The Wilderness: A Place of Preparation

The sermon text reading for today is 1 Samuel chapter 17, verses 1 through 11 and 32 through 38.

1 Samuel 17:1–11

You can find this passage in the Sanctuary Bible on page 403.

Please listen as I read God's word.

Now the Philistines gathered their forces for war and assembled at Sokol in Judah.

They pitched camp at Ephesemin between Sokol and Ezekiel.

And drew up their battle line to meet the Philistines.

The Philistines occupied one hill and the Israelites another, with the valley between them.

A champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out of the Philistine camp.

His height was six cubits and a span.

He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze, weighing 5,000 shekels.

On his legs he wore bronze greaves, and a bronze javelin was swung on his back.

His spear shaft was like a weaver's rod, and its iron point weighed 600 shekels.

His shield bearer went ahead of him.

Goliath stood and shouted to the ranks of Israel, Why do you come out and line up for battle?

Am I not a Philistine and are you not the servants of Saul?

Choose a man and have him come down to me.

If he is able to fight and kill me, we will become your subjects.

But if I overcome him and kill him, you will become our subjects and serve us.

Then the Philistines said, This day I defy the armies of Israel.

Give me a man and let us fight each other.

On hearing the Philistines' words, Saul and all the Israelites were dismayed and terrified.

David said to Saul, Let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine.

Your servant will go and fight him.

Saul replied, You are not able to go out against this Philistine and fight him.

You're only a young man, and he has been a warrior from his youth.

But David said to Saul, Your servant has been keeping his father's sheep.

When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went after it, struck it, and rescued the sheep from its mouth.

When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it.

Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear.

This uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God.

The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine.

Saul said to David, Go and the Lord be with you.

Then Saul dressed David in his own tunic.

He put a coat of armor on him and a bronze helmet on his head.

Here ends the reading.

Morning, everyone.

Glad to be with you once again this morning.

If I have not yet had the chance to connect with you or meet you in person, my name is John, and I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood.

I would love to meet you if I haven't already.

And come to think of it this morning, right after the service, we have a perfect opportunity for you to do that.

Right after the service, right back in the fireside room, we're having uh what's called a welcome party.

This is really just a chance for you.

If you're newer, whether you're newer for the first time today or whether you are just new-ish to Elmwood and haven't yet come to these, even if you've already come to one of these and you just want to eat cupcakes and hang out with people, uh please come join us for the welcome party.

The whole point of this is so that you can have a chance to meet other people who are newer to Elmwood, uh, a chance to meet some of our leaders and staff, and a chance to hear about some uh next steps for ways that you can get connected to what God is doing here at Elmwood.

So uh it's gonna be right after the service again.

It's gonna last 20 minutes, 20 minutes-ish.

So it's not a long thing.

You'll be out in time to get home and get lunch, uh, but we'd love for you to join us for that right after the service today.

Uh with that, let me invite you to join me in a word of prayer as we come to look at these verses today.

If the Lord had not been on our side, let Israel say, if the Lord had not been on our side when people attacked us, they would have swallowed us alive when their anger flared against us.

The flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, the raging waters would have swept us away.

Praise be to the Lord who has not let us be torn by their teeth.

Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.

God, we're grateful this morning that you are our help.

We're grateful that you are our defender.

We're grateful and we worship you because you fight for us.

God help us now as we look at these verses.

Lord, we want to see what is here, we want to see Jesus clearly, and we want to leave here changed people.

And so, Holy Spirit, we ask that you would do your work among us now.

We ask this all in Jesus' name.

Amen.

We've been in a series of messages here on Sunday mornings called Finding God in the Wilderness.

And what we're doing is each week we're looking at a different story from the Bible of God's people, whether individual people or the people of God collectively as they find themselves in the wilderness.

And what we have been seeing over these weeks is that the wilderness is pretty much never fun.

Okay, nobody chooses to be in a wilderness season.

No one wants to be there, basically.

And the good news is that one of the unexpected places where God meets his people and does his formative work is precisely in those seasons of the wilderness.

And we see that all throughout the Bible, the wilderness is a place where God encounters his people.

So those wilderness seasons, uh the ones that we find ourselves in as well, where we feel lonely or dry or barren, all of those spaces of pain or difficulty or sorrow or suffering, those are the places where God desires to meet with you, where he desires to meet with his people.

So in our time today, we're gonna be going to be looking at the wilderness and looking at how the wilderness is a place of formation and preparation.

That's what we're gonna see today.

And so, what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at the story of David and Goliath, and then we are gonna spend some time learning from David's experience in the wilderness.

So, as we look at these verses today, as we look at the story of David and Goliath, we can look at it under three different headings, uh, three different parts.

And the first part is this an impossible enemy.

An impossible enemy.

So the first three verses of this chapter here in 1 Samuel 17, as you heard it read, gives us the geographical and the geopolitical context for the conflict that is taking place.

Now, I find maps to be really helpful, especially when there's a bunch of like place names.

So I'm guessing that this is helpful for you as well.

So this is a map of the region.

The Philistines occupied this region over here on the western side, close to the Mediterranean Sea.

The Israelites occupied the area further inland towards the Dead Sea, and there's this town here called Soko, and we're told that the Philistines moved out of the territory that they occupied into the territory that Israel occupied and set up battle lines in this town of Soko that was in the Valley of Elah.

This is actually a picture of what that valley looks like today.

Obviously, you know, some of the vegetation may have changed, but this is uh the the sort of the general layout of this area.

And you can imagine that over on this side, there's all these soldiers and military encampments that are over on this side, and then as Israel comes in uh in response to the Philistines coming into their territory, all of a sudden now you've got their battle lines that are set up over on this side, and this whole big space right here in the middle is where, if these two nations were to go to war, this is where that war, this is where that battle would have taken place.

So, in this particular instance, the Philistines are the aggressors in this, and Israel is sort of drawn into this battle that they'd never started in the first place.

Now we're told that there's a military champion in the Philistine army who is massive and he's huge and he's scary and he's intimidating, and he comes out every day and he challenges the nation of Israel, and essentially what he says is, send out your best fighter, and we'll handle this between the two of us.

So he says, If I win in that battle, you know, one-on-one, if I win, you all get to become our servants, our slaves.

If you win, we will all become your slaves.

So that's the proposition that Goliath set out there.

And there there are other examples of this kind of warfare taking place in the ancient world, so this isn't as unusual to them as it may sound to us.

But essentially what Goliath is saying is he's saying that one chosen representative will determine the fate of all the people.

Or to put it another way, the fate of the many will rest on the actions of the one.

You'll want to tuck that away for later, because that'll come in, that'll come back, come in handy later.

So that's the proposal that uh Goliath makes is to send someone out and uh to fight with him.

And the writer of 1 Samuel goes out of his way to tell us that this is this is not a fair fight.

Okay.

Uh the amount of space that's given to telling us about Goliath's his armor and his weaponry and his physique, all these little parts of this come together to form this mosaic picture of this colossal man who is an impossible enemy for anyone in the Israelite army to overcome.

So that's the first part of the story is we see an impossible enemy.

The second part of the story is we see an unlikely hero.

Goliath's challenge for Israel was to select someone who would go to war on their behalf, who would lead them in battle, who would fight for them.

And the irony of this is that Israel had already done that.

So if you're reading through the book of 1 Samuel, and you come across chapter 8, where the people come to Samuel and they demand that he install a king over them, the reason the people give is this.

In 1 Samuel 8, verse 20, they say, We want a king over us, then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and go out before us and fight our battles.

1 Samuel 8:20

So Saul was already appointed by the people to go fight their battles.

He should have been the one who self-selected to go do this.

And as you read the story of uh 1 Samuel, you see that like Goliath, Saul was head and shoulders taller than everyone else.

He was selected to go fight the battles for the people, and here he is, cowering in fear, like the rest of the Israelite army, at the site of this gigantic man named Goliath.

So in walks David.

David is a teenage shepherd boy with no military experience whatsoever, and uh he comes to the battle lines because his older brothers are in the military, and so his dad sends him with some supplies to bring to them, and he's hoping to bring back a good report about what's happening on the front lines to hear about their well-being.

And uh so it just so happens that David shows up right as Goliath comes out for his daily routine of insulting God and insulting the people of God.

And so he comes out and he, you know, blunders some, you know, scary sounding nonsense, and David is like, guys, why are you putting up with this?

Why doesn't someone do something?

And everyone is like, not me, you know, no one feels capable of going against Goliath, and David then says, Okay, fine, I'll do it.

This little teenage shepherd boy says, I'm gonna go take on Goliath.

And King Saul says exactly what any one of us would have said to him.

He said, You're nuts.

He said, You're crazy, you're dead meat if you go out there, David.

You don't stand a chance against this Philistine warrior.

But David is convinced.

David is convinced that he does stand a chance and that he will defeat Goliath.

And what he points back to is he's trying to make his case to Saul, saying, No, please let me go fight.

You have to remember that this is uh whoever goes to fight, you get one chance.

And if you it if Saul sends out David and David gets his butt kicked, then all of the Israelite army is uh is is toast.

So this is a scary thing, and David's making his case saying, No, let me go.

And what he points back to as the evidence of like, no, I I'm prepared for this, is he talks about how in the wilderness, as he was wandering the countryside with his sheep, he was attacked by bears and lions, and he took down those wild animals.

And so he tells that story to Saul and says, I have been prepared for this.

I can take on this gargantuan man named Goliath.

In the end, it was not Saul, it was not any of the trained soldiers who took down Goliath, as we'll see in this next scene.

It was a shepherd boy with no military experience whatsoever.

So we see David turns out to be this unlikely hero of the story.

And the third part we can see here is there's an unearned victory.

An impossible enemy, an unlikely hero, an unearned victory.

So David uh convinces Saul to let him go out and fight against Goliath, and as soon as David steps onto the battlefield, Goliath is furious because it looks like these Israelite people are not taking him seriously at all.

He says, Am I a dog that you send out someone like this to fight me?

Look at him.

He doesn't stand a chance.

Why would you insult me by sending out someone like this to try and take me on?

And so Goliath is furious, he's angry, and in response to his insults, David says this to him.

David said to the Philistine, You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.

This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, I will strike you down and cut off your head.

This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel.

All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword, it is not by spear that the Lord saves, for the battle is the Lord's, and he will give all of you into our hands.

Goliath is understandably more upset when David says this.

And so he comes running at David to attack him, and the next thing we're told is that David pulls out his sling and he pulls out a stone, and he launches one of these stones at Goliath, and that stone hits him right in the middle of the forehead, sinks into his forehead.

Okay, think about from like a medical perspective.

This has shattered the front of his skull and pushed skull fragments back into his brain, and it kills him instantly, and he falls down dead, and then David goes over and pulls out Goliath's sword and cuts his head off with it.

Now we have to remember that David here is not using uh a twig and a rubber band, okay, like Dennis the Menace.

It's not what we should imagine here.

He actually was using a sling that was like this.

And what you do is you'd uh attach one of these to your hand, the other one would be free.

You'd put your projectile inside of that basket, you'd whip this thing around as fast as you can, and you'd let it go.

And you can actually, I encourage you, go online today, go on YouTube, uh, and search Ancient Sling Shot.

And you'll find videos of there are people who are skilled enough with these that they can hit a melon on top of a fence post from 20 plus yards away, and the projectiles that these things launch are going about 150 miles an hour.

Imagine getting hit square in the forehead with all of the mass of that projectile hitting you right in the face.

So, this is no child's toy.

This is not a stick and a slingshot that he's using here.

He's using what is legitimately a weapon of war.

And actually, in ancient armies, they would have whole regiments that were just people that had these slingshots.

So David takes down Goliath, and in doing so, he secured victory for the entire Israelite army.

So, as a result of one man's actions, all of God's people were then credited with a victory that they did not earn.

So that's the story of David and Goliath.

An impossible enemy, an unlikely hero, an unearned victory.

I think that there's uh this account shows us something about the wilderness as a place of preparation and a place of formation.

No one who looked at David's outward appearance thought that he stood a chance against someone like Goliath.

You're too small, you're too young, you're too inexperienced, you don't stand a chance.

But David was convinced.

And what David pointed to as evidence of his being trained for this very moment is he pointed out his experience in the wilderness.

This is in the ancient world, shepherds would very oftentimes they would wander the remote parts of the countryside, they would wander the wilderness areas in order to find food, places to graze in order to find water, they would be all the time out in these remote wilderness kinds of places.

And what David says here is he shows us that those wilderness places were places filled with danger.

So when he's trying to convince Saul, listen, listen to what he says.

He says, Your servant has been keeping his father's sheep.

When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, I went, I w I went after it, I struck it, and rescued the sheep from its mouth.

When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair.

Okay, this is like hand-to-hand combat with a lion or a bear.

Kind of things that people are terrified if you see them on a mountainside in a the distance.

Hand-to-hand combat.

I seized it by its hair, struck it, and killed it.

Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear.

This uncircumcised Philistine will be just like one of them.

So David looks at Goliath and says, he's no more of a threat than those other wild animals that I overcame with God's help in the wilderness.

He has defied the armies of the living God.

The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine.

David had the ability to look back on his time in the wilderness.

He had the vision to be able to look back, and he could understand and see that everything he needed to take down Goliath was forged in the wilderness.

Everything he needed to come against Goliath and come out on top was formed in him in that season of being in the wilderness.

The courage to stare down what looks like an impossible from a human perspective, from an impossible obstacle, like facing down a wild animal.

The confidence to face another dangerous situation, having lived through the last one and having learned from it.

The skill to take down wild animals with your bare hands, the trust that comes from seeing God deliver you time and time and time again.

Everything that David needed to come against Goliath and to defeat Goliath was forged in him in that season of being in the wilderness.

And while David was tending sheep, you know, he's out there in the countryside, he's tending sheep, he has no idea that God is preparing him for this moment.

No clue.

He couldn't possibly have known that.

But he can only he can see it when he looks back.

And so often that's the case, isn't it?

That we can only see those things we've been prepared for when we look back on it at a later time.

And David can see, oh, this is exactly what God was doing.

I think that there's an important lesson that we can learn from looking at David's time in the wilderness.

And it's very simply this our time in the wilderness is never a waste.

We we've said this and talked about the same idea in week.

Previous, but this is one of the like central parts of this whole series.

It's one of the central parts of looking at God's people in the wilderness throughout the Bible, is you see this theme over and over and over and over again that our time in the wilderness, your time in the wilderness is never a waste.

Like David, like it was for David, God intends the wilderness seasons that we experience to build inside of us and to form in us courage and strength and hope and faith and trust and resilience, prayer, love, empathy, compassion, wisdom.

God desires all of those seasons that we experience in the wilderness to form all of those things in us.

Our wilderness is not a waste.

That formation that God does inside of us in those seasons of the wilderness, that formation always has a purpose.

By forming you, God is preparing you.

By doing his good formative work inside of you in those even difficult seasons, God is preparing you.

Now, I don't know exactly what that is.

I don't know if God is preparing you for some big Goliath-sized moment in your life.

Okay, it's it's possible that there's some big thing he's preparing you for, certainly.

I don't know that.

But what I do know is that those times in the wilderness are preparing us for thousands of ordinary moments of obedience.

All of those things that God is forming inside of us are preparing us for those daily small things that maybe don't look as impressive as taking down a giant like Goliath, but they're no less important and they're no less impactful.

And it's in those seasons of the wilderness that God is preparing us for all of those ordinary moments of obedience.

It may not look as impressive as David taking down Goliath, but in the wilderness, it's possible that God is preparing you to sit across the table from someone who has just received a devastating diagnosis.

And God has prepared you to sit across the table from them and say, I know exactly what it's like.

I know what it's like to hear the word cancer.

I know what it's like to hear the words, we can't fix this.

And God is preparing you, maybe, or has prepared you to sit across the table from someone in that situation and say, I know what it's like.

And also, more importantly, he knows.

And he's not abandoned you, he's not left you.

Or maybe God is preparing you to sit with someone who's struggling in their faith, who has questions or doubts or fears.

Maybe they're ready to just throw in the towel and the whole thing, and you can sit with that person and say, Man, I know what it's like to wrestle with my faith.

I know exactly what that's like.

And what I can tell you that I learned through all of it is that he is trustworthy.

He is good, even if you can't see it, even if you don't understand in the moment, don't give up, don't give in.

He's trustworthy and he's good.

I've learned that.

Or maybe God is preparing you to sit across the table from someone who's on a very destructive path in life.

And God has prepared you to sit across from them and say, Don't make the same mistakes I did.

Don't shipwreck your life.

Don't shipwreck your family or your marriage.

It's not worth it.

I promise.

I've been there.

Or maybe God has positioned you to sit across the table from someone who's already made those choices that they can never take back, and to say, I know what it's like to be broken.

I know what it's like to sin much.

I know what you're doing.

And as unlovely as you may feel right now, you are deeply loved by God.

Maybe God's preparing you to sit across the table from someone who's been deeply wounded.

Maybe wounded by the church, someone who's been sinned against, someone who has been hurt, abused, abandoned, and maybe God is preparing you or has prepared you to sit across the table from them.

And to offer them encouragement and hope in the midst of what they're experiencing.

There's a million more different ways this could look.

But the point is that our time of being in the wilderness is never a waste.

In those seasons of the wilderness, God is forming things inside of us, and he always takes those things and uses them for a good purpose.

He wants to use those things for a good purpose.

In the wilderness, God is preparing you.

Let me offer you these uh two questions as a way to respond to this.

First question is this In the wilderness, what has God formed in me?

Have you ever sat down and actually thought about that?

In the wilderness, what are the ways that God has formed me?

What has God done inside of me?

Now, my encouragement, this is what I would do, is I would like block an hour of time.

I would do something that's fun.

Like I would go to a coffee shop and I would order a warm drink and sit there with the purpose of just of like with just like a piece of paper and a Bible and saying, God, would you help me see all the ways that you've formed me in the seasons of the wilderness?

And you may be sitting here thinking, like, I have no idea.

I don't know where to start.

Can I tell you where to start?

Ask God.

You know who wants you to see all of those ways that He's formed you in those seasons of the wilderness?

So that those can be used for a good purpose?

God does.

So ask him.

Say, God, would you reveal to me all those ways that you have formed me?

Ask someone close to you.

Ask a friend or a spouse or someone who knows you well and say, Man, what have you seen in me?

In what ways has God formed you in the wilderness?

Second question to respond, to think about, is what are the unique ministries for which God has been preparing me?

If he's then forming you, he is preparing you.

These two things go together.

So if you can answer question number one, there has to be an answer to question number two.

And sometimes, like David, you have no idea until you're staring it in the face and you all of a sudden recognize, oh, this is exactly why.

Now I get it.

Isn't it amazing when you get those glimpses into what God has done and what God is doing and why He's done it?

It may be that for some of you, uh, based on your experiences, you may say, okay, I know it's pretty easy for me to see that God has uniquely prepared me to love or to serve or to care for or to walk with people who are in certain kinds of circumstances.

And you just know these are people that God has uniquely gifted me to connect with.

And so you may, you may know.

And so it's it's not a matter of you know discovering what that ministry is, but maybe praying for and waiting for God to bring those people into your life so that you can serve and minister and love them well.

There are unique ministries that God has prepared you for or is preparing you for right now in the wilderness.

Do you expect God to do that?

Do you expect that?

Do you expect Him to use you?

Do you want Him to?

Are you looking for it?

Do you have the awareness and the spiritual discernment to see when those moments come into your life?

Oh, this is this is one of those moments where I get to put to use something God has been forming in me.

Friends, our time in the wilderness is never a waste.

God will never waste it.

There's so much that we can see and learn and apply in the story of David and Goliath, right?

This is uh I I so much was deleted from my notes.

Okay, uh so much was deleted because there's just not enough time to talk about all this in uh in one sitting.

Uh, but there's so much to learn and to see and to apply here.

And uh in the midst of all that there is, uh, I want to just uh bring us to the communion table today by reminding us of the one thing that in all of this we cannot miss.

The power of this story of David and Goliath is not first in its ability to inspire us to take on our giants.

Now, that's certainly an application of this, right?

With God's strength and with God's help, there's a lot of stuff we can face that seems insurmountable, it seems impossible, and certainly there is a response in that, okay?

But this passage is not here first to inspire us to do great things.

This passage is not first about what we do, it is first about what God has done for us in Jesus.

The Bible, if you look at the story of the Bible and see where David and Goliath fits into it, what you begin to realize is that giants like Goliath are the least of our problems.

Those circumstances or things we face that feel really big and scary and hard, those things are the least of our problems.

The Bible says we face an enemy far more powerful and far more vicious than Goliath.

We live under the soul-destroying power of eternal spiritual death.

The Bible says that apart from God's divine and miraculous intervention in our lives to rescue us and save us, that is the trajectory, that is the path that we are all headed, towards that eternal spiritual death.

And the good news is that God did intervene.

God the Father sent God the Son, who, like David, was dismissed and overlooked because of his outward appearance.

People said about Jesus.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

That dinky little podunk town?

Can anything good really come from there?

Certainly not the Messiah.

People said about Jesus.

Isn't this the carpenter son?

Who is this guy?

He's not important, he's not powerful, he's not of, you know, noble birth, he's just a carpenter son.

This guy can't be the Messiah, he can't be God's deliverer.

And so he was dismissed, and he was overlooked because of his outward appearance, too.

And this unimpressive and unglamorous man went to the cross, and he suffered and he died, and in doing so, he waged war against our greatest enemy.

He suffered and died, and then he rose again from the dead in victory over death, and in doing so, like David, he crushed the head of the enemy.

Remember back in Genesis 3 where God says, makes this incredible promise that the deliverer is going to crush the head of the enemy?

And then you come to 1 Samuel 17, and there's this big, scary guy, and it says he has armor that's scaled armor.

That's the same language that's used to describe snakes scales, like snakeskin.

And David crushed his head.

And then Jesus comes and goes to the cross, and in doing so, crushes the head of the serpent in the book of Colossians.

This is one of my favorite parts in the whole Bible.

In Colossians, as Paul talks about this, he says, When you were dead in your sins, God made you alive with Christ.

He forgave us all of our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness which stood against us and condemned us.

He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.

And here's the best part of it.

Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them triumphing over them by the cross.

It's exactly what David did.

Made a spectacle of that giant.

And God has done the exact same thing for us on an even grander scale through the person and the work of Jesus.

Jesus is God's appointed representative.

He is the one who fights for us.

And through the actions of the one, the one, many are saved.

So this morning, my invitation is worship him as the God who fights for you.

If you're here today and you don't yet know Jesus, you can make a decision to follow him today, to come into relationship with him today.

As we come to the communion table, I invite you to do that.

And if you make a decision to follow Jesus, the communion table is now open to you as well.

As we come to the communion table, let me invite you to take just a few moments of silence and reflection, and we will come and receive Christ together.