15th September 2023

15th September 2023


Pray (ACts)


Read - 1 Samuel 13:13-23


Message Alan Burke 


It started so well for Saul, while God had given him everything he needed to be a good king, to rule over the people, for God had called him, anointed him, equipped him, while he had everything he needed, as he was set up for success, and the early signs were promising it didn’t continue that way. We pick up just after Saul had failed to wait for Samuel. He had shown his disobedience, his failure to live according to God’s ways, he wasn’t serving the Lord with all his heart (12:20), the did not fear the Lord and serve him faithfully with all his heart (24).


As Samuel rebukes Saul and tells him because of his foolishness in how he did not keep the commands of the Lord and as a result his kingdom would not endure we get to the crux of the problem, the heart of Saul. We may want to defend Saul, after all if it was someone we knew a family member, we’d be saying but you don’t know the stress they were under, you don’t know what they had to deal with in that situation, which of course is true but ultimately in those times we see where our hope lies, where our heart is, is it in the Lord trusting in him or is it in ourselves because the temptation that we often face is to trust in ourselves, to trust in things, or our own strength but not in God. And this is as much true of us as individuals as it is for us as a church, as the people of God, we must be those who look to God and trust in his way. Ultimately Saul was showing that he was when his back was against the wall that he failed to trust in God and he sinned against God as a result. God would replace Saul with a man after his own heart. We know that man was David, David made plenty of down right stupid decisions but he was a man after God’s own heart because when confronted with his sin he repented of it.


Saul took things into his own hands, he was left with six hundred men, he would loose the kingdom he was entrusted with by the Lord. He should have looked to the Lord, every Israelite king was to look to the Lord, beside each one of those kings that followed Saul there was a prophet of the Lord speaking God’s word into the situation, but Saul rejected God’s ways and followed his own. On this we must never think to ourselves that ignoring God’s word will not have consequences, for what we do when we ignore it while we may try to pretend that it is not the case we are actually disobeying his word, Saul disobeyed and lost a great deal. For the believer, if you know and love the Lord Jesus Christ you can be certain that you will not loose your salvation but you can loose many earthly blessing, you may spend years living with the consequences of your sin that may be painful and a constant reminder of your failure to have a heart for God and to trust him in your past but in the present know that you have been forgiven, forgiven because of Christ Jesus. 


Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC
Q47 What is forbidden in the first commandment?
The first commandment forbiddeth the denying, (Ps. 14:1) or not worshipping and glorifying the true God as God, (Rom. 1:21) and our God; (Ps. 81:10–11) and the giving of that worship and glory to any other, which is due to him alone. (Rom. 1:25–26)
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