[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants please Visit our website globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: On Last week we took David from his childhood in Bethlehem to his incarceration in Gath of the Philistines.
The route of this incredible itineration from a child on a sheep farm, sheep and barley farm in a tiny village to the right hand of the king, to the son in law of the king, to one of the top generals, one of the top military men in Israel, to a national hero, to an internationally despised warrior.
Remember, the Philistines despised David above any other Jew because they viewed him not only as the champion that defeated Goliath, but that he decapitated Goliath's dead body and caused the Israeli army to have this surge in power and defeated them in a major battle. But then without going into all that again, the mutilation of 200 dead Philistines.
So they see David as a, as a warrior chieftain to be hated beyond anybody that they've ever faced before. Even more than King Saul, whom they despise.
And then Saul's paranoid suspicions of David. He attempts to murder David.
Then David flees to Ramah, to a place there that Samuel the prophet runs called Naioth. Naioth is a, it loosely translates as the residence.
So it's a lodge, if you will, for prophetic students.
A lodge, a residence, a dormitory, might be a translation.
And then David is supernaturally protected there.
And then finally fleeing there goes to Gath and that's where we left him on last week.
Now I want to remind you, if I can, that one and two, Samuel and Chronicles and Kings, those books are not all precisely chronological. They make no attempt to, to be, they are dealing. They're vaguely chronological. This happened and that happened. But I use the example of the old Sear television series. Meanwhile, back at the farm, you know, there's leaping back and forth and they do that with liberty because they're revealing things about what was going on about David himself, about things that were happening. And it's the Bible, it's not a movie. So they can't show flashbacks.
So sometimes there are things that overlap and I've taken the liberty to do that as well.
So I took you on last week. Now we're to this week. I took you on last week. Straight from Samuel's residence at Ramah Naioth, it's called, to the prison, the Philistine prison at Gath.
But let's deal now with two things that happen on the, on the road in that period of time.
The one has to do with Jonathan.
So out of the whole story of David and Saul and both of the books of Samuel and all of that, I would like to say to you, if I didn't say it on last week, really, one of the most admirable, sterling people is Jonathan, Saul's son, is really a wonderful person.
And we mustn't impose our twisted 21st century understandings of love on people that lived a thousand years before Christ.
But there is this statement that Jonathan loved David deeply, but it doesn't. There's nothing homosexual involved in it. It's the kind of friendship that only few people in the world have that are deeply. Where they can say, you know, I love you, man. He says, I love you too, and say it with liberty and without embarrassment.
But with David and Jonathan, it went a step further, and that is that they struck covenant.
I told you, I want to try to teach this and not get distracted with rabbit trails. I could preach for three weeks on covenant.
I will not.
But let me just say this to you here, that it has to do. It's an ancient ceremony of bonding that transcends contract.
A bonded relationship between two people that even goes beyond life and death.
It goes to their descendants.
The only thing like it that I can teach is in American culture is marriage. The exchange of rings, a symbolic physical exchange, vows, even the giving away ceremony. All of that is a covenant. It's not a contract. When you line people up at the altar, you don't say, well, the party of the first part or the party the second part.
It's covenantal language. And the language is expansive.
For richer, for poorer, in sickness, in health, for better, for worse. It's just kind of a way of saying no matter what.
However, as we've become more frivolous about the covenantal nature of marriage, it becomes less of a good example.
So for those of you who are old enough to have grown up on cowboy movies, I can give you a better example.
So you remember Gary Cooper? How many of you remember Gary Cooper? Thank God. Thank God.
I'm telling you, I speak to a lot of youth groups and I just want to say to you, it's a real burden to speak to people that don't know who Gary Cooper was.
Gary Cooper, you know, he made all these cowboy movies. But actually, Gary Cooper only made one movie. They just changed the title.
And the basic plot is this. Gary Cooper rescues some Indian that's caught in a bear trap or something, takes him back to his cabin, doctors him, they get to be friends and that kind of thing. The Indian gets well and gets ready to go back to his tribe. And so he takes his bowie knife and cuts the palm of his hand open or his thumb or something like that. You couldn't do this now without a blood test, but.
But he cuts his palm of his hand open. He cuts Gary Cooper's hand open and they press their hands together, and now they're blood brothers.
Then the Indian takes off a token of the covenant.
A bear claw necklace or something hangs around Gary Cooper's neck.
Now, that Indian disappears from the movie. We're near the end of the movie, and the Indians have captured Gary Cooper. They're just about to lift his hair and in rushes the Indian and says, you can't kill him. He's my blood brother. And they say, we don't believe you.
So he rips open Gary Cooper's shirt to reveal not only his manly chest, which works in cowboy movies, and the bear claw necklace, which is the proof of the covenant.
So David and Jonathan strike covenant together.
This is a bond relationship between these two men.
Now, normally they would exchange tokens like the rings in a wedding ceremony, but what's David gonna give the crown prince?
This is the heir apparent to the throne of Israel.
David's a nobody.
So Jonathan is the one who makes the token.
He gives David his weapons and his mantle.
And he basically says, that's not in exact words, but he basically says, I know the hand of God is on you and not on me.
You're the deal.
Okay?
And then he says, there's just one thing I need to know.
Will you remember this covenant when I'm gone?
Okay, now hold it.
Remember what I said? Sometimes we're just going to park things and say, meanwhile, back at the ranch.
So hold that covenantal moment.
And it doesn't matter now for weeks, but weeks from now, that will show up in a very important way.
The second thing that happens in this kind of journey from Ramah to Gath is David has fled from Saul in the middle of the night.
And his wife, Michal, Saul's daughter, has helped him to escape by itself. It's like. It's pure Hollywood. Pure Hollywood. They build like a statue, you know, a fake thing, and put it under the car covers and put hair on it and everything like that. So that when the people break in, you know, they think David's asleep in the bed. David slips out the back window and runs for it.
And he needs a sword. He's fled in the middle of the night.
He needs food.
It has no weapons. He has nothing. He just snuck out the back window and run for it.
So he goes to a town northwest of what is currently Jerusalem, was not at that time, but Jerusalem, northwest, called Nob.
It's a community of priests, so the priesthood and their families live there.
And David goes to the chief priest, Achimelech, who is the grandson of Eli.
You remember Eli in the story of Samuel.
So he says to him, I'm on a secret espionage mission for King Saul.
And he sent me on this mission and said, leave right this minute. So I left. And you know. You know the strangest thing?
I forgot to get any food.
And so the old priest says, oh, I don't have any food here except the food that's on the altar. Showbread.
I'll give you that.
And David takes the food, the shoebread, showbread, if you will, off of the altar.
It is that moment. I'm not gonna make a huge deal of it. Jesus references that a thousand years later when he says, remember, Shabbat is made for man. Man is made for Shabbat. And he says, don't you remember when David ate the food off the table of the Lord?
So David takes his bread and he says, I'll take all you got, because I've got all these men with me that are up in the hills. He's got nobody.
And then he starts to leave, and he says, you know, one other thing, and this is crazy, I forgot my sword.
And the old priest says, well, that's funny. He says, I have a sword here, and technically it's yours.
And he says, why would it be mine? He said, after you killed Goliath and cut his head off, we kept the sword. And this sword's kind of a memento. It's kind of a memorial of your victory over Goliath.
And after you killed Goliath, and we have his sword here, and David says, oh, I'll take it.
So he now leaves Nob with Goliath's sword and the food off of the shoe bread.
The shoe bread off of the table.
All right, leave.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, David then makes this inexplicable decision, which we talked about at the very end last week.
David flees to gas.
It is stunning.
I've gone over it and over it in my mind. What could it be one possibility is he just panics.
But David seems to have a low capacity for panic.
I don't know that I'm really able to go with the possibility that he panicked.
I think what he thought was, I'm such a famous warrior, so powerful that they will hire me as a mercenary, they'll take me in.
But he has underestimated how they despise him.
So immediately they throw him in, they throw him in prison and they're obviously going to torture him and kill him. These are pagans.
And David says that his one chance is to feign insanity, real craziness.
So he starts putting dirt in his mouth and foaming at the mouth. And. And it describes that he scratches at the doors like a dog. And so the king of the Philistines, Achish, he says, what do you bring me this crazy guy for?
You think I'm short of mad men?
Get him out of here.
There is also this. The Philistines, like many primitive people, had a superstition that it was bad luck to kill a crazy person.
In fact, they thought that they were touched by the gods.
In fact, we still even use part of that terminology. We say, is he a little stranger? Say, no, he's touched.
So they throw rocks and drive David out from the childhood in Bethlehem to Saul's right hand man, all the way to the end when he's the king of united Israel. This is the lowest moment in David's life.
This is lower than two rebellions led by his own sons.
This is lower than the civil war. This is lower than the cave of Adullam. Think of the absolute humiliation.
He has no home, no help, no allies, no friends, no resources.
And he's being driven out of a Philistine stronghold with them throwing rocks at him and saying, you crazy, you lunatic, get out of here.
When David thinks back on it years later, he writes Psalm 34 and it actually, the subscription says a psalm of David. When he changed his behavior before Abimelech, who drove him away and he departed.
I won't read the whole psalm, but there is a part of it that we even use today in a praise chorus.
This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encampeth around about them that fear him and delivereth them. O taste and see, the Lord is good. Blessed is the man that trusteth in him. O fear the Lord, ye saints. For there is no want to them that fear him. The young lions do lack and suffer hunger, but they that Seek the Lord shall not, shall not want for any good thing. Come, ye children, hearken unto me. I will teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is he that desireth life and loveth days, and that he may keep his tongue from evil.
The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and the ears are upon their cry. The face of the Lord is against them that do evil to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth. The righteous cry. And the Lord hears and delivers them out of their Troubles.
So Psalm 34 is David's memorial to. To the deliverance of God from the worst moment of his life.
From the Philistine prison in Gath, David flees into the Judean wilderness and he finds a.
What's called the cave of Adullam. But if you think cave, you're kind of thinking of a bear cave or something.
It is a honeycombed network of caverns with pockets that are large, some big enough to put horses in, others smaller.
And they.
This cavern, one could go back this way and back and out another one and come out over there. They're an ideal place to hide. So if an army attacked you here, you could go back through the cavern, crawl into another cave out the other way.
So the cave of Adullam is actually a honeycombed network of caverns. And David goes there now, alone in the Judean wilderness, with no one and nothing. No one and nothing.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, King Saul is having a paranoid freakout.
He calls his staff around and he says, why are you all against me?
He even says, this is.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: This.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: This is so revealing. He says, you don't even feel sorry for me.
He said, I want you all to feel sorry for me. I want you to rally around me. You should protect me. And why won't any of you rat out Dyvd?
Some of you know where David is and you won't tell me. My own son has formed an alliance with him and you all are all against me. Paranoid, emotional, over the top.
There is a man in the group who is not an Israeli Jew. He's from.
He's an Edomite.
His name is Doeg.
Doeg says, I was at Nob recently and I saw David show up.
And he got food and weapons from Abiathar, the high priest.
And I witnessed it.
And so Saul mounts up the army and they all ride a nob. And Saul says to.
To the high priest, to Ahimelech, the high priest, he says, you conspired with David. He said, you, Majesty.
He told me he was on a Mission from you.
He told me that you sent him out on a secret mission. Sure, I gave him food. I was helping you. He said he left his sword.
Sure.
Wouldn't I give your most loyal servant whatever he asked for? And Saul says to his army, kill them all.
Kill all these priests. 84 priests, he says, wipe them out.
The Jewish soldiers all refuse.
They say, we're not killing the priests of the Lord, but Doeg, the Edomite, says, oh, I'll kill them all.
And Doeg wipes them out.
I just would like to point out to you in passing in this brutal and violent little story.
Doeg is an Edomite.
By the time of the New Testament, Edomites were called Idumeans. It's the same word, Idumeans.
The only non, really Jewish king of Israel was Herod the Great, who was an Adumean.
The Edomite people have an historical reputation of being violent, merciless and cruel. The most violent, merciless, psychotic king of Israel ever was Herod, and he was of the same country as Doe.
So David's now in a worse shape because the word gets out.
If you help David, Saul will kill you.
David is alone in the wilderness, in the Judean wilderness, hiding out in a network of caves.
Now something begins to happen. That is, we can only use our imaginations to know why men begin to go out and join him.
We don't really know why, but I think we can figure it out. The word gets around.
Somebody says, I saw King David. He raided my garbage can last week.
David broke in my tool shed. He got my shovel. I saw him. And people said, where'd he go? Out in the Judean wilderness.
And men begin to go out to Dyvid.
And the Bible is perfectly clear about these guys. This is not the creme de la creme.
These are bad guys.
These are guys that won't pay their child support.
They're tax dodgers.
They're people that there's a warrant out for them.
These are rascals.
And they come out and gather themselves to Dyvid, and he takes them in as a resource to him, and the number begins to explode.
Until finally David is at 400, ultimately 600, and then finally 800.
The Hebrew word for mighty, for strong, mighty, is gibor in Hebrew.
So to make any Hebrew word plural, like in English, we make a word plural by adding an S.
Bat, bats, hat, hats. To make a Hebrew word plural, you add, I am Gibor. Gibborim means mighty ones.
So the top 37 of this group of men become David's special bodyguard. They are devoted to David beyond anything else. Remember, they have no devotion to Israel. They've left Israel just like David did. They certainly have no devotion to Saul.
They have no family. David is their father, he's their mother, he's their only hope. He's their leader. He's their.
Their refuge in the wilderness.
And they are devoted to David, the gibborim, the mighty ones.
Sometimes that terminology is used to mean these 37 top warriors.
Sometimes it means the whole unit.
David trains this group of men in a unique way.
He trains them to be entirely ambidextrous.
Totally.
That is.
That doesn't seem like such a big thing in modern warfare.
If you're, if you're shooting an AK47, it doesn't really matter whether you're shooting it right handed or left handed, but if you're fighting hand to hand combat and I swing my sword at you and you cut my arm so badly that I drop it, you think you've got me. I pull a sword out with the other hand. I'm just as, just as good with my left hand as I am with my right.
And David trains these men to be the most powerful, feared and effective light cavalry unit in the southern area. The south. The south of what is now Israel is called the Arabah.
And they, they are down there.
There is a town, David hears about, a town named Kailah, and it's being surrounded by the enemy. And David goes to them and says, let me help you. And they welcome him in and he defeats the enemy and frees Keilah and kind of camps there.
And then the Lord says, david, these people have no gratitude at all. You need to get out of here.
The people in Keilah send word to Saul after David has rescued them, saved them, they send word to Saul, David is here in town.
So David takes his men and they flee.
They go to the forest of Ziph and they say to the ziphites, the people that live there, can we camp here? They say, oh, yeah, absolutely. You're welcome. They send word to Saul, David is here.
So Saul is pursuing David everywhere.
David takes his parents across the Jordan river to Moab and goes to the king of Moab, who is Saul's enemy. And he says, basically pitches to him, I'm in something of a civil war with your enemy. Will you hide my parents?
And so for years, David's parents live with the Moabites across the Jordan River.
Now, at this point, two people show up in David's life.
Kind of a surprise. And I want to Point these two people out to you.
The first is go back to nobility.
I told you, this all gets kind of layered and it's hard to keep up with. Go back to Nob, where the high priest Ahimelech and all of the Nob priests were slaughtered.
One person escapes.
Ahimelech's son, Abiathar.
He escapes. Where's the only place he can go?
David. And he goes to David in the wilderness and. And he becomes David's high priest.
So he. He becomes the priest for David.
But I want you to keep this. Remember, I said remember the Covenant of Jonathan.
You have to remember it for weeks, but I'll reference it for you.
Now remember, where did Abiathar come from?
His father has just been killed. His family is wiped out. The village is gone, the whole town is slaughtered. He alone has escaped.
And when he comes to David and tells him, my father has been killed, all the priests have been killed, the village is wiped out, David says, this is my fault.
This is my fault.
It's a very humble and transparent thing. This is my fault. If I hadn't gone there, your father would still be alive.
If I hadn't gone there. And he says, not only that, I saw that guy Doeg.
I saw him there. And I thought to myself, I bet he tells Saul that I've been here. I didn't think about him killing your dad, but I saw Doeg. This is my fault.
And Abiarthar says to himself, he says to King David, let me stay with you.
But deep in his heart, he says, yeah, it is your fault.
And that lays in his heart for decades. And I need it to lay in your mind for a few weeks.
So you have the covenant with Jonathan and you have the sole survivor of Nob named Abiathar.
Now David has an army.
They're highly lethal, dangerous people.
Their only law is David.
Their only leader is David. Their only devotion is David. They'll do anything he says.
And David begins to use them to protect the farm they Hebrew farm and ranches in the south, to the far south of Israel. At that time, south of the Dead Sea, there is another lethal tribe called the Amalekites, and they are raiding all the farms and ranches. So David says, I'll protect you.
And he does protect them, but he expects to be paid for it.
So let me not.
Let me not throw some bad on King David.
But in a way, it's real protection. In another way, it's kind of a protection racket.
So is anybody familiar enough with the Mafia to know what I'm saying when I say a protection racket.
We're going to protect your store, protect you. Anything could happen. Somebody could throw a bomb right in your window and blow your store up. Pay us $1,000 and we'll make sure that doesn't happen. You refuse to pay me. And guess what?
Okay, so David is doing this, and people are paying him.
Then he comes to this one ranch, or he sends some of his guys to this one ranch.
And the owner of this ranch is called Nibal.
Now, that word in Hebrew means fool.
So I don't believe that is actually his name. While the story is happening, I don't what mother looks into the cradle and says, eh, look at this little fool.
So I don't believe that.
I think that it's like what I said about Jerusalem during this whole story. It's called Jebus, but there are times when it's referred to as Jerusalem, but it wasn't Jerusalem yet. It's just that people know what you're talking about. So I think this guy's story, People said, that guy's a class A fool. I bet his name was Nabal.
So David's men come there and he humiliates them, runs them off. And he says, I'm not paying you protection money. I didn't hire David to fight off the Amalekites. I don't need David to fight off the Amalekites. And you tell him I said, I'm not paying a dime.
Well, okay, listen.
David's a dangerous commodity.
And he's got these soldiers that are. These are serious hombres.
And David says, okay, everybody, mount up.
So Nabal's wife is a young woman named Abigail.
And Abigail, here's what this fool has done.
And she loads up groceries, a huge thing, all this food. Ox carts full of food. And she goes out to the intersection where the road turns off to their ranch. And she spreads all this stuff out and sits down in the middle of it.
Now, David loved groceries.
He also was not blind.
Are we communicating?
And she says, please forgive my husband. Don't do this. But listen to how she appeals to him. She says, someday you're going to be the king of Israel. And you don't want the blood of a fellow Jew, even a fool like my husband on your sword.
Take this and go.
And David does.
He takes it all and leaves. Loads it over. Fine, fine.
She goes home, back to the house, and Nabal says, what have you been doing? She tells him, and he has a cerebral hemorrhage. And drops dead.
So word reaches David at the cave of Adullam. Hey, remember that fool that wouldn't pay the protection?
He died.
His beautiful wife is a widow.
David said, you know, I've been needing a wife.
And David goes back and collects Abigail. And Abigail becomes really one of the.
One of the stable.
She is obviously a woman of wisdom and judgment, and she saved her husband's life. He was an idiot, but she saved his life, saved the ranch and everybody else. And she also knew how to make an appeal.
So Abigail becomes David's second wife.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Michal, Saul's daughter, who is David's first wife.
Saul is determined to humiliate David in every way that he can. And he takes Michael and gives her to another man.
Shealtiel.
And that couple, Michael and Shealtiel, become tragedies in the story of great people whose lives plow them under.
In Ghana, where Travis and I have spent so much of our lives, there is a Ghanaian proverbial that says when two elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers.
And that is certainly true of Michael and Shealtiel.
Now, David is now one of the major military forces in the Arabah.
And so now he makes an unusual decision.
He takes his army and goes back to Gath.
Not to fight, to hire out his mercenaries.
So there's a leadership point here.
Sometimes a decision that looks bad or stupid or makes no sense is not bad or stupid or makes no sense. It. It's premature.
I think that David thought he could hire his sword out to the Philistines and he didn't have anything to trade.
He didn't really know how to make a deal there, and he wound up going to prison.
Now he makes the same decision.
He goes back to gas, but this time he's got something to sell.
A powerful, highly trained, well equipped, ferocious private army.
And he becomes trusted friends with the king of the Philistines, Achish.
And Achish begins to really trust David and wants to keep him, wants to make sure that David stays with him.
How can he do that? How can he keep David from ever going back to Israel, back to the Jewish people?
I will have him raid Jewish towns and kill the people and the Jews will hate him. And David can never go back and he'll always work for me.
So he tells David to do that.
These are the kinds of stories that are hard for us to grasp because we live in a world with satellites and drones that can track everything. You can't hide anything.
But we're talking about 3,000 years ago, we're talking about the dawn of the iron Age.
So David says, sure, we'll do that.
So he leaves Gath on the Mediterranean coast, takes his army, goes north up into the southern edge of Israel, the border between Judah and.
And Benjamin.
Saul's capital is at Gibeah.
And he goes up, but he doesn't raid. He goes south down by the Jordan river, down to the Dead Sea, into the south, where the Amalekites are whom the Jews hate.
He raids Amalekite villages.
And this is hard.
This is the things about the Old Testament that everybody struggles with.
But David makes an expedient decision. He kills them all, is to kill all the witnesses, takes the loot, goes back up by the Jordan river, back up into Israel, comes back to Gath, and he says, I raided this Israeli town, killed everybody. Here's the stuff. And turns the loot over to Achish.
So Achish thinks he's raiding in Israel. David is raiding the Amalekites and running a ruse on him.
And Achish says, now I've got him.
Now he's mine.
I've got him.
So here's one of the second things about leadership in tonight's lesson.
Your personal individual success.
If I can use such a secular word, the hand of God on you does not necessarily make you popular with the people who observe your success.
Watch what happened between David and Saul now. What happens between David and. And the other.
And the other Philistine generals.
This is this Jew who's come in from nowhere.
He's the right hand with the king. They hate him.
They despise him.
So the king says, live here in Gath with me.
And David makes what is on the surface, a very humble answer.
He says, oh, no, your majesty. We're just a bunch of ragged soldiers, Jewish mercenaries. We, we. We not. We're not good enough to live here in the capital city. Oh, no, we're not good enough.
What he knows is his life isn't worth a plug nickel in gas.
And so the king says, I tell you what I'll do. I'll give you another town.
And he gives David and his little army the town of Ziklag.
And David and his army habituate there. They move there to Ziklag.
The king, Achish, calls a meeting of the joint chiefs of staff. All the generals, including David, come to Gath.
And the king says, I want to make one final push on Saul.
He's weak.
I think we can get him.
Let's all go and let's attack Saul and go after him, and let's see if we can bring this guy down and kill Saul and defeat the Israelis.
And the other generals say, let David go with us.
What they say is, we're afraid that we'll attack and David will pull back and go behind us and attack us from the back.
That's not it at all.
They are jealous of him, and they do not want him to get glory in battle.
And so the king says to David and his men, hey, look, I love you.
These guys are petty and, you know, but I love you.
But you guys go back to Ziklag and just wait.
There'll be other battles, other wars.
We'll take care of Saul.
So David and his men go back to Ziklag, their town that they've been given.
And when they get there, the Amalekites have decided to give David a taste of his own medicine.
They have raided up from the south, burned Ziklag to the ground, and taken all the women and children as slaves and have left.
There are two very pregnant verses that follow.
One says, and the men determined to stone David to death.
That's fascinating, isn't it?
I just want to say something to you about leadership in a crisis, particularly some kind of a major crisis. What looks like a defeat, a setback, a problem, some kind of thing like that.
One of the immediate impulses of people is to blame leadership.
They're looking for somebody.
This is so horrible, so painful. Their wives and children. Everybody's gone. Their houses are burned, everything. What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? Kill David?
It's not David's fault, but it is a law of leadership. In a crisis, the first thing you have to deal with is the anger that comes toward the leader.
You have to get through that.
Now, the next verse is one of these fascinating Bible verses that tells you so much and doesn't tell you enough. Do you ever read those verses where you just want to say lord? How about a little more?
And this verse says, so David encouraged himself in the Lord.
Isn't that great?
Yeah. How I would like to know what that looked like. I would like it. I wish the Bible would say, David went out of town and he knelt down. He repeated some of his own psalms to himself. He remembered his past victories. He spent time in worship. Something we don't know. All we know is it says, David encouraged himself in the Lord.
So in a crisis, one of the immediate impulses of followers is to blame the leader.
That has to be met by the leader.
Re encouraging Himself in the Lord.
I am who I am in God, and he is who he is in me.
And then the second thing is immediately you need to come up with a plan.
And David says, look, they've got all our dependants. They've got all the baggage they stole from us. They can't move very fast.
We're a light cavalry unit. Mount up.
We'll go chase them down.
Two things in that I want to give you in the next four minutes.
The first is this.
They're riding dead out after these guys.
Some of the men get where they can't. They just can't go on. And David says, all right, take all the baggage off all the horses, put it here. You guys that are too tired, you stay with the baggage.
And they track the Amalekites down, wipe them out and get their people back, get their wives and kids back and get their baggage. And then they loot the other stuff that the. That the Amalekites had. I think I said Philistines, the Amalekites, they kill all. The Amalekites, get their stuff. They get their. Their own stuff, and they. The Amalekite stuff.
And they come back to pick up the people at the baggage.
And the soldiers say, they don't get a share.
They didn't fight.
And David says, no, those who guard the baggage get the same share as those who fought in the battle. And there is the next verse that says, this is still the rules in the army of Israel.
That law, it's right in the Bible. It says, and this is still the law of the army of Israel.
We see in these stories, these things, as I close.
David's ability to inspire profound friendship.
Jonathan adored him.
His ability to inspire desperate jealousy and hatred.
His ability to.
To find God's abiding presence and resource in the lowest moment of his life.
His ability to dig out.
He didn't fall on his sword when he left the prison at Gath.
He went out into the desert and let God assemble to him a dangerous army.
And he used that army to fight his way back to the top.
He was a man of resourcefulness to overcome, to fight back.
He was a man of character in many ways. What he said about the death of all the priests, no, this is my fault.
He didn't have to say that.
He could have said, oh, that's Saul.
He's so evil.
Instead he says, oh, this is my fault.
And he was a man of deep conviction that God's hand was on him in all of these things.
David believed somehow or Another, the destiny that God has for me is still ahead.
Remember when Samuel came to him as a small boy last week? Remember, came into his father's house, anointed him with oil and said, you are to be the king of Israel.
That seems to have gotten subsequently further and further and further and further away.
But David believes that the hand of God is upon him.
And he also believes that if it is the hand of God and the will of God and the purpose and power of God, he doesn't have to take matters in his own hand.
Therefore, he makes the decision. And we'll close with this. He makes the decision.
If God wants Saul gone and wants me to be the king, I will not do it.
Let God do it.
And David refuses to lift his hand up against Saul.
So of all of his character traits and weeks ahead, I know what some of you are already thinking. Well, he wasn't a sterling character. We're going to deal with some of his character problems. But of all of his great character traits, one of the greatest of these was loyalty.
He was even loyal to people that didn't deserve his loyalty.
Well, let's pray.
Heavenly Father, I thank you and I praise you that we see in the life and leadership of King David your summons to us, Lord, that we can have relationship with you and with each other before you make us to be people of loyalty and faith and conscience.
And that we will allow you to right our destiny and not we ourselves.
We believe you for it, God. We thank you for it.
Now, Lord, bless our pastor, bless the service on Sunday.
Anoint him as you always do, and our ears that we may hear in the mighty name Jesus, the strong son of God.
Amen and amen. Don't Forget, next week Dr. And Mrs. Bullock will be here. You do not want to miss this Sunday morning is chapter two in road trip.
Road trip.
And Psalm 23, which I forgot again.
Which I forgot again.
As David would say, this is my fault.
Will you stand? And let's read Psalm 23 together.
Are you ready? Read with me aloud. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil.
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
[00:52:57] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on
[email protected] or visit his website, Dr.markrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
