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Part 11 of 16
A Cloud Of Witnesses
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Most of us can relate to the chaos of parenting—the long days, the constant interruptions, the balance between work and family. The days are long, but the years are short. You can go through life glazed over just getting through the day, all to realize later that these moments are fleeting and only a stage we get to be part of with our children.
We are thrilled to celebrate all the moms today. I have been blessed to be surrounded by wonderful mothers throughout my life. My own mother was an absolute riot—I remember when my older brother tried slamming his bedroom door on her, and she came back with a screwdriver and hammer, popped the door right off the hinges, and carried it to the garage. He was without a door for two to three months.
I'm also married into a family where God blessed me with an amazing mother-in-law who is tough as nails. My wife's mother was a teenage mother of two in a very toxic and abusive relationship on the reservation. She made the courageous decision to run away, which often meant being disowned by family. Yet she got a factory job, worked there for 30 years, raised five children, and every single one graduated college. She's a wild success story.
And of course, I'm thrilled to partner with my wife Kristen as a teammate in raising four kids. Our children recently reminded me that most of their good qualities come from their mother—the brown eyes, the athleticism, the ability to suntan. I was grounded for three months after that one.
Moms make some of the most creative and intentional choices to just get it done. They're absolutely amazing.
While we unapologetically celebrate and honor our moms, we also recognize that not everyone's heart is light on Mother's Day. Perhaps you have a strained relationship with your mother that you're still navigating. Or maybe your journey into motherhood came with pain. Your aspirations to become a mother may have been delayed, or you've had the daunting task of fully entrusting your child to God's hands very early. Some of you carried a child in your womb that you never got to carry in your arms.
We want to be attentive to your experience as a church family. We love you. We pray for you. Your church family is with you through it all. We celebrate your resolve, your faith in God even in that painful crisis, and the value you add.
As we turn to the story of Hannah in 1 Samuel 1, we're looking at a woman whose story speaks directly to the unavoidable element of pain. Pain is inevitable in this life. It's not something we want to talk about. It doesn't feel like good news. But this side of eternity in a broken world, we are marked in very painful, inconvenient, and disruptive ways.
You don't have to go looking for trouble. Trouble knows where to find you. At some point, we all get smacked in the face. You are either heading into a storm, in the middle of a storm, or you are about to exit a storm. But what we can all bank on is this: life is going to come with some storms.
The overarching idea is this: how you manage your pain determines how your life will unfold. The question is not whether you will experience pain, but how you will navigate it, process the grief, and come out on the other side in a way that moves toward wholeness and honors God.
There is a big difference between unprocessed pain and surrendered pain. Pain can either distort things in your life and distract you from God's purpose, or it can deliver you and develop you. How you choose to process it is key.
Unprocessed pain operates on a false assumption: if we just stuff it down and ignore it, over time it will handle itself. But what we discover is the opposite. The later it gets, the greater it gets. There's an elasticity to these things. You can try to ignore pain and move on, but five, ten, or fifteen years down the road, something triggers and snaps you back to that painful season you never processed. You have to face those things head-on if you want to live a life of health and move toward greater wholeness.
Surrendered pain is different. It's learning to say, "Okay, God, I'm opening my hands and I'm entrusting you fully. There are so many things outside of my control." One of the great illusions and idols within the church today is the desire for control and certainty. We want to have things mapped out. We want to manipulate and dictate the details of our lives. But then we discover we actually have very little control. We cannot predict, plan, or determine how everything plays out.
Where unprocessed pain can lead to bitterness, comparison traps, and withdrawal from relationships—building walls and becoming callous—surrendered pain positions us in a life of prayer. It develops within us a dependency on God. As a result, we get to experience transformation into the character and likeness of Christ.
So the question becomes: What is the pain in your life that you've yet to fully lay at God's feet? What are the things that have marked you in negative ways? The trauma, the things that still trigger you to this day? Maybe this week you would find yourself encouraged to do what Hannah does—to surrender it all to God and see what he might be able to do beyond your own capacity.
What we find next is Hannah seeking after God diligently, passionately, and with great resolve, laying her grievances before him. In 1 Samuel 1:10-11, it says:
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 well then I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life.
When you jump into this, you have to pause and discuss this idea of making a vow. Have you ever made arrangements with God? Has your prayer life ever felt more like a negotiation?
God, I will do this if you do this. God, I procrastinated. I didn't study for this exam. I'm going to fail. Lord, just this once, help me pass. I'll never procrastinate again. I will become the best student you've ever seen. Ever made a deal like that?
God, I've gone off the rails and made mistakes. I feel like I'm going to be in trouble. I don't want to face the consequences. Would you save me from this crisis? I promise I'm going to get right with you. I'm going to be at church every weekend. I'm going to join a team. I'm going to serve on a life group. I'm going to do all the things just to get me out of this predicament. And maybe God does, only to find that you stick with it for a couple weeks and then drift back into old habits.
We make all kinds of bargains and deals with God in our prayer life. God, if you would just bless me with this promotion and provide a pay raise, then I promise I'm going to start living the generous life you've called me to. We go on and on and on.
But it's important to understand what is happening in Hannah's story. Hannah makes a vow, lays out terms to that commitment, and then God fulfills it. For us in the room, we can read that and think, "Oh, this is how it works. I need to enter the negotiation table with God."
However, it would be beneficial for all of us to know the difference between what the world casually refers to as a promise and what scripture refers to as a covenant.
A promise is often more focused on personal assurance. God, I promise, but I need you to help me. The whole focus is you getting out of jail, getting out of your predicament, getting out of your pain and crisis.
A covenant, on the other hand, is focused on a relational structure and function and framework. You are making a commitment that as you honor your end of the deal, you understand it will edify, strengthen, and draw you closer to God. It comes with a broader perspective and more consideration. What are the habits, disciplines, priorities, and commitments you need to make so that you can hold up your end of the deal in this covenant vow with God?
I would say: be careful when you start making vows with God. In scripture, there is no sidestepping the serious nature of placing your integrity on the line and saying, "God, I'm all in and I am vowing to hold up my end of the deal."
Deuteronomy 23 says this about vows:
If you make a vow to the Lord your God, you shall not delay in fulfilling it. For the Lord your God will surely require it of you, and you will be guilty of sin. But if you refrain from vowing, you will not be guilty of sin. You shall be careful to do what is passed your lips, for you have voluntarily vowed to the Lord your God.
Essentially, scripture is saying: be careful that you don't put yourself on the hook voluntarily for something God didn't command or demand of you. Be careful that you don't enter into some covenantal arrangement with God that you haven't thought through—that you don't understand what is going to be required of you to fulfill it.
When you make a covenant vow with God, you are not entering into a casual agreement. You are placing your integrity on the line and saying, "God, I'm all in and I am vowing to hold up my end of the deal."
Deuteronomy 23 speaks directly to this:
If you make a vow to the Lord your God, you shall not delay in fulfilling it. For the Lord your God will surely require it of you, and you will be guilty of sin. But if you refrain from vowing, you will not be guilty of sin. You shall be careful to do what is passed your lips, for you have voluntarily vowed to the Lord your God.
Scripture is essentially saying: be careful that you don't put yourself on the hook voluntarily for something God didn't command or demand of you. Be careful that you don't enter into some covenantal arrangement with God that you haven't thought through—that you don't understand what will be required of you to fulfill it.
The moment you engage in a covenant with an all-powerful, all-knowing, always righteous, holy, magnificent God whose integrity and credibility is impeccable, you become held accountable for your end of the deal.
It's important to point out because you can read Hannah's story and take it to endorse the wrong thing. God is not a genie in a bottle to grant us our wish. He is the Lord of the universe who desires and deserves our full adoration and devotion.
Hannah says, "Lord, I vow if you give me a son, I will give him back to you fully and completely." As the story progresses, we find her doing exactly that. The moment her son is born, he is commissioned and placed into the efforts and the work of the Lord and used mightily.
Some of the most powerful, beneficial, insightful things that will take place in your life spiritually will be birthed out of seasons of prayer. In the temple, Hannah is praying with authenticity, laying it all before the Lord. The priest nearby sees how she is behaving and assumes she is drunk. She responds:
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 great wicked woman. I have been praying here out of my great anguish and grief.
The statement "I was pouring out my soul" grips me. Prayer is the pouring out of your soul. It is asking God to experience your theology.
You might think: "God, I know you're good. I know you're faithful. I know you are righteous and merciful. I know your grace is sufficient. I know you provide a peace that surpasses understanding. I know that your joy is often my strength. I know you have a plan and a purpose for my life. I know that you are sovereign and intentional to work all things together for my good." And then you ask God, requesting that once more you can experience your theology here and now.
When was the last time you audaciously and with some boldness and some honesty approached God in prayer and truly poured out your soul to him? Sometimes you need to pull over into that vacant parking lot where no one's there and just let the tears out. You can weep and process your grief and be honest with the things rattling around in the depths of your soul. God is able and willing and available to take those burdens from you.
When it comes to pouring out your soul, what doesn't get poured out eventually leaks out. When you don't place the burdens and the things that are tormenting your heart and mind into the rightful and able hands of God, eventually those things leak out into other circumstances and situations and show up in your relationships in unproductive and dysfunctional ways.
To not process your pain allows those things to live just beneath the surface. But in addition to that, when you and I pour out our soul to God, we create the margin within us for God to pour into our soul in a way that only he can.
So many people are filled to capacity when it comes to their thoughts and their emotions. They run around full of anger and rage and agitation and frustration and fear and timidity and insecurity and all these things bottled up within them. It's not until you create space and empty out your soul before the Lord that he is able to pour in the things that only he can provide.
Prayer is when you pour out what you can't carry so that God can pour in what you can't produce. It's saying, "God, I trust you. I'm opening my hands. I'm surrendering it all to you."
Hannah weeps bitterly. Out of great anguish, she lays it all before the Lord. There is no substitute for prayer. When it comes to God's word and prayer, those things are uniquely set apart as wonderful gifts that edify, strengthen, and fortify our relationship with God.
That said, prayer is tricky. Prayer's clunky. In fact, I don't think prayer is really easy for anyone at the outset.
I often get the feeling that people beat themselves up for unnecessary reasons when they don't have some spiritual momentum early on when it comes to their spiritual disciplines. No—praying and developing a prayer life requires time and consistency. You have to learn to give yourself some grace and not begin to think about it as a performance.
A theologian once said, "I can think of nothing great that is also easy." Most of us would agree with that. Anything worthwhile, anything valuable, anything beautiful and wonderful in this life requires effort. A car in neutral doesn't coast uphill—it drifts and rolls to the lowest point. Anything worthwhile comes with some effort.
And then he followed it up: "Well, prayer must be then one of the hardest things in the world." Give yourself grace if you find yourself approaching God through prayer thinking, "This is a little tricky. Maybe it's even a little awkward."
I can remember the first time I truly started diligently leaning into prayer and thinking, "Okay, I'm going to close my eyes and get this right. I am talking to an invisible person and not just an invisible person. One God existing in three distinct persons, the Holy Trinity." We get so hung up on how to say it, how to articulate it. We attach all these religious formalities to it.
I once had a lady email me concerned about my closing prayer in a sermon. She said, "I am distressed and disappointed that when you prayed, you had your eyes open and you didn't have your hands folded." I thought, "How did you see my eyes were open?" She was raised in a legalistic church where she was taught that if your hands are not folded with your fingers pointed to heaven, your prayers lack accuracy. That's not in the Bible.
We can attach very clunky religious legalistic things to our prayer life. What you need to understand is God is not looking for a performance. He is not grading your vocabulary. He is receiving your vulnerability.
Vulnerability is terrifying for all of us. Have you ever had one of those moments where you opened up and shared personal details with somebody, disclosed matters of the heart, and then woke up the next day with a "vulnerability hangover" thinking, "Oh my gosh, what did I do? What did I say?" Tragically, most of us discover that a lot of people in your life are not able and trustworthy enough to have that type of access.
We have a tendency within humanity where we use a person's history as weaponry. What that does is it jades our perspective on God. It comes with hesitation and timidity in our relationships. We assume that God is going to respond to our vulnerability the same way other people respond to our vulnerability.
My wife often says there's a big difference between authenticity and transparency. Authenticity is telling everybody something—you can go through life true to yourself, you don't have to pretend, you don't have to put on a facade. If you're having a bad day, you can say, "Hey, it's a rough day." But transparency is telling somebody everything.
The good news of having a relationship with God is you can come to him fully vulnerable, honest, and transparent, and he receives you as you are as his children despite the predicaments that you're facing.
To develop a life of prayer, it is going to be clunky at first. Think about it in terms of linguistics. We learn to speak by someone speaking to us. Someone speaks to us and over time we learn how to speak back. That is why the combination of God's word and prayer is so beneficial.
When you open up the pages of scripture, you can hear and sense and gain the voice of God. You can come in contact with the wonderful promises and purposes and plans that he has declared over your life. You can discover the things he prefers to talk about with his kids. You can bump into the conversations that he desires to have with you.
When you understand how God speaks to you, you gain clarity as to how you can begin speaking to God. But God is not looking for your sophistication. He is looking for your sincerity. When you are honest with the Lord, he's able to do some of his greatest work in your heart.
As time progresses, scripture says in verse 20: "In the course of time, Hannah became pregnant and gave birth to a son, and she named him Samuel, saying, because I asked the Lord for him."
That idea of time being a course struck me. You ever thought about all the different courses we bump into in life? A crash course, an obstacle course, a golf course, a four-course meal, a math course. It's interesting to think of time as a course.
One thing you discover in your relationship with God and as you go through a journey of faith: God's timing is unique. In fact, it's at times annoying. Ever been frustrated with God's timing? Like, "Bro, I don't know if you're ever early. I know you're always on time, but early does not seem to be a part of your function."
God's timing is hard to figure out at times. However, as you move through it, you discover his ability to work through every season, every trial, every moment, every year, every month, every day. He's present and active in your life. Even when you feel like you're down to nothing, God is always up to something.
Time is something we learn a great deal about in our faith. Some of the wisest people you will ever meet are those who manage their time well. Time is the one thing we want the most, but it often is the thing we use the worst. Time flies, but you're the pilot. Time is free, but it's also priceless. You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. But once it's gone, it's gone. Life is here today, gone tomorrow. Scripture says it is but a vapor.
It is learning to open your hands and trust God with the time of your life.
What you discover and what we see in Hannah's story is God doesn't waste your time. He doesn't waste that season of confusion. He doesn't waste that season of grief. He doesn't waste the sorrow, the pain, the heartbreak, the agony, the anguish. He doesn't waste any of it.
As you stay to the course over time, you find that God was productive with your time. It is learning to stay open-handed, surrendering all that you're managing and all that you're facing to God, knowing that down the road you will discover that God did exactly what you wish you would have done had you known what he knew at the moment.
You get down the road and look in the rearview mirror and suddenly you can trace the hand of God. You find yourself thankful and full of gratitude at times for the moments in your life that were uncomfortable and filled with inconvenience. Yet now in hindsight you see them as a blessing in disguise.
Have you ever found yourself looking at something you thought, "Man, that was a terrible season," but in some way now you're thankful that it happened? If you hang around a church long enough and people of faith, you will hear some pretty bizarre statements:
Somehow you see God's ability to use the situations that often break us down to break us out. He uses them instrumentally to shape our character and to loosen the hold of things that are entangling us and trying to hold us in bondage.
It's learning to say, "Okay, you're God. I'm not." Faith is often trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.
She has the child, and in verse 27 she 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."
Here we find Hannah fulfilling her end of the deal, fulfilling the vow that she made. She gives back to God. And ultimately, as parents, something we all must do is accept the truth and the reality that God loves and cares about your kid more than you do.
But something that comes with a great deal of peace and even at times confidence and delight is knowing that the God of the universe—an almighty, all-knowing, always present, unconditionally loving God—cares deeply about your child in ways you cannot compare to. She opens her hands and entrusts her child back into the Lord's tender care.
The difference between ownership and stewardship trips a lot of people up. We're very possessive in nature. We want control and we think things belong to us. Then life teaches us that we are here today gone tomorrow and life progresses and all things ultimately belong to God.
For seasons he places things in front of us that we get to steward, and that is something we need to consider. Our focus shouldn't be control. We should understand that with these things comes accountability. In addition to that, our assumption shouldn't be that everything is permanent. We should live with an awareness that most things are temporary.
Rather than drifting into some bizarre form of entitlement, a stewardship mindset anchors yourself to an assignment. "God, for whatever reason, this is what you're doing in my life. God, for whatever reason, this is how you've gifted me, and these are the ways in which you've blessed me, and these are the things that you've placed in my hands, and I am going to steward them to accomplish your purpose and plans for my life." It's about an assignment, not entitlement.
Folks, we're not entitled to anything when it comes to God. Know this: If all we get and the only thing we receive is Jesus Christ on a cross living out the perfection of life and serving as an atoning sacrifice to pay ransom for you and me, then defeating death, hell, and the grave where he resurrects three days later—if that's all we get, we are blessed and spoiled beyond measure. The fact that he does remarkably more is astonishing.
This woman goes from a place of pain to a position of prayer to an experience of God's provision to experiencing a privilege that he entrusts her with. It's an amazing story. Over time her gratitude became stronger than her grip.
"God, you're so good. And even now with whatever I'm carrying, I know you're with me. And I'm thankful for all that you've done in my life. And I know you're not done. And so Lord, I'm loosening the grip. And I'm living a life of gratitude knowing that there's a good chance I'm going to get down the road and look back on this moment and find myself thinking, 'Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.'"
I think there is a danger to answered prayers. An unanswered prayer tests your faith. Do you trust God? Do you still find confidence in his character?
But an answered prayer tests your heart and reveals your motives. Why do you want God to intervene in your situation? How will you use that provision if he shows up the way you desire? An answered prayer often tests our heart.
What I love about this story and what I love about all of scripture is every book, every page, every paragraph, every sentence points to, illuminates, foreshadows, and opens our eyes to Christ and his glory.
Scripture is the Father's portrait of the son painted by the Spirit. Here you have Hannah opening her hands and surrendering and giving her one and only son back to God. In the Gospels, what you find is God opening his hands giving his one and only son as a ransom for the salvation of the world. It's an amazing thing.
I would encourage you to consider how good God has been to you despite what you're going through.
It's Mother's Day weekend. Hannah is going to go on to raise a mighty man who is a great hero of the faith. I would say to all the parents in the room: Your greatest accomplishment well, there's a very good chance it will not be something you do, but someone you raise.
One of the best questions we can often ask ourselves is: What kind of human, what kind of Christian is my home producing? How do we live open-handed with our pain as well as our children when it comes to the goodness of God?
It's Mother's Day weekend. Hannah is going to go on to raise a mighty man who is a great hero of the faith. I would say to all the parents in the room: your greatest accomplishment, well, there's a very good chance it will not be something you do, but someone you raise.
One of the best questions we can often ask ourselves is: What kind of human, what kind of Christian is my home producing? How do we live open-handed with our pain as well as our children when it comes to the goodness of God?
