We live next door to a lovely older couple. From my upstairs window I get to enjoy their beautiful garden – you know the sort of garden I mean, well established, mature plants that have been devotedly attended. They have stunning climbing roses, a manicured lawn and a bird feeder overrun with little garden birds (and the occassional cheeky squirrel.) It is such a lovely garden. We, however, have a different sort of garden – one with a trampoline, a table-tennis table, a barbecue and a football goal. We are at a different stage of life and we are living it at a different pace at the moment so this is the sort of garden that works for us, still I can’t help but look over their fence and think how lovely it would be….
We all do it don’t we? We look at someone else’s garden, someone else’s life (job, family, holiday, bank balance, marriage, instagram account…) and think “If only…..” Even God’s people Israel fell into this trap;
When Samuel grew old, he appointed his sons as Israel’s leaders….. So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.” 1 Samuel 8:1,4-5
Samuel was pretty upset when God’s people came to him with this request. After all the years of sacrificing and serving them, instead of thanking him, they came asking to be “like the other nations” who were led by a king. Samuel took his displeasure to God;
And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.” 1 Samuel 8:7-9
The route of the problem was not that the people were rejecting Samuel as their leader – it was that they had rejected God, the King of Kings. The desire to be “normal,” to be the same as everyone else, was so strong that they wanted something less. They want a king to lead them into battle – this from the same people who had known God literally thunder against their enemies causing them to panic and flee before them in the previous chapter! They would rather choose a lesser, human king to follow because that is how the other nations do it.
Samuel reminds them that this choice will have a cost. A human king will take taxes, he will take advantage of them, oppress them, rule them for his own good and not for their own. He will take the best of their crops, their sons for his army and their daughters for his servants. They will become his slaves.
But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.” 1 Samuel 8:19-20
I can look at my neighbours garden with envy, I can be greener than their grass but forget that their garden costs them something. There is always a price to pay. They spend time, money and sweat to take care of their garden. When we look over someones fence we never consider the cost. We don’t see the scratches, the thorn pricks and the time taken pruning the rose bushes so that they bloom like that. We never think about the long hours of overtime at work away from family that covered the price of that holiday. We don’t see behind the scenes the sacrifice, the practice, the choices to go without and prioritise, the investiment into those gifts that look so effortless in public. We don’t know about the sleepless nights, the stress, the years of toil without thanks that were poured into that buisness or that relationship. Nothing is ever what it seems from the other side of the fence, and “like everybody else” is just an illusion. You didn’t see what it cost.
The really sad thing though, is that the people were so busy looking over the fence and wishing that they had what other people had, that they failed to realise that what they had was actually something far, far better. They couldn’t see that the garden that they had been given was vast, full of life and colour, bursting at the seams with abundance. What their neighbours had was actually a weed filled, drought affected, pale imitation of what they already owned.
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Romans 1:21-23
Lets not be foolish. Let’s not be those that exchange the truth for lies. Lets not swap all the goodness, life, fruit and colour that God is offering us and settle for what is “normal.” Let’s not be those who run after the approval of man, the leadership of faliable humans as if they had the answers. We have the King of Kings as our gardener. He is at work sowing, planting, pruning, tending your life for the most unbelievably spectacular results. Why would you want something lesser?
It’s interesting isn’t it that God didn’t turn down their request? He gave them the freedom to choose – He let them have their human king. Dear friend my prayer for us today is that we would not be fooled by the fence, that we would not allow someone else’s normal to entice us, that we would choose to King of Kings and not settle for any less. Much love Rach x
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