WEEKLY REFLECTION by Pastor Lap Dinh on 1 Samuel 28:15

1 Samuel 28:15 — and the tragic backdrop: Samuel is dead. Saul has expelled the mediums. And now he consults one. “Now Samuel said to Saul, ‘Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?’ And Saul answered, ‘I am in great distress.’” 1 Samuel 28:15 ESV

This is the most harrowing chapter in 1 Samuel. Saul — the man who once prophesied among the prophets, who was gifted by the Spirit, who was chosen and anointed — is crouching in darkness before a medium, trying to reach the dead prophet he had repeatedly ignored while he was alive.

The Lord had departed from him. Prayers went unanswered. He turned to the very thing he had once outlawed in a moment of obedience. Desperation without repentance leads not to God — it leads to the next available counterfeit. Now, in the light of Luke 17, Jesus warns: “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32). She looked back. She had physically left Sodom but her heart had never left. Saul’s tragedy is the same — he had the form of belonging to God without the substance of surrendering to Him.

The most dangerous spiritual condition is not open rebellion — it is the slow drift of a heart that keeps the vocabulary of faith while quietly transferring its allegiance elsewhere.

Is there an area of your life where you are seeking counsel from the wrong source because you have stopped hearing from the right One?