Hannah – Desperation (1 Samuel 1)

0:01 · Speaker 1 Just before Gareth comes, we're going to read from 1 Samuel, chapter 1. If you've got a phone, if you've got a real paper Bible, now's a chance to turn to that. We're going to give a little context, background, and we're going to be focused on Hannah and her prayer this morning as we enter into this series, Real Prayers for Real Life, and we're focusing on the topic of desperation. I hope that's right, at least it says it in my notes, so can't be sitting over there panicking, but not as much as me, because I have to read a lot of words I have no idea how to pronounce, so please, feel sympathy for me. There was a certain man from Raphtema, a Sephrite from the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Exanah, son of Jerome, the son of Eliu, the son of Tuhu, the son of Suph, and Ephraimite. Now, that's hard. Trust me. He had two wives.

1:03 · Speaker 1 One was called Hannah, and the other Peninnah. Peninnah 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 Hopinah and Phinehas, the two sons of Eli, were the priests of the Lord. Whenever the day came for Hannah to sacrifice, he would give portions of the meat to his wife Penina and to all 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, and whenever Hannah went up to the house of the Lord, her rival provoked her till she wept and would not eat. Her husband, El Hannah said to her, Hannah, why are you weeping?

1:59 · Speaker 1 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 the Lord for all the days of his life, and no razor will ever be used on his head. As she kept on praying to the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was praying in her heart and her lips were moving, but her voice was not heard. Eli thought she was drunk and said to her, How long are you going to stay drunk?

2:57 · Speaker 1 Put away your wine. Not so, my Lord, Hannah replied. 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.

3:19 · Speaker 1 And may the Lord of Israel grant you what you have asked of him. She said, May your servant find favour in your eyes. Then she went her way and ate something, and her face was no longer downcast. Early the next morning they arose and worshipped before the Lord and then went back to their home at Ramah. Elkanah made love to his wife Hannah, and the Lord remembered her. So in the course of time, Hannah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel, saying, Because I asked the Lord for him. When her husband Elkanah went up with his family to offer the annual sacrifice to the Lord and to fulfill his vow, Hannah did not go.

4:00 · Speaker 1 She said to her husband, After the boy is weaned, I will take him and present him before the Lord, and he will live there always. Do what seems best to you, her husband Elkanah told her. Stay here until you have weaned him. Only may the Lord make good his word. So the woman stayed at home and nursed her son until she had weaned him. After he was weaned, she took the boy with her, young as he was, along with a three-year-old bull, an ephah, a flower, and a skin of wine, and brought him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh. When the bull had been sacrificed, they brought the boy to Eli and said to him, pardon me, my Lord, as surely as you live, I am the woman who stood here beside you praying to the Lord. I prayed for this child and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him.

4:50 · Speaker 1 So now I give him to the Lord, for his whole life he will be given over to the Lord, and he worshipped the Lord there. So reads the word of the Lord.

5:10 · Speaker 2 It's really good to see you. We are going to be in Samuel 1. We are continuing our series that Gilbert began last week, looking at some of the different people, some of the different ways, some of the variety of contexts in which people talk to God in prayer. And we're going to be exploring that over the course of the summer, to sort of guilt us all into praying better, not to sort of distill some particular formula for praying, but simply to inspire ourselves to take up God's invitation to spend time thinking and learning from the experience and the example of people who talk to God before us. And one of the individuals that we're going to look at this morning takes us back 3,000 years to the remarkable story of an even more remarkable woman called Hannah. Hannah's story is given to us in 1 Samuel 1 and 2, which, as we know from are studies of that in recent years. This is the story, this book of Samuel, originally just one book, but there's also one Samuel and two Samuel now. It charts the story of Israel's transformation from the spiritual darkness and decay under the period of the Judges to a period of revival.

6:47 · Speaker 2 of the renewal of the worship of the living God under his king David and also for a short time Solomon as well. And Hannah lived at the beginning of that earlier bleaker period in history. But the reason why the author of 1 Samuel begins with her story is because she is one of the ingredients in how Israel goes from that spiritual darkness to the glory and revival years. Hannah's journey with God, her journey through her pain, her perspective, her commitment, not making her life simply about the fulfillment of her own desires and ambitions, but to shape her life and her choices around the purposes and the plans of God, even though it would be costly. That experience from one woman dedicated to God becomes one of the catalysts that brings about revival in the entire nation, even though it would happen a generation after her. And 1 Samuel 1 and 2 tells that story. It's a story that shows us two prayers of Hannah, not just one. Now we're going to focus mostly on the first one, but there are actually two in these two chapters.

8:07 · Speaker 2 The story begins with Hannah's pain. And part of that pain is that she found herself in a polygamous marriage, presumably through no choice of her own. We're told in 1 Samuel 1 that Hannah was married to Elkanah, but Elkanah had two wives. One was called Hannah, the other was called Hannah Now, just in case some of you husbands are considering expanding your horizons and maybe joining the manosphere by adding another wife or two to your life and now you think you've got a verse to back it up, let's just be clear that there is a world of difference between what the Bible describes and what the Bible prescribes. The author of 1 Samuel is simply describing the reality of Hannah's situation here. El Kanah, despite being a religious man who provided for his family, who clearly loved Hannah, didn't follow God's blueprint for marriage with one man, one woman, ideally for life. And although he's not the only man in the Old Testament who, despite all their other qualities, has multiple lives, the Bible continually, over and over again, when it describes these contexts of polygamous marriage, shows that they are actually a prescription for all kinds of hurt, tension, jealousy, confusion, both now and in the future. And it was certainly that sort of situation that caused all kinds of pain for Hannah, most especially because although Penina had multiple children, Hannah had none.

9:48 · Speaker 2 With all of the heartache and the questions and the disappointments and maybe even the senses of shame that are carried when those good and natural human desires for a child cannot be fulfilled. And to make matters worse, Penina intentionally and cruelly rubbed it in at every opportunity. God had blessed Penina with the gift of having children, but there was no recognition of the role or the purpose of God in her motherhood. There was no gratitude, there was no humility. Her children simply appeared to be instruments in elevating her own status and comparing herself to the other women around her in her day. And now Hannah, despite his obvious love for Hannah, made the situation worse by showing obvious favoritism, but also by saying things to Hannah like he did in verse 8, where he says, Hannah, why are you weeping about this? Why don't you eat? Why are you so downhearted?

10:54 · Speaker 2 Don't I mean more to you than 10 sons? My gentlemen, never. ever say anything like that to your wife in a situation like that. But what's so interesting is that the primary context for Hannah's pain when it comes to the absence of a child is the house of God. The text makes very clear that the hardest place for Hannah to navigate her pain of childishness, the place where she's most particularly vulnerable to the emotions and potentially even the emotional abuse of not having a child, was in her equivalent of church. And I'll just leave that and say no more about that, but just leave that for us to think about. But despite The trip to the tabernacle at Shiloh being the primary context for Hannah's greatest vulnerability, it also provided her with a specific opportunity to take that pain to the Lord, to come before God as she was, deep in anguish, weeping bitterly, as the text says in verse 10, and to talk with God about it in real prayer. Not everybody takes that opportunity, of course.

12:20 · Speaker 2 So easy, as we saw in the Ruth series with Naomi and we heard in some of the Story Berry series, it's so easy to allow the pain and the disappointment and the unfulfilled and unexplained legitimate desires to damage our relationship with God, to push us away from Him. to allow that dysphoria to completely reshape our sense of ourselves and our own identity, and to allow it to give us false assumptions about who God is and what His character is like and what way He feels about us and what His commitment to us is. But that's not what Hannah did. Inner pain, inner angus, despite being so emotionally drained from it all to the point where projecting words was difficult, she took her circumstances directly to God as she was, no pretense, and she found that God welcomed her in that place. Now that was a place where God was prepared to meet her, to listen, to engage, to take her pain seriously, even though God knew all of the purposes that would eventually go beyond it. And that's really important, isn't it? That even though in our pain God might have greater purposes, greater plans, things that we look back in years' time and say, why was I so upset? Why was I so affected by this?

13:50 · Speaker 2 And yet at that moment it does affect us, and God takes that moment seriously as much as what's going to eventually happen. That's the kind of God that he is. And as Hannah began to pray and open her heart to the Lord, it opened a door for her, not simply just to pour her heart out to the Lord, but to think about her situation in a different way, to think more deeply, to gain a perspective that she likely wouldn't have got had she just got whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. Because like many believers who navigate childlessness, Hannah had no idea why God had not given her that opportunity. But what becomes clear is that as she takes that to the Lord in our first prayer in verse 11, navigating this experience with the Lord sincerely in prayer shapes her perspective. Not only her perspective on not having a child, but her perspective on what it would mean What would be the motive? What would be the purpose? What would be the basis if God was to give her a child one day?

15:04 · Speaker 2 And Hannah's perspective completely changed. That's what prayer did for her. It reminds me of a quote I once heard by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his famous little book, Life Together, when he talks about prayer. He says this, Prayer is not a matter of simply pouring out the human heart once and for all in need or in joy, but it's actually this. It's about an unbroken, constant learning and accepting and impressing in our minds of God's will in Jesus Christ. In other words, prayer is not simply about coming to God with our needs and our praise, and then there you go, God, left it with you as if God didn't know before. It's actually about something completely different. It's about as we bring those needs to God, as we navigate them with the questions, the concerns, the confusions, all the things that we saw with Abraham last week, God uses that context not simply to change circumstances necessarily, but to change us.

16:04 · Speaker 2 God uses it as a crucible to shape our faith, our perspective, our desires, our characters. Prayer changes things. Have you ever heard that? But the primary thing that it changes is you. Yes, like Hannah, it might eventually result in a change of circumstances. But the primary thing that God is after is your heart, your mind, your will and obedience. where our minds and our vision and our perspective and our values are renewed and shaped and settled on God's will and wisdom and purposes and that's much more valuable than even the change of circumstances we might pray for earnestly bringing her sorrow and circumstances and desire before the Lord in prayer creates a space for Hannah to think at that deeper level what is it I am actually praying for. Why am I praying for it?

17:10 · Speaker 2 To process with God why it is she might want children in the 1st place and what would be the purpose of her having children? Was it simply to satisfy the natural maternal instincts that many women have? Was it simply to meet the expectation of what in her mind it meant for her to be a true woman? Was it simply to remove stigma or to gain the approval of other people, particularly other women? Or was there more to it? And as she thinks and she wrestles it through in the safe space of God's presence, she begins to think through the potential of a greater purpose for this desire. The potential of God's purposes in having a family. The potential of having a child so that she could give that child back to God.

18:02 · Speaker 2 to serve his purposes, whatever that might involve. She says in verse 11, 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 the Lord all the days of his life. And no razor will ever be used on his head. It's an example of womanhood and parenthood that is so rarely discovered. Hannah still longs for a child, but now she wants a child for a a very different reason than she wanted her whole life. She asks for a child because of how she believes having a child might serve God's purposes and agenda, not hers. Hannah clearly senses as she prays, as she thinks, as she encounters God, that what might be needed in the nation What God might be looking for, what our nation might need, is somebody who would be totally devoted to the Lord, somebody whose heart would be loyal to the Lord, somebody whose whole life would be committed to the Lord, symbolized through what was a Nazareth vow, which was symbolized through never having your hair cut.

19:21 · Speaker 2 And this is a commitment that Hannah made in the place of prayer, that if God would give her a child, she would give him back. It wasn't about bargaining with God. It wasn't about a rash promise made in desperation to try and move God's hand. It was a sincere, measured, settled request from a woman who has come to see and believe deeply that the purpose of having children is within a much bigger story than her own personal life and desires and the expectations of the people around her. She prays, Lord, I want you to give me a child so that I can give that child back to you. I ask for an opportunity to be a mom, primarily because of how it would serve your agenda. And her prayer raises a huge question. and a challenge for all of us, and it's this: when it comes to the decisions, the opportunities, the desires that each of us have as individuals or even as couples, what is at the heart

20:35 · Speaker 2 of why we ultimately want the things we do? Is it simply to fulfill our own desires, our own ambitions, Or expectations, or could it be that, like Hannah, we see beyond the immediate, we see beyond the temporary personal motives that may not necessarily be bad, but we come to the conviction that the reason why we are actually going to pursue these things is because the purposes and the glory of God might be fulfilled throughout whatever the cost for us. That's huge. Are we open to the possibility as well, though, that not pursuing those things might fulfill God's purposes and glory more than pursuing them? Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7, speaking about people who are deciding whether or not to get married, that in that context, that although marriage is good and has been instituted by God, it is better for some people not to pursue marriage because of how it will better enable them to serve the purposes and the mission of God in their life. At that time, And if that is true of marriage, it is also true of the decision to have children or not. It's true of the decision around how many children we might choose to have.

22:03 · Speaker 2 There is no mandate in the New Testament that says married couples ought by definition to have children or to have more children than you think you can handle, as one influential American pastor once put it. Children are a blessing. Many Christian couples have them, but let's be careful about conflating God's will with what might in fact simply be cultural ideals, including Christian cultural ideals or counter-control beliefs. I've had people say to me, Things like this, birth rates are dropping because our culture is so full of radical individualism and abortion and contraception, and Christians therefore have a moral responsibility to counter that by having as many kids as they possibly can. Really? The culture does not set the agenda for how we ought to act. Christian ethics is about a response to God, not a response to culture. The world does not set the agenda for how Christians live, even if that agenda is to counter the narratives and the values of that world.

23:16 · Speaker 2 Our goal as Christians is not to be countercultural. It's to follow Jesus. and let the world work out whether that's countercultural or not. It's none of our business. We're getting on with following him. When it comes to the choice to have children, if we are blessed with the luxury of that choice, God expects us to make that and weigh that choice up before him, ultimately with the purpose of what will serve his purpose is best. And that might mean that for some couples, despite having the potential, they choose not to have kids or they choose not to have a lot of kids or they choose not to have kids immediately in their marriage. And that's a perspective and a conviction that impacts every single area of our lives.

24:09 · Speaker 2 The choice to go to university, the choice as to why am I a teacher, why am I working in health care, why in finance, why in the media, why do I want that promotion? Is it simply to make money or to fulfill my own expectations of my career and ambitions, or could there be a higher purpose to it all? That whatever the benefits, whatever the cost, I'm going to pursue this in terms of the potential in God to serve his mission and purposes in the world. and believe that revival might be the outcome. Hannah decided that she still wanted a child. But as she brings that desire to God in prayer, she shifts from wanting a child simply for her own purposes to wanting a child because of God's purposes. And with that perspective and that settled conviction in her heart, I imagine it did not come quickly or easily. But that settled conviction that any child she might now have was ultimately about the purposes and the plans that God has for her life gives her a stability to get up, eat,

25:26 · Speaker 2 and walk on with her life and her family and her responsibilities. It enables her to leave the matter with God. Hannah's worship was genuine. It was costly. But in the course of time, without any engineering of her own circumstances or strength in her part, the Lord answers her prayer and enables her to give birth to a son. A son whom she calls Samuel, because she said, I asked the Lord for him, even the child's name. is wrapped up with the sovereign purposes of God and Hannah's commitment to him, and will be acknowledged and woven into Samuel's identity for the rest of his life, because that's how she sees this child. What a time of joy it must have been for Hannah to have Samuel arrive healthy and well.

26:23 · Speaker 2 But now the question shifts, doesn't it? about whether Hannah is actually prepared to fulfill her promise to God now that the child's here. It's one thing to do with all the fervor and the earnestness, make a promise and a vow to God if he'll give you a child about how you'll raise and lead and what you'll do with that child when the child's simply a hypothetical conscript. But it's a whole other thing when there's a real child, your child in front of you. and you promised God that you would give him up. Hannah never relented on her promise. Despite all the love and the commitment that she had for Samuel, despite all the temptation to satisfy her own agenda and purposes, despite the absence of any assurance that she would ever have any more children, she commits herself to raising Samuel until he's weaned and then giving them completely up over to the service of God under Eli. And when he's winged, she takes him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh.

27:35 · Speaker 2 She goes back to the point of her greatest pain, the point of her encounter with God, and she brings a little four-year-old boy with her heart wrenched, surely. And they worship the Lord together And they sacrifice to the Lord together, but then surely the greater sacrifice in Hannah's life comes after that. And she hands him over to Eli in verse 27 and 28 and says, I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the Lord for his whole life. He will be given over to the Lord. I have a four-year-old son. And I simply cannot imagine the level of commitment and trust and allegiance to God's higher priorities in my life if it would mean to hand that child over to God. But she was prepared to go right through on her commitment, in effect saying, Your will be done, God.

28:42 · Speaker 2 Your purposes, Your plans for this child are infinitely more important than mine. So I surrender them to You. I hand this child over to You. And of course, God may not ask us to literally give up our children in order to demonstrate that kind of commitment. But in the way that we lead our children, in the way we raise them and discipline them, the opportunities that we give them, the priorities and values that we set for them as their examples, God is asking us to make no less of a commitment. Lord, this child is about you, not me. And as I said at the beginning, One of the big problems in Israel that day, the reason why the nation was in such a spiritually bleak state was because of the failure of the priesthood. They were the ones meant to be demonstrating this kind of commitment.

29:35 · Speaker 2 They were the ones meant to be showing the value and the trustworthiness and the goodness of God the way Hannah was. but they completely failed. What a contrast in a juxtaposition Hannah's devotion to God is to the spiritual leaders of her day. Specifically Eli, who we are told in 1 Samuel 2 weakly chose a sentimental loyalty to a son rather than obedience to God. Eli's sons are described as scoundrels. They had no regard for the Lord. That's how the Bible describes them in chapter two. They had the position and the titles of the priests of the Lord, but they had no personal commitment to God themselves.

30:14 · Speaker 2 They exploited their position of power to line their own pockets and to sexually abuse women. Not the last priest to do that. But instead of dismissing them and handing them over to God so that the worship and the witness of God epitomized in the tabernacle would be pure Eli disregarded his loyalty to God in order to hold on to his children. Hannah is the antithesis of that. Eli had no vision beyond dead spiritual ritual or comfort. Hannah had a vision for her life and her choices that saw beyond the immediate, the sentimental, or the self-serving. Eli disregarded God's word and will in order to hold on to his sons and it resulted in spiritual disaster for the nation. Hannah was willing to give up her son out of sacrifice and commitment to God and it led to revival.

31:16 · Speaker 2 She wasn't a member of the priesthood officially. She would never facilitate any sacrifice, never hold that office. But she had something far more important. Hannah knew the Lord in the everyday affairs of her life. And she worked her faith out and her devotion to God out in that context, in her parenting. in her work, in her home and her responsibilities, Hannah knew what it meant to not simply collapse to the values or the choices or the purposes of everybody else around her, but instead to present her life, her hopes, her dreams on the altar of God as a living sacrifice, knowing that what Paul said in Romans 12, that that is true worship and priesthood. That's true service to God. And in so doing, she epitomizes what the New Testament describes as one of God's greatest purposes for anybody who would follow Him.

32:18 · Speaker 2 That we, in our everyday lives, would be priests to God. Not worked out, of course, in the way that Hannah or Samuel knew at the tabernacle of Shiloh. But we would be priests to God in the sense that our lives would offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God, that our choices, what we get involved in, what we don't get involved in, what we invest our lives in, where our priorities lie, what we conduct, how we conduct ourselves, and the everyday responsibilities that we have says or does, as Peter talks about in 1 Peter 2, it proclaims the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous The purpose of priests was to help people get to know God, to inspire and facilitate worship, and that is what God has called us to, help people see the reality of God through our lives, to help people see the wonder and the glory and the worth of God through how we live our lives, to see His beauty and the healthiness of His moral vision, to see the wisdom and the life of His Word, to reflect His glory and worth to the point that it facilitates and inspires and ignites worship and devotion to God. life your life your choices has the potential under the Holy Spirit to lead people to worship how's our priesthood going

33:50 · Speaker 2 how's our relationships our friendships how is that priesthood going in the church but above all perhaps the most important context of all. How is our priesthood going in our families? What an example of Hannah as a mother, even in Samuel's earliest days. Her faith was real, it was dynamic. She poured into him, investing in his spiritual potential. He was winged in more ways than one growing up in that house. perhaps even as a young age of three or four, telling him the story of how he came to be, God's commitment to his life, the miracle that brought him into existence, telling him the stories of Israel's past, the wonders that God has done, believing in his spiritual potential and capacity, even as a preschooler, to capture some measure of the glories of God,

34:53 · Speaker 2 believing that children are often capable of far more spiritual depth and insight than we often give them credit for. Making a commitment to developing him in faith so that his faith would be real and his own and full of potential. A priest of God in her own home whose greatest ambitions for her child would be that child would know God and walk with him and serve him and find his unique place and contribution in God's eternal purposes. What a calling. Seeing beyond just the momentary happiness, setting her personal hopes and desires as a parent under the greater purposes of God, and depositing in him, even for a very short period of four years, a knowledge, a reverence, a love, a trust for God, and an imagination for what might be possible for a life that would be totally devoted to that God. That's the priesthood of parenting. investing every day in the man or the woman that our children could be in God, exposing them to the exciting things that God is doing in the world around them, giving them a front row seat to our faith and how we're working out what it means to seek first God's kingdom, loving them and leading them, setting our greatest ambition for them that they might be conformed into the image of Christ, not the image that we have made for them. And of course, we're not in complete control of the outcomes.

36:25 · Speaker 2 Children have their own minds and will, but what a vision to have for our kids. What a calling to step into as parents. What an endeavor to help and support each other as a church in. To not simply subcontract all that to the children's ministry or to the youth ministry, but to get together and support one another, to think creatively and proactively and imaginatively, how do we navigate our children's faith? How do we build them up in the knowledge of the Lord? How do we navigate the challenges of smartphones and social media and sexual ethics and identity and anxiety? How do we help them to make their faith their own? That's our challenge as priests.

37:07 · Speaker 2 And there's an opportunity for all of us to help each other in that, investing money and time and resources in helping one another in our priesthood of parenting. Let me close with this. No matter how well that endeavor might be externally, the one ingredient that matters most in it is our own personal investment and devotion and commitment and knowledge of the Lord for ourselves. And that's what comes through in Hannah's second prayer. This wasn't manufactured in Hannah. This is real.

37:54 · Speaker 2 She truly believed. She truly had the foundation and the source of her parenting, her own relationship and commitment to God. She truly believed. My heart rejoices in the Lord. In the Lord, my horn, my strength is lifted up. That's where my dignity, that's where my value is found. That's where the strength and stability of my life lies. There's nobody like the Lord.

38:23 · Speaker 2 There's none besides you. There is no rock to build my life on. With all the stabilities and all the uncertainties and all the challenges, there's absolutely no rock to build and find my life on like the Lord. She goes on to talk about how God brings low the arrogant. the proud and the self-centered and how he exalts the humble, this is what she believed, that it's not by strength that someone prevails, but the Most High will thunder from the heavens. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth. He will give strength to his king.

39:05 · Speaker 2 How did she know about a king? and he will exalt the horn, the strength of his anointed. The secret to this kind of experience, the secret to this kind of parenting is to have our own lives, our own hearts shaped by the kind of conviction that comes out in this prayer. There is nothing greater that you can do, and I know I'm speaking very boldly and I know things are more complex than I can make, but can I just finish by saying this? There is nothing greater that you can do for your children or grandchildren than invest in your own dynamic relationship and knowledge and commitment to God. And who knows, as we do that and declare the excellencies of him who has called us and them out of darkness into his glorious light, who knows that in the Lord's purposes, as they find their own way serving for him, who knows that simple, steady commitment that sometimes comes at a great cost may result long after our time in revival, in Ireland and beyond.

40:38 · Speaker 2 Do you believe it's possible? Hannah did. It is so possible. We need a bigger imagination for what is possible in parenting. Let's pray. Father, thanks for an opportunity just to explore your word. Oh Lord, I'm so inspired by this woman, so challenged personally.

41:06 · Speaker 2 Lord, we pray that in all the dynamics of life, whether it's children or marriage or whatever those situations might be or those circumstances might be, whatever our desires might lie here this morning in this church, Lord, we pray that we would be people who learn to say not my will, but your will be done, who learn to say, Lord, we do want these things. We would like to have them, but we want to have them for the right reason. And so we pray that if you want us to have them, that our hearts and our motives and our focus and our commitment will be ultimately towards you and not to yourselves for your glory. And then, Lord, help us to step back and see the wonders of what you will do with that sort of commitment. In Jesus' name, amen.