Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How Real Repentance Works | Historical Books | 1 Samuel 7:3-17

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

How do you fight idolatry? What is true repentance? Is your life focused? In today's episode, Jensen shares how 1 Samuel 7:3-17 encourages us to assess our current path in life. If you're listening on Spotify, comment below one takeaway from today's episode! Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 1 Samuel 7:3-17

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jensen Holt McNair. We have been on quite the journey the past few days in the book of 1st Samuel. The Ark of the Covenant is finally back with Israel. It's been 20 years since we've seen Samuel, no longer a boy, and we meet him once again in Chapter 7. Now, it's clear that over the past 20 years, Samuel has gained notoriety. Like we read all the way back in chapter three last week, he was a prophet of God. All that God told him and shared with the people came true, and so he grew in fame and influence.

He was respected. And in this chapter, we'll see how that plays out in his role as a judge over Israel, as their leader. Now, if you remember in the book before First Samuel and judges, we saw as each leader fell further and further from the ideal. By the time we got to Samson, things were dire. He was not a hero. He was not faithful. He's honestly, he was a wreck, one that God does use for his good, but the book of judges leaves us wondering, what's next for God's people? They're in spiritual darkness. And if chapter three, where we learned of Samuel's call to ministry gave us hope that God might raise a new kind of leader, chapter seven is going to solidify that hope. heard from Samuel before as a boy when his obedience to God's word and his calling gave us hope now let's read his words as a man speaking to a nation in spiritual darkness and desperation verse three and Samuel said to all the house of Israel if you are returning to the Lord with all your heart then put away the foreign gods and the Asteroff from among you and direct your heart

to the Lord and serve him only and he will deliver you deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines. So the people of Israel put away the bales and the Astoroth and they served the Lord only. Now remember, over the past seven judges, we've seen the people of God repent and then return to sin over and over and over again. And so now Samuel is explicitly giving them instruction on what real lasting true repentance must look like. If they want to be the people of God, if they want to live in his blessing, they must live a repentant life. We're going to dissect his instructions to get a clear picture of what this true repentance must look like. First, Samuel tells them to turn away from idolatry. If you want to repent,

then you must necessarily fight the sin. Rid yourselves of the temptation to sin. You have to want to remove the sin from your life. In Israel's case, this looked like removing physical idols from their homes, their cities, to cease their worship of other gods. For you and me, this may look like deleting social media, putting up boundaries on our internet use, saying no to going out to bars with friends, cutting off communication with a person you know will tempt you into further sexual sin. Or maybe it's even transitioning to a job that doesn't make you compromise on your values. What are the areas of sin in your life that you are continually falling back into. What is tempting you to give into that sin? What's leading you back to the well-worn path of

rebellion? If you want to fight the idolatry in your heart, then you have to take away the habits, the places, and comforts that are feeding your love for it. Secondly, Samuel tells the people of Israel that true repentance must include directing your heart to the Lord. Now, if you're a Sunday school kid like me, this is the 180 turn illustration. True repentance is not just saying you're sorry, but physically turning 180 around and putting your back towards sin and walking instead in the direction of God. It's a rejection of an old life, an old pathway that led you away from God, and instead it puts you on a new path, one that directs your steps towards God. This is a whole life change. You've taken six. You've taken six.

steps to remove temptation to turn away from idolatry, and now you begin walking towards God. And we do that by leaning into Samuel's third necessary step of true repentance, to serve God only. Now, if we go back to the pathway analogy, you cannot be walking in two different directions at the same time. It's just not possible, right? In Matthew 624, Jesus, when talking about a common idol, money, says this, no one can see. serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. To serve a master, to choose a path, to walk in a direction, necessitates a choice, full devotion, full service to one thing. If you

truly love God, you will hate the things that pull you away from him, that cause disconnect, that hurt your relationship with him. True repentance produces a life of service to God. Not just that you would turn your heart in the direction of God, but that you would pick up your feet and walk towards him. It is obedience, faithfully following in the ways of Jesus, becoming more like him, doing the kinds of things that he did, that moves you further along the path of repentance towards the one you serve, towards God. Jesus himself, in Matthew 7 uses the illustration of a narrow pathway to describe faithfully following him. Enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction,

and many enter through it, but small as the gate, and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. Now, the road that leads to life, that leads to Jesus, it's narrow. narrow because to pursue him, to live a life of true repentance, you have to reject all other masters, reject all other pathways to consistently aim your life and direct your heart straight towards God day after day. Now you could walk a wide road. You could veer off course going one way today and another tomorrow, doing what feels best from moment to moment, but the road you take would be wide, full of options and choices for what you're chasing, what you're directed towards, what you are seeking out and worshipping. But that road does not find its end in God. It is not the road of true

repentance. It is the road of self-fulfillment. Now you may have noticed a key element woven throughout each of these three steps. True repentance is not a one-and-done decision. You cannot check these three boxes in a moment and then move on. The instructions that Samuel gives necessitates a whole life devotion to God. True repentance is characterized by new life. You'll see in this chapter the Israelites, they get it together. The people of Israel put away the bales and the Astoroth and they served the Lord only. They pray. They repent of sins. They offer sacrifices. They worship God. and in their obedience, God rescues them from their enemies and gives them peace for a time. But it doesn't last. Even in this book, we will see their faithfulness doesn't last.

And this should give us pause. Not because it should make us question whether Samuel gives the correct formulation for repentance, but because it should remind us that true repentance takes constant awareness. Now, what do I mean by that? All I mean to say is that even the people of God, with a prophet speaking his words directly to him, are capable of getting distracted from their end goal. They can allow lesser loves to pull them back into idolatry and lull them into a complacency that begins again to produce an unrepentant heart, a heart directed squarely away from God, a life treading the well-worn path to destruction, to death. See, true repentance takes constant awareness of where you are going, how you are getting there, and why you're on the path you're on.

You will not casually wake up one day and find yourself living a repentant life. You must take steps along the path, fix your eyes on life, and pursue Jesus each and every day. The thing that the Israelites got wrong again and again was not that they continued to sin. The Bible is clear. Until you and I are in our resurrected bodies, we will struggle with sin. We will need constant forgiveness from our Savior. True repentance does not lead to a sinless life, but a repentant life, a humble life, a life of service to one master, one love, one God.

If our life is aimed, focused, constantly on faithfully following Jesus, on staying on the narrow path, when we sin, it doesn't mean that we turned our back on God and started running in the other direction, that's an unrepentant heart. If we are faithful followers of Jesus, if we love him, if our greatest desire is to serve him, we can see our sins as moments of weakness. When we want to sit down and maybe take a break, when it feels too hard, when our gaze may be shifts, we lose focus for a moment and we stumble. A repentant life is characterized by what happens next. When we feel the conviction of the Holy Spirit, do we ask forgiveness, repent, fix our eyes back on God, direct our hearts towards him, and continue walking,

one foot in front of the other, down the narrow path that leads to life? Have you experienced true repentance? Are your days marked by the characteristics of a repentant life? When you feel the conviction of the Holy Spirit, do you ignore it and continue serving lesser loves, continue walking a wide path? Or is your life focused? Are you constantly fighting to have an awareness of the direction of your heart? When you feel conviction, does it bring you to your knees in humble repentance? Does it urge you forward towards the one you serve, the one you love, towards Jesus? That's a hard question to wrestle with, to be honest about. But it may be one of the most important things that you can think about.

Will you walk the path of true repentance? Will you live in the beauty of a repentant life? Will you surrender your steps to the ways of Jesus and in doing so find true, lasting, eternal life?