Walking With God | Hannah

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

1 Samuel 1:9

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 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.