Well, let's turn then to 1st Samuel and chapter 15. 1st Samuel chapter 15, I will read to really beginning with verse 16 up to verse 21. But then a little after that, I will draw your attention to a number of other passages around this same chapter. But to begin with, let's begin with verse 16. Then Samuel said to Saul, I will tell you what the Lord said to me this night." And he, referring to Saul, said to him, And Samuel said, though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel. And the Lord sent you on a mission and said, go, devote to destruction the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed. Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you pounce on the spoil and do what is evil in the sight of the Lord? And Saul said to Samuel, I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I have gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me. I have brought Agag, the king of Amalek, and I have devoted the Amalekites to destruction. But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal." Let's pause for a brief word of prayer. Eternal God in heaven, We thank you for the privilege that's been ours to hear testimony after testimony that speaks, those testimonies that speak of your grace, that even today you are still saving sinners. We praise you for this, O Lord. and simply ask that even as we hear your word now that you will make our hearts to be bare before you. That we might see in our hearts what is going wrong and that we might make amends that instead of false repentance there might be a true repentance. a repentance that genuinely speaks of reconciliation with the living God. Speak, O Lord, as your servants we are listening. For Jesus' sake we pray, amen. Where we are now is really the ongoing series of messages that we are going through in 1 Samuel and chapter 15. It is entitled, The Anatomy of False Repentance, or The Nature of False Repentance. And all we are doing is looking at this one man called Saul and seeing the way in which, although he was exposed to the truth of God, he had a hardened heart. And because he had this hardened heart, he continued to defy the means by which he ought to have been brought to genuine repentance in God. And so we listen to the way in which he acts, as recorded in chapter 15. We also listen to the conversation that he is having with Samuel. And as we do so, we keep asking ourselves, well, is this the way we are as God is having dealings with us? So, we have seen first of all the nature of true obedience in Saul, rather in Samuel himself at the beginning of this chapter. We have also seen the response of the godly again in Samuel as an individual who is told about the sin of Saul and the way in which he is utterly broken, utterly broken about it. and goes on to confront Saul. But we have seen now the false repentance from Saul himself. First of all, we saw the way in which he took advantage of thinking that Samuel did not know. And consequently, when he was confronted, his very first response was to say, I have done exactly what God wanted me to do. That was the way he responded. as though he had actually acted righteously. He went straight into a life of hypocrisy. But then, upon being confronted by Samuel, that I actually know what has taken place, and especially as he was hearing the evidence of the sheep and the goats, rather the oxen, that were uh... bleating and lowing and so forth so immediately changed and said well yeah actually i've i've spared uh... agag and so on but he quickly pushed the blame onto the people that he was king of he was saying they are the ones who have done this they are the ones who have spared uh... the the animals and so forth. And in fact, they had a good reason for doing so. They want to sacrifice them to the Lord. And basically, we were saying that this kind of life, this kind of message and speech betrays the absence of true repentance. Because where you are genuinely repentant, you own your sin. and you repent of it. Today, we see how Samuel still presses the issue. He is not satisfied with the answer he has been given. He presses the issue further. He goes for Saul's conscience. And again, we see how Saul, in responding, evades what Samuel is seeking to achieve. And this time, he goes into what I'm calling a sinful insistence. A sinful insistence. In other words, he is insisting on his previous position, but this time, not rightly, not righteously, but he's doing so as somebody who's really still hanging on to a repentance which is really a non-repentance because he is not accepting that he has sinned against the Lord. And this sinful insistence is one way in which you often realize that you are dealing with an unrepentant person. because it doesn't matter how many people they might be that are still saying, my dear friend, looking at the data that is before us, you've actually sinned against the Lord. The person will still continue arguing that you people just don't understand. Let me again go through the same ground, that you might see what I am seeing. And over and over and over again, in the end, It doesn't matter, you can have a thousand people, they finally just conclude, here is a person we cannot help. He is beyond help. He is a person that must finally meet his doom. So I want to divide my sermon into simply two parts. First of all, it is, here is what God said. And Samuel takes us through that. And then secondly, here is what Saul says. And then we see Saul answering that. So let's begin with verse 16 to verse 19 and hear what God said. Because often the person who is confronting someone who has not truly repented is very clear in his own mind that what we are dealing with here is a sin that needs to be repented of. that if I'm to be faithful to what God himself has said, there is sin here, and it needs to be repented of. And so Samuel begins, verse 16 to verse 19. We've read it, but I'll read it again. Then Samuel said to Saul, stop. I will tell you what the Lord said to me this night. And basically, as we ended the last message, this is what Samuel is saying to Saul, and it is simply shut up. Shut up. The story that you are giving me cannot stand in the judgment seat of God. It can't. So just shut up and listen to me." And then he goes on to tell him, after Saul says, speak, verse 17. And Saul said, though you are little in your own eyes, are you not the head of the tribes of Israel? The Lord anointed you king over Israel. And the point he's making there is this, that God has been good to you. Look at how privileged you are. You knew from the very beginning that you were among the least of the least of the people of Israel. But God took you, promoted you, gave you the kind of privilege that you currently have as king over the people. What a privileged individual you are. You don't deserve the position that God has been pleased to give to you. And then he goes on to tell him or to remind him God's clear instruction. What is it that he was given to do? Verse 18. And the Lord sent you on a mission and said, go devote to destruction the sinners, the Amalekites. and fight against them until they are consumed. The instructions were very clear, that here were a people that had sinned grievously against the Lord by what they did to the Lord's people. And this was now God's time to come and mete out punishment upon them. It was God's time. And he called you and put you on this assignment. You go and annihilate them completely. You go and do it. That's the assignment that he gave you. It was that you should fight against them until they are consumed. Clearly, Saul was not given any room to spare anything or to spare anyone. The instructions were very clear. And since there was no ambiguity on the part of God, Samuel asked Saul why he did not obey. Hence the question he now asks there. Verse 19, Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? The instructions were clear. What I want to know is why you did not obey those very clear instructions. And then he repeats the why question in order to get to the conscience of Saul, because Saul was not acting out of ignorance. And so he asks further, why did you pounce on the spoil and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord? Soul, why? Why? Why? You see, human beings are reasonable creatures. We are not like wild beasts, creatures of instinct. We are reasonable creatures. As human beings, we think like this, one plus one is equal to two. Therefore, that's the way we are. So when a person apparently is acting in an unreasonable way, you need to park there and begin to deal with the issue one by one, because the person is not a creature of instinct. So you want to ask very simple questions. so that you can see how the person re-zoned his way to the place where he found himself. And that is what is happening at this point. So you heard God. He wanted these people and all their possessions completely destroyed. That command came to me. I gave it to you. Very clear. Now you are telling me that you spared some creatures. You are telling me that you spared the king. Why did you disobey? Tell me. Give me the reasoning behind what you did. Why is it that you went ahead to pounce on the spoil and do what is evil in God's sight? And it is often in hearing the reasoning that you begin to see what you really have on your hands. Do you have an individual here who is repentant? or who is unrepentant. And often a repentant person will come clean. They will speak in terms, if it was so, in terms of his greed. in terms of what he wanted from the good things that he was seeing. That I was tempted by what I saw, and that began to speak louder than the voice of God that had told me what to do. I shouldn't have done it. I was wrong. I begged for forgiveness. I remember exactly the kind of thing that was tempting me. That I may never have an opportunity again to have these kinds of possessions. Or with respect to Agag, it was the fact that he was a fellow king and I wanted to spare him the way perhaps I would want him to spare me. And therefore, I removed him from the other people that were being killed. That's the way I was thinking. I was wrong. Please forgive me. You want to hear the reasoning behind it. So, he gives us an answer. But before we get to his answer, I also want you to see how Samuel deliberately first of all accused Saul of the sin of omission, in other words, what he did not do, and then the sin of commission, what he did. In other words, both kinds of sins were committed in this one sin. So the sin of omission, he says, why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? You did not obey. And therefore, you were guilty. But here's the second, the sin of commission. Why did you pounce on the spoil? and do what was evil in the sight of the Lord. And often, that's the way it is with us with respect to sin. It is on one hand, we are not doing what God wants us to do, but on the other, in not doing that, we end up doing what the Lord says you must not do. There is Samuel representing God. This is what God has said. Well, let's head on to look at what Saul says. In response, a person who is unrepentant will sinfully insist that there's just a misunderstanding here. That's a misunderstanding. And therefore, he continues the same narrative. A narrative that you've already listened to. A narrative that ultimately is not helpful. So as far as Saul was concerned, he had obeyed God. And the people who took the creatures, the animals, meant well. Listen to his response in verse 20 and verse 21. And Saul said to Samuel, I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I have gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me. I have brought Agag the king of Amalek, and I have devoted the Amalekites to destruction. But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal." Now I want us to go back to what he said before, and I want you to see if there's any difference. So let's go to verse 13. Verse 13. And Samuel said to Saul, and Saul said to him, blessed be you to the Lord, I have performed the commandment of the Lord. So I have obeyed his command. And Samuel said, what then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen that I hear? Saul said, they. that is, the people, brought them from the Amalekites. For the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen to sacrifice to the Lord your God, and the rest we have devoted to destruction." So what's the difference? What are you saying now, Saul, that you did not say before? Nothing. And yet I have come in to say to you, listen to what God had given you as his instruction. Instruction was very clear, destroy everything. And then as he's responding, he's responding in exactly the same way. I have obeyed the command that was given to me. I went in and destroyed. Fine, okay, I brought the king out, but you know, it's the people that then now took all these animals and sacrificed them. Exactly the same message that he is continuing to recite over and over and over again. Here's the point. He's forgetting where everything has come from. Remember, when Samuel first confronted him, his response was this. I've done everything that God commanded me. Full stop. He didn't say anything about sparing agaric. He didn't say anything about sparing animals. He just said, hey, praise the Lord. Mission accomplished. He's forgetting that he began with deceit. He's forgetting that. And that the person he's talking to right now is the one he lied to at the beginning. He forgets that. Number two, he forgets that he didn't himself bring in this issue of AGAG the first time. He forgets. That's a matter that he hid. He forgets. He still is not acknowledging, I lied. I tried to deceive. He's still forgetting that fact. If Samuel had not been informed by God, he would have thought Saul fully obeyed God. And this time, Saul insists that he obeyed the mission which the Lord gave to him. I want you to notice how he quickly passes over Agag, quickly, in order for him to still say that he has devoted the Amalekites to destruction. Look at verse 20 again. I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I've gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me." Then quickly, I've brought Agag, the king of Amalek, and I have devoted the Amalekites to destruction. Very quickly getting to that which he was supposed to have done, and yes, I did it. But there was the issue that you spared Agag, you spared. quickly mumbled over it and gets on to, but I've destroyed the rest of the Amalekites. I've destroyed them. And then repeats the passing of the blame to the people as if they acted independent of him. In order to justify what they did, he adds the fact that it was to sacrifice to the Lord. As he had done before, in verse 15 he had said, for the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen to sacrifice to the Lord your God. Exactly the same thing he repeats. Verse 21, but the people took the spoil, sheep and oxen, the best of the things devoted to destruction to sacrifice to the Lord your God." And very good, isn't it, by keeping the statement, the Lord your God. You better be grateful. We could have destroyed all these things, but they've been spared so that they can be sacrificed to your God. And then you are here now pointing fingers at me. I've done a good job. I've done a good job. And friends, all I want to say here is this, that this insistence of innocence, when one has done what God has not told him to do, and has not done what God told him to do, betrays a lack of repentance. It betrays a very sad lack of repentance. Because Saul knew what he had done. He knew. And all he was trying to do was to survive on the basis of the fact that Samuel may not know. And therefore, I can paint this wonderful picture, this wonderful picture of what it is that has happened. Sad, isn't it? But I want to say that this attitude did not end with the days of Saul. They didn't. This sinful insistence which betrays a false repentance is very common even today. You literally get tired of going in circles, in circles, with the same person sitting in front of you. And you're saying, come on. Can't you see that this is sinful? And the person still denies it, still denies it. Sometimes they can even blame, not a human being, but their cell phone. Yes! How did this pornographic picture get sent to this person? Ah, you know these phones these days. You know, I just don't know where the picture came from. And I think I just touched my phone and it went. You bring in other people to say, OK, maybe, maybe I am unreasonable. Maybe. Let me bring in somebody else. I'm just sitting. I'm listening. Exactly the same tale over and over again. Exactly the same response is being given. That look, my friend. There's enough evidence here that you sinned against the Lord, against God's people. You sinned. There's enough evidence. No, you people just don't understand. Don't understand. It's because you were not there. If you were there, you would understand. OK, so who should we bring in now who can understand? Who? Because this persistence, we want to get through. We want to finally show that this was seen. Who else should we bring in? And even when you say, OK, let's go through the details again, and you go through them, the answer is, It's not really like that. Really. It's not really like that. Okay, if it's not really like that, how really is it? Yes. Friends, this is how you miss forgiveness. That's how you miss it. Because it's an act of grace when God sends your brothers and sisters to you to say, friend, from what we've seen here, you have sinned against the Lord. It's an act of grace. Because Christianity is redemptive. It's not meant to finish you off, never. It's meant to help you, but you can only be helped if you admit your sin. That's the only way you can be helped. It's like meeting a doctor who's maybe a member of your church, and he notices that you are limping a little bit. And he says, how are you? No, I'm fine, I'm fine. But what about that limp? No, no, no, I'm fine. You didn't look like you're walking well. You know, it's these Chinese shoes, you know, Chinese shoes. You've got a doctor in front of you, a doctor. That's the best time to own the fact that you do have a problem so that the doctor can help you. That's it. But as long as you are insisting and insisting and insisting that all is well, well, in the end, you'll miss God's forgiveness. And that's what was happening with Samuel here. In the end, God actually rejects him completely as king, completely rejects him. When he had the opportunity to admit before Saul that I have sinned against the Lord. Greed on my part is what drove me in order to start getting the things that I ought to have destroyed. There's no excuse whatsoever. It's my own sinfulness. And I plead for God's forgiveness. Well, we'll see next time that he does say I have sinned. But again, we will see how it is a false repentance we are finding there. But brethren, I really do need to make this appeal because we easily miss an opportunity for forgiveness because somehow we still want to keep insisting and insisting and insisting that we are innocent, we are completely innocent. People just don't understand. Are you an individual who is like that? Who will still want to insist and insist and insist that you are being misunderstood, but you are innocent, totally innocent. I had one case that I was thinking about as I was preparing this message. It's a real case, by the way, of a lady saying she was raped. And that's a terrible thing, to be raped. As details began to come out, it was a guy she was getting close with. They even started calling each other Vahani, Vahboyfriend, Vahshani. They began calling each other all those terms of endearment. The next was the guy was having a party at his home, and she did go for that party. And the next was they were drinking. The guy was drinking. And then the next, he actually invites her outside the place where they're drinking to his bedroom, and they go to the bedroom. And where I'm sitting, I'm thinking, raped? You go with a drunk guy who has affections for you into his bedroom and starts cuddling you, and you are raped? Well, the question was asked in the midst of all the questions, did you scream? No. Why not? The African answer, it wasn't going to look nice. No. No. And it was insistence upon insistence upon insistence. All the way, it never finally got resolved. Did you report him to the police for rape? No. So now we should believe it's rape and say it's over. Brethren. It's a loss of an opportunity to say, forgive me. Because I began to entertain this sin very early, when I began to use terms of endearment with an unbeliever. I already was sinning. When I accepted this invitation from the rest of you to go and attend this party of this non-Christian guy that we were now beginning to do that relationship at his home and we were drinking there, obviously I was already in compromise and sin. I was already sinning against the Lord. And I'm an adult. The moment he now said, come, come, come, and I could see he's taking me into a bedroom. At that point, I knew what was happening. I shouldn't have gone ahead. Forgive me, brethren. Forgive me. Forget the final details. The point is, all along, I was doing wrong. Forgive me. The Christian church is meant to be redemptive. It's meant to be one that says, why should we beat a person to the floor when he or she is already on the floor? Why? Why? What are we gaining? There's repentance here. Our job is to assure of God's forgiveness. I want to repeat, sinful insistence betrays the absence of forgiveness, of repentance. Rather, admit your sin and flee to the cross for pardon. Just admit it and go to Christ. And say, Lord, forgive me. I'm the sinner for whom you died. Forgive me. Wash away my sin. Have your own way, Lord. Have your own way. You are the potter, and I am the clay. Wash me. Cleanse me. make me whiter than snow. Just go to the Lord and have him forgive you. And where it has come to the attention of others, yes, apologize to them as well. You are a sinner. That's who you are. And God's people ought to be a forgiving people. Is that you today? Is that you? Oh, that God may make each one of us recognize that the church and Christianity and God's people are redemptive. And therefore, when confronted with sin, our attitude should be that of yes, rather than sinful insistence. Christ forgives, readily forgives. It's not people don't understand, they don't understand, no. It is, let me honor, that I might find true forgiveness and reconciliation. Amen.