Sound Doctrine

Jeff Johnson: I went astray. I sought my own way and doing my own thing. I was afflicted, I was miserable. It was terrible. But then I started to keep the word of the Lord, go towards the things of God and hey, I am not afflicted. Listen, this book will keep you from sin. But let me tell you this, sin will keep you from this book.

So there is a problem here, isn't there? We have to deal with sin. We have to see what it does and see what it is trying to do to us. But I will tell you something, this book, because I have kept thy word, I am not afflicted.

Guest (Male): Your spirit leads me on and I am running after You. I will leave behind the worthless love and I am trading them for priceless truth.

So you say you are not the sharpest tack in the box. You do not have a degree behind your name. You are not well-known and there is hardly a penny in your bank. But does that mean God cannot use you greatly? On today's broadcast, we will read about a man who found himself in dire straits, yet found a way to sing praises to God anyway. As a result, God used him in a mighty and powerful way. We are studying 2 Samuel chapter 22 and the man we are focusing in on is King David. Let's join Pastor Jeff Johnson as we see David's faith in God really show through.

Father, won't You speak to me? Oh Lord, You know I am listening. You know exactly what I need. So Father, won't You speak to me?

Jeff Johnson: The promise to the Old Testament and to the New Testament saints is that God, all the way through His track record, before His wrath comes down and His anger is poured out, He always draws out His own. He told Lot, remember, "You have to come out of Sodom before I can let loose what I am going to let loose there. Get out of there, man," and He pulled him out. Rahab, He pulled her out before the whole city of Jericho came down. Over and over again, we see it through the Bible that God always calls them out.

Church, He is going to call us out before that great and horrible day of the great tribulation takes place. There is going to be the rapture of the church. We are not appointed unto wrath, God's wrath, we are appointed to salvation. What good news we have. We are just waiting for the rapture, aren't we? Just sitting back just going, "Lord, anytime. Any day now." I love that song. One of these days, we are out of here. Looking forward to that time.

But notice he says He is delivering me from a strong enemy. What is our warfare against but powers and high places, spiritual wickedness? I would say that that is a strong enemy. He delivers us from that. Then he says, "From those that hated me," or, "Those that hate me," he delivered me from. Jesus said, "I have given them thy word and the world hath hated them." When the Lord calls you out of this place and calls you to be His, the world is going to hate you. But the Lord is going to deliver you from this place. Yes, you will be hated because man loves his darkness rather than light. And when light comes around, they do not like light.

For those who were too strong for me, greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world. So we are to stand in His power, in His might, because He is all-powerful and He is able to deliver us from this place. There is a scripture that says to show Himself strong in behalf of those whose heart is perfect towards Him. So we need to get our hearts lined up perfect towards Him and He will show Himself strong towards us as He did with David.

David says the Lord is my stay. The Lord kept me. As I was looking at this, open doors or shut doors do not matter. He is leading us. Those who are the children of the Lord are led by the spirit of the Lord. So He leads us, and sometimes there are shut doors and we just go, "Okay, praise the Lord, God does not want me doing that." Have you ever praised the Lord for a closed door? Usually we are going, "I can get in there." We are going to get in there.

But the Lord shut the door. Are you going to slam yourself against the door trying to get in somewhere where God does not want you? No. When we have a shut door and we see it as a shut door, we need to go praise God for shut doors. God did not want me there, thank God. And that is a blessing. He is leading our lives. He is delivering us and we do not know what is ahead, but He does. We trust Him that He knows my future and what is ahead, so He is going to control it.

There are sometimes seemingly bad things, doors shut that I do not like and I do not understand, but I have to trust Him. Look at verse 20: "He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me because he delighted in me." One of the enemy's tricks that he tries to play with all of us is to believe that because of our weaknesses and our failures, God is against us or that God does not love me. But it is simply not true. You say, "Well, God does not love me because I am weak or because I have blown it here and I know God does not love me."

You know the enemy is right there saying, "That is right. Hates your guts. You might as well quit." He is right there, right? But that is a lie. Listen, God knows we are weak. God knows we have these vessels of dust. God knows we are sinners. That is why He sent His son to give us victory over sin and death. He sent His son to give us victory. He delivers for a number of reasons and I believe that David begins to lay them out here. Why does God deliver?

Well, number one is in Psalm 56. David talks there in that Psalm that the Lord is for me. The Lord delights in me. Notice in verse 20 there, he says the Lord delights in me. Romans 8 says if God be for me, who can be against me? And God is on my side. God loves me. Well, yeah, but look what you just did. Well okay, maybe God does not like that, but He loves me. No matter what I do, no matter what goes on, God loves me. So He delivers me, number one, because He delights in me, because He loves me.

Number two, verse 21 here: "The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanliness of my hands he hath recompensed me. For I have kept the ways of the Lord, I have not wickedly departed from my God." So number two, He delivers me according to my righteousness. I now have become the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. I am righteous. And because I have received Christ, He delivers me over and over again and He tells me, "I love you and you are not appointed unto wrath, you are appointed unto salvation."

My son died for you. He died for that. And He reminds me it is already taken care of. Then He says, "And because of the cleanness of my hands." How are you going to clean your hands? What are you going to clean your hands in? There is no solvent on this earth that can clean those filthy hands. You have filthy hands. Then it says, "Cleanse your hands, you sinners." How do you do that? You wash them in the blood and they are clean.

Then you can use these instruments that used to be used for unrighteousness to the glory of God, to raise those hands to the Lord to the glory of God. Awesome. Only God can do this. He loves to bless us. Look at verse 22. He says, "For I have kept the ways of the Lord, I have not wickedly departed from my God." David cried out in Psalm 119:67, "Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now have I kept thy word." Do you see the lesson here?

When I was doing my own thing, I went astray. I sought my own way and was doing my own thing. I was afflicted, I was miserable, it was terrible. But then I started to keep the word of the Lord and go towards the things of God and hey, I am not afflicted. Listen, this book will keep you from sin. But let me tell you this, sin will keep you from this book. So there is a problem here, isn't there? We have to deal with sin. We have to see what it does and see what it is trying to do to us.

But I will tell you something, this book, because I have kept thy word, I am not afflicted. It entered my mind as I was looking at this, "Well, David, you did keep the ways of the Lord a lot, but you lied a lot too. And you blew it a lot too." And I thought, but David when he saw what he had done, he repented of it and God forgave him. So David was in a place like we find ourselves in. You can get stubborn and say, "I do not want to do this Christian thing anymore. I am not going to read my Bible." Okay, fine.

But then you are going to hit the wall, and then you are going to turn around and the Lord is going to be right there and He is going to forgive. We go through these times of growing up, maturing. David too. But he was obedient to the word, he says, and God delivered me. Verse 23: "For all his judgments were before me; and as for his statutes, I did not depart from them." David was obedient, like I said, to a point. He kept God's word.

But he also blew it. He also collected wives, remember that? And do you remember when he committed murder and his adultery affair? When David knew the word of the Lord, it just came right back at him. When you are pointing, three come back at you. "Well, sinners." Well, what about these three? "I am a righteous man." Lying. David's sin was even more condemning, wasn't it, because he knew better. It is terrible when you know. That is why we are always liable when we read the Bible because we are listening to things and we are going "Uh-huh," and then we go out and do it anyhow.

Well, it is even more condemning, isn't it? We knew better. David knew better. But again, in his compromise and when he rationalized his sin, notice in verse 24 he says, "But I was also upright before him and I have kept myself from mine iniquity." He kept himself from his iniquity. What do you mean? He kept himself from sin. In other words he avoided it, he got into some of it, but he got out of it because he ran to his God. Paul said, "Lest I should be condemned or disqualified, I keep my body under subjection."

I know that this body can pull me down and get me into all kinds of trouble so I tell it no. You cannot have this. No, you cannot have that. No, that's not good for you, body. Down. Back off, sucker. Because I will tell you something about the body. It becomes weaker and weaker as your soul becomes stronger, your intellect gets into the word and your spirit begins to feed on the word and you begin to have a little better handle of this thing.

You can tell it to back off from sin that would destroy you. If it was left to go for itself, it would just go for it, but you are held in check. I love what Jude says. Jude says, "Keep yourself in the love of God." Keep myself in God's love, how can I do that? Jude simply says by praying in the Holy Ghost, number one, and by looking for the mercies of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's how you can keep yourself in God's love.

God says, "I want you to keep yourself in My love. Keep yourself under the spout where the glory comes out." You can keep yourself in the place of blessing or you can blow it and put yourself some way far away from where the blessings come, right? That is a decision that we make. Now you are here this morning. You are here to receive, to hear from God. You are putting yourself in a place of keeping yourself in God's love and that's good. But you say, but can we just keep ourselves like this all the time?

No, it comes to a point where I realize that I cannot keep myself. That's where Jude says in Jude 24, I love this, let me read it to you. He says, "Now unto him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before his presence of his glory to exceeding joy." You see I cannot keep myself from falling. I can keep myself in front of God and His love by looking for the Lord coming back. I can build myself up in the faith, but I cannot keep myself from falling.

He keeps me. I am kept by the power of God through faith. You know what that tells me? That God keeps me, but my faith has something to do with it. It is a two-way street. But to know God keeps me. He is going to present me faultless and He keeps me in His hand, safe, totally. Look at verse 25 and we will end here. David says, "Therefore the Lord has recompensed me according to my righteousness, according to my cleanliness in his eyesight."

David here says the reason that he is so blessed is because of his righteousness and his cleanliness. It is just because I am so good that I just deserve God's goodness. Again, we see how his tune changes later on we see how he is crying out for God's mercy to forgive him with his sin with Bathsheba. You see once you really blow it, once you really fall into sin hard and heavy and once you run to the Lord, the changes that happen are unbelievable.

You realize that God has been dealing in your life, chastening you and it did not seem joyous at the present, but it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness in your life. That it is not by your works that you are saved. It is not by what you do and how you do this or do that you are going to heaven, it is by what He has done. And to get that through our heads, what He has done for us. David is relating to God's mercy and grace when he finds out what a sinner he is.

That is true humility. You will walk humbly before your God when you realize what a sinner you are and how wicked and deceitful your heart is. You will walk humbly before your God. That is so needed. And yet there are those that through legalism and through the law and saying, "Well I have done this and I have done that and I am a good person." Yeah, but the Bible says that your righteousness is as filthy rags before the Lord.

It is putrefying before Him, your good works. You do not get to heaven by that. You are not saved by good works. It is a gift of God lest any man should boast. It is not of works. Unmerited favor, that is the meaning of grace. You are never going to merit it. You did nothing to get saved and you will do nothing to be saved or to get to heaven. Can you imagine if we were in heaven? "What did you do to get here? Do you got a couple thousand years?"

I just was one righteous guy and then I did this, then I did that. Give me a break, get out of here. We are not going to hear that. We are just going to be so glad to be in heaven and just for the glory of God and what Jesus Christ done for us. Period. The way of the transgressor is hard. The wages of sin is death. But once you repent, once you are sorry for your sins and you seek God's forgiveness, you get a stronger relationship than you ever thought you had.

There is a lot of people today thinking because they are going to church every Sunday, they have been baptized, they have taken communion, they are going to heaven. And that is how they are getting there through their little puny works. It does not work that way. But when you finally repent of that haughtiness and that pride, a new relationship strikes up. God is merciful, His loving kindness, and you are so grateful just that God saved you.

You could do anything for God and it would be great, it's the greatest thing and that's the humility that it brings. Do you remember the Sadducees and the Pharisees? The Sadducees, they were sad, you see. Kids have a song they sing that. They went around and with their haughtiness they would say in paraphrase, "I do not smoke, I do not chew, I do not go with those who do." And they figured we are somebody and we do all the law, we do everything right, we are going to heaven.

Jesus looked at those guys and said, "You know what, you're whited sepulchers. You look great on the outside, you got all your pomp and all your clothes on right and your priest clothes and you're wearing them right. You go to synagogue every day, you pray for hours every day, and you know what, let me tell you something, you're full of dead man's bones, inside you rot, you stink." He busted them because they were depending on what they were doing to get there instead of on what God has done.

That's such a deadly thing, your works. It is such an evil thing. It sterilizes people, do you know that? It makes them just self-centered and I have made it and I do not care what you believe, I just believe this way. I do not care what the Bible says, I have my own Bible. It is my own heart. People are so living on the edge. Jesus said you are whited sepulchers. Our hearts are full of sin, our hearts are full of pride and hate and evil and lust and evil things.

A lot of people cannot see what is inside and we can always put on a front, we can always say everything's fine when it is not and always hide these things. But Jesus knows how to get right inside of a man. He can see what is happening. When I was in Eastern religion, I felt that I had an in with God. I did my lessons faithfully. Like a lot of people, I go to church, I do this. I did my yoga, I would stand on my head until my ears were turning red.

I would get in the lotus position, I would eat right. I did not eat filthy meat. I was clean. I cleaned my body out with oats and rice. I was righteous and I told everybody. I would fast for days and I would tell everybody, "I am holy." But inside I was miserable. I was doing all these things and I felt like I am better than all of them. I am clean, they're dirty. And yet, I was dying inside.

There is a void there that just nagged me and hurt so much, I was dying. And I was distant from God, I wasn't satisfied with what I was doing. And here there's the key, I wasn't satisfied. I was full of filth and I knew it. Me and God weren't tight like I was telling everybody we were. I didn't even know Him, but I was telling everybody I did. We had a very distant relationship. And that nagging deep void in my heart, I had a lot of pain.

It was coming on me over and over again and it's kind of a slow death that you go through. It's kind of like a dog that returns to its vomit. That's what men do, they return to their good works and they try to make themselves feel better and I am okay, but they're not right with God. And when you're not right with God there's a nagging thing in here that just tells you you're not and it's not okay until I hit the wall and I cried out just like David.

God forgave me and delivered me and He became my savior, my Lord. Now my relationship is one of mercy and grace. That's it, bottom line. God showed His mercy to me, He shed His grace upon me. I love Him now because He first loved me. That's why I serve Him, that's why I love Him, because of what He has done for me. It is nothing that I can do back. When I received Christ, that's it, the bottom line. Jesus died, He said, "It is finished; it is paid in full."

Now believe, come and receive eternal life. You do not have to work anymore to get your way to heaven. Just love the Lord, get your eyes on Him. He is coming soon. Get ready. No condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus. I love it. God delights in me, David said. Not because I am holy, but because I have accepted His son and that sacrifice that He gave 2,000 years ago for my sins. And He came and He filled that void in my life.

His love, His grace, His care, His mercy is on my life. Now I can relate to David as David cried out in Psalm 51, "Restore unto me the joy of my salvation." The joy of being saved. Happy is the man who knows that his sins have been forgiven from the east to the west, who knows that God's not keeping track or up there with a big stick if you move wrong, "I am going to splat you like a fly, man." There's a lot of people walking like this.

What kind of a love relationship? That's a law relationship. No, it's a love relationship that He wants to have with us. Happy is that man. What a day, a song of deliverance. Jesus has set me free. Now those that confess their sins He is faithful and just to forgive you and to wash you from all uncleanness. You can walk in fellowship as He is in the light you can be in the light, have fellowship one with the other and the blood of Jesus Christ will cleanse you from all sin. What an opportunity to be right with God.

Guest (Male): Isn't that great news? You can get right with God and you do not have to do anything other than have faith in him and repent of your sins. Pastor Jeff Johnson will be back in a moment here on Sound Doctrine. We house all of our 2 Samuel studies at sounddoctrineradio.org. This comes in handy should you miss a study or two on the radio or just want to hear something again or even share it with someone you know. This study and more are available now at sounddoctrineradio.org under messages.

You can also listen at oneplace.com and through the Sound Doctrine Radio podcast app. And of course, speaking of podcasts, Sound Doctrine can be heard wherever you enjoy podcasts and that includes Spotify and Apple Podcasts. This program is made possible through the support of our listeners. To make a contribution to the ministry just visit sounddoctrineradio.org and click on giving. God is Jehovah. What does that familiar word mean? Here is Pastor Jeff once again.

Jeff Johnson: He is in the Bible called Jehovah. You know what that word means? The becoming one. He will become whatever you need Him to be this morning. If you need salvation, He says I want to be your savior. If you need deliverance, I want to be your deliverer. If you need healing, I want to be your healer. You just come. I will be what you need Me to be because I am a God that meets needs.

Guest (Male): Next time on Sound Doctrine, David offers a song of praise to God, a testimony to the Lord's faithfulness and goodness. It's a song each of us needs to sing. Join us then as Pastor Jeff returns to 2 Samuel chapter 22. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Downey.

Father, won't You speak to me? Oh Lord, You know I am listening. You know exactly what I need. So Father, won't You speak to me?