Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through 1 Samuel 1, focusing on Hannah's heartfelt prayer as a model for prayerful devotion. He emphasizes that true prayer comes from a place of deep love and desperation, urging believers to approach God with raw honesty and vulnerability. The sermon highlights that God often uses our painful moments to draw us closer to Him, and that prayer can transform our hearts even before our circumstances change. Ultimately, Pastor Safrit encourages the congregation to love deeply and to trust in God's faithfulness, as demonstrated in Hannah's story.
Welcome and Housekeeping
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If you have your Bibles this morning, we're going to be in 1 Samuel chapter 1. 1 Samuel chapter 1, I am starting a new series. Don't know how long this series is going to go.
Traditionally, if you've been around me for any period of time, I traditionally like to go through books of the Bible or passages of the Bible.
The Lord has laid it on my heart to go through a series of topical sermons throughout the scripture looking at prayer and what it looks like to be a people of prayer.
And so I've entitled it, When God's People Pray. I don't know exactly how long we're going to go in this, but I want to look at some significant prayers throughout scripture and how to have a prayerful praying church.
And I think we do have that, but I think there's always room to improve as well. And so today, in honor of Mother's Day, we are going to look at a mother's prayer. And we're going to look at Hannah's prayer in 1 Samuel.
And so if you found your place there and you're willing and able, we're going to stand out reading of God's word. We're going to read verses 9 through 20, and then we'll jump through the message today. The Bible says, On one occasion,
Hannah got up after they had ate and drank in Shiloh, and the priest Eli was sitting on a chair by the doorpost of the Lord's temple. Deeply hurt, Hannah prayed to the Lord and wept with many tears.
Making a vow, she pleaded, Lord of armies, if you will take notice of your servant's affliction, remember and not forget me, and give your servant a son.
I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and his hair will never be cut. While she continued praying in the Lord's presence, Eli watched her mouth.
Hannah was praying silently, and though her lips were moving, her voice could not be heard. And Eli thought that she was drunk and said unto her, How long are you going to be drunk? Get rid of your wine.
No, my Lord, Hannah replied, I am a woman with a broken heart, and I haven't had any wine or beer. I have been pouring out my heart before the Lord. Don't think of me as a wicked woman. I've been praying from the deep anguish of my heart and resentment.
Eli responded, Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant the request that you have made to him. May your servant find favor with you, she replied.
Then Hannah went on her way, and she ate and no longer looked despondent. The next morning, Elikhaon and Hannah had got up early to worship before the Lord. Afterward, they returned home to Ramah.
And then Elikhaon was intimate with his wife, Hannah, and the Lord remembered her. And after some time, Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel because she said, I have requested him from the Lord. Father, we love you.
We thank you for the reading of your scripture. We thank you for the young people leading our services today.
And we thank you for the mothers in this room and the ladies in this room that have had so much impact on our lives. And I thank you, Lord, for what you've done for us.
Help us this morning to understand the value of prayer and a brokenhearted when it comes to prayer as well.
The Power of a Mother's Love
Lord, we love you. In your name we pray. Amen. You may be seated.
As I was thinking through some ideas or some stories, and I'm reading a book right now. I just finished it. It's called Trigger Warning. It's by a lady that went through some really deep hurt in her marriage.
And I was going to pull some personal stories from there, but just didn't feel right to do that. But I did come across a story.
It's a story that you could probably relate to. It's a true story of a lady that years ago her house had caught on fire. And while it was on fire, smoke began to fill the rooms.
And she began to get all the kids out of the house. And she began to get them to safety. And while she was outside, the firefighters showed up. And she realized that she had forgotten one of her children in the house.
And the firefighters arrived and began holding her back because she's trying to go into the fire. She's trying to go and save one of her kids. The onlookers, the witnesses said that the mother fought through every person that was trying to restrain her. She was screaming and she was crying.
And she begged for someone to go and save her son. In that moment, one of the witnesses said that the firefighter began to put on, I mean, the house was completely changed, put on the fire retardant suits and have everything ready and ran into the flames of the fire of the house.
And a couple of moments later, he came out with the child. He said when he came out, one witness says that the mother collapsed in tears.
Not tears of sadness, but tears of joy that she was overwhelmed and trembling that this man willingly sacrificed himself to save her son.
Why would someone do that? Why would someone sacrifice of themselves to go into a burning building to go and save some stranger?
Because when we begin to think of the power of love, and specifically as we look at today, the power of this love of this mother that was trying to seek her son, you'll notice, and if you have a mother, and if you're in here, you have a mother, so this is everyone,
wanted to preface that. If you have a mother, you know that a mother will do anything to save her children. You know that a mother will do things that no one else will do. Right?
When we had Brody, Brody came five weeks early, and the doctors told us that every two hours, we had to wake him up and feed him. He had a heart monitor on, and I remember still to this day, every two hours, Allison waking me up.
Hey, go make a bottle. I don't want to make a bottle.
I'd go in there, I'd make a bottle, and I'd come back. Two hours later, I mean, you can imagine the sleep schedule, how this was.
But a mother knew, and it's like on clockwork, she woke up because she is going to take care of her children. A mother will carry the burdens that no one else sees.
And a mother will pray a prayer that no one else will ever hear. And as we look at this passage of Scripture from 1 Samuel, you begin to see this woman named Hannah who was a broken woman. She was a woman that was burdened.
She was a barren woman. But more than any of those things, she was a woman who valued prayer. Now, I didn't read the first eight verses of this book as it opens up, but Hannah was one of two wives of her husband.
Now, this isn't condoned in our day, but in this time it is. And one of the wives had many kids, and she didn't have any. And it says that her husband did so much for her to make up for those things.
And so when she comes to this time of prayer, this isn't a time where she has written out what she's going to pray. This isn't a time where she has polished her prayer life. This is a prayer that is coming from the most uncomfortable moment of her life.
And she begins in a desperate cry to reach out to the Lord because she has come to the end of herself. She's tried everything. She's done everything she can do. And now she realizes that I have to go to the Lord.
And what we discover in this is this. God will sometimes take us to the most painful moments of our life in order to bring us to the moment where we can go to the Lord in prayer because there's nothing else we can do.
Desire and Devotion in Prayer
And as we begin to walk through this, and as we begin to look at these aspects of Hannah's prayer, I want you to ask yourself this question, what do you love the most? And how you love that will begin to shape the way you pray.
It'll begin to shape the way you live your life. And sometimes through the most deepest, darkest times of our life, we can begin to see God work in our life. And so the first thing we see is a devoted love. We see a devoted love that Hannah has.
This is a love for her husband. She loves her husband so much that she begins to pray in this vulnerable type of prayer that, again, no one heard her.
She was silent in this prayer. She said her lips were moving, but no one heard what she was saying. And so she begins to pray because she loves her husband.
She has a desire for her husband that is stronger than anything else. Her earthly relationships begin to reveal how she looks at the Lord and her deeper belonging of where she's at. She said, I am so devoted to my husband.
I love my husband so much that I'm going to pray that the Lord would give me a son so that I can give it back to the Lord. But ultimately, I can have this love that I can show toward my husband. It wasn't so that she could be lifted up.
It wasn't so that she could be glorified. It was so that her husband would be glorified.
And it begins to put us in this picture of where we're going to look at as we walk through the first portion of this prayer. She is in a painful position. As I mentioned earlier, she was almost ridiculed and abused and talking down to.
If you read the first eight verses, you can see the abuse that she went through.
The Bible actually says that there was a rival that taunted her, which I think is crazy to think about when you think of the godliness of Hannah and the godliness of where she's at. But the Bible says that after they had ate and drank, everyone else was satisfied, Hannah sits there empty.
She hadn't eaten. She hadn't drank. She just sat there in the chair.
You can sort of imagine yourself as this person that is so weighted down that the only thing she can do is just get up and remove herself from the room.
She sees everyone else is having a good time and they're cracking jokes and they're having a great time in the Lord's house. This is right beside the tabernacle, the first permanent tabernacle that the Jewish people set up in Shiloh.
It sat there for 696 years. I've stood in the location of this tabernacle and you can see where the houses and the pottery was all at and you can see this location and you can see when you go there, you can see this image
of where the tabernacle would be at and how it would be a holy place and they're having a meal and they're enjoying themselves and this is on one of the most holy days of the year as they had
come here for this and all of a sudden she begins to separate herself from the party.
Some burdens in our life will not allow us to continue to be around the good things that are going on, to continue to stay seated. Some burdens in our life, what I learned in this principle, require us to get up and to do something about it.
She understood that the position I'm in, I can't just sit here. I've got to get up from the table.
I've got to get up from where I'm at and I've got to go and do something because I am in this position where I am so needing something from God.
And as we begin to think about this, you can imagine yourself, maybe at a Thanksgiving dinner or a Christmas dinner and everyone's around and everyone's hanging out and there's that one person that's sitting at the table and they're
not saying anything, they're not necessarily enjoying what's going on, you can just tell there's something deep in their heart.
And then all of a sudden you begin to go and you talk to them and you see the table is full but they have someone that's there that's just empty hearted in their life.
This is Hannah sitting at this table and the pain that she is walking through of not having a child is pushing her toward God.
What is it that the pain in your life is driving you that should be driving you to the Lord or is the pain that's in your life right now driving you to something else?
Or maybe it's driving you away from the Lord and the Lord is saying, no, I've put that there for a reason so that you would come back to me, so that you would turn your eyes back to me,
so that you would turn your face back to the one that created you and you would begin to see yourself in this position that sometimes is painful but it's for a purpose to bring you back to where you're at.
In verse 10 we begin to see the personal petition that she has here with the Lord.
The Bible says that she is deeply hurt and she is praying and she wept with many tears.
Emotional and Honest Prayers
As I mentioned at the beginning, this was not a polished prayer.
This was a prayer that came from the heart. This was a prayer that came from this brokenness that was inside of her, this unsatisfied moment that was inside of her and she begins to pray with so much intensity that she now has begun to cry because she
is in so much in tune with this petition that she has.
One commentator said it like this, that the Hebrew word where it says here with many tears is actually this bitterness from the soul that is driving her to pray this prayer but not bitterness toward God.
It's saying my soul is in torment, I am hurting because of this but I'm not blaming God because of this. I'm going to God with prayer, I'm going to God with deeply hurtness, I'm praying and I'm allowing myself to be vulnerable in this moment.
Now one of the things we have to look at is this, God is not intimidated by our emotional prayers. God welcomes our emotional prayers.
God is telling us, come to me broken hearted, come to me with the most vulnerable things that you have because I am there to invite you in to hear what you have to say. I am there to invite you in and listen to what you have to say.
It tells us that God cares about our sorrow even when our sorrow is real.
God looks at us and he says, I know that you're hurting, I've been there, I know what it looks like to lose someone or to not have something with my own son and now I am welcoming this in
to you and it shows us that God is wanting us to be raw with our supplication. He's wanting us to come to him and say,
God, this is what I need. Not this vague prayers that just say, and I'm guilty of this, bless all the missionaries in the world. Right?
I'm not going to mention them all, but Lord, just bless them all. He wants us to come and say, this person and this person and these things that are in my life, I'm going to be specific about the things that are in my life. It's almost like in this moment,
as Hannah's coming to the Lord, raw, just pouring out her heart, she's crying. It reminds me of a child who comes to his mom.
As the child comes to his mom because something happened, maybe they fell off of a swing set and they hurt their head or they fell and broke their arm and they come to the mom and they're crying. No one else in the world knows what they're saying.
But in that moment, the mother knows exactly what's going on.
The mother's like, yes, I know you're hurt. Yes, I know your head is hurting. What can we do? Get the ice. James, go call 911. Whatever's going on, they know what's going on. They're there to take care of it, even though someone else doesn't.
And God is saying, when you come to me in tears, when no one else knows what's going on, when no one else can understand what you're saying, I know what you're saying.
Scripture says that the Holy Spirit makes intercession for you and for me to God and he takes what we're trying to say and the things that we're trying to say and he formulates it in a way that God understands.
And this is allowing us to understand that we have the ability to come honestly before the Lord. When is the last time you actually honestly came to the Lord and said, God, I need this in my life.
I need you to work in this way. I need you to help me in this way. And not in formality, not in this eloquent style, but just brokenheartedness and saying, God, I need you in my life.
This is how Hannah came in this devoted love for her family. She also, in verse 11, had a place that she had promised. She had a place to promise. She says this in this prayer. She says, I will give him to the Lord
all the days of his life. She is not only asking for this blessing, she is saying, Lord, if you honor this, I'm going to do something else in return. God, if you do this and you give me a son, I'm going to give that son back to you. She prays this Nazarite-like vow.
I'm not going to cut his hair. I'm not going to allow him to touch anything that's wine.
We understand she's giving a vow, but she is praying that he's going to be dedicated. He's going to be separated. He's going to be a lifelong servant of the Lord.
And she now begins to lay out this blessing to the Lord. Now, I can remember as a kid, and I've shared this before, I told the Lord I was laying in bed and I was in my room and I remember we were about to go to Disney. And I remember praying.
And I just accepted the Lord as my savior. So I was five when that happened. So maybe it was six or seven. I'm laying on the bed. All the kids, six or seven. I know that's old now.
I was laying in bed and I remember praying to the Lord. Lord, I want to go to Disney. I want you to come back and take us to heaven.
But Lord, can you wait to come back until I go to Disney? Right?
It was this prayer to the Lord as a little kid. I'm praying. I'm like, God, I have this so desire to go to Disney and to see all the things that we're going to go and see. But can you wait?
Now, this is Hannah, right? She's coming before the Lord and she says, Lord, I have this desire
and if you honor that desire, I'm going to do something in return. True prayer doesn't always just ask the Lord for blessings.
It begins to say, God, I'm going to give these blessings back to you. God, I need a raise.
God, I need these things in my life. But if you give me that raise, I'm going to make sure that I take care of my portion and give back to you. God, I need a promotion to my job so that I can have more time.
And Lord, if you give me that more time, I'm going to be faithful to give that time back to you. Right? God is, he's blessing us with things and now he is saying, what are you going to, in return, give back to me?
Oftentimes, this is our prayer, right? Our prayer as parents, our prayer as mothers is we pray over our children. Lord, bless our children.
Allow them to come to know you at a young age. Allow them to meet a spouse that's going to love them and honor them and cherish them. And then we have to, as parents, this is the hard part, take our hands off the steering wheel sometime. Like we can't, at a 27-year-old kid,
continue to dictate everything that the child does. We've got to say, Lord, I'm going to pray for these things and then take my hand off the steering wheel and allow you to do the rest.
Right? I know, as Scotty said this morning, I know that it was difficult when I told my parents, hey, I'm going to go to college in Arkansas. Most people don't know where Arkansas is. It's like the armpit of America. You're going to go, where? Why?
Okay. We prayed. We prayed that the Lord would do some things and then the phone call to my parents is like, hey, not only am I going to Arkansas, I'm going to this place that no one's ever heard of, Idaho. You're doing what? You're going where? Why? And all of a sudden,
we prayed for these things and we're like, Lord, we want you to work in our lives.
We want you to do some things and then as the Lord begins to lead in our life, are we willing to accept what the Lord is doing even when it's difficult for us to understand how the Lord is
doing this? And oftentimes in our lives as parents, as loved ones, when we pray for things, are we willing to accept the difficult response that the Lord gives? If God answers your prayers, are you willing to give that answer back to him?
Are you willing to say, God, I'm praying for this and this will fulfill all of my earthly desires if you give me this? Are you willing to say and in return, I'll give that back to you?
I'll say, God, I want to do these things but if you answer this prayer, I'll give up what my desires are. And this is what Hannah is praying for.
She is saying, I want a child so bad that if you give me a child, I'm going to surrender him back to you and I'm going to have him be a lifelong servant of you.
We see there was a devoted love but number two, we see there was a desperate love.
Persistent and Dedicated Love
We see there was this desperate love in her life in verses 12 through 17.
Her focus now is looking at the earth and the things of the earth to the thoughts of heaven and the thoughts of where she was going to be at. Her focus begins to shift from the people that are pursuing her to the God who loves her so much.
And now in this desperation of love, she looks to heaven and she begins to cry out in verse 12 with a persistent cry. Look at what she says. She continues to pray. This was not a quick prayer.
This was not a prayer that she begins to pray and now she gets interrupted by Eli and some things are happening. This is a prayer where in this moment she continues to pray in a prolonged pleading to the Lord where she says, God, I need you to work in my life.
I need you to continue to work in my life.
I need you to continue to listen to the things that I'm going through in my life. And oftentimes in our life, church, a breakthrough prayer is not a prayer that you pray one time.
A breakthrough prayer that you're trying to get a hold of God and you're trying to say, God, I need you to work in this life and to work in what I'm doing is a prayer that is continuing to go before the Lord.
Not one time, not seven times, maybe it's a hundred, maybe it's 700 times where you're going before the Lord for years upon years and you're praying for these things. And in this moment, the Bible says that the Lord remembered her through her consistent prayers.
In Luke chapter 18, Jesus gives a story of a widow who comes to a house.
And a widow comes to the judge's door and she's pleading on behalf of her son in Luke chapter 18. And she is so pleading that she is not going to quit until the judge does something to change the situation.
So she's knocking at the door. Judge, I need you to come to the door. Next day, judge, come to the door. I need to talk to you.
Every day, she continues to come to the Lord until finally, the judge is like, who is this crazy woman? Why are you continuing to come to my house and what do you need?
Jesus is saying, and this is how our prayer should be. We should be coming before the throne room of God and saying, God, I need you today. I need more of you today.
I need you to direct my life today. I need you to continue to work on these things until he's finally like, if I give this to you, will you please be quiet?
Right? This is, we have kids. I have a five-year-old that loves snacks for some reason. And we eat a food and we eat a meal and it's like a massive meal, steak and potatoes and mac and cheese and we're full. And he sits back and he goes, oh, I'm so full. Dad, can I have a snack? What?
You need more? And it's like constantly, more snacks, more snacks.
I'm like, if I just give you a snack, will you please be quiet? And this is the idea that Jesus is saying here, are we continuing to pray so much that it's like it's going to happen because we're just continuing to pray? Or have you stopped praying about something
that God never told you to stop praying about? Hannah's life, she's praying and she says, God, I need a son. I've been bearing him. This other lady, she's had 10 or 12 kids and I haven't had one and she could have stopped praying.
She could have just said, Lord, this is how my life's going to be. And God was requiring her to continue to pray.
He never told her to stop and there was this persistent cry in her life. Verse 13 talks about the misunderstood condition. Look at Eli. Eli looks at her and he says, this woman is crazy.
This is James Safer theology, right? This woman is crazy. She's sitting in the front of the porch. She's over here and she's like mumbling words out of her mind. She looks like she's crazy. She looks like she's drunk. Like, hey woman, get off the porch. What are you doing?
And all of a sudden, the condition that she was in, she was so spiritually intensive
that she was mistaken by casual observers. If you flip back just a couple of pages in your scripture to the very last verse in Judges.
The very last verse in Judges chapter 21 verses 25.
Look at what it says. This is what Hannah is walking into as she walks into the temple.
And in those days, there was no king in Israel and everyone did whatever seemed right in his own eyes. As Hannah's walking into the temple,
the people don't even know who the Lord is. This is a spiritually dull error and the people are like, we've never even seen someone pray like this. She must be out of her mind. She must be crazy because people don't act like this. They do whatever's right in their mind. They do themselves.
They don't do anything of God. They're doing themselves. They're listening to the desires of their own heart. They're not praying for the desires of the Lord to come into their life. And genuine prayer in our life, in our day, may look abnormal to the outside world.
It may be when you say, I've got to pray about that to a co-worker. They say, you've got to do what? You've got to pray? What?
Who are you praying to? No one prays these days. You just do whatever you want. Whatever makes you happy, you go out and do. Why do you have to pray about this? And the world may look at us and say, that's really weird.
Just like they looked at Hannah and just like the priest of the time that was over the tabernacle looked at Hannah and said, yeah, this lady's crazy. Yeah, she's going off her rocker. Hey, guards, security of the church,
come escort this lady off because she's gone off her rockers. And she goes, no, no, no, I'm praying, you know, to come before the Lord because I need him. And she has this transparent confession that leads to verse 15 where she says, I've been pouring out my heart before the Lord.
This word pouring out your heart literally means to be spilled out like water out of a container.
Not like molasses that's going to be slow. It's like if I open this container of water and just dumped it out, it would immediately all fall out of it. She says, this is my life. I'm pouring out, I'm spilling out my life before the Lord.
And all of a sudden, the Lord then begins to work in Eli's life because of this woman who is standing before him. She is now influencing the pastor, the preacher, the priest of the tabernacle because her life is more aligned with God than his life.
And all of a sudden, we can see how our lives can begin to influence others that are around us. God doesn't always respond to rehearsed speeches.
He wants to hear our heart and he wants us to reveal our heart to him.
My mind goes to the teaching of Jesus as he's walking around with his disciples and he sees the two people praying in the temple.
And he sees the Pharisee and he stands in the middle of the court and he's got bells on all over his robe and he's lifting his hands and he's praying to the Lord and everyone sees him and everyone
hears him and he's got this wonderful speech that everyone hears and the disciples looks and says, hey, is that the prayer that we need to pray?
And Jesus looks at him and said, that guy is using vain repetitions and is just there for a show.
He says, I want you to look over here to the corner. Look at the man that's not even able to lift his head towards heaven who's laying on the ground who says, God, I'm not even worthy to look up at you and he says, this is the guy that he
wants to model our prayer after. This is the model that Jesus is saying that we should model our prayer after and he comes back to Hannah the same way. She's mumbling things and she's living in this way where God, I'm just going to continue to follow you. I'm not going to pretend anymore.
I'm not going to have a polished prayer anymore. I'm just going to pour out my life to you. And God says, that's the way our prayer should be.
We hold nothing back before God Almighty. And we say, God, I can't do this on my own and I need you to work in my life. Number four here, verse 17, we see the received confirmation.
Eli looks at her and Eli makes this grand profession here. He says, go in peace and may God grant your request. Now look at how Hannah walks away.
She walks away different than before she came. She comes with a broken heart. The Bible says that she is praying and she is crying and she looks like a mad lady crying before the Lord and as she walks away, her countenance begins to change. Look at what it says in verse 17.
It says, Eli said, go in peace. God will grant your request. May your servant find favor with you, she replied. And Hannah went away and ate and no longer look despondent.
She now walks away with a heart changed, with her countenance is now changed long before her circumstances were ever changed. She wasn't pregnant in this moment.
Her prayer was not answered in this moment and yet, because she prayed a real prayer, that was opening her heart before the Lord, it begins to immediately work on her heart.
And it begins to immediately work on how she is living her life because now she walks away a completely new, different, changed person.
Five years ago, me and my wife, we went into this really fun endeavor. We decided, hey, let's step on a massive limb and let's build a house from scratch. Like, this is what normal people do, right? We just do weird, crazy things.
And so, we step out and I remember it was January and we met with the builder and he came to us with this massive stack of papers and he said, here's your contract for us to build your house. You've got a sign on it.
And you're committing that you're going to pay for this house and if you don't, we're taking your land because we're building them all land. We're going to take everything that you have because if you don't follow through with this, we're taking everything. This is crazy.
Like, I'm going to sign away my life in order to build a house but never actually have a house.
And all of a sudden, we begin to sign and we walked away and we're like, are we sure we just made the right decision?
Like, we're about to go through this crazy ordeal of building a house and then in the middle of all that, this little disease called COVID came in and everything shut down and we're like, what is going on? The world's not working.
Everything's shut down. We went online with school and oh yeah, we're building a house. Yeah, Lord, this is great. Thank you. And all of a sudden, the contract was signed before anything had ever been done but yet we trusted the builders to fulfill their end of the deal.
This is the idea that God is saying to us. Come to me with your big audacious prayers and say, God, I'm going to sign the contract that you're going to do it and I'm going to trust you to do it and I'm going to step back and watch
you work. And all of a sudden, he's asking us, are you willing to come before me with your burdens and lay them at the altar of my feet and say, God, I don't know how this is going to happen.
There's no way on this earth that this prayer can get answered by me doing what I can do but I can trust that you're going to be the God who steps forward and does these things so that I can not look back and say, look at how great I am.
Look at how awesome I am. Look at all the great decisions I made.
It's like, God, I didn't do any of it and it was all you so that we can step back and we can say, God, this happened because of you and we can be a witness for the people in the world because of who God is and what he does for us.
Impact of Prayer and Faith
We see a devoted love. We see a desperate love and then the last thing we see here is a dedicated love and I'll be quick. The first thing we see in this dedicated love, we begin to see her love for her home.
Her faith is now flowing back into her everyday life and she is saying that as I walk through my life, I am so dedicated to the Lord that I am now going to be an example for those that are going to be around me. We see a renewed spirit in verse 18.
We briefly hit on it just a minute ago where it says that her face was no longer downcast or despondent. She had the same home that she was going back to. She had the same criticism that she was going back to. She had everything,
the exact same situation but now all of a sudden her spirit is different.
Her spirit comes back excited for the Lord. Her spirit comes back in a way that the people are looking at her and saying, you still don't have a kid. How are you happy right now?
How are you serving the Lord? How are you praising the Lord in this moment? Nothing has changed in your life and I'm here to tell us church that prayer doesn't remove the problems in our life. This is how often we pray,
God, I've got this person in my life that I'm struggling with. I need you to remove him from my life. Right?
I need you to give me patience in my life and all of a sudden he gives you circumstances to make you patient and God is saying, I'm not always going to remove everything but I'm going to restore a perspective in your life to put me in the middle of everything you're going through.
When you've got that co-worker, that family member, those things in your life that you don't understand why that's there, you can begin to say, God, give me the right perspective in this situation. He's not always going to remove these things for us. How has your prayer life changed your attitude?
Because as we see here in Hannah's life, she prayed and she was vulnerable and she poured her heart out to God and when she got up from that prayer, everyone noticed that her attitude and her life had been changed by that prayer.
Everything in her life was now being renewed because she now had a different attitude toward how God was working in her life. Number two, in verse 19, we see a remembering God. The Bible says that the Lord remembered her.
Now, this is one of those confusing verses because we can ask ourselves and we can say, how did God remember?
Did that mean God forgot her? Okay, this is not saying that God forgot things or God will forget us, but the word remembered in scripture is signaling that that was a divine intervention in her life.
God looked down from heaven and said, I hear you and I'm going to intervene in what's going on. I'm going to remember the prayer that you just prayed because I'm going to come in and I'm going to intervene so miraculously that no one can debate or deny what has happened in your life.
God's delays are not always God's denials. As this lady, Hannah, who went her entire life without a kid, it wasn't God denying her, but God saw her, God heard her,
God began to move in her life so that when the world looked onto that, he said, there is something different with that lady, Hannah, that we're talking about four or five thousand years later and we're still talking about
Hannah's prayer because Hannah's prayer was so impactful in this time.
We're in planting season and some of you have gardens, I know Buford and several others have been praying for rain, right?
Roy's been praying, God give us rain and we got a little bit of rain, but there was faith of taking that little bitty seed and putting it in the ground and saying, God, God, I'm going to put this there and there's absolutely nothing I can do now.
I've got to put the faith in something else. I've got to put the faith in the nutrients of the ground, the water, everything that goes involved in all that. I'm going to put it in the ground and for a very long time, nothing is visible.
Allison is right now in her classroom, they're about to finish up, school's almost over, kids are counting down the days, they're excited.
Do I have any kids in here that are excited? The school's almost done, only like three hands went up. The rest of you can go all summer long, but maybe I woke you up just now.
She began to, in science, she planted some seeds, some grass seeds and some lima beans and she put them on her doors and you may have seen this as a science experiment and she said that the greatest thing
that she saw her kids do was every day they would come into her classroom and they would go to their seed and they would go to their place and they'd say, has anything changed? Has anything grown?
First couple of days, nothing's going on. First couple of weeks, she told me, she said, I was nervous because I thought I had some bad seeds because some of them weren't doing anything and the kids would come in and go,
oh, my seed must have just been a bad seed. I don't have anything.
Miss Safer did something wrong. I'm going to go complain to my mom now because Miss Safer did something wrong and all of a sudden, they're coming in but then she said there was this moment where they came in and the ones that hadn't seen anything, they saw that little sprout come out
and it was this massive amount of joy that became through them because something that was once not visible is now being able to be seen
and this is what prayer looks like in our life. We're praying and we're like, God, are you even listening to me? God, I'm praying and it feels like they're just hitting the ceiling and bouncing back down. God, are you even there?
and then all of a sudden that one little peak of God's goodness begins to come through and you go,
yeah, you are listening, God. I've been praying for this, God, and now I'm being able to see you work in my life and you're the only one that could have done this because this is too big for me to even do and now you begin to say, God, I'm trusting you even when it's silent.
I'm trusting you even when I don't know what's going to happen. I'm just going to trust that you are the God of control and then the last thing we see here is in verse 20, we see a received child. Samuel means heard by God.
It simply means that God heard the prayers of Hannah and she named him Samuel because it literally means heard by God. Every answered prayer in our life carries a testimony in its name. A promised child,
a prayer for a child, a purposed child, everything that we pray for has a name that is within that and when we begin to name things in our life, we name them because they have meaning.
One of the greatest things that I do as a pastor when I begin to sit there and hold the newborn baby that's born and I'll ask the parents, why did you name them this? What's the reason behind the name?
Some will say it's a family name. My grandpa, my great grandpa, we mix two names together.
This is my mother's maiden name, my mother-in-law's maiden name, we put them together and we made this new name and all of a sudden that name has meaning behind it and this is what God is saying
when we name things in our life that God has done, it's a marker for the faithfulness of the Lord.
Oftentimes in the Old Testament as the children of Israel would be walking through the desert, the Lord would tell them set up a monument here. The Lord did something massive as we crossed through the Red Sea,
set up a monument. Lord, why would we set up a monument? So that one day when your great-grandkids come back
and they don't remember that we came to the Red Sea, you can say, hey, what are these stones here for?
Well, there was one day we were coming through here and the Egyptians were on our tail and we didn't know what was going to go and we thought, well, maybe we can run to the left and there's a mountain over there, we can't go that way.
We looked to the right and there's another mountain over here and we can't go that way and we looked forward and we said, the only thing we can do is go through this water but if we go through this water, we're going to die.
And in that moment, Moses lifted up his staff and the water parted and we walked through on dry ground and we know that God was the one that brought us through that river.
God was the one that brought us through that sea and so we set up this memorial here to remember and to remind ourselves that God is the one that does things.
When we name things, when we set up memorials, when we take pictures and we put them up in our house, we're telling the world that this is the testimony that God has done and the faithfulness that he has brought us through and we begin to say,
what is it in my life right now that God is working in my life, that he is bringing a testimony in my life so that I can show others the faithfulness of God. As Terry comes and prays for us, I want to ask us just a couple of things and I'm going to be done. I'm running over on time.
Hannah teaches us a couple of things. Hannah teaches us that we must love deeply.
Loving others in this world is something that the world doesn't have. And when we love so deeply, the world takes notice of that.
Not only do we need to love deeply, but we need to pray as if we are desperate for an answer. Praying so desperately that the world looks at us and says, you're out of your mind. Like, there is no way that's going to happen.
That is way too big of an ask. That is way too big for someone to accomplish that. Why are you even praying for it? And surrender our lives so completely
that no matter what comes of the answer, we're going to turn that answer back to the Lord and say, God, you saw fit for me not to need that. And I understand that and I'm going to trust in your sovereignty. I'm going to trust in your goodness.
Evaluating Our Own Prayers
I'm going to trust in your faithfulness and I'm going to surrender the answer completely to whatever you decide. Today, as we look at this mother's prayer and I've titled it a mother's prayer, it's not just a mother's prayer. It's a prayer that is modeled for each and every believer in here.
How can we learn to pray this way, to pray vulnerable and to pray as if God is the only one that can solve the problem in our life? This morning, church, what are you praying for? What are you praying for that's so deep in your heart?
I challenged you last year to put five names down on a piece of paper and to begin praying for opportunities for you to invite that person to church, invite that family to church,
invite that person that's struggling, that you know is struggling, to have an opportunity for you to share the gospel with them?
Have you continued to be praying for those five people? Have you continued to be saying, God, give me the opportunities
for me to interact with that person, to invite them into an opportunity to share the gospel with them? What in your life are you willing to surrender back to the Lord?
What in your life has such a hold of your life that if it were to be taken away, your entire identity will be taken away? Are you willing to say, God,
take that from me? Are you willing to surrender the thing that you are defined by? And does your prayer in your life, as you begin to examine it, does it reveal what you truly love?
Most of our prayers are for our kids and our loved ones because we love them. But when we have self-centered prayers, it begins to show who we truly care about and reveal who we truly are.
So this morning, as we think of our mother's prayer, I want you to evaluate your prayer.
As we walk through for the next several weeks, what it looks like when God's people pray,
how is that going to influence our life and how can we have a greater prayer life to when the world says, I need something done, I know that if I go ask that person, anytime they pray for it, they get an answer.
I got to go ask them because I know if I ask them, they're going to pray and something big is going to happen. Would that be our testimony
here in Ronda, here in Clingman, that we would be people that pray and when we pray, God hears our prayer. God remembers us.
He looks down at us and says, I'm going to divinely intervene in your life so that only the people that can look at this can say that God did it
Closing Prayer and Reflection
and it wasn't of ourselves. Father, we love you. We thank you for what you've done for us. Lord, help us to be so in tune with you and so connected with you that the world says that we look crazy sometimes. We do look crazy.
We pray to an invisible God that we don't see with human eyes but we know you're there. We know you sent your son to die for us so that we can have eternal life. God, help us to have a prayer life that matches Hannah, that matches Jesus' last prayers.
We looked at last week and the last two weeks as Jesus prayed in the garden, as he prayed for his disciples and he prayed for us that our prayer would be that same way, vulnerable and poured out before you.
Help us in this time of invitation that you would be glorified in your name we pray. Amen.
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