CALL TO CONFESSION

Luke 6:27-28, 35-36

27 “But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 35 But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. 36 Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

Merciful and loving Father, we confess that we are unloving people. We struggle to serve those closest to us and find it impossible to love our enemies without Your help. We are quick to harbor bitterness, slow to be generous, and full of prideful expectations. Your holy law exposes our fearful, sinful hearts and crushes our pride. We cannot love or forgive those who wrong us unless Your Spirit transforms us with Your astounding, sacrificial love.

Thank You for Your perfect Son, Jesus, who loved His enemies even as He was crushed under the mountain of Your just judgment in our place. Because He bore the punishment for our sin, we can now hide safely in His strong salvation.

Father, open our eyes to this amazing love and grace until we are transformed into Your image. Help us to mercifully love our friends and enemies. Help us to never move beyond the cross or consider ourselves better than others. Continually remind us of Your great mercy so that we can extend it freely to both friend and enemy alike. Thank You for reconciling us through the sacrifice of your precious Son and welcoming us into Your family forever. Amen.

“Take a few moments to personally confess your sins to the Lord.”

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

“Hear these words of comfort and assurance.” 

Romans 5:6-10

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. 10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. 

• Ever watch someone break in real-time? An event finally pushes them over the edge and they react violently.
• In 1 Samuel 18, we saw something break in Saul. 
• David’s star is rising and Saul didn’t like that. He became angry and jealous, and he eyed David with suspicion. 
• He threw a spear at David in his own house trying to pin him to the wall. 
• He tried to get the Philistines to finish him off, but David prevailed every time. 
• By the end of the chapter, David’s name was better than Saul’s in almost every household in Israel. 

• Chapter 19 begins with Saul done pretending that like David.  
• He wants David dead.
• Four times in this chapter, someone tries to end David’s life. 
• And four times, David walks away unharmed. 
• Not because David is an skilled at escaping, but because of the intervention of others. 
• And finally, God himself acts in a remarkable way to prevent Saul’s murderous rage from succeeding. 

• The chapter isn’t really about David’s survival skills. It’s about the Lord’s commitment to keep his anointed. 
• Samuel had anointed David privately. No one outside of David’s family knew. But from that moment, David belonged to God in a particular way, set apart for a purpose God had already decided. 
• And no spear, no army, no father-in-law with murder in his heart was going to undo what God had already done. 
• Through a providential chain of deliverance, the Lord kept his anointed. 
• That’s the central theme of this chapter: the Lord keeps what he has anointed. 

• Maybe you’re not being chased by a jealous, murderous king this week. 
• But many of you know what it feels like when someone with power over your life turns against you: a boss, a family member, an old friend who’s suddenly cold. 
• Some of you are tired of feeling like you have to manage every threat yourself. 
• This chapter isn’t just about David’s deliverance. It’s about how God works when his people are afraid, outmatched, and running out of options. 
• If you’ve ever needed the comfort of knowing that you’re not the one holding your life together, then I pray this message will encourage you. 

1 SAMUEL 19:1-7

JONATHAN’S INTERVENTION

• Saul gives the order to Jonathan and his servants, “Kill David!” 
• His previous attempts to get rid of David had been private, but now he enlists others in his desire to kill David.  
• “But Jonathan, Saul’s son, delighted much in David.” Think about what Saul’s order is asking of Jonathan and how conflicted he must have felt. 
• Jonathan is next in line for the kingship. He’s the crown prince. And David is his biggest rival for the throne. 
• Saul knows this, and he sees David as a threat to his throne.
• Yet, Jonathan already knows there's a covenant between him and David. It is a covenant of friendship and loyalty that Jonathan initiated because he loved David as his own soul.
• The royal death sentence means Jonathan has a choice to make. He can just let events run their course, and maybe he will ascend to the throne one day. Or he can risk his father's anger, and maybe his own safety, to protect the man who stands in the way of his own inheritance.

• Jonathan chooses to act on the basis of his covenant friendship with David.
• So he warned David. He told David the truth, "My father seeks to kill you. Hide yourself until the morning.”
• Real friends tell you the truth, even when the truth is frightening, so you can actually do something about it.

• Then Jonathan does something even harder and more courageous. He is going to act on David’s behalf and advocate for him. He goes to his father.
• He tells his father and his king that what he was doing was sinful. “Let not the king sin against David because David has not sinned against you.”
• On the contrary, David has brought good to Saul. Everything David has done, all of his deeds and exploits, have been in service to the king and all of Israel.
• He reminds Saul of the day when the whole army watched David march out against Goliath with a sling and five stones and strike him down, and “the Lord worked a great salvation for all Israel.”
• Saul had seen this with his own eyes, and he had rejoiced. 
• “Why then will you sin against innocent blood by killing David without cause?”
• What the king was doing was unjust. It was irrational and illogical. 
• Jonathan was building an argument with facts that Saul already knew to be true. He was appealing to Saul’s own memory of what David had done, the gratitude that Saul had shown David in the past. Saul was losing perspective, and Jonathan was speaking truth to him.

SAUL LISTENS

• And for the moment, it seemed to work. Saul listened and swore by the Lord that he would not put David to death. (v6)
• David was welcomed back into the court “as before.” It sounds like reconciliation.
• David being welcomed back into the king’s good graces only meant he would do more good for Saul.
• Saul’s oath sounds pious. To swear by the Lord is not something that should be done lightly. But an oath is only as good as the heart behind it. Saul says the right words, but his heart hasn’t really changed towards David. Saul doesn’t keep his word. Human promises, even sincere ones, even ones sealed with God’s name, don’t always hold up. People will fail you. The most faithful friend you have will one day let you down. Praise God we have the One whose oath never breaks. 

• Jonathan’s love and loyalty for his friend David was remarkable. 
• Think about the people in your life who've done what Jonathan did.
• Somebody who told you a hard truth because they loved you more than they loved your comfort and were willing to risk the relationship. 
• A friend who showed up at the hospital, sat there, and brought you comfort. 
• The believer who spoke up for you when you could not speak for yourself.  
• That kind of love and loyalty is costly. Jonathan is risking his father's anger and, in a sense, his own claim to the throne, to protect his friend.

• Some of you may need to be a Jonathan for someone else. Somebody in your life is being talked about, or targeted, or facing a hard providence, or facing severe discouragement. 
• And the Lord may be calling you to step in between them and the thing that is crushing them and speak up. 
• Jonathan shows us that love sometimes looks like an uncomfortable conversation with someone who has more power than you, on behalf of someone who can't defend themselves. 

1 SAMUEL 19:8-17

ESCAPE FROM THE SPEAR

• There was some peace between David and Saul for a time. 
• But unsurprisingly, there's war again with the Philistines. David goes out, fights, and strikes them with a great blow so that they flee. 
• And David’s further successes further infuriate Saul.
• Then we have a similar scene as in chapter 18. Saul in his house, with spear in hand, and David is playing music to soothe him because the harmful spirit from the Lord came upon Saul again. 
• And Saul attempts again to pin David to the wall with a spear.
• David evades impalement, slips away, and flees into the night.

• "The harmful spirit from the Lord" is an uncomfortable phrase and raises a lot of questions.
• The evil spirit is an aspect of God’s judgment and rejection of Saul due to Saul’s disobedience. 
• God is sovereign over the spiritual realm and sovereign over the wicked deeds of men. 
• This is not God causing Saul to sin against his will. The hatred in Saul’s heart is Saul’s.
• It’s God giving Saul over to the direction his own hardened heart has already chosen, and using even that darkness to serve his larger plan.

• The comfort that truth brings, is that if even the evil that comes against you is under God’s hand, then it can only go as far as God permits it to go, and not one inch further. 
• The spear is thrown with the king’s strength and skill in a fit of murderous rage, straight at David, and it missed. 
• Why did it miss? It missed because God said it would miss. The spear cannot cross a line that God has drawn. 
• In our own lives we see the spear that missed, but we do not see the thousand spears that were never thrown. Most of God’s protection over your life is completely unknown to you. 
• The accident that almost happened. The temptation that would have wrecked you but was removed before you ever felt its pull. The enemy’s plan to harm you that God quietly stopped.  
• You will not know until glory how many spears the Lord turned aside while you slept. 
• David watched this spear miss him and hit the wall. Most days, we don’t get to watch. 
• But the God who guarded David is guarding you, whether you can see the spear or not. 

MICHAL’S INTERVENTION

• David escapes, but he is not safe. He runs to his house thinking that Saul isn’t going to do anything to him there. But he was wrong. 
• Saul sent men to keep watch over his house so that he could kill him in the morning.
• And here's where somebody else steps into the story to keep David alive.
• Saul's own daughter, Michal, David's wife, warns David, “If you don't escape with your life tonight, you'll be dead by this time tomorrow.”
• Saul’s daughter was committed to David and had a higher loyalty to him than to her father. So she warned him of her father’s scheme.

• David's house was probably built near the town wall, so climbing out the window allowed him to escape both the house and the town. 
• Then Michal did something clever and also a little strange. She used a delay tactic to help David get as far away as possible. She built a decoy. She took an image, a household idol, laid it on the bed, put a pillow of goats’ hair at its head, and covered it with clothes, to make the dummy appear as if David was in bed. 
• And it was effective. When Saul’s men looked in, she told them David was sick, and they reported this back to Saul. 

• Saul sends the messengers back to retrieve David so that Saul can finish what his spear could not. The messengers pulled back the covers and discovered the ruse. 
• When Saul hears about Michal’s deception, he is furious. Michal tells another lie, that David threatened her, but it gets her off the hook.
• This is not the first time in Scripture we see deception used, and this is not a rubber stamp approval on using these kinds of tactics.
• The Bible places a high value on truth and truthfulness so these incidents should shock us. 
• We need to be careful not to moralize these biblical incidents into thinking that we would be justified in lying and deceiving others.
• We are called to be a people who love the truth, love to tell the truth, because our God is the God of truth. 

• But this is a messy scene, full of half-truths and family tension.
• Michal isn't a spiritual giant in the story. She’s a young wife with a mix of courage and fear, who has to think fast and use whatever she has on hand to save the man she loves, and God uses it.
• It's a bit alarming to discover that Michal had a household idol just lying around, ready to use.
• But it does give us a glimpse into what Saul’s household was actually like. There was compromise in Israel's first royal family.
• It's a real family, under real pressure, where love and fear and deception are all tangled together.
• And yet God used this imperfect woman, in this compromised household, to save the life of his anointed king. God is at work in the middle of all of that. 
• This is a comfort to us. God does not wait for perfect instruments. He works through real people, with real flaws, with real mixed motives, with real, raw, and unfinished areas of their lives, to accomplish real good.

• None of our houses are as clean as we would like others to believe. And we have waited sometimes for things to be cleaned up and perfect before we believe God can use us. 
• But God has never needed cleaned up and tidied situations and people to do his work. 
• He worked through a household with an idol in the closet to save the future king of Israel.
• There's real hope in that for those of us who know that our own lives, and our own families, are not as tidy, not as perfect, as we would like them to be. 
• God accomplishes his perfect purposes through deeply imperfect people.

1 SAMUEL 19:18-21

• Now David is a fugitive on the run. Take note of where he runs to. 
• His first move here, with two attempts on his life in the last few days, is to run to God's prophet.
• He runs to Ramah, to find Samuel and stay in the place devoted to worship.
• He runs to the one who had set this extraordinary chain of events in motion. Now, Samuel was no longer involved with Saul’s reign, and we have no indication that he was publicly associated with David, whom he had privately anointed. 
• But this is a reminder that the ultimate authority in Israel would always lie with God’s prophet, who had God’s Word, and not with the king. 

• David tells him everything that has happened, and from Ramah, they go to a settlement named Naioth. 
• It seems this place was connected to a community of prophets who lived, trained, and ministered together under Samuel's leadership.
• We saw this earlier in the events surrounding Saul’s anointing. These communities functioned as centers of teaching and worship throughout Israel's history, long before there was a temple in Jerusalem to gather around.
• When his world is falling apart, David’s deepest instinct is to get himself to where God’s Word is. 
• He doesn’t run away from God. He runs straight toward God. 

• What is your first instinct under pressure? When trouble comes, our first move is often to isolate, to try to troubleshoot and solve it alone, or to manage the crisis by ourselves before we tell anyone what's happening.
• David's first move, when his life is genuinely in danger, is to go find the man who hears from God and to be with God's people.
• When the pressure is real, run toward the Word, and toward the gathered people of God, not away from them.

• Saul discovered where David was and sent messengers to capture him.
• V20 shows us what happens to them. Saul’s own soldiers, sent to arrest David, walked into this scene of prophets worshiping under Samuel's leadership, and the Spirit of God came upon them. They started prophesying themselves. They can’t do what they came to do. Instead of capturing David, they are captured by God.

• Saul sends a second group of soldiers. Same thing happens. Then a third group. The same thing happens again.
• Saul keeps sending reinforcements against a plan God has already secured, and every reinforcement gets swallowed up into worship instead.
• It doesn't matter how many soldiers Saul sends. The outcome would be the same.

• Think of the early church under Roman persecution. Believers were arrested, killed, scattered, and the church kept growing anyway. Nothing could stop the spread of the gospel and the growth of the church.
• It's not because Christians were more clever than emperors or armies or political movements. It's because, like this scene at Naioth, there’s a limit to what any human power can accomplish against a plan God has already put in motion.

• You might be facing something that feels like an entire army is set against you. And it can feel like Saul's messengers, wave after wave, coming at you.
• But this passage speaks something more powerful into that fear.
• However many messengers come, they cannot undo what the Lord has already appointed for his people.
• That doesn't mean the pain isn't real, that there won't be any suffering, or that the waiting is easy.
• David is still a fugitive at the end of this chapter. But it does mean God's purposes are not up for a vote, not even a vote taken by kings and armies.

APPLICATION AND REFLECTION

In light of today's message....

• What did I learn about the gospel?
• How can I apply what I learned about the gospel to my life?
• With whom can I share the gospel this week?