Faithful, Flawed And After God’s Heart - King David

Message – “Faithful, Flawed and After God’s Heart”

Does anyone hear enjoy doing puzzles? What do you enjoy the most about doing puzzles?

Here’s another question: Do you ever feel like figuring out your life is like trying to solve a large, thousand-piece puzzle that doesn’t have a picture on the box?

Well, how do you sort yourself out? How do you sort out the pieces? That’s what I wanna talk about today.

How do you make peace… with your life as it is now, with your past, and move forward, hopefully not totally encumbered by your past, not ruled by what has happened in your life so far. How do you sort yourself out?

“Have you ever tried to clean out a messy closet? You start with good intentions, pulling everything out to sort through it.

But an hour later, you’re just sitting there, surrounded by piles of old stuff, wondering how your life got to this point. You find an old jacket, try it on, get distracted by some old photos, and eventually, you just shove everything back in and close the door.

That’s how a lot of us deal with our past. We don’t really sort it out—we just push it aside and hope it doesn’t spill out at the wrong moment.

One way of coming to a greater understanding of ourselves, is to think in terms of critical moments, scenes or snapshots from life. Ones that made some kind of impact.

I have snapshots from my life: my very first memory is being screamed at by my mother because I jumped out of the van my family had been driving in for 6 hours straight on the way to Mexico.

And with the energy of a 4 year old on fire, so to speak, I was about to run into a massive, deep gorge. So my first memory is of my life being saved by my mother.

Of course there were negative moments. We all have negative snapshots in our heads, and what we do with them has a big impact on how we sort ourselves out and how we progress in life. We can choose ourselves how much we might choose to focus on them.

In fact even as we try to figure ourselves out, the parts of our lives that we choose to focus on and concentrate our energies on often have an impact on how we experience the day and how we experience life overall.

But the truth is that we are in control of those snapshots, those pieces of memory, those Recalls of our life experience, and we have the agency, the ability, to determine at what distance from our lives painful snapshots stay.

Likewise we can choose which positive snapshots we allow to inhabit our imaginations.

Do I keep traumatic moments right in front of me, frequently thinking about them, frequently talking about them, essentially keeping alive those passing seconds or hours or days, when they really belong in a place of memory, in the past.

I did that with the moment of my brother’s death.

What were passing, semi-conscious moments for him lived on for many months - years even - in my mind. It was not good.

Or do I accept that by God’s power and because of His love and power at work in my life, I can learn to keep those dark moments behind me, at the fringes, the very edges of my awareness, because I choose to enter into NOW without the burden of that memory.

This was the situation for David, as we will see. David had a lot of pain in his background. He was the runt of the litter in his family, the youngest, mostly forgotten, under-rated son of Jesse.

Later in life, as we will see, David did some mighty dumb things for which he had to live with the consequences his entire life.

But, like David did, we can choose to not be defined by that pain, that trauma, those awful moments, that suffering in our pasts. We can choose instead to allow God to define who we are.

We can let God be God and make us that new creation that we are promised that we are and are becoming.

2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:[a] the old has gone, the new is here!

Today is the first Sunday of Lent, a time of year in the Christian calendar when followers of Jesus have the opportunity to reflect on Jesus’ journey to the cross.

A brother in Christ, Henri Nouwen, said, Lent is about becoming, doing and changing whatever it is that is blocking fullness of life in us right now. Lent is a summons to live anew (in Christ).

Today we are going to spend some time in the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible.