Defeating Giants

DEFEATING GIANTS

Students involved in a research project at the University of Illinois called 2000 homes at random between midnight and 2 A.M. on a Friday night in the city of Chicago to see if parents knew where their children were. In 75% of the homes called, a child answered and didn’t know where the parents were.

“The most urgent domestic challenge facing the U.S. is the re-creating of fatherhood as a social role for men.”—David Blankenhorn, Institute for American Values.

We need fathers that will take their God given places according to what God’s word says and not what Hollywood says. We need more Abraham’s, Isaac’s and Jacobs and less Archie bunkers as our models.

we are involved in a war today, and the battleground is not in Iraq or Afghanistan. The battleground is in our homes. And we’re not fighting for our land, or our property, . It’s more important than that . And it’s our children & families that are at risk.

I’m not just talking to father’s here but also to mother’s because some of them are the only one’s raising their children, and there are some grandparents here who are raising children, and maybe you’re an aunt or an uncle doing the raising…. so this is a message to everyone who’s fighting in this war

And believe me—it’s a war, it’s an important war, and in this country, we are losing the battle.

Adults & Children are turning from the faith in record numbers. And if you don’t believe me, look here this morning. And it is not only a problem here, it is all over this country.

A report by Warren Mueller revealed that where both parents attend church on a regular basis, 72% of their children continue in the faith.

If only the father attends, that percentage drops to 55 percent, but where it’s just the mother attending, that percentage drops to just 15 percent of the children remain involved in the church.

And most of the time when people stop attending church it’s because of a trial or difficult time in their lives Do you remember the times when you’ve struggled with something or you’ve been fighting a battle .

We’ve all been to the place where we’ve had to deal with giants; giants like worry, doubt, fear, anxiety, depression. Whatever it has been, we’ve wandered through those dry valleys looking for answers, and sometimes we come up empty. We feel a lot like David standing in the shadow of Goliath.

The truth is, we have a choice, and we are faced with a question:

Who are we relying on to defeat our giants?

Who are we counting on to carry our burdens?

In New York City at the entrance to the RCA building on Fifth Avenue is a massive statue of Atlas, a perfectly proportioned man who, with all his muscles straining, is holding the world upon his shoulders

There he is, the most powerfully built man in the world, and he can barely stand up under his burden.

‘Now that’s one way you can live,’ ‘trying to carry the world on your shoulders.

On the other side of Fifth Avenue is St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and there behind the altar is a statue of Jesus as a boy, maybe eight or nine years old, and with no effort, he is holding the world in one hand.”

Goliath was David’s giant to overcome. It was his distraction and his problem. In fact, Goliath was Israel’s giant to overcome.

Even though the spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul at this point in his life, he was still leading the army of the Israelites in battle.

And by this point, Saul had lost all confidence in God’s leadership, not only in his life but also in the life of his nation, and it became very evident in the way Saul led his troops against the Philistines.

For a long time, Saul and his men would wake up every morning and stand face to face with their giant.

But that was the problem.

They were facing their giant day after day after day.

There was a key element that was missing in their battle strategy that forced them to waste time dealing with the same giant every day.

Take your Bible and turn to 1 Samuel 17.

Here we read of one of the most famous battles not only in the Bible, but also in all of history.

David faced a physical giant in Goliath, but we face giants of our own all the time, whether they are

mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual giants.

So we must ask,

how do we defeat the giants in our life?

What do we learn from David’s strategy that we can use ourselves?

1 Sam 17;1 Now the Philistines gathered their forces for war …... 2 Saul and the Israelites assembled … and drew up their battle line to meet the Philistines. 3 The Philistines occupied one hill and the Israelites another, with the valley between them. 4 A champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out of the Philistine camp. He was over nine feet tall. 5 He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore an armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels ( about 125 lbs); 6 on his legs he wore bronze …, and a bronze javelin was slung on his back.