Most of us think we know David.
We know the boy with the sling and the stone, standing impossibly small before a giant that an entire army had refused to face. We know the king who fell — catastrophically, publicly, in a way that should have ended everything — when he chose Bathsheba and set in motion a chain of consequences that would mark his reign forever. Two stories. One hero, one failure. And somewhere in between, a man the Bible calls something extraordinary: a man after God’s own heart.
But why? How does a man who failed so visibly earn that title? What did God see in David that He does not seem to see in so many others who tried harder and stumbled less? And what does any of it have to do with the life you are living right now?
Ronnie Kidd has spent years sitting with those questions — and in Stand Up… Face Up… Look Up…, he offers answers that will surprise, challenge, and genuinely transform the way you read one of Scripture’s most compelling lives.
Pen In-Charge is proud to announce that this rich and revelatory work of biblical teaching is now live and available to readers everywhere.
The scope of what Kidd has assembled here is remarkable. Drawing on nearly a hundred parallels between the life and times of David and the teaching of the New Testament, he builds a case — methodical, surprising, and deeply moving — that David was not merely a historical figure whose story happens to contain useful lessons. He was a type of Christ. A life lived, in all its glory and its failure and its repentance and its restoration, that pointed forward across centuries to the One who would fulfill everything David could only foreshadow.
That reframing changes everything. It means that reading David’s story is not simply an exercise in ancient biography or even moral instruction. It is a way of reading the Gospel itself — seeing in David’s giants and caves, his psalms and his sins, his crushing defeats and his unlikely restoration, the shape of a grace that was always pointing toward something greater than any king could deliver.
Kidd opens that world up with the enthusiasm and clarity of a teacher who has fallen genuinely in love with his subject — and who cannot wait to share what he has found.
But Stand Up… Face Up… Look Up… is not only a work of biblical scholarship. It is a deeply personal invitation.
Because the giants David faced were real. And so are yours. They may not stand on a literal battlefield demanding combat, but they are present — in the fears that paralyze, the circumstances that overwhelm, the voices that insist you are too small, too ordinary, too compromised by your history to step forward. David stood up to his giant not because he was the biggest or the best-equipped person in the field that day. He stood up because he knew whose name he was carrying into the fight.
Kidd calls readers to that same posture. To stand up — not in self-confidence, but in God-confidence. To face up — to the mistakes, the failures, the Bathsheba moments that we would rather rewrite or bury than bring honestly before God. And to look up — always, consistently, in every season of triumph and every season of wreckage — to the God who called David His own not despite his humanity but somehow, mysteriously, through it.
Stand Up… Face Up… Look Up… is for the believer who has always sensed there was more in David’s story than the Sunday school versions revealed. It is for the Christian who has carried their own failures like a verdict rather than a chapter — who needs to see, in David’s life, what genuine repentance and genuine restoration actually look like when God is the one doing the restoring. It is for the student of Scripture who wants to see the Old and New Testaments in genuine, illuminating conversation. And it is for anyone who has a giant in front of them right now and needs a reminder that the sling and the stone were never the real weapon anyway.
Ronnie Kidd writes with the passion of a man who has spent serious time in David’s story and emerged genuinely transformed by what he found there. His teaching is grounded in careful biblical study and animated by a deep desire to make Scripture come alive for everyday believers — not as a collection of ancient texts to be admired from a distance, but as a living word with direct, immediate relevance to the giants, failures, and longings of real life. With Stand Up… Face Up… Look Up…, he offers readers a David they may have never fully met — and through him, a God more gracious, more pursuing, and more worthy of the whole heart than they may have dared to believe.