Mike Bickle emphasizes that confidence in God's love is a foundational element for intimacy with Him, drawing lessons from King David's life. He explains that believers must recognize God's unconditional love and view their own love for Him as genuine, despite weaknesses. Bickle stresses that intimacy with God is hindered by feelings of shame and condemnation, and that true intimacy is built on both confidence in love and a commitment to obedience. He encourages believers to understand their identity as beloved children of God, which empowers them to pursue a deeper relationship with Him.

Father, we ask you for the spirit of wisdom and the spirit of revelation to be released upon your word even now. We ask that hearts would be inspired in the name of Jesus, amen. Okay, session three, we're looking at foundations to intimacy in King David's life. He's our main focus here in this session tonight. And one of the most important foundations to intimacy with God is confidence in love. That when we stand before God, we have confidence that God loves us and we have confidence that he sees our love back to him as authentic, which is really obedience. I wanna say that again. Confidence in love is an essential foundation to growing in intimacy. A lot of people talk about intimacy and extols its pleasures and the power on the human heart, but at the foundation of it is this thing called confidence in love. That if a believer lacks confidence when they stand before God and they think that God's angry at them or they feel condemned and they feel shame, they cannot grow in intimacy without confidence in love standing before him that God loves them. But there's a second dimension. It's not enough to know that God loves you in order to grow in intimacy. You have to have the confidence that God sees your weak love as genuine and that he sees your love as real. And when you have a witness, the testimony in your heart, from the word of God, you have this assurance that God sees you not as a hypocrite that's double-minded, but as someone that, yes, we are weak, but our love is real, our love is genuine. With that confidence in place, we can grow powerfully in the subject of intimacy with the Lord. Without that confidence in place, growing in intimacy is very difficult. It just ends up a kind of a phrase that's kind of cool to use, but it doesn't have any substance to it. A person with a spirit of condemnation and shame cannot grow in intimacy with the Lord. We have to discern what the components of that shame and condemnation, and we have to expose them, and we have to cure them and correct them by the word of God. In other words, we have to believe what God says about himself. That's the main thing in the word of God that will bring our confidence in love, in terms of God loving us, to bring it to a place of strength. Second, 1 Samuel 13, verse 14. The familiar passage of which the life of David, everyone that studies it knows this passage. God sought for himself a man after his own heart. And here I have what I believe to be the three components of being a man or a woman after God's own heart. A is that we obey the commands of God. This is critical. I'm gonna touch a little bit of this tonight. To be a woman after God's own heart, a man after God's own heart, it's important that we are sincerely seeking and endeavoring to be people of 100-fold obedience, that every issue of our life is brought into a place of obedience. In our weakness, we don't have every area under submission, but we're laboring to, and whatever area we discover is not in obedience, we declare war on that area and we go after it. It's not just the sort of thing where we're casual, well, we got a few areas that really were kind of unsettled. We're going after this thing. A man or a woman after God's own heart is sincere about obeying the commands of God's heart. B, one of my favorite subjects. As a person after God's own heart, we study the emotions of God's heart so we can encounter his heart, so we can grow in this confidence in love. And C, it's the fasting and prayer dimension. We contend. We war in the spirit through fasting and prayer and other means as well. Preaching, proclaiming the word. We are contending for the breakthrough of God's purposes in our generation, for the full breakthrough of his purposes. Okay, Roman numeral two. We're not gonna go through this, but those of you that have the notes, these are just some different lessons we wanna learn about David's life. And so just review those because as you're reading 1 and 2 Samuel, these are the four issues you really want to focus on and pick up on. I've covered those several times, so I'm gonna skip them now. Roman numeral three, another thing I cover very often, but I believe that we can't hear it too many times, that the core identity or the core reality of David's life was based in his intimacy with God. The primary way David saw himself, the primary way that David measured the success of his life are these three core issues. His intimacy with God, his meekness before people, and the spirit of understanding in the word of God that God imparted to him. These are the three things we will bring with us when we go and meet the Lord on the other side. These are the things that define success in our life. It's not the size of our impact. It's not how many people follow our ministries. It's not how big our business is in the marketplace. It's not how good a reputation we have in the neighborhood or in the family structure. It's our intimacy with God. It's what God says about our meekness before people, and it's the measure of understanding we have of the word of God. I don't mean how many Bible verses you can quote. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about living understanding in the heart. We bring that with us forever. We wanna be people of understanding. We wanna be people of the word, even if we don't have a public teaching ministry. We're all called to teach people one-on-one. We're all called to be people with a bright spirit filled with understanding. David's identity or David's sense of value was found in his intimacy. Our value is not found in how anointed our ministry is, how big it is. Our value is found in our success, in the anointing of God on our spirit to walk in intimacy with God. The very last of paragraph A is that David felt successful before God. In context to how much he grew in the anointing of love, the anointing of meekness, and the anointing of revelation. Beloved, you can have no following. You can have nothing happening outwardly where you're drawing the attention of others, but be one of the most successful people on the planet. You can be one of the most successful people, literally, in this nation or on the planet with nobody ever knowing your name. Well, I guess I got one happy customer back there, okay. No, no, no, no, I don't like a lot of shouting all that. I'm not trying to get that going. I'm going the other way. That distracts me, actually. Okay, B, paragraph B. David's primary identity was established in who he was spiritually or who he was in his intimacy with God. In other words, who he was before God as one that God loved and as one that loved God. I'm just saying the same thing over and over. That's the power of our lives. It's who we are as one that God loves and one that loves God. That's the reason we're successful because God loves us and we love God, unrelated to all the other issues. And beloved, if we can tap into that core reality, our spirit is alive throughout the seasons of our life. We can be in a season where the circumstances aren't going so well, where the ministry, the marketplace, the vision, whatever isn't going so well. We're in a season where it's pruned or we're being cut back. But our spirit can be alive in the awareness that we're successful, profoundly successful in God's presence. If I gauge my success by where the momentum or the size of my ministry is, that's a perilous way to live. That's the sure way to live in despair and anxiety all the time. They say that some of the most insecure women on the planet are the beauty queens. Not all of them, but many of them that are just a remarkable beauty from the esteem of their peers in the world are some of the most insecure people. Here's my point. You can't be rich enough to ever be secure in your riches. You can't be beautiful enough to ever be at peace with your beauty. You can't have a big enough following. You can't have a big enough impact to ever find peace in any of those things. We have to find our life in another place outside of those kinds of things. And so many ministries are really burning out. Their ministries are growing and flourishing, but they have so much stress on their spirit trying to get it going. And then once it gets going, trying to maintain it and trying to make breakthrough in their position, they're so striving for position and honor and platform, they just live in anxiety perpetually. And even when they get it, they stay in anxiety. It's the beauty queen that wins all the contests that's really afraid of losing the next one. And I know many people in ministry, large ministries, but there's no peace, well, I wouldn't say no peace, but there's a spirit of anxiety that's wearing them out on the inside. It's very, very normal, very common thing because they're deriving their sense of success from something other than being one that God loves and being those that love God. God loves me, I love God, therefore I am successful. God loves me. I'm one of the most powerful people on the planet as you are because God loves me and I said yes to it. I'm one of the few percent, it's less than 10% of the planet is walking with God right now. I'm one of that 10% or whatever the number is of the planet that said yes to this extreme love of God. I said yes to it, that makes me one of the most powerful people on the planet, just like you. I said yes to receive it and I'm throwing my life energies to return it. Not just that I've received it, I wanna answer it back and therefore I am loved, I am a lover, therefore I am successful. Unrelated to anything else happening in my life with money or health or favor among people or impact of ministry, my spirit can be alive right through all the seasons of my life if I can tap into this reality that David tapped into. Now here's a very important point I wanna make, I don't have it written here but it's all through the notes, the idea is that the best friend of intimacy with God is the spirit of obedience. Some people have this idea that intimacy means they rejoice in being forgiven and that's what intimacy is and obedience is kind of legalism. Intimacy with God, it's pillars are confidence in love and a spirit of radical obedience. Those are the foundations of intimacy with God. A spirit of radical obedience is an essential part of intimacy with God. You will never have intimacy beyond the quest in your heart to be 100% obedient to God. Now nobody is 100% obedient to God but the quest, the pursuit and when we come up short, the other part is our confidence in God's love and God's mercy for us. It's confidence in mercy is pillar number one, seeking to be 100% obedient pillar number two and the end result of that is a heart enjoying encounter with God, intimacy with God and a security and a powerful spirit that knows we're successful each step of the way. We are successful even though our love isn't mature, we're still successful in God's eyes because we've said yes to it and we're going after it. Don't separate intimacy with God and obedience. Sometimes I'll talk on mercy and people will say, oh man, I love your intimacy talk. And I go, okay, that's one of the key foundations, confidence in mercy. That's what I'm talking on tonight actually. And then sometimes I'll spend a couple of weeks talking on obedience. They go, ooh, let's get back to the intimacy message. I go, beloved, that is the intimacy message. There is no intimacy apart from these two foundations. Paragraph C, it says for the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth. Now isn't this interesting, to show himself. I don't have that underlined, to show himself, but that's one of the most powerful parts of this whole verse. God wants to show himself to you. Beloved, God wants to show himself. God's eyes are looking all over the nations. He's looking all over America. He's looking at this room and he has something on his mind. He wants to show himself to you. But he wants to show himself to you strong. He wants to show his strength to you. He wants to manifest himself to you as strong. In other words, he wants to use you in power. He wants to align events and set up circumstances that take his power, but he wants to impact your spirit with power. He wants to show himself to you in a strong way. And his eyes are looking to and fro, and here's what he's looking for. He's looking for people whose hearts are loyal to him. And that's what he found when he found King David. He found a heart that was loyal. Now David stumbled on many times, but when David stumbled, he fell in sin, and he rose up, it says in Proverbs, that the righteous man stumbles seven times, but he arises every time. When we stumble, we're not out of the game. We don't fall. It's not a fall, quote unquote, until we quit. As long as we look at our disobedience, we push delete, we rise up and attack going full steam to seek to be 100% obedient. Beloved, you're in the ranks of the loyal. You're in the ranks of the obedient to God. Because God found David, because David's heart was loyal. God defined David as loyal, but he had many mistakes, and he had many sins in his life, but he was loyal because when he did confront those sins, excuse me, he rose up, he pushed delete on the sin, and he went after obedience again, and he said, you know, I'm done with that. I'm going hard after God again, and God says, I'll take you just like that. I'll forgive you, and we'll let the thing go, and I'm taking you full blast again right now, five minutes later. And David had this tremendous grace of God to restart himself, to realign himself back with God when he stepped out of obedience. Paragraph D, David had a deep resolve. This is about intimacy with God. He had a deep resolve to live in 100-fold obedience. That means every area, 100%. I'm gonna go ahead and ask everyone to turn their phones off. They would do that. If you're not sure, go ahead and check your phone real quick. Paragraph D, David had a deep resolve. Look at this in 1 Kings 11, verse 34. He's talking to one of the kings afterwards, and he says, talking about David, he says, my servant David, whom I chose because he kept my commandments. Do you know that God chose David at age 16 or 17 years old because he was keeping his commandments when he was 14 and 15? Now, think this through all the way. God's eyes were going to and fro across the earth, and he was looking for a man in Israel that could be king of Israel. Obviously, he was looking throughout Israel for the king of Israel, and he chose David because David obeyed him when he was 14 and 15 years old, 12 and 13, and that impacted God's decision when David was 16 and 17, and the prophet Samuel came to his house and anointed him. It was because of the obedience when he was 14. Now, think that through. That's a staggering concept, and the concept is our obedience really does matter as the eyes of the Lord are going to and fro across the earth. The next passage, Jesus said, if you love me, if you love me, keep my commandments. Verse 21, he who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me. Beloved, this is a verse that we speak when we do warfare in our soul against Satan and against demons and against the lust of our own heart. We can say it is written when our own lust rise up within us. We can quote John 14, verse 21. It is written, he who has my commandments and he that keeps them, it is he who loves me, and when something rises up in us to pull us to the right or the left, we can say he that has God's commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves him. I am the one who loves you. I am the one that loves you. I will keep your commandments. We declare these passages to the war that's going on in our own heart. We speak the word of God back to the forces within us, our own sinful forces as well as the powers of darkness. We can say, no, I'm not going in that direction. He that has God's commandments and keeps them, this is the one that loves God, and we use the very word of God to minimize and to diffuse some of these railing, fiery missiles of the evil one. Or you could quote 2 Chronicles 16, 9. I would quote all these verses. The one that we just used a minute ago. When our souls are being tipped to go right or left, we can say the eyes of the Lord are looking to and fro. He wants to show himself to me. He wants to show himself as my heart is loyal to him, and Lord, I declare I have a loyal heart to you, and you speak the word of God, and you get back on the path and you go forward. We use these passages as promises. We use these passages as weapons against sinful distractions pulling us to the right and the left. God will show himself to me strong if my heart is loyal to him. I am loyal to you, oh God. I say no to this, and I say yes to you. There was Jesus in the garden. In Luke chapter 22, well, it's in all the gospels. In Luke 22, verse 42, he says that, not my will, but your will be done. Beloved, when he said not my will, but your will be done in Luke 22, that was an act of warfare. When Satan was coming against him, he was speaking the word to Satan just like he did in the garden of Gethsemane. I mean, just like he did in the wilderness. When Satan came to Jesus in the wilderness, he spoke, it is written, you shall love the Lord your God and serve him only. And when he's in the garden at the end of his ministry, and the very powers of darkness are coming against him, he says, I will, it is, not my will, he proclaimed. It's not my will, it's that one simple sentence. It's like a missile from heaven. Not my will. Jesus used it in the most perilous time in his life in the garden of Gethsemane right before the cross. He said, not my will, but your will. That's what Jesus said when the powers of darkness were hitting him. Beloved, you can borrow that weapon and use it on Satan again. You can be right in the throes of temptation. You can quote the very truth Jesus quoted. That wasn't just a statement of dedication. It was a statement, well, it was dedication, but it was a statement of warfare. He was declaring, that was a prophetic oracle. He was prophesying back to the powers of darkness. Beloved, you're never gonna get a better sentence than the one that Jesus used in his hour of duress and testing. Not my will, but thy will be done. That's a big subject. We'll look at that at another time. But beloved, I want you to get that into your arsenal. I want you to get these other verses. Satan comes. He that has God's commandments and keeps them, this is the one that loves God. He that has God's commandments, it is written, he that keeps them, this is the man or woman that loves God. I love God, and I'm going after God with all of my heart. The eyes of the Lord are going to and fro across the earth. God wants to show himself mighty. He wants to show himself strong. And the one whose heart is loyal, I am loyal to you by the grace of God from my heart. Beloved, this is the heart of David. I find it inspiring, the passage we looked at a minute ago right there in 1 Kings 11, verse 34, that David was chosen because of his obedience when he was 15 and 16 and 13. Beloved, your obedience today is determining your future. It's determining your next decade of your life. Your obedience today matters. I don't mean that if you blow it, you're out. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about you blow it, you rise up, you confess it, you push to lead. You stand back up in the posture of 100% obedience because David blew it a bunch of times, but he got right back up in the ward. He says, I'm not even looking back. I'm not even gonna go visit it again. I'm going straight into God's heart. I view myself as a person radically obedient to the heart of God. He had this tenacious resiliency to get right back up into that place of battle in the spirit and go after God again. And because he did that, I guarantee you, when he was 14 and 15, he blew it a number of times, but he recovered. He came back hard. He came back with a vengeance. He said, I'm gonna obey you, God, and God chose him as the king of Israel because of that. It might be pornography, it might be alcohol, it might be bitterness, it might be issues with food or pleasures or entertainment that's out of the will of God, all kinds of things. Beloved, we need to declare war on these things and go hard after God and get our spirits locked into God, and I wanna tell you, it really matters if you do this. The idea, well, we're gonna be forgiven anyway. Yeah, you will be forgiven. You will be forgiven, but people go, they stand before God on the last day, and Paul the Apostle said, they're saved as though by fire. They have nothing from their life that they take with them. They're saved like by the skin of their teeth, so to speak. Anyway, I gave you these verses here so you could use them in warfare. You could declare these to the powers of darkness. They're powerful ones. Roman numeral four, David's confidence in love. Let's go to the other pillar. First is the spirit of obedience, and now it's his confidence in love, and this is the one I really wanna hit. I mean, the spirit of obedience is super important, but a lot of people, actually, their biggest thing that hits them isn't their compromise. It's the condemnation they have from a compromise a long time ago. It's still, they got a dark cloud in their soul because they don't have confidence in love, but some people go for the confidence in love, and they're soft on compromise. Other people, they're strong on obedience. When they blow it, they beat themselves up. They think that if they put themselves in probation for a year or two, it proves their sincerity, and it doesn't. It proves their confidence in their religious works is what it proves. Beloved, to put yourself in a self-made probation, and what I mean is I blow it today, so for the next couple months, I'm just gonna be suffer and be miserable to prove to God I'm sincere, and he says, you're not proving your sincerity by that. You're proving that you have confidence in your own religious works. I would rather you have confidence in my son's death and that you come after me hard today and push delete. That's what I would rather you do. Paragraph A, one of the foundational realities of David's life was his dynamic revelation that he was totally forgiven. He was delighted in, and he was dear to God even in his weakness. That was an unprecedented revelation. David had more insight on that than I think anybody in the whole Old Testament. He knew, foundational, that he was totally forgiven, not kind of forgiven. He knew he was forgiven. He did not have confidence in his religious works after he blew it. He had confidence in the heart of God and in the cross of Jesus, using New Testament terminology. One of the foundational realities was that he was delighted in, and he was dear to God even in his weakness. He wasn't dear to God after he matured, you know, 70 years old, about to meet the Lord face-to-face, and finally, he knew he was dear to God right through the seasons, even of his struggles. It's amazing. One of the foundational reality that God spoke to David was on the day that he was anointed King of Israel. Right here in 1 Samuel 16, verse 7. Samuel, the prophet, is the one speaking, and he's saying, thus says the Lord. He says, the Lord doesn't see as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance. Man looks at the outward performance, is another way you could say that. Man looks at what happens outwardly, whether it's performance or success, or whatever, but God looks at the movements of the heart. This is the passage that David was ordained with. I mean, his ordination service, so to speak, with the prophet Samuel, you know, thus says the Lord, the greatest prophet in the earth in that generation. He says, thus says the Lord. I got one word for you, David. God looks at the movements of your heart, not at your performance. Thus says the Lord. Build your entire kingship on that reality, David. David said, that I will do. He built his entire ministry based on that prophetic word at his ordination, so to speak. And having a heart after God like David, yes, there is a spirit of obedience. We talked on that, but David was a student of God's emotions. He knew God's heart, and he knew because of the way God's heart is, that God looks at the movements of people's hearts more than their outward activities. I'm still here in paragraph eight. The second sentence, rebellion and immaturity outwardly may look the same, but the heart of a rebellious person and the heart of an immature believer are very, very different. An immature believer has great sincerity. They're just immature in the walking of it out, but they really care to obey God. They really, really care. They're very sincere. They're just immature, and the heart of someone with rebellion is very different than that. They don't care. They're trying to get away with their sin. As long as they don't get discovered by man, they're happy. They don't care that God is grieved and God is watching. As long as they don't have consequences in the near future, they don't care about their sin. They think they can get away with it. That's a rebellious heart. An immature heart sees the sin and hates it and still steps into it, but rises up and declares war against it. It's sincere, but it's still weak. And that kind of heart is very dear to God. The person with a sincere heart for God, like David did in his youth and even through his adulthood, God did not view him as rebellious because at David's ordination service, again, I'm gonna say the passage again, was the prophet that said, David, know this, as king, God doesn't look at what you do. And no matter how big your kingdom is, that isn't why you're great, David. You're not great because your kingdom's big. You're not great because you externally perform all the right things. You're great in God's sight because the movements of your heart are towards God. And his heart is towards you. That's why you're great. God loves you. You love God. That's why you're successful, David. No matter how big your kingdom is, that doesn't add anything to your success. Beloved, you could have the biggest ministry in the world and fill the stadiums. That does not make you successful when you stand before God. The size of your ministry, the size of your impact is not what God's gonna talk to you and I about when we stand there before him. He's gonna talk about the movements of our heart, the size of our heart. Paragraph B, David had an unusual ability to fully receive the free mercy of God. I mean, when I first began to study the life of David, it almost made me mad. A couple times it did, actually. I thought the audacity of this guy to blow it this big and to be this happy right afterwards, to be this confident in God. And I said that, you know, I would read it and I'd put the Psalms, what he said in the Psalms is what he did with, I go, wait, he shouldn't be this happy. He shouldn't be this confident. And I don't mean that David didn't mourn over his sin and grieve because he sinned. But beloved, he was sorrowful for his tendency to sin. But when David sinned, he would repent of that thing and go straight on to God. And he would begin to rejoice in the mercy of God as though it was a brand new day, because it was a brand new day. David did not trust in his religious works. He trusted in God's mercy. Beloved, we need to trust in God's mercy like David did. That gives us confidence to stand there and then we can grow in intimacy. And intimacy is our portion. Intimacy is what we're all about. But beloved, we can't move into intimacy without a spirit of obedience on one side and without confidence in mercy on another side. Confidence in love is what I like to call it. It's the same thing as confidence in mercy. Paragraph C, after 16 months of compromise and zig lag, we'll look at that in the days ahead. When David stumbled in zig lag for 16 months, he had issues that he was in persistent disobedience for 16 months. That was the worst season of David's life in terms of prolonged period. The most grievous sin is, of course, when he killed Uriah. When he murdered the husband of the woman he committed adultery with. People talk about the adultery, it was the murder. Well, adultery's bad, don't get me wrong. But the thing that compounded it to another level is that he murdered a man because of it. But that happened in a short amount of time. But for 16 months, David had issues unsettled for 16 months. That's a long time to go with issues where you're saying no to the Lord and he's saying yes to you. And on the day that David was delivered by God and he repented, on the same day, on the same day, Psalm 18, you can read it in Psalm 18 in the subtitle of Psalm 18. It says, on the day that God was delivered from Saul. It's the day after the 16-month period. David says these absolutely startling statements after 16 months. He goes, I love you, O God. His friend said, well, you certainly didn't look like you did for this last 16 months. He goes, I do, I love you, God. And they went, it's interesting. You are there, you're at the conference dancing and I know what you did last week. David says, I take my stand. I love you, O God, in truth. The Lord says, you other guys be quiet. He loves me. The very fact that he started Psalm 18 with I love you. I know where I've been, I know what I've done, but I know that I love you and I know that you know I love you. Beloved, that's a powerful statement right there. You step into an area of compromise. You repent and what you need to do is stand before God and declare, I love you, O God, and that's the truth of who I am. It's kind of like rebooting the computer. Shut it down and start it over and have a brand new day because it is a new day. And then in verse 19, a couple of verses later, David talks about why God delivered him after 16 months. He goes, you delivered me because you delighted in me. What an outrageous statement, except for he got it by revolution. I like to think there's somebody there. David becomes king on this day. I can imagine the reporter, the USA Today reporter. Well, King David, you've been out of the land for 16 months. None of us, this Jewish reporter, we don't know what you've been doing over there in the Philistines land because he was in Ziklag, was over in the Philistine land. We haven't seen you for 16 months, kind of like you're off the radar. You're back, King Saul died today. You're the new king. Wow, what were you doing for 16 months? And why did God deliver you? He says, let me answer that one. God delivered me because he likes me. That's why he delivered me. I can imagine David's friends going, they're going, where did you get that answer? He goes, I got it from heaven. God delivered me from Saul, the king who was trying to kill me, he delivered me from my sin. He delivered me from several other perils, I won't go into right now. Why? That's the point I want to emphasize, because he likes me, he delights in me. I mean, no person should say that statement after 16 months, except he has the spirit of revelation in the word of God and he's speaking the truth, so therefore we can say it. But if it wasn't in the word of God, but it is, so we can say it. Then he goes on a few verses later the same day, verse 35, and he says, God, I want to be clear about this. It's your gentleness that has made me great. Now, David wasn't great yet. I mean, David's 30 years old. He's gonna be made king immediately, but he's not talking, I don't believe he's talking about he's a great king, because he's not a great king, he's a brand new king. I think he's talking about, God, your gentleness has removed all the issues, and because you were kind to me, because you could have wiped me out, because of that, I'm gonna grow, I'm gonna go on and grow up and be great in my heart before the Lord, like John the Baptist was. John the Baptist, the angel Gabriel said, he's great in the sight of the Lord. John wasn't great in the eyes of men at all. John had a very small ministry for only 18 months. John's ministry was not great by the standard of the numbers of people that we're accustomed to today. John's ministry was very small and very short. He was not great in the eyes of men at all. Matter of fact, it says in Matthew chapter 11, verse 18, Matthew 11, verse 18, that the nation of Israel said John had a demon. They said he was demonized. They said John was off base completely. He was completely off base from the word of God. Jesus said, they said John has a demon. I tell you, he did not have a demon. He was the greatest man born of a woman, but John's greatness, in Matthew 11 that tells the story, was not in the eyes of men. John's greatness was who he was before God. The nation wrote him off. And his ministry was 18 months. The numbers were very small. He was the greatest man ever born of a woman, Jesus said. With absolutely nothing going on on the outside that got anybody's attention, except for people who love God and trust Jesus' evaluation. Well, David's tapping into the same definition of greatness here. He goes, God, your gentleness has made me great. You could have wiped me out, God, in you. I had every reason for my life to be over in God, but you were gentle to me, and therefore I will grow to be great in the things of God at the heart level. David was one of the most powerful kings in Israel's history. But beloved, remember, David at the height of his ministry had five or six million people under him, or seven million. It was like the size of a major city. It was like the mayor of a major city. A very small amount of people. So he wasn't great in the sense of what we think of nations and numbers today. His number, I mean, the whole nation was the size of a major city. I mean, he had the political authority of a mayor of a city, really. That, because the nation of Israel was so small. He wasn't great in that regard. There's many mayors in many cities in America that had more clout than David did politically. David wasn't known to all the nations of the world. Immediately they knew him because he beat them up and defeated them. But he wasn't known in the earth. He was unheard of. David got famous years later when they wrote him and put his story in the Bible. David was great, not because of what he was in the eyes of men, even in his day, and certainly not on the day that he was delivered from Ziklag. He's just brand new. He's great because he's gonna be great in his heart, is what he's talking about. And he's gonna be great in the purpose of God and throughout all of eternity and all that as well. But he says, God, you could have wiped me out, but your gentleness has made me great. Look at the next verse, Psalm 130. King David's writing this again. He goes, if you, O God, should mark iniquities, who could stand? If God was gonna count people's sins and punish them, who could stand, is what David said. But it goes on to say, but with you, there is forgiveness. Why? So that I can go on and grow up and fear you in the days ahead. What if God wiped out Saul of Tarsus when he was killing Christians? Instead of forgiving him and letting him go on to be Paul the apostle, what if God would have wiped him out in his rage against Jesus? God says, no, Paul, I'm gonna forgive you. And then you're gonna fear me and you're gonna know me and you'll be great and mighty in your heart. Beloved, God wants to be gentle with you so that you can be great, so you can grow in the love of God and be great in your gratitude and great in your meekness and great in understanding. He wants you to forgive you and to be gentle with you. He doesn't wanna mark your sins. He doesn't wanna count them and destroy you. He wants you to go on and to be mighty in the fear of God, not wipe you out and to prove why he had a reason to wipe you out. He has a different agenda. He wants to stun you with kindness so you fear him all the days of your life because you know he deals gently with his people. I'm not saying there aren't difficult circumstances sometimes. Some people have some of the most difficult circumstances completely unrelated to their sin. I'm talking about God being gentle with them in terms of, I'm not saying that everything in their life goes good because God's gentle, but he doesn't push them back, but he embraced them and he brought them near him. Let's go on to paragraph D. A believer that's confident in love is more committed and more persistent than one constantly living under the threats and fears of failure and punishment. I've been preaching now over 30 years, and I can assure you this, watching people and trying to go hard after God through these years, you get somebody confident in love, you get them convinced God wants to be gentle with them and forgive them right now and restore them to full fellowship, you get them convinced they will be, I was gonna say 10 to one, it's like 100 to one over the years I've looked. They bounce back with a persistence and a tenacity in God so much different than the people who, they live under condemnation, fears and threats, and that's why they're trying to stay out of doing wrong things so they won't get in trouble. You get a person that gets confident in their spirit. Beloved, that person will be radical for God. Now there's those kind of people that take these verses, take these teachings, and they take these teachings and they wanna go live in compromise and then quote these verses to make themselves feel good while they're compromising with no intention of repenting, and that's called deception. Don't quote these verses if you're not quoting the other verses. If you're quoting the verses that I quoted earlier, not my will but your will be done, God. I say no to this sin. He that has my commandments and keeps them, this is the man or this is the woman that loves God. You're quoting those verses and you're warring against sin. You can quote these verses as well, but you can't pick one without the other. But some people are quoting the obedience verses, but they're coming up short on the confidence and mercy verses, and it injures their obedience at the end of the day. Another statement David said. David's still in the Ziklag years. Actually, Psalm 56 is about the same period of time. And it says in the subtitle in Psalm 56, it's when David is with Achish king of Gath, which is the Ziklag years. You may not have those names, Achish king of Gath, and the Gath is right next to Ziklag. It's the Philistine Empire. Gath and Ziklag and Achish are all a part of the Philistine Empire, which are neighbors to Israel. David ran into the Philistine Empire to hide from Saul instead of trusting God, and God wasn't pleased with David for doing that. He goes, don't go hide with the Philistines. Get over here and trust me. He goes, no, I'm gonna hide with the Philistines because I'm afraid Saul's gonna kill me. He goes, David, what are you doing? You're the anointed of the Lord, and David lost his way. I mean, he loved God throughout the deal, but for 16 months, he just stayed over there. He just camped in as some compromise in his life. And David's over there in the Philistine Empire, which is just right next door to Israel, in the Ziklag years, and look what David says. Psalm 56, verse eight. He says, God, you number my wonderings. And his wonderings, he means over there running around with the Philistines. That word wonderings isn't good. You number the days in what I'm doing. I know that you know what I'm doing over here. That's what, you number my wonderings. That was a very nice term in David's favor. I like that term. You know, when I've had some of my bad days, I like to call it my wonderings. That's good, good verse, eh? Well, the Lord backed up David when he used it, so I said, that's a good one. You put my tears, and these are tears of repentance and tears of love, you put my tears in your bottle. Isn't that amazing? He says, are they not in your book? So David is over there in Ziklag in the Philistine Empire, and he's got two things he's crying about. He's crying because he says, I don't want to be here. I hate being here. I don't belong here. Cry, cry, cry. And he's also crying, and he says, I love you. I love you, I really love you. This isn't where I belong, I love you. Cry, cry, cry. He had two reasons he was weeping. And you know what God did? Instead of God looking at him and saying, you old hypocrite, David, quit your crying and stand up and act like a man, God says, no, here's what I'm gonna do, David. I'm gonna take your tears, I'm gonna put them, I'm gonna catch them in my bottle because your tears are precious to me, and I will remember them forever, the tears of the pain of your anguish being in this area, being stuck over here right now. God put his tears in his bottle because they were precious to God. Beloved, some of you are crying tears right now because you're in wonderings, and you're saying, I don't belong here, and I really do love you, and you're crying, and you say, I wonder if I could only know for sure what God's saying. Well, I'm gonna tell you what he's saying to you. He says, I'm catching your tears in a bottle because they're dear to my heart, and I'm writing every one of them, all the wonderings, I'm writing all of the movements of your heart, I'm writing them in my book because they touch me in the midst of these wonderings. Verse nine, and David says, I cry out to you, and then my enemies will turn back. He goes, I know this thing is gonna turn around, this I know why, because I know that God is for me. David's in Ziklag writing this. I know that God is for me. That was one of the verses that, you know, 30 years ago when I first started reading this, I said, I'm just plain mad. There's no way he could know God was for him. Well, I was 20 then, I'm 50 now, and I've come to really like that verse. Let the reader understand, okay. But I actually remember I was teaching it the first time. I taught the life of David when I was 20 years old. I taught it like for 10 weeks to a group of people, and just took it right off of other people's tapes, you know, just transcribed them and just memorized them word for word, and was proud of it. I mean, a couple years later, I didn't tell anybody then, but a few years later I did, okay. You know how that is, okay. But I could never get through Psalm 56. I thought, no way, no way, that shouldn't be in there. And again, years later, I'm really glad it is. Psalm 103. David says, bless the Lord, oh my soul, and forget not all of his benefits. Beloved, we can't forget his benefits. We can't decide that we've out sinned God's heart, that our sin is stronger than God. David says, I'm gonna remember all your benefits. My sin is bad, but my sin isn't near as strong as your heart is. And these people that spin out in a year or two of condemnation, or even a week or two, it's because they imagine their sin is stronger than God's heart is in Jesus' cross, the blood of Jesus on the cross. Beloved, there's nothing mightier that you can do that will overdo the love of God, except say no to it. He says, I'm not gonna forget any of his benefits. And beloved, this is the kind of passage you quote. You quote to the enemy when he's accusing you. You say, there's no condemnation of Christ Jesus. I won't forget any of his benefits. He forgives all of my iniquities, and iniquity is the same word as sins. Thus says the Lord, he forgives all of my sins. That's one of the benefits. All of my sins instantaneously. Verse eight, he's merciful. He's really slow to get angry. He doesn't get angry fast. He abounds in mercy. 10, and you gotta quote this over your heart, and quote it over the hearts of the people that you love and you're relating to. He has not dealt with us according to our sins. Is that a fantastic sentence, or what? Thus says the Lord, he has not dealt with me according to my sins. It is written, Satan, he has not dealt with me according to my sins, and he's not punished me according to my sins, or my iniquities. The same idea. You could quote that back to the enemy. But beloved, don't quote that. If you're not gonna quote that, I'm gonna rise up and obey you, God, verses two. They gotta go together for intimacy to be real. And we want intimacy to be real, right? You can't fake the Holy Spirit out. You can't be pretending Christianity and have all the intimacy language. Intimacy's about encountering the Spirit. You can't fake him out. So we're not trying to come up with Bible verses to give ourself a way out. We're coming up with Bible verses to get rid of the condemnation with confidence in his mercy, and to get rid of the darkness, and that's our agreement with radical obedience. And those two pillars will cause intimacy to grow. And intimacy is the Spirit touching our hearts and bringing the revelation of God. It's the verse that we started off with earlier. God says, my eyes go to and fro across the earth. I'm looking all over the earth to show myself mighty to people who are loyal to me. He wants to show himself. The Spirit wants to show himself. He wants to rest on your heart. That's called intimacy. He wants to reveal himself to you in a mighty way, to show himself strong, to reveal himself strong. Well, you can go ahead and read the rest of Psalm 103. I mean, quote this, but look at verse 14. God knows our frame. He remembers that we're dust. I always thought that God was shocked when I was shocked, when I did something wrong. I remember it so well in my youthful days. And I said, oh, I can't believe I did that. And I remember actually saying this phrase, oh, I can't believe it, can you? And it took me a second to figure it out. I was talking to God. Can you believe I did this? Lord says, well, little guy, peewee, there's a whole lot more where that came from. Yeah, I couldn't believe it. I mean, I didn't hear anything from him, but I'm sure he smiled and he says, I'm gonna have a hard time with that kid. He just really thinks he's something special in terms of no sin. I was scandalized. I couldn't believe I did it. Verse 14, God says, I know your frame, your dust. Without my help, you don't have any power not to not do that except you cry out for my help. God isn't shocked because we're shocked. And when we're shocked, that reveals our pride. Every time I'm shocked, that shows me my self-evaluation as to what the score really is. And I always humble myself when I'm shocked. And the Lord says, don't be shocked. I know your frame. You're not surprising me. But I tell you, I wanna deal with you not according to your sins. I wanna deal with you according to mercy because I want you to grow up to fear me. And you may be 60 and you may have one year or you may have 40 more years. Tell you that you're 100, you're gonna grow up. You got years ahead of you to go on to the fear of God. Psalm 119, and many a scholar say David wrote Psalm 119, look upon me and be merciful. I love this. Be merciful to me as is your custom. It is God's custom to be merciful to people who love him. Not just merciful, just kind of random. Merciful to the people that are going hard after him. That's the key. Don't forget to those that love him. It is God's custom. It's his tradition. You know God has traditions. He has customs. We can come before the Lord and say, be merciful as is your custom with the people who love you and I love you. Consider how I love your precepts. And the word precepts, you could put the word Bible or your scriptures or the word of God. Consider how I love your word. Now he says revive me. Well, make up your mind. Do you love God's word or do you need reviving? Because if you need reviving, sounds like you don't love the word. And David here, if he's the writer of Psalm 119, he goes, no, I do love your word, but I still need reviving. How many know you can love the word of God and you can get yourself in a situation where you need to get revived? And God says, David says, revive me according to your mercies, according to your loving kindness. Well, the next passage, which I quote so much and we sing a lot, it's the, oh God, who is like you? There's no one, you forgive iniquities, you forgive sins. You pass over sin. Is that fantastic? Instead of wiping us out, he passes it over. He says, I'm gonna pass it over. Really, yes. I'm gonna give you a free pass. No, yes, I'm gonna pass it over, why? Because I delight in mercy. That's who I am, that's what I do. Oh God, I love you. I knew you would say that, the Lord says. I knew that when that touched you, it would make you love me and you will fear me and you will go on and be great in my sight at the heart level. Look at verse 19, God will again have compassion. Has anybody ever needed the word again? My Bible, again, underline it, I again. Lord, it's me again. And you know what he does with compassion? Look at the next line, he subdues, he conquers your sin. He conquers it because when he forgives you in his gentleness and he pulls you to his heart, and you begin to touch him, you don't want that area. You say, I hate the things that get in the way between me and the heart of God. It subdues it, it's like God is a champion that goes to war against the sin inside of us by showing us his mercy and his compassion. He subdues our own, the sin in us. Is that fantastic or what? Then he throws it into the depths of the sea and as Corrie ten Boom says, he puts up the sign, no fishing. He casts our sins into the sea and he says, no fishing. He says that to the devil and the devil can't fish and bring it back. You know who brings it back? We do. Beloved, if it's nine o'clock, if you send before nine o'clock, it's four after, forget it. It was 8.59, you whisper to your neighbor, that guy's driving me crazy, I don't like him. And you know, when you say something like that, go ahead and smile at your neighbor, okay. Anyway, one minute ago, push delete. It's nine o'clock, that was three minutes ago. We're going on, so do it. Maybe just purposed in your mind, you're gonna do something, dah, dah, dah, dah. Just say repent and just move that thing on. Okay, let's go on, a couple more verses. We're gonna end in just a moment. Top of page three. And I'm giving you these verses for spiritual warfare. These verses aren't just to read and go cool or to underline in your Bible, they're to speak, they're to quote back to the devil and to quote to your heart and to quote to God and to quote in front of the angels. These are verses to say it is written, get these verses into your lips, into your language. And when something pulls you off the path, you say, no, no, no, I am God's beloved, that's who I am. To he who has my commandments and keeps them, this is the one that loves me. I'm the one that loves you, I keep your commandments. I'm not the other guy, I'm the one that loves you, this is who I am. And then if you are on the other side of it, you say, God doesn't do with me according to my sins. He doesn't punish me according to my iniquities. He delights in mercy. And these verses, you just quote and pick several of them. Don't try to get them all, but pick the two to three that really touch you and on each side and go after it and speak it to your heart and speak it to God and speak it to the angels in the presence of the angels and speak it to the Satan when he comes to accuse you or to allure you. So here's just a few more. We'll just end here with paragraph B. These and you can just look at the other ones later on your own. David's confidence in God's love. Here's what he says in Psalm 60. He prays, oh God, that your beloved would be delivered. David calls himself your beloved. He doesn't say, oh, that your servant would be delivered. He says that sometimes, but he goes, that your beloved, me, you would deliver your beloved. Beloved, get that into your language. Talk to God about yourself and call yourself his beloved. I challenge you to do that. That's what King David did. Another time he needed protection in Psalm 17. He goes, keep me as the apple of your eye. I am the apple of your eye, God. I am your favorite one and every single believer is God's favorite one. Verse seven, Romans 1, seven. All believers are the beloved of God. All believers are the beloved of God. Let's go on down to Nehemiah 13. Nehemiah, a couple verses down in the PowerPoint. Look at this about Solomon. Did not King Solomon sin by these things? This is God speaking. Yet among many nations there was no king like him who was beloved of his God. King Solomon was beginning the road of compromise and God said about him as he was on this journey, there was no one like you. You were the beloved of God. And yet God made him king over all Israel. Nevertheless, he went on and sinned and he said no to God at the end. And we don't know how he ended his life in the final hours, but he went for a long season, if not permanently. We just don't know. But when God was looking at this king that was already on the pathway of compromise, God says, there's no other king who is beloved like God of all the earth. Just the Jewish king of all the other pagan nations. He goes, he stood alone as a king. He was beloved of God. But beloved, you stand among those in Christ Jesus of all the peoples of the earth, you are those that are the beloved of God. As Solomon was the only king in the earth that had this status, you are in Christ Jesus and you are that small percent of the planet that are beloved of God. Now we wanna get a lot more into that category. He was talking about the nation of Israel in the next passage. He says, I have forsaken my house. He means the house of Israel. And I have given, and God still has a tear in his eye. I have given the dearly beloved of my soul into the hands of her enemies. He goes, I'm gonna punish her to wake her up. She won't say no to sin, but when I send her into punishment, I send her as the dearly beloved of my soul. Beloved, this is what God's heart is like. This is, I'm giving you insight as to what God feels like when he looks at you and when he looks at me. I'm gonna take you to a couple more verses. Let's go to top of page four. I just remembered a couple. D, well, C, C and D. C, if you've been here, you've heard this over and over. If you're new, you need to make this your favorite verse. Jesus said, as the Father loves me, so I love you. He said, in the same way the Father loves me, that's the way I feel about you. Beloved, I can't, this is the verse that makes every one of you God's favorites. God feels about you the way Jesus feels about you the way the Father feels about him. And the next verse says the same thing. The Father loves you that much, too. You can read that on your own if that's new to you. But John, John's the, I don't get this. And, you know, that's, I'll have to sort that out in eternity. Why didn't Matthew, Mark, and Luke put that verse in their Gospels? When I meet Matthew, Mark, and Luke, I'm gonna say, guys, why didn't you put that verse in your, I mean, come on. You put those other verses in there. Why didn't you, this is like the main verse. And the Holy Spirit may say, just pipe down. I had the thing under control. But I just, ah, this verse needs to be in every one of the Gospels. I'm not challenging the Word of God. I'm just, just my humanity coming out. And the way that the Father loves the Son, well, John picked up on it, D. John wrote it. He says, that one's going in my book for sure. God loves me the way God loves God. That's, I'm taking that one to heart. God loves me the way God loves God. I'm in this thing for real forever. And then look at John. I just wanted you to see D. It just, John wrote of himself as the one Jesus loved. He said it five times. He won't say his name. He won't say, I, John. He says, Jesus, he's writing the story. Verse 26 here, John 19, 26, Jesus saw his mother and he saw the disciple whom he loved. He's talking about himself. He goes, he saw Mary and the guy he really liked. Next, she ran to Simon Peter and she ran to the other disciple himself, the one Jesus loved. She goes, she ran to, Mary ran to Peter and he ran to the, and she ran to the guy Jesus loves. Peter might have said, hey. Well, Peter, John says, I don't see you writing that anywhere. I'm going with it. It's yours to run with if you want. This is my gospel. It's Gospel of John. I'm writing myself into the story according to who I am before God. I'm sure it's more sophisticated than that when you're writing inspired scripture, but I'm just having fun with it. Verse seven, therefore, the disciple whom the Lord loved said to Peter, it's the Lord. You know, the Lord's, Peter and John are in the boat and Jesus is on the shore and Peter goes, who is that? And John says, it's the Lord up there, but Peter, but John writes it different. He goes, and the disciple whom Jesus loved, he's the one that told Peter, hey, get with it. It's the Lord. Verse 20, and the disciple whom Jesus loved, Peter saw the disciple whom the Lord loved. Verse 23, now there was one leaning on the Lord's bosom, talking about himself, he calls himself the man that leaned on God's heart and the man whom Jesus loved. Beloved, John took this really to heart and so can you. You are the disciple whom the Lord loves. That is our confession. That is our testimony. This is who we are. This is what we do. This is what we're about. Amen. Let's stand.