Posts Tagged: King David

“Self-Encouragement”

On August 14, 2023 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

Here is part of my response to a twelve-step sponsee who reported to me some encouraging words he said to himself:

“Dear ______________,

I appreciate your self-encouragement. It is important and a wonderful way to stay on track. Here is an interesting verse from the Old Testament and an interesting (to me, at least) grammatical tidbit. When David was still living in exile in the land of the Philistines, he and his merry men were away from their city of residence. It was attacked by the Amalekites and burned to the ground. The wives and children of David and his men were taken, and David’s men talked about stoning David to death! To say the least, they were more than a little upset.

And then, there is this verse: “1Sam. 30:6 And David was greatly distressed, for the people spoke of stoning him, because all the people were bitter in soul, each for his sons and daughters. But David strengthened himself in the LORD his God.”

That last sentence always grabs me! In the Hebrew, the verb translated “strengthened” is a hithpael, which is a way of modifying a verb to mean, “something you do to yourself”. We rightly appreciate others who do things for us, but we also need to learn to do many of these things for ourselves. Other people aren’t always available.”

However, at this point many of us (myself included) tend to make a blunder. If we encourage ourselves at all, it is only after some big accomplishment. We tend to ignore the little victories we make daily on the way to the big accomplishments. In fact, there may not be any big accomplishments without these daily smaller victories. Perhaps David was able to encourage himself at a crisis point because he had been doing that right along.

I am not saying that it is not important to encourage other people and to let them encourage us. The Bible talks a great deal about the importance of being encouraged by others and encouraging others. I will post something about this and a future date. But my point in this post is this: we need to take responsibility ourselves for encouraging ourselves. We should do this, not just in big ways, but in small as well.

Give yourself some atta-girls and atta-boys today!

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