SAMUEL ANOINTS THE WEAKEST SON DAVID - Part I

By Odon Bulamba (15 August 2003)

I Samuel 16

We thank God because He is good and He is always there and He is still leading us and protects us from all danger and He gives us everything we need and especially what is necessary. .

If you have a nose you need to breath and each person needs this breath so the body will function. God has put life in the wind and in the air and if there is no air anymore everybody will lose his life, so we must thank God for this oxygen. Imagine God has put life in the air, He didn’t put life in the sun or anything else but in the air around us and He said who ever will breath this air will live. To prove it I’ll ask every one of us to close your mouth and nose and we will try to see how many seconds we can hold our breath and you will feel how the body reacts. We will see that it is not easy, for a short time you will feel your body swell, you feel you want to explode. Sometimes we collapse, so we can’t even go 20 seconds without air.

Our souls also needs to breath and when we cut it off, our soul feels the same way the body feels. Our soul also feels it lacks oxygen, so imagine if you sin now and you stop the oxygen for your soul and you repent after three hours. Do you think you can stop breathing for three hours, I think it is impossible. Why do I say that? Because God is doing something for our souls and He asks us that our souls have life in abundance and God is not only our shepherd for our bodies but also for our souls. Dying animals don’t need a shepherd anymore. For example if you are a farmer and you wake up in the morning and you see that your sheep is dead, you will not look after this sheep anymore, you might throw it away. Every soul that goes far from life, it is a dying soul and God puts them aside. So whatever has no life for the Lord cannot live because the Lord is life himself.

I want to give you another example; I want to ask you to open your eyes wide and don’t move your eyelids. Open them wide and we’ll see what will happen. Blow in that persons eyes and see how they will react. You’ll see that because of the air the eyes move, whether you want to or not, your eyes will tend to close because a danger is coming. This is an invisible danger. And our souls too when they are attacked by the devil (if they are living souls) they always need to cover themselves and protect themselves. When the devil comes you can’t see him, he comes like the air but our souls must feel its presence.

Let’s say that I am dead and Colleen blows in my eyes, what will my eyes do? Nothing. They can’t move because there is no life in me. And a soul that doesn’t feel satan is like a dying body. Someone might sin and not even notice it and if you come to that stage you must know there is a danger. You might not see life in you. For God what counts is the soul. Whatever we do, for God the soul is essential. Do you know what is the height of a soul? It is different from the height of a body. God wants our soul to be alive because our soul needs life and if there is life then our souls will be able to protect ourselves against the devil. When we have life we become heroes for the Lord.

I Sam 16:6-13.

This is David’s story and many people know this story. David was a hero in the Lord because he would always obey the Lord and he would always have life in him. David was the youngest in his family and it seems like his dad didn’t like him very much. This is a family with eight boys and David was sent to be a shepherd. Maybe the dad asked first the oldest ones to look after the sheep but they refused so he forced David to go because he was the youngest and David couldn’t say anything. Maybe his brothers said something and maybe his dad said something or maybe because he was obedient. And as Christians we have two things on this earth, we are either intoxicated by our friends or family or number two we have obedience. In intoxication there is no life. Many people do things because of what others are doing. Many people do things because they are influenced by others and if you are not influenced by God but you are influenced by man, then you will get lost.

So this young man accepted to look after his Dad’s sheep although he was short and young. So after some time God visited Samuel and he said to Samuel, I want to give you someone who will rule over my people. Go there and I will anoint the one that I tell you. Samuel was a prophet and a servant of God and he would always listen to God’s voice and He respected Gods voice and went. But once he got to Jesses, I would say that life wasn’t in Samuel anymore because Samuel looked at all these children and when he saw the first-born, deep in his heart he thought, this must be the one. And God said, “no this is not the one”. Samuel was 100% sure that he was the one, so he was in confusion. Although he was a man of God, he also had human thoughts in his life. And many people today who serve God, because they are influenced by their surroundings or by appearance, these people make bad decisions.

Once when we were in Kenya and we had a big church with hundreds of people, there was a young man who had sinned. Everybody knew that he had sinned but what the others would do, no body could see. One man stood in front of everybody and said, “Look this man sinned and we must excommunicate him from the glory of God. We must put him aside because he doesn’t belong with us. We must not eat with him and we must not walk with him. There is no right for him to go to church, or to pray with us or to be beside us”. And I asked this man, if Jesus has forgiven us, why can’t we forgive this man? If you were forgiven for your sins and maybe you did worse than him, or maybe you hide your sins, why can’t you forgive this man? “Oh because this is the law.” So we opened the Bible to I Cor 5, it is written that if someone sins you will give the body to the devil but be careful with the soul because a soul has great value in God’s eyes. We had a big debate around this issue. In my other Bible I wrote the date and how things went. And in the end we found out that to excommunicate someone is not biblical and we could not find this word in the Bible. I had more than fifteen different versions and we couldn’t find this word. For our God there are no great sins or little sins so when you forgive you forgive, that is all. If someone killed your father, if it’s about forgiveness then you must forgive. If someone did something wrong to you then you must always be ready to forgive.

So Samuel used his thoughts instead of God’s thoughts and if Samuel made this mistake, who are we, will we be greater than Samuel? So we must be careful with our thoughts sometimes. Sometimes God can send us and when we get to the thing that God shows us, we put our thoughts first and they lead us astray. God said to Samuel, “that is not him, you man look at the outer appearance but I look at the heart”.