The Search for God's Own Heart

Finding a Genuine Relationship with God

By Andy Cook, Pastor, Shirley Hills Baptist Church

Kregel Publications, 2001

Coming to the City of Crisis

Chapter 11
 

Ziklag was a great place to raise kids. It was off the beaten path and always would be. This was the kind of one-stoplight town where you could charge things at the drugstore, and where the gas station attendant coached your kids in Little League on Saturdays. It wasn’t unusual to have a pecan pie on your kitchen table when you returned home from church, for no one locked their doors in Ziklag, and people were prone to drop off pecan pies for their neighbors.

This is where David lived. He was a young man, a man full of promise, a man who knew how to worship with his whole heart. His life hadn’t yet been contaminated with wealth, power, or fame. He had a good family, and good times. He would fire up the grill for holiday barbeques and family get-togethers. He loved the way this small town worked. There would always be big crowds for the annual elementary school play, and big turnouts for the volunteer firemen’s chicken-dinner fund raiser every fall. And though they worked hard, few folks in Ziklag ever punched a time clock. People here tended to drive pick-up trucks to work, and stop right in the middle of the day for a cup of coffee at the corner cafe.

David loved returning to Ziklag after his work had taken him on the road.

Never mind, for a moment, that this is one of David’s more unusual periods of life. Instead of working for God’s country, he is now employed by a Philistine king. He fights for the enemy, and he fights well. His reward is an entire town - the tree-lined streets of Ziklag. Forget, if you can, David’s story. Just imagine that this is your town. It’s where you park your mini-van under your carport, where you watch your favorite TV show on Thursdays, and where you attend high school basketball games on winter Friday nights.

It’s a place called home.

Try to imagine the day when you come home to disaster.

Maybe you read the story quickly, without feeling the emotion. Maybe you breezed past the heartache, the agony, the crisis. Can you possibly feel the tightness in your chest that David felt? His two wives, gone. Children, gone. House burned to the ground. Corner drug store a raped pile of rubble. God only knows the evil that has happened to his daughter. The men around him are screaming in grief, each finding his own home destroyed, his own wife, his own children, missing. Some of them are so wild with grief, they are ready to kill anyone, right now. David looks like a good target.

We cannot relate to the City of Crisis until Ziklag becomes our destroyed home. It’s different when the policeman says that it’s your child in trouble. It’s different when the doctor is holding a manila folder with your name on it, and the news inside the folder makes him frown. It’s different when the funeral director asks you to sit on the front row of the funeral home chapel. It’s different when the layoff has your name on the jobless list. It’s different when the parents telling their child that a move is necessary are your parents.

What are you going to do in a Ziklag crisis? Can I promise you something? Your heart will make the difference. And I’ll make you another promise. Your search for God’s heart will intensify a thousands times over when you come to the City of Crisis. If you have made this search for God your search, finding God will no longer be an option for sleepy Sunday mornings inside a quaint church sanctuary. Once you arrive in the City of Crisis, the search will suddenly be a gasping, burning, life-dependent desire for air when you’re still 10 feet below the surface of a lake.

It was a Thursday when I returned home to Ziklag. All I had to do to arrive in the City of Crisis was wake up from a short night’s sleep.

My wife was a beautiful version of 24. She was in the first stages of pregnancy, with our second child on the way. We had a lovely, smallish country home covered by shade trees and an expansive lawn. I was climbing ladders through a newspaper career, enjoying a lazy, comfortable existence. We had work during the week, friends over on weekend nights, and church on Sundays. Two children would make our family portrait complete, and the pictures would collect dust until someone read my obituary in the distant - far distant - future.

Melody was in trouble from the first moment she awakened. A frantic trip to the hospital went quickly from an emergency room to the halls of an intensive care waiting room. There were hushed conversations with serious doctors, doctors who told me my wife of five years was dying of a stroke.

Immediately, there was a crowd in Ziklag. My pastor was there. My parents, and my wife’s parents, were by my side. Family came from every direction. Friends filled every corner of the waiting room.

But the one presence I needed most was the presence most noticeably absent. My soul was screaming the question my mouth could not speak: "Where in the world ... is God?"

I didn’t deserve this. My wife, my child, didn’t deserve this. Look at what we’d done! I sang in the church choir. I taught boys in Sunday School every week. As a couple, we had worked with teen-agers on Sunday nights. We were faithful in attending church, in giving to church, in making sure we hadn’t embarrassed our church.

Hadn’t the dues we had paid been enough to avoid Ziklag?

King Saul had faced times like this, the worst coming when he and his sons were trapped in battle, a battle that had turned against them with an ICU-waiting room desperation. His pastor - Samuel the prophet - had died, and Saul was horribly alone.

For today, forget all the other details of what had happened to Saul. The details of his crisis are as different from David’s as your crisis is from mine. The lesson the Bible teaches has to do with the heart of Saul, the heart of David, of my heart, and of your heart.

I’ll say it again: The Search for God’s own heart will intensify in a crisis. Saul was desperate for God, and he prayed to God. But there was a delay. Was God waiting to see what kind of faith this faithless king would display? Had God grown callous to a man who had walked further and further away from Him? Was God not amused by the desperate, frantic, emergency-lights-flashing prayer life of a man who never found time for the things of God except when he dialed 911?

Whatever was in Saul’s heart, God didn’t have to wait long to see it. Before the paragraph of Saul’s prayer to God was over, the king was asking for a 1-900 number for a psychic hotline. He found one and called her. He disguised himself, calmed down, and trusted a fake.

Strangely enough, Saul got what he asked for. The psychic called up Samuel, the dead preacher, and Samuel gave him a blistering reproach. When we next hear of this king with the hollow heart, Saul was dead - but his search for God had died long before. He had gone to God with a "Plan B" in his mind, and God simply does not respond to anyone who comes to Him without total, unadulterated submission and dependence.

When you arrive at the City of Crisis, you don’t have a lot of time to react. Like Saul, David, and me, you’ll fall on your knees and pray. Perhaps you’ve already been there, and you remember it well. Perhaps, like Saul, like David, like me, you had less than 24 hours to find God. It seems unfair, in a way. You spend your whole life going through the routine, and suddenly the Philistines have you surrounded, and The Search becomes a matter of life-or-death spiritual survival.

It was in just such a place that Saul prayed. But Saul got up after a short time of silence and tried another solution. He gave up on a silent God. David, on the other hand, showed us the core of a man who was after God’s own heart. Did you see it? Ziklag was burned to the ground, the wives and children gone for three days, leaving only a trail of children’s toys and women’s lingerie that disappeared over the horizon. Half the men were crying in the ashes, the other half were listening to the plans to lynch their leader. It was a crisis of immense proportions. It was, certainly, the biggest crisis David had faced up to that point in his life.

"But," says the Bible, "David found strength in the LORD his God." (1 Samuel 30:6) How long did it take to find God? Maybe minutes. Maybe hours. Time is not the factor. The fact is that David didn’t have a second option in the back of his mind. He had no "Plan B." It did not occur to him to consult a witch, a counselor, popular opinion polls, or a political advisor. His only hope was God.

Within a few days, David and his men had their lives back together. Wives, children, all home and unharmed. Ziklag was rebuilt, and David was on his way to becoming a king.

But just as it does today, everything hinged on the moment of despair in the City of Crisis. While Saul turned to a witch, David stayed with the Lord.

It sounds simple ... until it’s your wife in the ICU prison, surrounded by stumped doctors. I prayed all day long. I prayed with my pastor, with my family, with friends, with myself. But there would come a moment, near the midnight of that nightmarish day, when it all came to a head. The games were all over. The Sunday School lessons were just pieces of paper drawn from a book of tradition. The church was a place of regular gatherings, a convenient place to find friends, to bury grandfathers, and to seal marriages.

If God was real, I would find Him at midnight, in the City of Crisis. If He was not real, I would make that horrible discovery in the very hour I needed Him most to be real, more than I had ever needed Him before. Everything I had believed for a quarter of a century hung in the balance. This thing called religion was either going to be the greatest reality ever known to mankind, or the greatest farce, the greatest joke ever pulled over the eyes of a stupid world.

In the midst of the midnight prayer, I, too, was completely alone. If you’ve not been there yet, chances are, you will be.

Finally, in the quietness, God began to speak to me. He spoke through a Bible story. Now there are thousands of stories in the Bible, and I hadn’t been reminded of any of them on that Ziklag Thursday. But now, at midnight, in complete quietness, there was the story of Paul and Silas floating through my mind. It is not one of the Bible’s most familiar stories. But the urging of the story was so persistent, so intense, that finally I gave up my prayerful begging and tried to remember the story of Paul and Silas.

According to the New Testament record of early church history, Paul and Silas, itinerant preachers, had landed in Philippi. It was a beautiful place, slightly larger than David’s Ziklag. The ministry here was sweet and consistent. By and large, folks tolerated the two men and their message about a Messiah named Jesus. A few were believing and meeting on a regular basis.

Then came the miracle. A child was healed! Paul and Silas had performed the miracle in the name of Jesus, and there was amazement around the city. However, the tide turned quickly against the preachers. They had not just healed a child, they had stopped a small business. The girl had been an adolescent psychic, a carnival-child curiosity. The adults who owned this slave-child had made a small fortune on her. Now they’d have to find another way to pay for the second car she had afforded them. They concocted a story, and drummed up false charges against the strangers.

Paul and Silas were arrested, beaten, and thrown in jail. I could remember most of the details through the fog of a hospital night, and I related to the two men. They had been punished for doing good. They were held in a dungeon of despair for serving the very God who should keep them out of such places. Still, it seemed strange that I would be recalling a Bible story at all.

And it was then, right then, that God spoke clearly. He spoke through the verse that had drifted by me through years of church attendance. I had heard the sermons, read the story, and ignored the meaning. The impact, I have since discovered, could only be found in the City of Crisis.

"About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them." (Acts 16:25)

God wanted me to sing? God wanted praise, worship, adoration - while all the while I was spitting the bitter ashes of Ziklag out of my mouth?

Yes, He did.

It was hard to start, horribly hard. All that was human in me wanted to avoid praise in the midst of pain. How could I tell God how wonderful He was when He had dropped me off at the gates of hell?

Nevertheless, I finally agreed to try. The prayer began with a simple praise of nature, of God’s creation. Once begun, it was easier than I had imagined. Soon, I was caught up in thanksgiving over life, over family, over my wife’s life, over my daughter, over this child in my wife’s womb.

I cannot put down on paper what happened next. It’s simply impossible to describe meeting God. My search in the City of Crisis had brought me to the throne room of heaven. The keys of praise, of thanksgiving, of worship, had unlocked my heart to see that God was ready to take the burden from me. My request was simple. "God," I prayed, "the doctors don’t know what to do, and I don’t know what to do. My wife belongs to You. I give this whole situation to You."

And it was over. The tension, the crisis, the fear ... it was finally all gone. When Paul would write those same believers of Acts 16 at his beloved church in Philippi, years later, he would remind them of the peace that passes all understanding, a peace that defies all comprehension (Philippians 4:7). Those Philippians would remember Paul’s prison ordeal, of the earthquake that followed, of the opened prison doors, of the prison guard’s family that all came into the church after the miracle of Paul’s midnight song service. Their lives were forever changed by that one event, all changed because of Paul’s prayer of praise in the midst of his pain.

I will always remember the midnight earthquake of my soul. It was an earthquake that shook me with the reality of God.

What a thought ... a real God! And there was a stunning peace that flooded my young-husband’s heart with a trusting sleep.

In the midst of my spiritual miracle, a doctor woke me with the news that my wife had miraculously pulled through the crisis with a physical miracle. Over the next six months, my wife and I would both need that same miraculous peace as we endured two bouts of brain surgery, several slow weeks of rehab, and a nervous Good-Friday morning when a second daughter was born, healthy, bald, and more beautiful than I had ever imagined.

I would need God’s presence simply to learn that the greatest miracle of all was not finding a happy ending to every Ziklag story, but of learning that God is real. It’s so true - God desires a living relationship with us that far surpasses the religion of men ... or the circumstances of life.

Ziklag is still a beautiful town. The beauty, however, has a special depth on this side of trouble. There’s more there than tree-lined streets and children playing on school playgrounds in this place. In Ziklag is the memory of the Crisis, and the remembrance of the reality of God. It is remembering the miracle of peace right in the center of the nightmare.

Have you found yourself in Ziklag, in the City of Crisis, recently? Your choice is amazingly simple, and profoundly difficult. Like Saul, you can turn away from God. Or like David, you can turn toward God with trust and praise.

My message is simple. No matter the circumstances, no matter the grief, the heartache, or the pain, turn without reservation, and trust the Lord your God. Praise Him in your heart, and you will discover that God richly rewards those who search after God’s own heart.