Courage, Your Giants, and the Giant

Today on Summit Life with JD Greer. So we are familiar with this story about courage.

It's just part of the common parlance in our culture now. But I want to suggest to you that there are some deep Bible things at work in this passage that you might not see at first glance, that get to the heart of what it means to actually have courage. Thanks for joining us today on Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. We're in a brand new teaching series through the life of King David.

Yes, I said brand new first time it's ever been on the radio. So you've joined us at a great time. And when I say David, what pops into your head? Sure, his life has many notable chapters, but today we're diving into the most famous one. It's David and Goliath. Everyone knows this story, but few truly understand what it's about. This story shows us what true courage is, where it comes from, and what God is up to when we hear the voices of fear. Remember, if you've missed any of this new teaching, you can catch up online anytime at jdgreer.com. Are you ready?

Let's join Pastor JD in 1 Samuel 17. The other day, I saw an updated list of the most common phobias in our culture. The APA defines a phobia as something that causes you such stress that you are no longer able to function in a normal way when that thing is present. There are on that list all the usuals you would expect, arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes. Of course, there's necrophobia, which is the fear of death, and glossophobia, which is the fear of public speaking. Interestingly, and you've probably heard this before, people rank the fear of public speaking higher than they do the fear of death.

It's like Jerry Seinfeld says, that means for most people, if they have to go to a funeral, they'd rather be the guy in the casket than the one giving the eulogy. In fact, this week I ran across something I clipped out of an article years ago about how to overcome the fear of public speaking. Listen, and I quote, before you go on stage, if you have public speak, just remember this, before you go on stage, stand still and feel the ground beneath your feet. Close your eyes and imagine yourself suspended from the ceiling by a thin thread. Then imagine you're made of rubber. Look into the mirror and make a horse's laugh with your lips. Why not lie on the ground and pretend you're floating, or just collapse on the ground like a limp doll?

So if you guys ever wonder what I'm doing backstage before I walk out here, now you know. On this list of phobias, there were more bizarre ones like octophobia, which is the fear of the number eight, believe it or not. Olfactophobia, that's the fear of foul smells. Some of you definitely have that. Colrophobia, which is the fear of clowns.

I feel like that's reasonable. Tocophobia, which is the fear of being around pregnant women. Then there's arachibutyrophobia, which is of course the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. And then there is windbagophobia, which is the fear of long sermons.

Just kidding, I made that last one up, totally made up. Fear of all kinds. Fear of all kinds is a part of life.

And your success in life in large part is determined by how well you learn to overcome those fears. Something about me that you might find surprising, and that is throughout my life, I have struggled to find courage in certain things. I say, maybe you find that surprising, maybe you don't. But maybe you find that surprising because sometimes I tend to present rather confidently. And it's like my wife says, often wrong, never in doubt.

That's her description of me. But that doesn't mean, that doesn't mean that there's not fear at work behind the facade sometimes. In high school, I sometimes struggled to find the courage to stand up to my friends and do the right thing. I was afraid of the awkwardness and their rejection if I kind of went against the flow. Throughout my life, I've struggled to tell the truth when doing so, when telling the truth could damage me or make somebody unhappy with me. In high school, I struggled with the courage to ask girls that I liked out because I was scared that she would say no and I would be embarrassed.

So I'd do that cowardly sneaky date thing that guys do, especially Christian guys where you hang around the girl like you're going out with her, but you never have to man up and actually ask her out. I was sometimes even timid to call for the ball in a clutch situation in a game because I thought I would just mess the play up. One of the darkest chapters of my life happened as a failure of courage. It happened when I was living overseas in a predominantly Muslim country. We had arranged for a short-term trip for some American Christians that I knew to distribute some Bibles to the people in our area. A Bible translation in this language for the first time ever in history had just been completed. We wanted to get that translation out to the people. So we arranged for these guys to come in and do some strategic drops in various places. Well, to make a long story short, they got caught. They were taken into custody by the police in a city about 10 minutes north of where I lived. They'd caused a riot. A mob of nearly 2,500 people were demanding that the police release these guys so that they could kill them. In fact, that mob burned the car that these guys were driving. The US Embassy tried to send in a helicopter to get these guys out, but it couldn't land because the people were shooting at the helicopter.

Eventually, they got them out by smuggling them out in the back of a utility truck in the middle of the night. The police didn't have any direct evidence linking those guys with me, but they suspected it. I was placed into custody of the vice mayor of the city who happened to live next door to me. I kept having police and investigators come to our house to ask questions. They indicated that some of the mob knew who I was, and they talked about coming for me. At one point, I remember calling my supervisor and just saying, you've got to get me out of here. You've got to get me out of here. They know that we're connected, and I think they might come for us. Now, I'll never forget, he said to me, he said, you cannot run. He said, because if you do run, they're gonna know that you're connected, and that'll put our whole platform here at risk.

You need to stay there and act normal as long as you can. I was so terrified. I remember walking out on my third story balcony where I lived and thinking, if I jump off of here and break my leg, they'll have to take me out. I had several copies of the same Bible that these guys were giving out, and I went into the woods behind my house, and I hid them in case the police did a search in my house. I'm embarrassed by all of this now, but this was not the way that I had always assumed that I would handle persecution if it came, because I was always the guy who told people boldly, you gotta be willing to die for Jesus.

Listen, it is one thing to say that to your small group. It's another thing when you think somebody's at the door who wants to take you up on that offer. Maybe you relate to that, or maybe you don't. Maybe you're just one of those people who is naturally fearless, but for most of us, for most of us, courage is a choice that we have to make.

C.S. Lewis said, one of the greatest struggles of his life, one of the things he was most embarrassed about was was his timidity. One of the greatest struggles was developing courage. So today I want us to discuss how those of us who are not naturally fearless, how we do that, because this is crucially important in the Christian life. Aristotle, who's not a Christian, but Aristotle said that courage is the cardinal virtue, because without courage, it's impossible to persevere in any of the other virtues.

For example, you may desire to have integrity, but telling the truth is hard sometimes, isn't it? And that means without courage, you're gonna end up folding, no matter how much you desire to live a life of integrity. You cannot persist in any of the virtues without courage. 1 Samuel 17 is all about courage. In fact, it might be the most famous courage story in the world, the story of David and Goliath. In this story, we're gonna see four kinds of courage. We're gonna see Saul, he has no courage. Then we're gonna see Israel, they have disappointed courage. Then there's Goliath, he has counterfeit courage. And finally, we're gonna see David, who's got real courage.

Little warning as we get started here, everybody everybody thinks they understand the story. If you grew up in church, this is probably one of your first Bible memories. I cannot say the words David and Goliath without thinking in flannel graph images. Anybody else identify with that?

When I meet David in heaven, I'm gonna be like, you don't look like that, but that's how I think of him. Even beyond church, this story has become a cultural metaphor for whenever an underdog team plays a much better team and they win. So we are familiar with this story about courage.

It's just part of the common parlance in our culture now. But I wanna suggest to you that there are some deep Bible things at work in this passage that you might not see at first glance, that get to the heart of what it means to actually have courage. Verse one, now the Philistines gathered their armies for battle. Y'all, we tend to glamorize and romanticize ancient warfare.

It was awful. In modern warfare, we kill from a distance. In ancient times, you killed at arm's length. Armies would form these shield walls and they would thrust themselves together.

And then everything became a death whirlpool of spears and swords and fire bombs. Unless you were several layers deep in that shield wall, your chances of survival were extremely low. If you survived at the end of the battle, they say you would usually be covered in blood, not quite sure if it were your blood or your enemy's blood, and chances are you were gonna die of an infection. More people in those days died of infection after the battle from battle wounds than they did in the battle itself. If you were lying wounded on the battlefield, you were terrified about who would get to you first.

Because if it was somebody from your side, you might have a chance of making it out. But a lot of times it was somebody from the other army who would come along with a spear, stabbing everybody who looked like they might be alive in the throat. If you did die out there, it was usually days before anybody would come and retrieve your body so your corpse would lay there and the hot sun and the birds of the air and the animals of the field would eat your flesh. No funeral, no burial, no family, just corpses everywhere.

That's what we're setting up for here. So these people had reason to be terrified. The battle was against the Philistines. The Philistines were the perpetual enemies of Israel. And they were a fearsome enemy. Sometimes in modern lingo, we use the word Philistine to refer to somebody backwoods.

You ever heard that? Oh, he's such a Philistine. The irony is that the Philistines were one of the most advanced civilizations of this era. They were the first people to work with bronze and iron. In fact, we refer to this whole epic of world history as the iron age. And the Philistines were the leaders in working with iron. Their weapons and their shields, unlike Israel's, their weapons were made of iron. The Philistines controlled the three major cities along the most popular trade route in the world. We call it the Via Maris, the way of the sea. And the three big cities on the Via Maris were Gezer, Megiddo, and Hazor. The Philistines controlled all three of those.

But here's the thing, y'all. God had given Israel the land of Canaan. That was their land. It was theirs for the taking. Israel had just never fully believed the promise that God would give it to them. That's a crucial backdrop to this story. The Philistines are not supposed to be there.

God had promised this land to Israel. Thanks for joining us today on Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer. We'll get back to today's teaching in just a second. But first, I wanted to make sure that you're in the loop of all the resources that we make available to you at jdgreer.com completely free of charge. At our website, you can access our entire library of Summit Life broadcasts, as well as our preaching catalog of full sermons with a transcript for each. You'll also find Pastor J.D. 's blog with an archive of more than 10 years of content for you to learn from. There's also links to Pastor J.D. 's podcasts, his social media accounts, and you can sign up for our daily devotionals all for free. And while you're on our website, be sure to check out jdgreer.com slash donate to learn more about how you can be a part of helping this ministry grow and thrive so that we're able to reach more people with the gospel of Jesus.

Once again, all of that is available for you at jdgreer.com free of charge. So browse away. Now let's get back to today's teaching.

Once again, here's Pastor J.D. Verse three, and the Philistines stood on the mountain on the one side and Israel stood on the mountain on the other side with a valley between them. I've actually been to this place. It's about a mile wide, this valley.

It's a perfect battle location. Verse four, and there came out from the camp of the Philistines a champion named Goliath of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span. Six cubits and a span would make him roughly nine foot six. Now, there are some scholars who say that this is a scribal error and that it should read four cubits and a span because the difference of the number four and the number six in Hebrew is actually really minuscule. And sometimes when these texts were copied, somebody would mess it up or it would get smudged.

And from that point on, the number would get recopied down wrong. There are a few places in the Bible where that happened and some scholars believe that's what happened here. If so, and he is four cubits and a span, that would still make him six foot nine, which is still a giant, especially in those days when the average male was about five feet. So whether we're talking nine foot six or six foot nine, Goliath was the guy that you wanted getting off the bus first at an away high school football game.

You tracking? Verse five, he, Goliath, had a helmet of bronze on his head and he was armed with a coat of mail. Coat of mail, of course, doesn't mean he was plastered with a bunch of postcards and stamps. It's referring to one of those iron metal meshing garments. They were really rare and very expensive, but the Philistines had them.

Why? Because they worked with iron. Israel didn't have those things. Interestingly, get this, in Hebrew it says literally a coat of scales. And it's the only time in the Old Testament where the word scales is used to describe clothing.

Scales. What image do you think the author is trying to conjure up here? A snake, a serpent. Goliath stands there like this gigantic snake as the enemy of God's people.

The writer is trying to make you think of Satan. And the weight of the coat, he says, was 5,000 shekels of bronze. And he had bronze armor on his legs and a javelin of bronze slung between his shoulders.

Why does the narrator keep repeating the word bronze? Well, because the Philistines were the only ones who really had bronze. That's what made them such a fearsome enemy. Israel was outclassed. Verse seven, the shaft of his spear was like a weaver's bean. And the spear's head weighed 600 shekels of iron.

And his shieldbearer, his intern, went out before him. Verse eight, he stood and shouted to the ranks of Israel, why have you come out to draw up for battle? Am I not a Philistine and you were not servants of Saul?

Choose a man for yourselves and let him come down to me. If he is able to fight with me and kill me, then we will be your servants. But if I prevail against him and I kill him, then you will be our servants and serve us. This was called representative warfare, where one person fought on behalf of the enemy. Now, don't think your arm wrestling match. The stakes were really high.

If Israel's representative were to lose, thousands of people would die and their women and their children would be taken captive or raped or killed. Day and night, the story says, Goliath taunted them. Verse 10, give me a man.

Give me a man that we may fight together. As they were preparing breakfast in the morning, he bellowed out, give me a man. At night, as they were roasting s'mores around the campfire, they could hear out in the distance, give me a man. It was terrifying. And Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine. They were dismayed and greatly afraid.

Wait, wait, who was afraid? Saul was afraid? Don't you remember why the people had chosen Saul? Saul had stood head and shoulders above everybody else. In other words, he was supposed to be their strong, capable giant.

He's head and shoulders above everybody else. He's their man of war who they thought guaranteed them security and would make them proud. What you're seeing here is that the king that Israel has chosen to replace God has utterly failed them. Verse 17, meanwhile, back at the ranch, just as he said to David, his son, take for your brothers parched grain and these 10 loaves and these 10 cheeses to your brothers and see if they are well.

10 bread loaves and cheeses is essentially an ancient deconstructed pizza. So David basically gets sent out on a pizza delivery run. Verse 20, and David rose early in the morning and left the sheep with a keeper. I need you to notice how the author of 1 Samuel will not let go how faithful a shepherd David is. I mean, before he goes on this trip, he arranges for a sheep sitter.

What a conscientious guy. And he took the little pizza kits and the hot pockets and he went just as Jesse had commanded him. And David came to the encampment as the army was going out to the battle line, shouting the war cry.

Now, y'all, this is a rather pathetic scene, is it not? All the Israelites are going out, not to the battle, just going up to the battle line and doing the war cry. I mean, imagine you're at Cameron Indoor Stadium and the little countdown clock for when the game starts is approaching zero. The music's blaring.

The cheerleaders are doing flips. The team's out there in the huddle and they're going, oh, you know, back and forth. The crowd's going wild.

Crazy towel guy's doing his thing. The other team and the refs are out there. The anticipation builds.

The team in the huddle yells, go Nellows! But then they just, they don't take the court. They just go back and sit on the bench. And the scorekeeper puts up a couple more minutes on the countdown clock and they go through the whole ordeal again. And they keep repeating this over and over and over, never taking the court.

Eventually that's embarrassing. That's basically what's happening here. Verse 23, as David talks with them, behold, the champion, behold, the champion, the Philistine of Gath, Goliath by name, this gigantic scaly Satan type figure came up out of the ranks of the Philistines and he spoke the same words as before. And David heard him. So David asked around and he's like, well, who's this meathead? And why doesn't somebody go and take him out?

And everybody's like, well, because he's nine foot six or six foot nine, because we don't know in the text. And David says, well, either way, I'll do it. Verse 28, now Eliab, remember Eliab? You remember him? David's older brother.

That's right. David's eldest brother, the one that God had passed over for King, even though he looked so good on the outside. He heard when David spoke to the men and Eliab's anger was kindled against David.

And he said, why have you come down? And with whom have you left those few sheep? Did you hear the disdain?

Listen, run, hack a tone. Why don't you focus on that handful of sheep out there in the wilderness? I know your presumption and I the evil of your heart for you've come down just to see the battle. How stinging must this have been for David? Isn't it true?

Isn't it true that often when you're trying to do what's right, the most discouraging opposition comes from the people who ought to be on your side? Goliath is big enough as it is, but then you got a bunch of family and fellow believers telling you that you're arrogant and crazy for doing what you're trying to do. Well, somebody goes and tells Saul. And at first, Saul's excited to hear that a champion is willing to fight until, in walks this 15 year old baby face runt kid. He didn't have any battle experience. He didn't have any scars.

He didn't have cool tattoos. Just a shepherd's staff and a harp slung over his shoulder. Verse 33, and Saul said to David, you are not able to go out against this felicity to fight with him for you are but a youth. He's been a man of war from his youth. Translation, David, not only has this got twice your size, he's been fighting longer than you've been alive. He's got socks older than you, David. Verse 34, but David said to Saul, your servant used to keep sheep for his father. By the way, I love how David has just given himself a permanent promotion.

Do you see that? Notice he says, I used to keep sheep as in this morning, this morning, that was my job. And now that's totally in the past. Now my business card says, David, giant removal specialist.

That's my new identity. David continues, and when there came a lion or a bear and took a lamb from the flock, I went after that lion or bear and I struck him and delivered it out of his mouth. And when he rose against me, I caught him by his beard and struck him and killed him. I mean, first caught him by his beard. What did bears look like back then?

Bears with beard sounds amazingly cool. Verse 37, the Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine. And Saul said to David, go and the Lord be with you. In other words, good luck being dead, David. Verse 38, then Saul clothed David with his armor. But y'all remember Saul was head and shoulders above the average Israelite, and David is a runt. So this stuff looks like a clown outfit on David. Verse 39, then David sent to Saul, I cannot go wearing these for I have not tested them. So David took them off.

Then David took his staff and his hand and chose five smooth stones from the brook and put them in his shepherd's pouch. These aren't real weapons. They're shepherd's tools.

They're kids' tools. So how are you doing with fear in need of a shot of courage? You're not going to want to miss the conclusion tomorrow. Remember, if you've missed any part of this brand new teaching series through David's life, you can always catch up for free at jdgrierd.com. Okay, you might be surprised to learn that while I'm your host every day on Summit Life, my passion and main responsibility is helping to lead worship at the Summit Church. Pastor J.D., at Summit Life, we love the local church. In fact, you consider shepherding the Summit Church your primary calling, right?

Yeah, and I think that's one of the reasons I love our team here at Summit Life, and I love working directly with you, Molly, just because I think at the core, yes, we love Jesus. We love the gospel, but we love the local church and feel like the best way we can love Him and grow in Him and grow in Him is to be a part of it. So we want to invite you as you were engaged in Summit Life to make sure that you are a part of a local church. After you've supported your church, that's when we invite you to give to Summit Life. It is such an incredible blessing to us for you to become what we call a gospel partner.

It's a team. A gospel partner is somebody who gives $35 or more to our mission. It allows us to do what we do. When you give, it also makes your faith and your prayers a part of what God is, how God is blessing.

That's probably the most important thing you give to us is your prayers and your faith. So we would invite you at any level to be a part of that team. Just go to jdgrier.com and reach out to us and we'd love to connect with you. If you'd like to join us as a gospel partner now, you can do that by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or you can head over to jdgrier.com. That's J-D-G-R-E-E-A-R.com.

I'm Molly Bittovitch. You definitely won't want to miss the conclusion of David and Goliath tomorrow, so be sure to join us. That's Friday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.