Discover True Strength
Three Key takeaways
Weakness does not disqualify you. God chose the youngest, smallest and most overlooked son in the family to be king. When you come to him honestly in your weakness, it draws in his strength, because his power is made perfect there.
God looks at the heart, and he takes time to form it. The world rewards appearance, performance and popularity, but God is at work on the inside. Years of trial and of feeling overlooked are often his way of preparing your heart to carry responsibility well.
God's strength is given for a purpose. The Father adopts the unlikely, the Son is pictured in the anointed king, and the Holy Spirit empowers the unready. You are called into the same purposes, and you cannot fulfil them in your own strength.
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Who does God choose to use? Many people quietly assume the answer is someone else: someone more capable, more confident or more spiritually impressive. The story of David's anointing in 1 Samuel 16 is written to overturn that assumption. Set around 1000 BC, it shows God passing over the obvious candidates and choosing the one nobody thought to invite.
The story so far
Israel has lived in the land for a few hundred years, with great moments and bad ones, times of following God and times of ignoring him. King Saul began well, but decisions that took him off track led God to say that his line would not be the kingly line of Israel.
In 1 Samuel 16, God sends the prophet Samuel, who anointed Saul, on a new mission: "I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons." Samuel fears that Saul will kill him, so God tells him to take a heifer and say he has come to sacrifice. Samuel consecrates Jesse and his sons, and Eliab, tall and impressive, seems the obvious choice. But God says not to look at his appearance or his height, because he has rejected him. Seven sons pass before Samuel and none is chosen. Only then does Jesse mention the youngest, who is keeping the sheep. David is brought in, God says, "Arise, anoint him, for this is he," and from that day the Spirit of the Lord rushes upon David.
Strength in weakness
A story written to emphasise weakness.
The whole passage seems to go out of its way to make a point. David is not even named until the final sentence. He is the youngest of Jesse's sons, and the Hebrew word for youngest can also mean smallest. In that culture the eldest held the place of prestige and honour, and standing decreased as you went down the family. David is at the bottom of the pile.
He is also overlooked by his own father. Samuel, a figure of great standing, invites the family to a feast and a sacrifice, and nobody tells David. He is left in the fields. Even after seven sons have passed before Samuel, it takes Samuel's question for Jesse to say there is one more.
There is a less obvious detail too. Samuel consecrates the family, which involved a ritual washing to remove any uncleanness under the law and to prepare them for worship and sacrifice. David is not there. Out with the sheep, he is ritually unclean and probably literally unclean as well. He is the youngest, the smallest, the overlooked and the unclean.
Feeling at the back of the line
Most people recognise something of this. You can feel spiritually small, as though everyone else knows their Bible, prays wonderfully and worships with enthusiasm, so God would use anyone before you. You can feel overlooked, as though other people get the attention and the opportunities. You can feel unclean, aware of things you have said, thought and done, while other people seem to be better Christians. That adds up to a long list of reasons why you belong at the back of the line for God's anointing, calling and purpose.
The passage exists to say that this is not true. God is choosing the king of Israel, the one who will be the primary forerunner of Jesus Christ, who is called the Son of David. And the man he picks is forgotten in the field, ritually unclean and the youngest of them all. God plucks him out of obscurity to use him in an amazing way.
Weakness draws in god’s strength
Think of magnets. Opposite poles are drawn together, and the same poles repel each other. Something similar seems to be true here: your weakness attracts God's strength, and strength repels strength. The world teaches you to look strong, so people come before God presenting strength, and it does not draw in his power.
The invitation is to strip off the pretence and come as you are. You can say that you are weak, unclean, forgotten and the smallest, and that none of it disqualifies you, because his power is made perfect in weakness. This story is a picture of the whole dynamic of the gospel. You come in weakness and it attracts his strength. The wisdom of the cross turns the wisdom of the world upside down, and Jesus' strength was seen most when his weakness was on display on a cross.
A particular temptation for men
This is especially relevant for young men. Wanting to be strong is not bad. It is part of how God designed men, and it is built into their psychology. But masculinity goes wrong when strength is displayed to the world, often as physical strength, rather than used to defend others. In the kingdom of God you go on a journey of learning your weakness, because your weakness invites in God's strength, and his strength is better than any you can offer yourself.
Strength in the heart
Perhaps the most famous verse in the passage is verse 7, where the Lord says to Samuel: "Do not look on his appearance, or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart."
The world trains you in externals. What you look like, how you behave, your performance and your popularity are all rewarded, so you are pulled into patterns of behaviour as though the outside were what mattered. It is a hard lesson to unlearn.
Even samuel needed correcting
The story is quietly encouraging here. Samuel is one of the great figures of the Bible. He followed God from childhood, grew up in the temple, heard God's voice and obeyed it, and in his farewell speech could say that none of his words had fallen to the ground. He had anointed Saul, who stood head and shoulders above everyone, handsome and rich, and who made a terrible king. Yet at Bethlehem Samuel takes one look at Eliab and assumes he is the one. God has to say that this is not how it works in his kingdom. If Samuel needed that correction, it is no wonder it takes you so long to remember that the Lord looks on the heart.
Jesus presses into the heart
This is why the teaching of Jesus still pierces the heart two thousand years later, in every culture and language. In Matthew 5, in the Sermon on the Mount, he says again and again, "You have heard." Do not murder, but do not even be angry. Do not commit adultery, but do not even look lustfully. Love your neighbour, but he says to love your enemies. He is refocusing attention from behaviour to the heart, because that is what the Lord is looking at.
In Matthew 6, he continues. When you give, do not let your right hand know what your left is doing. When you pray, go into your room and pray before your Father, not to impress others. When you fast, wash your face and put oil on, so that it is before God and not for the reward of other people's praise. What is going on in your heart is what matters, which is why you can read the same teaching again and again and still find yourself struggling to follow it.
The long training of the heart
David's life shows the same thing. He is anointed, but the next ten years are God forming and shaping his heart. He does not become king at once. He has to learn to submit to an ungodly king for years, then to live as a fugitive hunted by an army, feeling overlooked, forgotten and badly treated. All of it is part of a purposeful training programme, so that when he becomes king, he can be a good one.
Scripture shows the pattern repeatedly. At seventeen, Joseph has dreams of ruling, and then for thirteen years life is miserable: slavery, mistreatment and prison, even as he tries to be righteous. All that time God is preparing his heart, until he can raise him up as Prime Minister of Egypt. Peter stands up at Pentecost as a great apostle, but six weeks earlier he denied Jesus, having projected his strength by saying that even if everyone else fell away, he would not. He had to learn something of his own weakness before he could receive power from on high.
This is how God shapes people he can trust with responsibility, people who can shepherd others and bring his kingdom. Often it involves trials. You feel overlooked but choose to follow him anyway. You feel insecure but trust his promise. You feel unclean but believe the gospel. Again and again, it forms faith, character and humility, so that in your weakness God can safely display his power through you.
strength for purpose
There is a purposefulness in this passage, and you can see the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit at work in it.
The Father sovereignly adopts into his family a lad who has been forgotten by his own dad. It is a picture of how God chooses you out of obscurity, in spite of your weakness and sin, and brings you into the centre of his family and his purposes as a loving, caring Father.
The Son is pictured too, because all of this happens in Bethlehem. Samuel walks up to the town, a wise old man ready to anoint an unlikely king, and it foreshadows what happens when Jesus is born there and wise men come to honour this unlikely king who will rule over God's people among all nations. David is called the anointed one, which in Hebrew is the word Messiah, and the whole passage prepares you for the ultimate Messiah who is coming.
The Spirit is there in the very last verse: "the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward." The Father sends out his Spirit to anoint and empower people who are unlikely, unprepared, unready and unclean. God's presence in David's life is what qualifies him to be king. He becomes a worshipper, whose songs are still sung three thousand years later. He becomes a prophet, whose psalms teach about the Messiah and about Jesus a thousand years before he was born. He becomes an anointed leader who takes God's people into battle with boldness, and a shepherd of Israel just as he now shepherds sheep, a picture of God's own shepherd.
These are the things God calls people into and wants to put in you: worship, prophetic insight, leadership, boldness and courage. You need God's Spirit on you for all of them, and here the Holy Spirit comes first on the overlooked younger son.
So if you feel like the smallest, and would be at the wrong end of the line to be used by God, today may be the day he wants to come upon you and empower you, in ways you have not yet got your head around. If you feel forgotten or overlooked by family or church, God wants to remind you that you have not been forgotten by the living God. He knows your name. If you feel unclean, and think you do not qualify to come into his presence, he invites you to draw near, so that he can come to you by his Spirit, fill you and empower you.
At redemption
At Redemption, the story of David's anointing shapes how we think about ourselves. The dream is to see the kingdom of God spread and multiply across the city and then across the nations, and that will only happen if people, in their weakness, know something of God's strength upon them. Without it, a church is simply a gathering of people, doing the same things in five years' time. We are learning to come to God without pretence, to trust that he looks at the heart rather than the outside, and to receive his Spirit for whatever he calls us to do.
