After God's Own Heart | Part 3: The Heart Power Reveals | Senior Pastor Keith Stewart

Amen.

So glad to see you today.

Glad to welcome our online audience who's joining us now at 11 o'clock on Sunday morning.

Hey, uh, update on our roof.

We are halfway through the installation of the new roof, and it looks amazing.

I mean, really, really amazing.

Uh, something that maybe you're not aware of.

When we built the old food lion, which we moved over here in 2001, and then we built this building on the front, we had the same general contractor who's a guy who's gone to this church forever.

His name's Kirk Grounds.

And Kirk realized that I was in over my head when it came to managing this whole roof process.

That's not my calling, that's not my gifting, that's not my abilities.

And uh and he volunteered to do this at no cost to the church.

He stepped in and has supervised this whole process, has helped us to sort through all the contracts because we had contracts that were all over the map and offering us anything from$200,000 to a million dollars worth of work, and they were all bidding on different things.

So he standardized it all, got us the best bid possible, is making sure that the job gets done right.

So we just owe this big, huge thank you to Kirk Grounds, and I wonder if you would help me thank him this morning.

And of course, we give all the thanks to God for inspiring us and for all the people here who dug deep and sacrificed to make sure we would have the money to get this done.

It's been a true work of God.

I'm continuing the series on the life of David.

Today we're looking at the heart that power reveals.

As we get started, let's just pray together.

Father, you are already here in this place.

We know that.

We sense your presence.

We know you're moving from heart to heart.

And God, you're doing the work that needs to be done in us.

For some of us, we just needed the encouragement to remember that you're the God who never fails.

At the same time, God, you're going to speak to us through your word right now and through this story of David, and you're going to show us things about our life that maybe some of these things we're aware of and some things that we're not aware of.

But most of all, God, remind us that you're in the healing and you're in the forgiving business.

That God, you want to reveal these things about our life so that we can trust you with them and we can be free from a past that we're powerless to change.

So have freedom to do in our and through our lives what needs to be done today.

We're asking in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So we call it the Holy Bible, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a book that contains more stories about murder, rape, incest, personal problems than the Bible.

It's all in there.

And it's in there because God always tells the truth, even when it makes his main characters look bad.

When God describes people, it always does so honestly and accurately.

So as the Bible paints a portrait of David, it paints that portrait warts and all.

It says he was a king, a poet, and a great leader, but he was also a liar, a betrayer, an adulterer, and a murderer.

It spends a lot of chapters detailing all of his successes, but also spends a great deal of time also addressing his failures.

The Bible never glosses over the flaws of its heroes.

Now, the reason the Bible tells us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is not an attempt to humiliate or embarrass these men and women of God.

The reason it tells us the truth is because the Bible's also telling us our story.

What I'm saying is this Scripture exposes David, so David can expose us.

David isn't in the Bible so we can diagnose David.

David's in the Bible, so we can diagnose ourselves.

Does that make sense?

We're supposed to look at the life of David as a mirror, and it's going to show us some things about ourselves.

Now, if the Bible didn't do this, if the Bible wasn't honest, if it didn't tell the truth all the time about its characters, then you might be tempted to think that the people that surround you, they have it all together.

That you're the only one who really struggles and fails.

And as a result, you might be tempted to hide the broken parts of your life.

You might be tempted to play a charade of being a Christian who's got it all together, and as a result, remain stuck in your sins.

You see, the one thing you must never do about the damage and the brokenness of your life is try to hide it.

When we hide things like that, what we're really saying is we're ashamed of it.

And shame is the fuel for addiction.

Shame is what drives some of the worst behaviors among us.

And so the things that we push underground, the things we don't want to admit, the things we don't want to confess, actually they don't go away.

They grow in power.

They become strong.

They become even stronger because now they begin to exercise control over our lives in ways we can't even manage.

So the Bible tells the truth about human beings, even its heroes, that we're all fallen, finite, and fouled up, that there's a brokenness in the human condition that even, you know, willpower can't overcome.

It tells us the truth so we'll get comfortable with the truth that we, like them, fail to get it right all the time.

That we like them can fall flat on our faces, that we like them have a heart for God, but we still have feet of clay.

You see, you don't know all there is to know about me if you just know me as the preacher who gets up here on Sunday mornings.

And you don't know all there is to know about me just because I'm the preacher that did your wedding for you, or because I'm the preacher who prayed for you when you were sick.

That's me.

It's a part of me, it's a real part of me, but there's another part of me that sometimes disappoints people.

There's a part of me that still falls on my face and has to cry out to God for mercy.

There's a part of me that can get angry over real or perceived injustice, and that part is real too.

It's a part of me that God's still working on.

So I cannot afford to deny my shadow self.

I must never entertain ideas that somehow I've got that part of me safely under lock and key.

This is why the Bible tells us the truth about its character, because in doing so, it's telling us the truth about us.

It's helping us break through the denial about our own soul reality, because God knows denial only helps to perpetuate and strengthen the shadow self.

So, without a doubt, one of the ways that we easily deny our broken reality is by focusing on and fixating on sins we don't commit.

Let me say it another way.

By keeping our focus on the more horrible, egregious sins that others commit, we keep the spotlight off ourselves.

Now, somehow, in a twisted way, this makes us feel morally superior to other people.

We congratulate ourselves that though we know we've done wrong, we've never been that wrong.

Not as wrong as those people.

And this is why David's story is so important.

So let me explain it.

Simple question.

What was David's sin?

You know, if I asked that question, what was David's sin?

Most people would cite the same sin.

They would say, Oh, it's his adultery with Bathsheba.

Others might say, no, no, no, it was more than that.

It's his adultery with Bathsheba coupled with his subsequent attempt to hide it and cover it up by lying.

And so others will say, no, no, it's bigger than that.

It's his sin with Bathsheba, it's lying about it, trying to hide it, and then having her husband killed.

And there's no question that was a huge sin.

Major blunder, an unmistakable failure.

But there's another huge failure in David's life that seldom gets the airtime or attention that his adultery does.

It happens at the height of David's popularity.

He was a king, enjoying all the successes of one stunning military conquest after another.

And we get a little insight into the way David is thinking in 2 Samuel chapter 23.

2 Samuel 23 · chapter mention

It says this.

These are David's words.

Is not my house right with God?

Has he not made with me an everlasting covenant?

Arranged and secured in every part?

Will he not bring to fruition my salvation and grant me my every desire?

So think about what he's just said.

Is my house not right with God?

Yes, yes.

He's in a good relationship with God.

Has he not made with me an everlasting covenant?

Yes, even on that, God said, I'm gonna make something great of your life, David.

Has he arranged and secured every part?

Yes, that's true too.

Went along with the promise.

Will he not bring to fruition my salvation?

Yes, God's gonna make good on that and grant me my every desire?

No, David.

No, that's not what God said.

That's not what God promised.

You see, what's happening here is David's starting to get a little full of himself.

With all these incredible things that are happening in his life, he's thinking, as long as I feel it, as long as I want it, God's gonna do it for me, right?

Wrong.

This is the beginning of David's downfall because this is his pride.

This is David putting himself in the place of God.

This is David's ego taking over.

Ken Blanchard, the famous businessman, once defined ego this way.

He said, ego is an acronym that stands for edging God out.

That's the truth about us.

We get so full of ourselves there's no more room for God.

We edge him out.

We push him off the throne so we can ascend to his throne.

So in the middle of all this, while David's feeling full of himself, he says, I want to take a census of my fighting men.

I want to know how many I have.

Now understand, there's no problem with taking a census.

That's a census itself is not evil, it's not sinful.

In fact, in the Bible, sometimes even God says, take a census.

But in this particular case, there's no reason for it.

It seems that the only reason that David wants to take a census is for his ego to help him feel more important.

And the moment that thought begins to form in his heart, he hears a whisper.

No, David, you know this is not right.

Don't do this.

And you know how it is with whispers.

When we ignore a whisper, whispers get louder, right?

That whisper that God's trying to, David, this is not the way, this is not what you do.

So it gets louder, it gets amplified.

It gets amplified in his chief of defense, which is uh Joab.

And Joab comes to David and he says, uh, what's this?

What why do you want to take a census?

And he's being very diplomatic, but you can hear his concern.

Why would you want to do this, David?

Joab is smelling trouble.

But David's not listening.

He's not listening to Joab, he's not listening to God.

David is only listening to David.

So he insists on this census, and Joab is forced to comply, and they discover that the fighting army has 1,300,000 fighting men.

Now get this.

In the ancient world, it wasn't a king's Lexus or his financial portfolio that gave him power and prestige.

It was the size of his army.

And David's army is vast, and now he knows how vast it is.

But God begins to convict David right away about his egoism and how he's using these numbers in his army to prop himself up.

And David is still tender enough to know that pride has carried him into this great sin.

So in 2 Samuel 24, 10, we hear David's confession.

I have sinned greatly in what I have done.

But now, O Lord, please take away the iniquity of your servant, for I've acted very foolishly.

I've sinned greatly.

It's interesting, this sin, his sin of pride, he describes as sinning greatly.

In Psalm 51, when he repents of his sin with Bathsheba, he says, I have sinned.

He doesn't use the modifier greatly.

Now, most of us have heard the story of David's sin with Bathsheba.

In fact, when we talk about David's sin, that's typically the only sin that gets mentioned.

Because we tend to rank sins largely based on their visibility and scandal.

While Scripture repeatedly warns us that pride is spiritually lethal because the proud person doesn't recognize their need for repentance.

Now, one of the main reasons I didn't want to do a message about David's adultery is this we have a tendency to maximize the failure of adultery, which many of us have not done, while conveniently minimizing the character flaw where most of us live, which is pride.

Now, C.S.

Lewis, one of the Christian classics, is called A Mere Christianity.

It's a great book.

If you've never read it, you ought to read it.

But he talks about the sin of pride in this book.

And I want to quote to you what he said.

He said, according to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the most, the utmost evil, is pride.

Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, all of that are mere flea bites in comparison.

It was through pride that the devil became the devil.

Pride leads to every other vice.

It's the complete anti-God state of mind.

Now that's a strong statement, but he's going to follow it up with even more.

Listen to this.

If anyone thinks that Christians regard sexual promiscuity as the worst vice, he's quite wrong.

The sins of the flesh are bad, but they're the least bad of all sins.

All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual.

The pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and backbiting, the pleasure of power and hatred.

Therefore, a cold, self-righteous prig who regularly goes to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.

Now, Lewis points out that there's two kinds of sin.

They're the sins of the flesh and the sins of pride.

Sins of the flesh have to do with our earthly appetites: lust, greed, gluttony, drunkenness, laziness, things like that.

The sins of the flesh are highly visible things like too many Krispy Kreme donuts and obsession with sex and materialism and the pursuit of more.

Sins of the spirit are harder to see.

They have less to do with outer realities and more to do with inner realities.

Arrogance, pride, jealousy, deceit.

These are harder to detect and tend to be more deeply entrenched.

Now here's the truth.

We tend to see the sins of the flesh as scandalous, but Jesus seemed to be much more troubled by the sins of the spirit.

Point of fact, think about who Jesus hung out with in the Gospels.

Read the Gospels for yourself.

He hangs out with the people who are prostitutes, tax collectors, and the riffraff.

These are the people who are known for the sins of the flesh, right?

But Jesus' most scathing words were reserved for the prideful, self-righteous, religious people.

Now that in and of itself should show you how Jesus feels and how Jesus sees sin, not in the same way we do.

So when we tell the story of David, we fixate on David's adultery while ignoring and saying nothing about his pride.

In fact, if you think back about if you've been in church or we were raised in church in Sunday school classes or sermons you've heard over the years, you've probably heard dozens of times where David's sin of adultery was addressed.

But have you ever in your lifetime heard a sermon about David's pride?

Truth be told, most of us haven't.

And the question is, why?

By the way, this is not the only story we do this with in the Bible.

Think about Sodom Gomorrah.

We hear the term Sodom, and in our mind immediately we go to sexual sin.

And for many people in this room, it's a kind of sin that we can honestly say we've never committed.

But have you ever heard in church what Ezekiel said about the sin of Sodom?

Because he's explicit.

He calls it out.

He says this.

Now, this was the sin of your sister Sodom.

She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned.

They did not help the poor and the needy.

Arrogant, overfed, unconcerned, not helping the poor, that's the major sin of the American church.

But it's easier to get up on our high horse about homosexuality than it is to talk about the sin that we see when we look in the mirror.

Think about Jesus' best-known parable, the parable of the prodigal son.

Everyone knows about the younger son.

He takes the money, he goes parties, he lives it up with prostitutes, the sins of the flesh.

But the reason Jesus tells that story is to show us the sins of the older brother, who stays at home and gets lost in his self-righteousness.

That's the sin of the spirit.

So the older son represents the Pharisees who are judging Jesus because he hangs out with these people known for the sins of the flesh.

If you don't believe that, read Luke 15, verses 1 and 2.

Luke 15:1

And Jesus explicitly says, I'm giving this parable in response to how these people are looking at those people over there and judging them for the sins of the flesh.

So the older son is the point of the parable.

How many times, when you hear pastors preach on the parable of the prodigal son, do they put all the emphasis on the young son and living a debauched life?

Let me ask you, if the older brother is being obedient, if he's the one who stayed home, if he's never been a burden or a bother to his dad, why is his sin so awful?

I'll tell you why.

Because the older son is lost and doesn't know it.

He's lost and doesn't know he's lost.

He's guilty of pride, self-centeredness, self-righteousness.

And it never, even for a minute, occurs to him that he to question his standing with God.

He's lost, but he thinks he's found, and that's the worst kind of lostness there is.

People who are guilty of the sins of the flesh, you know what?

It's out there.

Everybody sees it.

It's unhidable, it's highly visible, and therefore they tend to be broken about those sins.

Because you can't hide it.

Everybody sees it, everybody shames you.

I've known many people who've been deeply entrenched in sexual sin and abuse of alcohol and all kinds of issues that we get associated with the sins of the flesh.

And because they're so visibly broken and they can't hide it from anyone, they come and they bring all that brokenness to God.

They can face it because it's an unhidable kind of sin.

But I've known people guilty of the sin of pride who've kept that thing under wraps and don't let people see it.

Can't you see why the sins of the spirit are so serious?

Don't you see that why Jesus had to take it up a level when it came to people who had sins of the spirit?

These are the sins that are easily denied, disowned, and more entrenched.

And that's why I simply couldn't do another series on the life of David and go to the place that everybody expected me to go.

The adultery was bad.

It messed up David's life and his family.

There's no question about any of that.

He paid a steep price for it.

I make no excuses for it.

But his pride was his undoing.

And we're going to see that more clearly in this next point.

I call it the kind of failure we've all experienced.

Now, many of you know that I've been involved with World Vision now for 20 years.

Actually, 20 years ago this month, I went away with World Vision, changed my life forever.

It's a wonderful organization.

And one of its founders, its founder's name, is a guy named Bob Pierce.

Bob Pierce not only founded World Vision, but also Samaritan's Purse.

And these are two of the largest organizations anywhere in the world working with orphaned and vulnerable children.

I mean, just amazing what God did with his life.

But he often justified his long absences from his family by telling people this.

He said, I made an agreement with God that I'll take care of his helpless little lambs overseas if he'll take care of mine at home.

So Bob Pierce would travel often 10 months out of the year.

His family wouldn't see him.

They wouldn't have dad's presence there.

And as a result, it put this incredible stress on his family.

I mean, his demanding schedule created isolation and distance and tension.

His oldest daughter, Sharon, suffered with very severe depression, committed suicide at the age of 27, with dad nowhere to be found.

In the aftermath, Pierce's marriage eventually ended in separation.

Biographers and family members, including his other daughter, Marit Lee, who's a personal friend of mine, she noted that that tragic bargain he made with God is a cautionary tale that what can happen when we neglect our family responsibilities in the name of serving God.

Now, the reason I mentioned Bob Pierce's story is because there's something about gifting and anointing and influence that carries with it its own seeds of destruction.

You may be anointed by God.

You may be used by God in incredible ways to accomplish supernatural things.

But your first ministry, your first covenant is with your wife and with your family.

To fail there is to utterly fail.

And that's what happened to David.

He failed as a father.

Now it seems odd to me that a man who is so passionate about pleasing God would fail his own kids.

But David appears to have gotten so busy with God's kingdom work that he neglected his family work.

And when things got really bad, his pride got in the way of working things out, talking things out, admitting his failures, and helping them work through those failures.

So to help you better understand David's story, I want to first talk to you about the reality of father deprivation.

Now, some of these things may get close to home for some of you today, and just be prepared for that.

I mean, I had a couple of people, and very tearful after the first service, come to me and said, You told my story this morning.

So if that's the case, please know there's people here that love to pray with you to be able to talk to you about this thing, okay?

So let's talk about father deprivation.

There's two kinds of father loss.

The first one we call father absent.

Now, death and divorce account for most father absence.

But it's more than that.

If you grew up in a military family and your dad was deployed for months or even years at a time overseas, you may not have had that at home.

Children who have fathers who travel a lot or who have dads who are in prison.

Do you realize that 87% of single-family homes in America are headed by mom?

Are headed by mom.

Dad's nowhere to be found.

And half of all kids who are living in a single-parent home have not seen their father at all in the previous year.

This is the reality of father absence.

The second is what we call father-deprived.

Now, father-deprived home is where dad is physically present, but he's emotionally absent.

For some of you, the memories you have of your father are sitting behind a newspaper or engrossed in television or out in the garage.

Some of you grew up where you had a father, but you really didn't have a father.

He was physically there.

He emotionally checked out.

Now, we get set up for all kinds of problems in life when we're deprived of dad.

My dad walked away from our family when I was a sophomore in college because he was having an affair with a woman at work.

For several years, my dad had no contact with me whatsoever, just cut me off.

I didn't hear from him, he didn't write, he didn't call, nothing.

I didn't see my father.

Over time, I realized that my dad had walked away from the family years before.

He'd just left his body there.

He was emotionally absent from the home.

So this struggle of father loss is something I do relate to quite well.

And you know something?

It seems to be a dynamic in David's story, too.

Remember how the first message of the series started out?

David had a dad who seemed to look right through him.

When the prophet Samuel asked Jesse to gather his sons because one of his sons would be the next king over Israel, it didn't even occur to Dad to have David there.

He didn't even bother to have him there.

And when he showed up, he doesn't even call him by name.

This is a father absurd.

This is where he's been deprived of his dad.

And so David had his own experiences around father deprivation.

Remember, his story is a reminder that if we don't face what's broken in our life, we just pass that broken baton to the next generation.

Now here's the deal.

We should pay attention to seemingly incidental details in Scripture.

We're told that Jesse overlooked David.

Maybe Scripture is giving us this seemingly incidental detail because it helps us understand something about the man that David became.

Now we can't know today everything that happened inside of David as a boy, but we do know this.

The boy who knew what it felt like to be overlooked eventually became a father who overlooked pain in his own children.

So, in the same way that David's dad was not there for him, he wasn't there for his sons or his daughter.

The broken baton just got passed to the next generation.

So, using David's family as a backdrop, I want to show you the price David and his family paid by describing the rules for dysfunctional family living.

David's sons, Amnon and Absalom, were young men.

Amnon took a liking to his stepsister, Tamar.

He hatched a plan to get her into his house by herself, and then he, when she refuses to give in to him, Amnon raped his sister.

Of course, the act of rape completely devastates Tamar.

It's total trauma.

The first thing she does is run to her other brother, Absalom.

Now, this is where we begin to witness the dysfunction that's going on in David's family.

The following is not just true of David's family, it's true of all dysfunctional families.

So let me give you the characteristics of dysfunctional families.

The first thing is this they go to great lengths to cover up problems.

Here's how the Bible describes it.

Her brother Absalom asked her, Is it true that Amnon raped you?

Don't be so upset, since it's all in the family anyway.

It's not anything to worry about.

So Tamar lived as a desolate woman in her brother Absalom's quarter.

So you hear what's going on.

Don't be so upset, Tamar.

It's no big deal.

Absalom's response to Tamar's trouble is typical of dysfunctional families.

Pain, like a lot of other emotions, is avoided or denied, but never faced.

When Tamar told her brother what happened, her brother had a perfect opportunity to help her and to comfort her and come alongside her, but instead, he follows the dysfunctional family pattern, clamps a lid on her pain, and expects her to keep quiet about it.

Here's a second rule of dysfunctional families: they shield their kids from consequences.

Notice this statement.

And even though the Bible tells us that David is furious over what has happened, he does nothing, absolutely nothing to Amnon and provides no comfort to Tamar.

A big emotional outburst cannot make up for silence and passivity around an issue like this.

So David is offering no solutions, and Amnon suffers no consequence.

In fact, the only thing that David really did is he tried to keep the family separate to reduce the conflict.

Here's a third rule of dysfunctional families: they fail to communicate with those with whom they have conflict.

So the story continues.

It says, however, he hated him with a deep hatred because of what he'd done to his sister, then two years later.

Now, how many of you can remember growing up at home, and when you did something wrong, your family gave you the silent treatment.

I mean, this is very common in dysfunctional families.

When you step out of line, when you do something wrong, they cut off communication.

I'm going to treat you like a non-person.

We're not going to communicate with you.

The only way you know you've done something wrong is not because somebody said, hey, you did something wrong.

You know that nobody's talking to you anymore.

So you take it out on them instead of talking it out with them.

This kind of behavior goes on for years in David's family.

Absalom wouldn't speak to Amnon, and David cut off all contact with Absalom for nearly seven years.

Now, Absalom's like all kids.

It doesn't matter how old you are, kids always know how to get their parents' attention.

They do this for a living, okay?

Kids know how to get mom and dad's attention.

So David and Joab are treating Absalom like he doesn't exist.

So Absalom says, fine, I'll set a fire.

And he literally sets fire to Joab's fears, fields.

So when kids don't feel like they're being heard, they set fires.

Fires can be punching and screaming, it can be getting in trouble at school, it can be hanging out with the wrong friends, it can be running away, it could be breaking their parents' hearts.

When families don't properly communicate around a conflict, family members will often create crisis to communicate their pain.

They act out.

So since there's no talking going on, Absalom does this huge act out and sets the fields on fire.

And that's his message to Dad.

Can you hear me now?

You're not talking to me.

Can you hear me now through my behavior?

And he's getting dad's attention.

And then there's this, the final characteristic dysfunctional families, they follow predictable patterns of relationship dynamics.

Now let me leave the story of David and Absalom for a minute and walk you through the dysfunctional family album to help you see and understand this problem better.

Let's say there's one member of the family and they've got a problem.

Let's say it's dad, and dad's an alcoholic.

On the other side of the scales, to balance him out, we have the wife and she's the enabler.

So she's helping to keep him stuck.

She's what we that's her role in life.

She likes to carry her cross, her cross being her husband.

She covers for him when he's too hungover to go to work.

He's a controllable man most of the time because of his alcohol abuse.

On the surface, everything appears to be fine, but she's really ticked off.

Now, obviously, the kids are picking up on this dynamic as well.

So one kid becomes the superhero, the driven one.

The first one, he's going to save the family name, or she's going to save the family name, the first to earn a PhD, the first to make a certain salary, the first to buy a house in the right neighborhood.

A number of you probably grew up in that role and you probably still live in that role today.

A second child we call the lost child.

The parents say about this kid, we never hear a peep out of them, they're not a problem.

Well, that's the problem.

Kid hasn't even entered the human race yet.

They're a lost child.

Then there's a third child we call the scapegoat.

This is the child who acts out the family pain.

The pain that the rest of the family is refusing to face, the one who's easy to blame for everything that's wrong with the family.

All the shame gets heaped on this kid instead of those who are really responsible.

So they may get in trouble with drugs or with the authorities.

Everyone says what a horrible thing this family has to go through to have a kid like that, a problem child.

But that's not the problem.

The problem is the whole family system.

The system, the symptom is the drugs, the drugs the kids are using.

The scapegoat only exists to carry off the shame of the family.

Now, think about David's family in particular.

Could it be that these same dynamics are playing out in his family as well?

Now I'm not suggesting that we can take people from 3,000 years ago and put them on a therapist's couch and diagnose them, but I will tell you this: if you've ever studied dysfunctional family systems, the patterns in David's family are painfully familiar.

So there's a book, and I read this years ago.

I'm talking like 34 years ago now, and it's called The Way Out of the Wilderness.

I found this, it's a Christian book written by a Christian psychologist, and he he studies especially the families in the book of Genesis through the lens of brokenness.

And when I read this, for the first time in my life, I felt like, gosh, I'm not alone.

I'm not the first person to ever face a broken family system.

I'm not the first person to ever have denied my pain for so long.

And he uses the book of Genesis as a teaching tool to help people understand that there is help and there's healing available to us all.

Now here's what I know.

No parent ever sits down with their kids and says, Today I'm going to teach you how to screw up your life.

That conversation is not necessary because they're watching and they're learning every day and in every way, whether you want them to or not, broken patterns are repeated.

So David, this man who's after God's own heart, makes a mess of his personal life.

He may have had a heart of gold, but he does have feet of clay.

Let me also say from the heart, you and I are not exempted from problems like these.

I mean, it's hard to find a man more admirable in terms of his relationship with God than David, but he's clearly the head of a dysfunctional family, a family that's not working the way God intended.

And the truth of the matter is this that every family falls short.

Every family has some kind of dysfunction, some degree of pain, some area of struggle, some unresolved issue.

We all bring baggage into our relationships.

So the question is not if we sin, it's how we sin.

It's not whether or not our families are dysfunctional, it's in what ways are we dysfunctional and to what extent.

Remember what the Bible says.

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

So rather than admit our brokenness, most of us will go to great lengths to conceal it.

And in the process, we become self-deceived and controlled by the very things we won't own.

The whole reason God wants us out in the open is so he can heal it, so he can forgive it.

So I can be free of it.

I can't change what happened to me in the past.

But God can.

God can heal it and set me on a different trajectory.

Am I willing to trust him with it?

So that leads to this, what I think is the real big takeaway from this aspect of David's life, and that is the blinders of success.

So David goes from obscurity to being king over all of Israel.

Once he ascends to the throne, he rules over united Israel for 40 years, makes Jerusalem the capital city, expands the kingdom.

So David enjoys huge success in uniting the tribes of Israel.

At first, he's just the king over Judah.

Once Saul's sons die, all the tribes unite under him, and for the first time in history, David is king over united Israel.

But not just that.

He establishes Jerusalem as the capital of the kingdom.

He brings the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem.

So this makes Jerusalem now the center and the heart and the soul of the nation.

After that, he begins to expand the territory around Israel by first defeating the Philistines, then he takes on new territories in Moab, Amnon, and Edom.

The kingdom grows so large it stretches from Egypt all the way to the Euphrates River.

In short, David is not just the most loved king of Israel, he's the most successful.

But therein lies the challenge that's the heart of this message.

What happens to the human heart when we become powerful, successful, and everything is turning out right?

They say for every hundred people that can handle the test of adversity, only one can handle the test of prosperity.

I mean, think about it.

Adversity is something we all face.

The moment I say adversity, you've got a dozen illustrations in your mind of adversity you've had to face and even overcome.

We all have to face adversity.

Not all of us get a taste of prosperity.

Not all of us get that opportunity to have power and influence and wealth behind our name.

Like Scott Peck wrote in his bestseller, The Road Less Traveled, life is difficult.

Or like Jesus said, in this world you will have trouble.

So most of us know what it's like to face adversity and be victorious, but not as many of us have been exposed to the temptations of power and prosperity.

The truth is this power and success do weird things to us, even the people of God.

Because when everything's going great, we tend to forget God.

David blows it in a big way, we've seen that, and for all of his mistakes, he pays dearly.

God included his story in the Bible to remind us that you can be anointed by God and chosen by him and destined to fulfill a purpose in your life, but if you're not careful, you can still crash and burn.

So think about this.

When David was anointed as a young man and the Spirit of God came on him, do you think that he ever imagined that one day he'd cheat on his wife, get a woman pregnant, and then kill her husband to cover it up?

Do you think that ever crossed his mind?

I don't think so.

Do you think that young David, the David we learned about last week, her learned he had to wait on God's time and God's way?

Do you think it ever crossed his mind that one day he'd be so full of himself, he'd take a census just to prop up his own fragile ego?

I don't think it ever crossed his mind.

Do you think that David, when he married and started having kids of his own, imagined that one day he'd neglect his own kids the way he'd been neglected when he was growing up?

I don't, I think David probably would have sworn he would never do what his dad did to him.

That's what I think.

Though the story of David, through the story of David's life, we're taught valuable lessons.

We deny our sin by comparing ourselves with the worst sinners.

We deny our wounds by pretending our family history hasn't shaped us.

We deny our vulnerability when success convinces us we've outgrown our need for God, but denial only helps to perpetuate and strengthen that sin.

What power revealed in David was what had been in him all along and remained hidden.

You see, this is the heart that power reveals.

Power didn't create what was wrong with David.

Power exposed it.

Success didn't suddenly manufacture his pride, it just gave it room to operate.

Family crisis is not what that led to these unresolved wounds.

He had unresolved wounds.

He wasn't facing them, and they began to play out in his family.

See, the great question of David's story isn't how could David do those things?

The question is, what is in me that I don't see?

Because there was a young David who would have sworn he would never become the David of 2 Samuel chapter 11.

2 Samuel 11 · chapter mention

There was a neglected son who never imagined becoming a neglectable father.

There was a man who once depended completely on God who never imagined he'd become a king, counting his soldiers just to make himself feel important.

And that's why God gives us the whole story of David.

Not to destroy our respect for David, but to destroy our illusions about ourselves.

The purpose of seeing our shadow isn't shame.

God is not pointing this out to shame David, and he's not pointing it out in you and me to shame us.

He's pointing it out so it can be brought into the light and be healed.

That's why he does it.

He wants us to have the courage to own that to God.

He wants us to have the courage to quit hiding from it and running from it and instead openly confess it.

David's story gives me permission to say there are things in me that I don't want to see.

There are wounds that still have to be dealt with.

There's patterns I've inherited and may be passing on.

There's sins I may minimize because I think they're respectable.

There are places where success has made me more dependent on me than dependent on God.

And none of that disqualifies me from being loved by God.

But all of it needs to be brought into the light where God can transform it.

See, what we see that's so extraordinary in the life of David is that God apparently isn't frightened by the truth about us.

We are.

God's not frightened what he says about David here.

He's not frightened for you to know that.

And he's not frightened about the secrets you hold either.

But we're afraid of it.

And because we're afraid of it, we hide it.

We stuff it down.

We don't want to face it.

And perhaps the most dangerous thing in our life is not the brokenness we know about, it's the brokenness we don't know about.

So I'm gonna wrap up with a prayer.

And this is a prayer of David, it's from Psalm 139.

It's a great prayer in light of this message.

It says this, Search me, O God, and know my heart.

Test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there's any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.

When you pray this prayer, what you're saying to God is, God, show me the truth about me.

Show me my weakness, my faults, my mistakes, my bad attitudes, my foolish pride, my arrogance, whatever's getting in the way of you using me and having full control.

God, show me my need to run the world, the need to put other people in their place, the desire to have my own way.

Show me the ugly side of my angriness, my bitterness, my lack of mercy, lack of love, lack of compassion.

You say, well, why would anybody want to know that?

Because a person who genuinely wants to grow wants to know the truth about themselves, not to become self-condeming, but to bring it on, lay it before Him.

So this prayer is really in four parts.

We're asking God to do four things.

Search me, test me, tell me, help me.

Search me, God.

Turn that powerful spotlight of yours off of the people that I amplify their sins out there, and put it on me, God.

Search me.

Test me.

Reveal to me any inside-out inconsistency.

Tell me.

God, tell me what you find.

I want to know it because I want to address it.

I want to yield it to you.

I don't want it to control me in ways that I can't control.

Then help me.

Show me your grace.

Give me the courage to follow you.

You know one thing?

I learned a long time ago.

This was the second year in this church as I got involved in therapy.

You've always and only had a fallen, finite, fouled up pastor here.

That's the truth about Keith Stewart.

And the moment I start pretending that I'm not that is the moment I get into trouble.

And there's no reason to be afraid of the truth about myself.

That when I own that freely, when I confess that regularly, that God has the power to work to an imperfect person and bring about some pretty incredible things.

But I know it's not about me, it's about him.

So it gets us out of the way.

We yield to him what we can't control and what we can't change.

And we trust that God is bigger than that.

And I've learned there's no better way to heal, to live, because you don't have anything to hide.

You don't have anything that's that people can blackmail you with.

I mean, you hear enough in my sermons if you want to blackmail me, but hey, it's already out there, so you can't blackmail me, right?

I mean, you just tell the truth about who you are.

Because I've learned my God in heaven loves me incredibly.

My God in heaven forgives it all.

There's nothing to fear in a forgiven past.

When God has set you free, you are free indeed.

That's what Jesus said.

I want you to experience that freedom.

And it comes from learning from the life of David and saying he was messed up, he brought it to God, God brought it to our attention so we would bring up our messes to him and experience the same thing.

God is not afraid of your brokenness.

You're the one that's afraid.

Don't be afraid anymore.

Let's pray.

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

I want to thank you for your word.

I want to thank you for this mirror that you hold up in the life of David.

He's far from perfect, but yet he was described as a man after your own heart.

So, God, you can be the center of an imperfect life.

And I'm so grateful for that.

Because if there's any truth that describes me, and I'm sure many people in this room feel the same way, is you're the center of a very imperfect life.

And so I pray that today we would have the courage to pray with David.

Search me.

Search me, God.

Tell me, show me, help me.

God, help us to pray that prayer and believe, God, that all the things that you bring to the surface, that you that you are more than capable to heal, to forgive, to release, so that we can be set free to be fully who we are in this moment.

I thank you, God.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

God bless y'all.