Recovering What Was Lost

Highlights from 1 Samuel

Allen Snapp

Grace Community Church

September 3, 2023

Recovering What Was Lost

Let’s turn in our Bibles to 1 Sam. 30. If you’re newer here, we were going through 1 Samuel and took a break from it for the summer and we’re going to wrap it up over the next couple weeks.

As I was preparing this I realized that the message from this chapter dovetails with the messages over the last two weeks so maybe someone here is in a difficult season and needs to hear this. But we’re also going to see the difference between David and King Saul when faced with serious challenges.

By way of a quick recap, King Saul is jealous of David because God has chosen David to be the next king of Israel and so for ten years Saul is chasing after David to kill him. Finally David says, I’m going to leave Israel and go to the land of the Philistines where hopefully Saul will stop chasing me. So he takes his wives and children and six hundred men and their families and they end up in Ziklag. And it works; Saul stops chasing him.

Here’s where things get a little weird and there’s some confusion. David and his men would go and attack surrounding villages of the Amalekites and the Geshurites – enemies of Israel – and then he would lie and tell the Philistine king Achish that he had raided various Israeli towns. So Achish thinks David is becoming a stench to Israel and that he will serve him forever.

The truth is David is thinning out the enemies of Israel, including the Amalekites – the people that Saul was supposed to wipe out and didn’t. Achish is so impressed by David’s military might that when the Philistines decide to attack Israel and Achish calls David to fight next to him, David answers enigmatically “then you will see what your servant can do.”

Some Bible teachers think David was ready to fight his own people but I don’t believe that for a moment. When David said, “then you will see what your servant can do” he meant Achish would see what David could do because he would do it to him! Once the fighting broke out David and his men would suddenly be fighting the Philistines alongside the Israelites.

But David doesn’t get that chance. When the other Philistine commanders saw David, they said, “what is he doing here? Isn’t this the one who has killed his ten thousand Philistines?” Send him back! So Achish reluctantly sends David and his fighting men back to their home in Ziklag.Let’s read chap. 30:1

30 Now when David and his men came to Ziklag on the third day, the Amalekites had made a raid against the Negeb and against Ziklag. They had overcome Ziklag and burned it with fire ² and taken captive the women and all who were in it, both small and great. They killed no one, but carried them off and went their way. ³ And when David and his men came to the city, they found it burned with fire, and their wives and sons and daughters taken captive. ⁴ Then David and the people who were with him raised their voices and wept until they had no more strength to weep. ⁵ David's two wives also had been taken captive, Ahinoam of Jezreel and Abigail the widow of Nabal of Carmel. ⁶ And David was greatly distressed, for the people spoke of stoning him, because all the people were bitter in soul, each for his sons and daughters.

Pray.

David and his men returned to find everything gone. Their city had been burned to the ground. Their wives and children and everything they owned had been captured by the Amalekites and they have no idea if their families are alive or dead. In their bitterness and grief, the men blame David for it and are talking about stoning him.

This has got to be one of the worst days David ever experienced. We all have good and bad days and sometimes we have worst days when literally everything seems to go wrong. It’s a lonely place for David because he can’t go home and pour out his troubles to his wife cause his home is in ashes and his wife has been captured. The men he has fought alongside through thick and thin are talking about stoning him.

This is where most of us would have a breakdown, but David turned it into a breakthrough by doing four things and what David did we can do too.

1. David weeps

Then David and the people who were with him raised their voices and wept until they had no more strength to weep. (vs 4)

They wept until they had no strength left to weep. They cried till they had no tears left to cry. These weren’t sensitive girlie men, these were tough men. Warriors. But they wept and wept and wept until they were exhausted.

I’m always a bit wary when people go right to faith and positive talk when life hits someone hard. Like one who takes off a garment on a cold day…Is he who sings songs to a troubled heart. Prov. 25:20

What that means is when we go right to happy songs with someone whose heart is hurting we’re exposing their raw heart to more hurt. There’s a time to weep. When life hits hard, when life hurts, it’s ok to stop and let it hurt. When you lose something precious it’s ok to be sad and let the tears flow.

To borrow from last week’s message, before the valley of weeping becomes a pool of refreshing, it needs to be a valley of weeping. God’s not afraid of our tears. Charles Spurgeon said a tear is enough water to float a desire to God.

David wept till there was no strength left to weep. But then God said, now it’s time for the next step.

2. David encourages himself in his God

But David strengthened himself in the Lord his God. vs. 6

3. David asks the Lord what he should do

⁸ And David inquired of the Lord, “Shall I pursue after this band? Shall I overtake them?” He answered him, “Pursue, for you shall surely overtake and shall surely rescue.” ⁹ So David set out, and the six hundred men who were with him, and they came to the brook Besor, where those who were left behind stayed. ¹⁰ But David pursued, he and four hundred men. Two hundred stayed behind, who were too exhausted to cross the brook Besor. Vv. 8-10

This is a big difference between David and Saul. David inquires of the Lord, Saul inquires of the dead. We’ll get to that next week.

We need a word from the Lord.

4. David fights to recover all that he had lost

¹⁶ And when he had taken him down, behold, they were spread abroad over all the land, eating and drinking and dancing, because of all the great spoil they had taken from the land of the Philistines and from the land of Judah. ¹⁷ And David struck them down from twilight until the evening of the next day, and not a man of them escaped, except four hundred young men, who mounted camels and fled. ¹⁸ David recovered all that the Amalekites had taken, and David rescued his two wives. ¹⁹ Nothing was missing, whether small or great, sons or daughters, spoil or anything that had been taken.

David sneaks down and sees the Amalekites dancing and drinking and laughing over what they stole from him. He saw his wife Abigail tied up and all his family and David got mad! He fought! They fought from twilight (maybe 7 or 8pm) until the evening of the next day. 24 hours of non-stop fighting! And look – four hundred of David’s men took on a much larger number of Amalekites and killed almost all of them. We know that because it says not a man of them escaped except four hundred young men. The “small” number who got away was the size of David’s entire fighting army.

But David and his men fought with the strength of God. We need to fight to recover what the enemy tries to steal from us. We need fight in prayer. We need to fight with faith. We need to fight with truth. We need to fight with love. I’m not talking about being belligerent or arrogant, I’m talking about gracious, loving, bold, Jesus-centered warriors who don’t fold up like a cheap suit just cause someone disagrees with us or people put pressure on us to compromise.