2 Samuel 7:8

I took thee from the sheepcote.

God’s making of a life

Though he was a born king by nature and character, David was not born a king. His father was a simple farmer, and his childhood was spent in the quiet scenes of a humble village. Jesus was born in the same Judean village-city, little Bethlehem. It is exactly thus that God ever carries out His mighty programme of action in creation, providence, and grace. The Rev. W. L. Watkinson says that, on visiting an art gallery recently, he noticed that some of the greatest pictures had not a splendid thing in them. The ordinary artist, when he wants to be effective, paints in a breadth of golden harvest, or be portrays a kingfisher or some other iridescent bird, or a tree in bloom, or that captivating thing, a rainbow. But you will notice that some of the greatest painters that ever lived never touch these things. They take common things--a railway cut, a ploughed field--no conspicuous object, only the black earth, the brown earth, the red earth; but their touch is a supreme touch, so that you can see the blossom in the dust and the rainbow in the cloud; and the picture, although it contains not a brilliant thing, is bathed in imagination, poetry, and beauty. So Christ can take the most common human plants in His garden and develop them into the most indescribable beauty and interest. God can take our poor humble lives and crown them with dignity and glory, as He honoured David the shepherd boy, if we fall into the royal line of the servants of righteousness. Before honour is humility. David was not a self-exalted king. He was called to rule, and he followed the Divine call wherever it led him, whether into the desert or into the palace.

Filling present limits

If a man be not signally successful in his present field he cannot reasonably hope to be more successful in a larger field. He must first fill out to his existing limits before he will be able to expand into the area of larger boundaries. A man may indeed have abilities beyond the sphere he is in at present, but in every such case the first indication of this is his filling that sphere satisfactorily. If he lacks where he is, he ought not to feel that he could do better, or even as well, if he were in a larger place. It were folly to expect that there is milk enough for a gallon measure when it cannot fill a pint pot. (Great Thoughts.)

God the Giver of power

That God is the Giver of power and dominion is a truth which has always been recognized in the unchangeable East. Thus, in the inscription of Darius on the rock at Behistun, the ninth paragraph reads: “Says Darius the king:--Ormazd [the god] granted me the empire. Ormazd brought help to me so that I gained this empire. By the grace of Ormazd, I hold this empire.” Substitute “Jehovah” for “Ormazd,” and David might truthfully have written that inscription. Again, in the Annals of Assurbanipal which are preserved on terra-cotta cylinders, now in the British Museum, it is said: “I am Assurbanipal, the seed of [the gods] Assur and Beltis, son of the great king of the North Palace, whom [the gods] Assur and Sin the lord of crowns, raised to the kingdom, prophesying his name from the days of old; and in his birth have created him to rule Assyria. [The gods] Shamas, Vul, and Ishtar, in power most high, commanded the making of his kingdom.” (Sunday School Times.)

From obscurity to eminence

For purposes of sober illustration or intense appeal to the unselfish and heroic, nothing can surpass the life of David Livingstone, whom Florence Nightingale called “the greatest man of his generation.” The vision of the boy placing his book on the spinning-jenny and studying amid the roar of the machinery at Blantyre, or sitting contentedly down before his father’s door to spend the night, upon arriving after the hour for locking it; the old coat, eleven years behind the fashion, which he wore when he emerged at Cape Town after Kolobeng had been pillaged; the sadness of the scene when he buried his little daughter in “the first grave in all this country,” he wrote to his parents, “marked as the resting-place of one of whom it is believed and confessed that she stall live again”; his jocular letters to his daughter Agnes about his distorted teeth, “so that my smile is like that of a hippopotamus”; the meeting with Stanley when he was a “mere ruckle of bones”; the indomitable grit of the man whose last words in Scotland were, “Fear God, and work hard”--this life is full of such things as these, capable of use, inviting it. And when, before or since, has this world been swayed by eloquence comparable with that of his death? No pulpit has ever spoken with such power. The worn frame kneeling by the bedside at Ilala, pulseless and grill, while the rain dripped from the eaves of the hut, dead in the attitude of prayer, solitary and alone, sent a thrill through the souls of men which, thank God, is vibrating still, and is working out the redemption wrought once for Africa by the world’s Redeemer. (W. G. Blaikie.)