"Surrendering to God's Sovereign Discipline" - 2 Samuel 16:5-14

What can you learn from David's surrender to the sovereign discipline of God?

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Transcript

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Church, I'm so grateful to be with you. I love you so very much. It's my joy for us to be together here this morning. For those visiting, we're grateful that you're here. I know it's been a transitional couple of weeks. For most of us, we've got one more week left of school, and everybody's going to be heading in a thousand directions this summer, I'm sure. But we're in a sermon series, and we're getting towards the end of it, got a few more weeks. We're in the book of 2 Samuel, and our series is Faithful and Flawed. Faithful and Flawed, as we've been looking at the life of King David, a man of great faith who ran after God's own heart, but a man of great flaws who ran after God's amazing grace. And we've looked at the life of David, and I've been talking about this since the beginning of the series. David, in the beginning of the series, shows us all these amazing aspects of the life of a true believer, what it is to run after God's heart, what it is to live for God. And then all of a sudden we see in chapter 11 the affair that he had with Bathsheba, and then being an accessory to murder of Bathsheba's husband, and everything in his ministry starts going downhill. But today, today we're going to see, even in the midst of suffering, he teaches us that a man or a woman after God's own heart is one who understands and, as the title shows us this morning, surrenders to God's sovereign discipline. Surrendering to God's sovereign discipline is what we're going to look at as we look at 2 Samuel chapter 16, verses 5 through 14. And I will just say this there is a universal truth for Christians in the 21st century. I want you to stop and think about this right now. And the 10 years I've been the pastor here, this has come up over and over and over again. I find over and over people are surprised by suffering. It's like when we're suffering, all of a sudden we look up at God and say, why? This is not supposed to happen. I am supposed to experience heaven on earth. This world is supposed to be paradise. All my relationships are supposed to be perfect. My body should be full of energy and health for hundreds of years. And we know that's not true here. And yet when we face suffering, God reveals what's going on in here. You know, one of the reasons I love to read and read Christian books from more than a hundred years ago is authors in the 20th century, in the 19th century, in the 18th century, and way before that, even though getting through their English is not always easy, I find they're not scared or surprised by suffering. I was reading the other day an author from the 1400s. He was not surprised when he was suffering because for him, plagues and short life and just complete suffering and struggle were part of their daily journey. But today, for us, we are so prosperous. There's a medication for everything. And most of you have enough money that you can get really far in this life, coasting on natural gifts and good investments and not trusting in God. But I have found that for every single person, I don't care who it is, a hundred percent of every one of you in this room looking at me and those watching on the video or those listening to this podcast, God is gonna find a way to get inside your heart. And he's gonna lead you into some type of suffering that you cannot fix in your own strength. And when he does, we're gonna learn from David today. This is not a time to fight. This is not a time to shake your fist. This is not a time to run away. This is not a time to try to double down on your energy and your effort to make things different. It is a time to be still before God and recognize what he's doing and surrender to his process of discipline, which he does for every single one of his children. This is something that is so foreign to us. And again, I blame there's a lot of different reasons. I think part of it too is what's floating around social media and these little two-minute vignettes that you see on Instagram or YouTube shorts or Facebook reels that are telling you that your season of prosperity is coming, and if you just believe this and say this and send this to five people, you're just gonna experience all this blessing. And we missed the whole point. It's not that God's just aware of your suffering, he let it happen. He allowed it to happen in his sovereign will because he's doing something in it. And if you don't know what he's doing in your suffering, you're in a good place today because David is gonna show us. David is gonna show us how we can respond. How we can respond. We can begin to see suffering not as cruel punishment from a cold-hearted God, but the discipline of a loving father. And we're gonna see this through David. Okay, David's under severe discipline for his disobedience, but God is not tormenting him, God is disciplining him and tearing apart his pride so that he can truly be a man after God's own heart. So here's our big idea as we look at 2 Samuel chapter 16, verses 5 through 14. Our big idea in one sentence David's refusal to retaliate after receiving curses and stones from Shimei reveals his true surrender to God's sovereign discipline. I'll say it again. David's refusal to retaliate after receiving curses and stones from Shimei reveals his true surrender to God's sovereign discipline. So if you want to know more about this, and and I know this applies to every life in this room, no matter what you're walking through, we can learn about this sovereign discipline and how we can surrender to this process. If you want to know more about that, turn with me to the book of 2 Samuel. Again, 2 Samuel is after 1 Samuel. It's before 1 Kings. If you don't have a Bible, grab the Pew Bible in front of you or beside you. We're on page 315 in your Pew Bible. And if you would stand at this time out of the reading of God's holy, infallible, inerrant, and fully sufficient word, we are in 2 Samuel chapter 16. We're going to start here in verse 5 and work our way through verse 14. So hear God's word to us, starting in verse 5. When King David came to Baharim, there came out a man of the family of the house of Saul, whose name was Shimei, the son of Girah. And as he came, he cursed continually, and he threw stones at David, and at all the servants of King David, and all the people, and all the mighty men were on his right hand and on his left. And Shimei said as he cursed, Get out, get out, you man of blood, you worthless man, the Lord has avenged on you all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose place you have reigned, and the Lord has given the kingdom into the hand of your son Absalom. See, your evil is on you, for you are a man of blood. Then Abishai, the son of Zeroiah, said to the king, Why should this dead dog curse my Lord the king? Let me go over and take off his head. But the king said, What have I to do with you, you sons of Zeroiah? Is he cursing because the Lord has said to him, Curse David? Who then shall say, Why have you done so? And David said to Abishai and to all the servants, Behold, my own son seeks my life. How much more now may this Benjamite leave him alone and let him curse? For the Lord has told him to. It may be that the Lord will look on the wrong done to me, and that the Lord will repay me with good for his cursing today. So David and his men went on the road, while Shimei went along to the hillside opposite him, and cursed as he went, and threw stones at him and flung dust. And the king and all the people who were with him arrived weary at the Jordan, and there he refreshed himself. Let's pray. Lord, this is a difficult text because this deals with a difficult issue in our lives, suffering under your discipline. Lord, it's so easy to shake our fist. It's so easy to question. It's so easy to look at everybody else who's got a life that seems better than ours and say, why do I have to deal with this suffering when they don't? But Lord, you know all things. You know none of us in this room have exactly the life that we would have chosen if it was up to us. We all have struggles, we all have pains, and yet those are the doorways that you get in to bring us to a place where you can truly use us and have intimacy with us in your kingdom. Lord, I pray for everybody in this room right now, everybody listening to this video or this podcast, everyone who hears these words, I pray, Lord, that we would apply them directly to whatever we're dealing with in our lives. I don't have to guess, I know each of us who are truly your children are experiencing some form of your discipline. And it's not because you don't love us, it's precisely because you do, and you're a good father, and a good father disciplines his children well. Help us to learn from David, to recognize your hand in our life, and to be submissive to this process, Lord, that we may truly be humbled and truly grow in our intimacy with you. Be with us right now, I pray, in Jesus' name. And God's people said, Amen. Again, I want to be honest. This is a tough sell this morning. There are some of you spiritually that are gonna fight me this whole sermon. Okay, I've been wrestling with it myself this week when I think about my own life. And also as I've been thinking about the lives of many of you. I don't know everything, but I know a lot of what's happening in this church, and I know many of you are really wrestling with big things. In fact, I just want to go the other way and say, I don't know any of you that are not wrestling with something. If you are living a perfect life, please see me after service. I need to learn from you. All right, I don't think anybody in this room would say that we have been able to avoid suffering. But I'm just telling you from the bottom of my heart, I think most of us in this room are absolutely clueless on what we're supposed to do in the midst of suffering and what God is seeking to accomplish. And because of that, we suffer longer and experience more trials than God originally intended for us because we simply will not learn and grow the way God wants us to. So let me just say a few things about God. All right. We'll start on level field here and make sure that we're all on the same page about the God that we're talking about here in the Bible before we get into this situation. So in the title, I said that God is sovereign and that God disciplines, right? So let me begin by talking about the sovereignty of God. What do I mean when I say that God is sovereign? Many of you know this, some of you may not, but we believe, according to the Bible, our God is all-knowing and he's all powerful, and he's all-wise, which means there is nothing in this world that happens by pure accident. There is no coincidence, there is nothing that sneaks past him. There is nothing in this world that God did not know before it happened, and in some way either enabled it or allowed it for a greater purpose. And I don't know how anybody gets through one day in this world without believing that. I mean, if things happen outside the control of God, man, you and I would have reason to have skyrocketing anxiety every single day if there was not a God who is in control. And yes, there's great evil in this world, but every single ounce of evil happens on God's watch. Now, he's not the author of evil, but he allows it to happen to bring about a greater purpose. And you say, Bo, prove it to me. My answer is always the same. You take a good look at that cross. God allowed the greatest evil that could ever happen, putting the perfect Son of God on the cross to bring about the greatest good that could ever happen, bringing salvation to mankind. And so, yes, God's allowed some real evil to happen in your life. And if he got rid of all evil, he'd also get rid of you and me. Because guess what? We don't produce nothing but blessing and goodness all the time. Each one of us is a work in progress. And so God is sovereign and he's in control of everything. And because God is also our heavenly father, he also is in the disciplining business. Now, a lot of people have a tough time with this, but let me just say this. I want you in your mind right now to think about the perfect earthly father. I've heard many of you talk about your fathers or talk about your parents that had good fathers, your neighbors that had good fathers, whatever the case is, when you think of a good father, a good father is a perfect balance of grace and truth, of tender love and firm discipline. That portrait of a father who never disciplines, that's not a good father, who turns a blind eye to things that are not right, that's not a good father. No, our father is perfect and he disciplines those whom he loves. And many of us, when we experience his discipline, we just don't recognize what he's doing. And so we run away when we're supposed to be still and enter into this process of discipline. It's not easy. But and let me say one thing. Over years of counseling, that I've counseled other people, let me say this. When you are under the discipline of God, do not try to figure out what specific thing you said or what specific thing you did that is causing that discipline because you are not God. You don't know his thoughts and you don't know his ways. You can recognize that you are under discipline and be submissive, and God will bring good, but you'll drive yourself crazy if you're trying to figure out what caused you to experience that. And I take that from experience. It drives me nuts when things happen and people say, Well, this is happening. God's doing this because of this. You're not God. Oh, it drives me insane when natural disasters happen and say, Well, that's God's judgment on New Orleans. You're not God. What that is the height of arrogance for you to claim that you know why God does anything. His ways are not your ways, his thoughts are not your thoughts. Yes, he will deal with all sin, but he's never doing just one thing. When he's moving in your life, he's also affecting other people through your life. He's the grand weaver. He's always weaving things together. And those people that claim they know why God does everything, they're just selling books. And they're gonna have to stand before God and give a reason why they're telling them everybody they know every reason why God does everything. So when you're under his discipline, don't try to figure out all these things. This is a time to be still. This is a time to be surrendered, this is a time to be humble, this is a time to cling to him, not run away from him. It's not a time to get busy doing good things for other people. It's a time to be still before him and recognize what he's doing in your life. Because no matter what you're dealing with, he's the God who's going to bring good out of it. All right? We're gonna talk about that a little bit more here in a minute. Now, here's the deal: every single human being suffers, every single one, whether you're a Christian or whether you're not a Christian. Here's the the rub. If you're not a Christian, the Bible says in John chapter 15, you're gonna be purged, and if you are a Christian, you're gonna be pruned. So being a Christian means your suffering actually has purpose. The saddest thing is those who live and suffer and die and never know God, and they're separated from God forever. All their suffering produced no good because they never turned to God of their suffering. And that's horrible. But for those that do turn to God, the Bible says in John 15, they're pruned that they may bear more fruit, and they recognize that God is at work. So if you're in this room and you're a believer, every suffering you've ever experienced is working for you an eternal weight of glory beyond any comparison you could have here on this earth. It's producing something good, it's producing fruit. You can look up at God and say, why? But hear God say to you, Because I love you, and if you did not experience this, you would not be as ready for eternal life as you now are. That's the reason that we're here. We're training for reigning. We're going to reign in the kingdom of God, and we're not ready yet. And so we're in this process of pruning under the discipline of God. And here is where David once again excels. For all his warts and wrinkles, and we've been reading them the last few weeks. Here's where David has been a mentor to me. He is so close to God that even in his great sin, when he's under the discipline of God and he receives rebuke from another man, he recognizes right away, oh, that's got God's fingerprints all over it. I'm not gonna fight this. I'm not gonna try to pray this away. I'm not gonna double down on this guy and show him I'm the king. I'm gonna humble myself. Because if it's God who's doing this, I'm gonna be fighting against God Himself if I speak up. I'm gonna receive this, and God's gonna bring good out of this. I'm telling you, this is a process that most of us don't recognize. And I can only tell you in my own life, I'm just now starting to recognize things that God's been wanting to show me for a very long time. So, what can we learn from this? I just want to hit some high notes as we walk through the text together. I want to show three things that surrendering to God's discipline in your life, three things that it requires. And if you learn from David these three things, you can experience great blessing even in the midst of discipline and suffering. Here's the first. Number one, surrendering to God's sovereign discipline requires humility before God. You and I have got to be humble, or we'll never have the joy that God wants for our life. Now, in verse 10, again, we just have to look at the high notes here. In verse 10, as David's being cursed at, he says this. Here's what he's saying. If God is the one doing this, who am I to tell him to stop? I'm going to be basically fighting against God himself. If God is the one that is calling him to throw words at me and stones at me, to humble me because of my pride in my sin, then I need to receive this and I need to be humbled. This is what David is doing. He's showing us the posture that we take before God in a time of discipline. It is a posture of humility. Now think about this. David's a man after God's own heart, right? He loves the Lord. And we saw in the first couple of chapters of this study that he was dancing before the Lord and didn't care what anybody thought. He showed unbelievable grace to Mephibosheth, who didn't deserve it. He was such a portrait of the faith. And then all of a sudden in chapter 11, he has an adulterous affair. And then he's an accessory to murder. And you say, how can a man after God's own heart slide into that much sin so fast? And the answer is the word pride. And we all wrestle with it. Pride comes before a fall. It happened in the Garden of Eden. If it happened to everyone else before you, it's going to happen to you and I as well. Pride is always the issue. And so the answer to pride is true, grace-fueled humility that tears pride down brick by brick. Now let me give you an illustration. I'm going to give you a portrait. I want you to think about this. Let's say you and I are walking in downtown Meadow. Okay? We're walking in downtown Meadow, we're walking on a sidewalk, and then we turn and we see a storefront, and through the glass, we can see into that store everything we always wanted. And yet every single time we reach out for it, our hand hits a plate glass window, and we realize everything I want's on the other side of that glass, but I don't know how to get there. Well, in the Christian life, you know what it is that you want, even though you can't even put it into words? In that store, what you want? You want the fruit of the Spirit. You want to live a life of joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and gentleness and self-control. That's the good life. That's the life that God wants for you. Do you know that plate glass that's separating you from that? You know what it's called? Pride. The only way you and I are gonna experience life the way that God intended is that you allow God to break the glass for you. And the only way that that happens is He humbles us through the situations in our life that we cannot control. Now, let me tell you something I've learned. Okay, and I'm gonna confess where I fail in this area. Pride manifests. Itself in two different ways, and it's like a scale on both extremes. All right. One side we all recognize pride can be arrogance, over-self-confidence, boastfulness. Everyone recognizes that pride when we see it, right? Well, there's another side of pride, and this is where I've been guilty most of my adult life, and I didn't recognize even until recently that this is also pride, uh, self-hatred, self-deprecation, constantly beating yourself up and just constantly stressed out because you can never do enough to please people, and you're living to be a perfectionist in all these areas over here. That's also sinful pride. And I confess I am prideful in that area. The sweet spot to be truly humble is to be fully human. As I heard one author say it, we are so prideful we refuse to be fully human. We refuse to recognize the limitations that we have. If you're overconfident, you refuse to acknowledge that God is the one that's given you the gifts to help you get where you are. If you're over here and you're beating yourself up, you refuse to accept the limits that God placed on your life. To be fully human is to accept this is how God made me. This is where God put me. I'm going to be completely at rest within myself. I'm going to be completely at rest with who God is, and I'm going to live life the way God designed me to live. I was here, one Christian singer was talking about this. He said, you know, if I was a car built by Henry Ford and my and I was built to just drive at 45 miles an hour down the road, he said, I wouldn't spend all my time trying to go off-road and be an all-terrain vehicle that I was not made to be. I'm going to stay in my lane and be what I was made to be. Well, many of us are trying to get out of our lane because of pride. We're trying to be more than God made us to be, and we take credit for it, or we expect more of ourselves than even God does, and we can never rest. And I know this, I'm speaking from experience on this. To be humble is to be human. Humility comes from the word humus, which means from the dirt. It's where we were from, Adam and Eve. Adam came from dust. To dust we came and to dust we shall return. You and I are nothing without the grace of God. And to be human and to be humble is to recognize that. And guess what? You and I don't recognize it naturally. So God, in his discipline and in his love, reaches into our life and takes things from us that are dear. Because our pride would be unbearable if he didn't. He may take loved ones from us, he may take health from us, he may make us struggle financially. We may have body parts that don't work the way they should, relational struggles that we can't seem to resolve. And when those things happen, God is saying, walk with me. Don't try to figure this out. Don't run from this. Don't double down with your self-determination and try to overcome this with grit and effort. Be with me. Humble yourself before me. Trust me and walk with me. And I'm going to bring good out of this. This is what David recognized. Now, most of us, if we were walking down the street and somebody was throwing stones and cussing us out, we wouldn't say, hmm, this is good. I need this right now. This is all God. This is this is God's telling him to do this. I'm telling you, this is why David's a man after God's own heart. Despite all his sin, David knew when God was at work in his life. You and I do not. After 10 years of ministry, I can say this. People do not know how to deal with suffering because they don't see God in it. They're just saying, God, fix it. And God says, I'm sorry, I'm doing way too much good work, not taking this away from you. But I'm telling you this right now from experience. If we can surrender to this process, you can have a joyful, joyful life filled with intimacy with God. Because God opposes the proud, but he always gives grace to the humble. If somebody knocks you down a peg, celebrate it. Because the lower that you get, the deeper the sweetness with Jesus is. This is what David's teaching us. Oh, he's a master at this. For all his sin, David really teaches us this well. So I just want to say, can you recognize God's calling on you to humble yourself before God in your current situation of suffering, whatever it is? You don't need God to fix it. You don't need a pay raise. You don't need a new church. You don't need a new spouse. You don't need a new body part. You need to humble yourself before God. Let him do his work. That's number one. Surrendering to God's sovereign discipline requires humility before God. The second, surrendering to God's sovereign discipline requires trust in God. It requires total trust in God. Listen to David, verse 11. And David said to Abishai and to all his servants, Behold, my own son seeks my life. How much more may this Benjamite leave him alone and let him curse, for the Lord has told him to. Now, this is what you call trust. Now, there is one difference between us and David. Remember how I said earlier we can't look at God when He's disciplining us and say, okay, he's doing this because I did that? Well, David could do that because he had a prophet named Nathan who said, You're going to experience all these things because of what you have done. We don't have a prophet, at least not that I know of. If any of you has a prophet living in your home that's giving you direct words from God, I'd love to meet him. But we don't have a prophet. We have the Holy Spirit who speaks to us for sure. We have the Word of God who speaks to us, and we have the church who God uses to speak to us. But we can't always draw a straight line on why we're dealing with everything we're dealing with. Now, David could in this particular situation, but David trusted the character of God. He trusted that God was somehow going to bring good out of this. So the question that came up in our deacons' meeting: how do you trust God? Well, there's three things you have to trust. You have to trust his character, his purpose, and his plan. His character, his purpose, and his plan. His character, he's good. There is no evil in him. He may allow evil to happen, but he doesn't celebrate it. He's not smiling when you're suffering. He is good. All he does is good. Alright, that's his character. What's his purpose? His purpose, the reason that you're here on this earth is not to have good health, good wealth, a happy life, and an easy death. No. You are here to transform. You are here to be shaped and molded into the image of his son, who, by the way, is the perfect portrait of humanity and humility. He says, I'm gentle and lowly, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. So his character is good, his purpose is transformation, and his plan includes discipline as a part of that process. Every single one of us is under his hand of discipline in some way. It's because he's a good father. He puts limitations on you so that you recognize how much you need his grace. And David said, I don't know if God's gonna bring good out of this right away, but I know the character of my God. Even in my suffering, he's with me. Even in my suffering, I'm gonna experience some goodness. How do I know this? Well, we have another book of the Bible, the book of Psalms, where David tells us what he's thinking about God. And what does he say in the most famous Psalm, Psalm 23? He says, Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. He knew that goodness and mercy was gonna come out of somebody cussing him and throwing stones at him. Not because the person is good, but because God is good and he brings good out of every one of your sufferings. Let me just say this. If you're in this room and you're like, why? I still don't know why God allows suffering. Can I say this? The Psalms also say he keeps every single one of your tears in a bottle and he records them in a book. There's not one moment of suffering that he's not with you, grieving with you. He doesn't smile at pain. He never has and he never will. That's not who God is. David trusted in the character of God, he trusted in the purpose of God, he trusted in the plan of God. Now, you and I are still working on it. Trust is a muscle that's got to be flexed, it's got to be strengthened day by day. We can't live on yesterday. If you're living on yesterday's trust, that muscle is going to atrophy, it's going to grow weak. And this is why discipline is what strengthens that muscle of trust. I mean, can I just say this? You may not know what God's going to do in your situation right now, but can you look back to how many years you've been on this earth and how much good God has already brought out of your past suffering? How much good has He already brought out? If you were to sit here today and say, you know, Bo, you don't know my life. It's been nothing but suffering. Nothing good has come out of anything I've suffered, I'd say, then you're not paying attention. You're not. It's not that pain by itself is good, it's that it produces good in us. And we forget quickly. When we are in a time of suffering, we forget everything that God has done for us. We do. But think about your life right now. Whatever you're in right now, how many times has he brought you through it to get you right where you are? Is he going to leave you right where you are and say, I'm done? I brought you as far as I could. No, his grace is going to carry you across the finish line if you will let him. That's number two. It requires trust in God. Third and finally, surrendering to God's sovereign discipline requires dependence on God. Dependence. It says in verse 12 it may be that the Lord will look on the wrong done to me. I and the Lord will repay me with good for his cursing today. Depending on the grace of God, depending on God's strength to carry you, on God's wisdom to choose what is best, on God's provision that you'll have what you need, maybe not always what you want, but definitely what you need. God wants you to live a life of dependence on Him. It's the happiest and most joyful life there is when you just trust what's coming out of His sovereign hand every day. And again, some of us in this room are just way too prosperous. Financially, you don't have to trust Him. You got reserves, you got savings accounts. You can lean on your own provision for a long time. And I'm just telling you, if finances are not the issue that God is using to discipline you, he'll find another way. It may be relational, it may be physical, it may be spiritual. He'll find another way. He wants you to depend on him. He made you. Human beings were made from the dust to be fully dependent on the Creator. But ever since Adam and Eve, we ate fruit we shouldn't have eaten because we want to have his knowledge so that we can do life without him. And that's again, driving a sports car off-road trying to make it something that it's not. So let me sum it up here in one sentence. To surrender to God's sovereign discipline as his adopted child, remember it's for our good, our holiness, and our peace. To surrender to God's sovereign discipline as his adopted child, remember it's for our good, our holiness, and our peace. Listen to Hebrews 12 as we close, starting in verse 5. It says, And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when he when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom the Father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who discipline us, and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them. But he disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. For the moment, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. No suffering feels good while we're experiencing it, but it produces the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who've been trained by it. You know, I will say that you know this is true, if you won't acknowledge it spiritually, many of you know this physically. The most physically fit people in this room have trained their mind to look beyond the sweat and the pain of the gym, not to try to experience as much pleasure in the gym as possible, but they actually find pleasure in knowing what the pain is going to produce. And he made the soul the same way he made the body. It does not grow in prosperity, it must be stretched so that we learn to depend on him. I'll close with this. The other day I was in my dining room. As some of you know, I a couple of years ago I had a trip up north with Jim Savage and my buddy Daryl, the pastor at Church of God. And we drove up to Philadelphia and I inherited my great-grandmother's dining room furniture. Big table, china cabinet, buffet, the whole nine. I love that furniture. I'm so grateful. I could not have afforded to pay for it. Uh it was donated to me. And I was sitting in my dining room the other day. I was sitting in the same seat that I sat in when I was a kid. And I remember this. Sitting there as a kid, having we call, you know, Sunday dinners with the family, eating the spaghetti and the meatballs. We call it the gravy, right? And we're having those meals, and I would think about the kind of life that I thought God was gonna pave for me. I expected that I was gonna have a huge family, tons of kids, strong marriage, I'd be the guy sitting at the end of the table, and everybody just call him Pop. And I wanted to be just like my grandfather. And I look at my life right now and I say, you know, my life has not ended up anywhere near where I thought it would. But I also know this I am where I am in many ways because of my pride. And I know that God is good. And I know that if he gave me the life I dreamt of when I was a kid, I would not love him. I'd love being pop. I wouldn't love Jesus. I'd enjoy my life probably a little too much, and I wouldn't have enough time or room for him. And so even though I recognize that there are some dreams that'll just remain dreams, God is good. And I will be in eternity saying, God, what you chose for me is way better than what I would have chosen for myself. If you and I can get to a point where we recognize our pride and recognize that his discipline is opening us up to the best life that we could ever have, that's where the sweet spot is. So as we pray, I just want to say this. Whatever you're dealing with, God is good, God does good, and God works all things together for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Do you know the Lord? Do you trust Jesus as your Savior? Do you trust what God's doing in your life? As we pray in this invitation, be honest in prayer with him. If you're still struggling to understand and embrace your suffering, tell him in prayer, Lord, I don't want to submit to this, but I know that you want me to, and so I'm asking you to help me. He'll answer an honest prayer. He doesn't play church, but he answers honest prayer. Reality is the only place that God will deal with us. So as we pray, do business with the Lord. Bring your troubles to him. As we sang into him, tell it to Jesus, whatever it is, and trust that he's going to bring good out of this because this is what he does in his sovereign discipline. He's a good God. Lord, right now, as we pray, right now as we pray, Lord, I just lift up every sigh and every tear and every pain and every separation and every disease and every frustration in this room right now. Suffering by itself is not good. If we had not sinned, we would never suffer. And you've called us to a place called heaven where suffering will have no place and every tear will be wiped away, but we're not there yet. Lord, I pray right now on every soul in this room that we would enter into obedience to this process, that we would no longer run away from you or shake a fist at you, but we would be still before you. We would humble ourselves and be open to you, showing us areas of pride in our life that you want to change. I know, Lord, that you want to transform our heads, our hearts, and our hands. Help us to be like David. Help us to be like David right now, Lord. And stay still before you, accepting what you've given us and knowing you'll bring good out of it because it's who you are. In Jesus' name. Amen.