God hears sees and will remember you

Our reading this morning is going to come from First Samuel. It's a lengthy piece, but I'm going to actually read the whole chapter just to pull us into the story this morning. We're turning a little bit for the next several months to the book of 1 Samuel and away from Matthew, partly just to give us a little bit of a different flavor and a little bit of a different time. Different books of the Bible communicate different truths about the character of God. And so we're going to be looking this morning as we journey into 1 Samuel.

There was a certain man of Ramathaim-zophim of the hill country of Ephraim whose name was Elkanah the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephrathite. And he had two wives. The name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other was Peninnah. And Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children. And this man used to go up year by year from his city to worship and sacrifice to the Lord of hosts at Shiloh, where the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were priests of the 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, even though the Lord had closed her womb. And her rival used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the 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. 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? And why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?"

After they had eaten and drunk in Shiloh, Hannah rose. 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 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 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 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. And Eli said to her, "How long will you go on being drunk? Put your wine away from you." But Hannah answered, "No, my 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 Lord. Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for all along I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation." Then Eli answered, "Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant your petition that you have made to him." And she said, "Let your servant find favor in your eyes." Then the woman went away and ate, and her face was no longer sad.

They rose early in the morning and worshiped before the Lord; then they went back to their house at Ramah. And Elkanah knew his wife Hannah, and the Lord remembered her. And in due time Hannah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Samuel, for she said, "I have asked for him from the Lord." The man Elkanah and all his house went up to offer to the 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, 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; 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. 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 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 lord, as you live, my lord, I am the woman who was standing here in your presence, praying to the Lord. For this child I prayed, and the Lord has granted me my petition that I made to him. Therefore I have lent him to the Lord. As long as he lives, he is lent to the Lord." And he worshiped the Lord there.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your word this morning. And I pray, Lord, that in this time that you would teach us, oh God, that our ears and eyes may be opened to see and behold the truths of you in these words. Father, we just pray that your Holy Spirit even now would speak to us. Lord, I pray that I would decrease and that you would increase, and that your word today would be the main voice in our gathering, speaking to us, convicting us, admonishing us, encouraging us, having its perfect word and doing its perfect work within us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

The book of Judges was the time right before this time period. The book of Samuel starts at the end of the time of the judges. If you're familiar with the book of Judges, it's really a time of moral decay. The book is summarized and highlighted like this: "In those days there was no king in Israel and every man did what was right in his own eyes." You see constantly throughout the time of the judges that these are imperfect people who have huge moral failures. Most of the time, idolatry is rampant in the land and people don't often worship God. They turn away and they're often in bondage in their lives as well.

If you remember all the way back to where we looked at Exodus at one point, we've talked about the fact that God had taken Israel out of the land of bondage, out of Egypt, and he said, "I have a plan for you, purposefully. I'm going to raise you up to be this priestly people among the nations. I'm going to bless you. You're going to thrive. You're going to live out this moral order, this law that's so different and makes you so unique in the land, and you're going to carry out this purpose so that through you, I will bless the nations around you. I'm going to use the light of God, the blessing of God on you, to shine and begin to have its work into the landscape and to the nations around you." That was the hope and the calling of Israel: to be a great people to serve the purpose of God, to draw people to become worshippers of God. So the nations afar would say, "Who is this God that lives so rightly, where the foreigners and the aliens and the strangers in the land are cared for? Who is this God who is so powerful that he blesses the people so they are fruitful, and they multiply, and they increase?"

But we find that because Israel constantly failed to step into that calling in the book of Judges, they failed to live out what God had called them to live. They chose the way of bondage. The Lord handed them over to their way. There are moments of repentance, moments where they seem to get back on track, but even the leaders who lead them oftentimes are so morally corrupt and bankrupt that things just go back downhill. And once again, they find themselves with everyone doing what was right in his own eyes. This is where we find ourselves as this 400-year time period is starting to come to a close. The book of Samuel takes place with that backdrop in place. Israel had reached the promised land, but she wasn't really living out the promise for her life.

So the question could come in this: Has God forgotten us? Are we really going to be able to live out our calling? Thirty and forty years go by and they find themselves in bondage or, like in this case, they find the Philistines ruling over them, growing mightier and mightier, seeming to be more blessed than them. They think about what God had promised them, and they are a far cry from that. Where is God? Does he hear us? Does he see us in our affliction? Yet everyone continues to do what is right in their own eyes. There is no king in Israel. There is really hardly any leadership. And so people can begin to wonder: What is God's plan? What is his purpose? Does he feel? Does he hear? Does he see? Does he remember his promises for us?

The big point I want us to take away today is this: I want us to remember that God does see. God does hear. God does remember his people. He remembers us corporately, but he also remembers you individually. We're going to look at the life of an individual today and how God remembers hurt in the midst of this as well. Because we can easily go through life and feel sidelined. We can feel like the purpose of God and the calling of God is over here, and I feel over there. I feel like an athlete on the bench watching everybody else play. I feel excluded and far away from the activity, the purposes, and the promises of God. I don't feel like I'm operating in the realm of blessing. It's over there—everybody else has it, but I don't have it. For some reason, God has me over here. That's exactly what Hannah is going to feel like today. That's exactly what she's going to be experiencing in her life as she feels like an outsider and like someone who is forgotten.

What we find here in this passage is it notes that Hannah was probably Elkanah's first wife. Maybe just a little bit of history here: Elkanah lives in the land of Ephraim, which is to the north. Elkanah is a Levite. We actually don't know it here, but we know it in 1 Chronicles 6 when the genealogies list Elkanah and Samuel in the line of the Levites. But what we find here is he has two wives: he has Hannah and he has Peninnah. Hannah is listed first. It could be that she was the first wife, and once she was barren and not able to bear children, there's the possibility that he took on a second wife who was therefore able to pass on the generations and the land that remained within their family in that time period. Whatever it may be, we just know that Hannah is barren.

In ancient Near East times, this was a very unfortunate lot in life. It was probably one of the worst things that could happen to a woman in that time period, just because there was so much honor, number one, in bearing children. But also, if you can just go way back into that time period, your children were your retirement plan. At the end of the day, your kids were going to be the ones who cared for you. Your kids were going to work the land. As you got elderly and you couldn't raise the crops anymore, till the ground, whip the ox, and plow the garden, your children would be raised up after you to care for you and to take up some of those duties in your place. So, even outside of Israel, there was just a great need to raise up children—to raise up lots of children. There was also this idea that blessing came through children. If the gods were favorable to you, then there was this idea of increase. Your crops would increase and abound; your household, your dynasty, and your family would increase and abound. If the plagues, the enemies, and the bands of warriors who could come against you stayed at bay and you continued to increase, then the gods—even outside of Israel—had dealt favorably with you.

In ancient Israel, there's even more of a calling because not only do they have these general ancient ideas about having children, but they remember all the way back to Genesis and the creation mandate to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth. Because Israel has this unique calling to be this priestly people that is going to come into the land, fill the land, and live out this moral code and ethic, they were meant to reproduce. To the generations around them, they were going to grow and prosper. Then the number of God-worshippers multiplying in the land would have greater visibility to the world around them. Nations would look on and say, "This nation that is rising, that is fruitful, that is multiplying, that is increasing, is blessed." So, in some ways in Israel, having children in this kind of setting was a way of changing the world. You were going to be the people of God increasing and multiplying, fulfilling the purposes of God. If your children carried out that same calling in their lives, then generationally, Israel was increasing. There was a calling they would fulfill.

And Hannah isn't able to step into that. Just from the general idea of blessing, but even down to this particular idea of how Israel was going to operate, she can't be a part of that. And it's heartbreaking. She is heartbroken and wounded. There has to be this thought for Hannah: Has God forgotten me? Am I sidelined? She's watching Peninnah over here have all sorts of children. She's watching all of her friends in Israel have children, and she's not able to do that. It's so easy in those moments to feel as if you've been excluded, sidelined, and forgotten. Does God care? Does he remember me?

We live in a day and age where our fertility is increasingly low. We oftentimes, even within the church, forget that there is a great blessing in children. Children are a great blessing of the Lord; Psalm 127 reminds us of this great blessing. There is this generational calling. I realize that not everybody can have kids. I realize that some people are beyond the age barrier of having kids. I realize that there are times when people are single because there's a calling to singleness. But it is worth reflecting on: just as Israel had this calling in her life to step into and carry out generationally raising up people, there's a calling for the church to raise up the next generation of children. Some of it is through the literal birth of children, but watch this for just a second and stay with me, because I've been meditating on this this week: there's also the idea of how we parent people spiritually in our lives.

We step into these roles and these callings. I knew a couple that served in the church faithfully for like 40 years in children's ministry. They never had biological kids, but they loved the children of the church. They taught them the word of God. They served in the children's program so faithfully. And I thought, How many hundreds of spiritual children have they produced, mentored, and raised up? How many people who maybe did not know the Lord did they help see and know the Lord? Maybe in some ways, there's this calling for us to mentor, disciple, and be parents to not just the children, but when a young college student or somebody in their 20s serves with the youth, they serve almost like a bigger brother or a bigger sister in that setting. Think of the ways that they step into this great calling and purpose of helping lead and raise up that next generation. There is such a calling and a purpose for the elderly couple that sits in the nursery with kids and tells them little Bible stories. There are all sorts of different ways in the church in which we can serve and raise up the next generation. It's not about parenting or having kids as much as it is about raising up the next generation and the great stewardship of that calling. It's not just for parents, but for singles, for young people, and for elderly people. God has a role for you. No one in the church should ever say, "I'm sidelined. My best days are behind me," because the Lord is always working you into his plan and his purpose. Like Hannah, we cannot feel sidelined, forsaken, or forgotten, because God always cares and there's always a place for us to serve in his kingdom.

But family and family dynamics are messy. We see that in the life of this household. We have Hannah, who can't have kids. And then we see Peninnah, to make matters worse, who has had plenty of kids. She's blessed; she's doing great. Her husband should love her tons, but the text doesn't say that Peninnah is unloved—it just says he really loves Hannah. He loves Hannah, and he wants to show her, "Am I not as good as ten sons to you? Your inability to have children doesn't make you valued any less by me." Isn't that so much like the Lord? We think that our value within the kingdom is based on what we can do and what we can bring to the table. It does not work like that with God. There are people who have immense value in God's kingdom who don't have a lot of skills and talent. God still loves them, and he still uses them as part of his plan and his working. God is working in all these ways. You are not forgotten. He will remember each person in the family of God.

It's important to understand that Hannah feels like an outsider right now. But isn't it ironic? Peninnah is technically the insider of the story. She's the one with the kids. She's the one that's blessed. But she looks at Hannah and how Elkanah loves her, and she feels like, Am I the forgotten one? Does no one see all the value that I'm driving and all the kids that I'm having? There's a bitterness that begins to develop in Peninnah's soul out of this. That's the thing that can happen oftentimes: if we don't appropriately deal with what's going on in our heart when we feel—whether intentionally or unintentionally—sidelined and excluded, and we just sort of process it inside of ourselves, then the mind can do funny things to us. We can begin to get disgruntled. We can get bitter. Another thing that we do oftentimes is we say, "You know what? God has sidelined or excluded me, so I'm going to do something about it." We begin to try to take control of our life and we become a controlling, steering person. Oftentimes we do just like Peninnah here, where we begin to just kind of nudge and poke those who get in our way, or those who are loved and included in ways that we want to be. That bitterness and offense erodes and hurts people.

We can hold Peninnah up as the bad person in this story, but we can just as easily be like her. We can easily feel, whether it's in family relationships or whether it's just in the church itself, like we are on the outside. We can feel like we are sidelined. I want to sing from the stage. I want to go do this certain thing. I want to be this kind of person in the church where everybody's got friends and they're talking to people, but nobody's talking to me. We can feel forgotten, and bitterness can sort of fester in our soul and grow. What do we do about something like that? Because if we don't handle it, we're going to become opinionated. We're going to find people who are outsiders, and instead of loving them and showing grace to them, we will just lash out. It's so easy to become that person. I never know who watches the video or where we are at in our different places of life, but it's important to take inventory of your heart. Look and see if there are thoughts in your mind that are judgmental towards others, that are harsh, that are critical, or that are condemning. The mind is a place where we're not oftentimes aware of the tape recording that's playing. It's important to let the Holy Spirit just take a peek at what's going on inside of our heart and inside of our head, because sometimes we find that we've wronged people, maybe intentionally or unintentionally, just because we stay in our realm of comfort and forget about them.

This is messy because Hannah has to deal with this not once, not twice—the text says year after year she feels this torment in her life. She experiences this constant harassment and reminder that says, "You don't belong. You're not a blessing to your husband. You're a failure. You're barren. You have no value." That is what she's told year after year, and sorrow festers and grows in her life. It's sad because Peninnah can't see the opportunity here—how God could work in the midst of this and how God works to redeem all sorts of broken things in our lives. I thought this week: What if Peninnah, instead of condemning Hannah, had compassion for her? What if she had mercy for her? How would that have played out differently? What if she was gracious toward her, and Hannah responded, received it, and then reciprocated that in some sort of way? What if Hannah became like a godparent to Peninnah's kids? What if she just sort of became this loving aunt, and somehow in this household and its broken relationships, she got included into this household plan of God raising up and doing his work there redemptively? How might this story have been different?

But in this odd and ironic way, Peninnah rejects the opportunity. She rejects the grace of this moment. Hannah's name—the root of it is Chanan, which is "grace" in Old Testament Hebrew. In some sort of weird way, Peninnah is rejecting grace—grace for her own life. Sometimes when we feel like the outsider and we get insecure about our position in life, or our lack of value, or what we bring to the table, and we feel excluded and sidelined, what we begin to do is become bitter in soul and bitter in spirit. We stop showing grace to others, and we become unable to actually receive grace in our own lives. We miss out on the opportunity and the calling that God can redeem through us.

So how do we respond in moments like that? How do we respond in these hours when we feel like the outsider, the excluded? We come to God. It seems like the obvious thing, but it's not always the easiest or the first thing that we do, especially when we are bitter and feel conflict in our heart, when we feel wounded, and when we feel like the outsider. Because we start to think: Maybe God doesn't see. Maybe he doesn't hear. Maybe he doesn't care. He's the one who closed my womb. What is he doing? Does he love me? Does he care about me? Why did he put this woman in my life to deal with every single year, reminding me, cursing me, being that voice in my head? Is that how God operates? Is his plan really at work in my life? Does he really care? That begins to play out. You can't see it perfectly in the English text, but in the Hebrew here, it says it literally: Hannah was bitter of soul. It doesn't read smoothly in some translations, but she was bitter of soul. Bitterness. You might think she just absorbed all this, cried some tears, moved on, and was okay. No, she had this internalized turmoil, and this grief and bitterness was festering its way into her life.

At that point, she can either choose to deal with it herself—saying, "I've got this, I'll take care of it"—internalize it, and let that bitterness ruin her own soul and eventually make her someone like Peninnah who lashes out at others, who's not gracious, who's not forgiving, and who's condemning. Or, she can pour her prayer out to God. This is what the Scriptures constantly remind us to do: to order our prayer to God and watch. And that's what Hannah does here. She comes with all of her bitterness. It's interesting that she doesn't pray the prayer out loud, because this was a culture in which they read Scripture out loud, they communicated things out loud, and they prayed out loud oftentimes in the temple. Hannah doesn't even want people to hear the words she has to say. She is bitter of soul, in anguish, grief, and frustration. But she and God have a conversation. Probably like the prayers we sing in the Psalms, it's honest, because we should pray honest, heartfelt prayers to God. She pours her heart out before the Lord and she asks, "Will you see? Will you look?" That's what it says: Will you see and look on my affliction? Look at it. See what I'm going through. Do you remember me? Will you remember me? Do I have a place in this story? Do you care? She is completely honest in the way that she pours this out before the Lord.

God never leaves you unanswered. He may not do the exact thing that you want in prayer, or give you the thing exactly when you want it, but God is working. When you are pouring your heart out, do you think God doesn't meet you there in that prayer? I love the Psalms because they always show us this model of David coming to God being broken, angry, and frustrated, and yet worshiping oftentimes by the end of the psalm. Psalm 13 has six verses. The first one is, "God, where are you?" David's not happy. The end of it is he bows once more to the sovereignty of God, worshiping God, remembering the character of God. What in the world happened in those six verses? Prayer. Prayer happened. Let's just take all of the frustrations of our heart and put them out before the Lord supernaturally and spiritually. He is meeting us there. The Holy Spirit is in our prayer, comforting, convicting, and changing our outlook and our perspective. God is working in the midst of all those things. Come to God with your grief, with your frustration, with your anger, and with your bitterness, because this is the only way that it's going to get out so that it doesn't just become a poison within your own soul. That's what Hannah does in this moment: she orders her prayer. She asks God to see her and to remember her. And she vows a vow to the Lord. This is something that I think is good in many ways, but I always want to say it with a word of caution because there is that old way of trying to "make a deal" with God. "God, if you'll do this thing for me, then I'll be your guy." We've all probably prayed prayers like that, or we know people who have. We don't want to play "make a deal" with God. But it is okay to come to the Lord and make a holy commitment. We see this beautiful vow here where she says, "If you will give me a son, I'll give him back to you." We can think of this great calling of how, in some ways, parents are only stewards anyway, because children come from the Lord. We are called to this great stewardship to dedicate and to raise up our kids for God, because he has placed them in our lives.

The text says here that she goes home and the Lord does what? He remembers her. He remembers her. And Hannah conceives and she bears a son. She names him Samuel—Shemuel in Hebrew, which points to Shama: "God hears." God hears. God listens. Listening is built into that name because the Lord had heard her, he had seen her, and he had answered her. Sometimes we pray prayers to the Lord and we see an immediate answer. Sometimes we can read the Bible and think, Man, that was quick. But how many years had she probably been bringing this prayer before? How many times had she been afflicted year by year? "God, would you do something? God, would you help?" Praying and waiting.

Sometimes God answers in different ways that we don't always understand. Sometimes it's a waiting game because God has perfect timing. We're reminded in 2 Peter 3:9: "The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance." God wants to work his perfect plan in our lives, and sometimes that plan means working through trials and working through hard things. We know from the book of James that those things are used in our lives to help mature us. You grow through hard things. You lift weights—that's how you get stronger. You don't get stronger by lifting the remote or the TV; it doesn't work. That's just the model of life: we grow. It's not fun being in a trial. It's not fun dealing with a difficult life. But God will use those sorts of things to refine us and, oftentimes, to draw us closer to him. Because in moments of deep despair, you run out of options. I can't do it myself. These people can't do it for me. I'm stuck. You turn to God. You turn to him, you learn to lean on him, you learn to walk with him, you learn to trust him, and you learn to be shaped by that relationship with him. Because when you walk with God, you will be changed. You will be transformed the more that you encounter Him. That's why we should daily meet with the Lord and daily have time with him, because we are shaped and formed through the midst of that. God will hear. He sees you. He remembers you. He has not forgotten you. You are not excluded. You are not sidelined, but you are called to come to him.

I'm just reminded time and time again that God is the God who answers in ways that we don't even often understand. Years ago, I heard a story about a man giving his testimony. He was saying he had lived a very rough, wayward life into his early 30s. His dad was a pastor. As you can imagine, his dad had prayed a lot for his son because his son was very wayward. This now-grown man was recounting some of his life and his brokenness. His dad died never seeing the answer to that prayer—never seeing if God had heard him, had seen him, or had remembered him. But that man, his son, was now in his 50s and he was a pastor. Somewhere after the death of his father, the Lord had taken him, raised him up out of his sin and his bondage, drawn him to himself, and eventually called him into ministry. This man, who was now himself a pastor, recounted that his father's prayers were being answered from the grave. God was answering. God had heard. In our own lives, we can't always make sense of the timing of God and the ways of God. But God is a God who can work even beyond our lifetime to bring about his promises and his plan. He does it in his time and in his way.

So the thing I want us just to remember is just like here: God hears you. He sees you. He remembers. Come to him, for he desires all to turn to him. That's what he really wants. If you feel sidelined by God, know that you are not excluded. If you are in Christ, you are included in the family, and all the promises of God are yours. Have you been sidelined? Take your bitterness to God. It's the only way to heal and to invite God into your pain. It's good to just take moments of repentance where we sit with the Lord and say, "Have I been sidelined? Is that narrative playing out in my head? Do I envy others? Is there bitterness festering? Is there judgment towards others?" It's important for us to take inventory so that we don't turn to corrupt ways, because that is easy to do. Allow him to search you, to know you, and to speak into your heart because God sees you. He hears you. He's writing you into his story. Won't you step into it?

Next week, we're going to look at some people who have been sidelined, and they have sidelined themselves because they have failed to respond to the invitation of God. God has a purpose for our lives, but sometimes we are working against that purpose. So, how do we avoid that pitfall and that judgment that we bring upon ourselves when we refuse the grace of God?

Let's pray. Lord, we just pray, God, that you would give us hearts of compassion and hearts of mercy. We thank you, God, that when we were working against you, when we were far from you and we were excluded from the family of God—when we were sidelined by our own sin—that you came, you pursued us, and you drew us to yourself. And it wasn't based on our works. It wasn't based on the value that we drove. It wasn't based on what we could bring, our talents, or any of it. In fact, none of it was good enough. None of it was enough. It was because of the work of your Son that we are included, that we are made into the family of God, that we belong, and that the will and purpose of God begins to work in our lives, grafting us into your wonderful plan. And I pray, Lord, that in our own lives we would invite others to come be grafted in too, because you see, you hear, and you remember the prayers of your people. We pray all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.