1 Sam 3:1, Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord before Eli. And word from the Lord was rare in those days, visions were infrequent.
	We are looking at what was in place in the days in which Samuel was called as a prophet of God. We considered several aspects of the fact that there was a lack of the knowledge of God and His Word because there was no desire for it. The people seemingly did not want to hear from Jehovah. The priesthood did not fulfill the Word of the Lord in terms of the manner in which Eli’s sons were so deceitful and self-centered. They were using their position as a means in which to meet their gluttonous appetites after all the enticements of this age.
	The Lord had told Samuel what God was going to do to Eli and to his family. Samuel, although frightened to tell Eli, did so out of his commitment to share the Word of God as so directed by the Lord. This established Samuel as the last of the Judges and as the prophet of the Lord who would be used to anoint the kingly heritage of the nation of God. 
	We continue forward with the heart of the issue at hand. It seems readily apparent that in our day, there is an increasing societal withdrawal from wanting to hear from the Lord. Within our nation, there is a turning away from God. There is a deceitful seeking to eliminate any idea that this country was, at one time, a Christian nation. This land was founded upon Godly principles, with the idea of being a light to the nations of what a people under God could become. 
Our current society, however, has no place for God. It seems to be immune to the warnings and the strident declarations of what will take place if God is replaced by the idols and the man-made images and desires after anything other than the worship of God, Alone.
	Part of the issue is expressed for us in Prov 29:14-18. This seems to give an indication of what may be taking place within the course of our society. This is much as it was in the days when Eli was the priest of God and his sons were doing whatever their lusful hearts dictated. 
	Prov 29:14-18, If a king judges the poor with truth, His throne will be established forever. The rod and reproof give wisdom, But a child who gets his own way brings shame to his mother. When the wicked increase, transgression increases; But the righteous will see their fall. Correct your son, and he will give you comfort; He will also delight your soul. Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, But happy is he who keeps the law. 
	There was no place for discipline in the Lord in the society then, with Eli’s sons, as is also true of our current day. The rod and reproof give wisdom, But a child who gets his own way brings shame to his mother. There is no value set upon the corrective discipline in these days. To do so is to bring the full force of the civil authorities down upon the heads of the parents. 
We are not talking about permitting any physical abuse. Sadly scriptures like this one have been so vilely misused and abused. We are talking about the place that Godly discipline has within the training and the growth into maturity that needs to be in place within the familial structure for children to know right from wrong. 
	The entire concept of right and wrong is no longer acceptable within the ideology of today. There is a graduated line of behavior that may or may not be acceptable. Society teaches that what is wrong for one person is not necessarily wrong for someone else. 
There are too many gray areas, too many justifications for actions, too many avenues of perception to hold to a strict standard of conduct. The whole idea of right and wrong is now delegated to the individual perception of what may be right for me is not necessarily right or appropriate for you. 
	Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, But happy is he who keeps the law. That is the course of the anarchy that is welling up within our current day. We are seeing the results of man refusing to obey any restraints upon the personal freedom to do only what one wants to do and not what one needs to do in honoring the Lord. The whole concept of the Law of God is anathema to our current social order because it places restrictions on the manner in which we do everything in our lives. We do not want anyone telling us what we have to do! We refuse to hold to the idea that we must surrender our will to the Sovereignty of God in obedience to His Word.
	That was the arena of thought in which Samuel faced the truth that he had to obey God and declare that which God demanded to be voiced. Eli was fully cognizant of the training and the discipline that was required for this absolute commitment and dedication to God. It was brought forth in the manner in which Samuel gave complete voice to the judgment of God upon the man under whose tutelage he had been raised and trained in ministry before the Lord.
	Let us ask ourselves, with all sincerity of heart and complete reality of the fact that God knows our every thought - do we love the Word of God? Are we so enthralled with Him that we willing subject ourselves to His discipline? Do we actually beseech for Him to do all that He has ordained within the manner in which we have surrendered everything unto Him?
Please take a deep pause at this! We make grand proclamations! We sing fanciful melodies and stanzas of how much we love God. But, how much do we love Him? How much have we really given to Him? How manifestly is there evidence of the fact that we are now a slave to Him in every sense, in every detail, in every arena of our lives? 
	This is not just a saying, a platitude, a doctrinal proclamation! It is to be true and real and readily apparent in the every detail! We cannot say the words and then act as if we have any control of any area of our lives. Have we fully surrendered all our interactions, our thoughts, our cravings, our disobedient willfulness, our lustful and self-centered activities unto Him without any holding on to some secret indulgence? 
Consider in every sense of this question, how much personal freedom does a slave have? We either are or we are not completely and manifestly bound to Jesus Christ as the Lord of our lives! 
He never sets aside His Sovereignty, His Lordship, His glory! It is all His as a result of the fact that once and for all eternity, He died, taking our sin and our shame and our death upon Himself. Being gloriously and victoriously resurrected from that vile and abusive death, He is forever seated on the throne of heaven and all creation as the Only Perfect Son of Man. That is His place and His honor and His Reverent position above all of creation!
	Accordingly, we are all either willingly subjected unto Him, or we will be damnably forced to submit to Him. There is no other option! Much as this world tries to manipulate and lie and practice all sorts of deception, there is only One True Sovereign Lord God Almighty! In Christ, as those who have unreservedly called unto Him for salvation, we find our joy in Him and we submit every area of our lives unto Him. The only other option is to willingly choose to be eternally damned to hell whose fiery torments will never cease! This will be what is reserved for those who choose to honor oneself in complete opposition and the abject spurning of the graciously and mercifully and lovingly freely offered gift of God’s salvation!
	There is no gray area in this! There is right in Christ or there is wrong in choosing sin and death and eternal damnation. There is no subjective aspect to this. We cannot argue against the Holiness and the Righteousness and the Justice of God. Either we are in Christ, partakers of His love and fully called as slaves to righteousness, or we are forever lost to the most horrendous consequences of our own choice to thumb our noses at God! When we choose to ignore the Beloved Word of God, we declare, in the most insidious way, that we know better than the Lord God Almighty, Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnipotent how to live our lives on this earth! Oh the pitiful self-deception that is born out of demanding that we will have our way, right now, come hell or high water!
	The Prophet Isaiah addresses this folly of man in opposition to the One Who has created us all. Please turn to Isa 44:24-26. 
	Isa 44:24-26, Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb, "I, the Lord, am the maker of all things, Stretching out the heavens by Myself, And spreading out the earth all alone, Causing the omens of boasters to fail, Making fools out of diviners, Causing wise men to draw back, And turning their knowledge into foolishness, Confirming the word of His servant, And performing the purpose of His messengers. It is I who says of Jerusalem,' She shall be inhabited!' And of the cities of Judah,' They shall be built.' And I will raise up her ruins again. 
	We think that we know better than God what is true and real and worthwhile in which for us to invest our time and our energy and our desire. We make all kinds of grand proclamations of the wisdom of this and the folly of that. We make grandiose plans with the time over which we have absolutely no control. We go to war with one another, verbally demeaning and physically assaulting and murdering brothers and sisters, sons and daughters over the most insidious of human concepts and the basest of human instincts! All the time we declare that we are right and they are wrong!  
Every action indicates that we hold nothing other than distain and insolence and impertinence in our hearts toward the One Who is Truth! What fools mortal men are in the course of our dealings with others, with ourselves, and most especially in our defiant stance before the very Creator and Sustainer of us all! Much like Balaam in the Old Testament, we think that we can make God bend to our will. We think that we can force God to do our bidding just because we attach His name to our conceptual ideology. When the wicked increase, transgression increases; But the righteous will see their fall.
God will not allow Himself to be sullied by the self-seeking and ill-fated manipulations of humanity. There may seem to be that time, in the course of history, with all the continual patterns of the rise and the fall of cultures and civilizations and governmental auspices of humanity declaring spiritual principals, but God will have none of it! Everything flows only according to His plans and His purposes, not those of any of this, His creation!
No matter how learned and how wise and how popular and how charismatic some creature on earth may be, there is nothing and no one who can tell God what He must and must not do! The end has been ordained from even before anything was created! What God is doing is what He has always done and will forever do, to the glory and the majesty and the honor and the worship and praise of His Holy and Awesome Name!  
Once again we consider what we have read so often in the Book of Daniel, Chapter 4, verses 34-37. Here, in the aftermath of all that the Lord took King Nebuchadnezzar through, we have the testimony of what one of the greatest and most powerful and most feared kings in the history of mankind had to proclaim to the whole of his realm.  
	Dan 4:34-37, "But at the end of that period I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored Him who lives forever; For His dominion is an everlasting dominion, And His kingdom endures from generation to generation. "And all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, But He does according to His will in the host of heaven And among the inhabitants of earth; And no one can ward off His hand Or say to Him, 'What hast Thou done?' "At that time my reason returned to me. And my majesty and splendor were restored to me for the glory of my kingdom, and my counselors and my nobles began seeking me out; so I was reestablished in my sovereignty, and surpassing greatness was added to me. "Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise, exalt, and honor the King of heaven, for all His works are true and His ways just, and He is able to humble those who walk in pride." 
The upshot of this is … And no one can ward off His hand Or say to Him, 'What hast Thou done?' No matter how powerful or wealthy or famous or infamous, no one can hold anything before God except the fact that God creates and God brings our physical bodies back to dust. God installs leaders into office, and God removes them from office. God Alone rules the entirety of His creation and no one and nothing can stand before Him in anything less than abject humbleness of being with the proclamation in our mouths and hearts that blessed be the name of the Lord! He, Alone is worthy of all praise and adoration and honor!
The Prophet Amos closes out this morning with the Word of the Lord as recorded in Amos 8:11-14. Amos 8:11-14, "Behold, days are coming," declares the Lord God, "When I will send a famine on the land, Not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, But rather for hearing the words of the Lord. "And people will stagger from sea to sea, And from the north even to the east; They will go to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, But they will not find it. "In that day the beautiful virgins And the young men will faint from thirst. "As for those who swear by the guilt of Samaria, Who say, 'As your god lives, O Dan,' And, 'As the way of Beersheba lives,' They will fall and not rise again." 
	It may well be that we are seeing a famine on the land, a famine for the hearing of the Word of the Lord. Maybe it is just a famine within our country. We seem so lost in the dust and the desert of having turned to any idol, any concept, any action other than that which stands for the Name of the Lord God Almighty. Where is the heart of God’s Church on earth? Do we seek His Lordship in our lives, no matter what the cost and no matter what the course that is required of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness? We can no longer consider this country a Christian nation in the sense that we look to God for His guidance and for His Sovereignty. 
Everywhere our society twists and flounders; there is nothing other than destruction and devastation. We have been blessed with vast resources of mineral wealth, and riches, and education and the ability to create seemingly impossible mechanical and scientific and technological advancements. This is to the scale that has never before been feasible in the history of humanity! But to what end? 
We have such unfathomable poverty in our midst - poverty of money, of time, of relationships, and of families. There is rampant social disorder, chaos, anarchy, and defiantly blatant demonic spirituality. Our society practices all kinds of adulterous religiosity which shows there is no true knowledge of the Lord God Almighty. 
Where is the desire to know Him and the fullness of His Word? We will embrace anything other than Christ, because to do so, is to set aside our rights and become slaves to His Lordship and to the precepts of His Word. It means that we choose, willingly choose to honor Him and Him Alone with the every fiber of our being! That is utter anathema to the defiled and insidious teachings and doctrines of this age!
Lord willing, we will proceed together into the greater measure of what it means to be hearing and to be desirous after the Word of God! It needs to be the earnest prayer of every Christian to go on into the depths of Christ, whatever the cost, whatever the road, willingly bound forever unto Him! So be it. 
Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord before Eli. And word from the Lord was rare in those days, visions were infrequent. Amen.

			 

This morning’s benediction is 2 Cor 13:14. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all. Amen.