Who are the difficult people in your life? – 1st Samuel 26 & 27, Preview

Who are the difficult people in your life?  Who comes to mind?  Could be a family member.  Could be a coworker.  A client.  A team member.  A friend.  A friend???  Why would we be friends with difficult people?  But we are sometimes, aren’t we?  

Would anyone in your life think that you are difficult in some way?  Probably.  

I’m bringing up difficult people because throughout our lives we will almost certainly cross paths with difficult people.  Some difficult people we might have to interact with daily.  Others rarely.  But we will have to consider how we will relate to them, and then actually relate to them.  What is a faithful Jesus-like way of dealing with difficult people?

In our study through the Life of David the past few weeks, we’ve been learning about his fugitive years.  David has been on the run from his father-in-law, King Saul, who is jealous of David’s success and wants to kill David.  Saul is the very definition of a difficult person.  Saul also has a lot of power, and he has used it in disastrous ways in his hunt for David.  Saul is bulldozing his way through Palestine, trying to take David down. 

David’s response to difficult Saul has been to run away, hide, and not fight.  David is a fascinating example of how to handle a difficult person.  But I have to ask, shouldn’t David confront Saul and try to stop Saul?  What would you do if you were David, on the run for what was likely multiple years?  How do you handle the difficult people in your life?  Do you avoid them?  Or do you confront them?  

This coming week on the blog we are going to study 1^st Samuel chapters 26 & 27, which bring a conclusion to David’s fugitive years.  In these chapters, David deals with Saul once and for all.  Check out chapter 26 ahead of time to learn David’s approach to Saul.  It might sound familiar.  It might sound surprising.  Then keep reading in chapter 27, as David makes what might seem like shocking decisions.  What David does could be described as unethical, maybe even sinful.  Have David’s years on the run ruined him?  Last week we saw him on the verge of committing an atrocity of slaughtering Nabal and his men.  Now this week, it might seem that David has gone off the deep end.  What is going on with David?

We’ll talk about it next week!

Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash