New Giants For A New Generation (A Graduate Recognition Sermon) Series

New Giants for a New Generation

2 Samuel 21:15-22

Good morning! I invite you to turn to 2 Samuel 21 this morning.

One of my favorite Sundays of the year is when we do our Graduate recognition. We had a great time last night with these representatives of the class of 2023 and their families. We went to Fat Boys and ate barbecue. Martha Ellis planned it. [Shout out to Martha and Deborah].

I love this Sunday because it celebrates a great accomplishment, but it also recognizes that there are a lot more milestones in the future. There will be more adventures, more achievements, more milestones. And yes, there will be more challenges.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to preach on this morning. I knew I wanted to stick to our reading plan, But I was also looking for something that would encourage you guys as you complete your high school career, but would also give our entire church a challenge as we have our Serve Fair today. Was there a passage in this week’s plan that could do both those things.

Well, it wasn’t until Friday’s reading that I found it. It’s the story of David and the Giants.

You’re like, wait. You mean David and the Giant, right? Not giants.

Everyone knows that when David was a teenager, probably about the same age as many of you this morning, he squared off against a giant named Goliath, right? We talked about this a few weeks ago when we got to first Samuel 17.You remember the story. David’s brothers go off to fight the Philistines while David stays home to take care of the sheep. His father Jesse sends him to the battlefield to bring food to his brothers. And while he is there, he hears the taunts of the giant Goliath, and he goes to King Saul and says, “Let me take a crack at him.” King Saul kind of laughs him off, but when David keeps insisting, Saul is like, “Well, this should be fun,” and he sends this scrappy little teenager out to fight Goliath. At first, Saul dresses David in Saul’s own armor, but it doesn’t fit. 1 Samuel 17:40 says he ran down to the brook and picked out five smooth stones, put them in his bag, grabbed the sling, and ran to meet the giant.

Then he took one of the stones, slung it at Goliath, and killed him.

Now, most of us would probably say, “Man, that was the battle of a lifetime!” We’d be like, “Ok, I’ve killed my Goliath. One’s enough… right?

But as most people older people in this room could tell you, there’s never just one giant. Maybe that’s why David took five stones. Maybe it was in case four other giants showed up.

Well, in 2 Samuel 21, they finally did. Let’s read this together. If you are physically able to stand, please stand to honor the reading of God’s Word.

[Read]

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let’s pray.

This year is my 28th read through of the Bible. But I have to admit to you that until it came up in our reading plan a couple of days ago, I had never even paid attention to this little story in the Bible. Am I the only one? Raise your hand if up until this week you had no idea that after Goliath, David would face not one, not two, not three, but four more giants? Raise them up. Yeah. Honestly, I think we are at the point in the reading plan where any time we see a bunch of names we can’t pronounce, our eyes kind of glaze over and we miss the details. But I promise you, the longer you study God’s Word, the more you are going to realize that you are never going to get to the bottom of it. The Holy Spirit will always take you deeper.

That’s the first thing you can write down on your listening guide:

The battle will never be Over (vv. 15, 18, 19, 20)

• “The Philistines again waged war against Israel” (v. 15)

• 18 After this, there was another battle with the Philistines at Gob.

• 19 Once again there was a battle with the Philistines at Gob,

• 20 At Gath there was still another battle.

Full disclosure—not all Bible scholars agree that these battles happened late in David’s life. Some look at it as a compilation of battles throughout David’s lifetime. Some even say that the Goliath in verse 19 is the same one we all know about, and that Elhanan is just a nickname for David. I’m not going to try to answer that this morning. This morning I’m just going to go with what the Bible says in the order the Bible says it, and assume that these four battles came decades after the story of David and Goliath. David is at the end of his life. We get his last words just two chapters later, in 2 Samuel 23. So he’s captured Jerusalem, got the ark back from the Philistines, had the moral failure with Bathsheba, and watched his own son Absalom wage war against him until he was finally killed by David’s number one general.