How To Lose Your Kingdom

How To Lose Your Kingdom In One Generation

I&II Samuel

I. Get married for all the wrong reasons. I Samuel 18:19-21

II. Become more interested in pleasure than responsibility I Samuel 25:42-44

III. Become great in everything but parenting II Samuel 5;10

IV. Know the world better than you know your children II Samuel 13:3-5

When we close out the life of King David and then his Son Solomon, we find the grandson coming to power and Rehoboam, is not a very wise man and not one set after the heart of God. He follows some bad advice and as a result the kingdom of David is divided and never returns to it=s glory. A phrase stands out from the people, AWhat have we to do with David?@ How did it go from the greatness of David to this in one generation? We will look at that in the life of David and find out. It was not that David and Solomon were not great enough in power and military might or governmental strength. So how did it happen then? My suggestion is that the kingdom collapsed because the family of David collapsed. I want to walk back thru the life of David and find some key areas that I think led to this point.

We begin in I Samuel 18;19-21 where we find one of many examples from David concerning getting married for all the wrong reasons. The truth of the matter is that David actually ended up with more than one sets of families. He had a set in Jerusalem and perhaps at least two other areas that he had a set of families. I want to tell you that the starting point of families of faith is to marry for the right reason and not the wrong ones. It is very clear that for David being married was someone to sleep with. One thing you do not find is David and any of his wives with a real basis in God. Now I know this is going to sound strange because the Bible tells us that David was a man after God=s own heart, but even those people can loose a kingdom and it will happen if they marry for the wrong reasons. Now I need to say a couple of things here. One is that if you did, you can start all over again. I can not tell you the number of couples who have come to me for marriage repair and after a while we found that there was really nothing to repair. They had not built their relationship on any thing other than physical pleasure and emotional pacifiers and when those passed their basis of being had passed as well. Second, to those of you who have not married as of yet, please, please, make sure that you marry someone because it is the person that you want to grow old with as you walk with God thru the days of your life.

Then we move to I Samuel 25: 42-44 and we find the kingdom fell as the family fell when David became more interested in pleasure than responsibility. Here is the consortium of wives being formed for David and we of course are familiar with the Bathsheba incident, as one of those times that David laid aside his responsibility for pleasure. Rather than care for what he had, David moved on to more wives and more concubines and more times of personal pleasure and all the while turmoil was going on inside what should have been a family. I want to say some things that I suspect will sound a bit challenging and perhaps uncomfortable, but I feel very strongly they need to be said. When you chose to make a family by marriage and then by having children, or even out of order as many do it today, when you make a family, your first priority becomes your responsibility to that family. When you make little babies, your quest for life from that point on is not to be happy or satisfied, but to be responsible. The tragic crashing of families all across our land today has a great deal of root in the seeking of pleasure over responsibility. It means nearly nothing to throw the future of a family away because daddy finds him a new sweety or mommy=s head has been turned by some one messing where he had no business. We have so confused this in our society today. We feel the key to life is to be happy. It is not, it is to be responsible. I am part of a lot of weddings and I tell you it is heartbreaking to see three and four sets of parents and hyphenated children all because they sought please above responsibility.