BEING SMALL IN OUR OWN EYES
1 Samuel 15:17 (NIV 1984) Samuel said, “Although you were once small in your own eyes, did you not become the head of the tribes of Israel? The LORD anointed you king over Israel.
Saul’s kingship ended in disaster; He died filled with envy and jealousy that drove him to insanity and murderous behavior, but he didn’t start that way. He was chosen by God, touched and changed by His Spirit, and given promises. He even seemed humble (See 1 Sam 9:21 and 1 Sam 10:21-22), but we discover that may have been false humility. Saul was small in his own eyes; this is not humility but a failure to see himself as God saw him, even after his anointing and elevation to kingship. Instead of seeing himself as the Lord’s anointed king, Saul felt little, insignificant, unimportant, and small when comparing himself to others. Sound familiar? It seems to be the norm for the human psyche, one few of us have evaded, and it comes with consequences; if we elevate our opinions of ourselves over God’s, we will experience the fruit of OUR spirit instead of the fruit of THE Spirit. We will live in the extremes of egotism and insecurity, bouncing between arrogance and low self-esteem, prone to futile and embarrassing attempts to defend and promote ourselves. Crippled by self-limitation and constant disappointment, depression and anxiety will press, all results of a clouded identity that can afflict for a lifetime.
People with identity issues become obsessively self-focused, vexed (Saul was demonized, 1 Sam 16:14), oppressed with a self-introspection that yields doubt, defeat, and despair, habitually comparing themselves with others. When comparing ourselves with others, our smallness will cause us to secretly, or not so secretly, wish for their demise, protecting anything that props up our identity, no matter the cost. When the crowds compared David’s slaying of tens of thousands against Saul’s thousands, it angered Saul, and “from that time on Saul kept a jealous eye on David.” (1 Sam 18:7-9). Imagine the mental instability of a person who feels insecure because they haven’t killed enough people.
Fearing what people think about us over what God says about us will turn our decision-making upside down. We become people-pleasers, which over time will sour our hearts and cause us to become people rejectors because they fail to recognize and reward us for our efforts at making them happy. Saul admits he was afraid of the people (1 Sam 15:24). People-pleasers are haunted by insecurity, vainly seeking praise and admiration, hooked on the drug of another’s opinion; they may be introverted and self-denigrating or pompous and abusive; either way, the people-pleaser is tempted to control the narrative others have of them. They can be manipulative, or in Saul’s case, murderous, forcing the admiration of others and causing them to feel unsafe. Saul tried to kill David. He also tried to kill Jonathan, his son; even the great prophet Samuel was afraid of Saul in this state (1 Sam 16:2), all because Saul was small in his own eyes.
David, on the other hand, was small in his father’s eyes (1 Sam 16:10-11), in his brother’s eyes (1 Sam 17:28-29), and also in Saul’s eyes early on (1 Sam 17:33), but he was not small in his own eyes (1 Sam 17:34-37). He was confident in who he was and what God had been doing in him; he had killed lions and bears and was about to kill a giant. Esteemed by God, David was a man after God’s own heart (1 Sam 13:14), and he went down in history as Israel’s greatest king, his name even connected with the title given to Jesus, “Son of David” (Matt 21:9).
People who are confident in how God sees them do exploits. People small in their own eyes become riddled with self-doubt; they are quick-tempered, defensive, and constantly trying to prove themselves; they are vulnerable to flattery or, in church culture, prophetic manipulation. All of this taints the good they do with suspicion of an ulterior motive to be seen and advanced by others, but it doesn’t have to be this way. We can find our identity from the indwelling Christ, become secure in God’s opinion of us, and live from the expectation of what He can accomplish through us. Our lives can culminate in a wholeness that only God can bring, leaving an enduring testimony of a life well-lived.
