The One Thing You Can’t Google When Your Life Falls Apart
“But David found strength in the Lord his God.” 1 Samuel 30:6
You can’t deploy in a crisis what you haven’t developed in the ordinary.
That was the throughline of Pastor Mike O’Connell’s message Sunday at Love Church — and it landed because most of us walked in expecting another sermon about getting closer to God and walked out with a sharper diagnosis. The crisis doesn’t form you. The crisis exposes you. The formation happened earlier.
Pastor Mike opened with a story most of us recognize. He watched a friend pull out a Plaud — a little AI recorder — and generate full summaries of every conference talk by the time they got back to the car. Pastor Mike was on Amazon before he got home. Plaud on his porch by 2 p.m.
“Same-day delivery from God isn’t coming. He’s not slow. He’s thorough.”
That was the setup. Somewhere along the way, instant access has trained us to expect instant formation. And it doesn’t work like that.
The text was 1 Samuel 28 through 30. The contrast was Saul and David. Saul spiritually outsourced. He ran every spiritual decision through Samuel. When Samuel died and the Philistines moved in, Saul panicked, went to a medium at Endor, and was dead on Mount Gilboa two days later.
David built the opposite life. Every day. In private.
When Pastor Mike got to chapter 30, the picture was brutal. David and his six hundred men walk back into Ziklag and find it burned to the ground. Wives gone. Children gone. Everything gone. And in the next verse, his own men start talking about stoning him.
“But David found strength in the Lord his God.”
That sentence is doing more work than most of us realize.
He didn’t discover it. He deployed it.
That was Pastor Mike’s first move. The Hebrew word for “strength” is chazaq — to fortify yourself deliberately. The ESV says David strengthened himself in the Lord. This wasn’t a feeling that came over him at Ziklag. It was a muscle he had built somewhere else, used in the worst moment of his life.
“Integrity is the exterior expression of interior formation.”
Pastor Mike pointed to 1 Samuel 29, where a pagan king named Achish said this about David: I have found no fault in him. Not a friend. Not a pastor. The man with every reason to find a flaw.
The question Pastor Mike asked after that line is the one that’s been sitting with us all week.
“What would your coworkers say about you?”
Then he made a second move that’s easy to miss. When David finally responds to Ziklag, he doesn’t just charge after the raiders. He stops. He asks the priest for the ephod. He inquires of the Lord. Should I chase after this band?
Pastor Mike said the obvious thing first. This is a no-brainer. The man’s family is gone. Of course he chases. But David doesn’t presume. He asks. And he gets to go forward with God’s confidence — not low-grade anxiety.
Pastor Mike told the story of a coaching call with author John Gordon, who got rejected by thirty publishers before The Energy Bus sold over a million copies. Pastor Mike messaged him the next morning. How did you keep going? John’s answer was one sentence.
“Because I got the book idea when I was on a prayer walk.”
He asked before he acted. The yes from God was what carried him through the thirty no’s.
Serve before you receive.
Pastor Mike had two more points he didn’t have time for, but he named them anyway. On the way to recover their families, David’s men find an Egyptian on the side of the road. They feed him. Then they get the intel that wins the battle. Then they come back, and the men who fought try to cut out the two hundred soldiers who stayed behind. David refuses. They get an equal share. We received freely. We give freely.
“He was able to give freely because he received freely first.”
That’s the whole sequence. Strengthen yourself. Ask before you act. Serve. Then give the way you received.
WHAT DO WE DO WITH THIS ON MONDAY?
What ordinary practice are you building that will hold you when Ziklag shows up? If you can’t name one, that’s the first thing to fix.
Where have you been presuming on God’s grace instead of asking? Inquire before you charge.
Who’s the Egyptian on the side of your road that you’ve been treating as a blocker? Serve them. The provision is often inside the interruption.
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