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Tag: success

Published July 12, 2021

Everybody Loves David

There was a tv show back in the late 90s called ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’. And the title of the show came from the fact that Raymond’s older brother, Robert, believed Raymond was unfairly favoured over him. The way he saw it, Raymond got the cake, and he just got the crumbs. Even in the eyes of their parents, everything Raymond did was wonderful and exciting, everything Robert did was lacklustre and mediocre. Raymond had a successful career, a great wife, and 3 wonderful kids – Robert still lived home with this parents. It seemed even life favoured Raymond over Robert.

And so, in the opening credits of the shows, Robert always remarks with the self-pity of Eeyore, “Everybody loves Raymond.”

And I mention that this morning because in our passage today, we’re going to see Saul take on that same attitude towards David. “Everybody loves David”.

If you were with us last week, you’ll remember how David had just returned from the battlefield after killing the Philistine giant, Goliath. Of course, David wasn’t even in the army at that time. He was just running some errands for his father and he overheard Goliath’s defiant boasting against the Lord and he just couldn’t believe that no one in the entire Israelite army (not even Saul himself) had the courage to fight Goliath and show the Philistines that the God of Israel was not Someone to triffle with!

And of course, you know the rest of the story. With just a sling and a stone, David takes out Goliath, allowing the Israelites to soundly defeat the Philistines and win a great victory for the Lord! 

Then as we saw last week, when David returned from the battlefield – with Goliath’s head still in his hands – he spends some time talking with Saul and his son Jonathan.

And both of them are incredibly impressed with David – especially Jonathan. It seems that David & Jonathan were kindred spirits – men cut from the same cloth. And so Jonathan, a seasoned man of war and next in line for the throne of Israel, takes this young kid under his wing and makes a pact with David. And while we aren’t given the details of this pact, it’s clear through the rest of the story that this is a pledge of loyalty and support and lifelong friendship between David and Jonathan. 

Perhaps most amazingly, through this pact, we see that Jonathan whole-heartily accepts the Lord’s decision that David will be the next king, instead of him – and Jonathan acknowledges this by giving David his robe, his tunic, his sword, his belt, and his bow. It’s an amazing act of servant leadership. Jonathan willingly does this because of his trust in the Lord and because of his love for David.

And that’s about as far as we got last week. Today we’re going to continue to see how life rapidly changed for David in the aftermath of his victory over Goliath – and we’re going see how Saul’s view of David also changed just as rapidly.

It doesn’t take long for Saul to bemoan the fact that “everybody loves David.”

To get us into our passage this morning, let’s start once more at the top of 1 Samuel chapter 18. This will be a bit of a review since we covered this last week, but the chapter begins like this:

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Published January 1, 2017

The Measure of Success

I think it’s fair to say that everyone wants to win. Everyone wants to be a success. That’s hardwired into us. No one wants to be a loser. No body wants to be a failure. We all want to succeed. We want to do well.

And we see this in every aspect of our lives. When we play sports, we want to take home the championship trophy – not just the participation award. When we play board games or video games, we say we play for the fun, but still, we want to win. In war – no one goes into battle being okay with losing –  if we’re going to fight, we want the victory.

We want to succeed in our careers. We want to have succeed in raising our kids. We want to succeed at being a good husband or a good wife.

We even want to succeed as Christians. Nobody wants to be a lousy Christian – we want to be a successful one. We want our church to succeed. Clearly there is something hardwired into us that drives us towards success.

But the challenge in all areas of life is knowing what determines success. We have to know what the objective is.

Because if you’re a football player, successfully running the ball to the end of the field is a measure of success – but if you’re a golfer, it’s not. You’ll probably get kicked off the course if you’re out there tackling the other golfers, stealing their ball and running it down the fairway.

We have to know our objective – We have to know what constitutes success in whatever it is that we’re doing. If we don’t know what the objective is – if we don’t know what determines success – then we’re gonna have a really hard time being successful.

As a church, we need to know what determines our success. Are we successful because we’ve outgrown this space and need to move to a larger space over at the Hall? Is that success? If we get to the point where we need to build our own building, is that success? If we get to the point where we offer more programs and have greater attendance and have more baptisms and have a bigger facility than Crossroads – is that success? Or are we measuring success the wrong way?

We need to know what determines our success – or we may spend all of our time and our energy and all our effort trying to be really good…  at the wrong thing!

And this totally applies to each one of us personally. We already mentioned how every one us wants to be successful in life. We want to be a successful in our work, we want our marriage to be a success, we want to raise our kids successfully and I think, as followers of Christ, more than anything, we want to be a success in that. At the end of our lives as we stand before God, I think each one of us wants to hear God say “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

So it’s really important that we know what determines our success. To use our golf analogy, I don’t want to spend my life running running the golfball down the fairway, weaving around and dodging the other golfers like a football player (and being really good at that) – when all along I should’ve been practicing my putt. I want to know and do what it takes to be successful in God’s eyes – because that’s what really counts.

So today, I want to do two things.

Since this is the last service in this building before we move over to the Hall, I want to talk a little bit about how we can have success as a church. How will we know if we are being successful? Are we successful just to keep existing? Are we successful when we reach a certain number in attendance or dollars or sq footage or new believers? What is the measurement of success for our church?

And then, also being New’s Years Day, I want to talk about what it means for you to have success in  this new year. What do you need to do in order to be successful in 2017? Were you successful last year? What’s the measurement of your success?

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