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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

A Man After Gods Own Heart: King David

David Wright

01 The Nobody Nobody Noticed

02 God’s Heart, God’s Man, God’s Ways

03 Giant Lessons Worth Remembering

04 Aftermath of a Giant Killing

05 Every Crutch Removed

06 How to Lie to Your Pastor

07 I Hate To Wait

08 Is This God’s Will or Mine?

09 Living Above Retaliation

10 Lying Appearances

11 When Seeing is not Believing

12 When Your Enemy Falls

14 Pulling Down Strongholds

13 Power Grab And Civil War

16 When God Says No

17 When Grace Calls You By Name

18 A Perilous Thing to Lose Dependence On God

19 Restore To Me The Joy

15 But God Knows My Heart

Well today we're continuing our series on David, a man after God's own heart.

Today we're looking at living above retaliation.

Have you ever been in a situation where you have been tempted to retaliate, to fight back?

I think of a story that a relative of ours tells of they were there at Taco Bell and they were eating their food.

This was when they were in high school, and 1 of their friends got up to, I don't know, use the restroom or get their order, whatever it was, and they did a trick I'd never heard of before, and kids don't do this, and especially don't do this and say, you got the idea from me.

They took a hot sauce packet and carefully opened it, and then inserted a straw into it, and then put all of that down into their carbonated drink.

Now, I hope you're not smiling because you've done this before.

And so then, when the friend came back, they said, I have this drink that's just really, really good.

Well, okay, and and so took a really big of hot sauce You know in the back of her throat and she's coughing and sputtering and all these other things she goes to grab somebody else's drink to try to get relief and it had hot sauce too.

And I hear that story and I think, oh my goodness, what would you do if that situation had been done to you?

Would you be tempted to be thinking and surmising?

So we were camping 1 time in Indian Boundary over in Tennessee, beautiful little spot.

And I don't know about you, but sometimes it's hard to get away from work with all of your things to the campground, get everything set up, you know, food, all the rest before it gets dark.

And on this occasion, there was a big group that was coming from all over, almost a reunion of sorts.

We were there, the tents and everything were set up.

There was even a fire going, but supper was kind of the last piece, and so while we were having supper of hot dogs, the sun had pretty much gone down, it was quite dark, and so you really couldn't see too well, but that's okay, you can see well enough.

And so hot dogs, as I said, was on the menu, and for my brother-in-law, I had nothing to do with this, but for poor Jeremiah, somebody said, hey Jeremiah, I have a hot dog for you that I made for you.

You know, you're so busy, he was, he was juggling kids and putting up tents and the whole thing here Let me do you a favor.

I mean he was hungry took a big bite of that hot dog You know something's coming.

It was a cat tail It wasn't a fresh cat tail.

It's kind of an old 1 that just kind of got really pithy and What is this I Remember my own experience camping and we were having haystacks.

I think it was for Sabbath lunch or something.

And there's, you know, haystacks are good any time, but then when you get out into the woods, everything tastes better in the woods.

So we're in the woods, and there's everything spread out, and I just remember on this particular occasion, I was just really hungry and I just happened to go first.

Everybody's kind of being bashful, I thought, well I'm not gonna be bashful.

So I went through and I got my beans and I put them on, you know, the chips and the whole thing, went through my whole line.

First bite, first 1 through lunch, first bite, and I bite down on something that's like, this is weird.

It was kind of a chewy, soft, but then you kind of penetrated and crunched through it, and then there was a little bit of this sweetness, I thought, I just ate like a slug or something.

And you know, you're trying to like, do I spit this out, do I keep, and with every bite, no, this is wrong.

Some individual, I think it was my uncle and my brother, cut up a piece of dried apricot and put it into the chili beans.

Chili beans and dried apricot don't go together, especially when you're eating this out in the open air with bugs and everything else.

You know, these are kind of more light things, but the question still remains, what do you do when somebody gets 1 over on you or worse, maybe it's actually out of real frustration with you or they just want to do something to harm you.

There's all kinds of expressions with that too.

Payback stings or payback this or don't cross me or if you do and all these threats.

Is that how the Christian should respond with retaliation, with revenge?

You know, there's whole movie plots, by the way, based on this idea of revenge.

There was a young person over here who said no.

But there are whole movie plots based on revenge, and sometimes the theme of some of these films are like, I'm gonna do nothing else in life, I'm gonna put everything else aside, and I'm gonna 0 in on getting my revenge.

I mean, you finally get your revenge after I don't know how many years you've been plotting this thing?

All right, so we're going back to our Bibles.

We've marched all the way through to chapter 23.

And you may recall that David is a fugitive at this point.

And in chapter 23, verse 14, it says, Saul sought David every day.

And at the end of chapter 23, this is going back some time ago, but we saw David coming down off the high ground, off of a position that he was better suited for battle, but rather than keep the high ground, he flees and he runs, but David is in hot pursuit and very quickly he is surrounded.

Now of course, David, I think, if he were to engage with Saul, could easily take Saul, right?

Saul has slain his thousands, but David his tens of thousands.

But David is choosing to not engage in this fight.

And last time we really looked at the end of chapter 23, David is now surrounded, everything is heightening for this climax, he's trusting in the Lord, Lord what are you going to do?

And at the last possible moment, Saul gets called away, the Philistines are attacking back home, we've got to go.

And so David is still trying to lay low as we enter into chapter 24.

And so let's begin now in chapter 24 beginning verse 1.

Now it happened when Saul had returned from following the Philistines, that it was told him, saying, Take note, David is in the wilderness of En Gedi.

He took 3, 000 chosen men from all Israel, not just anybody, chosen, and went to seek David and his men on the rocks of the wild goats." Another phrase for En-Gedi, really.

So he came to the sheepfolds by the road where there was a cave and Saul went in to attend to his needs, and David and his men were staying in the recesses of the cave.

Now, En-Gedi, you need to understand, is a small oasis, and essentially a wasteland.

I mean, if you've ever been in the area of the Dead Sea, it's not just the sea that's dead, everything around it seemingly is dead, it's barren, it's a wasteland.

In fact, it's 1, 300 feet below sea level and there's nothing living in that water, or the Dead Sea, so salty.

It looks, you know, and I guess it's refreshing, but you can't put it in your mouth.

But there is this little river that comes down.

I mean, you have the Dead Sea down low, but then up on the west side, I guess, there's this really high plateau, and then it kind of filters down through, and En Gedi is this place where a stream runs down through, and it's beautiful.

I mean, this is part of the rocks and the caves and it's a national park now and you can go and you can hike and it would be a lot of fun on this Saturday afternoon to go hike in this valley.

Because not just the caves and the crevices, but there are these wild goats, these ibex, they call them, that are there.

And I imagine there's lots of birds there because of the water.

And so this is an oasis, a gathering point for anything that wants to live in this hot place.

Back to Menu

Series

A Man After Gods Own Heart: King David

09 Living Above Retaliation

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Facing the Fire: Defying the Beast

44m

Sabbath School 3rd Quarter 2025: Exodus

09 Living the Law

26m

Watch and Pray

1h 5m

Preparing for the Latter Rain: The Judgment Hour Message

Prepare To Meet Your God

1h 15m

Apologetics

If God, Why Evil?

1h 1m

The Divine Solution

1h 33m

The Ten Commandments By Philip Mills

Hate Murder on the Inside

37m

Plenary

There Was No Man

1h 4m

To Forgive Is To Benefit

36m

The Price of Blood

56m

Care Enough To Confront

42m

Don’t Lose Heart

50m

Sound Doctrine