Look Where You're Going

Wow - nearly a year since my last post here - which was also a sermon text!  Well, I have another sermon text to post, this time a message I shared with my folks at St. Peter's Church in Purcellville.  We've been using the OT reading this summer, and have been following the life and times of King David.  Lucky me, I got the first half of the story of David and Bathsheba! (2 Samuel 11:1-15)

I hope that it not only feeds your soul, but keeps you on the road... :)
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This morning we’re continuing to consider the life of King David – one of Israel’s heroes: a great king, a great warrior, a man who loved God so much that he is called a man after God’s own heart.

But today, we get to take a look at David’s dark days and bad behavior.  It’s a sorry circumstance that’s as much at home in a modern newspaper as in this 3,000 year old story:  A political leader starts from humble roots, operating with a sense of purpose and morality and “what’s right”.  He does things the way they should rightly be done, wins success after success, and gains power and fame.  But eventually, he starts to think a bit too highly of himself and his desires, and before you know it, power leads to corruption, and the tawdry story of a pregnant mistress and a murder plot hits the tabloids.

When we dig into this story, we notice that David’s been king of all Israel for a while now.  He’s got the powerful Ark of God residing in his capital city.  He’s defeated his enemies.  He da man!  Powerful, well-loved, and surrounded by servants just waiting to do his bidding so they might bask in David’s reflected glory.  It’s good to be king, and I think David is finding himself just a little too wonderful in his own mind…. 

Because you see, it’s spring, the scripture points out, the time when kings go out to battle, but David has chosen to stay home.  Why?  Maybe he was trying to give his general Joab some space to make a name for himself, or maybe David was feeling a bit run-down, a little sickly and thought it best to stay home and rest.  But the way this story is told, it sounds like David doesn’t think he needs to go, he’d rather stay in his comfortable palace than go and sleep rough on a battlefield -  he’s important enough, blessed enough, that he doesn’t need to go himself and be inconvenienced…

So here is David, pampering himself in his pleasant palace, looking out over his city, when he catches a glimpse of a lovely lady, the beautiful Bathsheba.  And he might have appreciated that little look and then gone back to his duties.  But David is a great king, so why not find out who this lovely creature is and enjoy her in his bedroom? 

That she’s a married woman doesn’t even seem to register to him – he just sends for her and has his way with her, and sends her back home.  When she finds she’s pregnant, they have a big problem, because her husband Uriah has been away with the army so that the child could not be his.  David calls him back to report on the war, but the honorable Uriah won’t go sleep with his wife– he doesn’t feel right having that sort of comfort while his fellow soldiers are at war.

David then arranges to send Uriah back into battle to a position where he will surely be killed, and that is where our reading for today ends.  It turns out that Uriah is indeed killed in battle, and David is now able to marry Bathsheba to hide his adulterous secret.   

What a sorry situation!  Israel’s great and honorable king David has descended into adultery, lies, and murder.  Oh how the mighty have fallen!  But – how did this happen?  How did David wind up like this after such a great start, and what can we learn to avoid this sort of thing ourselves?

It all comes down to this: You look where you’re going and you go where you’re looking.  It’s driving 101 – when you’re behind the wheel, you need to be looking where you want to go, because that’s where you’ll tend to steer to.  If you want to drive straight down the road but you’re staring off to the right at something along the side of the road, there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself in the ditch instead!   And when you have to do emergency maneuvers, its even more important to look where you want to go – you need to look at the gap you want to steer through and NOT at the tree you want to avoid! 

As in driving, so in life – your life tends to steer toward the things that you allow to engage your attention, whether that’s where you say you want to go or not.  And that’s where David went wrong.  Instead of brief glance at Bathsheba and then turning his eyes back to the road, he let her become an obsession, focusing his thoughts on having her, and then on covering up his little indiscretion, until he wound up in a flaming wreck in the ditch. 

Fortunately for us, we have a God who can make all things new, and even a fiery wreck like David’s smash-up with Bathsheba can be forgiven and restored and set back on the road if the driver can just realize their error and repent.  We’ll see how this happens for David in next week’s readings, so I’m not going to delve into repentance this morning.  I’m going to stick with accident avoidance. 

So – if we tend to go where we’re looking, what sort of distractions are likely to take our main attention off of following God and striving to be like our Lord Jesus, and send us off the road into the ditch or worse?  It’s all the same old things that have always distracted people from God: power, sex, wealth, with all their combinations and variations, from the mild and subtle to the wild and outrageous.  The distractions range from anything to everything!

And with such a vast array of things to lead us off of the road to Godly living, how can we possibly hope to stay on track?  Well, God in his wisdom has given us some tools, and there are three in particular that I’ll share with you.

First off, our weekly worship is a very overt and intentional directing of our hearts and minds toward God.  Scripture and preaching and hymns and prayers not only connect us with God, but may show us places where our attention has been inappropriately wandering.  Have you ever had the experience of hearing something that seemed to be illuminated with a sort of Holy Hiliter, pointing out some sinful thing you need to change but have perhaps been ignoring?  I know I’ve felt that sort of conviction!

So weekly worship is essential, but that leaves an awful lot of the week without guidance.  You can get WAYYYYY off the road if you only look to God for an hour or so on Sundays!  We need guidance during the week, and the surest way to get it is with God’s own roadmap, Holy Scripture.  Daily scripture reading makes it easier to keep our attention on God – and to hear Him calling out for our attention when we’re heading off into some ditch that we haven’t noticed.  Add daily prayer and you’ve got the second great tool to keep you turning back to God.

But weekly worship and daily prayer and scripture may still not be enough to keep us straight – after all, I bet David himself did those things, but still he got off-course.  What David didn’t have was friends and advisors who might actually confront him if they knew he was doing something wrong.  David sent his army off to war – who was left to advise him?  No one but servants…  So the third tool we have is fellowship and accountability through others. 

We all need spiritual friends with whom we share our lives – people who have our permission to tell it like it is when they see us heading for a ditch.  Friends who will speak the truth to us in love and help keep us on the road to life in Christ.  If David had had someone to poke him in the arm and say “what do you think you’re doing?” when he sent for a married woman to sleep with, maybe this whole incident may have been avoided.  God himself said it when Adam was created – “it is not good for the man to be alone.”  We all need companions on this way.

You see, we live in an age that prizes “following your nose.”  If it feels good, do it.  Whatever captures your fancy should be pursued, and there is no notion that there is even a road that should be followed.  So it’s imperative that we use the tools God has given us if we want to follow His ways and have eternal life.  Worship.  Study and pray.  Let yourself be accountable.  Do everything in your power to keep your attention on God. 

 

Look where you want to be going, or you may go where you find you’ve been looking.

Again I say, Look where you want to be going, or you may go where you find you’ve been looking.