What does God look for in a leader? Join Pastor Tim tonight to think about that question and how it should guide us as we go to the polls.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon contrasts Saul’s “worldly scorecard” with God’s measure of success—focusing on the heart rather than outward appearance or victories. What does it look like in your own life or leadership to shift from measuring success by visible results to measuring it by faithfulness to God’s values?
Saul compromises by offering the sacrifice himself because he feels pressure from the people scattering around him. When have you felt tempted to bend God’s principles because of external pressure—fear, urgency, or the need to look decisive? How did you respond?
The sermon uses the two-faucet illustration to suggest we need both political engagement and confidence in God’s sovereignty. How do you personally balance being an active, discerning citizen with trusting that God is ultimately in control, especially during elections?
Samuel tells Saul, “The Lord sees not as man sees. Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” What are some ways the world’s criteria for evaluating leaders—whether in church, politics, or business—differ from what God values, and how should that shape our choices?
David’s defining characteristic is that he sought after God’s heart, even when he failed and sinned. How does the pattern of repentance and return to God differ from simply trying to do everything right the first time? What does genuine repentance look like in leadership?
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 here with you tonight as we continue our series, Like the Other Nations.
As we closed last week, I left us with a thought from the scripture, and it was a question about who we think we are in the context of God’s victory. Do we see ourselves as those who are acting to help God become king, or do we see ourselves as those who are following the victorious king? And where we see ourselves in that makes all the difference. It determines if we follow the path that Saul followed, or if we can rest in the peace and the joy of our victorious king with the confidence that he has already won the battle for us.
So let’s come before that victorious king tonight, ask him for his encouragement as we go into this election season, and then we’ll join back with Saul and see more of his story and see what it tells us about following our king.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for being with us even when we chase after other kings or we put too much importance in ourselves and we think that we can somehow affect the balance of history, when we know that you are the one who has history in his hands. You have us in your hands. You are with us. And Lord, would you remind us of that tonight? Would you give us comfort and encouragement that we would rest in you, our victorious king? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
What does it look like to shift from living as those who are trying to help God achieve victory to those who know that God has the victory? Well, it changes the way we evaluate our own victories, the way we write out our own scorecards, so to speak, how we measure success.
I’d like to introduce you to Frost. You may have actually heard me mention him the other night on a previous live stream because Frost really likes to help with live streams. In fact, he seems to like to come in right as they start and make sure he inspects all the equipment. He likes to sniff the lights and sort of see if they’re secure and see if he can push them over and come over and look at the cords and maybe chew on a few of them to make sure they’re tough enough. And I think if he does that sort of thing and he’s right in the thick of what I’m doing, he would count that as a success.
On the other hand, when I think about it, I measure success, I would consider success convincing him to sit over by the door and simply be there with me during the live stream without his help by rearranging the lights or the microphone or anything else. In life, we probably have had that experience a bunch of times where you’re working with someone and his or her measure of success is profoundly different from your own and it makes things difficult.
So often in life, we are Frost to God’s calling to our lives, and as God calls us to simply be with him and to rest in confidence in what he has done, we’re sniffing the lights and rearranging things and chewing on the cords and things go wrong. That’s what we see with Saul when we rejoin him tonight. Because you see, as Saul was measuring his successes, the Israelites were measuring Saul’s success. They were filling out a scorecard and he already had a ton of points on it simply because he looked the part. We talked about that last week. He was handsome. He was tall. He gave them confidence. Confidence they didn’t have simply by knowing the God of the universe was with them because they couldn’t see him. But confidence they had because they saw Saul, and as they saw Saul, they saw this king who looked in command. And on top of that, Saul had some military victories.
If we turn to First Samuel chapter 11, we see this in verse 11. It says, “And the next day Saul put the people in three companies and they came into the midst of the camp in the morning and morning watch and struck down the Ammonites until the heat of the day. And those who survived were scattered so that no two of them were left together.” So the Israelites are filling out their scorecard and it’s just off the charts. Wow. Look at the success of King Saul. He looks the part. He’s victorious.
And admittedly, Saul had some things going for him, even in relationship to the Lord. There were times where it seems clear that Saul really did want to seek after God’s will. Times when Saul probably would have reported that following the Lord was really important to him. He certainly said so, but we probably should give him the benefit of the doubt that some of those times were actually true. Now for the Israelites’ part, I don’t think that was really part of how they were counting whether Saul was victorious or not. Was he following the Lord in this or not? It was, do we feel safe or not? And in that we see where they encouraged Saul, and Saul in his own fallen heart encourages himself to compromise.
We see that in First Samuel chapter 13. It says he waited seven days, that is Saul, the time appointed by Samuel. Now this is a time right before battle and Saul is getting anxious, and it says, “But Samuel did not come to Gilgal and the people were scattering from him. So Saul said, ‘Bring the burnt offering here to me and the peace offerings.’ And he offered the burnt offering. As soon as he had finished offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came and Saul went out to meet him and greet him. Samuel said, ‘What have you done?’ And Saul said, ‘When I saw the people were scattering from me and that you did not come within the days appointed and that the Philistines had mustered at Michmash, I said, now the Philistines will come down against me at Gilgal and I have not sought the favor of the Lord. So I forced myself and offered the burnt offering.’ Samuel said to Saul, ‘You have done foolishly. You have not kept the command of the Lord your God, which he commanded you, for then the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever.’”
What we see here is that Saul is leading the people and they’re getting nervous. There’s this battle looming. He’s waiting for Samuel and he decides to be the decisive leader. I would imagine the Israelites were praising him for this. They were scattering up to that point because they don’t like a leader that looks like he’s just waiting. But he looks like he takes charge and he even looks like he’s being faithful. He’s seeking after the Lord. He’s going to offer these sacrifices. And for us today, it’s probably even a little hard to get our minds around what’s wrong with that.
But you see, in the Old Testament, it was very clear who should and should not offer sacrifices. Saul would have known this. He knew that he was not one of those who should have been offering sacrifices to God. That wasn’t his job. That wasn’t what God had enabled him to do. That was Samuel’s job. He should have been waiting for him, but he didn’t. Saul, in an attempt to convey a sense of leadership and a sense of leadership that surely gave the people of Israel confidence in the moment, compromised what he really should have been seeking after, which was following the Lord.
We do this time and again. This is not something unique to Saul. If you think about how there are always seemingly headlines about scandals in ministries and churches, should we really be all that surprised? Here’s the problem. Here’s the problem that Saul falls into. Here’s the problem that Israelites fell into. Here’s the problem that we fall into today, which is that instead of us as the people of God speaking into the world and setting the standard for what we should be seeking after in leadership, what we should value, instead we allow the world to tell us what we should value.
Israelites wanted a decisive leader, a leader who would take them into battle without just sitting there and waiting. And that’s what they valued. That’s what Saul valued, that he could have peace with that and he could see the people with him. What he needed to be worried about was that God was with him, not the people. And today we do the same thing. We promote leaders that compromise on God’s values, who are willing to just throw them out the window or twist them and misuse them. And sometimes it provides a superficial level of success for a time. And we see those levels of success and our scorecard is being filled out and we want those things and so we support it and we turn the other way when we see what’s clearly wrong.
But then is it any wonder? Is it any wonder we see scandals emerge? We encourage it, whereas we as the people of God should reject such things. We should be setting the standard for the world and then when we look to the rest of the world and we see in politics, for example, and we look at an election like this upcoming one and we think it’s so hard to figure out what to do, should we be surprised? We set such a low standard oftentimes even within God’s people. Why does it seem like we’re willing to bend God’s rules? Because, well, often because we feel like we’re in a crisis. We’re in a crisis in the church, we’re in a crisis in our nation, we’re in a crisis in our own lives and in our own areas where God has given us the ability to lead. And we compromise when God calls us to have a different kind of scorecard.
We’re measuring the wrong success when we say, well, it’s okay if I compromise here or it’s okay if I support a church that compromises here or there because success is coming or the solution to this crisis is coming. What does God value? Is that really how he measures success? We see clearly no.
As we turn back to the scene we just left with Saul and Samuel in verse 14, this is what Samuel says: “But now your kingdom shall not continue. The Lord has sought out a man after his own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be a prince over his people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.” God seeks after the heart. He’s not interested in that scorecard of worldly victories that we can make about ourselves, that we can make about our churches, that we can make about our political leaders that we raise up and we celebrate. He’s after what God desires. What God counts as success is that we’re seeking after him and his heart.
It’s the sort of thing that we have a hard time quantifying and measuring, and so we come up with all these other things, how many people are coming to something or how prosperous our nation is, and those things have validity to them. But instead of being some good fruit of godly leadership and godly pursuits in our own lives, they become the goal in themselves, and we fall into those temptations.
On the other hand, we see in King David a king who doesn’t necessarily check all those boxes in the way that Saul did. Saul was impressive from the get-go. The moment people set their eyes on him, he felt impressive. And after this moment when Samuel tells Saul that Saul’s time as king is going to be cut short because of his unwillingness to stick to what God has called him to do, Samuel himself even is going to struggle to actually have God’s scorecard in mind.
When we turn to 1 Samuel chapter 16, we see that Samuel arrives in David’s home city. He arrives to his homestead. God is leading Samuel there, but Samuel doesn’t know whom it is that God has in mind, and David has a bunch of brothers. They’re older than him, and they seem like they’re more impressive than him. And as Samuel evaluates these brothers, David is off taking care of the sheep. Samuel doesn’t even see him. He is falling into the same temptations as the Israelites, and that’s where we pick up in verse 7. It says, “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance, or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees. Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’”
That’s the crucial difference here. In Saul, God gives the Israelites the sort of king they think they want. He says, if this is what you think you want, I’m going to allow you to experience that. But with David, he gives them something different. And to our human analysis, it may not even seem like he gives them that different of a king. Think about the list. If you’re familiar with David’s story, David commits some terrible sins. David does some really wrong things, and he does them for some of the same reasons as Saul. At times, his fears get a hold of him, or his insecurities. At times, he simply does what he thinks will make himself happy without regard to the Lord.
So what makes David a good king, when he doesn’t have everything going for him that Saul does? He’s even the youngest in the family, and in the ancient world, the youngest was often valued less than the older brothers. It would have been really counterintuitive that God would say, okay, you want a real king? I’m going to give you this young unknown, and he’s going to replace this star of a king who’s on the magazines of Near Eastern kings every week because he’s so impressive. And believe it or not, Saul’s not really that impressive. David is going to be the king that’s really going to be great for you. It sounds so wrong.
But what’s the difference with David? It’s not that David always does right. It’s that David sought after the Lord’s heart. And we see that where David, even in his darkest moments, even in those times that he’s done desperately wrong things, what does he do? He comes back to the Lord and he repents. Even when he fails and he gets caught up in his own sin, his desire is to be in relationship with his God. That’s what God sees in his heart. That’s the difference. All those worldly scorecards make it really hard to say, well, clearly David is so much better than Saul. But in God’s measure of success, it’s not even comparable. And we see that exemplified even further in the person of Jesus, God incarnate, because God could have come and said, okay, now I’m going to give you a real king. And he could have made God in the flesh to be the most impressive human being ever in the ways that we would witness it.
But what do we see in Isaiah 53, for example? It says that people would view him as not much to regard, not someone who was impressive looking, not someone who looked like a king. And that’s how it plays out in the gospels. The people look at him and scoff, because what really truly matters isn’t that appearance, isn’t that worldly scorecard. It’s faithfulness to the Father’s will.
That’s what we see Jesus reiterate in Luke chapter 16. He says, “You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.” We exalt the wrong things and we measure success in the wrong ways.
And so that’s why we need to ask this question: Am I focused on following God’s heart? Because too often we’re chasing after our own hearts. Too often we’re chasing after the heart of the world, so to speak. We’re called to seek after God’s heart.
We’re called to seek after God’s heart when we support leaders, that we want to see leaders who genuinely show hearts of repentance and faithfulness, that they exhibit the fruit of the Spirit. And more so in our own lives, that’s what we’re called to cultivate. But what do we see? We see political leaders from both parties being raised up who so often show everything but the fruit of the Spirit. And then we go right into it and buy into that and absorb that into our own character as we share stuff on social media that excuses any wrongdoing in whatever side we pick and throws not even just the stuff they’ve actually done but creates all kinds of new false stuff that we throw at the other side because we don’t even seem to care about the truth.
God calls us to a different standard. He doesn’t call us to excuse sin. He doesn’t call us to make up things to make sure that whatever side we think God’s side is going to win. He calls us to be faithful, not to fall into that trap that Saul does.
Now you might say, okay, Tim, you’ve just pretty much blown this message as far as answering any questions about the election because you’ve said both sides raise up leaders that don’t show the fruit of the Spirit. You’ve been saying that Saul wasn’t a good king like David. What does this tell me about how I should vote? And it’s not really my place to try to say I’ve flipped open the Bible and I found here is a ballot. What do you know? And this is who you should vote for. That’s not what God’s Word calls me to do.
But what it does call me to do is to speak of what God values in those that we vote for. Here’s what we’re called to do. We’re called to come before God humbly to seek his wisdom and his will. And to act first and foremost in our own lives in a way that’s pleasing to him. That when we do that and we’re discerning and we’re seeking out whom we should elect to this office and we look at these choices and we say, well, both options that one of whom is going to be in the White House next year, neither of them seem to fit David so much as Saul. And so what should I do? What should I do?
Well, we start off with using godly wisdom. We vote for whom we think is going to convey the most the key things that God values as much as possible. But then we still don’t excuse the things that person does wrong. We don’t make up falsehoods about the other side. We have confidence that God is already victorious. So we don’t need to somehow try to game the system and play the dirty political game to make it all work out.
We have to play a role in this in a way that doesn’t cause us to compromise. That’s what we see in David. When David is appointed king, yes, later on, he’s going to make some mistakes. But what we see that he does right early on is he’s been told he’s going to be king, but he doesn’t as soon as he gets access to the presence of Saul, he doesn’t take out the sword and try to behead Saul and become king and say, OK, I need to make sure God’s will is done here. So I’m going to take this into my own hands. No, he tries to help Saul. He plays music to soothe Saul as Saul is tormented and struggles.
David has confidence that God has it under control and all he can do is what’s in front of him that’s clearly pleasing to God. He can rest in that, and that’s what we need to do as well. We see that exemplified in the book of Daniel with Daniel and his friends.
If we turn to Daniel chapter one, we see this about them. It says that in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, and this is a king in a foreign land. The people are in exile. That king found Daniel and his friends 10 times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom. And Daniel was there until the first year of King Cyrus.
Daniel finds himself in a situation, maybe sort of like we do. He’s facing serving under leadership that isn’t pleasing to God in so many ways. But God has allowed that leadership to be there. And so what does Daniel decide to do? He doesn’t decide, well, I need to figure out how to poison the king. I need to somehow make sure that God is victorious. No, he trusts that God is victorious and he seeks to serve in that context.
In that, Daniel has opportunities where he could have become compromised. For example, there was decadent rich food that he was convicted wasn’t pleasing to God for him to eat. And we don’t know the exact details of why, but he and his friends abstain from that and they eat vegetables instead. And God prospers them. He doesn’t think, well, maybe we’re going to fall behind in health and not be able to take over. We’re not going to be able to accomplish what we need to do. No, he trusts in God and he isn’t compromised in that and so many other ways throughout the book of Daniel.
And that’s what we’re called to do. Sometimes God is going to place us in a place where we have two King Sauls, we have to figure out which one to vote for. Sometimes, most of the time, when we think about all of our leadership, not just the presidency, but the Congress and our state level politicians and our local level politicians, there will be many times where we don’t feel like we see many Davids and we see an awful lot of Sauls.
What do we do in those times? Just like Daniel, we use godly wisdom to figure out what we do next. But we know the starting point from that is that we don’t compromise on God’s values in our own lives and behavior. Because sometimes we’re going to have to vote for people that don’t exemplify everything that God loves, because that’s the only choices in front of us. And we know that there’s a bad choice, that we’re going to have to, that these are not what we would see as the ideal. But we don’t have to compromise in ourselves.
And we as a church can say, yes, we’re trying to be engaged citizens and we’re going to vote and we’re going to realize that there are imperfect men to choose from. But what do we do? We do so in a way that still values truth and shows our confidence that God is the one that’s ultimately in control.
So often we run into the problem that maybe you run into with one of these faucets. I really like the faucets with one handle, but maybe you have one of these faucets that has the two different handles. And if you have one of those, you know that on the one side you have hot water, on the other side you have cold water. And especially in the middle of the winter, maybe you have a great hot water heater and that hot water can come out steaming, boiling hot, but that cold water actually hurts your hands because it is so cold coming out of the frozen ground. And so you come in and you turn just one faucet on and you get that hot boiling water and it’s like engaging in the political sphere. It’s just pouring out and it hurts and it stings.
So then you turn it off and you turn on the cold water and that burns and stings too as we say, well, clearly the political system is unrighteous. I’m just going to have to back away. Well, with a real world faucet, we don’t do that. We turn both of them on and we get to a comfortable level of water that cleans our hands and it’s refreshing, maybe takes the sting of the cold winter air out of our hands and doesn’t do damage.
That’s what we’re called to do as we enter into this election season as well. We need to engage with the political system. We need to make choices within the choices that we’re given. But as we do so, we should do so with confidence in God’s righteousness. We can stand for both being engaged and having confidence in God’s truth and his righteousness that we don’t have to partake of the moral compromises that our political system calls not just the politicians, but the voters into.
We need to turn on both of those faucets. And when we do and we show that mix, we can start to speak into the world the value of God’s truth and what’s really important to him. And yes, maybe this next January, we’re not going to have the person that we would like in the White House. We may not have a King David serving our country. But what do we do? What do we know? As the church stands firm and believes in God’s victory that is already secure, that we will see the day that we do see the true king sit on his throne.
You join me in prayer. Father, thank you for your goodness and thank you for your patience with us. So often we feel like somehow we need to make things right. It weighs on us and we look at options like we have here and we want to pick one side and just excuse everything they do wrong and support everything they do because we’re convinced that it’s somehow going to bring about your victory. Whichever side that is, Lord, would you help us instead to look to you and to your victory? Would you help us next week as maybe things don’t go how we would like? And I know that probably half the people watching this are going to be disappointed next week. Maybe I’ll be disappointed next week.
Lord, would you help turn that disappointment to a focus on you? Will you help us instead of seeking to see our side win at any cost? Would you help us to pray? At any cost, would you help us to pray for our leaders? Would you be with President Trump? Would you be with Vice President Biden? Would you be with our leaders in the House and the Senate and our in Jefferson City and other state capitals in our local municipalities and around the world? And more than us trying to find the right leader, would you turn the leaders that you allow to serve? Would you turn their hearts towards you? And would you turn our hearts towards you? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, as I mentioned, and as you surely know, next week we are coming up to this election. And some of us are going to be disappointed. Some of us are going to feel scared. But what do we know? We know that God is sovereign. So next week we’re going to focus on prayer. We’re going to focus on praying and understanding how we work, even when things don’t necessarily turn out how we want, and when they do turn out how we want. Because God is the victorious king.
I hope tonight’s video has been encouraging to you. And if it has, please share it. Please help other people hear about what God’s word says about biblical leadership. Please give it a like. You really can help us get the word out through that. And I do hope that you’ll mark next Monday night down and join me again then.
I also want to mention we have our men’s Bible study that’s just kicked off. And this is a great time to be involved in it. We have so much uncertainty. And Hebrews is written to assure people in an uncertain time. That’s 7 p.m. on Thursday nights. Leave a comment below or shoot me an email if you want more details on that. I would love to see you there.
If there’s any other way I can be praying for you, you can also shoot me an email for that. You can leave in the comments and we can pray as a group. And I hope that you have a wonderful week as we look forward to the things coming up, knowing that we serve a king who is in control and who loves you, who loves me. Have a wonderful and blessed week.