SEEKING GOD FAITHFULLY-
A LOOK AT THE LIFE OF DAVID
Message #5
Cave Training
1 Sam 22:1 & Psalm 142
INTRODUCTION
In her book, THE HIDING PLACE, Corrie Ten Boom relates an incident that taught her to be thankful for things we normally would not be thankful for. She and her sister, Betsy, prisoners of the Nazis, had just been transferred to the worst prison camp they had seen yet, Ravensbruck. Upon entering the barracks, they found them extremely overcrowded and infested with fleas. Their Scripture reading from their smuggled Bible that morning in 1 Thessalonians had reminded them to rejoice always, pray constantly, and give thanks in all circumstances. Betsy told Corrie to stop and thank the Lord for every detail of their new living quarters. Corrie at first flatly refused to give thanks for the fleas, but Betsy persisted. Corrie finally agreed to somehow thank God for even the fleas.
During the months spent at that camp, they were surprised to find how openly they could hold Bible study and prayer meetings in their barrack without guard interference. Several months later they learned that the guards would not enter the barracks because of the fleas.
Have you ever been in a cave? When I was in college at Kentucky Christian College, students would often go "caving" at Carter County State Park. The cave was a wonderful place to just get away and hide. Suzy and I once toured Mammoth Caves in SW Kentucky. When we deep into the cave, the tour guide shut all the lights off and let us experience absolute darkness. That was wild.
Sometimes life can be like getting lost in a cave. Problems and hardships begin to overtake us like the cold, damp, darkness of a cave.
We are in a series of messages here at NCC on the life of David of the OT. When we left David last week he was running for his life with the murderous King Saul and his army in pursuit.
1 Samuel 22:1 David left Gath and escaped to the cave of Adullam.
It’s a long way from the palace of a king to the dark, dampness of a remote cave, whether you measure it in miles or in status lost. As David stumbled into this remote hideout that first night, just glad to be alive, he was a man completely stripped of everything he once had.
He had only the shirt on his back, and perhaps the sword of Goliath to his name. His humiliation before the King of Gath must have stung.
In those early days in the blackness of the cave, David was a troubled man. Like you and me, when we suddenly see our situations reverse for the worse, and it seems we’ve done nothing to deserve it, questions and emotions ripped through his mind.
We don’t gain much insight into the turmoil David was experiencing in that cave from the writer of 1 Samuel. If all we had were what is written in these few verses, we might conclude that David just shrugged it off and went right on with his life, unaffected. But this was not the case. Like you and me when things go bad, he was hurting.
David was a musician and a song writer. Like many song writers today, he often turned his troubles into a song. If David was living today, we no doubt would have been a Blues musician.
A lot of powerful music has come from the heartaches and tragic experiences of songwriters.
Eric Clapton wrote his ballad Tears in Heaven right after his four year old son fell out of a window to his death in a London apartment.
David wrote many of the Psalms and one in particular he wrote in the early days in the cave as he hid from Saul and had no where else to hide. It’s Psalm 142. Try to imagine David composing this song in the dim light of a cave, where he was hiding out to save his life.
Read Psalm 142.
This Psalm gives us a tremendous insight into the turmoil David experienced as his life had apparently fallen apart.
If you are going through a dark, discouraging time, I see at least four principles that are common to all people who are going through situations that have them pretty low, through no fault of their own.
So when you are stuck in a situation where there seems to be no answer or solution in sight, where the future is unsure, when your resources are exhausted, when you feel as though you are in a prison with no way out, what can that "cave experience" do for you?
From Psalm 142, we learn some lessons about cave experiences.
THEY SHOW US THE NEED FOR PRAYER.
One night little Joey’s parents overheard this prayer. "Now I lay me down to rest, and hope to pass tomorrow’s test, if I should die before I wake, that’s one less test I have to take."
One of the toughest challenges of the Christian life is to maintain a consistent prayer life.
We are busy so we forget to pray. We go days and maybe even weeks without a meaningful conversation with God. Most of us know that isn’t good, or healthy for our spiritual lives, but we have a hard time breaking the pattern.
We can become so self sufficient in good times, that subconsciously we don’t feel a real urge or tug to pray.
But when we find our self going through some type of cave experience, all of a sudden we’re feeling like we can use some help, so we cry out to God, pleading for his assistance.
The following incident took place in 1968 on an airliner bound for New York. It started out routine and uneventful. Descending to the destination, the pilot realized the landing gear would not engage. He worked the controls back and forth, trying again and again to make the gear lock down into place. No success. He then asked the control tower for instructions as he circled the landing field. Responding to the crisis, airport personnel sprayed the runway with foam as fire trucks and other emergency vehicles moved into position. Disaster was only minutes away.
The passengers, meanwhile, were told of each maneuver in that calm, cheery voice pilots manage to use at times like this. Flight attendants glided about the cabin with an air of cool reserve. Passengers were told to place their heads between their knees and grab their ankles just before impact. It was one of those I-can’t- believe-this-is-happening-to-me experiences. There were tears and a few screams of despair. The landing was now seconds away. Suddenly the pilot announced over the intercom: "We are beginning our final descent. At this moment, in accordance with International Aviation Codes established at Geneva, it is my obligation to inform you that if you believe in God you should commence prayer."
I’m happy to report that the belly landing occurred without a hitch. No one was injured though the plane suffered so rather extensive damage.
It almost seems to be a characteristic of human nature that for many, unless there is a crisis that threatens life or limb, we don’t see the need for prayer.
But sometimes our inattention is interrupted by crisis. We are shown once again our need to pray.
-financial crisis
-relational crisis
-something inside that is making your heart break
-beyond the help of a Doctor
-wickedness of this world.......sin can be discouraging when participating in it or when you are trying to over come it....
-child gets sick
-16 year old is out late and you don’t know where
-lump or a discoloration....
James 5:13 Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray.
Listen to David as he pours out his heart to God.
Psalm 142:1-2 I cry aloud to the Lord; I lift up my voice to the Lord for mercy. [2] I pour out my complaint before him; before him I tell my trouble.
Can’t you hear David’s prayers echoing off the walls of the cave? He is hurting. He is despairing. He is intensely aware of his need to talk to God. Cave experiences do that to us. When you experience one, it will probably bring you closer to God in prayer.
That is why it is so important to develop a consistent and regular prayer relationship with God when life is going well.
We tend to save prayer until a crisis experience occurs and then we are out of prayer shape. From reading many of the other Psalms that David wrote, he apparently had a very strong prayer relationship with God, so when his cave experience occurred, he knew how to pray, and he was in prayer shape.
Don’t wait until you hit a cave experience to start praying. Get in prayer shape when things are going well, so you have that foundation in place when your cave experience occurs.
A second thing that such cave experiences do for us is
THEY UPROOT OUR SELF SUFFICIENT AND INDEPENDENT SPIRIT
The real root behind our prayerless lives is not our busy schedules- it’s our sense of self sufficiency and independence. We don’t want to admit that we have needs beyond our ability to take care of. We don’t like to admit that we cannot solve all of our problems on our own.
This is true for both men and ladies, but often it shows up in men more. That’s why we don’t like to ask for directions, we don’t like to call another person to come help us with a project we are doing at home. We don’t like to admit we need help.
We’d rather say, "I can do it myself."
Sometimes we are just "legends in our own minds."
"Egotism is the only disease that makes everyone else sick"
A doctor, a lawyer, a priest, and a little boy were out for a Sunday afternoon flight on a small private plane. Suddenly, the plane developed engine trouble. In spite of the best efforts of the pilot, the plane started to go down. Finally, the pilot grabbed a parachute and as he jumped he yelled to the passengers that they better prepare to jump.
Unfortunately, there were only three parachutes remaining. The doctor grabbed one and said, "I save lives so I must live! He grabbed a bundle and jumped. The lawyer shouted, "I’m the smartest man in the world, I deserve to live! And with that he grabbed a bundle and jumped." The priest said to the boy, "You have a long full life of ahead of you, you take the remaining parachute." The boy said, "Don’’t sweat it Father, the smartest man in the world, just jumped with my backpack."
This independent, self sufficient spirit within each of us is the primary reason many people reject God in their life. They don’t need Him.
It’s like a man swimming across a particularly large body of water. You see him out there and you know he’ll never make it, so you pull beside him in your boat and offer a life preserver. He won’t take it because in his pride he believes he can make it on his own. What happens? He drowns in his pride.
Pride keeps me from getting help. "I got marriage problems and I don’t want to talk to anybody about it" .....I can do it...pride. "I am in financial trouble and I don’t want to talk to a financial counselor." .....I can do it...pride.
For a self-sufficient person, it often takes a cave experience to get him to wake up and face reality. We are not as self sufficient as we like to think we are. We cannot solve all our problems by ourselves.
How much of that self sufficient spirit is in you?
I don’t know how much of this independent spirit David had in him, but I do know that in the Psalm he acknowledges his own insufficiency. "my spirit was overwhelmed within me." (3a) "There is no escape for me..." (4c) "I am brought very low...they are too strong for me." (v. 6)
Those are the words of a man who has realized he cannot solve all his problems on his own. David is humbled.
Cave experiences do that to you, and it is a good thing that they do sometimes, because otherwise we might die in our independence and never reach out to God.
A third thing that cave experiences do for us is
THEY TEACH US TO FIND COMFORT IN GOD’S PROVIDENCE
Romans 8:28 makes a promise to Christians that "all things work together for good to those who love God and to those who are called according to His purpose."
We hear that verse, some of us can even quote it, but so often when the bottom seems to drop out of our lives, we forget it, or find out that we really never understood or believed it.
The promise of Romans 8:28 is one of the most precious promises a Christian has in this life, yet, over and over, in the darkness of cave experiences, we tend to either ignore it or forget it.
David acknowledges God’s providence behind his seemingly dismal circumstances in Psalm 142:3 For I am overwhelmed, and you alone know the way I should turn.
David is saying that, in spite of all that seems to be going against him, God knows it and has it under control and is working it all out as a part of His plan for David’s life.
Do we consider that the events in our lives, even the events that qualify as "cave experiences" are in fact events that God allows to happen because it is part of the plan he has for our life? We need to get beyond the concept that the only time God is working in our life is when everything is going great.
I can march people up here who have gone through some real "cave experiences," who have survived them, and can now see how God used them for their own good.
It may be impossible to see how God can use the loss of a loved one, even a spouse or a child, for good. We can’t make sense of God using a terminal illness for good. How could God use a debilitating muscular disease for our good? How can God bring something good out of this severe marriage problem we are having?
Lament. 3:37- 38 Can anything happen without the Lord’s permission? Both good and bad come from the mouth of the Most High God.
Yes, God does allow us to face some pretty tough circumstances, but he promises us that we’ll never face anything we cannot handle, that with the strength of Christ we can handle anything and that no matter how bleak the situation may be, He is working it out in such a way that good will come out of it.
CONCLUSION
Claude and Amanda Tackett were a typical young mid-western couple, living in Louisville KY. They were members of the Southeast Christian Church. Claude had recently completed law school and was doing well in his first job as a lawyer. In January of this year,
Amanda gave birth to their first child, Luke. Their future as a family looked so bright. Then the present came crashing around them. Three days after giving birth to Luke, while still in the hospital, Amanda got out of bed to put the baby in his bassinet. Claude was asleep. Suddenly Claude was awakened by the sound of Amanda crying out his name.
She was grasping the side of her bed, doubled over in pain. Claude hit the nurse’s call button, and the next minute the room turned into a scene right out of ER. The nurses took Amanda’s blood pressure, and she didn’t have any. They made Claude leave the room. Within a few minutes, the doctor came out to inform Claude that Amanda had died from a pulmonary embolism. In laymen’s terms, she died when a massive blood clot lodged in an artery between her heart and her lungs. Claude was left with a three day old son and no wife.
In March of this year, Claude sat down with a reporter of a Louisville newspaper. Listen to some of the things Claude told the newspaper reporter. "I wish I could say I was strong, that I never questioned God, that I always trusted and believed. But it’s so hard. Every night for nine months we prayed that God would keep Luke and Amanda safe. Every night for nine months! Frankly there were several days when I looked despair in the eye. But there’s no way you can live like that."
Claude then looked at the tiny child sleeping in his lap. "I have only one dream for Luke: it’s the primary goal of my life. My goal is that my son will not spend a single moment outside the will of God- that when he realizes he needs a savior, the next instant he will ask Jesus to come into his heart. I want Luke to see his mother again someday."
