Surviving the wilderness

This week's passage comes 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 Adullam. 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 Mizpeh 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 Hereth.

Now Saul heard that David was discovered, and the men who were with him. Saul was sitting in Gibeah 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 in wait, as it is this day."

Then answered Doeg the Edomite, who stood by the servants of Saul, "I saw the son of Jesse coming to Nob, to Ahimelech the son of Ahitub, 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 Ahimelech the priest, the son of Ahitub, and all his father's house, the priests who were at Nob." And all of them came to the king.

And Saul said, "Hear now, son of Ahitub."

And he answered, "Here I am, my lord."

And Saul said to him, "Why have you conspired against me, you and the son of Jesse, in 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 in wait, as it is this day?"

Then Ahimelech answered the king, "Who among all your servants is 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 have 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, Ahimelech, you and all your father's house."

And the king said to the guard who stood about him, "Turn and kill the priests of the Lord, because their hand also is with 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 priests of the Lord.

Then the king said to Doeg, "You turn and strike the priests." And Doeg the Edomite turned and struck down the priests, and killed on that day 85 persons who wore the linen ephod. And Nob, the city of the priests, he put to the sword; both man and woman, child and infant, ox, donkey, and sheep, he put to the sword.

But one of the sons of Ahimelech, the son of Ahitub, named Abiathar, escaped and fled after David. And Abiathar told David that Saul had killed the priests of the Lord.

And David said to Abiathar, "I knew on that day, when Doeg the 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 your life. With me you shall be in safekeeping."

This is God's word.

Introduction

What we see here is David, in the last chapter at the end of chapter 21, 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. That was desperate because, if you'll remember, they had written songs about how many thousands of Philistines David had killed. This should be the last place David should go; surely he's going to be in danger when he enters into that land. That's exactly what he finds: people start to recognize, "Wait a minute, isn't this the guy?"

So David very quickly has to get out of the Philistine land, doesn't know where to go, doesn't know where to turn, and so he runs and hides himself. We see here in verse 1 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 well-honored captain of the guard 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 and married the king's daughter. This is David.

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 wilderness, life on the run. 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 into 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.

David in here is at a very low point in his life. 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 all 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.

If you have 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. What I mean by wilderness... I mean by the fact that there are seasons in life where we just groan. 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 direction-wise, it's just all shaking. Well, you get rehired, but 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. We could go on and on—we could talk about even exiles in our home: there's turmoil, things with 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.

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 oftentimes 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 we don't necessarily grow or mature or put down deep roots.

There's something about the rawness of the wilderness—the rawness and being stripped and having so many things taken from us in life—that we really begin to open our eyes and look around. Because there aren't many things to distract, you begin to really think about the deep questions of life. 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: 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 wildernesses of our lives to accomplish his purpose, to use it to grow us and mature us and pull us to himself. In the wilderness, oftentimes, like any plant that is growing in a desert kind of place, you've 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. Because everything's been taken from you, so many of the things that you trust in the wilderness are no longer readily at hand. 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.

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 ourselves, and things in our life began to be removed and taken. We no longer found satisfaction, and we began to ask these deeper questions as things were stripped from our life. In that exile and in that wilderness, our eyes and our ears began to tune in and seek for something beyond ourselves, and ultimately to look to God and to what he has and what he is saying.

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, you'll be good, 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, 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... Psalm 142 was written from a cave. We don't know what cave—David spent a lot of time in caves, and there are a couple psalms that are from the cave—but I think when I read this psalm this week, this really reflected the heart of where David finds himself in the beginning in verse 1 of this chapter. We see in Psalm 142, David says:

"Look to the right and see: there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to 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. This is his prayer to God that he utters and where he finds himself.

1. Recalibrating Your Soul

In surviving the wilderness, what we find is recalibration. What I really want us to hear, though—and I really want to make sure that I'm careful here—I don't want this to be like, "If we just tweak some things in our life, 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 at. I'm talking about reorienting your life, reorienting to something maybe that you've lost, maybe you've lost your way or you've gotten off track. What God will do oftentimes in the wilderness is he will use it to reorient or to recalibrate—or maybe for the very first time, to begin to calibrate us to himself, to turn our eyes and our hearts to look beyond us to someone, when all of the other things in life are not found in the wilderness. So you can only look to God himself to come to him in this.

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 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 distract him away from sitting before God. We can go about it the wrong ways in our life, but David has learned the power of calibrating himself to the Lord.

Throughout this, 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. One of the things that we see in the parallel of this passage is Saul. Saul is another man here, and 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. 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 and say, "I'm off track, I'm not listening to the voice of God in my life," or "I've not sought him." Sometimes it's just to reorient our lives, to turn from something and to turn to something more and more in our life.

This is ultimately what David does as he begins to move. We see in verse 5 how the prophet Gad comes along, because David's all over the place. 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, 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. It says he runs to the stronghold, which many Bible commentators believe is the east side of the Dead Sea, 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. Then the voice of God begins to enter the picture, and he speaks through the prophet Gad. We see here in verse 5:

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 Hereth.

Now, we think obedience is automatic, right? The prophet speaks. But we've seen throughout as we've been studying 1st 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, and oftentimes we pick and choose what we want to hear. And so our life can sometimes get off 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.

David is going to learn: 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 spiritual disciplines. It's almost natural many times for a believer—for most of us, once we are at the end of ourselves and once things aren't going good, we begin to look outside of ourselves, and 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 onto in their life, and there's good in that because God speaks through his word—it's living and active.

One of the things about God's word that it does is it can encourage us, it can redirect us, it can cause us to repent. God is moving and speaking through his word. But the language that we have oftentimes is 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: 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 through his word and through prayer, our life is reoriented and recalibrated to God.

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. Now David has kind of a little cohort 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. 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 ourselves in our own wilderness, and yet 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 in love—all of these charges! We are not an island, we are not the end of ourselves, and it's not just "me and Jesus." 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.

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.

2. Gaining Clarity

The second thing that we find is clarity. 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 into 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 escaped to the cave of Adullam. And when his brothers and all his father's house heard it, they went down 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 he became commander over them. And there were with him about 400 men. And David went from there to Mizpeh 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 Hereth.

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 at rock bottom. And yet, what does God do? God is moving! If he's actually coming to the Lord, if he's actually recalibrating and putting his prayer like we see in Psalm 142 there, just being honest with the Lord, open about how things are, how he feels, how he's broken, how he feels that he'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 what he's 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." Then all of a sudden, he starts to bring other people who come around him, and now David's built up this little army and he's got guys around to protect and to work, and he's a leader over them. 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 more closely. Because sometimes when you go through the difficult things of life, that's when you have great depth in your relationship even with God. When we go through the hard things of life, we have to press into him and call out to him.

God can be so good and sweet in giving us 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, the 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 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 have a grateful heart to the Lord, to begin to see how he's working. And so David is going to begin to gain that clarity.

You know who can't have that clarity in this passage? Think about it: Saul. Saul has rejected God, Saul has turned away, Saul is walking in his own wilderness. You know what he sees? Saul sees people who are against him: "Everybody is against me!" 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!" Do you see what's going on? He's just spiraling. He has no gratefulness, no gratitude in his heart, no idea of how God's working, because God's left him—because he wouldn't calibrate his life to God. He wouldn't turn to the Lord; he turned from God.

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 and into his own hands, trying to figure out, "How can I get out of this desert by myself?"

And you won't. 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 incapable. 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!"

That's the call for us: 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. That's why, time after... this guy lived in the wilderness for years, and he gave us all of these beautiful 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 sight of who God was, and he never lost that hope and that promise that God would be there, that God would fulfill the promises that he had for him." David walked in that assurance.

3. Finding Constancy in God

That's what we find here ultimately: David has this constancy in his walk with God—this constancy. 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 right here in verse 23, we actually find that he says... he's talking to Abiathar, and he says, "Stay with me; do not be afraid, for he who seeks my life seeks your life. 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, he's got 400 guys, but 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 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 Abiathar, "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 to 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 Abiathar and through the ephod to communicate his plan to David to save and rescue David, to preserve David time and time again. 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 conquer 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... Psalm 52 is actually written about Doeg the Edomite. So we have these different stories that are playing out in 1st Samuel preserved in the Psalms. I won't read the entire psalm, but so we can get a glimpse of the confidence of David as he's talking about Doeg, 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 just a few chapters ago—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 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 behavior. We see a guy that's... one day he's okay, the next day he's throwing his spear at you. One day 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's going to be like. If one day you're the favorite guy, Doeg 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 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 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 that things are bad, sometimes they're just not necessary, and God is saying, "Give that up." If you hold onto it, it's a sin—you're disobeying God. So what are you going to do?

Maybe for some of you... in our own life, 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 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 in his own destruction."

We know what happened there, we know what happened to Doeg, we know what happens to Saul: destruction, wandering in the wilderness. David says:

"But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. 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, 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, and 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 is 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.