<< Back to March 2001 Sermons

2001
4th March (am) - David and Romance
1 Samuel 25

Did you notice the poster on the front noticeboard as you came into church today? It reads:

Church: If it's only there for Weddings and a Funeral .... then U are missing out!

Hopefully it might help to make passers-by stop and think - there is more to church than the ceremonial occasions and important milestones of life - so much more, that we all need and cannot really afford to miss out on!

I suppose the poster is a really a play on the title of a film that was very popular a few years ago - Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Well, there's only one wedding and one funeral in today's part of the story of David - although there could easily have been many more funerals if David had got his way.

You remember, it's the story of how the wealthy sheep farmer, Nabal, refused to give David any food supplies - David wanted to take very angry revenge on Nabal, and was only prevented from doing so by the wise intervention of Nabal's wife, Abigail.

In the end, Nabal's sudden death occurs after a drunken feast - hence the funeral - and, fairly soon afterwards David marries Nabal's widow, Abigail - hence the wedding. Once again, we are going to find that this 3000 year old episode in the life of David has remarkably important things to teach us - both about ourselves and about God - for despite all the changes since the time of David, we are probably not all that different from him, and the God David believed in is the God we worship today.

This story today is about how David was protected from being his own worst enemy - protected from doing something unwise and very wrong, something that, in later years, would have been on his conscience with terrible regret. This is a story of God stopping David from doing what he wanted to do - blocking and changing David's plans and intentions

- God's over-ruling love and wisdom, even though David maybe didn't see it that way at first.

And maybe God still does that in our lives sometimes - things that don't go the way we think they should - protecting us from ourselves. Maybe as people of faith in Jesus Christ, we need to learn the lessons that David learnt through the episode with Nabal and Abigail.

So here, firstly, we see how David was protected from his own inclinations. David's natural inclination was to 'hit back' at a man who had treated him unreasonably and selfishly. Nabal - the wealthy sheep farmer had refused David's request for extra food supplies at a the festival which was held at the sheep shearing season - and in doing so he had made pretty uncomplimentary remarks about David.

This was even though Nabal's shepherds knew that David and his men had helped and protected them in all sorts of ways - 'night and day they were a wall round us' (vs.16) - probably from marauding tribe of desert sheep stealers.

So David's request was not really out of order, but as the story makes very clear, Nabal was an utterly unreasonable and unlikable kind of man - even his wife and his servants could see that - 'he is such a wicked man no-one can talk to him (vs.18); he is a fool, said his wife, Abigail. (vs.25)

So when Nabal bluntly turned away David's messengers, David's natural inclination was to tell his men to arm themselves immediately and get ready to deal with Nabal. If David had got his way, Nabal would have paid a very high price for refusing help to David. Only the intervention of a servant and of Abigail, prevented David from doing what he was inclined to do - he was protected from his own inclinations - from bloodshed that he would come to have seen to be wrong - from actions that he could not have put right.

With the help of the servant, Abigail took generous food supplies to David and his men, and pleaded with David not to get involved in a fight with Nabal - not to take the law into his own hands - not to do something that he would later regret.

David listened to her, and recognised that through her God was protecting him from himself - stopping him doing what he wanted to do, for his own good.

vs.32 Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, who has sent you today to meet me. May you be blessed for your good judgment and for keeping me from bloodshed.......

At the end of the day, David could see that it was a good job that he hadn't got his way - a good thing that things didn't work out the way he thought they should. And, for David, a man of faith, he knew that this was the hand of God at work in his life - this was God's goodness, love and wisdom, protecting David from his own folly and danger.

I wonder if is not like that for us sometimes - that there are times when we need to be protected from ourselves - from our own inclinations and the disastrous mistakes that we would make if left to our own ways - and that God does protect us in that way, even though we cannot see it at the time.

Indeed, sometimes life can be very frustrating when our plans do not work out the way we want - a job opportunity doesn't work out the way we hoped; exam results are disappointing, plans for the house .... maybe even bigger issues in marriage, family or church life seem to go wrong.

Could it ever be that we need to see this as God doing something in our lives doing something for the long term good of or lives, even protecting us from the foolish choices, unwise decisions of our own natural inclinations.

Maybe we need to learn to look back and realise that, unknown to us, unrecognised at the time, God has protected us with loving goodness and great wisdom - for our natural inclinations would have done us no good at all. - what might our lives have been like if we had been allowed to do what we wanted to do.

Maybe we need to realise that God just as God used Abigail and the unnamed servant to protect David from his own inclinations, so he has used people in our lives - we should maybe be looking back, thankfully for those people - for their caring about us, for their wisdom, for the courage they showed in saying difficult things to us at the time - which protected us from our own inclinations.

And through it all, maybe we need to remind ourselves that this is how much God cares about our lives - even when we are not thinking about him or don't even recognise that he is there - he is protecting us from pushing the foolish, self-destruct button.

When we realise God is like that, ought it not to make us really get our lives right with him - through a proper submitting of our lives, by faith in Christ, shouldn't we give him the full opportunity he longs for to love us and lead us?

Secondly, we see how David was also pushed back to see his own inconsistencies. David was in danger of the most glaring inconsistencies in his faith and his behaviour. Here he was on the brink of taking terrible revenge on Nabal - as he said himself, not one male belonging to Nabal would have been left alive by daybreak.(vs.34) Yet this was the very same David that we read about last week, in the previous chapter

- the same David who stopped his own men from taking out terrible revenge on King Saul, in the cave.

It was David who had told his men in no uncertain terms that it would be utterly wrong for them to take the law into their own hands in this way - that there was no place for acts of personal vengeance for anyone who believed in the Lord as the Judge who would deal with wrongdoing. (ch.24:12-13)

And yet, today we read of David on the brink of doing just that, in his angry reaction to the way in which Nabal had treated him.

David had said one thing, but was in real danger of doing the opposite. There was just no consistency in the way David was thinking or threatening to act. He didn't seem to see that he was in danger of contradicting everything he had told his men on that occasion at the cave. He seemed to have completely forgotten the principles of leaving punishment to God. And it was only when Abigail talked to him that David began to recognise the inconsistency of his behaviour and the wrongness of what he wanted to do.

David had to be pushed to see his inconsistency.

Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel who has sent you today ...... otherwise ......'

I wonder is there ever any sign of inconsistency in our lives?

I'm afraid that there might very well be!

It mightn't be in this area of violent revenge - God forbid - but it might still be that, as Christian people, we are often desperately inconsistent in our attitudes and behaviour - and that is not good for us, and it is not good for the impression that we give of Christian faith to others.

- Would there ever be times when we seem to say one thing in one situation, and another somewhere else?

- Would there ever be damaging inconsistency between what we look like on a Sunday and what people know us to be during the week? Is there a Sunday person and a Monday person? Would people see a contradiction between the faith we profess here in church life, and the reality they know when they meet us and relate to us and deal with us in real everyday life?

Sometimes people do notice that kind of inconsistency - they know that we are great people for our church, but they also know that we are difficult to get on with, unreliable in our work responsibilities and commitments, seemingly very dominated by our own money and possessions, maybe even almost two different people in different company and circumstances.

Such a contradiction doesn't do us much good - it is a sure sign that faith has gone much below the surface of our lives - faith hasn't really had a chance to work down into us - therefore it's not bringing faith's benefits and blessings to us ....... and it c certainly damages the way others think about faith and church.

We need to rate steady consistency very highly indeed.

Maybe the inconsistency crops up because we criticise other people for the very things we overlook in ourselves - we are hard on others and soft on ourselves - critical and judgmental about them, but always making comfortable excuses for ourselves. We see what's wrong with other people, but we can't see it in ourselves!

Does that make any sense - I'm afraid it does - it rings true for me, and maybe for you. Sometimes we need to learn the same lesson that David had to learn - the lesson of consistency - of really thinking hard about ourselves and recognising all those ways in which we still need to learn the way of Jesus for our lives - not least in taking the plank out of our own eye before we start helping people with a speck of dust in theirs.

David had to be pushed to see his own inconsistency - and so do we - for it is the people who are steady in their faith, whose words and ways show real faith in Jesus - it's those people who know the good of their faith - and it is those people who make an impression on others for faith.

Maybe one of the vital purposes of very regular Church worship and Home Group participation is to help us hear God's voice pushing us to see our own inconsistencies and helping us to do something about them.

Finally, we see how David was being prepared despite his personal inadequacies.

We know, and David knew, that he was being prepared to be King - he had been anointed as the future king of God's OT people, Israel - but it is surely very obvious that David was not by any means the rounded personality and perfect ruler material that we might expect. His life was full of inadequacies.

Today's story shows us a David who was impetuous, dangerously so - who could easily forget his own standards of faith and behaviour - who could, so easily, have done something that would have been terribly wrong, a dark blot of regret for the rest of his life - as Abigail put it, the staggering burden of needless bloodshed on his conscience (vs.31)

David still had so much to learn - so many aspects of his life and personality that needed a lot of further work - he needed to shaped into God's person, and maybe he still had a long way to go. Maybe today's episode was one of those shaping experiences brought into David's life, by God - not all that positive or pleasant at the time, but important and very necessary.

Maybe there were other aspects of David's life that were risky and fragile enough too - as we know David married Abigail, the widow of Nabal, the woman whom God used to protect David from doing something stupid. And it all seems to have happened very quickly - you can't help wondering if David was something of a ladies man - that he had a fatal attracted to beautiful women!

Here in today's story there is no suggestion of anything improper, even if it all happened very quickly after Nabal's death - but later in David's life, there certainly is an utterly improper relationship into which David enters - you wonder if today's episode hints at what may have been an area of weakness in David's life.

And yet despite these real or possible aspects of inadequacy in David's life, God had chosen him and was preparing him to be King.

And the point is that God chooses us - he offers us the hope of the Gospel, he wants to use us in the service of his kingdom - even though we are people who are imperfect and inadequate.

The Gospel does not tell us to bring our lives up to scratch and then we can be Christians - it calls us as we are, even though it does not intend to leave us there. Remember the incident by the Sea of Galilee with Peter: Lord, go away from me, I am a sinful man ...... and yet Jesus response to Peter was Don't be afraid, from now on you will be catching men ....

 

We all have our inadequate weak points - none of us are the right sort of people - few of us are the rounded Christian people we should be - there is much that still needs shaping and strengthening and changing in us.

This doesn't mean that we cannot be people of faith - indeed people of faith are people who know their own weakness and sinfulness and are earnest about their repentance and their readiness to follow Christ.

Nor does it mean that we cannot be servants of the Lord in our own lives and in our church life - few, if any of Jesus' disciples were all that they should have been - think of Peter, again, and his denying of Jesus, or James and John arguing among themselves about their own importance, or Paul admitting his on-going struggle with sin. God graciously takes very average people like you and me - all he looks for is a readiness to trust him sincerely, and to serve him willingly - and to be listeners and learners as he gradually works in us and with us, preparing us and making us able for the work he gives us to do.

Is that the attitude that is found in us? It needs to be.

So here is a wonderful lesson in the goodness and the grace and the guiding of God - a lesson for us that is real and relevant, even though it comes from the life of David so long ago.

A lesson in God's Providence:

He protected David from his own inclinations.

He pushed David to see his own inconsistencies - and to do something about them.

He prepared David for service despite his personal inadequacies.

And God who was good and gracious then, hasn't changed one bit.