SPEAKER_00: Well, good morning.
SPEAKER_00: We are studying our way through the book of 2 Samuel.
SPEAKER_00: Today we are in chapters 22 and 23, and these are David's last words as King.
SPEAKER_00: It's his final chance to tell us what matters and what matters most.
SPEAKER_00: Now, back in 2008, there was a book written called The Last Lecture.
SPEAKER_00: Not sure if you read it.
SPEAKER_00: It was on the New York Times bestseller list.
SPEAKER_00: There was a number one book.
SPEAKER_00: Randy Posh was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon.
SPEAKER_00: And after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, he gave a last lecture.
SPEAKER_00: It was his chance.
SPEAKER_00: And he didn't focus on his death.
SPEAKER_00: He took his chance to tell and teach what matters most.
SPEAKER_00: And then his book ended up being that lecture, what he thought matters most in life.
SPEAKER_00: And this is exactly what's going on here in 2 Samuel 22 and 23.
SPEAKER_00: It is David's chance to have a last lecture.
SPEAKER_00: It's David's chance to tell us and convey to us what matters most.
SPEAKER_00: So let's jump in.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to work our way through these two chapters.
SPEAKER_00: 2 Samuel chapter 22, verses 1 through 4.
SPEAKER_00: And David spoke to the Lord the words of this song on the day when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul.
SPEAKER_00: He said, The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold and my refuge, my savior.
SPEAKER_00: You save me from violence.
SPEAKER_00: I call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies.
SPEAKER_00: Now David goes on to describe himself as overwhelmed by death, and in his distress he cries out to the Lord for help.
SPEAKER_00: In verse 7, there's a turning point in the passage.
SPEAKER_00: Verses 7 and 8.
SPEAKER_00: In my distress I called upon the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: To my God I called.
SPEAKER_00: From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry came to his ears.
SPEAKER_00: Then the earth reeled and rocked.
SPEAKER_00: The foundations of the heavens trembled and quaked because he was angry.
SPEAKER_00: In verses 9 through 16, David goes on to use vivid poetry, that God responds to David's plea and his prayer.
SPEAKER_00: God responds like a divine warrior in this poetry.
SPEAKER_00: That the earth shakes and the heavens bow and storm clouds gather, thunder roars.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 17, He sent from on high, he took me, He drew me out of many waters.
SPEAKER_00: He rescued me from my strong enemy, from those who hated me, for they were too mighty for me.
SPEAKER_00: They confronted me on the day of my calamity, but the Lord was my support.
SPEAKER_00: And we're going to come back to that verse 20, but our point, point number one, is this our present faith rests on God's past faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: Your present faith today rests on God's past faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: David's praise is flowing from God's past faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: 30 years ago, author, Pastor John Piper, he wrote a book called Future Grace.
SPEAKER_00: Changed my life when I read it.
SPEAKER_00: We've talked about it before.
SPEAKER_00: The premise is this.
SPEAKER_00: Piper said, we use God's past faithfulness to fuel our present faith.
SPEAKER_00: How do I have faith today?
SPEAKER_00: Well, let's look back, let's remember at God's past faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: Philippians 4, 19, and my God will supply every need of yours.
SPEAKER_00: Great, according to his riches and the glory of Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, great.
SPEAKER_00: So God provides for me, God's with me.
SPEAKER_00: Great, great, great.
SPEAKER_00: That's preacher stuff.
SPEAKER_00: But how do how do I how do I live from that place?
SPEAKER_00: Like on Monday or Tuesday, how do I live from that place?
SPEAKER_00: And that's how 2 Samuel connects for us because we see David doing it.
SPEAKER_00: We see David looking back, contemplating, remembering God's past faithfulness, pulling it into the present to fuel a present-day experience.
SPEAKER_00: We could say it this way: Because God has been faithful, we can trust that God will continue to be faithful.
SPEAKER_00: Here are five ways, just possibilities that may play out in your life.
SPEAKER_00: We call them applications, I always like to call them implications of God's grace.
SPEAKER_00: Remember God's faithfulness more than your fears.
SPEAKER_00: Because the God who was with you yesterday will not leave you today.
SPEAKER_00: Preach the gospel to your heart every day.
SPEAKER_00: Because the cross is God's unchanging declaration that He is for you and will never let you go.
SPEAKER_00: Lean into God's promises, not your own strength.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we, I don't know if you notice it through the passage.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we kept hearing David saying.
SPEAKER_00: Saying, My refuge, my shield, my strength, yet God, but God.
SPEAKER_00: The grace that saved you is the grace that will sustain you.
SPEAKER_00: We're leaning into God's promises.
SPEAKER_00: Number four, bring today's burdens to the Heavenly Father.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to carry tomorrow.
SPEAKER_00: God has already gone there ahead of you.
SPEAKER_00: We can trust that because we can look back, remember God's faithfulness, let it fuel your trust for today, and therefore walk forward with hope.
SPEAKER_00: The story of your life, the story of whatever is going on today and your relationships and your job and the difficulties and disappointment, that story is not over.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus holds the future.
SPEAKER_00: Back to Samuel.
SPEAKER_00: Samuel 22, 21 through 28.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord dealt with me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands, he rewarded me, for I have kept the ways of the Lord, and have not wickedly departed from my God, for all his rules were before me, and from his statues I did not turn aside.
SPEAKER_00: I was blameless before him, and I kept myself from guilt.
SPEAKER_00: And the Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness, according to my cleanness in his sight.
SPEAKER_00: With the merciful you show yourself merciful.
SPEAKER_00: With the blameless man you show yourself blameless.
SPEAKER_00: With the purified you deal purely.
SPEAKER_00: With the crooked, you make yourself seem torturous.
SPEAKER_00: You save a humble people, but your eyes are on the haughty to bring them down.
SPEAKER_00: Now we could read that and become incredibly self-righteous.
SPEAKER_00: Let's remember who wrote it: King David, an adulterer and pretty much a murderer.
SPEAKER_00: The context of this story, in the context of this chapter, is David highlighting God's grace, not self-righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: David is speaking of a righteousness in terms, in the context of God's covenant with us, God's grace to us, not our perfection.
SPEAKER_00: Jump back in, verse 29.
SPEAKER_00: For you are my lamp, O Lord, and my God lightens my darkness, for by you I can run against a troop, and by my God I can leap over a wall.
SPEAKER_00: This God, his way is perfect.
SPEAKER_00: The word the Lord proves true.
SPEAKER_00: He is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.
SPEAKER_00: David goes on to describe that God strengthened him and equipped him.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 37, you gave me a wide place for my steps under me, and my feet did not slip.
SPEAKER_00: And then David goes on to recount victories over his enemies.
SPEAKER_00: The point is this our victory is not self-generated.
SPEAKER_00: It's God empowered.
SPEAKER_00: And what we just keep hearing is David is seeing all his successes through God's grace.
SPEAKER_00: That the good that's come out of his life, the triumphs, he's understanding the full context of how he got there.
SPEAKER_00: How did he get this goodness?
SPEAKER_00: How did he get this victory?
SPEAKER_00: Well, that was through God's grace to him.
SPEAKER_00: Verses 47 through 51, he begins to flesh this out more.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord lives, blessed be my rock and exalted be my God, the rock of my salvation, the God who gave me vengeance and brought down people under me, who brought me out from my enemies.
SPEAKER_00: You exalted me above those who rose against me.
SPEAKER_00: You delivered me from the men of violence.
SPEAKER_00: For this I will praise you, right?
SPEAKER_00: Past faithfulness, fueling present-day faith and praise.
SPEAKER_00: For this I will praise you, O Lord, among the nations and sing praises to your name.
SPEAKER_00: Great salvation he brings to his king and shows steadfast love to his anointed, to David and his offspring forever.
SPEAKER_00: Point number three is this God's deliverance of us is connected to God's promises to us.
SPEAKER_00: The focus of the text widens from David into David's offspring, and that's pointing us to the greater king to come.
SPEAKER_00: All right, so let's Bible study a little bit.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, 2 Samuel 7, 16 is the promise that God gave to David.
SPEAKER_00: And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me, your throne shall be established forever.
SPEAKER_00: There's the promise to David.
SPEAKER_00: Acts 13, 22 and 23.
SPEAKER_00: And when he had this in the New Testament, and when he had removed him, he raised up David to be their king, of whom he testified and said, I have found in David, the son of Jesse, a man after my own heart who will do my will, and of this man's offspring, God has brought an Israel to Israel, a Savior, Jesus, as he promised.
SPEAKER_00: See, the story of God's faithfulness and care to David and David's family is not a story of David's self-righteousness, perfection, or even David's faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: It's the story of God's covenant promise to him, and God saying, I will uphold the promise I gave to him.
SPEAKER_00: What does any and all of that have to do with your life?
SPEAKER_00: Well, what it means is when God promises something, he fulfills it.
SPEAKER_00: That means everything for your life.
SPEAKER_00: Because what that means is when he says to you, beloved child, I'm with you.
SPEAKER_00: It means, beloved child, I'm with you.
SPEAKER_00: And it's not dependent on your record or your self-righteousness because it's dependent upon his covenant promised to you and his faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: What it means is when God says, in Jesus you're fully forgiven, it means in Jesus you're fully forgiven.
SPEAKER_00: Because it's not based on your record or your self-righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: It's based on his covenant promise to you and his faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: What it means is when God says, in Jesus you're fully righteous, you're fully my beloved, pure, righteous son and daughter, I delight in you.
SPEAKER_00: It means you really are that because of God's covenant promise and his faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: So all of that, 2 Samuel 22, where we see David looking at past faithfulness, living out of this promise, it's the same thing we do today.
SPEAKER_00: We live out of the covenant promise and God's faithfulness to us.
SPEAKER_00: Let's jump into chapter 23.
SPEAKER_00: This is David speaking, the Spirit of the Lord speaks by me, his word is on my tongue.
SPEAKER_00: The God of Israel has spoken, the rock of Israel has said to me, When one rules justly over men ruling in the fear of God, he dawns on them like the morning light, like the sun shining forth on a cloudless morning, like rain that makes grass to sprout from the earth.
SPEAKER_00: David then confesses that he and his house and his family, they are far from the ideal.
SPEAKER_00: Yet God promised him.
SPEAKER_00: For he has made me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and secure.
SPEAKER_00: For will he not cause to prosper all my help and my desire?
SPEAKER_00: See, all of David's life and the goodness is coming from the root of God's pursuit of David.
SPEAKER_00: We have to remember in every word we read, this guy's an absolute mess when it comes to his record.
SPEAKER_00: Like if we're gonna put up the spiritual report card here, I mean, this guy's at the bottom of the list.
SPEAKER_00: And yet he's the one saying, God's my refuge because he knows God's faithful.
SPEAKER_00: Pointer four is this, all kings point us to the greater King Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Over and over again, David's hope rests not in himself, but in God's everlasting covenant, which means that all the spiritual anxiety that we feel, how righteous am I today?
SPEAKER_00: Am I love today?
SPEAKER_00: It can just all go away.
SPEAKER_00: Because it's not based on your record or your righteousness, it's based in Jesus' record and righteousness, and God is faithful to uphold that for you.
SPEAKER_00: David's last words, his last lecture are all about God being faithful.
SPEAKER_00: Even while we are not always faithful.
SPEAKER_00: Point number five is this in Jesus, God does not put up with us.
SPEAKER_00: God delights in us.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, I said we're gonna come back to that 2 Samuel 22 verse 20.
SPEAKER_00: He, God brought me out into a broad place.
SPEAKER_00: He rescued me because he delighted in me.
SPEAKER_00: You ever been in that tight place, that confined place?
SPEAKER_00: You feel enslaved, burdened, overwhelmed, and then you get a breakthrough.
SPEAKER_00: God gives you a breakthrough, God intervenes, a door opens.
SPEAKER_00: The image of being brought to a broad place that always reminds me of this hike that I love in Teton National Park is called Death Canyon.
SPEAKER_00: And this hike, it's a canyon on the other side of Phelps Lake, and you can see that's you hike up into that canyon, and there's a stream coming.
SPEAKER_00: It's lovely, it is lovely.
SPEAKER_00: But the entire time you're in the canyon, it is tight.
SPEAKER_00: You're confined.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have broad, open views.
SPEAKER_00: But then you get to the top of the canyon, you get into this open, broad area called the Alaska Basin, and it opens up.
SPEAKER_00: It's spacious, it's open, it's it's freeing.
SPEAKER_00: Feels restful.
SPEAKER_00: See, God brings us there.
SPEAKER_00: God wants to take you there.
SPEAKER_00: Open, spacious, freeing.
SPEAKER_00: Why would he want to do that?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, does he want to do that because of your record, your spiritual record?
SPEAKER_00: Does he want to do that because he's impressed with you?
SPEAKER_00: Does he want to do that because you've just been a really good Christian the past three weeks?
SPEAKER_00: It's been wonderful.
SPEAKER_00: He's so amazed.
SPEAKER_00: He's amazed at you.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 20, he brought me out into a broad place.
SPEAKER_00: He rescued me because he delighted in me.
SPEAKER_00: He delighted in me.
SPEAKER_00: The Hebrew word delight means to take pleasure in, cherish, desire, or favor, to be pleased with.
SPEAKER_00: And to this, God says that he delights in you.
SPEAKER_00: I think about who wrote this.
SPEAKER_00: David was the king, but an adulterer, basically a murderer.
SPEAKER_00: And to that royal mess of a human being, he says, I delight in you.
SPEAKER_00: I want to take you to freeing places, open places.
SPEAKER_00: This week I was thinking about that word delight.
SPEAKER_00: And when I was a little boy, um, grew up in plantation woods, and we had a plantation woods swimming racquet club in the summertime.
SPEAKER_00: We'd all be down at the pool swimming.
SPEAKER_00: And then the boys, me and my little gang of boys, we'd we would, every once in a while, we'd get on our bikes and we'd ride to the front of the neighborhood because there was a dairy delight at the front of the neighborhood.
SPEAKER_00: We weren't allowed to tell our parents we were going up there.
SPEAKER_00: We had to do this kind of clean dust, and we'd ride up there, we'd each get a dollar bill, and we would ride through the drive-thru of the Dairy Delight.
SPEAKER_00: We thought it was so fun.
SPEAKER_00: And we would order the soft serve dipped in butterscotch, Dairy Delight cone.
SPEAKER_00: You remember our Dairy Delight's still even around?
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: We'd go sit on the curb at Eckert Drugstore, and we would eat this ice cream cone.
SPEAKER_00: This delight, and we just little boys on a summer day, I mean, just cherish it.
SPEAKER_00: That's the word delight.
SPEAKER_00: Like, I cherish this.
SPEAKER_00: I long to be with this.
SPEAKER_00: The greatest metaphor for God in the Bible is a heavenly father.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, even Jesus says, hey, when you call God, when you call on him, just go ahead and call him Abba.
SPEAKER_00: Just go ahead and call him loving Papa.
SPEAKER_00: It would be the best way for you to think about him.
SPEAKER_00: Artist Charles Macassy, he's drawn three powerful image images of our relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: He illustrates how God is a loving papa.
SPEAKER_00: How God delights in you.
SPEAKER_00: Not because of anything you've done.
SPEAKER_00: See, in the images, in every image, the child is the one in need, needing to be rescued.
SPEAKER_00: Love comes to the child.
SPEAKER_00: Beloved, in Jesus, God does not endure you.
SPEAKER_00: He adores you.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't put up with you.
SPEAKER_00: He delights in you.
SPEAKER_00: And he can do this fully because Jesus is that sufficient for all of our messes and brokenness and sin.
SPEAKER_00: And our record that's just never quite good enough, our record is fully righteous because of Jesus' righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: So when he looks on you, he looks on you like he looks on his own son, Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Fully righteous.
SPEAKER_00: He delights in you.
SPEAKER_00: He can't love you anymore.
SPEAKER_00: So on Father's Day, we celebrate our fathers.
SPEAKER_00: We're so thankful for our fathers.
SPEAKER_00: And as God's beloved, we know the Heavenly Father delights in us.
SPEAKER_00: If you have any questions about the sermon or need prayer, I'll be down front afterwards.
SPEAKER_00: Love to pray with you.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, what an honor that we get to say Abba, loving Papa.
SPEAKER_00: What an honor to be weak and weary in your arms.
SPEAKER_00: To say and to confess that it's not our record.
SPEAKER_00: We are not impressive.
SPEAKER_00: And yet you delight in us because you promise that you'll love us, because you are faithful to uphold the promise.
SPEAKER_00: And we can see the promise in history in the cross of Jesus, where your love is displayed objectively, and we can always look to it to let it fuel our present faith today that you are with us, you are for us, we are forgiven, we are righteous, and we are loved.
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name we pray.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.