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I'd love you to open your Bibles, whether in your hand or on your phone. We're going to open the scriptures in the Old Testament at 1 Samuel chapter 17. We'll look at just three verses at the end of this chapter.
The context is probably the most famous story of the Old Testament. Even people who didn't grow up in church know this story — it's known in the wider culture. We're not going to focus on the story itself, but on three verses that happen afterwards.
There's a giant called Goliath who has been terrorizing God's people. God's people are cowed, pinned back — with this sense that they can't really progress or do what they're meant to be doing while they're being terrorized. And then the Lord raises up a young person, a small person, an insignificant person called David, who takes the giant down.
That's just happened. And at the end of the chapter, this is what we read:
As Saul watched David going out to meet the Philistine, he said to Abner, commander of the army, "Abner, whose son is that young man?" Abner replied, "As surely as you live, your majesty, I don't know." The king said, "Find out whose son this young man is." As soon as David returned from killing the Philistine, Abner took him and brought him before Saul, with David still holding the Philistine's head. "Whose son are you, young man?" Saul asked him. And David said, "I am the son of your servant Jesse of Bethlehem."
There's a story told of an inquisitive young boy who went to ask his dad about the origin of life. "Dad, where do people come from?" The father said, "Well, son, a long time ago God made two people called Adam and Eve. They got together and made babies. Their babies grew up and made babies, and that is where people come from."
The boy wasn't totally persuaded, so he went to his mum. "Mum, where do people come from?" She said, "Son, millions of years ago we were apes, and then we evolved to be like we are today." So the boy goes back to his dad and says, "Dad, you lied to me — this is what Mum said." And the father said, "No, son. Your mother was talking about her side of the family."
Three times in three verses, we have this critical question asked:
One of the things we need to know when we read the Old Testament is that it wasn't written in English — it was originally written in Hebrew. And Hebrew has rules of language, just like every language.
Think about how, if you were sending a text message and wanted to emphasize a word in the English-speaking world, you might put that word in all capitals. Caps lock makes it stand out. (I had to tell my 80-year-old parents to please switch caps lock off when they email me — it feels very aggressive!)
In the Hebrew language, emphasis is provided by repetition. You repeat the word that is important. So if I wanted to say "My husband is really handsome" — and you can judge for yourselves afterwards, but I think it's true — in Hebrew I would say, "My husband is handsome, handsome."
But to repeat something three times is a category beyond categories — it bursts apart the laws of language. That is to say: this is utterly mind-blowing. That's why, when Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up and the train of his robe filling the temple, he overhears the seraphim saying not just that God is holy, or holy, holy — but holy, holy, holy.
So when you read the scriptures, repetition is like a spotlight onto the page. When you see something three times, this is category-bustingly important. Here, at the end of one of the most famous stories of deliverance in history, we have this question repeated three times.
So this morning, church, I want to ask you this question: Whose son are you?
Now, about 50% of us might immediately be thinking, "Hold on — I'm a woman. That question doesn't feel relevant to me." But in the Bible, we're invited as men and women into metaphors. So men, you get to be part of the bride of Christ — sorry, but it's true. And women, you get to be the son.
Here's the thing about a son in the Old Testament worldview of the ancient world: the son carried the DNA of the parent. When you looked upon a son, you were looking upon the likeness of the parent.
So when Saul saw something truly astonishing — something that amazed and gripped him as king — the question wasn't "Wow, who is that?" The question was "Whose is that? Whose son is that?"
To be the son meant that you operated in the name, the power, the potential, the wealth, the influence, the hopes, the dreams, the vision, the character, the compassion, and the power of the parent. To be the son meant something really powerful.
In the New Testament, we're all sons. Paul puts it like this in Romans chapter 8:
Those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves so that you live in fear; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, "Abba, Father." The Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. And if we are children, then we are heirs — heirs with Christ.
To be a child of the living God means to live in living connection with a powerful God who speaks.
A few years ago I was doing some work in Chinese universities, and we ended up in Xinjiang province in the north, where the majority of people at this particular university were from the Uyghur people — a Muslim background. The Uyghurs experienced persecution in that context.
In my group of about 20 people, I saw a girl who was clearly hungry, thirsty, wanting to ask questions — but she just didn't say a word. Whatever I tried, I couldn't draw her out. She was obviously frightened by the others in the group.
Afterwards we went for dinner, and two very annoying things happened. Annoying thing number one: another member of our team described what had happened in his group. You know how you sit there thinking, "Why is it always someone else the good stuff happens to?"
He described how the opening question in his group was, "Is it true that Jesus is coming back again soon?" My friend said, "I'd love to answer that, but can I ask why you're asking?" And this young Uyghur man said, "Two imams from our village recently went on the Hajj — the pilgrimage to Mecca. On the way, they both together saw a man dressed in white who appeared to them and said, 'Jesus is coming back soon. You need to get ready.'" And they asked, "Can you explain it to us?" I mean, talk about an open goal — here's the ball, kick it in!
So there I was, thinking my testimony was that I'd been in a group where there might have been someone interested, who didn't say a word.
Annoying thing number two came at dinner. We were with some missionaries. At that time, the scriptures in that part of the world had been smuggled in at great cost. One of the missionaries took me aside and said, "I feel the Holy Spirit is saying I should give you these two John's Gospels in Uyghur. These are really precious."
I said, "We're going home tomorrow, and I'm not going to meet anyone else. You should keep them — they'll be more useful to you than me." But he slid them across the table and said, "No. God is telling me you need them." So, with the worst attitude ever, I put them in my bag and, back at the hotel, put them on my bedside table.
The next morning, the phone in our hotel room rang. The front desk said, "There are two young women here to see you. Can they come up?" I said, "Yes, that's fine." They came up — and it was the girl from the group and her friend.
She said, "Last night I had a dream. A man dressed in white appeared to me and said, 'Don't let those white people leave the country. They've got the book of life to give you.'"
So we handed over the John's Gospels and spent two hours speaking with them, and then leading these two wonderful Uyghur young people to Jesus.
Whose son are you? If you've accepted Jesus, you get to be a son of the living God — an heir and a carrier of the character, the power, and the inheritance of the Father.
Let's think about what it means to live as sons. The first name for God I want us to consider is Elohim. This name comes 2,570 times in the Old Testament, and 32 times in Genesis chapter 1 alone.
Elohim speaks of God as creator, preserver, transcendent, mighty and strong. This is the God who brought the universe into existence from nothing, the author of all complexity and beauty, the author of the laws of nature.
Elohim in Hebrew has a plural ending — which speaks of God being more than one — but his name is always followed by singular verbs. So God is both one and many. He is purposeful, intelligent, unique. God is endlessly vast and fascinating and beautiful and stunning. In no single lifetime could an individual, however clever, come to the end of discovering things about Elohim.
In other words, there is absolutely no dull religion or piety anywhere near him. Bertrand Russell, the great atheist of the 20th century, spent his life arguing that God does not exist. His daughter became a Christian, and she wrote this:
I would have liked to convince my father that I had found what he had been looking for — the ineffable something he had longed for all his life. I would have liked to persuade him that the search for God does not have to be in vain. But it was hopeless. He had known too many blind Christians, bleak moralists who sucked the joy from life and persecuted their opponents. He would never have been able to find the truth they were hiding.
Elohim is the opposite of that kind of religion. He is the one who brings our minds — atrophied on TV box sets and TikTok — alive with neural connection and possibility. He empowers his children to carry his presence and creativity into his world.
Imagine what that could mean if it were true that we carried the DNA, creativity and power of this God into the world. So I want to call you, Hillsong Church:
As you think about the work God has called you to, remember whose you are. Let his power fill you, so that we carry the glory of Elohim into his world.
I want to prophesy that in this place, individuals, adults, and the next generation you're raising would be so filled with the power of Elohim that we would take his glory into his world and make an impact on the nations. That we would write films that shape the imagination of generations, design transport systems that transform cities, solve climate change and cure cancer. May we dream bigger, children of God, because we are sons of Elohim — living lives that call forth not the question "Wow, who's that?" but "Whose is that?"
Secondly, God is El Shaddai — often translated God Almighty. It comes 48 times in the Old Testament, and 31 of those are in the book of Job. (I had a friend who became a Christian and for years thought Job was about jobs, so he never read it!) The book of Job is actually about suffering — and about how God is God even when we go through really difficult times. God is El Shaddai even in a suffering world.
Now, the idols of the nations in Hebrew are called the shedim. An idol is simply an entity that is dependent on its worshippers for its existence. It may be made by human hands out of metal or stone, or it may be something we project with our minds and give worship to. But either way, the shedim are dependent on their worshippers. They require creation.
But El Shaddai is the uncreated God. He is all-sufficient. He does not need anything from humanity. He is not made by us for our convenience, disposable if things don't work out. He is not a figment of our imaginations. He is almighty over material things, over circumstances, and over us.
But here's the beautiful thing: the Hebrew word shad also speaks of the bosom of the mother. El Shaddai is an extraordinary, tender, intimate kind of almightiness. We are nursed and carried by the one who is utterly almighty — even in the storms of this life.
When my husband and I were in our early twenties, he was called to lead a church in Britain's most notorious gang neighbourhood in London. This was a massive challenge. In England, when someone's been murdered, a yellow murder board is placed in the street calling for witnesses — and we walked past five murder boards on our introduction to the parish. We thought maybe we needed to see a shrink, but we sensed God calling us.
That church had been built in the 1950s. Many people had come from the Caribbean to help rebuild Britain after the war, and a group of Caribbean people had settled there, even though they experienced racism in the community and the church. Over time the neighbourhood and the church declined — down to fewer than 20 people. But there was a group of 12 praying women who had an unbroken chain of prayer meetings from the late 1950s, still continuing today.
When the diocese decided to sell the building to developers, these women felt God had said their church was not just going to live, but that thousands of young people would come to know Jesus there. So every Thursday night they kept praying. Eventually they put "do not enter" tape around the church, and one of them told me, "There's no archdeacon on earth that can tell us we can't pray in our own building." They saved the church through their prayers.
We began to see a move of the Spirit — hundreds of young people coming to know the Lord, often from very difficult and violent backgrounds. One day, about two or three years in, my husband Frog was called out to a gang fight happening with machetes and knives. He walked into the middle of these warring sides and said, in a very British way, "Stop. I'm your vicar. God doesn't want you to die. Jesus loves you, and he doesn't want you to murder anyone."
As they looked on astonished, one of these praying women walked into the middle of the fight and said, "I know your mother. I know your grandmother. God has a plan for you, and the plan is not violence. Come to know him." And they led a little revival service right there in the middle of the streets of Peckham.
Whose son are you? That woman knew that God is almighty — even when circumstances are against us, even when things look like they're declining, even when it feels like we're going backwards. She knew God as God Almighty, and she could walk in the confidence of sonship, confronting the power of the enemy.
Thirdly: whose son are you? If you've come to know Jesus, you get to be the heir and carrier of the character, presence, compassion, potential and resources of the God known in Genesis chapter 22, verse 14, as Jehovah Jireh — the Lord who provides.
There's an interesting play on words in the Hebrew: God's provision and his pre-vision — that he sees, and he provides.
This name is revealed only once in the Bible, in the context of Abraham and Isaac climbing the hill for the sacrifice of the son. Sometimes in our picture Bibles we see Isaac as a child, but the text is clear that Isaac was an adult male and Abraham an elderly man. Isaac could easily have overpowered his father. Isaac carries the wood up the mountain.
At the moment of the beloved son giving his life, God intervenes. Abraham is stopped, and there's a ram in the thicket. This is prophetic: Abraham is not the one meant to give his son for love of the world — God the Father is going to do that. And one day Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, would climb the very same hill. Mount Moriah is the mountain Jesus was crucified on. Jesus would carry the wood for his own sacrifice, because our God is the God who provides.
What difference would it make if you lived as a son in the sense of Jehovah Jireh?
A few years ago, Frog and I had the amazing experience of smuggling Bibles into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, meeting the top leadership and giving Bibles to their education, foreign and religion ministers. The religion minister had been praying for two years for a Bible. As nineteen-year-old students, we had dreams, and God took us there and opened doors — an extraordinary God story.
On the way home, we had to travel back through a land border. Being students, we had only $50 between the three of us and no credit card. At the land border between Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, there's about a kilometre of no man's land, with landmines on either side of the road. We were trying to catch a train that only ran twice a week to make our flight home. But the Turkmen guards wouldn't let us through.
Then a sandstorm began. If you've ever been in a desert sandstorm, it's frightening — so dark you can't see your hand in front of your face. So there were landmines on either side, we couldn't get through the gate, and we'd missed the train.
Frog, ever resourceful, started leafing through the Bible saying, "Let's look in Proverbs to see if there's anywhere God says it's okay to give a bribe." I said, "We've only got $50 — we need it." Then he said, "I'll hold up my British passport and say it's my right under international law to speak to the British consul and demand to use the telephone. And if that doesn't work, you cry." I said, "At this point, that will not be difficult at all." He tried it — and the guards just laughed.
So we were stuck in the middle of no man's land, in some of the most dangerous territory on earth, unable to get into either country. (Great marriage prep, I can tell you.)
I will never forget: into the midst of that darkness, two headlights pierced through. A Red Cross truck arrived. We told him our situation, and he said, "Don't worry. I know the best friend of the Turkmen president. I'll take you to him — he'll write a letter with his stamp, and these guards will have to let you through." I asked him, "How often do you come through this border?" He said, "About once every three months."
He took us, we got the letter, came back, and the guards let us through. But now we were standing in Turkmenistan in the middle of nowhere. The train station was a couple of kilometres away, but there was no point — we'd missed the train, and the next was in three days.
So we stood there praying. And out of nowhere a car appeared — like something from a 1960s James Bond film, a tiny Soviet-era Trabant. The person in the front wound down the window and said in perfect English, "Can we help you?"
We got out our map. The closest city was about a 14-hour drive away. We asked if they could drive us there so we could catch a bus. We got out our last $50 and said, "We'll pay you this if you drive the three of us." They nodded. After that, they couldn't speak English at all.
We squeezed into that tiny back seat — me in the middle between two six-foot men and our three rucksacks — and we drove. We gave them our last portion of scripture, a John's Gospel in Russian, and they just wept when they saw it. Then we began to sing and worship the Lord, praising him for all the wonders he had done — rescuing us from the jaws of death.
As we sang about the glory of God, the glory of the Lord filled that car in a way I've never experienced since. Everything turned yellow. This couple were weeping and just saying, "Jesus." This went on for about 14 hours, which felt like half an hour. They even gave us food — we hadn't eaten for a couple of days.
Eventually we got out at the bus station, cramped, put on our rucksacks — and turned around to thank them. But the car had completely disappeared. We don't know whether they were angels sent to provide food and deliverance, or Christians prophetically prompted who didn't want to be paid. But we know that God is Jehovah Jireh, the God who provides.
Whose son are you? Is Jehovah Jireh operative in your life?
A little while ago I was ministering with leaders from the underground church in China. One of them, having ministered to pastors in our nation, said that one of the things he'd observed in the West was that we were so proficient and brilliant at what we did that we had absolutely no need for God.
What would it look like to live as sons in confident assurance of active connection — being heirs of the God who is Jehovah Jireh? What would it look like to step out in such a way that we need to experience God as our provider?
Maybe, Hillsong Church, God is stirring his people and calling us to activate in sonship — not just to be Christians who love the Lord and are going to heaven, but Christians living in active sonship, taking territory for the kingdom in ways that need God to show up as the living God — the one who is almighty, the one who is Elohim, the one who provides.
So I want to ask you this morning: do you need an encounter? Do you need a sonship reset?
It might be that some of us have never actually made that decision to become sons. It's really simple:
God so loved the world that he gave his Son, so that we could have eternal life and not perish.
If you would like to step into sonship — a relationship with the living God — that possibility is here for us today. We can simply pray and invite him in. That's all that is needed.
But I sense that some of us made that decision a long time ago, and we've been coasting. The Lord loves you and your family — you're going to be with him in heaven. But there's more for you on earth. There's sonship to experience today, here in Australia and in the nations of the world. God is calling you to live in that sonship, and to raise the next generation in it — perhaps to cure cancer, to solve some of the intractable problems of the world, to be released in great feats of creativity, to win nations and plant churches.
Are you up for it?
If you'd like to pray for the first time — or the first time in a long time — if you've been far away as a prodigal, or if you've never come home, I invite you to raise a hand, and we're going to pray together:
Jesus, I'm sorry for the distance between us, and I'm sorry for the things I've done that have spoiled my life and other people's lives. Thank you for dying on the cross for me. Thank you for winning forgiveness for my sins. Please come into my life now by the power of your Holy Spirit. Please make me that son this morning, that I could live for you. In Jesus' name, Amen.
