Daily Devotions

1 Sam 17: 37
The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the bear will rescue me.

Many of us go through life experiences and it is when we go through these that we learn the lessons of life. The children, who run in the streets to play and tumble over obstacles, get cuts, and wounds are the ones who learn survival skills and develop their leadership talents.

We can recollect our young days when we ran around the neighbourhood climbing trees, going on adventure trips in the bush, catching fishes in the streams, hunting for fighting spiders, birds etc. We learn the trapping skills, what bait to use for different types of traps. Many of us also learned to swim in streams from friends.

There were no swimming pools in those days; our recreation was at disused ponds and streams or rivers. There were dangers all around us but through these we learned not only survival skills but leadership skills as we learn to lead others.

These experiences of childhood saw us through our teen years as well as our early working lives. As we grew, we gather more and more experiences and skills. Now we are into ministries for the Lord and we often draw upon our life experiences and the skills we learned to help us through.

In the case of David, his experiences were the battles with the powerful predators of the wild which were the lions and the bears. Can you imagine the strong and powerful bears and lions that David had to combat as he protected his father’s flock? Imagine that a tiny young boy could have the courage and skills to fight and kill these animals.

If we imagine how fast and powerful these predators were, we can see the picture of  David darting and jumping to avoid the strikes and attack of the predators and in the same move, he would counter attack them and killing them. These are survival skills that David had learned and they gave him more confidence than even the most able soldier in the army.

Now David could stand in front of King Saul to testify of his boldness and experiences in defeating and killing stronger predators. In the same manner, as we experience more and more in Christian ministries like spiritual warfare and healing, then we would be confident in doing greater things for God.

The key to developing our ministry skills to a higher level is to go out and practice and keep on practicing. Just like anything else, there is no short cut to being excellent; it’s all practice and nothing else.

Let us therefore build our ministry skills so that we can be like David who can take up giant tasks and destroy gigantic problems.