Insight for Living

The preceding message, "Absalom, the Rebel Prince Charming," was copyrighted in 1978, 1982, 1988, 1997, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2022, and 2024. And the sound recording was copyrighted in 2024 by Charles R. Swindoll, Incorporated. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.

Chuck Swindoll: Whatever you sow, you reap. Forgiveness notwithstanding. Grace means that God in forgiving you does not kill you. Grace means that God in forgiving you gives you the strength to endure the consequences. It does not mean the consequences are automatically removed.

Guest (Male): God forgives sin, but does forgiveness erase the painful consequences? King David discovered the devastating answer when his hidden sins came home to roost. What began in secret unleashed a whirlwind of tragedy that swept through his entire family.

Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll explodes a dangerous myth that many Christians believe about grace. In this study, we'll discover why the pain of the harvest always eclipses the pleasure of the planting, and why the phrase "God is not mocked" means more than we could ever imagine. Chuck titled his message "Absalom, the Rebel Prince Charming."

Chuck Swindoll: David's multiple sins for a short season resulted in extremely painful consequences for the rest of his life, and including the lives of his family members. His life experiences should act as bright red lights for every one of us. Paul summarized it beautifully when he was writing the Galatians, chapter 6, verses 7 and 8.

I love the way Eugene Peterson translates this: "Don't be misled. No one makes a fool of God. What a person plants, he will harvest. The person who plants selfishness, ignoring the needs of others, ignoring God, harvests a crop of weeds. All he'll have to show for his life is weeds. But the one who plants in response to God, letting God's spirit do the growth work in him, harvests a crop of real life, eternal life."

Well, David planted selfishness and harvested crops of weeds for the rest of his life. As the old prophet once wrote, "He sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind." And so here is God's message to David through the prophet Nathan, as recorded in 2 Samuel, chapter 12, verses 12 to 25. I'm going to read this section from The Message.

"You're the man," said Nathan. "And here's what God, the God of Israel, has to say to you: I made you king over Israel. I freed you from the fist of Saul. I gave you your master's daughter and other wives to have and to hold. I gave you both Israel and Judah. And if that hadn't been enough, I'd have gladly thrown in much more.

"So why have you treated the word of God with brazen contempt, doing this great evil? You murdered Uriah the Hittite, then took his wife as your wife. Worse, you killed him with an Ammonite sword. And now, because you treated God with such contempt and took Uriah the Hittite's wife as your wife, killing and murder will continually plague your family."

This is God speaking, remember? "I'll make trouble for you out of your own family. I'll take your wives from right out in front of you. I'll give them to some neighbor and he'll go to bed with them openly. You did your deed in secret. I'm doing mine with the whole country watching."

Then David confessed to Nathan, "I've sinned against God." Nathan pronounced, "Yes, but that's not the last word. God forgives your sin. You won't die for it. But because of your blasphemous behavior, the son born to you will die."

This evening I have a message that is not easy to preach and is not easy to hear, but it is from the Lord and we need to do both. It has to do with a family that is in trouble. There are two kinds of trouble that a family can experience: trouble that comes from without and trouble that comes from within. The more difficult of the two is the trouble from within.

This is not to say that trouble coming from without is not devastating and difficult for a family. Take for example the Weiss family, which many of us watched on the Holocaust, moved and troubled with this doctor and his wife and their dear Jewish children. We witnessed them one by one being picked off by the clammy fingers of death, took its tyrannical toll on their lives and brought pain to our hearts as we vicariously entered into the experience of that family that had trouble from without.

But the more difficult of the two is trouble from within: tension, heartbreaking hatred, pressure, the difficulties that accompany the carnal life when mom and dad walk in the flesh or act foolishly, or the children respond in rebellion, disagreement, and disharmony. When there is friction between husband and wife or between parent and child, that's a lot harder to bear. Especially when it is the consequence of sin.

Before we look at 2 Samuel chapter 12 and following, I want us to look into Galatians chapter 6. You turn there please and let's locate verses 7 and 8. I want to give you a principle from these two verses and then I want to lay on you the consequences that follow in light of the principle. These two verses are no doubt the most familiar in the book of Galatians.

Many of you have quoted these words and didn't really know where they were sourced. Galatians 6:7 begins, "Do not be deceived." Now you will read that in the New Testament rather often. And the reason the Lord gives that warning ahead of time is because the thing that follows is so easily an avenue of deception. In other words, the devil or the flesh or the world will work havoc on our thinking, deceiving us into refusing to believe the truth or the principle God presents.

And so ahead of the principle, God says, "Don't be deceived about this. Don't let anyone teach you the opposite. Don't let yourself or someone else or some experience lead you to believe that something other than this is the truth. Don't be deceived." Now what is the warning? Verse 7: "God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh shall from the flesh reap corruption."

Let's stop there. Here is the principle: We reap what we sow, forgiveness notwithstanding. If there is anything we have been duped into believing in our era of grace, it is the thinking that if we will simply confess our sins and claim God's forgiveness, then this business of consequence is all taken away.

All we need to do when falling into the trap of sin is to turn to the Lord and say, "Lord, I confess to you the wrong and I agree with you that it is wrong, and I declare before you and you only the wrongness of my actions. Now, I claim your forgiveness and I count on you to get me back on the track." As if to think at that point, all the consequences are gone.

But that is not what the verse says. The verse is written to people like you and me living in the era of grace, written to the church. It's not a law verse. It's not to Israel. It's to God's people, children of the king, people under grace. And the verse says, "Don't be deceived. God isn't mocked. Whatever you sow, you reap. If you sow to the flesh, you reap corruption, forgiveness notwithstanding."

Grace means that God in forgiving you does not kill you. Grace means that God in forgiving you gives you the strength to endure the consequences. It does not mean the consequences are automatically removed. If I sin and in the process of sinning I break my arm, when I find forgiveness from sin, I still have to deal with a broken arm. Isn't it amazing how we will accept that in the physical realm? Not a person here would deny that.

A broken arm is still a broken arm whether I have been forgiven or whether I'm still living under the guilt of the sin. Certainly we have a broken arm; it must be set, it must heal. The same happens in the emotional life. When a parent willfully and irresponsibly acts against God's written word, not only does the parent suffer but the family suffers as well. And that brings internal trouble, which is the subject tonight.

Now let me give you the consequence. See verse 8: "The one who sows to his own flesh shall from the flesh reap corruption." These are the words I use to describe the consequence: The pain of the harvest eclipses the pleasure of the planting. Think of your life like the life of a farmer. And as you walk along, you are planting daily. You are dropping the seeds.

If you choose to drop the seeds of sin and to sow the seeds of carnality, you will find a measure of pleasure in the sowing of carnality. Anyone who denies that is a fool, denies scripture. Scripture declares that sin has its pleasure. It's passing, but it has its pleasure. That's one of the things that draws us into it. It is exciting. It is adventurous. It brings stimulation. It satisfies the body. It brings a sense of conquering to us.

Now in the sowing of that seed, there is a sense of pleasure. But what we don't like to face, and we will face tonight in this message, is that the pain that comes in the harvesting of those seeds eclipses the pleasure. I received a phone call, it was long distance this week, from an individual who poured out her heart to me as she said she was living in the consequence of sin. And she wanted me to give an answer that would help her relieve the consequences. And I cannot do that.

At the time she made a decision, which was a foolish decision and she knows now it was a wrong decision, at the time she made it there was a measure of real pleasure in the act itself. There was a sense of delight as a matter of fact. And this dear woman is now reaping the harvest of that sowing, and it's miserable. And she says, "What can I do? How can I get out of it?"

And it fell my lot again, as it seems rather frequently I come back to these verses, to show her in Galatians 6:7 and 8 that the harvest has eclipsed the pleasure of the planting. That is never more true than in the life of David, 2 Samuel chapter 12. As we turn to this passage, I want to give you some things that you will for sure forget and I don't want you to forget. I think frankly we have been misprogrammed in our theology in the area of sin.

So many things need to be thought through in a fresh manner. I don't think anything concerns me more than using grace as a tool to justify sin or to take away the pain of the consequence. If I had one message that I could declare to Christians everywhere, it would have to do with this business of corrective theology as opposed to preventive theology. I'm going to tell you what I mean.

Every parent as the children grow older goes through the experience of teaching the kids to drive. It is a nerve-racking, unbelievably difficult experience, to say the least, no matter how careful your kids are. Now a parent has a choice in how to teach the child how to drive. He could teach the child in a corrective manner or in a preventive manner.

If I chose to teach my oldest son how to drive correctively, I could say to him, "Now Curt, I want to show you first of all before we get in the car the insurance policy that I have taken out on your life. And I want you to see here, son, that when you have the wreck, which you're sure gonna have it, I want you to notice you call the agent at area 213-9- on and on," and I give him the number. "And after the accident, son, I want you to be sure to call me. And then the third thing we're going to do this after you have had the wreck."

Or I could say, "Now son, let's just prevent a lot of problems by telling you ahead of time, here is the way to drive. And if you drive by these rules and regulations and if you obey these signs and do what they say, it's amazing, you could very likely go a long period of time without even a slight scrape. Can't guarantee it, but it would sure be better than the other way."

If you stop and think for a moment, you were taught 1 John 1:9 almost before you were out of the crib as a little baby, and you didn't learn Romans 6 perhaps until this very hour. It's doubtful that many Christians in this place could quote one verse from Romans 6, but most of us could quote 1 John 1:9. Why? Because we have been trained to sin.

Sounds heretical, doesn't it? You have been told since your earliest days out of the crib, "Now look, when you sin, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So when you sin, claim it, claim God's forgiveness." And that's a marvelous verse. I call it our bar of soap in the Christian life. It keeps us clean. It certainly is the answer to the problem of sin once it has happened.

But it's not the best answer. The best answer is Romans 6. "Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead; and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God." Meaning what? Meaning as I yield myself to God, when sin approaches I can say no, and in the power of Jesus Christ I can turn away from it.

I don't have to sin. You know why I sin? Because I have a deep, quiet, sincere, respectable love for sin. That's why I sin. And every sin I commit, I choose to commit it. And in every choice I set up consequences in my life. Part of the reason we don't get the full truth of Romans 6 is nobody's talking about the consequence. We've shortchanged the consequence by giving people the idea grace takes it all away.

Grace does not take away the consequences of sin. Just as it does not take away the arm and the need for the bone to be healed and set. I tell you if David could rise from the grave today, he would say amen to that statement. The awesome sin in David's life led to trouble the likes of which few fathers on earth will ever go through.

Now let me show you from this passage, beginning at verse 7 and following, some of the stairsteps that went down in David's life leading him to a life of misery as a result of his sin. Now David, verse 7, Nathan says, "You are the man." The prophet has stood before the king and has told him what no one else would tell him during the year's time in his life. "You're the one that took Bathsheba. You're the one that had Uriah murdered. You're the one that's lived like a hypocrite. You're the man, David."

Verse 13, David said to Nathan, "I have sinned." Three words he should have said the very moment after he went into Bathsheba, but he didn't. And I am convinced the consequences would have been much, much less if he had right on the heels of that act declared his sin, openly confessed it before the people as well as before God and laid his life bare. But he didn't.

And now ten, eleven, twelve months later, Nathan says, "You're the man, David." He says, "I've sinned." But wait. Wait a minute. Will you look at the prediction that Nathan made, verse 10, under the guidance and inspiration of God? Verse 10, the prophet declares, "The sword shall never depart from your house." If you have a pencil, circle the word "never." "The sword will never depart from your house."

I thought he was forgiven. He is. Verse 13 says the Lord has taken away your sin; you shall not die. That's forgiveness. But says nothing about the consequence? Oh yes it does, it says in verse 10, "The sword will not depart from the house." Am I saying that everyone who sins will have the same consequences? No, you haven't heard me say that.

God in his sovereign manner fits the consequence for the person and it's his choice. It's his move. It's his plan. Why he chooses some to go this way and some that, I do not know. All I know is in David's case, he led him down a path of misery so that he would never forget, nor would we in retrospect, the consequences of that act or those series of acts. "The sword will never depart from your house."

Verse 11: "Thus says the Lord, behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household." Twice in two verses the mention of his own house. The Good News Bible renders this passage with this bad news: "I will cause those from your own family to bring trouble on you." The Living Bible speaks of David having to live under a constant threat in his family. Since God said, "I will cause your household to rebel against you."

I told you it wasn't an easy message to hear because it isn't an easy message to preach. I have no platform upon which I live that keeps me free of the very things I'm declaring tonight. I have endured some of the consequences just as you, and no doubt before God I will endure more because I am imperfect.

And every time I make a choice to sin, I can be sure my holy God will not be mocked. As I turn to him and lay my life before him, as I repent of that, as I change my mind and turn to him for forgiveness, God will keep me from death, God will guard me in his grace, but he will not take away the consequence until I have gone through that period that he chooses for me to go through.

Now the sad part about it is, so will some of my children. So will my wife be affected in some cases. So will the church that I serve. And that's true in your life as well. Now David is forgiven, but it says that God will cause the household to rebel against him. Now the general prediction we want to remember is this: Trouble will come upon David's household.

Remember the beginning statement I made? There are two kinds of problems that a family can endure: trouble from without and trouble from within. And this is a case of the second. David endures with his family trouble from within. And I don't think there's any way to write in the sacred record the awful guilt that this man lived with as he looked back over the months that we're going to travel through tonight and trace the steps of the downward trend of misery because he sinned during that twelve-month period of time.

Okay. Job chapter 4, verse 8 is a verse you might margin in your Bible. Just in passing let me reaffirm the principle of Galatians 6 by looking at Eliphaz's words in Job 4:8: "According to what I have seen, those who plow iniquity and those who sow trouble harvest it." Hosea 8:7 says that Israel "sowed the wind and reap the whirlwind." Same principle.

Guest (Male): We're going to take our time moving through this story because there's so much to observe and so much to learn from King David's moral compromise. You're listening to Insight for Living. Chuck Swindoll, our Bible teacher, titled today's message "Absalom: The Rebel Prince Charming."

It's the ninth study in the larger biographical series called "Fascinating Stories of Forgotten Lives." We're praying that today's study causes you to want to dig deeper on your own. And when you're ready to learn more, we invite you to check out the variety of helpful resources we have at insight.org. Look for the 14-part series called "Fascinating Stories of Forgotten Lives."

Insight for Living has created the perfect toolkit for your journey. Start with the *Searching the Scriptures* Bible study workbook for this series, which is ideal for personal reflection or group discussion. And then add the complete audio sermon collection to hear Chuck's teaching again and again, either on CD or MP3. You can also access our convenient mobile app, where listening is free.

In closing, we'd like to share something that's been on our hearts here at Insight for Living. You're invited to request at no cost our brand-new quarterly magazine. It's called *Guided by Grace*, a vibrant newsletter packed with features to inspire your faith journey.

Each issue explores essential Christian virtues like joy, authenticity, leadership, and generosity through Chuck's biblical teaching, real-life stories from Insight for Living pastors, and thoughtful devotionals perfect for personal reflection. Think of it as an extension of what you hear on this program: rich biblical content delivered in a fresh, engaging format that you can hold in your hand.

And here's the best part: your one-year subscription is absolutely free. So call us at 800-772-8888 or visit us online at insight.org/guidedbygrace. Once again, it would be our pleasure to send you *Guided by Grace*, so call 800-772-8888 or visit insight.org/guidedbygrace.

I'm Bill Meyer. Chuck Swindoll continues to tell the story about Absalom, the Rebel Prince Charming, Thursday on Insight for Living.

The preceding message, "Absalom, the Rebel Prince Charming," was copyrighted in 1978, 1982, 1988, 1997, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2022, and 2024. And the sound recording was copyrighted in 2024 by Charles R. Swindoll, Incorporated. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.