From Grief to Glory: Hanna - 1 Samuel - with Phil Whittall

Welcome to the Grace Church Weekly Podcast. We're an international church right

in the heart of Stockholm, Sweden.

Each week, we share a message that's rooted in the faithful teaching of God's

Word and open to the vibrant work of the Holy Spirit among His people.

Here's this week's message.

All right, good afternoon, everyone. Good to see you. My name is Phil.

Welcome to Grace. We're glad you're here. If you're here for the first time,

we're about to start a new series on 1 Samuel, the rise and fall of kings.

So if you have a Bible with you, we'll love you to open it up to 1 Samuel chapter 1.

1 Samuel 1 · chapter mention

We'll have a reading a little bit later during the talk.

The books of 1 and 2 Samuel chart one of the most pivotal periods in Israel's history.

And what stands out is not only the rapid change, but the focus on key characters.

Samuel, Saul, Jonathan, David, each one of them rises and falls.

And there are deep and powerful lessons from both their triumphs and their failures.

We see anointing followed by tragedy.

We see zeal and foolishness. We see power and weakness.

It's a story that exposes the heights and the depths of the human heart.

And in the rise of David, it begins to tell or move the story on towards the

coming of our true king, Jesus Christ.

So a thousand years before Christ, this book charts the most significant political

shift in Israel's history.

With the rise of Israel's great rivals, the Philistines, Israel moves from a

confederacy of tribes to a unified nation.

They gain borders, a capital, and for good and ill, kings.

There's wild and fearsome Samuel. He's the last of the judges.

He's a prophet, a priest, and a kingmaker.

But Samuel's also a forerunner of John the Baptist, one who prepares the way

for the Lord's anointed.

And the first Samuel also sees the loss and the recovery of the Ark of the Covenant,

the rise and rapid fall of the house of Saul, the great friendship between David and Jonathan,

David's crazy success and rise to fame, including perhaps the most famous jewel

in human history, David and Goliath.

And it ends with David as a mercenary on the run.

And it's an incredibly romantic story of how a shepherd boy rises to become

Israel's greatest king.

So 1 Samuel has so much drama.

If they kind of shifted it into modern times, this would be like one of the

ready-made for Netflix.

But our series is not focusing so much on the events themselves,

but on the people in the middle of them.

People like you and me with successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses,

and they struggle with anxieties, parenting, grief, love, friendship, failure, rejection.

They stumble and trip as they seek to follow God.

But before we meet kings and warriors the

book opens not on a battlefield or in

a throne room but with a home and

a woman in great pain the story begins with hannah her husband elkanah he's

a man of some status he's devout he's pedigree he's got wealth and he loves

hannah And as his first wife,

Hannah should have felt blessed.

But she does not.

Nothing marked a woman then more deeply than the failure to have children.

They were quite literally your future, your inheritance, your treasure.

So Elkanah took a second wife.

Peninnah, one of those ways of saying it.

And she gave Elkanah lots of children and gave Hannah lots of grief.

We've seen this story before in scripture. Hagar has Ishmael and looks down on Sarah.

Leah has children and fights for her husband's affections because Jacob loved

Rachel who had no children.

And for some, reading the story of Hannah, it's not an ancient story, it's your story.

We want children, but for lack of, for whatever reason, lack of a good husband

or a good man, or for some other reason, it hasn't happened yet.

The absence of children in your life causes you pain and causes you grief.

But the stigma of having no children is not the only burden Hannah has to contend with.

She has to contend with Elkanah's mouthy other wife.

It says, Canina provoked and irritated her.

Verse six, anyone in your life who provokes and irritates you?

There we go. We're getting relatable straight away. Oh yeah,

I can think of some people who provoke and irritate me.

Maybe because she knew that her husband loved Hannah more, verse 5 and verse

8, and despite her many children, which she's given to her husband,

for whatever reason, she's a constant thorn in Hannah's flesh.

And as you read the story, you notice that she's religious enough, this second wife.

She's going to sacrifice year after year.

But her outward observances have not led to inward change.

She's not, it would seem, a kind and compassionate person, at least to Hannah.

She's a rival and she's a pain in the neck.

Friends, it's possible to show up to church, to sing the songs and still be mean to someone.

Well, God doesn't want polished worshippers with hard hearts.

God says he doesn't care about sacrifices that aren't linked to mercy.

Hosea 6, Matthew 9.

Hannah's suffering, though, it's not just a moment.

Hannah was in a season of grief. It says, verse 7, chapter 1,

verse 7, that it went on year after year.

You know, sometimes, maybe some of you, you're carrying burdens far longer than

you ever thought you would have to.

You wonder, when is this burden? When am I going to get to put this burden down?

When am I going to have to stop carrying this heavy weight and this heavy load?

And the longer it goes on, the more that sometimes it can wear you down.

And Hannah is being worn down.

She's not eating, verse 8. She's deeply distressed, verse 9.

She's weeping bitterly, verse 9.

And when you have no other place to go, even when your home for Hannah seems

to scream failure at you, when your heart is broken and you're in the dust?

Where do you turn? Where do you turn?

That's a great question for anyone, whether you're religious or not.

When life is at its absolute hardest, where will you turn?

Hannah turns to God. She rises, goes to the temple, It's the tabernacle.

The ark and the tabernacle have been in a place called Shiloh.

It's not in Jerusalem. It's a place called Shiloh. And it's been there since the days of Joshua.

And by this time, it has a semi-permanent kind of feel to it.

There's doorposts and there's like walls and things are being built around the tabernacle.

And so she goes there and she begins to pray.

And her prayers are silent and they're aching.

The kind of groans that only God would understand.

And there's a priest and judge, Eli. We're going to look at him next week.

And he's old and short-sighted.

And he has trouble telling the difference between drunkenness and prayer.

It's a confusion we run into again in Pentecost.

And he accuses Hannah of drinking too much.

It's insult added to injury.

She's gone to seek God in great pain, and the priest says, you're drunk.

Maybe you've been hurting, and someone mistook your pain for something else,

and their words brought you no comfort and no help.

So Hannah, she's provoked by a rival.

She's scorned by a priest. Hannah is troubled in spirit.

And verse 15 says she defiantly pours out her soul to God.

What a poetic phrase. She pours out her soul to God.

She's been praying out of great anguish and grief. Verse 16.

And do you know what? God is okay with that.

God is not a God that you cannot go to him in your weakness and in your anguish

and in your sorrow and in your grief.

In fact, God welcomes you when you need to pour out your soul to him.

Because God does not turn away the downcast. He does not turn away the aggrieved.

He does not turn away the heavy laden and the burdened.

God did not turn away Hannah, and that means that God will not turn away you.

Hannah's longing for a child is all-consuming.

There's a danger here for her. There's a danger here that her heart will cling

to the one thing and make it everything.

The one thing. Is that a case?

Sometimes we can have so much in life, but we're fixated on the one thing we

don't have, and that makes us miserable.

Hannah had so much, actually. But the one thing she did not have was causing her real pain.

Centuries later, Jesus challenges his heroes and us that it's the gospel that

we need to prize above all other things.

The one thing that we should want above all else.

The pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in a field, the thing we sell

everything for and leave to follow. It's Jesus and the gospel.

But Hannah, she avoids the danger.

And her prayer, her first prayer, is remarkable. She really wants a son.

And if God grants her a request, Hannah promises that her son,

she makes a vow on behalf of her son. Her son will live under a Nazarite vow,

meaning there's a few rules.

One of the most obvious ones being wouldn't have his hair cut.

John the Baptist would be one. Samson would be another one.

And the son would be given back to God to serve him all his life.

Hannah will not let herself be defeated by idols and surrenders even her deepest desire to God.

You give me a son, I'll give him back to you.

You give me my heart's desire, I'll offer it to you.

Which is why in the Bible, dedications tend to have a little bit of weight to them.

It means giving something or someone, I'm dedicating it to the Lord.

So now before you all drop your kids off at my house after a rough week and

say, we've dedicated them to the Lord, here you go.

Not so fast. I'm on to you.

But as parents, we share the prayer of Hannah.

She prays that our children would belong to the Lord, would be made over to the Lord.

And it's often the most heartfelt and important of all prayers that a Christian parent ever prays.

If right now you have children that are not walking with God,

let's ask God to remember our prayers.

That's what Hannah does. Lord, remember your servant and may the life of our

child be made over to you, to walk with you.

Maybe we just need to, some of you are just going to pray right now because

you've got a child that you know is not walking with Christ.

We want him to belong and to be made over to God.

Hannah's prayer also shows her faith. She says, Lord of hosts,

God of the angels and on creation,

the God who heard the affliction of her people when they were in bondage in

Egypt, that also that this God, this great God of miracles and God of the nation, is also her God.

And this God who listened to Moses would listen to her.

The God who saw them out of their bondage would see her in her bondage.

And as Christians, we have even more confidence than Hannah because through

Christ, we're told we can boldly approach the same throne of grace.

In the end of this, of her praying at the temple, asking God,

Eli sends her on her way with a blessing.

It's probably sort of a bit of a religion, from Eli's side, a little bit of a, I'll pray for you.

You know, if someone says, yeah, I'll pray for you, or be blessed,

and he gives her a blessing.

And I don't know if Eli has faith, but Hannah does.

In that moment of blessing, Hannah has faith. She believes God has heard her.

She rises in peace. Her faith is no longer sad. She begins to eat.

All the evidence is she's now trusting God. God has heard me.

God has heard me in my grief.

It will be okay. She has that confidence.

And the next morning as a family, they return to the temple and worship God, verse 19.

And I suspect that if Penina is taunting Hannah now,

that her words no longer hurt her the way they did just a few hours before because

Hannah knows God has heard me.

So back home, husbands and wives do what husbands and wives do and Hannah ends up pregnant.

And her son is named Samuel, which means God has heard.

And Hannah takes a pause from going to the temple.

Year after year, they were going as pilgrimage to the ark, to the tabernacle.

Hannah takes a pause.

This is precious time with her first son, but she's made a vow and she intends to keep it.

Even though one day she will have more sons and daughters, it's Samuel who is

the special gift from the Lord.

And when Samuel has grown a little, to maybe three, she will go with him to the tabernacle.

She will walk with him holding his hand. There's a little three-year-old.

There are some of you who've got boys that age, and you'll walk with them.

And she'll walk with Samuel.

She'll walk with him to the tabernacle, but she will walk home alone.

It will be old priest Eli who will watch over her son, not her.

Soon she will no longer see him every day, but maybe just once a year.

And she will take him a new robe each year that she's lovingly spent that last year making.

Every stitch a prayer, every thread showing mother loves her son.

And every year a reminder my child belongs to God One day all parents must let

their children go, trust unto the Lord,

that will require faith but Hannah did it when her son was just small, very small.

So in the middle of what I can only imagine is a heart about to be absolutely

wrenched, saying goodbye to her precious and promised firstborn son, Hannah begins to pray.

And this second prayer of Hannah's stands alongside some of the great prayers

in Scripture, like Miriam's and Mary's.

In fact, Hannah's prayer and Mary's prayer, which you'll find in Luke,

the early part of Luke's gospel, worth putting them side by side and comparing them, very similar.

It's theologically rich and it's saturated with a deep understanding and meditation

on who God is and what God is like.

And I'm going to invite Yemi to come and read it to us now.

In Hungary, my heart rejoices in the Lord. The Lord has made me sure.

Now I have an answer for my enemies. I rejoice because you rested me.

No one is holy like the Lord. There is no one besides you.

There is no rock like our Lord.

Stop acting so proud by unity. Don't speak with such arrogance.

For the Lord is a boy who knows what you can do.

He will judge your actions.

The wall of the mighty is now broken. A third of the stone walls are now strong.

Those who were well fed are now starving, and those who were starving are now poor.

The childless woman now has seven children, and the woman with many children wastes her way.

The Lord gives both death and life, and He brings some down to the grave, or raises others up.

The Lord needs some poor and others rich.

He brings some down and lifts the poor from the dust and the needy from the garbage dump.

He sets them among the praises, placing them in seats of order.

For all the earth is the Lord's, and he has set the world in order.

He will protect his faithful ones, but the wicked will disappear in darkness.

No one will succeed by strengthening them.

Those who fight against the Lord will be shouted.

He thunders against them from heaven. The Lord jumps us throughout the earth.

He gives power to His King.

He increases the strength of His anointing.

Thank you, Femi. Hannah's prayer starts with her heart, mouth.

She says, my heart, my heart rejoices. My mouth will boast.

Hannah says, I will praise God.

And then she begins to proclaim that there's no one like her God.

He's the creator. He's a sovereign king.

He's a holy God who raises up and brings down, who brings life and death,

and who cares deeply for the poor and needy.

This God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble.

Can't help but thinking she's thinking of the other wife at this moment.

But it's a story, this is a theme which resonates all through Scripture.

Jesus said, blessed are the meek.

Mary, after being told that she will give birth to a child, says,

God fills the hungry with good things. These are similar prayers.

And Hannah doesn't just pray like, thank you, God, for giving me a chant.

There's so much more to it. She recognizes that God's answer to her is a sign

of a much greater salvation.

The small answers that God gives us to prayer show us not simply that God cares

about the little things, which he does, but also that God will be at work in

much, much bigger things. which he is.

Have you ever wondered, what is it with God and women who can't have children?

There's several stories key here, all through scripture.

Abraham and Sarah, Jacob,

even Mary, miraculous birth. There's women who are having children who weren't supposed to.

Why is that? Why are they happening? Why is this story kind of on repeat throughout

Scripture, throughout the stories that we have?

Maybe it's that the Lord is constantly reminding us that his plan of salvation

and grace and redemption will be a work of his, not ours. This is something

that will start with God.

It's supernatural in origin.

It's God-ordained, not a work of art, of humanity.

It's true. When we're helpless and hopeless, we turn to God.

And God loves those who rely on him for their strength.

It's also the gospel. we're unable to bring life to ourselves it's God who need

we need God to give us life.

And also, God loves the brokenhearted. God loves those who are tired and weary and heavy laden.

And because this is a story of God loving Hannah, it is also a reminder to us

that when we're weary, when we're laid low, God can reach down to us too.

So what can we take? Three things that we can take from Hannah's story.

Three things that may be for us who might find ourselves one moment in time

in situations similar to Hannah's.

Firstly, go to God with your grief.

Hannah did not act in bitterness towards God. She was bitter.

It says her soul was in bitterness, but she wasn't bitter towards God.

In her bitterness, she went to God and poured out her soul to him.

She kept on going to God.

Sometimes bitterness, our disappointment, our sense that God has let us down

means that we are bitter towards him.

In this moment, Hannah is not bitter towards God, but goes to him with her bitterness

and says, you are my hope.

Friends, we don't, our hope is not that God will keep trial and testing days

away from us, but that when we have difficult days, when we have downcast souls,

even there, God will meet with us.

In the middle of them, God will find us.

So we go to God with our sorrows and griefs, and we have someone in Jesus who

was, we sang it, a man of sorrows.

We sang it, man of sorrows, familiar with sorrows and acquainted with grief.

That's what scripture tells us. Jesus is someone who understands those things

and can also bear them for us.

Jesus said, all you, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Secondly, so firstly, we go to God with our grief and our sorrows.

Secondly, we praise God in his victory.

When God gave Hannah victory, she praised God. She didn't forget.

Jesus tells a story of Jesus healed 10 lepers and only one of them came back to say, thank you.

You know, sometimes we get something amazing and we just somehow,

this little switch in our brain was like, well, I probably deserved that.

That was probably my doing after all.

Or life just carries on and we just think, oh yeah, I will get around to it.

I will get around to thanking God.

And before you know it, months have passed and you forget.

Hannah did not forget. She did not forget what she had vowed to the Lord. Her yes was her yes.

She praised God. She thanked God. She declared his great victory.

She declared he is great.

He is the one who has delivered me, and he is the one I'm praising.

So even in our suffering, we're told we can count it joy.

So we're people who praise God because he's creator, king, judge,

redeemer, because he's heard Hannah and he hears us.

He answers, and we praise him.

Thirdly, trust God when you have to give radically, when you have to give sacrificially,

when your giving is a sacrifice.

Can anyone doubt that Hannah's giving of her son to God was anything other than a sacrifice?

A sacrifice with praise and thanks.

The Lord honors those who honor him.

Hannah had no children and God gave her a son.

She gave him then, so God gives to Hannah.

Hannah gives back to God.

And then God outgives and gives back to Hannah.

Ends up that she has three more sons and two daughters.

You cannot, not now, not ever, out-give God.

Can't be done. In fact, I think maybe it's the only thing in Scripture that

we are told to test God. Test me in this.

Malachi 3 verse 10, it says, talking about financial giving,

Malachi 3:10

bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there would be food in my house.

Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty.

And see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much

blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.

You can't outgive God.

But we are called sometimes to give sacrificially, to a point where it costs,

where we would miss the thing that we are giving.

We're not called to common sense giving.

We're called to generous giving. And that, you might not be called to give away

your children, not even, we're dedicating them to the Lord on a bad day.

You're not even, but you might be called. Jesus spoke to the rich young ruler

and said, sell all you have and come follow me.

We might be called to give beyond what rational pension planning suggests is a wise amount.

You might be called to give in some other ways, giving of your home,

to share with someone who has no home, giving you food in a place at your table

to people who have no food,

to give of your time to people that would consume all of it, to give of your energy,

to give of yourself because God said, give, test me in this, test me in this.

Hannah gave all she had at that moment she didn't know when she gave Samuel

back to God that God would give her five more children she didn't know the end

of the story when she gave but she gave all she had,

God repaid her in full and in kind,

so from Hannah's tear-stained prayers came Samuel Samuel who anointed David.

Samuel, who established and saw the establishment of a kingdom with a king.

Samuel, prophet, judge, priest. Hannah didn't know any of that.

But she gave. And from her prayers, through Samuel comes David,

and through David comes Jesus.

The king who lifts the lowly and fills the hungry with good things.

Let's pray.

Father thank you for the witness and the testimony of Hannah what an amazing woman of great faith,

thank you for Hannah's for this story of Hannah trusting you in her grief,

having faith in a moment of blessing of her incredible radical generosity and sacrifice,

thank you for the way that you met with someone who was broken-hearted and you lifted them up,

thank you for that encouragement that we see in scripture because we trust that

what you could do for Hannah, you could do for us.

And that through Jesus Christ, you will help us and meet with us,

and you will lift us from the dust, and you will fill our hearts with good things.

That you will satisfy us in wonderful ways.

And so I would just do pray, and I want to pray, Lord, if there are children

in our lives, if there are people, brothers, sisters,

children who we know, who we love deeply, and we're not walking with you, we know.

Lord, we pray, would they come to belong to the Lord?

Would they be made over to you? We ask them.

We name them now before you and say, Lord, have mercy. Speak to them.

Reveal yourself to them again. Maybe bring to mind a childhood story of you.

Maybe let them catch a moment where they find themselves praying unexpectedly.

May you bring them back gently. Bring them back, Lord, we pray,

so they would know and love you.

So they would know you too to be the one who raises up and brings life.

Jesus, we lift up these unloved and precious ones to you.

And help us, Lord, to not look as the world looks on the things that you've

given, but to have faith when the things you call us to give and to give sacrificially.

Help us with whatever that is to trust

you to knowing that you are good you

are good for all that we might give and that we can never out give you

thank you for your great generosity and your great kindness and your unending

favor and blessing on those that honor you we praise you for that in jesus name

we pray we hope that this sermon has encouraged you if you'd like to learn more about us,

visit us online at gracechurch.se.

Thanks for listening.