I have a confession to make. I TEND to ignore the lights on my dashboard - probably because I can't tell you what half of these lights mean. And turns out lights can stay on for a long time before bad things happen - at least in my experience... 🙂Now, you probably know that there are certain lights on the dashboard of your car that you can ignore for a little while. The little light that tells you the windshield washer fluid is low? You can probably make it home. The light reminding you that it's time for an oil change? You probably don't need to pull over immediately. And because of that, I kind of operate with that same attitude for all lights.

People with more common sense than I have know that on the other hand, there are some lights that come on that you really shouldn't ignore. Oil pressure. Engine temperature. Brake warning. When one of those lights comes on, the smartest thing you can do is pay attention. But that's not what I do.

Now to my credit I've never done what I know some people do. There are some, if the light really bothers them, they just put a little piece of electrical tape over it. Problem solved!

You understand, right? HOWEVER - the issue was never the LIGHT, was it? In fact, you could even say that the light was actually an act of mercy. That little light was trying to tell you that something was wrong before something much worse happened. The warning wasn't there to ruin your day. The warning was there to save your engine—or perhaps even save your life.

And sometimes I wonder if we misunderstand the warnings of God in exactly the same way. We read a passage of Scripture and it makes us uncomfortable. Someone who loves us confronts us about something. Our conscience begins bothering us. The Holy Spirit presses upon an area of our lives that we would really rather leave alone. And our first reaction is sometimes, “I wish that feeling would go away.” But what if the warning itself is mercy? What if conviction is one of God's gifts? Because there comes a point when the warning light has been ignored for so long that the warning gives way to consequences.

And that's where we are when we come to 1 Samuel 3. We have been watching this story unfold in our series, The Rise of a King, and we have already seen that something is terribly wrong in Israel.