“Selfish Ambition & Seeds of Destruction– FBC Morning Light (4/21/23)

Well a good Friday morning to you. Here we are a couple of days away from the Lord's Day and at our church, the beginning of our Eternal Issues Bible Conference. Looking forward to this time of concentrated focus on things that really matter, on eternal issues.

Pastor Aaron Hoke from Warsaw, Indiana is going to be our guest speaker for these five special services, Sunday morning at 10 .30, Sunday evening at 6 o 'clock, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday at 7, bringing five different messages from the book of Genesis.

I know these will be a blessing to you if you're a follower of Christ, but they also have an evangelistic emphasis to them. After all, this is an Eternal Issues Bible Conference. We want to have some of our unconverted friends in the services and give them an opportunity to hear the answers to some of the eternal issues of life that bother them and concern them.

I encourage you to come to as many of these services as you possibly can and bring someone with you, maybe someone who knows the Lord, if at all possible. Today we're going back to the book of Judges, chapters 9 and 10, John 12, and Psalm 80 in our Bible reading plan.

I want to focus on this man Abimelech in Judges 9. We see so many examples in the Scriptures of messed up families, don't we? They're all messed up, all of them are messed up in some way or another, some more profoundly than others.

You have this man Gideon, and we think of Gideon and his 300 and the great conquest over the Midianites, but after the battling and the warring was all done, Gideon kind of went off the rails. He made this ephod, he probably didn't mean anything spiritual about it, but it ended up becoming a snare and people ended up worshiping the thing.

That was a mistake, never should have done that. Then he had a bunch of sons, nothing wrong with having a bunch of sons, but perhaps the problem is the way he had them. He says, verse 30 of chapter 8, that he had 70 sons who were his own offspring, for he had many wives.

He was taking upon himself the prerogatives, the illegitimate nevertheless, prerogatives, but typical of the day, of royalty, to have a harem. He had himself a harem with 70 sons, but he also had this concubine, this one concubine in verse 31 of chapter 8.

This concubine was from the town of Shechem, and she had a son whose name was Abimelech. We read about him more in chapter 9 and his ambition. There's nothing inherently wrong with ambition if it's motivated rightly and it's after the right thing.

Paul was ambitious about the gospel, he was ambitious about planting churches and so on and so forth. Ambition can be good, it can be holy, but Abimelech's was not a holy ambition, his was a selfish ambition.

He goes to Shechem, the hometown of his concubine mother. Remember, his dad is Gideon, his mom is a concubine of Gideon's. He goes to Shechem, to his relatives, to his uncles, and he says to them, shouldn't I be your ruler?

Look at what Gideon has done. I'm a son of Gideon. Isn't it better to have me rule over you all than to have 70 sons of Gideon, all taking a share of some kind of measure of control and authority? Isn't it just better to have one man?

They say, yeah, sure. So what does Abimelech do? What does he do? He goes and has all of his brothers executed. All of them. This is a characteristic of selfish ambition. Selfish ambition, it knows few boundaries.

It doesn't want to acknowledge boundaries, boundaries that will hem it in, that will prevent it from getting what it wants. Selfish ambition will do whatever it takes, no matter whom it hurts, to get what it wants.

You need to be careful about being selfishly ambitious, because here's the thing. It has within it the seeds of its own destruction. Somebody else rises in Shechem, who is equally selfishly ambitious, a man by the name of Gael.

He stirs up some of the Shechemites to follow him. Abimelech hears about this effort, and some of the Shechemites to rebel against him, his, Abimelech's rule and authority. So Abimelech goes to Shechem, and he fights against Shechem, destroys so many of the Shechemites as well as Gael.

In the end, what happens to Abimelech? What happens to Abimelech? You read about it in chapter 9, Abimelech ends up himself being executed. We read about a woman who dropped a millstone upon Abimelech's head and crushed his skull.

Why? Because he was so selfishly ambitious, he could not stand the thought of anybody challenging his position of power. He had to grasp it and hang on to it with all his might. He wanted to be the one.

He wanted to be the ruler. Well, beware of selfish ambition. You have no idea where it'll take you. You have no idea what it'll do to you, how it'll eat you up, how it'll spit you out, how it'll ruin your life.

Good to be zealously affected after a good thing, but it's so destructive to be jealously ambitious over the wrong thing. Our Father and our God, I pray that we would take this challenge, this warning, from the failure of Abimelech and his selfish, sinful ambition, we pray.

Deliver us from it, and we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, well listen, have a good rest of your Friday and wonderful weekend. Again, encourage you to join us for the Eternal Issues Bible Conference, starting this coming Lord's Day.

Have a good day. God bless.