Everyone in Distress, in Debt, or Discontented (1 Samuel 22:2)

 Everyone in Distress, in Debt, or Discontented (1 Samuel 22:2)

I may be the weird one, but this little triplet from David’s experience of fleeing Saul grabs me. The alliteration helps, but I am impressed again with how God works so much differently than does the world.

Think of an exercise in team-building. Maybe you could think of building a church staff. How are you going to go about it? You might start with a careful description of the skills needed, but then you move on to the personalities and psychological profiles are needed to fill all the seats on the bus. Yes, that is the kind of language that is used in the popular business books, and yet I am not sure at all that building a church staff or building a team has much to do with who sits where on a bus. When I ride the shuttle bus from the parking lot to the airport, I could not care less whether someone is a lion or an otter, extrovert or introvert, Type A or B or Z - everyone looks straight ahead; no one talks, and we just hope to get off the bus.

David, on the run from Saul with his life at risk, desperately needed a team. He was able to form such a group, though it seems he never consulted LinkedIn. This group which at one time numbered 600 men were drawn to him perhaps as much by their own personal distress as due to their respect and admiration for David and his reputation. They had lost everything, though we are not sure how. Perhaps the Philistines had taken their land and perhaps destroyed their families. Whatever victories Saul had been able to gain, it had not spared them their dire circumstances. And so they came to David.

But they must have known something of the one to whom they were coming. This was the man who, when a boy, had defeated Goliath. This is the one who was challenged to calm Saul’s evil spirit with music. He was the poet who sang to the sheep, and seemed to treat people as well or better than those sheep. He is the one who would be known as the Shepherd/King. Though not yet a king, these men saw something in David - that he would shepherd them, and they were willing to pledge their lives and service to him.

But there were rough, very rough. They were fashioned into mighty warriors, and probably had plenty of raw material available for that quest, but they were also prone to wanton violence and interpersonal conflict and greed and the immoralities that go along with it. David would have to patiently and carefully disciple them to be those who would reflect his own character and then help them to be conversant with God’s way rather than man’s ways. It would take time, and some would leave and die in their sins.

Corporate style teams cannot afford this much time. They need sterling resumés to start with, and each person needs to gain a following soon after. But David lovingly struggled with some of these men for the rest of their lives. I wonder what would happen if we saw “local church” more in David’s terms than that of “this present evil age (Gal 1:4)”