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We’re going to take a week off from our study in 1 Samuel. While these Old Testament stories are edifying and challenging to us and we often see the gospel in them, it is possible to miss the most important truth that we can proclaim, the gospel of life. “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.” Life and death are at stake! God’s offer of relationship with Himself is the good news. He is the Source of life and we want life!

I’ll go looking for a tool or some other item and then find something else that is so interesting I’ll forget what I was looking for in the first place! That happened to Saul. He spent three days looking for his father’s donkeys and ended up at a banquet with the preferred cut of meat.

A man I know, (now in glory), is reported to have said to disappointed customers, “Well, it’s good enough for who it’s for.” I chuckle when I say that out loud. I’m sure a few people on the receiving end of that line didn’t think it was as funny as I do. Some people are really hard to please. It’s not that we have to settle for shoddy work, but idealism is the ditch on the other side of the road and an unhealthy idealism can creep into everything from home repair to marriage.

At some point in your life, you have probably had to say, “Well, I assumed…” It’s really hard to live life without making some assumptions. Assumptions are not always wrong. However, the consequences of wrong assumptions can be disappointing at best and devastating at worst. Author Steve Cuss wrote, “Assumptions are the way we make meaning out of something we think we know but do not actually know…and some of us are Olympic-level long jumpers in our ability to leap to false conclusions.” When our assumptions are an illusion, our decisions become disconnected from reality.

Sometimes we feel bewildered. To be told, “We don’t think you have “it” anymore,” is a hard pill to swallow. It happens to athletes, blue-collar workers and white-collar workers. It even happened to the prophet/judge Samuel.