Fixing Society, Step Four: National Repentance
- Steven Cooper
- Oct 19, 2008
- Series: 1 Samuel 2008
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Fixing Society, Step Four: National Repentance
1Samuel 7:1-17
I. Return to the Lord
II. Get Ready to Be Tested
III. Get Yourself a Samuel
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR COMMUNITY GROUPS
1. Have you ever had a time where you were able to encourage someone else or a group of others to change?
2. Have you ever had a time where you made a commitment, and immediately you were tested by circumstances that forced you to show that your commitment was genuine?
3. What differentiates between “temporary” and “transforming” sorrow? How do you determine the difference in your life?
4. How does this passage demonstrate that Israel’s sorrow was transforming?
5. Do you have any “Ebenezer stones” in your life? What pivotal moments can you recall from your past that give you confidence that God is with you in the present?
6. In what ways does this story provide a picture of Jesus and his work as our Samuel?
10/19/2008
Harbor DT/UT
“Fixing Society, Step Four: National Repentance”
1Samuel 7:2-17
Introduction
So many of us make commitments to change, to grow. We all want to become better people. When we make a new commitment, we get fired up about it, we make a plan to do new things, or to stop doing old things.
But what do you do when you fall? What do you do when you fall off the wagon, when you slip back into the bad habit? When you back on your promise? When your anger gets the best of you again? When you go back to that porn site on the internet? You go out and have sex again? You take another smoke? What do you do then?
Nothing is more debilitating for us when we’re trying to set a new path for ourselves than the backslide. The relapse.
What do you do when things go wrong?
In our series in 1Samuel, in chapters 1-3, everything was going great. Hannah re-centers on God. Samuel emerges and replaces the evil leadership that was destroying society from the inside. God was speaking to the people again. Things were getting better.
We could have had a step by step process for how to fix society today. We could have had a sermon series. Wait… we do.
Then, in chapters 4, everything falls apart. We saw this last week. The nation fails, leadership fails. It’s so bad, that God himself leaves Israel. Now what are they going to do?
This has to be part of the steps toward fixing society because it’s reality. This is part of the process. To not deal with this is to avoid real life.
What do you do? When we are faced with those moments when it’s not society, but us who need fixing, what do we do?
This chapter tells us we need to do 3 things: I. Return to the Lord, II. Get Ready to Be Tested, III. Get Yourself a Samuel
I. Return to the Lord
This is where is the downward cycle reverses: Return to the Lord. V2 says the people of Israel were in morning and seeking after the Lord. They realize that their lives just aren’t right. There’s something wrong… they need God. There’s a void, something inexplicable deep inside them that makes them realize that this just isn’t how life is supposed to be. There must be something better… Do you feel that way?
Samuel steps in to lead. Samuel had been preaching for 20 years in the midst of the bad times—now finally, people are ready to listen.
Samuel’s message is simple: return to the Lord. The term for this process of returning is repentance.
It’s important to define this term properly. Most people hear the word repent, and they think of a guy on a street corner with a bull horn, shouting at everyone that they aren’t good enough. That’s not it. Conservative churches tend to be big on repentance in this negative way. Big on motivation by guilt, big on making you feel horrible.
Liberal churches tend to an opposite problem. They want everyone to feel good about themselves, and so aim to remove all guilt and so they tend to say repentance isn’t necessary—what counts is self-esteem and the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself.
But the gospel gives us a third way—we need the constant reminder to return to the Lord. Sometimes in big ways, sometimes in small ways. This is just being honest about ourselves—we are not perfect.
But how do we do this? The text tells us:
A. Stop worshiping in false ways (v3)
1. Verse 3 says, “Rid yourself of the foreign gods and serve the Lord only.”
2. Samuel doesn’t come out with a laundry list of the sins that the people were committing. He focuses on the sin beneath the sin, the root issue: They were worshiping things that were not God. They has Ashtoreth and Baals—these were gods of sex, prosperity, and power.
3. It’s not just “My God is better than your god.” In the ancient world, there was something fundamentally different about Israel’s God vs. all the others.
a. To worship Baal or Ashtoreh was to believe that you could manipulate the gods, or bribe them to act for you.
b. The same is true today. Most religions are trying to manipulate God to get something from him. To bribe him to get the life you want. Israel was actually guilty of this very thing in Chapter 4.
4. But Israel’s God was different. Christianity is different. God wants a relationship. A personal relationship, where he can show you deep love, and you can know him and love him back. That is what God is after.
5. We don’t repent because we want to clean up our lives so we’ll feel less guilty. We repent because we want a deeper relationship with the God who loves us more than we can ever understand.
6. Repent of Goodness: This means that some of us even need to repent of our morality. Many people—Christians and non-Christians—look at their obedience as a way to manipulate God or as a way to justify their demand for a good life. Then when they don’t get what they want, they turn sour and lash out at God or at the world.
7. God is saying to you today, “First and foremost, I don’t want your obedience. I want your heart. I want you to know my heart… then I want you to obey out of the joy of knowing me… out of the peace of being in my family, knowing that no one can snatch you out of my hand.
8. My daughter Amanda was talking to me this morning.
B. They stopped trusting in themselves: (v6) Poured water out before the Lord, and they fasted
1. In these practices—giving up food and water—You are giving up the thing that gives you strength because you need something to happen that cannot happen unless God does it. When you fast for something, you are saying to God, “God, I am emptying myself of strength because I can’t do this. I need you to accomplish this for me.”
2. So these Israelites were declaring their dependence on God. When we are looking to change, to grow, to get back in right relationship with God, we need to remember that we don’t do it by our own strength, but by the power he gives us.
C. They confessed, “We have sinned”(v7). So many people think this is antiquated and a little morose. Let me show you why deep in your hearts, you all agree with the need for people to confess their sin.
1. When someone does something that really hurts you, what do you expect them to do? You expect them to apologize, to ask you to forgive them, right?
2. Why? Why aren’t you content for them to just not do it again?
3. Because confession is good for the one who sins and the one who was hurt. When you’re the one who was hurt, you want to know that the other person understands what they did, right? You want to know that the other person is sorry, right? Of course!
4. When you’re the one who sinned, if you really want to change who you are so you don’t sin that way again, isn’t it powerful to confess to the person you hurt? Don’t you also need to know that the person is willing to forgive you?
5. This is why it’s good to confess our sins to God. When we are trying to get back on track, these principles that govern forgiveness in relationships also govern our relationship with God. Confession is a powerful cleanser of the soul (this is why we do it together every week in our worship service), and we have a promise from God himself, “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
So when we falter, when we’re in the wrong, we need first to return to the Lord. Second, we need to…
II. Get Ready to Be Tested
The Philistines attack. As they are returning to God, an enemy army attacks. These are the Philistines who routed Israel in chapter 4.
This is always how it is: we commit ourselves to God, or to a new way of life, to never do it again, or to start going to church, or joining a community group, and it feels like immediately something happens that makes it inconvenient, or that tempts us back to our old ways.
1. Really what this is, though, is God asking the question, “How serious are you about wanting me and this new life? You will trust me in good times, but will you trust me in the bad, too?”
2. So how will Israel respond? Will they do the same thing as chapter 4 and try to manipulate God by dragging the ark into battle?
3. No, they do the right thing! Their return to the Lord is genuine! This time it’s the opposite of chapter 4.
A. When the tests come, you cry out to the Lord. That’s what the Israelites did. They begged Samuel to pray for them (v8).
B. They devoted themselves to God. (v9) The whole burnt offering was an offering of consecration, of full dedication. This meant that Israel was fully dedicating themselves to God. More signs that it was genuine!
1. God gave them the victory. He thundered from heaven (just as Hannah said he would in her prayer in chapter 2) and he routed the Philistines. Israel achieved a resounding victory, and their part in the battle was really just to mop up. It’s amazing when God is at work sometimes how easy victory can be, when we are living in full awareness of his Spirit and his power in us.
C. Celebrate and memorialize
1. V12-13 describe a ceremony where Samuel builds a memorial, celebrating God’s victory. It was a wonderful time to rejoice and rehearse what God had done.
2. Plus, this memorial was designed to be remembered. When we have great victories in our battle for change and growth, we need to celebrate those victories as wonderful displays of God’s power in our lives, and then we also need to train ourselves to remember those victories since they gives confidence for the future.
God hasn’t given goodnesss and mercy all the way through merely to desert and abandon us at this point.
We stand in the present, but dwell on the past—so we can be steadfast for the future.
So when you stumble, you return to the Lord, you Get Ready to Get Tested. Finally, you need to…
III. Get a Samuel In Your Life
A. Much as it may inconvenience us at times, we all need people in our lives who will tell us what we need to hear.
1. Timing: One preacher said, “The seasons when you begin to know more of your own heart don’t come at your convenience.” Returning to the Lord is seldom convenient. There are always reasons NOT to come back to a living relationship with God.
2. Some of you are feeling God speaking to you right now. You are sensing his call to come back to him.
B. Samuel is the hero of Israel in this chapter.
1. He provided extraordinary leadership that led Israel as a nation to return to God.
2. Then he provided ongoing leadership that kept Israel close to God. V15-17 detail his yearly circuit of teaching and judging the people.
C. In these ways, Samuel points to someone greater. Samuel points to Jesus, who was a hero for the whole world.
1. Jesus’ extraordinary work of death and resurrection brings us to God, and opens our way to return to him. He is our memorial stone.
2. Jesus also provides ongoing leadership for us that keeps us close to God. He is the one who intercedes for us daily,
a. One author said, “Do you want to know the secret of my faithfulness? We rely on the prayers of another whose prayers are always effective. Nothing is quite so moving as knowing I’m a subject of Jesus’ intercessory prayer.”
3. He is our empowering presence, he fills us with his Spirit. And he is our burnt offering. His consecration of himself in his perfect life also gives us the strength we need to live as people fully devoted to God.
Amen.
FLOOR
This ancient worship was a kind of “priming of the pump” to get agricultural fertility going, which then had consequences in a more general prosperity.
1. Samuel, then was saying, “Look, you’ve got it all backwards. You are trying to manipulate God, and that drives you away from him. God wants you to put away the foreign gods and the foreign ways of manipulation.”
2. So repentance, returning to God, isn’t merely trying to stop sinning. It’s much deeper than that. It’s figuring out what we are truly worshiping when we sin, and returning to a real, loving relationship with the living God.
3. Peterson, “This is much deeper, a theological/spiritual repentance that involves abandoning the culture’s way of doing things, and setting myself unreservedly (“with all your heart,” v3) under the initiative and action of God.”
4. What are our idols? Approval of others? Status? Do you live for that? Control? Do you feel insecure and so manipulate people and situations to maintain control? It is pleasure? Money? What does your lifestyle show that you are living for?
5. The call to return to the Lord goes deep into our hearts. It searches our hearts to discover what we value most. But it also is the most freeing, the most liberating thing we can do. When we let go of those heart idols, then we’re repenting for the right reasons.
6. When we live for other things, it’s not just that it’s wrong because you’re not living for God, but it literally saps the lasting joy out of life. It robs us of our confidence and comfort. The Bible says when we have a relationship with God, we can have PEACE in every circumstance (2Th 3:16). Because his love, his character is the one constant in a life that is filled with turmoil and change.
7. 52—Is their repentance only cosmetic—a surface piety that will dissipate under Philistine pressure and send them scurrying after the tangible and reassuring gods and goddesses that they have trafficked with for so long? It is not. They call on Samuel to pray for them, a most uncharacteristic action on their part.
