God Doesn’t
Need You
God
doesn’t need you but will you let Him use you? We talked about Hannah’s plight
yesterday, how God as put her in a position where she is now ripe for God to
act in a way that only He (not us) can do. Hannah brings her sorrows before the
Lord. She pours out her deep longings and makes God a promise. Now, we can’t bargain
with God, we shouldn't say “If you will do this God, then I will do this”, “if you
give me what I want, then I will follow you”. That’s not what Hannah is doing
here. If God would gift her with a child, she promises to gift that child back
to God. This gets back to the major
theme that we see in this book. Those who have nothing, or at least view that
everything that they have is directly from God himself, will freely use it for
or give it back to God. God should be the one who receives the glory, and
Hannah is happy to give it to Him.
Now a
word about Eli in this section. We’ve already talked about the shaky spiritual
state of affairs in the nation at this time and Eli, the High Priest, proves
the point. We see here that Eli, who has the high spiritual position, is
without spiritual insight. Hannah, a lowly, barren woman, is the one who know,
how to appropriately come before God. You want to see God work? Come before Him
humbly. Proud, lazy spiritual leadership will lose their spiritual vision. God doesn’t
need them, God doesn’t need us. He chooses to use us, he wants to hear from us,
if we will let Him.
It’s
very important for us to see that Hannah makes good on her promise to God. How
any of us have promised something to God when we were in crisis, only to forget
about it when life got easy again? Am I the only one?
The beginning
of this section causes us to wonder as we see Hannah not bring Samuel to the
Tabernacle right away but says she will do so “as soon as the child is weaned”.
Is she reneging on her promise? Is she
growing so attached to her child that she is now making excuses to not obey
what she had promised? There is a bit of tension here but it is short lived as we
then see that she does, indeed give the child over to be a servant of God with
the priests at the Tabernacle. Her greatest gift, she gives back to God. God is
going to use this gift in an amazing way.
What
gifts has God given you that you are afraid to give back to Him? What excuses
to you make for not giving back to God what He is due? If you were to give back
the great gifts that God has given you, how might God use those to change the
world?
Far too
many of us are like Eli, we are spiritually fat, lazy and proud. We believe the
right stuff and think that is pleasing to God. We are so satisfied with our spiritual
condition that we have blinded ourselves to the needs of the hurting both
physical and spiritual. Ask God for spiritual sight, act on what He shows you,
use what He gives you.
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