Why not stand the embryo? Give our attention to the very word of God. David said, is there yet anyone left of the house of Saul that I may show him kindness for Jonathan said? Now there was a servant of the house of Saul. His name was Ziva. They called him to David and the king said to him, I use Ziva. I am. He said and the king said, is there not yet anyone of the house of Saul to whom I may show the kindness of God? In Ziva said to the king, there is still a son of Jonathan who is crippled in both feet. So the king said to him, where is he? In Ziva told the king, then, where Mfibishev was. So King David sent and brought him from that household, from World of War, and Mfibishev, the son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, came to David and fell on his face and prostrated himself. And David said, Mfibishev, and he said, here is your servant. And David said, do not fear for I will surely show kindness to you for the sake of your father, Jonathan. And we will story to you all the land of your grandfather, Saul, and you shall eat at my table regularly. Again, he prostrated himself and said, what is your servant that you should regard as dead dog like me? The king called Saul, servant Ziva, and said, all the belong to Saul, and to all his house, I have given to your master's grandson. And you and your sons and your servant shall cultivate the land for him and bring in the produce, so that your master's grandson may have food nevertheless. Mfibishev, your master's grandson shall eat at my table regularly. Ziva had 15 sons and 20 servants, and Ziva said to the king, according to all that my lord, the king commands his servant, Saul your servant will do, some Mfibishev ate at David's table as one of the king's sons. And Mfibishev had a young son. His name was Micah, and all who lived in the house of Ziva were servants to Mfibishev. Some Mfibishev lived in Jerusalem, for he ate at the king's table regularly. Now he was laying in both feet. Father, would you take your word, we've heard it, we've read it, and now would you press it in our hearts? Lord, would you convict us of our sin? And would you make Jesus so attractive, so appealing, so delightful, that we can't help but run to him for life, for forgiveness, for freedom. Lord, we pray this in Jesus' name, and we see it, please. Some passages of the Bible are just sticky with grace. They just sort of ooze grace. Certainly, that's second Samuel chapter 9. Anytime you find a cripple, at the king's table, then that just might be grace, you're snowing. So at the end he said that he left the church because he found so little grace there, but he went back because he found grace, nowhere else. It's the way we use a lot of this church, and sometimes people come to me and say, just what is grace? Well, there's a lot of ways to explain it, sometimes knowing stories, like what about you, is the best. Very often, we would say that, well, grace is getting something that you don't deserve, or it's not getting something that you deserve. Yes, grace is something that comes as someone else's expense. In fact, John Gilbert describes that experience when he was five years old. John was sticking with muscular dystrophy. He only lived for the age of 25. He did the world of favor, though, in those intervening 20 years as he chronicled his experience of his life in a sense, ebbing away, giving us insight into the world of someone having this experience. John described the life of rejection, a life of junior high with muscular dystrophy. I mean, junior high, he said, if there's an argument for purgatory, it's called junior high. He described the life of every year losing the ability to do, he described the life as very few bright spots, but he did mention one. He said, when he was a teenager, he went to, he was invited by the National Football League in a big gala. Gala option they were having to raise money for children who were suffering, so he was brought in. At this auction, one of the items was a basketball sign by every member of the Sacramento team. He wanted that ball desperately. In fact, when the fitting started, his hand shot up. He said, no, astronaut has experienced the, the G-forces that he did when his mother grabbed his arm and he angled it back down, so it was able to get a beating for this basketball, went away beyond their very modest means. There's a spiral up, two men battling back and forth. In fact, they were far more valuable items, but this basketball was receiving more attention than any other item had that night. The beating went up until finally, one man made an outrage as big. The whole room gaped. The beating was over. He won the ball. When he went up, and he paid for it, he took the ball, and rather than going back to his seat, he brought it and he placed it in the hands of John Gilbert, hands it with never dribble, legs that would never run down, of course. And of course, the whole room was taken with that. But no more than John, who said, was a defining moment in his life to experience being given something valuable that you could never afford, that you could never purchase it, you could never require of any ability of your own and being given to, given it by someone else who paid for it, who paid, who paid it all. I want to ask you this morning if you know how you felt. I want to ask you this morning if you've experienced great. I don't know, I'm not going to ask you to get it, if you understand it, if you can teach it to someone else, if you've been impacted by it, as it captured your heart. You know when we could surely say that if you ever see the lame leap for joy, that might be great to your smelly. How about you? Is your heart ever wrapped for joy? I feel wonder, is you are the recipient of the grace of God. We just had a team come back, we saw the pictures on the film from Belize, and they told me that there was a number of that team. One of the ones tasting God's favor and love for the first time in his life, that every time they gathered for devotions, every time they gathered to sing or to pray, as a team he would capture them, to sing God has smiled on me. You know that's not such a bad thing, to be so hungry that we're like little children saying, sing it again, play it again, play it again, dad, tell me you love me again, dad because I promise you it's what your heart really wants, to know that though we are lame and though we are broken, that we are the object of his delight. So, second Samuel, chapter 9, I want you to clear your nostrils and breathe in the fragrant aroma of grace afresh. Mephebyshev, first we'll note his condition. You know the passage begins with David saying, is there anyone left of the house of Saul? And the answer comes and chapter is, his name is Mephebyshev. Second Samuel, chapter 4 verse 4, Paul tells us that when he was five years old, his father Jonathan and his grandfather King Saul were slaughtered by the forceons on Mount Gilbara. When word came to the palace of Saul, that Saul and Saul's son were dead, then there was a panic. Everyone fled because the police were ruthless and bloodthirsty and they would surely come and eradicate every vestige of the house of Saul. Thankfully, it's not just the forceons they had to be concerned about. It was King David himself who would widely come and destroy all that was left of his rivals in the house of Saul. And so, a nurse grabs up five-year-old Mephebyshev and as she frees from the palace, she trips and they fall and both his ankles are broken. They take him to a nondescript obscure village called Lodabar which means no pasture. There's some idea that this was undoubtedly an impoverished place. And there he grows up lame. The bones in his legs never hit a nit properly. There he grows up in obscurity because if it's ever known that there's a living air of King Saul, then his life will surely be in grave danger. He grows up poor, he grows up impoverished, he grows up orphaned, he grows up no father, no family. He has royal blood in his veins, but he's utterly cut off from it all. He has nothing, he has lame, he has broken. That's his condition. Now God's word would ask you. Can you see yourself in Mephebyshev? Can you see yourself in this condition? What were we created as? Genesis chapter 1 would tell us what? We were made in the image of God. We were invited by God, called by God, created by God to be co-regions. What does that mean? Co-rulers over the heavens and the earth. In other words, guess what's close through your veins? Royal blood. You're made as sons and daughters of the living God, but the Bible says that we too have suffered a great fall, and we are broken. We are cut off and separated from what was a luster that some lost our lives is not the case. We are cut off from our father. Your sins have made a separation between you and your God, says Isaiah. And so the God we were created to know and serve. Well, our natural condition is that we are orphaned from him. We are broken. Now, is the world broken? We don't have much trouble seeing that, do we? To read the paper this week, it only takes a day of reading the paper, the brokenness of our world and such as counting itself, a little baby dies, forgotten in a car. Since I went to the airport to get my family, I went up here to the light and left hand, so I turned right only to see a car with a roof sheared off. Just moments before a man had died in an accident, suddenly, right there. And so power outages and floods and a rock and a round we can go about the brokenness of this world. We just prayed for two people to ask cancer. This week someone zero to our family, fam was brought to live in a therapeutic home. Imagine bringing the child to a therapeutic home. Who wants to do that? Imagine how desperate you must be. Our world's broken. The promise, that's still fairly generic and outside of us. The far more salient point is that we are broken. Our bodies are broken. This summer I had that press into my life, laying in a hospital, having one day been enjoying vacation and literally moments later, being going into emergency surgery. All because the doctor told me that 30 years ago, when I was one year old, apparently, 30 years ago, when I had my appendix removed, God's tissue from that, 30 years later, had brought this problem on in my life, I'm going to tell you something. The Bible says there's something inside of you. It's called sin. It's called an old nature. It's called the rebellious heart. It's called a being cut off from your father in such a way that we are afraid. We are determined to do life without him. And yet we are insecure. We are orphaned. We are broken. We are lame. I want to ask you, have you owned that? Do you confess that when I started the service when I read through the books and about how we are feeble? We are the weak. We are losers. That's true. The bother you to be told that? Or do you know that's more true than I could even describe? The friend of mine went to start a church in Seattle and he wrote this email about one of his experiences. One of the things that has me astounded wrote is the fact that my neighbors, members of Seattle's gay community, never miss a service. Many of you have asked me why? Why did they keep coming back? Yesterday, I found out. Now one of the partners has come from the beginning. He was raised a methodist. He loves it on music. The other partner, however, was very hesitant. After the first time he attended, he wrote me a note that said he was offended by the fact that I implied in a sermon that we are hopeless in and of ourselves. Well, that didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was that three months ago he showed up again and hasn't missed a service since. Yesterday he called and asked if we could meet. When we met, he opened up and said, Tom, I am really beginning to understand what you mean when you say I'm totally broken and hopeless. I'd also feel very frustrated and dissatisfied with my life. I feel lost. And the reason I keep coming to grace is the fact that I feel like in every sermon you're speaking directly to me. I'm telling you something. That gay man is closer to the kingdom of God than you are. Unless you two can say, apply some deepest trust. I am hopeless and I am lost and I am dissatisfied. My fellowship's condition is ours. And so I ask this morning, have you owned that? It is so freeing to own it. To own your land. Angel Richard was sharing with us this week about watching the movie Seabiscuit and that scene in the movie where the trainer finally gets the hold of this incorrigible horse. The horse is lazy. It eats too much. It lays around. It won't exercise. Others have tried to beat this horse in the submission unsuccessfully. When the trainer first puts the horse out on the track under his gaze, the horse just weaved all over the place in its running. And the trainer comments, this horse has been beaten so much. It doesn't even remember what it was created to do. It doesn't even remember what it is. The horse made the run fast. Brothers and sisters, worst of all, we've been beaten but our wounds are what? Self-interested. We're laying cut off. We sing in our songs just as I am without one play. Just as I am poor, wretched, blind, sight-riches, healing of the mind. That's who we are. The song I listen to almost every morning, come you sinner, poor and needy, weak and wounded, sick and sore. Come, come, you lame, come you sick, come you sore. Jesus ready, stand to save you. Full of pity, joined with power. Second, not just in a herbicious condition, but second, I want you to see the welcome that he received, the reception that he received. Brothers and sisters, I want you to get this. I want you to understand grace. I've been a pastor here over 20 years but I didn't always get this. Understanding the gospel of God's grace allowed me to see how lame I am has allowed me to start to see how blind I am, how stubborn I am, how my words and injure other people, how my attitudes can be condescending, getting the gospel of God's grace. Long after I would have been a Christian has changed the way I lead people, the way I relate to my wife and my children, it's changed everything. I want you to get this, I want you to get this. And I want to tell you something else, on my deathbed,
if you have a chance to speak to me moments before my death, I believe the words you'll hear from my mouth are, I don't understand the grace of God. So when I say get it, it's a lifelong process in which the more we get, the more we will say why, this whole thing for questions. I don't understand. I'm getting new vistas into the pursuit of God as someone such as me. I want to welcome you into that process. And the citizenship, welcome. Now, if you get summoned by the king and you're a relative of his dead rival, what do you expect that summons before? Someone's a leaf, someone told, the word is out, there's someone in Saul's family still left alive. David can't allow that to happen. David's reign is not so secure that he can have an air of Saul running around. There's lots of people who hate David. We're going to read that in the next week or two. There's lots of people who long for the good old days when Saul was king and they'd love to be rid of David and they'd love to annoying someone in Saul's family as the rightful king. If you want to consolidate power, you don't leave Uday and Kusay running around unchecked. It's that way today. It was that way thousands of years ago. And so my citizenship knows that his time is up. If he's been summoned to the king, it is for his death. But what reception does he receive? He has not summoned to be killed. He has summoned to be a wild ghost figure. He would have spent the rest of his life saying, I never would have imagined that in a million years. Restored to him is the confiscated lands of his grandfather. Restored to him is the wealth of his grandfather. Restored to him is the servants of his grandfather. Protests, protection, a provision of every sorts is given to him a fervish effort. And if that wasn't enough, what is the Bible for? David treated him like his own son. He sat at David's table as a trusted advisor, as a member of David's cabinet, not as an outsider, not as a potential rival. All the insight, all the knowledge that would be known to the insiders, it was given to him a fervish effort. He was included. He was received as a son. Now, if you were summoned before God,
if you were summoned at the end of your life before God, what reception do you anticipate? But really a better question is, how do you stand with God right now? Because you have been summoned before the face of God right now. That's what's happening in this room right now. He's been summoned before God. What's your standing with him right now? If he were to call you into his presence, would you experience anger, disappointment? You might be thinking of what you did last night. You might be thinking of some things in your life. You might be thinking that surely what I would receive is his rash, his his thick, his anger, his his fury, because that's what you deserve. But I tell you this, that if you are in the family of Jesus, you will experience with my service, just experience his welcome, his warmth, his embrace, his provision. The prodigal puts his dad's money and he spent it on food and on drugs and on partying. And when he went home, he was ready to get it. But what did he experience? Once and welcome that would transform any life and transform any heart. So welcome, welcome of God to be in his family. Do you know how much the Father is not about his children? Jesus could say of God the Father who loves me before the foundation of the earth. The Bible has God saying, I just don't know why he didn't you. Imagine receiving that delight from God on you. But then I could tell you that I can tell you that I saw the best testimony ever given in this church was this morning. It was way better than any of you guys had been up here before. He's bright and insightful and well-ped and spiritual and godly and as just an unbiased observer. My sons and my daughters, for my wife and for me, the source of the greatest pleasures in this world. And I know you know that too. God the Father, doing that way about you. But what I see approach my kids, I like it when they do well. I delight when they get age. I delight when they score the winning goal. But I delight when they mess up. And they struggle. And when they're funny and when they're rotten, I'm taking with them and everywhere. God the Father, taking with you, smitten with you, delighting in you, taking treasure out of you, living your life, scrolling up, being bold, learning this gospel thing, watching you, watching you raise your kids, watching you grow up. So what's the right for you? Can you own that? That's what it is to get the grace of the gospel. And the fibresha is welcomed right into the table, right into the family of God.
And unless this whole Christianity thing becomes that personal to you, then you'll wonder why it feels like you're just not happening. You're going to church, you profess space, you're a Christian. But why isn't my marriage changing? Why isn't there any transformation? Why isn't there any movement? I don't have to be perfect, but there's the power. The power is, when we begin to be melted by the wonder of the gospel, so that we get up in the morning and we are filled with the wonder of how deep is this love of God, how wide, how high that I might explore the depth of it. Don Dupre was here last week, he said of this church, he said, the people that are so authentic and so real, he said, I want to go home and get my wife and bring her here. I've been trying to tell the students about what the church of Jesus Christ could be, and he said, I feel like I found it. Debbie Holiday said this week, the willingness of the people at Seven Rivers Church to be honest about who they are and to struggle with off the charts, it's phenomenal. What is that come from? People from the outside looking in and seeing something. What do they see? They're seeing people who feel so secure at their table of God, so secure that they are honest and they are rotten, they are so thrilled that they could admit that they are wrong and they could admit that they are broken and they could admit that their marriage is struggling and they could admit that their heart isn't good and they don't have to be artificial, they can start to be real. Comey sinners, comey sinners, poor and needy, weak and wounded, sick and sore, Jesus ready stands to save you, poor pity, joins with power and he is able, he is able, doubt no more. Well, I'm going to say this yet, we've got to examine this just a little bit further, how in the world does the cripple get to the table? What connection did he have? What was his end? How did that happen? Well, the answer is Mosebius gets to the table of David because of what?
He didn't do it in his own, Mosebius doesn't get to the table without help. Whatever saying that we repeat in this church, when you see a turtle on a fence post, you know what? He didn't get there by itself. Mosebius doesn't get to the royal table to be treated like a prince by himself. He got there because of his father. He got there because his father, Jonathan, was wise, that before his father, Jonathan dies, he made provision for his son. He said to David, in whom he covenants with, David and Jonathan had a covenant, a bond, and Jonathan said to David, after I'm dead and gone, will you care for my children? Will you covenant? Will you swear that my household will not be cut off from your lives? A covenant was made. You see, Mosebius shaft is lavished with the goodness of the king, not because David loves Mosebius, he doesn't even know Mosebius, but because David loves him. Jonathan, because he loves Jonathan, Mosebius shafts gets it all. Well, the parallel is obvious. How the cripples like us get to God's table? I don't want to break the news to you, but you didn't get there because you were still attractive. You didn't get there because you were faithful and good. We have no merit of our own. Christianity is not about being good. We are morally lame. In fact, the Bible says, we don't even seek admission. Did you notice that? Mosebius shafts doesn't come a knock on the door and say, I'm Jonathan's son. I'm here to claim what's mine. It's David who goes and seeks Mosebius shafts. Isaiah chapter 61 verse 1, God said, in a beautiful way, I permitted myself to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, here I am. Like a game of hide and seek. You know, and God said, I'm sort of going to pretend to be hiding, but as soon as you start working, I'm going to jump up. I'm going to reveal myself. You're not even making, but I'm going to thrust myself in front of you. Here I am. There are people who aren't even looking for me. It's God who pursues us. It's God who goes and finds us. In fact, right through this room, this very morning, you can count on this, that the father has turned to the sun and he says, are there any more of your house on whom I may pour out my mercy, Jesus? Are there any more of your family that I've yet overlooked? Where are
God? The father loves you because he loves his son. All the benefits, all the blessings. That's the security of it. As we struggle, as we fumble, as we boil it, as we look at our lives and say, God, can rub me up such a failure. I'm a rich. This doesn't have to do with you. It was never drawn to you for your beauty. Father and son coven in together. The Bible says, that's our security. That's our security. Is the God's war on something greater than God's finding nothing greater than himself. Surround himself that he would keep his covenant. That every person for whom Jesus died, the father would find and bring him to his family and he will not miss one. And our security in this life is that the father is nuts for his son, Jesus. And we are in the house of Jesus. We are in his family so we get the good. When I was at college, no money, no confidence, I would like to take a girl to the Bokerson Hotel and Club. The Bokerson Hotel and Club was one of the happiest places in all of Florida. Now, you have to know that my family is decidedly middle class and the only reason that we had an association with this club is that the company, my father, worked for the company's new man and did it and because he was an executive, he got a membership. So I would pull up to the gate of the Bokerson Hotel and Club and a rumbling or, you know, Jawapi of a car and you could see that the guards standing there wanted to tell you where the service entrance was. And as the guard would step out of the guard booth and look with the things at me and the heap I was driving, I would just unroll the window and say, I'm Norman Cortezer's son. And the gate would go up. I'd look over at that girl, you know, drive right in. You know, when you show up before God and we make our outlandish prayers, what do you think will come to the end of the prayer? We say, what? I'm connected with Jesus. I'm praying in the name of Jesus. I have no claims here. I have no standing. I have no right. I don't belong here except for one thing. I have one place. I belong to Jesus. It's all I've got handed to all I need. That's what makes the name leap for joy. Have you experienced it? Are you resting it? Are you in Jesus' family? Let's pray together.