Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] This morning, I want to talk about strengthening yourself in the Lord.
[00:00:09] I want to ask a poignant question for each of us today, and that is, where do we get our strength from? Where does our strength really come from? We know, as we just sang a few moments ago, that God never fails, that he is a firm foundation in our life. We know the scripture says that he is is our refuge and our strength, our ever present help. So we know that God is a God of great strength, the greatest source of strength that there is. But as I was thinking of introducing this, I remembered that in my bag, I carry around this. It's a power bank. It's been charged up and it sits in my bag in case I go somewhere and I can't access electric in order to charge my phone or my iPad. And I simply put, I plug the power bank into my phone and it distills the power from this bank into the phone. It's really good. But I can't remember the last time I used it because it's an emergency device.
[00:01:08] It's carried around in order to help me in those unlikely situations that I am not able to access power anywhere else. And I was reminded that I believe that many believers live their life like Jesus is their power bank.
[00:01:23] They sort of carry him around. They know that he has power when they need it, but they have got other sources of power in their life. And only in a crisis do they ever turn to the power bank. Only when things seem to have run out of all other options do they turn to God. And I want to just ask us this morning that the Lord, who wants to be our entire source of strength, is he, or is he our source of emergency strength when things are tough?
[00:02:00] You see, most of us believe that we are strong until life removes the things that we're leaning on.
[00:02:11] Strength is revealed in our life when the job ends, when the relationships crack, when the diagnosis comes, when the future feels uncertain, when the church disappoints you, when your energy runs out. It's at that point we discover where our strength lays.
[00:02:35] The Bible has a word for moments just like this, and it's called ziklag.
[00:02:44] It's not a describing word of a feeling or emotion. It's the name of a place, and it's the name of a place that King David was found in before he became king.
[00:02:59] Ziklag is the place where everything you trusted in suddenly fails and you discover whether your strength was in you or in God.
[00:03:14] Because there are two sources of strength in our life.
[00:03:17] One is that we find Strength in us and our resource. The other is we find strength in God and we have to choose where we draw our strength from.
[00:03:29] Ziklag.
[00:03:32] When the safe place, You see, Ziklag was a place where the Philistines were.
[00:03:45] David was being chased by King Saul.
[00:03:50] And in that chase, he was exhausted, and he went to this place called Ziklag.
[00:04:00] In fact, he went to a place called Gath, which is where Goliath was from.
[00:04:08] And he goes and presents himself as someone that had defected from the Israelites to the Philistines.
[00:04:17] And so the Philistines give him this place in their territory called Ziklag. And David became like a little king in this little place with his hundreds of men and this community.
[00:04:31] And he built a refuge for himself.
[00:04:35] He built a place that was safe from the attacks of Saul and apparently comfortable from the threat of the Philistines.
[00:04:43] And David was deceiving them, really, because he hadn't affected at all.
[00:04:48] He wasn't suddenly fighting for the Philistines. But they didn't realize that, in fact, David was carrying out covert operations on other nations that were a threat to Israel.
[00:05:01] And then one day in Ziklag, David comes home and there's ashes.
[00:05:10] His home is burnt, his family is gone.
[00:05:15] There's no warning and no explanation.
[00:05:22] Here's the key detail we often miss.
[00:05:25] Ziklag was where David went when he was tired.
[00:05:30] He was tired of pressure, he was tired of fighting.
[00:05:35] He was tired of uncertainty.
[00:05:38] It wasn't rebellion that took David to Ziklag. It was exhaustion.
[00:05:44] And many of us have Ziklags.
[00:05:49] Maybe it's a job we leaned on for security, a routine that dulled our hunger for God.
[00:05:58] Maybe it's success that replaced prayer, Relationships that carry more weight than they should.
[00:06:06] Church activity replacing intimacy.
[00:06:10] Ziklag is the life we build when we are weary.
[00:06:16] And sometimes God lets it burn because he loves us too much to let us live on borrowed strength.
[00:06:29] There comes a point where people can't carry you anymore.
[00:06:34] It said, as these men return to their burning village, that David's men who had been faithful to him, mighty warriors around him, that they wept until they had no strength left.
[00:06:53] And then when they had exhausted themselves with their tears, they then turned on David.
[00:07:04] When people we have lent on are broken, they can turn on us.
[00:07:14] People can support us, but they cannot and they should not be our source of strength.
[00:07:24] When we lean too heavily on our spouses, our. On our leaders, on our friends, on our churches, on our routines, eventually something cracks.
[00:07:42] Ziklag exposes this gentle but Painful truth.
[00:07:49] No person was ever meant to be your strength.
[00:07:57] And when people disappoint us, and they will, God may be freeing them from a role that they were never meant to play in your life.
[00:08:15] And then we see what was David's response in all of this?
[00:08:19] It was this verse in 1 Samuel 13:6, where it says, david strengthened himself in the Lord.
[00:08:29] This is a turning point.
[00:08:32] Not just in the moment, this is a turning point in the destiny of David. This is a turning point. If David had not experienced what he was experiencing now, he would have never stepped into the destiny of what was ahead of him. This was a transformational moment. This was God taking him through university of leadership in life. This was a moment of crisis. That was a moment of redemption. This was a moment of the most extreme pain that you could imagine someone would go through. But this was a moment of the most wonderful resurrection of life.
[00:09:07] This turning point.
[00:09:09] The Bible says not that David made a plan to get back those that he had lost.
[00:09:18] It doesn't say that he made a plan to gather his army, to fight harder.
[00:09:23] It doesn't say that he just pushed through and said, oh, well, you win some, you lose some.
[00:09:29] It says that David strengthened himself in the Lord.
[00:09:39] Now, I've sometimes read this verse about strengthening yourself in the Lord, and you imagine walking by a nice stream in a beautiful dartmoor location with the sun shining. You remember that, remember those days and walking in a beautiful, idyllic location and just building up your spirit and strengthening yourself in him.
[00:10:03] But that was not David's scene.
[00:10:07] This was devastation.
[00:10:09] This was betrayal.
[00:10:10] This was the most horrendous sense of grief and loss that you could imagine.
[00:10:17] Now, as David strengthened himself in the Lord, it doesn't mean that the pain disappeared, and it doesn't mean his direction changed immediately.
[00:10:29] What does strengthening yourself in the Lord look like?
[00:10:35] It looks like this.
[00:10:38] Turning toward God instead of numbing the pain with something else.
[00:10:45] How do you numb pain in your life?
[00:10:50] What strategies have you got to numb the pain?
[00:10:54] Ziklag was David's numb the pain strategy. What's yours?
[00:10:59] Is it alcohol?
[00:11:01] Is it drugs?
[00:11:03] Is it friendships? Is it busyness? Is it work?
[00:11:07] Is it an addiction to box sets? What is it?
[00:11:12] What is the pain number in your life? What's your ziklag?
[00:11:20] Strengthening yourself in the Lord is when you recognize that that fails and you turn to God.
[00:11:28] He becomes your entire strategy for your pain.
[00:11:35] Strengthening yourself in the Lord looks like praying. Honestly, not impressively.
[00:11:44] It's fascinating. If I was to open this floor now and I said, I'd like you to come forward one at a time to lead us in prayer. Most of you would be thinking, oh, no, what am I going to say that's going to make me look okay in front of everyone else rather than, wow, what a privilege we have of coming to the king of kings who loves us?
[00:12:05] We think in this linear dimension, we're always thinking about our image and around what people would think of us.
[00:12:13] But Ziklag is a place where that matters.
[00:12:17] But when we put our strength in the Lord, those things don't matter.
[00:12:22] It doesn't matter what someone thinks of you when you dance poorly before the Lord. It doesn't matter how poor your phraseology in your prayer. What matters is the integrity and the honesty and the authenticity of your heart.
[00:12:38] I'm so glad God's not rating my prayers according to my eloquence.
[00:12:43] I'm so glad he peers into my heart and he says, is that genuine?
[00:12:49] Are those poorly fumbled words genuine?
[00:12:54] That's how you strengthen yourself in the Lord.
[00:12:57] Strengthening yourself in the Lord looks like sitting still instead of scrambling around for control.
[00:13:06] You may not put yourself in the category of being a control freak, but the reality is that most of us feel most vulnerable when we're not in control, when things happen that we can no longer find a way out with our own resources.
[00:13:22] I see it all the time.
[00:13:24] People lose in a sense of control in a situation, and they panic.
[00:13:31] Strengthening yourself in the Lord means at that time, you be still and you know that he is God.
[00:13:43] Strengthening yourself in the Lord looks like trust in him when you don't understand the circumstances.
[00:13:52] David didn't regain strength because his life improved.
[00:13:59] He regained strength because he stopped trying to be his own source of strength.
[00:14:10] And many of us are tired, not just because life is hard, but because we've been drawing strength from places that can't sustain us.
[00:14:21] And then we come to church and we plug the power bank in and we say, God, I need your strength now.
[00:14:28] And he's saying, okay, I'll do that.
[00:14:32] Okay, I'm gonna bless you.
[00:14:34] I'm gonna encourage you. I'm gonna give you a promise.
[00:14:39] But his vision for your life is not that you turn up once a week and plug in.
[00:14:44] His vision is that you are continually sustained by his power and his strength.
[00:14:54] See, there are two ways we try to be strong. Strong in ourselves.
[00:14:59] This looks like willpower pushing through just by sheer force of personality and strength.
[00:15:08] It looks like staying busy to avoid the pain. It looks like pretending we're fine.
[00:15:15] It looks like Talking faith instead of living faith, it talks about controlling the outcomes. If those are traces in your life, that is the thermometer showing you that you are drawing your strength from other places other than God.
[00:15:33] But when your strength is in the Lord, you admit that you're not okay.
[00:15:39] You wait instead of rushing.
[00:15:41] You return to prayer without the need for performance.
[00:15:44] You trust God with your outcomes, and you let go of control.
[00:15:51] See, one of these sources of strength leads to exhaustion, but the other leads to renewal.
[00:15:59] God, let Ziklag burn.
[00:16:03] Why?
[00:16:06] Why are there times in your life when chaos, where things going wrong, where disaster even seems to be unbuffeted by God's intervention?
[00:16:23] Why does that happen?
[00:16:27] Well, listen to a promise.
[00:16:29] God will not allow Ziklag to destroy us.
[00:16:33] But he does burn it in order to free us.
[00:16:38] To free us from our false security, to free us from strength that's been borrowed from others, to free us from the routines that are unhealthy in our lives.
[00:16:49] To free us from shallow dependence on others.
[00:16:54] What feels like loss may actually be God clearing the ground so something stronger can grow.
[00:17:02] David didn't lose everything forever.
[00:17:06] He lost it temporarily.
[00:17:09] He had it restored.
[00:17:11] But he experienced this so that he could receive it back from the right source.
[00:17:19] Because God did not want David hiding in Ziklag, living a life that wasn't his destiny.
[00:17:27] He wanted David to be on the throne of Israel. He wanted him to establish the place of worship in the nation. He wanted him to be someone that would point people to God.
[00:17:41] Ziklag is not the end.
[00:17:46] Ziklag wasn't the end of David's story.
[00:17:49] It was the beginning of a deeper strength in his life.
[00:17:54] And for us here today, Ziklag may look like a crisis.
[00:17:59] Ziklag may look like exhaustion.
[00:18:02] Ziklag may look like disappointment. In your life, Ziklag may look like loss.
[00:18:11] And God is not asking you to be strong today.
[00:18:15] He's not inviting you to find a new resilience within yourself.
[00:18:21] He is inviting you to come to him for his strength to be made perfect in your weakness.
[00:18:30] Because the strength that God gives never burns out.
[00:18:36] It never relies on circumstances.
[00:18:40] It never commands pretense.
[00:18:44] It never collapses under pressure.
[00:18:48] Ziklag is where false strength dies so that real strength can begin.
[00:18:58] David strengthened himself in the Lord.
[00:19:04] Will you.
