The Lifted Warrior

The Saul Complex: Choosing Approval Over Obedience

• Cameron Giles • Season 3 • Episode 2

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The Saul Complex silently infects many believers' spiritual lives, causing them to prioritize human approval over divine guidance. Drawing from the biblical story of King Saul, this episode explores how our obsession with others' perceptions can lead us directly into disobedience and away from God's perfect plan.

At the heart of this spiritual struggle lies a profound irony: we often beg God for things He never intended us to have, then allow those very things to create distance in our relationship with Him. Like Saul, who famously pleaded, "honor me before the elders" even while acknowledging his sin, many believers prioritize appearance over substance, perception over obedience.

The consequences of living with a Saul Complex are significant. We take matters into our own hands when God seems too slow to act. We make partial sacrifices that God never requested while withholding the complete obedience He actually desires. We become so enamored with our self-image that we forget our first love. Yet the solution remains beautifully simple: immediate, complete obedience coupled with a return to genuine love for God above all else.

Remember that God remains mindful of you as His beloved child. He has planned each day of your life with careful attention to detail. The question isn't whether God is thinking about you—it's whether you're thinking about Him. This week, ask yourself: "How can I surrender my life to God more fully today?" Then watch as everything else falls perfectly into place according to His divine plan.

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Cam:

what's up, guys, and welcome back to another episode of the lifted warrior podcast, where, once every two weeks, I give you wisdom and strength on how to conquer life's daily struggles and live a life above the things that are coming against you. This, this episode, we are still kind of in our series of deconstructing us, and in this episode, what I really want to kind of hit at is what I will call the Saul complex or the complex, the plight of Saul, and what it is is. You know, how we value other people's opinion and how we value other people's thought of us and how we allow them to then get us to be disobedient from God. But before that, before we hop into that man, I just really want to quickly encourage somebody else who is a creative mind, is a creative person, but you are trying to fit into a place that wasn't necessarily God's place for you, and what I mean by that is that you were created to do something very creative. You were created to do something that is different from the main aspect of what we see people being anointed for. So maybe you're anointed to write a book, maybe you're anointed to do spoken word or do artistry or create music, whatever it may be.

Cam:

However, a lot of times in the Christian faith, when we see that someone is anointed, we immediately try to make them into a pastor or into a preacher or, in today's culture, we immediately try to make them into like an apostle or prophet. But you may not be anointed for that. And I'll give you scripture in verse four In Exodus 36, in verse one it says the Lord has gifted Bezalel I probably screwed that up but Bezalel, olieb and the other skilled craftsmen with wisdom and ability to perform any task involved in building the sanctuary, let them construct and furnish the tabernacle, just as the Lord has commanded. And what I want to really point out there, what you should really be able to see in that verse, is simply that just because you are anointed, just because you are gifted, does not mean you are anointed or gifted to perform or not even perform, but to do a thing like somebody else is what's a better word for that? Just because you are gifted does not mean that your gift operates the same as somebody else in the church. So you may be gifted, but you may be gifted to teach, not preach. You may be gifted, but you may be gifted to labor with someone and not necessarily to prophesy Whatever it is. Own and take ownership of your gifting so that the body may be edified, because for far too long we've tried to put too many people into one place and we've really pinholed the move of God and what God really wants to do in the earth by not being submitted to what he has truly called us to do. That's my two take, that's my two cent, but we'll move on from that right.

Cam:

So, moving on to exactly what I said, what I would call the plight of Saul, and how we allow what people may think about us and we allow our perception, or how we think people perceive us, to get us out of the will of God. And there's two ways that we do this, and it happens all within the lives of Saul. We see it all within the life of Saul. The first one is we beg and beg and beg and beg and beg and beg and beg and beg God for something that he never intended for us to have, and when we get it, it causes us to now become enemies with him. What do I mean? So, if you look at the life of, if you look at early on, with the children of Israel, before they didn't have kings. They had judges right, and they begged Saul to pray to God and, excuse me, they begged Samuel to pray to God and ask God for a king for them, because they didn't want to be scattered tribes anymore. They wanted to be like the other nations that they saw around them, and so they begged for this king. And once they finally got this king, this king was constantly disobeying God, constantly doing what he wanted to do in order to please them and not doing what God asked him to do, and because of that, he constantly put them in a place of offense with God. He constantly put them in a place where they could be honestly eradicated because they didn't do what God wanted them to do.

Cam:

And for many of us, I think we can look at different things in our lives, different things that we've asked God for, different things that we have begged God for and said God, will you please give me this? And then, once we get it, we allow that thing to turn us away from our God. For a lot of the men in here, that may be the wife that you prayed for a lot of the women, if you're listening to that, maybe the man you prayed for you prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and begged for this person. And now that you have this person because it was not what God wanted for your life that person is now causing you to sin against God. They're now putting you in a place where you're not able to completely obey what God has told you to do. And now you're, now you're submitting yourself to oh, I did mostly what God wanted me to do, but I didn't do all of it. And it may not be a spouse. It could be different things in your life. It could be a job, it could be a car, it could be whatever it is for you.

Cam:

But a lot of us have done this in different ways, where we beg God for things and I know we don't talk about this a lot because we we always say that God will never give you something that will take over him and he won't do that right. However, if you continue to ask for a thing, he'll give you what you've been asking for, just like he gave the children of Israel a king, like they were asking for. So that's the first way that we ourselves can lean into the same mindset and the same thought as Saul in many ways, and the second way is just simply by not obeying him. Saul didn't obey God in many different ways, way before God decided to take the anointing off of him and to put it on David. Saul was doing all types of stuff, but here's the thing he wasn't doing all types of stuff just because he wanted to disobey God. Again from what I said when I started off the podcast, he was doing all these things in order to please the people around him. Don't believe me, I'll show you.

Cam:

So let's first look at 1 Samuel, 15 and 30. And it says Then Saul pleaded again. I know I have sinned, but please at least honor me before the elders of my people and before Israel by coming back with me so that I may worship the Lord your God. Now, this is double-sided. First of all, because he didn't say the Lord my God. He didn't say the Lord our God, he. He didn't say the Lord our God. He said the Lord your God, meaning Saul already knew I was already professing something in his heart that we did not see just yet. He was professing that he was not submitted to God. He was submitted to his kingdom, or what he thought was his kingdom, and he was submitted to pleasing those who were around him and making sure that he was lifted up and not that God was lifted up, right.

Cam:

And then the second thing it says that honor me. Before the elders of my people and before Israel, he was more concerned with how he looked. He was more concerned with what perception he was given, that he did not care that he was disobeying what God told him to do. And many of us do the same thing. Are you hearing me? Because I do the same thing too. I'll get caught up in what I'm doing. I'll get caught up in what I believe I'm supposed to look like, what my life is supposed to look like, what I'm supposed to be doing by a certain age, and I completely, I disregard, completely disregard what God told me to do and I completely begin to move in an avenue that he did not set up for my life. And when I begin to do that, I'm putting myself in the same shoes, in the same mindset that Paul did, where I'm more concerned about what things look like versus what God told me to do. That's one, I'll go to another one. That's one, I'll go to another one.

Cam:

If we look at 1 Samuel, 13 and 11, but Samuel said what is this you have done? Saul replied I saw my men scattering from me and you didn't arrive when you said you would. And the Philistines are at Michmash ready for battle. So here we see. Saul was supposed to be waiting for Samuel in order to get back to him so that they could pray before going into battle. However, he thought that Samuel was taking too long to get there, so he took matters into his own hands. If that don't sound like us, I don't know. What does we hear clearly from God on the front end? God tells us hey, I want you to do this, this, this and this.

Cam:

However, when things begin to take too long, when we begin to not necessarily see what God said he was going to do or okay, god is getting up to 30 days, you said 30 days and we begin to take things into our own hands. And when we do that, not only do we move out of the will of God, but then anything that happens from that is now on us. So we take the responsibility from God, we put it on ourselves, and now we're moving into disobedience and we've put ourselves in direct contrast with what God wants us to do. Like I said, I can speak for myself, man. I've done this plenty of times where, instead of simply just waiting on God, simply just asking God okay, you said to do this I've done this plenty of times where, instead of simply just waiting on God, simply just asking God OK, you said that, you said to do this, I've done it and I'm waiting. What should I do while I'm waiting, instead of simply having that thought process, we begin to scramble and try to do things in our own will, and so that's another way where we lean ourselves to the plight of Saul. And then the last thing that I'll go over there's more, but the last thing that I'll go over is in 1 Samuel 14 and 37. And it says so.

Cam:

Saul asked God should we go after the Philistines? Will you help us defeat them? But God made no reply that day. Then Saul said to the leader something's wrong. I want all my army commanders to come here. We must find out what sin was committed today. So what's powerful in this is that the sin that was committed is that Saul had made a decree earlier in this chapter. He made a decree that nobody should eat. However, he did not tell everybody that nobody should eat, and so his own son disobeyed what he had laid out. And then he goes even further and doubles down on what he said and says that even it's my own son, he shall die today because of his sin, and it ended up being his son. And you know what he did? He didn't do it, even in his own decree, even in his own declaration. He was not obedient enough to himself to carry out what he had said because, again, he was worried about what other people would think.

Cam:

We put people in place. This is the issue. This is what happens when people are put in place, not necessarily because it's what they're called to do, but simply because the crowd around them begged for them to do a thing. We see it a lot in church, we see it a lot in not just in ministry, but we see it a lot in life, where someone is not called to do something. Someone is not called to lead, someone is not called to teach, whatever it may be, they're not called to it because the demand for it is so high. God says, okay, here you go. And now that you have this person in place, you begin to see all the flaws and all the problems that they have in everything that God was trying to keep you from that. They have in everything that God was trying to keep you from. So what's the fix? How do we get around this? Right, because let's not just keep beating on what the problem is, but how do we fix it?

Cam:

The first thing that we have to do is get back to a place of immediate obedience, immediately being obedient to what God told us to do, and immediately getting those things done, so that we are not putting ourselves one in a place against what God has told us and we're not coming against, we're not putting ourselves in conflict with God, but two, being in immediate obedience so that we don't allow ourselves to get caught up with. Well, what does this look like? Well, how are other people going to think about me when I do this? Well, I don't know if it's going to be perceived. Well, it doesn't matter. If God told you to do a thing or if God told you not to do a thing, do it or don't do it, and remain obedient 100%. So what that means is, if God told you to throw away everything in your house, throw away everything in your house. Don't hold on to anything, because even that little bit that you're holding on to is disobedience. So be completely obedient to what God has told you to do.

Cam:

The second thing that we have to do is we have to get back to simply being in love with God and getting back to our first love remaining in love with him and not in love with ourselves. We're a generation and I can say we, because I'm talking about myself as well but we're a generation that loves ourselves so much. We love how we look, we love how we sound. Look, I'm doing a podcast with a video in front of my face. We love these things and we love what we look like or what the perception is, and we put up this facade and because of that, we do not allow ourselves to truly fall in love with Jesus, to truly fall in love with God, the one who is our savior, the one who has our best plans and intents at heart, the one who is mindful of us I'm going to come back to that mindful of us part at the end of this but we have to get back to a place where we truly rely on God, and rely on him alone, because nothing else is going to sustain us. No amount of us striving is going to sustain us. No amount of us sacrificing is going to sustain us.

Cam:

We see that in 1 Samuel, where he said you know, we're going to keep these things because we want to sacrifice it to God, but what if I didn't ask you? What if God didn't ask you to sacrifice anything? You want to keep your job because it allows you to tithe, it allows you to give, but what if God didn't want you to give that? What if he had a different plan for your life? We put up these things and then we begin to sacrifice in the name of Jesus or in the name of God. And God is saying I never asked for that sacrifice. I wanted your obedience. I wanted your obedience and I wanted you to be in love with me truly. And the only way that we can truly love him, the only way that we can truly fall back in love with him, is by learning how to be obedient. And I'll end on this. This is perfect how God ties it in God.

Cam:

The Bible says, or David says who is man? That God is mindful of him, and the answer to that is his sons and daughters. We're his children. That's why he's mindful of us, the same way, a parent is always mindful of their daughter or their son. They're thinking about their future. They're thinking about what they're going to be. They're thinking about what they're going to need in the next five minutes. They're thinking about what they're going to need in the next five years. All of that they're mindful of and they're keeping a running tab of that in their mind, right? God is doing the same thing for every one of us, and the reason he's doing that for every one of us is because you're his child.

Cam:

So think about that this week. Think about God. You've been mindful of me even when I wasn't mindful of myself. God, help me to be more mindful of you. Help me to be more mindful of what you desire for my life and not be so caught up in what's going on around me. Not be so caught up in what things look like, others' perception how it comes off. No, god, let me be more so focused. Let me be so focused on you that nothing else matters. Let me be so focused on what you want from my life that nothing else matters. And I believe if we get to that place, then we'll be able to defeat this plight of Saul. I believe we'll be able to defeat what has been plaguing many people, which is trying to keep up perception and living a consistent life of disobedience.

Cam:

So that's the task for this week, man, understand and take it to heart that God is mindful of you, so mindful of you that he's planned each and every one of your days. Sit and ask him God what is your plan for me? How can I be more obedient to you today? How can I make you the love of my life? How can I surrender my life to you even more on today? And trust me, when you have that conversation, that heart to heart with God, he's going to show you different ways, like hey, this is what I need you to do, this is what I want you to do, this is what I have planned for you, this is where I want you to go, this is who I want you to impact, this is who I want you to touch. And when you do that, trust and believe that everything else is going to work itself out. Everything else will work itself out. God is not a man that he should lie. So if he told you a thing, it's going to happen. But that's it, man. That's all I got for this week. We're going to continue this process of trying to do it every two weeks.

Cam:

So I really pray that something that was talked about in this episode is something that you were able to glean from. It's something that was able to be a uplift, a encouragement to your life. I pray that you continue to walk in the light that God has for you. I pray that you continue to rise above your issues, continue to use this Bible, use your prayer life, use God to rise above everything that is trying to attack you and keep you in the mind state and keep you in the place that you are currently, because God has greater for you. God has greater for your life. God wants to prosper you, even as your soul prospers, and that's just not money, that's all of your life. That's mind, body, heart and soul. So until next week, man, I love y'all. Stay lifted.

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