Fitting God in Your Pocket
Notes
Transcript
"The Jesus I Keep in My Pocket"
Picture a young woman named Sarah. She’s a Christian—goes to church most Sundays, posts Bible verses on social media when they feel inspiring. But day-to-day? She likes running her own life. One morning, she’s rushing out the door—late for work, coffee spilling, phone buzzing. In the chaos, she mutters, “Jesus, please let the traffic be light today. Amen.” And strangely, the freeway is clear. She arrives on time. “Nice,” she thinks. “Thanks, Jesus.”
Later that week, she’s staring at a huge medical bill. Panic sets in. She drops to her knees for the first real prayer in months: “Lord, I need help with this money. Please provide. I promise I’ll tithe more.” Miraculously, an unexpected refund check shows up. She breathes a sigh of relief. “You’re the best, Jesus!”
A few months later, her relationship is falling apart. Tears streaming, she cries out in the car: “Jesus, fix this! Bring him back, change his heart!” And over time, counseling and hard conversations lead to reconciliation. She whispers, “Thank you, Jesus. You came through again.”
But here’s what you notice if you watch Sarah’s life closely: Jesus is always there—standing quietly beside her. Wanting to walk with her every single day. Wanting to speak through His Word in the quiet mornings. Wanting to guide her choices at work, shape her words with friends, guard her eyes and heart when she’s scrolling late at night. Yet most of the time, Sarah treats Him like a phone contact she only calls in emergencies. The moment the traffic clears, she goes back to rushing—without inviting Him into the rest of her commute. The moment the money arrives, she spends it without another thought of gratitude or surrender. The moment the relationship stabilizes, she stops seeking His voice on how to love better.
When Jesus gently tries to follow her into the everyday places—the gossip session with coworkers, the streaming binge, the resentment she nurses toward her parents—Sarah gets uncomfortable. “Not now, Jesus,” she thinks. “I’ll talk to You later. Sunday’s coming—I’ll give You a full hour then.” She doesn’t yell at Him or nail Him to a cross outright like in that dramatic skit. No, her rejection is quieter, more polite, more common. She just… puts Him back in her pocket. Only pulling Him out when she needs something.
**Pause.**
Church, that’s the tragedy of a pocket-Jesus faith. We love the Savior who rescues. We resist the Lord who wants to rule. We celebrate the Jesus who answers prayer. We ignore the Jesus who wants every corner of our hearts. Jesus is not a talisman we pull out for good luck. He’s not a 911 operator we call only when everything’s on fire.
He’s the risen Lord who gave His life so He could walk with you—everywhere. In the traffic and the triumph. In the boredom and the battle. In the secret places no one else sees.
So here’s the question today: When was the last time you let Jesus follow you into an ordinary Tuesday—not because you needed a miracle, but simply because you wanted Him? Stop keeping Him in your pocket. Open your whole life, every single day, and say, “Lord, come with me. Everywhere.” Because the truth is, He’s already there—waiting for you to stop treating Him like a convenience and start walking with Him
A god we could fit in our pocket, wouldnt that be convenient. We could go about our do and do as we want to do and then when the times get difficult or we need something we pull out our handy little God and ask our wishes.
but thankfully that is not the way God works. God demands our reverence and humility. But yet we sometimes approach God as if we are the judge and he on trial and ask how dare he do the things that he does.
HBI: God is not someone we can put away when it is convenient but we must follow Him even when it is hard. People may tell us to do things that god against Gopd but we must always do as the Lord says. sometimes this involves patiently waiting on the Lord’s timing.
1-7
It has been a while, I hope you all have been enjoying our Journey through the life of Saul and David and the Israelites search for a king in mostly all the wrong places. But we are not done quite yet. Sure it might get a little repititive
When Saul returned from pursuing the Philistines, he was told, “David is in the wilderness near En-gedi.”
So Saul took three thousand of Israel’s fit young men and went to look for David and his men in front of the Rocks of the Wild Goats.
In this chapter we are going to start to read about more spiritual growth of David, he is going to be challenged on how he is following God. We start out with David in the valley of En-gedi
Engedi is a narrow canyon that moves up from the desert floor of the Dead Sea to the mountain range on the West It is rocky and difficult to traverse as you wind through the canyon Running down the wadi is a stream created by a spring at the mountain Along either side of this canyon are caves of various sizes worn out of the limestone hills And mountain goats can be seen throughout this region even to this day. This is a picture of the mouth to the valley of En-gedi in a recent picture. It is apperantly quite the beutiful place to see. It is where David went to hide from Saul as Saul was trying to kill Him.
Saul was coming with 3000 men into the valley to try and search for David. I mean these days the natural reserve that we call the valley of En-gedi is 14 square km but we do not know if was the same back then. To try and find a guy with a few hundred followers in a valley full of caves would have been slightly difficult.
This next part I find funny, I mean through this all even the danger and all that was going on you cant tell me God does not have a sense of humor.
When Saul came to the sheep pens along the road, a cave was there, and he went in to relieve himself. David and his men were staying in the recesses of the cave,
The KJV actually had this right for once.
they translated it as Saul went to find a cave “to cover His feet”. which to their credit, that is what the Hebrew actually says. Saul went into the cave and left his gaurds at the door. what would you do in a cave wearing a robe that would involve the robe covering your feet? In NA we see that we “have to go to the Bathroom” or the washroom. When I was in England we had to ask for the toilet, because if you asked for the bathroom you would get taken to the room with the tub in it which often did not also include a toilet, which was in a seperate room.
Saul goes to take a poop, and what are the chances of him going to the toilet right in the cave that David and his many men where hiding in the recesses of. 1 Samuel 24:4-7
so they said to him, “Look, this is the day the Lord told you about: ‘I will hand your enemy over to you so you can do to him whatever you desire.’ ” Then David got up and secretly cut off the corner of Saul’s robe.
Afterward, David’s conscience bothered him because he had cut off the corner of Saul’s robe.
He said to his men, “As the Lord is my witness, I would never do such a thing to my lord, the Lord’s anointed. I will never lift my hand against him, since he is the Lord’s anointed.”
With these words David persuaded his men, and he did not let them rise up against Saul. Then Saul left the cave and went on his way.
The people pressured him and said, go kill Saul he is right there, the Lord has delivered Him into your hands.
Be careful that we always go back to the Lord for wisdom. Saul’s men said to kill the king for the Lord delivered Him to you. and by all accounts it looked like God had. All David did was cut off a corner of the robe, though talk about akward to do while someone is “covering his feet” but he felt bad. He had lifted his hand against an annointed of the Lord.
It was in God’s plan to replace Saul with David, but God would do it in His timing and no one elses. People may say they hear from the Lord, and God does use. God does use people to Guide us but sometimes they are wrong and we always need to Go back to God. God is not someone we can take in and out of our pocket and use whenever we please, but He his to be revered and followed
The easy thing would have been to kill Saul right then and there and not think about what God would want him to do. But to do the right thing is not always the easy thing. If God is who he says he is then we must not treat him like somewone we can take out when it is convenient to us.
8-22 - David’s right to rule.
even cutting the hem of the robe of the king David knew he had done wrong.
After that, David got up, went out of the cave, and called to Saul, “My lord the king!” When Saul looked behind him, David knelt low with his face to the ground and paid homage.
David said to Saul, “Why do you listen to the words of people who say, ‘Look, David intends to harm you’?
You can see with your own eyes that the Lord handed you over to me today in the cave. Someone advised me to kill you, but I took pity on you and said: I won’t lift my hand against my lord, since he is the Lord’s anointed.
There si some symbolism behind the thing David did as well that we may not realize being this far out of the context. Symbolism of the Robe’s Corner
1. Royal Identity: In the ancient Near East, the robe’s hem represented authority (cf. tablet archives from Mari, 18th c. BC). To remove a portion signified an attack on sovereignty.
2. Covenant Tassels (tzitziot): Numbers 15:38-39 commands tassels on garment corners to remind Israel to keep the LORD’s commandments. Cutting Saul’s tassel-laden corner implied David was presuming to strip the king of covenantal authority.
3. Prophetic Parallels: Samuel had earlier torn Saul’s robe, declaring, “The LORD has torn the kingdom of Israel from you today” (1 Samuel 15:27-28). David’s act unintentionally reenacted that prophetic judgment, making his remorse all the sharper.
besides the significance here, It was more the idea of raisining his hand against the Lord’s annoinjted, even though His rule was temproary to begin with. and even then he approached Saul in Humility. Finally Saul admitted he was done.
“Now I know for certain you will be king, and the kingdom of Israel will be established in your hand.
Therefore swear to me by the Lord that you will not cut off my descendants or wipe out my name from my father’s family.”
So David swore to Saul. Then Saul went back home, and David and his men went up to the stronghold.
Saul had given up and admitted David was God’s man to be king. God will accomplish his will in His timing. To see the king admitt in front of His 1000’s of His men that David was God’s man, the guy kneeling in front of Him said alot.
God is God and I am Not
God is God and I am Not
God is to be revered, seems straight forward you would think but sometimes. The central theme of htis text is the idea that David recieves an opportunity to take the prophecy and plan of God into His own hands, gets encouraged by his people to do it and almost does take Saul’s life into His own hands.
we run into this problem in our lives as well, this idea that we can take our own lives into our own hands and control the flow of our own ending. Yes we have free will, but in our free will we must revere God.
1 & 2 Samuel Contemporary Significance
C. S. Lewis spoke with his characteristic brilliance about the place God holds in the minds of modern people compared to ancient times:
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock [or “defendant’s seat”]. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defence for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God in the Dock
Lewis’s words, true enough in his own day, seem almost prophetically written for our times. The truth of God has been displaced in postmodernism by a communally contrived understanding of religion, or better, spirituality. Truth has become a concept difficult to define; it becomes whatever you believe it is, as long as you believe it sincerely. In this context, the idea of taking on oneself personal risk and discomfort for the sake of faithfulness to an idea one holds as “true” will become more and more of a rarity.
But we are left with this portrait of David. He allows Saul to walk away unharmed from the cave at En Gedi because he believes in the sacredness of Saul’s anointing and in the holiness of Saul’s God. Such ideals and values are likely to become more rare in our culture
And if this is all the case for us, what cab we do to remember how we are to live our lives. we step forward in faith revering God and remembering we must not run in front of the will of God. David had a chance to advance the will of God but it was not the will of God. He humbly approached the man that wanted to kill Him.
The world may come against us, but we approach them in love and the message of the gospel. understanding God is not a pocket god, but the Lord of the universe and we pray for his will to be done and not our own.
