There are so many teachable lessons from the life of King David that we can incorporate into our lives today for great impact and purpose. David is a fascinating man in the Bible who experienced both the greatest of victories and the lowest of defeats. He was real and authentic and his life has many valuable lessons that we can apply. David was the only person ever recorded in the Bible who was called "a man after God's own heart." Why was this? We should want to know because we see David was a flawed man who committed adultery and murder, yet he was also a many who sought after God with an authentic passion and intensity that was unparalleled in the Bible. He literally thought about God day and night. He was vulnerable with his emotions before God, both in times of triumphant worship and in the lowest valleys. He was real before God. He repented of his sin before God. He praised God when He remembered who He was and he questioned God when in his distress he forgot how big God was.
David sought God with a deep passion and relentlessness. David didn’t lack alignment in his life. He clearly had God at the top of his life pyramid and everything else came after that. God was first place in his mind and his heart. The authenticity of David’s relationship with God I think that is why in spite of all his failings and deeply sinful actions he could be called by God a “man after my own heart,” in Acts 13:22 why he was such a successful leader and effective servant of the Lord. God can only use us to the degree to which we are willing to abandon ourselves to him. Our effectiveness for God’s Kingdom is directly proportional to our level of surrender. The more we surrender, the more God can use us. More than anything, David prayed fervently to God about all aspects of his life. His relationship with God was nothing if not authentic, and boy does this world need that type of authenticity right now. Whether David was frustrated, scared, angry, confused, grateful, ecstatic, depressed, hurt, lonely, impressed, reliant, joyful or many other emotions, he always told God exactly how he felt.
So we’re going to dive headlong into a deeper look into David’s life and hopefully how the lessons David both learned and taught can be applied to our lives to make us stronger, wiser and bolder. Today's lesson was on authenticity and how important that is in our relationship with a God who is so big He in incapable of being truly understood in our limited human capacity and who lives in "unapproachable light," as 1 Timothy 6:16 says.
Tomorrow we will consider courage, bravery and boldness.