You Are David

My name's Michael, and I am the speaker for the weekend. And I don't want it to be about me, but just a little bit about me, just so you know who I am. I live in Pickerington, which for some of you, you know where that is, just a little bit north of here. And I have eight children. Three of them are already in heaven. So that's a theological conviction that if you're interested in, I can explain to you how I know that.

And then I have a 19-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old daughter. I have a 17-year-old son and a 3- and a 5-year-old son. And so that's just a little bit about my family. I've got a lovely wife named Erin, and she's at home with the two little boys right now, so I can do things like this. I'll just say I am a cool character. Like, nothing bothers me, and this is the most nervous I ever feel in my whole life is when I speak in front of Christian groups.

I don't know why, but I fear intrepidation when I stand in front of Christians. And frankly, I think it's because you deserve the best. You're God's children. And so my hope would be that I can do my best at least, and by God's grace, I can give you guys the truth of God's word. So a few things about speaking at an FCA event. This is the first time I've ever been to anything called FCA in my life.

So for those of you who have been doing it for years, this is the first time I ever set foot on anything FCA. When I was in high school, I wasn't a Christian. I became a Christian when I was 30 years old. And so you can probably, well, I don't know if you can guess or not how old I am. I don't want you to, maybe. But I'm 43 now.

So I became a Christian 13 years ago by God's grace. And so for me, I don't know what it's like to be a high schooler who is doing the Christian thing. I don't know what it's like to be a college person being a Christian. I don't know what it's like to be in my 20s and be a Christian. So I can't come up here and tell you, like, well, here's all you need to do when you're 16 to be a Christian, which I don't think that would be the right thing for me to do either.

So I want to tell you what I'm not going to do. What I'm not going to do is what I would consider to be patronizing and try to relate to you on the basis of being an athlete. So we're at the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. So my guess is everyone here plays a sport, considers themselves an athlete of some type. And so I kind of joked like I'd show up in my high school wrestling singlet and, you know, pretend like I could relate to you.

And, of course, that would be silly and it would be insulting to you, I think, because really you're all really adults in some respect. At the very least, you're young adults, and you should be spoken to logically and rationally and reasonably. And I shouldn't be afraid to maybe use a few big words once in a while because you're smart enough, if you don't know it, to look it up or figure it out in context.

So I'm not going to patronize you and pretend that I'm still in high school or that my athletic things that I did matter because they don't. if I was an athlete or not, it's irrelevant to what you guys are here for this weekend, which is to get to know God better. The other thing I'm not going to do is apologize for God's Word. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you what God's Word says.

I'm going to read it to you, and I'm going to preach to you, and hopefully by the power of the Holy Spirit, everything I say is going to be accurate according to God's Word. And I'm not going to apologize for parts of it that are hard for you to hear. I'm not going to tell you, well, I'm sorry God did this, but we have to accept it. I'm proud of God. I love God.

And everything God does is perfect and righteous and good. And anything we don't like about God or something he said or that's hard for us to understand, that's a problem with us. So I'm going to tell you what it says. And my goal is that you will have a confrontation with the God of the universe. And he knows your needs. I don't know your needs, but God knows each and every person's individual needs in here.

So when I talk to you from the scripture that I picked to preach about with with no knowledge, if anyone here has ever read it or what your current needs are, I trust that God knows how to use that scripture to bring to light the things in your life that need to be brought to life. So having said that, let's turn to Psalm 51, which is where we're going to live for the weekend. So what I'd like you to do when you're not with me, I'd like you to read and reread Psalm 51.

It's not that long. and then you can also study over in 2 Samuel 11 and 12 where we'll talk about what David did with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah. So those are some things, because I don't have a lot of time when I'm here. Of course, there's no clock, so I may have an unlimited amount of time. But when I'm here, that was a joke, by the way. You guys are allowed to laugh and react and stuff like that.

It really encourages speakers, especially when he tells a joke and you laugh. Thank you. So, of course, it should be funny. But anyway, when you're not with me, if you're doing your quiet time, if you want to look through 2 Samuel 11 and 12 and Psalm 51, that's going to help these times that we're together. That's going to help you to exercise something called discernment, which you should be exercising right now.

So when a man stands in front of you and says that he's going to teach you from God's word, you should be discerning. You should be thinking, well, is this really God's word? Or is he just telling me his opinions? Is he just telling me stories? Is he just telling me about himself or something like that? So that's things that you should be able to do.

And I realize you probably have other things going on, but this is what we're going to focus on for this weekend. So let's look at Psalm 51. Just real quick, let me start reading to you. It says, To the choir master, a psalm of David. when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba That something you might not know Those little introductions to the Psalms those are actually part of the Scripture So when you read Scripture you should read those little introductions I didn't know that until recently.

He says, Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, you delight in truth and the inward being and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. so without the context of this psalm it it would be senseless to know what david's talking about right he says he says i know my transgressions my sin is ever before me he says against you you only have i sinned and done what is evil in your sight he says so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Well, if God's going to be justified in his words and blameless in his judgment, then there must have been some words that God spoke and there must have been a judgment that came down.

And so turn to 2 Samuel chapter 11. And you know, we're not going to read it, but I'm going to summarize it for you. And you can turn there. But in 2 Samuel, David goes through a string of events where we get the context of when David is saying this psalm. So the psalm tells us when Nathan the prophet went to David after he had gone into Bathsheba. So we know that it's after this event that we can read about in 2 Samuel.

So just to summarize it, if we had 10 hours, we'd take our time and read all these passages together and talk about them more. But what David does is, David, it's in the spring, it says, right? In the spring of the year when kings go out to battle. David didn't go out to battle. David stayed home. And he was walking around on his roof.

And long story short, this woman Bathsheba is bathing. And David's attracted to her. He lusts after her is what he does. It's a sin in God's eyes to lust. Jesus tells us in Matthew 5, you've heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who even looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

So Jesus tells us there that to simply desire somebody who's not your spouse, you've already now committed adultery in God's eyes. But so even more than so, David then sends for her. He's the king. And he sends for this woman and messengers go and get her and they bring her back to him. And then he gets her pregnant. And we're not going to go into details of all that stuff.

But he gets her pregnant. So we kind of get an idea of what must have happened here, right? Then she tells him that she's pregnant. And David decides basically he's going to try to make it look like her husband got her pregnant. So he brings her husband home from battle. And he tries to get her husband to go lay with her.

And her husband, a very virtuous man, if you read this passage, this isn't the focus. Her husband says, all my buddies are out at war. Or why should I get to enjoy time with my wife? And he doesn't even go see her. There's like no chance, you know, that she can get pregnant by her husband Uriah. The Hittite is his name.

And we'll talk a little bit about more of him tomorrow even. And so David actually gets this guy drunk in the hopes that he'll go do this thing. So now he's causing this other guy to sin, getting him drunk. Drunkenness is a sin. Now listen, I didn't say drinking is a sin. I said drunkenness is a sin.

And so before anybody calls me a legalist or something like that. But David gets this guy drunk. The guy still doesn't go and lay with his wife. So now there's no chance that this baby that Bathsheba is going to have is her husband's. And so David orders him to be put on the front lines of a battle so that he'll die. So long story short, David murders this guy to cover up the fact that he slept with his wife and got her pregnant.

Now, in the modern day, this would have been a different story, because what people would have done is they would have just paid someone down the street to tear the baby apart in an abortion procedure. And it would have been a little easier to cover up. But they didn't do that as much then, or at least it wasn't as common. Either way, David's now a murderer in the eyes of God.

He's got blood guilt on his hands. David is an adulterer. David's a liar. The baby's born at the end of chapter 11, so it's been several months now. Nine months or so, right? He's got this baby, he's got this new wife that he brought into his house, Bathsheba, this woman who he widowed.

And Nathan the prophet comes to him, and this is an interesting story. Nathan says, there were two men, I'm in chapter 12 now of 2 Samuel. There were two men in a certain city, one rich and one poor. By the way, I'm reading from the English Standard Version, and you may have a different version of the Bible. We all still have Bibles. We're all reading a translation of the way the Bible was originally written, which this would have been in Hebrew.

And so you may have a different version of the Bible from somebody else, but we all still have God's Word and God's thoughts given to us. And sometimes it's just communicated a little differently because of different languages. Anyway, there's a certain city, there's a rich guy and a poor guy. The poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he bought.

So we're in verse 3. And he brought it up and it grew up with him and with his children. And it used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms And it was like a daughter to him Now there came a traveler to the rich man and the rich man was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for this guest who'd come to him.

But he took the poor man's lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him. So Nathan the prophet, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, goes to King David and tells him this story. So David's hearing this story like it really happened. Right. Rich guy has a bunch of stuff, takes the poor guy's thing because he doesn't want to share his stuff that he already had.

It's basically the story. Right. And David responds, we'll say rightfully in verse eight. Then David's anger was greatly kindled. And he said to Nathan, as the Lord Yahweh lives, the man who has done this deserves to die. And he shall restore the lamb fourfold because he did this thing.

So David looks at this other guy who was committing an atrocity in this story. This is really bad, what this rich guy is doing. And David righteously says, you know, he's going to judge the guy. And Nathan, you know, I always imagine in the picture he's pointing his finger. And he says, you are the man. Thus says the Lord God of Israel.

And then Nathan goes on to explain to David how God had blessed David with all these wonderful things, all these good things. And David still wasn't content with what God had given him. He coveted after another man's wife and then, in fact, went further than just the coveting and just the lust and actually committed adultery with her. And so now David is a coveter.

He's an adulterer. He's a liar. He's a murderer. And now David's a hypocrite, too. because now David seems quite pleased to stand in judgment of someone else when David himself is guilty of the same sin. So David cries out to God, Psalm 51. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love.

Blot out my sins, wash me thoroughly. So he's asking God to forgive him. But where I want to focus for this session is David says, For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. When David says that, I think that should resonate with us here. Because if you are a sinner, which you all are, then you have sinned in the eyes of God. And if you have ever sinned in the eyes of God, and you have a conscience, then you should know the feeling that David is expressing here.

For I know my transgressions. Conscience is just a compound word, con meaning with. It's like from the Latin and then science, knowledge, right? So a conscience means with knowledge. So we sin with knowledge. And when we sin with knowledge, we should feel guilty.

You know that you've sinned. And I want you to think about how often you've committed a sin like David. Maybe not exactly like David's in that case. and it wasn't revealed right away and you tried to cover it up. And how our natural reaction in our sinfulness is not to expose our sin, in fact, and run for forgiveness, but we react just like Adam and Eve reacted.

We try to hide and we try to cover up our sin. And that is what I want you to consider in your own life is how your sin has been ever before you when you've sinned. How it, it's like you, I don't know a situation to bring up, but I know for me, when I was a younger person and my boss would want to talk to me at work, I always had this fear that he had found something out.

Because I had this really guilty conscience. And I wonder if that's how David felt at times. I mean, you know there were people that went and got Bathsheba and brought her back. And then they saw Uriah die. Like, there were people that knew. If you read the story, there were more people that knew what David had done.

David had to have been scared on a daily basis that it was going to get found out. He's going to lose his kingdom or the respect he had. That somehow he was going to be exposed. But then David says against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. David sinned against Uriah. He sinned against Bathsheba.

He sinned against the kingdom of Israel. He sinned against the church of God. This statement is not a statement of absolute that only God is sinned against when somebody sins. What this statement is about is that only the sin against God is what matters, ultimately. Because Uriah was a fellow sinner. Bathsheba was a fellow sinner.

Every sinner deserves punishment. So for David to sin against them, it could just be a form of God's judgment in a sense. But against God, David sinned. And it was from God that David needed forgiveness. And it's God who's righteously angry with the wicked every day. It says in Psalm 5, 5, you hate all evildoers.

So what are we going to do with a God who hates evildoers when we're the ones that do evil? David says oh he says so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment David announces that he sinned against God so that God will be blameless in his judgment the judgment of God against David we didn't talk about it but you can read about it in 2 Samuel 11 God tells him through Nathan the prophet your son's going to die so you got this lady pregnant you brought her in you married her the chances are he loved her they had a baby together and God says I'm going to kill your son you might argue with me and say God never said he's going to kill his son but who gives life and takes it away God does that baby died as the judgment of God against his father And actually that one of the wonderful passages where we start to develop the doctrine that babies who die go to heaven So 2 Samuel 12 is a nice chapter, and 11 for that reason. But the judgment of God was that that baby's going to die because David had sinned against God.

And God wanted David to experience consequences. and God wanted David to be devoted to him. And even you'll see that David had hoped that maybe God would change his mind in that case. But God is just to do whatever he wants. And God is right to do what he pleases with his creation. God creates, God destroys, he does what he wants. That's the way God is.

It's his prerogative. So, for example, God can't sin. So there's no way that we could accuse God of sin because he is justified in his words and blameless in his judgment against David. But then in verse 5, sorry, I need reading. I need to take my glasses off, so that's a 5. David says, Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

And here is where I think there's been a lot of confusion on this verse. When he says, In sin did my mother conceive me, when I first read that and probably the next 20 times, I thought it meant that David's mom was sinning when she conceived David. So like she was committing adultery also is what I thought that meant. What that verse is saying, he says, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me.

David's saying that from the moment that he was conceived, and if you read the rest of the Bible, you'll find out David's mom was a godly woman. She was a Christian, for lack of a better phrase for Old Testament people. She was a Christian woman who believed in the Lord and trusted in him. David's mom didn't sin to bring about David's life. David was conceived as a sinner, is what that statement is saying.

So when the Bible talks about sin, the Bible teaches a doctrine that we should all agree with in this room, original sin. Original sin refers to the fact that when Adam and Eve were in the garden, that when Adam sinned and brought a curse on all of humanity, everybody who would be born after Adam would be born a sinner. So that when you sin, you sin because you're a sinner.

You're not a sinner because you sin. So each and every one of us, like David, was conceived in sin. So at the moment of your conception, you were already in the eyes of God an unholy sinner. You were already someone who was not fit to be in his presence. And David is living out that truth. And David is confessing that truth that not only has he sinned against God in real time, right?

Hypocrisy, lying, adultery, murder, the cover-up, malice. not only has he done these sins in real time but david is confessing to god his innate or inherent sinfulness that there's something about david that is that is fundamentally wicked at a level that's so different from a holy god that only if god would wash him thoroughly and cleanse him from his sins, could David have any hope of forgiveness? That only a God who would be willing to act on David's part could help him. You are now confronted with this story.

You're confronted with all these things David did. And you can do what David did, which is to look at David and think, oh, what a poor, pathetic soul. And you can look at David and say, you know, Well, you could say, what a moron. You could say, what an idiot. You could say, what a fool. You could say, what a wicked man.

What a horrible sinner. But what I'm going to challenge you to do instead is to look at David and recognize that if you read enough of the Bible and how it talks about David and his relationship to God, that David is better than everybody in this room. and that every one of us is a way worse person than David. And we haven't acted it all out, maybe, because we have the benefit of stories like this to teach us, right?

But what I want you to do is don't be the hypocrite that David was at the end. Instead of focusing on David's sin that God laid out for us, David's sin that was graciously given to us as an example so that we might know what sin can do to us. I mean, where did this start? Well, you ever hear that song Slow Fade, right? By Casting Crowns? Is that just too old?

Are you guys too young for Casting Crowns? They have a concert in Columbus in like two weeks or something. There's a song Slow Fade. It's about how it starts. David started by just walking around looking at a girl with his eyes. He didn't walk upstairs and say, hey, I'm going to commit adultery today.

It started with just a look, and then he started to lust, and it slowly developed, right? But I want you to think about your own life. I want you to think about your own sin. I want you to think about, have you ever truly confessed to God your sinfulness? Or do you think that maybe God's pretty fortunate to have you? like he's a lucky God that you decided to accept Jesus one day I want you to think about yourself as the sinner in the story that's why I titled the message You Are David I'm terrible with titles and that title is actually a play on a sermon some guy gave years ago that you maybe never heard of but the point is we're all David we are all David We've fallen short of what God demands of us from the very start.

And by God's grace, we actually manifest our sin, and we violate His law against our own conscience sometimes in such a way that we can recognize our sinfulness. And so what we're going to do tonight, so this will give you something to think about right now. And I normally wouldn't do this unless I knew I was going to speak again, but we're not going to go to the next part now.

We're not going to talk about the solution that God gave for sinfulness. I want you to have to be confronted with your sinfulness. I want you to be confronted with the fact that God finds you wicked. I want you to be confronted with the fact that in his holy and righteous justice, he will punish sinners for eternity in hell. And that there will never be enough punishment against a holy God.

There will never be enough punishment you or I could endure that would satisfy a holy God's wrath for our sin and our wickedness. And then I will tonight, I'll tell you the solution to it. And some of you already know. But some of you needed to hear this. Some of you needed to be really confronted with this fact, even those of you who are already Christian.

Even those of you who already knew these things, it's good to be reminded. So David, horrible person. still may be the best of us. So let me pray. Father in heaven, we're grateful for your word. We're grateful that sinners have for centuries had their lives documented in the Bible for our learning The New Testament tells us that those things that were written in the Old Testament were written as examples to us and so let us learn from the example of david let us let us meditate on psalm 51 the the prayer of a repentant sinner and let's consider these things that david has declared about you and your righteousness and the the requests he has made of you and and in particular let's consider what David teaches us about ourselves.

May your Holy Spirit grant us wisdom and understanding this weekend. I pray for everyone in this room, Lord. You know the individual needs. And we know that every person individually needs to be confronted by you. Whether it's to meet you for the first time or to grow. We pray, Lord, that you would do that work in each of our hearts today.

I pray that you keep these people safe as they do the sports and the different events that they're doing, that you would build friendships that would last for all eternity this weekend. People who didn't know each other yesterday will be forever friends, maybe. We pray for these things to occur. And let everything we do be to the glory of Jesus Christ, in whose name I pray.

Amen. You are listening to Be a Berean with host Michael Coughlin on the Bible Thumping Wingnut Network. Michael is a writer at ThingsAbove.us and resides in Central Ohio with his wife Erin and their kids. You can contact Michael at ThingsAbove.us or visit his ministry website, MichaelCoghlan.net. That's C-O-U-G-H-L-I-N. Thank you for listening to this episode of Be a Berean.

We hope you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.