Year 1, Day 293: 1 Samuel 7

Return to the Lord

Here in chapter 7 we have a great example of returning to the Lord.  Samuel gathers the people and then makes some demands and forces some action out of them.  Let’s look at these demands and see if we can’t learn something about the process of returning to the Lord.

1. The first demand: Put away your foreign Gods.

Samuel tells the Hebrew people something quite plain.  If you want to follow God with all their heart, they must put away all other gods.  This makes so much sense academically.  But it is nearly impossible for any of us to actually do.  Sure, we can throw away our stone figurines – most of us probably don’t even have any of those!  We can say we are Christian and we only follow God.  But do we?

How many of us – myself included – follow our own agenda over God’s agenda?  How many of us follow the agenda of other people over God’s agenda?  How many of us truly can claim to constantly be putting God at the center of our life and making our decisions based on His ways?  For that record, how many of us can actually claim to go to God frequently in prayer and conversation seeking His will when we are going to make a decision?  Sure, we pray over the really big stuff.  But how often are we on autopilot, assuming we know what God would say is best for a given decision?  Yes, we have our gods.  Most of the time, the list of our gods begins with ourselves.

2. The second demand: True Confession

Samuel gathers the people after they have put away their foreign gods, not before.  Once their foreign gods are put away, then Samuel has them fast.  Then Samuel has them confess that they have sinned.  Samuel forces them to take ownership of their sinfulness.

Many of us are familiar with the process of confession.  We tell God that we know we have sinned.  We tell God that we’re sorry.  We say that we won’t do it again, knowing that we probably will.  We might even quote 1 John 1:8-9 with consistency.  But compare what I’m talking about here with what Samuel does.  Samuel makes them come together and fast.  How does our typical confession of sinfulness compare with this one?

3. The third demand: Sacrifice

As the Hebrew people gather, the Philistines grow afraid of their numbers so they come out to attack.  The Hebrew people become fearful and ask Samuel to intervene.  Samuel takes a nursing lamb and offers it up as a sacrifice.  The Lord responds and drives away the Philistines without any help from the Hebrew people.

How often is our confession followed by sacrifice?  To put it bluntly, something quite literally died.  That young lamb had its life extinguished.

Now, I don’t mean to sound brutal or gruesome.  And I am certainly not intending to judge the sacrificial system of the Hebrew people.  But let’s face it; we do know that true repentance requires true change.  True change requires true sacrifice.  Perhaps an animal need not die, but the sinful part of ourselves certainly should die! 

Anyone can come before God and say “I’m sorry” and not even mean it.  But the one who is genuinely repentant comes before God, makes their confession, and then goes about sacrificing their sinful nature so that it dies.  The truly repentant person gladly sacrifices their sinful self so that Christ lives within them.

The nature of the process may have changed in the Post-Christ era.  We may not have to offer up burnt offerings anymore.  We may not have to be careful about clean and unclean anymore.  We may not have a special class of people that we call “priests” since we are all priests in His kingdom.  But just because the physical representation changes doesn’t mean that the process changes.  True confession requires a genuine putting away of the foreign gods that lead us into sinfulness.  It requires an honest and meaningful point of confession.  And it requires a sacrifice.

Yes, the sacrifice is Christ, but we too are sacrificed with Him so it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives within us.

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