Be Real - By Carefully Filling Your Life!

How are you filling your life? During this time of quarantine, under the Stay Home order, my wife and I have begun using a different means for grocery shopping. We have begun using Shipt – this service allows you to fill your shopping cart online, someone else goes to the store to gather your supplies, and they deliver them to your home. Shopping online is a lot of fun and really helps us as we fill our cart with various items to ensure we have a healthy diet during this time. However, one should be cautioned, that it is also easy to fill our online shopping cart with snack foods that lack nutrition. 

Similarly, when it comes to our spiritual diets, we need to be careful of the diet we are cultivating. Be Real – by Carefully Filling Your Life! Today our text is 1 Samuel 12:19-22. The key verse we will focus our attention on is 21 – “And do not turn aside after empty things that cannot profit or deliver, for they are empty.”

Context: The Israelites rejected God as king and demanded to have a king like the rest of the nations around them. Add this to their general rebellion against the Law of God and drift towards other deities and you understand why Samuel was upset. Samuel, at God’s direction, heeds the desire of the people for a king but also gives some stern warnings. He confronts them on their rebellion and encourages them to consider how and what they are filling their lives with.

Lesson: Samuel’s call on the people is to cease filling their lives with empty things. Food, money, relationships, and religion are all wonderful things but in themselves they cannot satisfy. When we try to fill our lives with what God has created apart from worship of Him, we will not be filled. Similar to eating cotton candy – though it gives the appearance of substance, when you chomp down on it, you find it is quite lacking. When we attempt to fill the deep void of our lives (caused by sin’s destruction of our relationship with God) with anything apart from God’s provision, we will find them lacking. 

Application: Am I expecting other people to fill a void that only God can fill? Am I depending on things (school, sports, books, or possessions) to satisfy and bring me joy? Let us seek God and to be satisfied in Him and His provisions for us!