I would like to read one sentence from Acts 13:22—the last sentence:
I have found David, the son of Jesse, a man after My heart, who shall do all My will.
“I have found David, the son of Jesse, a man after My heart, who shall do all My will.”
We know that David’s life was very, very colourful. His experiences were varied. He was a shepherd, a refugee, and a king.
In the Bible, David represents, in a very full way, a type of our Lord Jesus. Also, in the life of David, we can see the principles governing the making of a king. In other words, we are all kings and priests unto God; but how can we really be kings? You will find it in the life of David.
But this morning, what the Lord has impressed upon my heart is the witness of God—the comment of the Holy Spirit—over the life of David.
When God looked upon the life of David, in the New Testament He gave a witness to that life. It is the verdict of God concerning that man, and it is very simple:
I have found David, the son of Jesse, a man after My heart, who shall do all My will.
Now, brothers and sisters, in the very beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, you find in Genesis 1 that God spent six days in doing that. Every day He did something and said that it was good—except, of course, the second day.
But on the sixth day, He created man in His image, according to His likeness. He blessed them, and He gave them dominion over the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field, and the fishes in the sea.
Then God looked at all that He had created, and He said, “It is very good.” In other words, when God completed His work in creating man in His image and according to His likeness, He said, “It is very good.” He was satisfied, and then He rested on the seventh day.
Now, in a sense, I feel that this gives us some kind of a clue. God’s intention in creating man was that man should be a man after His heart. When man was created, His heart was satisfied.
God gave dominion to man. God wanted man to represent Him on this earth, to do His will, to carry out what was in the mind of God. So I believe that originally we were created to be men and women of God’s heart. That is what we were originally created for.
But unfortunately, we all know the story of how man sinned against God. Since that time, you find that God has been searching, seeking, trying to find men and women after His heart. That is the work of God through the ages.
So, for me, I feel it is not only in David that God said, “I have found David, a man after My heart, who shall do all My will.” As a matter of fact, I believe that throughout the centuries this is what God has been searching for. He is trying to restore, to regain, the man that He has in His heart—a man after His heart.
I believe God today is still searching. He looks over all the men and women in this world, and it seems that He is not able to find many of them.
So when He located David, out of all the multitude of people in Israel, He said, “Finally, I have found My man. This is the man after My heart, who shall do all My will.” How it pleased the heart of God.
To me, I feel this is something God is doing today. If He is looking at all of us here, searching us and trying to see whether He can find among us men and women after His heart, then, if He does, how happy and satisfied He must be.
So this morning, I feel that we would like to consider together David, a man after God’s heart.
The first mention of David is found in the book of Ruth. In Ruth 4:17 and 4:22, you find the name of David mentioned. David was the great-grandson of Ruth; Ruth was the great-grandmother of David. His name means “beloved.”
Now, if you turn to 1 Samuel 16, you will find that David was actually the eighth son of Jesse. But when you come to 1 Chronicles 2, in the genealogy there, you find David as the seventh son of Jesse. People believe that probably one of the sons passed away, and that is why the eighth became the seventh. But that is not really a big problem.
The problem is this: usually, in a family, when you are the last one born, whether a son or a daughter, you are the darling of the family. Not only are you beloved by your parents, but you are loved by your brothers and sisters too. I mean, that is natural.
But when you come to the life of David, you find something very different. He was the last-born of the family, and his very name was “beloved.” Yet you find that he was neglected by his father and despised by his brothers. You wonder why. It is a puzzle.
Through the centuries, people who study the Bible have tried to find an explanation for this. Of course, all this is guesswork. One ancient tradition offers this explanation: that David was born of the same father but not the same mother as his other brothers. It was said that the wife of Nahash later became the wife of Jesse, and that was how David was born. Thus, David and his brothers were half-brothers.
Furthermore, if you read 1 Chronicles 2, you find that David had two sisters, Zeruiah and Abigail. One was the mother of Joab, the captain of the host under David, and the other was the mother of Amasa, the captain of the host under Absalom. So there is a great difference of age here. How can you explain that difference unless you say that David was born much later, perhaps by another mother?
But then some people began to think that this did not really explain why he was neglected by his father and despised even by his half-brothers. So people tried to find an answer in David’s own writings in the book of Psalms, because the Psalms express his inward feelings.
People come to Psalm 51:5, where David said:
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity;
And in sin did my mother conceive me.
Usually, we take that verse generally, because we are all born in sin. But some take it personally and say that perhaps David was born out of wedlock. If that were the case, then perhaps there would be some justification for his brothers to despise him.
When you turn to Psalm 27:10, David himself said:
When my father and my mother forsake me,
Then the Lord will take me up.
Some versions translate it not as “when,” but as “my father and my mother have forsaken me; but the Lord will take me up.” When you gather these various hints together, people try to say that this was the reason why something so unnatural happened in that family.
David was sent, as a boy, into the wilderness to take care of a few sheep. He was completely neglected by his father. There is no mention of his mother. He was looked down upon by his brothers.
In other words, David was completely cut off from normal human relationships. He was shut out from everything that we would consider normal and necessary.
But thank God, there, while being shut out, he was being shut in to God. He did not have anything. So, in the wilderness, in nature, his heart began to turn toward God.
That was his only hope and his only comfort. As he turned his heart towards God, he began to know God. The more he knew God with his heart, the more he began to understand God’s heart.
In this young boy, you can almost feel how his heart must have longed for a relationship with his father—for a right relationship with his brothers. How he must have longed for real union with his own family, and yet he was rejected.
Because of this, he began to understand God’s heart. At the time of David, God was completely forgotten and rejected by His own people.
You remember the story of how the ark was captured by the Philistines. When the ark came back, instead of the whole nation returning to the ark of God—for the ark represented the presence of God—it was taken to Kirjath-jearim, into the house of Abinadab. It was hidden there. Nobody cared for it.
During the time of Saul, he never inquired about the ark. He had no heart for God. During that period, you can almost feel the heart of God—how His heart yearned to be with His people, to bless His people with all the riches that He had.
Yet somehow His people did not understand Him. His people forgot Him and rejected Him. It must have hurt God’s heart very deeply.
David, because of his own personal story, began to understand God’s heart. That is how you find that he gradually became a man after God’s heart.
How he longed for God. He longed for the ark of God to return and become the centre of the nation of Israel, that Israel might be blessed.
Brothers and sisters, oftentimes when people live a very easy and normal life, as it were, they do not think much about God. They do not care much about the heart of God or what God really wants, because they have everything that they need.
Sometimes, if we are deprived of something that we normally would have, we may think that it is a tragedy. But in God’s sovereignty, it can become a great blessing—that we may be shut out and shut in to God.
When you lose everything outwardly, then you begin to turn within, and your heart begins to turn toward God. By that, you begin to understand God’s heart.
God wanted at that time to have a king according to His heart. Saul was a king chosen by the people. Saul was a man of the flesh.
Naturally speaking, he was not a bad person. In the beginning, he was quite humble. When the lot fell upon him to be king, they could not find him because he hid himself among the baggage.
But when they found him and he stood before the children of Israel, he was a head taller than all the children of Israel. He was a good-looking man. Of course, the people said, “Well, that is all right,” because they chose a king according to outward appearance. So they got their king.
But Saul never understood God. He was not the king of God’s choice.
When God sent Samuel to anoint one among the sons of Jesse to be king—the king after God’s heart—you know what happened. Jesse gathered his seven sons, but he did not call David back from the field. In the eyes of Jesse, David was nobody. Nothing good could come out of David.
He did not even bother to call David, though it was such an important occasion. He put no hope in David.
Then Jesse asked his seven sons to pass before Samuel. When Samuel saw the first one, Eliab, he thought, “This must be he.” Even Samuel was deceived.
But God said:
Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.
That is the difference. All seven sons passed by, and Samuel said, “No.” Samuel asked, “Do you have any more?” Then Jesse admitted that he had another one in the field, so he called David back.
When David came, God said, “This is he. Arise, anoint him.”
Brothers and sisters, you find that God’s way of choosing people is very different from man’s way of choosing. Man chooses according to outward appearance because that is all we can see.
How misleading outward appearance can be. We can put on a kind of front, but God knows the heart.
Before God, outward appearance is nothing. Before God, the heart is everything. Today, God looks upon our heart.
The Bible says in Proverbs 4:23:
Keep thy heart with all diligence;
For out of it are the issues of life.
Now, the heart here does not refer to our physical heart. Even so, our physical heart is, in a sense, the centre of our physical being, because all the blood passes through the heart. If you have a bad heart, then you are in trouble.
I recently had that experience, but I did not know it. I did not know that I had a bad heart. I nearly had a heart attack, but I never knew it. Thank God that He saved me in time, so I am here this morning.
But in Scripture, the heart is not the physical heart. The heart is the centre of our moral and spiritual being.
Before God, we are not merely physical beings with bodies. Before God, we are moral and spiritual beings. That is what we really are before God. Our heart, in the Bible, is the very centre of our moral and spiritual being.
Out of it are the issues of life. Whatever our moral and spiritual life is comes out from the heart. That is why the wise man Solomon said, “Keep thy heart with all diligence.” Why? Because it is the most precious thing in your life.
How we spend our time trying to improve our outward appearance. But how many times do we try to examine our hearts? I think it is something we should do, but probably we neglect it.
Yet our heart is the most important thing in our life before God, because this is the one thing God is looking at. You may try to improve yourself in other ways, and men may notice it, but God may never notice. Only the heart is what God looks at.
We need to guard the heart above all things, because everything comes out of it. You remember that in the Gospel our Lord Jesus talked about the heart.
For instance, in Matthew 12, the Pharisees blasphemed the Holy Spirit, and our Lord Jesus said:
Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.
A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit. You cannot change that. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.
Again, in Matthew 15, the disciples of our Lord Jesus ate without washing their hands. The Pharisees came and said, “Why do Your disciples not wash their hands according to the tradition of the elders before eating?”
Our Lord Jesus answered them in a parable: what goes in does not defile a person; it is what comes out that defiles.
Then Peter asked the Lord to explain the parable. The Lord said that what a person takes in goes out, but what comes from the heart—wickedness, sins, and evil—all comes from the heart. That is what defiles a person.
So it is very important that we guard our hearts above all things. But strangely, when you turn to Jeremiah 17:9, it says:
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick: who can know it?
But the Lord searches the heart. He examines the heart and tries the inward parts. Again, you find that the heart is so important, and yet the heart is deceitful above all things.
You cannot think of anything more deceitful than the heart, because it not only deceives other people; it deceives ourselves too. We do not know our own hearts. We think that we have a good heart, but it turns out that we do not know our heart.
We are deceived even by our own heart. The Bible says it is incurable. If that were the end of it, what could we do? Nobody can do anything with such a heart—deceitful and incurable.
But God knows our heart. He proves our thoughts. He is the only One who knows.
Thank God, one day, when we believed in the Lord Jesus, something happened. Not only did we receive a new life, but the Bible says we received a new heart.
This old heart is deceitful above all things and incurable—hopeless. So when we believe in the Lord Jesus, He does something marvellous in us. Not only does He wash away our sins from the conscience of our heart—conscience is part of our heart—but He also gives us a new heart.
We have had a guilty conscience all our lives, and there is no way we can remove that guilty conscience. We may try to accumulate merit, to appease our conscience, or to deaden our conscience, but it does not work. It does not work.
Only the blood of the Lord Jesus washes our sins away from an evil conscience of the heart. That is Hebrews 10.
The Bible says in Ezekiel 36 that God will give us a new heart. He will take away our stony heart and give us a heart of flesh.
Before we believed in the Lord Jesus, we had a stony heart. What does that mean? A stone is hard; it has no sensation, no pain, no feeling towards God. We were hard.
But when we believe in the Lord Jesus, He not only cleanses our heart from an evil conscience, but He gives us a new heart—a heart of flesh. A heart of flesh means that you can feel; you can sense.
That is why, when we first believe in the Lord Jesus, some people say that when you even mention the name of Jesus, tears begin to flow. Why? Because you feel it. You feel the love of God. You have a heart of flesh toward God.
In our first love toward God, our heart is so tender toward Him. We can hear His voice—the still, small voice within us. We are able to hear it, and we love to obey the teaching of the anointing within us. Our heart is really tender toward God.
If this can be kept throughout our life, how good it will be. This heart of flesh is always tender, soft, and pure toward God. With such a heart, we can see.
In the Beatitudes, the Lord said:
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
So we see God every day. But unfortunately, we do not guard our heart. We do not carefully and diligently guard it.
Because we fail to guard it, very soon you find that the world again begins to influence us. Sin begins to harden our heart, and the flesh begins to lead our heart away from God.
In our daily life, when our heart is tender toward God, we hear God’s voice. But sometimes we neglect it. Sometimes we even rebel against it. By doing that, gradually our heart becomes hardened.
So in Hebrews, you find:
Today if ye shall hear His voice,
Harden not your hearts.
This heart of flesh, this new heart that God has given us, is so precious. It is the centre of our spiritual life, yet we neglect to take care of it. Eventually, it can gradually become hardened until, to an extent, you cannot even hear the voice of God.
Sin is so deceitful. How can we become hardened? Because we do not keep our hearts carefully.
So, brothers and sisters, the point is: how can we guard our heart? Are we able to keep our heart as tender as when we first believed in the Lord Jesus?
We cannot save ourselves, nor can we keep ourselves. The perseverance of the saints—the power is not in us; it is in God.
In Proverbs 23:26, the same wise man, Solomon, said:
My son, give me thy heart,
And let thine eyes delight in my ways.
We are not able to keep that heart, but there is one thing we should do: give our heart to the Lord. If you give your heart to the Lord, then let Him keep it for you. He is well able to keep our heart until the day when we shall see Him face to face.
Dear brothers and sisters, the important thing for us is that we need to give our heart to the Lord. Love the Lord with all your heart.
Have you given your heart to the Lord? You say, “Lord, I love You, because I am not sure of myself. If it is left to me, my heart may be hardened toward You. You are the only One who is able to keep it, the only One who is able to keep it for eternity.”
“I want to give my heart to You and let You keep it for me and for Yourself.”
If you give your heart to the Lord, the Lord will keep your heart tender, pure, and toward Him throughout your life. That is what the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives.
You have the anointing within you. He is teaching you in all things, great things and small things. If you obey the anointing, you abide in Christ. Then your heart will be kept by Him.
So, brothers and sisters, I would suggest that we pray the prayer of David every day.
In Psalm 139:23-24, David prayed:
Search me, O God, and know my heart:
Try me, and know my thoughts:
And see if there be any wicked way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.
Psalm 139 is a wonderful Psalm. David speaks there of God—how God is omniscient and omnipresent. Finally, he prays, “Search me, O God, and know my heart.”
David was not a perfect man. That is very clear when you read the Word of God. Yet his heart was always toward God.
He turned his heart to God and asked God to search him. He said, “Search me and know my heart. I do not know my heart. I can be mistaken. I may think that I have a good heart, yet do something very wrong. So You search me.”
“Try me, and know my thoughts. What is in my thoughts? See if there is any evil way in me.” One translation says, “See if there is any idolatrous way in me.”
Why is it idolatrous? Because idolatry simply means that, aside from God, you worship something else.
Be a man of heart, and let our heart be in tune with God’s heart. Gradually, you will find that you come to know more and more of the heart of God—what the heart of God is.
You want to be a person who, in a small sense, satisfies God’s heart. “I have found David, a man after My heart.”
Can God today say to each one of us, “I finally have found you”? Unless you are a man or woman of heart, and a person after God’s heart, you are not the person God is trying to find.
But if you are, then you can see how God’s heart is happy and joyful when He says, “I have found in David a man after My heart.” “I finally have one.” May it be true with each one of us.
We need to pay very special attention to our heart. But again, I say, we do not know our own heart. So bring it to the Lord. Ask Him to maintain us and keep our heart always pure before Him, that we may see God.
But the sentence is not finished yet. He said, “I have found David, a man after My heart, who shall do all My will.”
The heart is invisible. It is visible only to God, but invisible even to ourselves. Yet what is within eventually will work out.
David, being a man after God’s heart, manifested that heart in doing all God’s will. When you find God’s will being done, then you see what is really in the heart. That is the way to prove what is within the heart.
It is not merely some metaphysical or mystical thing. It is expressed and manifested in outward action.
When you read the story of David, as soon as he had opportunity, you see what he did. Before he had opportunity, he could not do it, because he was a fugitive. He could not do anything for God.
Read Psalm 132. David said, “Lord, remember me in all my affliction.” What does that mean? David afflicted himself because he could not rest while thinking of the ark of God. Nobody cared about it. Where was it? Where could it be found? He wanted to find it, to worship before it, and to find a resting place for the ark of God.
But he could not do it. As soon as he became king over all Israel, notice what he did immediately.
In 2 Samuel 5, as soon as he became king of Israel, the first thing he did was take Jerusalem. He made Jerusalem the capital of the nation.
We are told that, from a political and geographical standpoint, Jerusalem was out of the way. Why, then, was David’s first action as king to take Jerusalem? There was a reason.
Way back, when God led the children of Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness, God said in Deuteronomy 12:11 that after they entered the promised land, He would choose one place in which to put His name.
The children of Israel were to go there to offer their sacrifices. Three times a year, all the males were to go to worship God. Under the name of God, they would be united as one nation.
But after they entered Canaan, this did not happen. Did it ever happen? Nobody inquired where the place was in which the name of God would be placed.
Throughout the book of Judges, through the time of Samuel and Saul, nobody knew where God would put His name. The ark moved here and there. The tabernacle moved here and there. There was no settled place.
When they first entered Canaan, most likely the tabernacle was set up at Gilgal. Later, it moved to Shiloh. During the time of Saul, it moved to Nob, where the priests were when David fled. Later, it was at Gibeon.
There was no settled place where the people would go and worship as a nation. Nobody knew where the name of God would be put.
But somehow David, because he was a man after God’s own heart, knew God’s heart. He was given revelation: it was Jerusalem.
The first thing he did was take Jerusalem. It was not out of consideration for geography or politics. It was out of consideration for God’s will. That was the place where God would put His name, and the children of Israel would flow into Jerusalem. Under that name, they would become one nation and one people under God.
Brothers and sisters, do you know why God’s people are scattered today?
Our Lord Jesus said:
For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.
Where He puts His name, that is where we gather. That is where we gather as one people under one name.
But unfortunately today, among God’s people, we neglect that name. Many of God’s people gather together under other names—sometimes under the name of a great man of God, sometimes under the name of a form or system, sometimes under the name of a doctrine or teaching, and sometimes under the name of an experience.
When you gather together under such names, God’s people are scattered.
Only when we respect the name of the Lord Jesus and gather together under His name, under His authority, do we become one nation and one people.
No matter where we are, we are one nation and one people. It is His name that gathers us together into one.
Of course, it is not merely mentioning the name of the Lord in vain. It must be in reality. That is to say, we must really gather together and put every one of us under His authority.
Then how can we be scattered? How can we be separated? We are all under that one name—a name that is above every name. At that name every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God.
So, brothers and sisters, to us today it is no longer a physical place. It is His name. If we are men and women after God’s heart, that is what we should do. That will be doing the will of God.
Then, secondly, the second thing David did was to bring the ark back to Jerusalem.
Nobody cared for the ark, but David cared, because the ark represented the presence of God. It had been hidden in the woods of Kirjath-jearim, in the house of Abinadab. People, in a sense, did not care whether God was present or not. If they could have other things, they were satisfied.
But David was not satisfied with anything if God was not there. He wanted to make God the centre of the life of the people. So the second thing he did was bring the ark back to Jerusalem, to the tent he had prepared for the ark.
You know the story. In the beginning, what he did was right—his heart was right—but the way he did it was wrong. God’s will must be done in God’s way.
Unfortunately, God’s will was not done in God’s way, but in the way of the Philistines. David tried to bring the ark back on a new cart. Then something happened, and David was frightened. Not only was he frightened, but he was indignant.
He felt that he had done something right for God, so why had God done something bad to him? He was not happy with God. Instead of bringing the ark back to Jerusalem, he let it go into another house—the house of Obed-edom.
But after God blessed that house, David understood that the ark had to be carried on the shoulders of the priests. Finally, you find how joyfully he brought the ark back.
The presence of the Lord—God being present among His people—is really everything to us.
Even Moses, who knew God, said no when God told him, “I will send an angel before you, but I will not go with you, because you have sinned so terribly.” Moses said, “If Your presence does not go with us, do not carry us up from here.”
What makes us different from all the nations is Your presence. If Your presence is absent, we are no different from the other nations.
Brothers and sisters, do we really treasure the presence of the Lord—not just personally, but corporately?
When we gather together, what are we looking for? Are we looking for something that will satisfy us? Oftentimes, we come to a meeting, and when we leave, we shake our heads and say, “We did not get anything. It was a waste of time.”
But is that the reason why we gather together? When we gather together, what are we looking for?
We are looking for His presence. If His presence is here, everything is fine.
In His presence is fullness of joy, and at His right hand are pleasures for evermore. Without His presence, nothing—nothing.
If we know the heart of God, if we are men and women of God’s heart, brothers and sisters, we desire His presence more than anything else.
If His presence is not here, everything is nothing. Individually, that is the thing you seek for. Corporately, that is the thing you look for: His presence. Only His presence can satisfy our heart.
Then, thirdly, in 2 Samuel 7, David wanted to build God a house.
He said, “I cannot live in a house of cedar while the ark of God is still in a tent.” He loved God so much that he said, “I have to build Him a house.”
He shared his heart with Nathan the prophet. Nathan, in principle, knew that David was a man after God’s heart, so Nathan said, “Go ahead. That is the right thing to do.”
Yet God’s word came to Nathan: “Go back to David, because he is a man of war and has shed much blood. Such a man does not represent My house. But his son will build it.”
Even so, David loved the house of God so much that, in all his affliction, in all his power, and in all his affection for the house of God, he prepared abundant materials for the house of God.
Brothers and sisters, that is what we should do if we are men and women of God’s heart.
What are we doing every day? Are we gathering things for ourselves, or are we gathering materials for the house of God?
Are we preparing materials for God’s house—preparing ourselves as His material, preparing others as His material, and doing so in abundance?
Out of our trials and afflictions, we gather materials. With all power, we gather materials. In all our affection toward God, we gather materials. That is the way we do all His will.
You know, “His will” is in the singular number. His will is one.
His will is to have a habitation, a dwelling place, a house in which He can live together with those who welcome Him.
Brothers and sisters, how can that will be fulfilled? Only by those who are men and women after God’s heart.
May the Lord find in all of us such men and women.
Dear Lord, our hearts do go out to Thee, knowing how Thy heart longs for Thy people to be Thy dwelling place, that Thou mayest be able to pour forth Thyself to Thy people and enable Thy people to manifest Thy glory.
O dear Lord, we do pray that Thou wilt impress upon our hearts: make us men and women of heart, after God’s heart, that we may do all Thy will.
We give Thee all the glory. In Thy precious name we pray. Amen.
If we could play the tune “Amazing Grace” and sing Psalm 139, the last verses:
Search me, O God, and know my heart:
Try me, and know my thoughts:
And see if there be any wicked way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.