How does the sort of leader we imagine stack up to what God values? How do we find our blind spots? Join Pastor Tim tonight for the second part of our series exploring these questions through the life of King Saul.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon uses the image of a beautiful pumpkin that looks perfect until it rots from the inside. How does this challenge the way you evaluate leaders in your own life—whether political, church, or community leaders? What “internal” qualities do you think matter most that aren’t immediately visible?
Israel valued Saul’s height and appearance; God was looking at something else entirely. When you evaluate political, church, or community leaders, which outward traits or personal benefits most easily sway you—and why?
How can fear or a desire for security tempt Christians to treat an earthly leader as a champion in God’s place? In what ways are we tempted to do the same thing Israel did—pushing aside God’s direct faithfulness because we want a visible, tangible protector?
God’s commands in Exodus 23:1–2 call us to truth and justice. Reflect honestly on your own conversations, social media posts, or advocacy for candidates you support. How many of your words would match that standard—and what would change if they did?
The sermon closes with this reframe: we are not those who help Jesus be king, but those who serve the one who already is king. What would change in your political engagement—and in the way you talk about leaders in the church and community—if you held that conviction consistently?
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be with you again tonight as we continue our series, Like the Other Nations. Last week, we began this series thinking about our present political climate that feels like it could almost overwhelm us, and thinking about how we look to the wrong things. Next week, we’re going to get to what a godly leader looks like. But as we continue to explore the life of King Saul, we find more that we need to learn about ourselves and how we wander from what God has called us to do, and we need to do that first. So let’s go ahead and come before our God, ask for His guidance, and then we’ll dig right in.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for your patience with us when we seem to want to see everything other than what you’ve placed before us in your word. Lord, thank you for drawing us back when our hearts wander. Lord, as we study your word tonight, would you help us to have our thoughts directed towards you? Would you help us to show your love to those around us? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Depending on whether you love when we hit November 1st and all the radio stations start playing Christmas carols, or you’re one of those who dreads that moment when the Christmas carols come on, you may or may not appreciate what I’m about to say. But I’ve had a Christmas song stuck in my head this week. Maybe you’ve heard it. It’s entitled “Must Be Santa.” I didn’t know about it until about 10 years ago when Bob Dylan released his Christmas album. It’s a fun song. It goes through a whole list of things that are attributes we think of, we associate with Santa. For example, he has a suit of red, beard of white, cap on head, comes on a special night, and it lists those out. The conclusion to each verse is, “Must be Santa, must be Santa, must be Santa Claus.”
As it works through it, the path is being narrowed to isolate specifically Santa. But if you think about the descriptive words being used, if we don’t know the right context or we aren’t paying attention to what really matters, you could come to an entirely wrong conclusion. Instead of, for example, coming up with Santa Claus with a suit of red and cap on head and beard of white and comes on a special night, you might get Mark McGwire, who shows up on special nights in Cardinals history and wears a suit of red and has a cap on his head and a beard of white. We have to value the right things.
Of course, in a way, this seems like a silly example because we think, oh, you say suit of red and cap on head, it doesn’t take a genius to think of Santa, even if we know there are other people wearing such things. After all, if you go onto Google or Bing and you type in suit of red cap on head or any variation thereof, you’re going to get pictures of Santa Claus. We kind of associate the two together. But what happens when in life we make those same sorts of lists, but we have all these superficial attributes, but not the ones that God actually values?
You see, that was the problem the Israelites ran into when they said they wanted a king. They had this list of the suit of red and the cap on head, the beard of white. They had the list of things they wanted to see in a king, but they weren’t listing the things that God values. And just as I had that list and ended up with Mark McGwire, they ended up with a king who wasn’t really a good king. So let’s join them now because as we think about what they sought after that was wrong, we find that we seek after the same things. And so this is so important in this political season for us to think about.
Let’s go ahead and turn to 1 Samuel chapter 9. It says, “A man had a son whose name was Saul, a handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he. From his shoulders upward he was taller than any of the people.” Here you have the perfect casting of a king. If you’re a Hollywood producer and you’re trying to find the perfect person to be a king in a movie, you would have picked the man who became King Saul. He was more handsome, it says, than anyone else.
As the Israelites are imagining a king who can lead them off into battle, they want someone who, when the people see him coming, he’s so tall, they don’t just look up to him because of his victories. They look up to him because he’s taller than they are. In fact, commentators on that phrase that says, “From his shoulders up he was taller than anyone else,” suggest we really should take that to mean he was so tall that everyone else only came up to his shoulders at best. So they really were looking up to him. And then he was handsome, like someone who would show up on a magazine so that people would say, “Wow, look at the king that Israel has.” That’s the sort of king that the Israelites are imagining when they come to Samuel and they say, “Samuel, you’re old. We need a king. All the other nations have kings. We, yeah, we have the Lord, but we need someone that people can see, someone that people will fear, someone that people will know will champion us.” When we’re scared, we can look to him and know that he’s our champion.
Saul looked like those strong leaders that they thought would somehow make life better for them. In fact, when they finally see King Saul for the first time, they react with incredible enthusiasm. Take a look at chapter 10, verse 24. It says, “And Samuel said to all the people, ‘Do you see him whom the Lord has chosen? There is none like him among all the people.’ And all the people shouted, ‘Long live the king!’” The people are so excited. They see King Saul. Samuel says, “This is the king for you.” And they say, “Wow, Samuel, you found the man that we’d been thinking of. If you could have brought in one of those sketch artists and we’d been describing the attributes of what the king would look like, the picture that would have drawn would have looked just like King Saul.” So they’re really, really excited.
In fact, the way it’s phrased when they’re saying “Long live the king!” and they’re shouting this exclamation, there’s another scene where they shout something very similar. We see it back at the beginning of 1 Samuel, but that time it was when the ark of the Lord came into battle with them. You see that security they felt when they were in battle and they saw this representation that symbolized God’s presence with them. Now they felt it when they saw King Saul. They had a symbol to tell them that their God was there to fight their battles. But now they had a king.
The problem was they were looking at all the superficial stuff. How tall was he? How handsome was he? Could he come into a room with other kings and people would say, “Wow, now Israel has a king.” They weren’t looking at his heart. They weren’t looking at what God values. We’re just entering the time of year where we start to get frosts. At the same time, we’re in the time of year where we love to go and pick pumpkins and put them out on our porches and enjoy just their beauty as they decorate and add a little light as the nights grow shorter.
But have you ever had that experience? You have this beautiful pumpkin, you have it sitting on your porch and it looks so beautiful. And the first hard frost hits and it actually even looks more beautiful because you have the little twinkling frost on top of it. And then you think, “Well, I need to rearrange it a little bit.” You try to pick it up and the bottom of it just drops out. Everything inside the pumpkin, all the seeds, all the innards of the pumpkin just fall out and splatter on the porch because the frost has gotten to the pumpkin and it’s just rotten. If your plan was to use that pumpkin to make a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, you know it’s shot because that pumpkin is done. But it looked beautiful. It looked great until that moment you tried to move it and you realized that it actually was really rotten inside.
That is time and again what happens when we look to what we value to evaluate someone, for example, who’s going to lead us. When we think of our political leaders, when we think of church leaders, when we think of other community leaders, what do we do? We have these lists of things. We have the suit of red and the beard of white and comes on a special night, and we end up describing someone but not the one that we actually had in mind. Certainly not the one that’s going to be best for us because we’re not looking to what really matters, what really designates that person as the right person for us, as the person after God’s own heart.
If you think about what campaigns, political campaigns are really about, they’re really about taking the rotten pumpkin that is in some sense each of us—we’re fallen human beings—and making that pumpkin look like a strong pumpkin that can be lifted up and carried around and it’s never going to fall apart. Those campaigns want us to believe that their person is a hero, that that person is going to be our champion, that no one else can compare to the person they’re advocating for to save us and to give us the things that we need.
What happens when we value the wrong things? What do we find? We find what actually was going on with King Saul. If we go back to chapter 10 where we just were looking and we look at verses 20 to 23, we see where King Saul was right before Israel first saw him. It says, “Then Samuel brought all the tribes of Israel near, and the tribe of Benjamin was taken by lot. He brought the tribe of Benjamin near by its clans, and the clan of the Matrites was taken by lot. And Saul the son of Kish was taken by lot. But when they sought him, he could not be found. So they inquired again of the Lord, ‘Is there a man still to come?’ And the Lord said, ‘Behold, he has hidden himself among the baggage.’ Then they ran and took him from there. And when he stood among the people, he was taller than any of the people from his shoulders upwards.”
They found Saul hiding because he didn’t want to be king. He was afraid of this calling to be king. And they ignore that. They don’t say, “Oh, this man, how is he going to be our champion? How is he going to actually achieve what the Lord has been doing for us? When the Lord is our perfect champion, how is this man who is hiding going to do that for us?” Instead, they don’t think about that because they look at him and they have that list—the suit of red and the beard of white—and they say, “This man meets everything. He’s going to be the perfect counterpoint to whatever kings we might have to fight against, whatever kings we might fear. We finally have our man.”
But they weren’t valuing what God values. What’s clear in Scripture is that God gives them Saul because they are so fixated on these unimportant attributes that they aren’t yet ready to recognize what a true king—a king who can champion them and direct them towards the Lord—would look like. He’s unwilling to be the leader, but he looks the part. And so they think he’s perfect.
We need to ask ourselves the question: What do we consider to be the right kind of leader? Do we think someone’s a good leader, a champion for us, because certain people around us or certain people around the world will like us if only we have this particular kind of leader? Do we want someone who’s going to be tough and say what I feel and stand up against those who I think are against me or don’t have my interest at heart? I think actually if we really dig down into our hearts and seek to understand what we really want, it really boils down to something very simple. We want to know that I will do well under this leader, not that it’s what this leader is going to do that the Lord values, but what I value in my heart, what I think is going to be good for me.
That’s why we need to ask ourselves a question. This is a really simple test for our own hearts: If I examine what I say on leadership, how many of my words would match God’s values? If you could take everything that you say around the water cooler at work, if you could take everything that you post on social media and strip it of particular references to a certain candidate that you’re advocating for right now—maybe you could take the cumulative total of it over the course of several elections—and you boiled it down and had the things that candidate was going to do that you were advocating for, that I am advocating for, would it be the things that God says he values? Or would it be the things that seem to indicate that I think this person can advance my cause? He’s going to lower my taxes or help me to get a better job or do this or do that, that I think are going to be things that make me happy and secure?
When we do that, we quickly feed this need to accomplish whatever we think is going to make us happy to the point that we start to justify even when we act wrongly towards the other side, whatever side that may be.
Take a look at Exodus chapter 23, verses 1 to 2, where we hear what God values. It says, “You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit siding with the many so as to pervert justice.” You see, what God values is truth. God values justice.
As I’m saying these things, especially in this politically charged environment, you might be trying to think, “Well, whom is Tim supporting? Who’s he trying to advocate for?” When it really comes down to it, as I look at what I see being posted by people I know on social media, neither side seems to value these things. You don’t have to look very far if you look at simply things being posted for your own candidate to find that people are constantly posting things that don’t meet the standard of truth and justice that God calls us to. But we turn our eyes the other way when we see that happening because we think, “But this affirms what I want. This affirms the person I want. Ultimately, this affirms the person whom I think is going to champion me.”
We need to guard ourselves against that, friends. Because we just get into this vicious cycle. And we do this not only with presidential campaigns and other political campaigns. We do this in the church, where we think, “Here’s a leader that’s going to grow the church, grow God’s kingdom.” And we’re not paying attention to the fact that the things that we’re saying to advocate for that person or the things that that person is doing are not the things that God values. We’re purely thinking in terms of, “I want my church to be bigger or more successful.” We do that in our own lives.
Ultimately, this is a call for us to look at our own hearts. The problem for Israel wasn’t King Saul. We focus on Saul. The problem was whom they wanted to be king. God gave them the sort of king that they were imagining. Saul was exactly what they asked for. We repeatedly get the sorts of people we ask for, too. And in that, we bear responsibility.
If we rewind a little further into 1 Samuel chapter 10, right before the introduction to King Saul, we see Samuel gathering the people. We hear these words: “Now Samuel called the people together to the Lord at Mizpah. And he said to the people of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, I brought up Israel out of Egypt, and I delivered you from the hand of the Egyptians and from the hand of all the kingdoms that were oppressing you. But today you have rejected your God, who saves you from all your calamities and your distresses. And you have said to him, Set a king over us. Now, therefore, present yourselves before the Lord by your tribes and by your thousands.’”
Here, if we boil it down, is Israel’s mistake. Samuel reminds them the Lord has been with them. He’s actively championed them time and again. He took them out of the land of Egypt. The fact that they can stand there as Israel in that moment is a testimony of God’s faithfulness and His work to rescue them. But they shove away that direct faithfulness from the God of the universe because they say, “We need the perceived security of a king who will impress the nations and impress us.” And we do the same thing.
I actually love political rallies. I’m a political junkie. If I think back to times I’ve gotten to go to political rallies, they’re amazing events. They’re almost electric with excitement. People are chanting mottos about their favorite candidate. You have balloons being dropped. You have speaker after speaker talking about, “This is the candidate we need. This candidate is going to make everything that’s wrong in our country or our world right. He’s going to do everything right that the previous administration did wrong.” They roll through this whole list of things. By the time you actually get to the candidate, everyone is so excited. You think, “Wow, this person is my hero, my champion, the one who’s going to make everything that I perceive wrong in my life right.”
You know what the truth is? He’s not the one. She’s not the one that’s going to do that. Only God is.
And just like Israel mistook and focused on all these superficial attributes, this list that they had that wasn’t really the list they needed, so do we. That’s when we fall into those traps of spreading gossip and mistruth because we think, “I have to protect this candidate. He’s my hero. She’s my hero. I can’t allow this other side with all their evil and horribleness to prevail.”
Friends, we’re so tempted to fall into this. We’re often going to fall into this, and we need to reject it. This has no place in the church. It has no place among Christians. We should not be spreading gossip and lies. We should be conveying God’s truth and His love of justice and mercy.
It’s not to say that we ignore the issues, that we don’t see the stakes that are at hand with political candidates. They matter. But we need to focus on the right things. We’ll never see this in a political rally because the point is to center our attention on this one human being and help us to get to a point where we don’t think that person’s going to crumble when we pick them up like that rotten pumpkin, but that they will stand strong and firm and do everything they can.
The right kind of political rally would actually be focused on God and how He’s our champion and rallying us around God, and then taking the two candidates and we’d simply be looking at them and saying, “Which one is going to do the best job in this moment of doing the things God’s called us to do?” Not because that person’s a hero, but this person’s a fallible human being who needs God’s guidance—just like I am and you are. All of us have those rotten parts in us that God’s working on. If we’re following Him, if the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives because we’ve trusted in Jesus, those rotten parts are going to go away. Over the course of our life, He’s working those out of our lives, and someday in His presence, we will be perfect. But right now, we know we’re not, and neither are the candidates that we support.
And that perfect political rally would focus on that, but that perfect political rally doesn’t exist. So what we need to do instead is resist the temptation to chase after a political candidate as if that person were our perfect champion and leave that place to God and go and enthusiastically research and know what we should do as citizens, but do so recognizing that these people at best are flawed servants of God, not heroes.
How do we tell if we’re doing this? We need to ask ourselves, “Who do I sound like when I advocate for my preferred leaders? Do I sound like the scared Israelites who felt like they needed to have that king who would stand up for them because even though God was directly intervening in their history and protecting them, without that king they felt like they wouldn’t actually be able to stand? Do I sound like those false witnesses who are willing to spread gossip—gossip I would never want to spread against myself, dubious claims that I would want people to seek the truth of before they ever said them about me? Do I sound like someone who’s doing that towards the opponent, whoever it is that I don’t support? Or do I sound like Jesus?”
I think probably all of us are going to have those times where we sound like those first two—like the scared Israelites or the false witnesses. As we think about, what do I sound like to my neighbors? What do I sound like to those that I’m talking about this upcoming election to? What do I sound like to those in my church when we’re talking about our leadership in churches? What do I sound like in my community when we’re talking about different forms of leadership?
Every time that we realize that we were running in fear and simply seeking an earthly tangible champion rather than God, every time that we’re willing to bend the truth or to not try to stand up for the truth, we should stop ourselves, remember who Jesus is, and sound like Him instead.
Here’s the thing that it all boils down to. We need to stop acting like those who need to help Jesus to be king and recognize instead that we are those who serve the one who already is king.
If we’re busy trying to help Jesus be king, we’re going to compromise ourselves and we’re going to get in the way of the message of the gospel. But when we recognize that we aren’t those who are helping Jesus to be king, we are those who serve Him as the one who already is king, we can stand in His strength and value what He values.
Let’s pray. Lord, too often we don’t value what You value, whether it’s out of fear or a sense that we can bend things against a candidate or another type of leader or defend a leader that we think is somehow championing us even when he or she does wrong. Lord, in all these things, we don’t look like You. We pray that You would forgive us of those times that we wander and you’d instead direct us to value what You value — instead of making that list and having that list describe things that aren’t important, let it be a list of things that are important to You.
As we do that, Lord, would You help us not to ever think that some earthly candidate is going to make everything right or some earthly leader of any sort is ever going to make everything right, but to keep in mind that You are the one who makes all things right and that all of us are those who are desperately in need of Your strength and Your grace. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
We’re going to continue next week picking up where we just left off and thinking especially in terms of how we get caught up in these candidates and, as we do, what it is that they think is important and what it is that we should really seek after in a godly candidate. Now that we’ve thought about the basis that we need to understand that no candidate is really going to be perfect, we need to keep our hope in the Lord.
Now let’s go ahead. We will think about the candidates themselves. I’m not going to name any names, but think in terms of what King Saul does well and what he doesn’t do well and ultimately what God values in those who lead. I hope that you’ll join me next week for that at 7 p.m. on Monday night and that you would share this series with someone who might be struggling in this political season or struggling in relation to other leadership questions in life.
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Also this week, I’d like to remind you before we continue our series, we’re going to be continuing our men’s Bible study that just started a new series on Hebrews. And again, in an uncertain time, this is another really helpful study because Hebrews is written to early Christians living in a very uncertain time. It was so encouraging as we started last week. I would love to see you there. Leave a message in the comments or shoot me an email. I’d be happy to get you connected with that.
If there’s any way I can be praying for you this week, once again, you can shoot me an email. You can leave it in the comments and we can all pray for each other together.
I hope that I’ll see you again next week as we continue this series. It’s so important that we keep focused on God in this season and every season. I hope this has been an encouragement to you. I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week. I’ll see you next week.