I Samuel 15 narrates how God commanded Saul to attack the Amalekites, and utterly destroy them and all their possessions. Saul did indeed launch the attack, but he spared the king, Agag, as well as “the best” of the animals and whatever looked good in their eyes. As a result, God told Samuel that He regretted making Saul king, and Samuel went out to relay the bad news to Saul. Verse 12 tells us that on his way to the meeting, Samuel was told that “he (Saul) has set up a monument for himself …” because of his “victory.” How ironic; Saul was about to be rebuked, and His kingdom taken away from him, and here he was, making a monument for himself!

Surely Saul is not the only one to have done this. How often do we congratulate ourselves, because we think we have been “successful” in our own eyes, when in fact we have made ourselves odious in the eyes of God because we have not been faithful to His word in what we have done:

— We may gloat over a promotion or a big sale — when we should rather be mourning because we have compromised our Christian convictions to get what we did.
— We may congratulate ourselves that we were able to gather large groups of people for meetings in our churches, when in fact we used worldly methods to gather them.
— We may triumphantly produce many “decisions” for God for which we congratulate ourselves, but are they mere “empty professions” instead of life-long disciples?
— We may rejoice that we got “our way” on an important decision that was made, without considering that it is not “our way” which is important, but God’s.
— We may post numerical proofs of our “success”, forgetting that success in the eyes of God is not found in numbers, but in faithfulness to His word.

Like Saul, we may congratulate ourselves for our “victories” — not realizing that our carnal “successes” actually stink in the sight of God. We must remember that we are not the ones who set the standards of right and wrong, of success and failure. God is our judge, and our standards come from His word. We may congratulate ourselves all we want on our “victories”, but we would do better to wait and make sure we are not about to be rebuked for our unfaithfulness before we do!