It is pretty easy to read right through the exhilaration and triumph of David’s life. David was not born to royalty – and actually was not highly esteemed by his own father or his brothers. There is no evidence that he went to school or studied, but rather was a shepherd, but a shepherd destined to become king.
We are very familiar with David’s achievements, his victory over Goliath, his accomplishments over the Philistines and his record as a king; but for a moment I would like us to consider David the musician.
For a moment, I would like us to focus on his music. So powerful was David’s musical ability – that a king hired him to play and sing to fend of the demons that were afflicting him. When David played – God’s power became manifest. Not only God’s power – but the entire atmosphere of the palace shifted. I am sure that when people entered Saul’s palace and they heard music, they must have said, “David is in the house.”
David somehow was bestowed with this talent that could rent the spiritual atmosphere apart. I believe that this was the by-product of at least three elements:
- The depth of his knowledge of God
- The depth of his experience with God
- The depth of his revelation of God’s character
The combination of all three produced reliance upon the Lord that consistently manifest what I call: The Final Reality.
If you track back to David’s knowledge of God, even back to the days when his father left him to fend for himself with the family’s sheep – David’s life was design to be a training ground for reigning.
David learned to fight off the lion and the bear.
David faced adversity.
David faced isolation.
David faced himself,
But what produced the unique quality of a leader in him was the fact that David learned to face God.
It was David’s ability and persistence to wrestle successfully with God ultimately taught him that ‘wrestling’ was God’s way of empowering him to fight the lions and the bears and prevail.
Wrestling with God yields a level of authority referred to in the bible as royalty.
I am sure that you have come to see that God hates to waste a ‘good’ crisis.
With God, adversity becomes His University.
In those days, the family was the nuclear basis from which everyone operated. [It is still true today, that within the Semitic culture; family loyalty trumps all other allegiances.] The family was the nuclear basis out of which everyone operated. Everything revolved around family. You lived for family. You worked for family. You even married and died for the family. Survival of the family was the cardinal rule.
The Lord allowed David to be extricated from his feudal family culture in order to embed a divine culture in him. David was exiled by his own father and brothers to care for the sheep of the family. This ‘exile’ was so palpable, that when the great prophet Samuel came looking to anoint the next king, Jesse didn’t even think to include David with the rest of his sons. In Jesse's eyes David didn't even rate.
All of this was leveraged by the Lord as Leadership 101 for David in which he would be forced to learn about God. But David went far beyond learning about God; he actually learned to love God in the way that God loved to be loved: through worship in song.
It was as a shepherd that David learned that every adversity could produce a spiritual benefit that he memorialized in musical memorial form.
And so it was here that this shepherd king would learn that the process of spiritual and personal growth often involved crisis through injustice. David never permitted himself the 'luxury' of becoming a victim. He resisted that temptation through the power of waiting on God. And with each setback, he learned it was the Lord creating a 'set-up.' Each time, David would emerge with a new song in his mouth – and it was his song that God used to shift the circumstance of his life.
David went through so many of these transformational events in his life, that he wrote 73 Psalms in the Bible. That's a lot of setback and a lot of setups. But it was not the vast number of songs that he produced that distinguished David as the ultimate Rock Star in history: it was what people saw when they heard those songs.
People saw a man who had emerged through adversity, and his secret was his location.
Waiting on God is like searching for the right house to' buy' when you can't just settle on any house. It has to fit you and the life you want to live.
By waiting on the Lord, David learned that his spiritual batteries were getting charged and that he could expect the Lord to set him on The Rock.
When people heard a David song, it was David's rock that made him a Star... and it is your Rock which will make you a Star as well...
So Rock on, Rock on!
Come out to BOLD this week and get ROCKED! St. Bart's, Tuesday, 12:45pm, 50th Street and Park Avenue.
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