In this episode, Charles Stanley unravels the compelling narrative of David and Goliath to emphasize the power of conquering faith. With a deep dive into the seven guiding principles that fortified David’s faith, we explore concepts such as recalling past victories and rejecting discouragement from others. This discussion serves as a spiritual toolkit for listeners seeking to enhance their faith journey. Through vivid storytelling and biblical insight, this episode encourages listeners to recognize the divine strength within and to trust God’s unfailing support in the face of adversities. David’s story becomes a powerful metaphor for overcoming personal Goliaths in
Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, April 14th. You probably know how the story of David and Goliath ends, but today’s podcast reveals powerful principles within the story that show us what it truly means to trust the Lord.
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How much faith do you have? Well, the Bible talks about little faith, great faith, and perfect faith. Little faith is, I know he can, but I’m not sure he will. Great faith says, I know he will. Perfect faith says, it’s as good as done. Now, all of us would like to start off in every challenge and every battle in life with perfect faith, but it’s just not that way because we’re progressive in our faith, even in different situations. But there is a faith that conquers over and over and over again. And what I want to talk about in this message is conquering faith. And what I would like to do is to take the incident of one of God’s choicest servants in the Old Testament and illustrate the seven basic principles of conquering faith. So I want to encourage you to get a pencil and a piece of paper and write them down. You recall, for example, in 1 John… in the fifth chapter and the fourth verse that John said, for whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world, our faith. So I want you to turn, if you will, to 1 Samuel, and I want us to take the 17th chapter. And since we’re going to take the whole chapter, we won’t read it. I’ll just give you a, first of all, a brief survey of what’s happening here. And then each of these seven principles, I would like to illustrate in the life of David. You’ll recall that David was the younger son of eight brothers of the son of Jesse and that he was a shepherd boy. He’s the one man about whom God said, he’s a man after my own heart. And here is a shepherd boy and probably scolded and ridiculed by his brothers. And on this particular occasion, the Bible says that the Philistine army of an ungodly heathen group and the armies of Israel were arrayed against each other across this valley. And for 40 days now, one of those Philistines had come upon the scene with all of his armor, 125 pounds of armor, javelin, sword, spear, and an armor bearer. That is one who carried a shield. And they were taunting the armies of God and everybody was afraid and Saul was afraid and all the soldiers were afraid. And every time he’d come out, they’d all run. So this is what was going on. On this particular day, Jesse said to David, he said, David, I want you to carry some food to your brothers, cheese and so forth and bread and see how the battle is going. So he comes upon the scene and when he gets there, he leaves his baggage, the Bible says, and he goes up to the front lines. And while he’s there talking and finding out what’s happening, Ogilv comes on the scene and gives one of his big taunts. And so David hears this, and some conversation goes on among him and the soldiers. And finally, David gets a little tired of all this, and he hears what’s offered, for example, to the man who kills Goliath. And he comes before King Saul, and Saul says, well, you can’t do anything about this. You’re just a young shepherd boy. And so they get in a conversation. And in the process of that conversation, David says, well, let me tell you what’s happened to me before. He tells him, and then he goes out to face this Goliath. And of course, every child who knows the Scriptures at all knows about the story of David and Goliath. The tragedy is that too many children know it, not enough adults know it. Now, we sort of know what happened, but somehow we read the words and miss the principles. And what I want you to see in this passage, I want you to see seven absolutely essential basic principles to make our faith work when we go through difficulties and situations and battles and challenges in life. And so what I’d like to do is to interpret this in the light of that. and to see how we apply to our own life. Now, for your benefit in mind, why don’t we look at it this way? And that is, whatever you happen to be facing in your life today, whatever challenge it may be, let’s just identify that as Goliath, whatever it might be. And how do you respond and how do you face those challenges? Well, the first principle I want you to jot down is this, and we’ll take each one and illustrate them. The first one is this, that… Conquering faith recalls past victories. Conquering faith always recalls past victories. Now, it is in the recalling of those past victories that our strength, that our faith is strengthened at that very moment. And what happens is we become aware of the presence and the power of God when you and I look back to say, what did God do in the past? Look, if you will, in Verse 32 of this 17th chapter. And David said to Saul, let no man’s heart fail on account of him, that is on account of Goliath. Your servant will go and fight with this Philistine. Then Saul said to David, You’re not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him, for you are but a youth, while he’s been a warrior from his youth. Now, here is, listen to this. This is one of the basic principles of faith, recalling past victories. Listen to what he says. Verse 34, But David said to Saul, Your servant was tending his father’s sheep, when a lion or a bear, both of them, came and took a lamb from the flock. I went out after him and attacked him and rescued it from his mouth. And when he rose up against me, I seized him by his beard and struck him and killed him. Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear and this uncircumcised Philistine, which is his way of saying that heathen, this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them since he has taunted the armies of the living God. Now, David’s confidence level was based not on what was happening right then. His faith level was based on what God had done in him, through him, and for him in the past. The basis of David’s faith was what God had done for him in the past. Now you think about this in your life. You think about the times and the ways and the situations and circumstances that you’ve been through in the past and how God has delivered you in times when you thought, God, I don’t know what to do at this point or which way to turn or how to respond. And God has worked in your life in His miraculous ways over and over and over again. That’s why I say to you, keep a diary. Write down what God is doing in your life because what happens is you have a running account of God’s faithfulness in your life, things He’s brought you through, challenges you’ve faced, battles you’ve fought, and your own personal diary is a recall of what God has done for you in the past. David was looking at Goliath through the eyes of Almighty God, not through the eyes of a fearful shepherd boy. And the reason he could look at him that way is because he said, I recall God’s work in my life in the past. Conquering faith is continually recalling God’s past victories. Number two, conquering faith reexamines and reaffirms the proper motivation for going into battle. That is, it reaffirms and examines carefully what is the proper motivation for this battle. Now, the Bible says in verse 20 that David rose early and headed out to gather supplies to his brothers. And when he gets there in verse 21, he says, the armies arrayed against each other, ready to go to battle. Verse 22, then David left his baggage in the care of the baggage keep and ran to the battle lines and entered in order to greet his brothers. As he was talking with them, behold, the champion, the Philistine from Gath named Goliath was coming up from the army of the Philistines and he spoke these words and David heard them. That he’s really challenging them and defying the God of Israel. So verse 24, when all the men of Israel saw the man, they fled from him and were greatly afraid. And you can imagine what David was thinking. You know, where is everybody? And verse 30 says, Then he turned away from his brother to another and said the same thing. And the people answered the same thing. That is, he said, Now… I heard what you said. Then he asked some other soldiers, now give me that again. Now he’s asked the third time. You mean whoever kills this giant is going to be rich, is going to have the king’s daughter, and his family is going to be free. That’s right. Now you’d say, well, that’s David’s motivation. Money, a wife, and his family would be free from serving the king as they had been serving him. So you’d say, well, that’s enough motivation. Not really. David’s ultimate motivation was not riches or the king’s daughter or free family. It was his love and devotion to Almighty God. Listen to how David responds over and over again. Now, I’m going to read several of these verses several times. But listen, if you will notice in verse 26. He says, then David spoke to the men who were standing by and saying, what will be done? For who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should taunt the armies of the living God? What motivated him was that the name of God was being disgraced. Look, if you will, again in verse 36. When he’s talking to Saul, again he says, Now, I want you to think about something. When you and I say God or Lord or Christ, we can sort of say that sometimes we say it rather casually. In those days, and if you’ll notice over here, and look, if you will, in verse 45, when he says, I come to you in the name of the Lord, notice that’s all capitals, Jehovah. That was their highest form of being able to express their idea and concept of God, Jehovah God, Yahweh. They would never have used that name casually as you and I used the name of God. They would never say, oh, you know, God will do this and God will do that and God will do that. They would never have thought of His name in that way. There was a reverence about the holiness of the name of God because, listen, As it is today, so it was in that day, but they understood and recognized it. The name Yahweh or Jehovah represented everything that God was. It represented his holiness, his righteousness, his mercy, his judgment. It represented everything that he was. They would never have used his name in that way. So when David said, you come out here and you taught the armies of the living God. He was not about to allow that to happen. He couldn’t stand by. And so his motivation was not riches, wife, and a free family. His motivation was to defend the name of God, to defend the nation of God, to defend the people of God. And so he says, you uncircumcised Philistine, which was a very scathing way to identify him. He said, you come out here and taunt the armies of the living God. And what he was really saying is, he says, look, the nation of Israel might be afraid, but I cannot tolerate this. Why? Because of his love and devotion to Almighty God, he could not. So his motive was pure. Now, the riches and the wife and the free family was just sort of icing on the cake. The issue here was, who is God? And where is the God of Israel? Where is the God of my family and my nation? And he was not about to allow him to be disgraced. Now… When you and I face those battles in our life and challenges, things we can’t oftentimes know exactly what to do sometimes, we have to face them with faith. And we want to be sure to be able to recall what God has done for our life in the past. And secondly, that our motive and our purpose for this battle is pure. Number three, conquering faith rejects the discouraging words of others. Conquering faith rejects the discouraging words of others. Now, people can really discourage us if we let them. And I want you to look at two incidences here of what happened. If you go down to verse 28, David’s been talking to the soldiers, and now he says in verse 28, Now Eliab, his oldest brother, heard when he spoke to the men, and Eliab’s anger burned against David. And he said, Why have you come down? And with whom have you left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know your insolence and the wickedness of your heart. You’ve come down in order to see the battle. But David said, what have I done now? Was it not just a question? Now here’s what you can realize. David, remember, was the youngest of eight brothers. So naturally, he’s the fellow they picked on. Now how do I know that? Because listen, doesn’t this sound like something that you and I have said when we were growing up to our parents or maybe to someone else? What have I done now? How many of you ever said that? We all said it. What have I done now? You’re just picking on me. And so that’s what was happening. And notice how he described him down here. He said, having burned with anger, he said, with whom have you left those few sheep over in the wilderness? Now, what a way to cut his brother down. He didn’t say, well, who did you leave your sheep with? With whom did you leave your sheep? With whom did you leave those few sheep over in the wilderness? You’ve just come up here, you insolent, prideful, egotistical character, you. And besides that, he says, your heart’s just wicked. You just want to see a bunch of fellows get bloodied up. Well, none of that was the case. Now, suppose David had listened to that. He’d have just turned and gone home. After all, this was his eldest brother. Well, that was bad enough. Then they took him to King Saul, and listen to what Saul said to him. Now, here is the king looking, and remember this now, that Saul was head and shoulders above everybody else in Israel. So he had to be a pretty good-sized fellow. Listen to this. When he spoke to Saul, he said to him, Let no man’s heart fail on account of him. Your servant will go and fight with this Philistine. Now here’s courageous, bold, confident David speaking to the king. Listen to what the king said to him, speaking with all of his authority. Now he said, You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him, for you are but a youth, while he has been a warrior from his youth. So if David had listened… to the comments and the words and the authority of the king and the criticism of his brother, both of which was very negative. One said, you have no business even being here. And the other one said, you can’t do it. You don’t have any business even being here. You can’t do it. If he’d listened to either one of those, he would never have fought Goliath and won the victory for the nation of Israel. Now listen to me carefully. You have to be very, very careful who you listen to in any challenge in life. If you listen to the negative stuff of people who are just sort of wobbling around in the Christian life and their faith just wandering here and there and blowing like the waves of the sea, as James says. You won’t ever get anything done. You can’t face life that way. You can’t listen to that kind of negative stuff. This is why I’ve said to you over and over and over again, the most important thing in your life and mine is our intimate personal relationship with God through His Son, Jesus Christ. When you and I learn to walk with God and walk in His Spirit and live an intimate relationship with Him, there is no voice in this world as loud as God’s voice. And He never even has to make a sound. It is the voice of Jehovah God. It is the voice of Yahweh. He doesn’t speak in audible sounds. He speaks from spirit to spirit. And from spirit to spirit, it is much louder to us than the voice of people who are negative. But listen, if David had just been a shepherd boy out there doing his thing and killing lions and bears, this would never have happened. This young man had a relationship with God. This young man had a relationship with God through his son, Jesus Christ, whom he did not even know at that time because he didn’t understand all the truth of the Messiah, though he was in that genealogical line. He had a relationship with God that was so strong, all the negative stuff that he heard did not even faze him. And so someone sent me this and it was so appropriate for this. Listen to this, because it fits this point. If you have seen God face to face, your circumstances will never arouse any panic in you. Listen to that. If you have seen God face to face, your circumstances will never arouse any panic in you. You know why David didn’t panic when he saw Goliath? Because he had been observing the living God for years. That’s the reason. If you’ve seen God face-to-face, does that mean you’ve got to see some physical person? No, there’s something better than that. When a man or a woman learns to walk in the Spirit and learns to walk in an intimate relationship with Him, listen, seeing God with your spirit is better than seeing Him with your eyes. Because the Spirit is able to perceive and to understand more than the human eye can. If you have seen God face-to-face… He says, then when your circumstances come, you won’t panic. Why? Because you have a foundation built on something far greater than just people’s opinions and their attitudes. But what? The simple truth is you will reject the words of those who are negative and you will pursue the word of the living God. And the voice of God is going to be louder than the voice of man.
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Thank you for listening to Conquering Faith. For more inspirational messages like this one, visit our online 24-7 station. And if you’d like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by intouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.
