When You Feel Too Small

Well, good morning. It is great to be back. My name's René. I'm one of the pastors here. If you've been coming to church for the last half year, you probably don't even know who I am. But no. We've been gone for about five weeks. I'm gonna show you a little bit of what we've been up to in just a minute. But first, I wanna dig right into Houston flood relief efforts.

We as a church are working with a church called Woodlands Church. It's a kind of a Twin Lakes Church style church in Houston, Texas. In fact, we got a lot of friends who go there like Bill Butterworth, Lee Strobel, Carrie Shook, and others who are on the pastoral team there. As you can see, they have a disaster relief team. They've got a people's pantry. They're a Red Cross location. They're an emergency first responders gathering place. And they've been doing some great things. They're sheltering over 300 people at that church.

And there's a lot of great charities doing a lot of great things when it comes to what's happening in Houston. But what we like to do when we can is to work through local churches for disaster relief because they're already networked into the community. They're gonna be there for a long time after the disaster has passed, the other agencies might have moved on. So if you would like to help support what they are doing at our sister church there in Houston, you can on your check today, just put Houston flood relief. You can indicate part of the check or all the check goes to that. We'll make sure it gets to this church. Or if you'd like to go to the Woodlands Church website directly, it's just wc.org and you can give there direct. And please remember to keep the people, especially the leaders there in Houston in your prayers.

Now, what have Lori and I been up to? I wanna show you a video that might help you cool down because this is Alaska. And we went to this tiny fishing village of Cordova there. See that glacier? Doesn't that feel good? This is how remote this village is. There are no roads there. To get there, you gotta either take a plane or a boat. And a church there, Cordova Community Baptist Church, was without a pastor for a year and a half. And so they were using our videos and our small group materials via video and through our website to fill in the gap. And they invited us to come up and to speak there.

I got to speak at a Bible study, the youth group, a couple of morning services. And the hospitality of the people of this church was just off the charts. But you know, it really opened up my eyes to the needs of these very rural churches and how our videos and websites and books are helpful. And I just wanna say publicly, I'm so grateful to our media team here, Jamie, Adrian, our volunteer camera operators. Let's just thank the whole media team for their incredible hard work. It's mostly volunteers that are putting all this together. And churches in places like this are being blessed by their ministry.

And it's not just places like this. We've also gotten responses from, there's a church in Florida that uses our material. There's a church in Hawaii that uses our material. And I'm hoping to visit those churches soon. Now, the scenery was all so amazing there. But one of the most astonishing things I saw in Alaska actually had nothing to do with scenery. One of the young men of the church loves basketball. And he very recently went up on a tall metal bridge in the rain on a unicycle and tried to make what he thought might be the world's most impossible basketball shot. And I wanna show you what happened on the very first try. Is that not amazing? He is now a local legend there in Alaska. And I hope this pushes out his legend a little bit further.

Now, if you enjoyed that sharp shooting display on the first try, there's another display of amazing sharp shooting on the first try in the Bible that we're gonna look at today and it's gonna inspire even more than that. So grab your message notes as we continue our series, Small Faith, Big God Today, When You Feel Too Small. And here's my question for you. What giant challenge are you facing right now in your life that's just making you feel too small? Inadequate, overmatched, overwhelmed.

Now that you got your notes out, I want you to flip them open to page three. Do you see where it says, "What giant are you facing?" I want you to look at this and kind of check or circle or star which one of these applies to you. Go down the list. Maybe it's illness or a fear of the future or some kind of unforgiveness or resentment. Maybe it's marriage trouble or some other relationship trouble or school stress, the stress of daily life. Maybe you got some good challenging opportunities that are still causing you stress or you're working through grief or there's issues at work or you're looking for work or there's financial stress or there's addiction or it's something else in your life or maybe you're like, "Can I just write all of the above because they all apply?"

Well, in the Bible story that we're gonna look at today, the people are facing an actual giant. And if you feel overwhelmed lately, there is not a better story in the Bible to learn the biblical key to overcoming that sensation of fear than the story we're gonna look at today. Any guesses as to which story this is? It's David and Goliath. Open your Bibles if you got them to 1 Samuel 17. And while we look at the story of David and Goliath, I get the relevant verses are there in your notes, but I want to point something out. This is a story that happened about 3,000 years ago. And it's become really iconic to this day in our culture about sort of beating the odds, right?

But there are some common misconceptions about this story that are not true that I just want to address right at the start. First, almost all of the art gets it wrong. What do I mean by that? They always portrayed Goliath as too big, like he's a giant from some Harry Potter book or something, right? This one is from a video game actually, but even classical art usually gets it completely wrong. This is a picture that I saw in the Vatican. Goliath's head is the size of one of those exercise balls that you sit on, right? And it strains the credibility of modern people. It makes the story feel like a fairy tale, like Jack and the Beanstalk. And so nobody really takes it seriously.

The confusion comes from the fact that the King James version of the Bible, which is a very good, very poetic translation of the best manuscripts they had at the time in 1611, it's a translation of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, which was just from the Middle Ages, right? And that text said that Goliath was nine cubits and a span tall, which is the equivalent of over nine feet tall. However, since the King James Bible was finished in 1611, archaeologists have discovered many, much older Hebrew manuscripts, like over a thousand years older, like from the time of Jesus, like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint and so on. And in every one of those, Goliath's height is four cubits and a span, which is about six nine. So all the oldest sources say he was just under seven feet tall. So Goliath was not like the BFG kind of giant. He was more like the Kevin Durant kind of giant. You got the picture?

Now, the second thing that the art often gets wrong is this. It tends to be about how David triumphs like he is the hero of the story. But actually, that's not the point of this story at all. The point is that David, a small human with small weapons and small odds, had just the right amount of faith in his big God to step out in faith and meet the challenge. And that we can all relate to and we can all apply. So let's read starting in verse 2 of 1 Samuel 17. I'll be reading it out loud to you, but I'll explain some of this to you as we go along. It says, "Saul and the Israelite army assembled and camped in the Valley of Elah, where they arranged their battle lines to fight against the Philistines."

Now, I want to show you a picture of the Valley of Elah. You can go visit it today. I've been there. It's in Israel. Do you see how it's kind of a natural shallow bowl with two long hills on each side? So you can easily picture what happens here in verse 3. It says, "The Philistines were standing on one hill and the Israelites on another hill with the valley between them. And then a champion came out from the camp of the Philistines. He was Goliath. He was from Gath and he was close to seven feet tall. He had a bronze helmet on his head. He was wearing scale body armor. The weight of his bronze body armor was 5,000 shekels." That's about 125 pounds.

"He had bronze shin guards on his legs. A bronze javelin was slung over his shoulders and the shaft of his spear was like a weaver's beam." That's about two and a half inches thick and it's taller than a man. He's bristling with weapons. "And the iron point of his spear weighed 600 shekels." That's about 15 pounds. "And his shield bearer was walking before him with a body-sized shield providing another layer of protection." Now stop right there because so many retellings of the story of Goliath completely missed something. Did you notice how he had verse after verse after verse about the appearance of Goliath? I mean, it goes into real detail about what he looked like, how tall he was, what he was wearing.

Question, do we have that kind of description of the appearance of anybody else in Scripture? Does the Bible describe Jesus in that detail? Paul or Peter or Mary? The truth is we have more detail about Goliath's appearance than just about any other person in Scripture. Why? The writer is trying to impress the reader with how outmatched David and the whole Israelite army was. He's trying to explain this was a completely overwhelming situation because this was a hinge of history where battle technology was changing. There's an important detail here. It says that Goliath was a Philistine, little History Channel moment for you here. The Egyptians called the Philistines the Sea Peoples.

This is a picture on an Egyptian tomb of the Philistines. The Sea Peoples or the Philistines were Phoenicians. Many historians believe they were related to the Mycenaean culture on the Greek islands and they came suddenly in boats from those Greek islands down to Israel and Egypt, that whole corner of the Mediterranean. And their technology was way beyond what those cultures had. They were the first culture in that area to have armor. I want to show you pottery that they made of themselves, wearing armor. Now that might look a little cartoonish to you, but here's one of the few surviving suits of armor that the Mycenaeans or the Philistines wore. Look at that. Doesn't that look to you like it's something out of Lord of the Rings, right? Or maybe something out of the Middle Ages. This is armor from longer ago than 1000 BC. This armor is over 3,000 years old.

It's remarkable how advanced their armor and metal shaping technology was. This is important because the Bible says, you know how many blacksmiths there were in Israel at the time? The Bible tells us, zero. Israel at this time did not have any metal working tech. In fact, the Bible says only two people in the whole Israelite army had any armor at all, King Saul and his son Jonathan. And it tells us how they got it. They stole it from two Philistines that they beat up. So this is people in loincloths and leather shorts going up with rope slingshots against an army of this. And that's why there's all this description of the giant because we're meant to understand that these were absolutely overwhelming odds.

This is like the Golden State Warriors going up against the Twin Lakes Christian Junior High School basketball team. That's what this was like. And the Bible says, verse 16, "For 40 days the Philistine, Goliath, approached every morning and every evening and took his position." And here's what's happening. Goliath is shouting out, and this was typical the way battle was fought for probably a thousand years, was a champion would go out and say, "Look, we don't all have to fight. Just send your champion out. We will fight and the outcome of our little boxing match will be the outcome of the war. One group will just become the slave of the other group and we can all avoid a bunch of bloodshed."

And so that's what Goliath is yelling out for 40 days every morning and every night. And the Bible says, "For 40 days, every morning and every night, the Israelites would run up to the battle just all charged up and angry. And then they would hear him and it says, 'Then they would all run from him in great fear for 40 days, night and day.'" And I really want you to picture this. Every single day they run up to the battle line to fight. And every single day they get scared and they run away and flee. Fight, flight, fight, flight, fight, flight over and over every morning and every night. And this is classic fearful behavior.

Listen, when fear controls you, there are usually only two responses, fight or flight, right? It's just biological. And here's why this is so relevant to you and me today. This is what we are seeing all over the world right now. Everybody is afraid. Everybody feels threatened. Everybody feels like the world is immediately a dangerous place. Why? Well, thanks to cable and the internet, we are constantly seeing the giants. The giants of hatred, of poverty, of racism, of violence, of disasters, wherever they're happening in the world. And these are real giants. But here's the thing. Watch this. It makes me feel like I am under close personal threat at all times. I feel that threat sensation every time I open up the news or read the newspaper.

And so the fight or flight response, which I think God gave us for when we are in immediate personal danger. Well, everybody's feeling that all the time right now. We fight, we post angry things on social media, where we feel so angry we can hardly sleep or we take flight. We flee to the safety of our own homes or for religious people, the safety maybe of our religious places. And it's fight, flight, fight, flight, back and forth, back and forth every day. And it's exhausting. But the Bible shows that there is another option, an alternative to fight or flight. And it's faith. Faith not in yourself. That doesn't help when you feel too small. Faith in the big God. And listen, that is what this story is about.

Yes, there are giants out there. There are disasters. There are formidable foes. Yet as David knew, listen carefully, you are actually safe. Did you know that? The world is a dangerous place, but you're safe. This is what Christians believe. This is why the early Christians had so much courage. Because we believe that even if worse comes to worse and we're killed, we'll be resurrected. And our spirits absent from the body, present with the Lord. And God is ultimately in control. Ultimately, He will renew heaven and earth so you can relax.

Now, this doesn't mean you don't act against injustice. This doesn't mean you pretend there are no dangers. What this means is you act with courage and with confidence and with hope. You say, "What are you talking about, René? What does that look like?" Let's talk about four keys to faith when facing giants in this story. I put this in the acronym FEAR for fear. And write fast because this is going to be a blast right through most of these. The F stands for find out the facts. Calm down and find out what's really happening.

In the midst of this scene in 1 Samuel 17, everybody says, "Fighter flight, fighter flight." It's just this horrible paralyzing cycle. A teenage boy who had not been there for 40 days named David shows up because his older brothers are in the army. And he's only there because his father has told him to bring some cheese to the older brothers. Dad wants him to have some protein. So, first thing he does, verse 26, David asked the men standing near him, "Well, what's going to be done for the man who kills this Philistine and removes this disgrace from Israel?" You know what I love about David? Everybody else is focusing on the problem and he's focusing on the benefits. What's going to happen to somebody who actually takes this risk on?

Find out all the facts during my own anxiety attacks. I read, I think, every book that was available at the time about anxiety attacks, right? And how to handle that. Jot this down somewhere. Somebody once said, "Information breeds confidence." And that's true. So don't build mental monsters out of your fears. Get the facts. Is your giant an illness? Get the facts. Educate yourself about the illness. Is your giant, say, fear of flying? Get the facts about how to conquer that. Is your giant raising a teenager? Good luck. No, get the facts about how to conquer that.

Then e, eliminate discouraging thinking. Eliminate discouraging thinking. Look where the criticism of David comes from. The discouraging thinking. People are trying to drop into his brain. First, from relatives. Starting at verse 28, Eliab, David's oldest brother, asked, "Why have you come down here? I know how conceited you are." And he actually goes on to say, "You only came to see some blood." Eliab just could not see past his paradigm of David as the stupid kid brother. And you know, some of you experience this. Sometimes some of the worst criticism that you get will come from your own parents or your own family. You'll never amount to anything. I knew you couldn't do this.

So what do you do? Argue? Look what David does. Very, very important. Verse 30, "David then turned away to somebody else." That's all you have to do. You don't have to argue. Rejection isn't fatal. It's just somebody's opinion. Rejection is not fatal, not even from your own family. So you don't have to argue with... You don't have to debate family when there's real giants out there roaming around. You just turn away to somebody else, right? And then David also got opposition from authorities. Verse 33, "King Saul, best warrior in the land and expert in warfare, replied, 'You aren't able to go out against this Philistine and fight him. You're only a boy.'" And by the way, the Bible says that Saul, "stood head and shoulders above the tallest man in Israel." So who should have been out there fighting the Philistines giant, the Israelites giant, Saul? He's the only one with armor and so on. It all adds up, but he's too afraid.

Authorities are not always right. So how do you know which authorities to listen to? I personally will listen to anybody. I read stuff and get critique all the time. But the authorities whose opinion means the most to me are the ones who are already doing what I hope to be doing successfully, not the people who are just going around telling why it can't be done. And then of course there's opposition from enemies. Verse 43, "Goliath," says to David. He shouts it across the valley, "Am I a dog that you come at me with sticks?" Now listen, many of you hear this exact kind of sarcastic negative criticism from a giant in your life every single day. And you know who that voice is? It's yourself. Some of you every day are the ones who are telling yourself, "You're so stupid. You could never do that."

And you know, even your prayers are turning into a nonstop litany that sounds something like this, "God, forgive me because I'm so stupid. I'm such a failure. I don't know enough. I'm so dumb. God, I'm such a failure. God, forgive me. I'm such a failure." Over and over again, there's a point where that's not prayer anymore. I mean, you've got to be honest with God, but there's a point where that's not refocusing on the greatness of God anymore. And it's just thinly veiled self-hatred. How do I know what it's like? Because that's one of my personal biggest struggles. I told many of you I've had to learn positive thinking. I've had to learn faith by nature. I am just a negative thinker.

Maybe I had something to do with my childhood, but Lori's five minutes late, like coming home from the store, and I think she's probably dead. That's my first thought. I was running the other day and I had a little pain in my knee. Instantly, my first thought was bone cancer most likely. Instantly. Right? Anybody else hear your own worst critic, right? Kind of negative thinker. So I really have to fight this. How do you fight that? Third point. This may be the most important of all, A, I need to affirm my source of strength. This is the big difference between positive thinking and positive faith. David did not just use positive thinking. He didn't go running up to Goliath, "I think I can. I think I can." Right? He had positive faith.

I know I can because I want to affirm that my source of strength is actually not me and my reservoir of power. It's God. Verse 45. David said to the Philistine, "You come against me with sword and spear and javelin." He's not downplaying the danger here. "But I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty. It is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves, for the battle is the Lord's." And I hope you circle that phrase, "The battle is the Lord's." This is the key to the whole story. If you forget everything else, don't forget this. In fact, say this phrase out loud with me, "The battle is the Lord's." Let's do it again. "The battle is the Lord's." Why is David so confident? Because David believes that God can and will work through this situation somehow because he believes that God has a destiny for the people of Israel.

David even declines Saul's offer of his armor. He says, "I'm not comfortable with it. I don't need it." Because that's not how the Lord wins these battles. Look what he says when he declines Saul's armor back in verse 34. "David said to Saul, 'The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.'" You know, this whole thing about bears took on new meaning for me last week in Alaska, I just have to say. I'll show you something. We went for a hike. It was very beautiful. The river had just receded. It was low tide. And I looked down and discovered in the muddy riverbank fresh grizzly bear paw prints. And up there, they take this very seriously. It's no joke because they all know people who've encountered aggressive animals and have been killed. They are not afraid, but they are alert.

They told me, "Well, René, if you're afraid, that just keeps you locked up in your house. So don't be afraid. Be alert and prepare." How do they prepare? I started off on this hike on my own, and a guy that we were with came up with his shotgun and said, "Well, you got to go with me because I've got a gun." I said, "A gun?" He goes, "Yeah, it's either a gun or bear repellent around here." I said, "What's bear repellent?" He said, "It's pepper spray." And I said, "Oh, I think I feel more comfortable with a bear repellent." He said, "Well, the thing with bear repellent is you have to be close enough to spray it in their eyes." And I said, "Bring the gun! Get the gun!"

So what is your weapon against the predators that are out there seeking to sow fear into your life? Do what David does. Remember what God did for you in the past as an encouragement that he's going to work again in the present. Now, you might be thinking, "Well, I mean, that's pretty spectacular, but God has never delivered me from the paw of the bear or the paw of the lion, hasn't he?" Think of what Jesus did on the cross, vanquishing the ultimate predators, death and sin and evil, Satan. He vanquished them through his death and resurrection. He delivered you from the paw of sin. He delivered you from the paw of death. And the same Lord who delivered you then will deliver you now. He didn't do all that to leave you alone, defend for yourself. And on the cross, he proved that it's not by might or by earthly power that the Lord saves. It's all God's power. The battle is the Lord's.

Now, listen, I want you to really soak your mind in these truths this week. So flip your notes over to the back. I put there some verses. It says, "Read these verses until you believe them." And I want to challenge you to take these notes home, stick them up on your fridge or somewhere and read them every day. Verses like, "God has said, 'Never will I leave you. Never will I forsake you.'" And I love this one, Isaiah 41:10. Don't be afraid, "For I'm with you." Don't be discouraged, "For I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will hold you up with my victorious right hand." And I love Psalm 37. Wait patiently for the Lord. Wait confidently for Him. Refrain from anger and turn from wrath. Do not fret. That only leads to evil. So good. And there's many more verses there as well, and I'd encourage you to just steep your brain in this truth.

Now, flip your notes back over because once you find out the facts and eliminate discouraging thoughts and affirm that your source of strength is God, not you, finally you must run to battle. And now, the tension's really mounting, right? David and Goliath have made their speeches. They've approached each other on the battlefield. Everybody's going, "What's going to happen next?" As the Philistine moved closer to attack him, David ran quickly to the battle line to meet him. Circle David ran quickly. After everything's said and done, you got to run to meet the challenge and stop just sitting there thinking about it. You can get paralysis by analysis, right? But somebody once wrote, "Action breeds courage." Tennyson had a great line, "I must lose myself in action lest I wither in despair." I love that.

David lost himself in action while the whole army had been withering in despair for 40 days. And what's so funny to me is after 40 days of stalling, it came down to like 10 seconds of action. And it was all over. Verse 48, "Reaching into his bag and taking out a stone, he slung it." And if you'll remember the armor, it hits Goliath and the only vulnerable place on his body that's not armored, and that's this area right here. And in case, again, this has sort of fairy tale connotations for you. I want you to picture this. He's using a sling and arrow that looks like this. These were not toys. They were dangerous weapons. The exit velocity of a rock from a slingshot like this is about 250 miles an hour.

In fact, a TV documentary recently took an expert in ancient slingshots to Israel, and they put a load cell about the size of a human forehead, and the load cell measures impact, measures stress. And they put it up on an aluminum tripod about the height of Goliath, and they asked the slingshot expert to try to hit that load cell. And here's what happened. Watch this. "Louis readies his sling for the test. The target is tiny, equivalent to the only area of Goliath's forehead that was not protected by armor." "3.62 kN. That's sufficient to eliminate Goliath with a sling and a stone. Goliath is now dead." "Muerto, right? That falls." David cuts off his head.

Now watch this. The point of the story is not that David was such a miraculous shot. It was a great shot, but there were other soldiers in the army who could have taken that shot. The Bible says in Judges 20:16, "Among Benjamin's elite troops, 700 were left-handed, and each of them could sling a rock and hit a target within a hair's breadth without missing." And that's just the tribe of Benjamin. There were at least 700 soldiers on that hillside who probably could have taken that shot. But David is the only one who actually stepped up and did something about it. Why? His faith in God allowed him to escape the paralyzing fight-or-flight panic, and so he put his pebble into play.

He did what he could to see what would happen next. What God would do next, because he trusted that no matter what happens, God will somehow use this. And look at this. The last verse is the key to the whole story, verse 52. "Then the men of Israel surged forward with a shout and pursued them." When did the people shout? When did they charge? After David had killed the giant. Watch this. Look at what happens every time you slay a giant in your life. Whether it's an addiction, or whether it's an anxiety, or whether it's a challenge you need to face, the minute you knock it down, other people will say, "Well, I can do that, too!" and they will surge forward.

I remember the first ever hurricane relief team that Twin Lakes Church ever sent out. It was after Rita, and then we sent more after Katrina. We ended up sending out multiple teams for about six years to help with hurricane recovery after those two disasters. But do you know how it all started? One woman named Suzanne Carlton. Suzanne's an RN at Dominican Hospital. And as a Twin Lakes Church attender, she's our lighting director, Kurt Carlton's mom, in fact. But she had a personal vision for helping out down there. And the first time, there was nothing happening here at the church. And so she went all alone, all by herself, and came back and told a bunch of us what happened.

And the next time, a few of you decided to join her, and then a few more, and then a few more. And she ended up leading hurricane recovery teams multiple times a year. And because one person, Suzanne, started something, a whole army was inspired. And that's the way it works with everything. One person in your family, one person at the office, one person at your school, one person in your church has just got to take the first step. So stop thinking about it at some point. Run to battle.

Now, as we bring this in for a landing, I want you to really apply this. I want to ask you to look at that list of giants that you might be facing there again on page three of your notes. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to write underneath all those things, but my God is bigger. See, I don't have to know what giant you are facing. And I don't have to know how many giants you are facing, because you could take every giant in that list and every giant that isn't on that list that's in the heads of people in this room and write, "My God is bigger." God's bigger than any problem you face. God's stronger than any opponent you have. He is bigger than any giant in your life.

So don't let fear paralyze you. Instead, here's the bottom line lesson from David's story. Act on what you say you believe. See, the whole Israelite army would have said they believed the same stuff David believed, right? Theologically, they were there. But they didn't act on what they knew with the faith response. And you probably believe God is strong. You probably think God could help you, but the proof of the belief is in the action. So even if you feel like all you've got is a pebble, put your pebble into play and see what God does next.

Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, as we prepare our hearts to receive communion this morning, we want to come to you now at the communion table and we ask this. We would ask that you would help us to see Christ on the cross destroying giants, giants who once held power over us. And God, I pray that you would help us to see those giants that we face, perhaps giants of fear, of worry, of sin, of addiction, of unbelief, of lack of self-control, giants of anger, giants of discouragement, giants of depression. And as we come to you now at the communion table, help us to see them vanquished by Christ on the cross.

Help us to take our place with Christ in that victory. And God, if there's anybody here who's not sure they're a believer as we move into communion, God, I just would encourage them in prayer to step over that line with you right now and just very simply say, "Thank you for what Jesus did on the cross." And I believe that because of that I'm victorious, not because of my strength, but because of God's great power. Thank you for vanquishing those giants. Help me to see myself in your triumph, complete in Christ. In his name we pray. Amen. Amen.