David, who authored Psalm chapter 16, knew a lot about the living waters of God. He spent more time drinking from the springs of His divine presence almost more than anyone else in Scripture. Referred to in the Bible as a man after God’s own heart, David had a relationship with the Lord that was leagues above everybody else in his day, a relationship forged in the fires of adversity.

Shunned as a child by his family, David spent years of his life in isolation. As a youth, he tended sheep alone in the Judean hills. Forgotten and ignored by his father and brothers, when Samuel came to anoint one of them to be king, they considered David so unworthy that they didn’t bother to call him in from the field. Even after he made a name for himself by slaying Goliath, David suffered rejection. Living the lonely life of a fugitive, he spent years hiding from the murderous Saul.

Yet with every natural reason to feel abandoned and forsaken, David didn’t. Instead, according to the Jewish sages:

David found rich pasture and flowing water to his soul from his father who was God, also God being his brother and friend. Nothing compared to the divine presence and the radiance of God that filled his all in all. David joined in song and praise as a result of his nearness to God. His wilderness life was transformed into thirst for the living God, a cleaving and a passionate devotion for God.

It seems the more David was shunned, accused, blamed, and shamed by his family and his nation, the more he resorted to waiting upon God. And the more he waited, the more he was prepared and positioned for his divine destiny. Talk about what the Devil meant for evil being turned around for good! Rather than destroying him, the years David spent alone with God opened the door to a revelation of God’s goodness and loving kindness, a revelation that inspired him to write psalms that would echo through future generations with words like this:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul….
(Ps. 23:1–3 NKJV)

As New Testament believers, we sometimes take the truth of those verses for granted. We assume that because of his early vocation David simply had a special understanding of the relationship between sheep and shepherd. He knew, for instance, that for sheep to lie down, they had to be free from fear and free from friction with other sheep in the herd. They had to be free from flies and parasites and hunger. They needed the provision, comfort, and protection that only a shepherd could give.

The concept seems so simple that we sometimes overlook the fact that when David said God would provide those things for him, when He proclaimed that the Creator would do for His people what David himself did for his sheep, David was revealing the Shepherd-heart of the Almighty. He was tapping into a truth practically unheard of in his time.

In David’s life, quietness was the incubator for such revelations.

The same is true for us today. Although fellowship with other believers has its vital place; although preaching and teaching, and ministry activity are helpful and important; times of waiting when we hear directly from God can change us in ways nothing else will.

Hundreds of years ago, Thomas Goodwin, a Puritan preacher put it this way:

When we wait upon the Lord, the Holy Spirit comes down into our hearts, sometimes in prayer with a beam from heaven whereby we see more at once of God and His glory, more astounding thoughts and enlarged apprehensions of God, many beams meeting in one and falling to the center of our hearts. By these coming down of divine influxes, God slides into our hearts with beams of Himself. And we come not to have communion with God by way of many broken thoughts put together but a contraction of many beams from heaven which shed into our souls so that we can know more of God in that moment of communion than we could learn by man’s wisdom in a year.