Samuel No.1 Hannah from despair to delight

Now my secretary Joyce Dyer is going to read to us a passage which really needs a lady to read it as it speaks of a very remarkable woman in the Old Testament, Joyce. Our reading is taken from the first book of Samuel, chapter one. For those who aren't familiar with the story, Elkanah had two wives, Peninnah who had several children and Hannah who was unable to have any.

This distressed her very much despite the love of her husband for her and her sorrow was increased by Peninnah's continual taunts about her childlessness. Every year the whole family went up to Shiloh to worship God and sacrifice and as we take up our reading Hannah is broken-hearted at Peninnah's cruelty and she goes into the temple to pray and we start reading at verse nine of chapter one of the first book of Samuel. Once when they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh, Hannah stood up.

Now Eli the priest was sitting on a chair by the doorpost of the Lord's temple. In bitterness of soul, Hannah wept much and prayed to the Lord and she made a vow saying, O Lord Almighty, if you will only look upon your servant's misery and remember me and not forget your servant but give her a son then I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life and no razor will ever be used on 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 said to her, how long will you keep on getting drunk? Get rid of 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 away and ate something and her face was no longer downcast. Early the next morning they arose and worshipped before the Lord and then went back to their home at Ramah.

Elkanah lay with Hannah his wife and the Lord remembered her. So in the course of time Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel saying, because I asked the Lord for him.

Well then the story continues. Hannah having had her baby, she nurses him and he grows into a little lad and she fulfills her promise to give him back to the Lord and returns with Samuel to the temple. We read her second prayer in chapter two verse one.

Then Hannah prayed and said, my heart rejoices in the Lord. In the Lord my horn is lifted high. My mouth boasts over my enemies for I delight in your deliverance.

There is no one holy like the Lord. There is no one beside you. There is no rock like our God.

Do not keep talking so proudly or let your mouth speak such arrogance for the Lord is a God who knows and by him deeds are weighed. The bows of the warriors are broken but those who stumbled are armed with strength. Those who were full hire themselves out for food but those who were hungry hunger no more.

She who was barren has borne seven children but she who has had many sons pines away. The Lord brings death and makes alive. He brings down to the grave and raises up.

The Lord sends poverty and wealth. He humbles and he exalts. He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.

He seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor for the foundations of the earth are the Lord's. Upon them he has set the world. He will guard the feet of his saints but the wicked will be silenced in darkness.

It is not by strength that one prevails. Those who oppose the Lord will be shattered. He will thunder against them from heaven.

The Lord will judge the ends of the earth. He will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed. Amen.

Now father we ask that you will minister to us through your word and help us to do what we've just been singing about to take our burdens to you and if there is some despairing heart here today we ask that you will transmute their experience change it completely and lift them from their perplexity into a state of joy and delight as they recognize something of the goodness of God and his interests in their lives for Jesus sake. Amen. Please be seated and I'd be glad if you'd have your bibles open at the book of Samuel.

It's a real joy to me always to minister from the old testament. The old testament there are great gems that wait to be excavated and when you find them you're enriched in your christian life. So let's have our bibles open at 1 Samuel 1 and 2 and then on consecutive weeks I want to bring to you addresses.

Obviously I can't go through Samuel verse by verse or else you'd be here to the millennium assuming that's still future. So what I will do is bring together certain things that strike me pastorally as being of significance to me and also to yourselves. I think I have the spirit of the lord telling me this morning that there is within my congregation somebody that I would describe as a Hannah.

Now let that not immediately rule out all the men because I use the word Hannah in a bisexual fashion. If you please in the book of psalms there's a man and I quote this just to endorse the fact that I want the brothers in on this as well as the ladies. There's a man who says truly God is good to Israel but as for me I'm an exception to the rule.

In effect he finds himself in exactly the same circumstance as does this woman Hannah and I want to address this particular situation that some folk here may discover themselves to be in. One that I would describe as despair. The name Hannah actually means grace and in one sense it was a very unfortunate name for this woman to have.

I think almost like a contemporary of hers in the previous book of the bible she might have said no longer call me Hannah because well my name mocks my circumstance. Far from being gracious the lord has treated me like Lorohammer which is a Hebrew for no pity, no mercy. My circumstances are such that my name really needs to be replaced.

God has failed to have compassion on me. Do you feel like that sometimes? You know for everyone else in the Christian life and here in the tab it's fantastic but you somehow you got in at the back of the queue and all the best blessings have been given out when you arrived at the counter and so you find yourself to be somewhat unfortunate in a position of nigh on despair. Well then with this in mind let's open up our scriptures and first of all I want to talk to you about the stigmas that Hannah felt, the stigmas she felt.

It's an interesting word stigma isn't it? It's a sort of word actually that you really could find in the wild west when they branded their cattle. The stigma indicated the ownership of the cattle. Stigma in this sense highlights the deficiencies if you please from which Hannah was suffering and now if we put that into the new testament I think we'd have to express it more carefully than I've just brought it to your attention.

You see you never come across a man or a woman in the new testament who doesn't bear his cross and that's the real reason why we get the word stigmata which is actually a latin term and it goes back to the idea of crucifixion and whether we like it or not and it's not popular in bible teaching these days to remind people of this our savior said that unless a man took up his cross and followed him he couldn't be his disciple. In other words there is a stigmata that's attached to being a christian. Now what was the stigma or what were the stigmas from which Hannah was suffering? Well let me outline first of all the condition which plagued her, the condition which plagued her.

You see she was infertile. That means to say she couldn't have a child, happily married to Elkanah but frustrated in the whole business of bearing him a son. Not that she was exceptional I mean Sarah had the same problem with Abraham, did she not? Rachel had the same problem, Rebecca had the same problem, Manoah had the same problem, the Shulamite woman had the same problem, Elizabeth in the new testament had the same problem until as Alexander White that scottish preacher puts it it seems as though almost a mark of the election of God was for a woman not to be able to bear a child.

As though when you got to that situation you could almost rejoice because the Lord was going to do something spectacular for you. Now let's lift this into a principle because obviously we're not all suffering from the fact of bearing children, of not being able to. I mean I've never born one but it doesn't exactly worry me that I haven't born one myself, it's some deficiency that all males suffer from.

But that one word deficiency is the thing that unlocks the problem that makes this whole bible study relevant to you and to me because there was something deficient which was causing Hannah to feel that there was a stigma on her. What's your spiritual deficiency friend? What is it that others can do that you can't do and you almost despair as a result of your inadequacy, the condition that plagued her? But then I go on, there was the companion who provoked her, the companion who provoked her. You know the odd quip I've used it before because it amuses me, you can't choose your relatives but thank God you can choose your friends.

And the one who was causing problems for Hannah was someone who'd come into her life by no choice on Hannah's part, it was Penina. Are there some people who irritate you? No? I don't believe you. People who sort of get under your skin, they have a remarkable charismatic gift to do that.

You know the temple in the old testament, no let's go one further back, you know the tabernacle in the old testament, it was a sort of portable temple. How did they make it? You ever thought of that? Because they constructed it in the wilderness didn't they? What do you use? I mean I've been reading through the book of Leviticus because I follow the Max Shane Bible reading method and everyone who's following Max Shane's prescription for this month is going through Leviticus and there these Hebrews were told to go out and get wood. Well where do you get wood in the wilderness? I mean they don't have pine trees in the wilderness.

They don't have massive cedars. What do they have in the wilderness? Well they have acacia bushes or shitting wood as it's translated in the old testament and you know it's the most awkward wood that's possible because it grows almost like the equivalent to a drunken man. It's all over the place or as we'd say in my native Yorkshire it's higgledy-piggledy and to get that wood into some sort of usable fashion you have to take an axe chop it down and then take out all the all the knobs and and all the twists and and all the grotty little bits and then eventually when you've done that when you've planed it down and every sweep of the plane goes against the grain of the wood you eventually get it into a place where you can use it as a carpenter to build the temple or the tabernacle of God.

In the new testament I discover that you and I are part of that tabernacle part of that temple and you know how God planes us? He brings a penina into our lives. He can do it through other circumstances and he can do it through people and it was Penina who becomes an irritant to Hannah provoking her and ultimately Hannah will thank God for Penina and I'll tell you why because one of the great virtues of Christianity is long-suffering patience. There is one fruit of the spirit and there are nine flavors and one of the flavors is long-suffering and I am not naturally born as a long-suffering person.

I need a Penina to give me patience. I need circumstances that are awkward to bring out this disposition within my life. The stigma that Hannah felt, well there was the condition which plagued her.

There was the companion who provoked her. Look at verse six, 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 would not eat. Penina with a quiver full of arrows with her own children and Hannah with her barrenness and Penina goading Hannah all the days incessantly. The companion who provoked her and the confusion which perplexed her.

Confusion, well you see her husband verse eight comes along to her and they're in Shiloh for the feast. It's a peace offering that he's gone to Shiloh to bring to the Lord and Hannah's spoiling it all. Why don't you eat? Why are you downhearted? And so Hannah does eat and drink, verse nine.

And then later on when she goes into the sanctuary herself and she starts to pray but just mouths the word. There's no noise coming from her lips. The priest comes along and he says, verse 14, how long will you keep on getting drunk? Get rid of your wine.

The confusion which perplexed her. Halkana the husband says, eat and drink. Eli the priest says, you're drinking too much.

I blush at my own profession when I think of Eli. This woman she needed counseling, she needed help. And here is Eli wrongly adducing that the problem for Hannah is one of drink.

He'd have been better told his sons Hophni and Phinehas to lay off the booze because they were a disgrace to the priesthood. And when I think with righteous indignation about Eli, I then blush for myself. And I consider the many times when my counseling has been utterly inept.

And I have to cry rock of ages cleft for me. Let me hide myself in thee. This was a woman who had stigma, stigmata, that caused her to be so depressed.

A condition which plagued her, a companion who provoked her, confusion which perplexed her. But then there was the stimulus she found. Now when you're in despair you need stimulus, you need a stimulant to lift you out, to give you a boost, to bring you from your depression.

Well what about the stimulus which she found? Let's say this for starters, it didn't come from a husband. Now I don't say that in a insensitive fashion because I do believe that Elkanah was a very godly man. He himself was from the tribe of Levi.

But you see Elkanah in one sense, although he's so very lovely and tender in his attitude to his wife, he perhaps has precipitated the problem. He's done his best, he said to her, where are we, at the end of verse 8 of the first chapter, don't I mean more to you than 10 sons? This infertility is a problem to you but it's not a problem to me. And like a very religious man and a very good husband he's taken her to the sanctuary at Shiloh year after year and probably interspersed within the 12 months as well because he's a good and he's a godly man.

But you know sometimes, and I speak to my brothers who are husbands, sometimes we're pretty poor as priests to our wives. And the very counsel that we need to give, we can't because well our behaviour patterns, they've tended to negate the advice that we would offer. You say, what do you mean? Well in one sense Hannah's problem revolves around Elkanah, does it not? You see he's got two wives.

Now it was for the hardness of a man's heart that he was allowed to divorce in Old Testament times, that's what Jesus said. For the hardness of his heart he was allowed to have more than one wife but it was not something that was a creative principle. It wasn't like that in the beginning.

God could have made any number of wives for Adam. He could have given him a Harim but he makes one woman for Adam, Eve. And when you bring someone else on the scene in a marriage relationship there's problems.

I don't know what precipitated it, it may have been a sort of Abraham-Sarah situation, a sort of rerun you know. Sarah says, how about Hagar because I can't bring you a child. What bad advice that was.

Hagar comes in and Erlang, Hannah-Penina relationship twixt Hagar and Sarah. You remember? And poor old Elkanah, he becomes the least person qualified to minister to his wife who definitely needs some sort of stimulant. It didn't come from her husband, the stimulus that she found.

Some heartbreaks need more than our husbands, more than our wives to help us to get through. It did come from her God. It did come from her God.

There's wisdom, is there not, in that hymn that we were just singing. Have you trials and temptations, bring it to the Lord in prayer. Here is Hannah.

James says, is any one of you afflicted? Let him pray. Now Hannah is afflicted and so what does she do? Well she does what you ought to be doing my friend, what I need to do more often than not, to bring it to the Lord in prayer. She can't get help from her husband but she can get help from the Lord and that's precisely what she does.

So let's follow her if we may into the sanctuary for a moment, this great and godly woman regarded as a mother of Israel, an outstanding person, the Mary if you please of the Old Testament. Let's follow her in the sanctuary and let her teach us something about prayer. I believe that women can teach a great deal.

I'm not very happy about this idea that seems to suggest within the Church of Christ women somehow are second class. Maybe people don't express it quite like that but the fallout is sometimes like that. It seems to me very significant that very often in the Old Testament and in the New Testament God uses a woman to bring people back to their senses.

I engage in an excursion for a moment but don't forget the spiritual poverty that had hit Israel at this time. The word of the Lord was rare in those days. There was no open vision which means to say if you unlock it and bring it into modern English that the situation was so bleak God wasn't speaking to anybody but he has a hand, the divine hand upon this woman and she because of her circumstances, because of the stigma, is brought into the sanctuary and she stands before her God and she engages in a holy prayer from which you and I can learn a great deal.

It wasn't an ordinary prayer, it was an agonizing prayer, an agonizing prayer. Look will you at the 13th verse. Hannah was praying in her heart and her lips were moving.

Verse 16, right at the end, I have been praying here out of my great anguish and grief. Do you know on one occasion our blessed Lord prayed an agony prayer? You discover it in Luke's gospel 22 and verse 44. There he is in Gethsemane.

Gethsemane is the place for agony prayers. Have you never prayed a prayer of agony? You say I'm pushing the point too much. I'm not.

I wish that I could introduce you to the variety of Greek language. It's much richer as a language than English and sometimes you've only got one word in English language to translate five words in the Greek. And when you discover our Lord in the garden of Gethsemane, he's in a great agony.

He knows that Calvary is in front of him. Bloody beads of perspiration are down his face and in that verse that I quoted in Luke 22, it speaks of the earnest agony of our Lord Jesus and the idea is of a violin string stretched across the bridge, almost to the point that if it's twisted a fraction more the thing will break. Now that's the condition that Hannah is in.

It's an agony prayer that she brings before the Lord. It's a prayer that's bejeweled by her tears. She cries.

It's what Matthew Henry calls not a dry prayer. Not a dry prayer. The fountain of her heart is moved as she comes before the Lord and she brings to him her desire.

It's a faith-developing prayer. I say that because verse 11 is quite interesting. It says, and she made a vow saying, O Lord Almighty.

You who have the authorised version, I think it's O Lord of hosts. It's in the book of Samuel that you first get that title ascribed to the Lord. The Lord Almighty.

Now when you're praying, follow Hannah because she's a great theologian. She prays on the basis of what she knows about the ability of God to perform. O Lord Almighty, the great God before whom there is no before.

With whom there is no impossibility. The God who speaks and bring the worlds into existence. Can you not speak and cause my dry womb to become fertile? O Lord Almighty.

A faith-developing prayer. A specific prayer. O Lord Almighty, if you will only look upon your servant's ministry and remember me and not forget your servant, but give her a son.

Not a daughter. Not because she feels that there's something special about a son over against a daughter, but a son she wants because she wants the prayer, when it is realised, to be functional in the service of God. A woman could not serve in the tabernacle, only a man.

So she prays for a male child, so she'll have a child in the ministry. A specific prayer. And it was an acceptable prayer.

I've been a little rough on Eli, but I'm also rough on myself when I think of my crass impotence as a counsellor. But here he redeems himself. Having been told by Hannah that she is not drunk, rather, verse 15, 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 great anguish and grief. Eli responds and brings back our sense of respect for him as a priest.

As he utters a benediction in the name of the Lord, and with prophecy being a gift that he seems to receive at this time, he's able to say, go in peace and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him. Here is this woman in an agony with this delightful prayer, and the priest comes along and he pronounces a benediction and he says, go in peace. Now can you take this from me? I want to say to some people who are distressed of soul this morning, in the name of Jesus, and listen, go into peace.

Go into peace. You see, that's the thing that our Lord Jesus brought into the world, and he dispenses it in a way that no one else can. My peace I give unto you, not as the world gives give I unto you.

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. Time and time again, when Jesus is accosted by people who are nervous, by people who are in an agony, he will say, peace be unto you. Go into peace.

This is the reason why he came into the world, and on that basis I address Hannah's. I address perplexed men, folk, here this morning, and I say in the name of God, go into peace. You see, for Hannah, this is something that she hadn't had for many a long year.

She came annually, I said, to the sacrifice. It was the sacrifice of the peace offering. This is the reason why Hannah's husband, Elkanah, brought her and her wife time and time again the peace of the home he wanted doubtless to bring about as a result of him coming to Shiloh and keeping the peace offering, bringing it to the Lord.

But Hannah never had any peace until the day came when a priest of God says to her, Hannah, go into peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him. And so she returns back to her own home, having encountered God and believing that he will minister to her circumstances. Now let me say this.

If you come along to the tab on a Sunday morning, and you listen to me preach or anyone else, and it doesn't make any real difference to the life that you live and the enjoyment of that life from Monday through to Saturday, then really it's about time you changed your church. You see, it's the prayer of my brother elders as we meet Sunday by Sunday and during the week too, that spiritually we shall be improved as a result of coming here. If we're not helped, then somehow the ministry is defective, and maybe the elders should think about replacing it or changing it.

We want people to go into peace. There's not much peace in our world. There's a great deal of madness.

There's a lot that happened this last week which fills our hearts with fear. But I want you to go into peace. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, until next Lord day, enjoying the peace that God himself in Jesus Christ can make available to you, whether you're someone in your 70s or someone in your 17s.

She went into peace. We've looked at the stigma that she felt, the stimulus that she found. Let's just bring the alliteration together.

The steps she followed. The steps she followed. The Bible says, the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord.

It also again applies to a woman. She goes back home, and the first thing she does is she adjusts her priorities. She is now pregnant, and when the child has been delivered, then she doesn't go up to the temple anymore.

Not during the period that she weans him. She's only got three or four years in which to have this lad and to tutor him, because this is what she is. This is what any mother worth her salt is.

She is a teacher, the first teacher of her boy, of her girl, and she's only got a limited amount of time. It doesn't say how many years. I'm suggesting three, perhaps it was five, and she will spend those days, those months, those years, pouring what she knows of God into her child.

She adjusts her priorities, and then she remembers her promises. She remembers her promises. The time comes.

You read of it in the 27th verse, when she returns to Shiloh with this young lad who's now weaned, and she says, I prayed for this child. She's addressing Eli, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him, so now I give him to the Lord. For the whole of his life, he shall be given over to the Lord, and he worshiped the Lord there.

She remembered her promises. Ah, my friends, those promises that you made yesteryear were the whole realm of nature mine. That were an offering far too small.

So often our great and good God, he grants us the petitions that we bring before him, and when the prayers are received in terms of the answers, we squander the blessings. The only legitimacy of your prayers is that if your prayer is realized, you take the answer, and you dedicate it on the altar for God. You asked for health, then what you're doing with your health? You asked for a comfortable life, then what are you doing with the comforts of your home? You asked for friends, well how are you treating your friends? These are good and perfect gifts that our Father gives to us, but he doesn't give us these gifts for us to squander them, or selfishly hang on to them.

That is the curse of the Christian church. In the 20th century, Hannah calls her son Samuel, given by God, so that every time she mouths the name, she realizes the source of the blessing. How many Samuels have you got that you've never returned to the Lord, my friend? I ask you in his name, repair your debts.

You read of a woman at the end of the book of Proverbs, who had a son by the name of Lemuel, and she calls the son the son of her vows, because she vowed that when she conceived, she would give him back to the Lord. Another Hannah who remembers her promise, and having remembered the promise, Hannah enters into praise, and what a teaching there is in this chapter, the second on praise. Then Hannah prayed and said, my heart rejoices in the Lord, my heart rejoices in the Lord, not in her son, but in her Savior, not in the gift, but in the giver.

My heart rejoices in this, that I Hannah, have been chosen by God to bear a son, and God has accepted my child in his service. Great praise to the Lord for this. What a remarkable woman she is.

When she's in an agony, there's no words that come from her soul. The prayer is a prayer with groanings that cannot be uttered. That's the agony prayer.

It's often inaudible, but praise is not inaudible. My soul rejoices in the Lord. My heart rejoices in the Lord.

In the Lord my horn is lifted high. She praises her God for his great fidelity towards her. Open thou my lips, and my heart shall show forth your praise.

Praise is the tribute money that we should pay as Christians for the blessings that are ours. You defraud God when you don't praise Him, when you don't say thank you for the things that He has done. It is as illegitimate at the spiritual level as it was for our Savior not to have paid the Roman occupation tax to Caesar.

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. How many of us pay to Caesar in a more responsible and regular fashion, or the inland revenue if you want it updating, than what we do are tithes of praise to the Lord our God? Learn from Hannah, my friend. And the Lord honored her, didn't He? Honored her in the most remarkable way.

She quotes the number of seven as being a perfect number, but she tells us actually she had five children, sons and daughters, as the Lord blessed her and honored her. And if you steal a glance into the second chapter towards the end, you find Eli blessing Elkanah and his wife, verse 20, saying, may the Lord give you children by this woman to take the place of the one she prayed for and gave to the Lord. God pays good interest for children that you give Him.

And what do you discover right at the end of the third chapter, if you'll steal a glimpse at that, on the 20th verse, we read that Hannah's child is recognized nationally, and all Israel from Dan to Beersheba recognized that Samuel was attested as a prophet of the Lord. And some of the theologians there will say, now there you are, God has sent a prophet to Israel in a day when His word has been barren for such a long time. And I say to you theologians, you're wrong.

He first sent His word through a woman. Hannah has the gift of prophecy. The whole of that Old Testament Magnificat is bathed in prophecy.

She refers to a time when God's own Son, the Servant King, will come and strength will be given to Him by the Lord Almighty, the last part of verse 10 of the second chapter. The very spirit of prophecy which Hannah is invested with as a result of her obedience before the Lord passes on to this young child Samuel, who she schooled and weaned for three or four or five years. Now I'm through.

This is the lady who went from despair to delight. God removed the stigma she felt by the stimulus that she found and showed her steps which she followed. Now as it was for Hannah and the psalmist, so my good friend it can be for you.

God doesn't want us always to be despairing and depressed. He makes it possible for us to come before Him and to agonize in prayer and to bring the desires of our hearts to Him and He'll sort them out. Some He will reject and some He will accept, but He will always give blessing and ultimately lead us to the performance of what are His plans for us in our lives.

So take the stigma that you're suffering from at the moment, the penina, the circumstances that are creating pain and thank God for them. Take them into His sanctuary and bring them before Him and find stimulus and then, and I predict for you, He'll highlight the steps that you're to take in your life from this point forward and as you follow those steps and keep rigidly to them as Hannah did, not wavering to the left nor to the right, not exploiting what God had given her for her own advantage, so she will, you will discover what she discovered, that within the purposes of God there is the fullness of joy and at His right hand there are pleasures forevermore, because that's what King Jesus promises His citizens and why He bled on the cross of Calvary and was raised again to underline the fact that the joy and the peace that He wants you to have, He is qualified to give. Hail Hannah, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

Words taken from the Old New Testament, I apply them to Hannah and thank God for her and for what her life teaches me. Let's just bow our heads in prayer and let's listen to the Magnificat being sung. God my Savior, all who hear that His mighty hand embraces, and holy is His name.

My soul doth magnify the Lord, my soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. All who hear that His mighty hand embraces, and holy is His name. And all the saints said, Amen! And the Christians shouted, Hallelujah! Father, we go into this week, emotions arouse, but even more importantly, our minds stretched at what You can do in the lives of an ordinary woman, in the lives of people like ourselves.

Send us on our way rejoicing, and may Monday through to Saturday be richer because of the hour or so we spent here this morning. For Jesus Christ's sake, Amen.