Never Let Your Heart Be Dissatisfied • 2 Samuel 11

1:01:47 Teaching begins

Notes

We forget that the people in the Bible are just like us. They struggle with the same things we struggle with. They sinned like we do and worse. We have one of the worst incidents of the Bible here: adultery and murder and lying, from someone described as a man after God’s own heart.

These things were written for our instruction. We learn that gross sin starts small but significantly, when a heart turns away from being satisfied by God, looks somewhere else for satisfaction and, worst of all, finds it.

You never want to let your heart be dissatisfied.

I’m reading in 2 Samuel 11.

1. David stops doing what is right and does what is wrong, v. 1.

A. It was time for David to get out the army and finish the war in Ammon.

1. Joab defeated the Ammonites right in front of their capital city Rabbah and they ran in and shut the gates. That would have been the time to besiege the city and finish the war but he went back to Jerusalem. The reason was it was the end of the season for conducting war. You can’t fight in winter time. It’s too cold, wet, and muddy to engage in war.

2. So you go home, rest up, re-arm, get ready for spring, when it’s dry and warm enough for the soldiers. Then you continue your campaign and finish the war.

B. David stays inactive. He sends Joab and the army to do the job but he stays home in Jerusalem.

1. He should have gone out. A king’s duty and responsibility before God is to lead the army into battle.

2. But David avoids his duty and when he should have been active in service, he is inactive. He’s not doing what he should be doing because he doesn’t want to do it.

3. Do you ever have to do things you don’t want to do? You have to face the people you are responsible to if you don’t: your family, your employer, the local council, the government. You can’t say, “I don’t feel like carrying out my responsibilities.” so you do them even if you don’t want to. Joab can’t say, “Well, your Majesty, I just don’t feel like obeying you.” So he obeys orders and leaves for battle.

4. David is king. He’s under God, he’s accountable to God, but he starts thinking and acting like an ordinary king who has no one above him. An ordinary king doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do. David could give any number of reasons why, but he does not want to go out.

C. Right now David is indulging himself. He is saying “yes” to himself when he doesn’t want to do what he should do. It doesn’t look like that big a deal but it is a small change of heart, a beginning of disobedience and saying “no” to God.

2. David falls into temptation and pursues self-indulgence and self-serving, vv. 2-4.

A. David gets up from his afternoon siesta, which you do in Middle Eastern countries when it gets too hot for anything else. He walks on his palace roof, and he’s just looking. He’s not doing anything, he’s looking.

B. And that’s when trouble finds him: he sees a beautiful woman bathing.

1. She’s probably in the courtyard of her home; because of the walls no one else can see her, but the king’s palace gives him a higher view.

2. He sees her, that’s accidental. He could have said, no thanks, and walked away.

3. He keeps looking at her, that’s intentional. He follows up on her and finds out what he can about her, that’s intentional.

C. There’s lots of reasons for David to leave this alone.

1. He finds out her name, and that she’s the daughter of Eliam, one of the honoured elite military group called the Thirty. They are the best of the best, close to the king, loyal, powerful.

2. She’s married! Her husband Uriah is also in the Thirty.

3. We find out later that her grandfather is Ahithophel, David’s counselor.

D. None of this makes him think, “I can’t betray these men,” because his thinking is self-indulging and self-serving.

1. Self-indulging is “excessive or unrestrained gratification of one's own appetites, desires, or whims

2. Self-serving is “serving one's own interests often in disregard of the truth or the interests of others.”

3. Forget the men, their honour, their relationship, what the consequences would be. All David thinks about is sleeping with that woman.

E. What you think about you will do. David uses his authority to bring Bathsheba to him and he lays with her. She ritually purifies herself from her uncleanness according to the law, and she goes home.

F. David has committed one act, and it touches many lives.

1. He has seven wives. He has sinned against them.

2. He’s sinned against her husband, her father, her grandfather.

3. He’s sinned against himself, because the immoral man sins against his own body.

4. He has sinned against God who commanded sexual purity.

3. David tries to cover up the awful consequences of sin, vv. 5-27.

A. Bathsheba becomes pregnant.

1. It will be obvious that she has committed adultery because Uriah is with the army and couldn’t have been the father.

2. The Law of God commands that the adulterer be stoned as well as the adulteress. So that means David also forfeits his life for his lawbreaking.

3. Numbers 32:33 says, “Be sure your sin will find you out.”

B. So David tries to make it look like Uriah is the father of the baby.

1. He has Joab send Uriah to Jerusalem and David asks how is the war going. Then he sends Uriah to his house with a gift of food, just right for a romantic reunion.

2. But that doesn’t work. Uriah unwittingly rebukes David for not doing his duty. “Because the ark is out there, Joab is out there, all the guys are roughing it, and do you think I’m going to go home and sleep with my wife and whoop it up while they suffer? Absolutely not!” It’s not right to shirk my responsibility!

3. Then David tries to corrupt Uriah, and get him drunk so he won’t have any inhibitions about sleeping with his wife. But Uriah is a man who sticks to his principles even if he is drunk.

C. David sends instructions by Uriah to Joab: get this guy killed and make it look like an accident. Joab does it and now he’s a part of this wickedness. You notice how nobody ever thinks of killing the baby. That’s how wicked we are nowadays. We would kill the baby, and no one would know except God.

D. Joab sends a messenger back to David who is nervous about reporting losses in battle, so he gets right to it and says Uriah the Hittite is dead. David is clearly relieved, he’s out of trouble now. He says, don’t worry, people die in wars, just keep doing your job.

E. But God saw everything. And what He saw didn’t please Him.

4. So what? You never want to let your heart be dissatisfied. Let me explain.

A. David fell into the trap of: I don’t need God’s satisfaction all the time. When everything is good, I can coast on momentum.

1. God is for when you’re attacked, when it’s wartime, dangerous, Saul or the Philistines are out to kill you. But when it’s okay, I’m on my own.

2. David was at peace, he had had a whole winter season of peace and quiet, no danger, that day he had just taken a nap, he was refreshed, he was unsuspecting. Why should he be on his guard? It didn’t look dangerous.

3. David allowed himself to become dissatisfied. He quit looking to God. He figured what he had was enough to satisfy him. Victory, a palace, authority, and seven wives. But notice he was still dissatisfied. Something wasn’t right. No amount of earthly goods can satisfy your heart. Only God Himself can satisfy you. You can be in need, rejected by men, and sick, but you can be satisfied in the Lord.

4. Being dissatisfied was a tiny change. No one noticed it, maybe not even David. But somewhere inside his heart he was dissatisfied to the point where he had no joy in doing the Lord’s work. He began to see it as a burden, a duty, something he didn’t want to do.

B. If you’re not being satisfied by the Lord you end up looking elsewhere. He was just looking, no real purpose in mind. Suddenly he is faced with desire, with lust, and the promise is, “This will satisfy you. This is what you need.” That’s all he could think about. It took over his thoughts. And what is thinkable becomes doable. That’s why you want to guard your heart with all diligence, for from it flows the issues of life.

C. This is a constant in your life: you seek the Lord to be satisfied by Him all the time.

1. In your up time, in your down time, on vacation, in a crunch time: you need Jesus satisfying your heart all the time.

2. Or else—you’re going to look elsewhere for satisfaction and you will find some earthly momentary satisfaction that will destroy your life.

D. There are an abundance of Scriptures about this.  I’m going to use just one.

1. Matthew 11:28-30 “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

2. This doesn’t sound right. When you are weary and heavy-laden you are exhausted. You don’t have strength and you don’t feel like working or serving.

3. But Jesus says, come to Me. Take My yoke upon you. You get tied into the same harness as Jesus for the same purpose as Jesus. You say, “Okay, teach me You. I want to learn You.”

4. It’s His burden, His purpose. His purpose is to get you where you need to be in His strength.

5. You are always active in living with Him. There’s no “you” down time. You do active life with Him, you do inactive life with Him. You do all the time with Jesus.

6. You find rest and peace. He gives the heart, He gives the strength, He gives the joy, the hope, the delight that satisfies you. If your heart is satisfied, does it matter how He does it? All that matters is, you are at rest and at peace. He will do that for you.

E. This chapter also shows that you can’t deal with the consequences and destruction of sin. David could only try to cover it over and hope he could get away with it. But the guilt is still there, still burdening the conscience. You did wrong.

F. Next week we’ll see how only God can deal with sin, through Jesus dying for your sins on the cross. So today if you are struggling with any kind of sin, you come to Jesus as we pray. You confess your sin to Him, and humble yourself before Him. He will remove your sin and deal with the destruction that sin causes. Come to Jesus, take His yoke upon you, and ask Him to make things right.

Let’s pray.