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Country Life SDA Church

Eric Walsh

Never Shaken

All right, we're gonna get right into God's Word today.

I want to read from Psalm 56 verses 1 through 3.

The Bible says, Be merciful unto me, O God, for man would swallow me up.

Mine enemies would swallow me up for they be many that fight against me.

David says in Verse 3, what time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.

A message this Sabbath is entitled, Not Shaken, Lessons from Ziklag.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to study a word.

And I ask once again, Lord, that I be not seen or heard.

Instead, Father, we need a word from the throne room of grace.

Send the Holy Spirit, Lord, that He would lead us into truth.

We start with the background to our story today in 1 Samuel chapter 29 tells the story of David's, in essence, treachery.

In that chapter, David is actually working for the Philistine king.

So David is in this predicament where he has been exiled by Saul.

He's working for the enemy, that's King Achish of the Philistines.

He's been exhibiting this mercenary behavior and in the end he's rejected by the enemy as well.

As Achish is getting ready to go and fight Saul, David signs up to go and fight with the Philistines.

It's a chapter, a kind of sad chapter in David's life.

He's ready to go and fight with the Philistines, but when the lords of the Philistines see David show up, they remember him from the battle with Goliath at least and maybe some other battles and they say, wait a minute, we're not going into war with this guy on our side.

And so Achish has to tell David, look I'm sorry, go back.

And David, if you read 1st Samuel chapter 29, he literally seems to plead with the Philistine king to go and fight with the Philistines.

David is in a, the story starts with David in a dark place spiritually as he seems to have lost his footing and his compass, his direction.

Well as he and his men are sent away and David is rolling with 600 soldiers and 1st Samuel 30 in verse 1 says this, and it came to pass when David and his men were come to Ziklag on the third day that the Amalekites had invaded the south and Ziklag and smitten Ziklag and burned it with fire as David and his men are coming up over the last hill or mountain on their way home to Ziklag.

It's a town that the Philistines had given them to live in where they would be safe from Saul.

As they coming over that hill they can see smoke in the distance.

You can imagine as David and his 600 men, they begin to run towards home.

Their families, their wives, their children are there.

They begin to run and in verse 2 it says that the Amalekites had taken the women captives that were there and slew not any.

Nobody was killed, neither great nor small, but carried them away and went on their way.

When they get home, not only is home burned to the ground, their families have been kidnapped and are missing.

To give you a bit of a kind of geographic sense of what's going on, in fact David was fortunate.

Had David gone to fight Saul and Israel with the Philistines, he would never have been able to recover and be king of Judah and all of Israel later on.

Instead God sets it up even in David's foolishness.

We don't know for sure where it is but this is where the fight, the battle was.

So David was went in the opposite direction and sometimes in life you think if you're going in the opposite direction of the fight that you're safe.

But sometimes God is leading you to a different kind of battle.

Verse 3 of 1st Samuel 30 says this, so David and his men came to the city and behold it was burned with fire and their wives and their sons and their daughters were taken captives.

It says, Then David and the people, speaking of his soldiers, his men, that were with him lifted up their voice and wept until they had no more power to weep.

They were so distraught when they got home and everything they owned was either burned or taken.

Their families, their wives, their children, all gone after they had been out ready to fight for the Philistines just 3 days earlier.

It was a three-day journey back to Ziklag.

Now they get home and there's nothing there.

What's interesting is that these strong mighty men of war, when they see what they have lost, the Bible says that they begin to weep and the weeping is so intense that they lose power to weep.

This is a situation where you enter the crucible.

The crucible is really a vessel, it's something to use, it's like porcelain and you can heat it up and melt metal in it.

That's the practical kind of real world application.

The allegoric application is number 3 in the definition.

It is a place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development.

I want to submit to you that the crucible experiences that many of us will travel into in life are put in place so that we can grow and develop.

It's a tough reality about being a Christian, but from a prophetic standpoint, we will not be ready for what's about to happen.

We're not gonna be ready for what's about to take place on earth if we can't handle the crucibles we face now Here's what sons and daughters of God page 100 Ellen White says a harsh spirited man is unrefined Course, he is not spiritual He is not a heart of flesh but a heart as unimpressible as a stone.

His only help, look at this, his only help is to fall on the rock and be broken.

The Lord will place such in the crucible and try them in fire as gold is tried.

She goes on and says when he, Christ, can see his own image reflected in them he will what?

You know this is this is a tough thing for me to hear Because when I look at my own life, I realize there are trials I've gone through that seem to take forever for me to get through or out of.

And when I read this, I realized God will leave you in your trial until It has served its purpose of refining you.

Sometimes the reason it seems we are stuck in a mess and it can't get better is because we have not submitted to allowing God to transform us.

The religion of Christ is to take possession of the whole being and give force and power to all our faculties, renovating, cleansing, and refining.

It manifests itself without parade and high-sounding words, but is shown in an upright and unselfish life." Interesting, we just read this text for the children's story, but here it is.

James 1 to my brethren counted all joy when you fall into diverse temptations.

What do you mean we should count it joy when we fall into temptation?

This doesn't mean temptation to sin, this is temptation to doubt, to quarrel against God, to be angry with Him.

Knowing this, that the trying of your faith works patience.

But let patience have her perfect work that she may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

A powerful statement because in Revelation it says here is the patience of the saints.

We are to be developing a patience with God.

We are supposed to be developing the kind of character that when things don't go our way we don't instantaneously turn on God.

First Samuel 30 and verse 4 again says this, then David and the people that were with him lifted up their voice and wept until they had no more power to weep.

I want to ask you a tough question today.

In your life have you ever had the experience that it seems you've lost everything.

Have you ever showed up in a situation, and it seems as if God was moving, God was working.

He had his little town tucked away where Saul couldn't get him, and he was now in the favor of the Philistine king and the Amalekites came from the south and messed everything up.

I ask again, have you ever been to Ziklag?

Have you ever had situations in your life where you lost so much, your reputation was damaged, where folk didn't like you, where family turned against you?

Have you ever been to Ziklag where your boss?

Unjustly fired you or mistreated you Has the ziklag of disease ever touched your family and left you wondering where God is?

Church, on this Sabbath I want you to look at your ziklag situations, ask God about them because I am sure that most of us as adults especially we've had a visit to Ziklag where everything was burned and it seemed everything was taken.

What he does is he allows it so that we might have growth in our crucible experience.

Here's the 5 or 6 lessons I want you to get out of that.

Number 1, the first lesson from the story of Ziklag is this.

I remember, I know we're going to have religious liberty weekend next month, and I remember when I went through my own religious liberty issue.

I was working for the city of Pasadena, California.

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Never Shaken

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