We have not had our Samuel Sermon series for a couple of weeks. We are presently at chapter 15. I did a sermon about the stumbling block in this chapter that offends many people today—where God calls His people to exterminate the Amalekites. If that is a problem for you, I encourage you to listen to that sermon from April 6. I did that so that I wouldn't burden the sermon I am preaching today with explaining all of that—which I think is an important thing to do in our particular day. The heart of this chapter is about God's passion for His people and Saul's disappointing refusal to engage with Him as a passionate God. In looking at this, it is my desire that you all will see and understand God's passion for His people and that you will all joyfully connect with Him in His loving zeal for us!

Today in our Mountains of Bether Sermon Series, the hinderance in our relationship with God that we are looking at is doubt. Doubt, of course, can be such that it keeps a person from ever coming to Christ—But in this series, we are looking at barriers between us and the Lord that we have after we have been converted. We will do that today.

This afternoon, we will continue our Mountains of Bether sermon series where we are looking at things that come between us and the Lord. This week, the barrier we are looking at is one of those mountains that we often don't notice—in other words, we are blind to it. It is what I am calling the mountain of false peace. I hope that you do cry out to Him when your relationship is dried up. That is a mark of a true believer.

A word about holy days not instituted by the Lord and God's mercy. Last year, I preached on 1 Corinthians 15:22, and this year we are looking at the whole of 1 Corinthians 15 to consider how our faith is fed with Christ's Resurrection.

Today in our Samuel Sermon, I am doing something a little different. The passage we are looking at today, 1 Sam 15, has a stumbling block in it—something that makes people offended with God. It reveals His severity in calling for the annihilation of an entire nation. So I am going to read the part that makes people offended, and then I am going to do a topical sermon about how to deal with God's severity.

In our afternoon sermon series, we are looking at things that come between us and our Lord. We have looked at quite a few of the mountains that He overcomes—and today it is one mountain which has two opposite barriers that we will find to be essentially the same thing: Worry and Overconfidence—one mountain with two aspects. We might call this Mount Self-trust—which produces both worry and overconfidence.

The Mountain of Bether we will consider today is Envy. For those who have not been with us for this series, the Mountains of Bether are barriers that stand between us and God that Christ overcomes.

The church of Jesus Christ, which is His Kingdom, is made up of two kinds of members: sons (converted like Jonathan) and servants (professing but unregenerate members like Saul).