Introduction
Acts 13. The Bible calls us, when we come to Christ, priests and kings. When you come to Jesus Christ, your identity radically changes, but what happens is that most of us don't come up to the new person that we are. We're still living out of the old that we used to be, but we need to come up.
God calls us a Priest! That means a person who is called. It's your purpose to come near to God, to minister to Him, access Him, listen to Him, receive from Him, and have something to give.
You're also called to be a King. A king is a person who extends dominion, who rules over something. Every one of us has a realm, or an area, where God calls us to bring His influence to extend His kingdom. There are places that you go, and you walk, and you meet people, and interact where I will never go. You are called to advance the work of God in that place.
The trouble is, so many Christians have been happy and content to come to meetings, and they consider that to be fulfilling their call of God. No, that isn't fulfilling your call of God! That's positioning yourself to be inspired, and be encouraged, but you fulfil your call when you go out those doors, and we need to be connected to that call of God!
Acts 13:22 – “I have found David, the son of Jesse, a man after My own heart, who will do all of My will”
Acts 13:36 – “For David, after he had served his own generation, by the will of God, fell asleep, and was buried…”
We discover two things about David, that God says about him. It's one thing to have people say things about you, but it's another thing when God is saying things about you. You need to value what God is saying about you, and what heaven is saying about you.
If you've never received Jesus Christ, never given your life to Jesus Christ, then God is saying that you don't belong in His family; but when you respond to Jesus Christ, receive Jesus Christ, and begin to trust Him, and commit your life to Him, God writes your name in His book, and then He says some different things about you. He says: this is My son, and My daughter; I love them. We can divide the world up into two groups of people: those who are in God's family, and those who potentially are in God's family. The people who are in God's family, make Him known.
David was a man after the heart of God. David passionately desired to know what God is like. You can have your own ideas about God, and they will limit how you can walk with God; but David made it a personal pursuit to discover what God was like.
In his first season in his life when no one saw him, he learned how to worship God and access the presence of God and listen to the voice of God, and he discovered things that God liked. We have the whole Bible, but when he was living, only a part of it had been written. We can look back and we know so much now; he didn't know that much. But what he did was, he was so connected with the heart of God, he looked at all of the religious order - the way things were done, the way God had set it up. Moses, the mighty man of God who delivered Israel; the great giant in Israel's history. He had set up all these ways of worshipping God, according to how God had directed him.
But David found that it was not really what God was after. You've got to be quite bold if you can look at what's existing, and be able to say: actually, that's not really what God is after. It's temporary, but there's actually something different that He's got in mind. How did he find that out? Well, he found the heart of God. He found what God desires. He found what God delights in, and he was able to write it down in the psalms.