Root Words | 1 Samuel 27:1-9 “Derailing Discouragement”

In the 26^th chapter of 1 Samuel the final words of Saul to David is, “May you be blessed, my son David! You shall both do great things and also still prevail.” Two things become quite apparent as we start reading the 27^th chapter:  

1. David didn’t believe Saul.

2. David did not believe the Lord’s ability to “both do great things and also still prevail.”

The first point in light of Saul’s character was the right assumption; the second was way off base. 

Oswald Chambers in his devotional wrote, “Living a life of faith means never knowing where you are being led. But it also means loving and knowing the One who is leading.” But what if you don’t much care for the road He has us traveling on? Well then we are faced with a difficult choice travel on the wide road of discouragement or chose the more difficult road of faith. Of all of satan’s weapons discouragement is the corridor by which all of his other weapons against enter. It was by discouragement that sin first entered the human race and it is still the pathway we exit the throne of grace for the dumps of this world. It is also here in this section that we see our hero David “the man after God’s own heart” leaving the presence of God for the world all because he succumbed to discouragement. Think of that dear saint the “man of courage” who had just crept into Saul’s camp of 3000 commando’s that encircled Saul has been reduced in only a few days or hours into complete discouragement. One of the things I realized looking at this passage is that most of the time when I’m discouraged what I need help with is how to get off that road not how to avoid it! It is here that a little bit of good old fashion Bible detective work is helpful. Based upon chapter 25:1 and 28:3 we know that Samuel had already died. That means that Samuel was not the one recording this chapter and it is safe to assume that it was David himself who wrote this section about his own journey living in the land of discouragement. My point is that David survived and even lived to write about it. I find that as I am in that place of discouragement I am prone to believe two lies that this fact changes and gets me off the path of discouragement:

1. I’ll always be in this place.
2. There is nothing of value for myself or others while I’m here.

Neither of these sentiments is true, as clearly David lived to write about it thus he was not always going to be there and furthermore the fact that he is retelling his time here means that there was something of value here. That to me is very valuable insight to keep me from becoming even more discouraged about me being discouraged in the first place. Hey Christian, you and I can pull out of the dive of discouragement any time we hand the control of our lives back over to the Lord and it starts with reminding ourselves that we don’t have to make it our home and there is something we can learn about the time we have spent here.

This has been Pastor Dale, Blessings!