The Way He Sees

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Don Filcek; 1 Samuel 16:1-13 The Way He Sees

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listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his series in 1
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Samuel, Timely Prophet, Tragic King. Let's listen in. Well, good morning,
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Recast Church. I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here and just want to start off by saying I'm glad that you are here this morning.
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Otherwise, it would be awkward, me just preaching to empty seats. So I'm glad that you've showed up. This morning,
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I'm pleased to make an announcement that the Lord has provided for one of the two positions that we're currently hiring for.
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Ginger Rixey is going to be serving as our children's ministry director here at Recast Church. That's appropriate.
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Perfect. And so I just encourage you to please be in prayer for her as she embarks on this new journey and this new position in that role.
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And we're looking forward to the things that God is going to do among our children and our families here. One of the things that I just like to point out about our
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Recast Kids program is you'll notice that the kids will get up at a part of the service and head back.
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Some of the littler kids, the preschoolers, are already back there. And then once in a while, the 180 middle school goes back there.
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And one of the things that we have as a fundamental from the understanding of why we do kids ministry here, what we're seeking to accomplish, is ultimately we believe that it's the parents' responsibility to raise their kids in godliness.
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And we want to support that. And so what we do on Sunday morning with your kids can never be the sum total of what spiritual influence your kids need.
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And so we just want to encourage you that as much as we're trying to support you in your role, that you take that role seriously, those of you that are parents in the room.
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And Ginger is going to be doing what she can from a church perspective to try to support you in that and even provide you with resources and run the program on Sunday mornings and VBS and that type of stuff.
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So grateful that she's here. And then also, please be in prayer for the ongoing search for a youth director.
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We are following up with a couple of possibilities there. But be in prayer for wisdom for that and the right fit as Nathan's going to be leaving at the end of this month, coming up pretty quickly here.
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So be in prayer for the search for that position to be filled as well. So let's jump into the introduction to the text.
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And I want to point out that this text, just like any text of scripture really at the end of the day, is intended to have an impact on the heart of all of us here.
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And particularly this text is focused on those who desire to please God. It's a focus of looking at the word of God and saying those who want to please
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God will take note of this text. Now, how many of you desire to please God? Tricky question because in church, boy, you're supposed to raise your hand on that one, right?
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Like, I mean, that's one that, you know, you ask, do you want to please God? Everybody's hands are supposed to go up.
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But really, at the end of the text, we're going to be looking at a specific text that will be giving us a clear indication of the way that God looks at a person.
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Now, the way that we look at people is, we can't help it, but look at people and judge what's going on on the inside based on the outside.
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How many of you have ever found yourself limited by what you're able to perceive about another person? How many of you have ever been betrayed by another person?
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You've been let down, you've been discouraged, you thought you had an assessment correctly and it was the wrong assessment, and all of us have experienced that because we have a limited ability to see, but our
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God is not limited like we are limited in that term. So He is able to see in a way that you and I don't see.
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Now, if you're anything like me, sometimes you falter at the point of taking what I know in my head and living out the truth of that in everyday life.
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And so, as we come to this text, my goal and my hope is that we would, by the end of this text and by the end of this message this morning, we would all be impacted by the reality of the
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Lord who doesn't look at the outside, but looks at the heart. He looks at the heart.
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How many of you already knew that, by the way? Did you already know that? You already knew that He can see all the way inside of you, He knows everything that's going on in there?
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And I hope that we're going to recognize, though, what that means for us in our lives and the way that we live, because the reality is we all knew that going in.
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A lot of you raised your hand and said you already are aware of that. And so the fundamental question is, what are we doing about it?
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How are we living differently based on the knowledge of who God is and what He has done? So let's open our Bibles, if you're not already there, to 1
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Samuel chapter 16, verses 1 through 13. Again, 1 Samuel 16, 1 through 13, you can navigate in your device, an app, whatever.
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If you brought your own Bible, that's great. If you don't have a Bible or a means to navigate to the Bible, then take the
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Bible under the seat in front of you. Hopefully, there's one in your row somewhere in there. Grab that, and it's page 136 in that Bible.
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In your own personal Bible, it's probably not, and mine is 334, so something's going on with the print in this one. But 136 in that one that's under the seat in front of you.
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And follow along as we read, recast, again, one of the most powerful things that we can do corporately is to take in God's Word, that we might be on the same page, that even some of our discussions in our community groups would filter through the knowledge of the
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Word of God as we're going through it. So recast God's Word to us, 1 Samuel 16, 1 through 13.
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The Lord said to Samuel, how long will you grieve over Saul, since I have rejected him from being king over Israel?
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Fill your horn with oil and go, I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.
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And Samuel said, how can I go? If Saul hears it, he will kill me. And the
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Lord said, take a heifer with you and say, I have come to sacrifice to the Lord and invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do.
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And you shall anoint for me him whom I declare to you. Samuel did what the Lord commanded and came to Bethlehem.
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The elders of the city came to meet him trembling and said, do you come peaceably? And he said, peaceably,
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I have come to sacrifice to the Lord. Consecrate yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice. And he consecrated
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Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice. When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, surely the
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Lord's anointed is before him. But the Lord said to Samuel, do not look on the appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him.
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For the Lord sees not as man sees. Man looks on the outward appearance, but the
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Lord looks on the heart. Then Jesse called Abinadab and made him pass before Samuel, and he said, neither has the
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Lord chosen this one. Then Jesse made Shammah pass by, and he said, neither has the Lord chosen this one.
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And Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, the Lord has not chosen these.
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Then Samuel said to Jesse, are all your sons here? And he said, there remains yet the youngest, but behold, he is keeping the sheep.
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And Samuel said to Jesse, send and get him, for we will not sit down till he comes here. And he sent and brought him in.
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Now he was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome. And the Lord said, arise, anoint him, for this is he.
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Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the spirit of the
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Lord rushed upon David from that day forward. Samuel rose up and went to Ramah.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your word. I thank you for your faithfulness to communicate to us.
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And Father, I just am impressed as I read this text about how you bring us down a journey. You don't just give us the end at the beginning, but you are in process with each one of us.
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And you even demonstrate to us a process that you bring Samuel through in this, where you could have just said, go anoint
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David, he's out in the field. You took him through a process of faith building. And Father, I pray that you would open our eyes to see our lives as this faith building practice that you are working into us.
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The twists, the turns, the ups, the downs, the good times, the bad times. Father, I thank you for your faithfulness to increase our dependency upon you and our trust in you and your faithfulness in our lives.
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Father, I pray that that reality would press deeply on us as we have an opportunity to worship you in singing right now that your faithfulness would ring true and loud in our hearts, that our hearts would be moved away from the distractions of this past week, or even just be able to take those distractions and turn them into worship of you.
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Father, there's so many things that have happened to us this week, and so many different angles and perspectives in suffering and difficulties and good and blessing and promotions and job loss and all different kinds of things.
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But Father, I pray that you would help us to reflect on you in those moments and in all of those things, even now, to see you as you are, high and exalted, sovereign, faithful, merciful, and just.
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In Jesus' name, amen. Yeah, you can go ahead and be seated, and again, thanks to the band for leading us in worship.
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I hope you were able to step before God's throne and worship him in spirit and truth this morning. I do encourage you to get comfortable and keep your
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Bibles open to 1 Samuel 16 verses one through 13. If you lost your place there, you can jump back into that and follow along as I'm talking through this text and helping us to understand that text and what
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God might have us do different in our lives because of it. And if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts, take advantage of that.
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You're not gonna distract me if you get up and go back there, so check that out. We've been talking about the tragic king as we've been going through 1
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Samuel. We've been following the life of Samuel the prophet, the timely prophet, and the life of Saul the tragic king, and we've been seeing the demise of King Saul.
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He was the first king of Israel. He was not a good king. He had no heart. The text has told us pretty clearly that he had no heart to please his creator.
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He did not have a heart, desire within him that wanted to put God first or to see
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God honored or God glorified. Part of that that we saw a couple weeks ago was that it stated directly in the text that he cared too much about what other people thought of him.
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He was concerned about what other people thought and not so much what God thought about him.
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He was impatient, he was impulsive, and if we're honest, pretty easy to beat up on in sermons.
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I mean, a pastor can get up here and just kind of put down Saul and push him off to the side.
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He's easy to belittle. He's easy to hold up as a cautionary tale. How many of you do not want your life to be a cautionary tale for others?
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You don't want it to be like, don't live like him. Like, I hope that's not my purpose on this planet, right, is to serve in that way as a cautionary tale, but it's very easy to use
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Saul that way. But if we're honest, he just isn't that far off of the way that you and I live.
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If we're honest about ourselves and we take a genuine assessment of the things that he did, I can see myself making the same mistakes that Saul made.
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How many of you have ever been impatient and took things into your own hands? Well, that's one of the sins of Saul.
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That's one of the things for which his kingdom is taken from him, because he was impatient and made a sacrifice when he was supposed to wait for Samuel to make the sacrifice.
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God gave him a specific instruction. He didn't follow it. How many of you, that makes you feel like you're on shaky ground when you read that that's what happened to Saul?
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And so it's a reasonable thing to come to the text with a humility towards Saul and recognizing, were it not for the saving work of Jesus Christ in my life or on your behalf, we would also be rejected by the
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Almighty. So we must enter the text, when we come into these Old Testament texts, where it's abundantly clear that somebody's making a mistake, they're doing wrong.
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It's not to point a finger at them and go, they're dumb, but it's to identify that, boy, they reflect a lot of me, and I ought to approach this whole thing with humility and recognize my need for a savior.
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So two weeks ago, we left Samuel mourning over the sinful character of the first king of Israel, Saul.
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He's mourned, he and God both were sorrowful about the way that sin has had its way in Saul's life.
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Now, God has rejected him as the leader because Saul rejected God, and so Samuel was angry and sad.
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Well, why would Samuel be sad about this? Because much of his life, much of his ministry was investing in somebody.
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Some of us can relate to that. You've invested time, energy, effort into another individual who's betrayed you, who's put you off, and how many of you think that sorrow is a reasonable response for Samuel in this situation?
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It's a reasonable thing that he feels this, and so he's angry and sad, and here we come to the next chapter.
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So chapter 15 ended with Samuel mourning and grieving over Saul and the sinful character, and now we come to the next text, and nothing has changed, and we find
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Samuel right where we left him. He's playing the part of disappointed prophet. His dreams did not come true for the kingship, and his hope and trust in Israel and the nation has been broken, and so he's here.
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He's melancholy. He's binge -watching This Is Us with empty packs of tissues all over the place.
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He's got empty cartons of Ben and Jerry's all over the apartment, probably Chubby Hubby and Cherry Garcia or whatever you can imagine, and he's just there.
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He's a blubbering mess of tears and sorrowful, and oh, this is us, and what's gonna happen? God knocks on the door and says, dude, how long are you gonna live like this?
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How long are you gonna stay in mourning over this? I have been abundantly clear. I mourned with you.
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I have rejected Saul. It's time to move on, time to wash off your face and get to work. I've got more for you than this, and he commands
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Saul to fill up a horn with oil and go to anoint a new king. He says, I'm not done with you, Samuel.
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I've got more work for you to do. I'm not done with Israel. I'm not giving up on this whole thing. We've got a new assignment here, and there's something fundamental to the wording of the end of verse one that I think is precious and is good for us to take on.
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God declares he has provided for himself a king among the sons of Jesse.
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See that, for I have provided for myself a king among the sons of Jesse, the
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Bethlehemite. It's very important that we understand that God is the one who is providing a king for himself.
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Now, remember that originally the people had demanded that God give them a king, and they had a specific type of king in mind, and they actually put a phrase to it to describe to God what we're looking for.
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They said, we want a king just like the nations. We want a king like the nations have a king.
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We want a king to rival the kings of the nations around us. Well, what kind of kings were those?
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They wanted a strong, a powerful, an imposing man who would command loyalty and inspire his troops while striking fear in the hearts of the enemies.
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They wanted a king like the nations, and so God gave them a man full head taller than anyone else in Israel.
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They received a man with an impulsive anger, impatient, and no love for their God, but man was he imposing, but now
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God is going to show them how he chooses. So step back and watch how this works, and we will see that God always does better when picking among sinful mankind than we do.
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Now, how many of you know that he has no options for a perfect person? Did you know that? God doesn't get the opportunity to pick a perfect person from among humanity to be his king because there isn't one yet.
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God sees the heart, and so he's gonna make a better choice. And he values the heart, so he's gonna make a better choice.
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And in verse two, just like so many others in Scripture, Samuel responds to the call of God with fear. God comes to him, knocks on the door, says,
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I need you to go grab a horn of oil. Think of like a cow or a bull's horn, hollowed out, drilled out, and then poured, filled with oil and probably a wax seal put over the top of it.
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He says, take one of those and go to anoint the new king. And he says, how can I do this? Saul's gonna find out.
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And when Saul finds out, he's gonna kill me. He's going to not figuratively kill me.
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He's gonna put me to death, and he's fearful. And we see that as a common, how many of you have noticed that as a theme in Scripture?
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Those of you that have read a little bit of it, you might notice that as a theme where people are called by God, and the first thing they do is they tremble.
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They're terrified. They're fearful of what the outcome might be. And I think some of us in this room have experienced that.
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You've known what God desired of you to do, and you've been scared of it. You've been fearful. Well, Samuel, so far throughout the book of 1
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Samuel, has been a rock. He's been solid. Samuel, even from childhood, obeyed the
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Lord with tenacity. The very first thing that Samuel was ever called to utter as a prophet of God was a condemnation against his mentor, against Eli, the priest.
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And so that's the very first thing as a little boy that he was given a word from the Lord to say, your priesthood's taken from you, bro.
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But now we're gonna see Samuel afraid to go to Bethlehem to anoint a new king, and so he rightfully fears that Saul's gonna kill him if he catches wind of this new anointing, this new king.
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You see, Saul would be growing in his paranoia. We're gonna see Paul descend into madness, and I think part of the madness that we see come upon Saul is certainly we're gonna see a spirit come upon him in the next text.
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Next week, we're gonna talk about that in detail. But part of that spirit is, I think, a madness of paranoia that, how many of you know that people who are in power and authority like to hold on to power and authority, that that's a common problem, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, as one said, and so because of that,
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I think we see that he grows in paranoia about his throne. He has been told by God that God is raising up someone new.
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God even used the word someone better than you. How many think that might get under your skin if somebody said, hey, I'm gonna replace you at your job, and I'm gonna replace you with somebody who's better than you?
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How many would feel a little paranoid about that? And so he's got that, I believe that he probably had spies out and about throughout the nation of Israel to report back to him anything that looked like the anointing of a new king.
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He would wanna know that. And so God commanded Samuel to take a heifer with him to offer a sacrifice in Bethlehem so that the suspicion would be removed.
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Now, it would not be rare for a prophet to show up in a town with a heifer to make a sacrifice, but I wanna point out that understanding from the
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Old Testament law, I went back in and I did some research, if a prophet showed up at your town with a heifer, it was not a good thing.
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You didn't want that to happen, okay? When the prophet came to your town with a heifer, it usually meant that something bad had happened, and he needed to make atonement for the entire village, the entire city, whatever, wherever you were living.
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For example, one example of a prophet or a priest bringing a heifer to your town would be in the case of an unsolved murder.
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So it says in the Book of Deuteronomy, if a person has found dead out on the countryside, out on a road, you go to the closest city, and you bring a heifer with you, prophet or priest, and go to that city, and then you will have the elders lay their hands on that heifer and declare an oath to the
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Lord, so be it as if what happens to this heifer happened to me if I'm lying, if I'm perjuring myself, but I do not know how this person died.
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And that's to happen according to the Old Testament Deuteronomy law. So if the prophet shows up to your town, it could indicate that there's an unsolved murder, and oh, goody, our town was the closest to the location of a dead body.
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But in verse three, God completed the instructions to Samuel, he says, take this heifer, go to this town, with a very open -ended statement,
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I love how it's open -ended, go and invite Jesse to the sacrificial barbecue, and then I'll show you what to do. How many of you love those kinds of instructions?
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Go do this, and then once you do that, then I'll give you the rest of the story, I'll tell you what comes after that. And I wanna pause for a moment and take a side note kind of application, because this interaction between God and Samuel is not the core of this text, but it still bears some application for us, it's worth thinking through.
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There's three observations that may yield some application in your life, if you're taking notes, you might wanna jot these down. The first is that God mourns with us for a time, we saw that last week, but then he does not allow us to wallow.
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He doesn't allow us to wallow. There is a time when God finally says, get up, wash off your face,
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I've got more for you to accomplish. The life of a person who is a follower of Jesus Christ is not to be a life of perpetual mourning.
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It is not. The second observation is that God graciously accommodates for the fears of his servant.
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He's afraid, and so God gives him a heifer. He says, go do this thing, go make this sacrifice. I'll give you a reason.
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I'll give you a cover, so to speak. God's not being deceptive, God's telling him, commanding him to go make a sacrifice, so he's doing that.
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But Samuel's afraid of Saul's murderous rage, so God does that for him, and he's able to go to Bethlehem without as much fear.
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And I just wanna point out that God proves himself in scripture to be amazingly accommodating to the fears of those he calls to serve.
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He's accommodating to those he calls to serve. It's amazing to see how he works through the pages of scripture.
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Maybe even more amazingly, he's willing to negotiate with those he calls. I find that astonishing throughout the pages of scripture.
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You may even not like that statement that I just said, that God seems willing to negotiate. Maybe that rubs you the wrong way, but I just see it at every turn.
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Throughout the pages of the Old Testament and throughout scripture, where he calls Moses, and Moses goes,
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I'm not good at speech. I'm not good at speaking much. And so he says, well,
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I'll work this out. Don't worry about it. Well, what if they reject me? Well, throw your staff down here, do this. And he accommodates, and he accommodates, and he accommodates.
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You see it in Abraham over Lot, and you see it all over the place. Lastly, God often gives us what we need at the moment and nothing more.
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He tells Samuel to go to Bethlehem, take a heifer, invite Jesse, await further instructions. And as I mentioned a minute ago, have you noticed how
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God doesn't give you all the information up front? Have you seen that? How many of you would like to have the method, the means, and the ends all spelled out for you before you take that next business venture?
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How many of you would like it before you go take that next assignment to have it all explained and clearly detailed, how it's gonna look, what it's gonna look like, what the outcome is gonna be?
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We would all like that, I believe. Do you realize, and I think you realize this, but let's state it explicitly.
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Do you realize that God could have told Samuel, Jesse has a youngest son who's out in the field tending sheep.
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Go to Jesse, tell him to get his youngest, and I want you to anoint him, his name is David. Did God have enough information to tell him that right up front?
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Or cut out the middleman. There's a guy out in this field. I'll give you directions. Take a left past this big oak.
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And just down the hill by the rock fence there, the rock wall, and right to the right there's a field, and there's a little boy there named
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David. I want you to anoint him. Could God have done that? Of course he could have. So why doesn't
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God do that? Why doesn't God do that for you and me? How many of you want a letter from God?
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You want an email from God? You want him to text you? I want that. So why doesn't he do that?
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Samuel would have liked that. I fully believe that God does this to exercise
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Samuel's faith, and I believe he does it in our lives to exercise our faith as well.
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And further, we're gonna see that in this story, in the way that he does it, comes a more fundamental lesson about the way that God sees a person, the way that God selects.
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We actually get to see why God is selecting who he's selecting, and not just how or who.
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The rest of the story is quite straightforward in the text. Samuel obeyed, came to Bethlehem. The leaders were freaked out, and they're trembling because a prophet on the outs with the king showed up with a heifer, which meant something was wrong.
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He says, chill, we're all good, I'm coming peaceably. We're gonna make a sacrifice. Get yourself consecrated.
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So Samuel calmed them down. And this idea of consecration is one that we're not very familiar with.
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This meant that they had to do some ritual washings according to the Old Testament rites and rituals found in Leviticus through Deuteronomy.
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Some may have had to wait for days. So what you don't realize, and when you're reading the text, is that probably between verse five and verse six, there could have been up to a week, maybe even two weeks in between there, depending on the ritual purifications for those sons.
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So all those sons that were gonna be there and partake of this banquet and this feast that was sacrificed, they all had to be purified.
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And depending on what they had done and all different kinds of things, if they had touched a dead body, if they had done any of these kinds of things, it took days for them to be purified from that.
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But the account from verses six through 13 is written with a dramatic flair to it.
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The day of the sacrifice arrived and Jesse brought out the eldest son, Eliab. We find out, by the way, it doesn't state in this text, how many of you always assumed that this was oldest to youngest order?
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Those of you that are familiar with the story, did you always assume that? Well, it's actually, we go to another text to find out that this is actually the birth order.
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Eliab, Abinadab, Shammah, that those are at least the first three oldest and we see that later mentioned in scripture.
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But the eldest, Eliab, Samuel, by the way, is immediately assumed that this was the Lord's anointed. Just right on sight, the first sight, kind of love at first sight, if you will.
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He's like, Eliab, wow, specimen of a man. This must be the one.
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And he even uses the word, surely this is the Lord's anointed. He was sure he was beholding the next king of Israel.
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Now, can you imagine him standing there, room full of sons of Jesse. Jesse is there and they've made the sacrifice.
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The smell of the barbecue is wafting through the tent. He's clasping the howled out horn of a bull filled with oil.
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He's about to break that wax seal and pour it on Eliab. He's like, this is locked down.
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We've got this figured out. And the text tells us he was sure this was the one.
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And chances are that if you or I stood in that room or in that tent, we would have had our own opinions.
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Everyone in this room would have put their bets on somebody in that room. Probably. We would have had an assumption.
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He was sure that it was Eliab. But we would have looked over every son of Jesse with scrutiny.
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We would have looked over them and we would have set up some debates and watched those on the
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TV. We would have watched the way they handled themselves on Twitter and Facebook.
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We would have checked their character. We would have listened to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, or whatever. We would have made our determinations according to the things that we saw.
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Some of us would have been team Eliab. I mean, after all, he's got the prophet's endorsement, right? I mean, he's got the prophet saying, yeah, this is probably the one, so let's go with that.
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Or some of us would have been team Abinadab. Some of us would have been out canvassing doors for Shammah.
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A few of us might have ventured out into joining the no -name other four brothers that are out there, but not many.
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And possibly one or two would have avoided voting altogether because hashtag not my candidates or something.
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We would have just been like, I'm so cool. I'm not even gonna take one of these. But the reality is, in our hearts, none of us would have had it right.
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None of us would have voted for David. Not a one of us. If we were there present, standing in that tent, would have got the right candidate for king.
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And so just as Samuel is about to break the seal and anoint Eliab the wrong one, we receive our central message about our
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God. Not about us, about our God. He has better eyesight than you.
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He sees better than you see. He knows better than you know.
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And fundamentally, we are called this morning to trust him with what he sees. That's the call.
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Do you trust him to get it right? And I would dare say that many of us at times have questioned
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God's judgment. We've thought maybe you got it wrong. And we're talking about the God who sees everything and knows the ends from the beginnings and everything in between.
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And he knows. He sees. He sees. The Lord doesn't see as we see.
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He sees better than you. He sees better than me. He sees better than the prophet Samuel who should have known better in the text.
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He only just left his apartment grieving the demise of the powerful Saul, the one who stood head and shoulders above everyone, the one who was a specimen of a man.
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And then he's ready to go out and judge a man based on the externals again.
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I think that just shows our own character. It shows our own heart. Samuel was just like us.
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How many of you know that you're not supposed to judge on the outside? You can all leave your hand raised at the next question.
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How many of you judge on the outside? All of us. It's in our nature.
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But before we bash Samuel and ourselves for this apparently foolish assessment that we all get hung up in, let's consider what the text is teaching us here.
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It is not telling us to feel bad about our inability to truly see the hearts of others.
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It isn't telling us to get better at seeing the hearts of others.
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It doesn't say that in the text. That's not the purpose that it's serving here is to tell you, you know what? You need to get better at smelling a fake.
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Is that what the text is telling you? You need to take a more concerted effort to discern the fakes.
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That's a good way to get jaded. That's a good way to live loveless and lifeless, trustless and faithless.
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You will never be capable of seeing the heart of another person. You will never be locked down in your ability to smell a fake.
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It's not in you. You don't have eyes like God. You will never be able to guard yourself against hurt, betrayal or the voting in of the wrong candidate.
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Huh. But before we despair, let's get back to the point of the text.
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God isn't here to tell you this morning that you suck. He's telling us that he is awesome.
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That's what he's trying to tell you. He is awesome. Get this point,
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Recast Church. The Lord is not limited in the ways that you and I are limited. We have our five senses with which to make judgments and assessments.
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Praise God that he's given us. How many of you are glad you have five senses? Be thankful for that. You've got some method of assessment.
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He didn't have to give you that. He's given you a method of assessment. That's a great thing. But God isn't limited to those five senses, to those external things.
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His gaze penetrates to the very nature of the heart. His gaze penetrates to the very nature of the will, the thoughts, the emotions, the values, the loves and desires of every single man and woman.
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Multiply that by seven billion. How knowledgeable is your
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God? All is laid bare and naked before him. Every thought, every action, every intention of the heart, every desire of the heart, every longing and love of every heart is laid bare to him.
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And for some reason, he doesn't let us in on what's going on in Eliab's life, or in Shammah's life, or Abinadab's life, but for some reason in his assessment,
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Eliab, Abinadab, Shammah, four, five, six, and seven, their hearts were not qualified for this role.
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God definitively rejects each one of them. And in verse 11, Samuel then asks the first of what I imagine could have been a string of questions.
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He asks, a little confused here, God sent me to Jesse in Bethlehem and told me to anoint one of your sons.
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He hasn't selected any of these. I would have thought maybe another potential first question would have been, is there another
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Jesse in Bethlehem by any chance? Are you the only Jesse that lives here? What he asks is another question that proves to be significant and gets to the bottom of it.
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Do you have more sons? Do you have more sons? And that gets to the heart.
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It yields an intentional drama that demonstrates God's sovereign hand over all things. Jesse has not invited all of his sons because he chose to limit, interestingly, think about this, what this declares of the heart of Jesse, he chooses to limit
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God's choices. God wouldn't select David, little pipsqueak.
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Now to his credit, to Jesse's credit, the sheep were not gonna take care of themselves, but he chooses, when told to bring his sons to this banquet, he chooses to leave one of his sons behind to care for the sheep.
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David's father didn't think him a candidate for this kind of thing. I think there's somebody, some psychologist would get in between that a little bit, like dad doesn't trust his son.
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Boy, David, does David have daddy issues throughout the rest of his life? Whatever, leave that to somebody else to assess. But wow, he's overlooked.
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He's the youngest, and he's out there serving the family while they're going to a banquet.
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Cinderella much? Right? But Samuel sent for David and placed an urgency on it by saying that they would not partake.
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He says, the word sit down here has to be in the context of the meat, the sacrifice has been made, the meat has been roasted, it's been prepared.
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What does sitting down mean? We're not gonna sit down until, we're not gonna sit down to this meal. We're not gonna eat until David is here present with us.
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So they rush out to the field, go get the little guy, probably had somebody else fill in for him to watch the sheep.
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And we're gonna see him arrive here in a second. But one quick word about David here at the beginning. When we're first introduced to him in scripture, we're just gonna meet him, and it's very interesting.
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The very thing that David was doing when we first met him, the very first thing he was doing when he was called was likely the thing that made people assume that he was unqualified.
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The very nature of where he was when he was called is the thing that people would have dismissed him for.
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He was just tending sheep, just out tending sheep.
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But we're gonna find out later that just tending sheep was a better school than all the Ivy League degrees that one could muster.
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Now I'm by no means an anti -intellectual, and I think the evangelical church has shot itself in the foot by insulting higher education, but the fact remains that degrees and education do not make one more qualified for ministry.
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Did you know that? Having degrees from the right institutions does not make you more qualified for ministry.
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A heart connection with the Almighty makes one more qualified for ministry. A humble heart that wants to please
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God, that makes one more qualified for ministry. A connection with God through Jesus Christ and love for him because of his love for us, that makes you qualified for ministry.
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And all throughout David's life, and all throughout his Psalms, we get a really good, of all the characters in the
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Old Testament, we get a lot of David. You can feel like you get to know David if you study his life, because there's so much that, not only what's written of him, but what he wrote.
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You can get both sides, you can get a little bit more of a glimpse of his heart. How many of you know that you can see a little bit more of a heart when you see somebody put down on paper what's in their heart?
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And you see that through the Psalms. We find that David didn't waste his life in the field, shepherding stinky sheep.
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He used that experience to sharpen his faith and trust in the Almighty God. Whether it was rescuing a sheep from the bear or the lion that we see him talk about, or delighting in God's creation under the expanse of the night sky, as we see him talk about, writing songs and poetry to God, or confessing his unworthiness to his maker, which we see him time and time again saying in his
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Psalms, David made his field a sanctuary to God.
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You're here, you work in an office, your cubicle can be a sanctuary to God. Public school teacher here, your classroom can be a sanctuary to God.
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You go, wait, I got rug rats running all over the place. It can be a sanctuary to God. He had sheep. UPS driver, your big brown truck can be a sanctuary to the
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Almighty God. You see, if we're not careful, we can waste our time in the field.
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Are you wasting your time in the field? You see, wasting your time in the field looks like feeling overlooked, waiting for your big break.
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Don't they know that I deserve better than this position? Don't they know I was made for more than this?
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Pining always for something more, or we can realize that every moment is a moment to draw nearer to our creator.
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It doesn't take much study of the life of David to know that he did not waste his time feeling sorry for himself outside of the elements tending those filthy, dirty, unresponsive, disobedient sheep.
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David arrives in the midst of his brothers, probably smelling like sheep. There was urgency. They go out, and they get him in the field.
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He probably hasn't showered, and he just shows up, and we see a description that may seem strange because I thought
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God doesn't look on the outside, and then we see this description. Right away, we meet him. They give us a physical description.
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He's ruddy, which means tanned. He's stunning eyes, and he was a looker.
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He's handsome. And God said to Samuel, I will arise and anoint him. He is the one
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I have chosen. And I love that God tells us that David was handsome, so that those of us who are really, really, really, really, really good -looking, we're let off the hook here.
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God doesn't assess by the externals. He doesn't only call the powerful, the handsome, the pretty, but he does indeed call some who are handsome, and Linda would certainly agree if she was here, but she's out of town right now.
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But I can speak for her in that context, so. Funny, huh?
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Hey, wait, what's that laughter for anyways? Samuel took the horn of oil, and he anointed
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David. There, surrounded by the towering Eliab, the towering inn, and much more strong Abinadab, and Shammah, little
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David was anointed. And when you see pictures of this, every picture,
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I even just Googled this online, every picture showed David and Samuel, like off on their own, and then people kind of standing by, looking in the distance, kind of watching this anointing happen, and that's not the picture that we have here.
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It says, in the midst of his brothers. Now, I don't wanna get into all the psychology, I don't have a lot of time, and I actually cut out a paragraph that I was gonna talk about, and now
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I'm sitting here talking about it, but how did that dynamic work? Brother's dad didn't see him, and then there we are.
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The Spirit rushed upon him from that day forward, and Samuel arose from Ramah, and David went back to shepherding to ponder these events, and we're gonna see him in the field again.
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Just like we saw Saul anointed, and then he went back to farming, we see
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David anointed, and he goes back to shepherding. The main point here, though, is, don't lose the main point here in the weeds, in the details, the main point is that God sees better than you and I see.
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And I have a guess that everyone here could have stated that God knows and sees all and knows everything, and to be honest, that lesson has most been pressed on us for conviction, hasn't it?
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If you grew up in the church, at least, if you grew up in the kind of church that I grew up at, then God's sight sounded like this to me.
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You better be careful. He sees it all. He knows everything that you did.
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Oh, anybody ever had that fear placed on your shoulders? Anybody besides me? Oh, he sees it.
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Oh, his presence. Oh, he's always with you. Well, that's true, isn't it? But is that the main point of his presence?
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Do you believe that he loves you? Do you believe that he cares for you? Do you believe that he laid his life down for you?
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Then get your mind away from just strictly judgment. He's with you for joy.
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He loves to see your heart. He knows what's there. He's giving you a new heart.
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He's giving you a new passion, a new drive to overcome sin and draw closer to him. Trust him, he loves you.
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He is indeed seeing these things, but how can we grieve him? Yeah, should that disappoint us?
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Yeah, weep for those things, confess those things, and then draw closer to him.
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But I think that there's some other areas. When we think about how God looks at the heart instead of the outside, then
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I think there's some areas of application for us to think about. And you might even take some of these general applications and see them more specifically in your life, see how to apply them more specifically.
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But consider how this principle of God seeing the heart, how he sees better than us, how does it apply to the selection of leadership?
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Whether it be in the church, be that political, whatever, in your workplace, how does the selecting of leaders go?
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What does that look like in an understanding that God is the one who sees the heart? Well, certainly as we select leaders in the church,
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God has given us some standards here. He has been gracious to spell out qualifications for eldership in the church.
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But I would suggest to you that even in those qualifications, we can find people who are qualified that still don't have a heart for God, that at the end of the day, their externals all measure up and all line up, but we must humbly submit to the
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Almighty and do what we can, obviously, to make the focus the heart of the person that we appoint to lead.
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But all the while, we need to, in humility, acknowledge our limitations and prayerfully trust
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God to lead us in the right direction. We need to lean on him, not on our own understanding.
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And that goes for politics as well. How many of you know that you don't know the candidates that you vote for?
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Can you just be honest about that? Did you know that? I mean, most of the time. Maybe you met a local politician once in a while and you've got to know them or something like that, but by and large, you just don't even know them.
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You know what the media tells you about them? How many of you trust that? So we don't need to raise hands on that. But the reality is, we're talking about the heart.
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We're looking for the heart, and all we can adjust and assess for, really, is the externals that we see and do the best that we can.
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Don't beat yourself up about that either. The second thing is how we worship. Think about how the fact that God sees the heart ought to impact the way that we worship.
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You cannot fool God. Did you know that? Of course you knew that.
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He sees your heart. He knows if this whole church thing is merely an attempt to look better than you are.
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He knows when you're just mouthing the words and your heart is far from him. He knows that. He who sees the heart knows if you're truly in hunger, truly hunger and thirst for righteousness.
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He knows that about you. So please don't fake it. If you're faking it and you wanna be brought into a deeper and more authentic faith, then
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I'd encourage you to come and talk with me. Not that I've got all the answers, but I can at least help listen and assess and kind of see if you're on the right track.
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And you can share with me, if you're willing to share, or find somebody else that you trust to share your heart with and say,
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I need a little internal assessment here. Because it's been a long time since I felt something spiritually.
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It's been a long time since I felt close to God. Take some steps and sit down and talk with somebody who's along in their journey, maybe a little bit ahead of you, and say, here's my heart, can you give me some assessment here?
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And be honest. How about how we disciple? This is a little bit of the way that Recast Church got started, was in this concept of discipleship and the way that discipleship happens.
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How does a Christian grow? We're a little bit different in terms of that. We don't have a lot of discipleship programming.
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Because I'm convinced that so much discipleship has been an attempt to lead people into behavioral modification. Act like this.
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Do this. Don't do this. Don't watch this movie. These movies are okay. Don't listen to this type of music, but this type of music is okay.
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And we just keep right skipping across the surface of what God wants to go for.
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What does God want most from you? Your heart, your affection, your love, that will be indeed shown by obedience, but he's gotta have your heart first.
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And I wanna know if he's got your heart. And the only way I can see if he's got your heart is if you're making decisions for him on your own.
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If you're genuinely in love with Christ, then it's gonna come out in your life, and I wanna see that.
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Not with me manipulating you to tell you what to do, what to watch, what not to watch. That's you obeying me.
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I'm not trying to make disciples of Don. I'm trying to make disciples of Christ. So much discipleship has just been behavior modification, but the goal of the church is to see our affections, our loves, our hearts change toward God and away from the world.
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I don't want anybody to give up Game of Thrones or any other pornography because the church or some mentor or Don told you to from up front.
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My prayer is that your heart will want to be done with stuff like that as you draw near to God, as you saturate yourself with his word, as you dig into his word and you're coming and you're hearing and you're growing by faith and you're taking on his word that shows you how to live, shows you his heart.
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But if the spirit's alive in here, he's gonna be drawing you into conformity with that. He's gonna be drawing you into his holiness, that you would be set apart for him by his spirit that lives in you.
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Fourth, how do we relate to those who are different from us? Only God truly can assess the heart of others around us and so how do we look out at the world around us and see others?
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I think that we all know that there's a little bit of a catch in this. We can certainly identify sin externally. Did you know that we're called to see that?
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We see that in the church, right? We're called to assess when we see sin in others and we have the ability to discern it because sin is manifested usually externally.
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It can be also internal, obviously, as well. We cannot truly know what's going on in the heart of a person.
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Therefore, in an ultimate sense, we must work with others with grace and with humility, knowing that we never have a full picture of the heart of another.
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And then lastly, this last application or area of application is in terms of the things that we love. I'm not gonna ask for you to show your hands but I want you to think about the answer to this question.
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Do you find yourself drawn to the externals? Do you find yourself gravitating towards that which is external?
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The things that you love, the passions, the drives, the things that you really get geeked about? Clothes, muscles, complexion, cars, status symbols, the externals, the outside stuff.
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Our culture is basically defined by the externals. But knowing that God's greatest concern is for our hearts, is ultimately where we get our marching orders, our marching orders to draw near to him in our hearts.
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Feed yourself on the things that increase your love for him and starve yourself of the things that draw you into sin, which is a separation from him.
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And so as we come to communion, we come to the core of the affection of the follower of Jesus Christ, the cross, the core, the center.
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His love for us is the source of our joy.
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His love for us is the source of our joy. His rescue of us as his people should always be in front of us.