Message: In 1 Samuel 10 Saul was anointed as king and then given instructions to go to certain places. He was told what he would find and what to do when he found each thing. As he followed each of the instructions they led to the next thing he had been told and each thing came to pass exactly as Samuel had spoken. When he had fulfilled each of the instructions he began to prophesy with the prophets (also as Samuel had said he would) and God changed his heart. As I thought about this whole sequence of events I realized the significance of the fact that he took each step and walked it out in both faith and obedience. After he obeyed it all God changed his heart. Sometimes I think we are waiting on a heart change in order to obey God, but God is requiring our obedience. As we obey him our heart changes towards people and situations. I thought about this for a minute and kind of laughed at how true this has been in my life. Some of the hardest obedience moments happened when I was emotionally driven and extremely resistant. God has prompted me to obey him with an attitude change long before I felt like doing it. In fact, I felt myself kicking and screaming all the way through it until that beautiful moment where my heart finally followed after the act of obedience. In this story Saul was so changed that everyone who knew him took notice and heard about it. They asked “Is Saul among the prophets?”. He was doing things he had never done before and it was not unnoticed. In spite of all of this, Saul didn’t tell his uncle what was going on and when the prophet came to present him as king he was found hiding in the supplies. This is such another interesting statement. We don’t know why was hiding. We can only speculate but we really don’t know why he was hiding. Maybe he felt overwhelmed or underqualified. Whatever the reason, I think we can all relate to times we have hidden from the calling of God for any of those reasons. Fear of failure, fear of success, feeling unqualified, unprepared or inadequate, fear of what our families will think. Whatever the reason may be we can all relate to hiding.
