Today, we are on psalm 35 and I’ve struggled some with this one. In it, David is praying judgment on his enemies and it didn’t seem consistent with the Christmas spirit that I’ve been trying to attain. Then I started to reflect on David’s life and I saw the psalm in a little bit more context. David was a hunted man. Probably his most notorious enemy was King Saul. I don’t know how familiar you are with the story, but David was anointed by God to be the king of Israel while Saul was the current king. I’m sure you can imagine that this created no small amount of conflict.

What I love when I read David’s story is that he didn’t strike back against Saul. Saul tried repeatedly to take David’s life, but David trusted in God’s providence and honored Saul when Saul was acting in a completely dishonorable way. David trusted God to be his protector. I’m not sure when David penned psalm 35, but the way that David interacted with Saul reminds me of the kind of man David was. David’s trust in God was not some flighty or merely spiritual trust. David looked to God to be his defender and this kept him from sin and murder on more than one occasion.

I don’t know if anyone reading this blog has a physical enemy. I don’t know if any of us are hunted in the same way that David was, but we can certainly learn from his example. Do you trust God to protect you? Do you look to him on a day to day basis to have your back when you face the trials of daily life? I don’t understand or strive for a Christianity that is confined to Sunday morning. The reason that I gave my life to Christ when I was 18 is because I believed that Jesus could save me in every sense of the word. If he can only be trusted to provide a warm and fuzzy feeling one day a week, then let’s all pick a different religion and shut down our churches. If however, Jesus rose from the dead and is the living Son of God, then there is no problem too big or enemy too strong that Jesus can’t deliver us from. What kind of Jesus do you believe in?