Introduction – God’s protection from sin is the main point
Main focus – God’s protection
There was a question that came up last week after the sermon. Someone came to me and said, “Darrell, usually you strive to always point us to the glory of God in every sermon. But in this sermon you just talked about how to deal with fools and how to deal with an angry man. It was useful information, but it was not really very God-centered.”
That critique of last week’s sermon is exactly right. And not only did the sermon not point to the glory of God, but it did not address the main point of the chapter. The reason for that is in the first half of my sermon I started with a few minor points from the passage, and then in the second half I was going to hit the major points, which were also the parts that point us to the glory of God. But the first half ended up taking up the whole time and I never got to the second half.
The reason I tell you all that is threefold. First, for those of you who are called to be Bible teachers, I do not want you to take last week’s sermon as a model. God made the main point the main point because He wanted it to be the main point. So always strive to point to God’s glory, and do not make secondary points the main point of your message.
The second reason I mention it is to make sure everyone realizes the value of you pointing it out to me when you notice problems in a sermon or in anything else I do as pastor. You are not going to hurt my feelings, and you may very well prevent the whole church from being misled on some point or another. Preaching is such a serious business that we cannot afford to let problems go unaddressed simply because someone is worried about not offending me.
And the third reason I am taking time to mention this is because I do not want there to be any confusion on what the main point of this chapter is. Last week’s sermon is still important, because we need to know how to respond to fools and angry people; but we also need to understand the main point of this chapter which is much bigger. The heart and soul of 1 Samuel 25 is in 32 – and also in 26 and 31. If you really want to understand the main message of 1 Samuel 25, underline verses 26, 31, and 32 and you will have it.
32 David said to Abigail, "Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel, who has sent you today to meet me. 33 May you be blessed for your good judgment and for keeping me from bloodshed this day and from avenging myself with my own hands.
The main point is that God protected David from sin.
Batman or Mr. Magoo? (God has been protecting David)
David is a great hero. He is smart, he is good looking, he is resourceful, he is skilled, and he is really, really tough. If you had to compare David to a movie character, who would you pick? Maybe Batman? Or Jason Bourne? Or Aragon in the Lord of the Rings? You could probably make a case for each of those. But in the past several chapters you know which character comes to my mind? Mr. Magoo. For those of you who were not watching cartoons 35 years ago, Mr. Magoo was a cartoon character who was so nearsighted that he was basically blind and he used to walk all around town and would just miss one death trap after another by sheer providence. He would think he was just walking down the sidewalk and in reality he would be on some steel girder 100 feet off the ground, and just when he would step off something would just happen to pass under his feet and he would just keep walking without knowing anything happened. And those kinds of things would just keep happening until he arrived home safely.
The reason I compare David to Mr. Magoo is not because David was ignorant of the threats around him – he wasn’t. I draw the comparison because in most cases David was protected from those threats not by any skill or strength of his own, but through acts of providence. When you watch Mr. Magoo it is obvious that the writers are protecting him. And when you read 1 Samuel 18-25 it is obvious that God is protecting David. God makes Saul’s spear miss, God provides David with food and a sword, God enables him to escape from the Philistine king, God tells him about Saul’s movements ahead of time, and when David is completely cornered and hemmed in, God sends the Philistines to attack so Saul has to pull away. God protected David in Moab, Keilah, Maon, Engedi, in the Crags, at the Sheep Gate. He protected him from the Philistine, from Saul, from the Ziphites, from the Moabites, and now God protects David from the greatest threat of all. God sends this woman to protect David from the most deadly of all his enemies. This enemy could inflict infinitely more harm on David than all of the rest of David’s enemies put together. This enemy is… sin.
Protection from the greatest enemy - sin
When Nabal’s servant overheard Nabal insult David’s men he came immediately to Abigail and told her about it. And then he said this:
17 Now think it over and see what you can do, because disaster is hanging over our master and his whole household.
The servant saw disaster about to strike Nabal. But Abigail saw a much greater disaster about to strike David. Being hacked to pieces by David’s sword would be a minor disaster but falling into sin would be a major disaster. No one can do you more harm than you. Not long ago there was a movie that came out where there was a virus that caused everyone who was infected to commit suicide. That is a great parable for sin. The real threat was not looming over Nabal - it was looming over David. It already struck Nabal many years ago. But now it was about to strike David, and so Abigail springs into action to rescue both Nabal and David.
God protects you from sin through wisdom
God’s promise to guard us from sin is one of the most delightful and encouraging, and at the same time one of the least appreciated of all of God’s great and precious promises. Think about it for a second – does it seem to you like God protects you from sin? At first you might be tempted to think, “If God is protecting me from sin He is not doing a very good job. If God is protecting me from sin, how do you explain all my countless sins? Is God failing? Has God even promised to protect me from sin?
Yes, God has promised to protect from sin
The answer to that last question is yes.
2 Thessalonians 3:3 the Lord is faithful, and he will strengthen and protect you from the evil one.
2 Corinthians 1:21 Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ.
1 Corinthians 1:8 He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Thessalonians 5:23 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.
Ezekiel 11:19-20 I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. 20 Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.
Over and over God promises to protect us from the evil one, to guard us from sin, and to keep us from evil.
Why do I still sin?
So then the question is, how does it work? What happens to God’s protection each time I sin? To answer that question you need to understand a principle that we studied in detail back in February when we studied 1 John 5:18-19. It was the second to last sermon of the book, titled “Satan Can’t Touch You, but Watch Out!” (It was part 6 of the Victory by Faith series) I am not going to repeat that whole sermon now. Let me just remind you of the main point, which is this – God’s promises to protect us from sin are not absolute and they are conditional.
Obviously the promise to keep us from sin is not absolute. When God says, “I will guard you from falling into sin” that does not mean we will never, ever sin. But it does mean every time we do not sin it is because God has protected us.
Think about it for a second. How many opportunities to sin do you have in a typical day? Would you agree that you could potentially have several ungodly thoughts in one second? If so – if you could potentially sin three times per second, that is over 170,000 opportunities to sin during your waking hours each day - One hundred seventy thousand opportunities to fail to love God with your mind. And that does not even count all the opportunities to fail to love God with your affections – with your feelings and your heart and your motives and your desires and your priorities. It is impossible to calculate how many thousands of times per day the Lord prevents you from sinning.
But how does He do it? Let’s watch and see how God did it with David.
Protection through wisdom (Abigail)
One way God works to protect you from sin is through providence – making sure the right servant overhears the right conversation at the right time and comes and tells Abigail. But more importantly the way God protects you from sin is through wisdom – and that is where dear Abby comes in. God protected David by sending someone to apply the principles of Scripture to David’s heart. Abby points out the sinfulness of what David had planned and the benefits of doing the right thing. And David responds with an excited declaration of praise to God for protecting him from sin.
32 David said to Abigail, "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who has sent you…
Experience God’s protection by listening to wisdom
Experience God’s attributes
And if you are like me you might wonder, how is it that David was so delighted about that? Understanding with my mind that God has done a good thing is not hard for me. But how do you get so it affects your emotions and causes praise? (Praise is the expression of joy in the Lord, so where there is true praise there is emotional delight.)
This question of how to become genuinely delighted by God’s protection from sin is a very important question, because the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart. And delight is at the core of love.
The reason I want all my sermons to point to the glory of God is because it is only when you see and experience His glory that you will love Him more. And His glory is seen in His attributes – the things that are true about Him. And this particular attribute is the fact that God is a God who protects His people from sin.
So if you want your love for God to increase in your heart, the way to do it is to experience God’s attributes firsthand. I did not come to love my wife by reading a book about her. My heart learned to take delight in her when I experienced the wonderful things about her firsthand. If you want to love God more it is essential that you study about Him in Scripture - you cannot love what you do not even know. But gathering information in itself is not enough. For it to touch your affections and emotions and appetites and desires you have to experience God’s attributes firsthand.
People come up with all kinds of superstitious ideas about what it is like to experience the presence of God. You hear people say it feels like electricity coursing through your body or a tingle or tinge or a quiver in your liver or whatever. But we do not have to make it that mystical. You experience the presence of God when you experience His attributes in a way that rejoices your heart and gives you peace and hope. So in this case, if we want to experience the presence of God, we need to learn what it means to experience firsthand what it is like to be protected by God from sin.
Follow David’s Example in Sin
And we can learn how to do that from David’s example. The reason we are studying this book is because God has made it clear that the life of David is given to us as an example to follow. God wants us to know what the life of a man or woman after God’s own heart looks like. And up to this point it has all been very inspiring. David’s faith in God has amazed us, his love for God has delighted us, his zeal for God has motivated us. But when you are studying someone’s life in order to follow his example, what do you do when you get to a chapter where he sins (like David does in this chapter)?
God gave us David as an example of how to recover from sin in your life. You cannot learn anything from Jesus’ example about how to recover from failure or how to repent of sin or how to deal with evil impulses in your heart. We can learn all that from Jesus’ words, but not by His example because Jesus never sinned so God gave us a man who can teach us all of that by example. Remember, the fundamental difference between David and Saul, and the thing that makes David a man after God’s own heart, is not that Saul sinned and David did not sin. It was that David repented of his sin.
David listens to wisdom
Last week we heard the voice of wisdom as Abigail came out and gave David some unsolicited advice. David had not asked for any advice, but she gives him counsel anyway. And just so there is no question in our minds, the narrator tells us right up from that Abigail’s voice is the voice of wisdom.
3 His name was Nabal and his wife's name was Abigail. She was an intelligent and beautiful woman
Literally, TOV SEKEL (good of insight) and beautiful in form. So she had a nice figure, and she was wise.
So how does David respond to the voice of wisdom? Abigail catches David at the worst possible moment. He is in a terrible mood, he is angry, and he was just rehearsing all the things he was angry about. And he was so out of control he had even vowed with an oath that he would slaughter every male in the entire household – which would include all the servants and shepherds and everyone. (You know it has to be a significant number of people – David is not going to bring 400 men to kill three guys.)
So Abigail meets David, presents him with a gift – a whole bunch of food – and then proceeds to show him that what was in his heart was evil. And it would have terrible results. But if he does what is right he can trust God to take care of justice and to fulfill all His promises to David.
So which way is David going to go? Will he listen or not listen? We saw in chapter 24 how David responded to bad advice. When he got peer pressure from his own men to do the wrong thing in the cave David ripped them to pieces with rebuke. He was not one bit moved or influenced by them. That is how he responds to bad counsel – let’s see how he responds to wise counsel.
32 David said to Abigail, "Blessed be Yahweh, the God of Israel, who has sent you today to meet me. 33 May you be blessed for your good judgment and for keeping me from bloodshed this day and from avenging myself with my own hands. 34 Otherwise, as surely as the LORD, the God of Israel, lives, who has kept me from harming you, if you had not come quickly to meet me, not one male belonging to Nabal would have been left alive by daybreak." 35 Then David accepted from her hand what she had brought him and said, "Go home in peace. I have heard your words and granted your request."
David listened to wisdom. He would not listen to bad advice, but when someone comes with wise counsel, he is all ears.
Matthew Henry: "‘Abigail was a wise reprover of David’s passion, and he gave an obedient ear to the reproof according to his own principle: ‘Let the righteous smite me, it shall be a kindness’ (Ps. 141:5): never was such an admonition either better given or better taken."
And that is how you experience this attribute of God. The way to experience God’s protecting love firsthand so your eyes are opened to the gloriousness of it and your love for God increases is to listen to the voice of wisdom. Wisdom is from God so when you listen to wisdom you are experiencing God Himself.
Reversing Course
But the hardest time to listen to wisdom is right after you have sinned. When you stumble in some relatively small way, and then you come to your senses and realize the path you are on is a sinful one, at that moment you have a decision to make – listen to wisdom and get back on the right path, or keep going in your sinful direction. And it is very, very hard because your momentum is in a direction away from the Lord.
Imagine a narrow, rocky path up in the mountains and the downhill side of the path goes downhill fairly steep for about four or five feet from the path and drops straight off a cliff. When you are walking in God’s path you are safe. When you step off, by God’s grace you do not always drop immediately off the cliff. Usually you slide down a few feet and then stop, and the voice of wisdom tells you to immediately turn around and scramble back up onto the path.
If you listen to wisdom you can recover with minimal damage. But if you take another two or three steps you will very likely find yourself dropping right off the cliff.
That is what happened to Cain. Cain sinned by offering God a sacrifice apart from faith and as a result his offering was rejected by God and his brother’s was accepted. Cain had stepped off the path. He is two feet from the path and two feet from the cliff, and God comes to him with the voice of wisdom.
Genesis 4:7 If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.
“Get back on the path and you will be accepted. Keep going and you will drop off the cliff.” God uses a different illustration though. Instead of the imminent danger of falling off a cliff, it was the imminent danger of being pounced on by a wild animal (sin is crouching at your door). But the point is the same – after your initial failure you need to turn around quickly or you will fall into much worse failure.
In Ecclesiastes 7:26 we see yet another illustration for this same principle. That passage personifies temptation as a woman whose heart is a trap and whose hands are chains. That is a vivid picture – her hands are actually handcuffs. You think, “It’s OK, I will get close to her but I will not become ensnared.” But then you find that the moment she touches you, you are instantly in bondage to that sin and you cannot escape. So whether it is dropping off a cliff or being pounced on by a wild animal or being enslaved by some sin, all three illustrations point to the same principle – venture too far off the path into sin and the results are that you quickly plunge into a much worse situation.
Ecclesiastes 7:26 I find more bitter than death the woman who is a snare, whose heart is a trap and whose hands are chains. The man who pleases God will escape her, but the sinner she will ensnare.
That last sentence is the opposite of what you expect. You would think he would say, “If you manage to escape temptation you will please God.” But what he says instead is if you please God you will be able to manage to escape temptation. The more you please God the more protection He gives you from the enemy. But the more you rebel against Him the more He removes that protection and lets you keep moving toward the cliff and allows sin to pounce on you and slap the cuffs on you.
God Protected David from being given over to sin (Ro.1)
That same principle is taught in some detail in Romans 1.
Romans 1:21 although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to impurity
They did not listen to the voice of wisdom and repent, so God stopped restraining them, and as a result they drop into the horrible downward spiral of depravity described in verses 25-32. That is what God protected David from in 1 Samuel 25.
Listening to wisdom improves your soul
Failing to listen to the voice of wisdom after you have sinned destroys your own soul. But listening to wisdom has the opposite effect – it actually improves your soul.
Proverbs 1:20 Wisdom calls aloud in the street…22 "How long will you simple ones love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge? 23 If you had responded to my rebuke, I would have poured out my heart to you and made my thoughts known to you. … But 25 since you ignored all my advice and would not accept my rebuke, 26 I in turn will laugh at your disaster; I will mock when calamity overtakes you
Wisdom is personified as a woman. (“Personified” means if wisdom had a brain and a mouth, this is what it would say) Wisdom would say, “If you had listened to my rebuke, I would have poured out my heart to you, but since you didn’t, now when trouble comes I am going to be nowhere to be found.” If you listen to the voice of wisdom when it comes, there is a fantastic benefit that comes from that. And the benefit is wisdom will be accessible to you. You will be able to know what the wise course is. But if you refuse to listen, then when trouble comes and you really, really need wisdom, you will not be able to find it. You will not be able to figure out what is the wise thing to do.
And the reason you will be able to figure it out is because it will be pleasant to your soul.
Proverbs 2:1 My son, if you accept my words and … 2 turn your ear to wisdom …10 wisdom will enter your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul.
Do you see what that is promising? He is saying, “If you start listening to wisdom then I will change your heart so that you start really liking wisdom.” That is crucial if you want to be a wise person. There are times when you have enough information in your head to discern the wise path, but the wise path in this particular case is something your soul is not really interested in. Your soul really wants to go another way. You are praying, “God, should I do A, or should I do B? Give me wisdom!” And God gives you the ability to figure out that B is the wise path. But your soul really, really wants A, so your soul ends up tricking your brain into thinking A is the right way to go. That is what happens when wisdom is not pleasant to your soul. Your soul sees the wise way and says, “Oh no – surely that can’t be God’s will.” It is next to impossible to discern wisdom when the wise way is not pleasant to your soul. But when the wise path is pleasant to your soul that makes it really easy to discern wisdom. And each time you listen to wisdom, it improves your soul so that your soul has a greater love for the wise path.
Failing to listen makes you miss out on the experience of God’s protecting love
But each time you fail to listen when God makes the wise course clear, that has a perverting effect on your soul, so that you do not desire it as much. And not only does it have a damaging effect on your soul, but it also causes you to miss out on the experience of God’s protecting love. Remember – experiencing that attribute of God firsthand is the goal. When you come to that crossroads after you have stumbled off the path, and the voice of wisdom is telling you, “Turn around now! Repent, and turn back to God!” – and your flesh is telling you, “No, it’s OK. You can venture a little bit further. You can keep going – you can always repent and turn around later” – when that happens, when wisdom is saying one thing and folly is saying the opposite, at that moment you have an opportunity to experience the presence of God by experiencing one of His attributes firsthand. You have an opportunity to experience firsthand what it is like to be protected by God from sin.
Must be aware that it is God’s doing
But in order for that to cause you to rejoice in the Lord and to love Him more and take greater delight in Him you have to see the protection as coming from Him. David does not say, “Boy, am I glad I came to my senses.”
32 David said to Abigail, "Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel, who has sent you 33 … for keeping me from bloodshed this day
He was fully aware that it was God who had protected him from falling further into sin. And Abigail saw that too.
26 the LORD has kept you, my master, from bloodshed
She interpreted her own actions as having come from the Lord, and she was right.
Think about your life. When you resist some sin, or when you listen to wisdom and choose the right course, do you recognize that as God’s doing? Or do you just assume it was all your doing? I am not suggesting it was not your doing – we are not controlled by God against our will like robots. However whenever we willingly take the right way we only do so because of countless actions of protection God has performed on our behalf, without which we would have for sure fallen into sin. Whenever the right way seems good to you - whenever the righteous option is appealing to you, say to yourself, “Hey, this is what it is like to experience God’s protecting love!” If God protects you from sin but you are oblivious to what is going on, or you think it is just your own strength, then you miss out on the experience of God’s presence and you miss out on the opportunity to cause your love for God to increase.
Following David’s example
David’s response to Abigail is amazing, and we should strive to follow his example. And when you hear me say that you might think, “Wait a minute – David had a totally selfish, childish, prideful, angry, vengeful response when he was insulted. How can you say we should follow his example?” Obviously we should not follow his example in the sin, but recovery from failure is a huge part of the Christian life, is it not? Depending on how you respond, a small stumble can result in restoration and a renewed intimacy with the Lord and greater love for Him, or it can be the launch pad into turning your whole spiritual life into a total train wreck. Satan never comes after you harder than right after you fall into a sin. That is when you are vulnerable. He knows you have some momentum going in the wrong direction, he knows you probably will not fight against him effectively because you are so depressed and disgusted with yourself, he knows that once you cave into a sin it is 100 times easier to cave in the next time; and so when you stumble into sin you can expect the enemy to pull out all the stops in a furious attack of temptation and discouragement. And so let’s make sure we learn from David all that we can about how to recover from failure. David is a great example of how to recover from having been a terrible example.
Complexity – don’t pigeonhole a sinner
And if that sounds like a contradiction to you, you need to understand the complexity of the human heart. Is David good or bad in this chapter? His initial response to being insulted was horrible. But his teachability and responsiveness to wisdom was wonderful. It is simplistic to just try to boil it down to an overall “good” or “bad.” David had a bad reaction and then a good reaction.
And the reason I mention that is because very often we tend to oversimplify the issue of sin and righteousness. Someone sins against you and later repents and you are tempted to say, “I don’t accept your repentance or your change of mind because your initial reaction revealed what was truly in your heart.” That is an oversimplification. Did their initial reaction reveal what was really in their heart? Yes, but so did their change of mind. The initial sinful reaction revealed some sin in their heart and their godly change of mind revealed some godliness in their heart. And being a man or woman after God’s own heart means sinning and then repenting.
So what should happen? Two things: You should accept their current godly attitude as being valid. They should examine their heart to try to discover why they had the initial bad response and work toward overcoming that sin. In other words – you should not dismiss their current godliness as if it were not genuine, and they should not dismiss their initial sin as if it were irrelevant now that they have repented. They still need to figure out what went wrong in their heart to cause the initial sin. But while they do that you should rejoice over their repentance.
So even though we see some very ugly sin in David’s heart in this chapter, we can learn from his quick repentance. What David did here is extremely hard to do, because the enemy always tells you, “Look – you already blew it, you might as well just go all the way.” Think of the insanity of that kind of reasoning. Think of God’s protection from sin as being like your house protecting you from the elements outside on a cold winter evening. You leave the shelter of your house and step outside into the cold, and immediately you get chilled, and as you shiver you think, well, I’ve already blown it. I might as well go ahead and get hypothermia.” So you spend the night out on your front porch. That argument makes zero sense, and yet we fall for it time after time.
It is kind of like a golf swing. That is one thing that has amazed a lot of golfers about Tiger Woods – his ability to stop in mid swing if something is not right or if there is a distraction. Most golfers cannot do that. Once they start into their backswing they are committed. Sin is like that – once you start in on it, it is next to impossible to stop. But David shows us how to stop in mid swing and do a complete 180.
Teachable
And the way he did it was by being humble enough to be teachable. And that is all the more remarkable when you consider that the person rebuking him was a woman. Women had no standing in that culture to rebuke men – none. It is a great mark of character to be teachable – by anyone. When you are not teachable you become like Nabal the fool.
17 disaster is hanging over our master and his whole household. He is such a wicked man that no one can talk to him.
People who are too proud to be teachable are stupid fools, like Nabal. And the result is they become wicked. But David was teachable – even by a woman – and a total stranger.
I imagine David might have risked losing respect in the eyes of his men by doing this. He just made this big vow – “May God strike me down if I don’t kill every male there!!!!” And then he is completely stopped in his tacks by a woman. You can imagine some of the talk that might have gone through the ranks.
“Nothing can stop me – yeah, except a pretty girl with a crockpot. ‘Oh David, please don’t do it’ – ‘Oh, OK.’ What a wimp!”
Women were not highly regarded in that culture, and listening to a woman like this – especially a woman who is telling you to completely reverse your plans - and a woman who is rebuking you for sin – listening to that would not be viewed as a sign of a mighty warrior in those days.
I wonder how much priceless counsel has been thrown aside and lost because it came out of the mouth of someone who was considered an inferior. I wonder how many parents have missed out on experienceing God’s protective love because they did not listen to their children when their children tried to point them to Scripture. I wonder how many seasoned Christians have fallen into disaster in their spiritual lives because the man God called to preach the sermon they needed to hear happened to be only 20 years old. And they spent the whole time critiquing how well he was doing rather than letting the Word of God rebuke them through the sermon. Listen to the voice of wisdom – whether it comes from the mouth of a wise sage, or your wife, or a child, or a donkey – or, a sinner. A lot of people reject the voice of wisdom because it comes out of the mouth of a sinner.
“Who are you to rebuke me? You have a log in your own eye – first take the log out of your own eye then you can talk to me about the splinter in my eye.”
That is the voice of stupidity. Jesus never told us to reject wisdom if it comes to us out of the mouth of a sinner. If the person is a sinner then help him recover from his sin – but not until after you have repented of your own sin. But no matter who he is or what sin is in his life, if what he is telling you is wisdom, listen to it.
Proverbs 13:1 A wise son heeds his father's instruction, but a mocker does not listen to rebuke.
And people who do not listen to wisdom very soon find that wise people stop offering them wisdom. Why didn’t Abigail try to correct Nabal? Probably the same reason the servant didn’t –they both knew from experience that Nabal would not listen. It is usually a bad idea to try to correct a fool. It does more harm than good.
David was not a fool because even though he fell into sin, when he was confronted with the voice of wisdom he listened.
Proverbs 9:8 Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you; rebuke a wise man and he will love you.
That is really true – rebuke a wise man and he will love you – in fact, he might even marry you.
39 …Then David sent word to Abigail, asking her to become his wife.
David really took Proverbs.9:8 seriously.
Don’t hesitate to correct someone who is over you.
And while we on this subject, we can learn from Abigail’s example too. Do not hesitate to correct someone who is over you. We sometimes use that as an excuse to avoid the hard work of reproving someone. But really being in a subordinate position can be one of the best positions from which to rebuke a person, because they do not get confused and think your position is the issue. If I am in authority over someone and I rebuke him for something, he might get confused and think, “I have to change my ways to please Darrell.” But if someone they regard as an inferior rebukes them that is not as much of a temptation – they can see more clearly that they need to change their ways to please God.
Conclusion
Lord God, You are a Father who guards and protects Your children from sin. We love that about You – but dear Lord we don’t love it enough. Most of the countless millions of sins You protect us from we are just oblivious to, or we write it off as either us being strong or the temptation being weak.
Oh Lord, teach us how to attend to what You are doing on our behalf. Open our eyes to see that each time we love what is good – each time the wise path seems reasonable and attractive to us and has a tug on our hearts – we are experiencing nothing less than the direct touch of Almighty God on our souls! Let that delight us as it should. Let it cause us to rejoice in You so that genuine praises arise from deep within us.
Blessed be the Lord, who has kept us from sin this day by sending a parent, child, friend, enemy – whoever it is He sent to point us to the principles of wisdom in His Word that our souls may be spared the ravages of sin!
Amen
Benediction: Ps.20:1-2 May the name of the God of Jacob protect you. 2 May he send you help from the sanctuary and grant you support from Zion.
