Speaker 1: And we can't really know the Lord if we don't lay undignified before him. Yes, he knows our thoughts and our desires. He created us. Right? But he's he's waiting for us to come to him too, to partner with him.
Hello, friends. Welcome to the Life Tabernacle Church podcast. It's an honor to be with you today. This podcast serves as our church's weekly sermon archive. Tune in each week to hear what God is speaking in our community.
Be sure to follow and share with a friend. We hope you enjoy today's message. Good morning, everybody. How's everyone this morning? Happy Mother's Day to our moms.
As I get older and as I've become a mom, Mother's Day is truly very special. So it's an honor to speak with you this morning. And today's really special because I have my mom here. I don't think I've got to spend Mother's Day with her in like five or six years. This is a really special weekend.
Next week's our women's gathering and she gets to be here with me. And so it's just gonna be a really, really awesome time. And so in honor of Mother's Day, I wanted to put this picture up on the screen. This is me and my mom, I think in kindergarten, at my kindergarten graduation. And so just a sweet little memory.
And before I get into the word, I wanted to share about the first time I found out I was gonna be a mom. So everybody's obviously seen Semi running around, taller five year old, little girl. And Dallas and I, if you didn't know, we got married after my freshman year in college and he was a sophomore. So really young, y'all are like, what did you do? Right?
No, but the Lord was really, really in our story and we got married while we were in Bible college. Right? And it was our My second year, my sophomore year, we were living at what we call the commons there. And after we finished that year, we were like, you know what? We had acquired some debt.
We thought it'd be a good idea to buy a car. We just got married and we were like, what are we doing? We got school loans. We're like, we wanna get out of debt. So my parents graciously let their married daughter move back into their house to get out of debt.
Praise God. That's pretty awesome, right? So they let us move in, we pack all of our stuff and I think two weeks after moving to their house, I was feeling a little funky. I was like, Oh, well, this is during COVID, everything shut down. And I find out that I'm expecting our first kid and I'm a little nervous, not gonna lie.
Dallas and I are young, we're in school and But I was determined that I would still finish school, be a mom. And I told Dallas at the worst possible time, right before he left for work. So you can expect all day at work, he's like, how are gonna afford this kid? How am I gonna finish school? But he was really excited, I promise you.
But a poor timing on my part. And I was like, bye, have a good day. And then we didn't talk about it till I got home. Anyways, but I just wanted to share that story. And as I was reflecting, I'm like, wow.
Now look at five and a half years later, I have four precious babies, twin boys, they're around here somewhere and then little Sela. And I'm just really thankful on this Mother's Day. Being a young mom is really hard, and so I'm sticking with the thankfulness and the gratefulness that the Lord has provided these special blessings. So if you have your word this morning, I'd love for you to turn with me to first Samuel chapter one. And if I had to title today's message, it would be A Praying Mother.
If you don't have your word, it'll be up here on the screen with me. So follow along and bear with me. There's a lot of names in this scripture, so I'm gonna try to say them as best as I can. Okay? This is the word of the Lord.
There was a certain man from Ramoth a Zephophite of the hill country of Ethereum whose name was Elkanah, son of Jaretham, the son of Elihu, a son of To, the son of Zeph, an Ephraimite, he had two wives. One was called Hannah and the other one was called Penana. Penana had children, but Hannah had none. Year after year, this man went up from his town to worship and sacrifice to the Lord Almighty at Shiloh, where Hophni and Phinehas, the two sons of Eli, were priests of the Lord. Whenever the day came for Elkanah to sacrifice, he would give portions of the meat to his wife Panahi and to her sons and daughters.
But to Hannah, he gave a double portion because he loved her and the Lord had closed her womb. Because the Lord had closed Hannah's womb, her rival kept provoking her in order to irritate her. This went on year after year. Whenever Hannah went up to the house of the Lord, her rival provoked her till she wept and she would not eat. Her husband, Elkanah, would say to her, Hannah, why are you weeping?
Why don't you eat? Why are you downhearted? Don't I mean more to you than 10 sons? Once they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh, Hannah stood up. Now Eli the priest was sitting on his chair by the doorpost of the Lord's house.
In her deep anguish, Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly and she made a vow saying, Lord Almighty, if you will only look on your servant's misery and remember me and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to you, to the Lord for all the days of his life and no razor will ever be used on his head. As she kept praying to the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was praying in her heart, but her lips were moving, but her voice was not heard. How long are you going to stay drunk and put away your wine is what Eli said. Not so my Lord, Hannah cried.
I am a woman who is deeply troubled. I have not been drinking wine or beer. I was pouring out my soul to the Lord. Do not take your servant for a wicked woman. I have been praying here out of my great anguish and grief.
Eli answered, go in peace and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked him. She said, may your servant find favor in your eyes. Then she went away with her and ate something and her face was no longer downcast. Early the next morning, they arose and worshiped before the Lord and they went back to their home in Ramoth. Elkanah made love to her to his wife Hannah and the Lord remembered her.
So in the course of time, Hannah became pregnant, gave birth to a son and she named him Samuel saying, because I asked the Lord for him. Let us pray. Lord, I thank you for this morning. I thank you for every single person in this room that has come here today, whether that's their first time here or many, many times. Lord, I just pray as we hear your word, would you open up our hearts, Lord?
Give me the words to speak and the strength to honor you and praise you. In Jesus name, amen. Amen. This story that we just read, if you haven't read it before, is a story about a woman named Hannah. And when I was Dallas asked me to speak, this is one of the first passages that just like came to my mind.
And at first I thought the Lord was like, it's a mother, it's Mother's Day, like it's gonna be so fitting like yada yada, but the Lord took me a quite a bit of different direction. But, this story is about a woman who is desperately praying and crying out to the Lord for a son. And I didn't read the last little bit of the chapter because it was a lot. But Hannah goes on to have a son and that prayer that she she you saw her cry out. She says, Lord, I'm gonna give him back to you.
And that's just what she does. She actually gives her son back to, the Lord and he lives there with Eli and he observes. And so this blessing she prays so hard for, she actually gives it back to the Lord. That's crazy, right? How many of us can say that we would have done that, right?
But today I want us to just observe from Hannah, I have a few points that I think that we all can really, really grasp from. Not just moms, this is a powerful story of a mother's prayer, right? But I think we all can grasp from it. So the first one, if you're taking notes, is I wanna focus on Hannah's motive. What was Hannah's motive in her prayer as she goes before the Lord?
So we see Hannah and she's greatly troubled and the Lord has closed her womb. The scripture literally says, the Lord closed her womb, right? And her husband has another wife, we're gonna call her Penny. Her name's a little hard to say sometimes. So Penny, all right?
She has a lot of other children, okay? And I'm not gonna go into the deep details of why does he have two wives? Like we don't do that. Right? But this is back then.
Okay? And can you imagine so Hannah is actually probably helping raise these other children as well. Right? So that's like a big slap in the face. Right?
Because she can't have kids. So imagine how like hurt and just she probably she's doing it gracefully because Hannah's name actually means grace. So this is a very fitting story. But she's taking care of these children, honoring the Lord. And she also probably feels a lot of shame because in that culture, if you couldn't give children, that meant you had nothing to give to your family line.
It was just this something's wrong with you, your family might be cursed. It was this whole thing, right? So she's feeling a lot of that. Penny having all these kids, it was this constant reminder. And the scripture doesn't specifically say why Hannah's womb was closed, why the Lord did that.
I can give you a really answer other than as I was studying, I'm reminded, you know, it probably wasn't the Lord's timing, which is so hard to grasp, right? That he would do that, put her through that hurt, through that tough season. But the Lord had a specific plan for Hannah, right? And this was gonna grow Hannah's faith and her trust in the Lord. And even Hannah's husband, we read reminds her, hey, like I'm more to you than these sons.
Why are you so downcast? Why are you so weeping bitterly? I love you. I love you. Like you don't have to give me any kids for me to love you anymore.
Right? So you think that'd be reassuring, which I'm sure it was, but Hannah still weeps before the Lord for these children, right? She comes before the Lord, just in this raw emotional state, right? And she comes to the Lord with something she desires, with a pure heart. Right?
It says that she wept bitterly and we she probably is a little bitter. Right? But it's more out of this like, Lord, do you see me? I love you. I'm coming before you.
Please hear my cry, right? And we see that that pureness and that trust and faith that Hannah has in him instead of continuing to just complain that she doesn't have children, right? What does she do? She goes before the Lord in prayer and asks. And sometimes we don't always come before the Lord in the right motive, right?
Right? Have you ever asked for something that you already know? That's probably not a good idea for me, right? But I'm gonna come before the Lord and ask because that's what you're supposed to do, right? Like, for example, maybe you are asking the Lord, you really need some money.
Okay? Don't we all need money? Amen. And you come before the Lord and you're like, Lord, I really need this money. I need your help.
But you have not been faithful with the other money. Maybe why you don't have money. That's not always the case. And the Lord's like, man, I don't know if you really need this new job that's gonna make you all this money because you haven't been faithful with what you already have. Right?
That's just one example maybe we come before the Lord and we're just asking out of selfish motive, right? Because the Lord, he he knows our hearts but he knows what we need and he knows what we need in his timing, right? So even though Hannah has come before the Lord and she's asking and she's asking, he he sees her, right? But it's gonna happen in his timing, okay? And how do we know, maybe you're asking, how do I even know if I come to the Lord with this pure motive, right?
I think it can be pretty simple as we're praying, we can ask the Lord to search our hearts, bring light to, hey Lord, if I am asking you in a greedy or a selfish way, would you just guide me? Father, would you direct me elsewhere? Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal that to you. And the Lord isn't this genie in a bottle. My daughters were watching Aladdin last night and I'm reminded he's not this genie, we rubbed the lamp and he just grants our wish right there, right?
Sometimes it happens right away, which we're gonna talk about that in a minute, but he's not because he knows what we need, he disciplines his children and he guides us, right, in his timing. And so becoming, but still coming before him with everything builds our faith and trust in the Lord. Instead of continuing to complain, Hannah continues to pray. So Hannah's motive was pure. Can everybody say pure?
The second thing through this story is Hannah's endurance. Can everyone say endurance? How many of y'all have endurance when you run? It's really hard to build endurance when you run, right? But to build endurance, you have to keep going, right?
I can't just expect to run a five k if I haven't ran in like a year, right? I gotta build some endurance, okay? So Hannah in her prayer has endurance. She didn't just come to the Lord one time, it was like, Hey Lord, please give me a child. Noah says yearly they went and she prayed.
And she prayed at home, not just here. She was constantly praying. She fervently continues to pray before the Lord, weeping before him. And in verse 15, it says, as Eli is saying, are you drunk out of your mind? You look like a crazy woman.
Right? She says, I'm pouring my soul out to the Lord. Right? And it's just funny that he thinks that she's just this crazy lady because and then it kinda hits him like, oh, I should probably be praying to the Lord like that too. Right?
And Hannah's prayer isn't this passive wishfulness. She was praying so intensely that it's kind of a weird wording. Like her lips were moving, but it says her prayer wasn't like you couldn't hear her. She's praying she's been praying so exhaustively like you couldn't even hear her. She's just like, here I am Lord, this is all I got.
Right? She's truly praying out of her heart and laying it out there before the Lord. So praying with endurance looks like continuing to go before him and that is tiresome. That can get really old. We may wanna give up, but the Lord is asking us to continue to come before him and ask.
It's not because necessarily I think he just wants to see us struggle, see his children struggle. No, he wants to work through us and again in his timing. And in verse 18, I wanted to point something out. It says, after she's done praying, she leaves and she went and ate something. Because remember it said she wasn't eating, she was downcast, just so in this like distraught state.
Right? But after she prays that Eli blesses her, she leaves and she goes and eats something, right? And it just hit me when I was studying this that the Lord, when we come to the Lord in prayer, he changes something within us, right? It's not just like, hey Lord, it's literally changing us internally, right? So the anxiety you're feeling when you come to the Lord in prayer, it might not be answered right away, but you're already feeling his peace, right?
And trust even if it's not right away the circumstance, right? So she left the place, she eats and her face, she's like already lifted. Like I went and prayed, I feel better, right? And they leave and says sometime after she conceives, right? But before even then the Lord's already transforming her.
So when we come before the Lord in prayer, he partners with us, Right? And this this might sound silly to some of y'all, but here's an example of something that I keep coming before the Lord in prayer. Obviously, you know, I have four young children and I'm really tired a lot. Twins, everybody said, get them on the same schedule. It was a good thought.
It's just not working for us. Okay. So I can't tell you how many times I've asked the Lord through the day, through the night, Lord, can you please give me some rest tonight? I just want my babies to sleep through the night. Now, just turned six months, so that doesn't always happen, right?
My older two, they don't even sometimes sleep through the night. So it's just the season I'm in, right? But I'm still continuing to come before the Lord because I still believe he can give me rest and asking him, Lord, can you can you give me the strength then to get through tonight? If it's not what I think it's going to be, can you give me the strength to get through this night? And you know what?
Guess what? They haven't slept through the night yet, but I keep going to him. Right? Like last night was one of the worst nights in a really long time. But I kept praying.
I'm like, Lord, you know, I gotta speak in the morning. Can you just give me rest? And he is. He's giving me the energy. He's giving me the rest.
But we must continue to come to him even in the like little small things. Right? And you know what, if I stopped going to the Lord in prayer about that right now, what would it do? I'd probably just be more miserable, really lonely, sit in my pity, which trust me, I have bad days. It happens, it does.
But if I just stopped asking him, I would just probably feel worse. So I might as well ask Him, right? I might as well go before Him even if it's not gonna be answered in this season. That's not the point of it being answered right away. It's about talking to Him and being with Him.
I have to have the endurance to pray, to seek. And this is what Hannah does. The Lord answers her prayer in some time. And like I said before, she even The Lord blesses her, gives her the son Samuel, which side note, I forgot to mention this before. Samuel is an extremely important person into the history of Israel, right?
This is the period of judges where Israel is having all these judges and it is just not going well, folks. They are disobeying the Lord, then they're doing good, then it's terrible, right? So during this period of time, this is when Samuel is born, the son that Hannah prays for. And he's gonna be the the prophet that anoints Israel's first king, King Saul. Then after that comes David.
Right? And so forth to Jesus. That's the lineage of Jesus, right? Through David. So he's really an important figure, right?
So Hannah's prayer is very significant. But right, sometimes the Lord answers our prayers right away. And then other times we have to have the endurance to come before the Lord and to ask again. I wanna share a story about my friend Ashlyn. She has actually been here and she spoke the last time they were here.
And they just had their second baby boy. How exciting. And, her first pregnancy was really tough and her birth experience was not great. So when and then they actually had lost and then they got pregnant again, right? Such a miracle, okay?
So when she gets pregnant again, she's like, friend, I really need you to pray that this pregnancy would go well. She had a lot of other issues dealing with like high blood pressure in her first pregnancy. She's like, I just wanna have an awesome experience because it was really tainting her longingness to have kids, okay? And so I was like, I got you friend, I'm gonna start praying, okay? Praying through this whole pregnancy and then the other day she texts me, she's like thirty eight weeks pregnant.
She's like, friend, my blood pressure is sky high. They are wanting me to go to the hospital. They're gonna induce me. I don't want this. This is not what I asked the Lord for.
And I was like, okay. Was I like, I'm gonna start praying. And I prayed right then. How many people have asked you to pray for them and then you're like, I'm praying for you, but you don't pray right then? I do it all the time because you just like, Oh, I'm gonna pray for them, right?
No. But I was like, Okay, Lord, I'm praying right now. I had just stopped what I was doing. My kids were running around. I said, Lord, I am just asking for healing in Ashlyn's body right now that you are gonna heal this blood pressure.
She's not gonna have any issues. She's gonna be able to have the birth that she wants. I literally felt, this isn't to like be like super spiritual, but I felt in my body, was like, woah, okay Lord, felt these goosebumps. And you know what? The Lord completely healed her body.
Amen. She had a beautiful birth, no complications. Praise the Lord. Right? So that's just one example of coming before them.
And immediately in that moment, he answered that prayer. Matthew seven verses seven through eight says, ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, who seeks finds, and the one who knocks, the door will be opened. First Thessalonians five seventeen says, pray continually. And in Jesus' teaching in Luke chapter eight, he tells his disciples, always pray and do not give up.
Like that little sideline because Jesus probably knew it wasn't gonna happen the way we thought it was. He says, always pray and do not give up. So the real question is, are we willing to continue to pray and ask him even when it doesn't happen right away? I know prayer is really hard because I mean, and also sometimes I think we have to sit down and it has to be quiet. It's gotta be this like quiet little thing to pray, but you can pray whenever.
But I mean, praying for one minute, it's hard. Praying for five minutes is hard. Praying for an hour, that's really hard to stay focused and to be in prayer, right? But it's not about the time necessarily that we're spending in this prayer time, right? It's about pouring our hearts out before the Lord, just like we see Hannah doing here.
Spending time with Him, letting Him work through us, right, as we open ourselves up to him. Our prayers move him. I love the song that Keaton sang this morning. I just wanna move your heart Lord. And that's what Hannah's doing in this story.
Can everyone say endurance? Endurance. So we have Hannah's motive, we have her endurance in her prayer. And the last one I wanna speak about today is Hannah's boldness. Everyone say boldness.
I already kind of talked about these few verses, but verses 12 through 16, she's praying and you see Eli being like, you're drunk, you're not even making sense. What are you doing woman? But Hannah was praying so hard, I kinda picture her like, maybe like it says there was like steps and he's sitting in the chair, like she's just laying on the steps. Right? Which to some of us might look like, yeah, woman, you look why would you do that?
Like that looks like not ladylike or just not even cool. That wasn't the point to her. She's pouring her heart out to the Lord and she's coming before him boldly, doesn't care what anyone else thinks. She's just coming to ask him because that's all she has left, right? And we often focus a lot on maybe how we look when we're praying or that we're praising in worship, but it it it really doesn't matter.
Obviously, don't wanna look like cuckoos, right? And we wanna be respectful before the Lord and Hannah is. We have to forget about everything around us, which is what she does and lay ourselves before him. And we can't really know the Lord if we don't lay undignified before him. Yes, he knows our thoughts and our desires, he created us, right?
But he's waiting for us to come to him too, to partner with him. And Hannah comes boldly before him. He's not necessarily gonna force it upon you, right? He wants to build this relationship with you, this intimate relationship. So if we can't come to him and ask him and communicate with him, then it's probably not gonna happen.
He's still gonna move, right? But that intimacy that you want with the Lord, we gotta go before him. Go before him boldly. Listen, I'm really bad about like when I when I wanna ask for something, like even Listen, this is not Dallas, this is me. This is all me.
I don't know what happened to me as a child. Nothing probably happened to me, my personality, right? I'm like, hey, can you do this favor for me? And it's filling my water up, like filling my water up while I'm dealing with children and I'm nervous to ask my husband, can you like and he's like, stop. Stop.
Stop. Ask me boldly what would you like. He's always willing to do it. Right? This is one example.
It's silly. Right? He's my husband and he's never like yelled at me, how dare you ask me to do that? Never. Right?
I'm just like scared and just like don't wanna be confident in asking him. I'm working through it folks, I'm working through it. But that's what we're supposed to do to the Lord and sometimes we're like, oh, I don't know. Like I don't know what to say. Like I don't know even what to do.
Just ask him and ask him boldly. I can't guarantee it's gonna happen, but just ask him. It doesn't hurt, right? I love this quote from a source that I was studying. It says that Hannah had taken her burden to the Lord and trusted him to do his will, suggesting that genuine faith surrenders outcome to divine sovereignty rather than demanding specific results.
Her prayer demonstrates God's power both to exalt and to humble, to bless and to punish, reflecting a faith that accepts God's comprehensive authority over circumstances. Meaning Hannah knew like, I'm gonna pray Lord, I'm gonna keep coming to you even if it doesn't work or happen. Right? She had enough faith in the Lord that she knew that praying wasn't just getting what you want. Right?
And because of Hannah's willingness and boldness though, the Lord does answer her prayer. We don't get to I didn't read the other passage, but Hannah actually has like three or four more children after Samuel. And like I said, Samuel, her precious son was gonna be this crazy prophet in Israel's history that would just go on to do amazing things. So if Hannah hadn't prayed so fervently and unashamedly for the son, what would have happened? I think the Lord would still move, right?
But he moves specifically because of this prayer and this and this this mother. Ketan, you can go ahead and make your way to the front. But So the Lord answers her request, gives her this son, she dedicates him back to the Lord. Oh, thank you. And she praises him.
Let's focus on that real quick before we close. She praises the Lord. After she receives her gift, she turns around and thanks him. Sometimes we could be so excited about the gift that we don't even like remember to say, thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord, for answering that prayer.
And that's really important. She doesn't forget her vow she makes to the Lord, she takes her son when he's old enough, leaves him there and she says, thank you Lord for giving me a son. So when the Lord does answer our prayers, let's not forget to say thank you, right? Can everyone say Hannah's boldness? So we have this woman who's a mother, right, fitting for Mother's Day, but I think she applies to all of us in our prayer life.
And I just think that we can learn from as she comes before the Lord with this pure heart, right? This pure motive. Obviously she has this desire, right? It's not wrong to have desires, okay? The Lord sometimes places them in our hearts.
It's okay to have wants and needs, right? But she comes before him with this right, pure heart and right motive and she continues to ask the Lord. And she unashamedly puts herself before him. And all these things are probably really uncomfortable. Probably makes a lot of us squirm or just like, I'm not really into that.
Like, I don't really wanna do that. And I'm not asking you to necessarily come up here and like lay before the Lord. That's not what I'm talking about. A lot of our prayer time happens not around people, right? It's just us and the Lord.
And we do pray with others too, right? And you still could apply all of these in that situation, but I just want to encourage you that if we partner with the Lord in prayer, we see miracles, we really do. It doesn't always happen the way we think, but we really, really do. We see him change lives. We see him shift the room, the atmosphere.
You know, when I pray like, Lord, I'm anxious, can you please like just help me have peace? My house doesn't immediately go quiet, right? My kids are still running around or I'm like, Lord, please, please, please guide me in the patience today with my kids because they're young and they're learning and I have to be gracious, right? But it might not work right away, but I already feel this like heaviness lifted off because I went to Him in prayer. I know days where I didn't even pray.
And I'm like, why am I so like, why is everything out of control? I didn't even like go to Him in prayer and ask. I just like sat there and was like, this is miserable. I don't like this. I wanted to change.
Right? Which I don't really mean those things. But if we go to Him in prayer and open ourselves up to Him, He transforms us, He partners with us. And that's what He did in this story with Hannah and Samuel. I really encourage you if you haven't read the story of Samuel first and second Kings, it's a pivotal point in the history of Israel.
And I really encourage you to see how it plays out, how Hannah's prayer affects that. But as we close today, on this Mother's Day, I don't know what you're going through necessarily mom or not, you know, anybody, but I want you to go to him in prayer. Don't wait any longer. And when it's not answered or doesn't look the way we think it does, keep praying. And you have the ability to ask for that, not just your pastor or a spiritual leader in your life.
Like you have the ability to change lives and change your life through the power of prayer and partnering with the Lord. Prayer changes us. It changes what is to come and it draws us closer to him. So I'm gonna pray fitting, then I'm gonna offer some time of prayer for you guys. If your mom's here, grab her hand, pray with her, just have a sweet moment with the Lord as key in place, as a reflection of how powerful our prayers are.
Okay. Dear heavenly father, I thank you for today. I thank you for this story, this gift and your word, this pivotal point in Israel's history that we can learn from. We can learn from Hannah's, her willingness to come before you boldly, to ask confidently in your name. Your word says that.
So Lord help us to do that, to partner with you, to see miracles, to see you grow us, to draw us closer to you. So right now, Father, I pray over everyone in this room, whatever they're going through, whatever they may need to ask you, that they would come and ask you boldly. They would ask you now that they wouldn't wait and that they would continue. They would continue to see your faithfulness as they pray. They would continue to trust in you always, every day.
Because sometimes it's, Lord, it's really easy to feel comforted in these spaces with other believers around. But Lord, when we leave this place, we go home, we go home to our home lives, would you continue to walk with us? Would you continue, Lord, that we would continue to pray and ask that you would be there with us. Lord, I thank you and I praise you, Lord.