Have you ever had one of those days
when it seemed like your whole life was
just coming to a stop?
God had brought you to such a point
to where you realized you could not go
on any longer in your own strength.
And all you could do was just fall
on your face before him and say, Oh
God, I can't go on.
There was a day in the life of
David, what you might have said was more
than just a bad day.
It was a day in which he had
just been kicked out of his own kingdom,
kicked out of his own castle, kicked out
of the city of Jerusalem, and was leaving
in disgrace.
When I'm sure his heart was at the
bottom, except that he had been disciplined in
life in this one area, and that was
not to give up on God, no matter
how hard life got.
My friend, you and I will go through
many trials.
That's what life is.
And it's not the trials that will determine
the outcome, but your attitude toward them.
Many years ago, I had a pastor on
preaching on this passage in 2 Samuel 16.
When David was leaving the kingdom and Shimei
was cursing and throwing stones, he said, No
Shimei can hurt you, but your attitude towards
him can kill you.
Now let me read you the passage on
David, and then I want to take you,
as the Spirit of God leads us today,
to Calvary.
You see, my friend, life begins at Calvary.
Life proceeds from Calvary.
And when Jesus told His disciples to take
up their cross and to follow Him, what
He meant was that there was a daily
dying to self.
But before the daily dying to self would
come, there would have to come a day
in their life where they died to self,
and they considered themselves as dead, and that
Jesus was their life.
When the Lord Jesus Christ arrested Paul, Saul
of Tarsus, out on the Damascus Road, that
day Paul died, and Jesus revived, Jesus came
into his life, and Jesus became his life.
But it took him a few years, as
God buried him off out into the desert,
and He taught him, by the Holy Spirit
and by the Word of God, He taught
him the cross.
So when Paul came out of the desert,
there was a man walking, and talking, and
looking, but it was no more Paul of
Tarsus, it was now Paul of Jesus.
He had been taken to the cross, and
so when he came out, he was a
new man.
As the Scripture says, therefore, if any man
be in Christ, he is a new creature.
Old things have passed away.
But the question is, when you go into
your trial, will you come out like Jesus?
Or will you come out bitter?
I've been sharing the last few weeks on
bitterness.
And I wanted to go on, I wanted
to take you into a revival series, but
the Spirit of God just would not let
me, He's checked me at every corner.
And even would not clearly give me a
message to prepare ahead of time.
I said, Lord, you want me to depend
on you completely.
And He says, yes.
He's been taking me deeper and deeper.
Remember, sometimes you think, how deep, how far
will He take you?
I don't think there's any bottom, as long
as we're on this earth.
There's no place to where we stop.
No place to where we get up and
we plateau and we say, this is it,
I've arrived.
The Christian life is a continual crucifixion.
And Christ brings into our life the trials
and the tribulations that we need to continually
conform us to Jesus.
Now, I want to take you down a
little road this morning.
And I'm trusting that the Spirit of God
will open up to you what He wants
you to see.
You may have to stop your car.
If you're driving, you may have to shut
off whatever's going on around you.
If you have ears to hear and the
Spirit of God is saying to you, this
is the message I want you to hear,
then you better listen.
Don't miss it.
There are some days that are extraordinary days.
There are some messages that are extraordinary messages.
There are some times in the stillness and
the silence of our storm, God comes and
He speaks.
There was a day when David went through
his valley of humiliation.
And he made a choice that day to
go through the valley of shame.
And he came out victorious.
The Scripture said in 2 Samuel 16, 9,
Then said Abishai, the son of Zerui, of
the king, Why should this dead dog curse
my lord the king?
Let me go over, I pray thee, and
take off his head.
And the king said, What have I to
do with you, ye sons of Uriah?
So let him curse, because the Lord hath
said unto him, Curse David.
Who shall then say, Wherefore hast thou done
so?
And David said to Abishai and to all
his servants, Behold, my son, which came forth
of my bowels, seeketh my life.
How much more now may this Benjamite do
it?
Let him alone, and let him curse, for
the Lord hath bidden him.
It may be that the Lord will look
on mine affliction, and that the Lord will
requite me good for his cursing this day.
And as David and his men went by
the way, Shimei went along on the hillside
over against him and cursed as he went,
and threw stones at him and cast dust.
And the king and all the people that
were with him came weary and refreshed themselves
there.
Now, I want you to listen to this.
You may come weary, but there will be
a point where you will refresh yourself there.
When God meets you there, you will be
refreshed, anointed with fresh oil of the Holy
Spirit, and you will be a new person.
Heavenly Father, I ask that you bless the
teaching and preaching of your word today in
Jesus' name.
There is an old preacher by the name
of Raymond Edmond who shared a message on
the discipline of defamation.
And he said, it's understandable that we should
take patiently and graciously whatever correction we need,
and to take rebuke for our errors.
But, as the Scripture says, if when you
do well and suffer for it, you take
it patiently, this is acceptable with God.
David was going through a school of God's
own special choosing, just like Job.
And so, when you come to the point
when you go through your trial and you
want to enter back, you want to return
the abuse, or you have someone hanging around
you that says, why don't you go take
off his head?
You've got the authority, you're the king.
And God says, no, you go through this
trial.
You see, I think a lot of us
have wanted the shortcuts.
We've wanted the easy way out.
And we've not been willing to sit still
and let God finish it.
And we've jumped in and tried to do
it ourselves and we've messed it up.
Some of us have gone through our whole
life messing up things.
We've not learned to enter into His rest
and be still, and let God be God
in our lives.
We haven't figured it out that He is
a sovereign God.
No devil will touch you unless he wants
Him.
No trial will come into your life unless
God wants it to come in there.
Some of you, maybe less than a day,
you've been running from God for a long
time.
And it's God that's been chasing you down,
trying to get you to Jesus, to trust
Him as your Savior.
And some of you have trusted Jesus as
your Savior, trusted Him to be the one
that covered your sins.
And then you try to go on and
live the Christian life and you can't do
it.
That's the most frustrating thing in the world,
to try to live the Christian life.
The Christian life is not you living a
Christian life.
It's Jesus living His life through you as
you're led day by day by His Spirit.
You check with the Spirit on everything you
do, every place you go, everything you say.
That's the Spirit-filled life.
And that's living in the will of God.
And if you want to get confused, you
just try not living in the Spirit.
When God commanded us to live in the
Spirit, Ephesians 5.18, that's not an option
for our Christian life.
It is an essential, vital.
Walking in the Spirit is just as vital
for you as breathing.
You can't have the Spirit-filled life without
the Holy Spirit correcting and guiding and directing
and choosing for you, and you talking and
fellowshipping with Him.
And so when you come along and you
hit your day, when a Shimei comes along,
the reason you get bent out of shape
and you get bitter and angry is because
you're in control.
And the sad thing about it is you
can go through your whole life that way.
Ehrman said, When we want to answer back,
to return the rebukes that we have received
with interest added, to defend ourselves and our
actions where motives and methods were above reproach,
then we're to remember.
For this is thankworthy, if a man for
conscience toward God endured grief, suffering wrongfully.
For even here unto where you call, because
Christ also suffered for us.
Leaving us an example, that you should follow
His steps.
Who when He was reviled, reviled not again.
When He suffered, He threatened not.
Now listen to this.
But committed Himself to Him that judges righteously.
How often do you do that?
You do that every day.
He said, this is a deep discipline of
the soul.
This evidence of our true sonship with God
as described by our Lord Jesus Christ.
But I say unto you, love your enemies.
Bless them that curse you.
Do good to them that hate you.
And pray for them which despitefully use you
and persecute you.
That ye may be the children of your
Father which is in heaven.
For He maketh His Son to rise on
the evil and on the good.
And sendeth rain on the just and the
unjust.
The thing that will make you stand out
and be different, will be the fact that
God is in your life.
And my friend, you can't love your enemies.
That's not humanly possible.
But it is supernaturally possible under the enabling
of the Holy Spirit.
So David's conduct before Ishmael illustrates really the
excellent discipline that he had learned in his
desert.
He had learned that in those moments when
he was under trial, when he was blasphemed
and cursed and had stones and dust thrown
at him, he had learned to give it
to God.
Vengeance is mine, says the Scripture.
And if you don't think it was just
a little trial, I want you to think
about this.
David was well advanced in years.
His own son, rebellious Absalom, whom he really
loved, dearly loved, deeply loved, had kicked him
out of his own palace.
And now you have this old Benjamite out
there doing all this to him.
With these stinging insults and lies and accusations.
Going along with the heartache of his own
son's rebellion.
My friend, he knew what a broken heart
was.
And if anyone had the power to turn
and take that man's head off, it was
him.
He had the power and the authority to
resist and fight Absalom.
He was the king.
But he loved and knew and walked with
God so close that he knew that God
was in this.
And that's where you and I miss it.
Many times we don't recognize that God is
in it.
Many times we think it's the devil fighting
against us.
We got demons hounding us.
But if you get to the bottom of
it, it's God.
You know the Scripture says that He'll turn
the tormentors against you.
Even Malachi says that you'll have all kinds
of financial disasters if you don't give God
your heart and evidence it by your giving.
You can't beat Him.
Don't be deceived.
God won't be mocked.
So upon the bleeding heart of an old
father was He, the Invictive.
Come out, come out, thou bloody man and
thou man of Belial.
You don't think that He knew what pain
was.
He did.
But He was also a type of Jesus.
As flawed as He was with His life,
we have the suffering of David showing us
our Jesus.
And the cursing of Shimei was just almost
too much for David's friends.
You ever gone through a trial?
Matter of fact, if you don't respond many
times to the way your friends think you
should respond to your trial, they'll write you
off.
I know men that God has called them
into the revival ministry.
And revival ministry is not what you always
think it is.
God may call you into a life of
prayer.
Where you have to seemingly do things that
are unusual and maybe seemingly neglect your family.
To do what God has told you to
do.
And friends will call you different things and
write you off.
Or God has called you to resign your
ministry and to drop everything.
And to do something different.
And you know that He's done it.
But they don't think that you're doing what
God has called you to do.
And they'll write you off.
They'll think you're a fanatic.
You've flipped your lid.
You've gone crazy.
And that may have been the way it
was with David.
And it was almost too much for his
mighty army men.
Man, they could pick off a flea at
50 yards with a spear.
They were warriors.
Excellent craftsmen in the art of warfare.
And this dead dog over there doing that.
David's response, Erdman says, was touching in its
expression of tenderness towards a misguided man.
Think about that.
And of trust toward Almighty God.
You'll never get to the depth and the
heart of the love of God until you
get to the point where you can love
your enemies.
And the evidence that you're in a spirit
of self and selfishness and self-will and
rebellion and you haven't dealt with the root
of sin in your life is that you
have a bitter attitude towards those that come
your way.
And it's God all the time letting that
Shimei come into your life.
And He will take you from one thing
to another.
From one job to another.
You can't get away from Him.
He will keep bringing you to it.
Until you actually just destroy yourself, your life,
your own family.
Until you get to God.
David's response was one of love of God.
He said, it may be that the Lord
will look on mine affliction.
Long before, many times he'd faced similar circumstances.
And he had learned to commit his cause
unto Him that judges righteously.
If you think back into his youth when
he had lost his temper and he almost,
because of some gross ingratitude towards him, he
almost killed Nabal.
God in His graciousness and His providence spared
him.
How many times can you look back to
where God spared you from destroying yourself in
a terrible way?
And so, as the Scripture says, That this
shall be no grief unto thee, nor offense
of heart unto my Lord, either that thou
hast shed blood causeless, or that my Lord
hath avenged Himself.
Think about it.
Nabal's wife.
This woman came out and said these words
to David that struck his heart.
And on that occasion, he turned and he
said, Okay God, You take care of it.
You know, the Psalms reveals the heart of
a man seeking after God.
And this lesson is written in the Psalms.
It's there.
If you go back to Psalms 12, 1,
2, and 5, You'll find David said, For
the oppression of the poor, for the sighing
of the needy, Now will I arise, said
the Lord.
I will set him in safety from him
that puffeth at him.
He cried out, False witnesses did rise up.
They laid to my charge things that I
knew not.
They rewarded me evil for good to the
spoiling of my soul.
But as for me, when they were sick,
my clothing was sackcloth.
I humbled my soul with fasting.
I behaved myself as though He had been
my friend or brother.
But in my adversity, they rejoice.
They deter me and cease not.
You see, if you're going to be like
Jesus, And you want to be like Jesus,
And you say, I'm a Christian.
I love Jesus.
Then don't think it's strange If testings and
trials come your way That's going to draw
out of you a response That you don't
have to give That will draw them to
Jesus Or show others that there's something different.
You don't have it and God is letting
it come So that you'll turn to Him
and say, Oh God, will you produce through
me the love For that one that hates
me, that one that's hurting me?
And God in His supernatural power Will fill
you with the Spirit And out of you
will flow love instead of hate and revenge.
It may be that the Spirit of God
this morning, Today, tonight, whenever you're hearing this
message Is convicting you that your life Has
not been one of response of the Spirit
of God But it's been one of the
response of self.
And you wonder why your friends have turned
away from you.
Much less your enemies.
It's because they haven't seen Jesus.
They've seen you.
They don't need to see you.
They don't need to see me.
You know, I've been thinking lately, Boy, I'd
like to get down there And have a
meeting with you folks And have a gathering,
get together And see you face to face.
And the last time we was coming through
the area We got together as many as
we could On a one-on-one basis
And we got to share a little bit
in a church.
But I'd like to just get together with
you And see you.
And I'm talking to God about it.
I need a place.
And I need permission from Him to do
it.
But face to face communication and contact Is
the closest, the clearest, the strongest That people
can see Jesus in you and me.
You hear my voice.
But there's just something different When you're face
to face.
And you know what?
God loved this world so much That He
gave His only begotten Son That whosoever believeth
in Him Should not perish but have everlasting
life.
And so He came down and He died
on the cross.
He was crucified, He was buried And then
He rose again and then He went to
Heaven.
And then He sent the Holy Spirit back
to indwell us So that people all over
this world Could see Jesus in us.
What a responsibility, what a privilege That God
can speak to my neighbor Can speak to
that person in the grocery store Can speak
to someone in this community Or in another
state or wherever through me.
I can be what they need.
But I can blow it If I fail
to reckon myself dead to sin and self.
A powerful lesson.
Oh David, he determined by God's help He
said, I will take heed to my ways
That I sin not with my tongue.
I will keep my mouth with a bridle
While the wicked is before me.
You know, he had observed He said, I've
seen the wicked in great power And spreading
himself like a green bay tree.
Yet he passed away.
And lo, he was not.
Yea, I sought him, but he could not
be found.
Could it be that the Spirit of God
Could put into your heart Some compassion and
love For those people around you?
You go out to the mall if you
can stand it There in Joplin or any
big city And you just watch people.
They're empty.
The kids drive up and down the streets
In their vehicles.
Souped up cars, pickups or whatever.
But their hearts are empty.
They need Jesus.
Who is willing to put their all on
the altar As Abraham did when God came
down and said Now put now thy son,
thine only son whom thou lovest Put him
on the altar and sacrifice him.
You know, you'll never really get to the
heart of the cross Until you give your
Isaac to Jesus.
He gave his all.
God gave his all to us.
But if you withhold one thing You have
an idol in your life.
And so David, he could testify out of
his deep And his hurtful experiences Oh how
great is thy goodness Which thou hast laid
up for them that fear thee Which thou
hast wrought for them that trust in thee
Before the sons of men That thou shalt
hide them in the secret of thy presence
From the pride of men Thou shalt keep
them secretly in a pavilion From the strife
of tongues Blessed be the Lord for he
has showed me His marvelous kindness in a
strong city.
You see the fruit of the Spirit is
love.
And out of that love comes the joy
And the peace and the long suffering And
the gentleness and the kindness and the goodness.
All of those things come out of the
love Of the Spirit.
The bitterness, the hatred, the reviling The strife,
the tension That comes from the flesh.
What's God speaking to you about today?
We've got so many programs We've got so
many plans And what we need to do
Is have a good old fashioned revival Where
we fall on our face before God Right
where you're at And say, oh God I
have been the problem.
It's not my brother or my sister But
it's me, oh Lord Standing in the need
of prayer.
Where are you at my friend?
Are you living in victory?
You know the proverb says We speak words
of life or death.
God may be hounding and pounding on you
Because out of your mouth has been coming
Words of death.
And you're a detriment to Him And not
an asset.
And He loves you too much to let
you keep on doing that.
And all the misery and the grief That
this old selfish heart can produce And remember
the heart is deceitful above all things And
desperately wicked.
All these things God wants to get rid
of And all He wants there is Jesus.
Just sweet Jesus Filled with the Spirit Living
His life through us.
Well I trust God has been speaking to
you today.
I'm going to continue on this next week
If the Lord wills And finish up this
I have something to share with you About
Jesus In concluding this message.
I have a burn in my heart to
To share with you on revival But I'm
going to have to hold off Till God
will release me from this.
Until next time I trust that God will
richly bless you And remember That Jesus Christ
is all you need But if you got
to the point in your life To where
He's all you want.
Till next time May God richly bless you
My friend.