Confrontation!, Part 1

Today, from Chuck Swindoll. In today's world, some have adopted the false notion that sin will be overlooked just as that myth. In our study of 2 Samuel 12, we'll be reminded that sinners reap what they sow, even the secret stuff.

Chuck begins today by reading the passage for us. He gave a one-word title to his message, Confrontation. David has fallen into sins of all kinds, lies, adultery, and even murder. But God, in His great grace, mercy, and compassion, isn't ready to get rid of Israel's king just yet. He raised up the prophet Nathan to take a message to David. As we are going to see today, Nathan was a man filled with courage and wisdom and humility, all of which were strongly necessary when he confronted David regarding all of those sins.

Please listen carefully to Nathan's approach and to David's response as I read 2 Samuel 12 verses 1-14 from the message. The poor man had nothing but one little female lamb, which he had bought and raised. It grew up with him and his children as a member of the family. It ate off his plate and drank from his cup and slept on his bed.

It was like a daughter to him. One day a traveler dropped in on the rich man. He was too stingy to take an animal from his own herds or flocks to make a meal for his visitor. So he took the poor man's lamb and prepared a meal to set before his guest.

David exploded in anger. As surely as God lives, he said to Nathan, the man who did this ought to be lynched. He must repay for the lamb four times over for his crime and his stinginess.

You're the man, said Nathan. And here's what God, the God of Israel, has to say to you. I made you king over Israel. I freed you from the fist of Saul. I gave you your master's daughter and other wives to have and to hold. I gave you both Israel and Judah.

And if that hadn't been enough, I'd have gladly thrown in much more. So why have you treated the word of God with brazen contempt doing this great evil? You murdered Uriah the Hittite, then took his wife as your wife. Worse, you killed him with an Ammonite sword. And now, because you treated God with such contempt and took Uriah the Hittite's wife as your wife, killing and murder will continually plague your family.

This is God speaking. Remember, I'll make trouble for you out of your own family. I'll take your wives from right out in front of you.

I'll give them to some neighbor. He'll go to bed with them openly. You did your deed in secret.

I'm doing mine with the whole country watching. Then David confessed to Nathan, I have sinned against God. Nathan pronounced, yes, but that's not the last word. God forgives your sin. You won't die for it.

But because of your blasphemous behavior, the son born to you will die. You're listening to Insight for Living. To dig deeper into the Bible with Chuck Swindoll, be sure to download his Searching the Scriptures Studies by going to insight.org slash studies. And now the message titled with one word, confrontation. The name Bill Moyers was unknown until Lyndon Johnson suddenly took office and almost overnight this young 30 year old advisor became a prominent person in our nation. Young Moyers was a student of political science for years and had a keen, bright mind which he used to the fullest. So much so that when Johnson, the astute politician, became the president after the tragic assassination of Kennedy, it was Moyers that was chosen by Johnson to take that place of public or personal confidant.

To the surprise of many people he was appointed to that position, but it is believed by a number of individuals who have written on the subject in years that have followed. Because of that wise counsel of young Moyers, Lyndon Johnson's administration experienced a number of smooth times when it would otherwise have been difficult. It was a stormy administration because of the Vietnam War, but many believe that Moyers' counsel was one of the reasons that Johnson was able to operate as well as he did. Before his death, Johnson was interviewed by one of the nation's periodicals and the subject of Moyers came up. Someone asked him, why is it that you would choose a man in his 30s to be your advisor when you had so many others many years older than he who could perhaps have done even a better job? And Johnson's response, I'll never forget, he looked at the journalist who was writing the story and he said, I can tell you the answer in one sentence. Bill Moyers always tells me the truth.

As a casual reader, that might seem rather obvious, but it's not. If you've ever put yourself in the shoes of the personal confidant of the most powerful man in the nation, you know that the greatest temptation would be to become a yes man. To nod approval at things you don't really believe in simply because the person is so powerful or to tell him what he wants to hear rather than what he ought to hear. But Johnson says Moyers was valuable to me because he always told me the truth. 3,000 years earlier there lived a great man who served a great nation under a great God, the holy Jehovah God of the heavens. The man's name was David. So powerful was David that 62 chapters of the Old Testament are devoted to his biography and no less than 59 references in the New Testament call people's attention to this man. More by far than any other biblical character. And yet David, the great man of God was not perfect. He made an awful blunder when he was about 50 years of age, perhaps a little older. He committed adultery and then rather than facing it and admitting it, he covered it up with premeditated murder. And adding insult to injury he lived a lie of hypocrisy and deception for the better part of a year. And as time slowly passed one would believe that the holy God of heaven was asleep, letting it pass.

That sin does actually pay, that there are no wages. But you and I know that that was not the case. In a very marvelous move on God's part, he brought before David a man like Bill Moyers, in fact a man of greater integrity than that, who told him the truth. And I don't think any other confrontation has ever been so brief and so effective. Four three-letter words did the job.

You are the man. And David crumbled in humility and I think a fresh blush of relief came over his life. Tonight we're looking at that very honest advisor who told David the truth.

And I'd like you to turn to 2 Samuel 11 to start with and then we'll work our way into chapter 12. But first let's look at 12 months in retrospect. Let's go back. Let's refresh our thinking. Let's remind ourselves of where David has been.

There's no reason to dig up the filth of the story again. But just let me point out two things about the act of David that was carried on without public awareness. Number one, it was done secretly, the act of adultery, the plan of murder, and the whole story of hypocrisy was a secret act. It was done secretly. Unfortunately, one of the things that accompanies the promotion of individuals to high office is the increase in privacy.

The closed door policy is accepted by those in high office. And with that comes the great temptation to let lust begin to brood and breed and begin to be expressed. So it was with David. Unable to handle the privacy of the office, over the long haul David finally fell and rapidly went about to cover his tragic tracks. It was done secretly. The second thing I would say about the acts of David is that they were done willfully.

It was not a momentary mistake. He didn't stumble into the sin. He willfully, knowingly walked into the sin with Bathsheba, killed her husband, at least indirectly, and knowingly lived a lie for the months that followed. Now it's easy to get the mental picture that David's life was sort of a bowl of cherries. He had the world with a tail, that in fact what he did was hardly noticed by God. But if you look at the last sentence of verse 27, the 11th chapter, you'll see that that's not true. The thing that David had done was evil in the sight of the Lord. I would like to add the parenthesis, and don't you forget it.

Parenthesis closed. What was evil 3,000 years ago is evil today, even though many people do it. To cheapen a marriage with an adulterous relationship is still a willful sin, even though many carry it out. This very night, in secret places, people with wedding rings given by another person are with individuals that are not their own partners, and that does not make it right.

Public approval doesn't make it right. It is still evil in the sight of the Lord, and don't you forget it. Maybe nobody else noticed, but God noticed, and he began to mark his plan and stretch out a strategy that was designed to bring David to his knees at just the right time. God's good at that.

All his accounts are not settled in the spring. He sometimes waits months, but when he comes through, well, as one poet put it, his wheels grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine. Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatever a man, whatever a woman sows, that you will also reap. It's still in the book.

It's still true. Now, lest you think that David's life was really enjoyable, and that he had those long, delightful nights with his wife, free of guilt, lest you have the feeling that David was in a marvelous state of mind during those months that followed, turn to Psalm 32. Look at several verses with me, especially the first four of the 32nd Psalm.

To begin with, check the superscription. Right beneath the title of the Psalm, we read, A Psalm of David, a maskil. The Hebrew word from which the word maskil is taken means instruction. It's a Psalm designed to instruct. How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. How blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

Now, listen to his admission. When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away, through my groaning all day long. For day and night, thy hand was heavy upon me. My vitality was drained away as with the fervent heat of summer.

Selah, pause and think that through. The Living Bible puts it very well. There was a time when I wouldn't admit what a sinner I was. But my dishonesty made me miserable and filled my days with frustration.

All day and all night, your hand was heavy on me. My strength evaporated like water on a sunny day until I finally admitted all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide them. In his splendid book, Guilt and Grace, Paul Tournier, the brilliant Swiss writer, the physician, the psychiatrist, talks about two kinds of guilt, true guilt and false guilt. False guilt, says Tournier, is brought on by the judgments and suggestions of man.

True guilt comes from willfully and knowingly disobeying God. One psychologist has described the way people handle guilt by using the picture of the red light on the dashboard of the car. As you're driving along, you have on occasion red lights that flash on saying, notice, there's trouble under the hood.

You have a choice of doing two things. One, you can stop, get out of the car, open the hood and see what's wrong. Or second, you can carry in the glove compartment a very small hammer and when the red light turns on, you can strike the light and it'll go out and you can keep on driving and no one will know the difference for a while. Now, it works until you burn the car up and then you look back and realize what a stupid decision it was to break out the light on the dashboard. I come across Christians all the time who carry little hammers in the glove compartment of their conscience and when true guilt begins to flash, they break it out.

They snap it off. They call it false guilt or they say it's just what everybody else is doing and on and on and on but all the while their motor burns up and they look back a few months previous and they realize what a foolish decision it was not to stop, get out and come to terms with what is wrong. David says, when I lived in the true guilt of my soul, I could not stay silent down inside though I was from my lips. As a matter of fact, I groaned all day and you know what that means. There was this awful oppression, this misery of conscience and day and night, I felt the heavy hand of God on me. It was like carrying a fever. I couldn't get my head up. I couldn't handle the pressures of my work. I couldn't cope. I was sick.

My body wasted away. Flash over to Psalm 51 and look again. You'll get several thoughts as you read this psalm and again the superscription of Psalm 51. A psalm of David when Nathan the prophet came to him after he had gone into Bathsheba.

So this psalm was written in David's journal after Nathan had paid that fateful visit. David admits in the middle of it, verse 2, wash me thoroughly from my sin, from my iniquity. Cleanse me from my sin. I know my transgressions.

My sin is ever before me. Why, he wasn't relaxing, taking life easy. He had sleepless nights. He woke up and he could see it written across the ceiling of his room. When he did his thing in the kingdom, he saw it written across the walls. He saw it on the plate where he ate his meals.

He saw it in the faces of his counselors. He lived the lie and he couldn't take it. It went on and on until finally, you notice, he says in verse 12, restore to me the joy of thy salvation. He had no joy. He stopped writing.

You don't read many psalms written by David during that 12-month interval. In fact, he says in verse 10, create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. He was unstable. He felt inferior. He was insecure.

He couldn't handle the blows of the office because he was living a lie. Sin does that to you. It's part of the wages that sin inevitably pays. And a carnal Christian will dance all around and try to tell you everything's fine. Don't press me.

I'm doing well. You just haven't any idea. But down inside, it's there.

And a true Christian cannot deny that. It's there. Oppressively there.

Constantly there. That's why David says, renew a steadfast spirit in me, meaning I haven't had it for a long, long time. Now 2 Samuel chapter 12 is the story of this incredible confrontation where Nathan stepped into David's life and told him the truth. Let's work our way through it. To begin with, will you notice that Nathan was sent by the Lord, verse 1.

Then the Lord sent Nathan to David. I think the most important word in the entire sentence is the first one. Then. Why?

Why is that so important? Well, stop and think. When was he sent? Right after the act of adultery? No. Right after Bathsheba said, I am pregnant? No. Right after he murdered Uriah? No. Right after he married his pregnant bride? No. Right after the birth of the baby?

No, wrong again. It's believed by many Old Testament scholars that there was a 12-month interval that passed before Nathan paid the visit. The baby was at least three months old. God waited until just the right time. He let misery do its full work and then he stepped in. I'm going to level with you and say that there are times that I really question the timing of God.

I just don't know why he's so slow to carry out what I think he ought to do. But you know, every time I have looked at it in retrospect, I have seen how beautifully he had worked out his plan. How perfectly it had come to pass. God not only does the right thing, he does the right thing at the right time. Now, if you are the one who is called upon in day's future to confront someone in their sin, learn a lesson from that word then.

The timing is as important as the wording. Simply to tighten your belt and grab your Bible and take a trip and confront a person who is in sin at your convenience is unwise. You better be sure that you're sent by the Lord. Nathan was. Now, I want you to put yourself in the sandals of that fearless prophet. No prophet was ever given a more difficult commission than Nathan. He was to stand before the most powerful man in the nation and tell that man what the man had denied for a year. And no one else around the place would tell David.

There were some raised eyebrows, there were some tongues and cheeks, but nobody would be honest and forthright enough to say, David, you're in sin. Through his courage and insight, Nathan provided a timeless tutorial on how to confront someone who's living in sin. And there's much more that Chuck Swindoll wants to show us in this emotion-filled passage.

So keep listening. This is Insight for Living. If you'd like to learn more about this ministry, we invite you to visit us online at insightworld.org. Chuck titled his message, Confrontation. And whether you picture yourself as Nathan or David, all of us can learn something from this awkward exchange. In the coming days, we'll discover how the exposure of David's secret actually launched his recovery, but the lessons he learned along the way were painful. As we witness David's journey, it should become our highest priority to prepare for unexpected temptations and anything that might derail our growth in Christ.

Whether it's the temptation to compromise or a struggle with jealousy and envy, every follower of Christ needs to gain a strong hold on the wisdom of God's word. And that's the purpose of Chuck Swindoll's classic book called, Strengthening Your Grip. Chuck addresses 16 relevant topics, such as managing your money, coping with the aging process, making time for leisure, and setting proper priorities. Each chapter is designed to help you strengthen your grip on the things that matter most.

To purchase a copy of Chuck's book, Strengthening Your Grip, call us. If you're listening in the United States, call 800-772-8888 or visit this dedicated webpage for details, insight.org slash offer. Bear in mind that while you're listening to Chuck's teaching today, you're joined with fellow listeners around the world. Insight for Living is translated into eight different languages, and we're hearing from grateful listeners from all points on the globe. This extension of our ministry is made possible through the voluntary and needed contributions of friends like you. To give a gift today, call us.

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In fact, I guarantee this. You'll come home refreshed and filled with awe for His majestic creation. Yeah, at one point our ship was getting chased by dolphins.

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The tour to Alaska is paid for and made possible by only those who choose to attend. I'm Bill Meyer. Join us when Chuck Swindoll continues his message about confronting David about his secret sin. That's our topic tomorrow on Insight for Living. The preceding message, Confrontation, was copyrighted in 1978, 1988, 1997, and 2009, and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2009 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.