1 and 2 Samuel: Prayer of the Heart | Associate Pastor: Matt Armstrong

Uh, today we start a new sermon series that will take us uh into June and into the summer on the book of 1st and 2 Samuel.

We break it into two, but it's really one long book.

This is one of my favorite Old Testament books.

If you've never read 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel, I highly recommend you do so while we go through this series.

This is this book tells the amazing story of Israel's return to Yahweh after years of kind of a downward spiral recorded in the book of Judges.

If you've ever read the book of Judges, if you're not familiar with it, it can be kind of confusing because things just seem to get worse and worse and worse, and then the book ends, and you're like, wow, all right.

What's next?

Well, what's next is the book of 1 Samuel.

Uh and it centers around two beautiful, godly men, the uh Samuel, who we'll hear about his birth this morning, and then David.

Um Samuel is full of incredible uh iconic Old Testament moments.

The rise and fall of King Saul, David and Goliath, David and Jonathan, David and his mighty men, uh David's run from Saul, the Ark of the Covenant, the rise, decline, and fall of King David himself, and the transition to King Solomon.

So I'm very excited for what's to come.

Let's continue reading in our passage for this morning.

Now, this man, Al Kanah, used to go up year by year from his city to worship and to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts at Shiloh, where the two sons of Eli, Haphni and Phineas, were priests of the Lord.

On the day when El Kanah sacrificed, he would give portions to Panina, his wife, and to all her sons and daughters, but to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though the Lord had closed her womb.

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.

And Elkanah, her husband, said to her, Hannah, why do you weep?

And why do you not eat?

And why is your heart sad?

Am I not more to you than ten sons?

A lot of husbands in here going, like, Yeah, I can relate.

Why doesn't my wife think I'm as good to her as ten sons?

Lots we can relate to.

Our first point in our passage this morning.

We live in a fallen and broken world riddled with sin, suffering, and grief.

Amen?

Amen.

That's right.

I wanted us to get kick off on a happy note.

Um it's noteworthy to me that this epic book that covers so many years, so many generations, so many lives, such an important piece of Israel's history, it begins in the middle of a domestic squabble.

And inside the grieving heart of a particular, specific woman.

The man, Elkanah, appears to be relatively wealthy, right?

We get this lineage back four generations.

And he has two wives, which, you know, in some ways was um somewhat normal practice back in the day, but you had to be wealthy to support multiple wives.

Hannah was probably Elkanah's first wife, but when she proved to be barren, he married Panina.

To have an heir, particularly a male heir, was huge, was was um a big deal in the ancient Near East.

And so marrying a second wife was a way to solve the problem.

But as we, if you know the scriptures, as we learned in the book of Genesis and Abraham and Sarah's story, taking multiple wives uh tends to produce problems of its own.

Amen?

Okay.

Um first point.

Uh but what I love about this opening passage, right, taking the whole book in mind, is how the author of Samuel, like a master storyteller, he's able to capture the theme of the whole book.

And I would even say the theme of the whole of Scripture in these opening verses.

Who of us in our own way can't relate to these characters, to Hannah or Elkanah or even Panina?

The heartbreak of loss, of falling short, of not being enough.

In her culture, Hannah was a complete and utter failure.

She could not give to her husband what he required.

How many of us can relate to the love you feel for a loved one who is hurting, particularly a spouse.

When we see El Kana, what we see of him is that he seems to genuinely love Hannah.

He he treats her in actually a unique way.

He doesn't treat her in relationship to what she's able to provide, but actually loves her for who she is, and his love is evident throughout these verses.

We also see the pride of the haves over the have-nots.

It's easy, isn't it, to look down on others who don't have what comes easy to us.

As I read this passage, it brought me back, you know, unprovoked to my days in college.

I grew up here in East Cobb and went down to Georgia Tech, moved down to the city, and it was an exciting, you know, exciting time of life.

I joined a fraternity, and pretty early, we, as college students are wont to do, we we, a group of us went to Kroger on a on a Kroger run.

And as we were driving back to the fraternity house, we're leaving the parking lot, and uh the guy was driving, he didn't see this homeless guy who was kind of crossing the parking lot uh on a sidewalk, and he kind of swerved to miss him.

And one of the other guys in the car yelled out the window, get a job, you bum! And it just sort of it sort of struck me in that moment.

You know, we're all being whatever.

And um, but but kind of the harshness and the cruelty in that moment um struck me, and I remember it to this day, but that was the basic mentality that I grew up with.

If you were homeless and you weren't working, it was because you were lazy.

But then later, years later, as a pastor, I moved into the city and I was faced with homelessness on another level and on a personal level, and I learned the generational and the historical reasons for a lot of homelessness, the grinding uh nature of poverty, mental illness, and the number of factors that can lead to homelessness for a variety of reasons.

And it was passages like this that began to open my eyes to my own sin of pride.

And also open my eyes to a God who looks upon the weak and the vulnerable, even the lazy, with compassion and grace.

Beloved, we live in a broken and fallen world where we sin and where we are sinned against.

And when we look at stories like this, sometimes what is revealed is that we are not the hero of the story, we are not the victim of the story, but sometimes we are the villain in the story in need of God's mercy as well.

Let's look at the next part of the passage.

If they uh after they had eaten and drunk in Shiloh, Hannah rose.

Now Eli, the priest, was sitting on the seat beside the doorpost of the temple of the Lord.

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'll give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and no razor shall touch his head.

Point two, Hannah invites us to learn to lament.

What I'm calling the prayer of the heart.

In these verses, we are we are invited into a very intimate space, the space of Hannah's heart as she grieves and endures, you know, kind of the petty bullying of her rival sister wife.

But the interesting thing here is to note that this has been a situation that Hannah has been going through for years.

It's been years since she was first married.

It's been years since she proved to be barren.

It's been years since Panina came into this story, and it's been years since she has had multiple sons and daughters.

And yet, year after year, what we're told is as they went to Shiloh, to the temple of the Lord, where God's presence uniquely dwelt, and where God's people went to meet with the Lord, she went to him to cry out to the Lord in prayer.

It would be understandable if Hannah had become bitter of heart and had been turned in on herself.

But what we see is that she has been able to remain within the gap of lament.

Here's a helpful diagram that I got from another book.

I did not come up with this.

But in this simple image, it kind of captures what it's like to live in a fallen world.

Right, we all live in reality.

We experience suffering, setbacks, good things, you know, bad things.

But we also have hopes and dreams in our lives.

Hopes to be married, hope to be parents, hope for a certain type of job, a certain type of life.

And often in their day-to-day life, we experience a gap between our hopes and what is true about our lives.

And in that gap is pain, disappointment, disillusionment, just discomfort, right, when we acknowledge the gap between our hopes and the realities of our lives.

Nobody likes living in pain, right?

Not me, not you.

And so we tend to respond through this through a number of steps.

And they don't always have to go in this order, but these tend to be pretty typical.

First step is denial, right?

Notice there's the line of hope.

But the line of reality is gone.

Denial means we we look at hope, but we don't pay attention to reality, right?

I'm in denial.

I'm not gonna face uh what's going on in my life.

Now we experience this both as Christians and as non-Christians.

In non-Christian circles, right?

This may be uh the idea of manifesting.

Have you ever heard of manifesting?

Um I hear it all the time these days, right?

If I if I think it hard enough, if I talk about it, then I'm gonna bring it into reality.

Uh in Christian circles, we can see this uh in communities where it just doesn't seem safe, it's not okay to be sad, right, as a Christian, or depression is kind of seen as a result of a lack of faith.

Right?

Hey, don't you be sad.

God's gonna give you that baby.

You just need enough faith.

You're gonna get that job, God's gonna provide.

Don't worry, don't look at the bad, look at the good.

Um, but over time, in this denial, uh, we tend to get tired, tired of waiting, tired of just hoping against hope.

And so we turn to step two, which is determination.

And in determination, we take matters into our own hands.

And we say, you know what?

Maybe God wants me to make my hopes a reality.

Now, the classic example of this, of course, is again Abraham and Sarah in the book of Genesis, right?

God had promised to them a son by the two of them.

But time passed, years passed.

And finally, they took matters into their own hands.

In fact, we're told that Sarah is the one who instigated the idea of giving her servant Hagar to Abram.

But what they learned, of course, is uh that they could not bring about God's promises in their own power.

Now, you know, we were praying to God to get a job, but maybe we've been waiting so long we kind of lie and tweak our resume.

Maybe we we try to sabotage that guy or that girl who's also uh vying for the position.

Maybe we we just spend endless amount of hours in email and tweaking our LinkedIn profile.

We're trying to do whatever we can.

Maybe we're getting on the dating apps and we're bending our own kind of moral codes the longer it takes because man, I've just got to do whatever it takes.

Well, over time, when we learn that uh we can't make our own hopes a reality, we we turn to the third step, which is despair.

Now the the line of hope is gone.

We look only at reality and we begin to believe that our situation can never change.

We wonder if God is good, we wonder if God even exists, we wonder if our prayers are heard.

And in despair, we tend to look for things to distract us, to self-medicate us against that pain and hopelessness of despair.

And so we'll turn to get busy, we'll give ourselves to projects, we pour ourselves into work.

Maybe we look for some kind of physical stimulation like a drug or alcohol or Netflix, right?

That just makes the pain kind of go away for a minute.

We can look to change our environment, a new house, a new job, a new state, a new spouse.

Anything to get away from the pain.

But what Hannah is showing to us, and what God is inviting us into is lament.

And it's it's the way to remain in that gap between hope and despair.

God calls us to cry out to him.

Lament neither gives up on hope nor ignores reality.

It recognizes where we are and where we need to be and cries out for God to narrow the gap.

Again, this next slide here, that place between, we stay in the painful place, never giving up on faith, but never lying about reality.

Lament is actually an act of faith.

It says that what is true, what is what is ultimately true, that we are weak, that we are limited human beings, creatures created in God's image, who have not been given the power or the prerogative to create reality.

We live in a fallen world where we experience pain and suffering, but we live in a world where Yahweh is the king and reigns over all of creation.

And beloved, let's be real.

We live, many of us, uh here in the in this area of Marietta.

Many of us have college and graduate degrees, many of us have good jobs, have good income.

You look good.

That's just, you know, I'm gonna be honest with you.

You're a good-looking group.

But because of that, we tend to believe a false gospel that says, I should be able to overcome reality.

I'm smart enough, I have enough money, I have enough connections, I should be able to do it.

And beloved, I will tell you that God actually does bring circumstances into our lives to remind us of the truth.

He brings us to the end of ourselves so that we will remember who we are and who he is.

You see, in this moment, Hannah embodies Psalm 51, 17 that says, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.

A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

God loves it when we confess the truth, the truth of our weakness.

So, a question for you to ponder which of these steps do you tend to fall into?

Where might you be today?

Are you in denial?

Are you in despair?

Are you in lament?

Let's continue.

As she, Hannah, continued praying before the Lord, Eli observed her mouth.

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

Therefore, Eli took her to be a drunken woman.

And Eli said to her, How long will you go on being drunk?

Put away your wine from you.

But Hannah answered, 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.

Then Eli answered, Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant your petition that you have made to him.

And she said, Let your servant find favor in your eyes.

Then the woman went home, went away, and ate, and her face was no longer sad.

This third point here teaches us about the role of the priest.

Eli helps us see something important here in the midst of this situation.

After making a huge blunder, right, coming up to a woman just desperate and undone by grief, he rebukes her for being drunk.

But when she responds and tells him her situation, he recovers, right?

He blesses her and he prays with her.

Remarkably, we're told that Hannah goes away and her face is no longer sad.

She's able to eat.

So what is going on?

I believe what this is showing us is that God, our God, who is relational by nature, who has existed from all eternity, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, has made us as relational beings as well.

And we often need someone in our times of suffering to act as a priest for us.

You see, a priest, generally speaking, is one who stands between.

One who stands between God and man, who bridges the gap as a mediator and makes relationship possible.

That's why the book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is our perfect high priest.

Because it was through his willing sacrifice that bridged the gap between us sinful human beings and a perfect God, so that we can become sons and daughters of God and he becomes our Father in heaven.

Now, Eli shows us another act of a priest, which is rather than standing between, is one who comes and stands beside.

Another as they come before the Lord, acting as an advocate, a companion, and one who stands in solidarity.

Beloved, this is something that we are called and meant to do for one another.

Last week we had a particularly difficult thing happen in our family, and I was in distress.

Let's just put it that way.

And I called a friend.

I thought of someone kind of someone I hadn't talked to in a long time, but who I knew could kind of relate to what was happening in that moment.

And I called him, and by God's grace, he answered, and we talked for almost an hour.

And he listened, he empathized, he told his story.

By the end, we were laughing.

And when I hung up, I felt better.

In fact, it was about 20 minutes later, I just it just kind of struck me like, oh, I haven't, you know, I've I've been feeling good.

And um, and then I realized, oh yeah, this thing, horrible thing is happening.

And so then I plummeted back into despair.

But the point is that just talking to my friend alleviated my distress.

And this is why counseling can be so helpful, right?

To have someone that we can go to who will listen to us.

They don't even have to be a good counselor to sit there and listen.

Now, I am very pro-counseling, and there are some amazing counselors out there who are gifted and can do a lot with what they tell us, what we tell them.

But sometimes we just need another human being.

We can and we ought to, and scripture tells us to go to God directly, and that's what Hannah does.

But again, God created us as relate as relational beings, and we need other human beings.

And when we when we come into the presence of someone who is willing to see us and to listen to us and simply be with us, I think theologically what is happening is that that presence reminds us on an unspoken level that God too is with us.

That he is present.

It speaks against the voices in our head that say we are alone, we are unworthy of the Lord's presence and he has left us.

Am I someone who can be a priest?

Am I someone that a friend or a family member or a fellow church?

Or would come to in a time of need.

Someone who needs a confidant, someone who needs to confess even sin.

This beloved is a sacred role that we can play for one another.

Okay, let's look at the final portion of our passage.

They rose early in the morning and worshipped before the Lord.

Then they went back to their home at Rama.

And Al Kana knew Hannah his wife.

And the Lord remembered her.

And in due time Hannah conceived and bore a son.

And she called his name Samuel.

For she said, I have asked for him from the Lord.

And this is our fourth and final point, which is that the Lord is faithful.

This is the point of this story, and it's actually the point of the whole Christian life.

This is the message that we come to give a hearty amen to week out, week in and week out as we come to church to be reminded of what has God done for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

He has been faithful to his promises, promises to forgive, promises to embrace, promises to remain faithful.

In the midst of our own failures and our own losses and our own sufferings, he will never leave us or forsake us.

And we who have walked through the valley of the shadow of death and whom the Lord has led through the other side, we can give that hearty amen.

But this truth, that the Lord is faithful, is also the hardest thing for us to amen when we are in the midst of the valley.

Even those of us who have walked through it in the past and come out the other side but are being led to it through another season, it becomes difficult again to believe this truth.

And that's why we have the scriptures that tell us these stories.

That's why the scriptures are full of finished stories.

Stories like Joseph in Genesis, stories like David in the book of Samuel, the stories of Abraham and Sarah, and so many others.

And in the New Testament as well.

We get to see people who walk through suffering for years and years, and yet the Lord shows himself faithful in the end.

Because we need to hear that message.

We need to be reminded when things are hard that the Lord is indeed faithful.

And so I, as your pastor and as your priest this morning, I say to you, the Lord is faithful.

Whatever's going on in your life, believe this truth.

Now we don't have time to get into chapter 2 of 1 Samuel.

It's awesome.

I encourage you again to just read this book.

But there's some incredible, surprising, I wasn't expecting as I studied these passages.

There's some places in chapter 2 that echo in a very unexpected way from the Gospel of Luke.

Luke 2 · chapter mention

Chapter 2 begins with Hannah's prayer, right?

She has this kind of long prayer of thanksgiving that she is giving to the Lord for his faithfulness to give her a son.

And if you look at her prayer and you look at the Mary's magnificat, I mean it's just eerily similar.

Both the wording and the structure.

Also, later in 1 Samuel 2, it says this the boy Samuel, right?

Samuel's been born and he's growing up with Eli at the temple.

He said, Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the Lord and also with man, which is almost identical in its wording to Luke 2, 52, that talks about the boy Jesus, who grew in stature in the eyes of the Lord and men.

And, you know, looking into the in into the commentaries and the different things, there's there was no like aha moment, there was nothing there, but it reminded me of nothing else that Hannah and Samuel are meant to point us to the ultimate fulfillment of this story, which is in the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus.

Jesus is the yes and amen of all God's promises.

Jesus came to meet us in our darkest place, our separation from God, the heart and the root of sin that creates barrenness, that creates abandonment, that creates our unworthiness.

And Jesus came, a promised son who would call God's people back to faithfulness, and to play that role of priest and prophet and king, who would bridge the gap between God and his people.

Beloved Jesus is the better Samuel, Mary is the better Hannah, where God proved his ultimate faithfulness, to come himself in the flesh, to die upon the cross for our sins and to rise for our justification.

And so when we, it is these stories of faithfulness that climax in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that allow us to exist in that gap between reality and hope.

To hold on that, yes, God will be faithful to me, but I will not let go of him.

I will not simply look at hope and ignore reality.

I will not look at reality and give up on hope, but I will I will remain in that place crying out to the Lord until I see his answer to me ultimately.

There's no better passage that Hannah points us to in the New Testament than Hebrews 14 through 16 that says, Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God.

Let us hold fast to our confession, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet is without sin.

Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in times of need.

If you have any questions or need prayer after the service, someone will be right here down front to meet with you.

Let's pray.

Our Father and our God, thank you that you are the God who does not shy away from our pain and our suffering.

Lord, that you took our pain and suffering, brokenness and sin upon yourself, and that you have overcome and conquered.

Lord, meet us wherever we are today with your faithfulness.

For we ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen.