"The Fall of the House of Saul"
God will not allow the old thing to fall until He judges that the new thing is ready to take its place.
Download or email this sermon Emotional Exhaustion/The Source of Strength
Look at verse 4:
"David and the people who were with him lifted up their voices and wept, until they had no more power to weep."
They reached the point of emotional exhaustion. Job did the same. I knew a Jewish man named Gershom: the Nazis killed his parents, his brother, his two sisters with their families, his wife and his five children right down to the baby. He himself narrowly survived the concentration camp. The next forty years of his life the man spent in hell. He was a zombie. He had grieved so much and so hard that he no longer had any emotional capacity for grief, until the day he accepted Jesus, Yeshua, as the Messiah in Haifa, Israel. He read the Bible and began to scream and cry, saying that he had finally found a Jew who had suffered more than he had. It was the first emotion that man was capable of displaying in over forty years.
Christians do good works because we've been saved, not in order to get saved. A person must reach the point where he or she realizes, “I cannot save myself; it has to be a gift.” We must know that we are totally lost, helpless, and unable to do one single thing for ourselves – then we can get saved. It is a point that must be burned into each Christian's soul; we should never forget that. Just as we cannot save ourselves, so we cannot sustain ourselves. David “strengthened himself in the Lord his God” (v. 6). He trusted in and sought the Lord in his crisis. Just think: he had these people with him in the wilderness that had forsaken all to join him there. They're being pursued on one hand by Saul and on the other by the Amalekites. Then they lose their families and want to stone him. On top of all his other problems, David himself had lost his own family. What a mess, yet he sought the Lord his God, and asked whether he should pursue the troop.
The natural propensity of the flesh in an emergency is always to take immediate action. In a crisis, we should never, ever, ever make any decision before seeking the Lord. If it must be made in a second, pray "Lord, help me". The flesh will always want to take over in an emergency. (We deal with this on our 2 Samuel 5 & 6 tapes.) David doesn't do this, however. In that crisis it would have been easy to assume, “of course we have to go after the troop,” but instead of that David stops and seeks the Lord, and God gives him the green light.
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Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation.