AMEN 2013: Following the Leader

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network (AMEN)

AMEN 2013: Morning Devotions

James Rafferty

Principles of Biblical Leadership – Part 1

Principles of Biblical Leadership – Part 2

Principles of Biblical Leadership – Part 3

I've been awake for several hours actually, and I'm still using my iPad mini, but I still have my backup Bible.

When I was a young man, I was raised in London, England.

That's where my mother hails from, actually, from Ireland.

And though I was born in the United States, I lived there for 10 years as a young boy.

And we lived in a house that was divided into what they call flats or apartments.

And we had above us and below us other families.

There were 13 children in the house altogether in the flats.

By design, my mom wanted us to have a lot of kids that we grew up with.

And above us was a family, a father and a mother.

I was raised in a single family home with my mom, and a son and 2, well, actually ended up being 2 sons and 2 daughters, but I was good friends with the boy, Paul.

We were friends for the many years that we were there.

And his dad occasionally became my dad, in a good sense, in a positive sense.

He would bring gifts for his son and also include me.

And 1 day he came home with a couple of gifts.

1 of them was wrapped and 1 of them was unwrapped.

And they were both cars, little model cars, really cool cars.

It had little doors that would open, you know, it was about this size.

It wasn't a really small 1, it was a medium-sized 1.

It had little doors that would open and darkened windows.

And we just, oh, we just wanted those so bad.

We could hardly, we were ready to just grab them out of his hands.

And but before he gave them to us, he said, now I have these 2 gifts, and of course 1 of them is wrapped and 1 of them is not wrapped.

And Paul, I'm going to give you first choice, and then James, you can have the 1 that's left over.

And immediately, Paul went for the 1 that was unwrapped.

He went for the 1, the Mustang, the cool, white with blue stripe Mustang with the doors that open and the darkened windows.

But When I unwrapped the other 1, what I found was something that was just even more incredible than the Mustang with the blue stripes and the darkened windows and the doors that opened.

This car had a trunk that opened and doors that opened and a front end that opened and it had the wheels that would turn just a little bit.

It was just an incredible car, so much so that, well, I won't tell you what happened after that, but I will say this.

Our danger lies in being content with what we've already seen and wanting that more perhaps than what God still has for us, what God still wants to reveal to us, what God still wants to show us.

This morning we're going to pick up in 1 Samuel chapter 15.

I'm glad you're here this morning to join me in this morning hour because I believe God wants to feed us until we want no more.

We need to just be overflowing in such a way that we just wanna overflow to others that we come in contact with and just have enough to feed them.

And there are times I know when we've experienced that.

We've looked at the experience of Saul in his good days.

We've contrasted that with the experience of Saul and his bad days.

We've been looking at principles of biblical leadership and not only what he did, but what he didn't do, perhaps as a warning for us.

We've looked at Samuel and how God led him and blessed him and anointed him.

And there were a number of points here that we made about Samuel.

And I want to just pick up here in 1 Samuel 15, because we talked about how God is the God of second chances.

And Samuel was mourning and weeping over Saul.

And he wanted to reach out to Saul again and again and God used him to do that.

In 1 Samuel chapter 15, Samuel goes to Saul again and he goes with the word of the Lord.

We should never take it upon ourselves To go to those who are straying from God on our own recognizance, on our own will.

We should always be basing our ventures into secularism or into the domain of Satan on the Word of God.

Whatever we do, wherever we're going, we need the Word of God, we need a thus saith the Lord.

And when we have a thus saith the Lord, we can go into almost any company where God sends us and be an influence, be a blessing.

So the reason why this is so significant is because when you look at Samuel, you realize later on that Samuel's actually afraid of Saul.

Samuel is told later to go and anoint David to be king in Saul's place.

And he says, I'm afraid that Saul will kill me if I do that.

It is only the Word of God that gives us the courage to do what God wants us to do.

And so Samuel goes to Saul here in 1 Samuel 15, 1 and he says, Thus says the Lord, the Lord sent me to anoint you king of Israel.

Thus says the Lord, verse 2, I will punish Amalek.

And so the second chance that Saul is given is to follow up with something that God wanted him to accomplish in behalf of the nation of Israel concerning the Amalekites.

It says, and he's very specific here, that Saul is to go and to destroy all of the Amalekites and he's not to leave any of the Amalekites alive, not even the animals are to be left alive.

Well, it depends on who you ask, doesn't it?

And this is 1 of the difficulties that you're going to find as we move through the purpose for God in our lives, in the church, in every situation, we're going to find ourselves confronted with people, not only out there, but in the mirror, people who perceive themselves sometimes as obeying God when really they're falling short.

They're not doing what God really wants them to do.

We're not doing what really God wants us to do.

And that can be a startling revelation, but it doesn't have to be.

If we recognize and understand Christ in His fullness as our righteousness, as our salvation, we can deal with our shortcomings and our failures.

We can deal with the things that we see in the mirror and the things that we see in other people.

But Saul was not willing to recognize that he had changed.

Something had altered in his way of thinking at this point.

And so when Samuel comes to him and begins to ask him about what he has accomplished or whether he's accomplished the task, Saul begins again to make excuses.

And in that context, God begins to grieve over and repent in a sense of the fact that he called Saul to be king.

Samuel is revealing the heart of God and it says right here in 1 Samuel 15 and verse 11, God says, I greatly regret that I've set up Saul as king, and he has turned his back on following me, he has not performed my commandments, and it grieved Samuel, and he cried out to the Lord all night.

Have you ever spent sleepless nights grieving over the sins that you see in the church?

I know I've spent many hours talking about the sins that we see in the church and communicating my frustration over the sins that I see in the church, but what about this idea of mourning and weeping and grieving that we see here in the life of Samuel, in the heart of Samuel.

Biblical leadership spends sleepless nights grieving over the sins and faults and problems in the church.

He rises up early in the morning to meet Saul.

And he goes to him and he begins to communicate to him.

Now when Saul meets him, Saul says in verse 13, "'Blessed are you of the Lord.

"'I have performed the commandment of the Lord.'" But biblical leadership is not deterred by the flattery or the professed claims of obedience to God's word.

And Samuel has a specific message he needs to communicate to Saul regardless of the flattery, regardless of the words that Saul is communicating to him.

Oh, you're blessed are you, man of God, and I've been obedient to God.

No, you haven't actually been obedient to God.

And then he actually has to silence Saul because Saul begins to talk and to speak and Samuel basically says to him, Be quiet and I'm going to tell you what the Lord has to say." And then, and that's, we have to do that sometimes as leaders.

And then it goes on in verse 17 to describe how Saul, Samuel says to Saul, how when you were little in your own eyes, When you were little in your own eyes, God sent you on a mission, but you have not obeyed the voice of the Lord.

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AMEN 2013: Morning Devotions

Principles of Biblical Leadership – Part 3

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