David - Savage or Saint?

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like pirates, I cant help it! I understand well enough that they were a violent, blood thirsty lot who destroyed people’s lives wherever they travelled. But there is still something of the savage in me that resonates with these wayward men, sailing the high sea’s in search of treasure, adventure and mayhem. Maybe its the same part of me that resonates with King David also. After all, he was a savage right? Or do we prefer not to talk about that?

David, son of Jesse was a King, an adulterer, a murderer, a psalmist, a worshipper and a harpist the list goes on. But perhaps most importantly of all, David was the only man in the course of the Bible to ever be called, a man after God’s own heart. This always confused me when reading about David, because to be totally honest, he came across to me completely uncivilised and practically feral. The man killed wolves and bears with his bare hands and some stones, protecting his flock from a very young age. And he only killed the biggest threat to the army of Israel of his day, the giant Goliath! Not to mention after killing him he chopped off his head and paraded around with it! Bad winner anyone? In order to win Saul’s daughters hand in marriage he cut off the foreskin of 200 dead Phillistine men and laid it at Saul’s feet (I doubt my dad would be too impressed by that). He stole a mans wife, got her pregnant then had him killed in battle to cover up what he’d done. He danced like a crazy man in his underwear before the Ark of the Lord,.. the list goes on. He was a warrior, David knew war, he knew the battle, he was a fighter, a savage. He knew how to kill and how to do it well. So how on earth did he win the much coveted title of, ‘Man after God’s own heart?’.

I’ve read books on this subject and heard sermons preached about this very topic, explaining why David was ultimately called ‘A man after God’s own heart’, but the explanations always leave me unsatisfied, they are so sugary sweet and all wrapped up in a neat little bundle but there is something that still doesn’t sit right with stories the Bible tells about this man. Could it be as Christians that we over spiritualise David? When in reading the Scriptures we see that he was a broken person, like the rest of us. That David was a man, no more or less human than we, no more or less flawed than we, but still a man who sought the heart of God, a man who longed to know the inner workings of the heart of God and perhaps, at that time, David was the closest thing to being a man after God’s own heart that there was? That God looked down, saw David and saw a man who was a little wild and a little savage, but had a heart that was for God and a heart that was willing. Willing to be used by God, willing to be challenged and changed. Willing to step out into what others would consider terrifying, dangerous and just plain not worth it. Willing to give it a go, even if he made many mistakes, and willing to do what it took to make it right again in the eyes of God?

I really hope so, because to be honest, that’s how I feel a lot of the time. And I’m not so sure that the rest of you don’t feel like this most of the time either. Maybe there have been times where people might have come up to you and told you the reasons why God is using you, the reasons why you’re getting the opportunities to serve the way you do. Maybe its your faithfulness, your perseverance, your passion for the lost or your tremendous humility.  When in actual fact, if you were truly honest with yourself and them, you’d be telling them that actually, most of the time you feel like an absolute savage, a feral. That for a lot of the time you feel so uncivilised you can barely breathe in such a civilised world. But you’re willing,.. you have a heart that is willing to be used and challenged and softened and changed and even tamed by God if that’s what he so desires of you.

And its amazing what God will do with a heart like that.

Writer: Sally Joy Morgan’s life maxim is, ‘Dream, Risk, Create’, in fact the entirety of her passions and hopes both past and present can all be summed up in just those three words. Determined to always walk the road less travelled, Sally is passionate about two things, God and humanity and endeavours to give her life for both. Sally is a keen preacher and writer and looks forward to investing more time in these areas in the future. After serving for two years at Gympie Salvo’s as the Assistant Church Leader and Youth Pastor, Sally is back home with her family and friends in Brisbane where she attends North Brisbane Salvo’s.

Be You!

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arly on in my Christian walk I met some people who wanted me to change who I was. The way I dressed, the way I spoke, the way I viewed things. And because of my need, my desire to know Jesus and know his people, I obliged them and began to chip away at the fabric of who I am, who God created me to be.

I began to mimic and copy mannerisms and the “Christianese” of the people around me. I wanted to make everyone happy. Until I woke up one day, and realised I was nothing more than a carbon copy of this idea of what a Christian should look and dress and act like. And it horrified me.

There was nothing authentic or real about who I had become, it had nothing to do with who Jesus was moulding and shaping me to be but was more about who the people I had surrounded myself with were comfortable with me being.

The problem is that besides being completely demoralising for those within the church, those people outside of the church are pretty good at smelling a fake. They can tell when we aren’t being authentic. Our non christian friends (I’m assuming you still have some of those) and non Christian co-workers notice that some of us appear to undergo a lobotomy after becoming a Christian.

That maybe for a good number of us there is this beautiful honey moon period where we give our lives to Jesus and we are pumped and passionate and excited and they can see a genuine difference in us, but that over a period of time where we avail ourselves to the church we slowly become desensitised and civilised and lose the things that made us most uniquely us.

Unfortunately  those outside of the church a lot of the time look and see that Christianity seems to be more about cloning than it is about authenticity and a relationship with Christ. No wonder they are saying “no thanks”.

I said “no thanks” for so long because I was scared of what I would become should I say “yes”. Because I saw people go into the church as interesting, exciting, passionate individuals and come out like robots, no longer allowing anyone to have a difference of opinion, or having their delicate church sensibilities damaged by our worldly ways.

Our church’s should be the most colourful, diverse, alive, interesting places because they are full of people, individuals from all walks of life. People who speak and act and look different from each other. People with different thought patterns and outlooks and interests. People with different abilities and passions and talents. And thankfully some of them are. Thankfully there are some church’s out there that nurture a creative environment, where people are free to be themselves and express themselves and be most vibrantly who they were created to be.

The Bible tells us in the well known passage of Scripture, Psalm 139 that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Crafted in the womb by God himself. He made you who you are, he made you with your quirks and your interests and passions and outlook on life, your particular taste in art and music and your communication skills. He created you that way for a reason and he called you to a destiny based on the person that you are, that he created you to be. Don’t change who you are to fit an ideal or a century old copy of who others deem a Christian. Just endeavour to become the best version of you. Endeavour always to grow and learn and allow Christ to work in you and challenge you and soften you…don’t allow yourself to be a clone of another,.. be unashamedly, unabashedly, unusually, unorthodoxly, uniquely you.

The Kingdom of God will benefit more from one individual in relationship with God than a church full of clones doing and saying all the ‘right’ things but failing to be who God has called and created them to be.

“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” - Oscar Wilde

Writer: Sally Joy Morgan’s life maxim is, ‘Dream, Risk, Create’, in fact the entirety of her passions and hopes both past and present can all be summed up in just those three words. Determined to always walk the road less travelled, Sally is passionate about two things, God and humanity and endeavours to give her life for both. Sally is a keen preacher and writer and looks forward to investing more time in these areas in the future. After serving for two years at Gympie Salvo’s as the Assistant Church Leader and Youth Pastor, Sally is back home with her family and friends in Brisbane where she attends North Brisbane Salvo’s.

Living and Dying for Humanity

Found within the scriptures is a powerful and compelling love story between God and humanity. And the story begins with this almighty, magnificent and all powerful being lacking nothing and perfect in every way opening his mouth and creating us from start to finish. He begins dreaming out loud, and from the imagination of God humanity is born. He then places us in an oasis of endless beauty and pleasure and decadence and he tells us to enjoy the fruits of the land and to enjoy God and to enjoy each other. And even after we fail greatly and from that came the fall of humanity where sin and death entered into our story God loved us and nurtured us and never stopped dreaming over us. And from there we find tale after tale of God painting the picture of his love and great passion for humanity. We read about God revealing himself to his people, revealing different aspects of his person. And giving human beings like you and I the opportunity to change our circumstances and futures, and step into incredible moments and thereby alter the history of the world. He even allowed us the chance to work alongside HIM to create the future and accomplish his will and destiny for mankind. In the scriptures there is moment after moment where God literally steps into situations and pulls people out of slavery, and out of danger and fights battles on their behalves,… And then there are these beautiful stories of quiet, intimate moments that people just like you and I got to enter into with the Author of life, and they were changed, never to be the same again. And throughout the entire OT we read about this Saviour this Messiah this hope coming for us. That from the beginning God was planning to rescue us. Planning to make a way for us. And we see humanity from start to finish dream of this hope.

 And then nothing, for 400 hundred years,… absolute silence…

 And then … it happens!

The moment humanity had long anticipated arrives. And it comes not in the way that anyone expected, not in the way that anyone was looking for,… but God comes for us…. While we were feeling the most forgotten, God comes for us…. In the most beautiful, quiet, unassuming way, he is born of flesh and blood.

 Our God comes for us.

And the Bible tells us that from a child Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. God grew amongst us. He learnt and listened, he sought wisdom and knowledge, he sat at the feet of God and he grew into the man that would rescue humanity. And when it is time, he steps out from his home and he begins to walk among us. God all wrapped up in flesh then reaches out and begins to touch people. He loves those the rest of the world deem unlovable, he washes the feet of a dirty world and he blurs the lines between cultures and race and religion and customs and traditions to bring people together and to show us, to demonstrate to us that we are one. That we are the sole occupants of his heart. That we are what he desires. That we as all of humanity, then and now and to come are his passion, his love, his longing and yearning.

And we as we so often are, are so fickle and one moment we shout his name and lift him up and exalt him and cry out you are God and in our next breath we are cursing him and spitting at him and tearing him down with our words. 

Proving that while God walked among us we never really recognised him for who he truly was..

And what happens next is so savage and so violent and so unexpected, it’s almost hard to contemplate…. But we brutalise him, we beat him and torture him and using one of the most violent forms of capital punishment…

 We. Murder. God.

But here’s the part that to the rest of the world makes no sense,.. He planned it that way. He knew what was to be and yet God still CHOSE to come for us. And he spent time growing and learning and seeking God and wisdom and insight so that he could better serve humanity with his life. Not just in that one powerful, earth shattering, life changing moment where God gave up his life for us. But in every single moment that Jesus Christ walked among us as flesh and blood.

Every single moment of Gods life on earth counted for something and we are given that very same opportunity, for our lives to mean something. For our lives to stand for something and give testimony to something much greater than ourselves. Our lives are to be used up, to be poured out, not to be preserved and wrapped up in cotton wool.

There is a sense sometimes in Christianity where we begin to civilize Jesus and civilize the Gospel. But you see to an outsider it’s just completely uncivilised. When you look on the cross with fresh, new eyes, it makes no sense. The cross was violent and savage and barbaric! And for some that hurts their dignified sensibilities. As Christians we can get to the point where we over-spiritualise everything, somehow we’ve managed to take an uncivilized act of pure love and civilize it. I met an awesome lady in Gympie about 6 months or so ago, who said to me in anguish, “we’ve sanitised Jesus!” how true that is! We sprout off verses like John 3:16 which are incredible Scriptures about the passion and love of a wild, dangerous God for his people and we make them feeble and irresolute. In stead of looking at the cross and seeing it for what it really is, the moment when God stepped into our world and began to engage with humanity in such a way as had never been seen or heard of before. It was the moment that mankind was saved from hell and grave and given a second chance whilst we were most undeserving, and letting the truth and knowledge of that love transform us and from out transformation become people who love in an unjustifiable, unexplainable kind of way.

We cannot allow ourselves to grow cold! Not to the passion and love and sacrifice of our God! Not to the cross!

But what can happen to us sometimes after being a Christian for a while is we start to fail to see that the birth and life and death of Jesus is even more beautiful, even more poignant and potent and captivating and earth shattering than we may have even first realised. That the way Jesus lived and died was in its purest essence a demonstration of how we also are to live and die. That the God of the universe, the almighty Sovereign and creator of heaven and earth came not just to give us life in eternity but to give us life on earth, and we know this to be true because the scriptures, the word that is God breathed tells us so, in John 10:10 when Jesus himself says “I came that they may have life, and have it in abundantly”. I love the message version of this scripture it reads: “I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.”

This is not just a message for Easter this is a message for every single day of our lives!  This is the very foundation of our faith. Jesus stepped into space and time and changed our stories forever, he made a way for man to come to God, he paid the greatest price for love.

And what we need to realise is that the way he walked among us can tell us more about the way he wants each of us to live and die than we may have previously noticed. That in dying for LOVE Jesus was pointing the way to life … to the only life that would fulfill us and to the only life that really counts for anything, and that is a life of love, servant hood and significance. That in giving up our lives to serve God and serve humanity life does not end, but becomes more beautiful and magical and enchanting than it was to begin with. And that in becoming more like Jesus we don’t abandon being human, but become what God originally dreamt of when he spoke humanity into being.

Writer: Sally Joy Morgan’s life maxim is, ‘Dream, Risk, Create’, in fact the entirety of her passions and hopes both past and present can all be summed up in just those three words. Determined to always walk the road less travelled, Sally is passionate about two things, God and humanity and endeavours to give her life for both. Sally is a keen preacher and writer and looks forward to investing more time in these areas in the future. After serving for two years at Gympie Salvo’s as the Assistant Church Leader and Youth Pastor, Sally is back home with her family and friends in Brisbane where she attends North Brisbane Salvo’s.