Hey friends, welcome to the John Mark Homer Teaching Podcast. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm your host.

Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other friends who are talking about spiritual formation in the body of Christ.

Today, we're continuing our series on the story of Israel with a teaching from Gerald Griffin.

Jared has been a part of Bridgetown Church for 15 years, serving today as an elder and pastor of gatherings and prayer.

He's also part of our team, a practice in the way, as our coaching coordinator, where he helps pastors dream about doing church with

spiritual formation at the center. He truly lives a compelling life of joyful communion with God,

and we're very excited to share this teaching with you today. In this teaching, Gerald drives deeper

into the story of King Saul Soul and First Samuel, really

highlighting where Saul went wrong and how we can avoid these mistakes.

Here's Gerald.

Hey, like I said, we're in this kind of mini-series about Israel, and tonight we're going to look at one character, one specific person in the story of

Israel. And a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about how when you're reading through the

story of the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, there is only a few heroes, a few men

and women that, like, didn't blow it big time. The majority of the characters

we identify with in the scriptures are guys like Abraham or David who actually did amazing things

in faith, but then also made amazing mistakes. And what's cool about that, if we're honest,

is that's a lot more like you and I.

I mean, life isn't like the movies that most of us pay to go see that Hollywood produces,

where there's a little bit of struggle, but it ends with the hero, like prevailing and everything's

great and the guy gets the girl or whatever, right?

That's the romantic comedy version of the hero.

Not that I would know.

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