How could I forget God? Did David forget God, when he walked around the roof of the castle and viewed a naked woman bathing? He could have looked away and run from the roof, much like Joseph ran from Potiphar's wife. Instead, David forgot about God and sent a servant for the woman.
Men in Ministry: "Satan does not fill us with hatred to God, but for forgetfulness of God." Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
David was the great man of God: the man God refers to as the man after His own heart. How did he forget God? Does forgetting God happen all of a sudden, or is it a process? David is a good example of the process to forget God. It begins slowly with culturally acceptable practices. In David's example, in Samuel 5 God records David's initial assumption of power. It tells us that after he left Hebron, David took more concubines and wives in Jerusalem. In Deuteronomy 17, God sets down the standards for Hebrew kings. They are commanded to avoid three things: 1) acquiring many horses, 2) taking many wives, and 3) accumulating much silver and gold. David failed number two. Although it was culturally acceptable, it was a sin for the leaders.
Men in Ministry what are the concubines being allowed to corrupt your life?
In 1960, C.S. Lewis observed: "There are a great many people who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen."
Slowly we can become desensitized to sin. This occurs when we create an environment in our life that opens the sin door and the desire to forget God.
The door opens from television, the Internet, worldly music, radio, tabloids, books, magazines, and conversation, flirting at the office or in church. Our concubine list can be very long. The man who desires football, golf, or baseball on television or work or sleep more than time with God or their wife or family. Watching shows on TV that contain "adult content" opens a concubine door. We begin to forget about God. Maybe we cringe at the thought. I do not place these things before family or God.
C. S. Lewis believed salvation to be an ongoing process-not a one-time thing. Conversion is a huge event, but one can choose to back-slide and stop cooperating with the Holy Spirit and thereby lose salvation. True believers can fall from grace.
The environment for a growing sanctified life is our responsibility to create and increase space for God in our lives. But we can also create an environment that makes it easy for us to place things in front of God and family.
Living on the West Coast, it is easy to see when the local teams play football on Sunday on the East Coast. The games start at about 9:30 AM PST. What happens to the men in the congregation? Not all men are drawn to this concubine. What happens to the families of the men who choose a football game over fellowship, praise, worship, prayer and the truth from the pulpit?
We are in the world but not of the world. We need to live in heaven on earth; with us God brings heaven to earth. "Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."
Men in Ministry, forgetting God is made very easy by all the worldly, acceptable sins.
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