Living Life Successfully in a Cave of Troubles (1 Samuel 22:1–4; Psalm 57) Have you ever felt like you were living in a cave of troubles—troubles that just wouldn’t go away? That is exactly how the homeless refugees felt after they fled from the flooding and devastation of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and were herded into the New Orleans Superdome! As news about conditions in the Superdome began to leak out, the images boggled our senses. Think of 20,000 bodies packed into that dark, cavernous space day after day! So many people in such a small space for such a long time equaled a sickening stench of odor, multiple bathroom backups, garbage sitting around too long, dirty water, and unrefrigerated food. When you add intensive heat and humidity into this mix, the resultant horrible fog was too hard to adequately describe! Now go back in your mind to 3,000 years ago and another group of refugees. Think of 400 tough men living in the same cave under harrowing conditions—and then mix in time, heat, plus the fact they were all under great duress and in danger from Saul who was hunting David—and you have the sights and smells of 1 Samuel 22:1–4. After David fled from Gath and arrived in the cave of Adullam, he not only had to cope with his own problems but also those of hundreds of distressed men who had multiple troubles that just wouldn’t go away. But living and working with these men in the “Cave of Troubles” was the Lord’s perfect plan to teach David lessons he could only learn in the School of Affliction. You see, these lessons were all necessary to well prepare David to serve God’s purposes as the next king of Israel. When God puts us in a place of constant troubles, and we respond properly, He will use those hard times to give us some of the greatest blessings and growth in our lives. For example, look at how these now famous people of the past faced their trials with a positive attitude and triumphed: • Cripple him, and you have a Sir Walter Scott. • Lock him in a prison cell, and you have a John Bunyan. • Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have a George Washington. • Raise him in abject poverty, and you have an Abraham Lincoln. • Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes Franklin Roosevelt. • Burn him so severely that the doctors say he’ll never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham who set the world’s one-mile record in 1934. • Deafen him, and you have a Ludwig van Beethoven. • Have him or her born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Booker T. Washington, and a George Washington Carver. • Call him a slow learner, and write him off as uneducable, and you have an Albert Einstein. Now look at how David was learning to respond to God properly in his loneliness in hard times: • Have him grow up as an overlooked and neglected last child, and you have David the shepherd boy. • Have him accused by his brothers and slighted by his countrymen, and you have David the giant-killer. • Have him on the run for his life, hiding in a cave surrounded by hundreds of emotional cripples, and you have David the sweet Psalmist of Israel. Living in the “Cave of Troubles” was going to be an incredible crash course in “How to Conquer Afflictions God’s Way.” This would prove to be the turning point in David’s life—the time when his character was refined more than in any other period! That is what we are learning today in Chapter 11 of Davids Spiritual Secret, available on Amazon. amazon/Davids-Spiritual-Secret-Life-Serves-ebook/dp/B001Q3KB22/ref=la_B001K8Y0SE_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1421343928&sr=1-3
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 17:47:25 +0000
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