The Heart of a Steward

A praying church

In this week leading up to communion we want to place a special emphasis on prayer. In our church we want to be a praying church, full of praying people. We want to encourage everyone to have a daily personal prayer life, and to pray regularly with others.

Today I want to share the secret behind God’s silence: prayer enlarges the heart of a steward.

What’s a steward? Someone who manages something that doesn’t belong to them.

Have you ever had to look after something that isn’t yours? I once had to look after my mum’s car. Generally speaking, the better you know someone, the better you look after what’s theirs. There’s a big difference between “drive it like a rental” and “this is the car my friend lent me.”

Despair and misery

There was a certain man from Ramathaim, a Zuphite from the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Elkanah… He had two wives; one was called Hannah and the other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none… And because the Lord had closed Hannah’s womb, her rival kept provoking her in order to irritate her. This went on year after year.

— 1 Samuel 1:1–2, 6–7

For Hannah, being unable to have children wasn’t just a private sadness. It was a cultural stigma. In the ancient world, children weren’t only how you carried on the family line. They meant better economic conditions, and they were your superannuation for old age.

The text says something provocative: “The Lord had closed her womb.” It doesn’t explain why. It just states the reality.

To make it worse, Hannah’s husband Elkanah had taken a second wife, Peninnah, probably because Hannah couldn’t give him heirs. Peninnah becomes her rival, provoking and irritating her year after year. This household is a mess, a nightmare.

Hannah is rejected, disappointed and losing hope. Have you been there, where your prayers feel like they’re hitting the ceiling?

It’s even harder when the people closest to you don’t get it. Elkanah tries to help, but asks a pretty silly question: “Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?” (v. 8). That’s a one-way ticket to marriage counselling! He completely missed her heart. But in verse 9, something shifts.

Same misery, different place

Once when they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh, Hannah stood up… In her deep anguish Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly. And she made a vow, saying, “Lord Almighty, if you will only look on 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.”

— 1 Samuel 1:9–11

Hannah is at Shiloh, the centre of worship, where the ark of the covenant rested. And the text says, “Hannah stood up.” That’s an idiom: she took charge, instead of being a victim of her circumstances.

This is the quintessential Christian experience. We don’t leave our misery behind to go to God. We use our misery as a platform for prayer. When we worship, we don’t escape our pain. We bring our pain into God’s presence.

Notice that her circumstances haven’t changed yet, but her posture has. Even when Eli the priest mistakes her desperation for drunkenness (vv. 12–14), she doesn’t retreat. She pours out her soul. Instead of sitting down and sobbing, she stands up and surrenders.

Specific prayer

Hannah’s prayer is specific. We often pray “safe” prayers: “God, just bless me and give me peace.” We like vague prayers, where we can’t tell whether God has answered or not, so we never have to face the disappointment of a no.

Hannah gets specific: “Give me a son.” Specificity creates desperation, and desperation prepares the heart.

Waiting enlarges the heart

If you’ve prayed for long, you’ll know that much of prayer is waiting. In the waiting, God isn’t ignoring us. He’s enlarging our capacity, moving us from a consumer heart to a steward heart.

A consumer takes, uses and exhausts. A steward holds things loosely, ready to release them back to the Owner.

The shift in Hannah’s prayer is profound. It moves from “Give me a son so I can stop hurting” to “Give me a son so I can give him back to you.” If God had given her a son straight away, Samuel might have become her idol, something she possessed and protected. Through the waiting, Samuel became a gift she could entrust back to God for his glory.

Prayer enlarges the heart of a steward, so we can give everything we have for God’s glory alone. The waiting is where God uses our outward circumstances to change our inward motivations.

Not a transaction

You might look at Hannah’s vow and ask, “Isn’t this transactional? If I promise to give something up, will God finally give me what I want?”

No. God isn’t a vending machine with vows as the currency. If it were, this would be a bad deal for Hannah, because she doesn’t get to keep the reward. The child she receives won’t really be hers.

The difference is alignment. It isn’t about paying God. It’s about becoming someone God can trust with the gift. God is love, a Father who knows what’s best for us. He waits until our hearts are large enough to hold the blessing without it destroying us or becoming our god. And yes, God gives Hannah more children later (1 Samuel 2:21), but by then she has understood that it’s better to give than to receive, and she can steward God’s blessings.

A bigger purpose

Hannah saw a child. God saw a generational legacy. Israel needed a prophet. God sees the generations he wants to bless. If Samuel had been born years earlier, the timing for King David might have been missed. Your waiting isn’t in vain. It’s timing for a bigger purpose.

What Hannah learned is captured in her prayer in 1 Samuel 2. She realises that God works in a culturally upside-down way, through the poor and the lowly, and that his work depends not on her strength but on her surrender. Centuries later, Mary echoes that prayer in the Magnificat after she conceives Jesus. It all foreshadows Jesus, the climax of a salvation that works not through human strength but through God’s strength in human weakness.

Capacity for revival

As a church we pray for God to do great things and pour out his Spirit. But if he poured it out today, would we have the walls to contain it? Do we have the discipleship structures, the unconditional love, the systems to hold the rain?

Think about the Three Gorges Dam in China. At full capacity it holds back about 42 billion tonnes of water, roughly 23,000 MCGs’ worth. NASA scientists calculated that moving that much mass further from the Earth’s axis actually slowed the Earth’s rotation, lengthening the day by 0.06 microseconds.

When God builds a reservoir in you, it has the weight to change the world around you. But you can’t hold that kind of weight with a thin wall. The dam stands about 185 metres tall, and at its base, the part no one sees, buried deep under the water and the earth, the wall is 115 metres thick. If the engineers hadn’t made the base that thick, the pressure would crack and shatter the concrete. The water wouldn’t be a blessing. It would be a catastrophe, destroying cities and millions of lives downstream.

The weight of glory

This is why God allows the anguish and grief Hannah felt. We want God to send the rain, all 42 billion tonnes of his Spirit poured out. But have we built walls that can hold the pressure?

The Hebrew word for glory is kavod, and it literally means weight. When we ask for God’s glory, we’re asking for his weight to rest on us.

Every year Hannah waited, every tear she cried that felt wasted, God was adding another layer of strength to her soul.

Are we ready for the rain?

Sometimes we pray for God to do something, and maybe the issue is how ready our hearts are to receive it. Are we ready to bear his weight? If God sent many new people to our church, would we have the discipleship systems, the culture and the willingness to steward them? Or would the weight of what he wants to give us crack us?

We want the rain. But have we built the reservoir?

God isn’t ignoring your prayers. He’s building your capacity. He’s using the tears you cry to fill a dam that will one day flow out to bless generations. He isn’t just giving you a “Samuel”. He’s building something in you that can bless generations to come and leave a legacy that lasts for lifetimes.

Response

So we want to encourage everyone to have a daily personal prayer life and to pray regularly with others. Two simple places to start:

• A prayer journal, to write down specific prayers and notice how God answers them over time.
• A prayer partner, someone to pray with regularly.