Show Notes
1 Samuel 25
Pastor Christopher Chelpka
View Full Transcript
Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Our Heavenly Father, we ask that you would pour your spirit out on us, that we might hear the word of Christ and believe that we might come to see the wisdom, the righteousness and the life of our king, so that we would follow him with all that is in us, heart, soul, mind, strength.
[00:00:19] Lord, we ask that you would bless us this morning and that you would give us greater understanding, application of your word in our lives. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:00:33] Well, you may be seated and we'll turn to 1 Samuel 25 this morning.
[00:00:53] We have quite a set of events here.
[00:01:04] David, whose record has been pretty stellar up to this point, almost does some really bad things.
[00:01:15] You'll hear about those.
[00:01:17] And he's saved by a word of the Lord from a woman named Abigail, who brings wisdom to him.
[00:01:26] And thanks be to God. He listens and he hears that he pays attention.
[00:01:31] There's a lot of other details. Let's just get into it and hear God's word first. Samuel 25.
[00:01:39] It begins with the death of Samuel.
[00:01:42] A turning of the page, a new season, a sadness in a way, as this prophet of the Lord dies.
[00:01:52] Things are changing, things are happening, transitions are coming.
[00:01:58] So now Samuel died, and all Israel assembled and mourned for him. And they buried him in his house at Ramah.
[00:02:05] Then David rose and went down to the wilderness of paranoia.
[00:02:10] And there was a man in Maon whose business was in Carmel.
[00:02:14] The man was very rich. He had 3,000 sheep and a thousand goats. He was shearing his sheep in Carmel.
[00:02:21] Now, the name of the man was Nabal, and the name of the wife was Abigail.
[00:02:27] The woman was discerning and beautiful, but the man was harsh and badly behaved. He was a Calebite.
[00:02:36] David heard in the wilderness that Nabal was shearing his sheep.
[00:02:41] So David sent 10 young men. And David said to the young men, go up to Carmel and go tell Nabal and greet him in my name.
[00:02:50] And thus you shall greet him.
[00:02:52] Peace be to you, and peace be to your house, and peace be to all that you have.
[00:02:57] I hear that you have shearers.
[00:03:00] Now, your shepherds have been with us, and we did them no harm. And they missed nothing all the time they were in Carmel.
[00:03:07] Ask your young men and they will tell you. Therefore, let my young men find favor in your eyes, for we come on a feast day. Please give us whatever you have at hand to your servants and to your son David.
[00:03:21] When David's young men came, they said all this to Nabal in the name of David. And then they waited, and Nabal answered. David's servants.
[00:03:29] Who was David, who was the son of Jesse?
[00:03:33] There are many servants these days who are breaking away from their masters.
[00:03:37] Shall I take my bread and my water and my meat that I have killed for my shearers and give it to men who come from I do not know where.
[00:03:48] So David's young men turned away and came back and told him all this.
[00:03:53] And David said to his men, every man strap on his sword, and. And every man of them strapped on his sword. David also strapped on his sword. And about 400 men went up after David, while 200 remained with the baggage.
[00:04:08] And one of the young men told Abigail, Nabal's wife, behold, David sent messengers out of the wilderness to greet our master, and he railed at them. Yet the men were very good to us, and we suffered no harm. And we did not miss anything when we were in the fields as long as we went with them.
[00:04:25] They were a wall to us both night and by day. By night and by day. All the while we were with them in keeping the sheep or them we were with them keeping the sheep.
[00:04:36] Now therefore, know this and consider what you should do. For harm is determined against our master and against all his house. And he's such a worthless man that one cannot speak to him.
[00:04:48] Then Abigail made haste and took 200 loaves and. And two skins of wine and five sheep already prepared, and five seahs of parched grain and a hundred clusters of raisins and 200 cakes of figs, and laid them on donkeys. And she said to her young men, go on before me. Behold, I come after you.
[00:05:08] But she did not tell her husband the ball.
[00:05:11] And as she rode on the donkey and came down under cover of the mountain, behold, David and his men came down toward her, and she met them.
[00:05:20] Now David had said, surely in vain, I have guarded all this fellow has in the wilderness so that nothing was missed of all that belonged to him. And he has returned me evil for good God do so to the enemies of David. And more also, if by morning I leave him so much as one male of all who belong to him.
[00:05:39] When Abigail saw David, she hurried and got down from the donkey, fell before David on her face and bowed to the ground.
[00:05:48] She fell at his feet and said, on me alone, my lord, be the guilt. Please let your servant speak in your ears and hear the words of your servant. Let not, my lord, regard this worthless fellow Nabal, for as his name is, so he is.
[00:06:03] Nabal is his name, and folly is with him.
[00:06:06] But I, your servant, did not see the young men of my Lord whom you sent. Now then, my lord, as the Lord lives and as your soul lives, be because the Lord has restrained you from blood guilt and from saving you with your own hand, and from saving with your own hand. Now then, let your enemies and those who seek to do evil to my Lord be as Nabal. And now let this present that your servant has brought to my Lord be given to the young men who follow my Lord.
[00:06:36] Please forgive the trespass of your servant, for the Lord will certainly make my lord a sure house.
[00:06:43] Because my Lord is fighting the battles of Yahweh, and evil shall not be found in you so long as you live, if men rise up to pursue you and to seek your life, the life of my Lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living in the care of Yahweh, your God, and the lives of your enemies he shall sling out as from a hollow of a sling.
[00:07:05] And when the Lord Yahweh has done to my Lord according to all the good that he has spoken and concerning you, and appointed you prince over Israel, my Lord shall have no cause of grief or pangs or conscience for having shed blood without cause, or for my Lord working salvation himself.
[00:07:27] And when Yahweh has dealt well with my Lord, then remember your servant.
[00:07:34] And David said to Abigail, blessed be Yahweh, the God of Israel, who sent you this day to meet me. Blessed be your discretion, and blessed be you who have kept me this day from blood guilt and from working salvation with my own hand.
[00:07:53] For as surely as Yahweh, the God of Israel, lives, who restrained me from hurting you, unless you had hurried and come to meet me. Truly, by morning there had been nothing left to Nabal, so much as one male.
[00:08:05] Then David received from her hand what she brought him. And he said to her, go up in peace to your house.
[00:08:12] See, I have obeyed your voice and I have granted your petition.
[00:08:16] And Abigail came to Nabal. And behold, he was holding a feast in his house like the feast of a king. And Nabal's heart was merry within him, for he was very drunk.
[00:08:27] So she told him nothing at all until the morning light.
[00:08:31] In the morning, when the wine had gone out of Nabal, his wife told him these things, and his heart died within him and he became a stone.
[00:08:41] About 10 days later, Yahweh struck Nabal and he died.
[00:08:47] When David heard that Nabal was dead, he said, blessed be Yahweh, who has avenged the insult I received at the hand of Nabal and has kept his servant from wrongdoing Yahweh has returned the evil of Nabal on his own head.
[00:09:00] Then David sent and spoke to Abigail to take her as his wife. And the servants of David came to Abigail at Carmel. They said to her, david has sent us to you to take you to him as his wife.
[00:09:12] And she rose and bowed with her face to the ground and said, behold, your handmaid is a servant to wash the feet of the servants of my lord.
[00:09:20] And Abigail hurried and rose and mounted a donkey and and her five young women attended her. She followed the messengers of David and became his wife.
[00:09:29] David also took Ahinoam of Jezreel, and both of them became his wives. Saul had given Michal, his daughter, David's wife, to Palti, the son of Laish, who was of Galim.
[00:09:42] May God bless his word to us.
[00:09:50] So quite a story, right? Lots and lots of things going on. We won't have time to go through all the parts and enjoy all the details. I'll let you do that a little bit over lunch.
[00:10:03] As you think through the various things that happen here, what we want to focus on this morning is this theme about the wise king.
[00:10:12] There's a necessity for God's people, for God's king, or for. For God's people to have a wise king.
[00:10:20] It's God's desire to provide a wise king for his people.
[00:10:26] It's part of the good that comes out of leadership. But it's more than just making good decisions. Wisdom. True wisdom is righteousness.
[00:10:38] True wisdom is doing the right thing at the right time in the right way and knowing how to do that, knowing when to do it, making the decisions. Abigail, of course, is the wise one in this story.
[00:10:52] The men here, not so much her husband David, they're angry, they're raging, they're making all kinds of terrible decisions. Abigail keeps her head cool and she navigates through a really difficult set of circumstances.
[00:11:07] When the ball servants come to her, they say, you guys figure it out. We don't know what to do. We can't talk to him. And there's this impending doom. David's men is coming, and they're appealing to her to save them, essentially to save the household.
[00:11:26] And so she has some tough decisions to make. How will she make them? What will she do?
[00:11:31] How will she think about them in light of her relate all these relationships that she has to her servants, to David, to her husband, and of course to the Lord. It's an extremely difficult, scary, even set of circumstances that she finds herself in the middle of and had nothing to do with any of it.
[00:11:52] We often find ourselves in similar situations.
[00:11:56] Perhaps not between two warring parties or someone trying to completely destroy our household and all of our goats, but we do find situations where life giving wisdom and life connection connected. God centered wisdom is absolutely required all the time. It's required by God's grace. We are able to do many things in a wise way, almost without thinking intuitively. We follow the wisdom we find in proverbs and other parts of scripture, but not always right. There are things that we do that make sense and are wise, our smart.
[00:12:38] There's other things that are a lot trickier.
[00:12:41] And if we're honest with ourselves, there's a lot of wisdom that we don't follow.
[00:12:45] We know the right thing and then we really struggle to do it.
[00:12:52] We often struggle on finding the life giving wisdom that we need, the righteousness that we need.
[00:13:00] And when we reject it, what happens?
[00:13:04] Misery.
[00:13:06] Even at a temporal level in this world, the proverbs tell us over and over, if we reject the wisdom of God, we're going to be in a lot of trouble. We're going to face a lot of difficult circumstances. If you don't work, you're not going to eat.
[00:13:21] If you make bad friends, you're going to get backstabbed. If you tell lies, you're going to get in trouble.
[00:13:29] All of these kinds of things, it leads to misery. But those things at that temporal level are meant to point to something greater, which is when we fail to be obedient in all the ways that God requires, it leads us to what?
[00:13:44] Not just a little bit of misery in this life, but death, friends and hell and judgment. As we take God's world and we take God's wisdom and we reject it and we spit on it and we despise it and we go our own ways. The, the rejection of wisdom, it becomes a kind of idolatry.
[00:14:04] We go after our own hearts and our own lusts and our own ways. And throughout Samuel, we've seen this, haven't we?
[00:14:11] We've seen Saul being extremely unwise, deciding, well, I want what I want, when I want, I'm going to go get it doesn't matter when. And he's impatient and he gets in so much trouble as a result of it. David up to this point is, has been restrained.
[00:14:29] He has been waiting on the Lord. He has not, as Abigail says, exercised salvation by his own hand. But something in this moment sets him off.
[00:14:38] And it's a reminder that even the strongest of us, and even in times of great success, we are all prone to falling, prone to failure. We cannot be too pride and too prideful and say, well, I'm a moral person, I'm a wise person, I make great decisions. I, I'm not in trouble.
[00:14:59] Because what happened to David here? All of a sudden he is wronged and he goes way overboard in thinking about his response.
[00:15:12] What this will call us to is to God's wisdom and to seek it not just in the law of do this and do that so that you might live well, but to tell us that we need the wisdom of the gospel.
[00:15:28] We need the wisdom of Jesus, who comes as our wise King, who rescues us from our folly. He's not just a teacher, he's a savior.
[00:15:38] He saves us out of the, out of our wisdom, out of our foolishness, out of our foolishness leading to death. And he sets us in paths of righteousness and life, in healing and hope.
[00:15:52] He comes like Abigail comes here, reveals another way. And when we put our faith and trust in him, we find forgiveness and life.
[00:16:07] So let's first think this morning about the ways in which we are prone to foolishness that leads to death. What happens to David?
[00:16:16] What happens to David?
[00:16:18] Well, he's doing a good thing, right? He's in the wilderness, he's on the run, remember? He's protecting himself and he finds himself in a situation. Imagine you're, you know, walking through the desert and then you see a bunch of shearers and sheep and animals, right? You have the decision to make. How am I going to interact with these people? Am I going to hide from them? Are you going to ignore them? Are you going to attack them? You're going to take their things?
[00:16:42] These are pretty vulnerable people, right?
[00:16:46] These are not warriors, right? They're herders, shearers.
[00:16:52] They're out, they're far away, they are sleeping out in the wilderness as David is. What's he going to do?
[00:16:59] Well, he decides to do this very honorable thing, protect them. He's going to keep them, he's not going to ask things of them. He doesn't try to take their things and he doesn't even ignore them. He protects them. They say of David's actions that he's like a wall. Him and his men are a wall to them. We sleep, we get up, we're safe. With David around, things are good. He's strong and he protects us. That's a pretty sweet situation. If you're a sheep shearer and you're out in the wilderness and all of a sudden you find these, you know, 400 plus men just all they want to do is keep you safe.
[00:17:38] All right, great.
[00:17:40] So this is David, and this is also David, whom they know something about.
[00:17:44] Do you notice Abigail's words about the sling and things like that?
[00:17:49] David says, who's David? Who's the son of Jesse? Oh, okay.
[00:17:54] He knows who David is. And he uses son of Jesse like Saul uses son of Jesse to dishonor him.
[00:18:01] Right. When? When. When Nabal says.
[00:18:06] When Nabal says, you know, I hear there are lots of slaves breaking away from their masters these days. How can I know who these people are?
[00:18:14] He's not saying he doesn't know who David is. He's accusing him of breaking away from Saul.
[00:18:21] Right.
[00:18:22] But of course we know that's not the case.
[00:18:25] Right? Nabal knows what's going on here with these men. He knows who David is. He knows what's going on, but he's going to see things the way he wants to see him. Why? Because he doesn't want to share his stuff.
[00:18:37] It's so silly. Moments later in the story. Anyway, he's feasting like a king, right? This is not a guy who is suffering and really trying to scrape and feed his family. He's got tons of resources, tons and tons. He's very wealthy. That's made of a point of. Many times David asks him for whatever you have at hand, and he hasn't been asking a bunch. He asked this one time, he says, it's a feast day. It's a special day. Can you help us out a little bit? And Nabal attacks him, dishonors him, isn't grateful for all the things that David has done, and then on top of all that, then accuses him probably of a thing that's pretty sensitive for David, of breaking away from Saul, of doing these things, when in fact he's doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing. Have you ever been attacked for the very thing you're trying not to do?
[00:19:35] That. I don't like that.
[00:19:38] I don't like that. I don't think David liked it either. He didn't.
[00:19:43] What does he do? Strap on your swords?
[00:19:46] Enough with this guy.
[00:19:49] He's going to kill him. A fellow Israelite. This is not some Philistine garrison or something like that. This is a rich man. A man and his household gonna kill him and kill every male there is.
[00:20:05] David, in some ways, is acting much like Saul did when Doeg the Edomite came and he killed all Abiathar and all the priests at nobility. This extreme overreaction out of offense, pride Anger and all of these things that are in David's heart, and they're in our hearts as well, we are prone to these things. We haven't even talked to Nabal about Nabal yet. I better go faster. Nabal, right?
[00:20:40] What's he protecting? His stuff.
[00:20:43] You heard it me emphasizing when I read. I want my. You know, I don't remember the list right now, but he wants all the things. My, my, my, my, my.
[00:20:51] He doesn't have a right to these things. Where did Nabal get all that stuff from?
[00:20:56] From the Lord.
[00:20:58] Where do we get anything from? From the Lord. Ultimately, it's not ours. We are given wealth and prosperity to share it. Nabal doesn't think about any of that. He doesn't think about the potential danger that David posed. He doesn't think about his wife, his servants. He just wants to have what he has.
[00:21:17] And the Scriptures tell us his wife tells us that. Nabal. This is verse 25.
[00:21:25] Let not my Lord, she says to David, calls him Lord. Let not my Lord regard this worthless fellow Nabal, for his name is, or sorry for as his name is, so is he. Nabal is his name and folly is with him. Because Nabal means fool.
[00:21:41] This is very ironic, right, that he's living up to his name.
[00:21:47] Now. We are all fools in a very. Just like Nabal and just like David is, before the Lord comes into our lives, before he rescues us out of this foolishness, we could all say, my name is Nabal, right?
[00:22:05] And we are. We do these kinds of things from the time that we're very little. We try it. We hope it sort of works out of us as we get older. But I. It is easy to be surprised at our hearts and how we don't want to share, how we want to be protective, how we get offended when people say bad things about us and accuse things before us. And then we make these decisions and say, well, I'm going to be in control of this. I'm going to fix this.
[00:22:37] Where's David with the Lord at this moment? Is he thinking about God?
[00:22:42] Is he pondering him? Is he wondering what he should do? Remember the speech in the cave where he tells his men, he says, we cannot do this thing against Yahweh's anointed, right? He's thinking in this theological way. He's doing what he does in relation with. With a relationship or in light of his relationship with God. Not here. He's just mad.
[00:23:06] That's all it is. He's just mad. Nabal, same thing. He's Just mad. But Abigail, what do you hear in her speech?
[00:23:14] What do you hear of the framework that she's thinking through? Where's her heart at as she thinks about not just the danger that's coming? She could have done all kinds of other things. She could have tricked. She could have set traps. She could have, you know, mustered the men. I don't know. There could have been other things that she did, but instead, she thought about things in light of the promises of the Lord, acted in that way, and then spoke to David in a way to encourage him to do the same.
[00:23:43] Praise God, she was successful.
[00:23:47] The Proverbs and many other places in Scripture talk about our struggle with wisdom.
[00:23:53] Proverbs 14:12 says, There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.
[00:24:02] That's a hard saying, isn't it?
[00:24:05] Something seems right to you, but its way leads to death.
[00:24:10] How do we know what is life giving? How do we know what is wise?
[00:24:15] We often confuse one wisdom for another because of our sins and our lusts. James 3:15 talks about a bunch of things and then says, this is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.
[00:24:33] There's a kind of wisdom of the world that masquerades as wisdom, masquerades as righteousness, but it's ultimately earthly, unspiritual, and demonic.
[00:24:46] Like David, we often find ourselves, and like Nabal as well, where we need to be saved from ourselves.
[00:24:55] We can't see. We don't know what to do. And even when we can see those things, we don't want to do them. We're so mad, we're so angry, we're so offended that we're just going to do what we want to do instead of looking to the Lord.
[00:25:09] Like Nabal, we're often not that far away from a heart attack from the Lord, which seems what happens to him. His heart dies within him. He becomes like stone. And then a few days later, he. He dies. The Lord takes his life.
[00:25:27] The Lord answers and responds in the way that Abigail says he will. She says, leave this to God. As David has said before, vengeance belongs to the Lord. Leave it to the Lord, and the Lord takes care of it.
[00:25:41] Now, you might be thinking about your own lives and saying, well, the Lord didn't act so fast in my situation.
[00:25:47] There are things that are happening that I wish he would be quick about.
[00:25:51] But remember, we trust things in God's timing and not our own. And even David, though he will not be in this situation with Nabal anymore, he's going to have other difficulties ahead of him.
[00:26:06] As you may know, this is the situation we find ourselves in. In need of much wisdom and often doing things that are leading us to unrighteousness and death.
[00:26:19] So here's the good news.
[00:26:21] The good news is that in God's mercy, he often interrupts this emotional, frustrated, raging state that we can get ourselves into. He interrupts it with something better.
[00:26:39] He interrupts it with truth. He interrupts it with the Word. He interrupts it with wisdom.
[00:26:47] And this is good, because as I've said, we don't just need advice, we need salvation. We need to be rescued.
[00:26:55] And that's what Abigail does. That's how God uses her.
[00:26:59] Proverbs 2:6 says, the Lord gives wisdom from his mouth, come knowledge and understanding.
[00:27:07] First Corinthians 1:30 says, and because of him, of God, you are in Christ Jesus, who became who to us wisdom from God, Christ became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.
[00:27:22] Ephesians 1:17 says that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit, spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him.
[00:27:36] We need God to interrupt our lives, interrupt our patterns, interrupt our behaviors, interrupt our lusts, interrupt our sins, our pride, and rescue us.
[00:27:49] One because he has all wisdom, he is all wise. His wisdom is unsearchable in the sense that there's no bottom to it, there's no end to it.
[00:28:02] If Abigail shows a bit of wisdom here, you see it as in other examples in your life or in the Scriptures. This is just the tiniest fraction of the wisdom of God.
[00:28:17] God who works perfectly every time, every way, getting timing means, ends, all of it exactly right. By him, wisdom is defined. He is the definition of wisdom. By him, all things are made, all the rules are set. In him, all things are being done.
[00:28:40] He is the Source of all wisdom, and to him we must go.
[00:28:45] It is his wisdom and his life that we need. As Proverbs 2, 6 says, which I read, the Lord gives wisdom from his mouth, come knowledge and understanding.
[00:28:56] You can see why rejecting him and saying, I'm going to go do another thing is you're already doomed.
[00:29:03] When you say, I'm going to go this way for wisdom when there's only one source for wisdom, you're already doomed.
[00:29:13] Because of the state of our hearts, because of the foolishness in our hearts, we need God to save us. We need the Wise One to send wise ones to save us.
[00:29:26] And he does this in Abigail. And he does this in a huge way, world changing way, life giving way. In Christ Jesus, a much better David, a much better Savior never retaliates in rash anger.
[00:29:48] How many times did people say stupid things to Jesus, ignorant things, accuse him of terrible things?
[00:29:56] That doesn't mean he never responded. He often did. But he never just lashed out in unrighteous anger.
[00:30:07] Many times we see Jesus restrained, Jesus turning away, Jesus giving oblique answers, Jesus doing a number of things. You'll have to examine the Gospels to see how he handles these situations.
[00:30:22] But we see him acting always in this holy way.
[00:30:27] Jesus is the perfectly wise, perfectly righteous king.
[00:30:32] When you think about what kind of king do we need as people, this is the kind of king we need as people. And it's the king that God what provides.
[00:30:43] It's the king that God has given to us.
[00:30:46] And Jesus, remember, he's not just a great teacher of wisdom in his words and his examples.
[00:30:54] Do you remember what I said about God being the source of wisdom? All you know, being the definition of wisdom himself?
[00:31:02] Because Jesus is divine, we can say Jesus is not only the teacher of wisdom and the example of wisdom, but he is wisdom incarnate, wisdom in the flesh.
[00:31:14] He is God who is ever wise, fulfilling and embodying these things, ultimately all the way to the cross.
[00:31:24] To the cross which the world calls foolishness. But God knows better.
[00:31:31] We don't need to listen to the world. We need to listen to Jesus who comes and interrupts us and speaks to us in our folly, in the midst of our anger, in the midst of our pride and says, stop, you're dying.
[00:31:46] Follow me, I'll save you.
[00:31:51] I'll instruct you and I'll lead you.
[00:31:57] First Corinthians 1:24 says, those who are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.
[00:32:07] Colossians 2:3 says, In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom knowledge.
[00:32:15] Isaiah 11:2 Speaking of the coming Messiah, says, the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding.
[00:32:26] Jesus is not a kind of bonus to the regular wisdom that you might find. He is wisdom itself. And he is wisdom that not only gives us the law, but he gives us the gospel.
[00:32:40] Through the wisdom of God, he becomes to us a Savior who rescues and who redeems us.
[00:32:47] And so when we turn to Christ, seeking forgiveness, seeking life, seeking healing, seeking hope, when we turn to Christ, we're not just learning, we are living, living in him, united to him.
[00:33:07] Again, Colossians 2:3, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Christ.
[00:33:17] This story, as we think about David as this sort of precursor to the Messiah, reminds us that David is not going to be the final Messiah.
[00:33:29] He's a step on the way, a very important one. He begins to show us the kind of king that we need in his example, but also in his anti example of I don't know what the right word for that is right now, but we see in his actions and in his failures as well the kind of king that we need and that God provides for us in Jesus because we're so prone to foolishness, foolishness that kills. But God gives us a salvation in Him.
[00:34:02] So I'll end by saying this.
[00:34:07] Our job then is to listen and to receive what he's saying.
[00:34:14] David, he says, is saved from much blood guilt because he listened to the wisdom of God from Abigail's mouth, right?
[00:34:22] And we are saved by from all of our guilt as we listen to the wisdom of God from Jesus mouth.
[00:34:31] Our job is to lose confidence in ourselves and in our own wisdom and our own pride and learn to follow Christ and his wisdom and his righteousness. We don't need to follow our rage and our fury. We need to follow our Savior who saves us and leads us.
[00:34:52] So let's pray and ask that God would help us to do that, help us to see and understand him and to follow Him.
[00:34:59] Our Heavenly Father. We ask that you would help us to put our faith in Jesus alone.
[00:35:04] It's he alone who is the perfect king, the perfectly righteous king, and him alone who brought not only good teaching into the world, but a salvation that allows us to be saved from our sins.
[00:35:23] Lord, we want to take a moment now and confess the ways in which we have sinned, like David almost did, and did in some ways by forgetting you and rejecting you and the ways in which Nabal did. We ask that you would forgive our lack of looking to you, our lack of faith.
[00:35:46] We ask that you would forgive us for taking things into our own hands when we should be trusting you.
[00:35:52] We ask that you would forgive us for our lack of generosity even to our enemies.
[00:35:57] We ask that you would forgive us for our failure to listen to wisdom when it comes and interrupts us by your grace.
[00:36:05] We ask that you would forgive us for giving in to the lusts of our flesh, for drunkenness, for gluttony, for holding on to worldly goods and not sharing them.
[00:36:24] Lord, we ask that you would forgive us even for the weaknesses in our marriages where we fail to love each other as we ought and to listen to the good counsel from one another and show one another your good works and your grace.
[00:36:41] Lord, everywhere we look in our lives, we see need for you.
[00:36:45] We see and ask that you would help us and you would bring us hope.
[00:36:50] We pray, Lord, that you would help us to follow you in every way and that you would save us by the work of Jesus Christ.
[00:36:57] It's in his name we pray, our wise king, Amen.
