It is so good to be back.  Thank you for all the cards and prayers as I underwent surgery.  It went well, and while I still do not have all my strength back, I am getting there.  Again, thank you for your prayers.

    I also want to welcome any visitors that we have here today.  Summer is a time for traveling, so perhaps you are here visiting family or friends.  We are so glad that you are joining us today to praise our almighty and loving God.

    For the summer we have been following a message series entitled, “Liars, Cheaters, Cowards & Other Bible Heroes.”  The series has been looking at some of the heroes in the Old Testament, and seeing that despite them having some serious faults, flaws and foibles, God still selected them to be His instruments to do great things for His people.  And God is willing to do the same with us, His disciples, despite our faults, flaws and foibles.

    Since I missed the last two weekends due to my surgery, I am not sure if the series was continued.  I am certain that the deacons preached on Joshua two weekends ago, noting that while he was incredibly successful in leading the Israelites into the Promise Land because of his faith in God, he failed to leave a succession plan, so that the next generations failed to have their own encounters with God, and tended to reduce God into just some stories and rituals.

    Last week I had visiting priests covering for me, and it is difficult to ask someone doing you a favor to preach about something specific, so you probably did not hear about Samson.  I am not going to go back to talk about him this week, despite his being a fascinating story. I have put my version of the message on the parish website, under the Pastor’s Blog.

    Samson was one of the Judges, heroes that the Lord called to free the people after they had been conquered, or faced some other difficulty.  Whenever there was a judge, the people would be more faithful to the Lord for a period of time, but after the judge died, the people eventually fell back into their idolatry.  There still was not much of a plan of continuity and unity. The Chosen People were basically just a loose association of tribes.

    Under the last Judge, Samuel, who was also a prophet, the people came to say that they wanted a king, like the other nations around them.  They basically were rejecting God as being their king, but the Lord told Samuel to appease the people. The first king was Saul, but he did not have a good heart.  Saul was strong, pretty smart, and not a bad leader, but he did not have a heart for serving the Lord. Long story short, the Lord rejects Saul, and tells Samuel to anoint David king.

    After Moses, David is the most famous person in the Old Testament.  While most of his tale is told in the First and Second Books of Samuel in the Bible, David is mentioned in nearly all the books in the Old Testament from that point forward.  Unlike Saul, David had a heart for the Lord, meaning that he talked to God every day, planned and prioritized his daily time with God, and his biggest priority was doing the Lord’s will.

    There are many important stories about David, and lessons that we can learn from him.  Frankly, I don’t have the energy to even summarize them. For this message I would like to focus on one incident, a dark moment for David, who generally was so good at serving God first.

    After becoming a great military leader, and defeating most of the enemies of Israel, David was secure in his rule as king.  We hear in the Bible, “In the spring when kings go to war, David stayed at home….” This begins what we can call the anatomy of sin.

    It starts off simply, David just decides not to do his job for a while.  He is going to take it easy, let his generals take care of things. One night David wakes up.  It is late, but he goes to the roof to take a stroll in the cool air. From there he sees a beautiful woman bathing.  Not so different from what too many people do today, late at night they find themselves looking at things on the Internet that they should not be looking at.  It does not seem to be a big deal, no one is getting hurt, right? But the door of the heart is getting cracked opened to someone other than God.

    David asks around the next day to see who the woman was.  Why? By this time David already has at least two wives. He discovers that her name is Bathsheba, and she is the wife of one of his soldiers.  That should be it, right? Well, that is how sin works, its an escalation from less to more. It is a slippery slope, and the consequences quickly become dire.

    David ends up inviting Bathsheba to visit the palace, then he has an affair with her, and when he finds out that she is pregnant, he tries to cover it up, eventually having her husband killed.  That is not the end of the story for David; he eventually confesses his sin to the Lord and asks for mercy.

    The lesson that we should take from David is that the question is not “will there be sin in my life?”  While sin is not inevitable, given our fallen nature, it is a pretty good bet that we will experience a lot of temptations in our lives, and there will be times when we give into them.  The better question for us to ask is, “When, sooner or later, I recognize that I’m the path of sin, what can I do about it?” Do we continue to go down the slippery slope, thinking “well, I have already come so far down?” or do we do what David did, acknowledge our sin to God, and ask God to forgive us and get us off the slippery slope.  It is all a matter of heart. David had a heart after God’s own heart; and as God showed him great mercy, later David would show great mercy to others.

    There is no greater attribute in life to aspire to than to have a heart after God’s own heart.  We develop such a heart through daily prayer, and obedient service to God. That is the way it is done, and that is why I talk about it so often.  Through prayer and through service we can develop a better heart, a greater heart, a heart after God’s own heart.