Sunday Message: some assembly required

Yesterday, I played one of those FB games where you put up your name and people make a 'first impression' comment.  Someone commented for me 'wise'- to which I answered, "Another one fooled".  And this morning was a good example of why I said that.  So let me pose a question one way here, and another way when I'm done with this morning's experience.  The first question:  You ever get stuck by something so obvious, it feels like everyone on earth got it before you?

As I woke up from a questionable night's sleep, Charles Stanley was speaking about David.  If you have followed my faith posts for a while, you know that I have had the hardest time figuring out 2 figures- Davis and Paul.  Paul I have started to comprehend, thanks to Dennis Miller, but David still has been a head scratcher.  How does someone do all the NEGATIVE things he did, and still end up 'a man after God's own heart', whose only detraction from God is 'in the matter of Uriah the Hittite'?

Well, somewhere in between Stanley's own listing of these characteristics- "He was a liar, a murderer, and did some very hard things..."- and his conclusion, it began to dawn on me.  As he described David's acting like a madman to escape death at the hands of the Philistines as something God would NOT have wanted him to do, I began to see that my problem was that I was looking at David's failures and indiscretions as "means to accomplish God's ends" that God was giving him a pass on- but that wasn't what was happening.  I saw that, like with many other Biblical characters, I was seeing David 'fully perfected', complete as God wanted him from the moment as a cheese-toting lad he killed Goliath.

God, however, saw him different.  Stanley went on to describe what David went through, seemingly over and over, as God's "sifting him over and over until he produced in David the character he wanted."

David was not 'complete as delivered'.  He was 'some assembly required'- just like me, just like the rest of us, being sifted until the character God wants in us is developed.  Needless to say, I'll have to study David in a new light.  And if not wise, at least I've gained one small measure towards it.

That rephrased question:  "Did you ever have God keep something from you that should have been obvious, until the time you WOULD actually use it?"  And if you look at the first question, they are really one and the same.