Saul, The Bad King

Intro

Welcome

I’m Tony Graffanino

We’re continuing our sermon series

You can turn in your Bibles to...

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy

Chapter

We’ll get there in a minute

But first, let me tell you a story

The story is about a man, a friend of mine, we’ll say, ha

That’s how the stories go, right,

It’s actually about a boy, growing up in an average family, in a normal town in N.Y

The boy was friendly, energetic, loved to play outside, and was gifted athletically, was pretty good at any sport he played

But it was clear, from an early age, his best sport was baseball, and it was the one he loved most.

This boy, when not playing organized baseball, would play it by himself, creating games in his mind, pretending to be some of his favorite players from the Yankees, his favorite team, and the Mets, who also had their stars

He’d self hit wiffle balls from one side of the street to the other, pretending to be Dave Winfield, Don Mattingly, Willie Randolph, and Gregg Nettles from the Yankees, and then from the other side of the street, he’d be Darryl Strawberry, Lenny Dykstra, Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter from the Mets

Well, baseball served this boy well, he excelled from Little League, to middle school, in travel ball and then high school.

It earned him a scholarship to college, Clemson University, but it also got him drafted to play professionally with the Atlanta Braves

This small town kid decided to follow his dream, to sign with Atlanta and enter into the minor leagues

How exciting, how scary, an 18 year old young man, but still a boy in many ways, was entering into a man’s world, and one he knew little about.

Away from home for an extended period of time for the first time, pretty much on his own, now being paid to play, and expected to perform.

Would he be good enough? What if he wasn’t? Could he handle playing day after day, with few off days, for the next 5 months?

How would he handle failure? Nobody knew, because he had never really failed before.

How would he handle success in this new world?

How would he deal with life? How was one to know.

It was the failure that was the toughest to deal with at first, and fail did he, overmatched and overwhelmed

and the failure lasted, for days and weeks, an occasional good game mixed in, but boy was it tough.

There were days, he’d cry in his car, thinking he was going to get released, and his baseball life would be over. Thinking this was the worst decision, the worst thing that has ever happened to him and praying to God that things would change.

But it wasn’t, he didn’t realize failure was part of the process and that he had more time to develop and that things would change.

The next season was very different, he actually excelled, had a great year, but new emotions and thoughts developed.

It was funny how you can think so lowly of yourself one season, and then think so highly of yourself the next

The young man was thinking too highly of himself, he became arrogant, his prayers of desperation long gone, he was the master of his destiny now.

Well the roller coaster continued season after season,

We have these characters in the Bible, like Saul, not just so we can learn history, not just so we can shake our heads and think, what was he thinking or what was he doing, but to ask other questions

Like, why was he thinking that and why would he do that?

How did he get to this place where this is the man he became?

Am I capable of this? How do I see myself in Saul, or better yet, how am I like Saul?

Because there’s a Saul in all of us, in fact he’s part of our nature.

How do we know the heart of a person?

It’s not circumstances that create new things in our hearts, but rather, it’s the circumstances that reveal what’s already in our hearts.

We have no idea what we are truly capable of doing, only circumstances can help us to begin to see.

There are thoughts, beliefs, desires, that have been passed down to us through the generations, it comes to us from our original mother and father, from Eve and from Adam

These thoughts are these, is God really good, does He really have the best for me, is He holding out on me, is He trying to keep me down, is there better out there than here in His kingdom, can I be more, have more, do more??

These are the questions that lie under the surface, maybe in the deep recesses of our minds, maybe we are conscious of them, maybe we’re not.

But these questions can begin to creep to the surface, still possibly unaware tho, but they come when opportunity arises, when the right, or wrong, circumstances present themselves