Hannah: From Tears to Rejoicing
Daily Scripture
1 Samuel 1:10-11, 20, 24-28, 2:1-8
10 Hannah was very upset and couldn’t stop crying as she prayed to the LORD. 11 Then she made this promise: “LORD of heavenly forces, just look at your servant’s pain and remember me! Don’t forget your servant! Give her a boy! Then I’ll give him to the LORD for his entire life. No razor will ever touch his head.”
20 So in the course of time, Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel, which means “I asked the LORD for him.”
24 When he had been weaned and was still very young, Hannah took him, along with a three-year-old bull, an ephah [approximately twenty quarts] of flour, and a jar of wine, and brought him to the LORD’s house at Shiloh. 25 They slaughtered the bull, then brought the boy to Eli.
26 “Excuse me, sir!” Hannah said. “As surely as you live, sir, I am the woman who stood here next to you, praying to the LORD. 27 I prayed for this boy, and the LORD gave me what I asked from him. 28 So now I give this boy back to the LORD. As long as he lives, he is given to the LORD.”
Then they worshipped there before the LORD.
2:1 Then Hannah prayed:
My heart rejoices in the LORD.
My strength rises up in the LORD!
My mouth mocks my enemies
because I rejoice in your deliverance.
2 No one is holy like the LORD—
no, no one except you!
There is no rock like our God!
3 Don’t go on and on, talking so proudly,
spouting arrogance from your mouth,
because the LORD is the God who knows,
and he weighs every act.
Daily Reflection & Prayer
Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel, lived in ancient Israel, where men often had multiple wives. Her husband’s other wife ridiculed her constantly (see 1 Samuel 1:3-6). She pleaded with God for a son, promising to devote her son to God’s service. When she had a son, she lovingly devoted her son to God’s service and poetically rejoiced in God’s goodness.
- Of Hannah’s words in 1 Samuel 2, Scholar Bruce C. Birch wrote that this prayer celebrated how “God can use the powerless to break the power of the mighty,” noting that just as God used Hannah, a barren woman, to give birth to Samuel, God was at work transforming Israel’s future. * How did this story, like Sarah’s, illustrate God as the source of joy even after painful times?
- The full story in 1 Samuel 1 said that when Eli the high priest saw Hannah weeping and praying silently, he at first thought she was drunk. Hannah’s silent, tearful prayer was so intense that Eli the high priest mistook her grief for drunkenness—showing how deeply she poured out her heart to God. When you experience anguish or misery, are you more inclined to take those feelings to God in prayer, or to distance yourself from God?
Prayer
A daily reminder from Pastor Hamilton: Our hope is that tonight or tomorrow morning, continuing through Christmas, each of you will, either in the morning or at night, take the time to write down three things you are thankful for. You might write these in the form of a thank you letter to God or simply write down a journal entry.
Prayer: Lord God, I thank you for each person who helped to point me to your love, goodness, and joy. Help me to live in ways that are a positive influence on others. Amen.
GPS Insights
Brandon Gregory
Brandon Gregory, who serves as a volunteer for the worship and missions teams at Church of the Resurrection, wrote today's Insights. He helps lead worship at Leawood's modern worship services, as well as at the West and Downtown services, and is involved with the Malawi missions team at home.
I have to hand it to Hannah in this passage. If I want something, I give some quick but careful thought to how I can get it—I’m pretty resourceful—but if I can’t get it on my own, I usually just learn to be happy without it. I’m reminded of this brief exchange from the comedy play “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”:
Hero: For us, there will never be happiness.
Philia: We must learn to be happy without it!
I’m ambitious, but I’m surprisingly quick to turn to fatalism when something seems unattainable. Like Philia’s ridiculous statement, if I think I can’t have happiness, I simply accept that as a fact and move on.
Hannah had a different approach. She prayed constantly and passionately for a better life. She prayed because she knew God could achieve things that she couldn’t. She also vowed to give back to God the source of her happiness, happy to share her greatest joy with him. This is an act of faith and devotion far beyond what I typically practice, and I can learn a lot from Hannah in this regard.
I have to remember that God is not some cosmic ATM that dispenses blessings if I punch in the right code; however, I also have to remember that God’s capacity for achieving big things is much greater than my own. Like Hannah, I can ask God for something that will bless me and do the most good for the most people, offering to be a blessing with my blessing. That doesn’t guarantee I’ll get it, but it puts me in the right frame of mind for something bigger than my own selfish ambitions.
Christmas is a time for giving and generosity, which means it’s a time to think big—bigger than we think on our own. We can ask God for a greater means to give back. This might not be a supernatural miracle. Dreaming big and asking God for guidance might lead us to collaborators who can come together to make something bigger than we can do alone, or it might lead to a new opportunity to help others become better and more effective at giving back to their communities. If there’s a time to come together for the greater good, to give more than we do all year, it’s Christmas time.
When you’re making your list of things you’re thankful for, give some thought to things you could be thankful for, daring to hope for the impossible—and be willing to give those blessings back to God and others as they’re needed. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get everything you hope for, but hoping puts us in the right mind to find things we may not expect and to try for things we dare not dream on our own.
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Scripture quotations are taken from The Common English Bible ©2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
References
* Bruce C. Birch, comment on 1 Samuel 2:1-10 in The CEB Study Bible. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2013, p. 422 OT.
