ahead and muster your troops there in that location and wait. The sign's gonna be you're gonna hear like wind rushing or something.

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It's gonna sound like marching in the trees. And then you'll know it is time for you to attack. There's been a lot of adding to the text in sermons and accounts about this passage.

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I remember specifically hearing in my youth accounts of the armies of the angels marching in the treetops going before David and slaying the army of the

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Philistines. Any of you heard that story before? The marching of the angels in the trees and all this stuff.

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It doesn't say the angels marching in the trees. It says you're gonna hear a sound like marching. You're gonna hear some noise.

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I believe in miracles, church. Don't freak out. I believe in miracles. I believe in miracles of timing. I believe in miracles that break the laws of physics.

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I believe in even accounts where angels do indeed slay people. We know the angel of the Lord went throughout

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Egypt and killed the firstborn of everybody in Egypt. But I believe that what we have here is merely a miracle of timing.

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Maybe a God -ordained storm whipped up the wind in the trees and that's the sound that was the sound of marching.

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But the text only makes this clear, what's going on here. There will be the sound of marching in the trees as a sign to David to attack.

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And so obedience for David looks like camping out under those trees until he hears that sound in the treetops and away they go.

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What David did as the Lord commanded him here a second time and he struck down the Philistines sending them back together about 12 miles north and west right up back towards the sea.

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The detail of these second instructions give me the impression that, by the way, think about the detail and think about what

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I said about the Urim and the Thummim, the swirling of those lots and trying to bring those out.

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And what's interesting to me is that the second instructions give me the impression that God gave David more than a mere yes or no answer from the spinning of the lots.

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He communicated some other way to David here. Lots are good for discerning between options, but they are not good for conveying a battle plan that includes sounds in the balsam trees.

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How many swirls do you have to do to figure out what kind of tree am I supposed to camp under? And what's the sound? Is it gonna be marching or is it gonna be the sound of waterfalls or what's the sound?

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Okay, give me one if it's waterfall, give me two if it's trumpet. It wasn't either one of those. So what do you do?

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You can't get that. Are you getting what I'm saying? That medium doesn't produce that kind of information. God is communicating to David in some other way here.

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The reason I say this is to bring to our attention that God has many methods of communication at his disposal and I believe that that's part of the text.

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And again, I tell you that I ask God directly for communication in a way that I can understand. The most clear communication anyone will ever receive from God, hear me carefully church, this is the first and most fundamental thing, you've heard it before, the most clear way that God will ever speak to you is through what?

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Scripture, the word of God, the revealed, written, bedrock, solid word of God.

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You can be sure that God will never say anything to you personally that counterdicts his word specifically.

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But I'm equally confident that God is able to and will communicate to us further desires. I haven't always felt that way.

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I have almost always thought for the majority of my Christian life, I've thought that I'll just stick with a word that's safe.

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Anybody with me on that, camp? You've been there? But texts like this rattle me a little bit, they shake me.

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And then I don't think I've been honest with the New Testament in some regard. A lot of passages in the

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New Testament where God speaks specific instructions to somebody, he gives them very clear direction for the specific steps of their lives.

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I just don't think that we can expect that to be regular and routine, you know? It's not very often that the tiebreaker between Linda feels like going to a

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Chinese buffet and I feel like Mexican and so God speaks in and says, no, you're going to Olive Garden tonight.

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Some of you, that would be a good tiebreaker for you, right? That would just kind of ease the tension a little bit. But I mean, for most of us, it's like, okay, we'll just run with what we want and that's the way it goes.

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I'm equally confident that God is able to communicate to us what he desires to. And that's not merely an

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Old Testament thing, but it is found in the New Testament as well. I just want to give you a couple of illustrations. Paul particularly was guided frequently by God.

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He was guided in his missionary travels by things such as dreams. A dream led him to the first converts in Europe.

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Like it was a dream where there was a guy from Macedonia, Greece, which would have been the first place in Europe that anybody ever became a

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Christian. And literally he has a dream and a guy from Macedonia, I don't know what a Macedonian looked like in his dream.

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How did he know this guy was from Macedonia? Maybe it was the dialect or something that he spoke, but he's like, come over here.

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In his dream, he has a Macedonian come to him and say, come here, come here. And so he wakes up and goes, hey guys,

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I guess I know where we're going. How many of you would just have that kind of confidence about your dreams? I mean,

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I don't trust my dreams at all. I think that most of my dreams come from like eating lasagna too late or something like that.

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I mean, are you getting what I'm saying? Like it's like, I don't, that was weird and I have nothing, not a shred of anything in there.

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Like, I don't know if I'm, I mean, maybe Linda, we're supposed to get a pet purple monkey. I don't know. But it's like, I mean, you wake up in the morning, it's like, what are you supposed to do with these dreams?

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But Paul saw it and God communicated to him through it.

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And Paul woke up with confidence that God wanted him to go to Macedonia. Other things that God speaks to, speaks his will to him by speaking through others to Paul in the course of his missionary journeys.

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And then he communicates by circumstances that prevent him from entering into the province of Asia. He doesn't give us the details, but he says, we're prohibited multiple times.

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We tried to get into the providence of Asia and we're not allowed. I don't know if the border crossing wouldn't accept their papers.

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I don't know what it was, but we're not given the details, but we know that God was able to communicate. Asia's not open to you right now.

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This is a particular, when I say Asia, that's just a section of the country of Turkey right now, a

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Roman province. But here's what I do, church, and take it or leave it.

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I'm telling you what I do. I think it's biblical. I think it's helpful. It's helped me in my growth toward understanding that God, I want to lean in like David, to inquire of the

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Lord, to be open to whatever he wants. And so I'll pray something like this, and I've said it in multiple ways to you before, but here

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I am, and this is what I'll say to God. I'm not good at catching on to subtlety, God. You know the way that I was raised.

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You know that I was raised to only believe that this was your spoken word. And so I'm a little reticent to, I'm a little thick to get through to.

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I don't like subtlety. I'm not very good at reading my toast in the burn marks there.

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And the clouds, all, I can make them look like whatever I want them to. So I'm here, God, and I'm faced with a tough decision.

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I'll just give you an example. I can say to God, I think it's your desire for me to move to Arizona, especially in February. But all roads seem to be leading that way,

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God. But I'm confident that if you have another desire for me, you can make it clear, and here's the key, in a way that I can understand.

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I'm confident that you can communicate to me as thick as I am, and as poor as I am at reading subtlety,

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I still believe, God, that you can communicate to me in a way that I understand. So I'm open to that, and I will indeed follow you if you have something to say about this future plan.

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But now here's the step of faith. Saying it is easy, but letting it go is tougher.

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And I mean, my encouragement to you, church, is after you pray that prayer, seriously let it go.

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No fretting, no anxiety, no stressing, no attempts, again, to read the toast, no pushing

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God to like, okay, I'm looking for signs here, I'm looking for the clouds, I'm looking for wonder.

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Does that look like Arizona? Kind of shaped, I don't know. Are you getting what I'm saying? We can often begin then, what's the next step is we begin to force

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God's hand into our desires, right? What I really want is I really wanna move to Arizona, so I'm gonna do this, this, and this, and I'm gonna see it everywhere now.

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You getting what I'm saying? Trust God, you have removed yourself from forcing God to speak by that prayer.

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You have shared your desire with him. You have shared with him your faith and trust that if he does indeed communicate with you what he wants, you will follow it.

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And so now the act of faith is to trust him to get through to you if he wants to change your pathway.

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But do not be immobilized, church. Be ready to act. If there's no absence, continue forward.

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Don't stand there and hold up the line I mentioned before, you know, chocolate or vanilla frosty, don't hold up the line behind you waiting for God to speak.

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Or the one that you want and say, God, if you really want me to have the other one, make it clear. And he just might put the machine down, right?

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So more often than not anyways, especially if you're at McDonald's, their ice cream machine's always out, right?

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But you see, we serve a personal God, right? Right, church? We serve a personal

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God, not a mystical force, not a cosmic vending machine, not a magic eight ball that's limited to the answers on the pre -printed scheme, on the little ball inside there or whatever it is.

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Recast, we serve the one and only living God. Nobody collects him at the end of a battle and burns him in a bonfire.

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The one and only living God, the one who loves his people, the one who wants to be with his people, the one who rescued and saved his people, the one who is faithful to guide his people.

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So as we come to communion this morning, first confirm in your own hearts that you are indeed saved by the blood of Jesus Christ.

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This means that at some point in your life, you came to realize that you are a sinner in need of forgiveness. By the way, there's nobody in here that didn't need to do this.

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The only hope for any of us is that we've come to recognize our sinfulness before a holy God. And somehow by God's kind mercy, have you heard and believed that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins?

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Have you believed that is true? And then further, have you asked Jesus Christ to rule as king over your life and to forgive all of those sins?

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If that's indeed true of you, then welcome to the tables of communion this morning. But if that is not true of you, then

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I encourage you to sit out of communion, but I would also encourage you to come and talk with me. You can come and talk with Dave.

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You can come and talk with Zach who prayed before I started preaching. Any one of us would love to talk to you about how you can start a relationship with Jesus Christ as your savior today.

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This week, I hope that all of you who have heard this message will do these two things.

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The first is lean into a persistent pursuit of the living God. We do so in prayer. We do so in listening to him from his word.

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And we do so by humbly inquiring of him. Second and lastly, acknowledge his grace toward his children and his wrath toward those who war against him.

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And let that reality fuel your passion for those outside of Jesus around you this week.

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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your grace and your mercy that just continues to consistently pour down on us.

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We are so, we vacillate. We switch from side to side in our hearts from hot to cold to hot to cold regularly.

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And I believe that's true of all of us. You are consistent. You are faithful.

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You are the one who keeps your promises to the end regardless of how bad we mess up. Those who are in Christ are in Christ forever.

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So Father, I pray that you would be moving in our hearts with joy and with gladness to go out and share this message with others.

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With certainly a fire in our guts, a fire burning within us that pushes us out to have difficult and tough conversations, even just merely inviting people into church to come and hear the message, the good news.

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Maybe somebody here, that's their first step is just to invite somebody. But Father, I pray that the gospel would go forward with strength.

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I pray that you would continue to communicate with your people, that we would have a confident relationship with you, that you would help us all to persistently pursue you.

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And a big part of that persistent cadence is coming to the tables every week for those who are yours. We do this every week because we wanna remember you.

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We wanna remember that core of our hope. It is not go out and do a bunch of things, but it is a good reminder for us to come together with your people and recognize that each one of us is a sinner in need of a savior, and that savior is

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Jesus Christ who shed his blood for us, whose body was broken in our place. And so I pray that we would go out with strength, knowing as we reflect on these things, that we are loved by you because of the great sacrifice of Jesus Christ.