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One Step Back To God

One Step Back To God

191125AM

19-Samuel-15

NO MATTER how many steps AWAY from GOD you’ve taken, it is ALWAYS JUST ONE STEP BACK! That’s the GOOD NEWS. Sharing these truths with the NextGeneration of God’s servants in Asia, Africa, and Europe is the joy of our lives. GOD is within an arm’s length of EVERYONE if they’ll just REACH out in FAITH to HIM!
David fell so far, so fast—he didn’t even realize it until the dullness of his soul spread to every inch of his spiritual life. Soon his cold heart was combined with his tormented soul and trapped in a painfully chastened body. David was at the bottom, and he stayed there for almost a year.
ALMOST A YEAR—did that length of time strike you? DAVID WAS AT THE BOTTOM: Think of who we are talking about, that fell so far away from the God he so passionately loved and served.
• A man that God talked to directly by way of inspiration;
• a man who knew the indwelling Presence of God the Spirit;
• a man who had the direct line to God’s Throne by way of prophets;
• a man who could enter the very tent of God built to the specs God left;
• a man who had held perhaps the very scrolls Moses had written down;
• a man who may have seen the stone tablets of the law that were kept in the ark;
• a man who had seen God’s supernatural protection month after month in hand to hand combat as David was never defeated on the battlefield—and as far as we know, never even wounded by arrow, sword, spear or sling stone, though there had been tens of thousands pointed at him and held by those who hated him and wanted him dead.
That man who knew God, experienced God’s presence, loved God, sang scores of songs inspired by God, wrote chapters of the eternal Word of God—that man seemed to lose touch with God for a YEAR!
Now, think about yourself.
David knew the same God we know.
David wrote the same Bible we read.
David sang the same songs we sing.
David felt the same closeness we feel and probably even more so that many of us have ever felt.
Yet he stayed away from God for almost a whole year. Maybe we shouldn’t give up on people so fast. Maybe we shouldn’t stop praying so easily. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to write them off and erase them from the group. David spent as much as a year in absolute misery.
What is amazing is that David hid this so well. He went through the motions of being the king. He was God’s leader, he was God’s king. He was still the sweet psalmist of Israel. He still had the family line that would never end. He was still the one through whom the Christ would come.
But all those blessings and benefits meant nothing, like an engine without fuel, an electronic device with no power—David had walked away from God and stayed away for a long time.
But if you were just a casual observer, it looked as if David had gotten by with it. But always remember one thing: David was God’s man, and God would not let David get by with it. In reality, during the interval when he kept quiet, he was a tormented man. In Psalm 32 we saw what really went on in his heart. David says this: “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long” (Ps. 32:3). If we could have visited the court of David during that nearly year of hidden sin—we would have literally seen David aging before our eyes. The self-inflicted stress of those months was completely debilitating. “For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer” (Ps. 32:4). This describes his feelings during that interval.

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