No Where Else to Turn

ReCAST Church of Mattawan

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsex preaches from his series in First Samuel, Timely Prophet, Tragic King.

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Let's listen in. Where the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were priests of the

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Lord. On the day when Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to Peninnah, his wife, and to all her sons and daughters, but to Hannah he gave a double portion because he loved her, though the

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

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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.

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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?

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And why is your heart so sad? Am I not more to you than 10 sons? After they had eaten and drunk in Shiloh, Hannah rose.

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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

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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

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I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life and no razor shall touch his head. As she continued praying before the

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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.

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And Eli said to her, how long will you go on being drunk? Put away your wine from you. But Hannah answered, no, my

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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

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Lord. Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for all along I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation.

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

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And she said, let your servant find favor in your eyes. Then the woman went her way and ate, and her face was no longer sad.

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They rose early in the morning and worshiped before the Lord. Then they went back to their house at Ramah, and Elkanah knew

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Hannah, his wife, and the Lord remembered her. And in due time, Hannah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name

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Samuel, for she said, I have asked for him from the Lord. The men Elkanah and all his house went up to offer to the

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Lord the yearly sacrifice and to pay his vow, but Hannah did not go up, for she said to her husband, as soon as the child is weaned,

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I will bring him so that he may appear in the presence of the Lord and dwell there forever. Elkanah, her husband, said to her, do what seems best to you.

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Wait until you have weaned him. Only may the Lord establish his word. So the woman remained and nursed her son until she weaned him.

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And when she had weaned him, she took him up with her, along with a three -year -old bull, an ephah of flour, and a skin of wine, and she brought him to the house of the

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Lord at Shiloh, and the child was young. Then they slaughtered the bull, and they brought the child to Eli, and she said, oh my

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Lord, as you live, my Lord, I am the woman who is standing here in your presence, praying to the Lord, for this child

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I prayed, and the Lord has granted me my petition that I made to him. Therefore, I have lent him to the

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

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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your word. Your word is practical, it is powerful, and it has the power to transform us, and even in these narrative portions where we get a chance to hear history and events described that can sometimes be confusing to our modern ears.

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I pray that you would make this text come alive in our hearts in a way that produces trust in you, a deeper trust, a deeper dependence on you.

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Father, I thank you for all of these who have gathered here this morning, and I believe that each one is here with intention and with purpose.

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Father, we have gathered together as your church to hear from you, to sing praises to you, to do life together with others around us who love you.

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I thank you that we are not alone in this journey. You walk with us, others walk with us, and we have the opportunity to walk with others.

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And so, Father, I pray that you would guide us, direct us, and help us to see you high and exalted, even as we have an opportunity to worship you this morning in singing, in Jesus' name, amen.

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And thanks a lot to the band for leading us in worship. I hope you were able to see God as he is, high and exalted, and high exalted, but also involved in our lives, connected with us in vital ways.

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I would encourage you to get comfortable. If at any time during the message, you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts, while supplies last back there, take advantage of that.

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If you need to get up and stretch out in the back or whatever, but I do ask that you please do me a favor and keep your Bibles open to 1

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Samuel 1. That just helps you to reference where we're going and walking through this text.

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Every once in a while, I'm gonna reference a verse, and it's beneficial to kind of take it in and see what the flow is here, even though we've already read it.

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But I feel like we need to get our bearings before we just dive into a brand new story, account, historical account in the

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Bible. And the fact of the matter is, the Bible is one big story. It has plot, it has flow, it has irony, it has all of those things that, if you don't like English class or literature class, your eyes just kind of glazed over a little bit and you were like, get past that part real quick.

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But it has flow, it has, like history, like our lives, it has dark times and good times and exciting times, and it explains real life to us in the history of real people.

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The story of the Bible began when God created it. It then took a dark turn when Adam and Eve sinned and were cast out of the presence of God.

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But God began a plan to defeat sin among humanity by calling a man forward called Abraham, and he asked him to follow him and then made a promise to Abraham and said,

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I will give you a multitude of offspring, I will give you a great land, which was the land of Israel, and I will take one of your offspring, and he will be a blessing to all the peoples.

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So that was a promise given to Abraham at the kind of the start and the initiation of a new way that God was going to heal and fix things, and he promised this one who would be a blessing to all nations.

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Well, the people of Abraham, as many of us know, were enslaved in Egypt. God raised up Moses to bring them out, took them on a detour past Mount Sinai, gave them a law, and a law ultimately to demonstrate to them how bad they are, how bad humanity is at being holy, how bad we are at obedience.

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I'm not gonna ask for a show of hands, but I'm guessing that most of us would have to raise our hands if I ask the question, how good are you at obeying?

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I think that we recognize that in our own hearts, if we're honest, if we're honest, and we really get down into,

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I mean, when I see a speed limit, I wanna go faster. When I see a speed limit sign, when I see, for all of us, there are rules that immediately, when you hear the rule, you have an urge to break it, and that's part of the way that we are inside, and so the law was given to demonstrate

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God's standard of holiness, our inability and inefficiency at following him, and then under Joshua, they were granted that land that had been promised to Abraham, and then during that time, after the conquest of the land, they spiraled into a time of being led by judges.

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A nation would come up and fight against them, a judge would be raised up to battle back, and then they would gain their freedom, and then they would lose their freedom, and then they would gain their freedom, and it was a tumultuous time in the history of Israel, the era of the judges, and that era of history in Israel was defined by the phrase, each man did what was right in his own eyes.

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That's the definition, that's the explanation of the history, the cultural climate of when we enter our text today.

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So that's where we're at. Each man does what is right in his own eyes. How many of you know that that's a recipe for problems?

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Did you know that? If everybody does only ever what they feel, culture slides very quickly into anarchy in that context, and that's the way that Israel was living, that's the way that culture was at the time of the story that we come to this morning.

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The people of God had fallen far from their side of their relationship with God, and that's exactly when we meet this man,

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Elkanah, and his wife, Hannah. It's an abrupt start in verse one.

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If you think about the big picture scope of all that God has done in history, from Genesis up through Judges, and now we come to this text, and it's like right away, just there was a certain man, there was a certain man.

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But let me just suggest to you that big stories in history, big stories in history most often begin with some unknown person minding their own business and suddenly being swept up into big events.

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I mean, you've got Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, right? You know, case in point.

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I mean, everybody, you got that? I mean, you got Harry Potter just minding his own, I don't know, whatever your story is.

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But in real life, that's the way that real life goes, and our stories and our fiction mimics real life in the way that things genuinely go.

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And our text this morning is gonna have three parts of you. For those of you that like outlines, I know some of you like outlines, some of you don't. I even alliterated it, too, just so that you can see that I can do this from time to time,

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I don't usually do this. But the first is the problem. Verses one through eight, we'll look at the problem.

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Verses nine through 18 is the prayer, and verses 19 through 28 is the provision.

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So we're gonna look at the problem of Hannah, the prayer of Hannah, and the provision of God.

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And that's the flow of the text this morning. So we start at the beginning of the story with an introduction to one big happy family.

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Verse one gives us a setting in real history with a real dude with real lineage. It goes through who his father and grandfather and great -grandfather, and goes on down through so that you know that this is a flesh and blood real guy who lived in an area of the world that you could buy a ticket and go visit where he lived.

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Okay, this is history. This is fundamental to the Bible is that these are true accounts, this is not some fiction that we've made up in order to try to make ourselves feel better or something.

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There's flow, like I said, there's an entire story that's going on here that unfolded on this planet.

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And Elkanah was a real guy. His pedigree doesn't tell us much about him, but the text tells us at least this, he had two wives, so we know he wasn't too bright, okay?

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In all honesty, though, there are some things that we do know about him from the text that are kind of spelled out, or not necessarily spelled out, but are implied.

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We know that he was a wealthy man, and we see that by the sacrifices that he offers later. There were two tiers, multiple tiers of sacrifices and offerings.

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He gives the high one, okay? He's on the wealthy side of things. If you were poor, you could still make offerings, but you offered different animals.

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He gives substantially. We're gonna see a three -year -old ox, a three -year -old bull later.

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That's a pretty substantial, for him to even own one is a big deal. And so he's a wealthy guy. He's a religious man.

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He goes to the temple, or the tabernacle each year, rather, according to the prescribed laws. He wants to honor

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God and his family. That's a noble thing. He's a man who has at least enough compassion to be concerned when his wife is crying.

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Okay, so she's crying, and he wants to comfort her. That's a good thing, right? So we can see some of the character of Elkanah here in the text.

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So we see some of those things, but I think there's an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. It's not the main point, but where we live here in 2018, it grabs our attention so radically that we could miss the point of this text because our mind is still on it, and that's the fact that this dude has two wives.

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Were you already thinking it? Was it on anybody's mind? Raise your hand if it was already on your mind before I just said it. It's like, what is going on here?

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You just said he's a godly man. How in the world can he have two wives? What is going on? I wanna point out a few things about this, and then we're gonna move on.

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We're gonna try to get to the point of the story and not focus on this point. In the beginning,

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God created Adam and Eve. He created the first couple, two. Adam and Eve, he designed that as the model of marriage.

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The man shall leave his father and mother and shall cling to his wife, and the two, not three, not four, not five, the two shall become one flesh.

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What is God's standard? What was his design? What was his plan for this? And I wanna point out that scripture often describes events without moralizing every time that somebody is doing wrong.

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And so the fact that God doesn't come in and just smoke elk in it for this is you're gonna go, well, what's going on here?

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Is he endorsing it then? Is he against it? Is he for it? What's the scoop here? Well, he's given us his design.

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He's given us his standard, and here we have a description of a man, not a prescription for the way that we should live our lives, a description of a man in history and his family.

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And it's just gonna be honest with us. This guy had two wives. Well, I wanna point out that Jesus also in the

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New Testament confirmed that model and literally quoted in Genesis that the two shall become one flesh, and that's marriage.

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He endorsed that. He brought that forward in the New Testament. And even the organization of the representation of the kingdom of God on earth, which is the church, it is said in 1

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Timothy that the leadership of the church is to be men who have only one wife.

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That means that even when we go into other cultures where there is the cultural expectation or the cultural acceptance of multiple wives, that the church should still only be led by men who have one wife.

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That's the standard. And so I would give you all that evidence to say polygamy is not endorsed in Scripture, but maybe the most compelling argument against polygamy in Scripture is to actually read the

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Scripture. See what it says about men who had two wives.

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See how that works in their families. See the animosity, the hatred, the biting and the infighting that happens.

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Look at this text. As we study it, tell me about the happiness and the joy and the gladness and the way that the

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Bible is endorsing this. It doesn't look pretty to me. As we dig in, we walk through it, we do not see a happy polygamous marriage in Scripture.

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It doesn't work that way. So Elkanah is married to Hannah and Elkanah is married to Panina.

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We have to get beyond that to get to the point. But Panina had children, Hannah had none.

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Panina, we could say, was fertile myrtle. Hannah, Hannah wasn't.

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And again, we see the pious religious life of Elkanah and that he led his family to worship. They would go up to Shiloh, where the tabernacle of God was located, and they would worship every year and make sacrifices.

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This is a guy who makes sure his family is in church, so to speak. He is painted as a spiritual man who leads his family.

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And it isn't a main point in the text, but I would love for Elkanah's spiritual leadership to rub off on every single man in this room.

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If you're married and you have a family, if you're married and you have a wife, man, taking some spiritual leadership, guiding her, directing her, not making her be the one who says, hey, let's go to church this

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Sunday, but being the one who takes some initiative in that. Those of you who are not married yet, those of you who are young men who aspire to eventually having a wife, investing in your own spiritual growth now to be able to be the spiritual leader.

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Don't waste your singleness right now. Don't waste it. Use it to grow in spiritual discipline.

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Use it to grow in the knowledge of God. Use it, use the time that you're given to grow, to become the man that God desires for you to be.

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Elkanah was a spiritual leader in his household. And when they made their sacrifices, I think many of us have kind of a mystical understanding about what happened in the

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Old Testament during sacrifices. Did they just come, give a bull, the bull gets its throat cut and then it's laid on the altar and burned?

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Is that what happens? And the answer is no to that. There's a lot of detail. And if you ever read through the

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Bible in a year and got into Leviticus, Leviticus is the killer for Bible reading plans. Okay, you get into those first nine chapters and it's all about sacrifices and the way those sacrifices looked and we're like, that's too bloody, that's gross.

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And we get kind of freaked out about it. But about a third of the peace offering that we're talking about, this is the annual sacrifice that he would have been taking up with his family to offer the peace offering.

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The peace offering would have been about a third burned on the altar, about a third given to the priest, and about a third consumed by the family who brought the sacrifice.

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So that's rightly called a festival. It's rightly called a feast. I mean, they're having a big barbecue out and a portion of it is given to God every sacrifice, every year.

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So that's what you have to have in your mind when you see them feasting, you see them eating, you see Hannah not eating at this celebration and all of that that's going on.

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We're gonna see even some issues with the way that these priests were handling those offerings in a couple of weeks. They were not being completely honest in the way that they were taking their portions and different things like that.

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But at this feast, each year Elkanah gave portions to Peninnah and all of her sons, multiple, the point and the text goes over the top to explain that she is indeed prolific.

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But to Hannah, he would give a double portion. So obviously, Peninnah and her tribe each gets a portion, so she gets kind of more for her side.

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But to Hannah, he gave a double portion and the text tells us explicitly, it's because Elkanah loved

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Hannah. Every indication is likely that Elkanah had married

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Hannah first and then married Peninnah later in order to have children, which again was a cultural thing that is not endorsed in scripture but is indeed the way that things worked and happened.

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So far, the problem in the text hasn't been explicit, but you can hear the freight train coming around the bend, right?

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How many of you know human relationships? How many of you see it coming? You already saw it coming. A man with two wives, he gives a double portion to one because he loves her, which the text comes just this close to saying he didn't love

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Peninnah. Do you get that in the text? How many of you felt that? You felt that, just that little skiff of distance between the text saying he loved

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Hannah, it didn't say he loved Peninnah. So you can see the problem coming and to quote a great theologian,

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Scooby -Doo, I say, rut roll, okay? You know that it's coming and the hit, the hit comes in verses five and six.

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Verses five and six, this is where the depth of the problem of Hannah is laid bare. This is where you begin to see her heart, you begin to see her pain, you begin to see her problem and her suffering.

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God has closed her womb, the text says. It's mentioned twice so that we don't have the freedom to brush past it.

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How many of you might be tempted to brush past that phrase, God closed her womb? You kind of want it to just be natural. Do you want it to be natural?

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Do you want it to just be natural causes a bit? You want to vindicate God on this one and be like,

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God doesn't do things like that. God only gives to his people good things.

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Is it possible that the closing of her womb is a good thing? Wow, that's a hard one.

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And that brings up a stark question that we find in the midst of Hannah's problem here in our text that we have to address here where we live.

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Do we feel less comfortable receiving that which we perceive as bad from the

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Lord? I think it's a real question and it's a real hard thing.

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He closed her womb. He kept Hannah from pregnancy. Let that sink in.

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A theme in this book is the way that God works in the everyday narrative of human life. He works in Hannah's life, he works in Samuel's life, he works in Saul's life, he works in David's life, and he is working in your life and he's working in mine.

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But Hannah's problem would be enough if it was just barrenness. If that was the extent of her problem, that would give her a lot of sorrow, that would give her a lot of grief.

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This has been a problem in all the ages of human existence. It is a pain and a heartache that has been shared by many women and men that God has loved.

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This is still an ongoing issue today. But Hannah further has to deal with Peninnah in the text.

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It's not just her barrenness, it's not just infertility that she's struggling with, but she's also wrestling with her rival.

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Notice that the text in verse six calls Peninnah Hannah's rival, it uses that word.

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And back to the whole multiple wife thing, how's that going? The word rival, does that strike you as a good word in the midst of family?

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A rival in your family, are you serious? That sounds kind of brutal. And what would you call her if your husband had a second on the side?

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Rival seems kind of tame in that context. Peninnah was cruel. She pushed, she poked, she prodded, she provoked

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Hannah. And it says that she did so, this is an interesting turn of phrase here, she actually did so in order to irritate

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Hannah. She's cruel and it's intentional, and her heart's goal,

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Peninnah's goal, is to irritate Hannah in the way that she provokes her and prods her. About the thing that matters the most to Hannah, about the thing that hurts her the most, that is where you find

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Peninnah twisting the knife, making fun of her, mocking her. Where are your kids?

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Not a happy family. I wanna suggest to you that verse seven takes us just a second or two to take in.

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You can read it and you can see it for yourself there. So it went on year by year.

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As often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she used to provoke her. It takes just a second or two for us to read that, but it represents years of sorrow and hardship for Hannah.

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Pain, she is recorded here in the text in suffering for our consideration. We should pause and consider the years of anguish for Hannah.

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The years of pain and doubt, the years of feeling abandoned and brushed aside by God, the years of trembling in the shadow of Peninnah and her vicious antagonism.

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So Hannah would weep. Hannah would go without food each year as they took this trip to worship.

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By the way, the word that's used there is not a technical word for fasting. It's not as though she's fasting to try to get

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God to give her what she wants. She's literally not hungry. She's literally nauseous.

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She does not like this trip to worship. And there are two observations about this that we consider as we think in and continue to take in Hannah's problem.

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The first is the hypocritical worship of Peninnah. Think about her. She's going up for the annual worship.

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She's going to church. And all along the way, she's provoking and irritating Hannah. She's acting wickedly while on her way to the house of the

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Almighty God who is just and always true and pure in his judgment.

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And she doesn't express much fear of God in this, does she? But willingly goes forward wickedly into worship.

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Let me just suggest to you that before we go, wow, that terrible

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Peninnah, may God have mercy on each one of us that have behaved just like her.

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Rather than stand, when we see someone sinning in Scripture and standing over them going, wow, what losers, what terrible people, how wicked, how evil, how in the world could

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Peninnah ever make fun of Hannah in this situation? What God wants us to do is take a look at our own hearts and see where we've been and what we've done.

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I've done this. I confess that as your pastor. I've shouted at my children on the way to church.

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I've done that. Anybody else want to raise their hand? No, don't raise your hand on that. I've arrived here.

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I have arrived in this place, well, in the gathering of God's people. I don't know if it's happened here yet.

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But I've arrived to preach God's word with a chip on my shoulder toward my wife.

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I'm assuming, I mean, this is good for me. I'm assuming none of you have ever done that. Of course, you've probably come just completely and utterly ready for worship and everything's going smooth in your household.

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And I'm sure your minivan is nothing like mine on the way here. But we're broken.

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We're fallen. We're like Peninnah. And we come together to receive.

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I hope you come together to receive forgiveness, to receive encouragement, to receive hope, but also that your heart is open to correction.

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We need correction. Peninnah needed correction. And that correction should come from the word of God and from the

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Lord. So we have Hannah here in our text worshiping next to Peninnah.

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And the second observation is just how difficult worship can be for one who suffers like Hannah suffers.

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This was not a fun trip for Hannah every year. Hannah's suffering, by the way, is not a mere plot device.

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This is a human life, a real person, wracked by sorrow, wracked by pain. She was afflicted.

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She would fast and weep during the annual trip to sacrifice and to worship. And for many, I believe that religious activity can often be a painful reminder of unrealized hopes and dreams.

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Sometimes drawing close to God as a reminder of the things that he has not given to us.

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But as we're gonna see by the end of this text, even Hannah, whose womb was closed by the Lord, it says, had to face the reality that there was nowhere else for her to turn.

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That's the title of the message, nowhere else to turn. Where could she go in her grief?

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Where could she go in her sorrow? Where could she go with her infertility? Where could she go with the pain and the suffering at the antagonism of her rival?

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Where can we turn? Where can we turn for hope? Where can we turn for help? Where can we turn that our face would no longer be downcast but would lift up?

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See, Elkanah desires to comfort his wife here in the text at the end of this discussion about her problem.

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And he wants to solve it. He tries to fix it. So that sounds kind of familiar to me.

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She's got the problem. He wants to fix it. And it sounds like maybe three millennia and three millennia men still haven't moved past trying to fix it yet.

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You see that in the text? He's there, he's eager to solve the problem. And Elkanah's a godly man, but even godly men can be relational dunces.

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Did you know that? Women in the room, just be patient with your guy. Sometimes we don't always make the connections relationally.

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Sometimes, by the way, women, I would suggest this to you. Give some grace to your husband. I'm not saying that just because I'm a husband.

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I'm saying give some grace to your husband when he wants to fix it, because guess what? He wants to fix it because he loves you.

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Even though what you want, and I mean, just please be explicit. If you just want us to listen, just let us know. This is a listening moment.

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Help us, help us. But the reality of it is here, he's a little bit of a relational dunce, and he's like,

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Gur, how can you be crying when you got all this? Do you see that in the text? That's how he says it.

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I mean, you got all this. Let's do the math, girl. There's, I mean, what, nine, 10 sons?

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You got me? He's not getting, Hannah has problems. Hannah's got some problems here.

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The second movement of the text is Hannah's prayer. Hannah's prayer. On one particular trip to the tabernacle with this happy family,

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Hannah finishes picking at her food, dismisses herself from the unhappy table, and in her distress, went into the court of prayer, just at the outside of the tabernacle where the sacrifices would be made.

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And in verse 10, we're not supposed to see this as a quiet, demure, lady -like crying.

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The text doesn't give us room for that. She's deeply distressed, the text tells us. She leaves the dinner early, gets up from the table, and walks away.

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It says that she didn't even eat anyway, so that's why I say she was picking at her food. But she is weeping bitterly.

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Again, a phrase that goes over the top in Hebrew to let you know she is just grieving. This is a makeup -running, hair -disheveled, snot -bubble sort of weeping, so that you can dismiss and give a little bit of credit to Eli when he thinks she's drunk.

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Why in the world would he think she's drunk? She's over there crying and praying. Because she looks freaky. She's totally freaky -teedy.

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She's completely, her hair's wigged out, and she's stuff running down her face, and it's not a pretty picture.

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She's not praying out loud, the text tells us, but I don't believe for a second she's being silent. I think her sobs are heard all throughout the tabernacle.

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And in her heart, she makes a vow to God that if he gives her a son, she will return him to God's service.

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And she even makes what is known as the Nazarite vow, a very specific kind of vow about the shaving of his head, that he will not have his head shaven.

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Another part of that same vow would be to not touch any dead thing throughout his life, and to not drink anything, any fruit of the grapevine.

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No wine, no grape juice, nothing. So that was part of the vow that she's taking here. But her prayer is very simple, and her prayer is very profound.

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She asks God, observe my affliction. Remember me.

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Can you look down on me and see my pain? Can you look on me and see my suffering right now? Please remember me, oh

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God. Forget not your servant. I want to serve you. She identifies herself in the most humble of terms, a servant of the most high.

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And then comes the request. Please, give me a son. Please give me a son.

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Now, one of the problems in contemporary Christianity, and in America in general, is we have a tendency to love formulas.

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We have the prayer of Jabez. Anybody remember the prayer of Jabez? You pray this prayer, and God's gonna bless you. He's gonna give you property. He's gonna bless all your business dealings and all that.

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Do you know what I'm talking about? Anybody, nobody even remembers that? Five of us. Anyways, I'm sorry. That wasn't the most apt of illustrations, but we like formulas.

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We like to make spiritual formulas. If I do A, B, and C, then God will do this.

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And please do not take Hannah's prayer as a formula to get your miracle.

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God is not a vending machine, where you put in the right things, and then the stuff comes out.

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Don't take this, rather, as a formula of humility, a formula of humbling yourself in the midst of hardship and difficulty, to go to God like this.

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Please, God, I had nowhere else to turn. Would you look at me in my affliction? Would you remember me?

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Would you forget me not, but then request? Well, Eli misunderstands what he's seen.

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All of this, he misunderstands it, and he takes her for a drunk woman. So, and I would imagine that during these feast times, there was actually drinking involved in it.

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And it probably wasn't unheard of that somebody got a little carried away. As much as that might offend some modern sensibilities, that's probably reality.

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So the priest's misunderstanding is probably just added to her feelings of loneliness and suffering.

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She defends herself, and in verse 15, points out that she's been pouring out her soul before the Lord. This woman whose womb has been closed by the

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Lord goes where with her request? To the Lord, to the

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Lord. And she pours out her anguish to him. She spoke to God out of her great anxiety and vexation.

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And do you realize that we can speak to God out of our own anxiety? We can speak to him out of our own irritation?

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The word vexation is one that I would almost guarantee that nobody in this room used this past week. You probably didn't use the word vexation.

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It's not a common English word. But it means aggravation or irritation. It's a soul kind of rash that itches that you can't quite get to.

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It's vexation. She's annoyed, she's aggravated, she's irritated with her circumstances.

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And she lets God know. She lets him know. She said, I'm frustrated with the circumstance.

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I don't like this that's happening. And let me ask you a simple question. Where can you turn? You turn to other people.

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Go ahead and just try this. I'm sure you've tried it in your life already, many of you. Turn to other people and you will turn up at least one panina who will rub your face in your suffering.

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Turn to people for your comfort and you'll get a panina here and there. You'll find the diamond in the rough who will twist the knife.

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Turn to your family and you'll turn up at least one Elkanah who tells you, get over it and be glad for what you got, girl.

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Turn to religious people and you'll find at least one person who will misunderstand your concern or even worse, tell you that they think you're wrong based on the wrong information.

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Where can you turn? Hannah takes her problem to the Lord God Almighty.

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The text calls him twice the Lord of hosts. A phrase that probably doesn't mean a whole lot to many of us, but it's an image of the one who has the armies of heaven at his disposal.

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The one who is powerful and often it's translated almighty one. The one who can do it and it's not unintentionally that the text identifies him as that multiple times.

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Where does she go? To people who will let her down? She goes to the Lord God Almighty.

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The one who has the power to accomplish it and the one who loves his people.

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And the priest Eli stands corrected. He takes on the correction in verse 17. He's like, oh, you're not drunk, I get it. Okay, so you were just asking for something and he adds his prayers to hers graciously.

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He doesn't promise her an answer. He merely agrees with her request. She doesn't walk away with a prophecy from Eli that a year from now you will have a son or anything like that.

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He says, go in peace and may God give you what you've asked. May God give you what you've asked.

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She has someone now in agreement with her. She has somebody who is praying with her. Someone who is asking for God to give her what she's requested.

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And here the prayer concludes with a change in Hannah. The prayer concludes.

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The prayer, the time of going to the Lord with her pain, with her misery, with her suffering.

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And it's evidenced by a change on her face. The text tells us she left and her face was no longer sad.

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Well, she poured out her heart to the Lord and in that place she found peace.

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In that place she found calm. Note very importantly that when her face is no longer downcast, when her face is no longer sad, her hands are not holding a son.

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She's not holding a son, but she's come to the Lord and her heart has been lifted.

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Note that Penina hasn't gone away. She's gonna be there when Hannah goes back to the family.

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But her heart is no longer sad. Note that she doesn't have any details about how or even if her circumstances are going to change.

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When does she find peace? When does she find calm in prayer?

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When she comes to the Lord and she says, please remember me, please pay attention to my affliction.

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And something about coming to the Lord transforms her in a way that, it's not once she's, get this clearly, this is very fundamental, it's not after the provision that everything is okay for her.

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Not everything's gonna be fixed. I mean, obviously that's not the case. But it's here in the prayer and the meeting with the

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Almighty that her trust and her faith has been expressed. And it shows on her face as she leaves.

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She's understood. She's poured out her heart to God and she has been seen by God and his servant.

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And that leads to the final movement of our text, finally, the provision. The family has one more round of worship before the

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Lord at the tabernacle. They packed up the Winnebago and headed for home. And at the end of verse 19, it's explicitly stated that Elkanah and Hannah got jiggy with it.

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No, that's not what it says in the text. It says he knew her, sorry. It says he knew her. Some of you look confused.

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They did the thing that makes babies? Sex, okay. Sorry, sorry to make that awkward, you guys, wow.

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You guys, chill. Hannah conceived and bore a son.

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And it's such an understatement. I think it's funny, as I was studying this text, as I'm reading it, you see her pain, her suffering, and it's like, she conceived and she bore a son.

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It's like, awesome. Good, there's not a lot of exclamation points in the text. And it's like, what?

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This is so awesome. Understated and humble fulfillment to the pouring out of this woman's heart.

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And she named him Samuel as a play on words with the Hebrew verb to ask, because Samuel sounds in Hebrew like to ask for him.

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So that's where, or to ask from the Lord, rather. And in verses 21 through 28, she keeps her promise.

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After Samuel was weaned, which was usually around three years old, so just in case you're kind of wondering how old was he when he went into the tabernacle and lived with Eli, approximately three years old.

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And he was brought into the service of the tabernacle by Hannah and Elkanah. They took a very generous offering to Eli in a three -year -old bull, a bushel of flour, a few gallons of wine is the amount that's given there.

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And I imagine that Eli the priest was just as surprised as she was when he found out that her prayer had been answered.

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There's no indication that he had solid and firm hope that this was going to happen. He didn't seem to send her away with confidence, but just with the hope that God could do this and that he wanted

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God to do this. And now three years later, he sees the fulfillment of a prayer that he prayed with this woman three years ago, approximately.

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In verse 28, she returns Samuel to the Lord who has given him. Every indication in this text is that Hannah was most desperate to have a child in order to offer that child to the

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Lord's service. I can imagine all kinds of reasons, by the way, and I would assume that you can, too, why

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Hannah might withdraw her pledge to give the child back to the service of God. Can you think of a couple reasons?

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Maybe she just wanted to raise him herself. Maybe she wanted to be more connected to her son than that.

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But she follows through on her vow, nonetheless. Hannah, in our text, endured a huge problem.

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She went to the Lord in prayer, and she received the provision of the Lord. So let's wrap up our time by considering how we apply this to our lives.

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How do we process this in 2018? Is the application simply pray with passion, pray with tears, and make sure you vow something to God, and then he'll give you what you want?

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Is the application that all of your problems will go away if you just do things right?

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Not at all. But let's start with a more simple question. Where do you turn with the problems of your life?

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Even those closest to us cannot really perceive our pain and suffering. We see the response of three different people to the pain of Hannah.

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Penina exploits the wounded. Elkanah dismisses the wounded. And Eli misunderstood the wounded.

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But God is a God, according to verse 19, who remembers the wounded, remembers the wounded.

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God closed her womb, and we benefit. She went through years of suffering and hardship that we might sit here millennia later and hear her story of faithfulness, and really, ultimately, the story of faithfulness of God.

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So don't waste her pain by rejecting the lesson of her suffering. Don't reject her painful endurance, but look at it squarely this morning.

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See her anxious and vexed heart poured out in tears. See her patient endurance in the face of her rival, and see the way that the

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Lord God Almighty brings about his purposes, and then run out into this next week armed with the knowledge that the

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God who brings a Samuel at just the right time in history, the timely prophet, he is the

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God who will walk with us for his greater purposes, even this week. So turn to God in prayer with your anxieties and your vexations.

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The second thing that I just wanna point out is our story doesn't exist as a promise that God will give you whatever you ask. Jesus, the very

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Son of God, asked the Father if the cross could be taken from him, and the very next morning was crucified.

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If you wanna find peace in your problems, and hear me carefully, the preposition matters, if you wanna find peace in your problems and pain, turn to God.

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And you just may also find that in his grace he delivers you from your problems and pain.

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Ask yourself what you're seeking first. Are you seeking peace with what you have, or are you only accepting from God that he changes your things?

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The third thing, how do you respond when others come to you with their pain? So think of it from the other side.

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Think about it from Elkanah, from Paninah, from Eli. Think about the way that we respond when others are suffering.

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How do you respond to people around you that are going through it?

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Elkanah said, get over it. Paninah said, ha ha. Eli assumed the worst.

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We would all do well to consider how we respond to the hurting. Let's grieve with those who are grieving.

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See, I think sometimes our gut is to look at the suffering and either to just turn away and ignore it, or is to offer assumptions, to attempt to dismiss the pain.

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Darkest moments would be to twist the knife, like Paninah. And they're all horrible ways to respond to those who are suffering.

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So consider whether or not you're a person who is safe to grieve with. Are you a person who is willing to enter into the suffering and pain of others and just sit with them?

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Not like Job's friends, who would try to fix him, try to correct it.

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Would you just sit and grieve with people? Would you be sad with them? Lastly, the birth of Samuel signals a turning point in salvation history.

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Samuel will be a prophet that ushers in the era of the kings of Israel. And the final in that line of kings is none other than the greater son of David, who is

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Jesus Christ himself, our Lord and King. The miraculous nature of the birth of Samuel pales in comparison to the miraculous birth of our

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Savior King Jesus. And he is the hope that all of 1 Samuel points toward.

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1 Samuel is not gonna be merely a bunch of moral lessons about what we should do and how we should live. Many of us wanna look in the

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Old Testament for those moralizing lessons, but it is a book that brings us one step closer to King Jesus by introducing us to the way that the kingdom of God has been established here.

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So let me encourage everyone in this room to honestly define for yourself this morning your relationship to the

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King. How are you connected to King Jesus? Have you recognized him yet as your

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King? Have you asked him to save you from yourself? If you have, then

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I would encourage you during this next song, Dave's gonna come up here and he's gonna play a song, and we've got four tables set up in the corners of this room.

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One's gonna be set up back there. That's a little different. We usually have one back here, but just for space. We'll have one back there, one there, one up here, and one here.

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And we're gonna have those set up there. And I would encourage you, if you're all in with Christ, if you've asked him to save you, you recognize your need and have recognized your need for a

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Savior, you've acknowledged him as your Lord and asked him to save you. Then, come to one of those tables and take a cracker to remember his body that was broken for us on the cross.

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His sacrifice is the centerpiece of what we stand for here at Recast. That's why there's a cross on the wall behind me, one of the first decorations that we put up here in this place, and it's really cool.

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That cross itself has followed us wherever we've met. It was in the original storefront. But it's really about his sacrifice for us.

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And that's why we take communion every week here. We recognize that it could become a routine thing, and that's a risk that we're willing to run for the sake of drawing our attention each week back to our neediness before a holy

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God, our unrighteousness, our unholiness, and our need for restoration and forgiveness.

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And so, come to the table, take the cracker to remember his body broken for you, take a cup to remember his blood shed for you, but only do this thing if you have asked

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Jesus Christ to save you. By getting up and going to one of these tables, you're actually saying,

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I'm in with Christ. That's what you're doing, and you're remembering what he sacrificed for you. And if you don't believe he sacrificed for you, then you shouldn't do it.

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Let's sit back and take in the song. We've got a song for you to take in, and just contemplate and consider the great love of Jesus Christ poured out for you, for each and every one of us.

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Jesus is our hope. We have hope based on the promise of Jesus so that our hope looks like this.

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If our circumstances, if my life, if my life from this moment forward is nothing but suffering and then death,

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I have everything. How can I have everything? I can go to God and say, look at me in my affliction, look at me in my pain, remember me in my suffering, and fix this voice, fix this illness, fix this problem, fix this situation with my kids, or with my parents, or with my family, or whatever it might be, or with my finances.

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And if he doesn't, I'm good with that. I stand before you and I say,

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I'm good with that. Why? Because I have hope for eternity that goes beyond this life.

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My hope isn't in finances, my hope isn't in family, my hope isn't in the stuff of this world. And that's the hope that we have in Christ.

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That's what this is all about. And so, I'm convinced that by the time that Hannah has gone to God, she's okay with whatever he does.

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Because she knows who he is. He's the almighty one, and her hope is in him. That's why she turned to him in the first place.

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And so, we have hope based on the promise of Jesus that our problems, our anxieties, and our anguish will not have the final word for those who are in Christ Jesus.

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He has made a way for us to have a restored eternity forever with him, and all we need to do is put our trust in the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins on the cross, and he will forgive us and restore us.

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Maybe today, someone in this room, maybe this is the first time you've heard that message, and you'd like to talk with me afterwards,

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I would love to talk with you. And just talk with you about how you can start a relationship with Jesus Christ, and how you can be forgiven, and how you can have that hope.

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And I mean, the fact of the matter is, I think everybody in this room knows that the stuff of this world does not satisfy. Many of us have tried different things, and we could get up and we could testify to the many things that we tried to fill the void and the pain, and tried to fix things and make everything just right for us, and at the end, the only hope is in Christ.

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So as we go throughout this next week, let's pour out our souls to the God who was able to meet us in the midst of our loneliness, our anxiety, our discouragement, our broken dreams.

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If we don't turn to him, where else can we turn? Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your great love that has been poured out on us, that we don't need to put all of our hope and trust in the things of this world, that our circumstances, as painful as they can become and as full of anguish as life can come down on us at times, and as we can feel trapped and not know which way to turn,

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Father, I pray that you would help all of us to be mindful of the one place we can go with our suffering, the one place we can go with our problems and our hardships, and it is you.

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You are gracious, you are full of love, and you have given to your people what we need, and what we need most is salvation from our sins, and a hope for eternity in the future.

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So, Father, as we come to the communion table, I thank you for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. He died because he loved us.

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Our sin deserved an eternal punishment from you. He took that punishment on himself that anyone who believes and puts their trust in him would have eternal life.

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Father, I pray that you would help us to reflect on this awesome hope that we have, and that you would allow our circumstances and our problems and our hardships to fade away in the light of an eternity that is promised in Jesus, and it's in his name that I pray, amen.