God's and David is known for that.
Tonight we're gonna be talking about a topic
that affects all of us because we all live
in a world full of conflict.
And you don't have to look far to see conflict in our world.
If you've been paying attention in the news,
there's a lot of conflict right now in the Middle East
and in Israel, specifically along the Gaza Strip
and throughout the cities of Israel.
If you've been paying attention at all here
in local politics, there's a lot of conflict going on,
especially with the first few issues on the ballot
this coming November.
You don't have to look far to see conflict in our world,
both on the national level, on an international level,
and even in our own community.
But there are conflicts that affect us on an everyday basis.
A lot of times those kinds of conflicts are far from us,
or we deal with them when it's time to vote.
But a lot of times the conflicts that really deal with us
on a week to week basis where we live, work, and play
are a little bit more,
we see these things a little bit more often.
For example, our golden Oreos, really Oreos, right?
We just talked about this one with candy corn.
Yes, candy corn, no candy corn, right?
I was trying to think of a few more of ones
that we face these on a more daily basis.
One where I come from,
we don't call the carbonated beverage that you drink pop.
But there's that argument, right?
Pop, is it pop?
Is it soda?
Is it Coke?
What do you call it, right?
There's the, this one, this one I get,
I had to deal with this one this last week.
This pineapple really belong on pizza, right?
Some of these conflicts,
we may not ever get an answer
to some of these kinds of conflicts.
If you live in Ohio,
can you really be a Michigan fan, right?
And the conflict continues, right?
The conflict click, right?
Many times the conflict's all getting aside.
We do live in a world that's full of conflict, right?
Many times the conflict can be in our own families.
It can be in our neighborhoods.
It can be in the city square, in our own state,
on a national level, in an international level.
One writer said this conflict is humanity's primal instinct.
And James chapter four, verse one,
kind of alludes to that.
Where does wars and fighting come among you?
It's because of our own lusts.
It is kind of part of that old man, that old nature
that we struggle with conflict in our world
and probably won't cease conflict
until we arrive to our heavenly home
because of the lusts that we have inside of us.
But one of the things that we're gonna hopefully
be able to pull out from our scripture today
is how to deal with conflict.
Because as believers, we need to know how to learn
to deal with conflict as it arises
in a way that honors God and demonstrates
that we have a heart after his.
So if you're gonna be in your scripture tonight,
we're gonna be in first Samuel chapter 25.
And we've got a lot to cover tonight.
It's a very lengthy chapter.
We won't read every single verse,
but kind of help pull out some of these highlights.
Let's pray together before we begin
to dive into the scripture this evening.
Father in heaven, we're so thankful for the word of God
that illuminates our hearts and our minds, Lord,
that you have given us this instruction booklet
so that we might be able to be conformed to your image,
that we might be able to know who you are,
that we might be able to understand the grace
that you've given to us in the eternal life
as promised to all who believe.
Father, I pray that if there is someone here tonight
who does not know Christ as their savior,
Lord, that tonight through the preaching of the word of God,
you would use the spirit of God to convict their heart,
to help them understand that there is a greater conflict
beyond just the conflict that we have in our everyday life.
Lord, that's the conflict between man and God,
sin and righteousness, but Lord,
you have already bridged the gap
so that we might have peace with you.
Father, I pray for those in here today
who have already called upon Christ to save you,
save them, but Lord, that they would help
to have a heart like yours in dealing with conflict,
that we might be able to use this scripture, Lord,
you might be able to use it and the Holy Spirit
to illuminate our hearts tonight.
And Jesus, and we pray, amen.
So I wanna kind of summarize the first dozen verses or so
as we lead up to the context of what we're gonna be talking
about.
So just kind of keeping up with David's life,
we've been walking through Samuel and his account
of David's life from his early beginnings
as a shepherd boy to his anointing,
to his display of courage and trust in Lord
on the battlefield with the Philistine Goliath.
We've seen him go through some valleys
in losing his friends, losing his family,
losing many different things,
but finding ultimate satisfaction in God.
We've been able to see him interact with Saul in the cave
and sparing Saul's life, him honoring God
through that portion.
But now we find in 1 Samuel chapter 25,
there's sort of a ceasefire between him and King Saul.
And so David finds himself out in an area called Hebron,
out near Carmel, not the mountain, but a different city.
And here he is with, he's kind of gathered together
a band of 600 rough riders, if you will.
These guys are men of war.
They are trained militarily and they are
a legion to David.
And here he finds himself working on the countryside
back into a familiar territory where he is guarding sheep.
He's guarding a rich man's sheep.
And that rich man, the Bible says, his name is Nabal.
Now Nabal is kind of given to us in verse three of chapter 25.
In verse one, Samuel died, the prophet Samuel,
and all of Israel mourned him.
And then now we find David out in the countryside
in familiar territory.
Verse three, we are familiarized with a man named Nabal.
And his wife Abigail, this man, the Bible says,
is a rich man.
He has many possessions and a lot of those possessions.
Of course, culturally is sheep and goats and other livestock.
And so we find that here, David is in the wilderness
in verse four and he is hearing good news,
good news for him.
He's hearing that Nabal is come time to shear the sheep.
Now to help kind of clue you into what's going on here,
culturally, sheep shearing time is a celebratory time
in the Middle East because it means payday.
When the sheep are shorn, it is time to get paid
to make lots of money.
So it's a celebratory time.
And it was very common back in this time
for those who had much riches and much sheep
when it came shearing time,
that they were going to kind of pay off some of their debts.
And they were going to pay the people that they owed.
In this regard, it was very common for those who had
a lot of money and a lot of sheep
and a lot of country acres to protect
from invaders and thieves
that many times these people would hire mercenaries,
they would hire military people
to protect their investments before it came time to shear.
And that's where we find David and his 600 rough riders.
They are protecting Nabal's property.
His sheep from invaders, from thieves,
and from anyone who would come in
and try to make a profit off of this livestock.
And so it's sheep shearing time.
And that means that it's payday for David and for his 600 men.
So it's a celebratory time.
When David hears that it's time to shear the sheep,
he sends in an envoy to Nabal and he sends a couple of men.
He doesn't want to frighten Nabal,
but they go in and they kind of go expectantly.
They go in because it's time for them to receive the payment
for all the work that they have done.
And in verses five through 12,
David sends out this envoy and these men are unfortunately
ridiculed and dishonored.
Nabal goes, I don't know who David is,
I don't know who these people are.
It seems to me that right now,
a lot of people are defying their king.
That was kind of a slam towards David.
And so because I don't know him
and I don't know you people, get lost.
And so there is a great amount of dishonor
and the people who were working for David
that were sent by David walk away empty handed.
And that's where we pick up in our text today
in 1 Samuel chapter 25 verse 13.
We're dealing with conflict tonight
and we're gonna look at four different actions
that we can apply to our lives from this text today
that we might be able to learn to deal with conflict
as it arises in a way that honors God.
So if you're taking notes,
the first thing that we were gonna learn today
is that when conflict arises, we need to slow down.
When conflict arises, slow down.
And we learn this by watching what David doesn't do
in verse 13.
So if you have your copy of your scripture,
let's look in here, 1 Samuel chapter 25,
beginning in verse 13, it says,
David said unto his men, gird you on every man his sword
and they girded on every man his sword.
And David also girded on his sword.
And there went up after David about 400 men
and 200 abode with the stuff.
Now, here's what's going on.
David has been dishonored publicly.
He's got 600 men at his disposal.
When the men come back with the news
that Nabal has not only dishonored you publicly,
but he's also decided to not pay off debts with you.
David is infuriated.
In verse 13, he says, all right,
I want all of you to put your sword on.
Now, this wasn't some kind of intimidation gesture.
David decided at some point that the way to respond
to this dishonoring message and this conflict
is to ride into battle.
The Bible says here that he takes 400 men.
That's a lot of people.
And his plan was to take these 400 men,
we find out later in scripture,
he was planning on killing Nabal and every man
in that community, shepherds, people he knew included.
That's how frustrated and how upset David was.
No doubt, David believed that he was owed something
and he was gonna collect what was due to him,
no matter what.
David's response in his display of anger
displays the danger of a gut reaction
in the times of conflict.
One counselor and best-selling author wrote this.
He said, severe anger is a form of insanity.
You are insane whenever you are not in control
of your behavior.
Therefore, when you are angry and out of control,
you are temporarily insane.
I don't know how much I agree with this in entirety,
but there is a clue here because that's not necessarily
what we've seen David's track record so far.
David doesn't normally say, I'm so mad,
I'm going to just murder an entire town.
That's not the David that we've learned so far.
But at some point here, when the conflict was arisen,
David decided to do, to make a choice not to slow down,
but to do wrong.
If you spend any amount of time on the internet,
you've probably come across this meme
where there's a conversation going on in a boardroom
and there's two good answers
and then one smug guy gives an answer,
the boss gets mad and throws the one guy out the window.
Anybody seen this meme before?
Maybe some of you who have parents
or some of you who are parents of teenagers,
maybe you felt like this one time
when you got an answer from your kid, right?
But we all deal with conflict sometimes poorly.
I remember one time when I was in college,
I was teaching a Wana group on a Wednesday night.
I was the director of the Truth and Training Club,
which is third, fourth and fifth graders.
And we had one young man in our class.
He was such a joy to have in class.
He ever had one of those.
He was one of those kinds of people
that you just were really frustrated all the time, right?
Because every time he came into class,
he was disrespectful, he was disrespectful to teachers,
he was disrespectful to other people.
He was always arguing, he was making fun of people.
He was just a joy to having class.
And I remember one time we were having an illustration time
when we were illustrating about the Bible
and I was using an egg.
And we had an egg broken up and an egg yolk.
And we were finished with the illustration
and he decided, you know, it would be a really good time
to stand up, to come put his hand in the egg
and then try to wipe it all over the back of my shirt.
And I remember at this point, I had, you know,
I was not dealing with this temptation very well
at this point.
And I remember when he would came around my back,
I spun around to grab him and I elbowed him
in the back of the head.
Now, not on purpose, after I went,
after I apologized to the mom, I was like, I'm so sorry.
I didn't mean to do that.
At one point I went home and I was just like, you know what?
Man, if I would have spun around a little bit harder,
maybe I would have knocked him out.
But sometimes we don't deal with conflict the right way.
We get heated, we get frustrated.
In fact, we don't do what Paul says
in 1 Corinthians chapter 9, 27.
We don't keep our bodies under subjection.
Because oftentimes that kind of response,
when we deal with conflict, when conflict arises,
the idea of slowing down is actually not only counter-cultural,
but it's also counter-biological.
Because a lot of times when we enter into a time of frustration
and time of anger, our body actually has a natural response.
We enter into a fight or flight situation
when we become very angry.
And a biologist have told us that actually what happens
is our brain releases a hormone called adrenaline.
And when adrenaline hits the bloodstream,
it increases your blood pressure,
makes your heart beat faster, it squeezes the arteries,
there's all kinds of things that happen
when adrenaline hits the bloodstream.
And so what happens is that because we're still living
in these sin-cursed bodies,
we still have bodies that betray the way
that we should respond in times of conflict.
And so when we get angry, we actually have a biological response
that we not only have to deal with the spiritual side of it,
but the biological side as well.
Now, as we're dealing with this,
I don't know that we'll gain victory over that portion
until we reach heaven and we get some glorified bodies
that no longer have the wrong responses to things.
But what I think we should do while we're here
and we're still dealing with that
is heed the words of the wisest man in the world, Solomon,
from Proverbs chapter 29.
He says,
In angry man stirs up strife,
and a furious man aboundeth in transgression.
When conflict arises, what we must learn to do
is rather let, instead of letting the fires burn
and us rushing into what's going on, that conflict,
we need to learn to slow down, slow down.
Not only that, when conflict arises,
if you're taking notes number two,
we need to learn to listen up.
When conflict arises, we must learn to listen up.
Let's read on in verse 14.
It says,
But one young man told Abigail, Nabal's wife,
saying, behold David sent messengers out of the wilderness
to salute our master, and he railed on them.
That's talking about Nabal railing on David's envoy.
But the men were very good unto us,
and we were not hurt.
Neither missed we anything,
as long as we were conversant with them
when we were in the fields.
And they were a wall unto us, both day and night,
night and day, and all the while,
while we were with them keeping the sheep.
Now therefore, know and consider what thou wilt do,
for evil is determined against our master,
and against all his household,
for such is a son of Belial,
that a man cannot speak to him.
Then Abigail made haste, took 200 loaves,
and two bottles of wine, and five sheep ready dressed,
and five measures of parched corn,
and a hundred clusters of grapes,
and 200 cakes of figs, and laid them on asses,
and she said to her servants,
Go on before me, behold, I come after you,
but she told not her husband.
Sociologists have identified really three main building blocks,
if you will, when it comes to how culture works
in our society.
There are three main components in which culture is built.
They're kind of like they've been referred to
as almost like the basic colors of the painting palette,
where you can take those three basic colors
and you can paint all kinds of different shades of colors.
Well, the three basic components of culture
is shame, guilt, and fear,
and how cultures react and utilize their colors.
These are the things that change those things,
change very drastically depending on where you live.
Now, we grew up, if you're like me, you grew up in the West,
we grew up in what's called a,
a sociologist would call it a guilt-based society.
So our society, a lot of the West, North America, Europe,
our laws, the way that we interact with each other,
a lot of time is built on guilt or no guilt.
That's how our laws are built, the way they are,
that's the reasons why we interact with each other
a lot the way that we do.
But as you begin to travel across the world,
what you find in the East, specifically the Middle East
and Asia and many parts of Asia Minor today,
these are still shame-based cultures,
which means that guilt is,
it's part of how they deal with each other,
but shame is really more the driving force
between how relationships are handled.
If you're in a fear-based culture,
many of those have been described as tribal cultures,
like in those in Latin America or Africa
or even places like New Guinea,
that's how their culture is based.
And we see that a lot through how they interact
with their gods and the witch doctors, the voodoo,
they try to build fear and the tribes
try to have these fear competitions.
This is how they do culture.
But when we're dealing with David here,
David is in a shame-based culture.
And the shame that is brought upon David by Nabal
and his ungracious and demeaning words
to David's envoy and David personally
create this cultural imbalance
that kind of tempts David to balance the scales.
That's just kind of a little bit of explanation
of what may be going on through David's heart.
David chooses though,
that how he's gonna balance the scales
is that he's going to kill Nabal,
his family and their workforce.
That's how he decides to balance the scales.
But we see here a wise lady, according to verse three,
now it introduces us to Nabal,
which means fool by the way,
and Abigail, according to verse three,
is a woman of good understanding
and of beautiful countenance.
And this lady is reported to by one of her servants,
one of the shepherds in verse 14,
who relays this dishonorable treatment
of David and his envoy to Abigail.
And Abigail right away knows,
I've got to intervene, I've got to do something.
And so we see in the text that we just read,
she prepares this huge, a massive feast,
this huge banquet.
She says, get it already.
We're gonna deliver it.
It's kind of the ancient Uber.
She's going to deliver it to David.
And so they put all of this food on these donkeys
and she goes out riding out with the food.
Now let's look on here at verse 28,
and we'll see how she responds to David.
She meets David and these 400 armed men
coming down the mountainside.
And in between a city of a bunch of innocent people
and a 400 murderous rough riders,
she meets them, she bows to the earth.
And in verse 28, she says to David,
I pray thee, forgive the trespass of thine handmade
for the Lord will certainly make my Lord a sure house
because my Lord fighteth the battles of thee, Lord.
And evil hath not been found in all thy days.
Yet a man is risen to pursue thee and to seek thy soul,
but the soul of my Lord shall be bound
in the bundle of life with thee, Lord, thy God.
And the souls of thy enemies shall he sling out
as in the middle of a sling.
And it shall come to pass when the Lord hath done to my Lord
according to all the good that he hath spoken concerning thee
and shall have appointed thee ruler over Israel,
that this shall be no grief unto thee,
nor offense of heart unto my Lord,
either that thou hast shed blood causeless,
or that my Lord hath avenged himself,
but when the Lord shall have dealt well with my Lord,
then remember thine handmade.
Abigail in a stroke of genius decides to meet him
and his hungry men with this huge platter.
She falls to the earth and she gives this wonderfully,
I don't know if she rehearsed this,
but it was a wonderful speech to David,
highlighting his life, highlighting what she knows about him,
how he has been anointed to be the next king,
highlighting his battle with Goliath,
highlighting how God has his hand of favor over David.
And she says, I don't want you to mess it all up, David.
I don't want you to get to the throne and look back
and know what you have done to Nabal and this community.
In her apologies for her foolish husband,
Abigail wisely reminds David of the folly
that would be unleashed upon him and his household,
if he were to go through with his plan.
Look back again at verse 30 and 31.
She says, it shall come to pass when the Lord shall have done
to my Lord, that's David, according to all the good
that he have spoken concerning thee,
have appointed thee ruler over Israel.
She says, when you get to be king, David,
I know what God's done, we've heard it,
God's put his hand upon you
and you are going to be the next king.
When you get to that position, David,
I don't want you to look back, verse 31,
and remember that you've shed blood causeless
and that you've avenged yourself.
She points out two evils
that he would have been guilty of doing.
Murder and a causeless murder, that's verse 31,
shed blood causeless and vengeance,
the Lord that my Lord had to avenge himself,
talking of David.
These two things, murder and vengeance.
This murder here, or what the Bible would refer to
as blood guilt, was something that's kind of all throughout
the Old Testament, it pervades all the sources,
legal, narrative, cultic.
It's the very, we're very first introduced to this idea
of blood guilt in Genesis chapter four,
when the Bible says that Abel's blood calls out
from the ground.
This kind of blood guilt, taking a life without cause,
is something that throughout the Old Testament
was punishable many times multi-generationally.
God would oftentimes punish an entire generation
or entire legacy of people because of this kind of sin.
And life was so important.
There's such a big deal still as today.
Life is a big deal to God.
And those who are quick to shed innocent blood,
I believe will be avenged by God himself,
even in our culture today.
But I wanna say to you that God,
it's been a big deal from the very beginning.
Life has been a very big deal to God from the very beginning.
In fact, in Deuteronomy chapter 25,
there are specific laws related to the shedding
of innocent blood.
God provides some interesting thought
in Deuteronomy chapter 25.
It's very clear that God decided that if you were going
to shed innocent blood,
you would be guilty of capital punishment.
So much so that if you actually killed somebody accidentally,
you would still be liable for capital punishment.
But in order to allow for grace in the Old Testament,
the Old Testament, God provided six cities,
what we call, we're all cities of refuge
where you could escape to if you accidentally killed somebody.
Now, if you didn't get to that city in time
and someone killed you to pay you back basically
to balance the scales, that was okay.
That was capital punishment.
But if you were able to escape
to one of these cities of refuge,
the Bible says that you were allowed to stay there,
you couldn't leave the city
and you had to wait until the high priest died
and then you would be absolved of that blood guilt.
That was just God demonstrating that he took life seriously.
Now, there was also a thing in Deuteronomy chapter 25
known as the unknown blood guilt clause.
And so what would happen is that the Bible says
that if somebody was found dead
and nobody knew what happened,
there still needed to be reparation.
And so what would happen is that God says
you would call out the Levitical priests
of the nearest towns and they would literally measure
how far their town was from the dead body.
And whoever's town was closest,
that town had to provide a heifer, a cow
that had never been used and had never been used to plow.
It was a brand new cow
and you would have to take the cow out to that spot,
sacrifice the cow.
They'd have to ritually wash their hands
and beg God to forgive them
and not hold that blood guilty against them.
That's how serious God was when it came to this blood guilt,
this murder in the Old Testament.
And this is what David was going to be found guilty of
if Abigail had not stopped, stepped in and spoken to him
if she had not listened to her servant
and brought that reminder to David.
Personal vengeance, you might think,
well, that's kind of a weird one.
God had a really big emphasis,
a whole entire chapter about blood guilt.
That makes sense, but vengeance, she brings up,
she says you'd be guilty of two things, David,
killing without a cause, blood causelessly
and the Lord hath avenged himself.
What is that all about?
Well, this one's related to blood guilt in a way
because a lot of times blood guilt was established
because of someone's personal vengeance.
Somebody got mad and then somebody killed somebody.
That was kind of how they were.
It kind of worked hand in hand.
And oftentimes the vehicle for blood guilt
was one person's choice to circumvent the will
and the plan of God and retaliate to a point of killing.
So David would have not only been impious by doing this,
but also would be close to blasphemous at this time,
believing that he was above God's will
in taking the life of somebody
and personally seeking vengeance.
A quick wick birthed by wise choices of listening up
by Abigail ends up saving David from a great fall.
Proverbs 11, 14 says, where no council is, the people fall.
But in the multitude of counselors, there is safety.
My wife and I were blessed to be able to go away
for a few days this last week into Amish country
and for about a day and a half we sat through sessions,
listening to a biblical counselor talk about the importance
of counsel and biblical counseling for teenagers
and for children.
And the importance of how the word of God is used
to help change someone's heart
because that is where real change happens.
Because a lot of times when we deal with counsel,
a lot of times counselors try to change just the surface level.
They try to change the behavior of somebody,
stop doing bad things, start doing good things
and they never really get down to someone's desires
and their beliefs.
And in the all times don't use the word of God
to change those to produce the good fruit.
He used an illustration of how if when he was teaching
he'd have somebody bring in a tree
and he'd set the tree on the stage
and he'd say, I'm gonna take this banana,
I'm gonna tape this banana to the tree
and he'd leave it there for a few days
and what would happen?
The banana would begin to rot
because that fruit was not part of that tree.
And that's a lot of times when we counsel,
we don't use the word of God, that's what happens.
We try to change someone's behavior, the fruit,
without changing the root.
He also reminded us the importance of self counsel,
using the word of God to counsel yourself.
Now interesting enough, one of the most clear representations
we see in the Old Testament of someone counseling themselves
with truth from the word of God is David.
Predominantly Psalm 42 verse five,
David says, why art thou cast down on my soul?
Why art thou disquieted in me?
Hope thou in God for I shall yet praise him
for the help of his countenance.
Counsel is important, especially when there's conflict.
And if we're going to deal with conflict
a way that honors God, we must, when conflict arise,
listen up, we must seek Godly counsel
and seek counsel from God's word on how to deal with it.
Let's keep going, when conflict arises number three,
we must learn to peer in.
We must learn to look inside and see what God is doing
in our hearts during this conflict.
Verse 32, let's continue with the narrative.
Verse 32, David says to Abigail,
blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
which sent thee this day to me,
and blessed be thy advice, and blessed be thou,
which has kept me this day from coming to shed blood,
and from avenging myself with mine own hand.
After that influential discussion,
after the counsel that's heated from Abigail,
from her own steward, now Abigail's counsel
is being heated by David.
And David takes a moment to compose himself,
to slow down, to listen up, and now he begins to peer in.
He knows that this woman was used by God
and allowed by God to bring him much needed counsel.
He uses the word blessed three times here
in these two verses.
That Hebrew word, blessed, means to kneel before.
He says, blessed be the God of Israel.
As David peers in, he begins to understand that David,
David understands that the sovereignty of God
in this situation, that God is the one
who's allowed this to happen,
that God has allowed this woman to stop him
from this foolishness and give him a chance
to cool down, listen up, and peer in.
He also says, blessed be thy advice.
David understands the impact of wise counsel
in his own life, and he says blessed be thou.
David understands that even this agent of reproof
is something that God has delivered to him
to help save him from foolishness
and from catastrophe in his life.
These two verses here show the inward change of heart
that David has, which manifests in his stay
of illegitimate execution.
From this point on, David does not continue,
and he does not continue with his desire to kill anybody.
But I wanna point out here this incredible 180
that happens in David's heart after he decides
to stop, to listen up, and to peer in.
You see, it's part of God's plan for holiness
and righteousness in the church
that reproof be part of the Christian experience,
that reproof be part of the church experience.
In fact, Paul says to his son in the ministry,
Timothy, as a pastor, I want you to reproof,
to rebuke.
It's part of scripture's profitability
in Timothy chapter three, verse 16, right?
All scripture is given by inspiration
of God's profitable for doctrine and for reproof.
What is reproof?
Well, reproof is the biblical practice of gentle correction
and redirection towards God's intended plan for our life.
It's part of God's plan to keep his church holy and righteous.
And a believer, as a believer, we need to be willing
to receive reproof the way that David received it here
from Abigail.
But oftentimes, that's not the case that we see.
Oftentimes, if we are not careful,
we allow our hearts to become bitter,
to become pompous, to become prideful.
And when someone comes to us with a word of reproof,
we decide, you know what, it's just a lot easier
to just go down to the next church and to run away from that.
But I'm telling you, reproof is a biblical practice
that needs to happen in our church.
It's not a way of judgment, being judgmental
towards somebody else.
It is a gentle correction towards God's intended path
for our lives.
And when we are unwilling to listen to reproof
and we would rather choose to play victim,
we'd rather choose to escape to another church in town,
we are destroying what God wants to do in our own life
and in this church.
There are consequences when we choose not to listen.
And I heard this story recently in the early 1920s,
there was a guy named Alman Shroger.
I don't know if you've ever heard of this guy before.
He was an undertaker in Indiana,
and he was also an inventor.
In the early 1920s, there was what was called
switchboard operators.
And so for some of the younger kids,
when you used to make a phone call,
you used to pick up a receiver,
this is before my time, I had to do some study,
you picked up the receiver
and somebody would ask you a question, okay?
And what you'd do is you'd give them the number
and then they would physically take a cable out of a wall
and put it into another place in the wall
and that would connect the phone lines.
That's how phone calls used to be made
before cell phones and cell phone towers.
So the lady that was the switchboard operator
in Alman's town was the wife
of the only other undertaker in town.
And so when somebody would call and ask for Alman
in his undertaker practice,
this lady would take the phone
and connect it to her husband's practice
and he would swipe the client.
And so obviously that necessity birthed an invention.
And what he invented was called the automated switchboard.
What he decided is he decided to include some circuits
and a rotary dial that you could use yourself,
and this was also again before me,
but there was a type of phone where you would spin the numbers
and they would automatically move a computerized,
well not computerized, but a digitized board
and you would be able to connect the phone call yourself.
And this guy came up with that invention.
And it began to sweep the nation, right?
In the 30s and 40s, automatic switchboard operators,
or switchboard operators became non-necessary.
They would install these automated switchboards.
And what happened was that close to 178,000 people
that were women who were working in the United States
lost their jobs because they were all put out of business
by this piece of technology.
And so this guy came up with this invention
and thousands of women who were emerging out of the home
at this time in the early 20s, 30s, and 40s,
finding a new place, a new path in the workforce,
it derailed hundreds of thousands of young women's careers
and all of them were in the same business.
And this guy came up with this invention
and thousands of women who were emerging
and honestly, it's hard to say the impact
that had on for women in America.
But I say all that to say,
that can translate into the church.
When one person decides they're not going to listen
to reproof, when they would rather harden their heart,
when they would rather say, you know what,
it's a lot easier to just not deal with this,
I'll just go down the street to another church.
There can be unintended consequences for the local church.
Reprove is part of the Christian experience.
As one Scottish commenter put it,
it's a mark of sincere and genuine godliness
to not be less thankful for being kept from sinning
than from being rescued from suffering.
A mark of maturity, I believe in Christ,
is the ability to peer in in the face of conflict,
examining ourselves and our responses
rather than the problem at hand.
Many times that happens when godly reproof
is part of the local church.
Number four, we're running out of time.
When conflict arises, we must learn to look out.
Now I don't mean look out for pots and pans
flying across the house or chairs.
That's not what I mean by looking out.
I mean, look at what God is doing.
As one pastor put it, don't look at what's happening
around you, look what's happening in you.
David and Abigail's conversation between this time
and the twist that we're gonna look at in here
in just a minute, Nibble throws a party.
He demonstrates just how foolish he is.
He throws this huge party, Bible says that he gets drunk.
The next day he wakes up and Abigail says to him, Nibble,
I wanna let you know about something
that happened yesterday.
David and those 600 men that had been protecting
your investment, they came here to kill you.
But I stopped them.
And the Bible says in verse 37 that when Nibble heard
those words, the Bible says that his heart died within him
and he became as stone.
Verse 38 says 10 days later, the Lord smote Nibble.
David did not take vengeance, but God did.
And here's the twist, verse 39.
39 says when David heard that Nibble was dead,
he said, bless be the Lord that hath pleaded the cause
of my reproach from the hand of Nibble
and hath kept his servant from evil.
For the Lord hath returned the wickedness of Nibble
upon his own head and David sent and communed with Abigail
to take her to him, to wife.
David sends a proposal to Abigail, Abigail accepts.
And the Bible says that she comes with her entourage
and they're married.
Later on in scripture we find out in 2 Samuel,
they have a child, one child together.
And actually in scripture, two different places,
he's named two different things.
And I think I just wanted to point it out.
In 2 Samuel chapter three, their child is named David.
His child is named Kilab,
which means the restraint of the father.
After David listened up, he slowed down, he peered in,
he looked out, he decided to make the right decision.
His hand was stayed, he restrained from killing the ball
and he was innocent of blood guilt.
The second name of this child,
the second name is given to this child
is in 1 Chronicles chapter three.
It's the word Daniel, which means God is my judge,
pointing towards God's vengeance on the ball
rather than David taking vengeance upon himself.
When conflict arises, we have to learn to look out
because when something is happening,
it's not happening to us, it's happening for us.
God allows conflict into our lives to sharpen us
and to help us be more like him.
One pastor said it this way, in the toughest times,
the hardest conversations, the most painful relationship
tensions is when the light of grace shines brightest
and transforms us most into his son's likeness.
Conflict is inevitable.
People are not going to stop putting pineapples on their pizza.
But I want to tell you that we can respond the right way
when conflict arises.
We can learn to slow down, to listen up,
to peer in and look out and honor God with how we respond.
Would you bow your heads?