Waiting on The Lord

[00:00:06] Our Heavenly Father, we ask that you would bless us now with your word and spirit, that you would carry us in your hands into salvation, into deeper fellowship with you, into deeper knowledge of your person, your character and your works, your nature as triune. God, carry us deeper into your love, into your peace, into your righteousness, that we might praise you and share you and be built up according to you. Our hope is in you and in you alone. So save your people, your own flock. Bless us with your Shepherd's care, even right now, and of course forever. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. [00:01:06] Please remain standing and turn your attention to 1st Samuel 13. [00:01:33] Saul has been chosen, anointed, established. And now we see him acting more and more in his official capacity as king, although sadly not acting very well. Let's hear God's word. [00:01:50] Saul lived for one year and then became king. And when he had reigned for two years over Israel, Saul chose 3000 men of Israel. 2000 were with Saul and Michmash and the hill country of Bethel. And a thousand were with Jonathan in Gibeah of Benjamin. The rest of the people he sent home, every man to his tent. [00:02:10] Jonathan defeated the garrison of the Philistines that was at Geba. And the Philistines heard of it. And Saul blew the trumpet throughout all the land saying, let the Hebrews hear. And all Israel heard it and said that Saul had defeated the garrison of the Philistines. And also that Israel had become a stench to the Philistines. And the people were called out to join Saul at Gilgal. And the Philistines mustered to fight with with Israel 30,000 chariots and 6,000 horsemen and troops, like the sand on the seashore in the multitude, they came up and encamped at Michmash, to the east of Beth Aven. [00:02:49] When the men of Israel saw that they were in trouble, for the people were hard pressed. The people hid themselves in caves and in holes and in rocks and in tombs and in cisterns. [00:03:03] And some Hebrews crossed the fords of the Jordan to the land of Gad and Gilead. Saul was still in Gilgal, and all the people followed him, trembling. [00:03:14] He waited seven days, the time appointed by Samuel. But Samuel did not come to Gilgal, and the people were scattering from him. So Saul said, bring the burnt offerings here to me, and the peace offerings. And he offered the burnt offering. As soon as he had finished offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came. And Samuel went out to meet him and greet him. Samuel said, what have you done? And Saul said, when I saw the people were scattering from me, and that you did not come within the days appointed and that the Philistines had mustered at Michmash. I said, now the Philistines will come down against me at Gilgal. And I have not sought the favor of the Lord. [00:03:56] So I forced myself and offered the burnt offering. Samuel said to Saul, you have done foolishly. You have not kept the command of the Lord your God with which he commanded you. For then the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever. But now your kingdom shall not continue. The Lord has sought out a man after his own heart. And the Lord has commanded him to be prince over his people because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you. And Samuel arose and went from Gilgal. The rest of the people went up after Saul to meet the army. They went from Gilgal to Gibeah of Benjamin. And Saul numbered the people who were with him, about 600 men. And Saul and Jonathan his son and the people who were present with them stayed at Geba of Benjamin. But the Philistines encamped at Michmash. And the raiders came out of the camp of the Philistines in three companies. [00:04:51] One company turned toward Ophrah to the land of Shual, another company toward Beth Horon. And another company turned toward the border that looks down on the valley of Zeboiim toward the wilderness. [00:05:03] Now there was no blacksmith to be found throughout all the land of Israel. For the Philistines said, lest the Hebrews make themselves swords or spears. [00:05:14] But every one of the Israelites went down to the Philistines to sharpen his plowshare, his mattock, his axe, his sickle. And the charge was 2/3 of a shekel for the plowshares and for the mattocks, and a third of a shekel for sharpening the axes and for setting the goads. So on the day of the battle, there was neither sword nor spear found in the hand of any of the people with Saul and Jonathan. But Saul and Jonathan, his son, had them. [00:05:43] And the garrison of the Philistines went out to the pass of Michmash, sends the reading of God's word. You may be seated. [00:06:22] We're going to do some careful reading of this passage this morning because there's a lot of really excellent details that help us to understand what's going on, but also understand what's going on in Saul's heart and to think about what the Lord is doing in the midst of all this and similarly, what he does in the midst of our own lives. [00:06:44] One of the details that we have comes from the narrator who tells us that Saul had waited the allotted time. [00:06:57] This is in verse eight. [00:06:59] The narrator tells us he waited seven days, the time appointed by Samuel. But Samuel did not come to Gilgal. [00:07:07] All right, so first a little background, right? Let's set the stage for this, for the story that's going on here. To understand that particular verse, we have to go back. We won't spend a lot of time there. But just very briefly to chapter 10, verse 8. So just a few pages over in chapter 10, verse 8, Samuel, as he is anointing Saul as king, gives him various instructions. And in 10, eight, he says after some other things, then go down before me to Gilgal. And behold, I am coming down to you to offer burnt offerings and to sacrifice peace offerings. Seven days you shall wait until I come to you and show you what you shall do. [00:07:47] So Samuel is acting as a prophet of the Lord here, perhaps as a priest as well, in offering these sacrifices. But the particular office is as a prophet. He is going to tell, after offering these sacrifices, he's going to tell Saul what to do. [00:08:07] So you got the scene is set, right? Samuel says, go wait seven days. After that time I will meet you there. I will offer these things. I'll tell you what to do. Now remember how the context in which Samuel's saying that, he's saying it as the one who is anointing Saul as king. He's saying it as the one who has been a faithful prophet and judge over Israel for quite some time now, right? Whose own story was very interesting. And we won't go back to that. But Samuel is the one in charge. He is the one who God has been using to speak and to proclaim things. All right, so that's the first background piece that we want to notice. [00:08:46] Now what happens though Samuel did not come to Gilgal. Now this is helpful to notice. We're working on our exegetical skills here. This is helpful to notice because it's not Samuel saying this. [00:09:05] So we couldn't say, well, Samuel's making excuses or something like that, right? It's not Saul saying it as though. It's like Saul's perception of time. This is the narrator telling us in a more objective way what has happened. Right? And he tells us what happens. He tells us that Saul waited seven days, the time appointed by Samuel. So we get a thumbs up for Samuel and his instructions. But Samuel did not come to Gilgal and the people were scattering from Saul. So that's Saul's situation. Try to put yourself in his shoes for a second, right? You did what you were supposed to do. You waited your seven days. You're. And things are not going well. The people here are scattering from Saul. Or if you look at verse 7, here's how it's put, it says, and all the people followed Saul, followed him, trembling, right? This is typically not the kind of leadership that leaders aspire to, right? That all of their followers are following them, trembling and scared and frightened. Frightened things are not good. [00:10:13] Well, why are they not good? Why are the people scattering away from Saul? And remember what it said about scattering? [00:10:21] We read it in verse 6. [00:10:24] When the men of Israel saw that they were in trouble, for the people were hard pressed, they hid themselves. They hid and they ran, right? They hid themselves in caves, in holes, in rocks, in tombs. They were willing to go into places where people were buried, go into tombs and cisterns, places where water was collected, possibly toilets, these kinds of places. They were willing to go anywhere they could to get away, to hide and to be away from the Philistines. That were as many as the sand on the seashore. I can never say that. Gotta practice. Sand on the seashore. [00:11:04] Imagine looking out, right? Imagine driving down the i10 and all of a sudden you're like, what's that cloud? [00:11:11] And then you look, you look more. That is not a cloud. And is it dust? It's not dust. And then as you get closer, closer, you realize that's people. [00:11:21] Imagine seeing as many as the sand on the seashore. People coming at you with chariots and horses and weapons. And that brings us to another problem. [00:11:33] When we imagine all these people, this great army, 3,000 men, Samuel or Saul, called 2,000 to himself, a thousand to Jonathan. [00:11:45] We read that there weren't any weapons. [00:11:48] If you're imagining army against army, you want to make sure you picture one army as having weapons and the other army as having two weapons, one for Saul, one for Jonathan. [00:12:00] Rough, right? And what was the reason for this? Well, the Philistines created this sort of economic supply chain disaster where they were the only ones who had blacksmiths. And it wasn't just weapons, it was agriculture. Plowshares, goads, these other necessary tools for just daily production of daily living, were also unavailable. Well, okay, you could go, but then you'd have to pay an arm and a leg to get it done. So functionally, it didn't happen. [00:12:34] The Philistines are killing it. [00:12:38] They have the weapons, they have the manpower. Now they're mad because Jonathan just took out a garrison. [00:12:47] And so they are rising up against their enemy. And they're going to come down hard. They're going to come down very hard on Saul and his people. The people are trembling. Saul is waiting. They're getting closer and closer. How long can I wait? [00:13:05] He. He waited seven days. The time appointed by Samuel. Samuel did not come. So Saul says, forget it. [00:13:13] I'll offer the sacrifices, I'll make the decisions. We'll move on from here. [00:13:20] Now, it's easy to be sympathetic to Saul in this situation, right? We're putting ourselves in his shoes. [00:13:26] Really tough, right? Really, really difficult. These are some of your first decisions as king. You don't want to get it wrong. People's lives are on the line. You're called to protect your country. [00:13:39] But there is a very important detail that we have about the length of time and another detail that we have about the length of time that Saul waited. [00:13:49] Saul says in verse nine, bring the burnt offerings here to me, and the peace offerings. And he offered the burnt offering. And as soon as he had offered, as soon as he had finished offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came. [00:14:03] You know, you could almost imagine Saul sort of looking at his watch. He's like, he said, seven days. So I'm going to wait seven days. Tick, tick, tick, start the fire, right? Maybe Saul followed the letter of the law. Maybe. He certainly didn't follow the spirit of the law. And certainly there were other options that he had. He was told to wait until the prophet of the Lord came to receive the instructions from the Lord. [00:14:34] He was told to wait, to be told what to do before doing it. Now, if the one who made the heavens and the earth, who rescued out of Egypt and has drowned great armies and established great kingdoms, if he was not the one on your side, then sure, you know, scramble around, do whatever you need to do to get the job done, I suppose. But when God has told you explicitly and shown it over and over, most recently in this great. Remember in chapter 12, the big thunderstorm, and everybody was terrified because of how powerful God was. And they said, samuel, pray for us, and all these sort of things, this is who has said, I will not forsake you. I will take care of you. [00:15:23] All Sam, Saul needs to do is wait. [00:15:27] Yeah. In an earthly, like on this level of things, without any consideration of God, without any consideration of his power, his might, his faithfulness, it's a desperate, desperate situation. And you can see why he might need to act, but it really only accounts for a very small percentage of the actual context that's going on. If Saul excludes God from his calculus about wisdom, his decision about what to do next. And he says, well, I'm just going to have to disobey him to get the job done. [00:16:05] He's failed, and not in a small way. [00:16:09] And I think if we're honest and we truly believe what we say we believe about God, it wasn't a small way or even an understandable way in which he failed. He failed in a massive way and failed in a way that, sure, it's understandable on sort of this very small level if you're not thinking of God as being his protector and helper and keeper, but when you consider that very, very large fact, infinitely large, we might say we can, you know, sort of hit our palms against our heads and say, saul, what are you doing? [00:16:49] Maybe you should pray about it, right? Maybe you should just pause a moment and say, oh, Lord, where are you? You said your prophet was going to be here. He's not here. I don't know what to do. Help me. [00:17:04] And could God have helped him? [00:17:07] Could God have vanquished all of the Philistines in an instant without any trouble or any work at all on Saul's part? Sure. [00:17:18] He's done it before. [00:17:20] Can God end or protect his people? Remember when we sing a mighty fortress is our God, we sing Lord Sabaoth, his name. [00:17:31] That word, Sabaoth, isn't Sabbath. It's a Hebrew word transliterated that means Lord of hosts, Lord of armies. [00:17:40] There are a hundred million plus angels at God's right hand ready to serve him and minister to his people and do anything that he needs them to do. And that's just the angels. That's just a means. One means by which God might protect his people? Saul is not thinking about any of that. He just watches his clock, sets the fires, burns the sacrifices. Oh, Samuel, this is embarrassing. Now what? [00:18:11] Samuel asks him this question, what have you done? [00:18:15] And there's excuses, right? You kind of hear the run on mouth here. When I saw that the people were scatting for me and that you did not come within the days of appointed and the Philistines were encamped in Mikbash, and I just, ah. [00:18:29] He says I was forced to do it. Mmm, not really. No one forced you to disobey God? No one forced you not to pray? No one forced you not to wait? [00:18:46] What happens as a result of Saul's lack of faith? [00:18:52] What happens as a result of Saul's impatience, of Saul's taking things into his own hands and just getting the job done because it needs to get done, what happens? [00:19:04] Verse 13, Samuel says, you have done foolishly. [00:19:08] You've not kept the command of the Lord your God, with which he commanded you. [00:19:13] For then the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever. But now your kingdom shall not continue. [00:19:21] And he, the Lord, will find another king. [00:19:24] Everything that was just set up in the previous chapters is all undone. [00:19:32] Saul's kingdom in his first moments, his first acts, his first job as a king, it's all undone. Why? Because the principle of God's kingship over his people must be established on obedience. [00:19:48] It must be established on the king's willingness and desire and actual fulfilling of the law of obeying the Lord. Because God is not going to rule his people through an unruly king. [00:20:02] God is not going to protect his people through a king who constantly is telling them to leave or forget or ignore or neglect the God who is over them, the true king, the one who has established himself over them forever. [00:20:20] And so Saul's impatience, Saul's impatience ends in the loss of the thing that he had just received. [00:20:33] All this, I think, teaches us a very important truth, and that's that even in times of great uncertainty, we must put our faith and our trust in the Lord. [00:20:45] And sometimes that means patience, sometimes that means waiting on him. A theme that you brothers who are going to attend the men's breakfast on Saturday, we'll have another opportunity to think about our theme. There is also waiting on the Lord. [00:21:06] Do you remember Samuel's point back in chapter 12, just the previous chapter, the groundwork on watch, on which much of the relationship between the king and the people and God is all established? What was his main point? [00:21:19] If you were here with us last week, try to recall that to mind. What was his main point? His main point was that the king and the people were to serve the Lord, to serve the Lord with their whole hearts. [00:21:32] You can look at the end of Chapter 12, for example. I think it happens three different times, said in different ways explicitly. And then at the end of chapter 12, Samuel says, only fear the Lord and serve him faithfully with all your heart. For consider what great things he has done for you. But if you still do wickedly, you shall be swept away, both you and your king. [00:21:58] They had wanted this king because they thought, oh, this king is going to be someone who can protect us against the Philistines. And God says, sure, as long as he obeys me, as long as he follows me. But if you're seeking a king to rule you out from out from out from under my authority, it's not going to work. In fact, you and your king will be sworn, swept away often by the very people that they were seeking to be like or to be saved from. [00:22:31] That was the thing on which all of this was established. [00:22:35] Saul needed to and failed to remember that point here, just in this next chapter. [00:22:43] Samuel's point in chapter 12 was, Trust in the power and the faithfulness of God and you will be okay. [00:22:54] He gave various reasons for that, as one of them was the God's previous work in bringing them out of Egypt. [00:23:02] Another was the sign that he gave them of this great storm that came at the harvest time. [00:23:11] Another after that sign was Samuel giving the reasons for why the Lord would do this because he has established them as his people and he's promised not to forsake them. [00:23:27] All of these lessons can be just multiplied and are exemplified and illustrated all throughout the Bible. The further we go on in the Bible, the more facts and evidence get piled and piled onto these things, which many ways are certainly already enough. But the Lord just gives more and more and more and more to show us how trustworthy he is, how powerful he is. [00:23:55] That's where Saul's safety really was. A mighty fortress was his God, and our God too. That's where our safety is. That's where our protection is. That's where our hope is. [00:24:12] We get off track when we think that things are different than that. [00:24:18] When we look at our world that is full of all kinds of uncertainty and say, yeah, it's just too tough. I got to just handle things on my own. [00:24:28] The world is very uncertain. Paul's and changing and moving. Saul's situation Here in chapter 13 wasn't the last time someone faced a moment of not knowing what to do and not having the information that they needed to act. [00:24:48] Turn with me if you will, to James, chapter four. [00:24:55] Here, James underlines this uncertainty and lack of control that we have in the world. [00:25:11] Just one way. There's many other ways and angles to come about this or come at this. James, chapter four, verses 13 through 16. [00:25:21] Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make profit. [00:25:29] Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. [00:25:33] What is your life for? You are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. [00:25:41] Instead you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it for him, it is a sin. [00:25:57] So a number of things James points out here. First of all, let me say something he's not saying. James is not encouraging us as Christians to establish a superstition by which we add if the Lord wills to every statement of planning or decision making and then think that that somehow sort of like, covers it and we're all good. It's about the heart, right? You can trust in the Lord and not say the words if the Lord wills. And you can also fail to trust in the Lord while saying if the Lord wills. Right. It's not a formula or a magic thing that somehow, like, gets us in and out of God's grace. Right? Certainly a good thing to say. We say it all the time. Good thing to have a part of our vocabulary and our mindsets and our. Our heart sets. Okay. But we don't want to think of it as a superstitious thing. Right? So what about our hearts? That's the question and the language that comes out of that. Do we speak and act in a way that boasts of our arrogance and pretends that we can make plans and control things in this world with such a degree of confidence that we know what's going to happen a year from now? [00:27:12] No. [00:27:13] The way James argues this is you don't even know what's gonna happen tomorrow. [00:27:17] Another point he makes is your life is like a mist that's there and then vanishes. Right? You can think about the last time you steamed something on the. Or boiled some water on the stove. All that big thing is up, all that vapor up above the water. And then where did it go? It was gone, right? This is what he compares our lives to. [00:27:39] This is how the life is. Instead, we ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. As we move into our prayer and planning off site this week with the officers, this is something that we have to keep in mind, right? We have a responsibility as officers to think carefully about what are the means that God has given us. How can we be good stewards of those? What plans can we make so that we can be intentional about what we do? But if we do it with a tight grasp that seeks to, that has in our mind, well, if we do X, Y, and, you know, A, B will necessarily and always get C, should we do it in a way that says that, says that puts all of the confidence on ourselves, or do we have in our hearts, if the Lord wills, it seems good to the Lord and to us, as they say in Acts 15 to do such and such a thing. [00:28:32] This is our heart. God calls us to be good stewards of these things. But we can never take away all volatility and uncertainty and complexity in our lives. [00:28:47] That's always going to be there, as James says here. So what will we do about it? That's the question that 1st Samuel 13 poses for us. What will we do about it? When we find ourselves in a situation where we don't know what the Lord wills, we don't know what to do, we feel like we're lacking that information. [00:29:04] Well, probably the easiest thing, brothers and sisters, to say, the easiest thing we can do, or to put it positively that we should not do, is disobey, right? To say, I don't know what to do, therefore I will disobey the Lord. You can pretty much not pretty much. You can guarantee that is the wrong response. Whatever you're going to do, take that one off the table. [00:29:27] If the Lord said, do this and you say, I'm going to do something else, because I really feel like that's going to get me the result. I need better. That is a terrible way of thinking. [00:29:39] Last night I was listening to someone who deals with academic retractions and academic integrity and fraud, listening to some interviews with people that monitor these sort of things. [00:29:51] They estimate that at a low number, 2% of academic papers have some sort of integral fraud based in them. That's based on a few things that happen, retractions, as people get caught and things like that. And say, actually, that data is not exactly what I thought it was. That kind of. They retract things also. They do it based on surveys. [00:30:14] So they ask anonymously, how many of you have cheated within your line of work? How many of you have cheated? And about. I think, if I remember right, if memory serves here, about 2% say, yeah, I have at some point produced fraudulent data or something like that for my work. When you ask them, how many people do you know who've cheated? That number goes much higher. [00:30:41] Very interesting. [00:30:44] One of the stories they tell about this, there's one scholar who got caught and busted and got in all kinds of trouble. And then he wrote a book. He wrote a book about. And he uses the metaphor of derailment. And he describes the process of how this happened. It's like, how do you go from somebody. And many of these people, interestingly, have success already. They are established, they are respected. And he describes this process of like, well, how do you go from that to all of a sudden being called out and potentially losing Your job and all these sort of things. And he describes this process. He used the analogy of driving or trains or something like that. And he says, you know, first you just start to wander a little toward the edges. [00:31:28] Then you start to, like, move outside the lane a little bit. You're like, okay, that wasn't too bad. I didn't get an accident. And you start making excuses for yourself, like, kind of like Saul did. People are scattering. Saul, Samuel didn't come. And on and on and on. Say, if the Lord wants me to protect his people, I'm kind of getting into what I would do if I were Saul, right? This is what I'm called to do. This is my job. This is not working. I will be failing at what God wants if I don't disobey him. [00:31:58] You can see it's all weird, but this is what we do, right? I'm not the first person to say things like this, right? And so you make these excuses, and you're thinking, like, well, I'll just fudge the data a little bit, because I know that the results are good. I know that the thing is going to be true. I know that the theory that I'm trying to give evidence for is right. So I'll move the data around a little bit, but the end result will be okay. [00:32:26] And then you get an award and you get some good points, and you get tenure and things like. And then you do it again. And you do it again. You know, honestly, this is just a lot easier than doing all the hard work. And it snowballs, you know, the rest of the story. And then so from. You move from changing lanes to getting, like, derailed, you know, to getting off in the ditch, falling off the cliff, and you're going, what did I do? [00:32:55] You know? And this happens in all kinds of ways. [00:32:58] In academia, in the workplace, in business, in marriages, in friendships, in sports. You pick your domain, right? [00:33:13] And we do it over and over and over again. [00:33:18] One of the lessons that I think we can take from all of this is that the pathway forward in the midst of difficulty and confusion and complexity is not to start disobeying the Lord. [00:33:33] It's not to start making excuses and coming up for reasons why this or that thing is allowable when we know it's not. [00:33:43] That feels controllable, right? All I have to do is add a zero. All I have to do is move the comma. It's so tiny. It feels so controllable. It feels so easy, Especially amidst much fear, you know, when your army's hiding in cisterns and holes and tombs. [00:34:03] But as I said at the beginning, it discounts in a massive way what it means to have God on your side. [00:34:19] And remember who he is, not just in his great power and in his faithfulness to us, but remember these are promises he's made. And remember his nature as well as one who is eternally stable, one who never changes, is immutable. We say in theology, think about the one who decides to do a thing, and it always happens, whatever he does, it pleases him. [00:34:52] Think about the blessings that he pours out on us when he promises us eternal safety, eternal provision, eternal happiness, eternal life. These aren't just sort of like fancy wishes of somebody who's gotten way outside of themselves. This is the eternal God, giving things only he could give. Who is eternally trust or who is perfectly trustworthy, who we can rely on for everything. That's who says these things. [00:35:28] If we want to think about. Probably the most important thing to think about in 1st Samuel 13, it's what the Lord does in response to Saul's sin. [00:35:42] He takes away the. Takes away the kingdom from Saul. He says, your kingdom shall not continue. [00:35:48] There will be something of a process there which will follow. And you'll want to remember all of these things that we've talked about here. As we think about the ripple effects. [00:35:59] What does it say in verse 14? The second half says this. The Lord has sought out a man after his own heart, and the Lord has commanded him. Notice it's the Lord's will that does it there to be prince over his people. [00:36:14] Because you have not kept what the Lord, your God, what the Lord commanded you. This is very similar to what God does in Genesis 3 when he curses mankind. [00:36:27] Because you have sinned here is the bad things that are going to happen to you. But I am bringing another who will do this right now. We know that the next king in Israel's history is David. And he's called a man after God's own heart. But David wasn't perfect either. And David, the Scriptures tell us, was foreshadowing yet someone else, our Savior, son of David, Jesus Christ. [00:37:01] And think about what God does here in establishing Jesus, the son of God, on the throne of man over man, on the throne of king over his people. [00:37:15] He establishes himself, the Son, being the radiance and the glory of the Father, the Son having all that the Father has in himself. [00:37:28] An amazing, amazing thing. God at this moment does not entirely sweep away all his people and all and their king. And then our Bible is only this big, right? Instead, it's this big because he continues, because he keeps this promise. And he brings to us a king who can and does accomplish all that he says he will do, do all the things that we want and need so that we might glorify God and enjoy him forever. God gives to us freely through our king, through Jesus, who never disobeyed the Lord, who was always patient when he needed to be patient, always waited for the perfect timing. There were people throughout Jesus's ministry who wanted to kill him. [00:38:20] And there were times when he rightly preserved his life by getting away. He retreated. [00:38:28] And he did that because he knew that the time had not come. [00:38:32] He neither went to the cross too early or too late. [00:38:37] He waited on the Lord. [00:38:41] And of course, he was the Lord as well, which gives us, should give us complete confidence in our king, right? In the king who now sits at the right hand of God ruling over his people, including all of us. [00:38:58] We are perfectly okay in the same world in which Saul was. With all kinds of confusion and difficulty and ignorance and sin and curse. We're still okay. [00:39:11] Not because we got it all under control, but because he's got it all under control. [00:39:16] And the things that we suffer through in this life, the things that are difficult and challenging, God uses for all kinds of things to sanctify us for one, to bring him glory for another, and to show over and over again that our faith is in the Lord and not in ourselves. [00:39:37] God's so good that he chooses even the weak and foolish things of this world to do his will to bring his glory. [00:39:49] He chooses silly, confused, bumbling, challenged people to accomplish his great ends. He chooses to use the death of his son as they mocked him, King of the Jews, putting it on the cross. He uses that to establish his eternal, glorious kingdom forever, to which you and I belong as a holy priesthood, a chosen race, a temple of the Lord in the splendor of holiness. [00:40:26] In a moment, we're going to sing hymn 500. Father, I know that all my life, which thinks about and the various different challenges and uncertainty and troubles that we face. And it responds in a way that remembers about the willing Lord or the Lord who wills it, responds instead from a place of fear and anxiety and stress and a lack of faith. The words of the hymn which we'll sing respond from a position of faith. [00:41:04] And as we sing that, we'll pray before we do. But as we sing that, I want to encourage you to think, to think about how this response in hymn 500 is so different from A response that is fearful and anxious and not trusting. [00:41:24] But don't just think about it, pray it as well. Sing it to the Lord as we put our faith in him. [00:41:32] Let's pray together. [00:41:34] Our Heavenly Father, we give you all the glory and honor and praise. [00:41:40] We know that you did not leave your people in these tombs forever. But Lord, you defeated their enemy, just as in that greater work you do not leave your people in their final tombs even after their death. But you defeat our enemy. [00:42:01] You take away the fear of death and slavery to the evil one that we might rise, that you undo or overcome the curse by taking the wrath and judgment that we deserved on yourself, and then through Christ, blessing us with life so that we rise out up from our hiding places and our fear and the curse of death on that great final day when the Lord will return in a moment of resurrection, of life everlasting, of faith completed and perfected. [00:42:43] Lord, until that day, we ask that you would help us know that all of our life is given to us perfectly from you, and that the changes that come are not changes that we need to fear, but simply trust you for. [00:43:01] And as we make our plans for the new year and all the various spheres of our life, as we set our minds to do this or that thing, whether it be several years out or just a few hours out, we ask that you would help us to be good stewards of the resources that we have from a firm faith, knowing that you are the one who gives to us what we need at the perfect time and in the perfect ways. Let our faith in you be the chief principle out of which that we do all things. [00:43:35] And we thank you Lord, for your trustworthiness, for your power, for your mercy, and giving us so much that we do not deserve. We pray this in Jesus name, Amen.