We have been in this great sermon series at the beginning
of this year. Entitled Walking with God and
we're going to end with this one.
Last story about one of my favorite biblical figures Hannah
and I personally love Hannah story because it's this raw
honest. Intimate look into the life of a
woman who is striving to follow God but he was also struggling
with the pain of unfulfilled. Desires.
And the narratives that we find in the Bible, the real story is
of people learning what it looks like to relate to.
God can be very different from one another and so each one can
speak a different word into our lives.
When I read the story of David and Goliath, I might feel
strengthened by David's courage and his trust in God, in the
face of these seemingly insurmountable odds.
And when I read about the Apostle, Paul's missionary
Journeys and might be inspired by his passion to share the good
news of Jesus. This with everyone and his
passion for the church to see it grow in Holiness and
faithfulness. But when I read the story of
Hannah, I feel like I'm looking inside my own heart.
She is not a ruler or a warrior or a world traveling Church.
Planter, she is an ordinary woman with a very messy and
complicated family life. And she wants her life to change
but she feels powerless to do anything about it.
Can anyone relate to that? Have you ever walked through a
season where you felt like your life was being defined by
something that was missing? Something that was Out Of Reach,
even if you didn't want it to be that way.
Everything seemed to revolve around this desire.
A dream job or just a way out of a really bad job relationship.
A family, a community to be a part of a sense of calling and
direction to bring you out of a dry season.
Hannah gives a voice to the instincts of longings of the
human heart for purpose, for fulfillment, to find our place
in the world for someone to love.
The presence of her story and scripture and the intention.
And the detail that we see their shows us that God, saw Hannah's
heart, God heard Hannah's cries and that means that God sees and
hears us. And this is why I deeply believe
that we need Hannah story today and that God can and will speak
to us through it. So, before we dive deeper, I'm
just going to open us with a quick word of Prayer.
Father, we thank you for the gift of your word.
We thank you for its surprising humanness the way that you enter
into the lives of people and some of them film extraordinary
and some of them feel ordinary and some of them are super messy
and some of them are complicated and confusing Lord.
But in them, we see ourselves and we pray that just as you
appear to people and you minister to them and you met
them in their weakness in their dismay.
They and their darkness and their confusion, and their
questions in their longings. We pray that you would meet us,
holy spirit. We need to feel your presence
today. We need to know you as a God who
walks with us. Lord, I just, I thank you for
the ways of my own life, where you've appeared in the midst of
darkness and cloudiness God. And I thank you for the way that
Hannah story has ministered to me, and I just pray that the
life that you poured into her, the way that you cared for her,
the way that you walked with, her would speak to us today and
encourage us to draw near to you.
We pray all these things in Jesus name.
Amen. So, Hannah story appears at the
very beginning of the book of Samuel.
So, in the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh Samuel comes right after
the Book of Judges. Now, this is important context
because it helps us understand the world that Hannah lived in.
So the Book of Judges to use a term that will expose my
Southern California, Roots is super gnarly.
Just when you think things can't get any more violent and
degenerate and morally Erupt, they do.
And the last line of Judges summarizes, the state of things
that says, in those days, there was no king in Israel.
Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.
And these words should strike us.
As ominous leadership was lacking morality and Justice had
been abandoned. And by the end of Judges, people
are committing these horrendous atrocities against each other,
and Israel is clearly in a state of spiritual crisis.
And yet in this era when depravity was high and knowledge
of God was low. The book of Samuel introduces us
to a family who follows God now they're far from perfect, but
given their social context elkanah and Anna's Faith stands
out as unusual. Every year, Hannah's, husband,
elkanah and Hannah's Faith or side every year, Hannah's
husband, elkanah brings the whole family to the temple, at
Shiloh, to worship to seek, God's presence and favor.
But for Hannah, these annual pilgrimages were a special
source of pain because elka's second wife pain.
Anna use this opportunity to provoke Hannah and remind her
that she is Barren pain and I had sons and daughters but
Hannah had done. And Hannah's inability to have a
child. Would have been painful for a
number of reasons. So first in Hannah's time and
that era having children was especially financially
important. Having a son in particular meant
that you had an error, your property would stay within your
immediate family, your son would learn your husband's trade and
carry on the family business and you'd be taken care of in your
old age and commentators suggest that.
It's likely that the reason L can took a second wife is
because Hannah could not have children.
Mmm. And while this cultural context
is different for us and hard to understand and wrestle with, I
think we can imagine how painful this would have been for Hannah.
And how for her, this is equated to having no role in her family
and perhaps feeling like she was only a liability.
Secondly, Hannah likely experienced social stigma for
being Barren. And one scholar says that for a
Hebrew woman in that era to have no child, was not only a
disappointment, but seemed to make one out as Dishonored by
God, since children were considered a sign of God's favor
childless, women were often scorned and female Society.
Depriving them of the emotional support they needed.
So, Hannah was likely, socially excluded, lonely and looked down
on by others. And lastly, Hannah may have
wanted children, simply because she wanted children.
It was an egg that just existed in her heart.
And sometimes the things we long for are just a part of being
human and they don't require much analysis, or explanation.
God himself is a father and a Creator and he chose to invest
his love and care and to humanity and we Are Made In His
Image. So our desires are sometimes a
reflection of our call to be caretakers of creation.
So even if Hannah's circumstances are familiar to
us, we can relate to the core of her desires, to have a sense of
purpose, to no longer be on the outside, looking in, for the
voices of envy and self-doubt to be quieted to have something
meaningful to invest our lives in, If we take a step back from
the historical and the cultural details on a very human level,
Hannah's story is about longing. It asked the challenging
question, how do the Deep desires of our hearts intersect
with our relationship with God or to put it another way as
people of Faith? What do we do with our longings
especially in the face of unanswered prayer?
And honestly I have way more questions than I have answers on
this topic and pressing into these questions about desire and
faith is intimidating because first we live in a culture that
tends to run after its impulses without wisdom or restrained and
secondly, because Christian culture sometimes reacts to
this, by trying to squash down our desires and live into this,
kind of Christian stoicism, that's all reason and no
passion, We know that the Bible does warn us about things that
it calls, deceitful, desires, desires of the Flesh.
And these would be things that explicitly run against the
nature. And the character of God, things
that are motivated by Envy rage, lust greed selfishness, instead
of compassion wisdom, patience, generosity self-sacrifice.
But for many of us like, Hannah, the desires, that permeate our
day-to-day lives, fall more in kind of this ambiguous, gray
neutral zone. Our desire for relationship,
vocation a purpose, security, and these other ordinary
longings of the human heart. What do we do with those?
I believe that Hannah story wants to just provided
encouragement that God wants to speak into our desires.
God wants to walk with us as we navigate and discover our
desires, our dreams, our hopes God already knows what we want,
even if we don't And I think this is important because
bringing our longings before God is an opportunity to strengthen
and enrich, our relationship with him.
As we discover How Deeply He Loves Us, How Deeply he knows Us
and how he approaches each of our requests with wisdom and
care. So, as we look again, at
Hannah's story, I want us to notice three things that she
does that lend themselves toward a deeper and a richer Faith.
So, first Hannah moves toward God.
Secondly can No, pours out her heart to God and third, Hannah
Waits on God. So, firsthand a moves toward
God. So years ago, I listened to a
sermon that Tim Keller, preached on the same passage and he cites
this renowned Hebrew scholar, who analyzes, first Samuel 1
verse 9, where the whole family is at the temple for the
sacrifices. And the text says, once when
they had finished eating and drinking at Shiloh, Hannah stood
up. And the Hebrew scholar points
out that, that last phrase seems like an unnecessary detail.
Because anytime someone is sitting and needs to move on to
the next thing, of course, they stand up.
So why is that in The Story? So He suggests that the phrase
is likely an idiom, which means that it's not merely literal,
and it was sitting and then she was standing and she was walking
instead. It implies that Hannah is moving
from being passive to being active and she's taking a
decisive action. And this Turning Point Point
this radical action that Hannah takes is to pray.
Do we think of prayer as being active?
Do we believe that our prayers shift, the tides of our reality?
I heard an analogy once that compared our spiritual lives to
swimming in the ocean because there's no such thing as staying
still. If you don't choose a direction,
the waves of our surroundings will decide where we go and the
undercurrent of the world will invariably pull us farther away
from God. It's a metaphor has its flaws.
But what I find helpful about this one, is it frames Faith as
something that is oriented in a direction, we can move toward
God or away from God. And prayer is movement, toward
God, the act of drawing near to God always changes us.
And so, Hannah orient's herself toward God by bringing her
complaint to him and she tells Eli the priest, I have been
praying here out of my great. Great, anguish and grief and the
Hebrew word that is translated. Anguish can also be known as
complaint and the word translated.
Grief can also be translated fixation or even anger.
So Hannah moves toward god with her complaint even if her
complaint is against him, The Lord is described as the one who
closed Hannah's womb, which may be challenging to us, but
acknowledges that God is the only one who can do something
about her situation. So Hannah's decision to come to
God, says, a lot about what she believes to be true about him.
Even if she's mainly motivated by pure desperation that
desperation compels her to hope that God might be merciful, that
he might listen to her tears that he might have compassion
and answer her cries. Throughout the gospels, people
would draw near to Jesus, to ask him for healing and freedom from
spiritual oppression, and many were motivated.
Probably mostly by desperation, but they found God to be
willing. There's a story of a Canaanite
woman who brings her daughter to Jesus.
And at first, it seems like baby, Jesus may not answer her
prayer because he tells her I was sent only to the lost sheep
of East sheep of Israel during this time, but she keeps asking
him for mercy and whether or not she realizes it This Canaanite
woman is making a choice. She is choosing to believe that
Jesus can heal and that it's worth it to keep taking the risk
to keep asking, because she might yet see his compassion.
And the second time Jesus responds to her by saying O
woman great. Is your faith.
Be it done for you as you desire and it says that her daughter
was healed instantly. Her persistence and boldness,
may have felt more like a Hail Mary pass than an Act of Faith.
But God responded. And even though Hannah has not,
yet seen evidence of God's hand at work.
She chooses to put her hopes in his hands and she does.
So, by pouring out her soul to God.
This is our second Point, Hannah, pours out her heart to
God, and the emotional language that's used in this passage is
intense, she's in the temple weeping bitterly and the verb.
Because actually repeated twice in different forms.
So it's almost as if she's saying that she was weeping
weeping Lee, her soul is distressed or bitter as if her
pain left like an unpleasant taste on her tongue that colored
how she experienced her life and she describes herself as pouring
out her soul to the Lord pouring out.
As if she were emptying a picture pitcher of water or a
dam that had been blocked up or her soul which in Hebrew is a
word that encompasses someone's whole self.
Their life, their desire, their emotion and much, like, the
psalmist Hannah is not holding anything back from God.
Pouring out, two hearts to God is easier said than done.
It takes a lot of vulnerability to come to God with your
internal Mass to come to God. When you don't feel heard by him
by Nature. I'm a person who feels things
strongly, a lot of my emotions just feel like tidal waves.
That hit me and watch over me. And yet, I still find myself
tempted to hide my feelings from God as if that were even
possible. Even when I'm praying, I'll be
trying to do this Balancing Act between being honest about my
feelings, but also You seem low maintenance.
Do you ever do this? Like, hi guys, it's me.
Just wanted to pray about that thing.
I know I've prayed for before but you tell us to ask, and so
I'm asking, but if the answer is no, that's okay.
I mean, I'll be super sad, but I'm already sad right now.
So, not much will change. Anyway, let me know when you
have a chance. This isn't technically a prayer
but it's more like a plate voicemail that I'm leaving.
God, I'm gonna Daniel. So I don't even leave.
More smells even though honesty reticle level, I believe that
God is omniscient omnipotent omnipresent he is he knows
everything he can do anything. He is always available sometimes
I still hold back. As if I might say or do
something that would make God not want to call me back.
And sometimes we approach God more like he is a Stern Monarch
or a busy executive or emotionally unavailable parent.
More like the people in our Lives, who didn't know what to
do, with the parts of us that were raw and messy, and confused
and needed, help and direction. But Jesus says to his disciples
in John 16, ask and you will receive that your joy may be
full. God wants us to come to him with
our desires and needs. God wants to see us filled with
joy. Do you believe this?
Do I believe this, God, sent his Spirit to dwell within his
people, which means that God chose to always be with us to
never be far from you or separated from you.
God is not going to ghost you. Do you hear that?
He has taken the time to get to know your heart.
You can't surprise him or overwhelm him, he doesn't
misunderstand you when you speak even if you're not exactly sure.
What you're saying before, a word is on our tongues, God
knows it completely. That's from Psalm 139.
God is a safe place for those who come humbly to him to pour
out their hearts. And I also want to say this when
I talk about pouring out our hearts to God, I don't want us
to confuse that, with their particular type of emotional
expression, some people are prone to tears case in point,
some are not some of clear words for their emotions and some find
them difficult to Define and articulate some experience
themselves, more as thinkers and are more aware of what they're
analyzing and processing than what they're feeling.
The Hebrew words for heart and soul are holistic.
They Encompass will reason emotion, all of it.
So, what Hannah models is not just about feeling, it's about
honesty, the willingness to open ourselves up to God.
And let him meet us in our uncertainty, our helplessness,
our weakness, bringing her honest request before.
God, laying it all out on the table, creates space for him to
work in our lives. And we see this in Han is
experienced through the vowel that she needs.
Ex she promises that if the Lord will give her a son, she will
give him to the Lord for all the days of his life.
So after all her longing for a child, Hannah tells God that
she's willing to have her child grow up, not in her own home,
where she can see him every day, but in the temple as an honorary
levite, a part of the Israelite priesthood.
So this part of the story is tricky, I think there may be a
Temptation here to see The Vow, as the reason that God answered
Hannah's Prayer and gave her a child.
And some have even thought that maybe Hannah's original desire
for a child was selfish, and God was waiting on Hannah to pray
unselfishly before he responded. Now, I think there's a potential
truth and a problem that I see with that.
So, it's true that when it comes to answering prayer, God is an
excellent multitasker. He's often working many things
in our lives all at once. And one of those things is
typically our sanctification shaping, our character healing
things, in our hearts to protect his gifts from becoming burdens
or Idols. It is true that God refines us
in our waiting and that's likely one of the many beautiful
things. That he's working in Hannah's
life but I think we want to be careful about creating a kind of
formula from Hannah's Prayer where we say to ourselves.
If I can just reach a point where my desire is free from
selfishness, then God will answer my prayer.
I think the problem is that if we set conditions for what it
takes for God, to answer our prayers, we accidentally make
prayer merit-based. As if the better we become, the
more likely God is to answer our prayers.
In this could risk clouding, the beauty that is at the heart of
prayer. So one beautiful Nuance in the
story and Hannah's story is that her name Hannah in Hebrew, comes
from the word for Grace prayer. Is Means through which we
experience God's grace. As we come to God, we discover
that he is gracious towards his children, he listens to us, even
though at times we've ignored his voice, he is generous
towards us, even though we've been stingy and giving our time
and our resources to him, he's faithful to us.
Even when our faith has proven fickle and frail in Grace is
what changes us. Earning makes us entitled.
We begin to see God as if our good behavior means that he owes
us favors. But when the grace behind the
gospel and the truth of the Bible, penetrate our hearts and
we realized that we are selfish short-sighted, sinful creatures,
we will be shocked and amazed at how kind God is to us.
God receives our prayers, our requests, our longings are
cries, and he thoughtfully and lovingly plans out how he can
answer them. In a way that brings about
goodness and growth and blessing and more often than not.
I've discovered that God answers prayers, what?
And how he chooses in ways that reveal more of who he is, and
expands our faith. So, we have to see him as
experienced in prayer, through the lens of God's grace, Hannah
is on a unique Journey, with God, whatever she's prayed
before. Whatever things God has been
doing in her life. Up to this point, brings her to
this moment of extraordinary surrender and asking God for
very different type of motherhood than we would expect
Dr. To want and this valve that she makes is important to her
walk with God, because her son will grow up to become a
righteous priest and a sea of unrighteous priests will be the
first in a line of important prophets who discern God's will
for his nation. And he will play a pivotal role
in restoring faith. In Israel Samuels, priesthood
will be a blessing to the entire nation and Beyond.
And for that to happen, Hannah has to be able to accept a very
different role in his life. But through prayer, God brings
Hannah to a place where without knowing it, she is ready for the
calling that God has for her life.
And for her son's life, she is asking God for the future that
God has planned for her. Do you see how beautifully
mysterious that is? Somehow the process of pouring
out her heart to God and wrestling with her Desires in
his presence has brought Hannah's will, and God's will
together. And that can be a source of
comfort for us. Walking with God shapes, our
prayers. Walking with God, directs our
desires Walking with God opens us up to the joys and blessings
and purpose that he has that. We could never have imagined for
ourselves but it will still take a while for Hannah to see the
full revelation of how God intends to answer the desires of
her heart. And that brings us to our last
Point, Hannah Waits on God. Not going to make you late for
about 2 seconds. After Hannah praise and she
receives a blessing from Eli. The priest, the text says she
went her way and eat something and her face was no longer
downcast and that last phrase if you look at it in the Hebrew
more literally it says something like her face did not continue
to be as it was before. So, in other words, everything
Hannah had been pouring out, her grief, her, vexation, her
bitterness her distress, her pain had left it.
This is like a parting of the clouds after the rain, a ray of
light coming up over the horizon after a long, dark night,
Hannah's experience in prayer, brings her to a place of peace.
And this piece does not come because Hannah has received a
child or even a prophetic promise of some kind piece comes
because through her wrestling. She has encountered God.
At this point we are still not. Sure of Hannah's circumstances
will change but Hannah has changed. and the tags also
doesn't say that Hannah's longing, disappeared after her
time of prayer, but her sadness did, That's God's Comfort.
Swept like a salve over her pain, Hannah's longing, felt
lighter. Have you experienced this coming
to God in a time of heaviness or pain and feeling these things
being lifted from you? Not because you're necessarily
received a clear answer or resolution in that moment but
because you experienced God's presence and somehow it changed
everything, I remember a while back, I was in a crazy busy
season dealing with stress and a lack of sleep and I was
struggling to create space to really sit with God, most of my
prayers were what I would call a reactive prayers.
So asking God for help, keeping up with my to-do list and maybe
to resolve a problem. I hadn't figure it out or just
for more energy, but deep in my heart, I knew that I really
needed to sit with God as if I could kind of feel like there
was something specific and needed to talk to him about, but
I didn't even have the brain space to figure out what that It
was. So finally I had an evening
where I was able to sit with uninterrupted time to pray.
And as I sat with God, it felt as if the spirit was tugging at
these things that had been buried inside of me and bringing
them to the surface. And I realized that there were
these deeper Desires in my heart that I had neglected because it
was easier to focus on what I could do.
And I realized that a part of me had been avoiding a heart to
heart with God because I was worried it would be too painful
to face my on that longings. But now the time had come to be
honest with myself and with God. So I told him God.
I feel like I've been working so hard and trying to focus on
things that I can control and surrender the rest to you but
things that I truly deeply want, still haven't happened.
And honestly I feel overlooked about you.
I feel like you forgotten. And I didn't want to tell you
this because I really need you to feel close to me to get
through this challenging season. But I haven't wanted to talk to
you about what I want, because I don't feel like you're
listening. If you're a person who walks
with God and who talks with God, it can be hard to explain what
it looks like. What it feels like to hear from
him. And how we experience, the voice
of the spirit can definitely vary from person to person and
season to season in our lives. But what I can say is that I
experienced the Lord's. Reassurance very clearly in
response to my prayer. I haven't forgotten you.
I remember all your prayers,
even the ones that you forgotten.
I see you. and after that prayer, Circumstantially,
nothing really changed. But everything changed.
And it felt like this. Not, that was in my chest had
been loosened, like a burden had been lifted.
It was a kind of refreshment, as if I'd taken a drink of cool
water on a hot day, or could aloe vera on a sunburn, it felt
like an obstacle between me and God, that I hadn't even
acknowledged was, there had been removed and I felt comforted, I
no longer felt alone and I believed that he saw me drawing
near to God. In spite of my fears pouring out
feelings that I didn't even want to acknowledge ended up being an
opportunity to experience. God's mysterious, peace and
Grace, encountering God In Prayer reminded me.
Who he was. And our story after Samuel was
born, we didn't read this part, but it's in first Samuel chapter
two, after samuelosborne hand appraise, this beautiful poetic
prayer and the things she focuses on in it are surprising.
She exalts God as a deliverer are rocks.
The holiest of holies she goes on about how God knows all and
judges, rightly, and he sees those who are hungry and Barren
and poor and humble, and oppressed and he reverses their
fortunes. And shows them his goodness.
He overcomes the wicked and strengthens those who Faithfully
serve him and not all of her. Praises seem particularly
relevant to Hannah's experience of praying for and receiving a
child. But that's because God's answer
to Hannah's Prayer, brought about so much more than the gift
of motherhood through this experience, Hannah came to see
God, more clearly for who he is and in an era when Israel was
filled with corruption and violence and idolatry.
And I had come to see God as her savior, the one who answers the
longings of her heart, in Hannah would actually go on to have
five more children and when that detail is mentioned, the Bible
says the Lord was gracious to Hannah.
See God can give us gifts. He can fulfill our desires, he
can bring her dreams to life. All these things are possible
for him. But the real sweetness in these
gifts is not in the gift alone, but the experience of his grace
when we receive answers to prayer with gratitude from God's
hand, we are drawn deeper into the knowledge of his love and
his wisdom and his goodness towards us and that can help
Shield us from Desiring gifts only for themselves or idolizing
them. Instead we get to enjoy the gift
as a reminder of God's grace and remain anchored in the security
and satisfaction of his great love for us.
So where do you need to be reminded of God's Grace today?
Maybe you relate to Hannah's wrestling and waiting, maybe the
feeling that God has been silent or distant has made it difficult
for you to draw near to him in prayer.
Hannah didn't know, when she showed up to the temple that
day, that God was waiting to meet with her.
Take a step toward God. Give him a chance to reveal his
presence to you. Maybe you're not sure if you can
come to God because of your mistakes, your failures, your
unbelief. God, responds to us, according
to who he is, and he is gracious.
His posture towards us is not clean up your act, but pour out,
your heart. Come as a child with all of your
needs and even your desperation and ask him to heal you.
Hannah names, her firstborn son, Samuel which comes from the
words Shema and Al which means God hears, my prayer for us
today is that we would turn toward God that we would have
the courage to lay our longings and desires before him and that
as we wait on him, we would discover that to be true.
God hears. Let me pray for us now.