From the QT...

Here's a good principle from my Quiet Time this morning. I'm studying 1 Samuel right now. In chapter 8 Samuel has grown older - and like Eli, his children have wandered from the LORD. This, along with the pressure to conform to what all the other nations around them were doing prompted the people of Israel to ask Samuel to appoint a king over them for rule.

They already had a King, but were really good at rejecting His Word. They wanted a human king like everybody else. Here is how it reads in the HCSB:

1 Samuel 8:4-6a: 4 So all the elders of Israel gathered together and went to Samuel at Ramah. 5 They said to him, "Look, you are old, and your sons do not follow your example. Therefore, appoint a king to judge us the same as all the other nations have."
6 When they said, "Give us a king to judge us," Samuel considered their demand sinful..."

That last expression: "Samuel considered their demand sinful" caught my attention because of what Samuel did next. We might expect Samuel to go into mighty prophet mode and just let the nation of Israel have it with a hell fire brimstone sermon, but that wasn't Samuel's next move.

I might have expected Samuel to reason with them about the benefits of the Judge system. You might expect Samuel to simply ignore their request and remind them that they already have a King. But that's not what Samuel did next. Check this out:

1 Samuel 8:6b "...so he prayed to the Lord." Samuel took his battle to the Lord in prayer first.
Furthermore, this is what really stood out to me this morning, and I hope you will consider it too: Samuel made sure his thinking ("Samuel considered their demand sinful") was in line with God's thinking.

I think it is a wise lesson for me to learn to pause before I interject my opinion on various situations, and make sure what I think is aligned with what God thinks.

- Brad