CBFC Worship Service 8/30/2026

Good morning.

It's lovely to be here with you all.

Just a quick correction to something Andrew said.

Um, we have not gone from How Great Thou Are into Crowder ever, because John Mark McMillan wrote How He Loves, and I only say that because Andy's not here to tackle me off the stage, and I like rubbing it in his face that Crowder didn't write that song.

Great song, anyway, to sing of the the love of the Lord Jesus Christ that he has for his people, like we talked about in Sunday school this morning.

Um the unrelenting love of our God.

And we're gonna talk about that in a moment as well here this morning as we continue in Matthew, or not even close.

Um I'm a little scattered this morning, I'm sorry.

1 Samuel 29.

We'll do the whole chapter if you want to open up to 1 Samuel 29.

Let's pray again quick as we get into it.

Father, would you be with us this morning now as we come to your word?

Focus our distracted minds, um, give peace to our restless hearts, give order to my scattered thoughts, and help us to look to your Son Jesus Christ and to see him in your word, to know him for ourselves, to be changed by him here this morning.

By your Holy Spirit, would you meet with us right now, we pray.

Amen.

Followers of Jesus tend to struggle with the desire to belong to a world to which we do not belong.

Right?

We want the acceptance of both God and the world around us.

We want to follow Christ without experiencing the alienation that following Christ inevitably brings.

One of the things that makes following Jesus so difficult is that it typically means living with our hearts being pulled in multiple directions.

I experienced this in middle school when I had I'd been a Christian for a few years.

Um, I was excited about Jesus.

I wanted to serve him, I wanted other people to know him and to be saved, and so I carried gospel tracts with me to school every day.

These little cards with uh the good news of Jesus explained on them that I would hand out to people, strangers in the halls, I'd stuff them into people's lockers and passing.

I was just passionate about evangelism.

I genuinely wanted others around me to know Jesus.

I also desperately wanted something else.

I wanted them to like me.

And it was out of this deep desire, deeper than I realized at the time, this deep desire for acceptance and appears, that I got involved with a friend group that was actually selling marijuana, and I started helping them transport and deliver it around the school, which is crazy.

And funny, but also terribly tragic.

It was in this same season of my life as a Christian that I was walking through school handing out weed one day and gospel tracts the next.

And as ridiculous as it all sounds to me now, I don't genuinely remember feeling like I had made some conscious decision to abandon Jesus.

Actually, the opposite, like I really did love Jesus.

I did.

I really did want people to know him.

I just also desperately wanted the world to love me.

And so my heart was being pulled in two opposite directions, and I hadn't yet understood how difficult, how impossible it is to hold on to both of those things.

Now, your version of that probably isn't gospel tracts in one hand, marijuana in the other, I hope.

Um I picked that example from my life because it's particularly stark and and obviously absurd.

Um, and and the other more recent ones are less um enjoyable to talk about.

But I suspect you understand that same tension, right?

We want to belong to Christ and we want to belong here at the same time.

We have multiple desires pooling our hearts into this tension.

We want God's approval and we want their approval.

We want to follow Jesus, but we don't want it to cost us friendships and comfort and financial well-being and all of these other things.

And so we spend our lives as followers of Jesus trying to solve that great tension of the Christian life.

How do I live in this world without belonging to this world, without being of this world?

And that's the tension we find David in in 1 Samuel 29.

David loves the Lord, he belongs to the Lord, he's been chosen by the Lord, he's the Lord's anointed king.

He has not renounced his faith, he hasn't decided that he no longer wants anything to do with God, but David has spent the last 16 months living among the Philistines, the enemies of God that he had gone to for salvation.

He's been trying to survive by keeping one foot in Israel and one foot in Philistia.

He's been serving the purposes of God while trying to maintain the approval of Akish, a Philistine king, and he's gotten remarkably good at playing both sides.

Until now.

Because in chapter 29, those two worlds finally collide.

The Philistines, remember, are marching to war against Israel, and David is marching with them, and suddenly David is faced with the inevitable consequence of the life that he has been living.

He has put himself in a position where belonging to the Philistines means fighting against the people of God.

Fighting against the kingdom of God.

David has been trying to live between two worlds, but now those worlds are at war and he cannot belong to both.

And neither can we.

The good news of 1 Samuel 29 is that even when David gets himself into this horrible mess, God does not leave him there.

This isn't a story about David cleverly escaping in a possible situation like we've seen before.

This is a story about the quiet, subtle, but relentless love and mercy of God pursuing and rescuing his helpless servant from a trap of his own making.

So let's read God's word together now in 1 Samuel 29.

I invite you to stand with me, if you are able, to honor the reading of the Word of God.

1 Samuel 29.

Beginning in verse 1.

The Word of God reads, Now the Philistines had gathered all their forces at Alphek, and the Israelites were encamped by the spring that is in Jezreel.

As the lords of the Philistines were passing on by hundreds and by thousands, and David and his men were passing on in the rear with Akish, the commanders of the Philistines said, What are these Hebrews doing here?

And Akish said to the commanders of the Philistines, Is this not David, the servant of Saul, king of Israel, who has been with me now for days and years since he he deserted to me?

I have found no fault in him to this day.

And but the commanders of the Philistines were angry with him, and the commanders of the Philistines said to him, Send the man back that he may return to the place to which you have assigned him.

He shall not go down with us to battle, lest in the battle he become an adversary to us.

For how could this fellow reconcile himself to his Lord?

Would it not be with the heads of the men here?

Is not this David of whom they sing to one another in dances?

Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his ten thousands?

Then Akish called David and said to him, As the Lord lives, you have been honest to me, and it seems right that you should march out and in with me in the campaign, for I have found nothing wrong in you from the day of your coming to me to this day.

Nevertheless, the Lords do not approve of you.

So go back now and go peaceably, that you may not displease the lords of the Philistines.

And David said to Akish, But what have I done?

What have you found in your servant from the day I entered your service until now that I may not go and fight against the enemies of my lord the king?

And Akish answered David and said, I know that you are as blameless in my sight as an angel of God.

Nevertheless, the commanders of the Philistines have said, He shall not go up with us to the battle.

Now then rise early in the morning with the servants of your Lord who came with you, and start early in the morning and depart as soon as you have light.

So David set out with his men early in the morning to return to the land of the Philistines.

But the Philistines went up to Jezreel.

This is God's word, and please be seated.

Let's pray once more.

Gracious Father.

May these be your words that you speak to us, your people.

And would you use my mouth now as a channel of your grace?

That we would have eyes to see and ears to hear, and hearts to believe and receive the good news of your son Jesus.

1 Samuel 29.

Lord, we pray all these things in his name for his glory.

And we ask only that Christ would be exalted and magnified here today.

That is our prayer.

In his name.

Amen.

In the world, of the world, and from the world.

That's our uh outline.

That's where we're heading for this morning.

Looking at David's life and faith or lack thereof, we're going to see the danger of seeking in the world the salvation, security, and satisfaction that comes only from God.

We'll see how no matter how hard we may try, God's people can never truly be of the world.

And finally, then we'll see the relentless mercy of a God who rescues his people from the world, even from the messes we make for ourselves.

In the world, of the world, and from the world.

First, in the world.

To understand how David ended up marching with the Philistines against his own people here in chapter 29, we need to remember why he went to them in the first place.

Back in chapter 27, David had grown tired of running from Saul, and God had repeatedly protected him.

It wasn't God's lack of favor.

God had promised him the kingdom, God had preserved his life, time and time again.

But eventually David looked at his circumstances and said, in chapter 27, verse 1, I shall perish one day by the hand of Saul.

So notice David's struggle here begins with his lack of trust in God's word.

And so David comes up with another plan.

He says, There is nothing better for me than that I should escape to the land of the Philistines.

And that's what he does.

He goes to the enemies of God, seeking refuge.

And the remarkable thing is, it kind of worked.

David went to Akish, king of Gath, and Saul stopped chasing him.

He was given his own city, Ziglag.

His men had homes, their wives and children were safe.

After years and years of caves and wilderness, and always constantly looking over his shoulder for Saul, David finally had some stability, some safety.

Philistia gave David exactly what he went there looking for, and for sixteen full months it seemed like he had made the right decision.

But that's what makes worldly attempts at security so dangerous.

They often kind of work.

If sin didn't work at all, nobody would do it.

If idols never actually gave us something, we wouldn't worship them.

The danger is that we the the things that we run to instead of God can actually give us some version of the thing that we're looking for.

Like it's popular to say money doesn't buy happiness, but like it kind of does.

Money has made me happy before.

Not truly and deeply in the sense that Christ does, but there is some way that money really can make you feel more secure.

Doesn't always, but sometimes it can.

People's approval really can make you feel valuable.

Lying really can preserve your reputation.

Gossip really can make you feel better about yourself by making someone else look worse.

A relationship really can make you feel more complete for a little while.

For a little while.

Philistia really can keep David away from Saul for a little while.

The problem is what Philistia eventually asks from you in return.

Because the refuge that saved David from Saul has now become the trap from which David needs to be saved.

David wanted Akish's protection, and so he needed Akish's trust.

And to gain Akish's trust, he lied and deceived and manipulated, and now Akish trusts him so much that David is made to march beside him into battle against Israel, fighting alongside the enemies of God against God's chosen people.

That's where we end up.

David sought salvation in Philistia, and now he needs salvation from Philistia.

He sought security in the Philistines, and now he needs salvation from them.

He sought acceptance in the world, and now the world's acceptance has led him directly into opposition to God, into war against God.

Church, this is what happens when we look in the world to find what we were meant ultimately to receive from God.

What begins as a refuge gradually becomes slavery.

What we use eventually begins to use us.

And what worked for a little while becomes a trap and our own destruction as it leads us into war against God and his kingdom.

We tell ourselves, I just need a little bit more money, then I'll feel secure.

I just need them to like me, then I'll feel valuable.

I just need this relationship, this pleasure, this position, this person, and then I'll be content.

And maybe it works for a little while, right?

That's the frightening part.

Maybe your Philistia gives you 16 months of peace, like it did, David, or 16 years of peace.

But anything you look to as your savior in this world will eventually become your master.

We may need to ask ourselves this morning, what am I looking to for salvation, or for security, or for satisfaction, today that I may someday need God to rescue me from?

What are we looking to for salvation that we may someday need God to rescue us from?

Because, like David, we are prone to lead a double life when it comes to God and the world, seeking eternal salvation from God, but still pursuing temporary salvation in the world.

Seeking eternal joy in Christ, but still also wanting to add to that some temporary pleasures from the world.

Wanting to share Christ with our friends at school, but also wanting them to like us.

Many of us want eternal security in heaven, but also feel like we need financial security now, and so we hoard our money and obsess over our savings, or we spend lavishly to feel a sense of pleasure in what our wealth can buy, or we track our investments with religious devotion, forgetting what Jesus said in Matthew 6, you cannot serve two masters.

You can't.

You cannot serve both God and money, both God and things.

You will be ruled by one of them.

You will love one and hate the other.

So if you feel like you might love your possessions, you do the math with Jesus' logic and tell me who then you hate.

We want to be identified with Christ, but we still want people to approve of us, and so we change how we talk, or what we laugh at, or what convictions we admit to having, depending on who's in the room.

We believe God is our comfort in one sense, but we still feel like we need something to take the edge off, and so we escape to alcohol or food or porn or entertainment or scrolling or shopping or anything that can make us feel better for a little while.

Again, that's the danger.

It works for a little while.

And only a little while.

We go into the world looking for something we think we need, only to discover that the world never gives without eventually asking something from us in return.

David went into Philistia looking for salvation and security, and for a little while he found it.

But now he's discovering that you can live among the world, but if you belong to God, you can never truly be of the world.

You can never truly become one with it.

Which brings us to our second point of the world.

Notice the question the Philistine commanders ask in verse 3 when they see David and his men marching in the ranks.

They say, What are these Hebrews doing here?

And it's almost funny, because in some way, these Philistine commanders understand David better than Akish does.

Akish looks at David and sees a Philistine.

He thinks David has abandoned Israel and become his loyal servant.

But the other commanders look at David and say, Are you kidding me?

That's David, guys.

That's the one they sing songs about killing tens of thousands of us.

He's a Hebrew, he belongs to them, not to us.

And they're right.

David can live in Philistia, he can dress like a Philistine and march with the Philistines, he can win the approval of a Philistine king, but David cannot stop being David, he cannot stop being one of God's chosen ones, he belongs to God and to God's kingdom, to God's people.

And the same is true of all of us in the kingdom of God.

Jesus says in John 15, If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own.

But because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

That's the Christian life.

Not being of the world, but chosen by God out of the world, and therefore the world hates us.

Christian, you live in this world, but you don't belong to this world.

Jesus has chosen you out of it.

You belong to a different kingdom.

You serve another king.

But, and this is important, that does not mean that we're supposed to run away from the world.

Jesus, generally speaking, does not call us as believers to hide away on Christian communes in the wilderness, away from the world where all our friends are Christians and all our neighbors are Christians and all our coworkers are Christians, and we never interact with someone who doesn't follow Jesus.

Israel, living in their own little believing commune in the wilderness, was the result of their disobedience, their cowardice in the face of the giants of the world.

What they were meant to do, what they were called to do, was invade the world and conquer it for the kingdom of God, gathering the nations in to join in the blessings of God's kingdom.

And that's our purpose as well.

Jesus prays for his followers in John 17.

He says, I do not ask that you take them out of the world.

And then he says, As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.

So the calling of the Christian is strange.

We are called out of the world to be distinct from the world, but simultaneously sent into the world to invade the world, not with violent force, but with the unstoppable power of the gospel that conquers lost souls and casts out evil and transforms individuals and cities and nations as the kingdom of God advances and takes over the globe, gathering in the nations to enjoy its blessings.

So there are anomalies, possibly, but the general calling of the Christian life is not to retreat into private safe spaces, but to invade the public sphere.

So we should, generally speaking, be among unbelievers.

We should be in their neighborhoods and workplaces.

We should sit at their tables and invite them to ours.

We should love them and serve them and give to them and befriend them and point them to Jesus with our lives and with our words.

And as a church, we should be sending people into the world, into the cities where the bulk of the lost and the needy are, and into the Middle East where most of the unreached are, to invade, to advance the kingdom of God.

Like, sure, Islam is giant and violent and terrifying.

So was Goliath.

God's people are called to slay giants, not to cower away from them in the wilderness.

This is what the church is.

We're not supposed to retreat from the world, we are supposed to invade it with the gospel and the love and the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

For the good of the world.

We are in the world and we are for the world.

But we go into the world without ever becoming like the world.

We are in the world and for the world, but not ever of the world.

There should be something unmistakably different about us because we belong to Jesus, because we belong to a different kingdom.

And often then we can expect this to bring about the what are these Hebrews doing here, kind of reproach from those around us.

Now, worldly approval is not always bad.

Scripture actually tells us to live honorable lives among unbelievers, to be well thought of by them.

If the people you work with, for example, respect you because you're honest and dependable and kind and hardworking and joyful, praise God.

That's what we should be striving for.

Akish praises and defends David here, but Akish really approves of him because he thinks David has betrayed his people.

And that's a kind of worldly approval we should be terrified to receive.

The approval that comes because nobody can tell that we belong to a totally different kingdom.

The 19th century evangelist D.

L.

Moody was once asked to describe what he thought the relationship between the church and the world should be.

Should the church reject the world entirely and separate from it and become Amish to avoid getting mixed up with it?

Or should the church embrace the world as its own, becoming just like the world in order to be able to reach it?

And Moody answered with this He said, The place for a ship is in the sea, but God help the ship if the sea gets into it.

Right?

In other words, Christians must be in the world, involved in the world, engaged with the world, but we must not let worldliness be within us.

We must, as it's all And said, be in the world, but not of the world.

That's the situation David had gotten himself into, trying to live in the world and of the world in such a way that he eventually became indistinguishable from the world.

And the result is that he has gone from fighting boldly against Goliath and the Philistines for God to marching alongside the Philistines into war against God.

So the danger of trying to live this sort of double life, having one foot in the kingdom of God and one foot in the world, is that eventually it always leads us to more and more into direct opposition against God, into war against his kingdom.

And the terrifying thing for David is that he can't get himself out anymore.

He's in too deep.

He's surrounded by Philistine armies, an army that will wipe out Israel.

Spoiler alert.

His compromise has finally carried him somewhere.

His cleverness cannot rescue him.

He is trapped in a mess of his own making.

And there's nothing he can do.

And maybe that's where you're at this morning.

You belong to Jesus, but you've made a mess of it.

Trying to keep a foot in the world and a foot in his kingdom.

And you knew better, you compromised anyway, and now you don't know how to undo what you've done.

That's where the good news of this chapter begins.

Which brings us to our last point from the world.

David may have gotten himself into a place he can't get himself out of, but he has not gotten himself into a place where the mercy of God cannot reach him.

What we see in this chapter is the unrelenting, unstoppable love and mercy and faithfulness of God, whose salvation is not hindered by the repeated failures and foolishness of his people.

Which is good news for all of us here today who have made a mess of our lives.

And what I love about this story is how how quietly God works to save him.

There's no miracle, at least not as we typically think of miracles, right?

There's no prophet that shows up, no angel appears, God himself never speaks, the author never says, and thus the Lord delivered David.

Some Philistine commanders just get upset in a military meeting.

They see David and say, What are these Hebrews doing here?

And they refuse to fight with him behind them.

And so Akish argues with them, but they won't budge, and so he reluctantly tells David, Go back.

And David walks away free.

That's it.

God almost silently uses the Philistines to save David from the Philistines.

The very rejection David was fighting against becomes the mercy that he desperately needed through a quiet, subtle act of divine providential kindness.

Church, don't mistake God's silence for God's absence.

Chapter 29 hardly mentions God.

And yet God is everywhere in it, quietly governing the universe on behalf of his servant David, quietly protecting him, quietly closing doors, quietly frustrating David's plans, quietly shepherding his foolish servant back to where he belongs and saving him from himself and from his own mess.

And God still works that way.

Sometimes the door that closes is his mercy.

Sometimes the relationship that ends is his mercy.

Sometimes the job you don't get is his mercy.

Sometimes being rejected by the people whose approval you desperately want is his mercy.

Sometimes God loves you enough to refuse to let your plans work.

And often we don't recognize his providence until we look backwards, sometimes years, decades later, and realize, man, if God had given me what I wanted, it would have ruined me.

If God had given me what I deserved, it would have destroyed me.

And what's beautiful about all of this is David didn't deserve a thing.

God never told David to go to the Philistines.

David made this mess.

David doubted God.

David lied, David manipulated, David compromised, David abandoned his faith, and when 16 months of scheming finally collapsed on top of him, God didn't say, Well, you know, you got yourself into this mess, you can get yourself out of it.

No, God stepped in and saved him.

The transcendent, infinite God over all the universe, stepped into the messy affairs of foolish people to save his chosen one.

Your foolishness, your rebellion, your sin does not exhaust the mercy of our God.

Now that doesn't mean that sin is safe.

David's about to experience painful consequences in chapter 30.

But it does mean that if you belong to Jesus by faith in him, you cannot wander farther than his mercy can reach.

And you may be sitting here thinking, but I messed up big time.

You don't understand.

So did David.

But I made this mess of myself, so did David.

But I knew better, so did David.

But I have failed again and again and again, so did David.

But I don't have anything to do, any way to get myself out of this.

Neither did David.

And that's precisely why you and I, like David, need a savior better than ourselves, better than the Philistines, better than the world.

David's story is ultimately pointing us beyond David, like we talked about in Sunday school this morning, to the son of David, Jesus Christ.

David was God's anointed king, who needed to be rescued from his sin and his own mess, but Jesus is God's greater anointed king who came without sin to rescue us from ours.

And here's the gospel.

We, like David, we got ourselves into a mess we could never get ourselves out of.

We went into the world looking for life apart from God, security apart from God, satisfaction apart from God.

We sinned, we rebelled, we made ourselves guilty, we went to war against God and against his kingdom.

We became slaves to the very sins that promised us freedom, and no amount of cleverness, morality, religion, regret, or effort could get us out.

And so God Himself, the transcendent, infinite God, in his unrelenting mercy and love for us, stepped in to save us.

Stepped into a world of messy, human, creaturely affairs to save his chosen people.

Jesus Christ entered this world for us.

He lived the life of perfect faithfulness and righteousness that David failed to live, that we failed to live.

And then at the cross, he took all of the guilt of all of our wandering, all our compromise, all our double-mindedness, all our sin upon himself, and he died under the judgment we deserved.

And on the third day he rose victorious over sin, over shame, over Satan, over death, over the world.

And now everyone, universally, who trusts in this Jesus is forgiven, cleansed, declared righteous, made new, reconciled to God, brought into a kingdom that can never be shaken, and from which we can never be removed.

You may wander into the world looking for security or satisfaction or approval.

You may compromise because you desperately want to fit in.

You may even make a terrible mess of things and wonder how you will ever get yourself out.

But if you belong to Jesus Christ by faith in him, underneath all of your wandering and all of your failures and all of your foolishness is the relentless love and mercy of a Savior who will not let you go.

For now, that mercy and love often works quietly.

God closes a door, he frustrates a plan, he allows a rejection, he uses a thousand silent ordinary providences that we may never recognize to rescue us from the world and shepherd us back to himself.

But in just a little while, our rescue from this world will not be quiet.

Because the same Jesus who entered this world quietly as a baby and as a slave to save sinners will return in glory with the blast of trumpets and the armies of heaven and the shouts of his people, descending not to take us out of the world, but to invade the world once for all to conquer it with the kingdom of heaven, destroying every enemy, putting everything under his feet, and making all things new and good forever.

And then those who are fighting against his kingdom, who have not trusted in Christ, will fall with the kingdom that they have put themselves in.

But those who have trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ and are united to him by his grace will be reborn, resurrected, made new to live and to reign with him in his kingdom forever in full righteousness, and the tension that we experience now will be gone.

We will no longer struggle to live in the world without being of the world, because the kingdoms of this world will have become the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

Until that day, church, live in the world, for the world, and do not become of the world, but trust the Savior who in relentless love is bringing you safely into his everlasting kingdom.

Praise God.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, you are so good to us, so stubborn with your love for us, and unrelenting in your mercy, we cannot fathom it.

Lord, you, though you are in the form of God and are yourself the fullness of deity, transcendent, infinite beyond our comprehension, have chosen to step into our lives, have chosen to involve yourself in our mess, and have chosen to suffer in our place and to resurrect yourself from the dead for our good and for your glory.

Jesus, we cannot fathom what this means, but we ask that you would press this into our minds, press it deep into our hearts this morning, that if we are tempted, when we are tempted, to live of the world and among the world, Lord, that you would open our eyes to our sin, lead us back to the cross, make us new time and time again as we seek you, and may you be glorified in us as we go from here.

We pray this in your name for your glory.

Amen.

Thank you, Daniel.

Let's stand with us as we sing of that great unrelentment.