Materials
The David Series: Our Lives Before God
Sanctuary
I Samuel 22:1-5
by R. Todd Bouldin
Of
all the things God asks us to do in life, none is more important, or more
difficult, than to call us to wait. When life crushes in and the losses
seem more than you can take, you have to quit rushing the salvation of
God. You can only realize His plan for you when you wait in holy places.
I hate waiting, but it seems that I spend a lot of time just waiting on
something or someone. I wait for someone to return an email, for company
to come, for the traffic to move, for vacation to arrive. Life begins
with waiting – It takes about nine months of waiting in the womb before our lungs even can breathe fresh air. All of us are waiting on something. Some are waiting to see what happens at work, some of us are waiting to find a job we truly love. Others are waiting to see what happens with their date from Friday night, and others what will happen with their children who seem to be struggling lately. Some are waiting for the results of a medical exam. Some of us are just waiting for pay day.
Maybe the hardest waiting is waiting upon God. Waiting on God is harder because you have a fundamental trust that He is going to bless your life, but you’ve yet to see it happen. You have read one of His promises to you, and you believed it. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when is old, he will not depart from it.” “Call unto Me and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things you do not know.” “All things work together for good . . . “ You know it. You have taken those promises to heart, and now you are waiting for The Lord to fulfill what He promised you. How do you survive the wait? When the rest of life seems to tumble in, how do you turn waiting into something other than wasted time?
The life of David provides a wonderful response to this important question. He had already been anointed by God as the new king of Israel. But Israel already had a king, and he wasn’t about to just walk out of office. In fact, he has no idea he really isn’t in office anymore. King Saul already had decided to kill David, and for years and years David was on the run from Saul, waiting for God to deliver His promises to him. But the throne seemed so far away to this man on the run from a jealous king with armies at his command. David lost his position as the national hero. His security began to dissolve out in the wilderness. Then he started to lose meaningful people in his life.
First, he lost his wife Michal, Saul’s daughter. Michal loved David, so Saul tried to get to David through her. He sent murderers to David’s house to kill him in the night, but Michal smuggled him out through a window and covered for him until he escaped. That is when David lost her. He and Michal would be together again years later, but things would never be the same. Michal’s heart would never be David’s in the same way again. Second, David lost his old mentor Samuel. David fled to Samuel for a period, but Saul was pursuing Samuel too. They spent their last day together forever, and they parted ways. Samuel died thereafter, and David could not even attend the funeral.
Then, David lost his best friend Jonathan to Saul’s schemes. We will look at their friendship in a few weeks, but for now, it is enough to say that these two friends loved each other deeply. When Saul learned Jonathan was protecting David from him, Saul seized his spear and attempted to murder Jonathan. This forced David and Jonathan apart. David had lost every vestige of security. Now, all of God’s actions in his life seemed to be in the glorious past – when he enjoyed a great friend, an adoring wife, and he was a national hero. God had promised that he would give him a great future too. But now all he could do was wait. But he was not wasting his time. His waiting became the means by which God molded the soul of Israel’s great king.
That is what your waiting is all about as well. While you wait, you are making the most important choices of your life. These are the choices that will make a difference when the waiting is done. They will determine if you have the soul to fulfill your calling.
After fleeing Saul, and sustaining great losses of people and position, we find David entering three sanctuaries. He thought they were just places to find sanctuary from Saul. But a sanctuary is never just a place to hide and wait. It is a place where we confront the greatest choices in life. The first sanctuary David found was a holy place. He left Jerusalem and went to the city of Nob, where the priest Ahimelech was serving The Lord. David arrived there hungry, desperate and afraid. He was in a hurry, fleeing from the tyrannical Saul. The priest asked him why he had come to his humble temple. And here we get a first glimpse of the humanity and fallenness of David. David lied to the priest and said he was on a mission for King Saul. When the priest asked about the mission, David invented one of Washington’s greatest political answers: Executive privilege. It was a secret mission and the priest did not have the clearance to know the information. Then he asked the priest for some food. The priest said all he had was the holy bread that was not for eating. But David demanded that he be given the sacrament for his hungry men, which was another lie, because at that point there were no other men.
Many of us end up in the sanctuary of God’s holy priesthood, the church, for the same reasons. We come here for something that will take away the hunger. We think we are just hungry for a relationship, or a job, or good children, or for healing, but it is actually our souls that are hungry for God. We don’t have a lot of time for priestly chatter, theology and Bible study. We demand that the church do something for us. We want the church to be our social experience. But what the church most has to offer are holy experiences.
The amazing thing is that the priest gives David the holy bread and lets him gobble it down like Hungry Jack biscuits. What is even more amazing is that much later Jesus reminds people of this when he uses the Sabbath to feed his hungry disciples. The Sabbath was never meant to shield us from caring for the felt needs of people.
Do people come to church with mixed motives? You bet. I certainly do. But the great thing about holiness is that it is not made less holy just because we grab at it with baser motives like trying to satisfy our hunger for community, relationships and healing. If people seek refuge here from broken relationships, loneliness and demons which chase them, that’s not all bad. Even people with some falseness about them, like David, are welcome here. It can’t pollute the holiness. In fact, our church is holy not because the members who gather are so holy but because The Word we proclaim and the grace we offer can satisfy our deepest hungers, transform our desires and turn our darkness into light in the presence of His holiness.
So, while you are waiting for God, come to worship and be part of His church. Come and bring your hunger, your yearnings and longings, your fears and your sin. And as you consume the church’s friendships, and ministries, and worship with us, you will realize that the holiness of God can be found in all of these things. You might have more fun at a night club than you do here with us – we are not guaranteeing we’re the most entertaining social experience – what we promise is that here you will find holiness while you wait. Holiness will get you through the waiting, and it is the holiness that will begin to mold your soul.
After leaving the sanctuary in Nob, David eventually finds himself hiding in a cave at Adullum. If David found sanctuary at Nob in holiness, at Adullum he finds sanctuary in receiving a community of people who support him. It was not the community he would have picked for himself. Great warriors, the wealthy, the connected, and the powerful are not present. The community God gives us is never the one we expected. While he is hiding in this cave, God brings him an army of 400 men. We are told by the writer, “Everyone who was in distress, everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was discontented came to him.” Sounds like the story of how our country began. Sounds like the words inscribed on the tablet of stone held by the Statute of Liberty. Sounds like the people that gathered around Jesus. Sounds like His church too.
Listen to Paul, “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong . . . so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus.” (I Corinthians 1:26-30). The people God uses to accomplish His mission, the people who will bring you sanctuary, are never the people you expected.
Did you notice here that the description of those who showed up is just like David? If you’ve ever done a little church shopping, you realize before long that every church disappoints you. The people are not what you expected. They are needy and discontent. Just like you. So how are these people who gather at our cave of hiding a sanctuary? Does God really expect that they will help us with the waiting? Yes. God called this crew together, and a Savior is always found among those who know they need one. Wherever a Savior is found, souls are being shaped and molded for the great callings God has for them.
We are told in I Chronicles 12 that this little community of 400 losers eventually were transformed into David’s finest and best troops. We are not what we appear to be. We are what God has called us to be. And in community we become our potential. No one is asked to wait in a cave alone for the blessing of God. We are wounded healers, in the words of Henri Nouwen, distressed souls who come along side each other, reminding each other that, “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.” (Philippians 1:6).
From the caves of Adullum, David marches on into his uncertain future with his distressed, discontented, and indebted comrades. David then goes to another cave in Engedi. Engedi is a beautiful oasis in the desert, and it is here that David finally enters the sanctuary of obedience. While David and some of his 400 men were hiding in a cave from Saul and his 3,000 soldiers with weapons of mass destruction, Saul strolled to the cave to go to the restroom. David’s men thought this was the opportunity to slay Saul. He was right there within their grasp, and David could take his rightful throne. But David refused saying, “How can I raise my hand against The Lord’s anointed.” So instead David snuck up behind Saul, and cut off a piece of his cloak. After the unwitting Saul got up, got himself back together and left the cave, David ran after him and called out from the cave entrance, “My Lord, the King, see the corner of your cloak in my hand. Know this day that my hand shall never rise against you.”
Notice the fascinating contradiction here. David has been anointed, promised, that he will be the king of Israel. The current king is out in the fields trying to hunt him down. David is given a great opportunity to defend himself and usher in the future he wants by killing Saul. But he just can’t do it because that would be disobedient sin against The Lord’s other anointed. There can only be one King, and David decided not to try to manage the future for God. He would just have to wait.
We all have moments when the future seems within our reach, and we are tempted to bring it about on our own time. You could get the promotion you want if you could just get rid of that person who opposes you, but that would not honor The God who called you. You could get the relationship you wanted if you just made some compromises, and went to the right places, but that would not represent who you are. You want to move, but your spouse does not, and you both feel you are right. You could get so many places if you could just eliminate a few people who keep you from your dreams. So what do you do?
When you face such contradictions of your faith and a future you desire, or the one you know God has for you, in the words of Soren Kierkegaard, you do not resolve it by sweeping the truth you know under the rug. Instead, you wait insisting on obedience until God resolves the contradiction. You keep worshiping. You stay involved in ministry. You keep this motley crew of broken believers around you. You keep your morals. You refuse to force your future. You keep doing what you know to do, what The Spirit empowers you to do, until God is faithful to His promises for you. While you wait, your soul will be molded to know that it is up to God to bring about your future and not you.
When Saul realized that David had not taken his life, it broke the old king. He said, “You are more righteous than I; for you have repaid me good for evil. Now I know that you shall surely be king, and the kingdom of Israel shall be established in your hand.”
Saul knew that day he would lose this battle because the kind of heart God wanted was finally made clear to him. David too knew that day he would one day prevail, in this battle and in the battles to follow. Not by might or wit, but by unswerving faith in the faithfulness of God. Everyone has experiences of waiting in their lives. When I speak to people I know who have no faith, the waiting is traumatic and the cause of all kinds of anxiety and fear. It feels like wasted time, and time is slipping away to be what they want it to be. So these people run from what they fear. They try to rush their future by forcing people and events to make it all happen. All of life, even the waiting, becomes forced because there always is a lingering fear that things might not go as well as they hoped. What if I do not succeed? What if I do not achieve the future I wanted? What if I do not marry this person of my dreams?
I have come to see that one place that faith makes a big difference is the place of waiting. Even faithful people doubt. But the periods of waiting take on new meaning to people of faith. Despite what happens, you have a fundamental trust that God is going to be faithful to what He promised you and to the calling He gave you. You only learn about the faithfulness of God during the waiting, not in the blessing. And you survive the waiting by resorting to the sanctuaries God has given you. It is in those places you come to know that the place of waiting itself is a holy place where God is present, even when He seems absent. It is only in the waiting room where all the other securities are stripped away and you can finally sing as David did from the cave of Adullum, “You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living.” (Psalm 142:5).
So come. Come to the sanctuary of holiness that feeds your hunger with the bread of life and the cup of salvation. Come to the sanctuary of community where you are transformed into the Body and character of Christ. Come to the sanctuary of obedience where you insist on honoring God with your choices until He chooses to bring you to a future filled with hope. David went on in his cave song to write, “You will deal bountifully with me.” (Psalm 142:7). It is not a future you can worry or rush or achieve into existence. It probably will not come to you as long as you think it is up to you. When it comes, it will come to you only by grace.
Lord God, You have promised that those who wait upon You will renew their strength, and mount up with wings as eagles. We do not often feel as though we are soaring. Give us the courage to wait – to enter into the places of holiness and community and obedience until You have molded our souls, and our spirits take flight into the future You have prepared for us. In Christ holy Name, amen.
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