Text:
1 Samuel 28: 1-10
Memory Verse:
“Then Saul said to his servants, ‘Find me a woman who is a medium, that I may go to her.’ And his servants said to him, ‘In fact, there is a woman who is a medium in En Dor’”(1 Samuel 28:7).
The true tests of faith are challenging and, sometimes, desperate Tsituations. Saul’s life had become a mesh of troubling, restless and desperate situations since he lost favour with God, and his kingship to David.
A wise person would have repented and asked God for mercy, but not Saul. His blind jealousy for David turned him into a fugitive king, preoccupied with roaming the deserts and caves in pursuit of David rather than concentrating on the business of governance.
God refused to answer his inquiry and, in desperation, he turned to a medium, a class of people he had outlawed and sent out of the land. What a case of returning to one’s vomit! Demas also returned to his vomit. Having earlier identified with Christ and served Him, alongside Paul(Philemon 23), he later fell in love again with the world he had earlier forsaken for the sake of Christ.Paul’s pain at this sad development rings clear in his statement, “for Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world” (2 Timothy 4:10a).
Imagine what the fate of mankind would have been if Jesus, during His temptation in the wilderness or His desperate moment at the Garden of Gethsemane, had turned His back on God and given in to Satan’s ploy? Challenges and desperate situations of life are meant to strengthen, rather than weaken, our faith. They are ordained to refine us into pure gold. They are not
opportunities to return to the sin from which we have been redeemed.
Prayer Points:
1. I will never return to the sin I had forsaken for the sake of eternal life in Christ Jesus.
2. Father, give me grace to stand firm in You in my challenging and desperate moments.
