Surviving the wilderness

This morning's scripture reading is from 1st Samuel chapter 22. 1st Samuel chapter 22. And I'll just be reading from the entire text this morning. David departed from there and escaped to the cave of Adullum. And when his brothers and all his father's household heard it, they went down to him there. And everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was bitter in soul gathered to him, and he became commander over them, and they were with him about 400 men. And David went from there to Mitzvah of Moab. And he said to the king of Moab, "Please let my father and my mother stay with you till I know what God will do for me." And he left them with the king of Moab. And they stayed with him all the time that David was in the stronghold. Then the prophet Gad said to David, "Do not remain in the stronghold. Depart and go into the land of Judah." So David departed and went into the forest of Herth. Now Saul heard what David was discovered. And when the men who were with him, Saul was sitting in Gibia under the tamarisk tree on the height with his spear in his hand, and all his servants were standing about him. And Saul said to his servants who stood about him, "Hear now, people of Benjamin, will the son of Jesse give every one of you fields and vineyards? Will he make you all commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds that all of you have conspired against me?" No one discloses to me when my son makes a covenant with the son of Jesse. None of you is sorry for me or discloses to me that my son has stirred up my servant against me to lie and wait as it is this day. Then answered Doe the Edomite who stood by the servants of Saul. I saw the son of Jesse coming to Knob to Ahimch to the son of Ahub. And he inquired of the Lord for him and gave him provisions and gave him the sword of Goliath the Philistine. Then the king said, "Summon Aheimch the priest, the son of Ahub." And all his father's house, the priests who were at Noob. And all of them came to the king. And Saul said, "Hear now, son of a Heub." And he answered, "Here I am, my Lord." And Saul said to him,"Wh have you conspired against me, you and the son of Jesse, and that you have given him bread and a sword and have inquired of God for him, so that he has risen against me to lie and wait as it is this day?" Then Ahemc answered the king, who was among all your servants, so faithful as David, who is the king's son-in-law and captain over the bodyguard and honored in your house? Is today the first time that I've inquired of God for him? No. Let not the king impute anything to his servant or to all the house of my father? For your servant has known nothing of all of this, much or little. And the king said, "You shall surely die, a Hima, you and all your father's house." And the king said to the guard who stood about him, "Turn and kill the priest of the Lord because their hand is with the David." And they knew that he had fled and did not disclose it to me. But the servants of the king would not put out their hand to strike the priest of the Lord. Then the king said to Doe, "You turn and strike the priests." And Doe the Edomite turned and struck down the priest, and killed on that day 85 persons who wore the linen ephod. And no, the city of priests he put to the sword. Both man and woman and child and infant, ox, donkey, and sheep he put to the sword. But one of the sons of Ahmcch, the son of Ahitub named Abiar, escaped and fled after David. And Abiar told David that Saul had killed the priest of the Lord. And David said to Abiar, "I knew on the day when Doe Edomite was there that he would surely tell Saul, I have occasioned the death of all the persons of your father's house. Stay with me. Do not be afraid. For he who seeks my life seeks yours. with me you shall be in safeke keeping. This is God's word. What we see here is David in the last chapter at the end of chapter 21 uh is running from Saul. We actually see that he is so desperate at this point in time he actually runs into the land of the Philistines. And uh and that was desperate because if you'll remember they had written songs about how many thousands of Philistines that David is killed. This should be the last place David should go. Surely he's going to be in danger when he enters into that land. And that's exactly what he finds. People start to recognize, wait a minute, isn't that isn't this the guy? And so David very quickly has to get out of the Philistine land. He h doesn't know where to go. doesn't know where to turn and so he runs and hides himself. And we see here in uh verse one that he hides himself in a cave. David is sitting in a cave. He's had everything taken from him. He was the man who was like the right hand, the the the wellhonored captain of the guard, David, over the soldiers. They sang songs about him. He was a military hero. He had taken down Goliath. He was loyal to the king. He had been brought into the king's family, married the king's daughter. This is David. And now David's not near his family. Everything's taken. He's on the run. He has no place to even lay his head. He's a refugee. This is a theme that we see constantly in scripture known as the exile. The exile is a time for David of moving into the wilderness, life on the run. And this theme we see constantly in scripture. Adam and Eve sin and they are exiled from the Garden of Eden. The children of Israel are brought out of exile from the land of Egypt. They sin hundreds of years later and they find themselves exiled to Babylon. This theme constantly recurs. Even Jesus models this as he goes out sort of into a an exile by moving into the wilderness in those 40 days symbolically showing this and aligning himself embracing the sorrows and all of what the wilderness has to offer or doesn't have to offer throughout. And David in here is at a very low point in his life. And you know, we could call this I debated on how to title this sermon, whether it was surviving the wilderness or surviving the exile. I think in many ways they are one and the same. The wilderness is a very hard place to survive. It's like the desert. You're out there in the elements and everything that the modern amenities of life are no longer available in the wilderness. It strips you down. It takes things from you and you can't just turn easily to the modern sugar highs of life. They won't fix the despair and the brokenness and the heartache or whatever it is that is going on that has brought you into this place in the wilderness. And if you've not experienced a wilderness in your life, or maybe some of you are experiencing one now, you will because the wilderness is a part of this life. It's a part of this broken world. And what I mean by wilderness, I mean by the fact that there are seasons in life where we just grown. You've probably felt them before. Everything is going right. Kind of like David. Things are good. Life is good, the money's good, the job's good, and then you're laid off and everything that you thought career-wise and directionwise, and it's just all shaking. Well, you get rehired. Questions swirl in your mind. What's your next move? What are you going to do? Or you go into the doctor's office and you get that news and it's going to be a long process. You don't know the outcome. You don't know how things are going to shake out. And so life has moved into a season of the exile. And we could go on and on. We could talk about even exiles in our home. There's turmoil things with maybe an adult child or with a child or raising our kids or with our marriage and all the different dynamics that go on. Maybe two couples feel distant. How are we going to fix this? Do I even want to fix it? There's so much going on and these seasons of just darkness, these seasons of brokenness and searching and we're just kind of looking around in the bare elements. But the good, the good of the wilderness, the way that God uses the wilderness oftentimes because we know that God works all things for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. The good of the wilderness is this, that God will use it to mature you, to grow you. Because often times when life is good and things are good, we so easily can forget the Lord, we so easily kind of look to our own hands and our own life and and and and we don't necessarily grow or mature or put down deep roots. And there's something about the rawness of the wilderness, the rawness and and the and being stripped and had so many things taken from us in life that we really begin to open our eyes and look around. And because there aren't many things to distract you, begin to really think about the deep questions of life because God wants to work his purpose in the wilderness, but it doesn't mean it's a guarantee. There are many people who move into the wilderness of life and you see this with the children of Israel and they wander in circles and they die in the wilderness. The wilderness can be a place where you grow and you mature and you eventually thrive from it when you come out. But it can also be a place where you die. A place where you just spin your wheels in circles. For all of us, God wants to work in the wilderness, in the wildernesses of our lives to accomplish his purpose, to use it to grow us and mature us and pull us to himself. And in the wilderness, often times, like any plant, for example, that is growing in like a desert kind of place. You got to put down deep roots. You're going to have to anchor into something beyond yourself because you can't survive by yourself through this thing. And because everything's been taken from you, so many of the things that you trust in the wilderness are no longer readily at hand. And no amount of Netflix binge, no amount of pleasure, no amount of distraction, no amount of these other things is going to change your geography where you find yourself, whether it be physically or spiritually at that moment in time. And it's not always an external thing. Sometimes it's just an emptiness in life. something is going on and there's a despair and a sorrow stirring inside of us. Sometimes even our journey to faith has been that way where we were brought into places of just coming to the end of our self and things in our life began to be removed and taken. We no longer found satisfaction. We began to ask these deeper questions as things were stripped from our life. And in that exile and in that wilderness, our eyes and our ears began to tune in and seek for something beyond oursel and ultimately to look to God and to what he has and what he is saying. So today as we look at this text, the key for us is to see how David survives in the wilderness because David is going to move into a long trend. One thing I want you to hear now is this is not a set of steps or best practices or things that if you check these boxes in your life that that you'll be good. You you you everything's going to be fine. I'm not here to give you three best practices. Don't hear that. I'm here to present principles, things that we see and observations from the text in David's life because David, as we know, he learned and grew and survived the wilderness and he eventually thrived and he gave us this great rich vocabulary of psalms that reflect his heart and his prayers and we get to see so much of what happened in David's life. One of them as we see Oh, sorry. I was supposed to actually do that through you. Never mind. usually that somebody is doing that. One of the things that we see is  Psalm 142. Psalm 142 was written from a cave. We don't know what cave David spent a lot of time in caves. Uh there's a couple psalms that are from the cave. But I think when I read this psalm this week that this really reflect reflected the heart of where David finds himself in the beginning in verse one of this chapter. And we see in Psalm 142, David says, "Look to the right and see there is none who takes notice of me. No refuge remains for me. No one cares for my soul." This is David. David has had everything taken from him and he's sitting in the cave. He can't even go in. He doesn't know where he can go, where he can run, where he can hide. And no one seemingly cares for his soul. And this is his prayer to God that he utters and where he finds himself. Surviving the wilderness, what we find is, and I went with I went with someiteration today. Well, really at first I had calibration. I was going to give us C's, but I I I guess really at the end of the day, I put recalibration. I what I really want us to hear though, and I really want to make sure that I'm careful here. I I I don't want this to be like if we just tweak some things in our life that we, you know, we just need to make some little adjustments, we're going to be good and everything's going to be fine. That's not what I'm getting. I I talking about reorienting your life. Reorienting to something maybe that you've lost, maybe you've lost your way or you've gotten off of track. And what God will do oftentimes in the wilderness when things is he will use it to reorient or to re-calibrate or maybe for the very first time to begin to calibrate us to him to himself to turn our eyes and our hearts to look beyond us to something to someone. And all of the other things in life are not found in the wilderness. And so you can only look to God himself to come to him in this. And so one of the very keys is if you are going to survive in the wilderness, you're going to have to look outside yourself. You're going to have to to find and orient your life to the source of nutrients that will allow you to survive in the midst of that wilderness. David could go in this cave right now and he could start blaming God. What are you doing to me? How dare you think about all of these things I've done? He could start blaming the people. He could be bitter at people in his life and just allow that to fester so much and just continue to detract him away from just like sitting before God. So, we can go about it the wrong ways in our life. David has learned the power of calibrating himself to the Lord. So, you see, oh, sorry, I'm ahead of myself. That's why I should not run slides. I'm sorry. Um, so we see throughout this that the Lord is using this to calibrate David. Survival is about orienting your compass to seek God, to find and anchor your life in him. And one of the things that we see in the parallel of this passage is Saul. Saul is another man here. And you know, nobody's really happy in this chapter. David's not happy. He's living in a cave. Saul should be great. He chased off his enemy. Things should be great. But we know that Saul has moved into his own wilderness and he's been there for quite a while. There's an evil spirit that torments Saul. He's constantly restless and agitated and paranoid in his life. Saul in that same way because Saul disobeyed the voice of God because he didn't listen to the voice of God in his life. It created this wilderness for him. and and and the goal of life is that Saul should turn to the Lord to calibrate his life. This is the language of repentance where we come oftentimes to the end. We say, "I'm I'm off track. I'm I'm not listening to the voice of God in my life or I've not I've not sought him." And sometimes just to to reorient our lives, to turn from something and to turn to something more and more in our life. And this is ultimately what David does is he begins to move. We see in verse 5 how the prophet Gad comes along because David David's all over the place. He's he's trying to figure things out on his own in the beginning. He goes into the cave. God brings some people and his family come to him, right? He's already run to the land of the Philistines. He thinks, "Well, there's a whole lot of us here in southern Judah. What do we do?" And so then he runs over to the land of Moab and he goes over there and he drops off his parents. And it says he runs to the stronghold, which many Bible commentators believe is the uh east side of the Dead Sea. And uh and that he's camping out probably somewhere here. David's just trying to find a way to survive through the wilderness. He's hopping everywhere trying to do things on his own. And the voice of God begins to enter the picture and he speaks through the prophet Gad. And we see here in verse 5, it says, "Then the prophet Gad said to David, do not remain in the stronghold. depart and go into the land of Judah. So David departed and went into the forest of Herth. Now we think obedience isn't automatic, right? The prophet speaks. But we've seen throughout as we've been studying 1 Samuel that the prophet can speak like he did to Saul and it seems optional. In the same way in our own lives, God will speak to us through his word. Often times we pick and choose what we want to hear. Our life can sometimes get off of kilter because we've picked and chosen the voices that we want to listen to the way that we want to go, the verses that we want to apply, but the ones that we don't want to apply into our own life. Like Saul, he's spun and he's wandering in his own wilderness, unable to find his way. But David is going to learn in how how do you calibrate? How do you calibrate? How do you orient your life to God? One of the ways that you find that you orient your life to God is by by spiritual disciplines. I it's it's almost natural many times for a believer, right? Like you you know, for most of us, once we aren't the end of ourselves and once things aren't going good, we begin to look outside of ourselves. One of the best things we can do is just look to God's word to begin to search the scriptures and to begin to see. I've even seen that for people that are very lukewarm in their faith. They're just looking for some kind of answer, something to grab hold on to in their life. There's good in that because God speaks through his word. It's living and active. But one of the things about God's word that does is it's it can encourage us. It can redirect us. It can cause us to repent. God is moving and speaking through his word. The language that we have often times is that that scripture moves us to pray, to talk to God. We read these things. And that's the rhythm we often find in David's life, right? He the Psalms give us a direction for hearing these prayers, hearing scripture and then being moved into our own prayers, our own encounter with God. And so his word and through prayer, our life is reoriented and recalibrated to God. But you know, one of the other beautiful things that we see even in this passage is God doesn't leave David alone in the cave. He begins to bring his family first to him very quickly here. And we see also that now he's brought these 400 men to David. And now David has like kind of a little cohort as well around him. So God doesn't leave David alone. We know that the Lord is also with David, but he's given him these little signs of his nearness and of his goodness and graciousness. In the same way as a believer, part of that calibration for us isn't just the word and it's not just prayer. It's also fellowship. It's also the people of God, the local church gathering around you. That we should be that to one another. That we should be vulnerable and transparent about our lives and where we're at. That sometimes life is hard and broken and maybe we find oursel in our own wilderness and yet to be an encouragement to one another. How many times do you hear constantly in the word where it talks about encourage one another, exhort one another, admonish one another, bear one another's burdens and love all of these charges. We are not an island. We are not the end of oursel. And it's not just me and Jesus. But I have to look around at my brother and sister and think about them and loving them and following what the New Testament calls me to live out to them in that local community. And so the church also and the fellowship and the people of God can be another way where voices in our life can help calibrate us, bumping us and sharpening us back in our walk with God, encouraging us in those moments in the wilderness. But as I said, if you're going to survive the wilderness, you're going to need to look outside yourself to calibrate your life to look beyond yourself and ultimately to orient yourself to God. The second thing that we find is clarity. See, ultimately if you recalibrate your life and you orient yourself to God, God will begin to put clarity into your life. He will begin to show you and invite you into how he is working and to his goodness and his faithfulness in your life. That's what he does in David's life right here as well as he begins to show him his faithfulness. As we see in verses 2 through 5, David departed from there, and he escaped from the cave of Adullum. And when his brothers and all his father's house heard it, they went down from there to him. And everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was bitter in soul gathered to him, and it became a commander over them, and there was with him about 400 men. And David went there from Mitzbah to Moab. And he said to the king of Moab, "Please let my father and mother stay with you till I know what God will do for me." And he left them with the king of Moab. and they stayed with him all the time that David was in the stronghold. Then the prophet God said to David, "Do not remain in the stronghold. Depart and go into the land of Judah." So David departed and went into the forest of Herth. And so once again, what we find here, if you're attuned to this, is David is sitting in a cave all alone by himself. He's he's at the rock bottom. And yet, what does God do? God is moving. If he's if he's actually coming to the Lord, if he's actually rec-alibrating and putting his prayer like we see in Psalm 142 there, just just being honest with the Lord, open about how things are, how he feels, how he's broken, how he feels that it's abandoned, and calling the Lord to do something about it. He begins to see how God is working. Now, we don't always know in the wilderness why God is doing. We can't always make sense of it, but we can see his faithfulness, past, present, and what we know will be the future to come. We can look at the line in our life and see how God has worked and been faithful and good and steadfast in our life over and over again. Why would he change that? Why would he stop now? Why would he give up now? David in this passage can see the very same thing. God brings his family to him. You're not alone, David. your people are here. And then all of a sudden, he starts to bring other people who come around him. And now David's got almost like it's almost like he's built built up this little army and he's got guys around to protect and to work and he's a leader over them. So God in a way said, "Everything has been taken from you and yet I'm going to begin to reestablish what was lost. I'm going to be able to restore things because the goal isn't to stay in the wilderness. The goal is for God to continue to grow you and mature you so that when you come out, you are more mature. you have grown, you are deeper, you've walked with him through more closely because when sometimes when you go through the difficult things of life, that's when you have the great depth in your relationship even with God. When we go through the hard things of life, we have to press into him and to call out to him. God can be so good and sweet and giving us the revelation in our life. Sometimes it's not that things have changed. Sometimes God just opens our eyes to how he is presently working. and you begin to find the ways that God is moving. If you find yourself in the wilderness, find something that will encourage you. Find those small ways where God is working. It may take time. You may need to sit with the Lord, but ask the Lord to show you. Maybe it's the people he's put in your life. Maybe it's just the kindness of a stranger. Maybe it was the way that the Lord just did something. I don't know. But I know that in my lowest moments of life, I've just done that with the Lord. I've come before him and just said, "Show me where I can be encouraged. Show me where you're working." Because it's hard right now. And God has been faithful. This is, by the way, same way as you recalibrate your life and you're reading the word, you know what the word does to you? Do you know why so many of the Psalms start out with David just down in despair and they end with him worshiping? because the word moves him to recount the faithfulness and the goodness of God in his own life. God begins to show him and he gives him clarity. Through that clarity, David begins to worship. One of the voices of worship and rejoicing is that voice of gratitude. That's not just a secular worldly word. That's the word for all of us to begin to be have a grateful heart to the Lord to begin to see how he's working. So David is going to begin to gain that clarity. But you know who can't have that clarity in this passage? I mean, think about it. Saul Saul has rejected God. Saul has turned away. Saul is walking in his own wilderness. And you know what he sees? Saul sees people who are against him. Everybody is against me. And all he does is he can't hear from the voice of God. He doesn't know what God's doing in his life. He doesn't even really care. And Saul is just spinning in circles. The most loyal guy in the whole kingdom that's part of his own family. Traitor. He's totally a traitor. I know he's against me. Paranoia and delusion. And Jonathan. Jonathan's got it out for me, too, as well. All of you captains of the guard. I mean, you guys are against me. I know there's a conspiracy, right? Do you see what's going on? He's just spiraling. He has no no gratefulness, no gratitude in his heart, no idea of how God's working because God's m God's left him because he wouldn't calibrate his life to God. He wouldn't turn to the Lord. He turned from God. So, not only is God not working for him, but even if he was, he couldn't see it. He's blinded now to his own way, into his own hands, trying to figure out how can I get out of this desert by myself? And you won't. Man, it I think that's one of the things if you don't hear anything else today, you do not get yourself out of the wilderness. You do not get yourself out of the wilderness. We are completely unable and uncapable. I hope you know that and can see that. It's not best practices or a bunch of principles that I can follow. God has to lead you out of that. But even in the wilderness, he has to lead you in it. Otherwise, you just wander. You'll never find your way out. And you'll never even thrive in the wilderness. You will starve and die if you are not turning to him. You will be like Saul just more and more spiraling downward, downward, downward. Wake up, Saul. And that's the call for us is to wake up to turn. We see this constantly in David as he gets to now have this viewpoint of God's goodness and faithfulness. And that's why time after this guy lived in the wilderness for years. And that's the he gave us all of these beautiful s psalms that show us constantly this is a guy that spent some time in the wilderness. This is a guy that had hard things happen in his life, but he never lost the ability to worship. He never lost the sight of who God was. He never lost that hope and that promise that God would be there, that God would fulfill the promises that he had he had for him. David walked in that assurance. That's what we find here ultimately is that David has this constancy in his walk with God. This constancy I'm not this I'm the slide guy. David has this constancy in his life. He's rooted and anchored not in himself but in God. He's ultimately looked outside and he's trusting. We find here right here in the in verse 23, we actually find that he says he says he's talking to to Abi Athor and he says, "Stay with me. Do not be afraid for he who seeks my life seeks yours. With me you shall be in safekeeping." How do you know? How does David know that he's going to be in safekeeping? I mean, like, he's got 400 guys. But I Saul's got an entire army. He's got hundreds of thousands of people. He has a whole land that's looking out for him. He's got all he's got, you know, he's like public enemy number one. You're going to keep people safe. You're living in a cave, David. It's only a matter of time before they scour the land and find you and kill you. How in the world are you going to survive? Yet, he has this confidence to tell Abi Athar, you'll be safe with us. Because David has this confidence in his own life that God has begun a good work and he will bring it into completion. He's rooted in the promises of God. He's oriented his life to God. God has begun to show him past and present his faithfulness, how he's working in David's life. He's even through the prophet Gad begun to speak into David's life. That should build some confidence. David, I'm calling you. I'm telling you where to go. We're going to see that throughout that the Lord is going to continue through Abi Athar and through the Ephod begin to communicate his plan to David to save and rescue David to preserve David time and time. David has this confidence in this moment to tell this man, "You'll be safe with me. You'll be safe with us." Not because these 400 guys can stand up and take and and and conquer a 100,000 men, but because the God of angel armies, the God of the universe, David's God, is protecting and preserving. David walks in that constancy in his life. He's anchored himself in the wilderness, not in anything but God alone to fulfill his promises. Then David can say this uh so Psalm 52 is actually written about Doe the Edomite. So we we have these different stories that are playing out in 1st Samuel preserved in the Psalms. I won't read the entire Psalms, but one of the things so we can just sort of get a glimpse of the confidence of David as he's talking about Doe, but also talking about himself as he's heard this story and this message and this travesty that has taken place in the land of Israel, which just shows you how far Saul has gone out of control. Saul would not kill an enemy king when God commanded him to do so in just a few chapters ago. He he preserved him and he left all the best of the sheep alive as well, right? So they could offer a sacrifice to the Lord. But when he's got an enemy, when his own people, the own priests of God are the enemy. Oh yeah, it's on. He takes out everybody. He treats them like they're pagans. He kills everybody, women, children, men, sheep, everything. He treats the people of God like they are the enemy. And he treats the enemy like they are the people of God. Saul has just lost his way. Do you see constancy in Saul's life? No, we see erratic. We see a guy that's one day he's okay and next day he's throwing his spear at you. One day he's he's he's uh he's accusing people. He's killing people. He's turning against people. He's just all over the place. You have no idea what his mood's going to be like, what his personality is going to be like. If one day you're like the the favorite guy, Doe better watch his back because you have no idea with Saul what he might do next. He lacks a constancy and a rootedness in his life. He'll never survive in the wilderness. He'll never thrive in it. He'll never grow. God's promises and and purposes that he wants to do for people in the wilderness will not be accomplished. So it can be in our own lives. If you do not turn to God, you will die in the desert. It will eat you up and you will wander in circles spiraling down in your life. The goal like God always says through the scripture in the moments of exile is turn to me. Return to me. Look to me. Listen to me. I want good for you. I am the best thing. I am working in this. If you will just stop for a second, stop trying to pivot and scramble and make things work and accuse everybody around you and just be bitter in spirit. If you will just sit with me, if you'll just tune in to me, if you'll just come to me and turn from all these other things that are not helpful to you, because sometimes in the desert, it's not just it's not just things are bad. Sometimes they're just not necessary. And God is saying, "Give that up." And if you hold on to it, it's a sin. You're disobeying God. So, what are you going to do? Maybe for some of you, I don't, you know, in our own life, if you have not, if you find yourself in that wilderness, maybe for the very first time, or maybe you've just been going in circles over and over, wake up. Don't try to find the answer. Don't try to turn to false things because they are idols is what the Bible calls them. They will not save you. They may give you a sugar high. They may make you feel good for a little while, but at the end of the day, you're still in a cave. At the end of the day, you're still in the wilderness. They may sustain you for a moment, but they won't last the whole time. You're going to have to turn to something outside yourself. If you will, you will find that your life will have constancy. and the spiritual disciplines more than anything else. The prayers, the worship, the word of God, these things will add anch will anchor your soul in such a way that you can weather the trials. You can weather the wilderness in all of its harshness and all of its stripping down. You will still be a branch that prospers. See the man who would not make God his refuge but trusted in the abundance of his riches and sought refuge for his own destruction. We know what happened there. We know what happened to Doe. We know what happens to Saul's destruction. It's wandering in the wilderness. David says, "But I am a green olive tree in the house of God. And I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever. I will thank you forever because you have done it. I will wait for your name for it is good in the presence of the godly. David knows how to wait because David knows how to hope. Hope keeps him constant, steadfast, and locked in and secure so that he can even promise security to others because he knows that God has anchored him, that God is working for him. You can gain the whole world even like Saul. You can have all the cards. You can be king of your own mountain and yet lose your own soul and be empty. But God wants to work in your life. God has good. The wilderness is not the end. We are reminded constantly that he is for us and not against us. If you are in Christ, then God is working for your good. He is drawing you to himself. He is establishing his plan and he will use the exile and the wilderness to accomplish his purpose. David will survive and be shaped by his time in the wilderness. We can see so much of this from the prayers. The wilderness was hard for him. But we see so much joy come forth from his psalms. so much depth, so much trust, so much faith, so much hope because that's what it does to you. Our goal isn't to stay in the wilderness, but God can use it for good. So that ultimately we can say, "My good things, my bad things will be turned to good. My good things cannot be taken from me." and the best it's yet to come because he will fulfill his ultimate plan for his people. David experienced loneliness as he entered the wilderness. He was alone. He had no place to lay his head. He was homeless. He was sought after to be killed. He was a refugee. Christ went into the wilderness. He came into this broken world, imperfect, hurting, something he never felt in his kingdom. And he experienced all of the brokenness and the wilderness and the sorrow. He was sought after to be killed. And he embraced the loneliness of the cross so that one day we might never be alone. because we are in him. Let's pray. Well Lord, we just know that this life time and time again does not work out the way that we expected. And it's filled with trial. It's filled with tribulation. And yet we are reminded, be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world, is what you say to us. We are thankful that you have a good plan and it cannot be changed or thwarted. Not human institution, not government, not power, not person, nothing can separate us from the love of God and from your plan ultimately your good plan working for your people. I just pray Lord that each day our hearts would submit and Lord where we where those who feel broken, those who maybe are experiencing all the pieces sort of shattered that they can come and they can find mercy. They can find healing. they can receive encouragement from you, but also from their brother and sister and from the people of God around them to speak that encouragement over them to remind them of these truths. I just pray that even through this word, Lord, that your word would speak to maybe those who are dealing with those. And we just pray all this in your name. Amen. before we sing and respond to the Lord, maybe just one one thing. And I I just so want to emphasize this, but if there are in your lives the pieces, I don't know, I just feel this sort of emphasis on this this morning, but you can bring those to the Lord. And I think there just needs to be a moment in your own life, you know, maybe even this morning right before we sing where just like you just sort of acknowledge that. You just acknowledge that before the Lord. God so already knows. He just wants you to be honest enough to acknowledge it and just to bring that to him. And I don't know, I just this morning I just it just is burning on me to just just say that to you. And so maybe even just for a second just just acknowledge that if that's in you, if that thing is going on, if there's those pieces and I want you to trust that the Lord can make good. Faith isn't always about seeing, but you can know. And scripture reminds us again and again, you can know. Know that he is merciful. Know that he is good. God is sweet to his people. I have seen in my own life many a time when he took the pieces and he made them good. And I'm so thankful. And it's things like that that we sing and proclaim.