God's Great Work

0:00 Denzel did a great job, yes, last week, you know, being timely and to the point. And, I asked him if I could borrow the extra ten minutes he saved last week. So sorry. Let's start with prayer. Maybe he'll maybe he'll keep it short for you.

0:20 Dear heavenly father, we just thank you. And Song said it so well. We thank you for your great faithfulness. We thank you that you love us so much and that you have a plan for our lives. You have a great work that you're doing, and, we can be a part of it, and you invite us to.

0:41 So, Lord, I just pray that you'll, you know, bless this word today, that, your spirit will be working in our hearts and, that you'll make it count. And I pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen. So there's a there's a saying. It's an anonymous quote.

1:04 It says, you can count the seeds on an apple, but only god can count the apples in a seed. Has anybody heard that before? I don't know. It's a it's probably pretty well quoted. The idea is that it's a comparison with kind of the tangible.

1:23 You can take that apple. You can open it up, and you can actually look at it and see it. You can feel it. You can count those seeds. By the way, does anybody know how many seeds are in an apple?

1:35 Good. Good. It's actually a trick question. There is no single number I can change. It's generally between five and ten.

1:42 So so... But, you know, can imagine doing that, and yet the the potential, obviously, is all of a single seed that one were to plant in the ground is all based on the work of God, if you will. Here, you plant it in the ground, it dies. The Bible talks about that. And then what happens next has nothing to do with human will.

2:13 You know? Perhaps you can partake in it a little bit. You know? Some some sow, some some reap. We could water perhaps.

2:23 But certainly in the time back then, there wasn't a whole lot of options for irrigation. So pretty much you planted it and waited for God to do his work, and you participated. Many people know of the Puritan preacher, Jonathan Edwards, from the seventeen hundreds. The older ones here may have read his famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which at one point was required reading in American literature courses. I don't know if it still is.

2:54 Probably not. Teacher over there? Probably not. No. But his preaching had a large effect on the formation of the American colonies.

3:03 He was a key figure in the Great Awakening, so he's known for his preaching. But it wasn't just his preaching to his congregation that had such a huge effect on the history of America. It seems he had a hand on the... His kids and the generations in his own family, or or at least with God, he had this hand. So around the same time, well, about a hundred years later after after Jonathan Edwards lived, there was a researcher named Richard Dukes.

3:35 And he and he... In 1877, he noticed that in a certain penitentiary in New York, there was a number of convicts that were related each... To each other. The researcher dug through the records, and he found 42 convicts in the New York prison system that could all be traced back to a single man, and they gave him the pseudonym Max Jukes. And he was living at the same time as Jonathan Edwards in a similar area.

4:04 So this is... This so called Jukes, as they studied his family, had the following tragic results, all from one man to his 1,200 descendants that they studied. There were seven murderers, 60 thieves, a 190 prostitutes, a 150 other convicts, 310 people were poppers. They had nothing. Four hundred and forty were physically wrecked by addiction to alcohol, and, three hundred died prematurely.

4:37 And I'm not sure exactly how they define that. And as this study was released, there was an American educator from the same era, and he decided to do a contrasting study with Jonathan Edward's descendants. And he found that from this impactful preacher who was not known for his family, that maybe his greatest impact was, just as much as his ministry at least, the descendants after him among his own descendant, his own actual physical descendants. And among his physical descendants were one vice president, a dean of a law school, a dean of a medical school, three US senators, three governors, three mayors, 13 college presidents, 30 judges, 60 doctors, 65 professors, 75 military officers, 80 public office holders, a 100 lawyers, 100 clergymen, and 285 college graduates, which at that time, that was not... There weren't a lot of college graduates.

5:43 That wasn't expected in an agrarian society of the time. And I just... I wonder how much thought was given by either Jukes or Edwards. You know? Because, again, the whole idea, like, you you have a seed.

6:00 You can see the seed. You can see the apple. You can look at it. But then what happens afterwards? That's a whole another thing happening.

6:09 And I suspect that the fiery preacher Edwards had probably given some thought and prayer, not just to God's great work in researching his area of the... Or reaching his area of the country with God's word, but also, perhaps, I'd like to believe, and I know there's many godly people out there, that God has reached their own heart to pray for their descendants, recognizing that that is part of... Our own descendants are part of God's great work. And I know as, as a father, though I unfaithfully pray, I would say, oftentimes my heart's not even in it. But daily, I ask the Lord that, he would make my sons men of God.

6:54 Obviously, after they're out of my hands, that's all I can do, but that is a worthy thing to do, to pray. I wanted to kinda shift to my main the main area. I won't call it a text because the story I'm telling spans over 40 chapters. So that would be more than the ten minutes extra allotted time. But I wanted to think about one family.

7:44 Right? And I wanted to compare Saul and David. King Saul and King David. Try to look at the key differences. When I started out, was gonna call this message as the king goes, so is the kingdom.

8:05 Right? Cause and effect. Just, hey, what happens with the king? You look at the kingdom and everybody just do what the king does. In in our own kingdoms, we'll we'll do better.

8:14 Right? That was the... Kind of simplistic thinking. And I and I... As I read through, I found that I couldn't call it that because it seemed like God was working regardless of us.

8:24 And yet I wanted to give you guys something to some some application for yourselves as well, and I think it's there. But the name of this message is God's great work. King Saul was the first of three kings that ruled all the tribes of Israel, and, that might be news to some people because, actually, there are only three... There's a number of kings talked about, but only three of them ruled the entire territory of Israel. He was a son of a wealthy man of the Israeli tribe of Benjamin called Kish.

9:01 And, God called him, and he was anointed through the prophet Samuel as a king. And that anointment is gonna be one of kind of the key factors to understand and appreciate. Samuel told him to do what his hands find to do. So he said, God's going to change your heart. And when he does, do what your hands find to do.

9:28 The first year of his kingdom, there was no castle or army or servants. You have to remember that this was... There had never been a kingdom here before. He was setting it up for the first time. And we'll touch more on that in a little bit.

9:45 In addition, he was an unproven king. They considered him a young man, and the way it's portrayed, you almost think he's in his twenties, but if you look at it, he's closer to 40. He has to be. Because he has a son that basically helps him with the army. And so you say he's probably...

10:01 Unless he had a very young son ruling over a thousand men, it would be hard. So when he first started, there was really nothing for him to do. He literally did what his hands found to do, which was to go back to his dad's considerable estate and go right back where they found him, which was farming. So when you first see Saul, he was looking for donkeys. That's how God called him.

10:22 That's a whole another story. But he goes right back to farming. For about a year, that's all he does. And so the first kind of serious thing that calls him to action and kind of cements his kingdom is a crisis at the border frontier town of Jabesh Gilead in Northern Israel. And the Ammonites, which were kind of bordering right at that border, they decided to come and attack him.

10:54 And they attacked him in a kind of a degrading way. They promising to put out every eye. That was the settlement. If you let us in, we'll let you live, but your eyes are gonna be cut out. Like, one of your eyes is gonna be...

11:08 You're gonna go blind. Not not a real nice way to go. So Saul heard the news, and sure enough, he was sitting right there when the news came in to Gibeah. Gibeah is right in Central Israel. So he's sitting there out in his fields and the messengers come in and they say, Hey, Gibeah is being attacked.

11:29 And they're saying that they're not just going to take him over and make him pay. They're going to blind all their eyes and, you know, this is going to be terrible. So Saul got so angry. And this is kind of significant on how he does this. He went straight to his oxen that he was plowing with that time, and he chopped them into pieces.

11:51 And he sent bloody packages of meat across the entire... He sent messengers with bloody packages of meat across the entire Israel and said, if you guys don't get every single one of you cities better be sending soldiers here because if you don't, I'm gonna make you like this meat. I mean, I guess he didn't have a lot of leadership sway, so he needed to threaten them. God used it. They raised a 35,000 person army.

12:17 So they routed the Ammonites. There's not much story about this battle other than they were victorious. And you don't find out till later, they didn't have any swords except for two. Saul and Jonathan had swords and armor. Nobody else had anything but farm instruments to attack these people with.

12:37 But they probably overwhelmed them and God worked. And so when he returns, Saul keeps a standing army of 3,000 men, which is reasonably small for the large territory of what he was controlling, but he kinda kept that. And that was kind of the start of his kingship. So with that 3,000 men over the next year, he kinda gets up a little courage. The Philistines were in the Southwest side of the territory.

13:32 But Saul, it says, made a stink. He took his 3,000 person army that he still had and over the next year, he kinda found a little garrison over here and killed him. You know, 20, 30 soldiers, you take your thousand and, you know, done. And at some point in time, the Philistines, which were not really a central army, they had lords. So it was kind of like city states that were kind of...

13:58 That every once in while they would get together and rally an army and go. At some point, started to realize, hey, this guy's getting annoying. And it says, were a stench. So the Israelites became a stench to Philistines. And that's where...

14:14 That's... That that is what brings Saul to his first test. So King Saul is now two years in, and he's become a stench to the Philistines who are dramatically stronger and superior in almost every way militarily. And they levy an army. It's 30,000 chariots.

14:41 Okay. So chariots is a whole different thing than... You know, it involves trained soldiers. It involves high technology, military strength, horses. And then it says 6,000 horsemen.

14:57 And then it says they had a number of foot soldiers that was as large as the sands in the sea, which is really the same as saying they had an uncountable army of foot soldiers along with them. Whatever that means, it had to have been a multiple of the ones that were counted. We know that they counted armies as large as a million in the Old Testament. So somewhere between a 150,000 total to as much as a million were now sitting there about three miles north in Michmash Of Gibeah. So Gibeah was the central location where Saul was was.

15:34 He didn't have a castle. There was no walls. There was no nothing. He was just sitting there out in the fields still. I mean, running around, doing things.

15:40 But he hadn't really developed any infrastructure for the kingdom. And and Saul was instructed by Samuel, the prophet. He was instructed to go to a place called Gilgal, which was about four miles west across the mountain. Right? So basically he had to kind of leave his central city, his fan.

16:08 The Philistines, this massive army, daily they were sending raiding bands out because it takes a lot of resources. They didn't have the ability like we have now to just fly out for a million people food from across the world. So these raiding bans were decimating. It says the Israelites were literally hiding in holes. They were panicked and desperate.

16:34 Some of them were running and crossing over the Jordan River to the west out of Israeli territory just to get away. So Saul was trembling and all the people with him were trembling. They were absolutely panicked. And so Saul sits here under this situation with an army that was superior in every way. They had men that were trained from their youth.

16:59 We know that because that's what it says about Goliath later in Samuel. It says he was trained from his youth. He was trained as a child for war. And they had these chariots. They had the numbers.

17:17 In every way they were superior. And here Saul is waiting. He was supposed to wait seven days for Samuel. That was the allotted time. And Saul is waiting.

17:27 And as he is waiting, soldiers are leaving every day. It says they are running off. They are deserting. And Saul had 3,000. And suddenly he was supposed to meet in Gilgal and be mustering an army.

17:41 No one was coming. In fact, he was losing the very army he had. Now it's seven days later, he has 600 troops. Among the 600 troops, there are two people with swords and armor. That is his son, Saul, that is son, Jonathan, and that is himself.

17:55 Nobody else has anything and he's in a desperate situation. So nobody can blame him when seven days, it's like halfway through the seventh day, he's like, Samuel's supposed to be here to bless me, to kind of fight and do something. I'm scared to death. You know what? I have an idea.

18:13 I'm going do it my way. And I don't think a single one of us in the same situation where you're looking at the death of your country, the death of everything else, would think to themselves, might not think about doing what Saul did. Let's put it that way. So Saul says, I'm just gonna go and sacrifice this sacrifice that I'm waiting for Samuel to do. I'm gonna do it myself.

18:39 And so he goes and does it. And immediately afterwards, Samuel arrives. And he's like, what did you do? He's like, well, I forced myself to do this because you weren't here. And everybody's leaving.

18:56 Right? Essentially what he was saying was, I had to do this because you failed me. God failed me. Right? This was a direct violation of the law.

19:14 In Leviticus, only priests were allowed to do sacrifice. And it was a direct violation of what Samuel had explicitly asked. So Samuel said to Saul, You have done foolishly. This is in one Samuel 13 thirteen-fourteen. You have done foolishly.

19:34 You have not kept the command of the Lord your God with which he commanded you. The Lord would have established your kingdom, but now your kingdom shall not continue. The Lord has sought out a man after his own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be prince over his people because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you. So, again, I don't think we would fault Saul here under the circumstances in many respects. Yet under even those circumstances, Samuel infers that Saul demonstrated he was not a man after God's own heart.

20:51 And in this, you see the real heart issue. Saul had boiled God's favor to a ritual. He took favor. Favor comes through relationship. And he thought that he could do an action outside of that relationship, encourage God's favor.

21:14 And that's the real heart issue. So it's kind of like, you know, if you have a problem, you find a solution. Simple cause and effect. You have a fire, break the glass and pull the alarm. It's just a straight up this and then that.

21:30 And all of us like to have that. We want a simple solution. We just want to know what to do. So I think we can identify with that. But God was not looking for a ritual improperly completed.

21:49 He wasn't even looking for the ritual properly completed by Samuel. God was showing what he really wanted all along but knew he wouldn't find in Samuel, a man that knew him well enough to trust him even in the most difficult of circumstances. Saul just wanted to force God to help him, like the wizards and witches so often of the day would do with their spells and enchantments, to bind the spirit world to take action in the physical for their personal benefit. So he was really kind of treating God as if he wasn't God, but more like a god, just another idol that you would make a transaction with. God wanted, and he still wants with us, a relationship with a man who was after his own heart to invite into the great work he was doing.

22:42 And even though Saul had triggered the downfall of his dynasty, even in this battle, God, in spite of Saul's faithlessness and lack of surrender, caused a miraculous defeat of the Philistines. In that time, God used Saul and his army to win many battles as a king of the territory of Israel. And Saul even saw a measure of peace and prosperity. Saul had many opportunities during his time to demonstrate faith, And when he did, he turned away from that opportunity. And instead, he trusted in himself.

23:24 In one Samuel fifteen seventeen, the prophet Samuel said to Saul, and this is a later example where he again turned away and did not follow God's commandment. Samuel said, though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel. And here Samuel gives the final judgment against Saul and his dynasty. It says after this occasion...

23:50 He never spoke to Saul again. He actually did. He was brought back from the dead. We'll get to that. But Saul has...

23:58 But, so he gives the final judgment, and Saul has not turned towards the Lord, but now has gone directly against a command given to him by God, again making excuses. And here you see in what Samuel said. He said, He is little in his own eyes. You are little in your own eyes. That's interesting because we would normally look at that as a kind of sign of humility.

24:23 And I've heard from this platform this phrase, this quote, if you will, about humility. Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. In other words, Saul was focused on himself. And of course, he was a little afraid, you know, because he saw himself as a little person. He saw himself as small.

24:44 And you see that in some of his language early on. He says, I'm the littlest guy from the smallest clan. I don't even know how I could do this, you know. But he missed the fact, even here it says, the Lord anointed you king of Israel. That was something that you will see in just a bit.

25:03 David, who was... Became Saul's enemy. Saul was more an enemy to David than David was an enemy to Saul. And that's because David himself respected the anointing of the Lord over his enemy over and above, what Saul respected that anointing on himself by God. So the story of David, who will later be king instead of Saul, and of whom God calls a man after his own heart.

25:37 So before he says, the Lord is searching for a man after his own heart. The Lord has found a man after his own heart. Right? You are not a man after his own heart. God calls him a man after his own heart and demonstrates quickly why he is called a man after his own heart.

25:57 David does. Before his interaction with Saul, Samuel, has with much fear and trepidation actually followed God's instructions to anoint, someone else as king. And so he he secretly goes into an area not far from where Saul is in Bethlehem. He actually has to travel through Gibeah to get to Bethlehem. Saul is just North of Gibeah.

26:27 Bethlehem is South of Gibeah by a few miles. I mean, Samuel is just North of Gibeah in Ramah, and Bethlehem is probably five or six miles south of Gibeah. So Samuel secretly travels through, and he anoints David. David is a young teenager at this point, and we're not even sure that David understands what this anointing is at the moment. But one of the clear things that God makes clear in this anointing is that...

26:58 He even warns Samuel, who was a prophet. He says, don't look at the outside. I'm not looking at the outside. You guys all see the outside. I am looking at the heart.

27:11 And on... And and so so, through a process, Samuel chooses the youngest son of Jesse, David, and anoints him. So, David appears to have first really made a remark... A a mark when he volunteered to fight Goliath, the great giant of the Philistines. That was the kind of figurehead...

28:14 But regardless, they were camped across the valley from the Philistines, and Goliath, this huge eight to ten foot man who was heavily muscled and and an imposing figure, was coming out daily to taunt any single Israelite to hand to hand combat. And every day, at least for some time, he was just coming out. The two armies were kind of across the valley and they were just kind of sitting there and waiting. And Goliath terrified every single person, including Saul and the army, when he would come out. But when David was there, out came Goliath.

28:59 And in one Samuel seventeenth, and David says, he says, for who is the uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God? And so while Saul Saul would say that guys are just servants Saul, David understood rightly that he was challenging and cursing God Himself because he recognized that this was a spiritual battle. And in verse 32 of one Samuel 17, David said to Saul, and he's just been brought in, they heard he was saying that. Saul says, Hey, sure, bring him on in. Let's see what this young man says he'll fight Goliath.

29:56 David said to Saul, Let no man's heart fail because of him. Your servant will go and fight with this Philistine. And Saul said to David, You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him, for you are but a youth, and he has been a man of war from his youth. But David said to Saul, your servant used to keep sheep for his father. And when there came a lion or a bear and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and struck him, delivered it out of his mouth.

30:25 If he arose against me, I caught him by his beard and struck him and killed him. Your servant has struck down both lions and bears, and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, for he has defied the armies of the living God. And David said, the Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of the Philistines. David said... And Saul said to David, go and the Lord be with you.

30:52 So here you see Saul sees things through man's perspective. Here David is unafraid of the great giant because he doesn't see himself fighting the giant, but in fact, he is doing God's great work, and God will fight the giant. Of course, he also has a history with God, and he knows God will be faithful to do the work. David is just a willing... He was just a willing and faithful participant.

31:19 Most of us know that particular story. David refuses any equipment. He goes without any physical protection and just a little rope swing and a smooth stone from the river. And he... A rope sling and a smooth stone from the river.

31:35 And he kills that giant, Goliath, with one stone to his forehead, and that is a miraculous route. That's the beginning of a miraculous route of the Philistines at that point. And when David returns from the victorious battle, the Bible says that Saul's son Jonathan's heart was knit or connected to David's. And you could call it like an unbreakable connection. And this is notable for several reasons.

32:07 Partially, it plays a large part in the relationship dynamics between David and Saul in the upcoming years. And partially because David, who was a teenager, and Jonathan's probably forty five to forty seven years at that point in time. So David's probably 17 to 18 years old. But I believe that Jonathan identified in David the same heart that God had given him. Jonathan, many years early had been willing to face the Philistine army alone, thinking nothing of his own life.

32:47 And that first route of the Philistine army we talked about earlier, directly after Saul had again been unfaithful, he had he had literally gone up by himself to fight the entire army, and that was the start of of the route. And then directly after that, Saul made an ill fated vow that Samuel unknowingly and unwittingly... I mean, Jonathan unknowingly and unwittingly violated. And that vow meant that Jonathan should die. And Jonathan willingly laid his life.

33:26 He said, yes. I will die. And he he was willing to give up his life. Only the army of Israel said, nope. That's not happening.

33:34 And Saul, not being a very strong person when it came to other people's wills and probably for good effect, did not follow through with his vow. So David became Saul's personal bodyguard after that. Saul found out that as God's spirit had departed from him, an evil spirit tormented him. That's what it says. And that David had a unique ability to make music that would normally calm Saul and ease his torment.

35:04 That was a problem. Suddenly, rightfully insecure Saul realized that David wasn't just his faithful servant who was solving a problem in his life, but he was actually a threat to power. So he immediately began looking to kill him. He used his daughter as a pawn to try to kill him. He tried to impale him with a spear.

35:33 He sent troops to David's house to assassinate him. And after that, David spent between eight to thirteen years on the run from Saul, mostly in surviving with a band of misfit warriors who were also cast out from society or otherwise on the run from Saul, including David's own brothers. And it's important to note that not just the warriors were there with David, but their families had come with David. And two of those years were spent even seeking refuge with the Israelite enemies, the Philistines. And that was a harrowing experience for David as well.

36:16 Let me look. We got... We're actually out of time. I was joking when I said I needed ten more minutes. I had written things down.

36:24 I thought I could I could I could fix my thing. Well, I'm gonna continue with my my speech, and stay if you want. You can go if you don't. So so So the notable thing about David's escape from Saul is illustrated in one of those close scrapes in Escaping from Saul. David was hiding in the wilderness of Engedi at this point in time, And Saul had informants, it seems, throughout the entire area.

36:59 And someone told Saul and David and or members of his band... That that David and or members of his band were hiding in that area. So En Gedi is a mountainous desert wilderness on the Western Side of the Dead Sea. It's about a 50 mile trip by land from Gibeah for Saul. So a nice little jaunt, to bring 300 warriors by foot and 3,000 warriors by foot, which is said he brought.

37:25 And Saul kind of followed David around the mountain. David was kind of it's kind of like, you're on one side of a tree and I'm on the other. We're gonna kinda... So David and his group was running, and they found a little cave to hide in. And Saul, while running around looking for him, he needs to use the restroom.

37:44 So he goes into the cave, and David realized Saul was there. I don't know how he did. You'd think it was dark and light enough for him to see it. I don't know. Anyway, he saw that he there, and Saul didn't realize anybody was in there.

37:58 He didn't realize how big it was. And David's warrior said, hey, this is your chance to kill him. God has put him into your hands. And this is, again, is like another of those kind of keys. So in one Samuel 24, David, verse six, David responds, The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my Lord, the Lord's anointed.

38:21 David still called Saul his Lord, and it was because he called him the Lord's anointed. That phrase is is just as key as a man after God's own heart that that it it says everything about how David thought. If the Lord anoints somebody, even if he's anointed someone else, including himself, the Lord has anointed him as king over Saul, you'd think somehow that made a difference, but David didn't see it that way. The Lord had anointed him. That was sacred.

38:51 It was from the Lord. And because the Lord was David's Lord, anybody that the Lord anointed was also in his own heart the one that he would serve as serving the Lord. And so he says, The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my Lord, the Lord's anointed. Speaking of Saul. And to put out my hand against him, seeing he is the Lord's anointed.

39:19 In this same section, Saul had found out that David was there and he said to himself, it says he said, Oh, the Lord has given him unto my hand. Okay? That was the logic Saul used. And it shows his heart, one not after God's own heart. Right?

39:37 It shows that he thought, just because the circumstances showed something, that that must be the Lord. David thought, well, the Lord said so. That must be the Lord. You know? I'm not going to let circumstances change what I know about the Lord.

39:51 And that is the same thing. When when you trust the Lord, you trust his word. When you trust his word, you follow it. Right? And you follow it because he is your Lord, because you have a relationship with him.

40:08 So in this... And so while Samuel, as was earlier pointed out, that Saul thought little of the fact that God had anointed him, David himself placed a great importance in this because David had a heart after God's own heart. I'll take this moment to have you consider this. Any time you see an example of an Old Testament, in the Old Testament of a man giving his life for another or for the sins of another, you can consider that person as a kind of symbol or type or archetype of Jesus Christ and how he sacrificed himself for us on the cross. You see this in Isaac in the Old Testament.

40:54 He willingly laid his life down. Thankfully, he was never actually sacrificed. Jonathan himself really kind of played that role where he just straight up gave up his life. He thought nothing of his life be used in God's service. And David was willing to die on behalf of the entire cowardly Israeli army in his own country facing Goliath alone.

41:21 And in this moment here in the cave, he was willing to die showing sacrificial love even to the very person that was his enemy and was at the moment, that moment threatening his life. And it just brings a couple verses to mind. Romans five:seven-eight, For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person, one would dare even to die. But God shows his love for us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And David was willing to die.

41:52 In fact, he even... He... What you see that he did next, he he he could have just hid there and let Saul leave and not killed Saul. But what he did do instead was he cut a little section of the garment out, and he removed it. Saul never knew.

42:13 Guess he was really getting something out. I don't know. But he never knew. And he he left he let him leave the cave still unknowing that there was a missing section of his robe. And then after he had gone out just a little bit, he came out and presented himself to his enemy.

42:28 Okay? He put himself in harm's way, and and so you could say he sacrificed himself to Saul's mercy, which was not the best in humans... Humanly speaking, it was not the... A certain thing that Saul would have any mercy at all because he was pursuing David. But Saul Saul did have mercy and God had it that way.

43:22 Saul was panicked again, showing his true colors instead of committing to God's will and violating God's explicit command to never seek out a necromancer. I guess that mean... Necro means death, you know, mancers together. I don't know. Someone that would call up the dead or a medium.

43:40 They were... He was also called a witch in other translations. She was the person she sought out. So... And he violated his own command banning all such people.

43:51 But upon inquiry, Saul was able to find a woman who was reported to communicate with the dead a few miles from the battle site in the city of Endor. And he convinced her to to do her craft. God actually manifested as she was trying to bring up Samuel. He manifested Samuel, the spirit of Samuel, in some way. I don't understand exactly what that means, but the witch knew immediately that this was not the way it normally worked when a spirit would communicate.

44:26 This was something unusual, and he immediately recognized this was Saul. And Saul and Samuel Samuel's message did did give one final message to to Saul. He said he said that, this was the day that Saul and his son and Jonathan would die, and the Philistines would win a big victory. And that... And and so the news of Saul's death came to David.

44:54 And, again, you see David's heart and his response. Number one, he executed the man who claimed to have killed Saul for murder because this, again, was God's anointed. In other words, no one is to put their hand on God's anointed, and even if it benefited David. This man was a foreigner, didn't know David, but thought that he would be very happy about this. And David, in fact, and his men mourned the death of Saul.

45:28 I'm sure it was more David than his men, but his men followed him. David went on to have a long and blessed reign, and there were many mistakes that David made. But through all of that, David would still return, to what God God called him. God called him the man after his own heart, and he chose to surrender to God even after the mistakes that he made, which were considerable. David's life ended much different than Saul's.

45:58 He prepared an entire fortune dedicated to the worship of the Lord, and he spent large amounts of energy developing out plans for the temple that his son Solomon was to build. Before he died, he was able to see his son Solomon reigning successfully after him. And, what is more, David was prophesied, and, of course, that came to bear to be in the line to our Messiah, Jesus Christ. David also wrote the book of the Bible devoted to worship, and we know that as Psalms, the book of Psalms. And that's been a benefit to many people over the millennia, reading a book that was from David's heart to God.

46:46 You could say, in summary, that David was part of God's great work. And I can't go into too much detail here. I need to complete this for your benefit. But this whole idea of a great work comes from Nehemiah. And Nehemiah had a great work.

47:07 He was... Got to give him a work to build a wall to protect the men of Jerusalem. And he did it in fifty two days. But during that time, there were multiple men trying to stop that because they wanted to continue to oppress the people of Israel, and that wall was a security to them. And so they tried to call Nehemiah out.

47:32 They said, Hey, come meet with us. There's a problem. You've to stop. And Nehemiah says this kind of epic phrase. He says, and I sent messengers to them saying, this is Nehemiah six:three, I am doing a great work, and I cannot come down.

47:46 Why should I stop the work while I leave and come down to you? And I tell you this because I believe that it's easy for us to kind of look at what we do, what God may have called us to do, and perhaps take for granted what we do. And we don't realize, you know, like the seed that we talked about at the beginning, it's pretty common. You can see it. It's mundane.

48:41 But I call it God's great work because it's easy for us to only think that great work is to build a wall in fifty two days or great work is to conquer an army or great work is to do something that, in our minds, we think is epic. But as you can see in the story, what we think is great and what God thinks is great is two totally different things. And so whatever he calls you to do is great because it's his work. Does that make sense? I'm not saying anything you happen to be doing right now is the right thing.

49:13 Maybe you shouldn't be doing it. Right? But oftentimes, what God has deemed as holy or good, we consider lowly or mundane. So even in modern day, just because of the media that we're inundated with, everything seems mundane because there's so many exciting things being put through our eyes. And it causes us to miss out on what God is actually doing.

49:48 Perhaps in our own family. Perhaps it's just something simple. Perhaps it's you're constrained to bed somewhere and you can't get out and you're an older person, all you can do is pray, as if that's all you can... Like, that's small, right? All I can do is pray.

50:04 And maybe that's your great work, right? Perhaps it's preaching like Jonathan Edwards did and leading a great revival. I don't know. But when God does a great work, he does a great work. It really is great.

50:18 It's just kinda hard to see because it's, well, just like the seed, kind of like underground. You don't see how he makes that seed grow. Right? And so I'll just leave it with this, that, you know, God is looking for a relationship with you. However, our sin and lack of faith gets in the way spiritually of us being able to have a relationship of deepest intimacy with him that he desires to have with us.

50:44 He sent Jesus Christ as a physical expression, if you will. You know, it's easy for her to open up that apple, right? That's a physical expression. But Jesus Christ was the physical expression of his great work. And, it was a love sacrifice of mercy.

51:03 He he bore our sins on that torture device called the cross. He suffered in a way that is both profoundly human and yet with a depth that only God can infinitely do spiritually. And he did this so that he could remove the barrier of sin so that we could be involved in relationship with him exactly as he planned when he made you. And when we join him, when we start that relationship, we partake. We get to partake in his greatest work.

52:07 We don't deserve this. We were your enemies, but now we are your friends. Thank you for the sacrifice. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.