Nabal answered David’s servants, “Who is this David? Who is this son of Jesse? Many servants are breaking away from their masters these days.

1 Samuel 25:10

For Meditation

Maybe you’ve been there before. The place where everything in you screams for a casket for that person for what they have done to you. You took care of them like your own, and every situation that challenged or brought misery to them became your immediate concern. But now they have spurned your request for a little favor or stabbed you in the back.

David can sympathize with you in his experience with “surly and mean Nabal.”

 “Who is David, and who is the son of Jesse? …  Many servants are breaking away from their masters these days. Why should I take my bread and water, and the meat I have slaughtered for my shearers, and give it to men coming from who knows where?” (1 Samuel 25:10-11).

So, David swiftly moves four hundred of his finest men to annihilate the man whose name means, Foolish and his household (12-13, 25).

But hold it, David! Didn’t you take delight in protecting Nabal’s shepherds and flock when they grazed around your camp in Carmel? Didn’t your heart desire nothing but the glory of God? Why then have you conditioned your request with your kind deed for Him?

That’s what exhaustion can do to all of us. Don’t we all have limits to what we can take? Are we not human and frail? After an estimated seven years of fleeing from King Saul’s pursuit to kill, why wouldn’t David be, perhaps, tired and edgy? Don’t we sometimes do better with managing the bigger challenges than the little foxes?

We may mean well and seek nothing in return when we show kindness to people. But, O, how prone we are to quickly connect a future need to that service and demand obligation, and when they reject us, it whips through our faces like a Sahara heatwave. That’s when we normally surprise ourselves with our reactions.

Those are times we need self-control. The Holy Spirit has an unlimited supply of it, and He coverts our partnership in spending it for God’s glory. If David, of all people, lost it with Nabal after his sustained discipline against King Saul, we all can get there with little provocation when we weary and tired.

What we can do to help ourselves is to consider our kind acts as a burnt offering to God and ask Him for grace to carry us, when tested. For, there is nothing to look for again when His fire consumes something we love, but have offered to Him.