The Power Of Hannah's Prayer Transcript

We jump forward quite a bit yet again in this narrative series from Genesis through the early church. What has happened between last week's with the golden calf and today is the people that were there at the golden calf wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. None of them who were there that night made it into the promised land, including Moses and Aaron himself. Joshua goes into the promised land and he's commanded by the Lord to use force to essentially wipe out anyone that is there wipe out their idols, worship God, and God would deliver the land. If you read the book of Joshua, it seems to go that way.

But if you then go into the book of Judges, you see that things didn't go exactly as planned. The people keep calling out for a king, for a leader, and God says you don't need a king. I will be your king. Look after me and you will be fine. Do what I have commanded you and you will be fine. But the people repeatedly, lose track of what God wants them to do. The people repeatedly lose track of how God wants them to live.

And at the end of the book of Judges, what we find is a verse that very clearly describes what was going on. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes, for they had no king. This leads to chaos. This leads to violence, especially to women. And we see this in the book of Judges. Oh, over and over again.

Now in the Jewish scripture, we don't have the book of Ruth in between Judges and 1 Samuel like we do in ours. It immediately goes from there was no, everyone did what was right in their own eyes, for there was no king to the story of Hannah. And I wanted to spend a lot of time on Hannah. The original scripture didn't include nearly as much that you read. And I give you thanks for reading what you did because those names can be hard. And I know it's terrifying. To stand up here and have to read all of those names, especially right off the bat. And so you did a great job and I'm and I'm thankful for you.

But I wanted to spend a lot more time with Hannah today because we get so few stories of women in the Old Testament, New Testament. We get so few stories where women are the primary antagonist, where they are the actors, where they are the center of the story and God teaches powerful lessons through these women. The transition from the wilderness into the promised land that we talked about that that that the people went through. They went from complete reliance on God.

They went on complete reliance on God for food and manna in the wilderness for meat for safety and security and for water. There was a complete and utter reliance on God because without God they would not have the things that they needed to survive and when they get into the promised land, that is no longer the case. They no longer have to rely on God because food is plentiful. It is a land flowing with milk and honey.

They no longer have to rely on God because water is plentiful. It is a land green and verdant. They no longer have to rely on God's for safety because they are no longer exposed to the harsh elements of the wilderness. And when you no longer have to rely on God, you start thinking that your life, and what you have relies on your own power. And this is exactly where we are in 1 Samuel. But Hannah transforms that.

The story of Hannah and Peninnah is heartbreaking. Hannah is barren and she is unable to bear children in a world and in a society that where a woman's worth and value is on bearing children. And her husband does not get this. Her husband does not understand this. They are eating at the sacrifice. They are eating the meal that comes with that.

And he gives her a double portion because of his love for her. And Hannah is still sad, heartbroken. She describes herself in a wretched state. And her husband says, Why? Why are you upset? Am I not worth more than ten sons? Am I not enough for you? Is my love not great enough? And this is a hard question to answer. Perhaps in today's society. But maybe not.

But the problem is Hannah's husband already has his heirs. He already has his kids. He already has the ones that will carry on his line. And so his needs are met. His desire for offspring is taken care of. And he's talking to Hannah saying, Well, why are you upset? But again, in a world and a society that finds their worth, a woman's worth through offspring. She is devastated. She has been mocked by Eli's other wife. Or sorry, Elkanah's other wife, Peninnah. And she is in distress.

And this deep emotional pain that she is feeling comes out. While everyone else is eating and feasting at this sacrificial meal, she goes into the temple to pray. goes into the temple. And she can't. She cannot put to words the prayers of her heart. She is praying in her head. Her mouth is moving. But the words are not coming out.

And we can learn a lot from this prayer. Because when we pray as Christians, when we pray as Protestants, we tend to pray in a way that is not demanding. That is safe and secure. We tend to pray in a way that makes sure that God is going to, that we understand that God is going to do whatever God is going to do. We don't think we should ask for the hard things. We certainly don't think we should make demands.

And when we pray, we often put it in a supplication sandwich. We give God all the praise in the beginning. We give God thanks. And we end by giving God thanks. And in the middle, we sometimes make our requests known. But when we word it, God, if you could, I would sort of like it if you would. But it's okay if you won't. This is how we tend to pray.

We don't pray like Hannah prays, where she demands of God, give me a son. Bless me with a son and I will be grateful and I will offer him back up to you. The audacity of this prayer, the challenge of our modern sensibilities of this sort of prayer that is crying out in distress, that is crying out for more, that is crying out to God to give her exactly what she is asking for. And there is no equivocation here. There is no worry about whether or not God will do it. There is no worry that God will be angry at her for making these demands. There is no worry that God will fail her. There is only the desire to make her requests known to God and a trust that God will answer.

For us, this may seem foreign. For us, this may seem like a challenge, like a different and a weird way of praying or too extreme. But if we remember the lineage here, Hannah is a lot closer to the people in the wilderness grumbling and complaining to God for not giving them enough to eat, for leading them into the desert to die and say, God, when will you give us something to eat? Maybe we should just go back to Egypt. When God gave them the manna, they said, God, why how often do we have to eat this bland manna? How often is this only going to be our food? Maybe, God, why don't you give us some meat? And God did. God, how long are we going to be thirsty? How long are we going to be parched? Why don't you give us water? And God did.

So the first thing we can learn from Hannah in our own prayer life is this. We should not be afraid to approach God with the desires of our heart, the things that we need, the things that we are heartbroken about. We should not be afraid to make known to God the things that we want. We should be willing to step out in God in our own heartbrokenness, in our own feeling of wretchedness, in our own feeling of unworthiness, in a feeling even if it feels like God has abandoned us. We should still go to God and say, God, give me this thing.

Again, this is hard. We're going to get to some of the challenges of why we maybe don't pray like this in a little bit. But we should be willing to approach God with all that we are and all that we have, all of our heartbrokenness, all of our feelings of being left out and broken and challenged and beaten, because God knows about it anyway. God knows what we want. God knows what we desire. We desire of Him. God knows what is on our hearts and is breaking our hearts, so we're not doing anything by not approaching God with the very thing that He knows.

That fear of making God angry, saying, well, if I ask too much, if I ask for something unworthy, if I demand something of God, then surely God will get upset with me and perhaps not answer the prayer, or I've wasted God's time, as some people have said to me. But we worship a God who knows our inner hearts. We worship a God that knows our very needs, knows what we are going to say, knows what is breaking us, and knows what we desire. So we do nothing by holding it back, except withhold ourselves, withhold who we are, withhold who we think we want to be from God.

we were in a relationship with somebody and we never told them what was hurting us, what was bothering us, we never told them what we wanted, then that relationship would never grow, would never deepen. If we never came to our spouse or significant other and said, this is where I'm hurting, this is where I feel alone and broken, then that relationship will never grow. There is no depth because there is no sharing of our true selves. Much more so when we approach God. How much more so when we think we need to hold back who we are and what we are feeling the one that created us.

So when we pray, when we pray like Hannah, we hold nothing of ourselves back. We hold nothing of who we are, where we are hurting, where we are feeling broken, where we feel God has hurt us. And we bring it back to God. And God can take it. Now Hannah's prayer was also one where she did not worry about what other people thought when she prayed. Sometimes when we pray, we feel like we need to do it silently. We do it in the privacy in our room. And there's other scripture that talks about this. And again, we'll get to some of the challenges of this kind of prayer.

But Hannah is so trusting in God and so in need of some sort of relief and so countering the presence of God. That she has no mind of who is around her and what they think of her. Not about what she is doing. Not about what she is praying. And not what she is asking for. We see this in this story because Eli is watching her. And at first, and I'm ashamed of this, at first he thinks she's drunk. And in some ways that makes sense. They were at this meal. They were at this feast. She had received a double portion of what she would normally be given from her husband. And there was drinking and revelry going on.

But he asks her, why are you praying? Or what are you doing? How long will you be drunk in the Lord's presence? She says, I am not drunk. I have not had anything to drink. My heart is broken. And I am praying. She doesn't get offended that he would accuse her. She doesn't try to change her prayer and change her actions. She stays in the prayer mode and way of praying that she was in. But she doesn't change her actions. She gives matter -of -fact answer of why she is praying the way she is. In her own distress, in her own feeling of wretchedness, she is reaching out to God, making her needs known.

Now, Eli, I wish I could be more like Eli. I wish I had the audacity, not only of Hannah's prayer, the audacity of asking for what she wanted and demanding of it, but the audacity of Eli to say, God will give you what you ask for. Go and be at peace. But his words ring true for Hannah. She is able to arise from that place of prayer. She is able to go back to the table. She is able to go back into the relationships that had hurt her. Both Penina on purpose in mocking her her husband for saying, am I not enough? She is able to go back content.

Not because God had immediately answered her prayer, not that she knew for certain that God was going to answer her prayer, but she had a faith in God that God had heard her prayer and would do something. Her hope of her heart was that God would give her a son. And Eli had promised this, but she did not know for certain. She leaves in peace after praying. She trusts that God will respond in some way and she is willing to wait for it.

So when we pray, when we approach God in whatever way, do we pray in a way that we honestly believe that God is going to do something? That God is going to act in some powerful way? I wonder if the way we usually pray suggests no. That we give God the out. We give God the way to say, well, if God doesn't do this, then it just, it's okay. When we temper our prayers, when we temper our needs, when we temper the way that we come to God in prayer, do we do so thinking that God is not even going to do anything anyway? I think sometimes that may be the case.

But if we pray like Hannah, if we make our needs known, if we say, God, do this for me, we are putting a trust in God that is different than when we couch it all and if it be your will, if you feel so inclined, if you think this is good, we don't have to have a whole lot of faith in that kind of prayer. Now that doesn't always mean that God is going to answer the prayers that we ask for in the way that we want. And this is where the challenge of prayer comes from.

Because one of the other things that Hannah was doing in this prayer that we often get caught up in is Hannah wasn't worried about the theology of her prayer. She wasn't worried about, well, what if God doesn't answer the prayer? What if God doesn't do what I ask? What if God doesn't see this as my need? So we get caught up in the theology of it all, of what does it mean if God doesn't answer that prayer when Jesus says, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move a mountain, and we're not out there moving mountains. What does it mean to somebody who has prayed fervently for children and they never get their answer that they're looking for? What does it mean for a mother who prays for their child or a spouse in the hospital and they never get better?

How can we pray like Hannah when all of these other cases exist that show that God doesn't always do what we ask for? And so again, we temper our prayers and again we say things that give God out. Because our theology of prayer and the way that we think of prayer can be so convoluted and can be so challenging, and rightfully so, these situations hurt people. And we don't always know why God answers some prayer and doesn't answer them as we expect in other cases. We don't understand why there's such heartbreak in one person's life while somebody else has it easy. We have no idea why some people are healed and other people are not.

And we let that get in the way of coming to God with our needs. When we come to God saying, do this for me, I trust in you, we do so trusting that God will do something. But I think it is fair to say that we don't always know what God's going to do. We don't always know how God is going to answer. And sometimes the answer is no. No is an answer. But we should not let our worries and our fears about what we think about prayer and how God works through prayer get in the way of us approaching God's presence with all that we are and all that we are feeling and all that we know and all that we want and all of our brokenness and all of our feelings of wretchedness and all of the ways that we think we are not worthy.

We still need to approach God. We need to approach God in that way because God is already there. And the transformation and the peace for Hannah doesn't come from her immediately getting what she asked for. She is at peace long before, long before her prayer is answered. it's because she feels heard and seen and that God was there and present. And God was present with her because she was fully present with God.

So we wrestle with prayer. We wrestle with prayer so much and in so many different ways. We have all had deep and earnest prayers that did not get answered how we wanted them to be answered. We have struggled with it. We have found ways that we can temper our own prayers because we are afraid of our prayers not being answered and what that means. Is my faith not strong enough? Is God not listening? Does God not care? So many of us in this room and I'd be willing to bet almost everyone in this room has been in that place. Both when prayers have been answered and when prayers have not been. Not in the ways that we want.

So we have to ask ourselves what are we holding back when we pray? Why do we hold back when we pray? Are we afraid of what other people think? Are we challenged by this idea that other people will see us praying for something supernatural, something transformative to happen and they look at us and say you're crazy, that's not how things work. How can we pray with boldness? How can we pray with trust that God has heard our prayers so that we can be transformed in the praying?

Like Hannah. There's some catharsis here for her. The wretchedness and the brokenness she was feeling is lifted in the act of prayer being seen and heard and known the one who created her. And that catharsis comes out in the prayer and the song that she sings in the second chapter. It's also mirrored by Mary when she finds out that she's going to bear a son.

And so we'll come back to this song and Mary's song in a few weeks. It's hard to believe it's going to be a few weeks but we'll be there. But in these moments for Hannah, that song, that prayer, that understanding of God as God, of God at work, of God as someone we can totally rely on and are totally dependent on, it brings her back to where the Israelites were in the wilderness. Totally dependent on God. Trusting in God for God's providence. Trusting that God will give them what they need. Trusting that God is in control. And that ultimately what God wants to see happen will happen. This is a message we certainly need today. Amen.