I was reading in 1 Samuel 12 the other day and came across this passage:
And all the people said to Samuel, “Pray for your servants to the Lord your God, that we may not die, for we have added to all our sins this evil, to ask for ourselves a king.” And Samuel said to the people, “Do not be afraid; you have done all this evil. Yet do not turn aside from following the Lord, but serve the Lord with all your heart. And do turn aside after empty things that cannot profit or deliver, for they are empty. For the Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself. Moreover, as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you, and I will instruct you in the good and the right way (vs. 19-23).
These words come from Samuel during his farewell address to the nation of Israel after he has anointed Saul as king at their request. There are many “nuggets” we could pull from this short passage, but I want to mention two that really stood out to me.
Samuel instructs Israel not to pursue after empty things that cannot profit or deliver, and I find myself resonating with this struggle myself. Too often my mind is pre-occupied with “empty” things that have no eternal value. The amount of time I spend each week checking the stock market, or scrolling through my news feed on my phone, or any other number of “empty” things that regularly occupy my time, does absolutely nothing that will have an impact for eternity.
It also struck me that shortly after that, Samuel mentions how it would be a sin for him to fail in regularly lifting up the nation of Israel to the Lord in prayer. I thought this was a funny way of putting it, because I have never before considered that my lack of prayer could be counted as sin against the Lord.
So instead of pre-occupying my mental energy and time with “empty” things that cannot profit or deliver, I need to be faithful to lift up those around me that God has put into my life and given me some form of responsibility for. That is something of eternal value that does profit and does deliver.
The only question left is: Do I truly believe this? Or am I just going through the motions of American Christianity? If I truly believe this, then I will regularly choose things with eternal value over that which has no profit because I know the value of these eternal things far outweighs the value of these frivolous things that so often consume my mind and time.
