Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, thank you for our teenagers. Our young men and women who caught the vision of your great commission and are now heading out this week into various parts of metro Detroit to share your love with people of all walks of life as part of Hope Week. Lord, I am so excited that our church family would support something as adventurous and courageous in young people. Bless each and every single one of them.

Lord, I pray over their safety. I pray for them to have courage. I pray that your Spirit would rush upon them so they would boldly go in faith, like the prophets and kings of old, to meet people and do things that you ordained them to do. Please let their acts of service be received well and most of all, let your glory come upon all who participate and interact with our next generation.

As we study your word today, let your presence be known to all of us who hear. Moreover, please do a work in our hearts so that we can become more like you. We want to follow you into eternity, doing the work you called us to. We pray in Jesus awesome name. Amen.

1 Samuel 2.

And Hannah prayed and said,

“My heart exults in the Lord;
    my horn is exalted in the Lord.
My mouth derides my enemies,
    because I rejoice in your salvation.

² “There is none holy like the Lord:
    for there is none besides you;
    there is no rock like our God.
³ Talk no more so very proudly,
    let not arrogance come from your mouth;
for the Lord is a God of knowledge,
    and by him actions are weighed.
⁴ The bows of the mighty are broken,
    but the feeble bind on strength.
⁵ Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread,
    but those who were hungry have ceased to hunger.
The barren has borne seven,
    but she who has many children is forlorn.
⁶ The Lord kills and brings to life;
    he brings down to Sheol and raises up.
⁷ The Lord makes poor and makes rich;
    he brings low and he exalts.
⁸ He raises up the poor from the dust;
    he lifts the needy from the ash heap
to make them sit with princes
    and inherit a seat of honor.
For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s,
    and on them he has set the world.

⁹ “He will guard the feet of his faithful ones,
    but the wicked shall be cut off in darkness,
    for not by might shall a man prevail.
¹⁰ The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces;
    against them he will thunder in heaven.
The Lord will judge the ends of the earth;
    he will give strength to his king
    and exalt the horn of his anointed.”

1 Samuel 2:1-10 ESV

Let me ask a question. Do you feel sometimes like you’re just going through the motions of faith?

• Like you’re reading the Bible, but the words don’t stick.
• Or you’re praying, but you say nothing and don’t mean what you say; more than that, you don’t hear from God
• Or you’re serving, but you’re not fully present with the people you’re serving
• Maybe you show up to church, but you walk away an hour older and as empty as you came in

If that’s you, I’ll be honest: the first half of this week, I was just going through the motions of faith, just like you. I was reading the Bible but couldn’t apply anything I was reading, I was praying, but there was nothing, nothing worth saying, nothing heard. I was serving like a zombie.

And you know what, I went through the motions because I committed to them—because going through the motions is better than not. Just like me, you’re committed to faithfully being a disciple of Jesus but you’re just so tired, numb, bored, or unimpeded, that instead of needing to be supernaturally sustained by the disciplines of faith, you’re unaffected by them. Yes, even your pastor has days like that. I’m human too. I put on my pants the same way you do, shimming into a pair that’s one doughnut too tight.

If you’re in a season and time when it’s a miracle that you even prayed or read the bible or served or even showed up to church on a Sunday. Keep going, you’re still standing. In fact, come and share your burdens with us, we want to journey with you through those struggles.

But if that’s not the season of life you’re in, and you’ve just been going through the motions of faith instead of practicing your faith, know this: when Jesus called you to be his disciple, he called you to live a life full of risks and journeying into places and meeting people that should make you so uncomfortable that every discipline of faith to keep you moving toward him in faithful obedience.

Being a disciple of Jesus is about being stretched and taking risks in faith, to do things outside the bounds of your comforts and abilities because you know God is greater than those comforts and abilities. And if you haven’t taken risks in faith in a while, I’m not even talking about going to live with cannibals who don’t know the gospel, I’m talking about sharing your faith, serving somebody that won’t reciprocate, being bold with your faith values, then the commitment you made to follow Jesus is worthless. Because honestly, there is just so much other stuff you can follow and fill your life with that will help you be more comfortable. Going through the motions of faith and calling it personal and private within the bounds of your comforts is not faith, it’s empty religion.

What happened in your life that caused you to shrink back faith to only when it is convenient or safe?

• When you got that family? A spouse, a kid?
• Was it an accident or a bad medical diagnosis?
• Maybe it was the demands of a job.
• Maybe it was COVID. We can point to COVID for putting our lives on pause for another two years, right
• Maybe it was when America decided to become post-Christian. Just a note: countries are just imaginary constructs that represent the people living there. We’re living here, so if our country is post-Christian and you’re lamenting it, and shrinking back in your faith because of it, then realize you partly caused the problem you’re lamenting. So if you follow Jesus, and if you take risks by living the gospel, others may come to experience the fullness of God.

That’s how I become a follower of Jesus. My friend, who was looking at the path his friend was walking down, took a risk of faith and invited me to follow Jesus with him. He barely understood what it meant to follow Jesus. He had just responded to the call of Jesus on his own life before he decided it was time to take another risk in faith to come and grab a hold of me. If it wasn’t for the risk he took by reaching me, I wouldn’t be here in front of you.

Do you want to boldly take risks in faith? Do you want to live the life Jesus called you to? I know I do. To that end, I want to share with all of you the power that lies in regularly and frequently worshipping God when it comes to spurring us on in works of faith.

David Foster Wallace once made these observations about worship:

“[I]n the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough…Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you…Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is…they’re unconscious. They are default settings…. we all know this stuff already…. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

David Foster Wallace, 2005

David Foster Wallace was an atheist most of his life. It’s said that he found while participating in a 12 step program in a local church. Let me summarize his observations on worship:

1. Worship is something everybody does. Regardless of religion or socioeconomic status. The question is who are you worshipping? Is it God or is it some other idol?
2. Worship as an act of venerating something or somebody as worthy actually causes us to behave in certain ways in our attempts to be like it or attain it.

So it’s important for us, being the people called by God, to intentionally worship God. When we worship God and we keep that worship in front of us daily, our worship of God transforms us and sanctifies us, renewing us as we follow Jesus. Worship does something spiritually profound as it supernaturally encourages us keep following Jesus in faith. So the risks we take in faith are never empty, but full of grace upon grace.

Great! Then how do we worship God? Jesus tells the Samaritan woman in John 4:24, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” Here’s what that means: Because God is spirit, he is invisible and unknowable unless God chooses to reveal himself. And God does reveal himself to us through his son, Jesus Christ. When Jesus calls us to be his disciples and we receive the Holy Spirit, the spirit of truth awakens our hearts and minds to the reality of biblical revelation becoming tangible through cross and resurrection of Jesus.

Worship is not mindless or a matter of checkboxes, but it is thoughtfully grounded in truth of God’s Word and passionately charged by our heart’s affections through God’s Spirit. So,

Worship is a response to God’s faithfulness

God is faithful. God opens his arms to sinners, calling us to be his children because of his faithfulness, not ours, that’s the gospel. And when we received the gospel in our lives, by obeying the calling of God to be his disciples, we chose to leave everything else behind and follow him.

That’s what it means to practice our faith. So when we fail or shy away from following him where he is taking us or calling us, God doesn’t kick us out. He doesn’t shame us. He continues to love us and prod us. God is faithful in that way. We worship God because he is faithful.

That brings us to our passage in 1 Samuel chapter 2. Before we read the passage, I want us to understand the context of this passage.

Hannah was one of two wives of a man named Elkanah. The thing about Hannah was that she was the beloved wife of Elkanah and she was barren. His other wife, Peninnah was not barren and had both sons and daughters. She used to rub that in the face of Hannah, shaming her and antagonizing her for her barrenness.  

The Bible says that Elkanah and his entire family would go from their home in the city of Ramah to the city of Shiloh, about 20 miles away, once every year so that they could worship God. One year, while the entire family was at Shiloh taking part in their annual worship to God, Hannah prayed a desperate prayer to God. She asked him for a son, and in return she would give him back to God in service to him for the rest of his life. Can I tell you, this is a huge step of faith! You’re basically conceding what you don’t have yet in the hopes of getting a taste of what you’ll be conceding.

The priest at Shiloh, Eli, thought she was drunk and tried shooing her away. But she explained that she was just passionately praying, and he blesses her by also asking God to be faithful.

Hannah goes home, gets pregnant, and later that year, gives birth to a son, whom she names Samuel. And as soon as Samuel is old enough, she comes back to Shiloh, bringing Samuel with her, so she could give him back to God, just as she promised God in prayer. Mind you, Samuel is a little boy, it’s not like she was sending her grown adult child away.

When they arrive to Shiloh, Hannah presents Samuel and both mom and son worship God. Hannah’s prayer, which is actually a worship song, shows us three attributes of worshipping God that supernaturally spurs us to risk more in faith. The first attribute is:

Worship acknowledges who God is and his nature

¹And Hannah prayed and said,

“My heart exults in the Lord;
    my horn is exalted in the Lord.
My mouth derides my enemies,
    because I rejoice in your salvation.

² “There is none holy like the Lord:
    for there is none besides you;
    there is no rock like our God.’

God is first and foremost our salvation. When we worship, we rejoice in that truth. Then we are confessing that:

• There is none like our God.
• There is nothing hidden from him.
• There is nothing that he can’t do.
• There is nothing that can overcome him.
• As a result of who he is, our hearts praise God.
• As a result of who God is, we have glory and victory. You see, the idea of a horn being exalted comes from the image of a bull lifting his horns in victory after a battle.

Verse 3.

³ Talk no more so very proudly,
    let not arrogance come from your mouth;
for the Lord is a God of knowledge,
    and by him actions are weighed.

⁴ The bows of the mighty are broken,
    but the feeble bind on strength.
⁵ Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread,
    but those who were hungry have ceased to hunger.
The barren has borne seven,
    but she who has many children is forlorn.

The nature of God is sovereign! His omnipotence alters life as we know it. That is why we have salvation by grace through faith alone in Jesus Christ. Our salvation doesn’t come by our works, efforts, or positions. We are his children because his nature is to redeem and restore us for himself.

When we worship God by rejoicing in who he is, we will be supernaturally encouraged. Hannah is worshipping God very much aware that this is where she says goodbye to her one and only son. She is going to leave her son at Shiloh to serve God the rest of his life. This is the son that she’s been longing for. She worships God rejoicing in the fact that she is sending her son to not only a faithful God, but to a sovereign God.   

A second attribute of worship is:

Worship helps us recognize our need for God

⁶ The Lord kills and brings to life;
    he brings down to Sheol and raises up.
⁷ The Lord makes poor and makes rich;
    he brings low and he exalts.

 ⁸ He raises up the poor from the dust;
    he lifts the needy from the ash heap
to make them sit with princes
    and inherit a seat of honor.
For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s,
    and on them he has set the world.

As Hannah is worshipping God, she recognizes the work of God in the lives of people like herself. God is the one who is responsible for death and life. He is responsible for poverty and riches. He is responsible for highs and lows of life.

We fail to worship God because we don’t recognize our need for him.

• We think we’re God.
• We believe we brought about our own fortunes through our own blood, sweat, and teers.
• We believe we are the ones responsible for all the good that comes to our life.
• More than that, we feel entitled to God’s blessings.
• At the same time we blame God for everything that is wrong and everything that hinders us from our dreams. Nothing is our fault.

Either God is responsible for everything and so we need him; or we don’t believe God is who he says he is and we minimize our need of him.

I was reading an article about the barriers to Christian faith, and according to Barna Research, the number one barrier to faith is that people have a hard time believing a good God would allow so much evil or suffering in the world so they would choose not believe in God. The number two barrier to faith is that Christians are hypocrites. When you think about those two barriers, you realize that people only want a God that bends and fits their morality.

Evil and suffering in the world should convince us to recognize our need for him to intervene. If we don’t need him to handle the evil and suffering in the world, then our hypocrisy should be enough reason to confess our need him because we’re never going to live up to the impossible moving standards, virtues, and morality we place on ourselves or each other. Worship helps us recognize our need for God.

Come on, you know the reason you get anxiety sometimes is because there are things in life you can’t control and standards you can’t achieve but for some strange reason you try to control uncontrollable things and live up to standards that you just can’t meet. We decided to follow Jesus because of it. Because he has control over sin and death. Because he makes us white as snow, blameless and pure.

There are some people today, if you’re in a place of authority, influence or leadership you have no reason to be in, or if you’re meeting with people and you have their ear even though there is no reason you should have their ear, then recognize your need for God and worship him because you need him.

In worship, we relinquish the control we never had to God, who can control it all. We worship God because we need him to provide for us. We know he will provide for us because he has control over all of it. That’s in verse 8: For the pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and on them he has set the world.

God rules over all things! People don’t rule over things. We are just the poor people that sit in the dust until God lifts us up. Our lives, our circumstances, our relationships, our decisions, we depend on God for all of that. You don’t have what you have without God. You don’t do what you do without God. So, we worship God because we need him.

The third attribute of worship is:

Worship anticipates the promises of God

Hannah recognizes God’s promises and worships God for having fulfilled his promises even though she hasn’t seen or experienced them yet. Honestly, God’s promises are hard to believe, but they are worth our trust. That’s the hope we have when we take risks following Jesus in faith. Hannah shares 7 promises of God. Verse 9.

1. ⁹ “He will guard the feet of his faithful ones,
2. but the wicked shall be cut off in darkness,
3. for not by might shall a man prevail.

I want to focus on this promise, “for not by might shall a man prevail…” Hannah understands that victory in this life is not by our own doing, by our power or strength. The Prophet Zechariah finishes this thought when he says, not by might, not by power, but by God’s spirit. God fulfills his plans and purposes for our lives by his sheer will alone. There is no burden for us to perform in faith. When we worship God, we eagerly anticipate his promises for our lives.

Verse 10, promise number 4.

1. ¹⁰ The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces; against them he will thunder in heaven.
2. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth;
3. he will give strength to his king
4. and exalt the horn of his anointed.”

What a glorious picture of the end, a preview of what happens when we join our God in eternity. In worship we get a taste of eternity. We take risks in faith because we know what awaits us in eternity. The promises of God are way greater than us and our lifetimes. They stretch into eternity where we can stand witness to the awe of God unfolding.

Hannah worships prophetically seeing God judge the earth; giving the king, Jesus, strength to reign over all creation because the world was created through him and for him—how glorious a victory God provides for Jesus. Our Christ is glorified by God in victory over sin, victory over death. Victory over all.

God is faithful and we need him to fulfill his promises. If you want to experience the fullness of a life well lived in faith, then commit to making worship, both corporate and individual worship a regular rhythm in your life. Not when it’s convenient. Not only when you’re in need. Not occasionally. Make worship the center of your life and be empowered for the good works of faith God has for you. His power. his greatness, his spirit will spur you into eternity.

Let’s pray.

Father, we worship you. All praise is yours. You are the one we bow before because you reign forevermore. We acknowledge that you are holy, and you alone break the chains of injustice, of brokenness, of poverty, of division. Lord, we worship you because we need you. We need you to redeem us. To change us from the inside out, to help us move forward in faith because there is just so much around us that tells us to abandon our faith and to follow other things.

Allow our worship be anointed by your spirit, let it overflow into delightful obedience so we can be faithful in the plans you have for us. God help us follow Jesus. We want to witness your power, grace, and mercy as you promise in your word.

Some today are going through the motions of practicing faith, God, hear them, sustain them—give them the power to follow you. Give us a taste of eternity that dulls the mundaneness of this life and provides a vison of what you are unfolding before us. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.