David, Saul, and the Battle against Destructive Attitudes

Have you ever considered how bitterness, fear, and pride could impact your life? Brace yourself as we journey through a thought-provoking exploration of these destructive attitudes and their consequences. We highlight how they not only harden our hearts but also lead us to reject God's blessings, fuel hate and anxiety, and could even result in eternal condemnation. We take you through the Biblical story of David and Michael in 1 Samuel 18:17-30, presenting a vivid picture of how to replace bitterness with forgiveness, fear with love and contentment, and pride with humility.

As we forge ahead, we take a closer look at Saul's fear of David which sparked hate and anxiety, and led him to plot against David. This scenario offers insightful reflections on the damage these attitudes can cause in our lives. Moreover, we draw depth from the analogy of a good marriage representing a healthy church, the relationship between worry and contentment, and the vital importance of addressing conflicts directly and with love. 

Our journey doesn't end there. We've got a treat for you - the re-recorded version of our popular Christmas stories from last year's podcast that will hit the airwaves from Sunday, November 26th. So, gather your loved ones and immerse yourselves in these heartwarming tales, perfect for stirring up the holiday spirit and appreciating the joy of storytelling. Together, let's tread this path towards peace, joy, and the ultimate esteem and honor from God.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Let's talk about three attitudes that kill bitterness, fear and pride in this episode of Truth Trek. Welcome to Truth Trek, where we dive deep into the Bible to uncover the treasures there. I'm Pastor Jason Hubdy and I will be your guide as we journey together into Scripture, god's Holy Word. In this episode, we're going to be talking about three attitudes that kill and the opposites of them, which we should be striving for. I want to start out with two verses from Proverbs 29. The first one is 29, verse 6. An evil man is ensnared in his transgression, but a righteous man sings and rejoices. And Proverbs 29.25,. The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe. So we're going to be talking about three attitudes that kill and their opposites. The first one is bitterness, or being unforgiving, which leads to a heart and heart, and the result is that God cannot forgive the person who is not forgiving others. The opposite of that is forgiveness, which leads to peace. The second attitude that kills is fear, which leads to hate and results in anxiety. The opposite of that is love and contentment, which leads to joy. And the third one is pride, which leads to rejection of God, resulting in eternal condemnation the opposite of pride, of course, is humility, which leads to being esteemed, resulting in honor, according to Scripture.

Speaker 1: 2:02

Let's look at a story found in 1 Samuel, chapter 18, verses 17 through 30, where David marries Michael. It says Then Saul said to David here is my elder daughter, merib. I will give her to you for a wife. Only be valiant for me and fight the Lord's battles, for Saul thought Let not my hand be against him, but let the hand of the Philistines be against him. And David said to Saul who am I and who are my relatives, my father's clan in Israel, that I should be son-in-law to the king. But at the time when Merib, saul's daughter, should have been given to David, she was given to Adriel, the Mahalathite for a wife. Now, saul's daughter Michael loved David and they told Saul and the thing pleased him. Saul thought Let me give her to him, that she may be a snare for him and that the hand of the Philistines may be against him. Therefore, saul said to David a second time you shall now be my son-in-law.

Speaker 1: 3:02

And Saul commanded his servants speak to David in private and say Behold, the king has delight in you and all his servants love you Now, then become the king's son-in-law. And Saul's servants spoke these words in the ears of David. And David said Does it seem to you a little thing to become the king's son-in-law, since I am a poor man and have no reputation? And the servants of Stahl told him Thus, and so did David speak. Then Saul said Thus shall you say to David, the king desires no bride-pice except a hundred foreskins of the Philistines, that he may be avenged of the king's enemies. Now Saul thought to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines. And when his servants told David these words, it pleased David well to become the king's son-in-law. Before the time had expired, david arose and went along with his men and killed two hundred of the Philistines and David brought their foreskins, which were given in full number to the king that he might become the king's son-in-law. And Saul gave him his daughter, michael, for a wife. And when Saul saw and knew that the Lord was with David and that Michael, saul's daughter, loved him, saul was even more afraid of David. So Saul was David's enemy continually. Then the commanders of the Philistines came out to battle and as often as they came out, david had more success than all the servants of Saul, so that his name was highly esteemed.

Speaker 1: 4:28

So again we're going to look at three attitudes that kill. The first attitude is bitterness. Again, that's being unforgiving and leads to hard and hard, and the result is that God cannot forgive the one who does not forgive others. The opposite of that is, of course, forgiveness which leads to peace. You may remember how mad Saul was that the people were cheering for David. He hated it, and this jealousy led to bitterness. Bitterness leads to a hardened heart. It keeps one from enjoying God's blessings, and bitterness is an attitude that kills. Bitterness often stems from either a real hurt that someone has done to us or a perceived hurt. Sometimes we are bitter because someone really did something hurtful to us. We don't forgive the offense, and so we live in bitterness. Bitterness brings with it all kinds of stress, and it is so unhealthy. So why can't we forgive? If we are Christians, we ought to be able to forgive.

Speaker 1: 5:29

Jesus told a parable about a man who was forgiven a debt that was so huge there was no way he could pay it, but he asked for mercy, and mercy was granted. Then he saw a man that owed him a small amount and he demanded to be paid. The man asked him for mercy, but he did not give it. The purpose of that parable was for us to understand that our debt of sin paid on the cross was a debt we could never have paid. Our sin was against God, the perfect, holy God, whose omnipotent and is the Creator, to whom we owe every breath. And yet, for those of us who put our faith in Jesus, we come to an understanding of our sin debt, a debt we cannot deal with. It is such a burden we cannot even fathom the cost to have the weight of that sin lifted. And at the moment we realized this and believed that Jesus had died on the cross and that death was a sufficient payment for our own sin. We cried unto God. Mercy and mercy was given.

Speaker 1: 6:32

And yet when we do not forgive someone who has hurt us and we allow it to become bitterness, and not only that, we nurture that very bitterness by thinking again and again of how the person hurt us and we become their judge. Now, scripture tells us there is only one judge, god. And when we hold someone else in judgment, we take the place of God. We begin to think how we are good and that person is not. We forget about our own sin debt and focus on the much smaller offense given to us, and the bitterness leads to a hardened heart and eventually that bitterness leads to spiritual death.

Speaker 1: 7:13

In the version of the Lord's Prayer found in Matthew, jesus follows it by saying this in Matthew 6, 14, and 15, for if you forgive others, their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. So ultimately, if we cannot forgive someone and instead embrace bitterness, then Jesus says we cannot be forgiven. And the mark of a believer in Jesus is that we do forgive others who have hurt us. Saul could not do that. He could not forgive David for receiving praise from people that Saul thought he himself deserved. His bitterness continued to harden his heart and eventually led to his death. Instead of being like Saul, let's be like Jesus, who even forgave those who beat and crucified him. The result of forgiveness is peace. Instead of a hard heart, we can have a soft, pliable heart.

Speaker 1: 8:17

There is an alternative to bitterness, and we read about it in Hebrews, chapter 3, verses 12 and 13. It says there Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God, but exhort one another every day, as long as it is called today, that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. We do not need to have an evil, unbelieving and unforgiving heart, but we are to exhort one another. Exorting is encouraging. It cannot be done properly without love and gentleness. Christians should not be trying to change each other's behaviors by only rebuking. We are to let the Word of God do that. We may be the ones to speak, the Word of God that rebukes, but unless it is done with love, gentleness and graciousness, it may result in further hurt and bitterness. So when you encourage each other, do it with the true brotherly love that we ought to have for one another. When we can forgive, we can experience peace, and in the family of God that is the peace that will make the Church attractive to others.

Speaker 1: 9:34

A church could meet every modern expectation that people could think of. You could have good coffee, snacks, all the right music, all the right classes and programs anything you can think of. A church could meet all of those expectations and yet not have peace. You can't fake peace, you can't pretend. If you want peace, you must have love, and love does not nurture resentment towards others. Love does not continue in bitterness. A good example for the Church is a good marriage. If being quick to forgive and having love that sees past hurts and serving one another and communicating well are signs of a good marriage, these same things are also signs of a healthy Church.

Speaker 1: 10:21

Our next dangerous attitude is fear. Fear leads to hate and that leads to anxiety and many other issues, and the opposite of fear is love and contentment, which leads to joy. Saul not only was bitter toward David, he feared him. Some people want you to fear them. Some of us have known people like that the boss who wants everyone looking over their shoulder, wondering what they will be chastised for next. The bully on the playground who gets a kick out of his reputation for getting everyone to either scatter out of his way or become sycophants to stay in his good graces. The tyrant who demands that the people weep out of gratitude for his very existence and, out of fear, worship him in the streets. However, a Christian should not be known for causing others to fear them, and we see why fear is bad in Saul's case. He fears David even though David has done absolutely nothing to hurt him, and his fear leads to hate. That results in anxiety. We know Saul had other issues as well, but we can see how a person who is emotionally unhealthy in one area is also emotionally unhealthy in other areas. He's always looking for a way to get rid of David. His son, jonathan, loves and swears allegiance to David. His daughter loves David. The people love David, and Saul's fear of him leads to an utter hatred and gives him great anxiety.

Speaker 1: 11:55

We fear that we can't control something or someone, so we hate whatever we can't control, and anxiety is the result of us not being content with what we cannot control. I remember a sermon I heard many years ago about the sin of worry. Worry is the opposite of contentment. We have anxiety because we don't have control. We feel if we could control some situation, we wouldn't be worried. This is why, when people cannot control some situation they're worried about, they find another way they can have an element of control. Maybe they take control by becoming a bully themselves. Maybe they go shopping to replace things they already have. Maybe they quit their job and start a business.

Speaker 1: 12:41

But the thing is, if one cannot be content with the situation they already have, they will not be content when things change either. If you are not content because your house isn't as nice as you would like and you scrimp and save and maybe work harder to have a new house, you will soon find things in that new house you wished were different. The same is true with people who hop from church to church. One church is lacking something they want, so they go to another, only to soon discover the new church is also lacking something, and so on. Experienced pastors will tell you they have a caution flag whenever they hear a new person attending who tells them how much better this church is than the one they went to. They know it may not be long before they are saying the same thing to yet another pastor. For some it's a pattern, and that pattern is a result of not being content.

Speaker 1: 13:34

The same thing is true in relationships. Sadly, many people go through life without a true close friend or without a truly happy marriage because they are never content with the people they have in their lives. They are always finding fault, always looking at the ones with whom they should have the most grace with a critical eye. But there's a better way, and that is the way of love and contentment. This is what leads to joy when we learn to love one another, we can be content with what we have in our lives. We can have joy.

Speaker 1: 14:05

David loved First. He loved God. You cannot expect to have loving relationships with people if you do not have a loving relationship with God For one. It is impossible to love the creation without loving the Creator and, importantly, we cannot love without the help of the Creator. Love is his kind of thing. There's a song that we used to sing at one of our kids' programs God so Loves the World that he gave his one and only son that anybody who believes in him will have everlasting life. When we begin to realize that he loved us like that and that he will give us the help we need, we can learn to love.

Speaker 1: 14:50

Now, is that easy? No, people can be very difficult to love. It is a struggle, but Jesus has loved some pretty unlovable people. I'm one of them. But there were people who hated him, who mocked the Father, those who were hypocrites, and he loved them. He spoke truth, with the sensitivity to know when to speak that truth with great gentleness and compassion and when to display a holy anger.

Speaker 1: 15:21

David loved God. You can see in the beautiful poetry that is in the Psalms he wrote, his heart would pour out praise to God. Even when he was caught in his sin, he was first concerned about his relationship to God. He said against you alone I have sinned. Create in me a pure heart. Don't take your Holy Spirit away from me. Stay with me, forgive me, help me.

Speaker 1: 15:47

David sinned and he knew it, but his immediate concern was that God would not leave him alone. And when we sin against each other, our first concern, when we realize it, should be to plead with that person, not to leave our relationship to rot, but to work together to heal it. No one is ever completely innocent. In the strife we find ourselves in with others, we must go to the one we offended or, if we are offended, we must go to the one who offended us. Jesus talks about this in Matthew 18. The perfect result would be that both the offender and the offended would be moving towards one another, the offender realizing how they hurt someone, the offended willing to forgive so to live in forgiveness.

Speaker 1: 16:32

We can look to David, who was forgiven and forgave, and even with Saul, at times actively trying to kill him, he never takes vengeance into his own hands. He loves even Saul, his tormentor. He loves him and weeps when he dies. That is love, contentment that leads to joy. And as David can be an example to us of someone who loved, so can he be an example of someone who experienced great joy. Our last attitude that kills is pride. Remember that pride leads to rejection of God, results in eternal condemnation, and its opposite is humility, which leads to being esteemed and resulting in honor. Now we've gotten to the sin of Satan. Pride puts one in the place of God.

Speaker 1: 17:20

Pride says I am the most important and I will do what it takes to get what I want. Pride rejects the precepts of God and replaces them with selfish replacements. We see it all over. God says I give you a beautiful way to live in love with a spouse. There's a specific design for marriage. Pride says I can do it my own way. That's what pride is. Pride says my way is better than God's way and what he has forbidden I will allow. And not only allow but celebrate. And while we could look at others and say I see how prideful they are and they're denying the way God created them and they're trying to be prideful in a certain situation, as soon as we start judging that we need to watch out because each of us, in our own ways and at certain times, do the same thing. We take something God has designed and perverted, or we do something he forbids us to do and say I'm allowed.

Speaker 1: 18:22

We are all susceptible to pride when we refuse to do things God's way. It's pride. We know Scripture tells us how to go to someone if we have an issue with them, and yet we go instead to tell others of that person's fault. Pride we know that we are to love our spouses with Christ as our example, and instead we hold things over the head of our spouse, making mockery of God's design for marriage. Pride we point out all of the flaws of the politicians we don't agree with and dismiss those same flaws in the ones we do agree with. Pride we take the place of God, our judge, and put under our judgment people we see that we think are not living up to God's standards. Pride we know we ought to spend time in His Word and in prayer and we do every excuse to do something we would prefer to do instead. Pride so be careful in pointing the finger at the pride outside of the church, because there is abundant pride in the church. Paul said we are not to judge those outside the church, but inside the church we are to be watchful and certainly in our personal attitudes we must be careful as well.

Speaker 1: 19:32

Pride's ultimate result is eternal condemnation. It is the sin of Satan, who put himself above God and tempted sin into this world so that countless generations since then have followed this model. Putting oneself above God is the final result of pride, when God in the end casts it into the eternal fire along with those who remain in pride. Yet we do not need to remain in pride. Instead, we see in our example today a humility. In David, he says who am I? That I should be the Son and Law to the King? Who am I? And we can ask ourselves, in regards to God's grace given to us through the cross, who am I? Who am I to deserve this Humility is realizing who you really are before a holy God.

Speaker 1: 20:27

Isaiah 53, verses 4 through 12, say Surely, he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed him, stricken spittin' by God and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we, like sheep, have grown astray. We have turned every one to his own way and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth like a lamb that has led to the slaughter and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent. So he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment, he was taken away.

Speaker 1: 21:16

And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of living, stricken for the transgression of my people, and they made his grave with the wicked and with the rich man in his death, although he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth. But it was the will of the Lord to crush him. He has put him to grief when his soul makes an offering for guilt. He shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days. The will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul, he shall see and be satisfied by his knowledge. Shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore, I will divide him a portion with the many and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors. Yet he bore the sin of many and makes intercession for the transgressors.

Speaker 1: 22:18

And Jesus is our example for humility, the beautiful opposite of pride. Instead of the pride that leads to death, jesus showed humility that leads to esteem and honor. So, to recap, those three attitudes that kill in their opposites the first attitude that kills is bitterness, or being unforgiving, leading to a heart in heart and resulting in the fact that God can't forgive the one who will not forgive. And the opposite is forgiveness, which leads to peace. Fear leads to hate, which results in anxiety. Its opposite is love and contentment, which leads to joy. Pride leads to rejection of God, resulting in eternal condemnation. Its opposite is humility, which leads to being esteemed, resulting in honor. Again, proverbs 29.6.

Speaker 1: 23:09

I started out with. An evil man is ensnared in his transgression, but a righteous man sings and rejoices In. What an example we see in Saul of a man ensnared in his transgression. We almost get the picture of him spending every ounce of energy in plotting and despising David. He was truly a miserable man. He's ensnared in his transgression. In other words, he has become a slave to the sin of pride, the sin of fear the sin of bitterness. He's ensnared. He tried again and again to make a move against David, and yet he's thwarted at every turn. He doesn't give David the first daughter, as he promised, but instead sends David to war, hoping he will be killed. Then, upon giving his second daughter, he requires David to bring proof of a hundred killed Philistines, again hoping David will be killed. He threw a spear at him twice. He's utterly consumed by his hate. On the other hand, david is a man who sings and rejoices.

Speaker 1: 24:12

Everything we know about David tells us that, though he had his difficulties in life, in his pains and sorrows, he was a man of joy. He rejoiced in the Lord and sang. May we be people that sing and rejoice. We must put aside our bitterness, fear and pride and replace them with forgiveness, love and contentment and humility. Humility leads to esteem, as we saw in the last line of our main passage, and his name was highly esteemed. We know that Jesus, who humbled himself, is now esteemed and given the name that is above all names. We are to be humble and God is the one who will give esteem, as I said earlier, proverbs 29-25,. The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.

Speaker 1: 25:10

Thank you for listening today. If you found this to be helpful or encouraging, I ask that you please share it with someone who may enjoy joining us. Also. Please like and follow the podcast on your favorite podcast platform. And I want to make a special announcement right now that, starting the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I'm going to be republishing some Christmas stories that I had previously recorded.

Speaker 1: 25:34

Last year I had a different podcast that was actually titled Christmas Stories and many of you listened and many people around the world listened. Actually, it was pretty well received. So I've taken some of the most popular podcasts from last year that were Christmas stories and I've re-recorded them. They're much more professional and I'm looking forward to reposting those starting on Sunday, november 26th and each Sunday from then until Christmas. So you will definitely want to be looking out for those and being ready to share them with friends and family and those of you with kids at home. I think they'll be a nice way to sit around at bedtime and get ready for bed and listen to some Christmas stories. So I hope you all enjoy that. So I'm definitely looking forward to sharing those with you. So thanks again and I will see you next time on Truth Track.