This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome to our final day, day five in week five of our Look Through First and
Second Samuel. We're going to be talking today from chapter 30 about what do you
do when everything falls apart? This is actually from a message that I preached
from when Matthew Warren took his life.

This is what we talked about together as a church at Saddleback. This is the
message that Rick had sent me a little book that had been written by a friend
and he'd asked me to pass along this message to the church that week, a little
book called What to Do on the Worst Day of Your Life. And it's from this story,
chapter 30, David at Ziklag, and what happened when David and all his men were
attacked while they were away at battle.

They weren't attacked, but their town was attacked and their entire town was
devastated. All their families were taken captive. What did they do?

What do you and I do? If you want to listen to the longer message of that, you
can. It's even on Drive Time Devotions, I think, in five days.

But what I'd like to do today is just walk through this very quickly. The things
that you and I can do as we face the very worst in life, six specific things
that you can do. What do you do?

What do you tell someone else to do that you love when the very worst has
happened? Here's what David teaches us. Number one, you weep.

You weep. In chapter 30, verses 3 and 4, David and his men reached Ziklag and
they found it destroyed by fire, and their wives and sons and daughters taken
captive. And so David and his men wept aloud until they had no strength left to
weep.

You just cry out before the Lord. You weep. Now, this is the step that mature
believers often try to skip.

Oh, I don't need to weep because God has this in control. But remember, John 11.
35 tells us Jesus wept.

And he's the most mature believer that you're ever going to see. He's the most
mature that we're ever going to see in this world because he was perfect.
Remember that the Bible tells us in Hebrews that during the days of Jesus' life
on earth, he offered up prayers and petition with loud cries and tears to the
one who could save him from death.

So the first response is this response of dependent petition. This response that
Jesus modeled, depending on the Father. He depended on the Father.

I've got to depend on the Father when it all falls apart. And that begins with
loud cries and tears. You pray with emotion.

We talk to God with the emotion of your heart. Depend on God with the emotion of
your heart. I'm not talking about being desperate.

I'm talking about being dependent on God. It's like you're hanging off the edge
of a cliff and there's a rope there and you're hanging on to that rope with all
that you have. Joy comes in the morning, yes.

But the Bible says that we weep through the night, that we express our emotions
to God. And this isn't just true for you. The book of Romans tells us that we
should weep with those who weep.

So you don't just weep for yourself. You weep for those who are hurting. That's
the first place.

But that's not where you stop. That's where you begin. Some of us never begin.

We never begin at the right place so we can't get to the other steps. The second
thing that David teaches us to do when everything falls apart is don't get
bitter. 1 Samuel 30 verse 6, David was greatly distressed because the men were
talking of stoning him.

Each one was bitter in spirit because of his sons and daughters. When it all
falls apart, sometimes all you're left with is questions. Why did this happen?

How could this happen? And those questions often lead you to some one, some
person to blame. And I'm not saying they're not to blame.

There's a lot of imperfection in our lives as human beings. And the truth of the
matter is if you're looking for someone to blame, you can always find someone to
blame because none of us are perfect. There's always someone out there that you
can blame in some way for what happened.

But that so often leads to bitterness, a life where you're focused on getting
revenge rather than getting healing. So don't get bitter. Ask God, just in the
tenderness of your own heart, ask God for a strength to forgive that you don't
have in yourself so that that bitterness doesn't eat up the rest of your life.

Don't get bitter. Weep. Third thing you do that David teaches us to do is
encourage yourself in God.

1 Samuel chapter 30 verse 6, the last half says, "David encouraged himself in
the Lord his God. " It's one of the greatest lessons from David's life. He knew
how to encourage himself in the Lord his God.

How do you do that? There's a lot of ways, but there's a few that we see from
David here. How do you encourage yourself in the Lord?

One way is you get around God's people, other people who are trying to encourage
themselves in the Lord. Now I understand other Christians aren't always
encouraging. Try to find the encouraging ones.

Other people are going through their own pains. Find the people who are
encouragers in your life. Let them encourage you in your faith.

So you get around God's people, but second, you get a word from God. In this
chapter, B. F.

R. brought David the ephod, the word from God, and he listened to God's word. So
you open up the Bible and you begin to let God's word soak into your life.

In my grief after Matthew's death, I've been reading through the book of Psalms,
just letting those Psalms speak to me, letting those Psalms speak hope. Those
are very emotional Psalms. They speak of hurt and grief and the heartache of
loss, but they also speak of strength and grace and the fact that God can be
trusted no matter what.

You get a word from God. You let God's word begin to soak into your life, and
it's not just one day. You just let it soak in day after day after day.

Good crops don't grow out of just one rain. It's when the rain comes and it
comes again and it comes again and it comes again that God can bring growth in
your life. So you encourage yourself in God.

Fourth thing you do is you begin to look to the future with hope. David began to
look past what they had lost at some point, after they'd wept, after they'd
decided not to be bitter, after they'd been encouraged in God. You don't do this
immediately, but after a time, you look to the future with hope.

I can't tell you what that time is for your life. It's different for everybody.
Don't let somebody else try to force you into their mold.

You begin to look to the future with hope. Now, as you look to the future with
hope, there's two things you're going to need to do. You're going to need to
restore your vision and regain your passion.

Restore your vision. You start to see again the future that God might have, the
relationships that he might have, the ministry that he might have, the job that
he might have, the career that he might have, the potential direction for school
that he might have, even though you can't go to that school. Maybe over here
could be you begin to restore your vision.

You see it, but you also have to regain your passion. You also have to feel it,
to sense this is something that God could use in my life. It isn't what I
planned, but God can use it in his plan.

You look to the future with hope. The fifth thing that you and I have to do if
you and I are going to survive the worst days of our life is you have to attack
evil. The reason those worst days come is because of evil, because there's an
evil one in this world who wants to hurt your life, to tear up your life.

First Samuel 30 verses 17 and 18 says, "David fought them from dusk until the
evening of the next day. David recovered everything that the Amalekites had
taken. He took the battle, he went out and he found those who had taken his
family, taken everything that they had, everything that they owned, all the
families, and they attacked them.

They attacked evil. " Now, you and I don't live in the day of David where we
have people, most of us at least, where we have people raiding our city and
taking our families off and we have to go and find those families. We live in a
different day, but we still have evil around us.

So how do we attack evil today? As followers of Jesus, what do we do? Romans 12,
21 says, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

" This extremely significant verse tells us how important our focus is. You're
never going to defeat evil by focusing on evil. Satan and demons and evil
forces, they are in this world, but evil is defeated by focusing on what is
good, God is good, and living what is good.

God's plan for your life, God's people, God's heart to reach people, those are
good things. Evil is real. It impacts our lives every day whether we notice it
or not, but you don't have to live in fear of Satan.

You do not have to live in fear of evil because God won the victory at the
cross. Greater is he who is in me than he who is in the world. So decide, I'm
going to attack evil by overcoming evil with good.

Let your response to the pain of those you love, the evil that's coming to the
lives of those you love, be your decision to fight, to keep fighting this battle
against evil, not to give in. You might say, "I feel like giving in, I feel like
giving up. " We all do sometimes.

Just remember, he will never give up on you. That's one of the things that helps
you when you feel like giving up. Okay, I've got a God who will never give up on
me, I'm hanging on to that.

And then there's a sixth thing that David teaches us to do, and that is give to
others. When you've had the worst day of your life, you often want to pull in
and just think about yourself. Maybe for a few days or weeks that might be okay,
but for a few years, for the rest of your life, all of a sudden you've lost the
life that God wants you to live.

So you again, at a certain point, start to give to others. What a great example
David is in this. They go and they have this great victory.

They're the ones who win this victory. But then in verse 21 of chapter 30, David
returned to the brook Besor and he met up with the 200 men who'd been left
behind because they were too exhausted to go with him. They went out to meet
David and his men and David greeted them joyfully, but some evil troublemakers
among David's men said, "They didn't go out with us.

" So they can't have any of the plunder we recovered. Give them their wives and
children and tell them to be gone. But David said, "No, my brothers, don't be
selfish with what the Lord has given us.

He's kept us safe. He's helped us defeat the band of raiders that attacked us.
Who will listen when we talk like this?

We share and share alike those who go to battle and those who guard the
equipment. " From then on, David made this a decree and a regulation for Israel
and it's still followed today. So he did this for his men.

And then in verse 26, when he arrived at Ziklag, David sent part of the plunder
to the elders of Judah who were his friends. Here is a present for you taken
from the Lord's enemies, he said. David kept on giving.

When you've had a loss and God begins to restore your life in some way, it is
easy to become selfish with what God has returned to you to think, "I've got to
hold on to this because it was so easy to lose before. " But David broke through
all that. He decided to keep on giving.

So when it comes to going through the worst of life, the worst day of life, some
of you, God has designed this message for you today. You're just going through
it right now. Some of you, you have a friend that needs to hear this message.

You need to pray for them through this message and maybe even share this message
with them. Many of us, we haven't maybe been through it right now today, but at
some point in life, we're going to go through one of these days that just seems
to shake our faith. If you're going through it right now, if you know someone
who's going through it, where are you in the process?

What do you need to do to keep trust in God? What do you do? You don't get
better.

You encourage yourself in God. You look to the future with hope. You attack evil
and you keep on giving.

Our Father, even when the worst happens to us in this life, we can still know
that we can trust you, that even through that, Lord, you are working. When the
worst happened to your son, when he gave his life on the cross and they hurled
the insults at him and took his life, you were there and out of that, God, you
brought our salvation. So we pray that even out of the evil things that are
thrown our way, you help us to see how you want to deliver us and, God, how you
want to keep working.

Lord, it doesn't make the evil not evil. You know we live in an evil world.
You've told us in your word, but it reminds us of how good you are and it
reminds us that this world is not all there is, that you have a plan that's
beyond, above what we experience here.

So Lord, instead of letting that day, that thing that happened, all of a sudden
become the only story of our life, we pray as we walk through this process with
you, we would find you increasingly to be the story, our faith to increasingly
be the story of our life. That's what we pray for. We ask it in Jesus' name,
amen.

Well next week, we're going to get fully into Second Samuel. We're going to see
David becoming king, David teaching us about faith and about worship.