A Kingly topic: What the Lord looks for

Our connection group (small-group Bible study) is following the life of King David. Our text is David: A Man of Passion and Destiny, part of the Insight for Living series by Charles Swindoll.

Here is a summary of what we discussed at our most recent meeting:

What characteristics of David do we admire most? One response was his honesty before God, as seen in the book of Psalms. Often in David’s psalms we see a man who is fleeing for his life, and he’s questioning God. Where are you? Why are you letting me go through this? But there’s always a sense of resolution at the end of those psalms — a sort of point where David says, “You’re God. I’m not. Your will be done.”

Swindoll calls King Saul “the people’s choice” verses David as “the Lord’s choice.” I personally don’t know to what extent I agree with that. I think that Saul started out his reign as a humble man and had several characteristics that would not have made him “the people’s choice” (hiding in the baggage, for instance.

But he had physical characteristics in his favor. At least twice the scriptures mention that Saul was “a head taller” than those around him.

I pointed out that our own presidents of the United States, on the average, are taller than the general population. Studies also show that the heads of major corporations tend to be tall people. AND recently I saw a news piece in which reporters compared tall and short people in a “speed dating” situation. Women tended to rank the taller men higher than the shorter ones in categories including looks, potential for success and “date-ability.”

I’m 5-foot-10, by the way.

But God looks for things that the world doesn’t look for in a leader, and sometimes God purposefully goes against society’s idea of success to prove that he is sovereign.

We also talked about the years David spent as a shepherd, and the skills he acquired through this time of solitude and obscurity that would help him later in life.

Laboring in obscurity is hard for me. I’m used to having my byline on almost everything I write. Inevitably my sense of accomplishment at The Christian Chronicle is tied to how many people see what I write. But there is a freedom and satisfaction in laboring in seemingly trivial things — I used the example of raking leaves, which I did this weekend (and I’m still a bit sore from it!)

(By the way, did you know that bylines in newspaper stories were introduced not to feed the ego of journalists, but to help the editors assign blame when something in the story is wrong? That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.)