1 Sam 22:8, "For all of you have conspired against me so that there is no one who discloses to me when my son makes a covenant with the son of Jesse, and there is none of you who is sorry for me or discloses to me that my son has stirred up my servant against me to lie in ambush, as it is this day." 
Today we are faced with something that we all hear far too often, oft times from our own mouths - there is none of you who is sorry for me. This is the mantra of our self-centered lives in so many ways. The whole idea is focused on the emotional thread that we are not given the place in the hearts and minds of others around us that we think we should receive. 
It is that insipid whining self-centered excuse that we level at others for the way in which we respond and set aside all human decency for anyone but ourselves. We put the blame on people who probably have no clue why anything, including wrath, is aimed at them. 
In our current reading, it meant that the whole priestly city of Nob was put to the sword because of the violent temper tantrum of King Saul. He was enslaved by his jealous rage at the impudence of the shepherd boy, David, whom Saul imagined had involved even the priests of God in this revolt against Saul’s authority. At least that was the way that Saul saw it and thus how he justified the slaughter of the entire populace of Nob. This was minus one priest, Abiathar, who escaped to tell David all about it. 
In Saul’s mind, nobody could hold him responsible for the way he was forced to deal with squashing the insurrection which he imagined was taking place all around him. This included even his very own son, Jonathan, who had just escaped being speared by his enraged father.
Poor, poor, pitiful Saul. Nobody understood how hard it was to be the king. Nobody felt sorry for him. Nobody understood how mistreated and maligned he was. This was in the confines of his own mind, riddled with anger, and unforgiveness and jealousy and envy and strife. If only someone would feel sorry for this poor unfortunate soul who was willing to slay the very priests of Jehovah to feed the insatiable delusions of his growing mental insanity.
There is a quick aside that we should deal with at this point of the establishment of the human king over the people of the Lord. The king was never intended to supplant the priestly order. We will see that later when Saul puts himself directly into that place that was never designed for anyone other than the ordained priests. The hierarchy of sovereignty was always God first, over all the peoples. Even the king answered to the Lord. Therefore the king was to listen to the priests as they declared the counsel of God. Thereby the king would show complete submission to the Lord in obedience to the priestly order. 
This was evident as even Saul, in the beginning of his kingship, was subordinate to the Prophet Samuel. He sought for the direction of God, through the counsel of Samuel, at least initially. Therefore the Lord and the religious basis that He established were the preeminent order of authority over the entire nation. This was followed by the king and his control over the social and political order of the people. 
The reason to highlight this in this morning’s consideration is the fact that the guards of Saul, those soldiers of the king refused to kill the priests of God even at the express directive of the king. They understood that the priests were to be considered in a higher regard than even the king. They were not willing to dishonor the Lord by laying a hand on His priests even though their political sovereign so demanded it. 
It was Doeg the Edomite who followed the order of the king to the letter, actually even beyond the scope of his instruction. He utterly slaughtered not only the priests, but all the women and children and the livestock of the priestly city of Nob. He did so because he was not a Jew. 
As a foreigner among the Jews, an Edomite, he held no allegiance to God over the king. He was sworn to obey the king first and foremost since it was from the king that he received his manner of living as the chief of Saul’s shepherds. Unlike even the very guards of Saul, to Doeg, if the king said kill the priests, that was his duty and he did so with no apparent compunction against that hideous action committed directly against the priests of Jehovah.   
Accordingly we return to the self-piteousness that was displayed by Saul as he did not get any cooperation from even his own son or the guards of Saul’s choosing. No one felt sorry for Saul. This is a theme with which so many of us are familiar. We will trace it through some even surprising members of both the New and the Old Testament. This is due to the fact that it is a part of that old human nature that reared its ugly head at its advent in the Garden of Eden. 
Every one of us has this battle for self recognition and self righteous indignation and self pity when we do not get our way. It is just as nasty and wicked and vengeful and insidious today, in us, as it will be seen throughout the recorded history of the people of God when they, when we give into it, just like Saul did.
Let us return to the scene of the encampment of the Children of Israel as they had been released from their onerous enslavement to Egypt. They were being led by the Lord God Almighty through the leadership of Moses. God was meeting their every need, although not their every want. He was teaching them what it meant to be led by the Spirit of God. Num 20:3-5 records their self-centered and vicious demand, even after the miracles of their release and the provision of Jehovah in their wilderness journey.
Num 20:3-5, The people thus contended with Moses and spoke, saying, "If only we had perished when our brothers perished before the Lord! "Why then have you brought the Lord's assembly into this wilderness, for us and our beasts to die here? "And why have you made us come up from Egypt, to bring us in to this wretched place? It is not a place of grain or figs or vines or pomegranates, nor is there water to drink."
	Notice what they wanted was not being provided by God. They were receiving water and food. We know, from a later passage that the Lord led them through 40 years of wandering and even their shoes and their clothes did not disintegrate and neither did their feet swell. God was providing what they needed, but not what they wanted. They were caught up in that self piteous cycle of nobody knows the full measure of their suffering, without the grain, the figs, the vines, or the pomegranates. 
Sure, God was bringing forth water from rocks. They were eating of the bread of heaven, the manna of His Divine provision, but that was not enough for their self-centered desires for the forgotten meager and pitiful rations that they had received in their enslavement to the Egyptians. Oh what a poor and pitiful people. Their life in the wilderness was so dramatic that they wished they had died in Egypt, rather than continuing to see how God would provide through all His miraculous working on their behalf.
	Then, in Num 21:5, the children of Israel once again cried out in their self-pity that it would be better to be dead than in the hands of Jehovah. They even proclaimed that the provision of the manna, the food of Heaven, was miserable and to be despised. 
	Num 21:5, And the people spoke against God and Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this miserable food." 
	It was not just that first generation of Israelites, doomed to die in the wilderness that succumbed to this self-pity that infests all of us. Later, in the history of this people, the Prophet Elijah, one of the greatest of the Prophets of Jehovah was also one to succumb to this horrible affliction of humankind. In the chapter after the great demonstration of the power of God over the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel, Elijah found himself being hunted by the vengeful Jezebel. Please open in your Bibles to 1 Kings 19:2-4, where we can read of the self-pity that overcame even this great Prophet of God.
	1 Kings 19:2-4, Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, "So may the gods do to me and even more, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time." And he was afraid and arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there. But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree; and he requested for himself that he might die, and said, "It is enough; now, O Lord, take my life, for I am not better than my fathers." 
	Elijah made reference back to his fathers. Maybe even back to the self-pitiful proclamations of those Children of Israel in the wilderness as they were so bemoaning their situation that they wished that they had died in Egypt. He had been party to a tremendous example of the power of God evidenced magnificently on Mount Carmel. Then we find him under a broom tree in the Negev, asking God to take away his poor, pitiful life. Oh how the propensity to self-pity, poor poor sorrowful me, can so distract our attention from that which is of true and greatest concern. 
	Elijah was so caught up in that self-pity, that he forgot for Whom he had shown to the people the tremendous and unparalleled power of Yahweh. Sure, he was being hunted, but God was his Protector, his Provider, and his strength. It would be in the power of God life that Elijah would overcome this piteous display of self-concern. Elijah would be brought forth from this desert experience with a power that would stand against the evil and the idolatrousness and blasphemy of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. The power of God, through this prophet would be exerted to show the nation that God was the true Sovereign, not these vile and despicable expressions of the worst of humanity.
	It was the second king over the nation of Israel who made it very clear how to deal with those times of self-pity and self-loathing. David was a man after God’s heart, and yet there were those times in his difficult life in which he found himself feeling that self-pity rising up within his soul. He would do what we all need to learn to do in those times when that old nature is putting forth those calls to just end everything and be done with life. David cried out to the Lord, and then found himself so enthralled with God, instead of himself, that he had to sing the praises of Jehovah and forget about that attitude of poor, poor, pitiful me, myself, and I. 
We will read but one of the many Psalms which put the perspective of God ahead of that dismayed and pitiful self-demeanor. Please turn to the 13th Psalm and read along together. 
Ps 13, How long, O Lord? Wilt Thou forget me forever? How long wilt Thou hide Thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, Having sorrow in my heart all the day? How long will my enemy be exalted over me?  Consider and answer me, O Lord, my God; Enlighten my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, Lest my enemy say, "I have overcome him," Lest my adversaries rejoice when I am shaken. But I have trusted in Thy lovingkindness; My heart shall rejoice in Thy salvation. I will sing to the Lord, Because He has dealt bountifully with me. 
	Through all the sadness and the defeated disappointment and fearfulness and panic and depression that could infest this man, there arises that knowledge that God is greater than it all. There is that within David, who endured so many betrayals and heart-aches and losses, which displayed that heart after God. David faced the hard times, not in a defeated and self-pitiful longing for death to end it all, but with that knowledge that no matter what happened, God would prove Himself more gloriously and mightily than ever before. This was not the defeat of his soul, but the manner in which David would lift himself up from the mire and the filth of this age through the power of looking to Jehovah and proclaiming His majesty over all the affairs of the history of mankind. 
	It was David’s son, Solomon, who would as well proclaim how a man was to lift himself out of the defeat of our human situation. We are to look to The Lord with every expectation of God’s deliverance and God’s provision as the testimony of the people of God would be seen in the faces of our joyful worship. The smiles of the righteous would proclaim the glory of God no matter what the earthly situation being dealt with in this walk on this earth.
	Again, we will consider but one of the encouragements as detailed in Prov 15:13-17. Please read along with me.
	Prov 15:13-17, A joyful heart makes a cheerful face, But when the heart is sad, the spirit is broken. The mind of the intelligent seeks knowledge, But the mouth of fools feeds on folly. All the days of the afflicted are bad, But a cheerful heart has a continual feast. Better is a little with the fear of the Lord, Than great treasure and turmoil with it. Better is a dish of vegetables where love is, Than a fattened ox and hatred with it. 
	Throughout this passage, there is contained that fundamental and foundational reality that we are to look to the Lord with every expectation that He will provide everything that we need to make our testimony of Him glorious on this earth. We may not have the finest of the meats of this world, but what we will have will make us recognize that it is the best that the storehouse of Heaven lavishly and lovingly provides. 
Rather than setting our eyes on the allurements and the tidbits and the enticements of this age, we are to see the manner in which God provides. Our faces and our hearts and our voices are to be the evident manifestation that we belong to Him with all joy and gladness and satisfaction in the goodness of His bounty unto us. That is what will set aside that foolishness of bemoaning what we do not have and giving into the lie that we would be better off dead than in the situation of our self-miserable existence. That lie is the one Saul’s mind embraced against all the reality of what God had set before him as the king of His people. 
	We will continue, Lord willing, next time with more examples of how the self-pity of humanity is but a lie that only destroys, if we permit it to have that place in our hearts and minds. We need to learn to rejoice in the goodness of the Lord rather than in the foul and besmirched mind-set of this age. So be it.
"For all of you have conspired against me so that there is no one who discloses to me when my son makes a covenant with the son of Jesse, and there is none of you who is sorry for me or discloses to me that my son has stirred up my servant against me to lie in ambush, as it is this day." Amen.

	This morning’s benediction is Ps 119:11+12. Thy word I have treasured in my heart, That I may not sin against Thee. Blessed art Thou, O Lord; Teach me Thy statutes. Amen.