Stopping to Think

  This post is the first of three on prayer, drawn from the opening chapter of 1 Samuel.  Do you pray? Maybe you're like me, someone who definitely prays, who even counts prayer to be a significant part of your life-and yet you find yourself feeling guilty that you still don't pray with near the frequency you should. After all, the apostle Paul told us to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17). I hardly manage to pray with substantial frequency, let alone constancy.  Reasons Thus, I find it helpful when reading Scripture to observe the various reasons  we are to pray. In prayer, God doesn't just give us an action to perform. He is welcoming us into a deeper relationship with himself, the very relationship for which we were designed and made. But our default tendency is to believe we don't need this relationship, that we are sufficient on our own. Which is why the first reason for prayer that I want to examine is this: desperation. Desperation Have you ever felt ...

"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.    1 Samuel 1:27-28 Have you ever received a gift, and being so overjoyed with that gift, turned and given it away? The Setting That seems to be how the book of 1 Samuel, found in the Old Testament of the Bible, begins. We meet in these opening pages a woman named Hannah. She is the wife of a man named Elihu-but she isn't his only wife. She has what v6  refers to as a rival, her husband's other wife, Peninnah. And beyond being her rival, Peninnah is prodigiously gifted in what would have been the measure of a woman some 3100 years ago: she's very able to bear children. Hannah, on the other hand, is barren.  This causes Hannah great distress, for although her husband loves her ( v5 ), one imagines that love has a hard time holding up in the face of how fruitful his...

When Times Get Tough Have you ever heard the old saying, "when the going gets tough, the tough get going"? There are a lot of tough times recorded in the Bible. Some of the most interesting occur in the historical books, which begin with 1 Samuel. In the book of 1 Samuel, we read the story of Israel's transition from being a theocracy which acknowledged God as king, to being a monarchy with a human king sitting on a physical throne. Standing in the way of that transition, though, were the Philistines. As one comes 1 Samuel 14 , we find King Saul of Israel and his army waiting for battle. The Philistines outnumber the Israelites by an order of magnitude. And not only is the tiny army of Israel outnumbered, they are (to speak anachronistically) outgunned. The whole army of Israel has two swords: the one carried by King Saul, and the one carried by his son Jonathan. The rest of the men have axes, mattocks, plowshares, and sickles.  Which brings us to verse 6 of chapter 14, J...