The Pattern Of Courageous Manhood

Now, the Bible says that while he was in the land of the Philistines and had gone out to war to help them, that back at Ziklag, in his city, there were those who came in and decimated the city and carried off all of the possessions and took all of the people captive. So that when David and his men came back to Ziklag, all they found were the ashes of David’s decision.

I want you to know something. Making wrong decisions—making them after the flesh, making them after the ways of the natural mind—will many times leave us with nothing but the ashes of that decision. It will carry away captive the very things that we consider to be the most valuable and precious.

But when David had last left all, the Bible says he prayed. He sought God. And the Bible says that he encouraged himself in the Lord and he strengthened himself in the Lord. That is to say, he encouraged himself in the Word of God, or rather encouraged himself in past deliverances that God had given to him in his life, and strengthened himself in the Word of God. He went to the Word to get strength for his spirit in order to see, in order to be, in order to do the kinds of things that a man of God would do. His other decision left him dissolute, desolate. This time, instead, he prayed, was encouraged and strengthened himself. God said go and recover them. And the Bible says that he recovered everything that was stolen.

Now, I want to deal with this for just a moment because he immediately did what God said to do. But a lot of times we don’t do just that. And the Bible says in Proverbs 10:4 that, “He becomes poor who deals with a slack hand.” The Bible says in Deuteronomy 7:10 “God does not want us to be slack,” and God Himself is not slack concerning his promises. Joshua says, “How long slack we to possess the land,” in Joshua 18:3. II Peter 2:9: “God is not slack concerning his promises.”

I want to show you what slack means here. In Deuteronomy 7:10, it means to loiter, by implication, to procrastinate. Procrastination will always create consternation. It will produce pressure on others, pressure on self. It will create all kinds of problems because it’s dealing with a slack hand. It’s a type of loitering. Waiting until the pressure becomes so intense that you have to do whatever it is you want to do. In Joshua 18:3, it means to sink, to relax, to let drop, to be disheartened—slack. In II Peter, it’s to delay, to be slow, retard, tarry, and to be permissive. It means treachery, deceit, false, idle, slothful, and lazy.

Many times, we are simply lazy. One of the things that I can remember over the years of getting letters from women who talk about her husband, who may not be the couch potato, but when it comes to doing things, he’s just lazy or slothful or procrastinates. And it hurts the family. It hurts her. It hurts him because his character is character deficiency exemplified and therefore creates a negative attitude.