To obey is better than sacrifice

Making a decision for college has arguably been one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made in my life. I agree that, initially, it didn’t sound to me like a daunting choice either. After college admissions destroys your self-esteem and narrows your choices down to only a handful of schools, you would think that visiting each college and factoring in your personal preferences will help you to quickly crank out a college choice in no time. However, if you got into your dream college that has just about everything you could ever hope for, but God called you to another college that you may not have wanted to go to as much instead, would you obey Him?

Read 1 Samuel 15

Saul was Israel’s first king and the Lord’s anointed one. God chose Saul out of all the other men of Israel to be king over His people. However, God also wanted Saul to love and obey Him. When He called Saul to go to war with the Amalekites, He gave Saul specific orders to put to death all men, women, children, infants, and all of their livestock. God was with Saul when the Israelites battled with and annihilated the Amalekites. However, instead of following God’s orders completely, he only half-heartedly obeyed them. He took the enemy king as hostage and kept all of the best livestock for his army.

Saul’s actions displeased the Lord, who conveyed His message of grievance to His prophet Samuel. Samuel then rebuked Saul and told him that the Lord has rejected him as king over Israel. Saul was not expecting this. He thought he had done the right thing. He didn’t even take the enemy’s livestock for himself, but wanted to sacrifice all of the good things he reaped to the Lord. Saul thought he knew how to do things better than God did and, through his pride and selfishness, disobeyed the Lord’s commands.

After senior year started for me, I knew I wanted to be an economics major and made a plan of all of the colleges I intended to apply to. Out of these schools, I put the University of Chicago as my number one choice for a number of reasons. Not only was it the closest to home, but it was also in Chicago, one of the country’s most exciting and fun-filled cities. I also had a handful of close friends who were already in the city who I met through Teen Camp, WCAC, or school. On top of that, it was also tied first in the nation at economics with Harvard, Princeton, and MIT. Yeah… small wonder I had that school as my first choice.

(Continue Day # 1) I thought I had everything in the bag last fall after I applied to UChicago as early action. My essay for that school was arguably my best yet, my interview with the admissions officer went by very smoothly, my grades in school were decent, and the admissions rate for UChicago was extremely high for its prestige – sitting at almost 30% a year, and even higher for early applicants. When decision day came in early December, I was crushed when I received a skinny envelope in the mail with a short letter inside confirming that I had been deferred. Things seemed pretty hopeless to me at that point. I thought I knew exactly where God wanted me to go to school next fall, but obviously He thought otherwise. Why else would He have deferred me? I knew what I had to do though – trust in God to provide me with the right college that He wants me to go to.
When colleges started releasing their regular decision admissions results, one of the first ones that came out was UChicago. And what do you know? I was arguably one of the happiest people alive at that moment when I found out that I had been accepted. However, a good education seems to always come at a high price as well – a price that cost me nearly $57,000 per year (holy moly)! However, overall, I had already considered myself a UChicago student. Maybe that’s exactly how Saul felt when he went off to do things his own way. He saw the “good” that the enemy’s livestock had to offer and became enveloped in pride and greed.

Likewise, my happiness about being accepted into UChicago didn’t leave any room for God to work in my life and to direct me to the college He wanted me to go to. He intervened and, through my mom, forced me to go on a college visit to Washington University in St. Louis (another school I got into). I was extremely reluctant to go, thinking that it would just be a waste of my time, but I went anyways because of free travel expenses. In the end, my college decision was down to – you guessed it – my dream college that has just about everything I could ever hope for, or a less prestigious school where I’d still be happy and where I thought God might be calling me to go to.

I prayed to God, asking Him to give me some sort of sign that would assure me as to where He would like to go. I ended up visiting UChicago as well, but found that it actually didn’t quite appeal to me the way WashU did. I came home reasonably sure that WashU was where God wanted me to go. I prayed to God again, asking Him if WashU was indeed the college of HIS choice for me. He answered my prayer and solidified my decision by granting me a scholarship from WashU that made it one of my cheapest colleges.

Now, looking back, I can see why God did the things He did and how He works in such amazing ways in our lives. While I was really hurt that I was initially deferred from my top choice, things would have been completely different had I been accepted right off the bat. I don’t think I would have even bothered applying to WashU if I had been accepted early. With the mentality I carried about wanting to go to UChicago for sure, I wasn’t making any room for God in my life. I was following my own plan instead of His, and was obeying the things my mind was telling me rather than what God was telling me. Even when I thought I could crank out more success to honor God with in the future by going off on my own, God would rather just have me obey Him.

Obedience to the Lord shows that we love, trust, and fear Him. How could we say we love our God if we don’t do the things He tells us to do? 1 Samuel 15:22 says, “To obey is better than sacrifice.” Saul thought he could make things better for God rather than simply doing what He was told to do. However, God remains the rightful king and sought obedience from his chosen leader Saul. As a result, God rejected Saul and, instead, made David his new Israelite king. I know my story about how I decided on a college isn’t exactly the best parallel for this passage, but obeying God take shapes in a variety of other ways in our lives. We can obey our parents, our teachers, our church leaders, our elders, being respectful to strangers, and always praying to God and reading His word so He can speak to us.

One of the dangers we face is greed. We want to gain recognition for ourselves and, as a result, we over complicate things when it comes to obedience. We don’t just want to obey, we want to impress and gain glory for ourselves. As soon as we lose sight of why we are obeying God’s commands, or even what things we are obeying, we have lost ourselves to sin. Thus, I really encourage you to spend more time with God each day. I know I forget about it too some days, but how else can we obey our Father if we don’t know how to obey him? Luke 11:28 says, “[Jesus] replied, Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.” High school will always come with struggles and pressures, but if we trust in Him, He will deliver us from all of the Amalekites in our lives. Nothing makes our Father happier than showing Him that we love him – and to do that, we have to obey!