The legendary pastor and pioneer of the Church Growth Movement, the late Dr. Yonggi Cho, once shared a remarkable experience. It was during a church building project. He had exhausted all available resources, and the work was not completed. Shame was stirring at him. Greatly discouraged, he went inside the uncompleted building and prayed that the building might fall and kill him! Of course, God did not hear that prayer, but came through for him in some other way. The essence of this story is that everybody has their day with discouragement, a time when you feel overwhelmed and think you are not making any sense or progress. It does not matter whether the reason for discouragement is real or imagined; the effect is the same. It always wants to take away wind out of your sails. 

One of the things discouragement does is to paralyse positive actions necessary for success. Anyone can be courageous when the sail is smooth. It only becomes rare when things are not exactly the way we want them to be.

The men and women whom we revere today as greatly accomplished are those who successfully wrestled their way out of discouragement. It is inconceivable that one who has not mastered discouragement will do exploits. One of the things discouragement does is to paralyse positive actions necessary for success. Anyone can be courageous when the sail is smooth. It only becomes rare when things are not exactly the way we want them to be. In our text, David became discouraged when he lost his camp to marauders. He furrowed through that terrible season by God’s assuring word and guidance, and this is what we all need to sail in discouraging seasons.