Tired of God

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Don Filcek; 1 Samuel 12 Tired of God

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his series in First Samuel, Timely Prophet, Tragic King.
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Let's listen in. Well, good morning. Welcome to Recast Church.
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As Dave said, I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here. And I just want to say I'm very glad and grateful to be back with you after a week away.
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I'm also very thankful for people like Rob Knold who was willing to step up and preach in my absence last week.
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I am very grateful for godly men that God has raised up to lead the church like Rob.
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I don't know how many of you know this. Rob is currently the chairman of the elder board here. And so I'm just grateful again for men like him who can step up in my absence and preach.
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Here at Recast, we believe that everyone should be growing in faith, growing in community, growing in service. That's our growth model.
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That's what we desire for everybody in reality to be taking on more and more of in their life. And this morning, as we take in God's word, we're gonna be studying a portion of scripture that is focused on growing our understanding of our great
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God, which is really what we basically mean when we talk about growing in faith. When we talk about that, we talk about taking in God's word, believing that it's true, and believing so much that it's true that we let it impact our daily lives.
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And so we come together to grow in community. We need each other in relationships. God has given us the church fundamentally as a gathering of individual
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Christians in a community for encouragement, for strength, for recognizing.
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How many of you know that you live in a hostile world, that there's a world out there that doesn't have the same values as you?
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And sometimes it's refreshing to gather together with God's people to reflect on the fact that we need each other and that we're not alone in this work that God has for us.
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And most often, the power of scripture grows our faith by revealing something to us of the nature of who we are, telling us something about us, and then equally telling us something about God.
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Often, scripture does really one of those two things when we read it. It'll tell us more about who we are and reflect about us or something about what is true about God.
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And this morning, we're gonna be in a text that tells us both. It's gonna reflect something about who we are, but also about who
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God is. It will reveal to us that we are a people who often tire of the invisible
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God. We tire, we get tired of serving the invisible God. If we're honest, we all go through stages of life where faith seems unreasonable.
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How many of you already know what I'm talking about when I say that? A time where it's a little bit easier to put your eyes on, it'll be easier to put your plans on the issues or the circumstances that are confronting you.
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And I believe that all of us struggle daily with the idea of doing things our own way.
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I confess to that. Doing things my own way is often more practical. It's more controllable, at least, isn't it?
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We can control things, at least like the illusion that we can control things. And walking by faith and trusting in the invisible
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God is at times scary. Often, we find that God comes through at the last moment.
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Do you know what I'm talking about? You're under siege and everything is pressing in and your deadline is right there and you just don't know how this is gonna be accomplished and you're praying and you're working and you're doing your part, but at the same time, you're just like,
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I don't know how this is gonna, and faith often causes us to go the full length, the full distance with God, trusting in him before, boom, he comes through.
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And we're gonna see that in our text. So we're gonna be reading and studying an Old Testament account of the people of Israel at a time when they grew tired and they almost said it directly, we're tired of leaning on you,
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God, we wanna do our own thing. And instead, they decide to go their own way and how do you think
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God would respond to that? How would your God respond to somebody saying to his face,
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I'm tired of you, I'm tired of you, I'm tired of following you, I'm tired of trusting you,
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I really wanna just kinda trust myself for a while here. How would your God respond?
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And I hope that he would respond the same way that the God of Scripture is gonna respond, but I have a feeling that some of us are gonna need a little bit of correction this morning in what we're saying now and what we're gonna see by the end of the text, how
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God would respond. Would your God be angry at his people for rejecting him?
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Probably, probably, right? Kinda think maybe he'd be a little upset about that. Would he reject his people?
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Would he give up on them? Let's open our Bibles to 1 Samuel chapter 12 if you're not already there.
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And we're gonna look and we're gonna read this entire passage and we're gonna get an answer to that question, how does God respond when his people say,
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I'm tired of you? If you don't have a Bible or a device or a means to navigate to the Bible, just take the
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Bible under the seat in front of you and you can turn to page 134 and you can follow along there. 134 is a quick way to get it in the
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Bible that's under that seat in front of you. And then if you don't own a Bible, I encourage you towards the
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ESV Bible app. You can look at that and that's the version of the Bible that I prefer, just more than anything it's because it's readable and it's also a good translation.
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But ESV Bible app or just take that Bible under the seat in front of you, home with you and we want everybody to have a copy of God's word to be able to read on their own.
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But please follow along as we read in its entirety 1 Samuel chapter 12.
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And Samuel said to all Israel, behold, I have obeyed your voice in all that you have said to me and have made a king over you.
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And now behold, the king walks before you and I'm old and gray and behold, my sons are with you. I have walked before you from my youth until this day.
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Here I am, testify against me before the Lord and before his anointed. Whose ox have I taken? Or whose donkey have
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I taken? Or whom have I defrauded? Whom have I oppressed? Or from whose hand have
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I taken a bribe to blind my eyes with it? Testify against me and I will restore it to you.
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They said, you have not defrauded us or oppressed us or taken anything from any man's hand. And he said to them, the
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Lord is witness against you and his anointed is witness this day that you have not found anything in my hand.
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And they said, he is witness. And Samuel said to the people, the Lord is witness who appointed
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Moses and Aaron and brought your fathers up out of the land of Egypt. Now therefore stand still that I may plead with you before the
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Lord concerning all the righteous deeds, the righteous deeds of the Lord that he performed for you and for your fathers.
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When Jacob went into Egypt and the Egyptians oppressed them then your fathers cried out to the Lord and the Lord sent
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Moses and Aaron who brought your fathers out of Egypt and made them dwell in this place. But they forgot the
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Lord their God and he sold them into the hand of Sisera, commander of the army of Hazor and into the hand of the
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Philistines and into the hand of the king of Moab. And they fought against them. And then they cried out to the
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Lord and said, we have sinned because we have forsaken the Lord and have served the Baals and the Ashtoreth. But now deliver us out of the hand of our enemies that we may serve you.
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And the Lord sent Jeroboam and Barak and Jephthah and Samuel and delivered you out of the hand of your enemies on every side and you lived in safety.
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And when you saw that Nahash the king of the Ammonites came against you, you said to me, no but a king shall reign over us when the
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Lord your God was your king. And now behold the king whom you have chosen for whom you have asked, behold the
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Lord has set a king over you. If you will fear the Lord and serve him and obey his voice and not rebel against the commandment of the
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Lord and if both you and the king who reigns over you will follow the Lord your God, it will be well. But if you will not obey the voice of the
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Lord but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then the hand of the Lord will be against you and your king. Now therefore stand still and see this great thing that the
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Lord will do before your eyes. Is it not the wheat harvest today? I will call upon the
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Lord that he may send thunder and rain and you shall know and see that your wickedness is great which you have done in the sight of the
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Lord in asking for yourselves a king. So Samuel called upon the Lord and the Lord sent thunder and rain that day and all the people greatly feared the
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Lord and Samuel. And all the people said to Samuel, pray for your servants, to the Lord your
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God that we may not die for we have added to all our sins this evil to ask for ourselves a king.
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And Samuel said to the people, do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. You have done all this evil.
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Yet do not turn aside from following the Lord but serve the Lord with all your heart and do not turn aside after empty things that cannot profit or deliver for they are empty.
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For the Lord will not forsake his people for his great name's sake because it is pleased the
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Lord to make you a people for himself. Moreover as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the
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Lord by ceasing to pray for you. And I will instruct you in the good and the right way. Only fear the
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Lord and serve him faithfully with all your heart. For consider what great things he has done for you.
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But if you still do wickedly, you shall be swept away, both you and your king. Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word. In the Old Testament, we see an old covenant. We see an old way of doing things.
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And in the New Testament, we know that we live under grace. And we rejoice in the grace that's given to us in Jesus Christ.
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But we have an opportunity to get a glimpse into the way that the text identifies our own sinful behaviors, our own sinful patterns, the way that we have rebelled against you.
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And we have patterned often, we have just repeated the sins that have gone before us. The sins clearly spelled out here in this text from Israel.
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Rejection of you, a growing tired of our God. And we repeat that often in our lives.
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And you have been faithful and faithful and faithful to keep your covenant with us.
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We who are indicted, we who are rightly judged by you as sinful, we who have time and time again rejected you and your rule and your authority over us and have said we want our own king.
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We want to even, at our darkest moments, be our own king. But you in your great mercy and grace have said you will not forsake your people for your great name.
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So Father, I pray that we would lift your great name high this morning in worship as we get an opportunity to sing some songs, to celebrate together, to even celebrate the graduates here.
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Father, just that our hearts would be lifted up in the things that you are doing here in the midst of your people, the things that you're doing in our hearts and the way that you have been faithful to us, even in our faithlessness.
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And may that even be a lesson to these graduates as they're going out and gonna be going off to college, Father, that they would hold tight to this one truth that you have loved them.
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And Father, that that would be a sustaining message in their hearts as they launch out from their household and find their own faith and their own way in life and their own pathway.
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I ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Well, you can go ahead and get seated. And I do encourage you like every week to get comfortable and if you need to get up at any time and get more coffee or juice or donuts, while supplies last back there,
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I don't know how many are left, but also I just ask you to do me a favor and do yourself a favor and keep your
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Bible open to 1 Samuel chapter 12. That wasn't just a Bible reading. We're gonna walk through that text. And that kind of is our outline is to walk through that verse by verse and kind of see the big picture of what
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God wants for us. Our text this morning is a transition speech. It's a speech that's given to us by Samuel.
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And to be quite honest, as I was going through and setting out the plan to preach through 1 Samuel, this was one of the texts that was kind of like ho -hum to me when
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I first read it. It was like, okay, you know, there's all this movement, there's battle scenes, there's kings, there's all of this intrigue.
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And then there's this transition speech in the middle of it, kind of like a political speech or something like that. And it was kind of like, but this, as I studied it this week,
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I was like, wow, this is the linchpin to the book. This is a very fundamental text to an understanding of a big picture thing of what
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God is doing in the history of his people. You see, in our text this morning, the prophet Samuel ceases to be the judge over Israel.
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Now judge was a political term, not just strictly like we think of Supreme Court justices or judges in a court of law or something like that.
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The judge was a political military leader that was selected by God for a specific task.
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Now the judges were raised up and then they were brought back down. And then they were raised up and they were brought back down depending on the need of the moment.
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And God was in charge of that system. God was the one who determined whether or not the nation needed a judge at any given time.
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There was not always a judge. God would raise one up when the need was there.
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And so that was the system that they were living under up till this text that we're looking at here.
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So we're looking at Samuel ceasing to be judge over Israel. His official leadership is over, is of this text, as God's chosen person.
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And instead, the people have now said, we're tired of this whole system of God raising up judges to deliver the nation.
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We wanna do our own system. We want to have a consistent king. Do you have a difference between God doing his thing, raising one up when one is needed and not when there wasn't, and having a consistent king?
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Do you see the distinction between the two systems that the people were looking for? They're saying, we want stability.
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We want a consistent leader who can, who when, we already know who's gonna lead us into battle when the next oppressor comes.
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When the next, the next time that somebody comes and sieges Jerusalem, we know who's going to lead us out.
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And so that's the nature of what's happening here, a transition from trusting God moment by moment to saying, we've got some stability over here that we can take care of ourselves.
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They wanted a king. They didn't like leaning on God and depending on him to defend them from oppression, they wanted that stability that a human king could bring.
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So our text is gonna divide into two main sections. The speech is kind of, the speech and the events surrounding it really divide well, but not equally.
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And there's a reason, and I'm gonna get there here at the end about why I don't think, why I think this is an unequal part of this text as we divide it into two sections.
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The first section is verses one through 19, nearly three quarters of the entire text is the first point, and it is the case against God's people, the case against God's people, which can be summarized by the statement,
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God's people have grown tired of their God. That's the case against the people of God.
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His people have grown tired of him. Then verses 20 through 25, we're gonna see at the end, again, about a quarter of the entire speech and section of text, we're gonna see the case for God's people, which is summarized by the phrase,
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God never grows tired of his people. People are tired of him, that's their indictment.
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But what is to their blessing, what is to their benefit, what is the case for them? God never grows tired of them.
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So all of verses one through 19 are an extended indictment from Samuel, and this is during this transition of power.
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He's basically giving a transition of power speech before the people. They're all gathered at Gilgal.
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The entire nation of Israel is in this place, and they've just been victorious in battle against the
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Ammonites, as we saw two weeks ago. I wasn't preaching last week, Rob was, but the last time we were in 1
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Samuel, we saw this victory over Nahash, the Ammonite. And Saul had led them into battle, and so that's the context.
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And what do you think the atmosphere should be in Israel when they've just had a victory in battle?
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Anybody think it should be celebratory, like there should be a lot of celebration, a lot of partying, a lot of, like yes, we were just victorious over this guy who wanted to pluck the right eye out of everybody in Israel.
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So it's like a pretty gruesome story that we looked at. And so we would think it would be celebratory.
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But what we have here is Saul is finally coming into the final stage of his kingship. We saw him anointed as king.
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We saw him selected by Lot as king. We've now seen the spirit of God rush upon him to act kingly in battle.
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And now this is gonna be the final, this final speech is that transition of power.
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What we have here is kind of like the speech that often we'll see during election years, particularly presidential election years, where the defeated candidate gives a concession speech.
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Often you'll notice that that happens when there's not dangling chads and all of that kind of stuff. Usually that concession speech happens sometime in the middle of the night.
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Do you know what I'm talking about? You have to stay up late to watch that. Sometimes you watch it a week or two later. You know, it just depends on when that transition of power happens.
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But so this is kind of what we're looking at, is we're kind of looking at a level of concession speech from Samuel.
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He's saying, I'm not the guy anymore. You've now got Saul, and there's a passing of the baton on to him.
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And in a sense, this is not a concession speech for Samuel. Certainly he has been rejected as judge, but God has already told him, don't worry about that,
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Samuel. It's not so much that they're rejecting you as much as they're rejecting me, said the Almighty.
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Samuel is the prophet, remember, speaking on behalf of the Lord God Almighty. Samuel was
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God's chosen leader, and he had been rejected right along with the Almighty himself. So this speech is pivotal in the history of Israel.
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It's kind of like the point at which things are balancing. Samuel will be the last of the judges, and Saul will be the first of the kings.
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A huge political change among the people of God. So this speech from God here through Samuel emphasizes the wrong -minded view that the people had about their
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God. They were viewing him wrong, and the way that they even viewed this transition from a human, or rather from God's rule and a divine monarchy to a human monarchy.
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So the first indictment of the people is found in verses one through six, and it seems a little bit strange to understand why this is an indictment, but Samuel starts off by acknowledging that the making of a king was their idea.
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He says, I want to emphasize, because all this time Samuel has been wanting to distance himself from the people and their plan to make
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Saul king, and so he doesn't like the idea, and he's been vocal about not liking the idea, but God said, go ahead and obey the people and do what they tell you to do, because they're rejecting me, not you, so just follow what they want, and so he says,
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I've obeyed you. I've done what you've desired, and I've given you a king. So they now have
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Saul as king, and Samuel has served. He says, I've served you in this role of judge and as a prophet from my youth up.
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Haven't you guys known me? Haven't you guys seen me? Haven't I been in front of you all of the time? You know who I am, and is integrity, he says, my integrity, is my integrity the cause of your rejection of God?
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Is it because I have been a hypocrite? Is it because I haven't walked well in front of you? Samuel wants to confirm that it has not been hypocrisy in him that has caused the nation to reject both his judgeship and God as king.
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How many of you know that that can happen with leaders, right? Some of you maybe have experienced that, unfortunately. Some of you have gone down that road where there's been a leader who has abused and beaten and bludgeoned the flock, and therefore, it's been like, oh, there's hypocrisy here, and there's animosity and anger, and that often gets deflected, of course, to God, and so he says, is that what's going on here?
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So in verses three through four, that's the reason for this litany of questions that Samuel asks to the people. Have I stolt anything from you, he says?
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Who have I oppressed? Have I been blinded by bribes? Has justice been blind in my eyes because I've been willing to take money from people to, you know, one guy says, no, the corner marker for my property is here, and another guy goes, no, the corner property marker should be here, and then one guy slips
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Samuel some money and says, isn't it over here? And he's like, oh, yeah, it's over here. You know, that's the kind of injustice that would happen during this time, and that's what you can imagine, like the way that a judge could be bought out or something like that, and he says, have
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I ever done that? Have I ever been unfair in my judgments? Have I been blinded? And further, look at the integrity of Samuel here in the text, he says, tell me what
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I've taken. Tell me what I've done wrong, and I will seek within the best of my ability to make restitution.
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I will restore it, I will make it right. I wanna point out that for a leader, this takes a lot of guts.
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Do you see that in the text? It's a lot of guts to stand up and say, have I done anything wrong here? If I've done wrong,
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I will make it right. And I think at this point, Samuel serves as a great model of integrity to all of us.
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Whether or not you consider yourself in a leadership position or not, this should be the heartbeat of the follower of Christ.
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We need to live the kind of life that is willing to seek to restore what we have taken from others in our sin, and we have sinned, and we have, and I don't think it would take much creativity and thought in our minds to recognize things that we have taken from others in our sin.
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You see, Samuel wasn't perfect. We know his sons were greedy and willing to take bribes. They were willing to pervert justice, and we know that from the text earlier in the book of 1
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Samuel. And so he was not the perfect father who raised the perfect kids, but Samuel was willing to open himself up, at least to scrutiny, and he was eager to make restitution toward anyone he had wronged.
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And so I'm gonna be sprinkling the application out throughout the message instead of just giving it all at the end in three or four points or whatever.
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So I'd like all of us to just take a moment to consider, are you willing to make things right like Samuel did?
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Who do you need to confess to? Who do you at least owe an apology to?
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Maybe this morning would be a day that would be a start of repentance and restitution for some of us, of going to those that we've wronged and making it right.
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But I don't wanna belabor that point because Samuel's humility is not the main point of this text. The main point is to clarify that Samuel's performance as a prophet and judge has not been the issue.
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You see, the people responded favorably to Samuel's leadership. It wasn't that he was a poor judge that made them want a king.
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It was that they didn't like the whole system to begin with. They even openly declared
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God is witness in verse five that Samuel has been a good leader. Yeah, God is witness before us. You've done a great job,
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Samuel, kudos. A standing ovation for Samuel. You've been a great judge. We just want a king. We just wanna trust in the system that we can put in place.
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We don't like the way that God rolls. We don't like this waiting till the last minute before deliverance comes because that is too dicey.
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That's scary for us. That doesn't mitigate all risk and we would like to just be able to cut out some of the risk and some of those feelings that you get when you don't know how it's gonna turn out.
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So we just thank you for your service, Samuel, but we'd like Saul instead.
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You see, Samuel was a good leader and I seek to live my life with that kind of integrity. An elder and a leader of a church should be above reproach and I try my best to live that way and I pray for an ongoing conviction that when
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I do fall short, I'm made of the same stuff as you guys. I pray that God would continue to keep my heart soft to him and I'd be willing to listen and to think through, have
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I wronged anybody? Have I done what is inappropriate and can I make that right?
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We should all pray for a sensitive conscience and the strength to make things right when we sin against one another.
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That's one of the things that makes for a healthy church, by the way, is a willingness to genuinely repent, a genuine willingness to look internally and say, have
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I sinned against others? And then to go and make that right. And when somebody has wronged you, which is a thing that's going to happen if you're doing community well, by the way.
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If we do community right recast, then somebody's gonna wrong you. And it's a question of whether or not you're now gonna tell your best friend that they wronged you or are you gonna go to them and say, can we work through this?
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This conflict with resolution produces intimacy, connectedness, relationship, community.
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That's fundamental to what it means to grow in community is being willing to address these kinds of things that come up.
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But the first part of this indictment against God's people is simply that they cannot blame poor leadership for the rejection of God.
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He gets that out of the way at the beginning of this indictment. He says, is it me? Is it me? No, no, it's not you.
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Don't worry about it. It's really the Almighty that's the problem. And with that out of the way, the indictment then, of course, takes a pretty dramatic turn in Samuel's speech.
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Samuel speaking on behalf of the Lord then says, well, if it wasn't Samuel's leadership, then what was the problem then?
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What is it? And then almost sarcastically, what's implied is
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God goes on to say, was it the way that I kept delivering you time and time again?
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Was it the fact that every time that an oppressor came, I brought a savior to you?
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Is that what you've got against me? Is that what's frustrating you? And he begins in verse seven to rehearse the righteous deeds that the
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Lord, the righteous deeds, do you hear that? The good, right, kind, true things that God has performed.
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The Lord has performed for Israel in their history. And he doesn't even scratch the surface. He just kind of rattles some off.
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Very easy when you go through the Old Testament to see the way that God provided time and time again. There's that whole parting the
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Red Sea. There's that mammon in the wilderness. Not even mentioned in this little review here. Just, he's just using some contemporary things from the times of the judges here.
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Goes back a little bit into Egypt. And the pattern of Israel's history was that they were oppressed and the
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Lord sent deliverers. Time and time again, they were oppressed by Egypt. So the Lord sent Moses and Aaron.
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And then good times arrived after he delivered them. And so in the good times, they would forget God and begin to worship idols and the idols of the nations around them.
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That's where you get the words Ashtoreth and Baal and they're two pagan gods that they would begin to build idols and bow and worship and forget their
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God. So then God in his mercy would allow oppression again in this big cycle and an oppressor would come in to wake them up.
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And then in their oppression, they would cry out to the Lord and they would realize that Baal can't deliver them.
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Ashtoreth can't deliver them. So then they'd cry out to the Lord and the Lord would be again put at the center and he would send a deliverer.
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So they came under oppression from people like Sisera of Hazor and so God sent
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Barak. They came under the oppression of the Moabites and so God sent
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Jephthah, guys that are mentioned in the text. They came under attack by the Midianites so he sent Jeroboam, who's more commonly known as Gideon.
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See, God's history with his people was one of faithful deliverance even though it often came at the last moment.
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You see, God's way of working with his people is often faith -producing and when you hear the phrase faith -producing, think stressful, right?
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Do you know what I'm talking about? How many of you know that your faith is forged in the tough times? Your faith is forged when you can't see the way forward and God delivers you.
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Your faith isn't forged in the knowing types of things. Your faith is forged in the times when you don't know how it's gonna turn out and you have to lean on him wholly and completely because plan, you don't even have plan
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B and C, you've already burned through all your options. You know what I'm talking about? Some of you have lived those moments and you know and you're stronger for it.
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You don't sign up for that kind of thing, right? How many of you are signing up for that? Hey, maybe this week, God, could you bring some insurmountable challenge that completely makes me chew my fingernails to a nub and pull my hair out?
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Could you give me something like that this week? Don't pray for that, you guys. I mean, there's plenty of that down the pipeline.
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God will give you exactly the grace that you need to handle the things that are in front of you but my goodness, this is reality, this is fundamental, this is grow your faith 101 here.
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It's grown in the tough times. It's in those challenging moments.
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Faith -producing, when you hear that, think stressful. And it was that faith -producing nature of God's deliverance that the people were sick and tired of.
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Like, give us consistency for goodness sake. We're like a yo -yo here, it's oppression and then it's deliverance and oppression and deliverance and oppression and deliverance.
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Could we just have some consistent deliverance? Could we have someone we can turn to when we're frustrated, when we're stressed and say, deliver us?
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And that's what they wanted from Saul, that's what they wanted from their king. That's why they're going this direction, they're tired of God's way.
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Can you relate to that? How many of you like to protect yourself? Go ahead and raise your hand if you tend towards that.
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You like to protect yourself, I think most of us do. How many of you like to set up plans and methods for hedging yourself against risk and you assess risk in your life?
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Is this gonna be a problem, is this gonna be a trouble, is this gonna cause issues? We all do it and I am not at all suggesting in this message, by the way, you could hear me saying the wrong thing,
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I'm not suggesting that everyone who locks their doors or locks the car when they go into the store or locks their house at night or has a retirement account to trust in and rest in,
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I'm not suggesting that that's a sinful way to live. That you're lacking trust in God by doing some of those simple things that God has given us to protect.
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But Israel, remember, I think that we can push things to a line and I think that's different for each one of us and it's something that we have to wrestle through in ourselves, you know when you are depending on the externals and not on God.
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I can't define that line for you, I can tell you that Israel crossed it here and you have to wrestle with that on your own but Israel had entered a covenant relationship with the
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Almighty that said, we will be your people and you will be our God and then
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God said, I've got your back if you'll trust me. If you'll trust me, I've got you.
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And they grew tired of trusting him. And this is a good place to pause in our own hearts and consider just simply this as application, are you trusting in God?
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Which is such a generic question that of course you want to answer yes to it. But I want to just point out and let us sit in this for a minute, we can be just as thick as the
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Israelites were here. Many of us want to judge them and go, oh, how dumb can you be? I mean, you're getting deliverance at every turn and God's been faithful to you down through the ages.
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He can point to time and time again. We can read the stories and go, wow, faithful God, right? But it wasn't as comfortable for them living in it.
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And so we can be just as thick. You know, God has rescued us time and time again. How many of you would testify that you could share some stories about how
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God has delivered you? He's rescued you from yourself most often, right? He's rescued me from myself.
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And then we decide an issue comes up, a challenge comes up and you know what, God? Thanks for all the deliverance. I'm gonna just do this my own way.
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I got this one, I got this one. That's what Israel's doing here, right? It's just that, yeah, okay, maybe this isn't a big enough deal to bring to your attention,
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God. I can handle this one. What areas is that true for you?
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What areas have you adopted the all -American phrase, I guess if it's gonna get done,
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I'm gonna have to do it myself? You know the phrase? If it's gonna get done, I guess
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I'm gonna have to do it. What areas of your life are you tired of trusting
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God? Some of the big areas that I can point to that are just, there's all kinds of issues that swirl around these categories of areas of life in our culture where it becomes difficult to trust
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God for people in our culture, for us if we're honest, for people in the church. Can you trust God with your sexuality?
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Can you trust Him with your finances, with your raising children, with your future just in general?
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Can you trust what the word of God says, and do you believe that it truly is in your best interest, that He really loves you and cares for you and knows what is best for you regarding sexuality, regarding finances, regarding the way that you treat your spouse, with a husband loving his wife and a wife respecting her husband?
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Do you trust that God's way of doing things and what He reveals to us is enough and it is right and it is good?
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We all know, I think, to a person in this room, we all know how easy it is to slide into a life by sight instead of by faith, living by seeing versus by trusting.
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But what are we called to do? To walk by faith and not by sight. And the breaking point for Israel, we find out in this text, was actually
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Nahash the mutilator of Ammon, the guy from two weeks ago. In verse 12, we find the place where Israel finally rejected
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God's plan of raising up judges. They grew tired of a God who was more concerned with growing their faith than a
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God who just gave them what they wanted. They really just wanted what they wanted and you could take the whole growing our faith thing off to the side, you could have that.
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Just give us what we want and we want deliverance, we want to be saved. So when Nahash came up against them, they said, give us a king.
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That was the context for their entire quest. They saw Nahash marching against Gad and Reuben and surrounding
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Jabesh -Gilead and they said, this is the one, we can't wait on this one.
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We can't wait for God's deliverance, we have to have a king to save us in this. So, look at the end of verse 12.
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They said, give us a king, but the Lord, your God, was your king.
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You already had a king, says Samuel. You already had one. The greatest and most powerful of all kings, the king over all kings, but you grew tired of him and you wanted an earthly king.
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And so now they have the king that they chose. One of their liking,
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Saul, the tallest of Israel, more handsome than all. Gaston, no,
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Saul, powerful when the spirit rushed upon him. A man who could compete with the earthly kings around him.
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A man to cry out and rally the entire nation around his cause.
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Powerful when the spirit came. This indictment comes with a warning.
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They rejected God as their king and they wanted an earthly king. But this transfer of power to an earthly king matters very little if they do not continue to serve the
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Lord anyways. If the people and the king follow the Lord, if they revere him and serve him and obey his commandments,
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God says it's gonna go well for you if you do this. Samuel assures them that there's a pathway to a good future for Israel, but it's still wrapped up in following God.
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It is not enough for them to have a king ruling over them. They need the spirit. They need to love
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God and to obey him and to honor him. Rejecting his leadership on an earthly plane doesn't give them the freedom to do whatever they want.
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They are still held accountable to the covenant. And so if they rebel against him and his commandments, then his hand will be against both
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Israel and their king now. Getting the king wasn't the solution. They're still under the rule and reign of God.
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You see, the covenant of God always comes with warnings. I wanna be clear about that because we're about to see this thunderstorm thing that can be a little confusing in the middle of this text.
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It always comes with warnings, Old Covenant and New Covenant. In the Old Covenant with Israel, it came in what was a very straightforward warning to the people.
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Honor me and I will protect you and provide for you. Dishonor me and it's gonna go tough on you until you come back in line with the covenant that you've pledged to.
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But now in this covenant of grace that we live in now, we don't quite know what to do with the warnings.
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Would you agree with me on that? Like, I mean, if God warns me, I thought I was saved in Christ. Don't I, am I, is it once saved, always saved?
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Do I have anything to fear now that I'm in Jesus? What's the scoop with that? The fundamental warning looks like this.
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Accept my grace, says the Almighty, and you will be saved. Accept my son and come to me through the way that I have set for you and you will be saved.
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Or reject my grace and be damned. There's still a direct warning.
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And both the Old Covenant and the New Covenant entail coming to God on His terms.
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And the way, the truth, and the life, no one, no one, no one comes to the
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Father except through Jesus Christ. A warning, a pathway,
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His terms, the way that He has set it forth. Both covenants require a heart moving toward God, but both covenants make a provision for a heart that desires to flee
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God. Both covenants allow for a person to run away from Him and ignore
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Him and reject Him. So God gives them here in our text a visual and startling reminder of what rejection of Him looks like.
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In verses 17 through 19, Samuel concludes his case against the people of God with a display of God's anger against the people for their rejection of Him.
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The wheat harvest places this at the dry season in Israel, a time when rain would not occur in Israel.
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That's why there's a mention of the grain harvest. As a matter of fact, at the end, you want the grain to dry out before harvesting and a hard rain or wind could damage the crop and the people could starve to death if the crop was lost.
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Rain during the wheat harvest would be about as uncommon, and one commentary said, as uncommon as snow in Miami.
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Now, it's not impossible, but highly unlikely that you would have rain during this season in Israel.
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Samuel calls down a thunderstorm that threatens the crops and wakes Israel up to the rejection of their God. What have they done?
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And the people actually repent in fear. Now, what do we do with that, repent in fear?
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Again, still thinking about our covenant situation, where we live, is there room for fear in the life of a
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Christian? Well, I would say to you that there's never a poor reason to repent of your sin. There's never a bad reason to run the other way from sin.
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It's always a good, whatever it is that motivates you to run from sin, run away, run away, run away.
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Flee it, wherever it is. The people in our text repent in fear.
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And here's the reason why I would say fear is a reasonable motivator. Consider that the number one response of God towards sin, always, consistently, and forever is one terrifying word.
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Wrath. God's response, God's well thought out, not some kind of wrath like somebody cut me off in traffic and now
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I've got to get back at you kind of. This is a well thought through plan of God in his character.
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It's part of fundamentally who he is. God doesn't lose his temper. God just has wrath towards sin.
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Toward that which is other and essentially foreign to his holiness and his righteousness and his majesty and everything that he is.
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He is consistent and he is unchanging. So when we sin, whatever sin it is, when we sin, fear is a reasonable and right gut level response.
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Even for those who are covered by the blood of Christ, it's reasonable that we would recognize the wrath of a holy
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God against sin and that we would actually have some level of fear. So fear is routinely held out as a motivation to turn away from sin, to confess it, but to seek shelter in his grace.
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I don't want to leave it there, the text doesn't leave it there, but I want to let us sit in this for just one moment. You see, three quarters of this text, the lion's share of this text is taken up with a case against God's people, against us.
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They've grown tired of him. And who in this room could not admit that there have been times in your life where you've grown tired of him?
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We've grown tired of him. They didn't like his ways. So they rejected him as their rightful director.
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They fired him as CEO and sought a man that they thought would lead them better. But before we move on and set ourselves free by the warm fuzzies of grace that we're so familiar with in the
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New Testament and from motivational posters and coffee mugs and anything else that you could buy at a Christian bookstore, before we move on to that territory, please, oh please,
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Recast, let the weight of this text sit on your shoulders. Don't move so quick to grace that you miss the point of the first three quarters of this text that we're reading right here, right now.
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Because let me just tell you, without a picture of the darkness, you don't really understand what you have with the light.
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Without the picture of your depravity, you don't understand the amazing, glorious, beautiful grace that has been given to you.
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Without knowing the weight of your sin against a holy and righteous God, what has been given to you at the cross, take it or leave it, right?
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When you recognize what he's doing for you there. Let the weight rest on you.
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You're indicted. We're indicted in this text. There's a legal case against us a mile thick.
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What kind of hope do we have in our own strength? What kind of hope do we have if our record is kept against us?
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If that scroll is unrolled, I don't know how long yours is, I don't wanna see how long mine is.
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It's a long, long, long list of sins that I have committed. And if on that day it gets read, well that might add some meaning to the word eternity.
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It's a terrifying thought. You're indicted, I'm indicted. We are all guilty as charged.
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I grow tired of serving God. I accepted him as my king.
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And in moments where I'm at my high point and life is going well and I'm in a good relationship with God and things are going great,
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I accept him as my king and I wanna honor him and I wanna do what he wants me to do. And a few days later
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I wonder, how in the world did I get on this throne? Again, I thought I just asked him to be my king a few days ago.
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And here I am on the throne again. I appoint him as my
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CEO and the next thing I know, I'm calling the shots. How did I get behind this desk again?
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We've all betrayed him and we've all rejected him. And I wanna suggest to you that if you re -read 1
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Samuel chapter 12 and you re -read 1 Samuel 1 through 12, you see a
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God who feels this. This isn't just some intellectual thing that he's going through.
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He's rejected by his people. He feels it when we're tired of him. And that makes what comes next shine all the brighter.
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Don't miss this first point. We're all indicted. We're all guilty. And the case is stacked against us.
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And that makes verses 20 through 25 shine all the brighter. From verses 20 through 25 we see the case of God for his people.
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And that is simply that even when we get tired of God, he never gets tired of us.
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The people feared for their lives in the text when they even got a glimpse of God's righteous wrath towards their sin is represented in this thunderstorm.
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And they plead with Samuel, oh please, oh please, lest our crops fail and we die, please intercede for us.
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Pray to God on our behalf. We have sinned. We have added sin upon sin and even added this sin of rejecting him and growing tired of him on top of all of the other sins that we've committed.
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Please pray and ask that he would relent and accept our repentance. Look at how
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God responds. In verse 20, look at it. Put your eyes on it. He calms their fears.
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In the midst of this storm he says, all right, don't be afraid.
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You have indeed done all this evil. And notice that God doesn't go, it's not like, forget it.
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I mean, I know it wasn't that big of a sin. It wasn't that big of a deal. He says, no, you have done all of these sins.
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Don't be afraid, but you have indeed done all of this evil. It's true, the accounting is not false.
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You are indeed rightly indicted by the Almighty. Yet do not turn aside from following the
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Lord. In other words, you have indeed sinned grievously, but don't let that stop you from following the
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Lord and serving him with your heart recast. You have sinned. The list against you is big.
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It is enough to indict you for eternity. You see, often when we sin, though, we're tempted to run away from God instead of toward God.
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But the real movement needs to be always away from our sin and toward the
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Almighty God of mercy. Some people seek to be saved from God, and they run to their destruction.
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They spend all their days running from the Almighty, and in the end, God will oblige them with the one thing that many in our world most desire, and that is separation from him.
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What they want most is to be apart from him, apart from his rules, apart from his authority, apart from his rightful reign over them, and so he says, you can have that.
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But some will trust him. Some will see in him our only hope, our only help, our only forgiveness, our only hope for mercy.
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And so we run to him based on what he has revealed of himself and his word. How many of you think it's a logical thing to run away from somebody that you've wronged?
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Do you get that? I mean, what do the kids do when they break the vase? They run, they hide, right?
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That's a gut -level sinful response. Why would anybody ever turn and run to the one that they've offended and go to them for clemency?
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Well, I would suggest to you it's because this Bible reveals a gracious and eager to forgive you
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God. If you would humble yourself and run to him and say, please forgive me for the sins
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I have committed against you. He's eager to forgive. I love this.
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This verse is one of my favorite verses in the entire New Testament. It's one that I live by. It's one that gives me hope.
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It's one of the Beatitudes. It's blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
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Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Now, you don't hunger and thirst after a big meal, right?
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You haven't got it yet. You haven't achieved it yet. You know you don't have it yet when you're hungry and when you're thirsty.
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It's because you want for water. You want for food. You don't have it fully yet.
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Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be satisfied.
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They will be satisfied. Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness enough to run to the one who is righteous for it?
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The case for God's people is that God is a safe place to run to when you have sinned. He is eager to forgive anyone who would run to him in genuine humility and say,
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I've sinned and I need a new start. He's the God of new starts. The problem is when we in our arrogance refuse to come to him and seek his forgiveness.
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Further in the text, Samuel warns us as God's people to stay on the right path. Do not turn aside after empty things that cannot profit or deliver you, he says.
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God is the only place to turn for deliverance. And I would suggest to you that we must look really silly and sad to the eyes of God when we seek deliverance in the very things that would enslave us.
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You know what I'm talking about? The things that enslave us are the things that we run to often to try to assuage the feelings of guilt that we have or to push down, to try to medicate the pain that we feel when we've let ourselves down or let
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God down or let others down around us. There will always be some people who will turn to run to God for mercy but get distracted on the way there.
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It's very easy to get distracted by the things that really never help us to draw closer to him.
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Alcohol, drugs, sex, religion, relationships, entertainment, self -improvement, wealth, health that amounts to trust in the world or even mindless debates and unfruitful doctrines that never quite get to the heart of God's goodness and love and care for us.
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All kinds of things arrayed to try to masquerade as solutions that will never satisfy.
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But the hope, the true hope of this text is found in verse 22.
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Here in this text, the rejected God rises up from his throne before the people as the bigger man.
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Rejected, jilted, scorned, we're tired of you.
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We don't like the way you do things. We want new management. We want a new CEO and he rises up and he declares in the face of that rejection,
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I will not forsake my people. You spit in my face,
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I will not reject you. Do you hear that, church? Is that your
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God? Does he love you with that kind of love? He won't quit on you.
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He is not giving up. And it isn't because you're awesome.
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Not at all. As a matter of fact, it is against the backdrop of your routine rejection of him that he declares this over you.
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It's in the very face of you saying, I'm tired of you. He's like, I'm not letting you go. I'm not giving up on you.
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And you're like, nope, I'm gonna go a different direction. Nope, I'm not giving up on you, I said. It is for his great name that he is committed to his people, church.
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He has placed his own integrity on the line in his relationship with you.
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And he will not waver from his covenant over his people. And look at the end of verse 22.
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I love this. I love the word choice here. It has pleased the Lord. It has made him happy.
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What have the people done in three quarters of this text? Is about their rejection of him. It has pleased the
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Lord to make you. It has made him happy to make you a people for himself. God is happy to have you.
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And the depth of the rejection, as the transition of power goes from divine theocracy to human monarchy, we're tired of your rule, we're gonna go with Saul.
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We see here in this Israelite declaration of independence from the rule and reign of the Almighty, he declares,
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I'm happy to make you a people for myself. The case against God's people is great.
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Every one of us is guilty. Every one of us is indicted as those whose affections for God are weak, easily torn to other things.
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We whose faith is easily, often, routinely placed in foolish things. We have this one thing that matters most as a case for us as God's people.
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Our God is faithful. He is faithful. What is the redeeming grace of this mess called church?
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Only that God, who is faithful, is at the center of it all. And in the last three verses,
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Samuel commits to continue to pray. He says, it would be sin for me to not continue to pray for you as a people. And he commits to instruct them in the good, in the right way that they should go.
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In the right way for a sinful, faithless, and broken people to move on when the case is so strong against us is to once again renew our commitment to fear and think respect and awe of God, to serve him faithfully with all of our hearts, and to give him credit for the good things that he has done for us.
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Fear the Lord, serve him faithfully, and live in gratitude. And as the last verse says, do not persist in wickedness.
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So I've sprinkled the application throughout this text, and I wanna encourage you to consider what the Lord is saying to you as an individual this morning.
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Maybe he said something to you that I didn't say, but you got it out of the text, and I'd encourage you to run with that. But I wanna bring our focus to one big point as we come to communion together this morning.
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Ask yourself this question. Fundamentally, thinking back to the root issue, they're tired of God.
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Ask yourself, am I satisfied with the Lord's way? At the fullness of time,
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God brought forth his final deliverer, the one who will rescue his people from sin and death in the end.
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And is that enough for you? Maybe we'd like something more contemporary. Maybe we want a specific kind of deliverance that involves physical health, or financial health, or maybe we're just tired of honoring
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God by keeping our vows. Life gets routine and mundane, and maybe someone here is ready to just mix it up and try something new, and that's where you're at in life, and you're kind of been doing the same thing over and over again, and sure, you've seen
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God deliver you, but man, it's just getting kind of boring out here. I wanna do something different. I wanna do something new. I wanna do something sinful.
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I wanna do something empty. I encourage everyone here who is a follower of Christ, feel free to come to the table, one of the tables set up in the back to take the cracker, and the cracker to remember his body broken for us, and the juice to remember his blood shed for us, but only come to that table after you're ready to say,
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Jesus is king enough for me. His deliverance is all that I need.
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His deliverance is all that I need. That's gonna be up on the screen, and I want you to pray, and I want you to really think that through before you get up and go to that table.
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Now, I'm not saying you can't go up to that table if you can't say that, but I'm just saying, take that in and consider that. Jesus is king enough for me.
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His deliverance is all that I need, and if you're here and you've not yet accepted the deliverance that Jesus provides, then
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I'd encourage you to skip communion, take in this song, and then come and talk with me afterwards about how you can run to God and follow him as your savior and king.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your mercy and your grace. You have been so kind to us, and the list against us, our indictment is strong.
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It's a lock, solid case, and we are deserving of penalty. We are deserving of punishment. We are deserving of condemnation.
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So your covenant to make us your people through the blood of Jesus Christ is all the more amazing. The work that he did for us on the cross,
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I pray we never get over that, that we don't graduate on from the cross to something, the heavier things of the faith.
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It's always about the cross. It's always about his sacrifice. It's about living out the gospel, believing it, trusting it, and letting it impact the way that we interact with others around us in life.
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And Father, as we have an opportunity to reflect, I pray that Christ would indeed be king enough for each one of us, that the salvation that he offers would be enough for each and every one of us, that we would trust you as our king.
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We would not grow tired of you, but we would grow enamored with you. We would grow more and more in awe of you each and every day.