the Word is alive

"Has the Lord as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and insubordination is as iniquity and idolatry." (1 Samuel 15:22-23)

God taught me what this meant in a very sobering way this morning.

I was in a sulky mood... feeling sorry for myself, throwing a pity party, whatever you want to call it. Work was the last place I wanted to go, and I was refusing to trust that God would carry me through the day. I guess you could say that I had a rebellious attitude. For me, it would have been a sacrifice for me to go to work--my selfishness would be up on the altar. But that was okay, because at least God would notice, right?

Wrong.

As I was praying, God showed me that He wanted me to go to work NOT because it was a sacrifice, but because I would be obeying Him by doing it. That's when the phrase "to obey is better than sacrifice" popped into my head. God showed me that He would rather have me at work with an obedient spirit than at work confidently putting my desires on the altar. The message was loud and clear, and I was thankful that God had met with me when I needed Him the most.

He wasn't done teaching me, though.

I went to read more Scripture, praying that He would show me where to turn. As I sat there, flapping the page corners of my Bible, I felt my thumb stop at a specific spot. I couldn't move it from there! When I opened my Bible, the words "to obey is better than sacrifice" screamed at me from the page.

Wow! Did God actually cause me to open to that passage? I could hardly believe my eyes. There was no way I knew where that verse was found, and there it was before me. I figured that God didn't just want me to read the verse, since I already knew it. I read the whole chapter to see what the context was.

I read about King Saul, and how he disobeyed God's command to destroy the Amalekites and everything they possessed. Instead, he kept the choice lambs and offered them as a sacrifice to God. God was disappointed with Saul, and His prophet Samuel told Saul that the Lord had rejected him because he had rejected the Lord. Nothing more was recorded until Saul's death, at which point it says "And the Lord regretted that He had made Saul king over Israel."

After I had read this, I was grieved that I had ever thought I was doing God a service by sacrificing rather than obeying. I do not want my God to regret having put me where He did after I die!

I am so thankful that God uses these stories from history to reveal sin in my life. It just goes to show that God's word is "living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughs and intentions of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12)

The Word is alive.