MAY 14 2017 | The Giant Series S1E1 | 1 Samuel 1:1-20

Sea Change Church · The Giant Series S1E1 · "1 Samuel 1:1-20" · Adam Stadtmiller · May 14, 2017
1 Samuel 1:1-20
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Hi, church. Hi, family. This is the reading of God's Word today. This is 1 Samuel, chapter 1, 1 through 20. There was a certain man from Ramathim, a Zulfite from the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Elkanah, the son of Jeraham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zulf, an Ephraimite. He had two wives. One was called Hannah and the other Penina. Penina 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 Hophni and Phinehas, the two sons of Eli, were priests of the Lord. Whenever the day came for Elkanah 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. Whenever Hannah went up to the house of the Lord, her rival provoked her till she wept, and she would not eat. Her husband Elkanah would say to her, Hannah, why are you weeping? Why don't you eat? Why are you downhearted? Don't I mean more to you than ten sons?

Once, when they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh, Hannah stood up, and now Eli, the priest, was sitting on his chair by the doorpost of the Lord's house. In her deep, 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.

And I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life, and no razor will ever touch 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 he said to her, how long are you going to stay drunk? 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, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him. She said, may your servant find favor 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 they went back to their home in 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.

This is the reading of the word of God. Praise be to God. Good morning, church. Good to see you. Good to see you. I've been waiting to preach this sermon for about 10, about 12, 13 years. It's true. When I got to North Coast Calvary Chapel, before I worked there, we were going to church there, and I thought, this is the kind of church I'd love to work at.

We were living in a 250-foot studio. My daughter was living in the closet. We had about 2,000 bucks in the account, and no health insurance, no job. I had given everything up to go to Australia to pursue a dream. Didn't quite work out the way I thought it was going to work out. So there we are, and I was hoping I would get hired at this amazing church, which I ended up getting hired there.

It was awesome. And in the midst of that, I was actually offered a job at a church, but I knew I shouldn't take it. And that was one of the most faith-filled decisions to say no to a pretty good job when you feel like God is saying, no, that one's not for you. But you see your account dwindling, and the giants are looming larger. And so we got to that church, and Pastor Mark Foreman was speaking on the book of Samuel and on David.

And I thought it was the best series he ever did in the 10 years that I was there on staff. And I thought one day I will preach a sermon on David and giants and 1 Samuel. Here we are. So I'm excited about it. And I wanted to start out by showing you something. If you're online, I'll try to post this. We have a fair amount of people that listen online.

Hello to you. These are little stones. And these stones that I have in my hand are from a very special place. It's called the Valley of Allah. The Valley of Allah was a place where a ruddy little boy named David took the hopes and dreams of a nation upon his shoulders and went out to fight Goliath. And what has always impressed me about this story is how small a stone you need to kill a giant.

One of the characteristics of giants is they talk a lot of junk. They like to intimidate. And so as we're going to see, we're not going to start with David. We've got to get to David. But he had this Goliath that would just go taunt him. And I love, we're going to get to this really cool statement that I think is one of the hinge pins for this entire scripture.

And he says, who is this uncircumcised Philistines to taunt the armies of what? The living God. And I guess the encouragement as we look at giants, because I want to go through Samuel. I want to look at David. But there are giants throughout the book of Samuel. You're going to see them today as we look at Hannah and her desire to have a child. This was this big giant in her life.

I want to make this very personal. I want this series to be a giant hunting series. We're at the end of our time together. It will be somewhere near the end of the year. I'll have a couple more things Adam wants to talk about series in between there. But at the end of this year that many of us are going to look around and we're going to see a field of giants laying at our feet.

That we went after them. And I guess the encouragement the Lord gave me is I, sometimes I'll hold on to these when I pray. My mom got these in Israel for me. And I'll pray and I'll just hold on to them. And if I have a giant, a particular giant I'm facing, I'll just hold on to it. There's no spiritual significance in that I get power from it or any crazy thing.

But it's just a symbol. And I'll just pray over those giants in my life. But I just want to encourage you that the giant in your life only needs a small stone to feed it. We tend to think we need a nuclear arsenal, you know. We tend to think that we have to have this army or this sword that we go up against with. But David just walked out there with a small stone.

Do you want to know the hardest part though? It's not throwing the stone that will kill the giant. It's showing up to the battlefield. And I want to work on providing a platform where as a church we can learn to show up. We know before this the men of valor, the mighty men of Saul, if they were called that, were hiding in cisterns. They were hiding, it says, in the crags.

They were hiding in pits. They were covering themselves in haystacks. They were running from their giants. And the thing that separated David from these men of God, he was just a little boy who had killed the lion. And I think the bear, it says, with his own hands. So he obviously had the ruach of God with him, the spirit of God with him. Is that David was willing to show up to the battlefield and he knew what weapon to take.

I don't want to pre-preach that story. We're going to get to it. It's going to be powerful. Today we are looking at the beginning of the story. The beginning of the story of the kings. Now if it was up to God, the story of the kings would have never existed. God never wanted the people of God to put their reliance upon a person. But he never wanted them to have a sense of control or safety because there was someone who was ruling over them.

God wanted them to live in dominion alongside of him as opposed to in a sense of control. That we've got everything together if we have this powerful king leading us. And so God's desire was never to have a political solution to the problem. God always wanted to have an individual relationship with people. But the people, as we will see, and this will be another one of the giants, were crying out for a king.

And I think that needs to speak to us as Christians today. Are we looking for political solutions? Not that God doesn't use politics. He does. But are we looking for political solutions? Are we looking for an army of people empowered by the ruach of God living on the corner in which they dwell, making change and bringing the kingdom of God to that corner until the kingdom of God is expanded on earth?

That's the game plan. So we see in Samuel here, which is actually originally the book of 1 Kings. There was four book of the kings. Now it was named Samuel. But there were four books of the kings. You have 1 Kings, which would be 1 Samuel. 2 Kings, which would be 2 Samuel. And then you have 1 and 2 Kings, which should actually be 3 and 4 Kings. We're going to set this up.

But at the same time, once again, the characters in this story, the characters in the book of Samuel, probably my favorite Old Testament book, are beautiful mirrors to allow us to look at ourselves and to ask some very important questions. We have people like Eli who was not able to overcome the giants in his life. We have people like Saul who was not able to overcome a persistent fear in his life.

And so to look at ourselves in the framework or to look at ourselves through the filter of 1 Samuel and to say, what does this say to me? As we show up to the battlefield and realize that with God in a small stone, any giant can fall. And I want to, you know, some of us are going to walk out on the other side of this, and perhaps it's you, are going to walk out and the giant of your life is going to be no more.

You know, we tend to think that these giants in our lives are just going to, you know, are just going to be over us forever. And we just, you better just learn how to live with it. Learn how to live, you know, with a fox in the hen house. As opposed to being the idea of Corinthians, I think it's Corinthians, being more than conquerors. God didn't call you to be a conqueror.

He called you to be more than a conqueror. To conquer and to learn how to show up on the battlefield with just a few small stones. We're going to start with the first character. The first character that we're going to look at is Hannah. Hannah is an amazing figure in the scripture who is persistently nagged by not only a giant of purpose, a giant of desire, things that she wanted, a desire of her dreams, a desire to be a mother, and so much of that back in that century and in that Hebrew culture was tied.

Your purpose as a woman was tied on. If you could tie it into, can you give your husband sons? Because sons and men meant manpower, it meant safety. The entire safety of your people, of yourself, was tied into the idea that could we produce a protective element believing that men are there to save the day. Now I think that we still believe that in a lot of times and I think knowing enough about men, not always true.

Can we agree with that? On Mother's Day, we'll definitely agree with that. But Hannah was here and she wanted a son so bad and she had this rival. We'll talk about Panaya. We'll talk about, I probably didn't just pronounce her name right. I'll get it right by the end of the week. I worked on it all week. But she was this rival who also had her own giant, unloved wife.

Second, number two, this is why we're not supposed to have more than one wife. Because we have to split our desire between them. And marriage is meant to show a complete intimacy that God has with us. A complete intimacy. And she knew that she was second on the list. And so she would provoke. She created a rival out of Hannah. Because Hannah, while she was not able to produce that son, and it says that it was the Lord that caused her not to produce the son.

And that doesn't mean that that is the case every single time. But in this case, for a purpose that God has, he closed her womb. I don't know if you saw that in the scripture. Very interesting. As you'll see in the notes, perhaps he was trying to show a metaphor of a nation that had become unproductive. But it was from the womb of Hannah that the line of David comes, as we'll see.

And from the line of David comes who? Jesus, a non-political king. A non-earthly political king who would come and bring a new kingdom. When the scripture says that women will be saved through childbirth, it doesn't mean that by having labor pains that they are earning their salvation. It means that women are the ones who birthed the Messiah. So they were saved.

Why? Because of their ability to bring children into the earth. And Jesus came, and they were saved because of their ability to birth the Messiah. That's what that scripture means. Okay? If you've ever had an issue, now you can stop having an issue with that scripture and understand it. But one of the things before we look at Hannah here and her personal giant and some of the other giants and ask ourselves questions, because the scripture should always allow us to ask ourselves questions.

Few things give us a platform to ask questions about what does this mean for me? And as I began speaking, you already thought about your giants. Few of us in here didn't think, weren't prodded to think about your giants and how you would love to overcome that giant, become more than a conqueror over it. But I want to set the scene here of what is happening in Israel, because we have to see where this book is coming from and what exactly is happening before we get to these characters and attacking their giants.

First thing is this, is Israel is really, as you'll see highlighted in this scripture, or in this whole entire book of 1 Samuel, is going through a period of incredible spiritual insensitivity. They've developed a callousness to the word of God. They've developed a callousness to the presence of God. Even the priest had lost the ability to know when God was in their midst.

And so when Hannah does have a child, spoiler alert, has a child, and that child becomes a priest in the temple of God, and Eli is the priest, the one that thought she was drunk, God begins to speak to Samuel. And the little boy was learning the voice of the Lord, but he hears God's voice and he runs to Eli, and Eli is the priest. And basically he says, I heard this voice.

And Eli says, you didn't hear anything. Go back down and lay down. And he doesn't until the third time where eventually Eli wakes up and says, oh, that was God. I mean, how often is God in our midst? And we have no idea. There was a spiritual insensitivity, and there are things that lead to spiritual insensitivity. Probably the greatest which is our personal desire to fulfill our sinful nature.

That leads to an ability to, it blunts our hearing. It clogs up our ears. It allows us to not be in touch with what God is saying. And I think what we want to do is get to a place in our life where we are so, and not neurotic, because you can become neurotic about following in the dust of Jesus. What would Jesus do? I don't know if he would do, you know, we're not asking you to live that way.

Jesus, that's not freedom. But where we get to the point where our value of following Jesus, our value of being close to the Savior, is so superior to our value of having our own desires met, that we begin to get a soft baby skin heart. That's another Mark Foreman from my old church that would say that. Do you have this baby skin heart? And as I came in today, you know, there's things that are always happening.

When we get here, I'm wondering, okay, how the light's right? How's the music? You know, part of this is work, okay? I show up, your staff is working. And I was sitting there in the midst of it, and I realized, am I hearing? Settle down. What is God saying right now in this moment? And I have to do that on a regular basis to keep my heart, to keep myself ready and attuned to what God is saying in this moment, whether you're driving down the road and that homeless person, you've passed them 20 times because they're on that corner every single time.

But this one time, there's something that says, you know, pull over, give them a meal or whatever it is, or say you're sorry, that we become spiritually sensitive. Israel was in a time of not only being spiritually unproductive, but spiritually insensitive. And I would say it is virtually impossible to be spiritually productive in your life if you are spiritually insensitive.

We'll see that Eli's eyes even became darkened, and he was unable to see. It was what was happening in the scripture was actually being, what was happening, excuse me, in the spiritual realm was being played out on the actual narrative of what was happening in the true life events of the story. You'll see that in the scripture all the time. Something that is happening spiritually will be happening in the physical realm because there is a tie between the spirit and the physical.

So there's a spiritual insensitivity. Read your notes. It says this, 1 Samuel was preceded by two very important books. If you do not know what's going on in the two books prior, or in the books prior to 1 Samuel, you're going to miss some things. And so we're going to go back and look at those just quickly. And it says, these books are Judges and Ruth.

And they give us an incredible insight to what is happening in Israel and what God is doing in the midst of it. And this is a great thing to remember. Whatever is happening in your life, there is another question. And this is a great question when you come against a giant in your life, no matter what it is or what it's saying or trying to accomplish, or whether it's taunting you, like Goliath or like Peniah that is taunting Hannah.

You ask yourself, this is what is happening, but what is God doing in the midst of it? Being able to hear God in the midst of suffering is an incredible spiritual resource. And it comes from hope. It comes from peace. It comes from stopping all the dialogue in your head and slowing down and saying, God, this is incredibly difficult. What are you trying to say?

It's a great question. And this is a question that I encourage you to ask during this series. God, what are you trying to say? In the midst of something happening, or even when good things happen, God, what are you saying to me? Not that we always get it right, but that he will be there and say, God, I'm open. I'm willing. I believe this. Even if I never actually hear what God is doing, the posture of an open heart and open spiritual eyes and ears and a posture of submission will cause God to lead you and determine your steps in a way that will be productive and spiritually productive.

We don't always have to know what's going on. You know, whenever I lead my children places when they were small, they didn't always understand where we were going or why, but to trust that I would lead them to the right destination. And often we did. So what is happening? If you look in the closing passages of Judges and of Ruth, you're going to see some very powerful things.

First is this, is understanding that in Judges, God did not want to place a king over Israel. He wanted to have a theocracy. He wanted each person to be able to go to the temple, to meet God, and to be ruled by the Spirit of God and live according to the laws and the commands and the love of God. But this was not a safe enough situation. It wasn't a control-based situation.

So the Israelites wanted something more. But before that time came, God was sending judges. He was sending people, like Supreme Court-type judges, like Moses was a judge, that could lead the people, but not be set over them in the same way a king would be. We'll look more at that, because that story will show itself as we go on. But in the book of Judges, it is a story about all these righteous judges that had came before the time of the kings and were judging the issues.

And sometimes they were saviors, savior figures, salvific figures that would come and rescue and help get Israel back on track. At the end of Judges, though, something incredibly tragic happens. I would say chapters 19 and 20 and 21 of the book of Judges are some, are the, in my opinion, the most tragic, unfortunate, disturbing events and a story that happens in the entire Bible.

There's probably nothing worse in the Bible. And if you know the story, the story talks about a Levitical priest who has a concubine, a woman, and he, it's besides his wife, and they had, I won't go into the whole concubine situation, but he goes into the city, and he's traveling, and he's trying to get back home. And he ends up in a Benjamite town from one of the tribes of Israel.

There's these different tribes. And he goes into the town, and when he's there, he finds someone to take him in for the night. This is something that would happen in Jewish culture. You would go into the city, and you would sit in the middle of the city and in the public square, and somebody would come and be hospitable and bring you to their home.

So he finally has an old man come and say, no one has come and taken you because it wasn't a very hospitable city. And he takes him into his home and, you know, gives him rest, and he says, you can go in the morning. But in the middle of the night, some unworthy Benjamite men come, and they demand that the stranger who would come for the night be put outside so they might have sexual intercourse with him.

And the old man says, hey, I don't want this to happen. This is horrible. But, you know, don't do that. But I have, now this is, I don't even get this. I have two daughters, and I'll give you my daughters, or you can have the concubine. So, tragically, the concubine is put outside, and she is, you know, forgive me, but she's raped to death. And the story is so tragic.

In the morning, the man, the Levitical priest, who was so insensitive, comes, tells her to get up, puts her on her donkey. She actually dies after that. Because of that, and this is in the Bible, I apologize for having to share it with you, but he cuts her into 12 pieces, and he sends her to all the 12 different tribes of Israel. So, right? There's probably not a worse story in the Bible.

Like, I hate that story. And whenever we read through the entire Bible, my daughters go through it, I make sure that we skip that portion. We're not quite there yet. This incenses Israel. They realize, what has happened? What has happened to the people of God? And so, 11 other tribes get together, and they come up against the Benjaminites, and they say to the tribe of Benjamin, now this is the tribe that Saul is from, they say, send out these unworthy men, that we might, you know, make them pay for this incredibly, incredible atrocity.

And it says that they're not willing to do that, because this is a very prideful tribe, and it says that they have these warriors that are left-handed, that are just these amazing warriors that can basically knock a feather off a stone. I don't remember the exact analogy, but it says that these men, they will not give them up. And so, all of the tribes of Israel go against the Benjamite tribe.

Now, this is tragic. God's people warring against each other. And so, the Benjamites come, and they have this war, and it's the Benjamite rebellion. I will let you go read about that war. The Benjamites hold off the 11 tribes of Israel on the first day. They go, and they get ready for another battle, and eventually, after getting beat again and again by the Benjamites, the tribes of Israel go up, and they meet with the Lord, and they cry out to God, and they said, are you going to allow this to happen?

And God says to them, no, you go, and I will deliver them into your hands. Israel destroys the tribe of Benjamin to the point where they're almost extinguished. I'll let you go back and read what happens to that. But Benjamin does survive, but it becomes the least of the tribes in Israel. This is called the Benjamite rebellion. Go and read it. It's a tragic, tragic story.

But at the end of Judges, this is the thing that really stuck out to me. In the end of Judges, it talks about the spiritual condition of Israel at the point, before we get into the book of Ruth, which I love. It says, in those days, Israel had no king, and everyone did as they saw fit. Now, if you were to look at the scripture and what was happening at the time, you can see that that was not a good thing.

God wanted them to have individual lives where they followed God, and they were sensitive to the spirit of God. But basically, everyone was doing whatever they wanted. There was a complete chaos in the society. They had had a spiritual insensitivity. This is the history that the book of Samuel is birthed out of. Incredibly difficult times. Now we look at the book of Ruth, and the book of Ruth is a beautiful story.

The exact opposite. You have this man named Boaz, who is, he's older, and he's looking for a wife, and it just, just read the book of Ruth. It's so beautiful. You need some healing salve after you've read chapters 19 through 21 of Judges. It's incredibly difficult. But this is a beautiful book about a humble woman and a loving relationship, and you have to read through it.

But Boaz ends up taking this woman in who had lost her family. She had no protection anymore. She had no sons. Her sons had died, and she goes to him in this submissive act, and she lays at his feet, and he loves her, and then he pays the Redeemer's price because you could pay, you have to read the story, but basically he was willing to sacrifice to say, would she be mine?

And he fought for her. There was another man who could have paid the Redeemer's price, and you'll have to read and do your homework on that one to see what that means. But he was willing to go up and said, can I take her? And he just wanted to have her as his wife. It's so beautiful. It is so antithetical to what we see in the previous chapter. It is like God saying, look, this is hope.

This is the way it's supposed to be. And here's the closing part of this book that I think, because God always has an answer to suffering. This is the point. Incredibly tragic time in Judges, but the next book is what? Ruth. And at the end of Ruth, it says this. After she had married Boaz, it says, then Naomi had a child. She took the child in her arms, and she carried him.

The woman living there says, Naomi has a son, and they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David. David's our boy. Okay? David's our boy. He's our man. David is the man after God's own heart. And so out of this tragedy, God births David. And out of the line of David comes who? Jesus. Do you see how God takes an incredible tragedy, and he turns it around, and he turns your suffering into delight?

That Jesus, the Messiah of the world comes. And I want to say, as you look in your giants, some of you have experienced tragedy, probably not far removed from what I've already spoken about. In a room this size, people have experienced incredible tragedy. I want to say God has a plan for your tragedy. He has hope for your tragedy. But this is the story, and I had to give you the backstory of what was happening, because now we come, and Israel is asking for a king.

And we see that this begins to happen. And so as we come into the book of 1 Kings, we have some players. And I want to talk quickly about some key players because the book is filled with incredible people that are mirrors for our own personal lives. First players, you'll see in the book, or excuse me, in your notes, is the nation of Israel. We'll make them anthropomorphic if we can.

They are disunified and spiritually unproductive. Perhaps, this is just me, perhaps the closing of Hannah's womb was done by God to signify the spiritual state of Israel. Perhaps. Who knows? The Bible doesn't tell us. We want to be careful to not preach out of the silence. But on occasion, we can make some thoughts into maybe why God had done this. But Israel is in an incredibly difficult place at the moment.

And then we have Eli. Eli is a priest. He is supposed to be the spiritual shepherd, the one leading the people that will be there at the temple when they come to bring their sacrifices for God. He is a mediator in so much that he takes the sacrifices and they give people a place where they can encounter God. That's what we want to do here. I want you to know that one of the key premises here is to provide a place where you can come and not just get a pep talk, but encounter the living God.

So that you can experience the ruach of God, the presence of God, that you can walk away with a little more hope than you had to go back out to your corner and to change the world. That's what we're doing here. And that was the place of Eli, but he was a failed priest. He was a failed father. And if you look at Eli, we'll read more about him, but he had become completely blind to what was happening.

And so when one of the parishioners come and she's crying out before God, she has this incredible moment where she is wrestling with God. Hannah is having a Jacob moment with God. It is this incredibly difficult anguish. She is pouring out her soul like a drink offering. The Bible speaks about Jesus being poured out like a drink offering. She's just like a puddle on the ground.

You know what Eli sees? Drunk woman. No spiritual sensitivity. No eyes to see what's going on. No eyes to see beyond what he can see with his own eyes. And this is another thing you'll see in the book of 1 Samuel where God says over and over again, don't judge by what you can see with human eyes. You have got to develop a spiritual sensitivity and spiritual eyes to see what's happening.

If you were to look at our political and world landscape that is happening around the world today and only look at it on the surface, you would be so terrified. It might be terrifying anyways. But if you can step back and say, God, what are you doing in the midst? If you can begin to see that God is moving in the midst of these massive shifts in culture, that God is up to something and maybe you don't know.

Maybe it'll just take hope to believe that he's in the midst of it. But spiritual eyes will begin to open up something that creates hope. The scripture once again says, Jesus says, when you see these things happening, and he talks about all the negative things that will happen in culture in the end times, he says, look up for your day of redemption is near.

How's your spiritual eyes? Or is everything that you make all your decisions on based on what you see in the temporal? Do we have spiritual eyes? It's a great question from the book of 1 Samuel. And as we go giant hunting, it is going to be key that you can ask yourself the question, what's behind the curtain? Spiritually, what is happening beyond what I can see?

And so we have Eli, who is a spiritually blind priest. It actually says in 1 Samuel 3, 2, that his eyes were growing dim. The physical, representing what was happening in the spiritual. The Bible has a lot of places, especially in the Proverbs, where it speaks that joy, that laughter will do what? Does anybody know what it says the scripture will do, what laughter will do?

Heal the body, heal the bones. Yeah. That there is, the things that happen in our body, the things that we accept in our spirit, the things that we allow. If you're going to walk in bitterness, bitterness will lead to a lack of health in your body. The Bible speaks over and over again, between the connection of the physical and the spiritual. Eli was going blind.

He was also a horrible father. He was the father of Hophni and Phinehas, these ungodly priestly sons of Eli. We'll talk about their story. But they were sleeping with prostitutes at the entrance of the door of the temple. They were taking the sacrifices that were meant for God, taking the best meat and giving God the leftovers. Not a good thing. We'll get to them.

Eli had no ability to speak to his sons. You know, unfortunately, there is such a lack of male leadership in the book of 1 Samuel. David was just, we'll see. He was just a bad dad. His son Absalom rose up against him. Now, maybe that was because of his own personal sin. He just had bad relationships with people. He had a great relationship with Jonathan, but for the most part, he was just bad when it came to relationships other than with God.

He just couldn't work it out. He was a bad dad. Eli was a bad dad. God didn't know how to discipline his sons. Same with Saul. These other ones, this lack of men being able to stand up to their sons and say, this is right and this is wrong. And there is a place in this world for men to stand up and to give a compass and a direction of some place. As long as we are following the spirit of God.

Eli and Hophni are a mess. We'll talk about them. Elkanah, great example of a man, right? Guy's clueless. I mean, Hannah is his husband. He cannot see what is going on. If I just give her a few fat portions and tell her if she had, you know, aren't I enough? You know, take a look, take a look at me. Aren't I enough? That should heal her grief. Just say, husbands, boyfriends, guys that want a girlfriend that are in the room.

Being able to sit back and to be able to, to come into unity with where a woman's spirit at is at is, it's a learned trait, first of all. It takes an emotional sensitivity. And I will say this, women have a much higher emotional IQ. I don't care if it's politically incorrect. It's true. Women have a much higher emotional IQ than men. Incredibly higher. They're just more in touch.

And by the way, I don't know why that has ever been seen as a negative thing. Like that's less. It's an incredibly powerful thing. To be able to slow down and to be able to hear your wife, to be able to listen to your wife and to walk in dominion with her as opposed to rule over her is an art form. And it can only happen when you lead, when you're led by the Ruach of God.

And so to sit there and to chill out and to be able to come alongside her. Eli couldn't see what was happening in this woman's life. Elkanah couldn't see what was happening in this woman's life. And he says, he's faithful. He's so faithful, but he's out of touch. And the husband of two wives, trust me, you don't want two husbands either. You know, one's enough.

The Bible has nothing, the Bible does not bless polygamy. It has nothing good to say about polygamy. Never is good. It creates a rivalry that is not supposed to exist. And so it says that he has two wives. Lamech was the first person to do this in Genesis 4, 19. Excuse me, 4, 19 through 24. Basically he says, and he had two wives. The Bible talks about it.

The Bible shows it. But the Bible never shows God saying to do this because it goes against what he wants to portray in himself. A complete intimacy with the beloved, which is you. And marriage is meant to show that metaphor in true life. And he says to his wife, why are you weeping? Don't I mean more to you than 10 sons? Guys, I'm not saying that I didn't make similar statements, okay, for the first 10 years of my marriage.

Ugh. We'll just leave it at that, okay? Penaniah. Penaniah. There we go. Pen... Thank you. Peanut gallery. The Penaninah gallery. The unloved yet fruitful rival of Hannah. You know, both Hannah and Penaniah had what the other one wanted. And they were both miserable. Make sense? Unloved. The unloved... The Bible talks a lot about the unloved spouse or the unloved wife.

Ugh. Proverbs talks a lot about it. The ability to love your wife well is amazing. Takes the Lord. It says Penaniah. She created a rival of Hannah because of her own personal pain. She let her pain become her platform to how she would treat other people. The giant in her life she would use as a platform to oppress other people. Why? Because she was unloved.

And it says in verse 5, but Hannah had... But to Hannah he gave a double portion because he loved her. This is so foolish. If you're gonna have two wives, don't give one a double portion and the other one not, okay? Double portion because he loved her. What did it show Penaniah? It showed her you're unloved. You are unloved. So Penaniah, her rival, kept provoking her in order to irritate her and she did a good job out of it.

And then we get to Hannah. I love Hannah. Hannah's a beautiful picture of a person struggling with the giant of purpose, the giant of desire, the giant of the dreams that she wanted. I heard a person recently say in an interview, it was one of our politicians, and they said, you know, I love America because if you try hard and you have a dream and you go after it, you can have that dream.

That's a lie. That's a lie. You can have the option to keep going after that dream, but you might not get it. And my question is, how do you live when you don't get what you want? Because here's what's key, and this is one of the things we're gonna see with Hannah, that if you're gonna do giant hunting with me, this is so key when we're talking about your giant of purpose, this thing that you've always wanted, whether it's to be a mom and you can't have a baby, or whether it's to write that book or to sing that song you wanna do, or to, whatever your thing is, we all have our thing.

It's the dream that, and by the way, once you get that, you're gonna be happy. Just read it. Every time you feel that way, read Ecclesiastes, because as soon as you get there, you're gonna want something else, okay, it happens every single time. If you're gonna kill the giant of purpose and desire and dreams and this whole dream, there's nothing wrong with dreams.

It's hope. I love the hope. There's a lot of great story. But when the dream becomes bigger than the Savior is when we start having an issue. And the question is, are you gonna let your dreams be bigger than your values? Are your dreams gonna be submissive to your values? You see, I have a value that I wanna give God glory and praise no matter what the circumstances.

And to this point, I've been able to do it. I don't know what the future looks like. But I hope that through the Ruach of God and the grace of God, I'll continue to be able to do that. But when you don't get what you want, are you going to blame God? Or are you gonna be able to say, I have a value that God is superior, that he loves me and I am his beloved?

I wanna say, this is what Hannah found out how she had to do. And there's quick things and we're circling the tower and we're gonna land here in a second. But this is how Hannah went after her giant. This is how she destroyed the giant of purpose and identity and desire and broken dreams. First of all, we start that she was distraught. We see her in verse seven.

It said that she had let this giant take her to a place where she wept and would not eat. And it completely, it had become her complete identity. Oftentimes, giants have the ability to change your identity. They want to change your identity. They will call you dogs. If you look at how that Goliath would yell and he would boast and they love to boast in your face.

They love to tell you who you are. They love to cast you down and to take your identity, your true identity of who God has called you to be and tell you that you were something less. They love to come from a platform of bullying, a platform of calling you less than what God has created you to be. They're incredibly provoking and whether it be Paniah or Goliath, you see the same structure and you see the same playbook.

And in your life, what are your giants telling you? It had allowed her and she would not eat. It had completely changed your identity and maybe you've met those people or maybe it's you where their identity has just collapsed under the weight of a giant that they face or this giant of purpose. What I like is in verse eight, we have a change. We have a change in verse eight and I don't know what the change was but she went from distraught to being determined.

She was gonna wrestle this out with God. She was gonna show up to the battlefield. She was gonna show up to God with her double portion or whatever it was because she was gonna show up and meet God in the presence of God at the temple of God in a different way than she had ever gone before. She was gonna have a Jacob moment and you know what? Some of you need to go have a Jacob moment.

Some of you need to go wrestle with God and you might come out never walking the same again but you've gotta have that moment. You've gotta go to God and pour out your heart before him and so she becomes determined and I don't know what happened but she showed up and she took her stone and she said I'm gonna show up and so she gets determined and I love it.

It says once, once, just once when they were eating so they're up at the temple they're getting ready they do this every single year and it says once when they were eating I don't know what happened when they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh Hannah stood up. That word stood up that phrase stood up just, it just have you ever have you ever seen in a movie or in a fight or something where somebody's getting pushed and pushed and then at one moment like in the Christmas story maybe you remember that where you start beating that kid they just stand up and their countenance changes and they said no more not this time.

I gotta say some of us have to stand up. It's time to stand up. Enough's enough and I'm gonna go wrestle with the living God and so she goes from being distraught to determined to devoted. Verse 16 she wrestles with God says she's pouring out my soul to the that's what she said I'm pouring out my soul to the Lord. What does that look like to pour out your soul?

It's incredibly intimate it's incredibly you'd be tired you'd be exhausted. She pours out her soul before the Lord completely. Eli has no idea that this is happening and she does her business with God and then after she has done that she lets the chips fall where they may because in verse 18 she's delivered but she still doesn't have what she wants. Hear this she's delivered she still doesn't have what she wants.

She wants a baby she's not pregnant the baby comes later. She doesn't know she's ever going to get it she doesn't know that whatever's going to happen but she's changed and she comes to peace with something because of pouring her heart out to God and it says that she's delivered she said may your servant find favor in your eyes then she went her way and ate something and her face was what?

No longer downcast her identity changed no longer not eating no longer downcast saying no matter what I have said my peace with God and that's enough and my value of leaving this in God's hands and living my life no matter what happens is higher than my desire to have this child. She didn't get a yes she didn't walk away with a yes she didn't walk away with you know having conceived she didn't get what she wanted but she went away completely delivered.

She killed the giant but never got what she wanted at that moment at least. She says may your servant find favor in your eyes and then she went away and ate something and her face was no longer downcast. Early the next morning they arose and what? Worshipped before the Lord and then they went back to their home in Ramah. The story could have ended. The story doesn't end.

God opens her womb and Jesus comes from that line but the story could have ended and it would have been a good ending. Do you see that? So this is the first giant. It's a giant of purpose. It's a giant of your desires the thing you want. Maybe having to say it's time to stand up it's time to pour my heart out before God and come to peace with no matter what happens in my life God is on the throne he's still good and he is my beloved.

Amen?