Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Disorientation to Reorientation | Historical Books | 1 Samuel 2:1-11

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

To experience reorientation towards God, you have to experience disorientation first. How do things work in God's economy? What part of Hannah's prayer is disorienting to you? In today's episode, Jeff shares how Hannah's Prayer in 1 Samuel 2:1-11 points us to the King we long for. If you're listening on Spotify, please feel free to comment below one takeaway from today's episode! Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 1 Samuel 2:1-11

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jeff Parrott. It's often the case that the only way to experience reorientation is to first undergo disorientation. You've probably experienced that reality if you wear corrective lenses like classes or contacts. For most people, when they first look through lenses in a new prescription, their perspective is not in new. clearer. It's actually cloudier, blurrier. Objects seem distorted. You may even experience things like dizziness or headaches. You might even wonder if the eye doctor or the lens

manufacturer somehow made a mistake with your prescription because you know that your new lenses are supposed to help you see better, not worse. Why are those newer, better lenses so frustrating to begin with? This phenomenon is widely referred to as the adjustment period, a stretch of time that can last anywhere from a few minutes to a few days or even longer. The problem in the adjustment period, of course, isn't with the lenses themselves. It's with the natural need for your brain to adapt to the better, clearer images that your eyes are bringing in. You may find that your eyes feel like they're working harder during the adjustment period, but eventually you get to a point where your brain and your body are fully in sync,

and that temporary blurriness is slowly replaced with a strengthened capacity to see the beauty around you. A lot of us undergo our own version of an adjustment period when it comes to our experience with God in the Bible. We're confronted with a limited or a small view of God that needs to be corrected and clarified. But with faith, this adjustment period doesn't usually last for just one little stretch of time. In fact, the more we're encountered by God and explore His Word, we find ourselves undergoing a kind of ongoing adjustment period. It's like we're constantly going back to the eye doctor over and over again to address deeper and deeper levels of our blurry vision. As we read and consider a powerful prayer by a woman named Hannah in First Samuel, I want to invite you to see how her prayer is almost like a way of giving us new lenses to help us see God. and his ways more clearly.

At first, her prayer might disorient us. It probably should disorient us, but then we'll come to find that this disorientation actually reorientes us. It's like a new set of lenses that seem blurry at first, but turn out to be beautiful. As we approach God's word together,

let's pause and ask for His grace to move through our time. Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of life and breath, and thank you for your word. We bring before you every part of our lives, every part of our emotional experiences. We bring before you our joys, our sorrows, our anxiety and our excitement, our calendars and our contingencies.

God, all these things we bring before you. We pray that you would meet us in this space and in this time. Jesus, help us abide in you as we engage with your truth. Holy Spirit, we ask you, out of your grace, to move in and through this time in 1 Samuel. And as we read these words, let these words read us, read our lives, and restore us. In Jesus' name, amen. Back in 1 Samuel chapter 1, we met Hannah, a woman who was unable to have a child, but then, by God's grace, had a son named Samuel.

And we learned there that Samuel is a gift from God to Hannah. It's all about his faithfulness, not only to Hannah, but to his people as well. In response, Hannah displays her faithfulness to the Lord and vows to give Samuel back to God to serve him with his life. And that leads to our passage today, where Hannah prays in response to God's faithfulness. One of the striking features of Hannah's prayer here is who the prayer is really about. Now, we might presume that she's going to spend most of her time thanking God for providing her with a child, that this prayer would center on her circumstances. But from the get-go, her prayer puts the spotlight in a very different direction.

Let's start by looking at verse one and see how it begins. Then Hannah prayed and said, My heart rejoices in the Lord. In the Lord, my horn, or my strength, it's a biblical picture of strength. In the Lord, my horn, my strength is lifted high. Now notice here from the beginning of her prayer how Hannah's heart doesn't, rejoice in what she's received from God. As important as wonderful as that is, her heart doesn't rejoice in what she receives from the Lord. Her heart rejoices in the Lord. For me, I am so wired,

or really miswired, to be honest, to assume that the most important things in life are the things that I can accumulate, what I can achieve, who will approve of me? It's all about me. I want to rejoice in what God can give me, which is essentially me rejoicing in myself. So when Hannah starts her prayer by rejoicing in the Lord, I am giving a corrective lens that at first might seem blurry and disorienting. But for Hannah, this is the part of reality that we need to see most clearly, that the main point of life is not the elevation of ourselves, but the elevation of God. And if there is any question about the centrality of God in Hannah's prayer and in her life,

we can see how her prayer unfolds by emphasizing why God is the appropriate focal point of our lives. And that why is centered around what many theologians call the theme of reversal in the Bible, where assumptions that we have about the world and how it works are reversed or upended, turned upside down, when we see how God actually works in the world. The theme of reversal is definitely at play in verses 4 through 5. We read this. The bows of the warriors are broken, but those who stumbled are armed with strength.

Those who are full hire themselves out for food, but those who are hungry are hungry no more. Verse 8 explores the same theme of reversal, or upside down the nature of how God works. We read this in verse 8. He raises the pore from the dust, and lifts the needy from the ash heap. He seats them with princes

and has them inherit a throne of honor. This is not the way we expect the world to work. Hannah is exploring the kinds of things that happen in the economy of God's kingdom. The weak are made strong. The hungry are full. The poor and the needy are given a place of honor. This is why she rejoices in the Lord.

This view of life is so different from the way that we tend to see ourselves in the world around us. We're used to seeing the world through the lenses of social media gurus, political antics, and whatever show is popular to stream this week. Those lenses often cause us to see a world where the weak are a waste, and we need to make ourselves strong. Those lenses prime us to assume that we need to fill our lives on our own power, that we need to fill our minds and our hearts, our bank accounts, and our shopping cars.

with the junk food of consumerism. Those lenses given to us by the world make us pursue power and glory for ourselves at the expense of other people, at the expense of rejoicing in God. But according to Hannah's prayer, those lenses from the world are distorted. Through this prayer, God is trying to give us new lenses that help us see him and how his kingdom operates. But if we're really seeing God and his purposes clearly, it will probably seem blurry or confusing or disorienting at first. What about for you, what parts of Hannah's prayer seem disorienting? Is it the way that she rejoices in God? Not just what she gets from God, but God

himself. Is it her portrayal of God's reversed upside-down kingdom, where our priorities of comfort and power are overturned. What is your adjustment period like when you see God and his purposes this way? One of the interesting features of Hannah's prayer is that it is continually pointing beyond Hannah and her life alone. It directs us to what God has done, is doing, and will do. At the end of her prayer, Hannah looks ahead to how God's kingdom will continue to advance in the future, and we read this in verse 10. The Most High will thunder from heaven. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth.

He will get strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed. So for an ancient Israelite hearing or reading this prayer, Hannah's final words there in verse 10 would have created a deep sense of anticipation. After living in the darkness of the period of judges, there is hope now that a king will come. come, who will usher in God's upside down reversed kingdom. Human kings would eventually come and go, rise and fall over the passage of time. But one day, God's people would receive the true king that Hannah's prayer anticipates.

King Jesus. It's no accident that there are many parallels between Hannah's prayer here and Mary's song in Luke 1, 46 through 55, where she responds to the good news that she's. she would give birth to Jesus, God the king, who is with us. In her song in Luke 1, Mary also rejoices in God Himself and celebrates the reversal and life-creating power of God's kingdom that comes through Jesus' life and death and resurrection and his reign today. And in that way, Hannah's prayer here in 1 Samuel really should give us new lenses that clarify our perspective of Jesus as our king. Jesus isn't just another teacher or influencer or religious figure.

He is the king who fulfills the deep longings that God's people have, going back to the days of Hannah and beyond. He's the king who fulfills the deep longings of our lives today. The question for you and me is this. Will we have the humility and the courage to endure the adjustment period in following this king, Jesus? To let the corrective lens of his kingdom encounter us. us and challenge us, maybe even cause us to feel disoriented for a season, so that we can be

reoriented to him and his purposes in every moment of every day. If we keep those lenses on, what at first seems blurry will turn out to be beautiful as we see Jesus with an ever-increasing degree of clarity. Heavenly Father, we do rejoice in you, not just in what you give, us, but in you yourself as our creator. Jesus, we thank you that you bring your kingdom into our lives and into our world through your sacrificial love. Holy Spirit cultivate within us the humility, the curiosity, and the courage to live with the lenses of your kingdom.

Let that change how we see, how we live, how we love other people, and how we love you, all for your glory. In Jesus' name, amen.