From Great Days with the Great Lives, by Chuck Swindoll, Pg 107
Read I Samuel 16:1-11
God knew David had the quality on integrity. Today, we live in a world that says in many ways, “If you make a good impression, that’s all really all that matters.” But you will never be a man or woman of God if that’s your philosophy. Never. You cannot fake it with the Almighty. He is not impressed with externals. He always focuses on the inward qualities, those things that take time and discipline to cultivate. God trained David for a leadership role with four disciplines, and FYI, we’re not told any of them were reading, writing, arithmetic or even science.
It is interesting that God first trained David in SOLITUDE. That for sure is a lost art today and found nowhere amongst all our device screens. David needed to learn life’s major disciplines all alone before he could be trusted with responsibilities and rewards before the public. Solitude has nurturing qualities all its own. If you can’t stand to be alone with yourself, you have deep, unresolved issues in your inner life. Solitude does have a way of bringing those issues to the surface.
Merlin Monday morning quarterbacking now 20 years later after Chuck wrote this book: Did Chuck actually state counter-culturally that anyone who must have superficial sounds to survive their self-inflicted chaos today lacks depth? Consider the manifestation hugeness of this addiction for our culture at all levels since we witnessed such events as Sony introducing the Walkman in July 1979? Adding insult to injury, I really wonder what Chuck would say about all the prescriptions being written today for too many kids, parents, grandparents & beyond, for whoever to simply survive the stressors of their lives?
Moving on, second, David grew up in OBSCURITY. That’s another way God trains His best personnel – in obscurity. Men and women of God, servant-leaders in the making, are first unknown, unseen, unappreciated, and for sure, not applauded. It is in the quiet context of obscurity character is built. Strange as it may seem, those who first accept the silence of obscurity are best qualified to handle the applause of popularity.
Which leads us to the third training ground, MONOTONY. That’s being faithful in the menial, insignificant, routine, unexciting, uneventful, daily tasks of life. Life without a break … without the wine and roses. Just dull plain L-I-F-E. Just constant, unchanging, hours of tired monotony as you learn to be a man or woman of God … with nobody else around, when nobody else notices, when nobody else even cares. That’s how we learn to “king it.”
That brings us to the fourth discipline: REALITY. Up until now you might have the feeling that despite the solitude, obscurity, and monotony, David was just sitting out on some hilltop in a mystic haze, composing a great piece of music, or relaxing in the pastures of Judea and having a great time training those sheep to sit on their hind legs. Simply not true!
Merlin again: This daily devotional with these four words of discipline : solitude, obscurity, monotony, and reality, have really struck a cord with me. I personally have witnessed this shift from relative “peace & QUIET” to “deafening & numbing NOISE” in predominately an agrarian religious sub-culture over the past seven decades, fraught with its own litany of revelations. I have also experienced reconciling this shift’s ever growing influence first and foremost, in my personal growing and maturing into His desired spiritual Righteousness for me, which was, is, and is continuing to be, no small task. Understand however, this shift is actually incalculably minute, considering all the other fronts Satan is now employing against servants in Christ’s vineyard in these approaching days. There are numerous relevant scriptures that both encourage and warn us. Here are a few verses from my reading today.
1 Corinthians 1:25-30 (MSG)
25.) Human wisdom is so tinny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can’t begin to compete with God’s “weakness.”
26. Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families.
27.) Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses,
28.) chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”?
29.) That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God.
30.) Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ.
NEXT UP: Inner Qualities