Is Your Faith Unemployed or Is It Actively Working?

“Once after a sacrificial meal at Shiloh, Hannah got up and went to pray. Eli the priest was sitting at his customary place beside the entrance of the Tabernacle.Hannah was in deep anguish, crying bitterly as she prayed to the Lord” (1 Samuel 1:9-10 NLT).

Have you ever been in a place where you were sick and tired of being sick and tired? Hannah has. That was the very place that she was in when she cried out to the Lord on one of her yearly visits with her family to the temple. Hannah got to a place where cute prayers were no longer getting it for her. The cute cries were not getting her what she longed for and the glare of people no longer affected her. Hannah needed the Lord and she needed Him immediately. Hannah had a purpose in her that no one could bring forth but the Lord and she understood that. Many of us have a longing, but we are either afraid of it, we ignore it, or we attempt to accomplish it on our own. We don’t consider the Lord or think about the fact that perhaps it is Him that is calling us to a greater purpose and a higher standard to accomplish the goals that He has set for us. Hannah had to put her faith in action. She had to pray as if her life depended on it. Hannah had to submit her mind, her will, her thoughts, her biological time clock, her desires, and her heart to God in that very moment; and because of her faith God answered her.

Hannah was under pressure. It was not the pressure to get bills paid or the pressure to be a better wife. Hannah was under pressure by her purpose. She had other people’s lives attached to her call and it was time for her to get moving. Weather Hannah knew it or not, she was called to be an intricate part of God’s plan for Israel. Hannah was at a place in her life where she was not only pressured to fulfill a desire. She was under pressure to fulfill her destiny.

The pressure that you feel is because of your purpose. It is time for you to birth something. Hannah felt the pressure of her purpose knocking at the door. She could no longer do things the way that she did them before. She could no longer sit around and mope. God was calling Hannah to action.

God is calling many of us to action. He wants us to do something with our faith and with the other things that we are believing Him for. We have to move! It is now uncomfortable to be content with mediocre and stagnation. We have to birth what we have been placed on the earth to birth for such a time as this.

I once heard Bishop Td Jakes say “It is not your turn. It’s your time”. It was Hannah’s time for God to release something mighty to her that would be pivotal to the time that she lived in, but she had to get aligned first. I believe that Hannah was saved. I know she prayed, but her motives and her heart were not in position to be blessed. God sees the inner workings of our heart. He knows what we think, how we feel, and why we do things. To be honest, He is not always pleased. We find comfort in saying that “God knows my heart”, but sometimes that is our problem. God knows our heart. He knows that we want more of Him, but we are not aligning everything in our lives to get it.

Lord deal with me. Deal with the inner workings of my life and sift through the private things. I pray for a cry that will reach your ears. Hannah had a cry that you heard. The silent sound that she made at the alter on that particular day was not like all the others. Something in her groaned for purpose. She understood that she needed you to be in the midst of her desires and she was willing to change her heart and her mindset in order to receive you. I believe Hannah’s life changed when she cried a cry of surrenderance. She surrendered her motives to you. Lord help me to be like Hannah. Help me to surrender my motives, my heart, my will, and my desires to you. I pray to do what you have called me to do, how you have called me to do it. I pray to go through whatever it takes to get to you. I pray for a made-up mind to surrender all. In Jesus name, amen.

Releasing everything to God is an open door for blessings to flow through. Hannah was blessed when she released her will and her son to God. She was blessed with other children when she didn’t try to hold the one child hostage. We can’t hold our will and our purpose hostage. We have to give it back to God. We can’t believe that we can fulfill the groanings of our hearts on our own. The groaning will birth a purpose that will achieve more than we ever imagined it would, but we must give it to God.

God raised Hannah’s purpose. He didn’t need her help to accomplish what He wanted to do with Samuel, He needed her surrenderance. Samuel was used mightily of the Lord. Moses was used mightily for the Lord. Moses’s mom had to trust God to take care of what He had given her even when she couldn’t see it.

Trust God with what you can’t see. He his faithful to perform a thing and cause it to come to pass.

Recommended Reading: 1 Samuel 1:9-18, James 2:14-25, Proverbs 3:5-6, Hebrews 11:1, Hebrews 11:6

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Janina B.

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