CALL TO CONFESSION

Psalm 46:10-11

10 “Be still, and know that I am God.

    I will be exalted among the nations,

    I will be exalted in the earth!”

11 The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. 

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

Father of mercies, quiet our anxious thoughts and help us to be still before you. We confess that we do not run to you as our refuge and strength, but turn to many other sources of hope and help when our souls are troubled. When our lives fall apart and our hearts are like roaring and foaming seas, we are prone to fear you, accuse you, and feel abandoned by you. If we have been obedient to you, we think that you owe us better than this cup of suffering. When we have disobeyed, we imagine our failure spoiling your good plans for our lives. Father, thank you for your presence with us in our joy and our sorrow, in our strength and our weakness. We praise you that we cannot ruin your plans, for you work all things, even our own sin and the sins of others against us, together for our good and for your glory.

Lord Jesus, you obeyed your Father with every thought and action, yet the good plan from all eternity was to give you the bitter cup of suffering that should have been ours. You trusted and loved God even when he didn't let that cup pass from you; your faith never wavered as his face was turned away from you on the cross, so that he would never have to forsake us. Thank you for obeying in our place and giving us your righteousness.

Holy Spirit, exalt Christ in our hearts. Give us strength to trust in him, for we are weak and it is hard to practice what we believe. You alone can restrain our sin, without your grace to sustain us, we quickly fall. When we fall, remind us of the oceans of love and forgiveness that are ours in Christ, and of your complete sovereignty over all sin. May we treasure Christ in our weakness and failure, celebrating the love of such a wonderful Savior. When life is stormy, let us find safety, peace, and hope in Christ, our best refuge and only source of true and lasting strength. In his priceless name we pray, amen.

“Take a few moments to personally confess your sins to the Lord.”

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

“Hear these words of comfort and assurance.” 

Revelation 22:1-5

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the city; … No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

• We have watched the remarkable rise of David.
• Now we come to some very dark chapters in David's life. David the fugitive. 
• He is on the run, fleeing the murderous rage of the rejected king. 
• David is no longer a hero dining at the king’s table, enjoying the king’s favor. He is a hunted man running for his life. 

• Maybe you’ve experienced a sudden collapse in your own circumstances. 
• One day everything is good. You feel secure. Your job is stable. Your health is fine. Then, one phone call, one betrayal, and everything changes. 

• That’s where we find David in 1 Samuel 21. He is alone, afraid, hungry, and hunted. 
• Yet in this dark valley, God teaches David, and God teaches us, a profound truth. 
• When fear drives us down into the valley of desperation, God’s covenant mercy drives us up to our ultimate refuge, our greater Priest and King. 
• Even at our weakest, we are held by a grace we have not earned. 

1 Samuel 21:1-9 

• David flees to Nob, a short distance from Saul’s palace at Gibeah. 
• Nob seems to be where the tabernacle was resettled after the Philistines destroyed Shiloh. 
• The priest who came out to meet David was Ahimelech, the great-grandson of Eli. 
• He greets David trembling. Why? 
• It would be unusual for David, who was high-ranking commander in Saul’s army and the king’s son-in-law, to been seen alone without his usual military escort and servants. 
• He suspects something’s not right.
• Now, David responds with a lie. He tells the priest the king has sent him on a highly sensitive, secret mission. He fabricates a cover story.
• This is not one of David’s finest moments and it speaks to his emotional state. 

• Why did David lie? There is no moral evaluation made in the text.
• Commentators have wrestled with David’s deception. 
• Maybe he was trying to protect Ahimelech. 
• Some have argued that he was justified in using tactical deception like you would in war-time. 
• Others argue that David was letting fear dictate what he said. 
• Whatever the case, we know that fear can make you respond in ways you wouldn’t normally respond and do things you wouldn't normally do if fear wasn’t gripping your heart.  
• We have seen throughout 1 Samuel that David was a real man with real flaws. 
• He was a young man under enormous stress and genuinely afraid of the king’s threats. 
• He was a God-fearing man, who, as many of us have experienced, was having a crisis of faith in a tense, life-or-death situation.  
• He stood before Goliath and declared “the battle is the Lord’s” and now he is standing in front of a priest and telling lies to save his own skin. 
• That’s what fear does to us. When we’re afraid, we scheme. We start trying to manage the situation instead of trusting God. 

THE REQUEST FOR BREAD

• What happens next shows the grace of God and his provision in the midst of David’s weakness. 
• David asks for five loaves of bread.
• Ahimelech responds that he doesn’t have any common bread but only the holy bread. 
• What he is referring to is the “Bread of the Presence” also called the showbread. 
• In Leviticus 24, God instructed the priests to bake twelve loaves of bread that were to be placed on a golden table inside the Holy Place every Sabbath.
• The twelve loaves represented the twelve tribes of Israel. It was a picture of the whole people of God who were always before the face of God. The bread was a witness to the fact that the Lord sustains his people and supplies their needs.
• Every Sabbath, fresh loaves were put out and the old bread was removed.
• According to Mosaic Law, only the Levitical priests were permitted to eat the bread that was removed.

• Ahimelech inquired if David and his men were ceremonially clean to receive the holy bread. David assured him they were.
• And Ahimelech took that holy bread, that by rights belonged only to the priests, and he put it into the hands of David. 
• He showed David compassion. He understood that the bread was always meant to keep God's people alive and here is one of God’s people who is starving. He determined it better for David to have sustenance than to strictly adhere to the law.
• Mercy triumphed over the law and ceremony.

JESUS, THE BREAD OF LIFE

• Why is this moment so important? Because it's a story that Jesus himself told in Matthew 12.
• Jesus and his disciples were walking through the grain fields on the Sabbath. And the disciples were hungry, so they plucked heads of grain and ate them. And the Pharisees criticized them for breaking Sabbath traditions.
• They said to Jesus, "Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.”
• Now, that was not correct. What the disciples did was in keeping with the law (Deut. 23)
• Jesus responded by reaching back to this story. He says, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry… how he entered the house of God and ate the Bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat… But only for the priests?”
• The Pharisees highly esteemed David, yet what David did was not lawful, and here they were nitpicking an act that was lawful. They were being inconsistent. 
• Jesus mentioned how the priests are doing work on the Sabbath and yet they are guiltless. 
• Jesus continued, “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you understood what Hosea wrote, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned my disciples who have not broken the law.”
• Jesus was pointing out the heart of God’s law. The ceremonial law was designed to serve people, not to starve people for the sake of ritual precision. 
• Ahimelech understood that preserving the life of God’s servant took precedence over strict adherence to the ceremonial law. 

• Jesus told the Pharisees, “For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”
• Jesus is declaring he is the greater David. He is the true and greater High Priest. 
• And his heart is mercy. He feeds his people when they are hungry.
• And the bread he gives us is himself. He said, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger.” (John 6)
• The bread of the Presence on the table in the Holy Place was pointing to him the whole time. 

• When you are spiritually exhausted, when you’ve been carrying a heavy load for a long time, you can come to the great High Priest who meets you in your weakness and feeds you with his grace. 
• He is not looking for a reason to turn you away. He is holding out bread to hungry sinners. 
• That is the gospel! 

• Now, we could say that David didn’t deserve the bread. He just lied to the priest. Yet, God fed him anyway. 
• That is grace! Grace is not God’s reward for those who finally have their act together and are all cleaned up and perfect. 
• Grace is God’s provision for people who are at the end of themselves. 
• We receive our daily bread not because we are godly but because the Lord is gracious. 

A SHADOWY FIGURE

• V7 is an ominous verse of a shadowy figure lurking in the background.
• Doeg the Edomite. He is Saul’s man and he sees David. He is going to report to Saul everything he saw at Nob.
• Ahimelech’s kindness to David is going to cost him his life and the lives of many. 

• This is here to remind us that David’s actions, the decisions he made, impacted other people. There were consequences that David could not see coming when he fled to Nob. 
• When he told his lie he was not only putting himself at risk, but others also. 
• That’s true for us. Our sin impacts others. Our fear, our half-truths, affects people around us. They have ripple effects that touch our families and relationships. The private choices we make don’t really stay private. 

THE REQUEST FOR A WEAPON

• David asks for a weapon. He tells Ahimelech another lie, that he left his weapons behind due to the hasty departure the king’s business required. 
• Ahimelech offers him the only sword he has there, Goliath's sword.
• And David says, “I’ll take it! There’s none like that!”

• Think about God’s providence in this moment. Of all the swords in all the world, the one that just happened to be there was the giant’s sword. 
• The trophy from the greatest day of David’s life. The day God gave him the victory. 
• And now, on the worst day of David’s life, the only weapon in the whole place is the reminder of the greatest day of his life. 
• That’s not a coincidence. It’s providence!
• God has a way of reminding us of his faithfulness at the very moment we are most in need of remembering his faithfulness. 
• He was reminded that the God who was faithful to him down in the Valley of Elah is faithful here in the valley of the shadow of death.
• What a visual! Every time he looked at that oversized sword he was reminded, “God delivered you before. He can deliver you again.” 
• That sword was an Ebenezer for David. Remember the stone Samuel set up and named it Ebenezer, which means, “stone of help,” and he said, “Till now the Lord has helped us.” (1 Sam. 7:12)
• Some of you need an Ebenezer. A verse you write on a card and tape to your bathroom mirror. A journal entry you revisit of a date and time the Lord carried you through a difficult situation.

1 SAMUEL 21:10-15

• The story of David’s flight takes another disturbing turn. 
• David had become so desperate and Saul’s pressure so intense that he fled to Gath. 
• Gath was Goliath’s hometown in the heart of Philistine territory. 
• He obviously thought this would be the very last place on earth Saul would think to look for him. 
• He evidently feared Saul more than he feared the Philistines.

DAVID DISCOVERED

• It didn’t take long for the servants of King Achish to recognize him and report it to the king. 
• They knew the song the Israelites had sung about David.  
• The song that first made Saul jealous is now the song that puts David in mortal danger. 
• Notice, they refer to David as “the king of the land.” Where did they get that idea? 
• No one was calling David king. It was because David’s military victories had given them the impression he would soon become the ruler of the land. 
• In chapter 18, the narrator tells us that David had more success than all of Saul’s servants when he went out to battle against the princes of the Philistines.  
• David was no folk hero in Gath.

DAVID’S PERFORMANCE

• V12 shows us the conflicted emotional state of David, “And David took these words to heart and was much afraid of Achish the king of Gath.”
• He realizes he is in immediate danger and he is afraid. Any hope of safety in Gath is gone. He is taken into custody. 
• He does something desperate and undignified. He acts like a madman. He changes his behavior before them, drooling all over himself, clawing at doorposts, hoping that Achish will determine he is harmless and let him walk out of there alive. 
• And it worked. King Achish is revulsed by the sight of David slobbering hysterically. 
• David escaped with his life.
• How are we to understand this strange scene? 
• This was a low point in David’s life. This was not him at one of his most faithful moments but in one of his most frightened moments. 
• He was trying to save his own life the only way he could think of, by hiding who he really was. 
• That’s a skill many employ. They learn how to survive by pretending and putting on a mask of self-sufficiency, so that people will not see how fearful they really are underneath. 
• Fear makes us hide. 

• David was a real man, a believer who sometimes acted with incredible faith, and other times acted out of sheer panic and frailty. His actions at Gath were far from heroic or exemplary. 
• Yet, God was faithful to his covenant promise. God had anointed David to be king, and God would preserve his life, even when David was afraid, and acting like a madman in enemy territory.

LESSONS FROM GATH

• Did David learn any lessons from his time in Gath? He did.
• Later, David would look back on this exact experience and write the lyrics of Psalm 34 and Psalm 56. 
• Psalm 34:4 “I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears.” 
• David didn’t take credit for his escape. He credited the Lord who heard his cry for help and delivered him. 
• Psalm 34:11-13 Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. 12 What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good? 13 Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit.
• He recognized the foolishness of his actions and repented and now he is instructing others in the fear of the Lord. 
• God delivered him despite his weakness and fearful, faltering faith. 
• Psalm 56:3-4 When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. 4 In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. What can flesh do to me?
• Psalm 56:13 For you have delivered my soul from death, yes, my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light of life.

• Underneath the facade of a madman was a man crying out to God. 
• His fear and faith all tangled up together in the same moment. But he was praying. He was crying out to the Lord for deliverance. 
• And that is the mercy of God toward weak believers. He hears the prayer that comes up out of the mess. 
• He doesn’t wait for you to get your act together before he will listen. 
• He heard this poor man’s cry and saved him out of all his troubles. 
• And on the other side of the sweet victory the Lord gave him, David writes a line we can hold as a promise in our heart. 
• Psalm 34:8 Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
• In the midst of the fiery trial, the fearful moment, the faltering faith, David learned that the Lord is good.
• The Lord is good! Taste and see it for yourself. 

CONCLUSION

• These events in David’s life speak to our lives today. 

• First, this passage reminds us that God’s grace is bigger than our fragile faith. 
• We have all had moments when we have let fear get the upper hand. When we’ve encountered unexpected suffering, financial distress, or deep personal heartbreak. 
• In these moments, our first instinct is to panic and scheme, to try to control the outcome. 
• If your hope rests on the strength of your own faith, you will be disappointed. 
• But if your hope rests on the faithfulness of God, you can stand firm. 
• God did not abandon David when he was hiding in Nob or acting like a madman in Gath. 

• Second, this passage points us directly to Jesus Christ, our true Priest and King. 
• David was a flawed king. He lied, he schemed. He fled to enemy territory. He faked madness to save his own skin. 
• Consider the contrast with our Lord Jesus Christ. 
• When Jesus was hunted by his enemies, he never spoke a word of deceit. 
• When he stood before Pilate and the High Priest, he did not pretend to be someone else. 
• David ate the holy bread to preserve his own life.  But Jesus gave his own body to be broken like bread so that we could have eternal life. 
• David sought a weapon to defend himself.  But Jesus went to the cross without a sword and there he disarmed the powers of darkness through his death and resurrection. 

• Third, this passage offers comfort for every season and stage of life. 
• For those of you who are younger, you will face seasons where the path ahead looks uncertain and you will be tempted to fear. You might be tempted to compromise or cut corners to secure your future. 
• Remember David’s story. God is capable of providing for you without you needing to resort to sinful self-reliance and self-preservation. Trust him with your future. 
• Some of you might be carrying heavy burdens of responsibility and you may feel exhausted by the daily demands of family, work, and caregiving.
• Remember that Christ calls you to his table to be fed. He offers rest for your soul. You do not have to carry the world on your shoulders. 

• And If you are here today and don’t know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, see the grace in this text. He does not welcome the proud or self-reliant. He welcomes those who recognize their spiritual hunger and need. He welcomes the weary. He welcomes those who know they cannot save themselves. Come to him today.

• When fear knocks at your door, may you never rely on your own cleverness or resort to deception. 
• May you never run to enemy places for refuge. 
• Remember that when fear seeks to drive you down into the valley of desperation, God’s covenant mercy drives you up to your ultimate refuge, your greater Priest and King. 
• He is the Bread of Life. 
• He is more than enough. 
• Let us leave here today with renewed confidence. 
• Our King reigns. Our Priest intercedes for us. 
• Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! 

APPLICATION AND REFLECTION

In light of today's message....

• What did I learn about the gospel?
• How can I apply what I learned about the gospel to my life?
• With whom can I share the gospel this week?