Would You Know If the Spirit Left?

They had gone a full day’s journey toward home from Jerusalem before it hit them.

Mary and Joseph, headed home from the Feast of the Passover. They assumed Jesus was among their traveling group. Aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors. A 12-year-old boy could be anywhere in that crowd.

They hadn’t begun to worry. Why would they?

Luke says they travelled an entire day before they began looking for him. Not an hour. Not a quick headcount at the first rest stop. A full day of walking, talking, doing the normal things families do on long road trips. And only when evening came did they realize he wasn’t there.

Here’s what’s most worth noticing. They didn’t do anything wrong.

They weren’t running from God. Not in rebellion. They were faithful, observant Jews who had completed the Passover feast in Jerusalem. And now were doing exactly what they should be doing.

Going home. Returning to their responsibilities. Getting back to life as they knew it.

And that’s what makes this story so uncomfortable. You don’t have to be in sin to lose track of Jesus. You just have to be too busy. You just have to assume he’s somewhere in the group, in the routine. Somewhere nearby.

You stop checking. Not because you stopped caring. Simply because life filled the space where attention used to be.

They got Him back. After three days of searching they found him in the temple. He was doing what he’d been doing all along. But three days is a long time to not know where God is. And it started with one day of not noticing he was missing.

Most people reading this are just like Mary and Joseph. They’re not in a crisis. Not in obvious compromise. Just busy. And somewhere between the responsibilities and the routine, have stopped asking whether He was still there. It’s just assumed.

The question is what happens next. Because that assumption, left unchecked, leads somewhere.

* * *

Judges 16 is one of the most devastating passages in Scripture. And it’s not in the haircut. It’s in verse 20.

Delilah wakes Samson and says, “The Philistines are upon you.” And Samson’s response is almost casual: “I’ll go out as before and shake myself free.” Same confidence as always. Same routine.

Then the sentence that should terrify anyone who’s coasting: “But he did not know that the Lord had left him.”

He didn’t know.

The power was gone and he could not tell the difference. His confidence had not changed. His self-perception had not shifted. He still felt like Samson. He still expected the same results. But the thing that made him Samson was no longer there.

And he was the last person in the room to find out.

This is where the Mary-and-Joseph-path leads if you never course-correct. Distraction unchecked becomes assumption. Assumption untested becomes Judges 16:20. You shake yourself and nothing happens.

Samson didn’t test it until he needed it. That’s the whole problem in one sentence. He never checked. Never pressed in. Never put himself in a position where he’d know whether the power was still there. He just assumed it was, because it always had been. Because he’d never known anything different.

And when the moment arrived that required the power, that was the test.

Crisis is the worst possible time to find out whether God is still with you.

* * *

Here’s something interesting.

Samson killed a lion. Judges 14. The Spirit of the Lord came upon him, and he tore it apart with his bare hands. It’s one of the most dramatic moments of his story.

David killed a lion also. Out in the fields, alone with the sheep. No audience. A lion came for the flock and David went after it. Grabbed it, and killed it with his bare hands. He mentions it almost in passing when he stood before King Saul and made the case for why he should be the one to fight Goliath.

Same act. Same animal. Completely different takeaway.

David killed a lion and walked away knowing something about God. Samson killed a lion and walked away knowing something about himself.

David’s conclusion was, “The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will deliver me from this Philistine.” The power belonged to God. The encounter taught David who God was and what God could do. It became evidence he could point to, a building block in a theology forged in private.

Samson’s lion became a riddle at a party. Judges 14:14. He turned it into a bet.

The encounter taught Samson what Samson could do. It became a credential, not a confession. Something he’d done, not something God had done through him.

Look at what follows. When David stood at the battle line and saw Goliath, he didn’t say, “I can handle this.” He said, “You come against the armies of the living God.” The fight wasn’t his. The enemy wasn’t his. He was just the one who showed up. And he showed up with proof. The lion, the bear, specific encounters with a God he’d tested.

When Samson shook himself awake in Delilah’s lap, he said, “I’ll do what I’ve always done.” First person. Self-referencing. No mention of God. No evidence to point to. Just muscle memory from a man who’d been running on fumes longer than he knew.

Two men killed lions. One built a theology. The other built a reputation.

And when everything fell apart the difference showed up once again.

Samson lost the Spirit and didn’t notice. David, in the worst moment of his life, post-Bathsheba, post-murder, when he was fully exposed before Nathan the prophet, cried out: “Do not take your Holy Spirit from me” (Psalm 51:11).

Think about that. David sinned worse than Samson in many ways. Adultery. Murder. A cover-up that lasted months. But even at his lowest, David was more spiritually aware than Samson at his peak.

David knew exactly what he stood to lose. He’d been paying attention the whole time. The lions and bears did not just teach what God could do. They taught what God’s presence felt like. And the thought of losing it terrified him more than the consequences of what he’d done.

Samson treated the Spirit like a permanent feature. Something he was born with. Something that just was. David treated it like a gift that could be taken back.

Samson didn’t know the Spirit left. David was terrified it might.

Only one of them was right.

* * *

So here’s the question we’ve been coming to this whole time. How do you know God is still with you?

“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? — unless indeed you fail to meet the test!” (2 Corinthians 13:5, NKJV).

Not “do you believe He is.” Almost everyone reading this would answer, yes. The question is how do you know. What evidence do you have that isn’t secondhand? Something that happened between you and God where He showed up and you knew it.

Can you name your lion?

David could. And that’s why David could face Goliath without flinching. His confidence wasn’t built on theology studied. It was built on theology tested. Private, specific, recent encounters with a God Who proved Himself faithful when nobody was watching and nothing was guaranteed.

The answer to spiritual drift isn’t more church attendance or better quiet times. The answer is lions and bears.

David didn’t go looking for a lion. It came to him. A threat showed up, something that could have destroyed what he was responsible for, and instead of running or leaving to someone else, he engaged it. With nothing in his hands. No audience. No guarantee it would work. Just a boy and a predator and the raw question: is God with me or not?

And God answered. Not before the fight, but in it.

That’s what builds the kind of faith that holds when Goliath shows up. You can’t get there from a safe distance. You can’t build David-level confidence through study alone, or worship alone, or even prayer alone. At some point you have to be standing face-to-face with something that could kill you. While holding nothing but a conviction that God said He’d be there.

Your lion probably isn’t a literal lion. But it’s the equivalent. The situation you’ve been avoiding. The obedience that costs something. The calling that doesn’t come with a safety net. The confrontation, the risk, the step into the dark where the only thing between you and destruction is whether God meant what He said or not.

Most people don’t take that step. Most people stay in the caravan. And those people, if they’re being honest, can’t name their last lion.

That’s not an accusation. It’s a diagnostic.

Mary and Joseph were a day’s journey away before they noticed. Samson didn’t know until the Philistines were already in the room. The difference between them and David isn’t talent or anointing or spiritual gifting. It’s that David had tested it.

Recently.

Specifically.

With his bare hands and with everything on the line.

He knew the power was still there because he’d needed it last week.

When’s the last time you needed it?