Abide – 2 Samuel 22
Welcome everybody, welcome to Abide. I'm so glad you're here and you have shown up and you've pressed play so that we can remember who we are again and remember whose we are. So as usual, find a place to hide where you can't be found. Find a place to rest. Find a place to be alone.
And as we begin, I'm just going to invite us all to notice in our bodies and in our minds and in our hearts, where tension has built up, where stresses and demands have overwhelmed us, so we're going to begin by just relaxing some of these things. So to start, let us begin to let go of the many assignments. The quizzes, the papers, and the pages and pages of reading we still have to do, to finish out the semester. Let's just put all of those aside. Or maybe at your job and in your workplace there's just a lot of challenges, and there's just so much work to do, it will never get finished, piles of work, challenging colleagues. How about we take all of that and put that aside. Or what about our home life, our family members, our friends? There might be hurts or disappointments or unfinished conversations or worries, fears. So, you can also put aside these things too.
So, allow your thoughts to clear and your heart to ease and your body to relax as you let each one of these things go. And then begin to notice where the tension might be resting or residing in your shoulders, your back, your head and in the body, wherever that may be. Take a nice inhale and exhale and just relieve the tension. Bringing space into the body, into the muscles and the joints, in the complexities of relationships, demands of work and school. Allow these many many things to soften, to release and to practice just letting them go for a moment.
In case you forgot, Jesus is here. He asks us to lay down our burdens and give them to him. And so he is here. It's a safe place. As we move through this prayer time, if those concerns seem to pop back into your head and into your heart, and you begin to worry again, this is a good time to just say “I'm going to let it go for now. I'm going to set that down for now.” So even if you're filled with many distractions throughout this time, it's OK, just return back to sitting with Jesus and say “I'm going to set this down again”. So distractions can actually be a way of deepening and looking and abiding with Jesus so, distractions and all, here we are. So let's take another deep breath. To loosen our grip on life, loosen our grip in the body, loosen our grip on situations and rest here.
Our gratitude practice today is going to be about the created world. It's really hard to not notice creation in your day, isn't it? Whether it's the sunrise or the wind swirling or the stars bright or a fog, an icicle. I'm inviting us all now to just think about the last few days and where the beauty of creation has come close to you, that you noticed it. You know that you might have had to stop and say wow about something, about a sound of a bird, or the sound of the wind through the gentle snowfall, or being in awe of how an icicle is even created. So what have you seen? What have you heard? What have you felt and tasted? Within this beautiful world that surrounds you, that holds you, in everything you do, in everywhere you go, this created world is behind, before, below, around. So take these moments to dwell and observe and linger how God and his beauty of creation have met you right where you're at.
God, thank you for the beauty, that you provide for us every day to be surrounded in. Thank you. Such a beautiful backdrop to all of our problems or worries or fears or things that we just seem to not be able to ever fix. They're all in the backdrop of you, with the backdrop of you. So, thank you. You're so kind, so kind. And as we move deeper into this time where we are alone, where we are hiding with God, we're coming to the end of our 1 & 2 Samuel journey and we're ending with David and his song of praise. And hasn't it been wonderful to journey with David?
Eugene Peterson writes this about David, he says: “The single most characteristic thing about David is his relationship to God. David believes in God, and he thinks about God. He imagines God. He addresses God and he prays to God. He also forgets God, disobeys God, sins against God and ignores God. But God is the reality that accounts for and defines all that David does and says. The largest part of David's existence, it's not David. It is God.”
And I think that's our desire too, isn't it? We believe and we imagine, and we pray, and we love God, and we forget and ignore. But we do desire that God would be our deepest reality. More of God and loss of us. And so, we move into this reading of 2 Samuel 22, and it is a passage of scripture that has 51 verses, so it's going to be just over 5 minutes of reading, but it's an important account because we're no longer getting a narrator to talk about David and his situations and what's going on. We now have David speaking in his voice and in his language. This is also found in Psalm 18. And maybe it was first found here and then put into the Psalms, but it's just lovely to listen to all that David is experiencing with God. And so, allow yourself to rest in his descriptions and in his experiences and what a masterful poet he is. So just sit and enjoy and notice.
2 Samuel 22: David's Song of Praise.
David sang to the Lord the words of this song when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. He said:
“The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer;
My God is my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield and the horn of my salvation.
He is my stronghold, my refuge, and my savior –
From violent men, you save me.
“I call to the Lord, who is worthy of praise,
and I am saved from my enemies.
The waves of death swirled about me;
And the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
and the snares of death confronted me.
“In my distress I called to the Lord;
I called out to my God.
From his temple, he heard my voice;
my cry, it came to his ears.
The earth trembled and quaked,
and the foundations of the heavens they shook;
they trembled because he was angry.
Smoke rose from his nostrils;
and consuming fire came from his mouth,
burning coals blazed out of it.
He parted the heavens and came down;
dark clouds were under his feet.
He mounted the cherubim and flew;
he soared on the wings of the wind.
He made darkness, his canopy around him–
the dark rain clouds of the sky.
Out of the brightness of his presence
bolts of lightning blazed forth.
The Lord thundered from heaven;
the voice of the Most High resounded.
He shot arrows and scattered the enemy,
with great bolts of lightning and routed them.
The valleys of the sea were exposed
and the foundations of the earth laid bare
at the rebuke of the Lord,
at the blast of breath from his nostrils.
“He reached down from on high and he took hold of me;
he drew me out of the deep waters.
He rescued me from my powerful enemy,
from my foes who were too strong for me.
They comforted me in the day of my disaster,
but the Lord was my support.
He brought me out into a spacious place;
and he rescued me because he delighted in me.
“The Lord has dealt with me according to my righteousness;
according to my cleanness and my hands he has rewarded me.
For I have kept the ways of the Lord;
I have not done evil by turning from my God.
and all his laws are before me;
I have not turned away from his decrees.
and I have been blameless before him
and have kept myself from sin.
The Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness,
according to my cleanness in his sight.
“To the faithful, you show yourself faithful,
and to the blameless you show yourself blameless,
to the pure, you show yourself pure,
but to the crooked you show yourself shrewd.
You save the humble,
but your eyes are on the haughty to bring them low.
You are my lamp, O Lord;
the Lord turns my darkness into light.
With your help, I can advance against a troop;
with my God I can scale a wall.
“As for God, his way is perfect:
The word of the Lord is flawless;
he is a shield for all who take refuge in him.
For who is God besides the Lord?
And who is the Rock except our God?
It is God who arms me with strength
and makes my way perfect.
He makes my feet like the feet of a deer;
and he enables me to stand on the heights.
He trains my hands for battle;
my arms can bend a bow of bronze.
You give me your shield of victory.
You stoop down to make me great.
You brought in the path beneath me
so that my ankles do not turn.
“I pursued my enemies and crushed them;
I did not turn back till they were destroyed.
I crushed them completely and they could not rise;
they fell beneath my feet.
And you armed me with strength for battle;
you made my adversaries bow at my feet.
You made my enemies turn their backs in flight,
and I destroyed my foes.
They cried for help, but there was no one to save them–
to the Lord, but he did not answer.
I beat them as fine as the dust of the earth;
I pounded and trampled them like mud in the streets.
“You have delivered me from the attacks of the peoples;
You have preserved me as the head of the nations.
People I did not know are subject to me,
and foreigners come cringing to me;
as soon as they hear me, they obey me.
They all lose heart;
and they come trembling from their strongholds.
“The Lord lives! Praise be to my Rock!
Exalted be God, the Rock, my Saviour!
He is the Lord who avenges me,
who puts the nations under me,
who sets me free from my enemies.
You exalted me above my foes;
from violent men you rescued me.
Therefore, I will praise you, O Lord, among the nations;
I will sing praises to your name.
“He gives his king great victories;
he shows unfailing kindness to his anointed,
to David and his descendants forever.”
Hear this word of the Lord and may it take root in you and be still in the presence of his word and in the presence of God now.
I wonder if you noticed in the reading or noticed in David's life how many metaphors he has for God. He calls God his rock and my lamp and my shield. And he's such a poet, he lingers and spends time really trying to describe what God has been for him and what God feels like and what God has shown himself to be, and he's trying to describe it by calling God a rock.
And so, I wonder if we can take a moment to ourselves becoming our own poets or our own way to describe God. What metaphor would you use? What metaphor would you use as of late to describe God? I know for me, I often think of God as my coach, that he's always training me and speaking to me and encouraging me and guiding me. So, I often call him my coach or my sunrise, or my fountain, or my lover. I often call him my mother, my father. So, spend a moment or two naming God with a metaphor.
And you might, you know, it might be something you think about, learning to describe God by using your everyday life and the things in your life. Give him a lot of names. I find parents that have children that have a lot of nicknames, it's pretty endearing, or spouses that have a lot of nicknames or pet names, or you might want to develop more names that you have for God, as David teaches us here.
I wonder if you notice how David shows us how to read the Bible. He enters in and he makes the word of God his home. He sits in it, he imagines it, he talks about it. And this takes time, you know, it takes time to sit in a passage of Scripture to linger, to gaze, to find your own words, to describe it and really allow it to be fabric in your life or incorporated into your life and to not have it be so distant when we hear David speak, God and the things of God seem very close and all intermingled in his being, where you don't know where God ends and David begins.
We see here that David is recounting the story of the exodus of God's people being rescued from Egypt. It says “he made darkness his canopy around him and the dark rain clouds of the sky out of the brightness of his presence, bolts of lightning blazed forth. The Lord thundered from heaven in the voice of the most high resounded.” He's describing this, the biblical story and the biblical narrative in his own way.
And I ask us now, are the Scriptures a home for us? Are we comfortable in them? Do we know the stories? And would we know the stories well enough to write a poem about ‘em? David is teaching us how to read the Scriptures and how to imagine and make these scriptures our home.
So take this moment to just talk to God about how his word, his living word can make a deeper impression into your being, become more at home in you, and that might take more time or attention. Talk to God about that now.
And lastly, I'd just like to talk about the conditions in which David lives. It's kind of hard to admit that David's life and conditions are about war and about killing and defeating his enemies, and he uses such descriptive language in doing so. He writes in verse 43: “I beat them as fine as the dust of the Earth. I pounded and trampled them like mud in the streets.” Verse 33: “It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and he enables me to stand on the heights and he trains my hands for battle and my arms can bend a bow of bronze.” And so, God gives us all different conditions to be living in. Nobody's conditions are the same, and no condition is without challenge. So in David's time, there is violence and war and corruption, and in his own being there's so much dysfunction of family and it's just like this rated R movie of sex, war, violence, and yet these are the conditions in which God has placed David to walk with him. And we see that God equips David to live in the midst of his conditions.
And so I ask us all, what are our conditions that we live in that seem like if we could just clean it up and fix it up, we would be able to abide with God so much more, so much easier, you know. If our world wasn't so much on social media, and if our world wasn't so divided, and if there weren't so many wars and disruptions and natural tragedies. These are the conditions in which the spirit of God desires to enter in. And so maybe take this time to describe what your conditions feel like to God now. Maybe they feel messier, or hostile, or sad, or beautiful, or challenging. Bring some descriptive words about your conditions to God now.
We are so grateful to have been a part of this reading of David's life, being able to get an inside scoop on the dirt, the beauty, the scandal, and how you meet him where he is at in his conditions. Lord, I pray that you would expand us all to begin to be more free, to use metaphors to describe who you are to us personally. Like we see here with David, he says: “My rock, my Lord, my shield, my lamp.” Grow our vocabulary to describe you. May we be all become poets. God, may the scriptures come into our beings and find a home within us. May we imagine the scriptures and describe them and get comfortable with the characters and may this be the biggest part of our lives, just as we see in David's life. May the word of God and the things of God be at home within us. And Lord, help us in our conditions. Help us to navigate how to live, in love, in the conditions that we have in our time just as you did for David.
As we close this time of prayer, may we be able to learn from David, how he adores you, God. How he believes in you and obeys you. And so, God, bring this into the rhythm of our own life, to adore you, to believe in you, and to obey you in our conditions. Help us to do that today. And so, we say glory be to the Father, and glory be to the Son, and to the Spirit. As it was in the beginning. As it was for David. And as it is for us and will always be. Now and forever. Go in peace, my friends.
