Friday, December 27, 2013
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I guess there's a daredevil inside of most little boys. They like to push the limits of safety and sanity. If you've got a boy or ever raised one, you know that. I'm not sure that part of the boy ever grows up, even when that boy becomes a man. I know that whenever we would hike to the top of a mountain, I would tend to head toward the edge of the cliff. That's where you get the best view, right?
And you know what? Even now I'll walk as close as I can to the edge, and you can hear the increasingly urgent counsel of my wife, who is saying, "Ron, you have children and grandchildren; you have one life. Don't go so close to the edge." Where we lived in New Jersey, near New York City, there are these beautiful palisades; sheer cliffs along the Hudson River. You can look across at New York City from there. And it was kind of fun to step to the edge and look down into the river. I stopped doing that. It got to the point where too many people had fallen over that edge.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Back From the Edge."
1 Samuel 15 is the story of Saul disobeying God's orders to him. Saul is the King of Israel; he has been told to destroy totally the corrupted culture of the Amalekites. It's like a poison, a cancer in the land. Sometimes God will destroy a sin-saturated culture directly as He did in Sodom. Sometimes He will do it though His people. Here He is giving Saul orders to do that through his army: "Leave nothing; take nothing." Listen to what happened.
Chapter 15, verse 9, it says, "Saul and the army spared the king, and the best of the sheep and the cattle, the fat calves and lambs-everything that was good. These they were unwilling to destroy completely." Okay, they are obviously disobeying God's orders. Verse 19 says, "Why did you not obey the Lord?" This is Samuel coming to him. "'Why did you pounce on the plunder and do evil in the sight of the Lord?' ‘But I did obey the Lord' Saul said." Well folks, not true.
Verse 22, Samuel says, "Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as obeying the voice of the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, He has rejected you as king." Here's Saul's line of thinking, "How close can I get to the edge of disobeying without crossing the line?" Instead of complete obedience, he flirted with sin and punishment by obeying as little as he could get away with. He was wrong, and he paid the price of God's blessing.
Now, we do this all the time. When there's any question about where God's boundary is, we run to the edges of sin, take the most liberal position we can, and in the process we often wander into sin and we lose God's blessing.
Teenagers say, "How far can I go physically?" And they're unsure where the moral line is. They try to do everything physically that they can and then say, "Well, I'm still a virgin." You can't be in danger of doing too little physically, only too much. "Well, I really didn't lie." You intended to deceive didn't you? That's a lie. "Well, the Bible doesn't forbid drinking." It sure does discourage it if you want God's best. "Well, divorce..." Now we'll come up with the most liberal interpretation we can find; that's what we go for, and we cross God's boundaries in the process.
I would rather risk over-obeying the Lord than under-obeying Him. I'd rather be too far inside God's line than to risk crossing it. I'd rather err on the side of caution than carelessness. There's something in us that likes to go as close to the edge as possible. But my friend, too many have fallen over that edge.
God's blessing is too precious to risk by living on the edge of sin.