Three Key takeaways
Your response in the lowest moments reveals the most. When everything collapses and even the people around you turn against you, the question is where you turn. David's strength came from the Lord his God, not from a pep talk.
Jesus has won you back, and not one is lost. Everyone the Father gives to the Son, the Son purchases and keeps. No one in the history of the world has sinned so badly that Jesus says, "We will leave that one behind."
Strengthen yourself by preaching truth to yourself. Rather than listening to your feelings, talk to your soul about who God is, what he has done and what he has promised. Then defy discouragement and say, "I shall yet praise him."
What do you do when everything falls apart?
What do you do when the worst happens and there is nobody left to lean on? It is one of the hardest tests a person can face, and 1 Samuel 30 shows how King David faced it. The chapter offers a pattern for leading yourself when your heart and mind are in turmoil. It also points beyond David to Jesus.
rock bottom at ziklag
David lived about three thousand years ago as king of Israel. His story begins with a shepherd boy, forgotten by his father in the field, whom God chose and anointed to be king. Years later, he had known real highs, such as defeating Goliath, and real struggles, such as being hunted and oppressed by King Saul. In 1 Samuel 30, he reaches what may be the lowest point of his life, just before he becomes king.
David and his men return to their home city of Ziklag and find it burned to the ground. The Amalekites have raided it and carried off the wives, sons and daughters. The Amalekites were no friends of Israel, so this was a moment of extreme panic and distress. The men "raised their voices and wept until they had no more strength to weep" (1 Samuel 30:4).
Then it gets worse. Grief turns to blame, and the people David has led for years start talking about stoning him. His city is burned, his wives are taken, and the men who gathered around him are now threatening his life.
The text gives few details about what happened next, only this: "But David strengthened himself in the Lord his God" (1 Samuel 30:6). Rick Warren has observed that a person's greatness is not determined by fame, position or wealth, but by what it takes to discourage them. You can tell a lot about someone by watching how they respond to criticism or failure. This is the defining moment of David's life. The very next chapter records the death of Saul, so David's faith is tested to the utmost just before God raises him up as king.
seeking god before acting
David could have been a man of action and charged off straight away. He could just as easily have stayed put to avoid losing anyone else. Neither choice was necessarily wrong. What he did instead was seek the will of God.
He asked for the ephod, which was the way of seeking what God wanted to say under the Old Covenant, and he inquired of the Lord: "Shall I pursue after this band? Shall I overtake them?" The answer came: "Pursue, for you shall surely overtake and shall surely rescue" (1 Samuel 30:8).
What follows is a remarkable victory. Two hundred men were too exhausted to cross the brook, so David pressed on with four hundred. They found an abandoned Egyptian servant, gave him food and water, and he led them to the Amalekite camp, where the raiders were eating, drinking and dancing over their plunder. David struck them down and recovered everything. Nothing was missing, whether small or great, sons or daughters. The passage keeps repeating David's name, and it labours the point on purpose: everything David went after, he got back.
reading the story with jesus in view
David was the anointed one, which is what the word Messiah means. That makes him a forerunner of the Messiah, and the patterns in his life shine a light on Jesus a thousand years before Jesus was born.
David's darkest hour echoes Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. His enemies had turned against him, and Judas was leading soldiers to arrest him. Jesus asked Peter, James and John to pray with him, and they fell asleep. Alone, he sought God, praying that the cup might pass but that God's will be done. Jesus strengthened himself in the Lord.
The pattern continues. Just as David won back everything that was taken, Jesus wins back the captives through his death and resurrection. John 6:39 says, "This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day." Verse 37 adds that whoever comes to Jesus he will never cast out.
That is deeply comforting. In this story, you are the wives and children who were taken, and Jesus is the one who came to rescue you. It can be hard to hold onto that truth. Past sins, weak faith and ongoing failures make you wonder whether Jesus has really rescued you, or whether he will eventually get fed up with you because you are not a good enough Christian. Yet everyone the Father gives to the Son, the Son purchases, owns and claims for himself. David was a messiah of a kind, anointed to win physical battles. Jesus is a Messiah of a different kind. He won the ultimate spiritual battle so that your soul is secure in him, and not one is missing.
grace for the weary
The story has one more episode. When the victorious men return, some of the four hundred want to keep the plunder from the two hundred who stayed behind. It is an understandable instinct. If you were one of the four hundred, you might think you deserved a greater share.
David refuses. "You shall not do so, my brothers, with what the Lord has given us," he says, reminding them that God preserved them and gave the victory. The share of the one who stays by the baggage is the same as the share of the one who goes into battle. "They shall share alike" (1 Samuel 30:24). He makes it a statute and a rule for Israel.
This models the grace of God. The victory was never earned by the men who fought. It was given by God, so it is shared with everyone, including those who did nothing to obtain it.
It is tempting to think some Christians are spiritually elite and receive a greater share of God's favour. You hear their stories and feel that they live in a different spiritual world, with a different level of faith and enthusiasm. You feel like one of the men too tired to cross the brook. But Jesus wins the entire victory and shares it equally with all of God's people. You receive as much forgiveness as anyone else. The gift of the Holy Spirit is not a reward for good behaviour but a free gift. In the church of God there is no distinction between men and women, races, backgrounds, social classes, wealth or giftedness. Everyone receives the same portion from Jesus.
the danger of leaving Jesus out
If you read this story and ask only how to copy David, it becomes tricky. You are probably not a military leader in Judah in 1000 BC, and David is a kind of supreme, elite believer that none of us can match. Reading the Bible like that leaves you disappointed with yourself.
The better question is what the story says about Christ and what he has already done. Because he has done it, and because his Spirit lives in you, there is hope that something of his life can be worked into your soul. You are probably not going to be the king who rules all of God's people. You can have the life of Christ at work in you.
how to strengthen yourself in the lord
When it feels as though the world is caving in and nobody else is around, you can strengthen yourself in the Lord your God. In fact, you must. If you do not, you become fodder for a spiritual enemy who will lie to you, accuse you and weaken you. If you do not fight back, you are surrendering.
David's phrase gives some clues. This was not a pep talk in the mirror along the lines of "Come on, David, you can do this." It was, "Come on, Lord, you are the one. I need your strength." The psalms give a glimpse into how David prayed when he felt low. In Psalm 42 he writes, "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God."
Martyn Lloyd-Jones drew on this psalm in his book Spiritual Depression, which is about spiritual weariness rather than medical depression. He asked whether you have realised that most of your unhappiness is due to listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself. The main art of spiritual living, he said, is knowing how to handle yourself. You must take yourself in hand, preach to yourself and question yourself. Then you remind yourself of who God is, what he has done and what he has pledged himself to do, and you end by defying yourself, other people, the devil and the whole world, saying, "I shall yet praise him."
In practice, that means refusing to let thoughts like "I am a rubbish person" or "I am a failure" define you. You preach about who God is, what he is like and what he has said, with a spiritual defiance that says, "I am not going to give in to this." David's general pattern was to speak and sing truths about God over himself. Songs can do the same work. When Satan accuses, you can remind yourself that Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, has made an end to all your sin, that you have an advocate in heaven, and that God's justice is satisfied by Christ on the cross. Learning songs and Scripture ahead of time is how you prepare to fight back.
anointed ones in a community of grace
You are not the Messiah, but you are an anointed one. Messiah means anointed, the Greek word for that is Christ, and Christians are those anointed by the Spirit of God. That means you can win spiritual victories in Jesus' kingdom, and you can show grace to the weak and weary around you.
That grace shapes a community. In a city that prefers to exalt the strong and minimise the weak, believers can build a countercultural church that shows the same grace to the poor as to the rich, and the same strength to the weary as to those who look strong. If you read 1 Samuel 30 and think, "David did this, so I will do this," you are more inclined to dismiss the two hundred who got weary at the brook. If you recognise that you are the one who got weary, and that Jesus has shared his goodness with you to strengthen you, spiritual pride begins to fall away. Cliques and preferences that ruin community are rescued by the grace of God as it is received and then shown to others.
The summary is simple: "I was the weary one. I was the broken one. I have received grace from God, and therefore I can freely show it to others." Freely you have received, freely you give.
At redemption
At Redemption, we want to be shaped by this kind of grace. When we read the story of David, we keep looking for Jesus in it, and we are learning to treat Scripture as a record of what Christ has already done rather than a list of examples to imitate. That habit protects us from the quiet disappointment of comparing ourselves with a king.
It also means learning to fight back with truth. We treat songs and Scripture as resources to be learned, so that when discouragement comes, we have something true to say to our own souls. Our hope is to be a community that is slow to dismiss the weary, because each of us knows we have needed the same grace. Bit by bit, slowly but surely, we want to be a church that shows grace and gives strength to those who are weary, and that looks to Jesus as the one who has won every single person back.
