Good morning. My name is Alan. I'll be reading our scripture day from 1 Samuel chapter 18 verses 1 through 5. After David had finished talking, talking with Saul, he met Jonathan, the king's son.
There was an immediate bond between them for Jonathan loved David. From that day on, Saul kept David with him and would not let him return home. And Jonathan made a solemn pact with David because he loved him as he loved himself. Jonathan sealed the pact by taking off his robe and giving it to David, together with his tunic, his sword, bow, and belt.
Whatever Saul asked David to do, David did it successfully. So Saul made him a commander over the men of war, an appointment that was welcomed by the people and Saul's officers alike. What have God for the people of God? So you might remember in the 80s, there was that that fad where all the famous people would come together to sing songs together.
Remember that? That's what the younger brother, what are you talking about? What are these 80s things? One of the ones I remember is the song, that's what friends are for.
Remember Dionne Warwick, Elton John, Stevie Wonder. I think of this picture of Stevie Wonder. Remember he had the harmonica, Stevie Wonder? I'm ready for that look to come back.
Like the age you're coming back, let's do that look back. But I think about that song and over the last few weeks we talked a lot about what relationships are for. What friends are for? That's sort of a thing.
We've gone to that conversation at a really big level. The first week we talked about how God is a community. And that for us to really experience life, we have to experience it in community with God, but also in community with other people. And that we're participating with other people, not just relating, because there's a difference, but you're participating from relating.
The second week we talked a lot about how trust functions and community. And how if we want to experience life at one level, we're only going to experience it to the level that we actually trust others and that we trust God. And the last week we talked about how spiritual community really is realizing that we need others in our life that are different from us. We use Paul's language of the body and it's why God made us different, how that's part of it.
And then we talked about thick community being this thing that we come together and that it's about a community that relies on each other, that needs each other, and is focused on purpose together in direction. And how that's devolved over the last few decades to what are called peg communities. Which means these are people doing the same thing at the same place at the same time, but not having any shared purpose and not having any shared direction and not having any shared dependence on each other. So we've kind of done that really big picture.
And today as we wrap up all these conversations, we're actually going to dive down into one relationship and just kind of a unique situation. That's there and seeing how it all worked out. But also how this intentional relationship really ended up saving everything around it. Now Alan read for us earlier that this a blurb of this story of David and of Saul and of Jonathan.
And that's the relationship that we're going to look into today. But to understand the big picture of all this, we have to think about Saul. Saul is the first king of Israel and there's something that's going on there. You know, the first few hundred years when God's people were in Israel, they did not have a king.
They were ruled by what are called judges and judges are really, really interesting. Me and Graham, I've had a running conversation podcast for the last six months called the Bible is Metal, which is about all the weird stories that we find in the book of judges. And after a time, the people of God is right. So hey, listen, we don't like this anymore.
All the other nations around us have kings. So can we have a king too? They have one I want one. Like they have he-men's castle grace skull.
Can I have a castle grace skull? No problem. They're bugging Samuel, the prophet, and God's. And we want a king.
We want a king. And sometimes when we want something really bad and it's not going to be good for us, but we keep on aggravating God about it. You know what he does? It's like, yeah, I'll give you one of those.
Let's see how that works out. So they got a guy named Saul. Now Saul's story. It's kind of a big trajectory here.
Saul's story actually started all pretty good. Like number one right there. You see, when Saul becomes king, Saul did not want to be king. When they came to Saul, he said, listen, I'm the least important person in my family.
And my family is the least important person in my clan. And my clan is the least important clan in my entire tribe. And my entire tribe is the least important clan in all the nation of Israel. Like Saul starts a story saying, like, I'm the least important person in the entire country.
Why do I get to be king? He didn't want the job. And then as part of this discernment practice, the spirit of God fell upon Saul and some like weird and wild holy spirit stuff happen. And he began prophesying and running around with a roving band of prophets.
We don't have those. So Saul becomes king and things look great. We move into the second side of things. And Saul starts doing king stuff.
And Saul's king stuff means crushing all of their enemies. And Saul began to get a little bit arrogant. And Saul is there with all of the armies of Israel at this place called Gilgal. And they're waiting on Samuel to show up and make sacrifices and seek the favor of the Lord before they go out and do more enemy crushing.
And Samuel is taking his time getting there. So Saul gets impatient and says, you know what, I'm going to take care of these sacrifices and it's inquiring upon the Lord on my own. And as they're finishing the stuff up, Samuel shows up and says, listen, that was not your job whatsoever you do at all. So Samuel curses Saul.
Because that's the one thing he wasn't supposed to do was to begin to think that he was the most important person. Saul hadn't held up his end of the bargain and he began to act unreasonable and untouchable. We moved to number three right there. Just an example of Saul's unreasonable and untouchable.
The army and Saul are going and doing the enemy crushing thing and they're chasing some enemies down. They're winning very well. And Saul gets a little overzealous and says, you know what, nobody's going to eat until we're done with all the enemy crushing for the day. And if anybody eats, they're going to die.
Well, his son Jonathan, grown man, was like the champion of the nation of Israel, didn't hear this. And so they're on their journey of enemy crushing and Jonathan's a little hungry because enemy crushing makes you hungry. And he sees a honeycomb in the ground so he sticks to spirit and the honeycomb gets himself a little honey snack. And then Saul finds out about it.
He's going to kill Jonathan. And the entire army of Israel rises up to a line against Saul because they can't kill Jonathan. They realize that this is just completely out of control. So we come to number four on our chart here of Saul.
Saul's on the way down. Saul just, the Lord actually rejects Saul as king with the spirit of God that descended upon him and his calling actually left. It picked up and went away. And then Saul became overwhelmed with an evil and a tormenting spirit.
And so this time the story that David, a young kid, enters in. Saul is refusing to lead Israel against their enemies in battle. I mean, enemy crushing. They've been enemy crushing for a long, long time now.
And Saul's like, I'm not going to do anymore. There's a giant in front of us. We can't do this literally. Saul's lost purpose.
The people of God have lost purpose. The whole nation is on this collision course with chaos and with captivity. They're encircled by their enemies. And there's a giant in front of them.
The whole arc of Saul and Samuel and David and Jonathan. It's interesting. But Saul is at this point now to where he is emotionally bankrupt. He's morally bankrupt.
And he is spiritually bankrupt. Even his own son Jonathan realizes that something has to change. This young kid named David enters the scene, kills the giant, and then calms the evil spirit that's tormenting Saul with his music. The little version of this story is we realize that this story of Saul is a Greek tragedy.
It's sad because we can see where Saul really just began flying too close to the sun. Got full of himself and it fell apart. He even realized this on his own. This is several years in the future.
In the story of 1 Samuel 26, 21, it says this. And Saul confessed, I have sinned. Come back home, my son. He's talking about David, not Jonathan.
And I will no longer try to harm you for you valued my life today. I have been a fool and very, very wrong. What's been going on is David, Saul gets so jealous about David. That David has to run away.
He begins chasing David. We see these years where the pattern is, David has to go running high, go living caves with his small army. Saul chases him down. He comes back home.
It's just a back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. This takes place after Saul is trying to find David to catch David. David's hanging out in the back of the cave hidden. Saul goes into the cave to use the bathroom.
David cuts off the edge of his cloak. Saul leaves the cave and David comes out and says, I could have killed you, but I didn't. We see Saul confessing everybody who has this where he's gotten to. All of that hate is burning him up.
But this isn't a story about David. Alan read our teaching text for us earlier. But when we begin to pull all of this story back, this is actually a story about Jonathan. We really think about it.
This is about Jonathan. It's about a son that does not want to end up like his father. He's so scared of it. He sees the consequences so much that he decides that he doesn't even want to be king.
He becomes friends with David and tries to keep his friend David from falling into the same trap that his father came into. Our text today with Alan read for us, this literally comes in the very middle of the Goliath story. You mentioned David standing there like holding the head of Goliath and Jonathan starts taking his quote and his weapons off and gives them to David. You see, before this whole thing had happened, Samuel the prophet had already anointed David to be the next king.
Now Jonathan, who's the king's son, the rightful successor, puts his robe on David and gives him all his weapons, signifying I am laying down my right to this title and I'm inferring upon you the authority I have as son of the king. So David has the blessing of God with anointing of Samuel the prophet and the blessing of humanity with Jonathan doing this. And it's at this point in time when David's story and David's life, the intervention of Jonathan is what keeps him alive. We see Jonathan stopping his dad multiple times from sneaking or finally by the way to convince David to come back home so Saul could kill him.
What's also wild is we look at this moment. It's these couple of verses right here that kept that entire country from falling apart. It's the relationship between these two people between Jonathan and David and Jonathan's realization and recognition of all this whole thing that keeps Israel from just absolutely falling apart. So when we look at this story and we read this when we think about this point in time, that's when we really have to start asking ourselves the question Am I taking my life seriously enough?
Am I taking my life with God? Am I taking my direction with him seriously enough to involve someone else? Because we can't do it by ourselves. Am I taking this seriously enough to involve another person?
The home sheet this week, there's copies out in the back table where you can find it online at Mount Foundry. All those questions really are about this thing right here. Am I serious enough about this to let somebody else be part of it? Because Jonathan had to make a decision.
Jonathan had to be a deeper safeguard. He had to be a deeper safeguard, not just for himself and not just for his father and not just for David, but for the whole nation. Jonathan realized every single thing is at stake. If I don't take this seriously enough.
Jonathan's also personalizing us because he sees his father and his father's sinful patterns that got him into the situation of where he is now. And as I was reading the story the last few weeks and kind of every time I read it, I took a step back and I took a step back and reading more and more and more of first Samuel to see this. I began to answer myself the question, what if Jonathan was the one that kept David from falling into the same sinful patterns as father? Because here's the thing, if you've been around Foundry for a while, we've talked about David before.
David's morally complex. The whole back half of David's life, he made really horrible decisions where you see his downfall. But what's so wild is the David that we think of. The David that man after God's own heart.
The King David that's attributed most of the Psalms to all of these things. David has so much faith. David has so much faith. All that's going on when Jonathan is protecting him.
When he's inside of this way, because Jonathan ends up dying later on. The greatest witness of faithfulness that we see from David, this person, is while he's hiding out in caves being chased down to be killed by Saul and he's under the protection of Jonathan. So we see this life of David and Jonathan. You know, from the moment they met, it's up and to the right.
So we see David's faithfulness and Jonathan's sacrifice that's up and to the right. From this point on, the life of Saul is down and to the right. It's just descending rapidly. Saul had spiritual blinders on.
And he also isolated. In this story, Saul isolates himself from advisers. He isolates himself from his generals. He isolates himself from his sons.
He just becomes more and more and more and more and more on himself. And we have to ask ourselves, in this question of the seriousness, our own capability of sin. Am I taking this seriously enough to involve other people in my life? Not just just for confession.
Confession is a very good thing. It's a healthy thing. It's a very intimate thing. But also we can just for mutual support.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Movement said this, there's no such thing as Christian holiness and isolation. To become whole in your isolation is as likely as to become holy in your adultery. John Wesley talked a lot about social holiness in our world. Now we hear that phrase, social holiness.
We think that means justice and compassion and compassion and those sorts of things. You know, 300 years ago, what that meant was, know your personal relationships. That you cannot find an experience in living holiness without having other people involved in that for you. And whereas our own personal situations might not be those ones where the entire safety of the nation is at stake, we can be held in chaos and captivity.
Our families can be held in chaos and captivity. Our friends and those that we love, they can be held in chaos and captivity. And us making intentional decisions about those things absolutely is at stake in our lives. And we have to learn what does it mean to bury each other's burdens in a holy and a biblical way.
Paul, hundreds of years, thousands of years after the story of David and Jonathan Saul says this in Galatians 6, 1 through 6. Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves or you also may be tempted. Carry each other's burdens.
And in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ. If anyone thinks they are something, when they are not, they deceive themselves. That's the blinders of Saul right there. Each one of us should test their own actions.
And they can take pride in themselves alone without comparing themselves to someone else. For each one should carry their own load. Nevertheless, the one who receives instruction in the Word should share all good things with their instructors. There's a relational dynamic to our discipleship and our own spiritual holiness together.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks about true existence and he said this, for an individual to exist, others must necessarily be there. For an individual to exist, others must necessarily be there. Let's talk about why Bonhoeffer talked about community so much. So he was a German aristocrat who lived in the 1920s, the reason for it.
He's his father had a university position. They were extremely wealthy. He could have lived off the fat of his land for the rest of his life. But instead he devoted himself to reading scripture, to building community and to killing Nazis.
This is actually his illegal underground seminary he ran in the early 1940s. Bonhoeffer died at a German concentration camp with execute in the final days of World War II. And he was placed in the concentration camp because the spiritual communities that happened to spring up everywhere he went were so absolutely subversive that the German government thought him to be an enemy of the state at the highest level. For an individual to exist, others must necessarily be there.
Bonhoeffer, he said isolation isn't human. And that for a person to willfully be in self-isolation is a self-induced dehumanization. That isolation is an action that makes our souls cease to exist. They atrophy and fall away.
And as I say that, we've been talking about these things for the last few weeks. I've been kind of saying one thing repeatedly over and over and over. Is that there are folks in the room right now that are hearing this and are saying, you know, my soul is ceasing right now. I need other people because I'm experiencing isolation at this level.
I read an article just this past week that talked about one of the most destructive bits of isolation that's happened in the last few years in Western culture. It's not the loss of good close friends, but how we don't have acquaintances anymore. That the first year of the pandemic when everything was so shut down we weren't going out. How little the fact that we didn't interact with a waiter or a waitress or a person making a cup of coffee or the person we're paying a bill to make the loss of those middle-acquainting relationships are one of the most catastrophic losses that we have seen.
There are people in this room right now that are experiencing isolation and loss at a significant level. And there's also some of us that say, you know what, I'm going to control. I'm going to need anybody else. My time's full, Chad.
Can't do it. We feel like we don't have to be part of that. And I say that because of this. A lot of things have changed in the last few years.
A lot of things have changed. The church has changed a lot. Not just our church, but the church. The church has changed significantly.
The people who don't follow Jesus' their opinion of what the church has changed significantly in the last few years. And one of the things I've realized in the last few months just personally, and I deeply believe that we're all looking at fragmentation and chaos and captivity all around us. And where my heart has been just throwing so much for the last six or eight months is this, I believe the greatest mission field in the West in the 21st century is simply going to be churches and Christian communities creating safe and whole communities for people that provide meaning and a true fulfilling purpose. And what these are going to do is they will stand in opposition to a life that lacks meaning while being absolutely crammed with things that simply don't satisfy us any longer.
They're not standing in contrast to some sort of alternative intentional life. Some other new God that's going to pop up. They're not going to stand in contrast to radical atheism or something like that. What they're going to stand in contrast to is a life of unknown apathy that is filled with nothing left to watch on Netflix, a social media feed that can't be refreshed anymore, and a false version of digital isolation that simply does not meet needs.
Paul talks about this in Ephesians chapter 4, it says this, throw off your old sinful nature and your former way of life which is corrupted by lust and deception. Instead let the spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes put on your new nature created to be like God, truly righteous and holy. So stop telling lies. Let all of our neighbors, let us tell all of our neighbors the truth for we are all parts of the same body.
Some of us have been conditioned our entire life to feel like we're going to fight some big, huge, large, well-seen enemy. And the thing we actually have in front of us is just apathy. It's our holiness, it's our struggle, it's our experience with Jesus, all of those things. That is what we offer to each other in spiritual community.
Paul speaks of taking off falsehood. And what he might be talking about is just the falsehood and the brokenness that what happens when we realize the way that we are told things should be and the things that should make us happy, the things that should satisfy us and be empty and don't really get the job done. As we talked about last week that there's a truth of hopefulness and what that truth is, it's not these words of scripture saying, hey, this is what could be if you're good enough. But instead it's saying this is what God already has going on all around you and what we do as the Christian community is we step into this honesty of life together.
That means we ask ourselves questions about what blinders do we have on in our life. What are those blinders of individual power, of individual capability, that sort of thing? You know, we also pray to have Jonathan's in our life. You know, we're going to have points in time where we need somebody to divert things for us.
We need somebody to come and say, listen, you're about to step in that and it's going to be really bad. I've stepped in number four, it did not work out well. I love you enough still, you don't step in that. We also have to realize that we have to be like David.
We have to let people into our lives to do those things. We build all of this memory up together. This requires vulnerability and requires intimacy. You know, a lot of people look at the story of David and Jonathan and to be honest, like those guys are kind of sketchy.
They look a little bit too close to me, you know what I'm saying. I think someone else is our broker because we do not believe that you can live a life of vulnerability and trust and honesty with someone without going into that type of relationship. Because to trust someone is truly intimate. To be honest with somebody is truly intimate.
I mean, you're putting your barrier, okay? You might throw something at me now in this situation. To be vulnerable is to really be intimate with somebody. This is the call that God gives us.
This is the type of community that changes things. This is the type of community that gets you thrown into a concentration camp. The David and Jonathan story is one about being on a spiritual journey with each other. And as we've been having these conversations the last few weeks, we're not going to seal this off this Sunday and not talk about it again, but this is something so important in our church that we really have to have this conversation for a month before we can start having the conversation.
So let us take these things and let us be honest with each other about the need for spiritual community that we have, the need for relationships that we have, and also to be willing to safeguard each other as Jonathan's and David's and the truth that we know Jesus has revealed to each of us. Let's pray together. Father, we pray for truthfulness of you, God, for the words of your mouth, God, to come into our heart, Lord. God, we pray for the truthfulness that only you can speak into us, God.
But God, for that truthfulness that happens so that we can be laying down ourselves for you. God, we cannot expect to experience anything in community. We're not experiencing personally between you and us. So God, we come into these spaces together.
God is space of dependency. God, dependency on you. But Lord, also dependency on each other. God, for some of us, we're just trying to find a handhold of all ourselves out of the water.
God, others of us, we're laying on our backs and breathing deep breaths because it's taken so much energy and effort to just get up. God, some of us are a long way away from the water and a call that you're giving out to us for us to turn around and see those who are just now climbing out. God, all those spaces are present in this room right now. I'm praying for you to activate our hearts towards this reality.
I'm going for us to realize that we all need each other to truly be who you made us to be. There's going to be pray. Amen. Let us stand together and get...