At the Corner of Ordinary and Ordained

Highlights From 1 Samuel

Allen Snapp

Grace Community Church

February 12, 2023

At the Corner of Ordinary and Ordained

If you have your Bibles, turn to 1 Sam. 9. We will also have the verses we read up on the screen for you to follow. Last week Tim shared how Samuel’s sons were not good men and Israel didn’t want to be stuck with them leading them when Samuel died so they went to Samuel and demanded he give them a king.

God spoke to Samuel and said, “give them what they ask for. They aren’t rejecting you, they’re rejecting Me as their King.” Israel was a theocracy, God was their king. But now they wanted an earthly king so they could be like the other nations.

In chapter 9 we’re introduced to the man who will become their first king.

There was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish, the son of Abiel… ² And he had a son whose name was Saul, a handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he. From his shoulders upward he was taller than any of the people.

Saul was the son of Kish, a Benjamite, and the writer takes pains to impress on us what an impressive looking man Saul was. He was the kind of man you want to be your king. He’s handsomer than any other man in Israel. He’s taller than anyone else in Israel. He looks the part! Saul starts out good but we will find as things play out that Saul has some major character flaws. He is proud and cares too much about what people think of him. But on this day Saul is on a collision course with destiny.

³ Now the donkeys of Kish, Saul's father, were lost. So Kish said to Saul his son, “Take one of the young men with you, and arise, go and look for the donkeys.” ⁴ And he passed through the hill country of Ephraim and passed through the land of Shalishah, but they did not find them. And they passed through the land of Shaalim, but they were not there. Then they passed through the land of Benjamin, but did not find them. ⁵ When they came to the land of Zuph, Saul said to his servant who was with him, “Come, let us go back, lest my father cease to care about the donkeys and become anxious about us.” ⁶ But he said to him, “Behold, there is a man of God in this city, and he is a man who is held in honor; all that he says comes true. So now let us go there. Perhaps he can tell us the way we should go.” (jump to verse 14)

¹⁴ So they went up to the city. As they were entering the city, they saw Samuel coming out toward them on his way up to the high place.

¹⁵ Now the day before Saul came, the Lord had revealed to Samuel: ¹⁶ “Tomorrow about this time I will send to you a man from the land of Benjamin, and you shall anoint him to be prince over my people Israel. He shall save my people from the hand of the Philistines. For I have seen my people, because their cry has come to me.” ¹⁷ When Samuel saw Saul, the Lord told him, “Here is the man of whom I spoke to you! He it is who shall restrain my people.” (jump to verse 27)

²⁷ As they were going down to the outskirts of the city, Samuel said to Saul, “Tell the servant to pass on before us, and when he has passed on, stop here yourself for a while, that I may make known to you the word of God.”

10 Then Samuel took a flask of oil and poured it on his head and kissed him and said, “Has not

the Lord anointed you to be prince over his people Israel? And you shall reign over the people of the Lord and you will save them from the hand of their surrounding enemies. 1 Sam. 9:5-6,14-17, 27; 10:1

A few years ago NBC News carried a story about a woman who went missing from an Icelandic bus tour. At a scheduled stop in a remote volcanic region, an Asian woman failed to return to the bus at the designated time. The bus driver waited an hour before calling local rescue units to search for the missing woman. Passengers on the bus helped in the search for her as well.

Thankfully this story has a happy, if somewhat bizarre, ending. Turns out that when this woman had gotten off the bus she had changed clothes and freshened up, so when she got back on the bus no one recognized her as the same woman. She didn’t recognize herself in the description of the missing woman so she helped out in the search for herself.

Saul also goes on a search and rescue mission to find his father’s missing donkeys, but instead of finding his father’s donkeys, Saul finds himself. He finds God’s purpose for his life. What started as an ordinary day became an ordained day – a day ordained by God to usher Saul into the plan of God for his life and to usher Israel into the era of kings.

We can’t relate to every aspect of this story. We don’t own donkeys. We will never be king. But there is one thing we all can relate too: God often uses the ordinary to accomplish the extraordinary. Often we don’t see it until we look back but ordinary days are often ordained days - days ordained by God to accomplish something great in our lives, to usher in a new day, to do something that changes the trajectory of our lives forever.

Title: At the Corner of Ordinary and Ordained

God’s purposes in our lives often at the intersection of ordinary and ordained. Ordinary days, ordinary jobs, ordinary moments that are ordained by the sovereign hand of God. Kish said, “son, those dumb donkeys are lost again – go look for them!” Saul probably wasn’t thrilled, but donkeys were valuable, you didn’t just go on without them. He probably wasn’t too excited about having to search for these donkeys, but Saul was faithful. He passed through the hills of Ephraim, through the land of Shalishah, Shaalim, Benjamin, and Zuph. He went from town to town to town, for three days he traveled looking for these lost donkeys. He was faithful.

Lesson # 1: Be faithful in the ordinary things – you never know when God has ordained them for extraordinary purposes

Jesus tells us to be faithful in the little things and God will trust us to be faithful in the bigger things. Sometimes the bigger things come in the form of bigger things, but a lot of times bigger things come in the accumulation of little things over a period of time. Most of our lives are lived doing the ordinary, so if we do that faithfully, it has an accumulative effect on our lives and the lives of people around us.

Recently Ken posted an excerpt of an interview with Jordan Peterson and what he says about being getting

it right in the little things is profound:

Your life isn’t margaritas on the beach in Jamaica. That happens now and then. Those are exceptions. Your life is how your wife (or husband) greets you at the door when you come home every day. Cause that’s like ten minutes a day. Your life is how you treat each other over the breakfast table cause that’s an hour every single day. You get those mundane things right, those things you do every day; you concentrate on them and you make them pristine, it’s like you’ve got 80% of your life put together.

These little things that are right in front of us, they’re not little. That’s the first thing, they are not little and they’re hard to set right and if you set them right it has a rippling effect and fast too, way faster than people think. Jordan Peterson

Being faithful in the mundane task of searching for donkeys put Saul in right place at the right time. He couldn’t have known that, he didn’t plan that, but God knew it and God planned it. A day that started out so ordinary changed the trajectory of his entire life.

God does that in our lives too. Sometimes we’re just in the right place at the right time and the trajectory of our lives is changed in a big way in a big moment. The day you meet your wife or husband. The day you get that job offer. The day you realize what you want to do with your life.

I don’t know if I ever shared this story, but the only reason I am a pastor today is because I went to an all-you-can-eat fish fry. OK, that might be a bit of an exaggeration but not by much. One day when Janice and I were attending a church called Lamb’s Chapel, the pastor, John Steigerwald, asked me to give him a hand dropping off some furniture for a single mom. After we did that we stopped at a fresh fish market that had an all you can eat fish fry. We ordered, and then John said, Allen I want to share something and it’s big. He felt the Lord calling him to plant a church but he would only do it if I became the pastor of Lamb’s Chapel. I had no desire to be a pastor and was actually unsettled by this, so much so that I lost my appetite so John ruined my all you can eat fish fry lunch! But after Janice and I prayed for days, the Lord put the desire to pastor in my heart – and I’ve pastored ever since. That was a major trajectory change brought about by one day! You might have stories like that.

But more often I think the trajectory of our lives are changed by little moments and small adjustments over time than it is by the big moments and large adjustments that happen on rare occasion. As much as possible by God’s grace we want to be faithful because as is the case with Saul, being faithful puts us in the right place at the right time. Even being a little off over a long period of time can change our direction and destination by a whole lot.

Think about this: if you are going somewhere but are off by 1 degree, after one foot you’re just off by .2 inches. Not a big deal. But if you’re aiming for the sun, one degree difference will have you off by 1.6 million miles. Over time, being off by one degree can make a big difference.

That’s not to stir up fear in our hearts – God is sovereign over our lives and He is big enough to make up for

our mistakes, but it underlines the importance of being faithful in the little things.

Lesson #2: The best way to find ourselves is to lose ourselves in God’s will in the day to day

This poor woman in Iceland was searching for herself and didn’t know it. She didn’t recognize herself in the description of herself. Saul could say the same thing.

Things start to swirl around Saul so quickly that he is confused and unsettled. Samuel

tells the servant to keep going and then he reveals to Saul that Saul is the man God has chosen to save Israel from the Philistine’s oppression.

What did Saul expect his life to be? Not that, that’s for sure. He never expected to be chosen by God. Never expected to be king. Never expected to lead his people to victory against the Philistines.

If someone had described God’s plan for Saul, he wouldn’t have recognized himself in it.

I don’t mean to get real philosophical but who are you? What is the meaning of your life? Sometimes people say, “I need to find myself…” But ironically the best way to find ourselves is to lose ourselves in God’s will. Jesus said the one who seeks to save his life (find himself) will lose it and the one who loses his life for Jesus’ sake will find it.

What Jesus means is that the more we try to find ourselves apart from God, the more we try to reduce our lives to ourselves, the more lost we will be. But as we lose ourselves in something bigger than ourselves – meaning God, the definer and imparter of reality – the more we will find our identity even when we’re not looking for our identity.

I knew someone years ago who went through some tough times and it shook her sense of identity. One of the ways she reacted was by declaring over and over, “I am secure in who I am. I love who I am.” But it was kinda obvious these declarations came from a deep insecurity. When we are secure, we don’t need to tell everyone we’re secure. We’re not thinking, “I’m secure”. There is a blessed self-forgetfulness that finds our identity by losing ourselves in God’s good plan for our lives.

Ironically the more we narrow our lives to Christ, the wider and broader our lives become. And the more we try to puff our lives up to something big apart from Christ, the smaller our lives become.

I don’t know if this is for someone specifically, but if you’re struggling with the meaning of life, or with your sense of identity, find your security and meaning in Christ.

God demonstrated His love for you in this, while you were still sinning, Christ died for you. If He who did not spare His Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

The more we lose ourselves in the infinite love of God that is in Christ Jesus, the more we find what life is. As

we seek first the kingdom of God, all the other things we need and care about are added to us. Let’s pray.