One More Thing

Hi Five Oakers, The weekend's coming and there are a few things I want to share with you.

The Weekend

Do you ever feel too ordinary, too marginal, to be used by God to influence your children, your friends, your company, the political landscape or issues of justice and compassion? What kind of person does God use to influence and bring change in lives and in our world? A person like David.

David was, hands down, the greatest king of Israel. And he plays large in the story of Jesus. Yet when we first meet David, he is considered by those who know him to be ordinary. He is ignored and marginalized in a large family as the eighth son of a Jesse. If Samuel were to choose the next king himself, the next king would have looked and led much like Saul. Israel would again have a failed king. But God saw into David's heart and he knew he could work with what he saw.

What God saw in David he can see in you. That's what we'll be talking about this weekend in our David Story series as we focus on David's anointing as king in 1 Samuel.

FYI

Rob Schwarzwalder and Pat Fagan on "On conservative religious activism, the numbers speak for themselves"

Harvard professor Robert Putnam makes an assertion about what he terms “organized religion,” its agenda and the use of its “resources.” Specifically: “The obvious fact is that over the last 30 years, most organized religion has focused on issues regarding sexual morality, such as abortion, gay marriage, all of those. I’m not saying if that’s good or bad, but that’s what they’ve been using all their resources for. This is the most obvious point in the world. It’s been entirely focused on issues of homosexuality and contraception and not at all focused on issues of poverty.” This is utter nonsense, to the point of absurdity....

One More Thing

Eugene Peterson in Leap Over a Wall:

[The David story provides] more plot and detail, more characters and landscape than any other in Scripture to show us how to live entirely before and in the response to God.