Have you ever had one of those moments where you're in desperate need and then out of nowhere, someone shows up to help you? I remember once in the dead of summer, my dad and I were driving to church when the car overheated on the freeway. It was an 89 Chevy Caprice. Dad pulled over on the highway and lifted the hood and flames came pouring out. Dad was yelling at me to get out of the car and to come up to where he was in the front of the vehicle. And suddenly, out of nowhere, at least it seemed to me, there was a police officer with a fire extinguisher. He must have pulled in behind us without me noticing, but it seemed as if he just showed up out of thin air. And he put out the flames and he waited with us until the tow truck came. My dad always said that he must have been an angel What are the chances that at that very moment, when we needed a fire extinguisher, there one was? I'm sure that you can think of instances in your own life when God brought about a deliverance that saved you. Usually these are formative experiences that forge our character. We have been traveling with David in his wilderness, sojourn as a fugitive from Saul. And David has had numerous times where it seemed hopeless. Yet God was intervening. God intervened. And David has had to learn to rely on God, seeking His will before acting, and trusting in Him to keep him safe. Hebrew storytellers have one main rule that they stick to tenaciously. Brevity. Often the characters are not developed beyond a few sentences. The dialogue is short. They're not overly descriptive. They also don't usually tell you the point overtly of their stories. There's no interior development of the characters. That is, of course, except for in the case of David. Not only do we have all the narratives of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Chronicles, but we have David's own thoughts and reflections in the Psalms sometimes of the specific situations that he faced. Psalm 54, which we read responsibly together, was written during the events of 1 Samuel 23, verses 19 through 29. The title to that psalm says, when the Ziphites went and told Saul, is David not hiding among us? And that psalm provides us with an inside look into David's thoughts and how he reacted to the situation. His response is instructive for our own cliffhanger moments when we desperately need God to deliver us. So to understand this text, it will be helpful for us to keep our finger in Psalm 54, as we learn how David deals with the treachery of betrayal. But more importantly, as we see how God delivers David from his enemies. You may not have physical enemies like David did, that threaten you. But we do certainly face enemies. Enemies of our soul, the world, the flesh, and the devil. The situations David faces will be instructive for how God delivers you from your enemies. Since God delivers us from enemies, we must give Him thanks. So let's open up this text this morning from 1 Samuel chapter 23. We're going to begin reading at verse 15. David saw that Saul had come out to seek his life, and David was in the wilderness of Ziph and Horesh. And Jonathan, Saul's son, rose and went to David at Horesh, and strengthened his hand in God. And he said to him, do not fear, for the hand of Saul, my father, shall not find you. You shall be king over Israel, and I shall be next to you. Saul, my father, also knows this. And the two of them made a covenant before the Lord. And David remained at Horesh, and Jonathan went home. Then the Ziphites went up to Saul at Gibeah, saying, Is not David hiding among us in the strongholds of Horesh, on the hill of Heqala, which is south of Jashmon? Now come down, O king, according to all your heart's desire to come down, and our part shall be to surrender him into the king's hand. And Saul said, May you be blessed by the Lord, for you have had compassion on me. Go, make yet more sure, know and see the place where his foot is. And who has seen him there? For it is told me that he is very cunning. See, therefore, and take note of all the lurking places where he hides, and come back to me with sure information. Then I will go with you, and if he is in the land, I will search him out among all the thousands of Judah." And they arose and went to Ziph ahead of Saul. Now David and his men were in the wilderness of Maon, in the Ereba, in the south of Jeshmon. And Saul and his men went to seek him, and David was told, so he went down to the rock and lived in the wilderness of Maon. And when Saul heard that, he pursued after David in the wilderness of Maon. Saul went on one side of the mountain, and David and his men on the other side of the mountain. And David was hurrying to get away from Saul, as Saul and his men were closing in on David and his men to capture them. A messenger came to Saul saying, Hurry and come, for the Philistines have made a raid against the land. So Saul returned from pursuing after David and went against the Philistines. Therefore that place is called the Rock of Escape. And David went up from there and lived in the strongholds of En Gedi. This is the word of the Lord. Amen. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, Almighty God, we do give you thanks for this, your word. And we ask that you'd give us eyes to see and ears to hear so that we may behold wonders out of your law. We ask that you'd bless the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts. May they be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our closest kinsmen redeemer. Amen. David has already faced betrayal. Certainly being hunted down by his father-in-law must have felt like a betrayal, even if Saul only ever intended to give his daughter as a trap to ensnare David. Plus, there's the betrayal of Doeg. who, although a foreigner, should have treated the priests of Nob, he shouldn't have treated them the way that he did. Then last week, David finds out that the inhabitants of Keilah, even after he delivered them from the Philistine raiders, would give him up to Saul. And so he flees from Keilah out into the wilderness of Judah. And after he does, given the situation that he's in, Jonathan comes to David to encourage him. And David and Jonathan have formed one of those deep and lasting friendships that have left an indelible mark as the ideal of male friendship. Jonathan is a type of Christ, giving of himself, laying down his own mantle of royal prerogatives, his own right to the throne, for David, just as Christ who, as Philippians said, though he was in the form of God, did not account equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. So we get a picture of Christ and the actions of Jonathan, laying aside his own desires for David. And although David is abandoned by many, even within his own tribe, in Jonathan, God sends the kind of encouragement only a friend could give. It seems that God sends Jonathan to him right at the perfect, crucial time in David's life. Because just after he leaves the Ziphites, who know where David is. They have seen him just after he leaves. The Ziphites go and tell Saul and Gibeah, we know where David is. They are like Doeg. They're opportunists. They want to curry favor with the king. And so they rat David out. And Saul is, of course, grateful, but skeptical, because at this point he has learned that David is cunning. He has not been successful in capturing David. Of course, that's not a red flag to Saul. He should be thinking, why is that? Why is the Lord not delivering this man into my hands? Maybe it's because I shouldn't be persecuting him. But Saul doesn't have the wisdom to think that far ahead. And so he sends the Ziphites out to go and look more closely, go and mark where he lays his head, where his foot is, because he's cunning. And so they do. And then Saul pursues them, and he gets very, very close. Although he doesn't know this, as he's on one side of the mountain and David is hurrying to flee on the other. Saul is so near to closing in on David that unless the Lord had intervened, he would have apprehended him. Saul hears that the Philistines are making raids against the land and so he is prevented from capturing David. We see first that God delivers David from his internal fears through the strengthening of Jonathan before providing a way of escape from Saul against his pursuers. But as we examine these two ways that God delivers David, I want to frame this all within the telling of this situation through Psalm 54. So really, this is a two for one. You're getting two expositions for the price of one. And I mean, who doesn't like a deal? This is a great deal. We studied the Psalms of Lament in 2020, and we found that a lament is a form of prayer that's meant to lead us from a place of pain to a position of trust. And we see that come out clearly in this psalm as verses 1 through 3 lay out his lament, and verses 4 through 6 encourage and bolster his faith as he trusts in the Lord to deliver him and to vindicate him from his enemies, which are strangers and ruthless men who have risen against him and seek his life. No doubt the Ziphites and Saul and others. Then in verse 4 the tone shifts and the psalmist is moving to a place of trust by recounting God's past faithfulness. God is his helper and has upheld him and therefore will deliver him from his enemies because he is confident in the Lord. He pledges to offer a freewill offering and to give God thanks. So what we find is The voice of trust that David comes to is giving thanks. And so we'll end our discussion of how God delivers by looking at what it means for us to give thanks. First then, God delivers us from our enemies by the strengthening of friendships. It's not surprising that as we've worked through this text of 1 Samuel that we're coming to some of the same themes over and over again. We've seen, as we follow David in the wilderness, the importance of trust and reliance upon God, the importance of friendship and community, and these things have come up again and again. So as Paul said to the saints in Philippi, to write the same things to you is no trouble to me, and it is safe for you. So it's important. These are themes that we struggle with. and that we need to be reminded of over and over again. Jonathan, he comes to David at an opportune time to bolster his faith in God, strengthening him in the Lord. Now, it's not printed in your bulletin, but if you had your Bible and you looked back at verse 14, the narrator tells us that Saul sought David every day. Every day Saul was pursuing David. That's what we call relentless. I mean, I've been in battle. I fought in a war. Still, I cannot say that somebody sought to kill me every day. What would it feel like to be pursued like that? It makes me think of our Christian brothers and sisters in countries that are openly hostile to the gospel. They're constantly on guard. Every word, every correspondence, every move is being scrutinized by others. The mental exhaustion that this kind of persecution takes a toll. It's astounding. Some cannot make it under this strain and their minds give way and they break. But even the best need encouragement from others. Our age is a therapeutic age. And part of this is because we have replaced the meaningful community connections in everyday life with our individualism. We have decided that what I'm going to pursue is my heart, my desires, my inclinations. We've rejected the wisdom of the community so that we can be free to follow our hearts. We have to rely now, because of this, on therapists and psychiatrists, because a network of relationships that once sustained communities, even here in America, has been evaporated or torn down. It used to be that you could depend on the wisdom of the previous generation, but the youth culture that developed since at least the middle of the 20th century, and that means all of us have grown up in that. The youth culture has been conditioned to distrust authority and to mock their parents' traditions. They're often skeptical in all the wrong areas, and not least a bit skeptical where they should be most. Skeptical about myself, about my ability to create meaning that will sustain me without the fabric of a community, without the reliance of the previous generation's wisdom. And our culture nevertheless is hungry for community. And this provides a great opportunity for us within the church. For Christianity is the community of the called out ones. That means to be the church, we have been gathered together as one body with many members into a communion of saints. And since the pandemic, the gathering of the church has been under attack. And people have often claimed that the church isn't a building, and that's true. It's the people. But it would be better to say that the church is a people assembled in a place. David is facing tremendous external pressure because of persecution, but also pressure to protect and provide for the small band of people that he is leading, that have fled to him for leadership. And as Paul so eloquently put in 2 Corinthians 2, 5, as Paul said, David is fighting without and fears within. He's facing external pressure, but also his own internal doubts and fears. First fears about why. Why is this the path God has him walking on? Why through the wilderness? When he's been anointed already to be the king. Whenever we encounter difficulty in the Christian life, you can be sure that Satan is there, ready and waiting with his lies, designed to make you doubt primarily the goodness of God. He whispers in your ear, is God even good? Does God even love you? Does He even care? Why would He put you through this if He loved you? Satan has been whispering that same lie since the very beginning. He's trying to get our eyes off of God and onto our situation. Of course, we need to be personally equipped to handle those kinds of thoughts as they happen. And we do this by arming ourselves with the promises of God, by arming ourselves with Scripture. And this is exactly how Jesus encountered Satan when he was tempted in the wilderness. Oh, you're hungry. I doubt that God loves you. But, you know, if you were so special, this turned these rocks into bread. What does Jesus say? Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Jesus is armed with the promises of God. God will sustain him. He need not concern himself over that. And so we are to respond as well by remembering the promises of God, by quoting scripture back to those voices that whisper in our ear. But if the trauma is significant enough and the fears crippling enough or the doubts relentless, you will not be able to handle them alone. You need a Jonathan to come alongside of you and strengthen your hand. And notice how Jonathan does that. Look with me at verse 17. And Jonathan said to David, Do not fear, for the hand of Saul my father shall not find you. You shall be king over Israel, and I shall be next to you. Saul my father knows this. He relieves David's fears by reminding David of the promises of God. God has made you king, David. I know this. My father knows this. When God says something, you know, David, that it comes true. God doesn't make promises that he can't keep. I imagine Jonathan reminding him of all the ways that God had been faithful to him. Remember David. Remember when he delivered you from this enemy. Remember when you went out in faith and you conquered Goliath, and God was faithful to deliver him into your hand. Remember, remember God's faithfulness. I imagine that after this conversation with Jonathan, David pens Psalm 54. As he laments the persecution of enemies, he bolsters his trust, his faith, by reminding himself of God's past faithfulness. I can't help but seeing the signature of Jonathan on Psalm 54. Listen to this verse 4. Behold, God is my helper. The Lord is the upholder of my life. He will return the evil to my enemies. In your faithfulness, put an end to them. With a free will offering, I will sacrifice to you. I will give thanks to your name, O Lord, for it is good. For He has delivered me from every trouble. And my eye has looked triumph on my enemies." David recounts God's past faithfulness to bolster his faith so that he can trust God to deliver him from the persecution that he faces right now. God has been faithful in the past and he will be so in the future because his promises never fail. I won't belabor this point because it's come up repeatedly in 1 Samuel, but notice that for Jonathan to be able to do this, to be able to encourage him in this way, he had to be involved enough in David's life to be able to recount God's faithfulness. He had to know something about what David had experienced to be able to say, David, remember, There's an intimacy here that most men don't have with other men, but which we must work all the harder to cultivate. The world around us says you can't have this kind of committed, covenantal, intimate relationship between two men without sex. Like all God's good gifts, homosexual sex is a perversion of the close intimate relationship that can exist between men. The sex doesn't make them closer together. Homosexual men are statistically more depressed. They have more anxiety, are more suicidal, are more lonely than straight men in committed marital relationships. And these statistics are still higher even in monogamous homosexual marriages, which are incredibly rare. So men, let's show the world how it's done. Love the brothers God has put in your life and form deep bonds with them. Confess sin to one another. Call out sin in one another. Encourage one another. Remind each other of God's past faithfulness. And that means you must be involved in their lives. Strengthen your brothers in God as Jonathan did for David. But not just you men. Women, likewise, encourage each other with the promises of God. Don't let your Bible studies and prayer time turn into gossip sessions about so-and-so's husband or the latest scandal. but encourage one another in the things of God. Older women teaching the younger women to be keepers at home, loving their husbands and raising their children in the faith. You won't be able to speak that timely word that strengthens your brother or sister in Christ if you are not paying attention to what's going on in their lives. Which means we all need to be doing life together. Which means We have to be creative. A lot of us live an hour away from each other. We have to be intentional about building that kind of community so that we can encourage and strengthen each other in God in the midst of our own troubles, where we need deliverance, where we are fighting those internal fears and doubts. We need to be able to rely on each other. God may just use you and your words of encouragement to deliver them, to deliver somebody from that internal enemies of fear and doubt that daily threaten our faith. God delivered David from internal fears by the strengthening friendship of Jonathan, but he also delivers by providing a way of escape. despite his deliverance of the inhabitants of Keilah, which is, it's near Ziph. This is like, you know, a different borough. It's right there, you know, and these people know that Jonathan delivered, or that David delivered the inhabitants of Keilah from the Philistines. They know that. And yet, they betrayed David to Saul. They are opportunists. They routinely back the wrong guys, essentially because they measure, not by biblical standards, but by what they can see, by power. Who's got the power? Who has it? How can they get some themselves? We find the same problem recurring over and over again in history. And given the prevalence of lament, especially in the Psalter, that the wicked seem to be getting away with it while the righteous are punished, are persecuted, like Psalm 37 and Psalm 73. And we could be prone in the midst of that kind of situation to despair. But just because someone occupies a position of power, sitting as Saul does as the de facto king, while the king de jour, that is David, the rightful king, while he is out in the wilderness, does not mean that the Ziphites are judging rightly. That is because they don't see with the eyes of faith. They look at the situation and they judge based on what they see. Whereas the small remnant that is fled to David, they see by faith that David is the rightful king. And despite his current situation being on the outs, that God is with him. But it turns out that these are exactly the kinds of situations that God loves to bring his people to. Not to be cruel and unloving. Not just because God wants us to squirm like he is some kind of kid with a magnifying glass and, you know, every bug is an ability to scorch the earth. No, God is not like that at all. But he's interested in building faith. In fact, all the lessons in scripture can be boiled down to this, the words of this song. Trust and obey, for there's no other way. But the diversity of scripture proves the opposite truth that we, as sinful creatures, go to great lengths to discover ways not to trust and not to obey. We sing a different tune. Distrust and disobey, for I'll go my own way. Unfortunately, we don't learn to trust God by everything going swimmingly. We learn to trust God in the forge of adversity. We learn it when we experience God's deliverance, and not a moment too soon. Imagine the scene. David is on one side of the mountain, and Saul is on the other. And they're closing in. And David knows this. Saul's not quite sure. Just as Saul's about to catch him, that moment, then a messenger comes. obviously from the Lord. The Philistines are raiding. We have to stop this fool's errand and go and protect the nation. Saul must turn from pursuing David just at the moment when to David it seemed he had almost succeeded in capturing him. God brings his people to the edge of the Red Sea with a sea that they can't cross at their back and the screaming chariots of the Egyptians at their front. And he said, stand still and watch how I deliver you. When all hope seems lost, when there's no more of our own resources to rely on, when we are forced to depend on God, that's when He delivers us. The point is to remember, as David does in Psalm 54, he remembers God's past deliverance. for the strength and the trust to deepen his faith for his future trials. For he has delivered me from every trouble. That's David's confession. God has delivered him from every trouble. He's reminding himself of God's faithfulness and that gives him courage to wait on God to act. And you might think, I don't have experience of God delivering me as this David does. First, I would respond to that, you do. You might just not have noticed it. We'll return to see what this experience is in a moment, but secondly, the experience of David is your experience. which is why this story is included in Scripture. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10-11, now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages have come. If David was brought through this nick of time deliverance just for himself, for his faith to be strengthened, then it would hardly have been needed to be recorded for posterity. Take another example from Paul. Romans 4 verse 19, he's speaking about Abraham, and he says this about Abraham. No unbelief made him waver concerning the promises of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was counted to him as righteousness. But the words, it was counted to him, were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him, who raised Jesus from the dead, our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. Do you see what Paul's doing? He's saying Abraham looked at his state. He looked at the state of his wife. He concluded that by appearances, it's impossible for them to have a child. But he wasn't looking at appearances. But by faith he believed the promises of God, and that was counted to him as righteousness. But it wasn't written for him. It was written for you, so that you who have the same faith as Abraham, who believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, that you will have the same righteousness counted to you. It was written so that you would believe. When you believe that Jesus rose again from the dead for your justification, that is counted to you as righteousness. So God has given you the experience of these nick of time deliverances so that your faith and trust grow by seeing the character and attributes of God who delivers. How great is that? You didn't have to be on the other side of the mountain with Saul pursuing you for your faith to be bolstered in the God who delivers David. You get to join in on that story without ever having to experience the persecution that David experienced. And you can say with David, my God has delivered me from every trouble. Because you've read over and over in scripture how God has done just that. But it's also not true that you don't have a personal experience of God's deliverance. And of course, unless you don't believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, Paul again says in Romans 5, for while we were still weak, At the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die. But God chose His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. At the right time. At the nick of time, right when you least expected it, when you needed it the most. The most remarkable deliverance was the cross of Jesus Christ. There in Him, you were delivered from the penalty and guilt of sin, and in exchange, given Jesus' perfect righteousness. If you have trusted in Christ, then God has provided a way of escape, delivering you from what you justly deserve, His wrath and judgment, eternal punishment of hell. And if God has delivered you from the greatest of enemies, death, then He certainly can deliver you from this light, momentary affliction. That is why each of us must have in view our current situations through the cross in light of eternity. We look at our lives through the lens of the cross and in light of what God is doing, where He's bringing us. If the chasm of distance that separated you from God could be overcome at the cross, which is the scale of magnitude is seemingly infinite, how much more can God deliver you from the small daily challenges that are scattered on the pathway of your life? If He can do that, why would He not deliver you from this? Of course He would. Turning again to Psalm 54, we see that the response of trust is thanksgiving. What else would we offer the God who freely gives us everything in Christ Jesus? We could never pay Him back or hope ever to make a return on what He has given us, but we can give Him thanks. David says, with a freewill offering, I will sacrifice to You. I will give thanks to Your name, O Lord, for it is good. The name of God is an expression of his character. His name is Yahweh, that is his covenant name, which expresses the nature of God to be faithful to his covenant. He revealed this name to Moses at the mountain of God when he said to him, I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings. And I've come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. And now behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me. And I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. God knows the suffering that you face. He's not deaf to your cries. He hears and He responds to deliver. He is the Lord. That is His name. And we give Him thanks because He has delivered us from our enemies, namely death. And He's promised us a better land than Canaan. A new heaven and a new earth. The very contemplation of which causes us to fall like the elders in Revelation 5 in worship, giving thanks to him, saying, To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever. Amen. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful not only for the friendship of Jesus, who strengthens our internal doubts and strife and fears by speaking comfort to us, by speaking tenderly of the promises of God to remove the curse of sin, the penalty, which is death, reconciling us to God, freeing us from the things that we could never be free from on our own, and offering us life, delivering us from every enemy, every trouble that we face. And so we trust in Him, and we remember His faithfulness, and we remind ourselves of His promises, that everyone is true and finds their yes and amen in Christ, whose life is ours. And so we give you thanks in His precious name. Amen. Amen, saints, let's.