There is a particular kind of grief that settles in when something given by God seems to go wrong. It’s not merely disappointment, nor is it nostalgia. It’s the sorrow of watching hope, unravel of seeing a life, a ministry, a leader, a prayer fervently prayed, or even a season that once seemed full of God’s favor, slowly hollowed out by circumstance, by disobedience, fear, or pride.
That kind of grief lingers. It doesn’t pass quickly because it is bound up with love for God’s work and concern for his people. Most of us can point to at least one moment in our lives when something we were convinced was right simply did not happen. A door closed, proverbially speaking. Not dramatically, not cruelly, but family.
It may have been a job. We were qualified for a, a path that seemed sensible. A, a hope that was almost inevitable. We’d prayed about it. It had, we, we’d thought it through. Others even expected it to happen. And then it didn’t at that time. That kind of disappointment, rarely feels spiritual, feels confusing.
It feels bewildering and frustrating and sometimes even unfair. Only later, often, much later, if ever, do we begin to see that the closed door. Was not the end of God’s involvement, but the beginning of a different way of leading a path we would never have chosen for ourselves, a future we could not yet imagine.
First Samuel Chapter 16 speaks to people who live with that kind of disappointment. Samuel had been certain about Saul. Everyone had, Saul looked right, he fit the role. He’s, he seemed, at least initially, to be God’s answer to Israel’s predicament. But now Samuel was left grieving not only for the failure of the king, but for the collapse of hope.
What was meant to be God’s provision. Had become a spiritual disaster, and it is into that grief, into that sense of this should have worked, that God spoke, not with an explanation, but with a command. Fill your horn with oil and go. In other words, trust me again, even though your last confidence ended in disappointment, that is the space.
This text inhabits a space between a door that has closed and a future that God has not yet revealed. That is precisely where we find Samuel at the opening of one Samuel 16 solid, not simply failed as a king. He had failed as the servant of the Lord. What began with such promise ended in rejection and Samuel was mourning.
He grieved over a spiritual disaster over the collapse of a man once anointed by God over the danger now facing Israel over what might have been had sold. Just obey. Rather than hesitated and fluctuated and flip flopped. And if we honest, we may recognize ourselves in Samuel’s grief, we live surrounded by spiritual ruin That ought to trouble us more than what it does.
Leaders, great leaders fall, churches fracture, churches fold. Faith erodes quietly under pressure and compromise, and yet we often choose to move on without really mourning. We choose to distract ourselves rather than sit with sorrow over the condition of God’s people. But Samuel mourned and God let him mourn.
But not forever because grief, however, real is not the final word in God’s economy. How long will you mourn for Saul? Since I have rejected him as king over Israel? Question wasn’t harsh, it wasn’t impatient, but it was the summons for it. Note that God did not tell Samuel that sorrow was misplaced, that we told him that it was no longer sufficient mourning had to give way to obedience.
Fill your horn with oil and go. I am sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem. That sentence is hope wrapped in command. God wasn’t stuck with soul. His purposes had not been derailed. You see, even in the aftermath of failure, especially in the aftermath of failure, God was already planning a new beginning. What Samuel could not yet see God had already chosen.
Now that matters deeply. That matters deeply for us. The collapse of a leader, the disappointment of a season or the exposure of sin doesn’t leave God scrambling for alternatives. He is never reduced to damage control. The Lord who judges also provides and his provision often arrives while we are still grieving.
Yet when God begins anew, he rarely does so in ways that confirm our limited vision. When Samuel arrived in Bethlehem and saw Ilium, everything in him resonated with familiarity. He was height, he was presence. He was strength oozing masculinity. He was soul all over again. So it seemed Samuel simply assumed the pattern would repeat because human logic almost always does.
But the Lord interrupted him. Do not consider his appearance or his height for the Lord does not see as humans see. But this moment was far larger than Ilia, but even Saul. True it. It reached backward to Saul whose outward impressiveness concealed a fearful and self protected heart. But it also reached forward.
It reached forward to Absalom. Remember, Absalom flawless in appearance, yet corrosive in ambition. To a Niger, confident and charismatic, but never chosen by God. And it reaches into every subsequent generation where God’s people are tempted to confuse visible qualities with faithfulness and where they confuse ability with obedience.
See, the Lord looks on the heart. Not because the heart is sentimental or vague, but because it’s the seat of trust, it’s the seat of humility. It’s the seat of teachability before God. And this truth confronts us because it exposes how easily we misread what God is doing. Yet it also comforts us because it means that God mercifully overrules our most confident mistakes.
If the future of God’s people rested on our assessments alone, where would be disastrous, but God sees more deeply. God sees more truly than we ever could. So one by one, Jesse’s sons passed before Samuel and one by one God said. No, the moment almost became uncomfortable. And finally, Samuel asked the unthinkable question are, are these all the sons you have?
And Jesse responded with a sentence that explains everything. Well, there there is the youngest, but he’s tending sheep. See, David wasn’t merely overlooked. He was assumed irrelevant. He was not even considered worth summoning until every other option had failed. And yet when he arrived, the Lord said, rise and anoint him.
This is the one God’s. Choice overturns every human expectation, the shepherd becomes the king. The unnoticed becomes central. The one least likely by human standards becomes the bearer of God’s promise. And when the oil was poured, the spirit of the Lord rushed upon David. Look for ease, mind you, but for calling. What do I mean?
Well, at this point of the story, you might be tempted to think that, well, divine choosing leads immediately to divine success, but scripture refuses to indulge that illusion. No sooner did the spirit come on, David, then his life became profoundly more difficult. He was drawn into conflict. He was hunted by Saul.
He was driven into exile, betrayed by those. He helped and pressed to the edge of the precipice again and again and again. The gift of the spirit, although infinitely gracious, was at the same time quite severe. God equipped David not for comfort. But for conflict. And the same pattern marked David’s greater son.
At Jesus’ baptism, the spirit descended and the father spoke. You are my beloved son. And yet, immediately afterward, the spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to hunger, temptation, and confrontation with evil. From that moment on. Jesus’ ministry was marked by misunderstanding. It was marked by hostility and eventual rejection.
The Messiah was not crowned, humanly speaking, he was crucified. The cornerstone was not admired. It was rejected, which brings us quite naturally now to John chapter nine. The man born blind received his sight. Oh, happy day. But then everything fell apart. Instead of celebration, there was interrogation instead of praise and Thanksgiving, there was suspicion.
His parents were bullied, he was mocked, tried, labeled as sinner, and finally expelled from the community. Excommunicated. Suffering was not removed following his healing. In fact, suffering accompanied it. And this is where scripture presses on us most firmly. The trouble that follows obedience is not evidence of God’s displeasure.
It is often the mark of belonging to him. Likewise, suffering is not necessarily a sign of sin. It may be the tool of formation. The wilderness is not proof of abandonment, but of presence. God’s children are not spared discipline. They are shaped by it. The man born blind ended up seeing more clearly than anyone else, not just physically, but spiritually.
He knew Jesus because he walked the path that God’s chosen ones always walk the path of humble and obedient submission despite anything and everything contrary to our hopes and our dreams. You know, very few of us recognize God’s best work while it is happening. I am gonna say that again. Very few of us recognize God’s work, God’s best work.
While it is happening, we recognize it later. Looking back often with some astonishment, sometimes with quiet gratitude. We, we realized then that the thing we once, once mourned was, was not the thing we needed most. The door that closed did not ruin us, as we may have thought at the time. Rather it redirected us.
Samuel never saw the full shape of what God was doing when he poured the oil on David’s head. All he knew was that God had chosen differently this time. David himself would not understand it for years. Through caves and betrayals and fair and exile, even the, even the man born blind did not fully understand his own story until he was standing outside the synagogue, rejected and yet truly seen for the first time.
The disciples did not understand the crucifixion until they saw Jesus resurrected.
But in each case, the disappointment was not wasted. The closed door was not arbitrary. The unlikely choice was not accidental. God was seeing what they could not yet see. God still sees what we cannot yet see and that may be where some of us are today still mourning something that did not turn out as we hope. Still puzzled by a decision God made that felt so strange, even wrong at the time. Scripture doesn’t rush us past that grief, but it does invite us to trust the God who looks on the heart, the God whose choices are wiser than ours, whose paths are deeper than our plans, and whose purpose often comes disguised.
As an interruption, the story of Samuel, the story of David, of Jesus, and of the man born blind, reminds us that God’s most faithful work often begins when our certainty ends. But one day, perhaps not soon, perhaps only on the other side of eternity, but one day we will look back and we will say. That door had to close so that this one could open, and only then will we see clearly now the sermon began with Samuel Morning, what had gone wrong, but it has ended with a man who could truly say I once was blind, but now I see.
And in between Stan, David, Jesus, and all who followed the Divine, the same pattern of divine choosing, followed by costly faithfulness like our beloved persecuted brethren all over the world who have cried out for so long. How long? Oh Lord, faithful and true God sees differently. God chooses differently.
God forms his people through suffering, not despite it. And if we can learn, if we can learn to trust, if we can believe that the God who looks on the heart is present with us even in the wilderness, then our grief will not have the final word. True sight will,
shall we pray.
Father, in many ways, I, I want to thank you that you don’t choose, like we choose how many decisions I’ve made in my life that if you had granted me, those decisions would’ve been disastrous.
But I know that feeling of absolute disappointment when something we’ve wanted so desperately, something that we’ve prayed for for so long, something that we really hoped for, our dreams, our ambitions, our hopes, things that even others affirmed when those things just did not happen when that door closed so firmly.
That nothing could open it. And yet here I stand so many years later looking back and I can see, yes, those doors had to close. Those were wrong decisions. I didn’t see them then. And perhaps they are folks sitting here today who still don’t see it, who still don’t understand why certain things happened in their lives.
I want to pray that especially as we come before your table and we partake of that which unites us as believers to you and to each other, I want to pray that your spirit would speak into each one’s heart saying, peace child. I truly know what I’m doing. I truly know where I’m leading You. And so Father, as we go into this day, as we go into this week, as we go into the rest of Lent, as we look forward to the time of Easter, I ask that your spirit would work deep in our hearts and give us a trust that goes beyond our comprehension.
Give us a peace that passes understanding so that we may humbly and obediently follow you regardless of where you may lead. I pray this in the great and the glorious and the victorious name of our Lord and of our savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.