Amazing Stories: Hearts & Kings
Sycamore Creek Church
June 17, 2012
Tom Arthur
1 Samuel 16:6-13

Peace Friends!

Have you ever taken one of those personality tests that tell you something about who you are and how you make decisions? One of the more popular ones is the Myers Briggs inventory. It measures your personality in four different areas so that your personality is described with four different letters: E or I, N or S, T or F, P or J. There are sixteen different possible combinations of these results. When I take the inventory I end up an INTJ (Introvert, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging). If you’re familiar with the Myers Briggs, you now know a lot about me, but the one I really want to focus on is the T. In the Myers Briggs world you can be either a T (thinking) or F (feeling). Here’s how the website describes the distinction:

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).” This preference pair describes how you like to make decisions. Do you like to put more weight on objective principles and impersonal facts (Thinking) or do you put more weight on personal concerns and the people involved (Feeling)? Don’t confuse Feeling with emotion. Everyone has emotions about the decisions they make. Also do not confuse Thinking with intelligence.

So I tend to like to make decisions based on “logic and consistency” rather than “people and special circumstances.” It’s not that I ignore people and circumstances, I just prefer logic and consistency. If you want to get a clear distinction between the two, put Jeremy, our worship leader, next to me. Jeremy, by his own admission, is a classic F (feeling) decision maker. He likes to harmonize with those around them whether it makes logical or consistent sense.

We all tend to prefer one way of seeing the world over the other, especially when it comes to making decisions and sizing up the people around us. And sometimes we’re dead wrong…

I went to college and roomed with my best friend from High School. This was something of a blessing and a curse. We didn’t make the transition well from quality time together to quantity time together. While we have retained our friendship even to this day, at the time we decided to find other roommates for our sophomore year.

When I finally got around to picking a roommate I didn’t have much choice. There was really only one other guy left on the floor who didn’t have a roommate. His name was Greg Coddington, and Greg and I had very little in common except that we both needed a roommate. I had grown up in a big urban area, Indianapolis. Greg grew up on a farm in rural Wisconsin. For me, guns were something that cops and gangsters used to fight each other. For Greg, guns were a way of life. For me, animals of any kind were something cute and cuddly. For Greg, animals were a threat to their farm’s livelihood. I remember the night we saw a possum run across the road. I thought it was cool to see a possum. It’s not something I had seen every day. Greg, on the other hand, grabbed his hockey stick and went running after it trying to bash its head into the pavement. How could I ever live with this guy?

Well, after three years of living together, Greg and I had become great friends. When I sized him up, I didn’t think we’d get along at all. But when it came down to it, we got along great (well, except for that time that I lent his TV to someone on our floor and he came home from hockey practice wanting to watch the Rush Limbaugh show). I had made a “decision” about whether Greg and I would get along, and I was wrong.

Let’s go back to the Myers Briggs website and read a little more about the way Thinkers and Feelers make decisions:

Everyone uses Thinking for some decisions and Feeling for others. In fact, a person can make a decision using his or her preference, then test the decision by using the other preference to see what might not have been taken into account.

Well, if you’re like me, you probably rarely ever test a decision based on another way of thinking about things. If you’re like me, then you’re not the first person to miss seeing something in someone. The amazing story we’re going to look at this morning is a story about a national leader and a father missing seeing something in the father’s son. The national leader is named Samuel and he is looking for a new king to anoint after the first king, Saul, is a disaster. The father is named Jesse, and the son is named David, who eventually becomes king and becomes a “man after God’s own heart.” Let’s read the story that introduces us to David, the future king.

1 Samuel 16:6-13 NLT
When they arrived, Samuel took one look at Eliab and thought, “Surely this is the LORD’s anointed!” But the LORD said to Samuel, “Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The LORD doesn’t make decisions the way you do! People judge by outward appearance, but the LORD looks at a person’s thoughts and intentions.” Then Jesse told his son Abinadab to step forward and walk in front of Samuel. But Samuel said, “This is not the one the LORD has chosen.” Next Jesse summoned Shammah, but Samuel said, “Neither is this the one the LORD has chosen.” In the same way all seven of Jesse’s sons were presented to Samuel. But Samuel said to Jesse, “The LORD has not chosen any of these.” Then Samuel asked, “Are these all the sons you have?” “There is still the youngest,” Jesse replied. “But he’s out in the fields watching the sheep.” “Send for him at once,” Samuel said. “We will not sit down to eat until he arrives.” So Jesse sent for him. He was ruddy and handsome, with pleasant eyes. And the LORD said, “This is the one; anoint him.” So as David stood there among his brothers, Samuel took the olive oil he had brought and poured it on David’s head. And the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him from that day on. Then Samuel returned to Ramah.

In this story, we see that both Samuel and Jesse blew it. Neither saw in David, what the LORD saw in David. Let’s unpack what happened. The key moment is verse seven:

But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”

What exactly does it mean that the LORD looks on the heart? Most say that this means that we look at outward appearances, but God looks inside someone’s heart: their intentions, their motives, their inner life. And this is a legitimate way to interpret what is going on here. But I’d like to introduce you to another way of seeing this verse.

Robert Alter, a Jewish Biblical scholar has translated the last half of this verse as:

They look with the eyes, but the Lord looks with the heart.

That changes things doesn’t it? It’s not so much what God looks at, but how God sees things. God looks not with the eyes, but with the heart. So what is the heart?

The Hebrew word that is here translated heart is lavav. When we think of the heart we tend to think of the emotions. We tend to think of feeling rather than thinking on the Myers Briggs. But for the Hebrews, the heart meant something much more than emotions. The organs of emotions for the ancient Hebrews were the kidneys, guts, and loins. The heart included emotions, but also was considered the seat of the intellect and will. The heart was the place where we touch God. The heart was considered the “heart” of the person and their personality. The heart included the whole person. My Old Testament professor at seminary liked to say that the best translation of lavav was not “heart” but “imagination.” The imagination takes the whole person to use, heart, head, spirit, body.

So what if we go back to that verse and insert the word “imagination”:

The Lord does not see as mortals see. They look with the eyes, but the Lord looks with the imagination.

What we have in this passage, then is a failure of the imagination. Samuel’s imagination fails because he looked with his eyes at the appearance of Jesse’s sons. Eliab, who was easily the most kingly looking, didn’t make the cut. Jesse, David’s father, had a failure of the imagination because he didn’t even consider his youngest son, David, worth looking at, so he left him in the field.

So here’s the main takeaway from today’s message: Look with the imagination! Look at people and situations with God’s imagination for what could be. Look at the heart (the whole person) with the heart (the whole person) so that we are ready to participate in God’s work in creative and unexpected ways.

A Faithful Imagination

If the lavav/heart/imagination is the seat of the emotions, intellect, and will, is the place where we touch God, and includes the whole person, then a faithful imagination will be the cultivation of all of these things in our lives. Nurturing a faithful imagination means nurturing appropriate emotions, knowing God and the scriptures with the intellect, rightly ordering our desires by putting God first and everything else second, being open to the movement of God’s Spirit in our lives, and giving everything we’ve got—body, mind, heart, spirit—to God. When we cultivate this kind of an imagination, we are open to the creative possibilities for God’s grace to work in unexpected ways in our own life and the lives of those around us.

A Father’s Imagination

Today is Father’s day, and I’d like to explore for a moment what it would mean for dads to make sure we don’t miss God’s work in our children’s lives. How can we not repeat the mistake that Jesse made? How can we nurture a faithful imagination for our children?

Fathers, how do you look at the future of your children? What dreams do you dream for them? How do those dreams change over time? Father, look at your children with God’s imagination, not your own expectations. Let me give you an example of how I saw my own dad doing that in my life.

I began playing baseball as soon as I could join a t-ball league. My dad even coached one of my teams. I was good enough to join an all-star team in our local league that actually made it out of our league playoffs and into the state tournament. When I got into Jr. High, my dad did something that still amazes me to this day. Up to that point, I had always used someone else’s bat or one of the team bats. My dad went out and bought me a brand new bat that cost him $100. Now you’ve got to realize that my family did not have a lot of money. My dad was a stay-at-home dad. My step-mom had a good job as a nurse and then as an HR employee, but we weren’t rich at all. Spending $100 on one kid was almost unheard of. Then my dad took it one step further. He paid for me to attend batting lessons with a Mets scout. Eventually I got good enough in the batting cage that I could put the ball wherever my coach wanted it hit. High pop fly to right field. Line drive up the third base line. Grounder to first base. No problem.

When I got to high school I found a level of competition I had never encountered before. My high school had 3000 students in three grades. I was competing for five or six spots with ninety other guys. I made it as a “practice player.” I wasn’t bad enough to cut, but I wasn’t good enough to play. So I practiced and during games sat on the bench and kept score (while also trying to break the other teams’ signs from the third-base coach). A year of practicing without playing took all the spirit out of it for me. I lost motivation. I began my Junior year on the team, but ended up in my coach’s room one day tearfully telling him I was quitting.

I did not consult my dad on this decision. I simply went home and told him. To this day, I have no idea how this decision I made to quit baseball affected him. I have no idea if he saw $100 bills flashing in front of him. I have no idea if he was personally happy or sad about it. I have no idea if in that moment he gave up a dream of his own. I have no idea because in that moment by dad supported my own decision. Perhaps he saw, as I did, that my future was not in baseball. It was elsewhere. Dads, what dreams do you dream for your kids? Are they your dreams, or do you look at your kids with God’s imagination?

Let me give you another example of a moment where my dad had God’s imagination. One Christmas my dad noticed that I was planning on spending a lot of money on Christmas gifts for all kinds of people, but not my family. He saw a teachable moment. He sat me down and asked me to make a list of who I was going to buy a gift for and what I was going to spend on that person. At the top of my spending list was my girlfriend, of two weeks, my best friend, and several other friends. At the bottom of my list was my family. My dad told me the list was unacceptable and sent me back to the drawing board to rework it. In that moment, he saw a teachable moment. He looked at my spending habits with God’s imagination.

A third story about my dad. I wonder if some of us don’t think we’re not very good fathers. We don’t give our kids everything we think they should have. We don’t make enough money to pay for the right toys, vacation, car, clothes, or school. Dads, this is a failure of the imagination. The most important thing you can give your kids is yourself. When I turned twenty-seven, the age that my dad was when I was born, my dad began giving me a series of tapes he had made the first two years of my life. On these tapes he had recorded his observations about what it was like to be a dad. He introduces the purpose of the tapes in the first one: he felt like he never really knew his dad, and he wanted to make sure that his son knew him. If the highest form of flattery is imitation, then these are the best gift that he has ever given to me, because I decided to do the same thing for my son, Micah. I have been recording videos for Micah to give to him at some later point in his life. Fathers, of all the failures of imagination you could have, don’t have this one. Don’t fail to imagine that the best gift you can give your children is yourself.

A Community of Imagination

I know I’ve been talking mostly to fathers, but let me talk for a moment to all of us. Do you have a failure of imagination by thinking that you’ve done too much or not enough so that God doesn’t love you? If so, let me assure you this morning, you can’t do anything to earn the love of our heavenly father. Maybe you never had the love of your own earthly father because you never lived up to his standards. Know this morning that none of us live up to God’s standards, we all have sinned, and God loves us anyway. God loves us so much that he sent his Son, Jesus, to show us that love by living a perfect life and dying a perfect death. The Son of God became human, so that all humans might become sons and daughters of God. In this salvation, God sees something in you that you don’t even see yourself. God sees who you are in total, and loves you anyway. And God sees who you might become.

Imagine with me a community where people experienced this kind of unconditional love and in the process learned something new about themselves or became a new creation that they didn’t see or know before.

It’s already happening. Who could imagine a school cafetorium becoming a sanctuary? Who could imagine a local diner or coffee house becoming a venue for worship? These have to do with space, but what about people? Dave and Sue Knechtges are both accountants. In what ministry would you expect they would serve? Finance. Right? Nope. Dave serves making the lights work on Sunday morning, and Sue helps lead hospitality. Then there’s John Miller, a book keeper at a bank. He really likes writing skits and coming up with creative ideas for worship. Or what about Jeremy, our worship leader. He studied journalism. Then there’s Thomas Oates and Kevin Biesbrock. Both are computer programmers, but they both love playing drums in the band. Deb Ray is a radiology tech, but she loves teaching kids in Kids Creek. Mark Aupperlee is a breast cancer researcher, but he really loves teaching God’s word in messages and small groups. Carol Hazel is a real estate agent, but what she really wants to do is reach people with music so she sings in our band. Brad Blackmer is a pharmaceutical rep and his brother Brian is a lawyer. Both are in the band. Mary Hunter is a special needs teacher, but loves singing in the band. Bill Hoerner is in charge of marketing at a fast growing local company, but he helps lead and teach StuREV on Sunday mornings. Alongside him is Brian Richards, a lawyer. Who could have ever imagined these people reaching out to others in this way?

The Lord does not see as mortals see. They look with the eyes, but the Lord looks with the imagination.