After God's Own Heart | Part 1: The Heart God Chooses | Senior Pastor Keith Stewart

Amen.

He's a good, good father.

Hey, we're going to begin a brand new series today about the life of David.

And I just want to remind you of something because we just we completed not long ago a series around Jonah, the book of Jonah.

In that series, I talked to you a little bit about narrative literature.

That narrative literature or story literature is the dominant type of literature in the Bible.

More than half of the Bible is told in story form.

And there's some unique interpretive rules when it comes to understanding narrative literature, not the least of which is you have to understand, no matter who the story is about, even like here with King David, who's an immensely popular character in the Old Testament, the story is ultimately about God.

This is about God, how he's working in situations, what he's doing behind the scenes.

Every narrator narrative, the main character is God.

And if you forget that, sometimes you can get so focused on the minutia that you lose the bigger picture that's being told throughout the story.

So this is the way we're going to be looking at David's life through the lens of what God is doing in the story and what he might be teaching us in that process.

Today's message I'm calling the heart God chooses.

As we get started, let's pray.

Father, I just want to thank you for everybody who's joining us today, not just in person, but online, and they're here to hear from you.

I believe with all of my heart, God, that you're still a very good father and you're still at work and you're still speaking to us in ways that we can't even begin to understand.

I already saw that in the first service as people came up to me afterwards, and obviously, Lord, you are moving in their heart and speaking to them.

I pray, God, that the work you started you'll bring to completion.

In the same way now, God, we we bring our lives to you.

We are we are open to what you have to say.

So, in what ways we need encouragement, in what ways we need correction, whatever the need might be, I pray, God, that you'd have complete freedom in our time together to bring about in our hearts and lives the things that you mean to determine and to uh uh resolve once and for all.

I pray it all in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So in the Old Testament, there's three characters that stand head and shoulders above all the others.

They're spiritual giants.

They have this long shadow of influence.

One, of course, is Abraham.

He's the father of the Jewish nation.

We also call him the father of the faithful.

Another character is Moses.

So Moses, he actually organizes the nation.

He's the one through whom the law comes.

So Moses is a dominant character.

But the third one is King David.

David gets more attention than any other character in the Old Testament.

Just as an example, Abraham's story is told in 14 chapters.

Moses gets 40, which is a significant number more, but David's life story is told in 66 chapters in the Bible.

Now you could even say that David represents kind of the benchmark for Israel's monarchy.

He was the king by which every other king who followed him was measured.

So from David's reign forward, kings are often described as either being like David or not like David.

So why is David given such an elevated place?

Why is it, even maybe for people in this room, you consider David to be one of your favorite characters in the Bible?

Well, maybe part of the reason is because he wrote more than half of the book of Psalms, which in terms of literature are considered the most influential writings the world has ever known.

Or as John Ortberg said it, David wrote the prayer book for the human race.

So if you think about David as his story is told, we have a lot of titles or descriptions we would give to him.

He was a shepherd, a warrior, a general, and a king.

He was a poet, an outlaw, a champion, a musician, a prophet, a worship leader, an adulterer, a murderer, a parent, a leader, a hero, and an ancestor of Jesus Christ.

But for the purposes of this series, the phrase we want to kind of zero in in, zero in on is this phrase that he's a man after God's own heart.

So David unites a divided kingdom, brings the two northern and southern kingdoms together.

Not only does that do that, but he establishes Jerusalem as the capital city, and Jerusalem is also known as the city of David.

When David's name appears in the New Testament, it's actually in the very first verse of the very first book of the Bible, Matthew 1.1.

And then you get all the way to the end of the Bible, the book of Revelation, and nearly the very last verse of the Bible, Revelation 22, 16, it also mentions David once again.

When Jesus walked the face of this earth, he was not known as a son of Abraham, not called a follower of Moses, but he was called the son of David, and he was called by that title some dozen times.

When you study David's life, it's abundantly clear this man is both a sinner and a saint.

In other words, he didn't get it right all the time.

He was a lousy parent.

There's no question he was an unfaithful husband.

The height to which he ascends are great, but so are the depths to which he falls.

But in all of his greatness and all of his flaws, the one thing most notable about David is his heart.

In fact, he's the only person in the entire Bible who's described as being a man after God's own heart.

So David's story is there to remind us that God can be the center of an imperfect life.

Can I say that again?

God can be the center of an imperfect life.

And I'm, for one, am very grateful for that.

One of the reasons I love the Bible so much is it's a truth-telling book, even when the truth makes its heroes look bad.

So the Bible tells us the good, the bad, and the ugly about King David, which also helps you to understand that you can be anointed by God, chosen by him, destined to fulfill a unique purpose in life, but if you're not careful, you can still crash and burn.

It can happen to you, it can happen to me.

Now I find encouragement in that too because it makes me believe there is hope for me.

If God can look at David, given all his imperfections, and still see in him a man after God's own heart, maybe when God looks at me, he can still see the same thing in me too.

Now there's two stories about which most of us are familiar in this room.

The two stories are his hero and his zero story.

His hero story is David and Goliath.

We all know that story.

And the zero story is David and Bathsheba.

Most sermons and series about David spend a lot of time on those two events.

I want to tell you, even though there's a lot of good lessons in both of those stories, and I have done plenty of messages in the past about them, in this series, I want to give major airtime to stories that are just as powerful and just as revealing, but don't get the same level of attention.

In other words, I don't want to flatten David's story to simply two sensational events that we often use to define him and confine him.

David's story is bigger than that.

There's 66 chapters telling his story.

So we need to get the bigger story, the bigger narrative, and not just reduce his life to these two separate things.

So let's begin by looking at our perspective, which I call an outside-in perspective.

The Old Testament book that tells the story of David is 1 Samuel.

One of the things about this book is it links the period of the judges to the time of the king.

So 1 Samuel tells the story of three men.

One, Samuel.

He's the last of the judges, but the first of the prophets.

Then there's Saul, the first king of Israel, and then David.

Those three men form the three divisions of the book of 1 Samuel.

To understand 1 Samuel, you need to understand Israel's desire to have a king like all the nations that surround them had.

But what you need to understand is this was not God's design and this was not God's intent.

God wanted to be Israel's king, and he was going to rule over Israel in the government administered to by his priest.

But Israel knew that they wanted a king, even though they knew what life was like under a king.

They'd spent 400 years in Egyptian bondage.

They knew what it was like to live under the pharaohs.

They knew how hard their life was.

And God was saying, No, that's not what I want for you.

Samuel's not happy about this request.

God's not happy about this request.

In fact, Samuel goes so far as to warn them about what this type of government is going to do to you.

And you can read about that in 1 Samuel chapter 8.

1 Samuel 8 · chapter mention

And when you read it, the key phrase is, He will take.

Talking about the king.

He's going to take your sons and daughters.

He's going to take your money.

He's going to take your land.

Again and again, he will take.

Because that's what powerful men and women do who are kings and queens.

They take.

But God also knew that his people are not going to be happy unless and until they got their way.

So they'd have to learn the hard way what life was like under a king.

But even with all of that said, God still wanted to provide his people some level of protection from their own government through separation of powers.

So in Israel's political setup, there'd be a separation between civil and religious authority.

Here's what God did Israel would always have a post occupied by a person who, on behalf of God, would anoint the new king over the nation.

That person was called a prophet.

That prophet would also act as the conscience of the king.

The prophetic office was the counterbalance to the power of the king.

The prophets held the kings to the standards that all the people of God were held to, too.

In other words, the prophet held powerful people to God's standards.

This is why Samuel, who's Israel's last judge, is the perfect candidate for the job of prophet.

So they're to remind the king of his spiritual obligation.

Because listen, no government on earth is exempt from God's standards of right and wrong.

Amen?

No government is exempt from God's standards of righteousness and holiness.

This is what the prophets did.

They held the powers that be to the standards of God.

So throughout Israel's monarchy, God repeatedly kept raising up prophets to speak God's truth to power.

So with King Saul, there's the prophet Samuel.

With King David, he had the prophet Nathan.

With King Ahab, he had Elijah.

King Ahaz, he had Isaiah.

King Jehoiakim and Zedekiah had the prophet Jeremiah.

Now I'll tell you, today the church, Capital C Church, has abandoned this role of being a prophetic voice to power by jumping in bed with political parties and then only calling out the term transgressions of the other party and not their own.

I came across this powerful statement.

This is so true.

No amount of the other side's wrong makes my side's wrong right.

We need to be really careful as Christ's followers that we're not constantly calling out the wrongdoing on the other side of the aisle while turning a blind eye to the wrongdoing happening in our own backyard.

You see, our voice as Christ followers is not bent to the right or to the left.

It's bent heavenward, it's bent to God's standards, and we hold all political parties to God's standard.

That's what I believe.

Now, let me tell you something.

This is really interesting.

I am involved politically.

I don't post stuff all over Facebook because I see where that gets people.

I see people arguing, throwing thought bombs back at each other.

Nobody's convinced on Facebook.

But you know what I do?

One, I vote, and every one of us should be voting.

You should vote to make your moral voice heard in our government.

I write my congressional representatives.

They know who I am because I write and I write frequently.

I've been on Capitol Hill and I have talked to our representatives or their staff in person.

I've done that several times over many years.

I believe that Christians should be politically involved.

I think we have to be careful when it becomes partisan.

So a couple of months ago, I was signed onto a letter to Susan Wiles, who's the head of uh he's President Trump's chief of staff.

And it was advocating for global health initiatives.

Because many of you know when USAID was killed, uh there was stuff that needed to be rooted out of that program that was bad.

I agree with that.

But the good got thrown away with the bad.

And as a result of that, a lot of good health initiatives, people were dying around the world.

There was medicine not getting to people, there was grain and warehouses just left there to rot.

I mean, a lot of things happened.

So I just wrote the administration on behalf of what I believe is God's heart to say, listen, we have to prioritize the global health of the poor.

And and I got when I was in Central America, I got an invitation from the White House.

And that invitation was to a select group of pastors who'd signed onto that letter to come and meet with their faith department and members of the Department of State to talk about the church and global health.

Now I want you to know, I don't go as a Republican, I don't go as a Democrat.

I don't identify with either of those political parties.

I'm an independent voter.

I go on behalf of the kingdom of God, I go on behalf of Jesus Christ.

And I'm there to speak truth to power, whether they want to hear it or not.

So this is where we make our stand as Christ followers.

But again, that's another message for another time.

I just want you to know that the prophets were there.

God is this is God's protection against their government.

The powers of bee are corrupt, they're gonna do what they're gonna do.

You need God's voice in there and not partisan hacks.

You need people who know how to speak the truth.

So God explicitly tells them, okay, I'm gonna give you your choice.

And they choose Saul.

Saul's the people's choice.

By all human standards, he's the perfect candidate for the king.

He's a head taller than everybody else, the guy's handsome, his family's wealthy and influential, he's a perfect king by human standards, but he fails miserably and is disqualified.

So then God explicitly says, Okay, now it's my turn.

I get to pick the next king.

And this is where we pick up on our story, 1 Samuel 16:1.

1 Samuel 16:1

The Lord said to Samuel, How long will you mourn for Saul, since I have rejected him as king over Israel?

Fill your horn with oil and be on your way.

I'm sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem.

I have chosen one of his sons to be king.

So Samuel heads to Bethlehem, where Jesse lives with his eight sons.

We pick up this story then in verse 6.

When they arrived, Samuel saw Eliab and thought, Surely the Lord's anointed stands here before the Lord.

So Eliab is Jesse's oldest son.

Evidently, this is one impressive dude.

Uh he's a guy that knows how to get things done.

He's president of the student council, he's captain of the lacrosse team, he drives a Cadillac SUV chariot.

His name in Hebrew means you demand.

Now I'm just kidding about all that stuff.

But but in biblical times, birth order was very significant.

Uh being born first gave you were born into tremendous advantage.

The oldest child, especially the firstborn male, uh, would receive a double portion of his father's inheritance.

Headship of the family was passed to the oldest male son.

The oldest would be expected to be the most mature, the most experienced, and the most wise member of the family.

So he's a shoe-in for leadership.

Now, show of hands real quickly.

Let me just ask, how many of you are not the firstborn child in your family?

Can I see your hands real quick?

Okay, very good.

Thank you.

I'm also in that group.

I'm a middle child.

So how many of you would agree with me that firstborn children are spoiled, rotten, undeserving brats?

No.

Doesn't it feel good to just get that out of your system just for once?

Okay, so we got that done.

Over the years, everybody's looking at Eliab.

And they're saying, you demand.

When Samuel shows up, he said, Yeah, yeah, right, you demand.

But God looks at Eliab and said, He not the man.

This is not, this is not who I've chosen.

So listen to how God actually said that.

He says, The Lord said to Samuel, Do not consider his appearance or his hide, for I have rejected him.

The Lord does not look at the things man looks at.

Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.

So what Samuel has done is he's fallen for the same error that led to the choosing of Saul.

He's thinking, This guy looks the part.

This guy is sharp, firstborn, natural-born leader.

He's got to be the man.

So the number of degrees you have, your resume are the least of God's concern.

God is not impressed by the things that impress other people.

So Eliab, if he's not the man, then it has to be one of the other sons of Jesse.

So Jesse parades his other sons past Samuel.

Son number two is Abinadab.

He's followed by Shema, who's the son, some number three, and then number four through seven follow quickly.

Samuel squints at Jesse and says, The Lord hasn't chosen any of these.

Do you have any more sons?

So Samuel's beginning to think he's gone to the wrong Jesse's house.

I mean, this the he's not here.

And so then Dad adds this he says, They're still the youngest, Jesse answered, but he is tending the sheep.

The son that he's referring to here is David.

But what I want you to notice is right up front, when David is introduced to the story, he's not even called by his name.

He's the youngest.

The pronoun he.

David's name is withheld until verse 13, the very last verse in this passage.

So first, Dad doesn't mention him by name.

Second, he wasn't even invited to the sacrificial feast.

And third, he wouldn't even have been brought in at all had not Samuel insisted on it.

It's like Dad was saying, Why would my youngest be God's choice?

In other words, David seemed to look right through David.

Or Jesse looked right through David.

And I wonder how many of you, sadly, in your experience growing up, you felt like your parents just looked right through you.

You don't think you were really noticed that maybe you had a favored brother or sister, and they were the ones that always got all the attention of mom and dad.

Well, you know, David would later write in the Psalms these words, he said, Though my father and my mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.

And I've often wondered when I've read that if David didn't just kind of resonate, maybe even feel a part of that, that dad just constantly forgot him, that he wasn't that important to dad, that he was, in a sense, abandoned in his growing up years.

So if I were to summarize what we've seen so far in the story, I'd have to say David was not chosen because of what his father saw in him.

David was not chosen because of what Samuel saw in him.

David is chosen because of what God sees in him.

And that leads us to a new perspective.

So that's the human perspective outside in.

Now let's look at God's perspective, which is inside out.

Twice in the Bible we're told that David is a man after God's own heart.

First, in the story we're looking at today.

The Lord has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him ruler of his people.

Then it's repeated in the New Testament in the book of Acts.

But God removed him from the kingship and replaced him with David, a man about whom God said, David, son of Jesse, is a man after my own heart, for he will do everything I want him to do.

Now it leads to the question, what was it about David's heart that really impressed God?

It's a legit question.

What does that mean to have a heart after God?

What does God look for?

What's he searching for?

If that were ever true of you and me, what qualities is God looking for in a heart that is a heart like his, a heart after which he longs, a man after my own heart.

So let me share with you three things I think that qualified David's heart.

Number one, he had a heart like a shepherd.

David's career starts out early and lonely, not in a position of power at all, but in the fields with a sheep.

Now, Christians today have a tendency to romanticize the profession of shepherd because we associate Jesus with being the good shepherd.

And I understand that.

But the plain fact is, shepherding is dirty work.

It's a demeaning, boring job.

It's really a job that was reserved for the lowest of the low.

Keeping the sheep was considered servant's work.

The fact that David is the one keeping the sheep showed that this is a family not of wealth, not of beings, because if they had money, they would have hired a servant to look after the sheep, not a son.

So for many of us, maybe what we are doing right now in terms of our job, our work, we feel like it's keeping the sheep.

Maybe what you do for a living from nine to five, it pays the bills, but you feel this job is beneath you, that you are meant for greater things.

And why I got to say to you is this if God has greater things in store for your future, remember this that will only come to pass as long as you're faithful in keeping the sheep today.

Which means keeping sheep is not wasting time, it's training time.

David was a great man and a great king over Israel because he never lost the lessons he learned as a shepherd.

David learned all sorts of things that would help him lead well one day.

Like, for example, sheep are not the easiest followers to lead.

They get into trouble easily.

They do terrible things, and among they're among the most defenseless of God's creation.

There's a reason Jesus compared us to sheep.

We're not all that different.

We easily get into trouble.

We follow the wrong things.

And as a whole, human beings are very vulnerable creatures.

But it wasn't just God shaping David's leadership skills.

More importantly, he's shaping his heart.

Look at leadership today in America's corporate world.

Corporations largely think in terms of financial reality.

So we hear people talking about profit and loss, cash flow, debt to equity ratios.

People are commodified.

Dollars are squeezed, profit margins are maximized, and people are often viewed as merely cogs in the machinery to get us where we need to be.

But all that's different for a shepherd.

For a shepherd, the product of their labor is the follower.

It's not profits, it's not market share.

For David, the organization is flesh and blood.

So it's about trust the sheep trusting the shepherd, the shepherd trusting the sheep.

To David, leadership is profoundly relational.

It's also the place where he learned the discipline of secrecy.

This is probably one of the most neglected of all the spiritual disciplines, the discipline of secrecy.

The truth worth remembering is this preparation for the spectacular always begins with the insignificant.

Most great leaders I've ever known and great leaders I've read about in history have spent a significant amount of time in obscurity where they remain unseen and unappreciated.

You know, something concerns me about the time in which we live.

And that is that too often today, when a well-known celebrity or musician or an artist of some sort, they give their life to Jesus, we quickly platform them and put them in front of all kinds of people, and then within months, if not even days, they fail big time, bring shame and reproach on the body of Christ.

And we often blame the celebrity for that.

And I gotta tell you, I blame the people that surrounded that celebrity.

Why did you platform somebody before they spent time with the sheep?

Why did you elevate somebody's voice before they learned the discipline of secrecy, of what it means?

You see, we're not ready for the applause of people unless we've learned what it means to be to be used and unappreciated.

This is God's training ground.

And David learned that.

He learned that better than most people.

Character is always built in faithful obscurity.

Christ's followers should never fear obscurity.

The years that nobody knows you are the times when your character is being built.

We accept service that's unseen and unrewarded because that qualifies us for the applause of the crowd.

Don't fear obscurity.

Instead, embrace it as a path of growth.

That's what David did.

Faithfulness means to do the menial job in front of you every day for as long as it takes.

You do the insignificant, the routine, the repetitious, the unexciting, the uneventful jobs to repeatedly perform faithfully in these little tasks is what builds the character of kings.

Character is always built one block at a time by consistently making the right choice over and over again until it becomes a part of your nature.

That's what it means to shepherd sheep.

So David has a shepherd's heart.

He's learned in obscurity, he's learned in secrecy the lessons that will serve him well as a leader.

But he also had a different kind of heart in that he had a heart that breaks.

David is a man who fell, who sinned greatly, who did incredibly stupid things.

If you read the entire story of his life and not just the two incidents for which he's best known, you're going to see that some of these failures are really serious.

For example, he nearly murders Nabal out of anger until Abigail's wisdom intervened.

He lied to King Ashus about pretending to be insane.

He deceived the Philistine king with his military activities.

He improperly transported the Ark of the Covenant, which resulted in Uzzah's death.

He committed adultery with Bathsheba and orchestrated her husband's death.

He took a forbidden census, which led to the death of 70,000 Israelites.

On top of that, David's final instructions to Solomon, including instructed him to execute Joab and Shemai.

For a man who loved God, he sure knew how to make a mess out of things.

Now here's something you don't hear in most sermons about David.

Most preachers, when they preach the story, don't remind you of the fact that Saul and David both performed very badly.

In fact, David's performance is as bad, if not worse, than Saul's.

So the big question, if you're reading the story the way it's written, is why is Saul disqualified and David is not?

The difference between these two men is their heart.

When Saul was confronted about his disobedience, he rationalized it and blamed someone else.

He rejected the discipline of God.

David, on the other hand, he commits murder, adultery, he's vicious, he's cruel, he's emotionally unstable.

But when God puts his finger on him, he cracks.

He just breaks.

No arguments, no rationalizations, he repents.

Now, of course, until God put his finger on him, he rationalized just like Saul did.

But when he's confronted, he breaks every time.

Which shows you something about David's desire, doesn't it?

His heart is to be that man of God.

He really wants to be that man that God wants him to be.

He's not quite sure how to get there, but the only difference between these two kings, both of them make colossal mistakes.

One's disqualified, one's called a man after God's own heart, but it's because of their response to being corrected.

Now I'm not implying for even a minute that God doesn't care about bad behavior.

David has to face severe consequences on account of his disobedience.

His household was destroyed.

The seeds he sowed into his son's life eventually led to the destruction of the kingdom.

There's no escaping the consequences of sin for any of us.

But there's also no escaping the love, grace, and mercy of God.

Now you just need to know over the many years I've been a pastor, I've known a lot of pastors in the ministry.

We've even had pastors here who have come and moved on.

Some of them transitioned to other opportunities, others had to be fired.

Here's what I've learned: there are no perfect pastors, especially the one who's addressing you right now.

But there's one surefire way to end your ministry.

Develop a Teflon coating.

With ministers.

The ministers that have had to face a hard termination were the ones that developed this Teflon coating that nothing critical ever said about them would stick to them.

If a complaint was lodged, they always had an excuse as to why it wasn't their fault.

When they blew it, even if I had irrefutable proof, they always had a scapegoat, someone to blame, not them.

When things went wrong, they could never acknowledge how they might have contributed in any way, shape, or form to the problem.

That's what I call a Teflon coding.

And I'll tell you something from the heart.

There's a lot of failures I can get past.

There's a lot of mistakes that I don't think necessarily disqualify you from leadership.

But if you can't own your own humanity, if you can't own your own sin, when all you can do is point the finger at other people about your own shortcomings, you've committed the sin of Saul, and even God says, I can't do anything with that.

Listen to this, because this is a key takeaway from David's life.

Being a sinner is not what disqualifies you from leadership.

Pretending that you aren't is what dooms you.

And that's what we learn in David is this willingness to own his junk when he's called out about it.

Here's a third thing we learn about David's heart.

We can't forget this.

He had a heart that was centered on God.

Every life, every life in this room, you have a center.

Your life, my life, we all have a center.

At the center of your life is something to which you assign ultimate worth, something to which you always bow.

Your life revolves around that center.

No matter what religious language you use to describe your life, I can tell you what's at your center represents your God.

For some of us, it's anxiousness, our ongoing obsession with the things that I have to get done.

That's a false center.

Whenever I'm overwhelmed by this sense of urgency, I'm failing to pay attention to God.

I'm tempted to turn my calendar, my list, my strategies into objects of worship.

Some of us are good at handling chaos and change.

I mean, you're gifted at that.

For some of you, it's efficiency that lies at the center of your life.

The danger is this, is things may go so well that you forget God.

We end up leading productive, very efficient lives that have nothing to do with the reason why we were created.

Church work can be detrimental to spiritual health.

It's easy to become so busy in the name of Jesus that we even let the word of God through us compromise the work of God in us.

Henry Nowen said it so well.

He said, Too many of us imagine the time that we spend with God as a corner in the boxing ring where we go between rounds.

In other words, when I start feeling beaten up, when I feel like I can't take it anymore, then I retreat to God, I catch my breath, I sit down, I get a drink of water, catch some words of encouragement for my goats, and then go out there and start boxing again.

Sometimes we think that way about church.

I've heard people say, I come to church on Sunday morning to refuel and recharge my battery for the week ahead.

That's not why we gather on weekends.

The real purpose of coming together as a church is to push aside anything and everything from the center of our life that is not God.

It's to keep God at the center.

Here's our choice.

We can be God obsessed and let God rule us from the inside out, or we can be obsessed with something infinitely less, like our work, our busyness, our methodologies for getting things done.

David led a God-centered life.

And that's what it really comes down to.

This question do we live from the inside out or the outside in?

Do we spend most of our energy managing the exterior or do we keep the interior in good shape?

Your center is whatever you return to over and over again.

And for David that was God.

And we see this so clearly in the Psalms, don't we?

If you're reading the prayer book of the house of faith, if you're reading the Psalms, you see that even when David's in a bad place, by the end of that Psalm, he is centering again on God.

And that's one of the best lessons from the Psalms is the Psalms teach us to center around God.

Which means the heart that God chooses is a heart that's willing to serve when nobody's watching.

A heart that's capable of breaking when confronted about its own sin.

Doesn't blame, doesn't rationalize, doesn't excuse.

Third, it's a heart that continually recenters on God Himself.

So for all those reasons we looked at, God has, David has this heart that God loves.

His heart's far from perfect.

He messes up in big ways, and Scripture refuses to hide that.

Yet God uses him to lead a nation and even give words to our deepest fears and desires and struggles through writing the Psalms.

And I think that's why this next principle is so important.

This is a lesson we can't seem to remember.

Listen to what Paul said in 1 Corinthians.

He said, Take a good look, friends, at who you were before you got called into this life.

I don't see many of the brightest and the best among you, not many influential, not from high society families.

Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses?

Chose these nobodies to expose the hollow pretensions of the somebodies.

So what kind of person does God look for when he wants to accomplish something in the world?

Does God look for the good people who have it all together?

The really talented people, the smart people, the people from the most influential family backgrounds, the charismatic, the outgoing personalities?

God's choices have always been paradoxical.

I love this word.

The word paradox comes to us from the Greek language.

It's actually a combination of two words, para, which is against and doxa opinion.

So something that's paradoxical, paradoxical goes against popular opinion, goes against what most people think.

This is the way God works.

The kingdom of God is a kingdom of paradox.

What appears to be one thing from human perspective is quite the opposite from God's point of view.

It was Chuck Swindahl who said this when God scans the earth for potential leaders, he's not on a search for angels in the flesh.

He's certainly not looking for perfect people, since there are none.

So all of us in some way, we're like David.

We're sinners and saints.

Sinner or saint, that's my identity.

Sinner, that's my reality.

Those two words, sinner and saint, describe my life and describe your life too.

J.C.

Ryle was a pastor from the previous generation.

He said this the holiest actions of the holiest saint that ever lived are all more or less full of defects and imperfections.

Ryle's just telling the truth about the best of us and the rest of us.

This side of heaven, we're a pretty sorry lot.

But that's where grace comes in.

We run to the cross, we run and lay hold of Jesus.

Have you ever thought about why in the Bible the heroes all have these serious flaws?

Well, the answer is really simple.

That's all God has to work with.

Okay, I'm telling you.

All the perfect people, they're already in heaven.

The ones here on earth, we all have serious weaknesses.

The talent pool is pretty shallow when it comes to moral perfection.

So all God has to work with are sinners.

In heaven, we'll all be vastly improved, perfected by God's grace.

But until then, he's got some pretty honorary people he's got to work through, but he still does amazing things to us all.

Now, in case you don't understand this, God explains in 1 Corinthians 1 why, why he chooses people like this.

If you want this message in a single sentence, it's this God doesn't tolerate human pride.

Listen to this, brothers, think of what you were when you were called.

Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many influential, not many of noble birth.

The Bible tells us God chooses his team for a reason.

He chooses the last.

He chooses the weak over the strong.

He chooses the forgotten of the world.

He specializes in those whom the world has forgotten and count as nothing.

He uses them because they don't take credit for anything.

So he nullifies the mighty by using the weak.

He nullifies the proud by using the humble.

He nullifies the wise by using the simple.

He nullifies the PhD by using the high school dropout.

This is how God works.

So my last year of college, Brenda and I were trying to save because we wanted to get married.

And so I stepped out of dorm life, and there was a professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the major universities in Nashville, Tennessee.

Her name was Dr.

Dorothy Loomis.

And she said that I could have a home in her house, really nice house, in Belmade.

If you've ever been to Nashville, Belmade is the rich part of Nashville, or the old money part of Nashville.

So she she she lived in Bellmead.

And she said I could have a room in her house if I would take out her garbage and run her on errands, you know, clean up here and there.

And I said, Great, good deal.

You know, so I I go to stay with Dr.

Loomis.

Dr.

Loomis, uh, she is the English chair at Vanderbilt University.

She's fluent in five languages, three of them are dead.

Okay?

She is an amazingly brilliant woman.

If I would talk to her about the Bible, she would open her Greek New Testament to see if I was quoting Scripture correctly.

This is how brilliant this woman was.

Dr.

Loomis was also the daughter of a minister.

And over her many years she lost her faith.

And she considered herself an agnostic, no longer a believer.

You can't know, I don't know.

And so she and I would talk.

Now we would be in her study.

Her study was amazing, by the way.

There's actual biblical manuscripts that are framed on her wall.

There's a chair from the time of Beowulf over in the corner.

I mean, it's a very expensive home.

She's got all the trappings of being a person of real influence.

And so I knew there's no way.

I mean, I'm a country bumpkin.

I'm born in Ashland, Kentucky.

Haven't even finished my bachelor's degree.

I can't take her on toe-to-toe intellectually.

She will demolish me because she's just so brilliant.

So we're talking in her office one day, and I'm thinking, man, I can't compete with her arguments.

And so I just start talking about Jesus.

I talk about what he means to me and what he's done in my life.

And you know what?

Miss Dr.

Loomis, she started tearing up.

And she looked at me and she said, You know, Keith, sometimes you can be quite eloquent.

And I just don't want to say, Dr.

Loomis, that's not me.

That's a Holy Spirit.

He's not through with you yet.

But you see, God was at work because I had an experience and she had an argument.

And you know, that's what we need.

We need people who know what it's mean to live and to love God and to have him at work in their life.

And that experience with Dr.

Loomis 45 years ago has been the story of my life.

I am no one special.

I know the bolt of cloth out of which I was cut.

I eventually finished my bachelor's degree.

I never completed my master's degree.

I was born to a working class family.

I'm the first kid in my family to ever go to college.

But God uses me precisely because I'm no one special, because God is special.

The broken tools are God's best tools.

Because the end we know it's not about us, it's all about him.

And that's what David understood.

David knew what it was like to be raised in obscurity.

David knew what it was like to be looked past by his father.

David knew what it was like to do the demeaning job of keeping the sheep.

And God prepared him.

That was training ground to prepare him to be used by him.

And even, you know, this couple weeks ago when I was in Central America to get an invitation from the White House, my first thought is, why did this come to me?

You know, I mean, that's my really literally my first thought is who am I to go there and to talk to these members of state that are deciding these big matters about global health?

And I just think, I'm up for it, God.

I know who I am, and I know whose I am, and I know what I stand for, and I know what I value, and I'm just gonna bring all of me to all of that, but more importantly, I'm bringing you to that table.

And I'm gonna trust that you're at work in ways that I can't see, right?

So there's one final thing about David that's worth mentioning.

I want to say this: seeing Jesus and David's story.

I'm struck when I read David's life and story, I'm struck between the similarities between David and Jesus.

David, as the story started today, seemed to be a person of no standing, no prominence.

Certainly somebody that you wouldn't recognize as Israel's future king.

But in the same way, you know, Jesus was discounted from the start.

Remember what the prophet Isaiah said about the coming Messiah?

He said this about Jesus, wrote this a couple a thousand years before Jesus arrived.

Who has believed our message?

And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

For he grew up before him like a tender shoot, like a root out of parched ground.

He had no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to him.

He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised, and we did not esteem him.

Isaiah is telling us, when Messiah comes, don't look for someone striking, physically speaking.

Men are not going to be drawn to the Messiah because of his handsome features or his deep, broadcast quality voice.

You wouldn't look at Jesus from the outside and say about him what was said about Saul or Eliab.

He would not be impressive in his appearance.

But the similarities don't end there.

David is introduced as Israel's king as a young boy.

You know how many years between the time he's anointed by Samuel to be king and he actually become king?

Seventeen years passed.

A lot of time passes between the announcement and the actuality.

Well, Jesus was introduced when he came into this world, was born into this world, hailed Jesus, who's born king of the Jews, right?

But his kingdom and his throne, he's ascended to it now in all of our hearts.

But there's coming a day when he acclaimed his throne over all the world, and that is yet to come.

David is scorned and rejected by his brothers, just like Jesus was.

David's life was sought by a king, by Saul, who's terrified, intensely jealous of the other king who might challenge his right to the throne.

In the same way, King Herod is threatened by Jesus, this newborn king, a threat to his kingdom, and he does exactly the same thing.

He seeks to kill Jesus.

The outcasts of society surround David his entire life.

Many of those people that we consider the outcast of society surround Jesus his entire life.

What I'm saying is this David's story anticipates the Jesus story.

In 1 Samuel 16, David is anointed as king.

But God makes a bigger promise than just the anointing of a new king.

He says, There's coming one who will be the anointed one.

And that anointed one is none other than Jesus Christ.

Now you know that Christ is not Jesus' last name.

Christ is a title, and Christ is Greek for the anointed one.

So Jesus, the anointed one.

Listen to what God said to David.

The Lord declares to you that the Lord himself will establish a house for you.

When your days are over and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom.

He is the one who will build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne on his kingdom forever.

I will be his father, and he will be my son.

So he says, There's coming the one, the one who will be the anointed one.

This promise is that even though David is probably the best earthly king ever, he's still only a temporary solution because David's days would come to an end.

They were looking for the one who was to come.

But that one was not going to be Solomon.

Solomon had some initial years of success, but not long after Israel goes into steep decline.

The kingdom's divided again.

Dozens of kings rule after that.

Some of them are wicked, some of them are godly.

But eventually the land is captured, both kingdoms go into captivity.

It's the lowest point in Israel's history.

But God points to a time that's coming when he would establish himself as Israel's everlasting king.

Remember what I said when we got started?

Israel rejected God as king.

So we don't want you as king.

We want to be like the other nations.

We want a king to ourselves.

But God figured out a way to come back and be Israel's king forever through Jesus Christ.

And Jesus Christ has ascended his throne.

He's my king.

I hope he's your king too.

But because he's ascended that throne, because he's the anointed one of God, this is a kingdom that never ends.

This is the kingdom that lasts beyond this life.

And so in this life, we live as pilgrims.

We're just passing through.

This is not home.

This is just a temporary stopping place along the way.

So God, who sits on the throne now and forever, is established as his king over his people.

So to me, the best part of David's imperfect, flawed story is this when you tell it right, you see Jesus.

And you see, that's what Jesus wants to accomplish in all of our lives, too.

Your life's not perfect, neither is mine.

But you see, when when we live this life centered on Him, when we live this life and we're not afraid of obscurity, we're willing to go and do whatever He'd have us to do.

When we find ourselves not being afraid of our brokenness and sinfulness, but instead just owning that to God and knowing God forgives that and releases us, then we become a part of this story that God's been telling for all time.

I told you that narrative literature, the key to understanding it, is to understand that God's the main character in every story told in the Bible.

That story is continuing today in you and me.

God's still telling his story, the story of his one and only son who loved the world, died on a cross, rose again, and he's telling that story through your life and mine.

Are we gonna be the kind of people who yield our life to him and say, God, I know I'm not perfect.

I know I fall short.

But God, when you lay your finger on something in my life that's out of line, I'm gonna lay it before you.

I'm gonna confess that.

I know you're gonna forgive it, and your perfect love will shine through my imperfect life.

That's what we learn about David from the beginning of his story.

We got a lot more to learn about him in the coming weeks, so I hope you'll join us in the coming weeks because there's a lot to this story that speaks to us because the same God that wrote his story is writing your story and mine.

Let's pray.

Father, I just want to thank you for this time we've had together.

I want to thank you for your word.

What a powerful and challenging example from the very get-go of David's life about the kind of heart that you choose.

May God all of our hearts look like David's heart.

May we have the heart of a shepherd.

May we have that heart that's willing to go into the obscure places, that's willing to do the mundane, the boring, the difficult tasks that nobody sees, that no one acknowledges, that no one praises, that we do that because it's training ground.

It prepares us for the future that you have for us.

God, help us to serve with a shepherd's heart.

And God, help us to have the kind of heart that breaks.

A heart that when we know that we are out of alignment with you, when God, we are doing things our own way, that God, when you put the finger on our life and show us where we're falling short, that we own that.

We don't rationalize it, we don't excuse it, we don't blame other people.

Instead, we own that because God, that's the only way we find our forgiveness and the only way I find our healing.

And God, may we always be the kind of people who not only confess to you, who not only have a heart like a shepherd, but God, that your heart will beat with our heart and that it'll be centered on you in every single way.

That Lord, be the center of our life.

May today be a centering moment for us all to realize that God, the life that's lived well is a life that's centered on you, that's lived from the inside out, not the outside in.

So I thank you, God, for what you've shown us today.

I pray, God, we leave this place encouraged and full of you.

In Jesus' name I pray.

Amen.

God bless y'all.