We all welcome encouragement, especially when things aren't going well. But when things really, really aren't going well, or maybe it's that we have a really, really big task to face, and we know we're not enough, the world's platitudes, such as "You got this," can fall flat. What do we do then? And what do we do if we're all alone, with no one there to even urge, "Believe in yourself!"
We can follow David's example and encourage ourselves in God.
David was Israel's most prominent king ever. He was called a man after God's own heart. He fathered the wisest, and perhaps richest, man who ever lived. He killed a giant in his youth, after the entire army of Israel couldn't do it. He was blessed with undying friendship from the man who in the natural should have inherited the crown: Jonathan. He was Jesus' most auspicious ancestor. But David also lived years and years of going through the absolute ringer.
One such episode is recorded in 1 Samuel 30. David and his men returned to Ziklag, which was his home for a time, to find that the Amalekites had raided and overthrown the city, setting it on fire. They enslaved every single person there, male and female, adults and children, including David's two wives, and carried them away. Ziklag was empty of life, and nothing was left but a heap of smoking ashes.
David and those with him wept until they could weep no more, verse 4 tells us. For some time, then, they did nothing but mourn. To add to this, David's men began turning against him, blaming him for the tragedy and talking of stoning him. But David, says verse 6, felt strengthened and encouraged in the Lord his God. He immediately asked the priest for an ephod, and sought the Lord as to whether to pursue the band of raiders. He was given the go-ahead, and he recovered everything that had been taken.
The story in 1 Samuel doesn't tell us how David became strengthened, but we see David's process of encouraging himself in several of his psalms. In Psalm 22, for example, he begins, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" (Psalm 22:1 AMP 2015)? He is, of course, prophesying of Jesus through the first 18 verses of this psalm, but he's also expressing his own sense of separation from God during a time of anguish. The tide starts to turn in verse 19 when he writes, "But You, O Lord, do not be far from me; O You my help, come quickly to my assistance." From vv. 19-21, he prays for help and expresses confidence of an answer. Verse 22 begins, "I will tell of Your name to my countrymen..." Now he's sharing the good God has done for him in the past when he cried for help.
David takes yet another step forward when he says, in verse 25, "My praise will be of You in the great assembly." By the end of the psalm, in verse 31, David has the entire world and those yet to be born praising the Lord, having come quite a distance spiritually from feeling forsaken. I like how the Amplified version ends with its bracketed note, bringing the psalm full circle back to the voice of Jesus: "They will come and declare His righteousness to a people yet to be born--that He has done it [and that it is finished]" (Psalm 22:31 AMP 2015).
So how does David encourage himself in God? He:
--Starts by laying out his full lament. He gets it all off his chest and tells God exactly how he feels.
--Asks for help.
--Expresses confidence that this help will come.
--Tells others of God's goodness.
--Recalls answered prayers of the past.
--Praises the Lord.
--Declares God's goodness in all the earth.
You know--after one has done all that, it becomes a perverse kind of pride to feel that maybe you will be the first person ever that God didn't help. When we belong to Him, go to Him, ask for help, and remember who He is, we too can encourage ourselves in God. Because of who He is, and because He never leaves nor forsakes, we will get through it together.
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