David: The boy who became king
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“She was staring out the window of their SUV, complaining, saying I can’t wait till im 18. She said, "I'll make my own money, and I'll make my own rules"
That is the start to one of my favorite country songs growing up. Your gonna miss this, by Trace Adkins.
The song goes on from the young girl waiting to turn 18 to being a new bride in a small 1 bedroom apartment, telling her dad, It will do for now. But i have bigger plans.
Then the song continues, Five years later, there's a plumber, working on the water heater, Dog's barking, phone's ringing, one kid's crying, one kid's screaming, And she keeps apologizing.
At every turn of life, the main character of the song is yearning for the future. Aspiring to what is just ahead. But every other person in the song is telling her, Whoa, whoa, whoa, just wait, slow down, be patient.
Because you are going to miss this. We are all the same right? We can’t wait to get married, then we get to the newborn and we say, man, they are great. But if only they could smile, laugh, or I could play with them.
Then they start moving and opening cabinets and needing to be watched every second, and you're like, ugh, if they could just not put stuff in their mouth for 5 seconds! We keep yearning, and waiting for the next phase. I can’t wait to be done with diapers, to get my kids in school so I don’t have to pay for day care, etc.
Then we get to when they turn teenagers and we go Oh no! please no, save me, go back, go back, go back!
And just like the young lady at the start of the song, we are all impatient. Days fly by, and days become months and months become years, and for most of our lives, we are just looking ahead.
There is just about no one I know who had a harder wait than David. At about 15 years old, David is anointed king by God’s prophet. Saul sits on the throne, but it is no longer his. And for 15 more years, David has to tend sheep, play music, slay giants, and run away from Saul, who seeks to kill him because he knows David is the rightful heir to the throne of Israel.
And for about 7 or so of those 15 years, we think, David is actually a vagrant in his own kingdom. Running cave to cave, escaping and running from Saul. Sleeping on rocks and watching his every move.
But in our text today, we see David finally gets the chance to become king. To put an end to his misery, to kill this interloper on his throne, and get fitted for his long-awaited crown.
Saul, on the hunt for David, needs a bathroom break and goes into a random cave to relieve himself. David and his men are far back in this cave, and they see the easiest target ever. It is like David is in the movie Home Alone, and the robber is stuck in a window or in one of his traps. Saul is literally caught with his pants down.
And his soldiers tell David, here is your chance to fulfill what God had told you, what you have heard from everyone, even Jonathan, Saul's own son, that your enemies will be destroyed and you will reign as king.
But David can not bring himself to do it. Not only does he refuse to do it, but he keeps his men from doing it as well. Don't forget they are on the run as well!
David tells his men,
“The Lord forbid that I should put out my hand against the Lord's anointed.”
“As the Lord lives, the Lord will strike him, or his day will come to die, or he will go down into battle and perish.” Saul will die, but it will not be by my hand.
Okay, fine, it happens once, but just two chapters later, Saul goes back on his word and is at David's throat again. He finds Saul's army asleep in a valley. David sneaks up to the king with one of his trusted soldiers and again we see everything line up perfectly. Saul's own spear lies just a few inches from where his head lies.
The same spear Saul had thrown at David years ago. Divine retribution. Divine providence. One simple movement, and David goes home a free man. But again, even with all the stars aligned David realizes this is not actually God's will.
Wait. wait on the Lord.
As I contemplated David a different story came to me. A young man I met when I first started working in Arizona. In the English classes I helped out at, a young man just a few years older than me, told me his story.
He was born in the 90s in the Democratic Republic of Congo. When he was about 3 or 4 years old, his family had to flee what has been described as Africa's world war. Simply because of where he was born and what tribe he was a part of.
As a refugee, his family went from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Rwanda, where he would soon be the victim of one of the deadliest genocides ever. Those same violent ghosts of his past followed him to his new country. Before he could find a home, before he could learn to read or write. Before friends were even made, violence was at his doorstep once again.
So again, he fled. He fled from violence he had no part of, he ran from genocide he had no role in, he escaped from war he was never involved in.
He left his home at three or four. I met him in his first 6 months in the United States at 27 years old. For 22 years of his life, he fled from violence. For 22 years, he ran from shack to shack, jungle to jungle, just trying to survive. He started off as a young child fleeing with his family. When he arrived in the United States at 27, and alone. I do not know what happened to the family he started with; I was too afraid to ask.
That young man's name was Innocence. Innocent of the politics of the civil war, innocent of the hate that created a genocide, Innocence still suffered at the hands of men with hate brooding in their evil hearts.
So, David, a man after God’s heart, likewise suffered at the hands of Saul. A man doing everything he could with a red face and white knuckles to cling to his stolen throne.
But it is not David alone. It is the whole Bible that is trying to teach us to wait, be patient, and rest in hope and faith that God will provide. Think of Abraham, waiting for the promised heir. He tries to usurp God by forcing Hagar to have his heir instead.
Abraham, also lacking in trust, tells two kings that his wife is his sister because he is afraid they will snatch her from him.
Moses tried to save his people through a single violent act, and so he spent the next 40 years wandering in the desert learning how to be a leader. If that was not enough, He spent another 40 years trying to teach the Israelites how to obey God.
Think even of the story of Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers, then falsely accused and sent to prison. 13 years Joseph worked as a slave and rotted in prison. But unlike all these others, he patiently waited, knowing that what God had proclaimed would still be true. Knowing that any endeavor to take their lives into their own hands and force the issues would be useless.
The Prophet Micah reminds us “But as for me, I will look to the Lord, I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me. // Micah 7:7
You see I think we get off track, we get off course when we stop following Jesus. When we are no longer looking for the Holy Spirit to lead us and because of that we lose our telos, our goal, or God’s plan for our life.
Tish Harrision Warren talks about the process this way.
We go on with our lives like our commute home. We have a final destination we are trying to get back to. But oftentimes we hit traffic, and sometimes it feels like a dead stop.
But, if we forget where we are going, and why we are driving in the first place, distracted by the traffic, then we, she says, are “Like drivers stuck in traffic who get out of their cars and put out cots, fight over jumper cables for AC and stake out land and cook hamburgers. “We each stake out our own territory and try to eke out an existence on the interstate, believing that these gasoline fumes and concrete pillars are all there is; this is the way the world always has been and always will be. It would be a disaster. Out of touch with larger reality, we would have lost our telos. We'd have forgotten that there are better ways to live.”
We get so caught up in our careers, our worries, our anxieties that we wander around like sheep without a shepherd. Forgetting why we are here, and what purpose we have been given. So we slowly get sucked more and more into the world where our christian lives take a back seat to our day to day and Jesus becomes little more than the person we say hello to every couple of weeks when we find the time.
But for David, God was everything. He hoped and planned to do nothing outside of God’s plan. He dared not cut in front of God.
A few months ago I was meeting with my professor. I was asking what do I do? I am doing this church plant but its… hard. We aren’t growing like we should, people come, people go. We plan stuff and people don’t show up and everyone I meet already goes to church. In that meeting he reminded me of my freshmen year of college.
My freshmen year I was kind of over all of this. It felt like I was learning nothing of value, and it cost a bunch of money and time. And people were dying still not knowing the name of Jesus. So I went to my professor and mentor, I said why should I stay here? Well over half the world is going to die without saving faith in Jesus. Why am I wasting time here, I have a Bible, I can buy all these books you all teach out of anyways, why stay?
Sola Scriptura right?
But College prepared me to wait. I had no idea how to do missions, how to preach, teach, or disciple. If I had jumped on the first plane to Madagascar to teach people about Jesus I would have failed miserably. God needed to prepare in me not just a mind oriented towards the things of God, but a soul oriented and discipled by Christ.
I was told to be careful lest I jump in front of God. He showed me in the Bible all the Biblical leaders who waited. Did you know despite already being a pharisee and religious leader and knowing the entire OT front to back Paul spent 11 years from his conversion until he got his first teaching assignment from the church. ELEVEN YEARS!
The only reason we are equipped to follow Jesus and bring others alongside us is because of the Holy Spirit. If you take away the indwelling and the formation of the Holy Spirit, regardless of how much training we have, we are nothing more than a bunch of blind people leading an art museum tour.
As careful as David was to not cut in front of God he was also certain to not lag behind. When God finally tells you to move, to act, you better be ready.
Dr. King knew this well. During the civil rights movement a bunch of well-meaning northern White christians continued writing to MLK telling him to wait. That with time segregation would go away and voting would come. That with time the hate in the racist southerners hearts would go away.
But MLK wrote in his letter from Birmingham jail that time is neutral, if people who mean to do good do nothing than the people who wish to evil will succeed.
Slide
“Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God”
MLK, John Lewis, and the other Christian civil rights leaders knew it was time to work because they had communed with God. So in 1965 in Selma Alabama, led by the Spirit of God they attempted to walk across Edmund Pettus Bridge in order to campaign for voting Rights. The first attempt was met with tear gas, violent police officers wielding clubs, vicious dogs, and police officers on horseback chasing down fleeing protestors.
You would think this persecution, 17 hospitalizations and over 50 injuries would be a sign that it was not God's will. That they had stepped in front of God. But in reality this event was televised for the whole world to see for the first time. For the first time the rest of the country saw this brutality and injustice. They saw segregation and jim crow for what it really was, barbaric hatred of the worst kind.
So nearly a month later they walked across that bridge once again. No clubs were swung, no dogs biting, no fire hoses unleashed. Because they knew that God was leading them, they had hope that could not be snuffed out.
So they walked. And it directly led to the passing of the 1965 voting rights act.
How did they do it? How did they wait, and then how did they act, even though the world seemed to be against them?
SLIDE
Philippians 4: 6-8 “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
SLIDE
The historian Robert Wilken tells us plainly, “The singular mark of patience is not endurance or fortitude but hope. To be impatient . .. is to live without hope. Patience is grounded in the Resurrection. It is life oriented toward a future that is God's doing, and its sign is longing, not so much to be released from the ills of the present, but in anticipation of the good to come."
They walked because they had hope. We walk, and wait, on the expectation, the understanding, the certainty of where our hope lies.
Conclusion: David had been anointed king. But he waited because had hope.
For years, he had spent time sitting in the palace but not sitting on the throne. He had fought for the glory of Israel and their God, but only as a soldier. For nearly 7 years, he had fled from Saul, that traitorous man who disobeyed God and illegally squatted on David's throne. Everyone in the kingdom knew it; Saul's own son knew David belonged on the throne.
And yet that interloper chases David down, spear in hand, ready to kill in order to keep what was never his. And now, after waiting more than a decade, the only thing between David and his crown is a thrust of a spear, a swing of a sword. Then, it would all be over. He could reign!
But he dared not do such a wicked thing. He, a man after God’s own heart, knew how to wait. To not take vengeance into his own hands. He would be king when God had made him king, no sooner, no later.
Just like all the spiritual leaders of the Bible, we all have times in the wilderness, even Jesus went through a time of testing and waiting. Because it is there, in the wilderness, in the desert of life, the dark nights of the soul, that God speaks. God shapes. God defines, prunes, and molds.
Right now, we all sit here, in a small church striving to survive. We sit here in the wilderness of waiting. Yearning to hear from God where we are to go, what we are to do. What is his purpose for this place..
But any attempt to speed up the process or jump in line will ultimately fail. If we get ahead of God and what he plans to do we can be assured that we will not make it. It is only through God alone.
And any leader in the faith not moving according to the will of God is no longer fit for duty. So if you ever see me moving contrary to the will of God for my life and this church.. Then call me out on it.
So like David standing before Saul, hilt in hand, blade ready to swing, we wait. We sheathe our swords and we wait for the right time, we wait for God’s spirit to speak, even if it means temporary pain and tribulation. And like Dr. King, we act. With forceful determination and a courageous heart, we walk the path set before us. Not to the right or two left but ahead, with Jesus leading the way.
So we must be like Jesus, wait on the Lord, be patient, rest in hope, and seek out his will for your life. For if you wait for his timing, no matter how hard it might be, there is a hope that will not be hoped for in vain.