Can I trust myself? (1 Samuel 21)

Imagine you have a problem.

It could be something wrong at work. It could be a snag in a relationship. It could be serious. It could be trivial. It could be anything.

Who are you going to trust to solve it?

I’m willing to bet that a majority of the time that person is going to be you. It’s your problem. You’ll handle it. You’ve got this.

It’s a good choice.

But is it the best choice?

Disaster

David also thought that he was the best person to solve his problems.

This is a little surprising, because David was the giant-slayer, God’s anointed, a man of faith. If anyone was going to turn to God first, it would be David.

So why didn’t he?

Was it pride? Maybe all the praise and success had gotten to his head, and he assumed he was smart enough to handle this.

It could have been fear – after too many close calls, David worried God couldn’t or wouldn’t protect him.

Or it might have been the other kind of fear. David might have imagined God was testing him, waiting for him to step forward on his own.

Whatever the reason, when David finally realized that King Saul was determined to murder him, he decided to take matters into his own hands and save his own life.

And it was a disaster.

Once David realized he had no food or weapons, he wound up lying to a priest in order to get them.

Supplies in hand, he turned his attention to finding shelter—amongst the Philistines, Israel’s enemies, who David had faced in battle over and over again.

And when the Philistines instantly recognized him, David knew he was all out of options. So he pretended to have lost his mind. He drooled and screamed and scrabbled in front of the Philistine king until he was thrown out.

Again, this was David. A warrior. A leader. A capable, strong man.

If even he couldn’t solve his own problems, how can we expect to?

“You are never alone.”

We’ve all heard it before. And it sounds really good.

But that doesn’t change the fact that God is up there and we are down here, and that makes it feel like we’re alone.

How is God really going to solve my problem?

Well, how did He do it in the Bible? He gave people instructions. Sometimes He worked miracles. A lot of times, the answer was already written down in His law or the words of His prophets.

And God can do so much more. We may not be able to walk up to God and have a face-to-face conversation, but that’s completely irrelevant when nothing is impossible for God.

Take David as proof. We can’t save our own lives.

But thank God, because we don’t have to.

What do you think? How do we turn our problems over to God?