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endangers his family; to the tabernacle, he imperils the priests. Saul will kill him; Gath won’t take him. He lied in the sanctuary and went crazy with the Philistines, and here he sits. All alone.
    But then he remembers: he’s not. He’s not alone. And from the recesses of the cave a sweet voice floats:
    Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me!
For my soul trusts in You;
And in the shadow of Your wings I will make my refuge. (v. 1)
    Make God your refuge. Not your job, your spouse, your reputation, or your retirement account. Make God your refuge. Let him, not Saul, encircle you. Let him be the ceiling that breaks the sunshine, the walls that stop the wind, the foundation on which you stand.
    A cave-dweller addressed our church recently. He bore the smell of Adullam. He’d just buried his wife, and his daughter was growing sicker by the day. Yet, in the dry land he found God. I wrote his discovery on the flyleaf of my Bible: “You’ll never know that Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.”
    Wilderness survivors find refuge in God’s presence.
    They also discover community among God’s people.
    Soon [David’s] brothers and other relatives joined him there. Then others began coming—men who were in trouble or in debt or who were just discontented—until David was the leader of about four hundred men (1 Sam. 22:1–2 NLT).
    Not what you’d call a corps of West Point cadets. In trouble, in debt, or discontent. Quite a crew. Misfits, yes. Dregs from the barrel, no doubt. Rejects. Losers. Dropouts.
    Just like the church. Are we not the distressed, the debtors, and the discontent?
    Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? (1 Cor. 1:26–28 MSG)
    Strong congregations are populated with current and former cave dwellers, people who know the terrain of Adullam. They told a few lies in Nob. They went loopy in Gath. And they haven’t for- gotten it. And because they haven’t, they imitate David: they make room for you.
    Who is David to turn these men away? He’s no candidate for archbishop. He’s a magnet for marginal people. So David creates a community of God-seeking misfits. God forges a mighty group out of them: “they came to David day by day to help him, until it was a great army, like the army of God” (1 Chron. 12:22).
    Gath. Wilderness. Adullam.
    Folly. Loneliness. Restoration.
    David found all three. So did Whit Criswell. This Kentucky native was raised in a Christian home. As a young man, he served as an officer in a Christian church. But he fell into gambling, daily risking his income on baseball games. He lost more than he won and found himself in desperate debt to his bookie. He decided to embezzle funds from the bank where he worked. Welcome to Gath.
    It was only a matter of time until the auditors detected a problem and called for an appointment. Criswell knew he’d been caught. The night before the examination he couldn’t sleep. He resolved to take the path of Judas. Leaving his wife a suicide note, he drove out-side of Lexington, parked the car, and put the gun to his head. He couldn’t pull the trigger, so he took a practice shot out the car window. He pressed the nose of the barrel back on his forehead and mumbled, “Go ahead and pull the trigger, you no-good slob. This is what you deserve.” But he couldn’t do it. The fear that he might go to hell kept him from taking his life.
    Finally, at dawn, he went home, a broken man. His wife had found the note and called the police. She embraced him. The officers hand-cuffed