Father, I just thank you for your grace. I thank you for your goodness. I thank you that we are still free to gather and to offer worship to you. And this morning, Lord, that part of that worship is to open up your book and to ask your Holy Spirit to accompany us as we learn from it, as we read in it, as we seek your Spirit's grace and guidance to make it a permanent value. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. We are working our way through 1 Samuel. which is an historical book that basically describes Israel selecting its very first king. And we're up to the point in Israel's history where they're insisting that God provide them with a king. They've gone through lengthy periods of time with God as their leader, and now they simply want to be like all the other nations. God sovereignly knows that this is now the appropriate time to begin establishing a kingly line that Jesus is eventually going to be born through. And so he relents. He relents towards allowing a complete rejection of God as leader in order to begin to provide for the nation a king. And the man that he selects to be king is this person named Saul. And last time out, we asked the question of whether or not Saul was truly a saved individual. I mean, he started out spectacularly, but he ended tragically through suicide. And many folks wonder what his eternal fate was. And I said last time, I really have no idea. And I genuinely believe that it's none of my business. I mean, God has told us he has reserved final judgment for himself, and that's not something that we are to participate in. However, Saul has many, many lessons to teach us about the nature of our relationship to our God. And so we're introduced to Saul as king of Israel by first learning of a mundane task that he's been sent on by his father. He and his servant are sent by his dad to go seek out some lost donkeys. It's a search that leads him to connect with the prophet Samuel who's got much more in mind than simply finding some donkeys. We learned that God has spoken to Samuel ahead of time and he's told Samuel that Saul will be coming looking for his donkeys and that Saul is the one that he is to anoint as the future king of Israel. So Samuel has this chance meeting with Saul and he informs all about what he knows about the donkeys and the search that he's on and he tells Saul that God is going to give him a series of signs to prove to him that it's really God who's actually speaking to him. This is what Samuel says. He's speaking to Saul. He says, and this shall be a sign to you that the Lord has anointed you to be prince over his heritage. When you depart from me today, you will meet two men by Rachel's tomb in the territory of Benjamin at Zelzah, and they will say to you, the donkeys that you went to seek are found, and now your father has ceased to care about the donkeys and is anxious about you, saying, what shall I do about my son? Then you shall go on from there further and come to the oak of Tabor. Well Samuel then invites Saul to a dinner and he goes to the dinner and he winds up being the honored guest and afterwards he tells him that the donkeys are of no importance and what is important is this task that God has set out for him to be this first king of Israel. Samuel then physically anoints Saul with oil in a private ceremony, and he tells him, you're going to be given a series of signs so that you know that God is speaking to you. This is what Samuel tells Saul next. He says, three men going up to God at Bethel will meet you there, one carrying three young goats and another carrying three loaves of bread and another carrying a skin of wine. And they will greet you and give you two loaves of bread, which you shall accept from their hand. After that you shall come to Gibeath Elohim, where there is a garrison of the Philistines. And there, as soon as you come to the city, you will meet a group of prophets coming down from the high place with harp, tambourine, flute, and lyre before them, prophesying." So Samuel's telling Saul that in addition to all these physical signs, there's going to be an outpouring of God's Holy Spirit that will further verify this is God speaking to you. He says, then the spirit of the Lord will rush upon you and you will prophesy with them and be turned into another man. Now when these signs meet you, do what your hand finds to do for God is with you. Now you have to understand Saul, he clearly needs these signs because his life has taken such a profound turn. I mean, he's gone from looking for donkeys to being prepped for kingship. These signs that God gives so far include this chance meeting that he has with Samuel, where Samuel tells him that the donkeys have already been found, an invitation to a dinner where he becomes the main guest, and the anointing with oil by Samuel. And then he's told he's going to meet two men at Rachel's tomb who will tell him that the donkeys have been found. And he's further told he's going to meet with three different men, one carrying three goats, another carrying three loaves of bread, two of which he's going to give to him. What's going on here? God is convincing Saul that none of these events are happening by chance. He's proving to him that all of them have been predicted in advance. I mean so far Saul has been given the signs of the donkeys, the diner, the two men of the tomb, the three men with the goats, and finally another group of prophets where he's told he too is going to begin to prophesy. Samuel tells Saul, then go down before me to Gilgal, and behold, I'm 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. When he turned his back to leave Samuel, God gave him another heart. And all these signs came to pass that day. When they came to Gibeah, behold, a group of prophets met him, and the Spirit of God rushed upon him, and he prophesied among them." Saul receives the ultimate sign. I mean, he's been given another heart, and the Spirit of God rushes upon him, and he begins to prophesy. Now, you might think at this point, well, what an enviable position to be in this would be. I mean, God's given you experience after experience proving who he is. All you got to do is follow the signs. But signs and experiences don't necessarily preclude a solid faith. I mean, we know from Scripture that Saul's tenure as a godly king was a complete disaster. And it ended with the grave question as to whether or not he was ever a child of God. And it points to the danger of coming to God through experience rather than through understanding. And I can actually speak from experience here, because I too have genuinely felt the Spirit of God rushing upon me. Maybe not like Saul did, but certainly enough to convince me that God was directly intervening in my life. It happened over 50 years ago in a friend's living room in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. I was at a home church service at the time. I was bored and distracted because not only was I not a Christian at the time, I was an avowed atheist who thought anyone who believed in this junk was an utter fool. Janice and I were moving from Vermont to California so I could go to graduate school, and we were staying with some friends in Michigan as we headed west, and my friend had recently become a Christian. and wanted to share the gospel with me as well as to reconnect, and so we just decided to spend a few days with them. Well, we learned when we got up there that the family had a house church there, and my friend's dad was a leader there, and we spent a good two or three days just arguing in a friendly way about the gospel. And after two or three days, I told him I was impressed I wasn't able to talk them out of it, but they certainly were not able to talk me into it. And so he suggested at that point, he said, well, why don't you pray and ask God to show you himself? I said to him, I said, you don't understand. There is no God. Why would I be praying to a God that doesn't exist? And he made a proposal. He said, well, look, you seem to be an honest fellow and you want to have this thing settled. Why don't you just come before the God you don't believe in and say, if you're real, prove it? He says, and when he doesn't prove it, then you can walk away and you can say, I went the extra mile. And that really appealed to me. So I actually went into a room and had this bizarre prayer, and I said, God, and there is no God, and I'm praying to you who don't exist, and if you do exist, prove it. Show me that you're real. Show me in a way that obviously I cannot deny. And nothing happened. And, of course, I was greatly relieved, and so I came out and said, sorry, no lightning bolts, nothing. And so the rest of the day went on, and they had a church service that evening. And so they invited Janice and myself, and we wanted nothing, a bunch of religious, wacko folks having a church service. No thanks, that's not for us. We were very politely trying to refuse, and they just kept on insisting, we really, really would like you to come. And so they talked us into it. We really didn't have a choice in the matter. And so they met, and there was about maybe 10 or 15 people in this small little church, and they gathered and they prayed and they sang their songs, and it was lovely. And then they stopped, and then one of the women in the congregation said, no, we need to keep praying, and they cranked it back up again, not just once, not twice, but three times. I'm getting more and more annoyed each time they're doing this because, again, I was tuned out. I wanted nothing to do with this. And so, I mean, I'm extremely, aware of what was going on at the moment that this service went on because I'm sitting in their living room and I'm looking at the floor and they had a parquet floor and I was blocking the floor into one foot by one foot grids because that's how big the tiles were and counting how many nails there were in each tile so I could look reverent because I was looking down and I was bored to tears. I just get this thing over with. And, I just want to give you that, that was my state of mind at the time. And, as I was staring at the floor, suddenly there was a sense of God's spirit rushing on me. And, it came in a very small way at first. And, by the time it was barely noticeable, I thought, oh, I must be experiencing some psychological trauma or something, some, my id, my superego, something is, and then it doubled, and then it tripled, and then it got, ridiculously strong and it got, it started advancing at such a state where I thought, if this doesn't stop, I'm going to have to scream. And then I instantly thought, no, if this doesn't stop, I'm going to die. It was, I cannot begin to express how strong this rushing of spirit was. And so I'm looking down at the floor, and the woman who doesn't know me from Adam, who insisted we keep praying, she says, looks at me and says, I don't know you, but you should be praising God. And so I looked up at her and said, I don't know what, but I think I believe. And of course, Janice, who was an atheist with me, looks at me and goes, what? I mean, she couldn't believe it. And so this incredible thing happened to me. And then something else happened that same evening. We went out to a diner to get something to eat. They were all celebrating, and I didn't. I had no idea what was going on. I just knew something spectacular had happened in my life. I couldn't quite figure it out, but I knew something had happened. So we went to this diner, and I need to back up a little bit. That afternoon, I was working on my car in the driveway, had some mechanical issues, and my vocabulary back then was littered with the words Jesus Christ, not in the way you're supposed to say it. I mean, I was highly blasphemous at the time, and doing mechanical work, I'm sure I said the name at least three or four times that afternoon when things didn't go well. Anyway, we go to a diner, and as we walk into the diner, there's a couple arguing, and as they walk out, The guy's walking and he's right next to me and in exasperation he says, Jesus Christ. You know the way people say it. And that very phrase that I had been using that afternoon suddenly gut punched me and I felt like that was the ugliest thing, the most awful thing I'd ever heard. And I had no idea why I felt that. I had no understanding of the fact that when you become a believer, God's Holy Spirit enters into you and he starts living inside you. It was six months later that I realized that was the Holy Spirit inside me at that moment reacting and responding to that. And so we left. We left Michigan. We moved to San Francisco and I met with some friends of mine that from back east that I knew and a dear friend of mine. I was explaining the gospel to him and how this worked because I thought this is the way the gospel worked. And I remember speaking to John who was a dear believer who became saved. lived a great godly life and went on to be with the Lord, but I remember him sitting there and I'm explaining the gospel to him and he goes, let me get this straight. You say a prayer, you get a lightning bolt in your belly button, and then you're a Christian. And I said, yes, that's the way it works. Because I was convinced. I was certain that's the way the gospel went out. That was my understanding. And so we're in San Francisco for a while. And I'm reading a story. And the story's about a local politician, a local politician very well-known in San Francisco who went to see, I don't know if you ever heard of Guru Maharaj Ji. He was a 12-year-old kid who claimed that he was God. Well, the politician, I'm reading the article, the politician says, you know, he went very, very suspicious and he just, he was there at this meeting and suddenly God spoke to him. He had this sudden rush of the spirit of God that came into his life and he was convinced that Guru Maharaj Ji was God incarnate. I now had a problem. I had the very same problem that Saul had and it connected me with Saul. Saul had an experience with God. I had an experience with God. The politician also had an experience with God. And we know if we believe the scriptures that Saul's experience was rooted in reality because it's straight out of scripture. We know the politicians was not real because his guru-ji was unmatched as a fraud, as most of them are. I mean, this is Wikipedia. This is their statement about this particular guru. It says, stories about him became more derisory as knowledge of his bleeding ulcer, his materialistic and extravagant lifestyle, claims to divinity, and his worship by his followers became common. His marriage to a much older and taller devotee in 1974 was followed by his own mother disowning and disinheriting him in 1975. for his meat-eating, drug abuse, and general playboy lifestyle. I mean, standard stuff. I mean, this politician's guru crashed and burned like they almost always do. So how did I know that my experience was real? I mean, I remember reading about the guru and realizing that if I and the politician and saw, if we were all comparing experiences, they would have been almost identical. I mean, all of us, we all had signs. We all experienced miracles. I mean, now you can see, you can understand how experiences like miracles, they can be helpful on someone's journey to God, but in no way do they guarantee anything. And so this led me on a quest to determine whether or not the Jesus who I had met so convincingly was God. I looked at all the different religions. I critically examined the claims of Christianity and came to know Christ not because of an experience that I had, but because I saw the claims of Christ were rooted in absolute truth. Historically, archeologically, psychologically, factually. And so I tell folks all the time, don't wait for an experience. Examine the gospel. Examine its historicity. Compare its historical documents to any other document that is out there. Examine the psychology of all those who surrounded Jesus. Ask why they willingly gave up their lives for a truth that they could have easily denied. And look at the extensive extra biblical evidence that's been collected. I mean, examine these things with an open mind and just see who has the better argument, those who defend a biblical Christianity or those who deny it. You see, it's evidence that points to Jesus as Lord, not experience. Jesus himself pointed not to an experience as a means of coming to know Christ, but to one simple statement that defined his existence. This is what he said in John 14 6. He said, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Well, that's the truth statement that anyone is free to challenge. I mean, you see, if your only connection to Christianity is experience, no matter how miraculous, I have to tell you, you're skating on very, very thin ice. I mean, it's stunningly easy for the enemy to create all kinds of experiences to deceive you into falling for a false gospel. You know, one of the things that Mormons love to do is they share their version of the gospel, which is not the gospel. They do not believe that Jesus is God. But one thing that they do is they tell you, well, as they're speaking, and if you have some kind of back and forth with them, we'll say, well, why don't you just ask God to show you whether or not what we're saying is true? Ask God to give you an experience as to whether or not Mormonism is true. And what do you know? Lots of folks who make that request, you know what they get? They get an experience. And for the rest of their lives, they can look back and say, well, you know, I asked God if he was real, and I got this experience that Mormonism is true. But Jesus warned us in Matthew 24, he said, for false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. I mean, Jesus did all kinds of signs and wonders, but he acknowledged, he readily acknowledged that they oftentimes had a negative effect. Back in John's gospel at John 6, Jesus is addressing a hostile crowd of people who didn't really believe in him. It says, Jesus answered them, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal. Then they said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? Jesus answered them, this is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent. I mean, Jesus is telling the people flat out, the work of salvation is not experiencing, it's believing. And these folks were literally bathed in experience. They were experiencing the miraculous from Jesus all the time. I mean, they were seeing bread and fish literally come from nothing. They saw people healed directly in front of them. It did nothing to further their belief in him as Messiah. It says back in that same gospel, so they said to him, Then what sign do you do that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness as it is written. He gave them bread from heaven to eat. You have to read this carefully to realize what's going on here. This happened right after the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. And what the crowd is doing is they're mocking Jesus's miracle. What they're saying to Jesus here is that, well, you know, our Moses, our guy, his bread came straight from heaven. You started out with two loaves and fishes. I mean, you did a miracle. It was okay. But ours was much better because we started out with nothing. And then Jesus said to them, truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. They said to him, sir, give us this bread always. Understand what they're saying. Saying, Jesus, all you got to do is give us a steady diet of miracles. And as long as we can experience you on that level, hey, we're good. We'll stay with you. But once that stops, hey, we are gone. Jesus knew that all too well. This is what he said to them. He says, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me, and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. Jesus acknowledged these people were following him, not because of the truth that he preached, but because of the experiences that they were receiving. for the free food and the healings that he represented. Well, Saul followed God for the same reason, for all those different signs that he was given. I mean, in fact, he knew very little about Samuel and Samuel was Israel's national spiritual leader. And that points to the real possibility that Saul was not a man of faith even to start with. He starts out looking for donkeys and he winds up finding or rather being found by God. And the disaster that marked out Saul's life, it points to one glaring fact, and that is the proof of your relationship with God does not hinge on what you've experienced. It doesn't hinge on how you feel. What does it hinge on? It hinges on whether or not your life has been changed. Jesus said in Matthew 12.33, a tree is known by its fruit. If you want to know if your faith is real, just look at the fruit that it has produced in your life. Saul's life had little or none of that fruit, and thus the question remains, was he ever really a child of God? A genuine conversion involves a change of heart that is so profound that it always results in a change in attitude, a change in behavior. And that's because Ezekiel 36 tells us that God literally does a heart transplant. He puts a new heart inside us, giving us new desires from a new spirit. God says in Ezekiel 36 27, I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. Now previously the Lord, he explained to us what our obligation was, what we needed to do. Micah 6 sums it up. He says, he has told you, oh man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. Those are the marching orders. But now as believers in Christ, we do those things not because we have to, but because now we want to. Because that new heart and spirit within us has literally changed our very wants and desires to match those of Christ's. I mean, if our wants and desires are no different than they've always been, it's time to wonder whether or not that spiritual heart transplant has ever taken place. You know, as that wise old preacher once said, if you is what you was, you isn't. If you is what you was, you isn't. It's the life that you're living that's going to tell you whether or not your faith is real. Now I've met lots of people who, instead of looking for a changed life, look more to whether or not they feel this emotional connection with God. And I've seen people panic-stricken because they somehow can't feel God enough. These folks struggle greatly with Christianity because somehow or other they think they've missed the boat. They come to church, they think that everybody sitting in the pews has had this mystical experience of God that they've locked onto, and they feel it's something that they've missed. They wind up thinking that they have to have a similar miraculous experience in order to prove, if only to themselves, that their relationship to God is real. Well, that's an artificial bar that many, many folks think they just have to get over. I mean, most of you are here simply because you've come to know Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life, because that's who he is. And the more you examine the truthfulness of the claims of Christ, the more convinced you're going to be. In John 8 31 Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, if you abide in my word you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. Now I once had a young man tell me time and time again he had asked God to show him self real and the only answer he got was a big fat nothing. And my answer to him was a question. I said well just what were you expecting? I mean, God has shown himself as real in exactly the way that Jesus said he would. You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. And when you've truly been set free, you're going to begin to demonstrate a different attitude, a different perspective, a different conduct altogether. And that's all the proof you're ever going to need that you've truly been saved by the living God. I mean, Saul had wonderful experiences. And to this day, we have no idea whether or not he was actually saved. You know, Saul represents someone whose connection to God was strictly performative. You know, many of us have heard that scripture that says to obey is better than sacrifice. Well, we're going to see that that was uttered by Samuel. And Samuel uttered it when he was completely frustrated by the fact that Saul thought performing a sacrifice disobediently was more important than obeying God with all of his heart. And as we look at the life of Saul it's going to become self-evident that his heart was never really in it. And he was constantly looking for cues as to how he could serve himself as well as this God who had placed him in this position. I mean Saul's life in many ways just paints a picture for us of what empty religion is all about. There's just no heart relationship there. It's simply an attempt to check off the boxes to make sure you're doing all the right things. You know, the main difference between Saul and David is that David had a heart for God. He had some real bad falling outs. Some really bad. I mean, he was an adulterer. He was a murderer. He did all kinds of terrible things. But he had a genuine heart for God. That's something that Saul seemed to lack. And that's a question that we have to ask ourselves as well. I mean, are we simply checking off a series of boxes to make sure that we've done the religion thing correctly? Or do we actually have a heart for God? And if we don't have a heart for God, well, how do you get one? Well, that was Paul's question as well. Paul was praying for the Ephesian church. This is what he said. This is Ephesians 3.14. He said, For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all fullness of God. What Paul is doing here is he's saying, God, we don't have the ability, we don't have the strength to comprehend fully the love that you've expressed to us through Christ. And that task seems even harder today. I mean, the idea of a loving God has become a hard sell in a world like ours that's so filled with evil. We look around and we see child sex, slavery, and oppression, and brutality inflicted on those who can't fight back. And we wonder, how in the world could a good God create this mess? Well, that's perfectly backwards. He created a perfect world. We created this perfect mess. All of it is the product of our rebellion, of our treason against the Holy God that started in the Garden of Eden. And what is astounding in all of this is that God is willing to meet us not in some absolutely flawless place like heaven where he lives, but down here on this sin-crusted planet where violence and injustice is completely normalized. I mean his birth was marked by an attempt by his king to murder him. And he was born in a barn because there was no place on the very planet that he had created to welcome him. not only to decide to meet us here, but he came to us in the least powerful way imaginable, as the alleged out-of-wedlock peasant son of a blue-collar family, born in a stable instead of a palace. I mean, if you're not flattened by the idea of the very God of heaven, the creator of all things, consenting to become a human being. to meet us right where we are in this sin-cursed planet, so addicted to evil, and then live out his perfect life so that he could die on a cross in our place. If that doesn't move you, there's still hope. Paul prayed for the Ephesian church, quote, to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. That's my prayer as well. So let's pray. Father, I pray if there's anyone in this room that doesn't get the width and the breadth and the depth of the love of God in Christ. Lord, I pray that you would open their eyes and their ears, that they would get a sense of how astounding it is, the love that you've given to us. That the God of the universe would become one of us and live the life that you lived and die the death that you died so that we could join you in heaven is beyond comprehension. I pray that you would give each and every one of us in this room just a sense of what that entailed and that you would give them the ability to truly understand and trust you as Lord and Savior. And I pray this in Jesus name. Amen.