1 Samuel 17: 1-49 (links validated 5/14/24a)

New Resources

  • Every Human Heart

    by Dan Clendenin
    If anyone might justify divine judgment for unjust persecution, the Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) would be a good candidate. In 1945 he was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment and internal exile for criticizing Stalin in a private letter. The publication of his Gulag Archipelago in 1973 outraged the Soviet government for its exposure of the Soviet penal system. With 30 million copies sold in 35 languages, Time magazine called it the most important book of the 20th century. Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his citizenship, and banished to twenty years of exile in Europe and Vermont. But imprisonment and exile didn't embitter Solzhenitsyn. He even says that he was thankful for prison, because it gave him a deep insight into human nature. Instead of a binary world of black and white, he famously described what he learned: "If only it were so simple! If only it were true that there exist evil people insidiously committing evil deeds, whom it is necessary simply to separate out and destroy… When I lay there on rotting prison straw... it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an un-uprooted small corner of evil."...
  • Exegesis (1 Samuel 17:1-58)

    by Richard Donovan
  • Stones, Sling and the Spirit of God

    by Nikki Finkelstein-Blair
  • You Have Nothing To Fear

    by Evan Garner
    What if I told you that there is something far more dangerous for us to fear than our own deaths? What if I told you that, of all the terrible things that could happen to you or your loved ones or our nation or the economy, the only thing that you should be afraid of is being afraid? Although his was a political speech, designed to give hope to a nation that was stuck in the Great Depression, FDR’s first inaugural address might as well have been a sermon on today’s readings, if he had only based his hope upon God instead of the American ideal. Roosevelt said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” [4] Over and over—and chiefly in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—God has shown us that it is nameless, unreasoning, and unjustified terror that paralyzes our souls and that faith in Almighty God is the only thing that can set us free from the fear of fear itself..
  • Proper 7B (2024)

    by Libby Tedder Hugus
  • Proper 7B (2024)

    by Brad Roth
  • Proper 7B

    by Howard Wallace

Resources from 2021 to 2023

  • David and Goliath

    by Frederick Buechner
  • Proper 7B (2021)

    by Libby Tedder Hugus
  • Ordinary 12B (2021)

    by Matthew Johnson
  • Authentic Leadership

    by Cheryl Lindsay
  • Sermon Starters (Proper 7B)(2021)

    by Stan Mast
    What qualifies a person to be the main leader of a nation or a state or a church? Commitment to certain causes? Level of education or experience? Personal charisma or moral rectitude? Mental acuity or psychological stability? Campaign promises? Demonstrated loyalty to the organization? Those are the kind of questions people asked in the last election in my country. Interestingly, and sadly, very few seemed to be looking for the one characteristic that made David Israel’s greatest king—a heart commitment to the living God, a deep trust in the saving power of the God of Scripture. Given our standards, is it any wonder that we are always in turmoil?
  • Facing Our Giants

    by Jim McCrea
    ...less than 150 years ago, Thomas Edison was already celebrated as an outstanding inventor thanks to his creation of the phonograph. Even so, many experts scoffed at him when he announced that he would attempt to develop an incandescent light. The best and brightest knew that such a thing could never be done. Edison’s public announcement was considered so ludicrous that the British parliament set up a committee specifically to look into the possibility. Their final report came back with the conclusion, “Good enough for our transatlantic friends ... but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.” A few years later, Henry Morton, who was president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, referred to Edison’s light bulb when he said: “Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure.” Significantly, he said that after Edison had already given the first public demonstration of a working bulb. Similar stories may be told about skeptics weighing in on the possibility of innovation after innovation. In 1899, Literary Digest published this prediction about cars: “The ordinary ‘horseless carriage’ is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.” In 1902, Simon Newcomb, who was then Director of the US Naval Observatory, stated his conclusion that “Flight by machines heavier than air is impractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.” At the end of the very next year, the Wright brothers proved him to be wrong. The so-called “Father of radio,” who was himself an inventor, said “While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially, I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”...

Resources from 2018 to 2020

  • Preaching Helps (Proper 7B)(2018)

    by Doug Bratt
    In his inimitable style, Frederick Buechner describes Goliath: he “stood 10 feet tall in his stocking feet, wore a size 20 collar, a 9 1/2 inch hat, and a 52-inch belt. When he put his full armor on, he looked like a Sherman tank. “Even stripped to the bare essentials, he had plenty to carry around, and flesh and bones were the least of it. There was the burdensome business of having to defend his title against all comers. There were the mangled remains of the runners-up. When he tried to think something out, it was like struggling through a hip-deep bog. When he tried to explain something, it was like pushing a truck uphill. His dark moods were leaden and his light moods elephantine. He considered under-arm deodorants a sign of effeminacy.”
  • Peace, Be Still

    by John Fowler
  • Love God/Love Self?

    by John Holbert
  • When the Storms of Life Are Raging!

    by Beth Johnston
    In the movie, the Green Mile, based on a novel by Stephen King, one of the prisoners on death row is a really, really tall, barrel chested man, described by one of the guards as, “HUGE”. In the movie he towers over everyone else! I read that in reality, this actor is shorter than at least one other cast member! Creative camera angels were used to make him seem much larger than he actually was...
  • Agents of God

    by Kate Matthews
    includes several quotes
  • The Still Point

    by Carl Wilton
    “The world looks different now…. Something is over. In the deepest levels of my existence, something is finished, done. My life is divided into before and after.” So writes Nicholas Wolsterstorff — once Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale. What he’s writing about here is no great philosophical idea. It’s intensely personal. Those lines come from a book of his called Lament for a Son. It’s a memoir of an event that changed his life: an event that seems to violate the natural order, the experience they say no parent should ever have to go through: burying one’s own child. Wolterstorff’s son, Eric, died at the age of 25, in a mountain-climbing accident. “He was a gift to us for twenty-five years. When the gift was finally snatched away, I realized how great it was. Then I could not tell him…. I didn’t know how much I loved him until he was gone. Is love like that?” Yes, I’m sorry to say: I think it very often is...
  • Proper 7B (2018)

    by Alphonetta Wines

Resources from 2015 to 2017

  • Who You Are

    by Steve Garnaas-Holmes
  • The Bigger They Are...

    by Bob Cornwall
  • Peace, Be Still

    by Jane Ann Ferguson
    ("The tale Lady Gregory recorded is of two Irish warriors, Streng of the ancient race of the Firbolgs, and Bres of the Tuatha de Danaan who had just come to Ireland. Here is the story in the words of Lady Gregory:...")
  • Proper 7B (2015)

    by Scott Hoezee
    ("In his fine book on David, Leap over a Wall, Eugene Peterson states that the image in the David & Goliath story that most arrests his attention is the one of young David kneeling down by the brook to gather up his five smooth stones. Peterson thinks that the whole David saga is finally about becoming human, about awakening to the reality of a God-infused world...")
  • Stories of Crisis

    by Charles Hoffacker
    The man in the wheelchair was fifty-three, but he appeared almost infinitely older because of what cancer had done to him. The dozens of men who had gathered to hear him speak were well aware of his illness and how this would be the last time he would meet with them. The man in the wheelchair was Bonaventure Zerr, abbot of a Benedictine community in Oregon. The men around him were monks of that community. Eight years earlier, they had elected him as abbot, expecting that he would occupy the position for a good twenty years. They knew him well, this very large man with an imposing intellect who yet was totally affable and compassionate and confident. They knew him well, and in a short time he would be dead. The assembled monks looked on Bonaventure Zerr with affection and respect. They also looked on him with reverence, for according to the Rule of Benedict, the abbot holds the place of Christ in the monastery. So here was their Christ – Christ in a wheelchair, days away from death. His very last words to the assembled monks were almost exactly what he said to them moments after he had been elected abbot eight years before. “In biblical times,” he told them from his wheelchair, “when God’s people were in trouble, he would send an angel to help. He has not sent an angel this time, but I have an angel’s message.” This bear of a man, sick yet strong, slammed his fist down on the table in front of him, and commanded with a loud voice, “Stop being afraid!”
  • In the Name of YHWH?

    by John Holbert
  • *Facing Our Giants

    by James McCrea
    ("The families of the Mother Emmanuel Church victims have already given us an excellent example. Bethane Middleton-Brown, the sister of the murdered DePayne Middleton-Doctor said, 'I am a work in progress and I acknowledge that I am very angry. But one thing that Depayne taught me is that we are the family that love built.' Then she added, 'We have no room for hate, so we have to forgive.'...")
  • Already Equipped (Samuel)

    Art and Faith by Lynn Miller
  • Five Smooth Stones

    by Larry Patten
  • Proper 7B (2015)

    by Wesley White
  • The Overcomers

    by Carl Wilton
    ["There's an old story about an archaeologist who was digging in the desert in Israel. He came upon an ancient mummy. After looking it over, he immediately called the curator of a famous natural-history museum. "I've just discovered a 3,000 year-old mummy of a man who died of heart failure!" said the archaeologist, with great excitement. "Well, I guess you'd better bring him in, said the curator. "We'll check out your findings..." and another illustration, as well as some discussion of racism after the shooting in Charleston]

Resources from 2009 to 2014

Resources from the Archives

Children's Resources and Dramas