In a dark movie from a couple of years ago, The Clearing, Robert Redford plays the role of a very wealthy business man. He has been very successful in his career and made a lot of money and has a beautiful, loving and supportive family. That, too, had come at a hefty price. Like too many, he had strayed once during his marriage, but he and his wife had been able to reconcile and even restore their love for each other.

On his way to work one morning, Redford’s character is kidnapped and held for ransom by a disturbed and disgruntled former employee. While the family seeks the help of the police in securing the safe return of their husband and father, Redford begins to realize that he is not ever going to see them again. He’s seen the kidnapper’s face and knows that he’ll never let him go alive.

He finally asks for the privilege of writing a letter to his wife which she doesn’t receive until long after the kidnapping is over and it is clear that her husband is dead. One evening, some months later, as she is lying on her bed alone, she has a conversation with her dead husband, something many people do in their grief, sometimes for years. In the conversation, she sees her husband leaning over her, saying to her the same thing he had written in his last letter. "Do you love me," he asks. "Yes," she says with more sincerity than most people will ever hear love expressed. "Then," Redford says, "I have everything I need."

Those words had come back to him as he knew his life was about to end. He had come to the end of a very successful career, still working long after he had to and with more money to his name than hundreds of people could ever need in a lifetime. But, the one thing that sustained him in the darkest hour of his life was not his career success or his athletic good looks or his prominence, but the simple knowledge that he was loved by the most important person in his world. "Do you love me?" "Yes." "Then, I have everything that I need."

Do you have everything you need? Do you know it? Are you sure? Enough money in savings to live 20 or 30 years after retirement and even run and play a little in the meantime? Good health? Family? Friends? Meaningful career? Anything missing? If anything is missing, how important is it to you to have it and what are you willing to do to get it?

It’s hard to believe that anything was missing from David’s life. King of Israel. Servants at every hand at his beck and call. More wealth than hundreds could ever spend. Commander-in-chief of one of the most powerful armies on the planet. Athletic, good-looking, strong. Certainly, more women wanting him than hundreds of men could enjoy.

But, there must have been one thing missing. And, he saw it the day his eye caught Bathsheba, taking a bath. In this case, it’s Bathsheba. And, the rest is tragic, family-busting history. The kind of history that is written when one person decides that he doesn’t have everything he needs, finds what he thinks is missing and determines to have it at any cost. We all know the story, or should, of how David called for Bathsheba, took her to bed, impregnated her and then had her husband set up to be killed in battle to hide the mess he’d made of things.

The details we don’t know and can only speculate are tragic. Bathsheba is not just a character in an interesting story. The scripture tells us she was the daughter of Eliam. Whoever else she was, Bathsheba was the apple of some daddy’s eye. She was the wife of Uriah, a married woman, a woman who had promised herself to one man for one life.

But, David was who he was, too. Nothing could stand in the way of his getting his way. He was the King, after all. We’ll never know Bathsheba’s side of the story, whether she went to David’s bed gladly or reluctantly. She really didn’t have much choice. The King had called. In that day, when the king called, people laid down, one way or another. The question then goes begging. How much is too much? If something is missing, what is it? And, what are you willing to do to have it?

We know what David was willing to do? And, before you judge him, remember that this was God’s man of the day, a man after God’s own heart, the scripture tells us. A man as much singularly responsible for the history of Israel as we know it today as anyone else.

Without dissecting the gory details of adultery, here is something we might learn from this whole event. We shouldn’t need this story in scripture to tell us what evidence all around us today demonstrates. That sexual intercourse outside of a committed marriage relationship always comes with a price. The bill may not come soon, but come it will.

That’s something less and less believed, not just by people who make R-rated movies, but by people who crowd the pews any given Sunday. More and more, I am having conversations with Christian people who question that sexual intercourse should be reserved for a committed relationship and who see it is as nothing more than an extension of passionate necking. Some even go so far as to attempt to distinguish between what they call "adultery," and just "recreational sex," married or not. And, guess what? The divorce rate is now higher among people who identify themselves as Christians than among those who do not? Anyone surprised?

Just for the record, may I say it again? Just for what it’s worth. Sexual intercourse outside of a committed marriage relationship always comes with a price. The bill may not come soon, but come it will. As true as that is, that’s not what this story teaches most graphically. What this story teaches is that there is no more dangerous person in the world than a deeply spiritual person with an empty heart, something missing they are willing to do anything to obtain.

Even now, this very morning, within a stone’s throw of where Bathsheba took her bath and David took her down, there are people dying because other people who believe their cause is the cause of holy God are willing to do anything, including bombing some of God’s other children, to get what they think is missing from their lives. What’s missing in your life? Anything? What are you willing to do to get it?

If you had everything you wanted right now, do you really believe that would be enough? Or, will you, like David, climb to the top of the mountain only to discover there is something still just a little out of reach? You don’t have to be wealthy, either, or powerful, or at the end of your career, to make this discovery.

Just this week, I had a conversation with one of our young professionals who went with us to Latvia. She found something there she’d never experienced before. She wanted to stay. She wants to go back. She has come, like many of her generation, to detest the obscenity of American materialism, and believes that there must be more in life than just getting a degree, making a lot of money, retiring and then dying, having left all of her wealth to her children and grandchildren who will spend it at warp speed after her death.

I am compassionate about her frustration with what America keeps marketing as a meaningful life. I encouraged her that God may well have used what happened to her there to awaken a deeper call in her and that she should listen to that voice until it becomes clearer. But, I told her the same thing I tell married people who are bathing with someone else’s Sheba and considering leaving their Uriah or their Bathsheba for someone else’s David. Never leave someone for someone.

The last thing Latvia needs is a frustrated American looking for a meaning in life while, no matter how sincerely, posing as a missionary. I told her that, whatever leaves her feeling empty here would only follow her there. That if she is feeling empty here, she needs to explore that so that, if she goes to Latvia, or anywhere, she’ll go to give and not expecting to find something there she cannot find here.

Never leave someone for someone. Because, what you will discover in one broken heart after another and one devastated family after another is that, until your faith finds a resting place in the God who made your heart, your heart will go on destructively searching, doing damage to yourself and others, and leaving you at the end with nothing but a trail of broken dreams.

The Psalmist wrote, "The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’" (Psalm 14:1, NIV). There is more than one way to say there is no God. We can intellectually choose to deny God’s existence. It would seem that the person who chooses this has far more to explain, upon examining all the evidence, than the person who would simply affirm, in light of all the evidence, "There must be a God."

There is another way to say, "There is no God." We can say there is a God, sing it every Sunday at church, read the scripture, teach a Sunday School class, then leave this place to live as though there is no God by continually identifying all the things that are really missing from our lives and then paying any price necessary to get them.

It truly frightening, for example, how many people say there is a God, but who hoard all they make, never trusting God with their tithes and offerings. Young people, there are people in every church who have been singing “My Faith Has Found a Resting Place, not in device or creed . . .” who will go to their grave never having known the joy of giving. Some of them have made enormous sums of money, millions and millions, listening to the preacher speak of God’s free grace but withholding out of fear that if they give their tithe that God who loves them without reserve will abandon them and they won’t have enough, and never knowing what life could have been like had they been generous, too.

You can get very wealthy and never share one dime with the Kingdom work in this place. But, again, you can also go to your grave never having known the joy of giving, saying all along, "There is a God." Young people, don’t be one of them. Start giving now so you can know what life is like when you say there is a God and live like it, too.

But, whatever we do, all of us. We should be very careful about believing that just because we believe there is a God that means there isn’t something still missing. What is your heart telling you, right now? Is something, anything, missing? The most dangerous person in the world is a person who believes that their way of believing makes them right with God and is willing to do whatever it takes to get what they believe is still missing.

David had a need, decided he could meet it better than God could and found a way to get his needs met – no matter what it did to anyone else. A marriage was destroyed, a daddy watched his little girl shamed, a man died and more than one person’s heart, including David’s, would soon be broken.

Is there anything missing in your life today? Do you know what it is? Have you spotted it? What are you willing to do to get it? Once you’ve gotten it, do you think that will be enough? The most dangerous heart in the world is a heart claims there is a God but that has never found a resting place with God. There are lots of dangerous people in this world, worshipping God, even this morning.

Could you honestly have this conversation with God? You ask God, "Do you love me?" "Yes," God says. "Then," you say, "I have everything I need." Could you?