Written by: Madison Wilcox
What was your New Year’s resolution? I’m guessing it had something to do with improving your life. Maybe you swore off dark chocolate for the fifth time or outlined a spartan routine to follow religiously during the semester. (Waking up at 4 a.m. to a cold shower and weekly fasting, anyone?) Or maybe your resolve reached a serious level: This year you would allow God to confront your favorite sin. You would finally surrender what you’ve been clinging to all along.
Despite such grand hopes for transformation as the year began, it’s more than likely as we reach the third week of 2024 that these brave plans have already started to weaken at the seams. Mine surely have. So, what then? Where do we go when our resolve has already turned to regret?
We’ll start with Psalm 23.
In the final verse, David makes a bold promise: “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.” (Psalm 23:6) He uses confident, dangerous language here: “Surely” and “all” leave no room for outliers. According to David, God’s goodness and mercy follow him unrelentingly and eternally.
Does this confidence resonate with you? It doesn’t always resonate with me.
In fact, my life frequently operates as a living antonym of the verse: Experientially, it seems as if wickedness and cruelty are in hot pursuit of me, while goodness and mercy drag behind. Worse, it’s usually my fault. Maybe if I kept my life together, I could agree with this verse. But my frequent mistakes seem to prove it untrue.
When I face this incongruence between my experience and the inspired words of David, it helps me to return to David’s experience. It helps me to remember that this psalm was written by a human being, often tangled in his own sin, always needing mercy. David prayed within the nitty-gritty particulars of his own situation, yet somehow he still used words like “surely” and “all” to describe the insistent goodness of God.
So, where might this confidence in God’s mercy have come from? I think it may have come, ironically, from one of the biggest mistakes of David’s life, the capture of Ziklag described in 1 Samuel 30.
The story boils down to a simple pattern: David makes a lot of mistakes, all in a row. David’s first mistake (taking refuge with the Philistines) leads to a second mistake (being forced to fight his own people), which leads to a third mistake (leaving the vulnerable in Ziklag without protection) that results in a final, awful consequence: Every man in his band loses home and family to Amalekite raiders; Ziklag is burned, and the women and children are all captured.
Naturally, David’s band faces intense grief. They weep “until they have no more power to weep.” (1 Samuel 30:4) Then they speak of revenge; they pick up stones.
Imagine David’s predicament. Where could God’s goodness and mercy be now? His life has become a challenge to God’s promise; he has reached a climax of incongruence. At this moment, David could have chosen from a hundred different trains of thought, each of them leading to despair. But somehow, he refused each of them and chose another. Verse six says, “But David found strength in the Lord His God.” (1 Samuel 30:6)
The Bible doesn’t give a detailed account of what this strengthening looked like. It must not have taken very long — he was under intense pressure, a death threat in the air from the ones who were meant to support him. Yet, whether five seconds or five minutes long, David’s remembrance of God filled him with enough strength to rally his men, pursue their family’s captors, and restore every single thing that had been lost. (1 Samuel 30:19)
David’s story reveals that goodness and mercy aren’t just words to describe what God does, but who God is. Goodness and mercy followed David because God did.
I have decided to cling to this truth myself, to choose the confidence that God’s good presence in my life does not hinge upon me. God’s mercy pursues me, even when I don’t pursue Him. And ultimately, it’s the mercy that changes me.
I encourage you to embrace this alternative New Year’s resolution with me: When you mess up — even if it’s the second, third or 50th mistake in a row — strengthen yourself in your God. God is not as afraid of your mistakes as you are.
