SERIES: Leadership in Hard Times
Leading by Grace
SPEAKER: Michael P. Andrus
For the sake of the children (and any guests we might have with us today), I want you to know that here in Big Church we have been studying the OT book of 1 Samuel, and particularly the lives of Saul and David, the first two kings of Israel. The children were provided a work sheet to help them benefit from this morning.
Even if you haven’t been with us so far in this series on Leadership in Hard Times, I think you can still profit from today’s message, which I have entitled Leading by Grace. We are all leaders in some arena, whether at home, at church, at school, or at work. One can lead by law (“here are the rules, no deviation allowed”), or by leniency (“do whatever you want”), or as a tyrant (“it’s my way or the highway”), but I am convinced that God wants His leaders to always lead by grace, and we’re going to see David as a classic example. The difference between leading by grace and those other ways is having a heart that is alive, struggling with God honestly and faithfully, and having a keen radar tuned to the needs of others.
Our text is four full chapters of 1 Samuel–27, 29, 30, and 31! It’s not as huge a task as it may first appear, because these chapters are not exactly the epitome of biblical theology; in fact, some of these stories are so mundane that they tend to challenge a high view of Scripture and cause one to ask, “Why does God take up precious space in His Word for these kinds of earthy events?” Could the answer be because much of our lives are largely just that–earthy and mundane, with very little clear evidence of the supernatural?
Did you know that there isn’t a single miracle in the David story? Not one. Oh, I know we must define “miracle” in order to convince you of that, because the Goliath incident sure looks like a miracle. And in one sense it is–the power of God was certainly evident when the little shepherd boy killed the menacing giant. But what I mean is there is no “first-class miracle” in David’s whole story–no event that clearly contravenes the laws of nature–like a dead person coming to life or a man walking on water. There are acts of providence and supernatural timing, for sure, but Goliath’s death doesn’t demand divine intervention in the laws of nature. It could be explained as a lucky shot. Mind you, I don’t think it was, but a first-class miracle is, by definition, a direct interruption in the laws of nature.
But most of us have not experienced miracles either. Oh yes, we’ve seen God’s fingerprints in our lives, and we’ve seen things we call miracles because we are so convinced God is ultimately behind them. But I doubt if any of us here has ever observed the blind receive sight or an axe head float. We’re pretty much in the same boat as David regarding the fact that God’s power and presence are somewhat hidden.
To me that’s one of the things that makes David so appealing–he’s so much like us and his experiences are so much like ours. Frankly, I’m encouraged when I see David slugging it out in the muck and mire of daily living. And I think there is much we can learn from him about receiving and practicing grace when we are caught in the ordinary crud of life.
I want us to look at three events in David’s life this morning:
David in survival mode,
David in trauma mode,
and David in grace mode.
With each of these I have a question of application.
David in survival mode (1 Samuel 27)
The first of my questions is this: “Are you living with riffraff and misfits in Ziklag while serving Achish?” Huh? Well, hang on, because I suspect many of you are doing just that.
You may recall Achish, the ruler of the Philistine city of Gath from whom David earlier barely escaped with his life by acting insane and drooling on his beard (that was back in chapter 21). Here in chapter 27, we find David back with Achish again, but instead of acting insane, he is being treated as a trusted military ally and helping Achish get rich. How did this happen?
Well, for the better part of a decade David has been running for his life from King Saul, like an outlaw with a price on his head, hiding in caves in the Judean desert and living on food he has to beg from the likes of Nabal the fool. Twice David had the opportunity to kill Saul, but twice he refrained from “lifting his hand against the Lord’s anointed.” Yet Saul continues to pursue him.
As a last resort David decides to escape to the Philistine territory. Listen to his reasoning at the beginning of chapter 27: “One of these days I will be destroyed by the hand of Saul. The best thing I can do is to escape to the land of the Philistines. Then Saul will give up searching for me anywhere in Israel, and I will slip out of his hand.” And the plan works! Verse 4 indicates that “when Saul was told that David had fled to Gath, he no longer searched for him.”
But David has 600 men with him, plus their families, and he needs more space than the city of Gath provides, so he asks Achish if he can go and settle in the town of Ziklag. Achish gives him permission, so David and his men settle there for 16 months. During this time David regularly conducts raids against the nomadic tribes living in the area. However, to keep Achish happy and unsuspicious, he falsely reports that he is raiding Israelite towns in the Negev. In other words, he pretends to be a turncoat against Israel, while actually helping Israel by raiding her historical enemies–the nomadic tribes. The way David pulls this off is that he does not leave any witnesses; he massacres everyone—men and women—during these raids. The ultimate result of David’s ruse is that Achish trusts him completely and says with confidence (27:12), “He (David) has become so odious to his people, the Israelites, that he will be my servant forever.”
Now perhaps you understand what I mean when I say that these stories challenge a high view of Scripture, at least at first glance. God isn’t mentioned once in this whole chapter. David is found lying, deceiving, and even massacring, and the Scripture remains silent in its moral judgment. David’s behavior is not, of course, approved, but neither is it openly condemned.
I am indebted to Eugene Peterson for some profound insights into this period of David’s life. He writes (and I beg your careful attention to this rather lengthy quote):
“Commentators on this text commonly do one of two things: they moralize or they secularize. The moralizing approach is to criticize and condemn David for his spiritual backsliding. He knows better. He betrays his high calling as Israel’s anointed. He fails to trust God to care for him, as God has cared for him so amply in the past. David loses it.
The secularizing approach reads this as an admiring account of how David successfully comes to power, the outcome of incredibly good luck and shrewd wit…. And he manages to use the Philistine King Achish for his own purposes without getting caught in the deception. David is unstoppable–nothing to write home about ethically, but what a hero! And isn’t all fair in love and war?
But if we read this text in its context, enter the story and let the story interpret itself to us, we realize something quite different. Even though there’s no explicit reference to God and God’s purposes here, what we realize is that it’s in fact God’s purposes that are being worked out, detail by detail….
David is more or less doing what he has to do: surviving as best he can under conditions that are decidedly uncongenial to what we’re apt to call “the spiritual life.” He doesn’t stand up in indignation against Achish, confront his Philistine culture of brutality and idolatry. He doesn’t get on his moral high horse and announce to Achish that the only way he can in good conscience serve him is as a noncombatant. None of that. He lives not only on the money economy of Philistine Gath but also on the moral economy.
The storyteller doesn’t say that this is the right thing to do, simply that this is what David does. And in precisely these conditions, God works out his purposes….
The David/Achish episode isn’t a biblical license for caving in to the culture; on the contrary, we’re repeatedly admonished to “come out from among them; be ye separate.” We’re taught in many and various ways to resist the undertow of the world’s culture. It is, though, a story of what happens to us when we find ourselves overwhelmed by our culture with seemingly no way out–a story of God’s hidden providence, God’s behind-the-scenes efforts, doing for us what we aren’t doing for ourselves.” [i]
Now I’m fairly certain that such an interpretation makes some of you uncomfortable. We like our spirituality in black and white, don’t we? We shrink away from moral dilemmas and prefer to have everything wrapped up in neat little packages, kind of like how Bill Gothard used to do for us twenty-five years ago–seven easy steps to having compliant children. Sure!
Our evangelical heroes tend to be those who always stand tall and true, like Joseph and Daniel of the Bible, or, to use a more modern example, Eric Liddle of the 1924 British Olympic track team featured in the great movie, Chariots of Fire. Liddle refused to run on Sunday and thus missed out on the competition in his best event, but he entered the 400 meters and won gold anyway. That’s the way we like our heroes–uncompromising, straight as an arrow, and successful. Believe me, Eric Liddle was a hero, and so were Joseph and Daniel, but there are other heroes of the faith whose lives aren’t nearly so tidy–like David. Listen once more to Peterson:
“I know scores of men and women who are living under the patronage of Achish of Gath. Many of them feel terrible about it. Many of them feel guilty but honestly don’t know what they can do. They have jobs with companies that do business in defiant contempt of the Kingdom of God. They’re married to spouses who hate the name of Jesus. They seem to be inextricably tangled in an economic system that exploits the poor and ignores the oppressed. They’re doing their best to honor parents who dishonor God in thought, word, and deed. There’s hardly a Christian I know who hasn’t put in time, sometimes far more than David’s sixteen months, under Achish of Gath.
And what I want to say is this: God is perfectly capable of working out his purposes in our lives even when we can’t lift a finger to help. Better yet, God is faithfully working out our salvation even when every time we lift a finger it seems to contribute to the wrong side, the Philistine side.” [ii]
Notice also who is with David in Ziklag. His 600 men are not the cream of the crop, you know. They were earlier described in 22:2 as “all those who were in distress or in debt or discontented.” These are the riffraff and misfits of society, people who couldn’t make it in the culture–rejects, losers, dropouts, all of them.
There’s nothing in the story that explicitly describes the spirituality of David’s company, but we know that David prayed, so I think it’s safe to assume he taught them to pray. We know that David called upon God in times of trouble; it’s safe to assume he taught them to do the same. I suggest to you that these men and their families were the prototype of a community of faith that God was forming for His purposes. In fact, these seem to be the sorts of people God commonly uses to form companies of believers–churches, if you will.
Friends, in no area of our lives is disappointment and discouragement as likely as when we are in community. We enter a church looking for God, and to our dismay we find a company of hypocrites, gossips, and lowlifes of various sorts. (Sorry to let the cat out of the bag, and please don’t take unnecessary offense; I’m not thinking of anyone in particular in today’s audience–just everyone in general). It’s no wonder that one hears so often from ex-attenders, “I love God, but I hate the church.”
The most common reaction we have to this sad situation is probably denial, but the next is marketing. We try to improve the image of the church by public relations and professional staging. When the effort is successful, which it often is, the results are hard to distinguish from the world of sales and soap opera. But one can’t see Paul or Jesus taking that approach; they seem to revel in the fact that the church is made up of riffraff and misfits. Listen to the words of the Apostle from 1 Corinthians 1:26-31, as paraphrased in The Message:
Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have–right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start–comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, “If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.”
Let me come back to my application question: “Are you, like David, living with riff-raff and misfits in Ziklag while serving Achish?” Well, if you are, don’t get discouraged; don’t despair. Remember what Carlton Harris said when he preached a few weeks ago–this isn’t the end of the story. Keep the faith, fight to survive, learn to accept each other in our mutual state of riffraff-ness. God may even have a throne waiting for you.
On the other hand, things could get even worse, before they get better. They did for David. In chapter 29 and 30 we find David moving from survival mode to trauma mode.
David in trauma mode (1 Samuel 29, 30:1-6)
David may have thought things couldn’t get any worse than living in exile in Ziklag and surviving through deceit and murder, but they do get worse, a lot worse. He literally comes to the end of himself. And the application question I want to ask of you at this point is this: “Have you come to the absolute end of your rope?”
Here’s the story in a nutshell. The Philistines decide to launch a huge military effort near Jezreel to defeat Saul and his armies once for all. If you were here last Sunday, you we saw how frightened Saul was by this threat–frightened enough to violate an absolute command of God and seek guidance from a witch, a medium. He did this the very night before the battle. One of the reasons Saul was so frightened may be that he heard a rumor that David had joined the Philistine army.
You see, Achish decides to draft David and his men to fight against Saul. This undoubtedly constitutes a huge dilemma for David. He has been secretly plundering and killing Israel’s enemies while making Achish believe he is on his side. But now he is being asked to fight directly against Israel, and if he refuses, he will be revealed as a Jewish sympathizer and will lose his sanctuary among the Philistines, perhaps even his life. On the other hand, if he joins the Philistines he will have to fight against his own countrymen, and then they will never accept him as their king. There is no obvious escape from the horns of this awful dilemma.
But God is never impaled on the horns of our dilemmas. He shows himself to be active once again in the muck and mire of daily life. He causes David to be rescued by none other than the Philistine generals! They challenge Achish, in effect asking, “How can we include Israelites in our army when we are fighting against Israelites? David will try to recover favor with Saul by double-crossing us.” Achish argues vehemently that David is trustworthy, but he loses the argument. Listen to his words as he apologizes to David in 29:6-7: “I would be pleased to have you serve with me in the army. From the day you came to me until now, I have found no fault in you, but the rulers don’t approve of you. Turn back and go in peace.”
David feigns shock and disappointment, so much so that Achish feels guilty and apologizes some more: “I know that you have been as pleasing in my eyes as an angel of God” (29:9). Achish thinks he has let David down, but he has really become God’s instrument for delivering David from an impossible lose-lose situation. I marvel at God’s providential care but also at the ironic, almost humorous way David comes out smelling like a rose! Someone has said, “God prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies, and sometimes he even has our enemies set the table!”4
But David is not yet out of the woods, for when he and his men arrive back in Ziklag three days later, the town is gone! While they were gone a band of Amalekite raiders attacked the town, burned it, and took captive all the women and children, including David’s wives! In 30:4 we read, “So David and his men wept aloud until they had no strength left to weep.” The grief of the men soon turns to anger at David! In verse 6 we read, “David was greatly distressed because the men were talking of stoning him; each one was bitter in spirit because of his sons and daughters.” It’s a strange thing how anger is often vented at those who are closest to us, especially when the real culprits are out of reach. It wasn’t David’s fault that the town had been burned and all the families had been taken hostage, but because he is their leader, they hold him responsible.
David has absolutely come to the end of his rope. After being chased from his homeland by the wicked Saul and living like a desert rat for nearly ten years, he is now in danger of being killed by his own men–the very riffraff and misfits he has taken in and provided for when no one else wanted them! How low can he go! I can imagine David might have been tempted to complain bitterly to God: “I thought I was supposed to be Your anointed one! I thought you promised to never leave me nor forsake me! A lot of good it has done me to put my trust in You!” Or worse, he might have said, “I quit!” Or worse still, “I don’t care anymore! Fine! Kill me!” I’ve heard all these responses when life hits the skids. In fact, I’ve used all these responses myself. But if David was tempted to say such things he resisted, for the end of verse 6 says, “But David found strength in the LORD his God.”
Do you recognize the similarity here to an earlier statement way back in chapter 23? There we read, “While David was at Horesh in the Desert of Ziph, he learned that Saul had come out to take his life. And Saul’s son Jonathan went to David at Horesh and he helped him find strength in God.” Jonathan taught David how to do it, and now he can do it on his own. When the whole world is against us and there is no place else to turn, we can still find strength in the Lord our God. Of course, it starts by recognizing Him as our personal God. It says, “David found strength in the LORD his God.” David could no longer say, “my house,” “my city,” “my family,” or “my country, even,” because he was an exile, and everything dear to him had been taken. But he could still say, “my God.” And we can find strength in the same God if we know Him personally. We can still cry out to Him, cast ourselves on His care, be comforted by His Spirit, and revel in His mercy.
Our application question was, “Have you come to the absolute end of your rope?” I suspect there is someone, maybe several someone’s here this morning who are at that point. If so, don’t quit, don’t give up. Dig deep and find strength in the Lord your God. If you don’t know Him personally, then I invite you to talk to me or one of our leaders after the service, and we’ll show you how to meet Him.
It’s time to glance briefly at the rest of the story. David has gone from survival mode to trauma mode. But now we’re going to see him in grace mode–experiencing grace and extending grace.
David in grace mode (1 Samuel 30:7-31)
Our application question is this: “Have you learned to reject fairness and embrace compassion?” Another way of asking the same question is this: “Have you learned to opt for mercy rather than justice?”
Here’s how the story unfolds: One of the ways David finds strength in the Lord is to seek His counsel. He inquires of God as to whether he and his men should pursue the Amalekites and whether they would be able to overtake them. Most people would never have bothered to ask. If your loved ones are seized by hostage-takers, you just instinctively react. But not David. He asks God first, and God gives him the thumbs-up. That’s one way David experiences grace in this situation, for God hears and answers.
With God’s direction and approval, David leads his 600 men in pursuit of the Amalekites. They pursue with a vengeance, for we learn that when they come to the Besor Ravine, 200 of the men are too exhausted to cross, but David and 400 of his men continue on the trail. At this point David experiences a second sign of grace. They find an Egyptian who is near death, not having had any food or water for three days. David gives him food and water and he revives. David asks him, “To whom do you belong, and where do you come from?” The man turns out to be an Egyptian slave of one of the Amalekite warriors in the very raiding party that has just burned Ziklag! He had gotten sick and was left in the desert to die.
In exchange for his life (and perhaps to repay the Amalekites who left him in the desert), the Egyptian agrees to lead David to the Amalekite camp. David and his men find their enemy, defeat them thoroughly, and recover everything the Amalekites had taken, including every single wife and child. “Nothing was missing: young or old, boy or girl, plunder or anything else they had taken.” Amazing, isn’t it? Amazing grace that not one life was lost!
But now David has an opportunity to show grace as well as receive it. As the 400 men are returning with their families and flocks, plus the plunder they took from the Amalekites, they come to the 200 men who were too exhausted to cross the Besor Ravine. The evil men and the troublemakers among them decide that “just desserts” must be the order of the day. Here are their words regarding the 200: “Because they did not go out with us, we will not share with them the plunder we recovered. However, each man may take his wife and children and go.” (30:22b)
They demand justice, but David opts for mercy.
David replied, “No, my brothers, you must not do that with what the LORD has given us. He has protected us and handed over to us the forces that came against us. Who will listen to what you say? The share of the man who stayed with the supplies is to be the same as that of him who went down to the battle. All will share alike.” David made this a statute and ordinance for Israel from that day to this. (30:23-25)
That is leading by grace! He exercises a wonderful combination of warmth (“my brothers”), solid theology (“The Lord gave us all this stuff and protected us”), and authority (“This is the way it’s going to be–share and share alike”).
Not only does David graciously share the plunder with those too exhausted to cross the Besor Ravine; the last five verses indicate that he sends portions of the plunder to Israelites living in thirteen towns (plus others that aren’t named) where he had lived and roamed during his desert wanderings.
I go back to my application question: “Have you learned to reject fairness and embrace compassion? Do you know how to opt for mercy instead of justice?” One of the most frequent complaints I heard from my two sons as they were growing up was, “But Dad, it’s not fair.” Eddie might be talking about the playing time he got on the basketball court. Andy would more likely be speaking of a grade he got at school. But both boys somewhere got the idea that life is supposed to be fair. And, of course, they are not alone. We all tend to think like that, and frankly that notion is what lies behind most of the complaining and anger and even violence we hear from our culture. We should get what we deserve, and if we don’t, we’re going to make someone miserable.
(By the way, let me take a short rabbit trail here. The idea that life is supposed to be fair is so deeply ingrained in the human psyche that I think we need to conclude that God is the One who put it there. Eden was fair, and we long to return there. The longing is not wrong; what is wrong is excusing or ignoring the fact that sin is what has made things unfair. We long for heaven, for justice, for beauty, for respect, and frankly, as God’s image-bearers something is wrong when we don’t long for those things. Where we mess up is in thinking that unfairness and the resulting pain is the problem. No, that’s the symptom. The problem is that we are unwilling to wait for the time when God will make all things right. We want, expect, and even demand heaven on this sinful earth, instead of weeping for what has been lost).
Back to David’s story. I wonder how many of us would have agreed with the group of David’s mercenaries who decided they were being extremely generous by letting the 200 have only their wives and children back. How many business executives think of the administrative assistants and clerks who made their businesses grow when they’re handing out stock options? How many husbands give stay-at-home moms equal credit for providing for the family? How many senior pastors recognize their colleagues who don’t get a lot of up-front pulpit time as nevertheless critical to the mission of the church?
How many of us honor the nursery workers and the janitors and the guys in the sound booth as much as we honor the musicians who fill the stage or the teacher in our ABF? I attended Gertrude Hendrich’s funeral on Friday. They were the key founders of West Church and, for years before that, were faithful servants here. We heard from several of those who spoke about the huge impact Gertrude had on little children in the nursery. I’m talking about an impact that is still with those children when they are getting married. I am reminded of how the KJV reads in 1 Samuel 30:24: “As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff.” Well, there’s a lot of “stuff” in nursery work, and God honors it as much as preaching.
May I challenge you this morning to think of someone in your life who has stayed with the supplies–either because of exhaustion or giftedness or personality–and make sure they feel honored and receive their share of credit?
The last chapter in 1 Samuel records the death of Saul. Allow me to comment very briefly on this sad chapter.
Postscript on Saul: How the mighty have fallen! (1 Samuel 31)
When we return to 2 Samuel, we’re going to see a totally unexpected reaction of David to the death of his tormentor. In keeping with his godly character, he doesn’t rejoice but grieves openly. In fact, he writes a lament over Saul and Jonathan, and he requires that the men of Judah learn it. Three times in that lament we read the words, “How the mighty have fallen!” David intended it, I think, as just a simple statement of the sad death of two mighty warriors. But I think the Spirit of God meant it as a moral statement as well. Here is a man—Saul—who had everything going for him, every opportunity to leave a mark on his culture and his country, every privilege royalty could provide. But he fell ignominiously–not from the arrows of enemy archers, but from the evil weapons of his own heart.
Conclusion: I want to say one more thing about opting for mercy instead of justice. David is not the only one who did that. So did the Son of David, Jesus Christ. Jesus did not give us justice, for had He done so, we would all be facing eternal judgment. Jesus opted for mercy instead. He died in our place and offers His shed blood as the full payment for our sin.
In a moment we are going to be invited to a very simple meal that commemorates Jesus’ sacrifice. He gave us this opportunity in order to goad our memories, to remind us whenever we participate that mercy triumphs over justice.
Prayer: Father, as David received grace, so he bestowed it. Will you help us to do the same? Will you help us to live lives of grace as we interact with those around us? Will you enable us to lead our children, our employees, our classrooms, our friends, with grace? Most of all, thank you for pouring your grace out on us at Calvary.
DATE: September 5, 2004
Tags:
Grace
Fairness
[i] Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall, 97-99.
[ii] Peterson, 99.