The Story of David: The Vision of God
June 5, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
1 Samuel 16:6-13

We begin our summer series on the life of David. And we will be looking at the life of David throughout this summer. Today’s Scripture is from First Samuel chapter 16, and there’s also a little passage in there from 13 that we won’t read together. But we’ll be talking about the call of David.

When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely theLord’s anointed is now before the Lord.”But the Lordsaid to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lorddoes not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but theLord looks on the heart.” Then Jesse called Abinadab, and made him pass before Samuel. He said, “Neither has theLord chosen this one.”Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, “Neither has theLordchosen this one.”Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, “TheLordhas not chosen any of these.”Samuel said to Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” And he said, “There remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep.” And Samuel said to Jesse, “Send and bring him; for we will not sit down until he comes here.”He sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. TheLordsaid, “Rise and anoint him; for this is the one.”Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of theLordcame mightily upon David from that day forward. Samuel then set out and went to Ramah. (I Samuel 16:6-13 NRSV)
There’s a Sermon Notes inside your bulletin, and I hope that you will take that and follow along. We’ll be looking specifically at that Scripture and many of us are visual learners, we can look at it and maybe learn it better.
Let’s pray. Lord, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see and our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel, and then, O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
A couple of years ago one of my daughters got me connected to a podcast called “Serial.” Maybe some of you listen to it. It’s the story of a young man Adnan who had been convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend, and this was a journalist who came in and wanted to determine if he had really done so or not. So every week early Tuesday morning they would release a new episode of “Serial.” Now every morning when I walk I listen to a sermon. I steal their stuff and pretend it’s mine and give it to you. So I do those. Except on Tuesday I’d bail on the sermons and listen to “Serial.” Because I wanted to know what happened in next episode.
One of my daughters this week decided that my wife and I need to begin watching “Bloodline.” We haven’t done it, and it may be a horrible show, and I probably shouldn’t be mentioning it here in the church. I don’t know. Sometimes we just binge watch a bunch of episodes. It’s on Netflix or something. Maybe you’re a “House of Cards” or “Game of Thrones” or “LA Law.” I don’t know what you watch, but there’s some show that it ends with sort of a cliffhanger, and the next week you’re just anxious to find out what the next episode is. These are the sagas, these stories that go on and on, and they don’t end in an hour. They continue. They’re full of twists and turns and surprises and all sorts of things.
The story of David is a saga. It’s one of a number of sagas in the Scripture. There are really four that are built around a central character. One is the story of Moses, one is the story of David, one is the story of Jesus and one is the story of St. Paul. And much of the Bible is built around those four. You add the pre-history, the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel and that family and the story of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph then the story of the Children of Israel being taken off into exile and brought back from exile, those seven sagas take up 85% of the Bible. There are these stories that you’re just anxious….
What we do unfortunately is a lot of time we read a little tiny part. It would be like turning on the second season, third episode of “House of Cards” and trying to understand it. It just doesn’t work very well. So this summer what we’re going to try to do is look at the whole story of David and get it in context. I hope you follow will along. If you have to be gone I hope you watch on live stream. Hello to those watching on live stream today. We have between 300 and 500 each Sunday doing that. I hope you can do that. Just go into our church website, and you can watch or listen to the podcast or download the sermon off the Internet later in the week. So just try to do the reading so you can keep up and kind of see the whole story.
Now here’s where we are today. I want to give you the context. The nation of Israel has never had a king before, so they decide they want to have a king. And some in Israel say that they should never have a king, and others said they wanted a king. Literally the Bible says this: “We want a king like other people have.”
So finally God relents and he says, “I’m going to give you a king.” He says it through a prophet and it’s really kind of funny. He says, “I’m going to give you a king and you’re not going to like it. Here’s what the king will do. He’s going to send your boys off to war, he’s going to take your land, and he’s going to tax you. The king’s going to do all this stuff to you, but you want a king? Here’s a king!”
So he gave them King Saul. Saul becomes the king, and he leads the nation of Israel into a place of pretty strong military power, a real force. Then one day… and you’ll see the passage that’s in your Sermon Notes, I Samuel 13, Saul does something that offends God. It isn’t a big deal, but it makes it clear what Saul is really doing.
Saul makes this decision. Samuel the prophet has told him, “Here’s what you need to do.” And he goes ahead and does it a different way. The Lord speaks through Samuel and says, “No longer will Saul’s kingdom last forever.”
Because what Saul had done was that he had said “This is what I’m going to do, and I’m going to ask God to bless it.” What Samuel said that God wants is, he says, “I want a man after my own heart. I want someone who isn’t saying, ‘This is what I’m going to do and now I want you to bless it, God.’ I want someone who’s saying, ‘I’m going to do what God wants me to do.’”
See the distinction there? A lot of times we think we’re being holy because we charge ahead doing something. And we say, “Okay, God, I just need you to bless this.” When the truth is that we need to be open to see what God is doing and get on board.
So God decides to take away the kingdom of Saul and three chapters later he chooses David as his next leader. That’s our story for today.
The prophet Samuel goes to Bethlehem. I hope you’ve heard of that place before. Immediately you have David as sort of a type of the Messiah, a type of Jesus. He goes to Bethlehem and Samuel says to Jesse, “Bring me all your sons.” And he brings out his seven oldest sons, strong and mighty. Eliab is the strongest of them. Jesse says, “This is your new king, right?” And Samuel says, “No, not him. I don’t care how strong they are. How tall they are, or how mighty they are.”
So Jesse brings out all his other sons. All seven come out and Samuel says, “Is this all you got? This is it?” Jesse says, “I’ve got the runt of the litter out in the field, but he’s not a warrior, he’s just a shepherd boy.” Samuel says, “Bring him in.” And as soon as he sees him he says, “This is the one.” And he anoints him as the next king of Israel.
Now what can we learn from this story? I have four things and I want to do them as quickly as I can. But this single story is just packed with stuff.
Look first with me at verse seven: “For theLorddoes not see as mortals see; they look at the outward appearance…” Boy we do look at the outward appearance, don’t we? When I was a pastor in League City I had planted a new church there. And it was small, we were very intimate there. So I preached on this very text, and I wore a magnetic earring during the whole time I preached. And I just loved watching the people. I got to the end of the sermon, and I said, “By the way, you all are more worried about the fact that you think I got my ear pierced than hearing everything I’ve ever said. You thought your pastor went and got his ear pierced.” Now let me tell you I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I will tell you that the people there thought I’d lost my mind. We can’t seem to see past outward appearance because we’re human, we’re mortals.
They did a study and it was kind of troubling. They took a group of police cadets, and they divided them into two groups. In one group they said, “We’re going to be learning some things.” And they asked two white cadets and one black cadet to come forward. They said to the black cadet, “Okay we want you to put your hands up like this.” And they had the two white cadets stand behind them and hold out their fingers like they had guns behind them. Then they said to the group of cadets who were there, “What’s happening? Write it down. You have ten seconds.”
So they wrote it down and the great majority of those cadets both black and white said, “That is an arrest. The two white cadets are arresting the black cadet.”
On the other group they had two black cadets hold their guns and white cadet hold his hands up over his head. And they said to the group, “Write down what you see. You have ten seconds. Put it on a piece of paper.” The overwhelming number of cadets, both black and white, wrote on the paper, “That is an armed robbery.”
We don’t want to make decisions based on what people look like. We don’t want to, we don’t think we do. But we do. Mortals look on the outward appearance.
This week at Annual Conference Jacob Breeze – Rev. Jacob Breeze now - preached a sermon. Jacob was on our staff. Many of you remember him. He was the youth pastor at our Gethsemane campus and came over to this campus and worked in our Small Group ministry for a year. Then he went off to seminary, and he’s been there for four years. So Jacob is interesting in his appearance. I guess that’s the best way to say it. He’s interesting. He has tattoos that start off on the side of his face and then come down, and now he’s gone off to seminary and he’s come back, and he’s even more interesting than he was before. So he’s grown a Gandalf beard. One of these long wizard-like beards that wag. Down to here. He’s shaved all the hair on the side of head but the top of his hair kind of grows out over his face. So he’s preaching at Annual Conference.
Now this is a big fancy deal. He’s got a clerical collar on, but he’s wearing blue jeans with holes all the way down them, and red plastic shoes. Red plastic shoes. So he gets up to preach, and I’m thinking, “Please don’t say that he was on the staff of St. Luke’s, please. When you introduce him, don’t say that.”
Then he started to preach. And he preached maybe the finest sermon I’ve ever heard. The task he’d been given was “Why do I have hope in the United Methodist Church.” And he said, “You know a lot of people say that the United Methodist church is dead. I don’t know if that’s such a bad thing. Because we’re Christians and when we have something that’s dead we have something we can work with. We’re resurrection people. That’s what we do.” Then he gave the most powerful sermon. He got a standing ovation. That doesn’t happen. I was thinking, “He was at St. Luke’s.”
One of the other pastors came up next to me, and he said that his cousin was in his church in North Carolina, a little rural church where he served while he was in seminary. And he said when he got there his cousin was his biggest critic, and when he left his cousin was his biggest fan, his biggest advocate.
We make decisions like that. We put people into categories. We like to decide that if they’re old or young that must be how they think. Are they black, are they white, are they Hispanic, are they liberal, are they conservative, are they gay, are they straight, are they a man or a woman? You can make a list. Are they Aggies or are they Longhorns? We put them in categories and we make decisions about them based on the category that they’re in. Because it’s easy for us.
God doesn’t look on the outward appearance. What does God look on then? It says, God doesn’t look on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart.”
There’s a trend in medicine, in cardiology, that at a certain point in life based on a series of risk factors, genetics, lifestyle, age, and a whole series of them, that people get a preventative heart scan. Basically it determines the calcium, finds the places where calcium plaque has built up inside the arteries. It determines whether you are about to have a heart attack or what’s happening. They have new electron scanners that don’t have the same amount of radiation, and that’s opened this up to more people.
And it got me to thinking. What if God did a heart scan of your heart? He took you aside and took you into that little room in the doctor’s office where they have that light board on the wall. And he took your heart scan, and he put it up in front of you, and said, “Tom, come over here. I want to show you your heart. What do you really love? Let’s look here.”
“The Scripture says you’re to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and your neighbor as yourself.’ Let’s see what you really love here?” And they he looked at the scan. “Do you really love money? Do you really love applause? Do you really love popularity? Do you really love power?”
God could take your heart scan and put it up there. What would it show? What level of compassion do you have for others? Where has your heart grown hard? Where is it calloused?
When I read that God looks on the heart, it creates in me this sort of weird mixed feeling. On the one hand I think, “He knows I love him.” But do I love him with all my heart?
Now of course you and I can’t see the heart scans of others. So what are we supposed to judge them on? We can look at their actions, their words, their attitudes. We can come to some impression, but we can’t really see their heart. So what are we supposed to judge them on? You know the answer. We don’t judge them at all. That’s God’s job. Who are we to judge? Only God can look on their heart.
So I want to jump down a few verses because the good part is still coming. Look with me at verse 12: “And the Lord said, ‘Rise and anoint him, for this is the one.’” David, he’s the one.
One of my daughters was six or seven. I don’t know how old exactly. All of those girls, they kind of run together, so I’m not even sure which one it was. One of them. But she was six or seven and she was signed up to be on the soccer league. One of the coordinators of the soccer league called me and asked me to be coach of their team. I said, “I don’t want to be coach of their team. I don’t know much about soccer. I’m a very busy person.” What I was trying to say, was “I’m very important, so I don’t think I’ll have time.” But I did tell them, “I’ll be glad to be the assistant coach of the team and help out in any way I can.”
So we went to the organizational meeting, and there are all the teams there and they said, “I want you to meet…” I don’t remember the name of the team… “And these are the girls and Tom Pace is the assistant coach. And they don’t have a head coach.” I thought that was a really tricky maneuver. And I have used it often in ministry with you all since then. I’ve gotten you good with that one. It’s effective and sneaky. I like it.
See, it was like God was saying, “Tom you are the one.” So I went and bought a book on soccer, and I learned the important strategies like kick it that way, or kick it that way. Put it in that net, and don’t let it go in that one.
I remember the day when my cell phone rang. I was standing in the kitchen of my house and Bishop Janice Riddle Huie was on the other end. She said, “The cabinet and I have been meeting and we would like to appoint you to the pastor of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Houston.” A sense of honor and pride and sheer terror came over me at that moment. That’s the way it is, right?
I remember when Dee looked at me and said, “Tom, we’re going to have a baby.” And it takes a while for you to move from “We’re going to have a baby” to “You’re going to be a father.” First, it’s like, “That’s really good for you, honey. I’m glad. How swell, I’m so happy for you.” Then it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m going to be a father.” What does that mean? All the responsibility and all that stuff – you are the one. This is the one, God’s saying. You’re going to be a father.
Maybe you’ve had the responsibility for caring for an aging parent or another adult - aunt, uncle, grandparent. Or maybe you’ve even had to make that difficult decision about life support. And you say, “I don’t want to make that decision. That’s God’s decision whether someone lives or dies.” I don’t know how many times someone has come into my office and talked through that issue. They say, “That shouldn’t be my decision. This should be God’s decision.” My answer is, “God gave it to you. God said, ‘You’re the one. You decide. You’re a person after my own heart. I believe it. So you decide. You’re the one.’”
Now it goes on, and maybe this is the best part. “Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers, and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.” See, when God calls us to do something, that call doesn’t necessarily mean it’s something for a lifetime. It might be just for a moment. It could just be in an instant. You’re having a conversation with someone, and they say, “I don’t even know if I believe in God anymore.” And you have the opportunity to say, “Let’s talk about that.” You don’t say, “I’m going to call my pastor and have him talk to you.” No, you’re the one. You tell them about how much God loves them and that doubts are part of the journey of faith.
Or there’s someone who is just broken hearted and needs you to put your arms around them and hold them. See, a calling may be just this moment. Right now. You are the one. And what God says is, “I will anoint you.” The word anoint means to “pour out.” So the oil is the sign of God’s Holy Spirit. God will anoint you, God will give you the Holy Spirit to do the things that God has called you to do.
It has been a hard week here at St. Luke’s. On Monday we had a memorial service for Jim Davenport. Jim was a pillar of the church. Half or three quarters of you have been handed a bulletin by him over here at this door. He was an active Pure Sound parent. He was involved in Men’s Life and many, many other things here. He died too young, and we will miss him.
Then on Wednesday morning, Bill Ellerbrock, Julie’s husband – she’s the Director of Children’s Ministry here at St. Luke’s. If you come here at 11:00 you’ve seen her give the children’s sermon. Her husband died very suddenly. He was 57. Boy, it just knocked us for a loop I have to tell you. We were all thinking, “What? How could that happen?”
So we’ve been thinking and praying a lot. Not for Jim or for Bill, because we know they’re fine. We’ve been praying for Barbara, Jim’s wife and his daughter Claire. We’ve been praying for Julie and for her kids Taylor and Cole. But we wonder how will they go on? How will Julie will continue to be that bright and shining joy that she is and work with these children? How will those kids move forward? Their dad was the one they counted on so much.
So all of those - how could they possibly do that? Many of you have been in that place where you think to yourself, “How will I go on?”
The Lord anoints us with his Holy Spirit. And its comfort, and its strength, and its courage, and it’s whatever it takes to do that to which we’re called to do. God anoints us. Holy Spirit is poured out on us.
In 1953 Queen Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England. I’ve seen the videos online. It’s kind of cool to look back on these black and white deals of the coronation ceremony. It’s a big fancy deal. There’s one part of the ceremony that’s called the Anointing. It is the only part that could not be televised or photographed. What they did was that the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England, takes oil. They remove her royal robe, and the royal diamond necklace that she wears. They take the diadem – the crown – off of her head. They strip her of all the royal trappings. The Archbishop takes the oil and anoints her head, her hands, and her breast as a way of saying, “May the Holy Spirit take your mind, and your actions and especially your heart.”
I pray that the Holy Spirit will take your heart. God looks at you and doesn’t see that which is apparent, that which is obvious or outward. God looks on your heart even with all its brokenness, and pain, and hardness and stuff. And he calls you by name and says, “This is the one.” And he gives you the power of the Holy Spirit to do that to which he calls you.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.