Dwellers-I am so excited at all of beautiful revelations God is speaking to my Spirit. I pray that as each of you open up the Word, and invite Jesus into your chaos, that He speaks to each of you.
We are in 1 Samuel 23 today. I was only able to get through the first portion of this chapter and I knew I had to stop and soak it all in…
We find David in the cave again. And in His conversation he inquires of the Lord what his next steps should be. Up until this point, we know David had many conversations with God in this cave, but in this chapter David takes a moment from his emoting, and declarations and chaos and He asks God a question. What’s next God?
Let’s set the stage of the text here a little. In a short time, maybe a month or so, David has been displaced, lost every earthly belonging, lied, hidden, been the cause of the death of a community of priests, sought after, surrounded by disgruntled men, and all of this with David’s experiential knowledge of his anointing to someday be king.

Let me tell you where I’ve often “gone” in situations of failure, doubt, loneliness, despair, loss (my list could go on forever) I’ve ran to the pit of self isolation, self-focus, shame, blame, fear, defeat…can anyone see a pattern here? The primary focus of this pit is “me”. The enemy can cloud ☁️ our thinking in this pit and convince us (well-I should say-convinces me) that we are in self-reflection, self-care, self-reliance etc…. and the enemy wants us to believe that this “place” is safe and comfortable and holy.
It’s a trap!! Don’t do it! I’ve lived most of my life convinced that this “place” is healthy because I’m trying to be a better person, or I’m reflecting on me to get healing from what? Me?
The only true and freeing and healing in our Spirits is to die to self-fixing, and be resurrected in our identity, value and worth being transformed in the renewing of our minds through Jesus alone. We need a shift in our thinking-to get our thinking off of “ME”.
So David asks “what next God?” He is already accepting his healing and the mercy of God after a huge failure. I wouldn’t blame him if he just wanted to bask in his healing and stay there for awhile.
But God asks him to immediately do something. For Others.
Michelle Ogletree Lyon, made a great point in her heartfelt testimony that God equips those who are called. And David was being equipped to save the village of Keliah through his obedience, before the breakthrough, after the failure, when he could have chosen to stay in “self-mode”.
His own men wanted to hang in Judah and camp out in fear. But David, who knew the voice of his Shepherd, and knew he was God’s beloved, disarmed the enemy, denied self-soothing/fixing/etc., and decided to obey God.
He did what he was asked to do obediently and quickly and God fulfilled the promise and delivered the enemy into his hands.
We have the exact same promise dwellers. To disarm the enemy, deny yourself and be obedient to your Father. Do you know how beautiful it is to pour out to others when the enemy wants us to stay in “self mode”? It’s a
Spiritual and biblical truth and one of the most gorgeous experiences with God. Serving others and dying to self is freedom.
Keliah in Hebrew means “fortress” or citadel. Obeying God before the breakthrough, healed or not,equipped or not, in my experience is the way to run!