Hey everybody, welcome to your move. I'm Andy Stanley. Perhaps the greatest indicator of our personal maturity is how we handle authority, power, and influence.

How we respond when it dawns on us that we are the most powerful person in the room, the classroom, the boardroom, or even the living room.

So if you're a parent, a manager, a teacher, a coach, or really a leader of anything, this episode of Your Move is for you. Stick around.

I think that perhaps the greatest measure of an individual's maturity, the greatest measure of your maturity is how you are how we handle authority, how we handle power, how we handle influence.

In other words, how we respond when it dawns on us that we are the most important person or we're the most powerful person in the room. Whether it's the boardroom, the classroom, the locker room, whether you're at work, it may be at home, with your family.

But at any moment at any time when it dawns on you, all eyes are on me, that I'm the one in charge, I get to make the decision, I'm the most powerful person in the room.

What do you do in that moment, says so much about you, and what I do in that moment says so much about me, because the greatest, perhaps, reflection of our individual maturity is what we do with our influence, what we do with power, what we do with authority.

And few things are more disturbing, I think you would agree, few things are more disturbing, then when you see somebody with power or influence or authority, and they leverage it for their benefit to the neglect of the people that they're responsible for, to the neglect of the people that have chosen to follow them.

But at the same time, there are a few things more inspiring than a leader who has some sort of influence or some sort of authority who says no to herself or no to himself. In other words, they say no to something they could embrace for the sake of the people that they're responsible for, the people that have chosen to follow them.

Some of our favorite stories are the men or the women of influence or power, whether it's a politician or somebody we've worked for, somebody that we work with, or maybe one of our parents. And they said no to themselves so they could say yes to us or yes to the people who've chosen to follow them.

Now my theory is this, that none of us really know which lever we would pull, none of us really know what button we would push until somebody actually hands us the keys, until somebody actually hands us, gives us the position to sound, to the, you know, we won't really know which way we go with this until we actually have the authority or in David's case until we get the crown.

Now when David was a little boy, I say a little boy, actually he was in middle school, when David was in middle school, Samuel, the prophet who was kind of the authority other than King Saul showed up at his home and he wasn't home that day he was working.

And Samuel the prophet showed up in his home and he said to David's father, Jesse, he said I'm here on a mission, but as we would discover later it was a secret mission.

And the reason it was a secret mission is because Samuel's mission was to anoint the next king of Israel. And the reason it was a secret is because Israel already had a what?

Yeah they already had a king. So if you're going to anoint the next one, there's already one, you better keep your mission, a secret.

So he shows up and he doesn't even tell Jesse why he's there. He says Jesse I've come here to do a special sacrifice. I want you to invite all of your family to this special sacrifice.

And I want you to know that I'm going to get the God nod or the nod from God. I'm just going to know that this is the guy.

So Jesse invites all of this family to this special sacrifice and Samuel's kind of skin in the crowd to try to figure out which one of these folks is going to be the next king.

And the text says this, when they arrived, Samuel saw a liar which was Jesse's oldest son which was his first born and you kind of go the first born in a situation like this.

But surely the Lord's anointed stands here before the Lord. He thought this was easy. First born first kid. I mean we don't even have to do the sacrifice game over. I got this figured out.

But you may have remembered this story from childhood. But the Lord said to Samuel, do not consider his appearance which is very difficult to do.

I mean when you meet somebody, the first thing you notice is what you're not there IQ for sure. It's not their manners.

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