Hope and Hannah pt. 1

 

            This new series is all about hope. What should we do with the feeling of hopelessness

and how can we help others through it? This series goes through the story of Hannah and how

hope is shown through her life.


What is hope? Hope is, “A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.” At some point in our lives, we have all hoped for something. For most of us, we have been in a situation where the outcome wasn’t what we expected or wanted. 



Hannah’s story:


  • Hannah was married to a man named Elkanah, he had two wives: Hannah and Peninnah. There was one main difference between the two, Peninnah had children, Hannah did not. 

  • In this culture, having children was seen as the blessing and favor of God. 

  • Every year, when Elkanah would go to make his sacrifice, he would hand out portions to everyone in his family. When he did this, he gave Hannah a double portion of what he gave everyone else, even himself. 

  • When Elkanah gave Hannah the food, he noticed that she was not eating and said to her, “Don’t I mean more to you than 10 sons?” She replied saying, “I don’t have the favor of God.” 

  • She went up to the temple and prayed to God with her full heart. She looked so crazy, that the priest that was there thought she was drunk. But when he confronted her and saw that she wasn’t, he blessed her. Then she was able to become pregnant. 


It’s really important to look at the order that these things happen in Hannah’s life. Only when she prayed to God amidst her struggles did she see God working. But before this, she felt hopeless. There are a lot of times in our lives where we lose hope because we think that God isn’t answering or doesn’t care about us. When we feel hopeless, it makes it easy to slowly stop praying, stop going to church, stop having a quiet time, and eventually we look back and see that our relationship with God is in a far different state. 



            Before we look at how to have hope, it’s important to look at what causes us to lose hope. I think that ultimately, hope is lost because of doubt. What causes us to doubt? In Hannah's story, the thing that made her doubt and lose hope was the voice of Peninnah. It was worse enough that she couldn’t have children, but Peninnah reminded her of that every single day. Peninnah was the voice of doubt for Hannah instead of the voice of hope. What would it look like to be the voice of hope for other people amidst their struggles instead of the voice of doubt?


I feel like a lot of us give up on God right before the breakthrough, right before He blesses us. Right before something big happens. I wonder what it would look like if we could just hold on, walk day by day?





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intentional Author

Image
Intentional Author The last thing I wrote about was what having a posture of surrender looks like. Surrender is giving back to God what was His in the first place and trusting Him with the outcome.  There are some things in life that are much easier to hand over to God than other things. When it comes to things we are really looking forward to or hoping for, it typically is so much harder to surrender those things to the Lord. We desire to be in control, to know how the story ends, to write it how we wish. Most of the time we’ve already planned out how life is going to go, so that when something happens that is different to what we planned, we blame God for messing up, or not getting the timing right. Truth is, it’s us and our desires that don’t always align with the will and the timing of the Lord.  When we’re in a season of hope, hoping and waiting for something to happen, we get so excited and put so much trust in our plan that sometimes, it hinders us from seeing the...
Read more

Surrender

Image
      Something that the Lord has placed on my heart recently is the idea of surrendering. What does it look like to truly surrender it all to the Lord?     The first thing that I think of when I think of surrender is the act of opening my closed fists. So often in life, I find myself holding onto things that the Lord blesses me with or brings into my life with my fists closed tightly around them. While this isn't always bad, it leaves no room for God to be able to work and move through those things. Another thing about the posture of closed hands is that we can't receive anything when our hands are closed. The devil loves to get us to hold on so tightly to the things of the world and convince us that they are God's best for us; when in reality they're far from it. When I live my life in a posture of open hands, I am allowing the Lord to place things in my life that He wants there, and I'm allowing Him to move and work through them.     Something else ...
Read more

Comparison

Image
  “Admire someone else’s beauty without questioning your own.” How often do we compare ourselves to other people, to their accomplishments and their appearance?  Comparison will kill every relationship you have, if you let it. It tears apart people every single day. We think that by comparing, we can become a better version of ourselves, but really we are becoming a lesser version of someone else. With that, we also become a lesser version of ourselves. We can spend our whole lives trying to be like someone, but we never will be because we were not made to be.  I was listening to this sermon and it was focusing on the creation story. How God created the ocean and said that it was good, He created the sun and said that it was good, and He created mankind and said that it was good. Nothing was made lesser than, all was made good. When the God of the universe says that it is good, we can believe it.  For me, the most convicting part of the sermon was when she was talkin...
Read more