To Encourage You

1 Samuel 27:1-2 “Then David said in his heart, ‘Now I shall perish one day by the hand of Saul. There is nothing better for me than that I should escape to the land of the Philistines. Then Saul will despair of seeking me any longer within the borders of Israel, and I shall escape out of his hand.’ So David arose and went over, he and the six hundred men who were with him, to Achish the son of Maoch, king of Gath.”

There is perhaps no more miserable person on the face of the earth than a believer who is acting, for a time, in unbelief and sin. It’s an inconsistency. And if such a person is not already convicted about living in this way, the Lord will most surely put His heavy finger on his life in one way or another to bring that conviction. It’s like a hypocrite that is acting as if he is righteous – he’s out of place. But, unlike the hypocrite, who, in his deception, is only deceiving himself more than anyone, a true believer who is acting like an unbeliever typically knows it and brings grief to his or her own heart.

We have such a scenario in the account from David’s life from which the verses above are excerpted. Here, in what for David was atypical behavior, he consults only with his own mind as he faces unrelenting persecution from Saul. David is weary. Although God has delivered him from Saul time after time and assured him that he would be king, his faith begins to flag and he begins to despair. He convinces himself, wrongly, that to continue in the way he has been going will only bring death in the end. So, what does he do? He leaves the land of the people of God and joins himself to God’s enemies, the unbelieving Philistines. But it’s a very strange alliance, to say the least. As he, his men, and their families go to live among the Philistines, David and his people are out of place. As they continue to live among the Philistines for the next 16 months, David lives a life of deception. He feigns allegiance to Achish, king of Gath. He deceives Achish into thinking that he is making war against his own nation while, instead, he is making war against the Amalekites, Geshurites, and Girzites, all of whom were Israel’s enemies (1 Samuel 27:8-12). Eventually, David is squeezed into serving alongside Achish and his army as Philistia actually makes plans to go to war against Israel (1 Samuel 29). David is only saved from this travesty by the Philistine commanders who distrusted David due to his past attacks against them, and they refuse to let David join in their war. Then, when David returns from the battle front to Ziklag, the city that Achish had given David as a place to settle, he finds the city burned to the ground by the Amalekites and every person in his and his army’s families kidnapped. It was a devastating end to David’s scheming and plotting.

So does this have anything to say to you and me? Well, for one thing, no matter the trials the believer might face in serving the Lord, the answer to those trials is never to go our own way and join with those who don’t know God. To do so is to place ourselves in a situation that is inconsistent with our own nature, and to live a life that is not true to ourselves is never a place of blessing. Oh, it might go fine for a while, but sooner or later it will catch up with us, for the God who loves us won’t allow his children to continue in that place.

You see, “the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives” (Hebrews 12:6). I’ve found this to be true in my own life, just as David found it to be true in his. Although I became a believer as a young boy of seven years old, I spent a number of years of my life away from God’s people. I wanted to be accepted by the crowd – my peers in high school and college. I eventually stopped going to church and tried to blend in with my many non-Christian friends. On the outside one couldn’t really distinguish me from them, but on the inside I was miserable, and I knew that I couldn’t continue to live in such inconsistency – the inconsistency of claiming to be a believer on the one hand and living like an unbeliever on the other. By the grace of God, it was an unbeliever that finally confronted me with my sin. You see, I had begun to attend church again, and my unbelieving friend asked me this question one day: “Why do you do what you do on Saturday night and then go to church on Sunday?” It felt like I had been hit with a baseball bat, but it was something that I greatly needed. It exposed me. It moved me to get off dead center and move either in one direction or the other. Thankfully, and by the grace of God, I moved toward Him instead of to continue in the dangerous trajectory of moving further and further away. David did the same thing, by the way, turning back from his life among the Philistines to follow hard after the way of God.

So what about you? Are you living a life of consistency with who you really are? If you call yourself a Christian, do those around you know it or are you trying to just blend into the crowd. If you are doing that, and you don’t feel any remorse or regret because of it, perhaps it’s time for you to reexamine who you really are. You see, the Lord loves His children far too much than to allow them to live a life of sin and not bring his hand of discipline into their lives. And just like the Scriptures tell us clearly that the Lord disciplines those He loves, it also says that “if you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons” (Hebrews 12:8). It is in knowing the truth about who we are and living in consistency with that truth that is the way of blessing for the Christian. Anything else is asking for trouble. Anything else is an inconsistent life. That didn’t work for David, and I can assure you that it didn’t work for me.

So, what about you? Do you know who you really are and are you living in consistency with the life of a person who calls himself or herself a child of the living God?