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.

SOMETHING ABOUT FANTASY FOOTBALL. There is something fascinating about the way we choose people. I hated the way dodgeball or kickball teams were chosen back in Elementary School! When you choose your Fantasy Football team, you can base your choice a BIT on what happened last year - but more often than not you're kind of just playing the odds.

Ever wonder how GOD chooses people? I mean God looks at this old man, Abram, and says, "I'm going to make a nation out of you." He looks at a stuttering washed-up fugitive hiding out in the desert and says, "You will lead my people out of slavery." And later in this study in 1 Samuel, we will see God weeding through some really great guys - strong guys, talented, good-looking - just to find the kid brother who hadn't even been invited to the family meeting and says: "That's the one!"

It makes me sit up and take note as to what God must think is most important. But even as we pointed out last week, this study of the rise of a king does not begin with that story; but rather with a woman crying out to the Lord, praying for a baby.

We all know that feeling, don’t we? You want to sleep so badly, but it just doesn’t seem to be in the cards. You drift off, and the phone rings, the kids wake you up, or the preacher raises his voice.

Here’s another one for you. How many of you use the snooze on the alarm on your phone? There are times when I have hit the snooze on my phone - but I KNOW it going to go off again in, like, 10 minutes...and instead of actually going back to sleep, I keep thinking about the alarm for the next several minutes as I lay there in a state of half-conscious anxiety!

But here is the problem: as Christians, many of us are walking around in that exact same state. We are spiritually "half-asleep." We are hitting the snooze button on our faith. We are comfortable, we are drowsy, and we have no idea that the enemy is right outside the window, knocking.

As we continue in our series, "Questions Jesus Asked (And We Must Answer)," we come to a moment where Jesus’ closest friends couldn’t seem to stay awake. And the problem was, this was not the time to sleep.