Hey, I'm Lisa Whittle and welcome to the Jesus Over Everything show, affectionately known as Joe, where around here you will always hear honest conversations about life, faith, and true strength, courage, and love in the midst of our real everyday life.

Easing into a new season around here, going for some Bible teaching this time around,

and I hope you love it because the Bible is the place not only we find all our answers for

life, but also really practical wisdom for our everyday hope, help healing, and

relatability in all the many stories.

Diving into King Saul today. Know much about him?

Maybe you do or maybe you think you do, but here's what I'll say. If you think he was a total flop in the kingdom of God, you'd be wrong. I can't wait to tell you more. If you're in,

I'm in, so let's get into it.

So here's the thing about us as Jesus followers.

We often put people in categories.

Over here is the pretty glossy, heroic Jesus following crowd, the ones who really behave the best and thus are most usable in the kingdom of

God. And over here is the category of the sort of total disasters, the less viable, the more

difficult, worst, sending lesser good, even people who just aren't in the same category.

And we do this in life in comparing ourselves to other people,

I think, in the church, and even in scripture, we look at an incredible Moses versus maybe

Zacchaeus, and we weigh in our minds. Oh, Moses is on this level, and Zacchaeus is on this level,

and we pick and we choose our heroes based on our criteria, but God is not like that.

I'm going to say some things that might sound contradictory at first, but stick with me.

First of all, I do think in one way there are categories of people in the kingdom of God.

Now hear me, people God uses greatly for the kingdom of God and others, he doesn't on quite that same level.

I do believe that. But where I think this breaks down is that it's not something God has shown

favoritism about. And that's where I think we have this false belief, that there's these

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