Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: If you have your Bibles now, if you'll take those, turn if you will to the book of Psalms.
I'm not going to read a passage of scripture from the life of David. I want to read part of his product of his of his artistic work. Psalm 22. I want to begin reading it first and I'm just going to read the first of it in Hebrew. Eli eli lama shabbachtani Eli eli lama shabak.
Psalm 22:1. Just hold it in your mind. We'll come back to it.
Psalm 23, however, in English.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I pray that in the next few moments that you will speak to the inner self of us.
Brush aside any barrier to divine communication.
Speak. O Lord, your servants long to hear from you.
We thank you for the life of this your anointed king and pray that something in his life will inform ours. In Jesus name the strong Son of God.
Amen. Amen and amen.
If you were here Sunday and heard Travis, Pastor Travis, brilliant sermon on ordinary people.
It was so wonderful how he was able to take that Little Book of Third John, just those 14 verses and bring forth that message on ordinary people. Not they weren't extraordinary people. And yet they out of their ordinary lives.
He brought tremendous truth.
Tonight is not about an ordinary person.
Sunday was about ordinary people.
This is about an extraordinary man.
David was a consummate genius, a multifaceted genius in multiple genres of life.
Raised in an agrarian culture, the last of 13 sons of a farmer, a shepherd boy.
And yet he I believe that if David had been born in any epoch of history, he would have been one of the great personalities of that time. No matter when he had been born, he was a warrior, a military genius, an outlaw, the Commander of a 600 man light cavalry unit, a hired mercenary, a politician, a nation builder, a city founder. He built the city of Jerusalem 3,000 years ago.
He was a renowned singer. When he was a child, he won the Israeli version of the voice.
He was a poet who writes poetry. Who indeed in the whole world that three millennia later still touch us, that his poetry has been translated into virtually every language in the world.
And a prophet.
When Jesus hung on the cross in unspeakable agony, one does not think to oneself, hanging in humiliation and horror and pain beyond anything any of us have or ever will experience, with the impression of the sin of the world being forced upon him. One in that category of life does not think to oneself.
What would be a clever quotation right here.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: It's.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: It's what is inside of you. It is. It is that that which resides in you and that which has been prophetically spoken. What did Jesus cry out from the cross? Eli, Eli Lama Shani, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? When King David wrote Psalm 22, when he got finished speak, writing, it's horrible.
Psalm 22 speaks of all these terrible things, of betrayal and pain and this sense of God forsakenness.
One can only imagine that he took this and took it to Asaph the Seer and, and said, what do you think of this?
Well, no, must. He must have said to David, I.
I don't understand it. Who is this? Are you speaking for yourself?
And one can only imagine that David said, I don't know.
I just know that the spirit of the living God Ruach Kadesh, welled up inside of me. And this is what came forth a thousand years later on the cross.
The first verse of Psalm 22 is prophetically fulfilled. It's what Jesus cries out.
David was a businessman.
He lived to be phenomenally wealthy.
He ran the first legitimate capital campaign.
We think about Solomon's temple and yes, Solomon. It was built under Solomon's administration.
But David raised the money in a classical capital campaign. The pyramid, top giver, next level of givers, next level of givers. It documents it. It says, the top giver gave this. The next people, the captains and hosts, gave this. And then at the last, it says, and the common people gave gladly because their leaders had already given. Who gave the most personally was David. He raised the money, gave the Most personally warehoused the material, had the architectural plans, and set it all aside because he knew that it would never be called David's temple.
It was always going to be Solomon's Temple.
And yet, having said that, in one important area of life it must be stated, and it cannot be avoided, that David was pretty much of a failure. And that is family.
David's inability with his own family is remarkable. And some of his failures are absolutely astonishing.
One just says to oneself, I can't believe he did that.
So I don't. I'm going to go on with this. But let me say at this point, it means that there are extraordinary people, great people, but sometimes great people sin greatly, sometimes great people who accomplish great things for God, who do things that the rest of us ordinary people, as Travis said on Sunday, that the rest of us can't comprehend, can't think of.
But at the same time, there can be an area of life where they are just deaf, dumb and blind.
And I don't know that we take comfort from that precisely. And certainly we do not allow ourselves to. We don't cut ourselves any slack morally because we say, oh, because David sinned. It's okay for me.
It's not that. It is that it teaches us the frailty of humanity, whether it is an ordinary life or an extraordinary life.
Well, let me take four aspects of King David's life, and I'm going to try to move through these with some speed. I don't want to give you a document of his life because for that, but let me instead give you four ways of kind of thinking about his life.
First of all, one of the things that David was extraordinarily successful at was recreating himself.
And by that I'm not talking about some kind of public relations campaign to recreate an image of himself. What I mean is that David seemed to have this absolutely remarkable ability that no matter what came down the path, that he said, okay, if this is what life is now, I'm going to plunge myself into this life and do this at the best of my ability and to God's glory.
So that as a result of the crazy vicissitudes of David's life, the ups and downs of his life, in one life, and by the way, he didn't live to be a real old man. David died.
This is not a happy thought, but he died seven years younger than I am right now.
And yet in that brief period of time, in 70 years, the itineration of David's career is astonishing.
So as you know, he was as a child, anointed by Samuel the prophet. In a mysterious night, David had been in the pasture with the sheep. Samuel shows up.
I won't go through the whole background with Saul. The. The first king of the United Kingdom was Saul, and he had been rejected by God. And God sends Samuel to Bethlehem to anoint the new king. And he just knows that he's in Bethlehem and he's at Jesse's house.
So he processes all these older brothers of David's, and every time he just. God just says, this is not him. This is not him. This is not him. This is not him.
And so then Samuel asks, really one of the more humorous questions in the Bible. He turns to Jesse and says, are you sure these are all your sons?
And Jesse says, okay, there is another one. But I gotta tell you, David had already earned a reputation in his own family as at the best, a kind of a weird little kid, and at the worst, a pathological liar.
So his brothers were envious of him in many ways, but also deeply suspicious. You got this little boy, a little kid who's out in the pasture. He comes home one day and says, a lion attacked the sheep today. And they say, oh, a lion.
What did you do? He said, well, I punched him in the face and killed him.
And they said.
So not too long later, he says, well, a bear came. Oh, this time it was a bear. A bear. What'd you do? I punched him and killed him.
So this is not in the Bible, but this is what I think happened.
I think his oldest brother, Abinadab, said, the next time you kill some big, horrible beast, you cut his head off and throw it at my feet.
Just store that thought for a moment.
Then one day, Samuel arrives, passes on all the boys, and he says, Jesse says, my youngest is in the field. He said, we're not going to sit down. Nobody's having one hush puppy till that kid gets in here.
David knows nothing. You got to think about this. He knows nothing that's gone on in this house.
He walks in the door from the pasture and a strange old man pours oil on his head and says, I anoint you as the king of Israel.
That's kind of the weird beginning of an ultra weird life.
So let's skip.
I'm going to go through this pretty quickly, but we'll skip to the defeat of Goliath. I'm not going to go through the whole. This is not a sermon on David killing giants or you having giants in your life. This is a document quickly. So you know he slew Goliath and if you remember, he took Goliath's sword.
By the way, this is happening 3,000 BC. This is so this or a thousand BC, 3,000 years ago. It is on the cusp between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. That's how long ago this is.
The first iron weapon mentioned in the Bible is the sword of Goliath.
And David takes Goliath's sword and chops off Goliath's head.
I think he took the head and rolled it at Abinadab's feet and said, how's that?
Now Saul has promised that David is to marry his daughter, his oldest daughter from the very beginning. Saul reneges on that. He gives him instead his second daughter Michal. And she loves him and they do have, really do have a good marriage at first. A young couple, a honeymoon marriage.
Saul is suspicious of David from the very beginning and envious, terrified that he will usurp his throne or something. So he continues to send David on suicide missions.
Just crazy missions. Take three people and go over and kill those hundred people, thinking that it would get David killed. Instead what he does is by sending in on such crazy suicide missions, he creates the heroic posture of David because he keeps living over it until David becomes this almost mythic military figure in Saul's throne.
And David is one of those people.
And I think you may have known these people that women adore him, men love him. And the affectionate relationship between David and his brother in law Jonathan is by no means homosexual. David had his problems, trust me, boys wasn't one of them. But David and Jonathan were friends at that kind of deep connection level.
And this enraged Saul even further.
Finally, Saul attempts to kill David and his celebrity.
Think of this now, from a pasture to a palace.
And he is the best known military hero in the nation of Israel. And he is internationally despised by the enemies of Israel, the Philistines.
He's a huge celebrity and he's hardly out of his teens.
And now suddenly that's gone.
It's completely gone.
And David flees, first to Samuel at Ramah and then goes down to an astonishing decision.
If I'm ever allowed to speak to David in heaven, I'm going to ask him, hey David, this one thing, what was up with that?
Because David goes to Gath.
Now, can anybody tell me who is the most, who's the favorite son? Who's the most famous person in the world in history or born at Gath?
Goliath, whom David has killed and chopped his head off. And David Goes to Gath.
Does he think they're going to make him mayor?
I.
I just can't imagine what that was about.
And so they throw him in prison and they're going to kill him. David remembers a Philistine superstition that it's bad luck to kill a madman.
David feigns madness. He's clawing at the walls and foaming at the mouth and throwing dirt in the air. And the King Achish says, get him out of here. I don't want this lunatic in my house. They drive him out. And he goes into the Judean wilderness to a cocoon, if you will, a set of caverns called Adullam.
And David becomes a solitary hermit, alone in the Judean wilderness.
So David now has to reinvent himself as an outlaw in the wilderness.
He's a shepherd, He's a singer of songs. He's a celebrity now. He's an outcast. Now he's an outlaw alone in the desert.
And people hear that he's there.
It's not clear why, but one must assume he's, you know, raiding people's garbage cans and stuff. Somebody says, ah, man, I think I saw a divot, you know, and the word gets around.
People start coming out to him.
And they're not the cream of the crop. The Bible is clear. They're draft dodgers, tax people that won't pay their taxes, won't pay their alimony.
These are just tough guys that need to be away from their homes. And they come out and join David in the wilderness. And it builds and grows until he has 600 soldiers.
And David trains them in a way that no one has ever trained an army before. He personally trains them to be ambidextrous.
Now, if you're using an AK47, Ambidexterity doesn't do much for you. But if you're fighting with a sword, you can see if you're fighting and somebody chops your arm, you can draw another one and fight just as well with your left arm.
So this is a 600 light cavalry unit that are trained as soldiers, have never been trained. They become the most lethal force in the southern Judean desert.
And David now, kind of, this may be a hard way to say it, he kind of runs a protection racket.
He goes around to all the Israeli farms and he says, these Philistines, these Amalekites, they. They'll burn your farm down.
But of course, if you will pay us and give us food and everything like that, we'll protect you until he comes to One farm where there is a man named Nabal, which in Hebrew means fool. Now, here's what I've always asked myself.
Was he named that after?
Or did his mother look at him in the main, in the cradle, and say, I Nabal, if I ever saw one?
So he goes to this guy, sends his. He doesn't go. He sends some of his soldiers there's, to collect the protection money, and he humiliates them and runs them off. And so David mounts up the whole 600. He's going to go and clean them out.
This guy's wife is named Abigail. And Abigail loads up a bunch of supplies and goes out by the highway and waits for David to show up.
And David rides by and there's this beautiful woman sitting in the middle of all the, you know, food and banana pudding and everything.
And David says, let's pause, boys.
And she talks him out of it.
Nabal drops dead when he hears about it. And David remembers Abigail, which he was likely to do, and goes back and marries her. And Abigail becomes David's second wife.
Now he takes his whole army and he goes back to Gath.
Now he's got something to sell.
He becomes a mercenary for the Philistines.
He is selling his sword to the enemies of Israel.
He becomes a mercenary for the Philistines.
The Philistine king is extraordinarily fond of David and he really likes him. There's just something.
People just like David and they trust him, and he likes him a lot. David runs a ruse on him. He says, I want you to raid into Israel because he knows if David will raid in Israel and kill Jews, that he can never go back. He wants to own David. So David says, sure. So he takes his troops and goes north into Israel, touches, goes south down by the Dead Sea, down through the Arabah and comes to Amalekite, isolated Amalekite villages, raids them. I know this sounds horrible. Kills all the witnesses, everybody. There's no satellite pictures. There's no news.
This is the Bronze Age. He takes all the loot, goes back through Israel, comes back down to gas and says, oh, here's all the loot from that Israeli village we rerated, but it was Amalekites.
So the king wants to reward David and he says, come and live here in Gath with me. And David says, we're all Jews and we're not really worthy to live in the capital city. Give me a town of my own.
And Achish gives him a little village called Ziklag, a little town called Ziklag.
Now David has to reinvent himself again. He's like the chieftain of a small town.
The town is populated by his soldiers and their families.
While he's gone, the Amalekites decide to give David a dose of his own medicine. And they raid Ziklag, capture all the dependants and burn Ziklag down.
David and his men rescue them, and David has all of his dependents, including Abigail and his family, and all of them back.
Meanwhile, the Philistines have fought their final battle with King Saul. And Saul and Jonathan, his son, are dead.
And the tribe of Judah, which is David's tribe, breaks off from the united Israel and comes to David and says, come to Hebron, the capital of Judah. Come to Hebron and be our king. And David takes his cavalry. They are called in Hebrew Giborim. Gibor in Hebrew means mighty.
So these are the mighty ones.
So David takes the Gibboriim and they go to Hebron, and they crown David king of Judah.
I'm not going to go through a large part of it. But after a brief civil war, which really doesn't amount to very much, David now becomes the king of Israel. United Israel, all the tribes.
And David makes the same decision that our founding fathers made in the new nation of the United States.
He says, if I go to Saul's capital, they will say, the people in Judah will say, he's deserted us.
If I go to Hebron, the other tribes will say he's going to favor Judah. So David says, a new nation. We need a new capital.
And David remembers a Jebusite stronghold called Jebus, which is just north of his hometown of Bethlehem. And they raid, capture Jebus, particularly with the help of his kinsman Joab.
And they take Jebus and rename it Jerusalem. And he establishes Jerusalem as the capital of the united nation of Israel.
Now, David now has to reinvent himself as a political leader.
He's now the head of a nation, the head of a state.
He's not just a celebrity. He's not just a good singer. He's not just a poet. He's not just even a prophet, if you can say just a prophet. He's not even just a prophet.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: He.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: He's not a warrior. He's not an outlaw anymore. Now he has to be a king of a great new nation and a military king at that.
And David's constant ability to step from one thing up or down, backwards, sideways. David seems to be able to flex and fit into that with remarkable success.
So the first thing I want to say to you about David is that he is able to embrace the ups and downs of life and flex with the grace of God to successfully reinvent himself and to do magnificently.
He says, if I'm going to be an outlaw, I'm going to be better than Jesse James.
I'm going to be the best outlaw Israel has ever seen. SCENE If I'm going to be a warrior, I'm going to be a great warrior. If I'm going to be a king, I'm going to be a great king.
So the first thing is David's ability to flex in the vicissitudes of life.
The second thing is David's ability to come back from absolute disaster.
He just has this incredible ability to bounce back.
He comes back from the cave of Adullam, he comes back from the destruction at Zik, and he comes back from two deep personal wounds.
So let's take the first one, his sin, with Bathsheba. There's no way to talk about David and avoid it. There are people who know the phrase David and Bathsheba. They don't even know it's in the Bible.
David, at the peak of his career, stays behind in Jerusalem when Joab takes the army out to war.
And there he sees this woman, you know the story, bathing on the housetop. And he calls her to his house.
She is the wife of one of his most trusted generals, Uriah, a Hittite.
And he brings Bathsheba to his house and seduces her. Now, look, there's no way to place anything on Bathsheba.
You can't do that. Somebody said, well, she shouldn't have been bathing on her housetop. That that's the way it's done.
And this is on David. It's a classic story of a man of influence and power and wealth who seduces a vulnerable woman. This is David sin.
And when David writes about it in Psalm 51, the interesting thing is he never mentions Bathsheba. He doesn't make any reference to her in any way. He says, against thee and thee only have I sinned and done this, which is evil in your sight.
David said, this is my sin.
He never blames Bathsheba.
And of course, during that night, she's made pregnant.
And then this is. You just can't believe this. David's gonna palm the baby off on Uriah.
So he calls Uriah home from the battlefield and he assumes that Uriah will go to his house, a soldier home for a night. He's gonna go sleep with his wife instead. Uriah has better, more character than David. Does.
He says, I can't go sleep with my wife while my soldiers or living in foxholes.
He says, what I'll do is I'll sit down out here. I'll lay down in the hallway outside your door. At least I can be useful. I'll be your bodyguard for the night.
And David rewards him by writing a note and sending it to Joab. And he says, engineer him out into the front of the battle and then suddenly retreat and let him get killed. When he's dead, write to me.
And so it's basically a political murder to cover up a crime.
Wow, that sounds crazy familiar.
And Uriah is killed. David quickly marries Bathsheba. And they just count on the fact that the nation is not eager to do the arithmetic.
And then, you know, after the baby is born, that there is a prophetic denunciation in public.
And David owns up to it.
He says, yes, I did it.
And the consequence of that is that the baby dies.
And David is devastated.
He's devastated.
But when it's over, he gathers himself.
He just bounces back from this.
He comes back.
He overcomes the crime. He overcomes the guilt. His Psalm 51 is astonishingly new Testament.
He pleads the blood, Cleanse me with hyssop, wash me. He pleads for renewal in the Holy Spirit. Take not thy Holy Spirit from me.
He preaches.
He pleads for sanctification. Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me.
So David bounces back spiritually. He bounces back in terms of leadership.
He moves on.
That ability to go over it, to get over it, move on, and to move on with God, to move on in life.
I'm not saying David sweeps it under the rug. It's not a matter of moving on. Like, oh, everybody will forget that.
He owns up to it. Psalm 51.
On your own time, not during the rest of this teaching.
Read Psalm 51.
It is, the subtitle says, written by David when he went in unto Bathsheba.
And he claims it, he confesses it.
And can you imagine when he gave that one to Asaph the Seer? And he said, I want you to sing this in on Shabbat. I want you to sing this in a tabernacle.
Asaph reads it.
He must have said, you, Majesty, when everybody sees this, they're going to think you're talking about your affair with Bathsheba.
David says, I'm thinking about it. That's what it's about.
He says, I don't ever want it forgotten. I don't want it Forgotten as long as people read the Bible.
If your repentance doesn't equal your sin, that's sweeping it under the rug.
David bounces back from the sin with Bathsheba because he deals with it with God, publicly, openly, hugely, his repentance is at least as big as the sin.
Then he bounces back from the issue with Absalom when Absalom, his son, turns against him because David mishandles a terrible situation.
Absalom's half brother Amnon rapes his half sister, Absalom's full sister.
And David doesn't deal with it yet again.
Just one of those moments that you just think, what was he thinking?
Absalom.
Believes, like the Mafia, that revenge is a dish best served cold.
So he waits and then he has a barbecue at his house, invites all his brothers and kills Amnon and then flees the country through a circuitous things. I'm not going to go into the details of it. Absalom finally is brought back to Israel and begins immediately to foment rebellion against David.
He, he hates, he has never been able to overcome the, the rape of his sister. And by the way, it ended her life. She basically her life with a nervous breakdown. She lived the rest of her life in her brother's house.
And Absalom can't get over it, won't forgive, won't move past it, hates. David finally goes down to Judah, to Hebron and raises an army in David's own tribe and comes against Jerusalem.
And then David makes an interesting decision.
He takes The Gibborim, his 600, remember, and they leave Jerusalem, they abandon Jerusalem.
People have asked me many times, why didn't David fight him?
Two things. One is, I believe David had never defended anything in his life. He had only attacked stuff.
And I think the second reason was David loved Jerusalem and he loved the people of Jerusalem. And he knew that hand to hand, building to building, house to house, combat was going to be a bloodbath.
And so he vacated the city and turned it over to Absalom.
Absalom came in, took over the city.
And then Absalom made a terrible mistake. He took his larger army and attacked David in the Judean wilderness. Never, ever fight an enemy on his own ground.
David knew the Judean wilderness like the back of his hand.
Absalom is killed by Joab.
I think you know the story. He got caught by his hair.
And Absalom takes a bundle of arrows and thrusts them into Absalom's heart and kills him.
There is then this dramatic and virtually Shakespearean scene where David is grief stricken at the death of his son, probably also dealing with a lot of guilt. Maybe he's dealing with the death of Amnon, the rape of the daughter, all this is going on. And so he's in his house and you remember the speech. O Absalom, Absalom, would that I had died for thee.
And Joab comes to him, Joab, this guy, Joab, by the way, this is a very dangerous hombre.
Joab will kill you for a quarter.
And he's not the kind of guy that you might expect to have great wisdom from. And he comes to David and he says, these people fought for you.
They were willing to die for you.
And if Absalom had won this battle, he would have killed you and me and all the Gaborim. And you know it, and they know it, and you're ruining it for them. You're in here weeping over the guy that would have killed us all. You need to get out on that balcony and wave like the Pope, or in the morning, you're not going to have an army.
And David hears him and does that.
And David bounces back from the rebellion of his own son, the rupture of the kingdom, a terrible civil war, not just a civil war in the nation, but in his household.
And he bounces back, he comes back to it.
So there is this resiliency in David. First his. His flexibility, then his resiliency.
And then there is this sense of destiny.
The third thing about David, he never let go of the fact that God had laid his hand on him, that there was. That there was something that he wasn't just.
He wasn't just an ordinary person.
And David knew that. And he never let go of it. That sense of destiny held David, and David never, never retreated from it.
However, he never tried to make it happen.
Now that's the great tension inside David.
There were multiple occasions when he could have, and in any, any reasonable way should have killed Saul.
But David said, I will not lay my hand on God's anointed. And he refused to make his destiny happen. He knew his destiny, but he also knew his destiny was from God and of God, and that God would bring it to pass.
So David is flexible, resilient, he captured by destiny.
But we still have this question, and I'm just about ready to close. Stay with me.
Samuel, the prophet, before he finds David, says to Saul, God is gonna find a new king who is a man with a heart after God.
But that's before adultery and murder and conspiracy and civil war. And disappointment and disillusionment and weakness and political warfare. That's before a thousand years later.
St. Paul refers to David as a man after God's own heart.
Am I the only one?
I just want to say, in what sense was David a man after God's own heart? In some unique way that he's called that?
What was it about David that he is characterized not just before his sin, but after his sin?
Why is he still called a man after God's own heart?
And this is the conclusion I've come to.
I'm not laying this on you like the law of the Medes and the Persians, but it's the best answer I have at this time in my life.
And it is this after.
I took it early in life to mean a man like the heart of God, A man similar to the heart of God.
I don't think that's what it means.
I think it meant a man in pursuit of following the heart of God.
David was like, it's, it's a position that doesn't work much in modern football, but in old three yards in a cloud of dust, smash mouth southern football, there was this invaluable person called a fullback.
And they big and strong and powerful and direct. They didn't run sideways, they just came. They just came at you. Now you might get them down, but they're gonna fall three and a half yards.
I believe that's David. David was so in pursuit of the destiny of God and the God of his destiny that no matter what happened, no matter how he fell, he fell forward. He got up and went again. He got up and went again.
That David never quit. He never stopped.
He ignored the mud and the blood and the pain and the tragedy and the disappointment and his own sin. He said, I've done everything I know to do. I've confessed and repented and pled the blood. And I've been believing God for the restoration of the Holy Spirit, but I can't lie here in it.
And he said, I'm after the heart of God.
So when Jesus of Nazareth walked the streets of Jerusalem, the blind and the lame and the demon possessed cried out, have mercy on me, Jesus, thou son of David.
A thousand years later, when Messiah shows up, he is still connected to the king who built Jerusalem.
David was not an ordinary man.
His sins were never hidden.
They came out against his will. And when they came out, he confessed them and repented.
His leadership was filled with struggle and turmoil.
His life even to his deathbed. On his deathbed, David had to arise and deal with the coup d', etat, dying on his deathbed, the case can be made that Samuel ruined his life.
He became a child celebrity, an international celebrity. From the anointing of Samuel in the house of his father Jesse, and from there until some 60 or 55 years later, on his deathbed at 70, he's still in the struggle.
David was a complicated, huge, complex, multifaceted genius.
The choice of God and a man after God's own heart.
Well, let's pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you that you give us the Bible that we can read about these people.
God, we read about David, your servant, your king, your choice.
Oh, God, who are we?
Who are we?
But, Lord, somehow move in us that our destiny, whatever that is, your hand on us, whatever that means, our struggles, whatever those are our sins, however dark and depraved they are, that somehow, God, we can rise from it, plead the blood, be filled with the spirit, and be people in pursuit of your heart.
We thank you for it. We believe you for it.
In the mighty name Jesus, the strong son of God. Amen. Amen. And amen. God bless you.
God bless you, everyone.
[00:45:53] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on X at Dr.markrutland or visit his website, drmarkrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
