Saul's procession included a lot of things God
had told him to destroy.
I wonder tonight what kind of procession you're
leading.
Are there any elements in it that God
told you to have done with?
The man who insists on lugging idols and
affections and wedges of gold that God commanded
him to eliminate will stand indicted by that
very accursed thing in the day of judgment.
It was one of the great old saints
of another generation who had trouble with some
particular evil in his life.
Nobody knows what it was except that once
in a while in his diary you read,
Today I hewed a egg in pieces before
the Lord.
Now, he was having trouble.
And maybe I speak to somebody here tonight
who has spared in your life something that
God told you a long time ago to
part with and to exterminate utterly.
And the worst of it is that it
catches up with you.
Saul did not really repent.
He said, I have sinned, but like several
others in the Bible who said that.
He did not bring forth fruits, meat for
repentance.
It is always a mark of the unyielded
self to argue the case and to try
to explain why you did what you did
instead of coming clean with it.
You remember the word in Luke 10.29,
But he willing to justify himself said, Now,
the Bible doesn't say justify yourself.
The Bible says judge yourself.
The Bible says if we would judge ourselves
we should not be judged.
The trouble today is that altogether too many
of God's people are still trying to justify
things in their lives that ought to be
judged.
Saul explained or tried to that the sheep
and the oxen had been spared to sacrifice
unto the Lord in Gilgal.
Now, that made a good story.
But the inn did not justify the means.
Money made the wrong way is not justified
by giving it in the tithe at church.
A man could gamble on a horse race
and win money in a card game, but
he does not sanctify it by giving God
a tip in the Sunday morning collection.
God will not accept the offering of the
fruits of disobedience.
And so Samuel comes up with this immortal
answer that I read a moment ago, Hath
the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings
and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of
the Lord?
Samuel said, Now, you say that you save
this paraphernalia to offer it to God.
Well, God is not interested in that so
much as he is in obedience.
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and
to hearken than the fat of ran.
You can give up worldly amusements.
You can give God time and talent.
You can give your goods to feed the
poor.
And you can even become a missionary and
never obey God in the giving of yourself.
The Macedonians first gave themselves unto the Lord.
If any man come after me, let him
deny himself.
The Macedonians took the right course, self, service,
substance.
Now, God is not going to be paid
off with substance if you have not started
with self.
And it is not enough to give service,
a lot of it, unless you first of
all have started not with the money but
with the Macedonians.
The trouble with Saul was that he never
gave up soul.
Webb Peplow, a great preacher of another generation,
said, When I am on trips, I usually
buy presents for my wife, send her gifts.
He said, I am afraid that some of
my choices are rather unfortunate, but she always
accepts them in good graces, because she knows
that before I ever gave her the gifts,
I gave her my heart.
Oh, there are wives today whose husbands give
them gifts, and yet who are broken in
heart because that man has never given his
heart.
And it is also true in reverse in
many a case.
And my friend, God's heart is grieved as
it was here, because we read in the
very last verse of this chapter that God
repented that he had ever made Saul king
over Israel.
Now, what is back of all this trouble?
We still haven't arrived at the real trouble.
Verse 23 tells us, and it's a sin
that I never heard a sermon on in
my life.
For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,
and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.
We don't usually classify rebellion and stubbornness in
such bad company with iniquity and idolatry, but
you will observe that God does.
Have you ever given much thought to the
sin of stubbornness?
I couldn't escape from this tonight because I
have a conviction deep down in my soul
that things that we ascribe maybe to some
other ailment in our lives may be traced
to this.
There's an awful lot of stubbornness even among
God's people.
I've been preaching for a long, long time,
and I noticed that in some little simple
things, like asking the folks sometimes of a
night when the crowd is small, would you
please move into the center section.
Did you ever try that?
And see some of these saints of the
Lord marching to Zion, dig their heels in
church carpets and said, no, I'm not moving.
I shall not be moved.
Why I have been dumbfounded through these years
at the utter, absolute, mewlish stubbornness of God's
people to do the simplest things that would
make a meeting better.
It's a serious offense.
God says, I will instruct thee and teach
thee in the way which thou shalt go.
I will guide thee with mine eye.
Be ye not as the horse or as
the mule, which have no understanding, whose mouth
must be held in with bit and bridle,
lest they come near to you.
The Bible compares us to animals a great
many times.
And just between you and me, some of
the comparisons are not very complimentary.
The Bible says, don't be like a mule.
That's exactly what it says.
Somebody said the mule is always backward about
going forward.
We have a great many people who are
just exactly that mewlish when it comes to
the things of God.
Stiff-necked, generous.
Now you notice here in verse 24 that
Saul excused his conduct by saying, I feared
the people and obeyed their voice.
Now you've heard the old Latin proverb all
down through the ages or the old saying
about the voice of the people is the
voice of God.
The voice of the people is the voice
of God.
Now you have the voice of the people
in verse 24 and you have the voice
of God in verse 22.
I feared the people and obeyed their voice.
But look up at verse 22, hath the
Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and
sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the
Lord.
The voice of the people never has been
the voice of God anyhow.
And today we are so inclined to do
the thing that's popular, that's the same thing,
the voice of the people.
Saul pretended to be sorry, but he only
wanted to keep the support of Samuel.
He begged Samuel not to leave him, but
the chapter ends with Saul rejected by God
and by Samuel and hastening on to ruin.
That weird and sinister chapter 28 where he
meets with the witch of Endor.
Samuel is dead now and I read that
Saul couldn't get in touch with God.
Verses 5 and 6, so in verse 7
he turns back, notice it, to the very
thing that he once outlawed.
Now I read to you a moment ago
that rebellion is as witchcraft.
Witchcraft was a thing that Saul had put
out and now that God will not respond
and Samuel's gone, Saul turns back to the
very thing that once was put out of
his life.
The man who is always playing with forbidden
things, age, sheep, oxen, witchcraft, will return to
the very thing he renounced.
The man who never quite gives it up
and never quite obeys the voice of God.
Here's a man who feels that he ought
to give up a certain evil habit, but
he continues to play with that habit and
never give himself to God and I'll guarantee
you that nine times out of ten he'll
go sneaking back to it if he never
gives himself to the Lord.
I'm not concerned now with the details of
this episode at Endor.
I do see this, a king who has
missed his chance is trying to call back
his lost opportunity because Samuel represented the lost
opportunity that Saul had and didn't take advantage
of.
Saul had his Samuel.
Ahab had his Elijah.
David had his Nathan.
Herod had his John the Baptist.
Blessed is the man who listens to his
prophet and who heeds his oracle.
Most of us had a prophet somewhere in
our lives.
You had a good pastor.
You had a loyal friend.
You had a faithful wife.
You had godly parents.
Always you had the word of God.
Now if you trifle with that voice, the
day will come when Samuel will no longer
warn you and you'll be left to your
doom.
I thank God for our Samuels, but God
pity the man who treats his Samuel like
Saul did his.
And how many miserable souls I have met
all over this land in nearly 50 years
of preaching, trying to call back their Samuels.
The presence has departed and the voice is
forever still.
Now what was the trouble with Saul outside
of stubbornness, beyond that?
Well, he never was broken to the will
of God.
Saul said the people kept the best to
sacrifice to the Lord.
Samuel said, verse 22, what God wants is
another kind of sacrifice, the sacrifice of obedience.
Now doesn't that remind you of another king
and another prophet?
Doesn't that remind you of a king who
was faced by a faithful prophet of God
who told him a story and then made
the application?
And you know it's easy to tell a
story, but it's a little hard to make
the application if the application is sitting right
out in front of you.
And that's what happened here.
And after Nathan told the story, he said,
now you are the application.
This is you.
Here's a man who had his oracle, but
he did not like Saul because I read,
Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give
it.
Thou delightest not in burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,
a broken and a contrite heart.
O God, thou wilt not despise.
Now there's a man with a proper concept
of what kind of an offering God wants.
Saul never offered God a broken heart.
David listened to Nathan.
Saul didn't listen to Samuel.
And stubbornness was Samuel's analysis, and it led
to spiritism and suicide.
Have you ever been broken because of the
will of God completely in your life?
God always uses broken things.
It takes the broken soil to produce the
grain.
It takes the broken grain to produce the
harvest.
It takes the broken clouds to produce the
rain.
It takes the broken bread to feed our
bodies.
It takes the broken alabaster box to yield
the precious perfume.
The tumult and the shouting dies.
The captains and the kings depart.
Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, a broken and
a contrite heart.
Jacob met God and limped away from that
encounter, but had power with God and men.
Peter went away weeping bitterly, but he returns
to greater power than ever.
I hear it said today that what young
people need is redirection.
No, what everybody needs is crucifixion.
Sin is having its own way.
We have turned everyone to his own way.
God doesn't ask the sinner to give his
heart to God.
What would God do with such a vile,
deceitful thing as that?
God gives him a new heart and then
says, Son, give me thy heart.
Our young people and all the rest of
us, for that matter, don't need to be
cobbled and corrected even so much as to
be crucified.
We're living in a generation of unbroken souls
now.
They grow up stubborn and disobedient to parents,
and some never learn to say, I'm sorry.
They've never told any human being they're sorry.
Oh, I mean, in many we have a
habit of saying it as a matter of
courtesy if we step on somebody's toe.
But how many people ever know what it
is to tell somebody else they're sorry?
I don't think we're ever going to see
much revival today until there is a recovery
of old-fashioned reconciliation and restitution among God's
people.
It takes a lot more grace to hunt
up somebody and straighten out things and tell
them you were mistaken and get right with
them and with God.
It takes a lot more grace to do
that than to give $100 to foreign missions.
And I thank God for the gift of
missions in which we've just had a part.
Is there anybody in this world that you
ought to get right with?
You haven't.
I remember a meeting in Pennsylvania years ago.
We had a miserably poor start.
For a couple of nights there was no
response.
I wondered why I ever came to the
place.
Talk about a dry meeting.
If we hadn't had a glass of water
on the pulpit, I think the place would
have dried up and blown away.
On the third night, I gave a proposition
for folks to confess their sins before God.
I was desperate.
I said, Lord, do something, anything.
Anything is better than nothing.
Give us a revival or a riot or
something, but give us something.
And I made this proposition.
A fellow came down the aisle and faced
the congregation and said, I want to confess
the ungodly things I've said about our former
pastor.
And then I knew that God was at
work, because old Adam doesn't walk down church
aisles and say things like that.
It takes the grace of God.
Will Moody, the son of D.L. Moody,
said, I've forgotten my father's sermons, but I
haven't forgotten some other things.
He said, I remember one night when I
was a little bit of a tyke and
he told me to go to bed and
I didn't go immediately.
And then he said, go in a way
that I knew I'd better go.
He thundered at me, ruffly.
He said, I went to bed and lay
there sniffling with a broken heart.
Presently the door opened and I saw the
heavy-set figure of my father standing in
the door.
Then he came in and knelt beside me
and said, Son, you should have gone to
bed and I should have told you to
go, but not the way I told you
the second time.
He said the tears coursed down the bearded
face of my father and mixed with my
tears.
Will Moody said, I've forgotten my father's sermons,
but I haven't forgotten that.
It takes a lot of grace to humble
ourselves before God and with men today.
If you bring your offering to the altar,
my Lord said, let's put it in 20th
century language, if you bring your duplex envelope
to church next Sunday morning and remember that
your brother is at odds with you, don't
put it on the plate.
Hang on to it until you get right
with your brother and then make your offering.
Now that would wreck a lot of collections
on Sunday morning over the country, but it's
what God says to do.
I wouldn't be surprised that even in a
place like Finliffin, where everybody by now should
be in victory and filled with the Spirit
and walking in the light, I wonder if
the trouble with some of us is not
in some of these homely things that we
scarcely think about, wrapped up in more eloquent
phrases, chasing other experiences, when perhaps what some
of us need most of all to do
is just get right with God and with
men.
As Dr. Torrey used to put on all
his placards, get right with God in all
his great campaigns over the night.
Are you right with God, right with yourself
and right with other folks?
That's the essence of revival.
So we need to tell God we're sorry.
That's one thing that Saul never could quite
do from his heart because of his stubbornness.
Stubbornness breaks more hearts and wrecks more homes
and divides more churches and fills more suicide
graves and more institutions for the insane than
any other form of iniquity.
For the root of most of our troubles
is the unbroken self, lovers of pleasure, lovers
of money, lovers of the world, and also
lovers of our own selves.
I thank God there are two Sauls in
the Bible.
In the New Testament there was another man
named Saul, and he was just as stubborn
as the Old Testament Saul.
But one day on a Damascus road God
knocked him down and broke him up and
made him over and named him Paul.
The Old Testament Saul started out with a
crown and ended under a cross of his
own making.
The New Testament Saul submitted to a cross,
I am crucified with Christ, and ended waiting
for a crown.
Both of them were headstrong young fellows.
One took the path of stubbornness that led
to suicide, the other took the road of
submission and became the greatest gospel preacher of
all time.
Let me ask you tonight before we go,
are you traveling the Gilboa Road or the
Damascus Road, the way of Saul or the
way of Paul?
Submit yourselves therefore to God, resist the devil,
and he will flee from you.
Notice the order there.
You never are able effectively to say no
to the devil until you first have said
yes to God.
This verse starts off right.
Maybe you're having a time trying to say
no to the devil and you're not getting
anywhere, and the devil is winning the victory.
You cannot successfully resist the devil until you
submit to God because the way to freedom
is submission and victory begins with the surrender.
Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of
God that he may exalt you in due
time.
Saul refused and God demoted him.
Paul obeyed and God promoted him.
And every sinner needs to remember that this
whole business comes down to choosing your way.
We've turned everyone to his own way.
My ways are not your ways.
Let the wicked forsake his way.
You are not saved until you submit to
God and you are not usable to God's
glory until you submit to him.
I've said it many times through the past
that I used to pray God use me
and I haven't prayed that prayer in 20
years.
And I never expect to pray it again.
You don't have to ask God to use
you.
He's using you tonight all that he can.
He'd use you more if he could.
He's looking about for somebody whose heart is
perfect totally.
The prayer that you need to pray is
simply, Lord, make me usable.
And if you're usable, he'll wear you out.
He'll use you.
And you'll feel like saying, Lord, you're about
to kill me.
I didn't know you were going to use
me this much.
There was a time in my life, a
long stretch of lean and barren years, when
I had no message and no ministry and
no blessings.
And nobody ever wrote a letter to me
or came to me and said, Your message
or your book or your article was a
help to me.
And there came a day when I asked
God to put me in shape, make me
usable.
I'd ask him to use me.
He couldn't.
And he wants to use you, but he
can't until you come to this very same
place of utter and absolute submission.
There is one Bible verse that describes Saul
better than any other that I know.
He that being often reproved, hardeneth his neck,
shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.
Why, that's Saul's biography.
He was often reproved, he hardened his neck,
he was suddenly destroyed, and that without remedy.
That's the verse that brought my old-fashioned
country father to the Lord.
Down here in Catoba County.
He heard a sermon from this text which
has been in the mothballs too long, a
blood-curdling, hair-raising sermon, and was practically
scared into the kingdom of God.
But thank God that preacher was not lulling
people into hell.
And my father went up to that old
country church that afternoon, that morning, went down
into the woods and trusted Christ as his
Savior and said, I never did know how
I got back up to the church.
I don't remember that the next thing I
knew I was back up in the churchyard
and I took off for home after the
service.
And my old blind grandmother met me at
the gate and nobody told her that I
was coming and nobody had told her that
I'd been saved, but she met me at
the gate crying aloud.
I knew it, I knew it.
Some kind of a heavenly grapevine system, I
suppose, in operation.
But she knew about it anyhow.
And she said, I came back up to
that church that night and stood out there
at the old graveyard with the old-fashioned
fence around it.
Why a fence?
I don't know.
He used to say, the crowd on the
inside couldn't get out and the crowd outside
didn't want in.
But anyhow, that was the old graveyard with
the fence.
And Father said, I stood there and said
I wouldn't be back where I was this
morning for all the gold and silver that
you can put in that fence and all
the other fences the world around.
And what brought him to all of that
blessedness, beloved, was a terrific sermon on he
that being often reproved, hardened at his neck,
shall suddenly be destroyed and that without remorse.
I have an uneasy feeling that there may
be some in that sad plight in this
place.
And not merely because you came here and
had warning, because doubtless you've had much of
it before.
Are you traveling the Gilboa Road or are
you traveling the Damascus Road?
God help you.
Let us sing.
We pray, O blessed Holy Spirit, that thou
wilt make due and proper application of this
message and especially this text to any souls
in this congregation tonight so beset with the
sin of stubbornness, listening to the voice of
the people, as it were, the voice of
this age, instead of the voice of God.
And bring them to that blessed point where
they shall say like that other soul, Who
art thou, Lord?
What wilt thou have me to do?
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.