SPEAKER_00: You're listening to the rogue.
SPEAKER_00: Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.
SPEAKER_01: God's not all that interested in our degrees, our looks, our intellect, our abilities.
SPEAKER_01: He's focused on our heart.
SPEAKER_01: David is noted by God because of the direction of his heart, not the development of his resume.
SPEAKER_01: God is looking for wholehearted people, those whose hearts are given over and surrendered to him.
SPEAKER_00: At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: For more information on the road, visit theroad.org.
SPEAKER_00: We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.
SPEAKER_01: All right, be seated.
SPEAKER_01: We're starting a new series, Worshiper Warrior.
SPEAKER_01: I'm cherry-picking some of the aspects of my book.
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to start with being wholehearted.
SPEAKER_01: I want to start with this theme, and I want to give us a context of how God raised up David in the midst of another king, and his name was Saul.
SPEAKER_01: And if you turn to 1 Samuel 10, so in your Old Testament, if you don't have a Bible, there's Bibles most of the time in front of you.
SPEAKER_01: If you look down your row, if you don't have one, there is one there.
SPEAKER_01: 1 Samuel 10.
SPEAKER_01: And if you recall, the nation of Israel had not had a king.
SPEAKER_01: It had judges and it had prophetically gifted men.
SPEAKER_01: It had raised up armies through anointed men and even women of God that the Lord used.
SPEAKER_01: But they wanted a king.
SPEAKER_01: They wanted to be like other nations.
SPEAKER_01: And we have this interesting commentary in 1 Samuel 10, 19, concerning God's view of Israel wanting a king.
SPEAKER_01: Samuel writes this, but you have today rejected your God, who himself saved you from all your adversaries and your tribulations, and you have said to him, No, we don't want you to be our king, in other words, but set a human king over us.
SPEAKER_01: Now therefore, present yourselves before the Lord by your tribes and by your clans.
SPEAKER_01: And so God acquiesces to the desires of the people, raises up Saul.
SPEAKER_01: Saul is an interesting study in and of itself, and we don't have time to go into it.
SPEAKER_01: And I don't even want to focus on it today, but I'm going to give you a little bit of an insight into Saul.
SPEAKER_01: Saul is never wholehearted.
SPEAKER_01: Saul is never fully all in.
SPEAKER_01: Saul is for Saul.
SPEAKER_01: And Saul is about himself, and I would call him, instead of, you know, you've probably heard of Edward the lionhearted.
SPEAKER_01: We could say it's David the wholehearted.
SPEAKER_01: We could say of Saul, he's Saul the half-hearted.
SPEAKER_01: And I want to just think about Saul just for a moment to give context to God having his eyes and his heart upon David.
SPEAKER_01: And we're going to look at David until the end of the year.
SPEAKER_01: So we're going to hear all aspects of David.
SPEAKER_01: One of the things we're going to notice about David is that he's not perfect.
SPEAKER_01: That he is not the altar boy.
SPEAKER_01: He is not the perfect man.
SPEAKER_01: But one thing we will say about David is God notices his heart.
SPEAKER_01: So I want to look just quickly at three characteristics of being half-hearted by looking at Saul the half-hearted.
SPEAKER_01: So, first of all, half-hearted people, Saul in particular, tend to be reactionary.
SPEAKER_01: Saul doesn't have a vision for his life, he doesn't have a vision from God.
SPEAKER_01: I want you to look at chapter 11, verse 7.
SPEAKER_01: In chapter 11, verse 7, we see how Saul motivates Israel to follow him.
SPEAKER_01: This is just one example of so many.
SPEAKER_01: There's a mounting problem, there's another nation coming in to attack, and this is what he does to motivate his people.
SPEAKER_01: So he took a yoke of oxen and cut them in pieces and sent them throughout all the territory of Israel by the hands of messenger, saying, Whoever does not go out with Saul and Samuel to battle, so it shall be done to his oxen.
SPEAKER_01: Great motivational tool.
SPEAKER_01: He's reactionary.
SPEAKER_01: Saul again and again will show himself reactionary.
SPEAKER_01: Second, he's spiritually unprepared.
SPEAKER_01: He's spiritually unprepared for what he's about to face as a king.
SPEAKER_01: Men and women, when we're half-hearted, we're constantly reacting to circumstances and situations because we haven't spiritually prepared our heart.
SPEAKER_01: Anyone figure that out?
SPEAKER_01: Life is difficult and it's hard, and we go through depression sometimes.
SPEAKER_01: We go through despair.
SPEAKER_01: We have kids that rebel.
SPEAKER_01: We have a spouse that's struggling.
SPEAKER_01: We have sickness in our life.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes there's something like a cancer, or we lose our job.
SPEAKER_01: And so if we are not prepared spiritually, we're constantly reacting.
SPEAKER_01: And so, my goodness, so much here.
SPEAKER_01: But in chapter 13, I'm not going to go through it, but all of chapter 13 shows a man, a half-hearted man, who's about himself, not about the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And listen, he's not about the people either, trying to figure out what to do.
SPEAKER_01: And in one case, at the very beginning of chapter 13, he calls thousands to himself.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you heard why and how he motivated them to come.
SPEAKER_01: They come and then he figures they've got it in the bag.
SPEAKER_01: The battle's in the bag, and so then he sends everybody back home, leaves 3,000.
SPEAKER_01: He rules over and he commands 2,000.
SPEAKER_01: His son Jonathan commands 1,000.
SPEAKER_01: Then they get themselves in a huge pickle, and then he needs more men, so he's trying to call them back.
SPEAKER_01: He's just unprepared.
SPEAKER_01: He's unprepared spiritually, and he's unprepared strategically.
SPEAKER_01: And then thirdly, he has a fear of man.
SPEAKER_01: He's constantly fearing man.
SPEAKER_01: Look at verse 11 of chapter 13.
SPEAKER_01: Samuel said, What have you done when I saw that the people were scattering from me?
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember the story?
SPEAKER_01: So Samuel had said, I will come.
SPEAKER_01: I'll be there on the seventh day.
SPEAKER_01: Wait for me, and I will do my priestly duty.
SPEAKER_01: You have a kingly duty.
SPEAKER_01: How many of you know there's kings and there's priests?
SPEAKER_01: And in Scripture it's very clear.
SPEAKER_01: There's kingly jobs.
SPEAKER_01: There's a kingly job description.
SPEAKER_01: And then there's a priestly job description.
SPEAKER_01: And when they work together, it's beautiful.
SPEAKER_01: Same in the church.
SPEAKER_01: A lot of what I do is in priesting and kingly work, but a lot of my week is kingly stuff.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's leading, it's delegating, it's getting us ready for the battle.
SPEAKER_01: And so what Samuel does is he says, I'll be there on the seventh day, I'll do my priestly duty before you go into battle, and I believe it's totally of the Lord that it goes all the way up to the 11th hour, the people are scattering, and so out of fear of man, out of fear in reactionary mode, unprepared spiritually, unprepared strategically, Samuel takes on the priestly duties and offers a sacrifice he's not supposed to offer.
SPEAKER_01: And so as Samuel confronts him, here's his excuse, verse 11, when I saw that the people were scattered from me, and that you did not come within the days appointed, which he did, but it was the last minute, and that the Philistines gathered together at Mikmash, then I said, The Philistines will now come down on me at Gilgal, full of fear, and I've not made supplication to the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore I felt compelled and offered a burnt offering.
SPEAKER_01: So out of fear of man and lack of fear of God and lack of trust of God, we see a whole hearted fear grip his heart instead of a wholehearted belief in God.
SPEAKER_01: Interesting 2 Chronicles 16, 9.
SPEAKER_01: For the eyes of the Lord sweep across the earth to and fro, looking for a man or a woman whose heart is loyal to him, that he might come down and support them.
SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah 5.
SPEAKER_01: Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, see now and know, and seek in her open places.
SPEAKER_01: You can find a man or a woman.
SPEAKER_01: If there's anyone who executes judgment who seeks the truth, and I will pardon her.
SPEAKER_01: God is always in all generations, men and women, looking for people whose hearts are devoted to him.
SPEAKER_01: Just one man, just one woman.
SPEAKER_01: He searches across the globe.
SPEAKER_01: He searches across our city.
SPEAKER_01: He searches across this sanctuary for those whose hearts are wholly devoted to him.
SPEAKER_01: And so it is.
SPEAKER_01: In this great story, the great drama of the ages, the story of David, God finally runs out of patience with Saul, and he finds David.
SPEAKER_01: So look at chapter 13, right after his ill-fated sacrifice.
SPEAKER_01: Look at verse 14.
SPEAKER_01: But now your kingdom shall not continue.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord has sought for himself a man after his own heart.
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, there's no other man or woman in the Bible that is described as a man or a woman after God's own heart, but David.
SPEAKER_01: And the Lord has commanded him to be commander over his people because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.
SPEAKER_01: In his landmark book, Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, he writes about a woman who was raped and killed, and 38 people saw the incident and nobody reported it.
SPEAKER_01: True story.
SPEAKER_01: In the subsequent research that was done after that and interviewing the 38 people, other studies that had been done in comparison to what happened on that day, they found that the more people that see something or a part of something, the less chance of any of those people taking any action.
SPEAKER_01: Because everybody thinks that someone else will.
SPEAKER_01: Matter of fact, most of you in this room already do.
SPEAKER_01: God's on the verge of something really big.
SPEAKER_01: God's on the verge of something really big in this city.
SPEAKER_01: And God is on the verge of something mighty and powerful in this church.
SPEAKER_01: When we look at the midterm elections, which happened on Tuesday, we had our 24-hour war room.
SPEAKER_01: Many of you came out and we sought the Lord from 5 to 7 a.m.
SPEAKER_01: as men.
SPEAKER_01: We sought the Lord from noon to 2 as women.
SPEAKER_01: We sought the Lord from 6 to 8 with another group of us and we cried out to God.
SPEAKER_01: We took every one of those boards of the seven mountains of God and we and we prayed it.
SPEAKER_01: We prayed it for our nation.
SPEAKER_01: We gave up two, four, in some cases six hours of our day to cry out to God.
SPEAKER_01: Men and women, there is absolutely no way logically or politically that the left is ever going to agree with the right.
SPEAKER_01: The only bridge between the left and the right is the kingdom of God made known through the church.
SPEAKER_01: The only way God can bring unity again to this nation is through the kingdom of God proclaimed and demonstrated through the church.
SPEAKER_01: So David comes along with a half-hearted king and really a frustrated prophet.
SPEAKER_01: Look at 1 Samuel 16.
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's interesting when you study Samuel, because Samuel's writing this, so he's writing about himself.
SPEAKER_01: Pretty humble guy, because I think the next few verses are kind of embarrassing.
SPEAKER_01: I think I would edit those out if it was me that came to Bethlehem.
SPEAKER_01: But it shows here, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, speaking through Samuel, an insight into how far off even Samuel was in understanding the heart of God.
SPEAKER_01: Because just a few, probably weeks before, that's what we just read, was 1 Samuel 13, 14, about the kind of person that God's going to raise up, but Samuel still follows the same formula in chapter 16.
SPEAKER_01: Let's read it.
SPEAKER_01: Now the Lord said to Samuel, verse 1, How long will you mourn for Saul, seeing that I have rejected him from reigning over Israel?
SPEAKER_01: Fill your horn with oil and go.
SPEAKER_01: I'm sending you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided myself a king among his sons.
SPEAKER_01: And Samuel said, How can I go?
SPEAKER_01: If Saul hears of it, he will kill me.
SPEAKER_01: So mighty Samuel has a pretty big fear of man.
SPEAKER_01: He's not thinking about what God's telling him to do, he's thinking about his own life.
SPEAKER_01: So there's the only way I can describe it as half-hearted people tend to attract half-hearted people.
SPEAKER_01: Was it birds of a feather?
SPEAKER_01: So I think Samuel, who started off so well, is not doing so well right now.
SPEAKER_01: He's been affected, he's been impacted, he's been infested with half-heartedness, and he has a fear now of man.
SPEAKER_01: But the Lord said, Take a heifer for you and say, I have come to sacrifice to the Lord, verse 3.
SPEAKER_01: Then invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do.
SPEAKER_01: You shall anoint for me the one I named to you.
SPEAKER_01: So Samuel did what the Lord said and went to Bethlehem, and the elders of the town trembled at his coming and said, Do you come peaceably?
SPEAKER_01: And he said, Peaceably I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Sanctify yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice.
SPEAKER_01: Then he consecrated Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice.
SPEAKER_01: So it was when they came that he looked at Eliab, and he said, Surely the Lord's anointed is before him.
SPEAKER_01: But the Lord said to Samuel, Do not look at his appearance, or at his physical stature, so he must have been maybe tall and handsome, because I have refused him.
SPEAKER_01: For the Lord does not see as man sees.
SPEAKER_01: For man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.
SPEAKER_01: So Jesse called Abinadab and made him pass before Samuel, and he said, Neither has the Lord chosen this one.
SPEAKER_01: Then Jesse made Shammah pass by, and he said, Neither has the Lord chosen this one.
SPEAKER_01: Thus Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, The Lord has not chosen any of these.
SPEAKER_01: And Samuel said to Jesse, Are all the young men here?
SPEAKER_01: Then he said, No, there remains yet the youngest, and there he is, keeping the sheep.
SPEAKER_01: And Samuel said to Jesse, Send and bring him, for we will not sit down until he comes here.
SPEAKER_01: And so he went and he brought him in.
SPEAKER_01: Now he was ruddy, bright eyes, and good looking.
SPEAKER_01: And the Lord said, Arise annoying him, for this is the one.
SPEAKER_01: God's not all that interested in our degrees, our looks, our intellect, our abilities.
SPEAKER_01: He's focused on our heart.
SPEAKER_01: David is noted by God because of the direction of his heart, not the development of his resume.
SPEAKER_01: God is looking for wholehearted people, those whose hearts are given over and surrendered to him.
SPEAKER_01: On December 5th, 1955, Rosa Parks was exhausted from work and she sat down on a white-only seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
SPEAKER_01: Parks rejected bus driver James F.
SPEAKER_01: Blake's order to relinquish her seat into the colored section to a white passenger.
SPEAKER_01: Rosa Parks was just tired.
SPEAKER_01: She was tired of indignity, and she was tired from work.
SPEAKER_01: And that one woman began a movement.
SPEAKER_01: A movement by which she's been called the mother of the freedom movement, the mother of the civil rights movement.
SPEAKER_01: And Martin Luther King heard of it, and he jumped on board, and so did others, and thus began one of the greatest movements that this country has ever known through a whole-hearted woman.
SPEAKER_01: I think we could say there's two kinds of people in this world: there's whole-hearted and there's half-hearted.
SPEAKER_01: There's courageous and there's fearful.
SPEAKER_01: You know what the difference is.
SPEAKER_01: A courageous person is simply a fearful person who's focused and praying.
SPEAKER_01: All of us struggle with fear.
SPEAKER_01: All of us struggle with what people think about us.
SPEAKER_01: All of us struggle with that.
SPEAKER_01: But the whole-hearted person is one who is seeking God and spending time with the Lord, and God's downloading his heart into them, and they begin to be captured with those things that capture God's heart.
SPEAKER_01: That's really all it is.
SPEAKER_01: All that a whole-hearted person, a Jesus follower, disciple is, is one who has felt God's heart, is experiencing God's heart, and begin to live, begins to live God's heart.
SPEAKER_01: Someone has said the dearth of leaders, I love this.
SPEAKER_01: Little leaders have little problems.
SPEAKER_01: Big leaders have big problems.
SPEAKER_01: I fear we only have little problems.
SPEAKER_01: God's looking for whole-hearted leaders.
SPEAKER_01: God's looking for whole-hearted men and women.
SPEAKER_01: He says to God, God says to Joshua in chapter 1 of Joshua 1, he has to tell him three times to be strong and courageous.
SPEAKER_01: Why would you tell someone three times if it's true already?
SPEAKER_01: Because it wasn't.
SPEAKER_01: And Joshua, Joshua had followed Moses to the mountaintop.
SPEAKER_01: It says of Joshua that he stood right next to the tabernacle as Moses sought the Lord and the cloud came down.
SPEAKER_01: Nobody was as close to Moses as Joshua.
SPEAKER_01: And yet, as Moses passes away, the Lord has to say three times to Joshua, be strong and courageous, for I am with you.
SPEAKER_01: Be strong and courageous, for I'm with you.
SPEAKER_01: Be strong and courageous, for I am with you.
SPEAKER_01: Church, how many of us need that?
SPEAKER_01: God says to us, be strong and courageous, for I am with you.
SPEAKER_01: The power of one, the power of what a whole hearted disciple can do is amazing.
SPEAKER_01: Before 1954, the consensus opinion was that no human could ever run a mile in unconscious.
SPEAKER_01: Four minutes.
SPEAKER_01: Even studies had been done by cardiologists that said if you tried to run the mile in four minutes, you would have a cardiac arrest.
SPEAKER_01: On May 6th, 1954, Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, three minutes 59 seconds.3.
SPEAKER_01: And just a few weeks later, Bannister's record was broken.
SPEAKER_01: And over the next few years, athlete, runner, athlete, runner after another broke his record again and again as the numbers and the time began to drop.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it takes a whole-hearted person to break into an area so that others can follow.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it takes a whole-hearted person to do what everybody else says is impossible.
SPEAKER_01: But then they do with all the courage that they can muster.
SPEAKER_01: And then we pour in.
SPEAKER_01: We all pour in.
SPEAKER_01: David is a forerunner of the whole-hearted disciple.
SPEAKER_01: David is just a man.
SPEAKER_01: Everybody listen to me.
SPEAKER_01: David is just a man.
SPEAKER_01: He's no different than any of us in this room.
SPEAKER_01: What God could do through some of you.
SPEAKER_01: What God can do through some of you young people in this room for your generation.
SPEAKER_01: What God can do for some of you old people for your generation.
SPEAKER_01: Because God works through wholehearted people who begin to say, God, what do you want me to do?
SPEAKER_01: God, how do you want to use me?
SPEAKER_01: It says in Scripture about David, Incline your ear and come to me, hear, and your soul shall live, and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, the sure mercies of David.
SPEAKER_01: Indeed, I have given him as a witness to the people.
SPEAKER_01: No other Old Testament character is quoted and referred to more in the New Testament than David.
SPEAKER_01: No other Old Testament leader is spoken of more often by Jesus than David.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus even refers to himself as a son of David.
SPEAKER_01: We know more about David's personal life.
SPEAKER_01: We know more about his writings.
SPEAKER_01: We know more about his failures than anyone in the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: David is a forerunner of the wholehearted disciple.
SPEAKER_01: So I want to give you three thoughts as I close.
SPEAKER_01: Three characteristics of being whole-hearted.
SPEAKER_01: Three characteristics of a whole-hearted disciple of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Number one, God saturated.
SPEAKER_01: They are saturated with God and by God.
SPEAKER_01: David is described as a man after God's own heart, and men and women, it's from here that we receive God's heart.
SPEAKER_01: It's beginning each day in God's Word, reading God's Word, listening to God's word.
SPEAKER_01: Martin Luther, a good, solid, Emmy Award-winning Augustinian monk who did everything he was told to do.
SPEAKER_01: He fasted and he prayed and he crawled on his knees until the blood came.
SPEAKER_01: He lacerated himself, which was customary at that time, to feel the sufferings of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: He would sometimes go to confessional up to eight hours a day.
SPEAKER_01: It drove his confessor nuts.
SPEAKER_01: And then he was asked to go by his mentor to Wittenberg to teach the Bible at Wittenberg.
SPEAKER_01: He just wanted Luther to get off Luther.
SPEAKER_01: Luther was more into Luther than he was God, but he was an Augustinian monk.
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of pastors that are into themselves more than they are their flock.
SPEAKER_01: It's easy to do.
SPEAKER_01: So he goes to Wittenberg and he begins to read the scriptures.
SPEAKER_01: He's reading them in Greek and Latin.
SPEAKER_01: He's an expert in both.
SPEAKER_01: And as he reads the word, as he reads the Hebrew and the Greek and the Latin, he comes across a new version of Jesus that breaks his traditional paradigm.
SPEAKER_01: And he begins to have a heart on fire by God because he starts to listen to the word.
SPEAKER_01: As he listens, not just teaching it, but listening from it, he says, the just shall live by faith.
SPEAKER_01: For by grace you've been saved through faith, and not of yourself.
SPEAKER_01: It is a gift of God, not as a result of works, not as a result of crawling, not as a result of fasting and prayer, but that he had a, he could be a son of God by receiving God's grace through his finished work at Calvary by faith.
SPEAKER_01: And his heart came alive.
SPEAKER_01: And a movement began.
SPEAKER_01: He was saturated with God.
SPEAKER_01: He was saturated with God's love.
SPEAKER_01: He was saturated with God's word.
SPEAKER_01: John Wesley thought he was a great believer.
SPEAKER_01: He started the holy club.
SPEAKER_01: The holy club with George Whitfield at Oxford.
SPEAKER_01: And from the Holy Club, they would fast and they would pray and they were believing God for revival on their campus.
SPEAKER_01: And then he goes as a missionary to Georgia.
SPEAKER_01: We still need a lot of missionaries in Georgia.
SPEAKER_01: And he and he went and he had just a dismal missionary experience.
SPEAKER_01: It was an utter failure.
SPEAKER_01: Tried to start an orphanage.
SPEAKER_01: It was an utter failure the first time.
SPEAKER_01: And he's coming back on the ship, and they hit this massive storm.
SPEAKER_01: And he becomes fearful for his own life.
SPEAKER_01: But he sees this group of believers called Moravians.
SPEAKER_01: And there's just a peace and a joy, and he is moved by them.
SPEAKER_01: And so when he returns to London, he searches high and low, and he finds that there's this fellowship of Moravians at Aldersgate in London.
SPEAKER_01: And as he goes into the room, into this small setting with these Moravians, he hears the preface to the book of Romans by Luther being read.
SPEAKER_01: Just reading the preface of Luther's explanation and commentary on Romans, and he says, My heart was strangely warmed.
SPEAKER_01: And then he goes on to say, and then I knew that I knew that I believed that I had eternal life.
SPEAKER_01: And oh my goodness, what John and Charles Wesley and George Whitfield did to London and did to England and did to the British Isles and then came over to America and were part of the first great awakening.
SPEAKER_01: What God can do through one man or one woman or one child, even.
SPEAKER_01: David's about 13 years old when this happens with Samuel.
SPEAKER_01: Oh God, that you would give us 13-year-olds.
SPEAKER_01: Oh God, that you would give us 14 and 15 year olds.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, God, that you would give us nine-year-olds that begin to seek your face, that begin to go after you and say, oh, God, I want to be wholehearted.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to do what my classmates do.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to go to those parties.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to spend time with you.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to, I'm going to learn how to pray.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to hang out with people that are fired up.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to grow through my parents.
SPEAKER_01: And if my parents aren't there, I'm going to find somebody who is.
SPEAKER_01: That's what we need, men and women.
SPEAKER_01: We need whole-hearted disciples of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And God is no respecter of age.
SPEAKER_01: Some of you would look at your life and you would say, Here I'm 65, I'm 75, I'm 85.
SPEAKER_01: What do I do with these waning years?
SPEAKER_01: And God would say, Be saturated with me.
SPEAKER_01: One writer speaking of this 13-year-old David said this: the single most characteristic thing about David is God.
SPEAKER_01: David believed in God.
SPEAKER_01: He thought about God.
SPEAKER_01: He imagined God.
SPEAKER_01: He addressed God.
SPEAKER_01: He prayed to God.
SPEAKER_01: The largest part of David's existence wasn't David, but God.
SPEAKER_01: We don't need more self-esteem.
SPEAKER_01: We need more God esteem.
SPEAKER_01: And Jesus said the greatest of all commandments is that you would love me with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your mind, and all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself.
SPEAKER_01: And I think the sequential order of that is that it's really hard to love your neighbor as yourself if you don't love yourself, and you can't love yourself if you haven't learned to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
SPEAKER_01: The greatest self-esteem training we could do at the road is to press in and equip all of us to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
SPEAKER_01: That's God saturated, folks.
SPEAKER_01: So that's the first characteristic.
SPEAKER_01: Secondly, and the first leads into the second, fully alive.
SPEAKER_01: Most people are half dead.
SPEAKER_01: And God calls us to be fully alive.
SPEAKER_01: Arrhenius, the great church father, said, the glory of God is a man fully alive.
SPEAKER_01: Are you fully alive today?
SPEAKER_01: Are you engaged, heart, soul, mind, and strength?
SPEAKER_01: That's life.
SPEAKER_01: That's why Jesus starts John 14 by saying, Let not your heart be troubled.
SPEAKER_01: Let not your heart be troubled.
SPEAKER_01: And then a few verses later says, I am the way and the truth and the life.
SPEAKER_01: No one comes to the Father but through me.
SPEAKER_01: I think what he's saying is we like, we see that as kind of a salvation verse, but it's actually a life verse.
SPEAKER_01: I am the way.
SPEAKER_01: There's a Jesus way that makes us fully alive.
SPEAKER_01: That causes us to rejoice in the midst of incredible difficulties because God's got it.
SPEAKER_01: True manhood and true womanhood is not about perfection.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to learn that in David.
SPEAKER_01: But it's about the direction of our heart.
SPEAKER_01: Because all of us are going to make a lot of mistakes, and David is notorious for the mistakes that he made.
SPEAKER_01: But his direction was toward the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Brene Brown, a qualitative researcher of sociology at the University of Houston, has written extensively on the subject of being whole-hearted.
SPEAKER_01: She's described well-adjusted, joyful people as living and loving with their whole heart.
SPEAKER_01: She writes about such people as not being the most talented, not being the most successful, not making the most money, not even being the most self-sufficient.
SPEAKER_01: So she describes her journey this way in the 10,000 interviews she did.
SPEAKER_01: The first word that came to my mind in my research was wholehearted.
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't sure what it meant.
SPEAKER_01: I had a lot of questions about wholeheartedness.
SPEAKER_01: What did these folks value?
SPEAKER_01: As I started analyzing the stories and looking for recurring themes, I realized that the patterns generally fell into two kinds of people.
SPEAKER_01: Two columns.
SPEAKER_01: One column was dripping with words like perfection, numbing, certainty, exhaustion, self-sufficiency, being cool, fitting in, judgment, and an attitude of scarcity.
SPEAKER_01: But in the other column, the wholehearted column, I discovered words like worthiness, rest, play, trust, faith, intuition, hope, belonging, joy, gratitude, and creativity.
SPEAKER_01: So men and women, God wants us to be God saturated, and as we're God saturated with Him, He gives us hope.
SPEAKER_01: I heard a quote the other day the man with the most hope always has the most influence.
SPEAKER_01: I love that quote.
SPEAKER_01: The man or the woman with the most hope is the one who will carry the most influence.
SPEAKER_01: Thirdly and lastly, a singleness of focus.
SPEAKER_01: A single focus.
SPEAKER_01: Unlike Saul before him, David will walk into a battle with a single focus of God's glory and God's power.
SPEAKER_01: So look at 1 Samuel 17, and we'll cover this more in the weeks ahead, the famous story of David and Goliath.
SPEAKER_01: But I just want to camp on David's attitude here at the end.
SPEAKER_01: Look at verse 43.
SPEAKER_01: So let me paint the picture, and I know I'm running out of time, so I apologize.
SPEAKER_01: I'm just going to read it real quickly.
SPEAKER_01: We'll cover it more in the weeks ahead because it's such a powerful passage.
SPEAKER_01: But here's what's interesting.
SPEAKER_01: David, don't miss this now.
SPEAKER_01: David walks into a Goliath-dominated valley.
SPEAKER_01: Let me say that again.
SPEAKER_01: David walks into a Goliath-dominated valley, the valley of Elih.
SPEAKER_01: And what I mean is that all the soldiers of Israel were Goliath-dominated in their thinking.
SPEAKER_01: Some of you are Goliath-dominated all the time.
SPEAKER_01: All you think about are the obstacles, all you think about are the mountains in your life.
SPEAKER_01: David walks in, listen, with a God-saturated consciousness.
SPEAKER_01: David walks into the valley of Elah with a God-saturated consciousness, and he couldn't, and I really mean this, he's 13, and he couldn't care less about Goliath.
SPEAKER_01: All Goliath is, is an obstacle in the way of the glory of God.
SPEAKER_01: So we pick it up in verse 43, because he's disdained by this giant.
SPEAKER_01: So the Philistine said to David, Am I some kind of a dog that you come to me with sticks?
SPEAKER_01: And the Philistine cursed David by his gods.
SPEAKER_01: And the Philistine said to David, Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.
SPEAKER_01: Then David said to the Philistine, You come to me with a sword, with a spear, and a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.
SPEAKER_01: This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you.
SPEAKER_01: It's a 13-year-old.
SPEAKER_01: Come on.
SPEAKER_01: 13.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm just like, I dig this kid.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I like this kid.
SPEAKER_01: This is David, a man after God's own heart.
SPEAKER_01: What God can do to create within our spirit a new consciousness of what God can do through us, because we're God saturated and we're wholehearted.
SPEAKER_01: So he just doesn't mix words.
SPEAKER_01: You come to me with a sword and a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.
SPEAKER_01: This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you and take your head from you.
SPEAKER_01: And this day I will give the carcasses of the camp of the Philistines to the birds of the air and the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.
SPEAKER_01: Thirteen years old.
SPEAKER_01: Come on! Come on! Then all this assembly shall know that the Lord does not save with sword or a spear.
SPEAKER_01: For the battle is the Lord's, and he's going to give you into my hands.
SPEAKER_01: And so it was when the Philistine arose and came and drew near to meet David, that David heard and ran toward the army to meet the Philistine, and we'll stop right there.
SPEAKER_01: In the weeks ahead, we'll look at what happened.
SPEAKER_01: Like you don't know.
SPEAKER_01: But here's the reality, men and women.
SPEAKER_01: God's looking for a singleness of purpose.
SPEAKER_01: God is looking for God-saturated men, women, and children.
SPEAKER_01: And God is excited to reveal himself.
SPEAKER_01: God is excited to reveal himself to men, women, and children that are fully alive.
SPEAKER_01: Fully alive.
SPEAKER_01: 100% all in.
SPEAKER_01: It's the only way to live.
SPEAKER_00: You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.
SPEAKER_00: We hope you have been blessed by today's message.
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SPEAKER_00: Thanks again for tuning in today, and be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.