Who is your King Traditional (3)

Nick Stern brought the message this Mother's Day, working from 1 Samuel 8, where Israel asks God for a king. He traced a thread that runs from the Garden of Eden through the Old Testament and into our own lives: the pull to push God aside and choose a different kind of king.

What was said

Nick opened by noting how much of human history the Old Testament covers compared to the New Testament. That long stretch of history is where we watch God's character in action, how He responds to people who keep turning away, and how He keeps calling them back. That context, Nick said, is what makes the New Testament's grace land with full weight.

Before Israel ever had a king, God gave them instructions through Moses in Deuteronomy about how the whole thing should go. The king they chose had to be one of their own, had to stay away from the trappings of Egypt, and had to copy out and read God's law daily. It was a gracious provision, a warning built in before the mistake was even made.

By 1 Samuel 8, several centuries had passed. The elders came to Samuel and asked for a king so they could be "like all the other nations." God told Samuel plainly: "It is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king." Nick sat with the tension in that moment. God had already told them a king was coming. But the way they were asking, the reason they were asking, was the problem. They wanted to look like the world around them, not like a people set apart.

God did not simply cut them off. He told Samuel to warn them in detail about what a human king would actually cost them: their sons, their daughters, their fields, their flocks, their freedom. "You yourselves will become his slaves," the text says. And then the hardest line: when that day comes and they cry out for relief, God said He would not answer. Nick did not soften that. He called it heavy and said it is genuinely difficult to sit with, but it is in the Bible and it is true.

Solomon became Nick's example of what the warning looked like lived out. Every condition Moses had laid down, Solomon broke. Many horses. Many wives, whose hearts led his own astray. Enormous wealth. And he walked away from God, taking the nation with him until the kingdom split apart under his sons. The pattern God had described came to pass exactly.

Nick then told a story on himself. In the summer of 2011, he was dating someone his brother, his friends, and his own prayers had all told him to leave alone. One night he woke up with what he described as a clear sense from God: "Don't date her or she will destroy you." He spent that morning on his knees. Then she woke up, and he kept dating her for three more weeks anyway. He told it as a moment of shame and also as a mirror. Israel wanted to be like the nations. Nick wanted to blend in too. He said most of us do, whether it is by adding the world's theology to our own or simply staying quiet about who we are.

He brought it home by asking who, or what, is actually functioning as king in our lives. He named the love of money, gossip, and selfish ambition as sins that tend to get quietly retired from the conversation. And he ended where the Old Testament itself ends up pointing: even after God's silence, a new king came, not in a palace or a battle, but on a cross, so that none of us have to keep walking in the wrong direction alone. The invitation was to go live in that, to bring sins before one another, confess them, and return to the kind of closeness with God that started in the Garden.