[0:00] God, help us to hear your word in a way that perhaps we very desperately need to hear it, that our eyes may see and perceive, our ears hear and understand, and our hearts turn in repentance and faith.
[0:21] Amen. Amen. Amen. The passage that we're looking at this morning is 1 Samuel chapter 16, and it's found in your pew Bible, if you care to follow there, on page 253.
[0:42] We're starting a series which will run through the whole of September, with the exception of next Sunday when we're having a special sermon on for Count Me In Sunday, but for the whole of September on the subject of David.
[1:00] And the verse that I want you to look at is that which Mark has read for us in the lesson today and which is so much to the point from 1 Samuel chapter 16.
[1:14] Do not look upon his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees.
[1:27] Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. The topic for today's sermon is the future king, that David is to be the future king.
[1:44] And the story of how Samuel went to Bethlehem, and there he gathered the elders, and he gathered Jesse and his family, and they had a sacrifice to the Lord.
[1:58] But all this was, in a sense, a cover-up, because the Lord had sent Samuel to anoint the future king from among the sons of Jesse.
[2:11] And so you can see them gathered around this feast, and this sacrifice, and this religious celebration, and the people of Bethlehem watching. And Samuel calls to Jesse and says that his sons are to be brought in, so that he may see which one is the one who is to be anointed king.
[2:35] And so Samuel, at Bethlehem, has Eliab, the eldest son, brought before him.
[2:46] And when Samuel sees him, he says, Surely the Lord's anointed. And the Lord says no.
[2:57] And then Abinadab, the next brother, is brought. And the Lord says no. And Shema, the next brother, is brought. And the Lord says no.
[3:08] And four other sons are brought. And the Lord says no. You see, the one whom they all thought were most likely to be the one whom God would appoint, they were utterly mistaken about.
[3:25] The one his father thought, the one the brothers thought, the one the community thought, but the Lord didn't think so. The Lord had someone else in mind. And the Lord explains this to Samuel by saying, the Lord sees not as men see.
[3:44] Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. And so he asked Jesse if there isn't another son.
[3:57] And Jesse says there is one more. He's the youngest. And he's out looking after the sheep. And Samuel says, send for him.
[4:08] So they all wait. And they wait until David is brought in from looking after the sheep. And they think about the whole situation.
[4:23] Well, David was the one whom God had appointed. The one whom God had chosen. God the Lord was, by our contemporary standards, very guilty of what we would call unfair employment practices.
[4:43] Everybody whom we would have thought was the suitable person for the job, the logical person for the job, the rightful person for the job, the Lord chose somebody else.
[4:56] And if you have the sense of the Lord having chosen you, those are your qualifications too. Nobody else sees eye to eye.
[5:09] And you probably don't understand yourself why the Lord would choose you. But the Lord exercises his sovereign choice in choosing you to belong to him.
[5:22] He has exercised his choice of you as the Lord exercised his choice of David. And then when you stop to think about it, you think of the wonderful schooling that David had been given.
[5:37] Not by his father and his brothers, for whom he was just the eighth in a row of sons and perhaps countless daughters as well. But the Lord had prepared him.
[5:49] And he had prepared him by teaching him in the loneliness of looking after the sheep to play the harp. And he was very skilled in playing the harp.
[6:02] Nobody had taught him how to do it except the long days all by himself, alone and out with the sheep. He became very skilled in extracting music out of his guitar, his lyre.
[6:18] Not only that, but he had with him, and if you've ever been there in Israel, a great abundance of stones. And he learned to use a slingshot.
[6:33] And he learned with, he developed such skill at it, as you will know, stood him in very good stead later on in life. So you see a boy with endless hours learning to play the harp, learning to use the sling, and then you find out that he is a great soldier.
[7:02] And you know that because later on in life, they're gathered around David, and I'd like you to do this perhaps sometime. The great, what is called in the Bible, the mighty men of David.
[7:15] Great men from his generation rallied around such a leader. And politically in this country, we need a great leader, a man who can attract the best men to be the mighty men who stand with him in giving leadership to our country.
[7:36] Who is that one to be? Well, David was a soldier who gathered mighty men around him. And David was the one who looked up at the night sky and asked the ultimate human question.
[7:51] When I look at the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established, what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?
[8:05] And that is the question that is right at the heart of every human being. Who am I that God should be mindful of me?
[8:18] Who is that person that God should be mindful of him or her? Who is the son of man that thou dost care for him? Why has God done that?
[8:29] Why did Rachel tell us this morning that which contradicts all the experience and all the training of our culture and our society because we say you are nobody.
[8:42] But the scriptures come along and say you are created in the likeness of God. And so it's a wonderful thing on this Lord's day to turn from our society which counts humanity as almost meaningless, which is totally absorbed with the outward appearance and doesn't know anything about the hearts of people.
[9:09] I have been in an agony all week as I'm sure most of you had watching and watching and watching and reading the newspaper and looking at the television and all of them concentrating on the outward appearance and hoping that somehow we could penetrate through what we see with our eyes to know what's going on where we can't see, to know what's going on in the hearts of men, to be forced to look at our own hearts and see what is going on there, to look at the loyalties accumulated during a lifetime and to see those loyalties crumble and you don't know what to do with them or where to turn because we look on the outside and we don't have that kind of understanding.
[9:57] And the society in which this event took place was a society which was crumbling under the leadership of Saul. He didn't understand.
[10:09] He himself was in deep depression. He didn't know how to lead his men in battle. He didn't know how to lead his men in their relationship to the Lord. The whole country was falling apart because of the leadership of Saul.
[10:24] and Samuel was told go out and anoint a king so long before anybody in the country knew about it the Lord had already begun to create the answer which was to be the answer for that generation and which was to be a sign for us of the answer for all the ages including our own that God has appointed a Messiah an anointed one a Christ and one day he will be recognized and every tongue confess and every knee bow to acknowledge him as Lord.
[11:02] But we don't see that now. We see the things that discourage and dishearten and defeat us as a people because our eyes are on the wrong thing and what a glorious privilege it is for you and me this morning that we have perhaps for some motivation that we don't even understand come to hear the word of God come to read the Psalms of David because everybody understands David I am often asked to take the funeral of people who have spent a long time outside of the church and I say what scripture would you like read and they often are dumbfounded and don't know what to answer to that and I said what about the Lord is my shepherd ah yes that's it and who spoke those words but David and would you like to sing a psalm they said yes there's one
[12:08] I remember which always meant a lot to me under the hills around do I lift up my longing eyes that was written by David and then people when they gather to worship they like nothing better than to sing praise my soul the king of heaven and that was written by David you see David somehow understood David is a man that every people of every nation on the whole of the earth can understand and they can relate to him I would say almost the most pagan people in our society can relate to the writer of the Lord of the shepherd's song the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want in the hearts of almost all men that is there and that comes from the heart of David and the Lord knew that that was in the heart of David and the Lord drew out of David all these wonderful expressions of his heart that people could understand who the Lord was through the heart of a man like David as he opened his heart in the songs to all of us it's wonderful when I was young which was a long time ago there was a man came to talk to our Bible class in the parish
[13:40] I belonged to back in Toronto called St. John's and his name was Dr. Overton Stevens and he was a wonderful man because he could open his heart to people he could tell you what went on in his heart and when he shared that he just it was so thrilling he described his conversion how as a successful very busy young general practitioner making lots of money he and his wife went off to New York for a sort of binge weekend and just before he left somebody gave him an address and said look up my friend while you're there so they had some time to spare Overton Stevens says and they went in to visit this fellow at his office and the fellow talked to him and made good friends with him and said won't you come around to our house tonight he said well as a matter of fact we planned to go to the theater we were going to do this we were going to do that well do come and Overton
[14:46] Stevens felt the trap closing in upon him and described it very graphically and I tell you this because it meant a lot to me at the time this successful young doctor telling of how he got invited to come to the house then he found out what was happening at the house there was a Bible study and he hadn't come to New York for a Bible study that wasn't why he was there and then right there in the office door as they left the man said should we pray before you go and Overton Stevens wanted to drop right through the floor he didn't like that either and he felt he had really been trapped and had to go to that meeting that night with these back in Toronto he felt this kind of obligation and it was at that meeting that in the course of the evening everybody prayed and it came his turn to pray all this happened to him in a day and he just agonized with all this because he didn't know what to do with it but that was the point of his conversion to faith in
[15:52] Jesus Christ and he went on and lived out his life as a medical practitioner and constantly helped people he says I've broken up more healing meetings than anybody else I know because as a medical practitioner he was very sensitive to what the practical issues were but he was very honest and always spoke from the heart and when he contracted cancer he opened up all that to everybody too so that we could share that with him he opened up his heart to us and how we need to be able to open up our hearts to one another how we need to be able you see because David in the whole of 150 Psalms you can very rarely if anywhere find any direct reference to him he's talking about the Lord his focus is entirely on the Lord and his heart reflects the Lord so that when you see into his heart in the Psalms what you see there is the reflection of the
[16:55] God whom he worships and there it is and that's the way our lives need to be like David you see we've been the victims all this week of seeing on the outside I'd love to see the heart of a Mohawk warrior up on a big screen I'd love to see the heart of the Mohawk people I'd love to see the heart of a Canadian soldier who stands on duty there I'd love to see the hearts of those that are negotiating but we can't all we can see is the outward appearance and the whole thing is outward appearance and God wants to raise up a people who know each other from the heart and that's why when we begin this service we say almighty God unto whom all hearts are open you're not deceived by the outward appearance that doesn't count for anything with you when the Lord looks at this congregation he doesn't see this fine distinguished educated sophisticated people that I see row on row but
[18:06] I won't go into what he does see but he does and that's what really the joy of being here is is that the Lord looks on the heart so here you can do business with the Lord who knows your heart there was an amazing conference recorded in the Globe and Mail on Friday morning it was run by Elie Weissel in Stockholm and it was mostly Nobel Prize winners and they gathered leaders and writers to say why does man hate and they spent this whole conference some of the best writers in the world the Nobel Prize winning writers including political leaders and people from Tiananmen Square and say where does hate come from and why is it so prevalent and that was a conference which was designed to see into the hearts of people and the article says they were no further along at the end of the conference than they were at the beginning to try and understand the hearts of people it's very difficult and you see the thing about
[19:20] David was that that God could see his heart and the reason people all sorts of people relate to David is because he opens his heart to us and we somehow find in that some awareness of our own hearts but even more we find the awareness of the heart of God and it was this man whom God chose and Samuel anointed to be king one last question how do we move from David to the Lord Jesus because if David was such a supreme such a great man in the eyes of God he's only a pale reflection of the one whose heart is revealed to us on the cross the person of Jesus
[20:21] Christ you get that funny there's a funny statement you know I mean it's funny in a way but it's typical of the Old Testament and I read it this morning this week from 1 Kings 15 and it talked about King Abijah and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God as the heart of David his father nevertheless for David's sake the Lord his God gave him a lamp in Jerusalem setting up his son after him and established Jerusalem because David did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and did not turn aside from anything that he commanded him all the days of his life and then in brackets except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite end of bracket most of us can identify with David because he failed and we fail and his heart and our hearts draw closer when we accept our failure you see the difference between
[21:33] Jesus and David is in the point of his trial David or Jesus obeyed even unto death death on a cross and so you see in David in a sense the heart of God reflected and you see in Jesus the heart of God perfected in the death of Christ on the cross this was the one who was to be king and God has already begun the work of redemption in our midst hidden though it may be and God will work out that purpose through the one whom he has chosen and that purpose will be a purpose which touches your heart and mine and that's why we've come to this service this morning and why each of you has been invited to do what that first collect asked us to do to come and kneel before the
[22:42] Lord and say almighty God unto whom all hearts be open all desires known from whom no secrets are hid that we might deal heart to heart with God as he has made himself known to us in Jesus Christ and as we remember Christ's death his body broken and his blood shed on the cross it's a great moment isn't it a moment which is so filled in a week which is so filled with outward appearances which fill us with fear and apprehension but at this moment all the outward appearances are to be taken out of our minds and we open our hearts collectively to the Lord who deals with us out of love and mercy and grace amen let us pray pray
[23:59] I'm reading to you excerpts of Psalm 95 come let us sing to the Lord the Lord is a great God in his hands are the depths of the earth the heights of the mountains the sea is his for his hands form the dry land come let us worship and bow down let us kneel before the Lord our maker we are the people of his pasture we are the sheep of his hand
[25:03] Lord give us we pray a love in action that will help us to rise and pledge our word to pray for world peace again we pray for the Persian Gulf tensions for South Africa for aboriginal rights here in Canada we pray for release of people in areas of anguish and despair we pray for your hand to redeem the nations of the world again we pray for all children caught in the conflict of war and unrest we pray for them that you will give them comfort that you will give them hope
[26:20] Lord in your mercy hear our prayer now father we want to pray for world missions we pray for missionaries and ambassadors of Jesus Christ this morning we pray for Nepal for Dr.
[26:53] Helen Houston we pray for the Nepalese who are knowing new freedoms we pray for your hand upon them as they exercise new rights and new liberties Lord give them wisdom help them in their requests that they be reasonable to begin Lord in your mercy hear our prayer now father we pray for the beginning of a new academic year many who attend St.
[27:43] John's will be launching out again we pray for students and faculty we pray that you will give them courage and confidence as they move about in the business of learning and teaching we pray for Athena going to Toronto we pray for Michael and Jill as they go to the interior now father we also want to pray for family around us and friends who need a fresh touch from you may they know your anointing and blessing give them a special word of encouragement give them peace and give them some joy this morning we want to pray for a number of our friends we pray for
[28:47] Kathy Murphy we pray for Dawn a young doctor we pray for joy we pray for Jane and Tucker for Rachel for Kay Jefferson for Nora for Enid father will you put your hand upon them and help them to know your love and your care for them Lord in your mercy hear our prayers finally we pray for the ministry here at St.
[29:37] John's we thank you for our clergy for office staff for committee chair persons and all who encourage children and youth in this place we pray for all those who give care and attention to this parish in your name and for your sake we offer these prayers amen thank you to remain in prayer I'd like you to turn to page 77 of your prayer book wine colored prayer book page 77 and to either keep your heart open or to open it as we say the general confession together page 77 we say together almighty god father of our lord jesus christ maker of all things judge of all men we acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness which we from time to time most grievously have committed by thought word and deed against thy divine majesty may you earnestly repent and are heartily sorry for these are misdoings have mercy upon us most merciful father for thy son our lord jesus christ sake forgive us all that is past and grant that we may ever hereafter serve and please thee in newness of life to the honor and glory by name jesus christ our lord amen into that open heart the lord pours his forgiveness almighty god our heavenly father who of his great mercy has promised forgiveness of sins to all those that with hearty repentance and true faith turn unto him have mercy upon us pardon and deliver us from all our sins confirm and strengthen us in all goodness and bring us to everlasting life through jesus christ our lord amen hear what comforting words our saviour jesus christ says to us come unto me all that labor and are heavy laden and
[32:21] I will refresh you god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to the end that all that believe in him should not perish but have eternal life hear what saint paul says this is a true saying and worthy of all to be received that christ jesus came into the world to save sinners hear also what saint john says if any man sin we have an advocate with the father jesus christ the righteous and he is the propitiation for our sins we stand and sing the king of love my shepherdess number 81 in our blue books he o i u i
[33:33] CHOIR SINGS CHOIR SINGS CHOIR SINGS
[34:35] CHOIR SINGS CHOIR SINGS CHOIR SINGS CHOIR SINGS CHOIR SINGS CHOIR SINGS CHOIR SINGS CHOIR SINGS CHOIR SINGS CHOIR SINGS God bless you.
[35:25] God bless you.
[35:55] God bless you.
[36:25] God bless you.
[36:55] God bless you.
[37:26] And in these gifts, Lord, we ask that our hearts may be offered to you. And in this communion service, that you may offer us your heart.
[37:38] Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
[37:49] Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
[37:59] Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. so to do.
[38:36] Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of hosts, heaven and earth, our soul of thy glory, glory to thee, O Lord of hosts.
[39:01] Blessed be thy God, in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the name.
[39:17] Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
[39:28] Amen. Amen. Amen.
[40:30] Amen.