Go with me, if you would, two openings this morning, 1 Samuel 2 and Romans 13.

1 Samuel 2 and verse 29.

The Lord said to Eli, he said, you have honored your sons above me.

Should we ever honor any of our family or anybody above the Lord?

No, you should not, but that's what he did. By allowing them to do things in the house of the

Lord and with the offerings of the Lord and the people of the Lord that he knew was wrong.

And he just let them

keep doing it and he said you've honored your sons above me verse 30 wherefore the Lord God

of Israel says I said indeed that your house and the house of your father should walk before me

forever but now the Lord says be it far from me for them that honor me I will honor. And they that

despise me shall be lightly esteemed. So here we see that it's possible, even though the Lord

has given you something very precious and giving you a place to be used of him,

you can lose it if you cease to respect it, which is what happened to them. He said,

you and your sons and their sons after them should have been in the ministry before me,

and I said I gave it to you. But now he said, I'm saying, be it far from me.

It's not going to be that way.

And just in a few days, they were all dead and gone.

He said, because I'm going to honor those that honor me.

But those that despise me are going to be lightly esteemed by me.

Now, the word despise is the opposite of honor.

And it means a different thing than a lot of our normal usage.

When we think despise, we think basically of detesting something and a stronger manifestation than even what appears in the scripture

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