Sermon Tone Analysis

! Introduction

            What a tremendous blessing to hear how God has worked in your lives.

This morning, we have been privileged to hear these testimonies.

Sometimes when people transfer membership they ask, “do we have to give a testimony?”

and my response is, “It is a blessing for us to hear how God has worked in your life.”

We rejoice to hear your faith biography, thanks for sharing.

This morning, we have seen how God has worked and how people have responded to His work.

It seems kind of appropriate that on a morning when we have heard a number of faith biographies that we want to start a series on faith biographies.

Over the next 4 Sunday’s, we want to examine how people in the Bible have responded to the grace of God.

We know that it is by faith that we come to Christ in the first place.

When we come to realize that we are helpless, when we understand that we sin and can’t stop, when we understand that we will die and can’t prevent it then the good news that God has for us is that He has provided a way for us to receive forgiveness of sins and eternal life.

The good news is that Jesus Christ came to earth to die for our sins and rose again from the dead to provide the way of eternal life.

In order to receive this good news, God invites us to trust Him for forgiveness of our sins and for eternal  life.

He promises in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

But faith is not only the starting point of a life with God.

It is also how our life with God is to be lived.

John A. Toews wrote that faith “…is the universal and indispensable condition of all experiences of God’s grace - not only in conversion, but also in all subsequent experiences of Christian growth and development.”

This morning as we begin a series of faith biographies we will examine what it means to have faith and I hope to encourage and challenge all of us to a deeper faith.

To start with, we will look at two stories, those of King Saul and of King David.

What we notice is that neither of them had a  perfect faith.

They sinned, became discouraged, went through hardship and experienced loss.

This is encouraging to us because we all still sin, we all doubt, we all struggle with trusting God in the challenges of life.

I want to look at three areas in which faith can be challenged and notice how faith acted in these two stories.

We will learn that in the case of Saul, faith failed and in the case of David, faith was strong to the end.

As we examine their stories, we will learn the difference between a faith that fails and a faith that falters but remains.

I hope it will be an encouragement to you, Carl, as you continue in your walk of faith, to you who have joined to continue to develop a deeper faith and indeed to all of us as we walk in faith.

!

I. How Faith Responds to Sin

The first area that often challenges our faith is the area of sin.

Both Saul and David, like we, faltered in their faith when they sinned.

What is the difference between failing faith and faltering faith when we sin?

!! A. Failing Faith

            The sins of Saul are recorded in a number of places, but we will examine just one story which takes place in I Samuel 15.

Let me briefly tell you this story.

The story is the story of a battle.

When Israel came up from Egypt many years earlier, the Amalekites had attacked them.

For this reason, God told Saul it was time to punish them for their evil.

The battle was to be one in which everything in that nation was to be totally destroyed.

God’s command, given in verse 3 was to destroy everything.

This was a very serious instruction from God.

When God wanted everything destroyed, He meant everything.

Saul and his army went to the battle and destroyed the Amalekites, just as they had been told to do.

They completely destroyed everything, except, they did not destroy the king of the Amalekites and they did not destroy the best of the sheep and cattle.

In verse 9 we read that “these they were unwilling to destroy completely.”

This was Saul’s sin.

He failed to fully obey God in a command that he knew and that he knew was serious.

When Samuel, God’s prophet, came to Saul after the battle was over, Saul greeted him cheerfully and had the audacity to say to him, “I have carried out the Lord’s instructions.”

The response of Samuel was, “What then is this bleating of sheep in my ears?”

In response to this, Saul answered, “The soldiers brought them…” In this conversation we see that Saul was unable to see his sin and unwilling to accept responsibility for it.

In verse 19 when Samuel asked Saul directly, “Why did you not obey the Lord?” Saul responded in verse 20, “But I did obey the Lord.”

More of his heart is revealed later in the text.

When he is confronted with the evil of disobedience, he does finally admit that he sinned.

This looks like a good thing and we think that perhaps he is on the right track, but we see the depth of his sin and the shallowness of his repentance when later on he asks Samuel to come and “honor me before the elders.”

At this point we see that he was not concerned to deal with sin in his heart, he simply wanted to look good.

It is in Saul’s response, when he is caught in sin, that we see the difference between failing faith and faltering faith.

At first he did not see his sin, then he blamed others for it, then he made excuses and finally he glossed it over in favor of being honoured before others.

!! B. Faltering Faith                                   

            How different the response of faith that may falter, but remains true.

David also sinned and in a way that may even seem worse to us.

His sin is described in II Samuel 11,12.

One day when his army was at war and he should perhaps have been with them, he was walking about on the roof of his house.

Looking down, he saw a woman bathing.

He was attracted to her and since he was king he used his power to get her to come over and he had sex with her.

When that encounter resulted in pregnancy, David called for her husband to come back from the battle in hopes that he would get together with his wife and cover David’s sin.

When that didn’t work, he sent her husband’s death sentence back with him to the front and in a planned military manoeuvre, he was murdered.

David may have seemed to be getting away with murder and adultery, but God’s concern was evident.

II Samuel 11:27 says, “the thing David had done displeased the Lord.”

For over a year nothing happened.

Can you imagine the gossip?

This was not hidden.

There were people who knew about it.

However, from Psalm 32:3 we know that David’s heart was not immune to guilt.

There we read, “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.”

Some time after the child was born, Nathan the prophet came to David and told him a story with the intention of confronting him with his sin.

Nathan, probably in fear and trembling, said to David, “you are the man” and pronounced judgement on him.

The two stories are similar.

A sin is committed.

The one who sins does not recognize or admit the sin.

A man of God comes and confronts him with the sin.

In David’s case, however, the response is completely different.

Immediately, David said, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

He does not make excuses, he does not try to shift blame on someone else.

He understands and admits the evil of his sin right away.

In these stories, we see the difference between faith that falters, but holds on and faith that falters and fails.

The difference is in the response to sin.

In the one case, it is defensiveness, fails to recognize sin and seeks to save face.

In the other it is full confession of sin and falling on the mercy of God to forgive.

It seems to us that David’s sin was far worse than that of Saul.

That should encourage us that it is not the depth of our sin that shows whether or not we have true faith.

Rather it is the depth of our repentance and the fullness of our receiving the forgiveness of God that shows who has true faith in God.

What kind of faith do you have when you have sinned?

Do you accept God’s judgement on your sin? Are you quick to accept your wrong doing and seek God’s mercy and forgiveness?

True faith accepts God’s opinion of us and receives his forgiveness.

!

II.

How Faith Responds To Difficulties

A second challenge to faith is the difficulties we face in which we are sure that our resources will not do.

How does our faith operate in those difficulties?

!! A. Failing Faith

            Let us look once again at the lives of Saul and David.

It was another situation of a battle in which the weak faith of Saul was revealed.

In I Samuel 13, the Philistines had been attacking Israel and so finally Saul gathered his army in order to face the enemy.