How To Deal With The Fools In Your Life

Introduction

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Would you please turn to your Bibles to 1 Samuel, the 25th chapter? 1 Samuel 25. It’s good to see all of you. Appreciate you coming this evening. I uh I do want to apologize to you from the very beginning for my sermon placement. I have uh preached some of these lessons before, and uh, but I don’t think I’ve ever preached them in exactly this order, uh, in which I talk on one night about how to deal with the fools in your life, and the next night talk about uh 1 Corinthians 6 and entitled it, Such Were Some of You. So I I it is no implied insult of your audience. That’s usually a bad thing to do if you’re really trying to persuade men is to insult them from the very beginning.

So I did not intend it to work that way. But hopefully, you’ll see a little bit of method to my madness tomorrow evening. Uh the theme of our studies this week has to do with having a better relationship with God. And we talked about last uh yesterday, about uh the idea of making sure that we follow God’s instructions, to do the things that he would have us to do, to look to his word as lamp to our feet and light to our pathway, as a means of guiding us into what God would have us to do. We also talked yesterday about making sure that as we live our lives, that uh we learn how to deal with the problem of discouragement and recognize that sometimes even the discouragements that we face in life may be things that draw us closer to God.

As the Apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12, when I’m weak, then I’m strong. There is value that can come from suffering and from difficulty and from disappointment. And we need to understand that as well as we understand the joys of prosperity and how we need to praise God for our blessings. Have you ever noticed in the Christian life how much easier it would be to be a Christian if everybody else in the world would cooperate? You know, on Sunday or Wednesday night, when I’m around most of the people that I’m around at church at the West End Church of Christ in Bowling Green, Kentucky, I don’t ever have anybody tell me a dirty joke. I don’t ever have anybody cuss me that I’ve heard about.

At the worship assembly.

But as you and I know, sometimes there are frustrations that develop because everybody else doesn’t want to cooperate in our Christianity. Sometimes there are frustrations and aggravation. Sometimes people act downright inconsistent with Christianity and the way that they treat us. Tonight I want to deal with how to deal with the fools in your life. And I want us to look at it as an example in the first part of the Samuel writings in 1 Samuel, the 25th chapter, about a story that I think illustrates a woman, Abigail, who shows us, I think, through the pages of the inspired word of God exactly how to deal with a husband who is described as a fool, and with David, who is not at his best, as described in 1 Samuel the 25th chapter, where we find him acting foolishly.

And maybe from that we’ll be able to, after we talk about the story that’s described in chapter 25, draw some conclusions that will help us all learn better how to be the kind of people we need to be in spite of the reaction of other people. Beginning in verse 2 of chapter 25, it tells us now there was a man in Maun whose business was in Carmel. And the man was very rich, and he had 3,000 sheep and a thousand goats. And it came about that while he was shearing his sheep in Carmel, now the man’s name was Nabal, and his wife’s name was Abigail, and the woman was intelligent and beautiful in appearance, but the man was harsh and evil in his dealings, and he was a Calabite.

That David heard in the wilderness that Nabal was cheering his sheep. So here we have a situation that is another story of David on the run from Saul. He’s hiding out in the southern part of the country, in the area called the Negev, which just in Hebrew just means the south. When they said the south, they always meant desert country. Because in the southern part of what is now Israel, in the Negev, you have an area that is more, has more in common with the surface of the moon than it has with this nice verdant area that you have here in Florida. This man that it describes is named Nabal, and it describes him as being a person who was harsh and evil in his dealings.

The fact that he was a Calabite just describes that he was from the tribe of Judah from the descendants of Caleb. He had his business in Carmel. Now please don’t get that mixed up with Mount Carmel, which is in the northern part of the country. This is the town of Carmel, which is in the Negev in the south. He was very rich. It describes the goats and the sheep that he has. And it also tells us the time of the year that it was, because it would be in the spring that you’d have people bring their sheep down from the mountains where they’d been able to find grazing territory, and then they would bring them down in the spring and shear them, and that was a very prosperous time for most people.

It also happened to coincide with the time when the wheat and barley harvests were taken.

So they reverse their seasons there. They plant in the fall, and they get the early rains, and the things continue to remain somewhat dormant. Then you get the latter rains, and that allows everything to be able to become harvestable about the time of the spring. So here you have a situation in which you have the bounty of the harvest that they would have had from their grain products. You have the time when people are getting paid. Shepherds are coming down so that they can get paid for the work that they’ve spent the winter doing. They have to give an account if they’ve lost sheep. Do you remember in the Old Testament? If someone had a sheep that was even killed by wild animals, they had to produce an ear or a leg or something to prove that it was torn by animals rather than eaten by the shepherds.

So everybody is in a good mood here. It is a time in which Nabal is the man who is the master here, is the one who is especially proud because he’s going to be further enriched by the wool that is that is sheared and by the grain crops that are harvested. He has a wife, and that’s the best thing that Nabal has going, and her name is Abigail, and she’s intelligent, she’s beautiful, and she’s wise, as we’ll see in the rest of this story. David hears about this in the wilderness, and so he sends to Nabal, who’s shearing his sheep. In verse 5, it said, So David sent ten young men, and David said to the young men, Go up to Carmel, visit Nabal, and greet him in my name, and thus you shall say, Have a long life.

Peace be to you, and peace be to your house, and peace be to all that you have. Now I have heard that you have shears. Now your shepherds have been with us, and we have not insulted them, nor have they missed anything all the days that they were in Carmel. Ask your young men, and they will tell you. Therefore, let my young men find favor in your eyes, for we have come on a festive day. Please give whatever you find at hand, so your servants, to your servants, and to your son David. Now this has always sounded to me a little bit like protection money. That David is saying, All right, I’ve taken care of your shepherds while they were in the wilderness, and therefore I think something is due to me.

That’s not exactly the way that most people would have looked at that in the ancient world. One of the things that you’ll notice about in reading the Old Testament is that when people enjoyed the bounty of God’s blessings, they were expected to share those blessings, to give to those that ask of them. And to recognize that just because they were enjoying a nice harvest, they were enjoying a good sheep shearing, that they would use that time also to be able to share with the poor and the needy and those who were round about, so that everyone enjoyed the bounty of what God’s blessings provided. You remember that a man who was uh clearing his crops was someone who had to leave certain things behind. He couldn’t go back and give a second picking to anything that was in the field, or anything that was on the vine.

They also had to make sure that they left the corners of their fields unharvested, so that the poor would have something that they could have to enjoy the benefits of the blessings that God had provided. And here David is coming on a festive day, and he’s saying, Actually, you’ve benefited by the fact that my men have been among your shepherds. They’ve protected them from banditos. They’ve protected them from wild animals and other things because of the men who have come and are forming the core of my army. So therefore, please, if it please you, take care of me and provide something that our men may be able to have something to eat, and they may be able to have something to enjoy the bounty of the blessings of God.

But Nabal answered David’s servants and said, Who is David? And who is the son of Jesse? There are many servants today who are each breaking away from his master. Shall I take my bread and my water and my meat that I’ve slaughtered for my shears and give it to men whose origins I do not know. He insults David. He said, There are a lot of servants. Literally, he’s saying there are a lot of slaves that are running away from their masters these days. And he accuses David of being that, a runaway slave. Who is David? Who is the son of Jesse that I should take from my bread and my water and my meat and give to him? So David’s young men, it says, retrace their way and went back, and they came and told him according to all these words.

And David said to his men, Each of you gird on your sword. So each man girded on his sword, and David also girded on his sword, and about four hundred men went up behind David, while two hundred stayed with the baggage. This is an insult that is not lost on David. David realizes that he’s been called a runaway slave. He realizes that this man hasn’t done what would normally be done to anyone who cared about God and God’s word, who cared about fairness, who wanted to share and be what God wanted him to be. And he takes this insult to heart and he says, All right, men gird on your swords. And he girds on his sword, and four hundred men go off to the hacienda of Nabal, and they’re going to clean up, and he leaves two hundred men, staying with the baggage there in the wilderness.

But one of the young men told Abigail, Nabal’s wife, saying, Behold, David sent messengers from the wilderness to greet our master, and he scorned them. Yet the men were very good to us, and we were not insulted, and we did not miss anything as long as we went about with them while they were in the fields. They were around to us both by night and by day, all the time we were with them tending the sheep. Now therefore know and consider what you should do, for evil is plotted against our master and against all his household, and he is such a worthless man that no one can speak to him. Here you have a situation in which there is a collision that is about to occur.

You have a man who is foolish. In fact, his name, I’m going to start calling him Nabal now because I call him Nabal just like you do. But the word Nabal in Hebrew means wicked fool. You wonder what his mama was thinking when he was born to give him a name like that. But it’s the same word in the original language that you find in Psalm 14 and verse 1, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. It implies not that someone is just naive, but it implies that someone is foolish and wickedness is associated with it. She’s going to make a play on words later on in her discussion with David using that very point. But here, this servant comes to Abigail and says, You’re the only one that can mediate this.

Because he’s insulted David. That’s certainly going to bring calamity upon our household, and your husband has done it. And you may be the only one who can influence him in any possible way. So there’s a crisis that’s going to occur, and you have one godly woman that stands now between a wicked fool and a man after God’s own heart, who is not thinking as he ought to think now, but is thinking in terms of vengeance.

One of the reasons that we know that this was harvest time is because roasted grain was the only time that you could really have that was around harvest time. In our day and time, we try to get all the moisture content out of wheat and barley and rye before we combine them. And the combine does the process of making sure that the dry grain is separated from the stalk and the chaff. And they can be put in the bin, and because it doesn’t have much moisture content in it, it won’t mold. What they did in those days was they cut sheaves while it was still moist. And one of the things that you could do after you had allowed them to dry a little bit and you had threshed and winnowed the grain, it still had, if you’ve ever been in wheat country or barley country or rye country, you could take those heads of grain and rub them between your hands and eat them, and they’re kind of chewy like uh nuts almost instead of uh hard, like uh grains of dry rice.

So here it’s uh it’s harvest time, and there’s roasted grain available. Generally, what they do is take them and put them on a skillet or some sort of metal surface with a little bit of oil, and they’d let it pop a little bit. Not like popcorn exactly, but it would soften the already moistened grain, and it was very good. So it was kind of parched, we might say, rather than uh roasted. So I want you to think more in terms of uh uh parched corn rather than popped corn. And so here she provides this. And a hundred clusters of raisins and two hundred cakes of figs. Now I want you to notice these people have never eaten refined sugar in their lives. You know what some of the sweetest things that there are to eat?

And she realizes this is a situation that needs to be sweetened up. She takes dried grapes that are sweet. She takes figs that can be dried and put together in cakes. You can still go to a Middle Eastern grocery and buy them in exactly the same way. And in the drying process, you see that sweetness being able to almost crystallize in the figs that are there. So she wants to sweeten up this sour situation. And she loaded them on donkeys. And she said to her young men, go on before me, behold, I’m coming after you. But she did not tell her husband Nabal. It came about as she was riding her donkey and coming down by the hidden part of the mountain, that behold David and his men were coming down toward her, so she met them.

Now David had said, Surely in vain I’ve guarded all that this man has in the wilderness so that nothing was missed by all that belonged to him, and he’s returned me evil for good. May God do so to the enemies of David and more also, if by morning I leave as much as one male of any who belong to him. Have you ever been mad before? And when you first got mad, it was just a minor irritation. But the more you thought about it, the more you stewed on it, the madder it made you. David is mad enough to gird on his sword when he starts off. But as he and his men march down the mountain, he has time to think about this. And he says, This isn’t right.

This isn’t the way it ought to be. This is absolutely wrong. And I’ll tell you what this man deserves. He deserves not only to be killed, but I’m going to kill every male thing on his place. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. So you see, he’s talking himself into war and serious mad here. In verse 23, it says, When Abigail saw David, she hurried and dismounted from her donkey and fell on her face before David and bowed herself to the ground. Now I want you to notice. This is the mistress of the hacienda right here. And she bows herself down before David like a slave would. And she fell at his feet and said, On me alone, my Lord, be the blame. And please let your maid servant speak to you and listen to the words of your maidservant.

Blame me. If there’s anything that can be that can be done here about this, let all the blame fall on me and not on my husband, and certainly not on all the males in our household. Please do not let my Lord pay attention to this worthless man, Nabal. For as his name is, so is he with him. But I, your maidservant, did not see the young men of my Lord whom you sent. See, she makes a play on his name. His name means wicked fool, and she said, just like his name is, that’s the way he is. And I’ll tell you, I bet she really knew. Here was a woman who probably in that day and time didn’t get to choose her own husband, and no telling what she has suffered from this wicked fool.

But here she says, I know what he’s like. But I wasn’t around when your men came, because I would have responded completely differently. And verse 26, she says, Now therefore, my lord, as the Lord lives, and as your soul lives, since the Lord has restrained you from shedding blood and from avenging yourself by your own hand, now then let your enemies and those who seek evil against my Lord be as Nabal. Now let this gift which your maidservant is brought to my Lord be given to the young men who accompany my Lord. Please forgive the transgression of your maidservant, for the Lord will certainly make for my Lord an enduring house, because my Lord is fighting the battles of the Lord, and evil will not be found in you all your days.

Should anyone rise up to pursue you and to seek your life, then the life of my Lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living with the Lord your God, but the lives of your enemies he’ll sling out as from the hollow of a sling.

But the enemies, and you can just see her cutting the bale and twine that’s on that and slinging it out, may this be the way that your enemies are, scattered. She’s quite a persuasive speaker. And when the Lord does for my Lord according to all the good that he’s spoken concerning you and appoints you ruler over Israel, this will not cause grief or a troubled heart to my Lord, both by having shed blood without cause, and by my Lord having avenged himself. And when the Lord deals well with my Lord, then remember your maidservant. Here in the midst of this situation, between a worthless fool of a husband and a good man who’s thinking foolishly, she calls him to account for what the scriptures say. She says there’s two things wrong about what you’re wanting to do.

You’re wanting to shed innocent blood, because the only one who has wronged you has been Nabal. And yet you’re wanting to kill every male in his house. All of his sons, all of his male servants. And that’s not right. The scriptures never made provision for that type of situation to take place in any kind of decision that would be considered just. Another thing is that avenging yourself was not allowed. It’s easy for us to remember that it talks about in reference to justice in the scriptures, eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand and a foot for a foot. But do you know that was something that was never to be dealt out by the person who had been offended?

That was the penalty phase of someone who had been condemned by the elders at the gates, by the Levites and priests who were giving advice there in reference to what the word of God had said. And if someone was found to be guilty of punching out someone’s tooth, then it was the community that made the decision and the man’s next of kin who exercised the penalty. And you notice it’s easy for us to think that sounds as it’s been called the lex talionis, the law of retaliation. It doesn’t have anything to do with retaliation, it has to do with measured justice. What does it sound like to us? It’s easy for us when we think of justice to think of doing more back to somebody than they did to us.

I remember when I was a child. The summer I was 13. We had to, my dad was between jobs. We moved into a house that was smaller than the one that we lived in before. It was a two-bedroom house. The boys’ bedroom, and I had two brothers, was all beds, basically. You just kind of opened the door and kind of flung yourself in the bed. And there was a big bed and a little bed, and I got the big bed, but I had to sleep with my younger brother who was five and barely housebroke. And I can remember that was a hot, hot summer. No air conditioning. Oklahoma. You’re in Florida, so that even when it’s hot in the summertime, you’ll get a nice little breeze that’ll blow from the Gulf.

Nice little breeze that’ll blow from the Atlantic. Even here in Central Florida, you get those occasionally. In Oklahoma, the breezes are coming from the southwest. And that is the Chihuahua desert. So it can be a hundred degrees in the daytime and cool off to 98 at night. And I can still remember trying to sleep, opening that window with my face against the screen door, trying to catch a breeze as it went by. Occasionally, as I was sleeping, my little five-year-old brother in sleep would sling an old sweaty leg over across my leg. And I was 13. I was a man. And one of the things that a man doesn’t have to put up off a five-year-old is a sweaty leg in the middle of the night.

So, being a person with a great sense of honor and a great sense of my own position in the family, thought it important to hit him. That would wake my little brother up. And he, also a young man of a great sense of honor, but no great intelligence, thought that, even though I was almost the size this way that I am now, I’ve put on some height this way since then. But he thought it was important to hit me back. Well, I couldn’t put up with that. It’s the older brother in the family, so I had to hit him back twice. And usually by the time that I’d hit him back twice, that woke up my parents, and then my dad would come in and whip us both in the middle of the night.

And then you have a sore backside, and it’s still hot, and you’re still trying to go to sleep with a sweaty little brother. It’s easy to think that the way that you get back is to get back and get back double. You know what the old testament said? You don’t get to pay back double. In fact, you don’t get to pay back. It is your next of kin. In fact, under most circumstances, the redeemer, as he’s called, literally the goal is the Hebrew word, who was the one who was the avenger of blood, the one who would buy you back if you were sold into slavery. He would usually be, if he were alive, your father’s brother. And it would be he who was the responsibility for taking a chisel and knocking out one person’s tooth.

One tooth. Not two teeth, one tooth. If you got an eye gouged out, and the community determined that it was a situation where that had happened, you didn’t poke out both eyes. The avenger of blood poked out one eye. It was an effort to provide measured justice rather than retaliation. And here David is about to break those laws. And Abigail knows it. Here you’re about to shed innocent blood, and you’re about to avenge yourself. Both of those things will come back to bite you when you are the one who is raised to the position that God has designed for you to fill. In verse 32, then David said to Abigail, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel who sent you this day to meet me. And blessed be your discernment, and blessed be you who have kept me this day from bloodshed and from avenging myself by my own hand.

Nevertheless, as the Lord God of Israel lives, who has restrained me from harming you, unless you’ve come quickly to meet me, surely there would not have been left to Nabal until the morning light as much as one male. So David received from her hand what she had brought him and said to her, Go up to your house in peace. See, I’ve listened to you and granted your request. He tells us in the last few verses of this story that Abigail came to Nabal, and behold, he was holding a feast in his house, like the feast of a king. And Nabal’s heart was merry within him, for he was very drunk. So she did not tell him anything at all until the morning light. But in the morning, when the wine had gone out of Nabal, his wife told him these things, and his heart died within him, so that he became as a stone.

And about ten days later the Lord struck Nabal and he died. When David heard that Nabal was dead, he said, Blessed be the Lord who has pleaded the cause of my reproach from the hand of Nabal and has kept back his servant from evil. The Lord has also returned the evil doing of Nabal on his own head. Then David sent a proposal to Abigail to take her as his wife. Now, let me tell you something. David already has a wife.

But here, David, you can tell he’s no romantic fool. He says, You know what? Another wife might be good. I’ll send my men out there and hit they’ll they’ll give the proposal to her. He doesn’t even face her with it. But you know, here she doesn’t take offense at this. It says, When they came, they spoke to her, saying, David has sent us to you to take you as his wife. So in verse 41, it says, She arose and bowed with her face to the ground and said, Behold, your maid servant is a maid to wash the feet of my Lord’s servants. And she quickly arose and rode on a donkey with her five maidens who attended her, and she followed the messengers of David and became his wife.

Here she bows down before David’s servants, and she says, May your maid servant be the maid to wash the feet of my Lord’s servants. One of the things that in the ancient world you could really have that would cause crisis around your household if you had slaves was to expect a house slave to do a menial task like washing feet. A house slave expected you to send for a field slave to come in and wash the dirty feet. There were certain things that in spite of the fact that they were slaves, they just didn’t think that they ought to do. So I want you to understand here, the mistress of the hacienda. She bows down before David’s servants and she says, May your maidservant be the one to wash the feet of my master’s slaves.

1. A Soft Answer Turns Away Wrath

You talk about umble, and she follows them and goes and becomes David’s wife. So here the situation is resolved, partly by Abigail, certainly by God in the death of Nabal. But I want you to notice that here you have someone who rides that important line between two men who are acting foolishly. And I think there are several things that I want to close the lesson by letting us look at for just a minute, so that we might be able to draw important lessons for ourselves in our daily lives in it. The first thing we need to understand is as it says in Proverbs 15 and verse 1, a soft answer turns away wrath. Isn’t she great at this? Here is a situation in which all she would have had to have done is said the wrong thing.

Can you imagine coming to David and say, You fool, what are you up to? Look what you’re about to do. Now, David should have listened to what the word of God had to say in spite of how the message was delivered, but she did not like the spark. She spoke gently. And in doing so, she put herself in a situation to become a peacemaker rather than someone to make things worse. How many times have you ever been in a situation where you’re talking with a brother or sister in Christ, and you have a situation in which you have people who may not be at their best, and someone, rather than with a soft answer turning away wrath, wind up doing something that just ignites the situation and sometimes alienates brethren, sometimes splits congregations?

You may have even seen situations like this in your own family, where a spouse did not respond to you the way you thought you deserved to be responded to.

2. Be Peacemakers

Abigail’s a powerful example of how what Proverbs 15 and verse 1 has to say, how a soft answer turns away wrath. Another thing that is important that I think she does superbly, and that we need to try to do as well, is to be peacemakers. Do you remember in the Beatitudes in the fifth chapter of the book of Matthew in verse 9, there we see Jesus blessing the peacemakers? It says, For they shall be called the sons of God. It doesn’t take anything to stir up strife among brothers. It doesn’t take anything to cause problems in a family. It takes effort, it takes work, it takes wisdom to be able to take a situation that is volatile and turn it into a situation that is peaceful.

We as God’s people need to try to be peacemakers because in those great passages that talk about those people that are blessed by God, he’s describing the situation that turns the world as it was at the time, and that is it often is today on its ear.

Jesus says they shall be called the sons of God, because the Son of God was the Prince of Peace, who came to bring peace to men, peace among men, and peace that passes understanding in the hearts of men who love him and serve him.

You remember what we discussed a while ago? But I say to you, do not resist an evil person, but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants you to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. What seems normal? Somebody hits me, hit them back. Maybe twice. But you know what the Lord says? Jesus Himself says in his mountain message, he says, you let it stop with you. Here he’s talking not so much about self-defense. He’s talking about retaliation. But he says, you know, while the person that is in conflict with you may not deserve it, God deserves it. I deserve it, then you let it stop with you. If being slapped on the cheek is what it takes to stop the conflict, let it happen.

But you be the one that stops the circle of violence. You be the one who becomes the peacemaker. You be the one who allows the situation to be diffused. I think if we tried that occasionally, we’d notice just the major changes that would occur in the relationships among neighbors, among families, among brethren who are trying to live together in a way that would be peaceful before God.

There I want you to notice it says even more thoroughly than was said in Matthew 5. Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. Boy, that’s pretty airtight, isn’t it? Never pay back evil to evil to anyone. Respect what’s right in the sight of all men. If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. The King James Version says, so far as it lies within you, I can remember hearing this argued in Bible class when I was just a kid. Someone says, Well, you know, it just doesn’t lie within me to be at peace with that person. That’s not what it’s saying. Because it always lies within you. If there’s going to be a fight, there have to be two people involved in the fight, and you take yourself out of it.

3. Humility Never Hurts

You be the one that takes the slap. You be the one that takes the last blow so that it’ll stop with you. And usually in dealings in the family, usually in the dealings in the church, that’s the situation that’ll happen in dealing with people who are acting foolishly. In James, the fourth chapter and verse 6. Then we see another valid point in which I think we see Abigail acting perfectly as she should. And it says basically in the fourth chapter in verse 6, God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace unto the humble. Humility never hurts. And this woman knew that. From her situation as the mistress of this hacienda or this ranch or whatever you want to call it. Couldn’t have been that easy to bow down before as many people as she bowed and scraped before, but you know what she does?

4. Never Be Ashamed to Point Someone Heavenward

She does it consistently. And in that last statement, she says, Let me be the one to wash the feet of David’s slaves. Humility doesn’t hurt. In fact, as humble as you may think you are at any given time, you can always be more so and be justified in the claim. We need to be people who, instead of allowing ourselves to become pride, proud, realize that God is opposed to the proud, but is always standing willing to give grace to the humble. And we need to make up our minds and our hearts and our lives that that’s something that will imitate Abigail and even the more perfect example we see in the humility of Jesus Christ. And finally, I think there’s something that we see Abigail doing here that I think is especially noteworthy.

And that is she doesn’t hesitate to point David, even when he’s wrong in this situation in which he’s looking to the Word of God. And we ought to never be ashamed to point someone heavenward. You know, there are always people out there who are know it-alls. Always people out there who want to play gotcha with you. And I’m not talking about those. But there is a big difference in somebody who’s trying to play mental games with you and somebody who’s trying to point you toward heaven. And here we find that’s exactly what Abigail does. Look at the third chapter of the book of James, verses 17 and 18. When you find yourself in a situation where you believe that you’ve got clowns to the left of you and jokers to the left.

Look at this passage here and see if your behavior is showing itself to be consistent with what God wants. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without hypocrisy. And the seed whose fruit is righteousness is sown in peace by those that make peace. If you mark your Bibles, mark those two verses. Because think of how many situations we’d get ourselves out of if we could remember to evaluate our behavior in the light of these two verses. Is my behavior peaceable? Are my motives pure? Are my actions gentle? And so on and so forth. Some people look at the word of God today and say, it is a sexist book. I want you to notice that in this story, even in the Old Testament, we find a woman who is the prominent character in this story, even when it shows David, who is the prominent character in most of this section of the book of 1 Samuel.

Conclusion

To be someone who’s not at his best. But here you see someone who shows the attitude that you need to have when you’re faced with people whose main concern is not doing right. Let’s look at the example of Abigail. Let’s look even further at the example of Jesus and make up our minds that we’re not going to become part of the cosmic problem. We’re going to become part of the cosmic solution to sin, to conflict, to difficulty, and not allow ourselves to become fools just because someone else acts foolishly. What’s your situation tonight? Are you acting wisely, consistently with the word of God, are you allowing a false pride to keep you from obeying the gospel of Jesus Christ? Tonight, if you’ll come in faith, show it through repentance.

If you’ll confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, we’d be glad to baptize you into Christ this evening so that you can leave this place washed in the blood of the Lamb, having changed your love and your loyalty from a loyalty to self and to Satan to a new loyalty to Jesus Christ. You, as a child of God, have been more commonly someone who’s characterized by foolish behavior rather than the wisdom that comes from above. You need to change while there’s time and opportunity. Because there’s no room in heaven for the wicked fool, but only for those who have allowed the wisdom from above to change their attitudes and their behavior in this world in preparation for the next. Think about these things, and if we can help you in your obedience to the Lord this evening, we invite you to come while we stand and sing.