A Woman Who Kept Her Promise

In 1 Samuel chapter 1, 1 through 28, what we're introduced to is the story of the birth of a prophet named Samuel.

1 Samuel 1 · chapter mention

Samuel was used by God to usher in the monarchy of Israel.

So at the time, Israel had been governed by judges.

And God was going to use Samuel to usher in kingship, this monarchy rule of government for Israel.

And Samuel himself would anoint David as king.

And in David, we would actually have the coming of the Messiah.

Through his family line, we would have the coming of the eternal King, Jesus himself, whose kingdom would never end, whose rule and reign would see no end.

So we're going to be talking about the birth of Samuel.

But more importantly, we're going to be talking about his mother.

His mother's name is Hannah.

And Hannah has quite the story to unfold here in chapter one.

When we look at the beginning of the text and we start to dive into chapter one, what I want us to see in verses one through eight is a sorrow provoked and without pity.

A sorrow provoked and without pity.

As we come into the scene of this story, we're introduced to a man.

His name is El Kanah.

Now, El Kanah had two wives.

Now, one thing we have to understand is that the Bible itself is full of all kinds of different literary forms.

It's just telling the facts, right?

It's just like, hey, this is how it was.

You need to know this.

So, historical narrative, what we discover, El Kanah is a man who has two wives.

He has one wife named Penina.

She's assumed actually to be the second wife of El Kanah.

Now, see, what we understand through our understanding of the Old Testament and ancient history is that there was this kind of law in the land that if you married a woman and she was unable to produce children, or you together were unable to produce children, in the ancient times it was predominantly laid upon the responsibility of the woman, then what would happen is after 10 years of that situation, you were permitted to bring in another wife for the purpose of procreation, to be able to bear children.

And so we're assuming to some measure, but we get hints and clues throughout the story that Pinina was actually brought into relationship with him to bear children, specifically sons.

We get this clue right here in verse 8 that this was kind of the purpose in how many sons Pinnah actually bore to Elkanah.

Elkana says in verse 8, he says, Hannah, why do you weep?

Why do you not eat?

Why is your heart sad?

Am I not more than 10 sons?

And we're going to talk about how ridiculous of a statement that was from Elkanah but nonetheless, am I not more than 10 sons?

So we kind of get an insight that Penina bore many children for El Kanah, potentially up to ten sons that she bore for him.

The other wife, though, is named Hannah.

And she's assumed to be the first wife of Elkanah because there's this one statement within the chapter that in verse five it says that El Kanah loved her because he loved her.

Verse five, but Hannah had no children.

And so we can kind of start to paint the picture here that Elkana was a man who loved Hannah, and that he had brought her in to be his wife.

And after 10 years of probably struggle and sorrow and pain and trying to have children, that finally they brought in Penina as another wife to be able to actually bear children.

And so some of you can start to understand and get into the mind of Hannah, get into the sorrow that Hannah has felt in this time.

Can you imagine the family dynamics and tension that must have been going on there?

We get a bit of an understanding of it in verses six and seven.

It says this, read along with me if you have your Bibles.

And her rival used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb.

So it went on year by year.

As often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she used to provoke her.

Therefore, Hannah wept and would not eat.

Let's back up for just a second and get the whole scene that's being unfolded for us here.

You see, El Kanah is a Levite.

And Levites bore the primary responsibility of conducting worship unto God in the tabernacle.

They lived down in the city, but the tabernacle was located in the mountainside in a place called Shiloh.

And so being a Levite, Elkanah would annually make a pilgrimage to Shiloh, to the tabernacle, to worship the Lord and make sacrifices to him.

Now, more than likely, Hannah and Penina didn't really see each other throughout the year.

They could have lived in different areas, uh, they could have been spread very far apart.

But every year, as Elkanah led his family to worship God and make sacrifices to him at the tabernacle, their paths would always cross.

And every year, Penina provoked Hannah to great sorrow.

She irritated her.

We get a sense that during this pilgrimage was when the two wives' paths would be forced to cross, and every year Hannah would be provoked grievously, the Bible says by Penina to irritate her.

This word irritate literally means to cause thunder.

Can you imagine the way that Penina was actually bullying Hannah in such a way that thunder would erupt within her mind and heart?

Have you ever been in a situation where somebody got to you so bad and irritating you and provoking you that your mind and heart just felt like it was filled with thunder?

That's the language that the Bible is using, that Hannah had to endure this suffering, this ridicule.

And why would Pinnah do this?

It says very blatantly in the text, because the Lord had closed Hannah's womb.

This is why Pinnah had to try to find some value.

In fact, if we understand the story correctly, she was more than likely the second wife.

She was brought in simply to bear children.

Hannah was the one that El Kanah really loved.

She had to find something to grab onto to be able to provoke Hannah to such a degree.

You ever heard of the statement hurting people hurt people?

We can kind of get this sense that this was the story of Penina.

But let's take a moment and look at what the Bible communicates clearly about Hannah.

It says that the Lord closed her womb.

There's a lot of us with inside of our culture that would look at science and say, well, now that we've understood more and more, we can actually say all these different aspects of what creates infertility, or we can have clearer understanding.

We want to submit this to you.

We want to submit that even science is simply a discovery of the sovereign power of God.

Science alone has no power.

Science alone has no weight in its discovery.

It is simply a pursuit to discover the sovereign power of God's hand himself.

And they declare his glory in every discovery.

And so, even in this, while we might have some clarity of certain issues, the fact that God would do such a thing as in close a womb or open a womb, he is sovereign over every circumstance.

God had purpose in closing the womb of Hannah.

We're going to see it unfold here, as he does with every situation of him, of those who are his children.

God has a purpose in everything.

We can begin and relate to the sorrow of Hannah that caused her to be in such a state that she would weep and even refuse to eat.

She was a woman replaced or at least supplemented because she could not bear children.

She was provoked or bullied by this other woman because of her state.

She was a woman of vast sorrow that appears to be stuck in a situation and she would do anything to get out of it.

Hannah was entrapped in a personal hell of insufficiency, identity crisis, torment, and a thunderous voice telling her she was not enough.

We also get to see that El Kana, her husband, loved her very much, but failed to really understand her sorrow.

Can any women relate to that?

Men who try to fix your situation rather than to communicate pity to your situation, empathy, and compassion.

Right?

This is what Elkana does.

What does Elkana do as he sees her sorrow?

He throws a lot of meat at her.

How many of you have done?

You're going to probably do that this afternoon.

You're just going to throw a bunch of meat on the grill and be like, honey, everything's great.

So in the sacrificial meal, what would happen is that they would have a big sacrificial feast and they would eat as they were making sacrifices to worship God.

And it says in the text that El Kana would give Hannah double portions according to his other family because he loved her.

Can you imagine being Hannah sitting there?

You see Penana and her all of her children, her thunderous voice irritating you.

And what does Elkanah do?

He just throws a couple more stakes at you, like, hey baby, I love you.

This should be enough, right?

But then, but then El Kana does the classic, like uh uh husband move, where you just you just don't even understand what's going on inside of the heart of your wife.

And what does he do?

In verse 8, he tells her, in her sorrow and her weeping, am I not more than 10 sons to you?

And Hannah's like, No, you're not.

Actually, actually, you're worse right now.

So Hannah's sorrow was provoked by Penina, and it was without pity from Elkanah.

In summary of verses 9 through 18, what we see is that the promise of a poured out soul, the promise of a poured out soul.

On one of the early pilgrimages to worship and make sacrifice to the Lord, Hannah makes a promise to God.

Verse 10, we read this She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly.

And she vowed a vow and said, O Lord of hosts, if you will indeed look on the affliction of your servant and remember me, and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a son, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and no razor shall touch his head.

She was at the sacrificial feast and came to an end of her sorrow and despair, and she pours out her soul for the Lord, and she makes a promise to him.

As this meal was concluding, Hannah got up, she walked outside, she began to pray to God through the tears of her distress, and she makes this promise.

This child, if given to her by the Lord, we have to understand, would already be a Levite, meaning that in some ways he would already belong to the Lord.

He would have to serve and be trained and raised up to be able to offer the sacrifices and to mediate the worship of God in the tabernacle.

This would typically last from age 30 to age 50.

There'd be a 20-year service already set aside for him because he was being birthed into a Levite family.

But even more than that, Hannah makes a vow, not that he would just be consecrated as a Levite, but he would be consecrated as a Nazarite also.

This was a greater consecration.

This was a greater giving over to the Lord.

The vow of the Nazarite included abstinence from any product from a grapevine, signifying distance from all fleshly pleasures, taking no part in any mourning for the dead, nor to come near a dead body, because the dead show the corruption and fruit of sin.

Also it showed that the Nazarite had greater concerns than the ordinary joys and sorrows of life.

And they would also never cut their hair, because it was a public, visible sign to others of the vow that they would take.

Hannah is promising to the Lord that if he would give her a son, then she would give him wholly and completely back to him.

She demonstrates for us the stewardship of children.

They don't belong to us.

They are lent to us to give holy to God.

Here in the story, things get a little weird.

Hannah comes out of the feast, and the Bible uses this language as she's praying, but she's not really saying words.

Her mouth is kind of moving, but she's not really speaking anything.

Have you ever seen a person like that kind of walking around the streets or something, their mouth's moving, but they're not really saying anything?

You kind of think something's up, right?

And so there was this priest uh who thought something was up.

His name was Eli.

Eli was kind of semi-retired.

His two very uh uh uh bad, wicked sons uh were being the actual Levite priests in the tabernacle at the time.

He kind of finds himself sitting outside, and he sees Hannah, and he accuses her of being drunk.

It states this as he as she continued praying before the Lord, Eli observed her mouth.

Hannah was speaking in her heart, only her lips moved, and her voice was not heard.

Therefore, Eli took her to be a drunken woman.

I love Hannah's answer to this semi-retired priest.

She says, No, my Lord, I am a woman troubled in spirit.

I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord.

Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman.

For all along I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation.

I want us to pay close attention to what Hannah said there.

She had been praying out of what?

Her great anxiety and vexation.

Anxiety, this intense, excessive, and persistent worry, vexation, this grievance, this troubled and perplexed spirit.

What did she do with these emotions?

What did she do with these thoughts and even physical responses that she was having?

She poured them out.

She poured them out to the Lord.

It was the gut-wrenching, heart-pounding, palm-sweating, panic-inducing realities of her situation that brought her to a place of emptying herself out.

And so her soul laid as barren as her womb, empty before the Lord, whom he alone could do something with.

And in this pouring out of soul, her trembling, stammering lips released the promise, God, if you give me a son, I'll give him back to you.

I love what Hannah did there.

Our response, look, anxiety is nothing new.

Anxiety is at least, I don't know, I'm 10,000 years old.

Vexation, the worry of life that causes even physical responses.

What did Hannah do?

She poured them out to the Lord.

Is that our initial response to such things?

When we have anxiousness of heart, when we have vexation of spirit, man, I think the church is trending into a way where we gravitate toward psychotherapeutic measures first.

Where we gravitate toward the medication of science first.

And we don't see a lot in the culture of the church that in these worries, in these fears, in these anxieties and vexations, that are do we pour out our soul before God?

He alone can do anything about your situation.

We have to understand that if our theology is good, and if we understand the narrative of the scriptures, God alone can actually do something about your situation.

He is sovereign over everything that we encounter in this life.

I'm not stating that those things are bad.

I'm not stating that those things shouldn't be certain responses for us as the church.

I don't want to shame anyone who has uh pursued answers or uh solutions through those measures.

I just want to ask one simple question.

Did it come before or after we poured out our soul to the Lord and said, God, you've got to move.

You've got to move, or I have no other hope.

This should be the response to us as Christians who actually believe the truths of the scripture.

Did we sing this song in vanity this morning?

Great is your faithfulness to me.

No matter what, I won't be moved because what?

I'm standing on your promises.

Jesus, my anchor, holds me.

Is the theology, even in the songs that we sing, playing any real validity to the circumstances of our life?

Or do we just sing them here and the words fall to the ground like rocks, and we walk out and we listen to the ways of the world for how we should live our life?

In verses 19 through 28, uh we see a promised child and a promise kept.

A promised child and a promise kept.

After they had finished worshiping the Lord, uh Elkanah, the Bible says, knew his wife.

Like many of you, knew your wives during lockdown, and we celebrate their dedications.

That's the language that the Bible uses.

He knew her.

And it says this the Lord remembered Hannah.

The Lord remembered her.

Now, isn't this strange language?

Did God forget Hannah?

Was he on his turn to be like, oh yeah, I'm supposed to give that woman a baby?

No, I don't think that's what God did.

That's not the language that the Bible's trying to communicate to us.

When Scripture says that the Lord remembers something, it means that he's acting according to his covenant promise.

That he's intervening to rescue those who are suffering and downcast.

God was both rescuing the afflicted and remembering his covenant promise to her and to his people.

He rescued Hannah from the sorrow she felt over her barrenness.

And more significantly, in giving Samuel to Hannah, God was remembering his covenant promises to his people.

That through Samuel, a king would sit on the throne of Israel.

And through that king, a king would sit on the throne of all creation.

This child, Samuel, was a child of promise.

Not just to Hannah, but to us.

God would use Samuel to usher in the monarchy of Israel, and from David would come the king eternal.

But the story doesn't end with just a promised child.

That's what's so important about 1 Samuel as we look.

Hannah didn't just get what she wanted, and then the story ends.

It doesn't end with a promised child, it ends with a promise kept.

As O'Connor was preparing to head out for his yearly pilgrimage to Shiloh to worship and make sacrifices to God, Hannah chose to stay behind until she had weaned Samuel.

Then she brought Samuel to Shiloh and presented him to Eli, that same priest who she encountered the year before, that accused her of being a drunk and useless woman.

And here's what she said to him: Oh my Lord, as you live, my Lord, I am the woman who was standing here in your presence, praying to the Lord for this child, I prayed.

And the Lord has granted me my petition that I made to him.

Therefore, I have lent him to the Lord.

As long as he lives, he is lent to the Lord.

This language of lent means dedication.

What we symbolically did today dedicate our children to the Lord.

She's saying, God, if you give Give me a son, I will give him back to you.

He would be raised to know God, to worship him, and to have his life physically marked as belonging distinctly to him.

We see here the divine correlation between the promised child and the promise kept by Hannah.

I want to submit to us that God remembered her because he knew she would not forget her promise.

And so as we summarize this chapter in 1 Samuel chapter 1, I want us to walk away with this truth.

1 Samuel 1 · chapter mention

The gift of children is for the glory of God.

The gift of children is for the glory of God.

All of the gifts that God gives us are gifts given so that we might steward them well for his glory and the good of others.

Everything that God gives us our finances, our resources, our jobs, our relationships, and our children.

They are gifts given to us by God that we might steward them for his glory in the good of others.

They're gifts given to be given back.

Placing her boy in the care of the priest Eli, Hannah returned home again with empty arms.

As we read into chapter 2, Hannah sings this song, this prayer, praising God as the one who delivered her, as the one who rescued her and redeems her and gave her this child.

And then it says that in chapter two, after she ends this song that she sings to the Lord, that she literally hands Samuel over to Levi, and she walked home empty-handed.

Can you imagine that?

This child promised, this one who longed for, this one whose soul was vexed, the anxiety that gripped her, the thunder that raged in her heart and mind.

She finally had him.

She nursed him.

She weaned him.

She gave him back to God.

Even though Hannah would see Samuel each year at the feast, it would have been heart-rending to leave the son that she had cared for every day for three years.

And yet she knew from the very beginning, she uttered those words after the meal, that that day would come.

Samuel was never hers to keep.

We want to live in a life and operate in such false realities.

But if we're honest with ourselves, no child is ours to keep.

Our children are gifts given.

And we have an obligation as parents who claim the name of Christ, who submit to his lordship, to give them to the Lord for his glory.

We cannot lay claim to their lives.

Yet often we fail to understand this truth and we fail to function within it.

We tend to forsake our responsibility to disciple, train, raise up children to know the Lord, the works of his hand, and the promises that he has made for us through Jesus.

We fail to see the role that we're called to play in the life of our children.

Stewards of God's good gifts that work to raise him for his glory.

I feel like there's two different ways that we tend to do this.

There may be more, but this is kind of the top two that I was working through this week in preparing the storm.

And the first way is we lend our children to the glory of others.

We lend our children to the glory of others.

One of the primary ways we forsake our calling and responsibility as parents is that we give our children over to others to develop their worldview, their ethic, their philosophies, their foundation of truth.

And I see two primary ways that we do this.

The first way is that we hand over our children to be made disciples of pop culture.

How do we do this?

Screens are the number one way your child will be discipled.

According to research that shows that the average child spends daily, daily, seven and a half hours in front of a screen, you are lending your child over to another individual to be discipled.

The best access that pop culture has to your children is through a device that will teach them what to believe, the worldview that they should have, the ethics that they should carry, the truth that they should believe and stand upon.

The content absorption of children is unreal.

We live in a world where people are promoted and compensated to create content after content after content.

And that's all that they do all day long.

And they are feeding that to our children.

The world has a voice and it is loud and it is thunderous.

And we are giving our children over to it.

As parents, I get it.

We love the way screens can almost magically absorb our child's attention.

It gives us a few moments of quiet.

It gives us stillness.

It gives us an opportunity to breathe sometimes.

I get it.

But if we're honest with ourselves, we're continually allowing for the influence and discovery of thoughts and ideas that are at enmity with the truth of God.

And worse yet, we rarely, if ever, work to navigate those ideas through developing critical thinking and having honest conversations in our homes.

What I mean by that is this you're not going to be able to keep the fullness of the world's worldview, ethic, philosophy out of your home.

You can't do that.

Don't try to.

Don't invite it in to lay in bed with your child.

But you can't just keep your home as a fortress that is unpenetrable.

But what you have to do as parents is you have to walk with your children through those ideas that they're being taught, that they're discovering through this content.

You have to have honest, hard conversations with your child at any age.

In the Ramas home, there is no subject that's taboo.

Everything's on the table.

I don't care how old you are.

I don't care if you think they're ready.

Let me, when you think they're not ready, the world has already been trying to get them ready.

We have countless conversations about what the world wants to make our children believe and how it stacks up with the truth and promises of God's word.

Why?

I don't want to just protect my children.

I want to teach and train and disciple my children how to think critically, how to discern truth from air, and how to send them into a vicious culture that wants to consume them, but they will be standing on God's truth.

We can't keep the philosophies of this world from our children, but we can mediate it.

And we must submit them to the Word of God when they find their way into our living rooms.

How foolish are we when we invite them in to take up residence in the hearts of our children?

The second way we do this too often is through our education system.

We hand our children over to be raised, influenced, and developed by others.

Let me throw some thoughts for you.

Your children, if they go to school, will spend 14,277 hours with educators.

14,277 hours with educators.

They'll spend 55,803 hours with you.

Now that's being generous.

All I did was take off sleep time.

I didn't take off your work time, the time that you tell them to get away from you because you can't take another moment of their presence.

The times that you have them do chore or any other stuff, right?

So that's being radically generous.

But there's a reality where we are handing over our children at times to educators to train and teach our children.

Now, let me say something very clear.

At Sacred Mission, we are not homeschool only, we are not private school only, we are not anti-public school, we are not any of these things.

What we are is that parents are the principles of their home.

Fundamentally, you are responsible primarily for the education of your children, what they are learning, how they are processing it, and how you cause them to see it in light of the truth of God's authoritative word.

Often, because of our time at home is filled with screens and no real connection, we fail to walk through the things that they're actually learning or the ideas that are being shared with them.

We don't equip them to discern truth from air.

We don't develop a biblical worldview in them to be able to navigate this world in righteousness for the glory of God.

If you're seeing content and videos and news articles about what educators are doing to your children or what they want to do to your children, let me tell you something.

This light switch didn't flip on suddenly.

This has been decades of a culture where educators have been convinced through evidence that parents do not care about what their kids are learning or how good they're doing in school, or maybe they only care about what grades they're getting.

They don't care about the content because when they get home, they don't have a family, they have an empty shell of residence.

They've discovered that over decades.

It wasn't a switch that got flipped on suddenly.

You're just seeing the fruit of it being talked out loud.

And we have many educators in this room.

God be gracious to them, bless them.

Many educators who love children, who love God, and who find themselves now in a culture where they stand alone and isolated because of the convictions that they hold.

Listen, I don't care what you do education-wise with your children, public school, private school, homeschool.

Parents, we have to function as the principals of our children.

We have to help navigate what they're learning.

We have to ask questions at the dinner table when we're sharing meals.

What did you learn today?

What were conversations that were had?

What kind of things sparked your interest?

Or maybe something you heard today that you've never heard before.

Questions about things.

Well, Tommy said something, okay, let's talk about what Tommy said.

What does that mean?

Here's what that means.

Here's what that looks like.

That's not in truth of God's word.

That's not submitted to what God desires for us, is it?

No, it's not.

That's right.

Tommy, let's pray for Tommy.

Our homes have to be places of education themselves.

Our homes have to be places where the family is brought together so that our children can be raised for the glory of God.

We have to stop as parents handing our children over to others for their own glory because they don't love your kids.

They love the views they get on YouTube.

They love the views they get on TikTok and other social media platforms.

That's what they love.

Your educators don't love your children like you should or you do.

I don't want to downplay the affection that educators have for their students.

I have seen it be beautiful and tremendous and deep.

But those are your children that God gave to you to steward for his glory, not theirs.

You have the responsibility to raise them up under his word, to disciple them.

They don't.

Too often we hand our children over to others that they may develop and train them for their own glory.

The home should be a place where the worship of God and the learning of his truth starts.

It should be a place where the fullness of our lives, our head, our heart, and our hands are developed to bring him glory.

Some of us, though, we keep our children for the glory of self.

We keep our children to the glory of self.

Often we treat our children simply as reflections of ourselves.

We don't work to see the glory of God displayed in their lives.

We work to see the glory of self-image displayed in them.

They become vessels of our own glory, of our own pursuit.

We see our children as reflections of the image of us.

And so we strive to make sure that they represent us well.

We get angry with them when they misrepresent our image, don't we?

We get angry and frustrated most with our children.

I would submit to us, and this is a condition in my own heart, I get angry most with my children when they misrepresent my image.

And the problem on the flip side of that is I praise them more when they bless my image.

What am I teaching my children?

To be conform to me.

You see, we train up our children more to avoid the things that make us angry and to pursue the things that make us happy.

This makes them fundamentally children who then work for our glory.

We need to recenter our homes, church.

Not to be about our happiness, but to be about God's glory.

Meals that are centered on his provision and gift of family.

Time together focused on his goodness and mercy that he demonstrates to us.

Learning together of the gospel and his promises to us, resting together in his finished work.

Our homes should be homes full of individuals collectively aiming to see God's glory developed in them.

You see, the gift of children is not for the glory of others or for the glory of self, but it's for the glory of God.

We are given children that we might give them back to Him.

And the beauty of the gospel for us is that God gives us His Son that we might be brought to Him.

God gives us His Son that we might be brought to Him.

It is only in the giving of Jesus for us that we are able to know and live for the glory of God.

Jesus became the lint son that we might become forever children.

All of our efforts to raise our children for the glory of God would be futile if the God of glory himself had not become a child for us.

It is in the life of Jesus, fully lived for the glory of God, that we can be brought into the blessed presence of the Father's glory.

Jesus is the Son promised.

Jesus is the Son lent.

John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave.

It is in this giving of his own son for us that we can be made children of him.

And Hebrews 2.10 shows us that this promised Son brings many sons to the glory of the Father.

See in the way in which Christ carries us, brings us to Him.

Hebrews 2.10, for it was fitting that He, being Jesus, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.

Bringing many sons to glory.

If we are to live for the glory of God, if we are to steward our children for the glory of God, we can only do so because the God of glory brings us in to his eternal family.

So what should we do?

I would say this church, we need to work to be faithful, not flawless.

We would work to be faithful, not flawless.

Our ultimate hope in this world, in this life, is not in how good we parent.

I don't want you walking out of here feeling uh beat up or ashamed or helpless.

Uh today, God can do something with your efforts today.

If you've not been trying, then let me tell you something.

God will do something with your efforts and trying.

I believe that there is grace in pursuit.

And as we fail and as we mess up, God's grace covers us.

And if you've been trying and trying and trying and you're tired, church, rest.

Rest and believe that God alone is our hope.

It's not in how good we parent.

We are right to strive and to work to be a parent who is faithful to the calling of stewarding our children for the glory of God.

But without the power of God and the hope of the gospel, all of our efforts would be in vain.

So we don't fix our eyes on our success or on our failures, but on Jesus, who by his power will bring even our own children to glory.

Let's pray.