26 Proven Lessons from 1 Samuel 16: The Son Nobody Sent For, the Heart God Was Reading, and the King Who Went Back to the Sheep

Samuel had been hearing the voice of God since he was a boy sleeping in the tabernacle. He walks into a house in Bethlehem, looks at the oldest son standing in front of him, and says one word before God has said anything at all: surely.

He was wrong.

The lessons from 1 Samuel 16 do not start with a shepherd boy in a field. They start with a man who knew God as well as anyone alive and still read the room by looking at it. If you have ever been certain about a person and been wrong, or been the person somebody else was certain about, this chapter has already found you.

Brief Summary of 1 Samuel 16

God sends Samuel to Bethlehem to anoint one of Jesse’s sons as king, because Saul has been rejected. Samuel is afraid Saul will kill him if he hears of it, so he travels under cover of a sacrifice, and the elders of the town meet him shaking.

Seven of Jesse’s sons pass before the prophet and God refuses every one. The youngest is out with the sheep. He is fetched, anointed in front of his brothers, and the Spirit of the LORD comes upon him.

The chapter then turns back to Saul. The Spirit leaves him, a troubling spirit comes, and his servants go looking for a harpist to soothe him. The harpist they find is David.

Lesson 1: God Answered Samuel’s Grief with an Errand, Not an Explanation (1 Samuel 16:1)

1 Samuel 16:1: “How long wilt thou mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel? fill thine horn with oil, and go”

Grief that has gone on a long time starts to feel like the only honest response left. Samuel had invested years in Saul. He had anointed him, defended him, and warned him, and chapter 15 says plainly that Samuel mourned for him.

God does not tell him the grief was foolish. He does not explain why Saul had to fail, or answer the question Samuel was almost certainly carrying about whether he could have done something differently. He hands him a horn of oil and a road.

That is a strange kind of comfort until you have needed it. There are seasons when understanding is not available and obedience is, and God gives the one He is willing to give. Israel still needed a king while Samuel was grieving, and the grief did not pause the need.

Sometimes God will move you forward before He explains anything, and the moving is the mercy.

Lesson 2: God Had Already Chosen Before He Sent Samuel looking (1 Samuel 16:1)

1 Samuel 16:1: “for I have provided me a king among his sons”

Have you noticed the tense? God does not say He will find a king, or that He is looking for one. He says He has provided one already.

Before the horn was filled, before Samuel walked the ten miles south, before anyone in Bethlehem knew a prophet was coming, the king existed and God knew his name. Samuel was not sent out to conduct a search. He was sent to arrive at a decision that had already been made.

Read also: 100 Attributes of God: An Extensive List of Who He Is

Much of what looks like God deciding is God revealing. The waiting you are doing may not be God making up His mind. Scripture does not promise you will be told the outcome early, but it shows here that the outcome was settled long before the person carrying it out knew what it was.

God was not deliberating on the road to Bethlehem. He was walking Samuel toward something already provided.

Lesson 3: God Met a Frightened Prophet with a Plan (1 Samuel 16:2)

1 Samuel 16:2: “And Samuel said, How can I go? if Saul hear it, he will kill me. And the LORD said, Take an heifer with thee, and say, I am come to sacrifice to the LORD.”

What do you do with fear that is entirely reasonable? Samuel was not being dramatic. Saul was a king with soldiers and a temper, and anointing his replacement was treason.

God’s answer contains no lecture about faith, no reminder of the parted sea, no recorded correction of any kind. He gives him a heifer, a real sacrifice to conduct, and a true sentence to say. That says something about how God handles a servant He has already decided to use. The obedience is not made easier, but it is made possible, and the fear is nowhere treated as disqualifying.

If fear has made you say “how can I go,” Scripture does not record God despising a servant for asking. What would it change today to bring the fear to Him as a question rather than swallowing it as a failure?

Lesson 4: You Can Obey Fully Without Being Told the Ending (1 Samuel 16:3-4)

1 Samuel 16:3-4: “and thou shalt anoint unto me him whom I name unto thee. And Samuel did that which the LORD spake”

Samuel is given the town, the household, and the errand. The one thing he actually needs, which is the name of the man he has come to anoint, is held back until he is standing in the room.

He goes anyway. Ten miles on a road, with a horn of oil in his hand and an animal beside him, toward a house where he will have to wait for God to speak again before he can finish what he came for. Verse 4 records all of it in one flat clause: “And Samuel did that which the LORD spake.” No hesitation, no negotiation, no second request for details.

Most of us want the whole instruction before the first step, and God rarely works that way with anyone. He gives enough to move on, and the next piece arrives where the last piece runs out.

Take the step you have actually been given, and stop waiting for the one you have not.

Lesson 5: The Town That Trembled Was the Town God Had Chosen (1 Samuel 16:4-5)

1 Samuel 16:4-5: “And the elders of the town trembled at his coming, and said, Comest thou peaceably? And he said, Peaceably”

A whole town shakes when the prophet arrives. The elders come out to meet him and the first thing out of their mouths is a question about whether he means them harm.

Scripture does not say why they trembled. It says only that they did, and that Samuel’s answer was a single word.

Look at what he was actually carrying. God had chosen their town, their neighbour’s house, and one of their boys, which puts this among the greatest things that would ever happen in Bethlehem. The elders were braced for a verdict, and the errand was a coronation.

Fear of God is right, and Scripture treats it with respect. It is also worth remembering how often God draws near carrying something good, as He did here, to a town that assumed the worst.

Lesson 6: Get Ready Before You Know Which Day Matters (1 Samuel 16:5)

1 Samuel 16:5: “sanctify yourselves, and come with me to the sacrifice. And he sanctified Jesse and his sons, and called them to the sacrifice.”

Did any of them know what that afternoon was? Jesse consecrated himself for a meal. Seven grown sons washed and prepared for a sacrifice, and every one of them was about to be refused a throne he did not know was on offer.

Nobody in that house could have prepared for what was coming, because nobody in that house knew what it was. What they could do, and what Samuel called them to do, was get clean in the ordinary way God had already asked of them.

That is what makes unremarkable obedience worth something. God is not looking for people who guessed correctly about which day would matter. Chronicles says His eyes “run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him” (2 Chronicles 16:9), and that searching is running on the dull days as much as the great ones.

You will not get advance notice of the days that turn out to matter. Keep short accounts with God on the ones that look like nothing.

Lesson 7: Even a Prophet Can Decide by Sight (1 Samuel 16:6)

1 Samuel 16:6: “he looked on Eliab, and said, Surely the LORD’S anointed is before him”

Samuel had heard God’s voice since childhood. He had spent a lifetime saying things other people could not know. He takes one look at a tall firstborn and pronounces a verdict, and God had not said a word.

The word he uses is “surely.” Not “perhaps,” not a question put to God, but the settled confidence of a man who has seen enough men to know what a king looks like.

He had seen where this kind of thinking ends. The king Israel was currently trying to replace had been introduced in this same book as a man who stood head and shoulders above everyone else, and a nation had cheered when they saw him. Samuel had stood there for that, and had watched the whole reign since.

None of it removed the reflex. It rose in him the moment a tall man walked past, and it rose with total confidence.

What have you settled so completely that you would not notice God saying otherwise?

Lesson 8: God’s Verdict on a Person Is Not the One You Can See (1 Samuel 16:7)

1 Samuel 16:7: “for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart”

The verse does not say the crowd looks on the outward appearance. It says man does, with no exception carved out, and it is said to the most spiritually seasoned man in Israel moments after he had proved it.

That cuts in two directions at once, and the verse gives no permission to keep only the half you like. As comfort, it means the God weighing you sees past the version of you that other people have settled on. As exposure, it means He sees past the version you have settled on yourself.

Jeremiah says the same thing without the story attached: “I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins” (Jeremiah 17:10). Scripture treats this as good news for the overlooked and as sober news for everyone.

One practical use of it, since we cannot read a heart at all, is that we are in no position to decide in advance who is likely to receive the gospel and who is not. That call has never once been ours to make.

Lesson 9: Being Refused for a Role Is Not God’s Verdict on Your Worth (1 Samuel 16:7)

1 Samuel 16:7: “because I have refused him”

Someone reading this has been passed over, and has concluded that the passing over was God’s assessment of them as a person.

Look at what the chapter does and does not say about Eliab. God refuses him for the throne. That is all that is stated. Scripture does not call him proud here, or faithless, or unfit as a man. It gives no account at all of what God saw when He looked, only that God’s seeing and Samuel’s seeing were different things.

Eliab remained a son of Jesse, a member of the covenant people, and a man with a life in front of him. What he was not, was the king.

There is a real difference between “not this” and “not you,” and we collapse them constantly. A door closing on a role tells you about the role. It has not told you what God thinks of your heart, and you should be slow to hear something God did not say.

Stop reading a closed door as a character reference.

Lesson 10: God Said No Four Times Before He Said Yes Once (1 Samuel 16:8-10)

1 Samuel 16:8, 10: “Neither hath the LORD chosen this… The LORD hath not chosen these”

Most of us treat a closed door as God saying nothing. Count the refusals in this passage before you decide that. Eliab is refused in verse 7. Abinadab is refused by name. Shammah is refused by name. Then a fourth refusal sweeps up everyone else who walked past, and only after all of that does anyone say yes to anything.

God speaks far more often in this chapter to say no than to say yes, and every one of those noes is clear, immediate, and spoken out loud. There are no riddles. Samuel is never left standing in silence wondering whether the last son counted.

That is worth holding on to, because a refusal can feel like God has stopped talking. Here it is the opposite. The refusals were not God withholding guidance from Samuel. They were the guidance, arriving one son at a time.

When God closes something quickly and plainly, He has told you something real, and He has often told you sooner than a yes would have.

Lesson 11: The One Nobody Counted Was the One God Meant (1 Samuel 16:11)

1 Samuel 16:11: “Are here all thy children? And he said, There remaineth yet the youngest, and, behold, he keepeth the sheep”

If you have ever been left off a list in your own family, this verse will land before you finish reading it. Samuel has to ask. Jesse had gathered, consecrated and presented his sons, and it took a direct question before David was mentioned at all. Scripture does not tell us why, and it is worth resisting the urge to fill that in. It records only that the sons presented did not include him.

The rest of the chapter is God’s answer to that omission, and He does not correct Jesse or scold anybody. He just names the one who was not there. A psalm of David would later put the comfort plainly: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up” (Psalm 27:10).

Has someone else’s accounting of you become the account you believe?

Lesson 12: God Found His King Doing an Ordinary Job (1 Samuel 16:11)

1 Samuel 16:11: “and, behold, he keepeth the sheep”

Where was David on the afternoon a prophet came to anoint a king? Out with the flock, doing the job that fell to the youngest son. The prophet was in the house and the future king was in the field, and the text records it that way without comment.

Scripture later gives God’s own account of the same moment: “He chose David also his servant, and took him from the sheepfolds” (Psalm 78:70). The search ended at the place where the work was, and the psalm keeps going, saying God brought him “from following the ewes great with young” to feed His people, as though the second job grew straight out of the first.

That says something about where God does His looking. He looks inside the assignment already in a person’s hands rather than the one they are hoping for, and He was looking at that field long before Samuel asked whether anyone was missing.

Wherever you happen to be at your least visible is not somewhere God has to be told about.

Lesson 13: Everything Stopped Until the Youngest Son Arrived (1 Samuel 16:11)

1 Samuel 16:11: “Send and fetch him: for we will not sit down till he come hither”

When did anything last stop for the person nobody had thought to invite? Picture the room here. A prophet of God, a sacrifice prepared, a father, seven grown sons, and the elders of a town, all standing there while somebody runs out to a field to fetch a boy who was not on anyone’s list.

Samuel could have proceeded. The meal was ready and the family was consecrated, and nothing about the occasion required the youngest son to be there. He refuses anyway. Nobody sits down.

It is a small sentence and it says something enormous about how God values the person everyone else has managed without. The occasion waited. The important men waited. The food waited.

Read also: Lessons from the Story of David and Goliath

If God has purposes for a person, their absence is not something the room works around.

Learn to notice who is not in the room before you start.

Lesson 14: God Ruled Out Appearance as the Test, Then Described David’s (1 Samuel 16:7, 12)

1 Samuel 16:7, 12: “Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature… Now he was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to.”

Does verse 7 contradict verse 12? Readers notice the problem and rarely hear anyone address it. God tells Samuel not to look at appearance, and five verses later the narrative describes David as a good-looking young man and God says “this is he.”

The chapter is not teaching that beauty is suspect or that plainness is holier. If it were, verse 12 would be an embarrassment to it. What verse 7 rules out is appearance as the deciding factor, not appearance as a fact about a person.

David’s looks are mentioned the way his red colouring is mentioned, as plain description. The text presents them as a fact about him and never as a qualification for the throne. Eliab’s height was treated the same way, as something true of him that had no bearing on the question being decided.

What can be seen is real, and God refuses to let it have the last word.

Lesson 15: God Honoured David in Front of His Brothers (1 Samuel 16:13)

1 Samuel 16:13: “Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren”

You have probably stood in a room while somebody else’s good news was announced. The anointing here does not happen out of sight, or later, or in private. Samuel pours the oil in the middle of the seven sons who had just walked past him and been refused.

They watch it. The oil goes on the head of the one who was not called to the sacrifice, while the ones who were called stand around him.

Scripture stays silent on what any of them felt, and inventing it would be our addition rather than the text’s. What it does tell us is that God arranged the moment in the open, in front of everyone it might have been awkward for.

There is a kind of honour that only counts when it is public, because the whole point is that a person’s standing has changed in front of the people who set it. God gave David that, and He gave it to him first, before a single achievement.

Is there someone God has been raising whom you have found it easier not to acknowledge out loud?

Lesson 16: The Spirit Came on David and Did Not Leave (1 Samuel 16:13)

1 Samuel 16:13: “and the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that day forward”

Plenty of Christians carry a private worry that they did not understand enough at the time for it to have counted. Read the end of this verse again: from that day forward. The Spirit came, and the sentence runs on into the future instead of stopping at the ceremony.

Nothing in this chapter records anyone sitting David down and telling him what the oil meant. Samuel pours it, the Spirit comes, Samuel goes home to Ramah, and the narrative moves on. Whatever David grasped that afternoon, the Spirit did not wait for him to grasp it before coming.

Read also: Why Do We Need the Holy Spirit

Four words carry the assurance, and they are not about David’s grasp of the moment. They are about God’s staying. Whatever else this chapter is going to say about the Spirit, what God gave David here, He went on giving.

God’s work in a person does not depend on that person having a complete explanation of it, and it does not run out because they were young when it began.

Lesson 17: God Was Lifting One Man as He Withdrew from Another (1 Samuel 16:13-14)

1 Samuel 16:13-14: “the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that day forward… But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul”

The chapter sets these two sentences side by side and joins them with one word: but. One clause ends with the Spirit resting on a shepherd. The next begins with the Spirit leaving a king.

Two men are in view, moving in opposite directions, and the text puts almost nothing between them. No chapter break, no passage of time, no comment.

You only see it if you read the chapter whole. The first half alone is a story about God choosing the overlooked. The second half alone is a story about a king falling apart. Together, as the chapter is written, they are one movement.

Samson had come to the same edge in Judges 16:20, where “he wist not that the LORD was departed from him,” and the terrible part there is the not knowing. Saul is about to find out.

Across these two verses God is doing one thing rather than two unrelated ones, and it has a cost written into it.

Lesson 18: What Left Saul Mattered More Than What Came (1 Samuel 16:14)

1 Samuel 16:14: “But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him”

Which half of this verse frightens you more? It is the hardest sentence in the chapter and it should not be smoothed over. The verse names two things and puts them in an order: first the Spirit of the LORD left, then a troubling spirit came.

Chapter 15 has already told us why the first happened. Saul had been told to his face that because he rejected the word of the LORD, the LORD had rejected him from being king. Verse 14 is the outworking of a judgment already announced.

The second half is harder, and Scripture does not explain it. Many Christians read it as permissive, that God withdrew His protecting Spirit and allowed a tormenting spirit access it had not had before. That reading fits a Bible in which nothing operates outside God’s authority, and it remains a reading rather than something the verse states outright. Scripture leaves it where it leaves it, and so should we.

What the verse does state plainly is which loss was the real one. A troubling spirit is a terrible thing. Losing the Spirit of the LORD is worse, and it happened first.

Which of the two would you actually grieve?

Lesson 19: Saul’s Servants Named What He Would Not (1 Samuel 16:15)

1 Samuel 16:15: “And Saul’s servants said unto him, Behold now, an evil spirit from God troubleth thee”

Most people in trouble believe they are concealing it better than they are. Saul’s servants describe his condition to his face and they get the diagnosis right, naming both what is happening to him and where they believe it has come from.

Whatever Saul had been telling himself about how he was doing, the men in the room already knew. His condition had stopped being private some time before this conversation, and it took servants rather than a prophet to say it.

There is a real mercy buried in a hard passage here. God frequently surrounds a person in trouble with people who can see it plainly, which is a kindness however little it feels like one. Proverbs puts it bluntly: “Open rebuke is better than secret love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:5-6). Being seen accurately and being attacked are two different experiences, and we confuse them easily.

Who has already told you something true about yourself that you decided not to take seriously?

Lesson 20: Relief Is Not the Same Thing as Repentance (1 Samuel 16:17)

1 Samuel 16:17: “And Saul said unto his servants, Provide me now a man that can play well, and bring him to me”

There is a version of getting help that carefully avoids getting well. Saul had already been told, by a prophet, exactly what was wrong and what God required of him. When his servants offer him a way to feel better, what he asks for is a musician.

Scripture records the request for relief. It records no turning, no confession, no sending for Samuel. It does not say Saul never repented in his heart, because the text does not go there, and neither will we. The uncomfortable part is how easy our own versions of that are to reach. There is always something that takes the edge off an ache God is using, and the music was genuinely soothing. Soothing is not the same as dealt with.

Ask what you have been reaching for lately, and whether it treats the trouble or the noise the trouble makes.

Lesson 21: Saul Said “Provide Me a Man”; God Had Already Provided Him (1 Samuel 16:1, 17)

1 Samuel 16:1, 17: “for I have provided me a king among his sons… Provide me now a man that can play well”

Have you ever asked God for something small and been handed something far larger without recognising it?

The same word sits in both mouths here, and the chapter never pauses to point it out. God used it before Samuel left home. Saul uses it while looking for a harpist to settle his nerves.

What Saul gets is the king God had already provided. He asks for a musician and is handed the man who will hold his throne, and he has no idea that his request and God’s provision have just met in the same room.

That is what providence looks like from underneath. Nobody in the scene can see it. Jesse is packing bread, servants are running errands, a king is chasing relief, and the whole arrangement is carrying something none of them chose.

God’s purposes are frequently advanced by people who think they are solving a completely different problem.

Lesson 22: God Being with David Outweighed Everything Else on the List (1 Samuel 16:18)

1 Samuel 16:18: “cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters, and a comely person, and the LORD is with him”

What would you put at the top of a reference for somebody you rated highly?

A servant recommends David with six qualities, and it is worth reading them in the order he gives them: skilled at music, brave, experienced, wise in how he speaks and handles matters, good to look at, and then the last one.

Five of those are the sort of thing a young man could build or be born with. The chapter never tells us where a shepherd acquired a reputation as a man of war, and the servant states it without explaining it. The sixth is different in kind, because nobody achieves it.

“And the LORD is with him.” Whoever this servant was, he put the one thing David could not have earned at the end of a list of things he had, and it turns out to be the only line that decides anything. Chapter 18 will later say of Saul that he was afraid of David, and gives that same reason.

A list of credentials can be genuinely impressive and still be missing the only entry that matters.

Lesson 23: Anointed King, and Still Sent Out to the Sheep (1 Samuel 16:19-20)

1 Samuel 16:19-20: “Send me David thy son, which is with the sheep. And Jesse took an ass laden with bread… and sent them by David his son unto Saul”

If God has said something over your life and nothing whatsoever has moved since, this is your verse. David has been anointed. The Spirit has come. And when the king’s messengers arrive, they find him exactly where they would have found him a month earlier: with the sheep.

Samuel had gone home to Ramah. Nothing had been announced. No one treated David differently, and his first trip toward a palace is as the boy carrying his father’s bread and wine on a donkey.

The oil changed everything about his future and nothing about his week. He still had chores. He still took instructions from his father. The calling was completely real and completely invisible. God would put it plainly to him years later: “I took thee from the sheepcote, from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people” (2 Samuel 7:8), and the sheepcote is exactly where the messengers found him on this day.

Does that gap feel like evidence against God, or does this chapter suggest it might be the ordinary shape of a beginning?

Lesson 24: David Carried the Armour of the Man He Would Replace (1 Samuel 16:21-22)

1 Samuel 16:21-22: “and he loved him greatly; and he became his armourbearer… Let David, I pray thee, stand before me; for he hath found favour in my sight”

Waiting rarely looks like waiting from the inside. It looks like working for somebody else. The anointed king’s first position near a throne is carrying another man’s weapons, standing in Saul’s house, at Saul’s request, serving the man whose crown he had already been promised, and nobody gives him a date.

Notice also that Saul’s affection here is recorded as real. “He loved him greatly.” Whatever comes later in the book, the text does not let us read this moment as pretence, and we should not import a later chapter into this one.

David serves. There is no record of him hinting, positioning, or letting slip what happened in Bethlehem. He does the job in front of him inside the household of the man he is waiting out, which is what waiting usually looks like in Scripture: serving someone else’s agenda faithfully while God keeps His own timetable.

Serve well in the place you were not planning to stay.

Lesson 25: What David Learned Alone Became What Opened the Door (1 Samuel 16:18, 23)

1 Samuel 16:18, 23: “Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite… that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well”

The harp is what got him in. The anointing did not, because nobody in the palace had heard of it, and his family name carried no weight there either. He arrived on the strength of a skill he had picked up in a field with nobody listening.

He had not learned it as career preparation. There was no plan behind it and no audience for it. It was what he did while he watched sheep, and it became the door into the house where the rest of his life would begin. Notice too that somebody in the court had already heard of him. Whatever God was doing in that field had not stayed hidden.

He tends to use what a person actually became rather than what they arranged for themselves, and the years that felt like nothing are usually where the becoming happened. Paul’s instruction to do your work “heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men” (Colossians 3:23) points the same way, that the audience you cannot see is the one that counts.

God is not wasteful with the unwatched years. What you are learning now with no obvious use for it is not necessarily going nowhere.

Lesson 26: The Relief Was Real, and It Changed Nothing (1 Samuel 16:23)

1 Samuel 16:23: “so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him”

Anyone who has watched someone they love settle for a way of coping instead of a cure knows how this ending feels. Scripture is honest here in a way that is easy to miss. It does not say the relief was fake, or shallow, or that Saul only imagined feeling better. He was refreshed. He was well. The trouble lifted.

Read also: Lessons From the Life of King Saul in the Bible

It also kept coming back. The verse is built to repeat, describing what happened whenever the spirit came upon him, and the chapter closes with a king who has found something that helps and has not gone back to the One who could heal.

There is real kindness in a thing that eases a burden, and God gave Saul that kindness through a boy with a harp. The music worked exactly as promised. The tragedy of this chapter’s last verse is that working was all it ever did.

Frequently Asked Questions About 1 Samuel 16

Related Articles to Read Next

• Lessons from the Life of David in the Bible: 48 Truths
• The Story of King Saul in the Bible: A Strong Start, a Tragic Fall
• Why Was King David So Special to God
• The Book of 1 Samuel Summary by Chapter

Conclusion: What the Lessons from 1 Samuel 16 Leave You With

The chapter ends with almost nothing visibly settled. A boy has oil on his head and sheep to get back to. A king is still on the throne and still unwell. The two men at the centre of it will spend years in the same house, and nothing in this chapter tells either of them what they are to each other. The town that trembled at a prophet goes back to normal with no idea what has been planted in it. If you are somewhere between what God has said and what anyone can see, this chapter puts you in good company rather than in doubt. It is the gap David lived in, with a harp in his hand and a field to go back to. Do the work in front of you honestly, and leave the timetable with the God who never handed it to anyone in this chapter.