After God's Own Heart | Part 4: The Heart Grace Refuses To Abandon | Senior Pastor Keith Stewart

We serve a great God, don't we?

I want to apologize to all the parents who have their kids in the main auditorium today because we've had a major electrical issue in what would have been the old food line part of the building.

We don't know what it's related to, but uh there's some large power boxes there that even before you get to the breakers, we seem to be getting some intermittent power happening.

And so we're gonna have to get somebody out here to find out what's going on and address that need, and you can help us pray to that end.

We're gonna have to cancel uh Lionheart for tomorrow at the very least, and hopefully they can get to it quickly and inexpensively.

So, in your prayer, quickly and expensively, these are the operative words that we're asking God for uh to address this need.

Uh, but again, uh my apologies to the parents.

We really we didn't find out till late last night, until about 10 o'clock last night, that we were having this issue, and so we rushed trying to figure out what we could do to address it, and and realize that we're gonna have to get somebody out here because we had to kill the power.

Uh lights were flickering, and we if there was a short somewhere, we didn't want to cause a fire or safety hazard here.

So help us pray to that end.

I am continuing this series after God's own heart.

We've been looking at the life of David over the last four weeks.

Today I'm wrapping it up with the heart God refuses to abandon.

Let's pray.

Father, you are a good, good God.

We are so grateful to sing your praise this morning and welcome your presence among us because God, um, you are so powerfully at work, moving heart to heart, using these lyrics and this music to speak to parts of our life that desperately need your touch.

And now I'm asking you, God, that you would use your word to do the same thing.

That as we look at your the story of your servant David and how his life culminates, that God, we would find in this story the lessons we're so desperate to remember and to and to take forward in our life and to know, God, that you're at work regardless of the failures, the mistakes, the shortcomings, and the sidetracks that we go down.

I pray it all in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So, you know, I I've been preaching, I actually come November 28th for 50 years now, and and I've been serving as a full-time vocational minister for more than 40 years.

So I've been doing this a long time, and in that amount of time, I've studied the life of David many times over.

And something about this story that's always bothered me is not just that simply David makes mistakes, it's that he keeps on making them.

Even near the end of his life, when I expect him to have learned his lesson, David still does things that leave me shaking my head.

And it raises a question, I think, that anybody who's sincerely studied this, who hasn't just done a highlight of the life of David, if you really studied his story in 1 and 2 Samuel, you come away with this question: how could this man be described as a man after God's own heart?

You know, a lot of Christian pastors and teachers, they selectively tell the David's story.

They emphasize the good parts while they minimize the bad parts.

Or they say nothing about it at all.

And it makes me wonder.

I mean, I sincerely wonder, is this done out of ignorance or unfamiliarity?

In other words, have they never really studied the life of David in Scripture before?

Or is there an element of fear that motivates that?

Are they afraid that they'll uncover some things in the story of David that they can't explain?

Or might it be that some of these teachers are not that familiar with their own dark shadow side?

And because of that, they can't see it in the life of David.

And I don't know the answer to that question, honestly.

But I hear teaching on the life of David, and it sounds like a spin doctor trying to rehabilitate a politician's reputation.

Now we're in election season, if you haven't noticed, okay, uh, we're in election season, and there seems to be a lot of this going on where we're told all these wonderful virtues this candidate has, and nothing about all these skeletons in the closet, and some of them are frankly out of the closet for everybody to see, but we're only told, and they're positioned this way.

And sometimes when I read, I hear preachers preach about David, I think if all you do is tell the good side and you leave out the bad side, somebody who's actually studied the Bible and read the story of David, they're going to leave with a lot more questions and answers because the story itself leaves us with a lot of questions.

And so that's what I've really tried to do is give you a more holistic view of David's life throughout this series.

Because the one thing I can tell you about his story as it's told in Scripture is God has ensured one thing that you and I could never come to the conclusion that David was a man after God's own heart because in the end he finally got it right.

Or that because he was, it was because he constantly improved and got better, or that somehow David earned his place as a man after God's own heart.

The way the story is told, it actually makes it difficult to explain why he's a man after God's own heart, because the moment you attribute it to one thing, in the next moment he turns around and he negates it.

So here's what I've come to believe.

The test of whether a pastor really believes in grace or not is do they tell the story of David in an unvarnished way?

Do they tell the story the way the Bible tells it?

Or do they just showcase the highlight reel of his life?

Do they emphasize the good things and neglect to tell the bad or leave it out entirely?

The truth is this David's story doesn't go the way I want it to go.

David made mistakes.

He fell flat on his face.

I want him to do that early in his life.

I want him to learn from that, and by the end of his life, I don't want him making the same mistakes.

I think that's the way, if that's the way the story went, though, I think the problem would be I would assume that David was called a man after God's own heart because he finally got it right.

Or because he got better and better.

In other words, I'd I'd figure out a way to make David worthy of that title, that somehow he'd earned his place as a man after God's own heart.

But because of the messiness of David's story, you're forced to conclude this.

God loved David for God's reasons.

That's the story.

This is a story about grace.

It's a story about his unmerited favor, and that's the story of our life too, isn't it?

I mean, we all make mistakes.

None of us gets it right all the time.

We fall flat on our face.

And so I'm glad I served the God of David because the way he looked at David's life is the same way he looks at my life.

So let me begin by talking about the life that disappoints us.

So let me say right up front, David's story does not end well.

It ends messy, and you know this if you've read the story.

Look at this in 1 Kings.

This is probably one of the more notable and exemplary things he says.

This is 1 Kings 2, 1 to 4.

Now, among the final words of King David are some really good things like this.

Okay, so I'm about to go the way of all the earth.

He said, So be strong, act like a man, observe what the Lord your God requires, walk in obedience to him, and keep his decrees and commandments.

Do this so that you may prosper in all that you do, and wherever you go, that the Lord may keep his promise to me.

If your descendants watch how they live, and if they walk faithfully before me, with all their heart and soul, you will never fail to have a successor on the throne of Israel.

So get this David is getting older.

Uh he's he's in 1 Kings 1:1, it says that he's 70 years of age.

1 Kings 1:1

But he's not just 70 years of age, uh, his health is beginning to fail.

So he's bedridden, he's unable to keep warm at night, so his servants arrange for a young, beautiful Shunammite woman, a virgin, to take care of him and lie in his arms at night.

Now the Bible does explicitly tell us that David was not intimate with this woman, and maybe that's because he was unable to at this point.

Some scholars have even suggested David's servants might have been testing his virility.

You see, in those days, a lot of people kind of believed that if you had become impotent, that that was a sign of fragility and weakness.

And to be honest, when I hear this story, there's a certain cringe factor when I read it, because I'm thinking, if this is just about body heat, he's got a wife.

In fact, he's got several wives.

Any one of them could be laying with him at night.

He doesn't need a young, virgin, Shunammite woman to keep him warm at night.

So this idea seems to be hatched by his advisors, not his idea.

But David is dying, he's losing power.

They want him to prove by sexual conquest, by being intimate, that he's still got it.

And I like I said, even though the Bible's clear, David's not intimate with this woman, there's a part of me that wants David to object to this.

Isn't there a part of you that wants to say, you know, David, for him to say, What are you doing?

I I've learned my lesson about lust.

Just bring the queen to me.

This is no solution, it's not going to solve any problem.

That's what I want David to say.

But he doesn't say that, he goes along with it.

So that's not the only thing I don't like about the end of this story.

So, through a series of contrasts, let me show you about how David's life ends.

Number one, he could absorb insults and hold on to vindictiveness.

One of the more inspiring examples of David's life that I as a leader have returned to many times is an episode with this guy named Shemay.

I don't know if you remember this story or not.

It's a perfect illustration of what you should do if as a leader or just a person in general that somebody is making hateful uh accusations against you or to you.

Now, most of us, when we're on the receiving end of harsh words, we feel a need to object, to protect ourselves, and maybe even turn tables on the accuser.

Shemey is a man who launches this verbal tirade against David.

He makes all kinds of wild and hateful accusations against David, pretty much saying that all of David's problems, especially with his son and his rebellion, is because of God's judgment.

Now, most of what Shemae says is later proven to be completely untrue.

But while this guy is spouting off at the mouth, hurling all these insults and untruths against David, one of David's servants said this to David.

Then Abishai said to the king, Why should this dead dog curse my Lord the king?

Let me go over and cut off his head.

The king David said, If he's cursing because the Lord said to him, Curse David, who can ask, why do you do this?

Now what I find compelling about this story and personally convicting to me is how David responds to the worst of criticism.

This guy, everything he's saying is wrong.

The way he's doing it is completely wrong.

But David, when he hears it, his first impulse is not to strike back, is to say, wait a minute, maybe God has a message for me in this.

I wish I was more like that.

I wish when somebody was saying nothing but lies to my face and attacking me and tearing me down and doing it in all the wrong ways, my first impulse would be, is God got something in this for me to learn?

As a leader, like I say, convicts me to the core because that's not my natural response.

And it takes great humility when you're being abused like that to not return it in kind.

So I sincerely want to be more like David in this way.

So this episode with Shimei happens years prior when David's a young monarch and he's really wanting to do things God's ways.

But now in this story, David is on his deathbed.

He's going through his final wishes.

He made all those wonderful, strong, beautiful statements about being faithful and obedient to the Lord.

I read that to you a moment ago.

But then he adds this and remember, you have with you Shemei, son of Gerah.

Do not consider him innocent.

You know what to do with him.

Bring his gray head down to the grave in blood.

Now you hear what he's saying?

Off with his head.

I mean, that's what he's saying.

Take him out.

I want him gone.

On his deathbed, he's going through his hit list.

Now, by the way, it's not just Shemay.

He also includes Joab in that number of people he once killed.

Evidently, that criticism struck a nerve with David.

He hung on to it for years.

He rehearsed it in his mind.

He committed it to memory.

And now that David's about to meet God, he says, Here's my hit list of people I want you to bump off for me.

Shemey is first on the list.

Now I get that Shemay's accusations were more than just personal barbs aimed at David, but here's the deal.

If I'm about to meet God and I've already suffered injustice at the hands of this guy, but I've lived through it, I've survived it, I've proven myself the better man, I wouldn't want my last words before I meet God to be a hit list of people I want killed.

I mean, maybe I'm just funny like that, but I'm just saying I wouldn't want to risk it.

I wouldn't want to risk it.

I wouldn't want to say, make sure you kill these people in particular.

It reminds me of something D.A.

Carson once said.

He's a really well-known Bible scholar.

He said, you can be an old man and suddenly develop a whole new set of sins.

It is possible to be basically a faithful servant of God in many areas and yet to fail miserably in some others.

Here's what I know decades of obedience will not immunize you from failure.

You may have walked with God faithfully for a long time, and you can still blow it.

None of us are above that, none of us are beyond that.

So here we go.

This is not the way I want the story to go.

What I want from David is for him to finish strong.

I want a reversal in this order of events.

I want him to make his really big, stupid mistakes right up front, learn from them and not repeat him.

I want him to think about killing Shime when he first hears these awful words and then forgive him on his deathbed.

That's what I want.

But God refuses to tell David's story the way I want it told.

Instead, he tells us the way it actually happened.

But it's not just that.

Something else in the final scene from David's life, he could lead a nation and lose his own family.

So we read in 1 Kings 1:1 that he's got his son.

1 Kings 1:1

That son's name is Adonijah.

Adonijah sees that dad is weak and he's dying, and so he uses that as an opportunity to declare himself to be king and to begin acting accordingly.

But David's wish, what he wants, is for his other son, Solomon, to succeed him on the throne.

So the same family chaos that we looked at last week is still alive and well and largely unaddressed.

So in his final hours, David's family is fracturing and falling apart.

So once again, this is not the way I want the story to be told.

I want David, because of all the remorse he feels over Absalom's rebellion and the toll that it took on the family.

I want him to sit down with his kids and have a come to Jesus talk.

You ever had a come to Jesus talk with your kids?

And this is where you tell them listen, what happened with Absalom doesn't need to happen again.

I realize I failed as a dad.

I realize I haven't been there for you like I should have been as a father.

I want to make that right.

Let's begin again.

Let's do things in a different way.

But no, what's broken remains broken.

The family chaos continues, and David in his final days has to witness his sons at war with one another over who would sit on the throne.

There doesn't seem to be any significant learning about the family dysfunction in the past.

It's just a repetition of what's been going on for years.

So the broken baton is passed to the next generation.

Here's a third thing I see about his life.

He could show amazing grace and amazing cruelty.

Now we didn't cover this story in this series, but if you heard the story of Mephibosheth, Mephibosheth is one of the most amazing stories in the Old Testament.

It's David taking, having grace, really, for one of the sons or one of the family members of Saul, the previous king.

He finds out Mephibosheth, this young man who is disabled.

He he brings him into his home.

He invites him, he eats at his table, he's welcomed as part of the family.

It's an amazing story.

In fact, it's an Old Testament picture of what it means for you and I to be adopted in the family of God.

It's that spectacular.

And when I read that about David, it kind of takes my breath away.

It's amazing grace.

It's a picture of New Testament grace.

So you have this amazing, grace-filled story of Mephibosheth, and then just a few chapters later, you have amazing cruelty for somebody undeserving.

David abuses his royal power, takes another man's wife, gets her pregnant, tries to cover it up by having the husband come back from the battlefield to spend the night with his wife.

But because the guy is faithful to his brothers in armed that are in the battle, he says, No, I'm not going to have pleasure.

I'm not going to spend the night with my wife while my brothers are out in the field.

So he's not sleeping with his wife, he can't cover up the pregnancy.

So what's David do?

David has Uriah put out on the front lines as they're doing battle, and he tells the captain, When the battle is at its hottest point, withdraw your troops and leave him out there alone.

In other words, kill him.

He arranges for the man's murder.

What has he done to deserve any of that?

Nothing.

He's a totally innocent man.

He's done nothing deserving of that.

So you expect, you expect the kind of amazing grace that he shows to Mephibosheth to come with maturity.

But to turn around later and see such amazing cruelty done to a man who in no way deserved it is just glaringly inconsistent.

Now here's the deal.

It's not that David doesn't have his moments, because he does, and they're absolutely stunning when he has them.

But it seems that every single great thing in his life is followed by some amazingly equal catastrophic failure.

Here's something that's worth talking about that we very seldom address in church, and it's this spiritual maturity is not always linear.

What we want to think is I give my life to God, and there's this kind of unbroken success as I move more and more to the phase of God.

It's just a constantly ascending until I'm more like God.

I wish that was your story, and I wish it was mine.

I've been full-time pastor for more than 40 years now, and I gotta tell you, I've never met a Christian whose spiritual journey looks like that.

You know what the spiritual journey looks like?

It looks more like this.

That's what I see all the time in people's lives.

They get moving in a certain direction, they get caught on this maze and circuit and all these off trails and all this.

And if you want to know, here's the diagram of David's life.

This is David's life.

It doesn't get perfect, it doesn't go better and better and better until it arrives at God.

And that's the thing, is the Bible is just this amazingly truth-telling book.

It's always honest about its characters, like it's honest about your life and mine.

But being honest about our life doesn't disqualifies us, it shows us how great God is, right?

So let's move more deeply into what I call the grace that never abandons.

Now, many of you are familiar with the sculpture, even though you may not have seen it personally, of David.

This is Michelangelo's magnificent sculpture.

It stands 17 feet tall.

It weighs more than six tons.

It's an extraordinary work of art carved from a single block of Carrara marble.

For 500 years since its creation, thousands of visitors have gone to Florence, Italy just to behold it.

It's considered by many people, art critics, historians alike, to be the greatest sculpture in the history of the world.

It's David as a young man, fully nude, holding only onto a sling as he's about to meet the giant Goliath.

But what many people don't realize about this sculpture, it has an amazing history.

That massive block of marble that David used had been rejected by many sculptures for years prior.

For decades it sat untouched, considered by most people to be too difficult to work with.

Yet Michelangelo saw something special in it, something unique.

Where everybody else saw problems, he envisioned a masterpiece.

But as magnificent as this sculpture is, it is not without its imperfections.

Art historians, and in particular ophthalmologists, have long debated the positioning of David's eyes.

I don't know if you've ever seen this up close or not, but you can tell right there they're looking in different directions, can't you?

Now, ophthalmologists say, well, this is just wrong.

He just he carved it incorrectly.

This was the best he could do with a marble, but that's not true.

And then other people have said, no, David did it intentionally because of the viewing angle that it wouldn't appear that they were looking in different directions.

So that's been debated.

But other people have debated even the form of the body and whether that's anatomically correct in certain ways.

But the biggest thing upon which everybody agrees is there's some structural fractures in the ankles.

And they've actually done these, these are actual, uh, I don't know what kind of, it's not an X-ray, but it's some type of imaging that shows that there are stress fractures, especially in one ankle.

And because this thing weighs seven tons, that could be the undoing of the statue of David.

That literally it could collapse and fall over and never be able to be restored.

So even Michelangelo's masterpiece is not without its flaws.

So in this case, you could say art imitates life.

Because the David we see in the Bible is a remarkable figure, but he's also a deeply flawed human being.

And perhaps what makes this story the most important is God didn't choose David because he was flawless.

And God didn't abandon David because of his flaws.

His story reminds us that God can do extraordinary things through imperfect people.

And even in our failures, even when they're serious, our failures don't get the final word on our life.

And this is what we see.

When you tell the story of David right, there's great comfort, there's great encouragement in this story, because his story is your story and my story too.

Because we're imperfect like David is.

So King David is described early in 1 Samuel as being a man after God's own heart.

But the book of Samuel doesn't leave us thinking David's the man, we should all just be like him.

First and 2 Samuel leave us scratching our heads until we realize the point of these books.

Now, I've mentioned to you this before, but I want to mention It again because it's so important.

Narrative literature or story form literature is the dominant type of literature in the Bible.

60% of the Bible is told in story form.

But you realize in stories in the Bible, the main character is not David or Samuel or anybody else.

The main character is God.

The main character in every story of the Bible is God.

So throughout these stories, you're supposed to be asking yourself, what's this teaching me about God?

About how he sees us?

About how he interacts with us, about God's grace, about his unmerited favor.

You need to see God in every story because that's the reason the stories are being told, to show us something more about God.

Here's the truth: one day, you and I are going to stand before God.

You will not stand before God because you've earned it or in any way deserve it.

It'll be because God is faithful and loves us more than we could possibly ever imagine.

That's how redemption works.

We trade our junk for his glory.

David's life is there to teach us that there's hope for all of us, no matter how high our stack of regrets happens to be.

So people who've seriously studied the life of David, David have noticed this tension between his successes and his failures, that it's throughout the entire story.

But as I'm digging through his story, it dawned on me.

While we we hear his story told predominantly in 1 and 2 Samuel, we have the story of his reign, his accomplishments, his failure.

There's another source that we have to look to if we want a more full picture of David, and that is his writings, some of which have been described as David's personal prayer journal.

This is called the Book of Psalms.

About half of the 150 Psalms have been attributed to David.

They give us a rare and unique view into his life as he's going through these different circumstances, success and failure, of what's going on inside of him.

So you don't get a full picture of David unless you get into the Psalms.

But in particular, there's a phrase that I found that describes David's life to a T.

It's recorded in Psalm 109.

This is one of the 73 Psalms that David did write.

And with this Psalm, it was born in a time of intense personal struggle.

So listen to what he wrote.

For people who are wicked and deceitful have opened their mouths against me.

They have spoken against me with lying tongues.

With words of hatred, they surround me.

They attack me without cause.

In return for my friendship, they accuse me.

But I am a man of prayer.

That last line is what I want you to think about, to set with you.

I am a man of prayer.

Other versions translate it, I give myself to prayer.

Another says, I resort to prayer.

The New American Standard says, but I am in prayer.

It's interesting.

In the original Hebrew, it's just one word.

It's not a phrase, it's one word, and it's just prayer.

It's a Hebrew word, tafilah.

Charles Spurgeon was the great 19th-century preacher, and he was reading this passage.

And when he read that word tafilah, he said, No, I know what this means.

And what it means is I became prayer.

And I love that idea.

Prayer became so important, so essential to David's life that it defined him.

Whether times were good or times were bad, he became prayer.

Whether he was successful or fallen flat on his face, David became prayer.

Now few of us have experienced greater heights or greater depths than David.

What's significant about David's life is through the good and the bad times, he prayed.

It was his default.

He returned to it over and over again.

But understand, David wasn't a man after God's own heart because he prayed or because he always got it right.

He was a man who, when he got it terribly wrong, kept taking that broken, imperfect heart back to God.

Of course, the greatest miracle is not that David kept returning to God.

It's that God never abandoned David.

God never abandoned David.

The Psalms give us a window into David's heart, into his passion, and into his torture.

Regardless of where life found him, again and again, he brings all of himself to God.

And this is something I think all of us as believers need to do.

We need to learn to bring all of ourselves to God.

When I first gave my life to Jesus Christ, my prayers were real, they were authentic.

I had a conversation with God.

No matter where I was at, no matter what I was struggling with, I just poured it all out to God.

But then something happened.

I started hanging around with Christians.

When I started hanging around with Christians, I started listening to the way they prayed.

And I thought, well, that sounds really good.

I probably need to incorporate that into my prayer.

And I started using all these phrases and all this kind of thinking that was not me, but sounded cool.

And I thought, well, yeah, Christians are supposed to pray that way.

So I would pray over lunch.

I'd say, God bless this food to the nourishment of my body.

And God would say, I can't make that Dorito nourish your body.

I'm sorry, I can't do that.

But I'd pray it because that's the way Christians are supposed to pray.

Or I'd thank God for the food, the fun, and the fellowship.

Or I'd ask him to place a hedge of protection around people I love.

Who talks that way?

Nobody talks that way except Christians in prayer.

And we say these phrases that we don't use any place else, but we think it sounds spiritual, and it makes me wonder how much of our prayer life is just mimicry, it's imitation.

We hear what other people say, we think it sounds good, and we think that's what God wants to hear from me.

If the Psalms teach us anything, it's this pray what's in you instead of what ought to be in you.

Because God can do incredible things in the real you and nothing in the phony you.

You've got to get real with God.

This is what David did, and this is what David teaches us to quit using words and phrases that we don't mean and instead let prayer arise from the heart.

Even when it's messy, even when it's confused, even when it's angry, let your life become prayer.

Now it takes real faith to do this with God.

You do this with God because you believe that God already knows what's in your heart.

You see, the only people hiding that stuff are think people who think that I can't hide this successfully from God.

You can't hide anything from God.

God understands your thoughts, He understands your motives, He knows you better than you know you.

So why not come clean?

In fact, you know what?

The word confession, you know what the word confession means?

Literally, in the Greek, to say the same thing.

When I confess, I'm saying the same thing about my sin that God says about it.

I'm just saying, God, you already know the reality.

I'm just agreeing with you right now.

Now, listen to this verse.

I love this verse.

It says, God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.

Now, what that verse tells us is that God took the initiative in the relationship.

Knowing we were sinners, knowing we were not okay, he made a way for us to be okay.

So God's love and acceptance preceded our disclosure.

He said, I accepted you before you ever confessed to me.

Even steeped in your sinful behavior, my settled disposition towards you is love.

God leads with acceptance, so I don't have to ever pretend with God to be something that I'm not.

I can be totally honest about who I am.

Because he already knows it anyway.

He's wanting to know if you know it.

You know, when people pray, you know, God, they say all these wonderful things when they're really just depressed.

We're not pulling one over on God.

God was not thinking, you know, I thought you were really depressed the other day.

I mean, how are you feeling so good right now?

We're just using pretentious language.

It's not real.

So you never have to pretend with God.

With God, I never have to wonder whether revealing the truth about myself is going to cause him to discover something he doesn't already know.

He knows everything about us before he loved us, and he loved us anyway.

And that leads us to this the purpose that outlives our failures.

Now, like I told you earlier, I want the David story to be told in the opposite way.

I want the big failures to come up front for there to be profound learning from those experiences, and by the end of his life, for him to finish strong.

But that's just not the way the Bible tells a story.

But it does remind me of a true story of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

There were 74 participants in the marathon that year.

The man who won the race was from Ethiopia.

His name was Mamo Wald.

He finished in two hours, 20 minutes, 26 seconds.

Pretty awesome win.

But in the 68 Olympics, people don't remember Mamo Wald.

They remember the guy who finished dead last.

He's been called the greatest last finisher ever.

And his name was John Stephen Aquari.

Now, Aquari, about halfway through the race, so around 13 miles, he fell.

He badly injured his knee.

It was probably out of joint, bleeding badly.

Somewhere along the course, somebody bandaged it up for him, and he has to continue to run half of the marathon with his knee out of joint in pain, bleeding.

And so everyone expected Aquari to quit, but he didn't.

A full hour after Mama Walb crossed the finish line, Aquari came into the stadium in Mexico City.

He's limping as he's trying to run.

Most of the crowd had already gone home because they figured the race was over.

But here he came, making his final lap around the stadium, limping every inch of the way, knee bandaged, face grimaced in pain.

The remaining spectators in the stadium stood up and began to clap for him.

After he crossed the finish line, the officials asked him, why didn't you quit?

And he simply said this My country did not send me 5,000 miles to Mexico City to start the race.

They sent me 5,000 miles to finish the race.

Now, there might be some of you here right now that you've been knocked down and you've been hurt and you feel like your whole life is out of joint and it just hurts.

And you're tempted to sit this one out and just quit.

And I'm here to tell you, it's time to get up.

God didn't save you to start the race, he saved you to finish the race, the race that set before you.

Because when I look at David's life, he finished his race.

Maybe not in the way I expected, maybe not in the way I wanted.

Maybe he crossed that finish line with a limp and carrying the wounds of a number of falls along the way.

That's the way the Bible tells his story.

But when God delivers the final epitaph on David's life, this is what he says.

David served the purpose of God in his own generation and he died.

Here's what it's saying.

Through the ups and downs, the successes and failures, the stunning victories, the inglorious defeats, David still served God's purpose.

Don't you want that said over your life?

I do mine.

I'd love for somebody, when my race is over to say, Keith served God's purpose in his generation, then he died.

You and I have a purpose just like David did.

We're to serve God's purpose in our generation, to make an impact in our present day.

That means in our family, in our workplace, in our community, in our calling.

Now, long ago I realized I'm not here to change the world.

I'm here to change my world.

The Bible's honest about David's mistakes and his sins.

Still, it highlights the reality that his life accomplished the purpose God set out for him.

Evidently, fulfilling God's purpose doesn't require perfection, it requires a heart that constantly reorients back to God.

A lot of people think because of some huge failure, a costly decision, they have hopelessly messed up God's plan for their life.

That God can't possibly use them.

That if there's a plan A with God, they're on plan B or maybe X, Y, or Z.

They're just far away from what God intended for their life to be.

But there's one final lesson that we take away from the life of David.

You know what it is?

There is no plan B with God.

The God who calls us, like he did David, that same God knows your future as clearly as he knows your past.

He knows where you're going to follow faithfully, and he knows where you will fail dramatically.

He knows every decision, every sidetrack, every dead end you're going to face on the journey.

He knew that before he called you to his purpose.

Amen?

There is nothing that an omniscient God doesn't know.

God knows it all.

He knows everything about your life.

Not just what happened in the past, but everything that'll happen in the future.

And that same God is never surprised by any mistake that we make, about any detour we take.

Bad choice or foul up in your life and mine, so God has no plan B.

His original purpose remains intact because he's already taken it all into account.

Now, don't misunderstand me.

God's grace doesn't mean our choices don't matter.

Bad choices have serious consequences.

David suffered him, suffered because of it.

Relationships were destroyed, some consequences he carried to the grave.

But here's the miracle of grace.

Even our worst failures cannot prevent God from continuing to work in and through a life surrendered to Him.

It's why the Bible tells us in the book of Romans, and we know that to them that love God, all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to his purpose.

So back in seminary, there's this older guy sitting with a bunch of younger guys in class.

He's in his 40s.

Most of the students are in their 20s because they went straight from Bible college, grade graduating from college, right into graduate school.

Well, this man already had a PhD in nuclear physics.

He'd served on a submarine for the U.S.

Navy.

Then late in life, he felt like God called him into the ministry.

So one day in Greek class, he he looked around the other students.

He said, I look at a bunch of you guys, and you're on plan A.

You said yes to Jesus early in your life.

And then he added, It's taken me a lot longer to do that.

I guess I'm on plan B.

And you could tell just by the look on his face and his posture of his body, how he slumped over, and there's no smile on his face.

You could tell he he feels just humiliated, disappointed in himself.

Then the professor wisely looked at him and said, Sir, there are no plan B's with God.

You're still on plan A.

All of a sudden, this guy, his countenance changed, his posture, his appearance, a smile broke out on his face.

So many people become convinced that they missed out on the plan of God because of timing, because of detours, because of failure.

They think, God can't possibly use me.

The fact is this God knows us better than we know ourselves.

He knows every step we're going to take in the right direction and every step we'll take along the way.

Just like he did with David.

God isn't looking for perfect plastic saints.

He's looking for real people like you and me who don't get it right all the time.

Who, when they fall on their knees and they get busted up, they get back up and they finish the race.

Some of us have gone through a divorce, some of us have gone through financial disasters.

Some of us in this room have a terminal diagnosis.

God doesn't have a backup plan for your life, He's got the plan for your life.

It's the same plan He's had all along because He knows your life.

He knows where it's going.

He's incorporated it all into the plan.

So whatever time you think you've wasted, whatever detours you think have taken you off the path, he's weaving it all together for your benefit and the benefit of other people.

So stop living like your second best.

You're still on plan A.

Right now, right here.

That's what we learned from David.

Even with all of his failures, even the failures that last to the end of his life, he still served God's purpose.

David's story isn't ultimately about a man who never fails God.

It's about a God who never fails David.

And that's what's true about all of our lives, isn't it?

That we have a God who never fails us.

The Bible even says he's faithful when we're faithless.

That's the kind of God we serve.

And that's the kind of God who's, because his faithfulness is greater than David's, and his faithfulness is greater than ours, God can do incredible things with your life, and he's got a purpose for you.

You need to start cooperating with it.

Let's pray.

Father, thanks so much for this time we've had together.

Thank you for the message of David.

Even in its messagedness, it's such a it's it's such a redemptive message.

It's a story about an imperfect man who never quite gets it right.

Who, even when he's in these final days, there are things that are cringeworthy about his life.

But God, that didn't stop you from using David.

It didn't stop you for having a purpose for his life.

And so when he was all said and done, you said he served your purpose in his generation and then he died.

And God, I think that's really the heart cry of every single person in this room.

We want our lives to matter.

We want to count for something.

We we don't want to think that maybe because of some bad choices or a failed decision here or there, or because we got off track, but somehow we've totally missed out on the plan of God.

Lord, because you are a good God and you are God who knows everything, you've already taken all those details into account and you've incorporated them into the plan.

So God help us to look to you in good times and bad, in successes and failure, in the times when we're victorious and the times we fall flat on our face, and to know, God, that you are big enough and powerful enough and strong enough and capable enough to accomplish anything through our life that you've set out to do.

So God help us to say yes to you.

Help us to finish the race in Jesus' name.

Amen.

God bless y'all.