Preparing for God’s Presence: Lessons from 1 Samuel 6:1–7:1

Introduction

Well good morning, King’s Corner! It is good to be gathered with you on this Lord’s Day morning. If you are joining us online we appreciate you tuning in. And if you are anything like me, this has been a challenging week. We are overrun in our day to day lives with demands of all types: marriages, raising children, managing households, working jobs, stressed-out bosses, social commitments, illnesses, personal emergencies, the 24/7 news cycle, the constant barrage of texts and social media notifications on our smartphones, church commitments, after-school activities, relationship drama, unfinished projects, and on and on and on.

It is commonly said that repentance is a turning away. And I think we can think as a the weekly gathering of the church as something of a planned, weekly rhythm of repentance. It is a rhythm of restful repentance that we get to joyfully take part in as we gather together. To have some space to put all of that outside noise and business away for a while and settle into the intentional weekly rhythm of slowing down with God’s people and with God himself, and turning away from the noise of the week and turning - or perhaps “returning” - our attention back to God. To intentionally, knowingly, expectantly set all of those other things aside for a few hours and set our attention, our focus, our minds, our hearts on the glories of God for an hour or two. As we do that, we find rest from our busyness, calm from our worries, strength in our weaknesses, and a renewed spirit that empowers us as we go back into the weekly work in the surrounding world that God has called us to. Jesus once said to the Apostle Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.”

So this morning, as we prepare our hearts, I’d like to invite us just to acknowledge and confess our weakness. Life often seems hard because we are trying to deal with things as best we know how to the best of our abilities. But the truth is we don’t know what’s best and we often aren’t able to cope with life’s demands. Let’s just be honest about that this morning with God, with ourselves, and with each other, and let’s take King Jesus at his word that he will perfect his power in us in the face of our weaknesses.

Amen? Amen.

Well, we are going to be in 1 Samuel, Chapter 6 today. And so I’ll invite you to turn there in your bibles and on your devices. If you don’t have a Bible, please let myself or Pastor Ryan know at the end of service, the church has access to some that we would love to provide you with free of charge as our gift to you, but for now just nudge the person in the seat next to you and share their copy. And as you guys are turning there, ill just say that human beings were designed to crave communion and perfect relationship with God. But at the fall we lost that. And so now, part of our salvation is the recovery of taking joy and delighting in the presence of our redeemer God. And we don’t always do that perfectly. Human hearts are fickle, we get blinded by our own sinfulness, and sometimes we just need to go through the process of learning how to relate to God rightly. Have we asked ourselves what is required of us to properly receive God’s presence? How does he want us to respond to his presence? When we ask him in our prayers to show up, do we really believe he will or even that he wants to? How often do we actually prepare our hearts for Him, and are we truly excited when He shows up? Do we even recognize it?

Those are some of the questions that 1 Samuel Chapter 6 begs of us. This passage recounts the return of the Ark of the Covenant to Israel after being held captive by the Philistines, revealing to the Philistines the unrivaled might of the God of Israel and showing Israel's need for repentance and right worship to properly welcome the divine presence. As a church plant who is attempting to establish rhythms of worship and building a Sunday service, this passage emphasizes the importance of sincere repentance, worship, and obedience to prepare for God's presence and blessing in our midst. It challenges us to examine our hearts and community practices to ensure we respond to God’s work among us with reverence and faithfulness. We must prepare our hearts and community for the transformative presence of God, recognizing that true worship and sincere repentance are essential for His blessings.

So Let’s take a moment to read this passage together and we will actually be going all the way through the first verse of Chapter 7:

1 Samuel 6:1–7:1 CSB

When the ark of the Lord had been in Philistine territory for seven months, the Philistines summoned the priests and the diviners and pleaded, “What should we do with the ark of the Lord? Tell us how we can send it back to its place.” They replied, “If you send the ark of Israel’s God away, do not send it without an offering. Send back a guilt offering to him, and you will be healed. Then the reason his hand hasn’t been removed from you will be revealed.” They asked, “What guilt offering should we send back to him?” And they answered, “Five gold tumors and five gold mice corresponding to the number of Philistine rulers, since there was one plague for both you and your rulers. Make images of your tumors and of your mice that are destroying the land. Give glory to Israel’s God, and perhaps he will stop oppressing you, your gods, and your land. Why harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened theirs? When he afflicted them, didn’t they send Israel away, and Israel left? “Now then, prepare one new cart and two milk cows that have never been yoked. Hitch the cows to the cart, but take their calves away and pen them up. Take the ark of the Lord, place it on the cart, and put the gold objects that you’re sending him as a guilt offering in a box beside the ark. Send it off and let it go its way. Then watch: If it goes up the road to its homeland toward Beth-shemesh, it is the Lord who has made this terrible trouble for us. However, if it doesn’t, we will know that it was not his hand that punished us—it was just something that happened to us by chance.” The men did this: They took two milk cows, hitched them to the cart, and confined their calves in the pen. Then they put the ark of the Lord on the cart, along with the box containing the gold mice and the images of their tumors. The cows went straight up the road to Beth-shemesh. They stayed on that one highway, lowing as they went; they never strayed to the right or to the left. The Philistine rulers were walking behind them to the territory of Beth-shemesh. The people of Beth-shemesh were harvesting wheat in the valley, and when they looked up and saw the ark, they were overjoyed to see it. The cart came to the field of Joshua of Beth-shemesh and stopped there near a large rock. The people of the city chopped up the cart and offered the cows as a burnt offering to the Lord. The Levites removed the ark of the Lord, along with the box containing the gold objects, and placed them on the large rock. That day the people of Beth-shemesh offered burnt offerings and made sacrifices to the Lord. When the five Philistine rulers observed this, they returned to Ekron that same day. As a guilt offering to the Lord, the Philistines had sent back one gold tumor for each city: Ashdod, Gaza, Ashkelon, Gath, and Ekron. The number of gold mice also corresponded to the number of Philistine cities of the five rulers, the fortified cities and the outlying villages. The large rock on which the ark of the Lord was placed is still in the field of Joshua of Beth-shemesh today. God struck down the people of Beth-shemesh because they looked inside the ark of the Lord. He struck down seventy persons. The people mourned because the Lord struck them with a great slaughter. The people of Beth-shemesh asked, “Who is able to stand in the presence of the Lord this holy God? To whom should the ark go from here?” They sent messengers to the residents of Kiriath-jearim, saying, “The Philistines have returned the ark of the Lord. Come down and get it.” So the people of Kiriath-jearim came for the ark of the Lord and took it to Abinadab’s house on the hill. They consecrated his son Eleazar to take care of it.

This is the word of the Lord. < May he write it on our hearts.> Amen.

Body

In the preceding chapters, the people of god had carried the ark with them into battle to defeat their enemy the Philistines in an effort to win the battle. But the Philistines instead had captured the ark, defeated Israel in battle, and the chief priest’s sons both die. The news of these things led the chief priest himself to keel over and die. The Philistines put the ark of God as a trophy in the temple of their false God Dagon. God’s power is shown as the presence of the ark removes the head and hands of the idol and the Philistines are afflicted with tumors.

The presence of God always demands a response.

The Philistines’ response, unfortunately for them, was that they had misinterpreted who God was and what he was like. They assumed that he was just another God in their pantheon of multiple deities from the surrounding nations. So when they add his presence to the presence of their other idols in an attempt to add to their own power, they were met with the unmistakable authority and power of God. Communion with God is not one thing that we add to everything else in our lives to make it better. God’s holiness and glory demands that he be the unique centerpiece of our lives. To seek him in humility is to glorify him. To subordinate everything else in our lives to his presence and his commands is the only way that he can be rightly worshiped. Making priority of anything else is idolatry and a violation of the command God gave Moses to have no other Gods before him. God is not a supporting character in your story. It is his story and he invites us to be a part of it. He is God and only by acknowledging his will and submitting ourselves to it in obedience will we experience the blessing and joy of his presence. And to do that we must admit to him and to ourselves our own distraction, our own fickleness, and ultimately our own weakness and dependence on him. Jesus did not say, “you are already strong, with me you will be even stronger.” He said his strength will be made perfect in weakness.

The Philistine’s response was to follow their own best of intentions with regard to the ark. They assumed that the ark was a physical God like any other idol. They did what made sense to them. They assumed that they could use God to achieve their own ends.

If we aren’t careful we could end up unintentionally doing the same thing. As a church plant, and as church planters there is the constant temptation toward busyness. We often unintentionally live into the statement “If it is to be it is up to me.” We may even be tempted to be proud of all the good stuff we are doing for God. But I’m going to give you a little cheat sheet here. So if you’re taking notes, make sure to write this down. You ready? Here it is: God doesn’t need you. He doesn’t. Nothing you can do for him will add one ounce of power to anything he has decided needs to be accomplished. He doesn’t need us. We need him. We can get so caught up in our busyness and our doing and our strategies that we lose sight of that. We must remember that the building of rhythms, organizing of groups, arraigning public services, volunteering to serve the plant’s needs, sharing in the fellowship of community together are all vitally important. But they aren’t important because they are the ends. They are the means. Our ultimate goal is not to plant a Sunday service, pack a building with a bunch of people or multiply small groups. Our goal, ultimately, must be to glorify God himself as we enjoy communion with him and lead others to do the same. The sound systems, the music, the physical buildings and seating arrangements, the firepits, the table groups, the service projects and outreach - those are all only merely strategic means that we use, by which we can work to realize that ultimate goal of communion with God. Don’t miss that. If we are not careful, we will be consumed with doing. And we have a knack for justifying our doing to God as he invites us to slow down and rest in him. We are great at convincing ourselves that the things we are doing are good things when we start treating them as the ends. And they are. They are all good things. But they are not the best thing. They are not the ultimate thing. God is. John Piper has said that “missions exists because worship doesn’t.” Our goal in all the stuff we do is not to do the stuff. It is to get one step closer to more fully enjoy communion with our God and to invite the people of Morristown into that life in Christ with us.

What we do as church planters, we do out of a heart of humble preparation for our reception of his presence and out of heart of thankful obedience to the mandate that God has given us to go into our Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth with that same presence and power.

I am not saying that church planting is not hard work. It is. Being a missionary is hard work. But if we are to be successful in that, our first step and our continual need is to daily, hourly, and minute-by-minute, remind ourselves of our dire need for him, his centrality to the mission of the church, and to pray earnestly for his wisdom, direction, strength and blessing, even as we confess our weakness to him and subordinate our preferences, our selves, and our best intentions to his will.

So I want us to consider 5 principles that I hope can help guide us as we consider how to move forward in our efforts to see King’s Corner be established and grow by God’s grace in the coming months and years. The first is this:

1. Right Response to God's Power and Primacy

1 Samuel 6:1-5

So in the first five verses of this chapter, we see the Philistine’s response when they are confronted with God’s demonstration of his unique authority and power. God sends tumors to afflict them and mice to destroy their crops. And after seven months of this it finally dawns on them: “Hey! We gotta get this thing out of here!” But now they realize the power of this foreign God of the Israelites and they don’t want to risk offending them. So they get their false priests and divination experts together, because in their minds they are the ones who know best how to deal with gods. So they bring these guys together and they say, “Give us a plan. How in the world do we get rid of this thing and avoid ticking this God off any more than we already have?”

So the Philistines recognized - at least at some level - God’s power and sought to appease Him. I said before that the presence of God always demands a response. When we experience God in his fullness, the only reasonable first response is fear. The Philistines got that part. But the book of Proverbs says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is not the fullness of wisdom. It is a starting place. The next step for the wise person is humble repentance, followed by adoration and worship. The Philistines did not get that part. They did respond with fear, but in their spiritual blindness they tried to fix the situation on their own terms. And lest we think them silly, we often do the same thing. When confronted with truth or when we think we have erred in some way, our natural, sinful instinct is to try and fix it ourselves. Adam and Eve in the garden, they sin and then what do they do? They hide and make a feeble attempt on their own to cover their nakedness by sewing fig leaves together. Cain and Abel both offer sacrifices to God and Cain’s is rejected because it wasn’t what God wanted from Cain. So Cain in his anger, instead of humbly repenting and doing as God had commanded, took matters into his own hands and killed his brother as if his obedient brother was the problem. Moses goes up on the mountain to receive the law of God after exiting Egypt and while he’s up there people decide in their sinfulness to come up with their own plan and they make a golden calf. The same formula is repeated over and over again in Scripture: God tells us what he requires and we try to fix the problem ourselves rather than humbly accept God’s authority over us and trusting him to fix what we cannot. And I think if we are honest with ourselves, we would all say that at one time or another we have done the same thing. We try unsuccessfully over and over to cure our own addiction. We hide our sin because like Adam and Eve we are ashamed and don’t want our nakedness exposed. We come up with a plan to fix it - a way that seems right to us - but the end leads to death because in the end we are no closer to solving the problem than when we began. When confronted with God’s awesome power, we get afraid and instead of repenting in humility and an admission of our own weak nakedness we respond in our own strength, still in our sin, and rightly afraid, but without hope.

If we want God to bless the work that we do as we work to establish this church, we must first recognize and respond rightly to God’s presence and power. Wehave to humble ourselves and acknowledge that God does not need our meager efforts or our best-laid plans. He must be the center and we must seek him diligently, rather than trying to do things out of our own power and wisdom.

So the Philistines trust the word of these sorcerers who come up with a plan and tell them send it back with a gift to admit their guilt. They say you are going to make golden images of their tumors and the mice, and maybe God will cut them some slack. Sounds weird to us but making images of things you wished to get rid of and offering those things to idols is a well-attested practice in the ancient world. But ultimately it's just fig leaves.

Second Principle:

2. Avoiding Hardened Hearts

1 Samuel 6:6-9

So in verses 6-9, we see this plan start to take shape and even in their spiritual ignorance, the priests of Dagon and the diviners stumble onto what is really a very valid question. Look at verse 6 : “Why harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened theirs? When he afflicted them, didn’t they send Israel away, and Israel left?

So the Philistines had apparently heard about what God did for the Isrealites when he delivered them from Egypt. They had heard about the plagues and said, “Look, we don’t want those problems!” When the God of Isreal confronted Pharaoh and Pharaoh hardened his heart, things got worse. So why harden your heart?

It’s a great question. They’re exactly right. Where’s the wisdom in that? If you have encountered the Living God, you know you can’t stand in opposition to him. Why not, instead of hardening your heart and suffering the consequences, just relent? Isn’t that easier? Doesn’t that stop the judgement? It did for the Egyptians. They sent the Isrealites and their God away and the problems went with them.

So if we want the power and presence of God in our midst - if we want to witness his work among us - if we want his blessing in all that we are trying to do as we seek to obey his call to plant this church - we must be careful not to harden our hearts.

If King’s Corner is going to be a church that is blessed by the power and presence of God, the only way for that to happen is if we pray sincerely for God to reveal our sinfulness to us so that we can turn and repent from it, every day. When we make plans, we commit them to the Lord first, and we bathe them in prayer because we understand that we need him, he doesn’t need us. Our hope lies in returning to God’s ways and seeking to align our lives with His purpose and his direction. But too often, when God does show up and start to do some transformative work, I think it surprises us when that starts in us and not in everyone else. We hear that doorbell ring and rather than running to the door and inviting God into our mess, we get quiet and hide in hopes that the conviction we feel will go away. And in that moment, it’s hard not to get defensive and maybe even defiant. It’s hard in the moment to relinquish the death grip we have on that last ounce of control. And so we repeat our mistakes, because we convince ourselves that we have things under control. Its the same lie. We believe we can fix our own problems. But we can’t.

So the Philistines come up with this plan to put the ark on a cart to send it on its way with the golden mice and tumors. And here’s the idea - their going to use two untrained milk cows who aren’t used to pulling loads and they are going to take their calves away from them and pen them up off to the side. And they’re going to send the cows on their way. Now, I know not many of us are farmers here, but if you take an untrained nursing cow away from her baby and put a heavy load on her, what does your intuition tell you is very likely to happen? Well if you can avoid getting kicked into next week while trying to hitch her up, probably nothing spectacular right? Naturally, she’s going to want to return to her baby, she’s going to reject the load placed on her, she’s not going to know how to pull the load, and she certainly isn’t going to know how to be part of a yoked team. So the logic is this - verse 9 - “If it goes up the road to its homeland toward Beth-shemesh, it is the Lord who has made this terrible trouble for us. However, if it doesn’t, we will know that it was not his hand that punished us—it was just something that happened to us by chance.” In other words, if this cart goes anywhere that’s impressive. If it goes all the way to back where the ark came from, that’s miraculous. And so if this God can find a way to get this cart to where it needs to go, we’ll take it as a sign that the trouble we’ve experienced came from him. If not, it’s just a random thing that happened with no real meaning behind it. Do you guys believe in random chance? Me either. I believe in the sovereignty of God. And I think deep down, so did the Philistines and they picked the most likely scenario they could think of to say, “You see there? It was just a random thing. Phew.” But God has a sense of humor and he doesn’t let them off that easy.

Principle number 3:

3. Acceptance with Joy and Obedience

1 Samuel 6:10–16 “The men did this: They took two milk cows, hitched them to the cart, and confined their calves in the pen. Then they put the ark of the Lord on the cart, along with the box containing the gold mice and the images of their tumors. The cows went straight up the road to Beth-shemesh. They stayed on that one highway, lowing as they went; they never strayed to the right or to the left. The Philistine rulers were walking behind them to the territory of Beth-shemesh. The people of Beth-shemesh were harvesting wheat in the valley, and when they looked up and saw the ark, they were overjoyed to see it. The cart came to the field of Joshua of Beth-shemesh and stopped there near a large rock. The people of the city chopped up the cart and offered the cows as a burnt offering to the Lord. The Levites removed the ark of the Lord, along with the box containing the gold objects, and placed them on the large rock. That day the people of Beth-shemesh offered burnt offerings and made sacrifices to the…”

So in verses 6-10 the Philistines did as they were told that and surprise, surprise, surprise. The cows did the most unlikely thing possible and made a bee line toward Beth-shemesh where the ark came from. So when this thing arrives in Beth-Shemesh the people are harvesting wheat and they see this thing headed toward them in the distance and they are rightly overjoyed. The presence of God once again is coming to to reside in their midst!

And the text says that they chopped up the cart into pieces and used the wood to build a fire and slaughter the cows and offer them as a burnt offering to the Lord. And I think we could probably agree that makes sense, right? They were overjoyed that the Lord had delivered the Ark of the Covenant back to them and they thought, “Hey, we’re going to praise God and thank him by offering him these philistine cows.” Seems like they were probably operating with the best of intentions.

But there’s a problem with that. Beth-shemesh was one of the Levitical cities where priests from the tribe of Levi resided. Back in the book of Numbers, it had been set apart for the family of Kohath who was the Levitical family charged with caring for the ark. Beth-shemesh was also one of the homes designated for the descendants of Aaron. Suffice it to say that this was a place where the people there were (or at least should have been) well-acquainted with the ark, how it was to be handled, the law governing sacrifices, etc.

So there’s a problem with this sacrifice. The first chapter of Leviticus stipulates that only unblemished male animals were to be used for burnt offerings. Did the Levites not know this? They should have. But whether out of ignorance or because they thought it wasn’t a big deal, they let the people carry on with this sacrifice of these Philistine cows. Does this remind you of Cain’s offering a little bit? What did God say to him? Genesis 4:7: “If you do what is right, won’t you be accepted?” Here again we see this pattern: We encounter God. God tells us what he requires. We do things our own way.

As an outsider, you could be forgiven for thinking that the residents of Beth-shemesh were just worshiping God out of a thankful heart. But how did Jesus say his people would worship? “In sprit and...?” That’s right, truth. In other words, it matters not only in terms of our motivations when we worship God, but also the way in which we approach him. And if he has told us how we are to approach him, we have to stick to that. The cows didn’t stray to the right or to the left the text says. That is how we must approach God. Because true, repentant humility is shown in our obedience to his commands. By God’s grace, we don’t have to worry about sacrificial systems and following a litany of rules anymore. God has given us one. He says to us in the New Covenant, if you will come to me, it must and can only be through my son Jesus. Any and every other attempt you make will be rejected. Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

If King’s Corner is to be a church that experiences the blessing of God and witnesses the spirit at work in our midst, we must be a people who are determined to receive God joyfully on God’s terms, not on our own. We must be willing to welcome his blessing, and his discipline. We enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise, but we do so being careful to obey and to teach others to obey everything that the Lord has commanded us.

So the Israelites were right to express joy at the return of the presence of God. But they did not approach God with obedient reverence in humility. The Philistines had fear without joy. The residents of Beth-Shemesh had joy without fear.

Which leads us to our fourth principle:

4. Awe and Reverence

1 Samuel 6:17–21

The people of Beth-shemesh asked, “Who is able to stand in the presence of the Lord this holy God? To whom should the ark go from here?” They sent messengers to the residents of Kiriath-jearim, saying, “The Philistines have returned the ark of the Lord. Come down and get it.””

The Philistine rulers that had walked behind the cows to oversee the safe delivery of the ark back to its homeland turned and went back to their hometown of Ekron and then look at what happens in verse 19: “God struck down the people of Beth-shemesh because they looked inside the ark of the Lord. He struck down seventy persons. The people mourned because the Lord struck them with a great slaughter.

This is tragic. If there was any doubt that the residents of Beth-shemesh were acting recklessly and without reverence in their sacrifice, I think this portion of the text makes it quite clear. So picture this, here comes the ark and it comes to rest with the gold offerings on this large rock and people start to gather around because they understand that this means the presence of God has returned to them and they start to gather around it and look at this sight and someone gets the idea to chop up the cart and offer the cows on it because they are so happy. And then someone starts edging closer and closer to the ark and eventually someone touches it. Then more of them. Can you imagine touching the very presence of Almighty God?? Doesn’t that sound cool?? Well it’s very beautiful in person and you’ve heard stories and legends about this thing but never in a million years did you think it would be right here in front of you - like, oh my gosh - and getting to actually touch it? So cool. And then, I mean, if the outside is this amazing - what about the inside? Can you even imagine? Let’s take the lid off and have a peek inside just real quick. Right? Aren’t you even a little bit curious? Doesn’t that sound cool??

So you and the seventy or so other people gathered around this ark start putting your grubby mitts all over it, looking inside it and so disrespect and defile the physical representation of the Lord of Hosts. Like, how dare you? We’ve probably all seen Indiana Jones so we know how this ends, right? The Nazis faces melt but the good guys survive, right? But, no. All 70 of you. Dead. Instantly dead. Just dropped dead all at once as judgment for utterly disrespecting the most holy thing any of you had ever encountered. No fear. No reverence.

Again, they should have known this. No Isrealite, outside of the Aaronic priesthood was ever permitted to see the ark, let alone look inside of it. The Levitical family of Kohath who was charged with transporting it weren’t allowed to touch it. They carried, covered, it using long poles. The proper response for these Levites from Beth Shemesh would have been to immediately cover the ark somehow while also making sure that nobody touched it or looked at it. What happened here was inexcusable. In terms of the the disrespect and irreverence that was shown, what those 70 did was the equivalent of undressing the very presence of God.

And so 70 people were slaughtered in the righteous judgment of God in an instant.

Same story. God tells us what’s required. We do what we want.

If King’s Corner is going to be blessed by God, if we expect him to add to our numbers and deliver the people of Morristown from spiritual darkness - and guys, you’d better hear me on this - we had better be very, very, careful that we don’t profane his presence. We must have both awe and reverence toward the God we serve and what it is he is calling us to be a part of in planting this church. When God shows up, we revere him, we honor him, we listen to him and are careful to obey him. We treat the words of his book as the words of life because they are. We confess our sins to one another because if we do he is faithful and just to forgive us and will cleanse us from all unrighteousness. We do not bicker, and fight, and slander and gossip. And when we do inevitably fall into sin and do those things, we confess and we reconcile. We do not concern ourselves with our personal preferences and desires, when what we should be doing is sacrificing those things and serving for the sake of others. We do not quench the Spirit by failing to deal rightly with our sin. We come to God and to one another with repentance and contrition and a humble attitude that seeks the good of others first. We outdo one another in showing honor. We bear with one another. We live in the light of the gospel as a covenant family. Anything less than that is an affront to a holy God and not worthy of his blessing.

So naturally, the remaining people mourned because 70 of their friends, loved ones and neighbors had been put to death. and they ask in verse 20: “Who is able to stand in the presence of the Lord, this holy God? To whom should the ark go from here?” The Philistines had been struck with plagues of tumors and mice in response to defiling the ark of God’s presence when they mistook the Lord God for just another pagan deity. Why, then, should God not judge the Levites and the people of Beth-Shemesh when they should have known better? And so just as the Philistines had been judged by the presence of God and sent it away, now the people of Beth-Shemesh do the same. To whom should it go from here? Philistines and the men of Beth-Shemesh both responded wrongly. Fear without joy and joy without fear. But their end response is the same, they send the ark away. Perhaps in asking the question, “to whom shall it go from here,” you might think they had realized the error of their ways and determined that they were not worthy to keep the ark, and so they send a message to the people of Kiriath-Jearim that the ark is back and to come take it away. But is that really the right response? They were saddened over the judgment of God and became fearful of it, but were they contrite? Did they confess their sinsand throw themselves at God’s mercy in repentance? Did they ask his forgiveness? No. they sent a text message to their neighbors and said, “Come get this thing out of here.” The solution to the judgment of God for them and for the Philistines was to remove the presence of God. Not to confront and remove their own sin. 1 Samuel 7:1 “So the people of Kiriath-jearim came for the ark of the Lord and took it to Abinadab’s house on the hill. They consecrated his son Eleazar to take care of it.”

And that brings us to our fifth and final principle:

5. Abiding Commitment

If we want to see God move here- If we want to see lives changed- If we want to experience this amazing adventure of being on mission with God, we have to see it through. There has to be an abiding commitment among us to live together in holiness. We have to live in covenant community, not only with one another, but with the Lord our God. This is a call for the church community to commit to regular practices that honor God, signifying that honoring His presence requires dedication over time, not simply a single expression of momentary enthusiasm.

When God disciplines us in the various spheres of our lives it is easy to lose heart and become despondent. But the Lord disciplines the one he loves, Scripture tells us. If you are experiencing pain, struggle, discontentment, sometimes those things just happen because we live in a fallen world. But sometimes, they are the direct consequences of our actions and choices. And sometimes God allows us to experience those things in an attempt to wake us up and shake us from our sinful complacency. If that happens to you, I challenge you with the same question the Philistines asked: why harden your heart? Psalm 51:17 says, “The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. You will not despise a broken and humbled heart, God.” Humble yourself, look to your heart, ask the Lord to reveal any sinful way in you and repent of it with a commitment to abide in him.

Do not send the presence of God away from you just because it’s easier. When God calls you here and has given you a charge together as the people of King’s Corner, will you commit to abiding in him and embracing with joy both his blessings and his discipline? Or will you send his presence to another group of people? Will you take up the charge you are given or leave it to another church down the road? If we want to be a healthy, vital, growing, faithful church. We must commit to abiding in God together.

Guys, that’s covenant membership. That’s all that is. It is a commitment that we make to God and one another that we will abide with him and one another in a life lived together in the light of the gospel and in holiness, humility, reverence and repentance. At King’s Corner, we get to live this out by honoring God with worship together every Sunday. We fellowship together and find encouragement in our Table Group gatherings every other week. And we develop deep bonds of trust and confess our sins to one another by prioritizing a weekly firepit gathering with a small group of brothers or sisters.

These things are the means. They are not the ends. Communion with God and with one another in Christ is what we are ultimately after. And not only for us but for all of Morristown.

Conclusion

As the church we don’t have an ark. We have something better. In the broader context of Scripture, Christ Jesus represents the ultimate presence of God among His people, fulfilling the purpose of the Ark as He tabernacled among us. The return of the Ark foreshadows the greater reality of Jesus, who brings God's presence to us and invites us into a relationship with Him. We must prepare our hearts and community for the transformative presence of God, recognizing that true worship and sincere repentance are essential for His blessings.

As we have a right response to God's power and primacy, avoid hardening our hearts, accept God’s presence with joy and obedience, as well as awe and reverence, and as we abide together in that commitment, we can - and we should - expect God to go before us, to change hearts and lives, to save the lost and expand the Kingdom through the work of King’s Corner in Morristown and beyond.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we confess our need for you. You are life. We need you like the very air we breathe. We confess that we are weak. And we ask humbly that you would see fit to show off your power in our weakness. Lord, living together in community and commitment to you isn’t always easy. But we know that your presence demands a response from us. Help us to run to the door and invite you into our midst. You are welcome here among us, Lord God. By your Spirit, would you make us worthy of that presence. Because we ask it in Christ’s name and for his glory. Amen.