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David J: Today, on Real Life Radio.

Jack Hibbs: If their worshippers, listen, it's hard to get a worshipper of God down. And if they do get down, they won't stay down for long. Because you know what? They found out that when they're down, they make a what? Sacrifice of praise and they get right up on top.

David J: This is real life. Welcome to Real Life Radio with Pastor Jack Hibbs. I'm David J thanking you for joining us today as we listen, learn, and are challenged by God's word, the Bible. What do you say when a friend says their marriage might end? Or how do you help a co-worker dealing with depression? Do you have the right words when your child opens up about school stress or family issues or something else? The Biblical Counseling Reference Guide by June Hunt is your go-to resource when real life problems demand some real answers. Now, it's an easy to read book and it's simple to find answers that are from the Bible for every situation.

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On today's edition of Real Life Radio, Pastor Jack continues his series now called First Samuel with a message titled Worship at War Part 2. Samuel from the Old Testament was a man dedicated to God, Israel's last judge and the first of the prophets during a time of national difficulty, adversity, and uncertainty. Now, as we learned in Part 1, acts of worship are also acts of war in the spiritual realm. When Hannah brought her young son Samuel to the house of the Lord, it was an act of worship, a way of trusting God's plan. So today, Pastor Jack explains that when spiritual leaders lose sight of God, the people they lead often follow, and worship begins to feel empty or even unwanted.

This kind of ministry neglect misses the point. Spiritual worship is our offense, our protection against corruption. Now, with his message called Worship at War Part 2, here's pastor and Bible teacher Jack Hibbs.

Jack Hibbs: She says in verse 27, for this child I prayed and the Lord has granted me my petition. He gets the glory which I asked of him. Therefore, I also have lent him to the Lord. As long as he lives, he shall be lent to the Lord, not lent, but lent, loaned, given over to the Lord, so they worship the Lord there. And this is what I want to use to build to where we're going. Samuel was dedicated to God. From the womb, Hannah says, Lord, this baby is yours. On the other hand, we'll see that Eli, we have no record of his kids being dedicated to God, none whatsoever.

She prays. Now, listen, those of you who are parents in here, are are there any is there anybody in here that's going to be a parent? Awesome. Anyone else? You know what is great? You can pray right now for the spiritual welfare and well-being of that child. You can sing songs of praise and worship. I love when Mary comes to her cousin who being 6 months pregnant prior, Mary shows up on the scene and John the Baptist inside Elizabeth leaps for joy. Isn't that wild? 6 months developed inside and the Bible records that John the Baptist was filled with the spirit and leap for joy or or did a backstroke in there, something in the womb.

It's awesome. But she says, this child I've dedicated to God. Keep that in mind. Mom, dad, I don't care how old you are or how old your kids are, it's never too late to stop and dedicate your kids to God. Oh, Jack, you don't know what my kids have done. Hey, if they're big sinners, they can be big forgivers and lovers of God. Oh, they're so my son's in prison. Then pray God will save him in prison. Man, I don't know. Prison might be the safest place to be. The way things are going. But pray.

You might say I haven't talked to my mom or my dad in so long. Listen, dedicate your mom and dad under the Lord. And if you're with them now or you see them now, you've heard this before, but I think the greatest way to pass on the love of Jesus Christ is to just treat people like Christians. Just treat them like they're a Christian. Well, my dad's the Antichrist. Treat them like a Christian. Love them to death. Not literally, but love them. I've said it before, the the enemy of the Christian should be the most blessed person on the face of the earth.

Who's your enemy? Find them, get them in your sights, and then bless the snot out of them. And snot's a Hebrew word for all that you can. Bless them. We saw last time too in verse 6 that we're to trust God's plan. Interesting. Scripture says the Lord kills and makes alive. He brings down to the grave and he brings up. God's in control. And for a lot of people, that's a problem. How come he doesn't fix this world? Well, he's got to deal with some issues before he fixes the world. First things first, settle the sin situation between you and God.

And don't worry, he's going to fix this earth all right. Trust in God's plan. She did that. And in verse 1, we saw her express God's praise. Hannah prayed and said, my heart rejoices in the Lord. My horn is exalted in the Lord. All that she was, all that she is is exalted. And she praises. She expresses her praise unto the Lord. And so tonight, we come to the third part of this study that we will spend our time in. And that is worship at war in this third consideration. It is our line of offense, not defense, but offense.

On defense, you keep the team from scoring. That's what defense does. But in an offensive mood or mode, you are to march forward. The believer when they worship will be believers of success when it comes to things of the spirit. If their worshippers, listen, it's hard to get a worshipper of God down. And if they do get down, they won't stay down for long. Because you know what? They found out that when they're down, they make a what? Sacrifice of praise and they get right up on top. It 's a wild thing. You get depressed.

Oh, yeah, I get depressed. I I forgot what my thing is and I don't get much into it. You know there's the sanguine, melancholy, these psychological labels. Maybe mine's an idiot. I can't remember which one it is, but I have I have real high highs and I can have real low lows. I'm not always fun to be around because sometimes I'll just sit in the corner and suck my thumb for a while, you know, or I mean not not really. But feel like it. And but yet no matter what's going on and and this has been a real wonderful liberating thing in my life is when the pressure builds up.

And you know you can feel it. You guys know you start to get a little tense around your jaw area and you have to fight to get a deeper breath and you got tension in your chest. Some of you are so young you don't even know what in the world I'm talking about. Praise the Lord, you will soon. And it's like, oh, man. Listen. Listen. It's not time for an Advil. It's not time for coffee. It may not even be time to go jog, which is a great thing to do or go work out, though that helps.

You know what? Try You think I'm going to You're going to think I'm kidding. I'm not kidding. Try getting alone with God and and pray to him. I don't know why, but for some reason worshipping and worshipping him in prayer out loud with your I'm not talking about loud, but out loud from your mouth. Just thank you, Jesus. Lord, you are great. And right now, I feel like junk. But God, I know that you're on the throne. And Lord, I'm going to choose to focus on you right now. In fact, if I apply what I know from the Bible, you already knew about this situation before it came on me.

That means you have a way out for me. So Lord, help me to calm down and to think about you and what you want to do in the midst of this disastrous thing that's eating me up. In Jesus name, amen. Hey, I mean it. And you know what? I promise you because God promises you. I can't promise you anything. But God you will begin to feel God lift that burden. The power of spiritual worship is a a thing that allows us to move from the offensive attack side. We don't have to be Christians that take it all the time from the enemy, from the world, from the flesh, from Satan.

We can say, you know what? I'm going to go on the offensive. I'm going to worship God. I'm going to pick up the Bible. I'm going to go for it. By the way, if you're not a believer tonight, I challenge you to do that. Pick up the Bible. Just take God at his word and go do it and watch what happens. Uh in the next couple of weeks, you'll see this happen with John as Jesus is going to challenge the audience. If you don't believe that I'm the son of God, at least believe the works that I do.

That's a very gracious statement. God wants to do offensive attack things in our lives. You understand what I mean? In your own life, what is it and where is it that God is saying, you know what, Billy Bob, I want you to stand up and I want you to go in this direction for me. Do you have a vision? Do you have a passion? It's to know the word of God. Verse 3 taught us for the Lord is the God of knowledge. Don't you love that? I love it. People think, oh, there's Christians, you know, that just unplug their brains when they go to church and I love what history shows us.

Did you know the smartest people that have ever lived in human recorded human history have been of the Judeo-Christian faith? Did you know that? That sounds like a really arrogant thing to say, huh? But go do research on scientific discoveries and you will be shocked to find out that they were either Jewish or Christian in their theology. They believed in one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Do you know that? Don't believe me. Write it down. Go search it for yourself. You'll be blown away. Humanitarian hospitals around the world, schools, you name it.

If it blesses, extols, and lifts up the human race and helps them, you'll be surprised to see worldwide that it's Christian or Judean based. I love that. Why? Because someone believed the Lord and worshipped him and then got up and did something about it. Tomorrow, you're going to go to your job and as a worshipper of God, you can go to your job and say, you know, this is not this is not the job. This is my calling. So Jack, don't say that. I hate the place that I work at. As as long as you're there, it's a calling.

Really. Hey, Warren Wiersbe, I love that guy. Get anything you can that's written by him. You'll love it. Warren Wiersbe says, listen, until God moves you on, grow where you're planted. I love it. I think sometimes people get in a in a groove like a record, Christians, and they're so unhappy they just complain about their job or their boss or whatever or their employees and they just it's like a it's like a dog chasing their tail. And they just go go go and until or hopefully they will stop and say, wait a minute. If God is is my God and I'm going to be a worshipper of his, then maybe I should stop complaining about this bogus employee I have and see what's wrong with his life.

Maybe he is hurting. You ever think of that? I mean I say, well, Jack, I work for a guy and I'm I'm the one hurting. Hey, listen. God wants to use you as an employee. He really does. Know God's word.

David J: You're listening to Real Life with Pastor Jack Hibbs. To learn more about this ministry or to catch up on some previous episodes, go to jackhibbs.com. That's jackhibbs.com. And now, let's get back to today's message. Once again, here's Pastor Jack.

Jack Hibbs: On second consideration under this third point is to live with Jesus daily. Now, listen, Samuel's going to grow up like that. Why? Hannah was mindful of God all the time mindful of God. So Samuel grows up mindful of God. On the flip side, Eli, even though he's a priest, his sons prostitute the things of God. It's terrible. It's horrible. And then here's where we'll camp for tonight and we'll end our last 15 20 minutes here on this one. Verses 12 and on spiritual worship doing spiritual worship. It's very important. Look at verse 12. It says, now, the sons of Eli were corrupt, polluted, the word means.

And they did not know the Lord. Verse 16, skip down there with me. They would take the offering by force. What does that mean? Well, that as the people would come together and they would worship, Eli's sons would come to the place of offering. Now, watch this. According to the Old Testament, a worshipper was to come to God and bring the meat offering dedicated unto God and a portion of it was to be given to the priest. But what Eli's sons did is that they came not only themselves, but they taught their servants to come and steal offerings away from people before they were offered to God.

It would be like this in a modern day uh setting. You have you have money in your hand because God has blessed you with money this week. And uh I love the fact, you know, in America it 's money, but you know, in Zimbabwe it could be roots, you know, roots from certain Oh, look how many roots we got. God really blessed us. We've got We dug up all these roots for our meal. Well, the believers in Zimbabwe out in the bush land, they would take a portion of those roots and dedicate it to God.

So just pick whatever. In our world, it's money. And you come and you are saying, man, I'm going to give this 100 bucks to the Lord because I want to. Remember God loves a cheerful giver, not a grumpy giver. All right, God, you better take notice because I'm going to be giving you a dollar 50 today. And you better write that down and uh you know, when the plate comes, I'm going to be giving it to you. So hey, God says, keep your buck 50. Keep it. Our hearts are to be cheerful. So in our worship, when we come, what was going on then is that the people would come and they would have their choice meat that was dedicated to God.

By the way, God took the fat which was to be burned unto him. Now, you do know, especially we in America, that the fat is what adds flavor to the meat. But it's also what kills you. God says, give me the toxins. Even our offering to God is so little really. And by the way, what we offer him is yes to be an act of of respect and love and honor. But God is saying, you know what, you give that to me because you're going to be better off if you do give it to me.

And you see now it reverts back to what we said earlier about human logic. Hm. I don't think so, Jack. I think I'll do much better if I keep that 10%. No. Because an amazing thing happens. When you give to the Lord, the Lord blesses you back in ways could be monetarily. More often than not, it's health or some sort of blessings. Can't put a dollar tag on it. But God is so cool. It's the only thing that God says in the Bible, you cannot out give me. If you give to me, God says, I will give back to you double super duper smashed together compact overflowing abundantly in comparison to what you give to me.

Isn't that wild? So what the people were doing is that they were coming to the Lord and they were loving God and they were bringing their dollar 50. And you know what? Right before they got to the presence of the Lord to make the offering, Eli's sons stepped in and said, hey, give us 75 cents. No. Uh I'm going to give you the 25 cents that's allowed it to you according to Moses. But 75 cents, no. And they would take the money by force. Can you imagine? These are priests of God. All they want to worship God, draw near.

As people came near to offer their sacrifice, they would start pillaging these people and robbing them, taking the offering dedicated to God and putting in their pockets. And now, in that case, it was meat. And they didn't want it boiled. They wanted it raw. I kid you not. They wanted to do their own barbecue. Truly. Because according to the law, the meat dedicated to God was to go into a pot and there was to be a hook put in and brought out and whatever came out was given to the priest. It was an act of trust and faith.

Do you see? It's kind of cool. People of God would come together. They would put their meat in a pot and what this fish hook brought out, that portion It could have been a whole lot. Could have been a little bit. Was given to the priest. The priest was to shut up and go his way and thank God for what was given him. Why? Because the priests were supposed to live by faith. But these quote men of God were robbing people and ripping them off. Spiritual worship hardly, self worship absolutely. How did this ever happen?

I'm going to give you a few things. You might want to jot them down. In fact, I'm going to ask you to jot them down. How did this ever happen? Stand by. In verse 17 of Chapter 2, it says there that the sin of these young men were very great before the Lord. Listen. For men or so great was their sin that men abhorred the offering of the Lord. Uh Phinehas and Hophni were so corrupt in the priesthood that people hated to come and worship God because they knew they were going to have to deal with the religious leaders.

Isn't that tragic? It's sick. And yet I believe you and I are living in a time that so many people have to tolerate getting past or through the so-called Christian or religious leadership just to get to God. It's horrible. Jesus liberates us. I mean, look who hung around Jesus. Thieves. Thieves hung around Jesus. Tax collectors hung around Jesus. Prostitutes. In fact, everybody hung around Jesus except the people who acted just like these two men. Think about it. Does not history and church history record that the Pharisees and the scribes were corrupt? Doesn't it say that throughout church history and at the birthing of the church that the scribes and Pharisees they were very wealthy people?

They they drew so much money from the temple tax. They were rich. When you read of people like Caiaphas, oh, man. Hey, some of us have been to his house. Do you know they have unearthed his home. Truly not what we think it's his house. They literally found his house. And we've been there. Some of us went down. They they built some stairs down into the the dungeon that was there in his house because of the position he had. He had a place of where people were kept prior to trial. By the way, for those of you who remember we we we leaned against the wall there.

Remember the oils from the skin of of people? They would lean against the wall in the shape of a cross. You could see 2,000 year old body oil stains against the sandstone pit that's underneath his home where people would stand in the in the form of a cross to identify with Jesus because it is believed that prior to that kangaroo court that was held with Jesus and Caiaphas that that's where they held them. In early church, believers went and assumed that position because they're Jesus prior to his crucifixion had gone into that pit. Interesting, huh?

David J: That's pastor and Bible teacher Jack Hibbs here on Real Life Radio with his message called Worship at War Part 2. Glad you could join us today. You know, this message is part of Pastor Jack series called First Samuel. It's a study of the highlights the life of the prophet Samuel, a man called by God during one of Israel's darkest times as he led the people back to the heart of true worship. And we'll continue with more on the next edition of Real Life Radio.

Jack Hibbs: Hey everybody, you know, everybody here on the team thought it'd be kind of fun if you actually kind of saw or heard what goes on behind the scenes. After all, it's called real life and this is what we do. Take a listen.

David J: So I heard somebody say this week and it was I thought it was interesting. Um she was saying that pain is just pain, right? Pain is not going to do anything.

Jack Hibbs: Yeah.

David J: It's just there.

Jack Hibbs: It's like a megaphone. It's announcing.

David J: Yeah.

Jack Hibbs: It's announcing. Pain cannot take you out. Pain cannot rob you uh unless we sit around and complain about pain. Think about it. It's actually not the pain that could be ruinous to our lives. It's our attitude toward it.

David J: Right.

Jack Hibbs: So if somebody is going through financial woes and that's all that's all they complain about, that's all they're focused on is how bad it is,

David J: Yeah.

Jack Hibbs: then they're probably going to get stuck in that drain. Um and again, it goes back to the weather. If it's if it's hot or cold outside, dress for the weather and and realize, you know what, this is a season. It's going to pass. And uh we need to practice that. We do that and everything else in life. When we are full, we do not eat. When we are hungry, we eat. When we're cold, we go and get warm. And when we're warm, we go and get cold. And so it's just us realizing God's got this.

He really does. I think our big crime uh imposed upon ourselves is thinking for some real dumb reason that God doesn't know what I'm going through. I mean that just puts us through undue pain and sorrow.

David J: Yeah. Yeah. This program is made possible by the generous contributions of you our listeners. Visit us at jackhibbs.com. That's jackhibbs.com. Until next time, Pastor Jack Hibbs and all of us here at Real Life Radio wish for you solid and steady growth in Christ and in his word. We'll see you next time here on Real Life Radio.