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"A King Chosen By God"
There are two things I want you to consider and take home today. First, God is
constantly at work in the everyday circumstances and events of our lives to
bring us to a deeper and more meaningful understanding of who we are in
relationship to him and each other. And therefore He can and does use even our
foolish and less than faithful choices and behaviors to lead us to a new and
better place.
And second, when God works he often chooses the smallest and least
likely to succeed players to accomplish his greatest success.
That's what I want you to think about with me today.
To get there I feel like we need to rehearse our understanding
of the Bible as the story of God’s work to bring us, His most
precious and dearest creation, into a satisfying and eternal
relationship with Him and with one another. It’s been 20 weeks
now since we started our Thy Kingdom Come sermon series.
The goal is to open your heart and your mind to the idea that
the Bible is a story of God’s activity stretching across the
eons of time that incorporates us and the details of our lives
into the plot of that story.
Hold on tight now and try once again to fathom this reality.
God exists. And at the very core of his being, his passion,
his driving nature is his desire to be with us, to dwell
with us, to show us the limitlessness of his power and
glory and beauty and strength, to share with us the fullness
of his riches and the infinite reaches of his imagination
that exceed anything we could ever in our wildest dreams
hope for. That’s why he created this planet and everything
in it and put us here. The potential of human life was by
his design unlimited.
But to create such a being as us, capable of interacting
with him and enjoying the fullness of his expansive being
he had to give us the ability to choose. For to do otherwise
is to create a toy, a plaything, an unsatisfying, unresponsive
object of affection that is merely programmed to do what it
is supposed to do. It would be like creating a video or
computer game – make it as sophisticated as you want –
the outcomes are still limited to a relatively small
number of combinations.
But God really isn’t interested in simulations – he wanted
real life. To get us there he created us knowing that it
would take the entire history of the world to achieve his
goal. Listen carefully to what I am saying. God created
life knowing that it would take all the twists and turns
of human history to achieve the goal of bringing us into
that satisfying and eternal relationship with him.
From the beginning, before he ever created the first blade
of grass he envisioned the exact moment in that history
when He would take on human flesh in person and work of
a man named Jesus, as the eternal Son, the second person
of the Trinity who was with God the Father and the Spirit
in the beginning when all things were created, the Son is
conceived by the Holy Spirit and is born of the virgin Mary,
in order to secure the perfect ending to the story of God
for all who would come to believe in His life, death, and
resurrection.
What we are doing in Thy Kingdom Come is simply learning,
observing, pondering, embracing the development of the
singular story of human history that is revealed in the
Bible, God’s very own Word, His description of the events
of time and their meaning that leads us to His desired
outcome – us with him – forever. What we discover, when
we know the story, and know it better and better, is
that while God never does exactly the same thing twice,
there are patterns and rhythms to His activity that can
be seen in the past and applied to our present so that
we might have endurance to stand firm and live now with
an unquenchable hope for our future (Romans 15:4).
From the story of King David, from our text today, learn
and understand that first, God is constantly at work in
the everyday circumstances and events of our lives to
bring us to a deeper and more meaningful understanding
of who we are in relationship to him and each other. And
therefore He can and does use even our foolish and less
than faithful choices and behaviors along the way to
lead us forward in faith.
Last week we heard how the people God had chosen, brought
up out of slavery in Egypt, led through the wilderness,
taught them time and time again to fear, love and trust
in him above all things came whining to Him asking him
for a king. And do you remember why? So that they could
be like all the other nations. There it is – a remarkably
foolish and less than faithful choice that reveals the
broken condition of the human heart. And that, my friends,
is the way we all are. Lost in the Garden of Eden was the
ability to choose God, now we all by nature think that we
know at least much as, if not more than God, what is best
for us.
A man named Samuel was their pastor. He cried out to God and
God responded in a surprising way. He allowed the people have
what they wanted. In effect he said, “If a human king is what
you want, then a human king you shall have, but be careful
what you ask for.” Pastor Samuel even went so far as to list
for them the less than happy consequences that would follow –
the draft for the army and the king’s work projects and taxes
on everything they produced to support the lifestyle fitting
for a king. And still they persisted – Give us a king.
Does that sound at all familiar to you? The pattern and the
rhythm is the same. God commands that we too should fear,
love and trust in him above all things. That's the first
commandment, "You shall have no other gods." And if we
could only keep that one command, if we could day in and
day out, always be more concerned about what God thinks
than about what we are doing and the way we are thinking
there would be no need for the other nine commandments. But
daily we find ourselves in situations where we are more
afraid of the economy failing, more afraid of whether we
are happy and comfortable, than we are of what God thinks
and says about our fearful, faithless attitudes. Daily we
demonstrate that we have fallen so in love with the things
of this world that we no longer dream of and long for the
things of eternity that we were created to experience. Our
broken human hearts lead us down the same path - that we
surely know as much, if not more than God about what is
best for our lives.
It was Fred Allen, a U.S. comedian of the past century who
once said - "Most of us spend the first six days of each
week sowing wild oats, then we go to church on Sunday and
pray for a crop failure."
It's not that God doesn't want us to have fun or enjoy life.
The truth is that the most fun and the greatest joy are
discovered by a constant and growing faith that lives fully
aware that everything is happening inside the story of God
all the time. Our actions and our attitudes matter. God
calls us back week after week. He says over and over, "I
forgive you. Now remember who you are and remember that
what your life is really all about is getting you and as
many other people as possible through this life and into
the glorious eternity that awaits all who believe."
And the amazing thing is that along the way God uses even
our foolish and less than faithful choices and behaviors
to lead us forward in faith. That's what happened with the
Old Testament people who demanded a king for all the wrong
reasons. God chose David who would become the greatest and
strongest leader the people of Israel would ever know in
their entire history. David would lead them to the very
pinnacle of their success as a nation. He would secure the
borders, defeat their enemies, establish the capital in
Jerusalem and by the end of his life peace would reign over Israel.
You see what that means for your life don't you? While of
course the goal is to grow toward fewer and fewer foolish
and less-than-faithful choices and behaviors, you and I can
live boldly and confidently that God is always at work in
all the day to day details and circumstances to use them
for our good. That's not a license to be more foolish,
it's a call to be faithful.
The second lesson in today's reading brings it all home. God
uses the smallest and least likely-to-succeed players to
accomplish his greatest success. David was the youngest of
eight brothers and you all know how the babies in the family
are! His father Jesse didn't even consider it worthwhile to
have him present when the pastor came for a visit. And Samuel
would have never guessed God's choice. He looked at all seven
of the older brothers and had to be told by God, "Not that one,
not that one, not that one."
David had to be called in from the field where he was tending
the flocks and God's way of choosing is revealed. "The Lord
does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the
outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."
That is the pattern, the rhythm, that runs throughout the
story of God that culminates perfectly in birth of an infant
to a poor girl in a backwater town called Nazareth. David is
a picture, a glimpse of THE smallest and THE least likely-to-succeed
player that is the none other than the Savior of the world. What
looks like absolute failure to us - arrest, humiliation, suffering,
mocking, being spit upon, and publicly executed is the most
powerful thing that has ever happened and is the goal and
purpose of all human history! Jesus death and resurrection
from the dead opens the door into the ultimately satisfying
and eternal life we were created to experience.
Samuel, David's pastor, anointed him. Anointing was simply the
way in those days of marking a person as someone set apart for
a special purpose.
You too were marked by a pastor and anointed as someone set apart
for a special purpose - or you can be if you haven't been. In the
Gospel for today, Jesus commanded his disciples to "go and make
disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." It was at your baptism that
a pastor said, "receive the sign of the holy cross both upon
forehead and upon the heart to mark you as one redeemed by Christ
the crucified."
Then you were anointed with water - but not just with water, water
that was connected to the very Word of God, the same Word that created
the heavens and the earth when God said, "Let there be … and there was."
With the water came the very name of God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -
and there he claimed you as his own and created in you a new heart, a
clean heart, a right heart. It is the heart of Jesus that was pierced
for you on the cross.
"The Lord does look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the
outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart."
The Lord looks at your heart through the water of your baptism and he
sees in you the power and potential of faith that is connected to Jesus
Christ to live here and now no matter how small or insignificant you
may be, by faith He is doing mighty things in you and through you.
Two lessons; first, God uses even our foolish and less than faithful
choices and behaviors to lead us forward in that faith; and second,
He often uses the smallest and least-likely-to succeed players to
accomplish his greatest success, and by faith alone in Jesus Christ
that includes you and me.
Amen.
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