Well, friends, if we haven't met, my name is Josh.
I have the joy of serving as pastor here at the garden, and
it's great to see you. It's great to be together today.
If you're new here or still kind of checking the garden out and
we have people visiting today from out of town.
We've got people who are new to the city coming in for school.
And I just want to say welcome. We're so glad that you're here
with us. The garden is this kind of
random collection of individuals and communities and families who
are all journeying together, bound together by a common
purpose to increasingly be shaped and formed by the love of
Jesus. And then to extend that love in
the places that we live with the people that we love in our
workplaces, in our homes, in our schools and our families.
And so if that's a journey that is of interest to you, I, I
personally am very biased, but I think it's the most important
journey you could possibly take in your life.
But we'd love to have you with us on that journey to find a
place to connect here. Come grab me or anybody with a
lanyard out in the lobby after our gathering today.
We'd love to to share more about what's going on in the garden or
just meet you help in any way that we can.
Well, this morning we are continuing this series that
we've been in over the last few weeks.
We're coming up on the halfway point in this ten week journey,
which we are very ambitiously attempting to cover all of
scripture. So we're going beginning to end
and and really tracing this one story that that find its home in
a library of books written across languages, cultures, and
even centuries to learn about what the story has to teach us
not only about the world, but also about ourselves and our
lives. Today and this morning
specifically, we're in chapter kind of five of this series,
installment 5, and we're looking at the establishment of the
monarchy. All right, so in this chapter,
we are actually once again talking about the same stuff
that we've been talking about kind of every week in the
series. In week one, we discovered that
humanity was created and invited into this fundamental task to
enjoy God's presence and extend his purposes in the world.
As simple as that. Enjoy God's presence and extend
his purposes. And then in Week 2, we found
that that wasn't enough for us, right?
That, that, that our first parents made the decision to, to
take a shortcut, to seize control, to go their own way,
and in doing so unleashed a wave of disconnection and death.
And so throughout this story that we're tracing, essentially
we're, we're wrestling with week after week the same question.
It's like, can we find our way back to this initial original
design? Will we finally be a people that
can enjoy God's presence and extend his purposes in the
world? And I don't know about any of
you. I nerd about stories.
Has anybody here heard about Joseph Campbell and the hero's
journey and all that? I know we've got a couple of
nerds out here. At least I'm seeing some hands
go up. All right, So if you're
interested not only in stories but also in the architecture of
storytelling, then you read people like Joseph Campbell, who
has this theory that that myths and stories, although they have
all these differences, of course, also share some common
plot points. At least the epic ones do,
right? You've got a hero who, at the
beginning of the story, receives a call to go on an adventure.
Usually along the way, they pick up a guide who supports them in
this adventure. And then eventually, in order to
achieve their goals, they'll have to experience some kind of
death and rebirth. But that's painful.
That's icky. We don't want to do that.
And so through the early chapters of any series, there's
something that which Robert McKee refers to as progressive
complications. And there are plot points in the
story where essentially the hero attempts simple solutions to fix
the problem without actually having to suffer, right?
Can we just quickly fix it, solve it?
You know, can I just take on Darth Vader by myself right now
immediately? Like, can I, can I jump to the
end, please? And these progressive
complications, if you will always fail to resolve the
situation, they're superficial at the end of the day.
And through this kind of a section of the story, what we're
dealing with is really a series of progressive complications,
attempts to solve for the problem that we introduced in
Week 2 without really experiencing the transformation
that is needed. And so we see a kind of a series
of these, what if God wiped out the whole race and just started
fresh with Noah, right? Well, what if God chose one
special family, Abraham's family?
And this is a dew to faith. So maybe it will all work out
like what if, what if God rescued his people and and gave
them a loss? So they they were really clear
on what to do and how to live as the family.
And week after week, of course, we've seen that although these
are attempts are good, they're positive things that humanity
still does not live into its intended design.
We still fail to live as a people who enjoy God's presence,
who trust him and extend his purposes in the world.
And this morning we get to another one of those What if we
just had the right leaders? What if there was just a guy who
was powerful enough and, and responsible enough and, and, and
they could just take care of it for us?
Of course, this doesn't work out so well as we'll see in first
Samuel chapter 8 and verse 5, we see the people come to the
prophet Samuel and they say to him, appoint a king to lead us,
such as all the other nations have.
Now, if you've been paying attention through this series,
that should raise some red flags for you.
Just last week we talked about God's law that he gave and, and
one of the three purposes, if you'll remember, was to really
create boundaries, right? To create holiness to to
separate God's people who had this unique purpose off from all
of the others. And here it is in this passage
that we find them kind of stressed out and reaching for
the same solution that they see their neighbors engaging in.
Could we just have a king, please?
I I think that would really take care of everything.
In fairness, they were having problems.
In chapters 4 through seven of our texts today, First Samuel,
we find this extended story of conflict with their neighbors to
the South, the Kingdom of Felicity.
In fact, in First Samuel chapter 4 and verse 2, we find that
there was this big battle and 4000 of the people were killed.
It's a big loss, especially for that time that's like, that's a
lot of people dying. Not only that, but the ark,
which represented the presence of God himself, was captured and
taken away. So you can see why they might be
on edge. You could see that they might be
stressed out for good reason, like things are not going so
well. They want to reach for another
solution, a shortcut if you will, to deliver on the safety
and security that they're longing for.
We read in verse 6 that this displeased Samuel and even more
so, God. They have rejected me as their
king, God says in verse 7, as they have done from the day I
brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and
serving other gods. See, the request for a king is
just one more failure in a long line of distrust and
disobedience that we've been seeing play out each week in
this series. And while Israel's lack of
faith, their choice to kind of take a shortcut for comfort and
control is easy to judge from distance, it's a familiar
pattern, isn't it? Like we can relate if we're
honest, right? It's easy to trust God when
everything in your life is going pretty well, right?
When everything is simple, when everything is straightforward,
when the bank account is full and the bills are paid, when
you're in a good relationship, when everything is kind of on
track, trusting God, it's a breeze, right?
And then it hits the fan, right? Things are stressy.
Oh my gosh, the world is on fire.
My life is on fire. Am I ever going to get married?
How am I going to pay these bills?
Am I going to be able to afford a house?
Am I going to be able to get my kid into the school and and the
things go on, right? It's always something.
But when we begin to feel that the stress rising, so too with
it comes this impulse to reach for a shortcut.
And this is what we've been talking about over these past
couple weeks. And so the the the people of
God, the nation of Israel at this point reach for someone, a
figurehead and authority who they think are going to keep
things from going off the rails that that will allow them to get
what they want. We meet their guy in Chapter 9
in the very first verse. It says in Chapter 9 and verse
one that Saul comes from a family of status.
All right, this guy got a resume.
He's got a pedigree. And not only that, check this
out. He was fine.
Scripture goes on to say he was as handsome as a young man as
could be found anywhere in Israel.
Clear swipe right kind of a situation.
This dude was a head taller than everybody else, right?
He's a good looking dude. Like, from the outset, people
look at this guy and they're like, oh, yeah, that's the one.
He's going to look good on a campaign poster.
He's going to be great at the head of this column, right?
When the enemies attack, they're going to see this guy and
they're going to, you know, they're going to have second
thoughts. Like, we're going to be legit
established if we can get this guy.
Of course, there was a problem here beyond the fact that that
God was their king. There was the problem that Saul,
this person that they were choosing entirely lacked
character. Saul was all about the externals
and not at all about the internals.
Saul is vain and insecure. He's cruel and reactive.
He's performative and vindictive, as we see over the
following chapters. Let me be honest with you,
friends, I like when I think about this analogy, it hits me
emotionally. It is upsetting to me because we
just keep doing this, don't we? Like we, we keep looking for a,
a strong man to solve our problems.
Somebody who's going to be out there and is going to take care
of the bad guys, right? Character kind of doesn't really
matter as long as they can beat up those guys and look good in
the process. Maybe that's our God and and the
people of God have so consistently and so historically
and even today are so tragically reaching for these shortcut
solutions that are empty. This is what we see happen in
our text today. They they reach for Saul.
They're not content with God as king.
And so instead they crown a substitute that promises them
comfort and control. This guy is going to going to do
what we want. So we'll line up behind through
the remainder of kind of our message today.
The the main thing that I want you to see, because we've been
looking at humanity's tendency to take the wrong track over and
over, like basically every week in the series is just another
example of us not trusting God. But what I really want to help
you to see this morning is God's response to this, because
candidly, God responds pretty differently than I would have
imagined, pretty differently than I think I would have in
that situation. I mean, how would you expect God
to respond? Like if somebody is like, I'm a
parent, if my kid is pushing me away, saying I'm going to go my
own way, man, particularly to go my own way and do something
that's going to hurt them, harm them, damage other people.
Oh my gosh, like the impulse to, to jump in and to fix it, to
control it, to make sure it doesn't happen.
It's so strong. But that's not what God does.
It's interesting. Look here.
The the first thing that God does is he cautions his people.
He cautions them. This is the text that Amy read
for them or read for us earlier. God basically says, hey, look
out. If you go down this path, it's
going to cause you great harm. This is not going to go how you
want. And in verses 11 through 17,
Samuel doesn't pull any punches. He, he cautions, hey, you're
going to, you're going to appoint a king.
You go down this road, he's going to take your sons.
He's going to take your daughters, your fields, your
vineyards, your grain, your vintage, your servants, your
cattle. You yourselves will become his
slaves. This is a bad move, guys.
Caution, Pump the brakes. Consider this, this, this, this
shortcut that you think is going to give you comfort and control
is actually going to take, take, take, take, take from you until
Samuel explains in verse 17. One day you'll cry out from
relief for relief from the king that you have chosen.
This is the same pattern that we've been seeing week after
week, isn't it? The shortcut we take, the way
that we grasp for control so often as we reach out becomes
exactly the trap that binds us, right?
It becomes the hook, the snare. We try to simply solve things
without trusting God on our way. Maybe I'll just overwork.
Maybe this relationship, it doesn't seem right, but maybe I
could get in there. Maybe if I, you know, if I'm
able to, to move into this neighborhood, maybe if I'm, if
I'm able to get this job. Like we, we try and put so much
weight on all of these different things, just hoping that this,
the secondary thing will primarily solve for what it is
that we're aching for. And so often these things become
a snare to us. That's what we see happen in
this text today. So God, first of all, he
cautions, he says, hey, watch out, this is not good for you.
But then paradoxically, God consents.
He cautions, but then he consents.
In verse 22, we read that he says, listen to them and give
them a king. OK, give the people what they
want. Listen to them, Samuel, Give
them a king. And this is a profound truth.
It's honestly a truth that I might not prefer.
I'm not sure if I want God to show up this way, but he does.
God is not a helicopter parent. God is.
God is not so concerned with us avoiding pain that he swoops in
and interrupts and interjects any time we start down the wrong
course. He speaks truth to us.
He speaks wisdom to us. But when we say, hey, I'm going
this direction, God's like, OK, OK, so God consents.
He, he warns this is what will happen.
He cautions the people, but then he steps back.
He allows them to go their own way.
And sometimes I have to say, like, I think that we think when
God does this that like we're getting away with it.
Apple, the fast one, nobody noticed punishment did not fall.
I'm doing this thing and I know I'm not supposed to be, but like
he didn't get me yet. And friends, I think what God
knows that sometimes we don't believe is that the the wages of
sin is death, as the New Testament says.
And and God doesn't like, he's not mad at us.
He doesn't hate us. He's not out there sitting on a
cloud waiting to to smite us with a lightning bolt like Zeus.
But he does allow us to work that job and cash the paycheck
when it comes due. And so God allows us, he
consents to our decisions and lets us go our own way.
And then this is the third thing that I think is so beautiful and
where we'll spend the rest of our time this morning.
God continues, God cautions, God consents, but he also continues.
And this is a big deal because candidly, if I give you advice
and you blow me off and you're like, whatever.
And you do the exact same thing that I told you not to do.
And I told you it was going to cause this kind of a problem if
you did it. And then, and then you do it
like there's a part of me at least that's like, all right,
serves your right. Like see if I'll give you advice
again, honestly, right? But God, he doesn't retreat, he
doesn't withdraw, he doesn't quit on the relationship.
He continues. All right, so we're going to
zoom out from this very specific section to look at the rest of
the book of Samuel. All right, So Samuel is actually
one book across 2 sections that we know as first and second
Samuel. It's for the very strategic and
important reason of they couldn't make scrolls long
enough for it to be one book. OK, so they made it two books.
So it's it's one story and and this story exists in like a
contrasting portrait. There's 2 kings, the 1st 2 kings
of Israel are portrayed here. We've got Saul, who we've
already met this Guston type character, right?
And then after him, we've got David, David and and and Saul
and David are intentionally opposites.
Saul is proud. David is humble.
Saul is a stud. David is introed in chapter 16
and verse 7 with the declaration that the Lord doesn't look at
things like people look at. People look at the outward
appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.
I think. I think God just said he has a
great personality. In fact, David is the last
person that you would expect to be king.
He's the youngest of eight. He smells like sheep.
He's scrawny, can't wear the armor.
He's flushed in the face. He's an artist who is overlooked
by even his own father, who when the prophet shows up to appoint
somebody as king, Samuel's like, or, or his dad's like, he can
take care of the sheep like, he's clearly not even in the
running for this. So.
So David is not the person that you would think would be king.
But the contrast continues, right?
Saul is self absorbed and hollow while David is full of faith.
David becomes a much better king, in fact, than Saul,
Israel's best. Under Saul, the warning that
Samuel offers that the king will take, take, take comes true.
There's fear driven oaths that starve his own troops, there's
conscription and control, priests are cut down at Nob and
the nation is just led by insecurity and suspicion in ways
that continue to spiral until he, along with his sons, are
murdered. It's not a good story.
The art crashes out after some early victories pretty hard.
But David, under David, the tribes are gathered, the enemies
are pushed back, justice and righteousness are are actually
administered in a significant degree.
Worship is centered in Jerusalem and and the ark comes home like
Israel begins to get a taste for God's promises and his goodness.
It's not just about his charisma.
Under David, for at least a season, the people really begin
to taste what a shepherd leader for the common good might look
like. And yet.
Big. And yet David too, cracks.
He's not perfect either. David also ends up oppressing
the people. He ends up going sending his
troops to war and staying home. He ends up raping a woman.
He ends up killing her husband. Right.
David's entire family is in shambles.
His Kingdom is shattered, literally broken into.
And this is in some ways like this is the best we got.
This is like an exemplar of a good ruler.
Bummer. Electing the right guy is never
going to solve the problem. And so we see in both of these
portraits a warning, a warning that on its own, even having the
right guys, even even in some ways just outsourcing our
responsibility to be a people who trust God to the right
authority figure who's going to enact the right laws and kind of
fight for control of our country, doesn't work.
It won't take us there. It won't fulfill our original
mandate. Even under David, the cracks are
too much disobedience, distrust leads again to disconnection and
death. And all of this points us to a
truer, a better king that we'll talk about in the coming weeks.
For a couple years in middle school, I I practiced Akido.
She's like, kind of like judo. It's a Japanese martial art
that's characterized by these like non violent techniques that
are designed to control and redirect an opponent's force.
So they come to strike you and you have all these like
flourishing circular movements and things like that, that
theoretically throw the other person and you're safe and the
other person isn't too desperately harmed.
Please don't come try to fight me after the service.
That was a really long time ago and I wasn't that good at it at
the time, but I love this because there's this image, like
I wasn't very good at it, but the, the sensei, the person I
trained under was just incredible.
Like they had this ability. It's like you try to like
everything you try to do every every way you try to get them,
they somehow are able to just take and like kind of redirect
everything, repurpose it in a different direction.
And friends, what a beautiful picture of God.
Like God is like this supernatural sensei, this guy
who constantly is taking our evil, our mess, our distrust,
our disobedience. We're just constantly throwing
things at him. And instead of just being like,
I'm going to punch you in the face and knock you out, he in
his grace somehow like repurposes those things into a
gentle landing. Not too gentle.
It hurts. But he's constantly taking these
forces and, and redeeming them for good.
I think some of us have in our mind this, this image of God as
this distant, far away judge who sits up on the clouds and we're
going through our lives kind of looking over our shoulder,
hoping that we get away with it, hoping that he doesn't come in,
hoping that he doesn't strike us now.
And really, I think God is more like a judoka.
He's more like the guy who takes the use in the story, who
absorbs the punch himself, who takes it and turns the momentum
and somehow finds a way to move it towards good.
What a beautiful picture of how God engages our sin, our
distrust and disobedience are real friends.
When we rebel, it has consequences.
It certainly did for Israel. The fact that God didn't quit on
them, didn't make their journey like great and awesome and
shiny. The Kingdom goes into exile.
We'll talk about that next week, right?
The kings ultimately fail, and there's deep injustice, there's
deep harm. It would have been a crappy time
to live as a person in the state under the Israelite monarchy.
And yet God redeems. God redeems.
See, Israel's monarchy wasn't God's plan a he told them don't
do this. And yet in in his mercy, his
concession did not cancel his covenant.
In his mercy, his concession did not cancel his covenant.
After warning them and cautioning them, he continues to
weave their evil choices into his redemptive plan.
Isn't this crazy like David, who is a hot mess?
I wish we could just like spend the whole time on the story of
David. This this monarchy, while he is
a disaster in some ways, he still images God in others.
And God actually comes to him and says through you and through
your line, I will establish a king who will reign forever.
We're going to get to that in a couple weeks.
God chooses to move on in His plan for humanity redemptively
through bad choices. And thank God for that.
Thank God for that, friends, because I, I don't know your
story, but I do know people and I do know that a lot of us have
done things that we're not proud of.
A lot of us have had moments in our journey where we've made
mistakes. I know I have, and honestly, as
I look back at my own life story, tell you some stories,
but my arrogance, my lust, my grasping for control and
disrespect of my limits, my stubbornness and idealism caused
some harm. I've hurt myself and I've hurt
other people, people that I cared about, people who I wanted
to treat well, who I wanted to good for.
As I look back on my own story, there's there's regret.
There is some grief about the fact that there have been times
in my journey where I have not trusted God.
I have done things my own way in my selfishness and I and other
people have paid the price for that.
There's a grief that I live with because of mistakes that I've
made. Maybe you feel the same way.
Maybe you look at your own life and you're like, yeah, there's
nothing. I don't really talk about the
time I cheated on my partner, that moment where, man, I found
myself in a really wack situation and now I have a
record. Maybe for you it's under the
surface, it's an abortion, it's an addiction.
Maybe it's a divorce. Maybe you were fired from a job
for something that feels legit to you.
Maybe you are trying to navigate and coping with some kind of
mental illness that feels like a judgement.
It makes you feel fragile. It makes you feel disqualified.
But some of our wounds are are moral failing.
Some of them are just life. A lot of them are a combination
of both. But we're people and that means
that we have wounds. We have places in our life where
we were hurt, where things did not go well.
And God, friends, I am so grateful to be able to stand up
here and say, I don't know what wounds you're carrying this
morning, but I do know that we have that we serve a God who
continues. He doesn't bail out on his
people. He doesn't abandoned them even
when they make bad choices, even when they make stubborn bad
choices to fly in the face of the thing that he just told
them. Thank God, because I, I've done
that. Maybe you too.
And so even when the throne falters, the failure itself
becomes a, a signpost towards redemption.
This is our God, like a, like a freaking judo master who will
repurpose your brokenness into beauty, who who heals our wounds
and, and, and actually leverages them for contribution.
One of the things that I get to do, one of my, the favorite
things about my job is I get to help people discern and figure
out what their calling looks like and then walk into it more
fully. And that makes me so happy.
I love doing that. It's so much fun seeing people
light up, come on fire and begin to contribute for the sake of
the common good in light of the Kingdom being a blessing to
others, making a difference in their world.
It's awesome. And you know what I can tell you
based on that, like 9 times out of 10, when somebody really
discovers their calling, not just something that they're good
at, but something that they were made to do in the world, it
comes from a wound. It comes from a wound, like
there's a good thing, but the good thing is attached to a bad
thing because there was some place in your life where you
were hurt, where you were injured, where sometimes the
wounds are self-inflicted. Guys like we, we take these
wrong turns. We, we find ourselves making
mistakes, messing up, and God sometimes somehow comes in
exactly to those places with his grace.
The places of our wounding are precisely the places where God
meets us with his grace, where he restores, where he redeems.
And friends, this is so crucial because often times couple
things. One, we have a tendency to, when
we've done something we know to be wrong, when we've taken a
wrong turn, when we're living directly in the splat right,
we've messed up. To be so ashamed that we won't
let anybody, including God in to begin the healing process, to
just keep hiding and pretending and trying to cope with life as
though we're OK. And as long as nobody notices,
maybe we'll be all right. But it's at these points of
brokenness that God does his most beautiful work.
And then some of us, some of you are already on the other side of
that. You have already experienced
that. You know what I'm saying is true
because that's been true for you.
There was a place of brokenness. There was a place of sin, there
was a place of bondage. And you have been set free.
You have been healed. Praise God for that.
But some of us won't tell anyone because it makes us look bad to
talk about the things that were back.
Like I'm, I am a new man. Let's just talk about that part,
friends. Sometimes we have to be willing.
We have to have the humility to go back to the broken places in
our story and say, hey, this is where I was at.
But God. But God healed me.
But God showed up. But God changed this for me.
But God transformed this for me, friends.
So we have the courage to do that.
See, wounds are the site of God's work.
Wounds are so often a primary site of God's work.
Wounds become the places that calling springs forth from.
It's there that the grace of God grows the most.
This is how Paul puts it. He says God chose the foolish
things of the world to shame the wise.
He chose the weak things to shame the strong, the lowly
things, that is, to shame the despise things, the things that
are not to nullify the things that are so no one can boast
before him. Because when I am weak, then I
am strong. Friends, do you believe that?
Do you receive that? Are you willing to let the grace
of God touch you in that place? Because the story of the
monarchy is a story about a bad decision.
It's a story about distrust and disobedience.
It's a story about outsourcing our vocation to a figurehead
that we think can save us and take care of things and make
everything better, not trusting in God.
But the reality is, is that this message is not just about not
doing that, although don't because it turns out badly.
It's about the times when we have already done that, when we
already find ourselves on the other side of that, where we
already find ourselves in the pit.
And God not only cautions us, he not only allows us to go our own
way, He not only consents, but he also continues with us.
He continues to love us and transform us.
So friends, as we move into a time of response this morning, I
want to ask for you, where does this land for you?
Are you right now in the wrestling of going your own way,
not trusting God? Stop.
I can attest. Come ask me later.
It's it doesn't go well. It doesn't go well.
Maybe you're already there, hearing a story about it.
It's too late. I'm done.
I'm disqualified. God is just getting started with
you. He loves you and wants to redeem
you. You are not too far gone.
If God can use a murderer, A rapist.
If God can use prostitutes, if he can use tax collecting
oppressors, if God can use the stinky fishermen and shepherds,
If God can use the people who are humble and the people who
are mighty. If God can can use anyone who is
willing to be humble without minimizing the harm that they
have done, but also saying there's more to the story, He
can use you too. Are you willing to surrender?
To let Him in? And if you've already got a
story to tell, are you willing to share it?
Are you willing to let others know to give Him the glory and
honor that he's due because of what he has done in your life?