Mens Fall Bible Study | Week Six

September 23, 2026 | Nathan Stanfield discusses the dangers of impatience and distrust in God, using 1 Samuel 8 as the main passage to illustrate Israel's demand for a king despite God's warnings. The message calls believers to trust God's timing and sovereignty rather than seek control or safety nets apart from Him.

Show Notes

Nathan Stanfield discusses the dangers of impatience and distrust in God, using 1 Samuel 8 as the main passage to illustrate Israel's demand for a king despite God's warnings. The message calls believers to trust God's timing and sovereignty rather than seek control or safety nets apart from Him.

What is Bellevue Men?

Join the men of Bellevue as we seek to learn how to be men of God in the world today.

Man, well good evening. I want to continue on with the discussion questions a little bit. I would love to know who in here has, if I ask this question, named somebody who is a famous historical person or a person that you look up to that did something that was absolutely brave. They performed an act with no safety net. They performed an act that really could have been perilous for them or they were faced against a hard decision where they knew that if the decision went south, that it was gonna go badly for them. If you have some examples, raise your hand. First ones that pop off your head. There's no really wrong answers. Go ahead. Teddy Roosevelt was one. Teddy Roosevelt, that is my, mm-hmm. Was running for president the second time. Stood up to make a speech and an assassin shot him. Bullet went two inches into his chest and he let the people know that his message would be short. And so with the bullet in him, he spoke for 50 minutes. When he got through, a pool of blood was around him and he went and had that taken out. And I think it's just amazing that he persevered in the face of what could have been a real threat. If you didn't hear that, Teddy Roosevelt is probably one of the most fascinating presidents in just the realm of being a man's man. He ran in not a Republican party, not a Democratic party, but what was called the Bull Moose Party. That was the name of his party in which he ran and won his presidency under. And I actually have done several biographies about Teddy Roosevelt for school because he's my most favorite president because of stories like that. Every day he did wrestling matches in the White House until an intern took out one of his eyes and then he said, probably should stop doing this. And that's when he stopped. So, another person, another brave person. Way in the back. George Washington. George Washington, a founding father. What was something he did that made him a brave person who in the face of danger with no safety net performed? Well, he was going down in a freezing winter, it was a small blizzard with mist. You go infiltrate a camp and if anything went wrong, there was no safety net. Yeah, no safety net. It was just him, a small battalion of men crossing the freezing river, trying to take the opposing forces by surprise. They did not think that they would cross that river by night and they did. Anybody else? Woodrow Wilson. Another president. No, it was the president, World War II. World War II. In England, Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill. Yes, absolutely. All right, how many of you have heard of Winston Churchill and know how he kind of came about? He was rather underwhelming in his speech. He was rather underwhelming in his presentation and leadership until the battles of World War II happened and he became a fearless leader that led the Allied Forces. He was part of the leading of the Allied Forces to victory in World War II. A person that I find absolutely fascinating is this man right here, Alex Honnold. Who has heard of this man right here? A few of you. So there's a movie that talks about this exact climb right here. This man is climbing the face of a mountain called El Capitan. It is 2,900 feet straight up. And many, many, many climbers have made that ascent several times. It's a very complicated climb. There's a lot of places where you have to shove your toes and your hands in just the right way. And then sometimes he's holding on by just his fingertips, his entire body weight, reaching up with his other hand and finding a handhold all the way up. What makes him impressive is all these other people did it with safety gear and he did it with none. So he climbs 2,900 feet straight up, gets to the top of this with no safety gear. If you watch the documentary, he uses language, so I can't condone his language. But he talks about the fact that he knew that if he fell, it was it. But it didn't matter to him. For him, the challenge and the victory waiting at the top of El Capitan was worth not having the safety nets. He knew that being the only one, the first one to what's called free solo El Capitan was worth the danger. For us, what we're gonna encounter is a group of people who we've been talking about all this semester so far who looked at the danger all around them in the world. And a lot of times, what we can do in learning from the Bible is actually learning from bad examples. So tonight we talked about some men who were very strong. They were not afraid. They were brave in the face of danger. We're gonna learn from this biblical text about the people of Israel. They saw a danger and they forgot their Lord. They saw a danger and they wanted a safety net. And we're gonna talk about that safety net tonight. The passage we're talking about is when the people of Israel are setting up Saul becoming the king. And they go to Samuel and they say, hey, your sons who are the judges over Israel, they're no better than the people that came before you. We want a king. Samuel is very upset at this because he knows that God has told them in the past, you will get a king when it's the right time and the right king. So what I wanna do before we dive into our main passage tonight is actually read that passage where we're told that there is a king for them. So on your page, on your table, in Deuteronomy chapter 17, verses 14 to 20, you can follow along on the screen or you can follow along on your papers. We're gonna read this passage. Oh, I tried to make the text big. I guess it's not that big, but it's on your table. When you enter the land the Lord your God has given you, take possession of it, live in it, and say, I will set a king over me like all the nations around me. You are to appoint over you the king the Lord your God chooses. Appoint a king from your brothers. You are not to set a foreigner over you or one who is not of your people. However, he must not acquire many horses for himself or send the people back to Egypt to acquire many horses. For the Lord has told you, you are never to go back that way again. He must not acquire many wives for himself so that his heart won't go astray. He must not acquire very large amounts of silver and gold for himself. When he is seated on his royal throne, he is to write a copy of this instruction for himself on a scroll in the presence of the Levitical priests. It is to remain with him, and he is to read from it all the days of his life so that he may learn to fear the Lord as God, to observe all the words of this instruction, and to do these statutes. Then his heart will not be exalted above his countrymen. He will not turn from this command to the right or to the left, and he and his sons will continue reigning many years in Israel. The Lord told the Israelites, you will get a king one day. The Lord had a plan for a king of kings and a Lord of lords. What the Lord wanted was a king that ruled beneath him, that in every decision would say, we will do what the Lord tells me to do. I will be an example for you in following the Lord. That's the kind of king God wanted for his people. God would provide in the right time. So tonight, what we're gonna do is we're gonna read So tonight, what we're gonna look at is how the people looked at that command and disregarded it when they faced the danger of the nations around them. As we jump in, we can see, what I want you to do is answer the first question. When you look at this passage from Deuteronomy, what is it that we learn about God? So take about five minutes, read back over this passage of Deuteronomy, and we're gonna answer the question, what do we learn about God? And then we're gonna jump into our main text in 1 Samuel. So take about five minutes, discuss that at your table. What do we learn about God? I would love to hear three tables answers. So three tables answers, and I would love to hear from guys that have not spoken so far tonight. So who is brave enough with the very safe people in this room to share their answer? Go ahead. We learn that God has a plan that is far superior to man's plan if it's followed. Yeah. If we follow God's plan, we can abstain from so many errors that we're so prone to make. So if y'all didn't hear him, he's saying God has a plan that if man obeys, is good for us. There's good promises if we have obedience, if we follow God's plan. Was that a good summary? Yeah. All right, who else? Over here. If you're gonna be a godly king, you gotta be disciplined. Okay, if you're gonna be a godly king, you gotta be disciplined. All right, one more, folk. Okay, good. God's more concerned with your reliance on him than your comfort. Mm, that's good. If you didn't hear that, God is more concerned with your reliance on him than your comfort. I'm gonna piggyback off that for just a second. One thing that we often find, or one thing that is known about man is that we really, really desire and need two things, security and significance in our life. And when either one of those things begins to be threatened, we start to take control on our own. We should ultimately rely on God for both our security, we know that he loves us, he has promised us good things, and he is a good father. And our significance is found in Christ. God loved us enough to send Jesus to die for us. That makes us pretty significant. So keep that in the back of your mind as we talk about that for the rest of the night. One thing that as I was reading Deuteronomy, I was reminded of is that God will provide for and protect us.

people, but he will do so in the right time. In this passage, it was not a, you don't get a king. It was a, you get a king when I say you can get a king, and you get the right king. You see, God is a good father. He loved his people, and the reason that he had the instructions that he had, the laws that he had, was not just so that he could be in control and have his thumb on the weight and make sure that they do the right things because he's cruel, but it's because he wants to protect them. How many of you have the honor of getting to be a father or a grandfather or have relatives that depend on you? You, good. You know what it means to want to protect and provide for those who cannot protect and provide for themselves and to grow them and to discipline them and to teach them how to be self-sustaining. That's exactly how God sees his people. Those are his children. He wants to do that for us. He promises us good things. So the eventual king that we read about in this passage, he didn't want this king to rule by military might. He didn't want this king to rule and be ruled by pride and greed. He didn't want this king to be led astray by women who would cause his heart to stray from God. He wanted God's heart written on this king's mind so that the king would not lead by his own rule, but that he would live and lead by God's rule. Brother Ben said it this way last week in the worship service that God wanted a theocracy. He wanted a rule that was driven by the obedience to the Lord. So now let's look at our passage for tonight. It's a little long, so you're gonna stay with me. We're gonna jump around a little bit. But on your page, right underneath the Deuteronomy passage is the first Samuel passage. First Samuel chapter eight, starting in verse six. So jump down a little bit, find verse six. The people have told Samuel at this point, we want a king. Samuel says, that's not a good idea. He goes to the Lord and says, they want a king. I think that's wrong. They said, when they said, give us a king to judge us, Samuel considered their demand wrong. So he prayed to the Lord. But the Lord told him, listen to the people and everything they say to you. They have not rejected you, they've rejected me as their king. They're doing the same thing to you that they have done to me since the day I brought them out of Egypt until this day, abandoning me and worshiping other gods. Listen to them, but solemnly warn them and tell them about the customary rights of the king who will reign over them. So Samuel told all the Lord's words to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, these are the rights of the king who will reign over you. He will take your sons and put them to use in his chariots, on his horses or running in front of his chariots. He said, these are the rights of the king who reign over you. He will, oh, just read that. He can appoint them for his use as commanders of thousands or commanders of fifties to plow his ground and reap his harvest or to make his weapons of war. He can take your men and equipment for his chariots. He can take your daughters to become perfumers, cooks and bakers. He can take your best fields, vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He can take a 10th of your grain and your vineyards and give them to his officials and servants. He can take your male servants, your female servants, your best cattle and your donkeys and use them for his work. He can take a 10th of your flocks and you yourselves can become his servants. When that day comes, you will cry out because of the king you've chosen for yourself. But the Lord won't answer you on that day. You see, God is not really mysterious. A lot of times we do make him out to be so. We don't know what God's will is, we say. I don't know what God's will is for my life. I don't know what he wants me to do. I would argue that just like these people, they had all the nations against them say, we don't know what God wants us to do. We don't know what is about to happen. They're wrestling against the same culture and the same dangers that we're wrestling against all the time and they're saying the same things. But I would remind you that there is a written word of God that was being preached to them by the priests and there's a written word of God that we have in front of us now where God does tell us pretty clearly the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do. And in this passage, we see that in Deuteronomy, he was saying, this is the kind of king that I will pick for you. In Deuteronomy, he says that. In first Samuel, he says, if you want to get a king on your own, let me remind you of what exactly is going to happen. There were no bones about it. He was very straightforward. The mystery that we often say actually comes from seeing the problem at hand, hearing God's warning and then not really liking what he is saying. That's the mystery. It's kind of like my little boy, he's four, I love him to death and he's just four. But sometimes he'll be doing something he is not supposed to be doing and he hears the voice of his father saying, don't touch that. Benjamin, get away from that. And then it falls on his head and he gets hurt. There was no mystery to what I was doing. I was calling him away from something dangerous. He ignored it. And I know he ignored it because he's standing right here. There's no way he didn't hear me. I have a pretty loud voice, especially when I'm not mic'd up. So God is not very mysterious. He's very straightforward. These Israelites, they thought that they would die by the hands of the Egyptians when they left Egypt. They thought God would let that happen, but God didn't. He parted the sea. He had made a way. He, in fact, blocked the Egyptians with a pillar of fire and he provided a path through the Red Sea and he took the whole Egyptian army out to boot. And we see story after story in the Old Testament how God would take these Israelites through dangers. They would butt right up to the danger. They wouldn't know what's about to happen and then God would come through in a miraculous way. God never left them. God never abandoned him. And he told Samuel, they are turning their back on me as they have always done, time and time again. I would provide for them. They would move on to something else and want something else. But God is our loving father. He is omnipotent and omniscient and he is king. And if you combine just those two qualities together alone, you know that he's trustworthy, being all knowing and all powerful. God's demands are just for things that, God's demands are just for the things that are too much for us to wield on our own. What God wants is our heart. He wants us to trust enough in him to follow him. The thing is, is he's built this world, he already owns it all, so he's not gonna require that of you. What he's requiring of you is that you take care of the things of his world. That's the thing that he's requiring of you. He's asking you to be stewards. So a lot of times when we say, we don't know what God wants us to do, he tells us, be a steward of what I've given you. I've given you a wife, I've given you a family, I've given you a job, I've given you a neighborhood, I've put all that in front of you. What I want you to do is to steward that well. What is in front of you, where God has put you is not on accident. But oftentimes we say, God, what else do you want me to have? Oh, I know, I will go get this job or I will move to this better neighborhood or I will go hang out with these people because I don't like the people that you put right in front of me. We oftentimes will try to take control of our situations. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. What God wants is our hearts. He wants our complete and utter devotion to him. But God was warning them that a king that they picked now is not going to be as loving and as good as he is going to be for them. He would not rule in the mercious and graceful way that God would. So ultimately, their untimely king would never be the king that they needed. So now we have God's answer to their request. You can have a king, it's not gonna be what you want. He also knew this wasn't the right time. So what I want you to do is go back through the passage on your paper and read verses eight, 19 through 20. And we're gonna ask the questions, what do we learn about people? So we know that God warns us. We know that God cares about us. We know that God wants what's best for us and wants our obedience. But what do we learn about people in this passage? So read and discuss verses 19 through 20. We have not read that together yet. Take five minutes and we'll come back with your answers. All right, I would love to hear from three more folks, different folks than who talked before, representing your tables, answer to the question, what do we learn about people from these two verses? First Samuel eight, 19 through 20. What he said is we're stupid. Yes. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Quoting Jeremiah back here. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. What's one more person? I think that not being patient and faithful, basically. Yeah. Like waiting on God's timing and there's, I mean, I think a lot of us fall prey to that today. Absolutely. So we get impatient, we tend to fall on our faces because of it. Yeah, so what he says, impatience, not waiting on God's timing, and because of that, we fall on our face. And I saw a hand way back there. Go ahead. You're going to have to say it a little louder. I'm so sorry. When things get uncomfortable. We'll almost do anything to get out of the situation. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So in this passage, we see God warned them and they said, we still want a king. We'll read it together. The people refused to listen to Samuel. They said, no, we must have a king over us. Then we'll be like all the other nations. Our king will judge us. Or our king will judge us, go out before us and fight our battles. They thought a lot about themselves and they thought a lot about this king. The thing is we often lean towards control rather than dependency on God, which is what we said earlier. When times get hard or when things get uncertain, it's very difficult to know what to do. If you have kids, you have probably experienced this before in a fun way. You want to do something nice for them. You plan a surprise. Maybe it's their favorite sporting event. Maybe it's their favorite band you want to go see live. Maybe it's a game or an activity.

or a movie they wanna go see, but you wanna surprise them. You don't wanna just tell them out front. You wanna say, hey, I've got something fun for you and enjoy the anticipation, enjoy the surprise. In a lighthearted way, this is similar to when God says, I have something good for you. But an example, my kids, I did this. I had them, I was watching them the other day. My wife was at work and it was, I took a day off and just hung out with my kids and I said, hey, today we're gonna go do something fun. It was one of those days where it was like 104 degrees outside. So I was struggling to find fun things to do, but when I found one, I thought it was awesome. There's a place that just opened up. So if any of you have grandkids or kids that are like five and below, this is a great thing. It's called Little Diggers and it's off of Ridgeway and it's a giant sandbox, like as big as this room and like this deep of sand and they just have toy trucks and little excavators they can sit on and move the sand. They can build things out. It's really, really fun. I should have put pictures up here, but I didn't. But truly, it's just a giant sandbox and it's inside in the air conditioning and it was perfect. And so we went, but I didn't want to tell them. So I said, hey, we're gonna run a few errands and then I've got something really fun for you guys playing. And they were the most anxious kids you could have ever imagined. They were constantly, is this the surprise? I said, no, getting gas is not the surprise. Is this a surprise? No, getting your brother's haircut is not the surprise. We had to go to Target and pick up a gift for their cousin. This is not the surprise. It's just all day long. They were asking, is this it? Is this the thing? Is this the one? And I told them several times, I will tell you when it is the surprise. Just wait. And they couldn't because they're little and they don't have all that understanding of time and delayed gratification. And the thing is, is a lot of times we don't either. One of the biggest struggles for couples nowadays is when they first get married, the reason they get into financial trouble is because they see the lives their parents have and they want all that right now. They see the wealth. They see the things that their parents built over 40 years of time. And they say, that's what I want right now. And so they go into debt. That's a common occurrence. That's something me and my wife struggle with. There are things that my mom has like a giant KitchenAid mixer, which she made biscuits with all the time and bread with and cake with all the time. And I wanted us to have one of those right away. They're very expensive. I don't know if you've ever looked at a KitchenAid mixer, but they're incredibly expensive. It's things like that that we want right now because that's what we think we should have to be complete. But in reality, you can get a lot done with a whisk and a hand mixer. Now, if any of you are thinking, I did not get my wife the mixer, I did get my wife the mixer. It's incredible. And I eat from it all the time. If you don't have a KitchenAid mixer, invest in it. It's really good. It gives you good things. But what I'm getting at is that a lot of times we don't wait on God. And how many times have you said, I want this right now and you jumped the gun and you got the thing you wanted only to realize if I had just waited a little bit longer, I would have had something else that was actually really, really good that God had in store. I mean, you found it out. You see, God is merciful, but at some point God says it's enough. If you're gonna ask for it and you're gonna ask for it, I will tell you exactly what's wrong about that. And it is up to you to choose whether you wanna wait and have the thing that I promise you or go ahead and get the subpar thing that you wanna get on your own. And the hard thing about us is we're actually not very good at knowing what is better. These people were not knowing what was better for them. They saw how successful these kings were in other nations. They said, this nation is huge. We're afraid of them. They're gonna wipe us out and it's because they have an incredible king. They see other nations over the city. Hey, that nation is actually really politically strong. It's because they have a king who's really good at politics. That nation over there, they're so wealthy and it's because their king is really good at business. What they're doing is they're looking at small aspects of feeble men and they're thinking, that's what we want our nation to be like. And what do we do all the time? But we worry about our future as a nation. We worry about our future as a family. We worry about our future as a church and we look around and we say, that's the problem. When in reality, the problem is we don't follow God. That's the problem. And so the thing is God knows what we need. He wants to give us good things and he wants us to trust him. And Jesus said the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount. He had to remind the people, hey, look at the birds of the field. They don't go around worried or storing things up in barns. They know that their heavenly father is gonna feed them. Look at the flowers over here. They don't toil, they don't spin, but your heavenly father has dressed them more beautifully than anything else in this world. Not even Solomon had clothes like these flowers do. Are you not worth much more than birds? Are you not worth much more than flowers? That's the question we have to ask ourselves every day. Does God not see us as worth more than the birds that are in our backyards or the flowers that are lining our flower beds? He does. Do we believe that? And are we willing to trust that? I tell my kids all the time, listen, if you will just obey and wait, I promise what I have for you is gonna be good, but if you don't, you are not getting that thing. If you continue to act out, you're not getting, I'm saying things that I know all of you have said to your kids. I really hope this makes sense and this resonates. This applies to the Lord and to us. Same concept. So sometimes we can learn from other people's mistakes. What I want you to do right now, reread the whole passage on your sheet. All of 1 Samuel 8, the passage I have on your sheet, and I want you to talk about what is the command then that we need to obey? Reread the passage, look at this, and learn from their poor example what to obey, and then we'll come back and discuss. It'll take about five or six minutes. All right, I would love to hear from three more folks that have not yet spoken tonight. Be a voice for your table in the midst of this room. Three more folks. You're gonna have to speak loud, because you're in the back. Yeah, I'm waiting back here. Yeah. Your original question, what was your question? For this one is, what is the command we need to obey? What do we need to obey? Okay, what we discussed, and my personal opinion, I think this whole thing encompasses the first four commandments. Okay. You know, how, How, Yeah. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So he's saying that what they discussed was that the Lord was using, this is another example of the reality of the first four commandments and the 10 commandments and reminder for the folks to depend on the Lord and not on somebody who is a human, therefore less capable than the Lord. Did I kind of summarize that okay? Mm hmm. Yeah. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Do I expect them to do that? Do I expect them to be easy for them? You know, because they may not have experienced God moving in their life like God has moved in my life. Mm hmm. So how do, so my question to you, and I guess when I look at it from Samuel's perspective, before he went back to God, how do I convince these people to do this if they have no foundation? From which to understand it. Yeah. Did y'all all hear that for the most part? Good. I think you, go ahead. What I noticed, and I've read it before and never read those before, Samuel's sons did not even pay attention either. Yeah. They failed to, not maybe necessarily know about it, but they heard about Samuel. Yes, so that would, so what's so funny, I'm gonna put a pin in everything we're talking.

Like, that exact thing came up when I was assigned this passage. I said, great, I have to explain why Samuel was not as good of a dad as anyone thought he was gonna end up being. But we glossed over that. So what he is saying is, yes, Samuel's sons were actually not even that good. They did not follow the Lord as well and as closely as Samuel himself did. That is a good observation. I think one thing that we can learn from this passage is exactly what you were saying, is for ourselves to wait and to trust on the Lord. It's kind of been the theme throughout the whole night. What I love about groups like this versus if I'm just coming up here and talking to you, the whole point of what we're doing is to teach you how to read scripture for yourself, to teach you how to take a passage, grasp the main idea, grasp some other ideas from it and form a really cohesive, sticky thought that sticks in your heart that you can take with you and apply. This is not as polished as if I was coming up here and giving a 40 minute sermon. And I do like that. What that allows me to do is to kind of repeat the same thing over and over and over again because that's how we study scripture. And so for you guys, as y'all been doing that all semester long with these three questions, what does it say about God, what does it say about people and what is the command we need to obey, we're landing on something that we've been talking about all night long is waiting on God and trusting in Him. We need to make God the king of our life. You see, the people wanted a king because they saw what other kings were doing. They saw how other nations were thriving. They looked at other nations' military might and they forgot that the Lord of Heaven's armies was on their side. They looked at other nations' wealth and they forgot that a God who could provide food out of thin air and water from rocks was on their side. They saw other nations' political strength and they forgot that they had a God who could bend the will of one pharaoh to appoint Joseph to the right hand of the kingdom and afford them all the wealth in the nation while there was a famine. And His same God was also the one that could break another pharaoh's will when he wouldn't heed the warning to let his people go. They were forgetting who God was over and over and over and over again, which is exactly what our brother back here was saying is these people did not know the Lord closely. So for us, the command that we need to obey is to learn to wait and trust the Lord. We all the time treat the Lord as a safety net. So I'm gonna go back to what we said earlier about the safety net. A lot of times we say, I do trust the Lord, I love the Lord, I'm gonna depend on the Lord after I depend on my retirement funds to be fully funded. I'm gonna depend on the Lord after I get that job I want, I'm gonna focus on that right now. I'm gonna depend on the Lord, but first let me go over here before I share the gospel with that person because I gotta go do something. A lot of times we love to have the Lord in the back seat and there when we need Him, but we got the front seat. We've got the driver's side, we can do this. That's what the Israelites were doing. They're saying, oh, we do love the Lord, we absolutely do, but we want a king. They were treating the Lord as a safety net in the same way that my kids wanted to control me or every single time we get in the car, they say, Daddy, can we listen to this song? Yes, you can listen to this song before I even start the car. And we do the same thing, they jump the gun. We jump the gun. And I'm sure that as I'm saying these words, you can think of times in your life where maybe you depend on yourself a little more than the Lord. It's easy to do because right now we can look at the news and if you're on the news at all or if you're on the internet at all, you see scary headlines around us. There's forever wars, there's economic strain, there's political strife, there's moral decay, there's technological advances that we cannot keep up with nor can we contain. There are things that feel like literal Red Seas for the world closing in on us from all sides. And oftentimes our solutions to these problems are as simple as, well, we just need to elect the right president or we just need to put the right person in office or we just need to create the right rules. But we abandon the Lord and we abandon the things that he's told us to do. The thing is, is we need to learn our lesson like these people didn't. Let's not get to a moment where they're standing up against all the threats and they say, we want a king, we don't want the Lord. Let's get to a moment where we say, all right, there's a lot of things out there that can potentially do us harm. Let's go to the Lord and see what he would have us to do. Consult his word, go to him in prayer, listen for it, and then do it. If you wanna be different than the culture around you, if you wanna be a voice that speaks into the culture, someone that they can say, that man knows God, then do that. Wait on the Lord and trust in his word. One morning this week, I was discussing this very thing with my wife. I read the news, I'm on the same news cycles as everybody else here, and I told her, I said, honestly, it feels hopeless. When I look at the world around me, if I'm being completely transparent, it feels hopeless. I wake up in the morning, I see these headlines, it scares me. It scares me for my kids, it scares me for our future. And if I'm honest, it feels really dark and scary in this world. And she was in agreement. And what we landed on is, but you know what? What the devil has meant for harm, the Lord can turn for good. We have a God who cares enough to love us, protect us, provide for us. We have a God who sees us, who knows us, and wants the best for us. And he's given us a command to obey, which is, hey, you seek my kingdom and my righteousness, I'll take care of the rest of that stuff. That's the command we need to obey. And so when we wake up every day and we see the darkness around us, when we wake up today and we see all the deaf ears and the blind eyes and the people wandering around, we don't have to do that. We don't have to pretend that God is so mysterious that he hasn't told us exactly what it is he wants us to do. When we wake up every day, we can seek the Lord, listen to him, and be a voice for him among the people. So as we close tonight, I don't have any fun video or fun ending, and so what I want you to do is I would love for you to take two or three minutes as we close. Michael, is there any announcement that I need to make? He's shaking his head no. Take two, three minutes around your table. I want you guys to share something that the Lord has been laying on your heart the last few weeks, a command that you need to obey, clearly and simply, and that command may be, I need to wait on the Lord for this. So what's a need that you're waiting for him to meet and what's a command you need to obey? And then I want you to each pray for each other, and then after that, y'all can be dismissed. What I recommend to do, just to make it easy so you don't have to discuss it, pray for the person on your right. Y'all go ahead and do that, and we'll be done.