Today on Summit Life with J.D.
Greer. Where are you experiencing heartache and frustration? Because he wants you to do what David did in my distress. I called upon the Lord to my God I called. I made him my hope. God wants you to learn the four words that can absolutely transform your life. God is always faithful. Welcome to Summit Life with pastor, author, and apologist J.D.
Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. As we near the end of our Life of David teaching series, we're getting to the end of King David's life. And you know, a person's last words can often be very telling. Thoughts about the things that mattered most to them. Today, Pastor J.D. gives us a glimpse into the song that David wrote during an earlier time in his life, which kind of serves as a summary of both his life and his ministry. From these last words of David, we can learn important truths about God. Truths that sustain David and that can sustain us through even the darkest of times.
Don't forget to catch up on any missed teaching by visiting our website, jdgreer.com. Right now, let's join Pastor J.D. in 2 Samuel chapter 22. 2 Samuel 22. If you have your Bibles, we are nearing the end of the Life of David, which makes me a little bit sad because what a life it has been. chapters 22 and 23 of 2 Samuel are David's last words of sorts. David's summation, if you will, of his life, his kingdom and his ministry. I always find last words or attempts to summarize somebody's life or business or mission in a sentence or two. I always find that intriguing. Recently, I saw a list with some really creative taglines that local businesses had given themselves. And so I snapped out a few of my favorites. A man named Dave, a man named Dave had a septic system cleaning business and he named it Dave's septic services.
We're number one in the number two business, which I thought was fantastic. Even better was the tagline on his septic tank removal truck, yesterday's meals on wheels, which is also gross. A local plumbing company, a local plumbing company chose the tagline, we repair what your husband fixed, which my wife would especially appreciate.
A local optometrist, if you don't see what you're looking for, then you've probably come to the right place. Sometimes the summation of somebody's life comes in the form of last words. Elvis Presley's last words at a press conference were, I hope I have not bored you, which if you know anything about his life seems fitting.
One of my favorites, Dominique Boers was a famous English teacher. His last words on his deathbed were literally, I am about to, or I'm going to die, either expression is correct. That is dying on brand, I hope that I have that kind of poise when I die. Voltaire, who was the famous atheist a few hundred years ago, his last words were reportedly to a priest who asked him on his deathbed, the atheist to renounce Satan, to which Voltaire very famously said, now now sir, now is not the time to be making new enemies. Sometimes life summations like this will appear on tombstones. The epitaph on Merv Griffin's tombstone, for example, reads, I will not be right back after this message. That's actually what it says.
Here's one from old colonial New England. Here lies my wife. I bid her goodbye. She rests in peace. And now so do I. Does that seem mean, ladies?
Does that seem mean? Well, here's another one from a wife's tombstone, also in New England. And Margaret lived with her husband for 50 years and died confident in the hope of a better life ahead.
And finally, here's the one I just love for its simplicity. Here lies Ezekiel Akle, age 112, the good die young. You gotta wonder who chose that for him, right? Well, I share that because in 2 Samuel 22 and 23, the editor of 2 Samuel uses a song that David wrote at a point earlier in his life to summarize David's whole life. David actually wrote this song right after God had delivered him from the hand of Saul. So many, many, many years, probably 30 years before he died. In fact, look at chapter 22, verse 1.
He explains that. And David spoke to the Lord the words of this song on the day when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul, again, several years before he died. But now the editor of 2 Samuel, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, puts this song at the end of David's life to wrap up David's whole life and to capture all of his major life themes. This chapter, by the way, is almost word for word Psalm 18 in the book of Psalms. Textually, it's important to note that the editor puts this song of David here at the end of 1 Samuel to mirror the song of Hannah that the editor used to open the book. We went through that song on our very first week. I know it was many, many weeks ago that we started this series.
You should go back. I would encourage you to go back and listen to that first message so that you could pick up some of the parallels we're going to see today. Hannah opens her song in 1 Samuel by declaring that God is a rock. Well, David opens up saying the exact same thing. Verse 2, the Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation. I will call upon the Lord, he says, who is worthy to be praised. Hannah says that God will lift up the humble. David says, I was the humble that God lifted up. Hannah said that God would provide for Israel a king.
David said, I was that king, or at least I was the beginning of the lineage of that king. Hannah's song is prophecy. David's song affirms the fulfillment of that prophecy. Both Hannah and David rejoice that God is the salvation for those who are weak and the savior for those who are overlooked and oppressed by others. These two songs form bookends.
And so a little helpful illustration just for you to look at. I felt like those represented from my library, these represent Hannah and David. And so you can see their songs holding up all the things that we've learned in these books of 1 and 2 Samuel.
It really makes for beautiful symmetry. I'm not going to read this song in its entirety. I hope that you will do that this week if you have not yet. What I'm going to do is I'm going to draw three dominant themes from this song. Three truths about God that David believes that his life proclaims and illustrates. And as you write these things down this weekend, I'm going to encourage you to consider as you do, what are the three or four things about God that you would want to communicate to your kids or to those in your circle of influence when you die? You may not be a poet, but if your life were written as verse so that others might know it, what would you teach them so that they wouldn't blow it?
See what I did there? All right, you don't have to do it as a rhyme, but what would you teach people about God? Here are David's three from this song. Number one, David says, God my hope.
God my hope. Let me again read to you verse two. Verse two, the Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer and my God, my rock and whom I take refuge.
My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold and my refuge, my savior. Verse four, I will call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised and I am saved from my enemies. If there's one thing that David's life teaches us, it is that God will be the strength and the shield and the sword for all those who trust him. God was David's strength when he, as an unlikely young shepherd boy, was anointed to be king of Israel. When nobody else believed in David, David believed in himself, not because he was filled with self esteem, but because he knew that God believed in him and God had chosen him. God was David's stronghold when David rushed out to face Goliath. That stronghold, that sense that God was with David, gave David a courage that nobody else on that battlefield had, not even King Saul in all of his armor. God was David's shield when he hid from Saul in those caves and the song David calls God his rock repeatedly. David had hid from Saul in and behind literal rocks as Saul chased him for several months. They kept going in and around the same set of mountains. It's almost like when you're playing tag with one of your kids and when your kid's on the other side of the table and you're kind of like going this way and they go that way and then you go that way and this go this way and you never get to them.
You're not able to touch them. David was saying, God, this giant rock protected me from all of Saul's arrows, but the real rock, my real refuge from danger, it was never a mountain, it was never a piece of granite, it was always you. Knowing you were in charge, knowing you were in charge of even my enemies was my table of peace that I ate from in the presence of my enemies. If there's one thing that David's life screams at us, it is hope in God. I love how the missionary Hudson Taylor, missionary to China, I love how he summarized it. He says, all of God's giants, all of God's giants in Christian history have been weak men and women who did great things for God because they reckoned on God being with them.
That was it. Just weak people, shepherd boys who knew God was with them. God's giants are weak men and women who reckon that God is with them and their hope for any kind of success is the grace of God. They apply this literally to every part of their lives. Parents, it's how we're supposed to think about raising our kids. My hope in my parenting is not in my parenting skills.
It is in God who shows grace to my kids. One of my favorite parenting books is Elise Fitzpatrick's Give Them Grace. Now, this book doesn't have all the most practical tips. I got plenty of other books for that, but I love that book, Give Them Grace, not because of how practical it is, because in it she points out how so many books on parenting seem to guarantee success in parenting if you'll just follow this basic strategy. Here's the 10 things you do and then your kid's going to be awesome.
A lot of the strategies are great. They're biblical even, but Elise Fitzpatrick points out that God was a perfect father and a third of the angels and the only two humans he created directly rebelled against him. She's like, so you think you're going to be able to out-parent God, out-technique God? The really dangerous problem with this kind of thinking, she says, is that it keeps parents, Christian parents, from the one thing they most need and that is to cast themselves and their children on the mercy of God to work in their lives, which is the one thing that they most need. She points out 1 Peter 5 10 in that book, which says, after you have suffered a little while, that's a great description of parenting, isn't it, parents? After you suffered a little while, the God of all grace who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. Who's going to restore you? It doesn't say that you'll eventually find your groove or the winds of fortune will change or what didn't kill you makes you stronger or kids are resilient or they're going to turn out whatever way they're going to turn out.
No, it says God will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. The greatest thing I can commend to you as a parent is to actively hope in the grace of God because your great parenting skills will fail you, but your God will not. All God's giants have been weak men who did great things for God because they reckoned on God being with them.
See, that means when I get up in the morning, mom or dad, and I feel overwhelmed as a parent, I say, well, I don't have to go figure out how to be a parent today. God's at work in my kid's life. He is my rock and my shield and my horn of salvation for them. I just need to join him in what he is doing in my kid's lives. See, the sovereign God, the ancient of days, Israel's rock, the sustainer of the ends of the earth, the alpha and the omega is with me in this. The one who walks on water, the one who raised a little girl from the dead, the one who made the lame walk in the blind see, that's the one walking with me to this day's parenting.
So I'm going to be okay. Thanks for joining us today for Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer. I wanted to take a moment to make sure that you know about our featured resource here on Summit Life, which we're sending to all of our gospel partners and monthly financial supporters. It's called Exalting Jesus in First and Second Samuel, and it's part of a commentary series called Christ-Centered Exposition.
Pastor J.D. co-wrote it with Heath Thomas, and this book offers a comprehensive explanation of the passage you are reading, presenting each chapter like a sermon, which makes it perfect for preparing a message or a Bible study, but also for personal devotional reading. And it is intentionally easy to read, but still full of deep biblical insight. It also includes a section called Reflect and Discuss, which makes it incredibly practical and helps to personalize the message. We'd love to send this great resource to you today with your gift of $35 or more to support this ministry.
To give, call us now at 866-335-5220 or by giving online at jdgreer.com. Now let's get back to today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor J.D. My hope for my marriage is not in my ability to keep things together.
It's not even in my Christian marriage techniques that I preached to you all about. My hope in my marriage is in God whose mercies are new for me and Veronica every morning. Our confidence for tomorrow is not in our ability to provide for ourselves, or it's not even in how much money that we've set aside. Our confidence for tomorrow is in the one who has said, I will supply all your needs according to my riches in Christ Jesus. My hope for my future after I've messed things up with sin and bad choices. My hope is not in my ability to pull myself up by my bootstraps, up above my sin. My hope is in God's willingness to weave redemption in the ruin of my sin, to bring beauty from my ashes, to create triumph out of my tragedy, to bring resurrection out of my death. He is my rock, my refuge, my strength.
He is my horn of salvation. All of God's giants, all of them, starting with David, have been weak men who did great things for God because they reckoned on God being with them. When I'm asked by younger church planters, the one secret to building a great church, like, oh, look at the Summit Church. What's the secret to building a great church?
And they all get their notebooks out and they're ready to write stuff down. And I always feel like I disappoint them. Because I'm like, if I had to boil down on one thing, because you said one thing and you said, give me one thing, I'll give you one thing. I tell them to put all your hopes for success in his mercy and not your ability. I often will take them to Proverbs 3, 5, and 6, which say, trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don't lean on your own understanding. Don't lean on your ability to know how to lead a church or grow a church or do ministry. Don't lean on your ability to figure it out. Trust in the Lord. In all your ways, acknowledge him.
In other words, acknowledge your dependence on him and then let him direct your paths. That's always where I point out, by the way, that God's preferred metaphor, even for the pastor, is sheep, which I've told you before is both good and bad news. The bad news is that sheep are idiots. I mean, their eyesight is notoriously poor, their heads hang low, which means they usually have no idea where they're going. You never see a sheep up on his hind legs, checking out what's going on down there in the valley that looks safe.
They're dumb. They step into streams and they drown or they step on uneven parts of the path and they tumble over and become cast like a beetle and they die. Or they eat and eat and eat in a circle until there's no grass left and they're basically just consuming their own waste. That is the metaphor God chose for your pastor. That's the bad news. The good news is that we've got a shepherd who loves to lead sheep when they're dependent on him. I tell young church planters that the best ideas in our church, the best ideas in the Summit Church, the greatest gifts that God gave to our church did not come through my careful planning.
They certainly did not come through my brilliant strategically. The greatest things in our church were unexpected interruptions, gifts of grace that God put into our path because we, as a church, the one thing I can say that we have tried to consistently do for 22 years now is we have trusted in his mercy, not in our abilities. Put your trust, I tell them, in the Lord. Put your trust in the God of all grace who will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. What David came to realize is that God had orchestrated his life to teach him this. Look at verse seven. He says, In my distress I called upon the Lord. To my God I called. In other words, he says, God put me into situations of distress where every earthly help had failed me and no earthly strategy could save me.
This is what God is doing with you. I tried to point that out throughout the series. In fact, early on in the series, I told you the story of the lamb.
I've repeated this probably a couple times. The lamb who is wandering off constantly and so the shepherd does the very unusual thing of taking his staff and breaking the front legs of that lamb. It almost seems cruel, but then the shepherd picks that lamb up, binds up the legs, and carries that very heavy sheep around for the next three months while those legs heal. What they say is that after that sheep has been healed, after the legs are healed, then he puts that lamb down. That lamb never wanders off again because the lamb has learned in those three months that all he needs is just to be close to the shepherd. David had multiple moments where God had done this with him.
So here's the question. Where's God doing that with you? Is it in your parenting? Is it in your marriage? Is it with an addiction? Is it in some kind of failure?
Where are you experiencing heartache and frustration? Because he wants you to do what David did. In my distress, I called upon the Lord to my God, I called, and I made him my hope. God wants you to learn the four words that can absolutely transform your life. God is always faithful. In fact, Hudson Taylor, again, a missionary to China after he gave the previous quote, here's what he said. God wants you to have something far better than riches and gold.
You believe that? He wants you to have something far better than personal charisma or talent. But he wants you to have, he wants you to have helpless dependence on him.
Y'all, I spent my entire life trying to be anything but helplessly dependent on anybody for anything. But that's exactly what God wants me to learn. And God's here, look, listen, if dependence is the objective, then weakness becomes an advantage, right?
If the whole point is dependence, then weakness is your advantage. So beware your strengths, David would say, not your weaknesses, because your weaknesses are where you will experience God and your strengths are where you're going to forget him. So lesson number one, David says, God my hope. Lesson number two, David says, God our savior.
God our savior. When David first wrote these words about God being his horn of salvation and his deliverer, he had no idea the extent to which he would need those things to be true. You see, when David first wrote those things, he thought of them mainly as God's promise to save him from his enemies, to deliver him from those like Saul who were trying to destroy him. What David did not realize was that the main way that God would deliver him would be from himself. See, by the time we get to this point in the book of 2 Samuel, we're not sure how to feel about David anymore, are we? I mean, in some ways, he's shown great promise. He's been awesome.
He's done some great things. But then again, we got the whole terrible Bathsheba incident. And he's murdered Uriah, one of his most loyal men. And then we got Tamar's story and Absalom's story, which present David at best as an absent and disengaged father. Even here at the end of the book, David still has left Joab in power.
He didn't have the courage to remove Joab, who is a murderous jerk. And so the words of this song put at the end of David's life have a deeper meaning than David first realized when he altered them. God is going to deliver David and save him not just from his enemies, he's going to save him from himself. And so we end the books of 1 and 2 Samuel, we end them realizing that they're not ultimately about David. By the way, here's an interesting textual note. The books of 1 and 2 Samuel don't even record the death of David, which would be odd if 1 and 2 Samuel are supposed to be the biography of David. I mean, what kind of biography would fail to record the death of the central figure?
But see, that's the thing. 1 and 2 Samuel were never meant to be primarily the story of David. They're supposed to show us how David points to another king, a greater king, who would be that righteous king that Hannah prophesied would come, who would be that king that we've always craved, that king who would himself be our rock, our refuge, our deliverer, and our salvation. In the last verse of this song, David points us to this coming king. He says, great salvation, great salvation he brings to his king and shows steadfast love to his anointed, to David and his offspring forever, to his offspring. He ends this whole thing talking about his offspring.
I'm looking into the future to the offspring. And sure enough, y'all, 970 years after David died, in the skies above a hillside just outside of Bethlehem, a vast multitude of angels appeared proclaiming to another group of humble shepherds, unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord. When David said in this song, God my savior, he had no idea how much he would need that to be true. At this point in the book, we see that David's ultimate hope was anchored, thank God, in that one way, unconditional promise that God had made to David in 2 Samuel 7. Do y'all remember when we went through that chapter, 2 Samuel 7, how David had started off the chapter saying to God, God, I'm going to build something great for you, a temple that will be the biggest one in the world. And God corrected him and said, David, no, no.
This whole thing is not about you doing something for me, it's about me doing something for you. I think it's safe to say that King David's life had a lot of really high peaks, but also a lot of dark, deep valleys. But at the end of it all, he was able to focus on what really mattered, which is the grace and the goodness of God. 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 JD, 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 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 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 how God is blessing.
And that's probably the most important thing you can 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. You can become a gospel partner by calling us at 866-335-5220 or by visiting us online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Benavich. We'll see you tomorrow as we wrap up the penultimate teaching in our Life of David series called Life Song. Join us Thursday for Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
