How do you trust that God is good when life doesn't feel that way?
WATCH
Fruit of the Root, 6 of 9 from July 12, 2026
“God is good, God makes good and God does good..”
Galatians 5 & Psalm 34 by Michael Lockstampfor (@miklocks)
SUMMARY
This sermon teaches that God alone defines and supplies true goodness—God is good, God makes good, and God does good—even when evil and suffering tempt us to doubt that. Using Psalm 34 and David’s time hiding in a cave, it calls us to “taste and see that the Lord is good,” looking to Him in hard times so His unchanging goodness can transform who we are and how we live.
REFLECTION & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
💬 When are we most tempted to forget God?
💬 What evil is corrupting our view of goodness?
💬 Are we moving towards God’s truth or are we turning our back?
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Well, good morning, church, and welcome to our neighbors. Are we having a good summer yet?
Are we on the backside of summer now? Is it. Is it all downhill from here? No, no, no. Okay.
All right, all right, all right. I don't want to. I don't want to bring the vibe down, but it's been. There's a thing about summer that we get into some different rhythms. We go different places, we see some different people, and that's, like, beautiful.
It's just. It's great. One of the things about rhythms, about having habits and things, is, like, sometimes getting a little bit out of them, and that kind of refreshes the things that are kind of habitual and things that we get used to. We have, over the last several months, been working on Sunday mornings, preaching through a book in the Bible called Galatians. And as we knew we were coming up into summertime and knew that many of us would be traveling on odd weeks and things like that, we didn't want be working on a sermon series that was, like, cumulative, where, like, if you missed last week, you're going to be completely lost.
And so we were coming around In Galatians, chapter 5, to this list that Paul gives of things that the Holy Spirit grows in believers as they surrender their lives to Jesus. So. And we call that list the Fruit of the Spirit. So these are the things that the Spirit is growing in us. And there's nine of them.
I had to go back and count because you guys saw me doing it on the thing. There's nine of them. And we are. Again, we're working through Galatians, but we also are going real slow over these nine weeks, taking a look at each one of these aspects of the Fruit of the Spirit. We started with love as a big.
It's kind of the parentheses. Everything gets wrapped up in love, as we saw not only in Galatians, but also in First Corinthians 13. Like, if we're doing things for Jesus and we don't have love, then we actually are just kind of wasting our time. And we grow in love as we walk in God's Spirit. Then we looked at joy and saw that God grows our joy as we focus on his glory and his work.
We saw that Jesus makes peace between us and God, between our God and between our neighbors. He's making peace not only vertically, but also horizontally. And as we talked a couple of weeks ago about patience, we saw that Jesus takes all the time he needs to grow all the life that he plans. Jesus is not in a hurry to Grow to grow these fruit in us. And last week we talked about kindness, and I said, like, kindness is somewhat of a vanilla topic.
Like, if I were to say, if I were to get up in front of, I don't know, the Rotary Club or some other club in Ocala that wasn't necessarily celebrating Jesus, I said, I'm going to give a talk for, you know, 30 to 90 minutes on kindness. People wouldn't necessarily be offended by that. Like, yeah, of course you should be kind. You should be nice to people. I'm not like, sure, go for it, bald guy.
Not really. Like, nobody really is going to be mad about that. We saw that God's unbelievable kindness reshapes our belief to make us kind, because God is kind. He reshapes what we understand about how the world works so that we become kind people. Kindness is not just a random thing that we do.
We don't just, like, trip on it because Oprah told us to or something. Like, we're just going to do some random acts today and kind of guerrilla kindness through the world. Like, it actually is something that true kindness, God grows in us as he reshapes us. And kindness is super vanilla. I don't think anybody would be offended by that.
But today I've got a fighting word for you. So the fruit of the spirit today that we're going to talk about is goodness. And you're like, michael, what do you mean, goodness? Nobody wants to fight about goodness. Everybody wants goodness.
Ah, I agree with you. Everybody wants for life to be good, but everybody disagrees about what is good about life. Like, if you were to ask anybody, like, what's good about creation, what's good about life? If you're following Jesus, you're going to have an answer that is related to that. If you are not following Jesus and just living for yourself, your definition of what goodness is is probably going to be pretty drastically different.
And it goes across the board, like, across the planet. All of your neighbors probably have a different idea of what, what it is to be good and what goodness means. And so everybody's like, yes, I like. Generically, I like goodness until you define something as good or not good. And then I'm like, no, I actually do want to fight you.
So as we kind of begin our conversation this morning, I'm just going to ask you to pray together with me. It's our habit as neighborhood church to pray the disciples prayer. This is a prayer that Jesus kind of gave as a guideline for how we're supposed to talk with God. And so I put the words here on the screen so that as we're praying, you can pray along with us out loud if you'd like to do that. But more important than just kind of saying the right words, and more important than just knowing what the right words are, what he's asking us to do is to think about what's going on in our hearts while we say these words.
It's out of the overflow of the heart that the mouth speaks. Sometimes we can get the mouth to say something the heart doesn't believe yet. But what Jesus is driving that is what's going on in our heart. Okay, so I'm just going to give you a minute and take a deep breath, and I'm going to invite you to pray with me.
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
Amen. Amen. So where do we start in a sermon about goodness?
The Bible. Okay, cool. Well, as neighborhood church, we've got a couple of core values. We've got six of them that we kind of articulate, and usually they're hanging on the wall, but the sticky things fell off here recently, and I've not stuck them back up there. So one of the values that we have at neighborhood church is we trust the Bible.
So great work, Xavier. Like, we trust the Bible. We're going to look to the Bible because it's where God leads us most clearly about how we ought to live our life. And then another one of our core values is that we want to put Jesus first. We want to read the Bible and engage with our lives.
Putting Jesus first because he's the one who's done all of the heavy lifting to make it possible for us to be right with God. We center everything on Jesus because his love and grace alone has set us free. And so where does Jesus start with a definition of goodness? How does he start to define goodness? In Luke chapter 18, there's a series of teachings.
You don't have to. I'm going to give you the verses that you need. There's. So how do we. Like.
This conversation was challenging. And so what has resulted is a structure of sermon that's outside of my norm. And so I've got way more structure than I typically do. We're going to jump through a Lot more verses. So usually I like to get into a passage and just camp in that passage the whole time.
We're actually going to jump around a lot. I've got a bunch of the verses that are going to be relevant for you on the screen, so you don't have to flip, but I'll let you know when it's going to be helpful for you to turn there. So In Luke chapter 18, you've got a series of teachings that Jesus is doing, and he's addressing a number of different things. He's addressing greed, he's addressing humility. He's addressing the need that we have for prayer.
He's addressing God's eagerness to answer our prayers as he invites us to pray. He invites children in church. Like all of that stuff is kind of crammed in there. But then there's a guy that shows up as he's listening to Jesus teaching, and he says, hey, I've got a question for you. And he's a ruler.
He's somebody who's in charge of some things. And so a ruler asked him, asked Jesus, he says, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus said to him, why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. Now, I'll just say, I don't think Jesus is saying here that he's not God.
He's saying, he's asking the question, who do you think that I am that you would call me good? And when we look at Jesus's definition, like, how does Jesus define goodness? Jesus starts his definition of goodness with who is good? Which is going to be, hopefully, the first question that we answer today. That leads me to a second question, which is, what is good?
Which is where I wanted to start, but that's not where Jesus starts. So we're going to start with who is good? Then? What is good? What is goodness?
How do we define that? And. And then the thing that I think if we leave here today and we don't walk out of here with a so what then? I've wasted all of your time. So in order to not waste your time, how do we grow in goodness?
Right? So those are three questions we're going to work through this morning. Can we tackle that together? So how does Jesus answer the question who is good? He says, why do you call me good?
No one is good except God alone. Who is good? God is good. Jesus defines goodness by beginning with God and his character. Which means that as we have a conversation about goodness, if we trust the Bible and if we Put Jesus first and we trust his definition of goodness.
That means that it's God who sets the bar for goodness in his creation.
Your definition of what's good and my definition of what's good might be different. Your neighbor's definition of good and somebody from a different country might have a different definition of good. Who's right?
The person who gets to define what's good and what's not good is God, because it comes from his goodness. We often will refer to a verse in James that says that every good gift comes down from the Father of Lights. Everything that's good that we might, like, look in life as good is a gift that we get from God. If there is any goodness in the world, it comes from who God is and what he's done and how he's made things. God sets the bar for goodness in his creation.
It's in his character. It's like, who he is. It's like part of what he does. And if what he is is good, if what God is, is good, then what God does is good.
All right, if you're nodding with me, like, just put your hand up. If you want to fight me, you put your hand up.
What I just said is what God does is good.
Okay, cool. I'm happy for you. I don't think your neighbors would agree with that statement necessarily. Be like, well, what about this bad thing that happened? Didn't.
If God's in control of everything and this bad thing happened, doesn't that mean that what God did was bad? That's the primary question I think most of us wrestle with in our. In our journey of following Jesus is if God can do anything and God is good, then why does he let bad things happen? Why is there evil in the. Why is there bad in the world?
If God's good and he's able to. Either he's not strong enough to handle it, or he's not actually good.
Freedom. You guys got this. I don't even have to preach what is goodness if there is no God. Like, if we are like, okay, well, I just want goodness. I want to interpret the world as if there is good and there is things that's not good.
But, like, I don't know that I can trust that God is. Or that God is good. What do we do with that? There's a psalm that starts off this way, and this is going to come off as aggressive, but stick with me, and let's look at it together. There's Psalm 14, verses 1 through 3, says this.
Oh, I'm not even going to read that.
The fool says, in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt. They do abominable deeds. There is none who does good. The Lord God looks down from heaven on the children of men to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.
They all have turned aside together. They have become corrupt. There is none who does good. Not even one. That's Psalm 14:1 3.
The Psalmist says that if we are looking at the world and trying to interpret the world as though there is no God, we're not actually looking at the world the way that it is. We might say, well, I'm just trying to look at the facts objectively. But he would say, if there is a God, and God made the world. If you're looking at the world thinking there is no God, you're not actually seeing the whole picture. And the way that he describes that is foolishness.
He's not trying to be condescending. He's just saying you're missing a big ingredient of creation if you're trying to evaluate creation without a creator because it just doesn't happen. And not only that, but God is a creator who is looking for more goodness in his creation. He's looking for a man, a person, a woman, a child who does good. And as he, with complete and perfect knowledge, looks at every heart and soul on the planet, as he looks for somebody who's doing good, he's like, you guys don't got it.
There's nobody who does good. Well, that's pretty harsh, God. Like, I'm trying my best out here. I'm trying my best. Remember that one time that I didn't lose my temper?
That one time that I didn't say those words that I really, really wanted to say, and they deserved it, too. They. And I didn't say it. Do you remember that? Like, that was good.
He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good in a sense of, like, perfect completion. If God is looking for something that's complete apart from himself, he cannot find it because all of us have our being in him. And he is goodness. He is good.
God's existence doesn't depend on our belief. There's times where we can get into philosophical conversations with people and we can say we can because we are being generous and making space for them to wrestle. We'll say, like, I can hear that that's what you believe. But what I believe or what any individual believes doesn't change what's real. God's existence doesn't depend on anybody's belief.
If he is, he is, whether you believe in him or not. If he isn't, then he isn't. Whether you believe in him or not, that's the crux. And here we see that God is good and no one else does because no one else is. God is good and does good, or God is good, God makes good and God does good.
But as God is looking across the earth, he says, there's nobody who does good because there's no one who is good apart from me.
The fool says in his heart there is no God. You guys are great. You guys look clean. You got your shower today. Everybody's got a smile, you're well rested, everything's good.
You guys are great. And those of you joining us, live stream. I'm sure your pajamas are pressed and everything's great.
You're listening to a church, you're listening to a pastor at a church talk. And so, like, if you are wrestling with, I don't think I believe in God, then continue like I'm not. I don't say all this to say, like, you have to, like, come to whatever you have to solve it today. Continue to ask the question and continue to press in. But for many of us, like, we would say, no, I believe in God.
But then I also think that, like, I am good all by myself, apart from him. And there's areas where we can forget that God is and God does and God makes good. So we don't mean to. But sometimes I say in my heart, there is no God.
There's times where looking at something and I know the good thing to do and I want to do the not good thing. Michael wants to get there faster. I don't care what the sign says.
When are we most tempted to forget God?
When are we most tempted to forget God? When we look at our circumstances and begin to do as if there is no God. And the psalmist just reminds us when we look at the creation as though there is no God, we are acting foolishly. Our math isn't mathing because we've forgotten the foundation of creation.
I call it functional atheism. And there was a book a number of years ago called the Christian Atheist.
And the idea isn't that like, I'm an atheist and I believe there is no God. The idea is I believe in God. I think I'm following Jesus. But sometimes I'd rather just forget for a minute that God exists and I function as an atheist. There's all kinds of pressures.
There's all kinds of pressures at work, at school, like Okay, I see that you've got some kind of standards here. Let's just forget about those for a minute and let's do this other thing.
When are we most tempted to forget God?
And I just ask you to spend some time in prayer this week, kind of looking for those opportunities and those temptations. Because I don't think we necessarily do those things consciously, but we need to be mindful of drifting from the truth.
God is good. God makes good, and God does good. So who is good?
Nailed it. All right, next question is, what is good? Like, how do you define good? Michael, you've been talking about God is good. God is good.
God is good. Good, good, good, good. What is a good? Like, how do you actually define that? What does that word mean?
Okay, I would ask first. What is the opposite of good? Bad. Okay, I heard one. Evil in the back.
Where's my evil? There you go. All right. She read the book. In Genesis, chapter one.
So at the very, very beginning, God is, like, making things. It says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. You know what's included in the heavens and the earth? The heavens and the earth. All the things.
So God was making all the things. And as he makes the things, he spends kind of six days setting things in order. And so he sets stuff in order. He looks at it, he sees it, he says, and it is good. And then that's the end of the day.
Takes about six days to do that. It is good. It is good. It is good. It is good.
It is good. It is good. And then he, like, creates man. He wants to create something, to be like him. Creates man in his image and in his likeness.
So makes man to represent him. And he puts him in the garden. And he says, this is very good. Like, okay, cool. Like, we've got Good, Good, good, good, good, good.
Very good. Sweet. Everything. Everything is good. And then in chapter two things or chapter three, things start to get squirrely.
But before they do. Excuse me. In Genesis, chapter 2 and verse 9 says, all the fruit of the trees were good. But let me read it. I don't have it in my notes.
I thought that was the verse, but it's not. I'm going to turn to Genesis chapter two. If you want to look there, you can look there with me.
Genesis 2 is the very first book in your Bible.
Chapter two is on page four. And chapter two, I'll start in verse eight. The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east. And there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight of and good for food.
So it's good. All the trees are good. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden. That sounds pretty cool. Tree of life.
I like living. Living is better than dying. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Hold on a second. I thought all the trees were good.
You just said that all the fruit was good. I thought. And then you say in the midst of the garden, one of the trees is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Well, how can that be? How can the tree.
How can the fruit of the tree be the fruit of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and still be good? I suspect that all the fruit of the trees were good, like any other creature in creation could eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil with no bad repercussions.
But the thing that made that tree particularly painful for humanity was that God gave a prohibition against that tree specifically. There wasn't something wrong in the genetics of the fruit of the tree. The knowledge of good and evil, it didn't, like, explode as soon as you. It was a normal fruit. What set it apart was that God said, don't eat the fruit of that tree.
And that prohibition, God coming to those people and saying, hey, you can have everything. You can eat anything you want all day. Buffet, best fruit, no calories, no sin. Gluttony wasn't a thing. Yet you can eat anything you want.
I've provided a place for you to live. There's water, there's fruit, there's animals to hang out with. You can do anything you want. I've made this whole creation good. And the job I gave you was to be fruitful and multiply.
This is a good creation. Just one thing. Just don't eat of that tree. Oh, that's the one I want, though. Now, What is the opposite of good?
The opposite of good isn't necessarily just bad. It says the opposite of good is evil is the knowledge of good and evil. And the way that you gain knowledge, understanding, knowing good and evil is by choosing to do evil. God didn't introduce evil to the world. He introduced a free choice.
He says, I'm going to give you the option of whether or not you're going to love me and serve me and embrace all of the goodness that I've given you, or whether you're going to choose, choose to Rebel against me and choose the one thing that I said. You probably don't touch that one.
The problem is, a conversation about goodness inevitably leads to a discussion about right and wrong. Like when we talk about the fruit of the spirit, we actually get. We can't escape a conversation about morality. There are things that we can do that are right and wrong. And evil is the absence of goodness.
It is opposed to the design which God made things. God made everything good. We said, I want to do something different than the way God made it. And God said, that's what evil is. You have introduced evil by rejecting good.
Have you ever thought about light and darkness? There's an overlap, particularly in John's writing, where he says, God's goodness is like light and God is the source of goodness. God is the source of light. That's where he starts in creation. But how do you make a room darker?
Turn off the light, shut the curtains, block the light out. The only way that you can make a room darker is by removing light. There is no like thing that you can turn on that's going to be a source of darkness or evil is the absence of goodness and a rejection of what God made as goodness and goodness. Basically, there's some pictures. Goodness is alignment with God's design.
God designed things and made them good. And when we try to operate outside of the good design that God made, that's where we are, outside of what's good.
God is good. God makes good and God does good.
But when we're standing in the midst of the garden, when we're foraging and browsing amongst all the trees, all the biodiversity, the different plants and animals. We went to a botanical garden last week and there were plants I'd never seen before. They do weird stuff. I saw a plant that like fruits on the trunk of the tree, not on the leaves, which is where they are. There's fruits on the trunk of the tree.
And I thought, like, somebody had left up Halloween decorations. I was like, why is this? And, no, that's what the plant does. I have no idea what it was called, but I'd never seen anything like that before. God invented all that kind of stuff.
And as we're walking around in the Garden of Eden and seeing all the goodness that God has made, where do our eyes fixate the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?
The problem is, from the beginning, because of God's goodness being so great and so pervasive, we have fixated on the one thing that's different and deviates. And we let the badness and the wickedness captivate our attention to the neglect of all of the goodness that God has provided.
We wrestle with evil and we should. Evil is bad. Like it breaks God's heart. It's not the way he meant for it to be. But if we're not mindful, we can let the absence of goodness corrupt our view of goodness.
So what evil is corrupting our view of goodness?
This is a legitimate question. And this is, I think, the question that we're going to have to answer with our neighbors over and over and over again, and we're going to have to walk with them through. There is not a band aid for this question, what evil is corrupting our view of goodness? Because there are many of us who have experienced significant evil and significant hurt. And we would put God on the stand and say, I'm not buying into anything that you're selling until you answer for what you let happen here.
But when we fixate on that evil, we do so to the neglect of all of the goodness of creation. So I'll just ask, what evil is corrupting our view of goodness? And I would say, go ahead and name it and tell somebody that this is what it is that I'm wrestling with. Because when we, like, I don't know, he's got an answer for that and we just keep it to ourselves, like, we let it churn us and stir us away from him and we become convinced the opposite of what is true. Because what is true is that God is good, God makes good, and God does good.
Are we tracking so far? Okay, so what?
God's good. I'm not. Thanks so much. I'm really excited about this.
How do we grow in goodness?
What hope do we have? How do we grow in goodness? I know I get fixated on the dark parts of creation. So how do I grow in goodness? I'll invite you to turn with me to Psalm chapter 34.
Bless you.
Psalm chapter 34. It's on page 535 in the blue Bibles here. And we read the first nine verses of this Psalm.
But this is one that I have over the last couple couple of years have just continued to come back to. There's layers to this. A couple years ago, I preached a whole sermon on this psalm in particular. And so you can go back in the archives and find that. But like for this morning, let's look at Psalm 34.
It's written by David. This is the title. It was written by David when he changed his behavior before Abimelech so that he drove him out and he went away. So there's the situation. We'll come back to this.
That. But what David says is this. I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord.
Let the humble hear and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt his name together. Because I sought the Lord and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles.
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and delivers them. O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him. O fear the Lord, you his saints. For those who fear him have no lack.
The young lions suffer want and hunger. But those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.
Come, O children, and listen to me. I'll teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is there who desires life and loves many days that he may see good. Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good.
Seek peace and pursue it. The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil to cut off the memory of them from the earth. When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.
Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. He keeps all his bones, not one of them is broken. Affliction will slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned. The Lord redeems the life of his servants. None of those who take refuge in him will be condemned.
Just go ahead and put a bookmark there. Come back to that one. Read that one a couple of times this week. Spend some time chewing on it. The hinge.
The hinge of the psalm is about tasting. What does he say? Taste and see that the Lord is good. This is coming from a guy who's assuming that the Lord is good. Did you hear that?
Let my soul make its boast in the Lord. Oh, magnify the Lord with me. Like, oh, man, you're clearly having a good day. I'm happy for you. Like, welcome, brother.
Welcome to church. Like, everything's so good. God's good. God's good all the time. All the time God's good, like, okay, all right, David, I got it.
And what does he say? He says, taste and see that the Lord is good.
Have you ever just assumed that you're not going to like it?
There's a process by which we have to teach small humans to eat, And it's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart.
Because the issue is you got to convince them to taste something that they've already made up their whole mind. Their whole mind is that this is bad and yucky, smells bad and yucky, and I don't want it. Okay, but now you're going to taste it. No, no, no, no, no, no. And there's probably.
Probably no way on God's green earth that you can taste something with that mindset and it actually be delightful. So parents have to overcome that. No, no, no. Taste it. I don't want to taste it.
It's yucky. How can you say it's yucky? You haven't even tried it. It's interesting to me that, like, that dynamic of that conversation is what the psalmist directs us to when we hear somebody walk in and say, I will bless the Lord at all times. Yeah, right, buddy.
I'm happy for you. I'm glad. The whole world is peachy for you. Sugar and rainbows. I'll bless the Lord at all times.
His praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord. Let the humble hear and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me. Let us exalt his name together.
I'm tired. I'm tired. And God wasn't with me this week, and things didn't work out the way that I wanted to. And I don't want to be with him, and I don't want to hear what he has to say, and I don't want to give him a chance. And he's saying, I hear you, I hear you.
He says, but what I did is I sought the Lord, and then he answered me, and he delivered me from all my fears. Taste and see. Taste. Try it. Put it in.
Like, you're not going to want to at first, but just taste it and see that the Lord is good. There's goodness there because God is good. God makes good and God does good.
And David, as he writes, this is not in a pleasant situation. You could read a psalm like that and be like, that sounds like some bald pastor wrote it who, like, never had a bad day in his life. Like, everything always works out for him. Of course you're gonna let your soul magnify the Lord, because life is easy for you. Like, you're a pastor.
You only work one day a week. What do you have to complain about, right? But that's not David's. That's not my experience. But that's also not David's experience.
David writes Psalm 34 from the bottom of a cave.
The title there is when he changed his behavior before Abimelech, what had happened is that Saul was just really, really good at his job. And God was with him in his job. He was doing the best that he could possibly do. And sometimes when good people do good in God's name, evil people attack them for the good that they do. And that's what happened for David.
He was doing good. He was getting good from God. Everything was working out good for him. And Saul said, I'm going to kill you. And David says, that's a problem, and I should probably leave.
It doesn't make sense for me to stick around. So he takes off running, which is understandable, but he gets so worked up about what's going on that he goes to a priest in Nob and he lies about what he's doing there. He's covering his tracks. He's saying that Saul sent me on a secret mission and I need some help. And so he lies to this high priest, or not the high priest, he lies to this priest and says, I need some help.
And so the priest gives them a sword they had laying around on what kind of church they were going to, but they had a sword laying around and gives David this sword. And so David leaves. Okay, well, when Saul comes by looking for David, he sees this priest and says, you helped this guy that I was trying to kill. You clearly are my enemy. And he murders everybody in the town.
David left wise was scared, had his eyes fixated on the evil and on the problem that he was facing. And he led him into compromise. And it cost the lives of a whole town full of people. And he takes off running.
He's like, I don't know what to do. And he runs straight into a different country. The next neighboring country is the country of the Philistines. And he goes into a town that's adjacent to a town called Gath. And he's walking around, he's trying to hide in this other country.
And I should probably mention, that sword that they had that they gave to David, it came from a guy named Goliath, who was a guy who was from Gath home. He takes this sword and he runs into Goliath's hometown, carrying Goliath's sword to the people that were friends with Goliath.
And they welcomed him with open arms. No. They're like, hey. They went to the king. They said, hey, King, David's here.
He's like, david? Yeah, David. He's got Goliath's sword. David, the one who killed Goliath, our best warrior, the guy who we, like, decked out in all this expensive armor, like, that guy is here. Yeah.
Okay, well, let's go find him. And David has to act like a crazy person because they had a lot of things. They had a lot of grudges with David, but they also had a bunch of superstitions. And they had a strong superstition that it was very, very evil to murder somebody with a mental incapacity. So David acts like he has a mental incapacity so that these people who have every reason to kill him don't.
So it seems like for David, every step he takes is the wrong step. And he runs off. He leaves that area. He goes and he buries himself in a cave.
And when he walks out of that cave, he walks out carrying. Psalm 34.
When he got his eyes off of all of the problems and everything that was broken in his life and all of his bad solutions for how to fix them, and he cried out to God.
The Lord met him.
When God stopped trying to solve or when David stopped trying to solve God's problems for him and just went to God, he tasted and he saw that the Lord was good, that God is good, and he makes good, and he does good. And so he writes, I'll bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord. Let the humble hear and be glad.
O magnify the Lord with me. Let us exalt his name together. I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Are they significant? He had some anxieties to contend with.
He had some pressures at work.
He answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and delivers him.
O taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him. O fear the Lord. Surrender to the Lord, you his saints. For those who fear him have no lack.
Those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.
Come, O children, listen to me. I'll teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is there that desires life and loves many days that he may see good. I want good. Your neighbor wants good.
Everybody wants good. How do we do that? Keep your tongue from evil. Oof.
And your lips from speaking deceit.
David's lies had consequences for the whole town of Nob. And here he says, keep your mouth shut and take it to God.
Because God is good. God makes good and God does good. And when we come to God, we fear him. Our posture is, you're God and I'm not. You're good and I'm not.
I need you and you don't need me. God transforms who we are, which changes what we do.
He went from being on the run, compromised, lying. I don't know if you can conceal, carry a Goliath sized sword, but he was carrying a sword, running headlong into enemy territory just out of his mind, to calling others to rejoice, to asking us to see God rightly because we see ourselves rightly. Those who taste and see that the Lord is good will know of his provision. He takes care of their every need. He provides them with a good long life.
He's with them through troubles and saves them from their enemies. The eyes are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil to cut off the memory of them from the earth. When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.
I love that verse. If you needed one to get tattooed, that might be it. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.
But don't forget verse 19. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. We think that if God's near that the problems go away. And he's saying, no, taste and see, the Lord is good. When all the problems are stirring up and everything's going bad, that's not what I want.
That's not the good that I want. I understand. But know too that that is how it is that God saved the world. What do you mean? God saved the world by letting troubles happen.
Verse 20. He keeps all his bones, not one of them is broken. Is a verse that gets applied to Jesus.
That as Jesus laid down his life and suffered unjust, unjust execution. That the Lord was limiting the amount of the disaster to protect his bones. God cares about the details, even when trouble is real, the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. God is good. God makes good and God does good.
So how do we grow in goodness? Look at God, Michael. It's Sunday morning. Air condition's cranking. I get it.
What does that do for me when I have to walk out into the parking lot on a Wednesday somewhere when it's hot out?
God doesn't always feel so good. In real life, my friends, God's patience makes room for us to move towards an understanding that we can't quite yet grasp. So if you're saying God needs to answer for this evil that happened in my life, then I'm not discouraging you from wrestling with that. Continue to wrestle with that, but move towards it. Move towards it with the truth that God is good, God makes good and God does good because his patience is going to make room for us to carry all that baggage and his goodness is going to sort it out in our souls.
The question when we come up to a message like this about God's goodness is are we moving towards God's truth or are we turning our back and refusing to taste his goodness? Are we moving towards God's truth? I don't. I hear the scripture saying God's good. My experience doesn't match up.
Are we moving towards God's truth and saying, I'm trying to wrap my head around, I just can't. I just can't. Something's not clicking. God, will you help me? Will you help me?
Will you help me? Or do we just turn our back and say, God cannot be good and I don't care what he says. Are we moving towards God's truth or are we turning our back? Because the truth doesn't change that God is good. God makes good and God does good.
Let's pray together.
Lord, I'm acutely aware of my own inability this morning. And I know that we have just skimmed across all kinds of landmines in our personal life. There's all kinds of feelings that have been stirred up. There's all kinds of situations that have been brought to mind. And Lord, I don't have the ability to capacity to deal with all of the people who are hearing this message right now.
And so I pray that if there's anything that I've said that's just been my opinion or has been distracting from your truth, that those things would be forgotten.
But Lord, where we have interacted with your truth, God, I pray that that would stand firm. Lord, even when we cannot yet let ourselves. Believe it. Would you help us to move towards it? Would you help us to taste?
Would you tune our taste buds to know right and wrong and good and evil? Lord, Would you, if we have just become accustomed to the taste of evil, would you cleanse our palate so that we can taste what is good?
Lord, you're our shepherd. You lead us and guide us. You shape our hearts and you remind us that it's your goodness and it's your loving kindness that follows us all the days of our life.
And so, Lord, today I pray that you would deal with each of us, that you'd give us space to ask the questions that are on our hearts and our minds and that you would give grace as we process what that is and you help us to know what it is that you want for us to do next.
Lord, if it's surrender for the first time, God, I pray that you grant faith to trust that you are trustworthy and able to forgive sin.
Lord, if it's letting go of a hurt and not allowing it to be the controlling deciding factor of my life anymore.
Lord, we can make decisions in a moment, but I thank you that your spirit walks us through the process.
So I pray that you would do the work that only you can do in these moments and that you'd continue to reshape us as we leave this place. It's in Jesus name.
LINKS
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
