“And Samuel said,
‘Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,
as in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
and to listen than the fat of rams.’”
– 1 Samuel 15:22
God gave clear instructions to King Saul. However, King Saul had a “better” idea! Rather than obey God, Saul convinced himself that God would be more pleased if he made a spectacular sacrifice. Thoroughly convinced that he was bringing God greater glory through his “improvements” to God’s plan, Saul was surprised when God not only rejected his sacrifice, God rejected him.
This disobedience was the final straw resulting in God’s rejection of his leadership over Israel. Though Saul would reign for many more years, God’s favor was gone and He raised up David to be king instead. Lest we merely consider this to be an interesting historical story, we must realize just how often we Christians can act like King Saul!
God made His will clear through Jesus: believe in Him, follow Him, act like Him, obey Him. We do. To a point. However, inevitably we bump up against clear commandments of Scripture that are inconvenient, uncomfortable, feel dated, or seem irrelevant to our life. We rationalize doing something better, more loving, or more in line with God’s character instead of simply obeying.
We rationalize our compartmentation of the sacred portion of our life from the religious portion of our life. We distract, deflect, and busy ourselves with things only loosely related to making disciples, going, baptizing, and teaching to obey all Christ commanded. We explain away differences between our churches’ priorities (or our priorities for our churches!) and the priorities displayed by the early church. This is no different than what Saul did. We must be different! God still finds our obedience better than any sacrifice, gift, or offering!