Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How to See God's Miracles | Historical Books | 1 Samuel 1:21-28

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

How has God shown himself to you? Are you refusing to obey and choosing to remain blind? Do you explain away miracles? In today's episode, Patrick shares how 1 Samuel 1:21-28 encourages us to open our eyes to God's work in our lives. If you're listening on Spotify, 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 1:21-28

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 Patrick Miller. Tobias Wolf is an award-winning American novelist, and he's now the professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Now, back in 1972, in his late 20s, he went to Lord's France, where people reported that miraculous healings were taking place, and he came because he wanted to help. Specifically, he thought he could help bathe the sick who were arriving in hope of a cure. Now, to be clear, he wasn't looking for a cure for himself.

In truth, he had no significant physical ailments. Other than one, he had quite poor eyesight, and so he had to wear glasses, but he hated wearing glasses, and so he rarely ever did, and that was the case while he was on this trip. One day he was entrusted with a paralyzed two-year-old girl. She's bedridden. She has tubes coming out of her. She's not in good condition. And his job was to help her board a plane.

But when the time came for her to get aboard the plane, the door was slammed straight in her face. And he couldn't believe it. He started weeping over her. He started weeping at the wrongness of the world, the cruelty of the world, that it would care so little about this poor, disabled little girl. And then the door ended up reopening. And Wolf, he's out there. He's still weeping, but no one even notices because it's so hot that everybody's sweating profusely. They just assume it's sweat on his brow.

But the people tell him that the door was shut inexplicably. They didn't mean for it to happen. And so Wolf gets her on the plane. The whole time he's rubbing his eyes, he's trying to get the tears out, he's trying to get the sweat out. And he finally gets onto a bus to go back to Lord's France, where he came from. And as he's wiping the sweat and the tears out of his eyes, he suddenly begins to realize that he's able to see clearly. He doesn't have his glasses on, but he can see like he has his glasses on. And he thinks the sweat, the tears, they must have created some sort of lung.

lens that's clarifying things and so he keeps rubbing but the effect doesn't go away he wrote about this miracle to a friend named john cornwell he said i felt giddy and restless happy but uncomfortable not myself at all and then i had the distinct thought that when we got back to lords i should go to the grotto and pray that was all go to the grotto and pray but he didn't end up obeying the voice he never went to the gado He never prayed. Instead, he ended up in a conversation with an Irishman, and he ended up not even telling this Irishman about the miracle that had occurred to him that day. I mean, after all, he would have thought it was laughable, absurd.

And then the next morning, when he woke up, his poor eyesight had returned. The miracle disappeared. He continued in his letter to Cornwell explaining why he didn't go to the grotto, even though he somehow knew that not going was a rejection of the miracle he'd experienced, turning away from God. He says this, what interests me now is why I didn't go. I felt to be sure some incredulity, but this wasn't the reason. I have a weakness for good company, good talk, but that wasn't the reason either. That was only a convenient distraction. At heart, I must not have wanted this thing to happen. By giving up on doubt, he's saying, if he had given up on his right

to doubt in the reality of God, in the reality of miracles, he says, by giving up doubt, I would have lost that measure of pure self-interest to which I felt myself entitled by doubt. Doubt was my connection to the world to the faithless self in whom I took refuge when faith got hard. Imagine the responsibility of losing that. What then? No wonder I was afraid of this gift, afraid of seeing so well. Now here's the deal.

I can't judge Wolf. Because I see him and myself, it's all too human to experience the power of God, a miracle even, and then to refuse him to preserve our own autonomy. I mean, that's what Wolf wanted at the end of the day, saying that if I gave in and I went to the grotto and prayed, I would have had to exile doubt in my heart. I would have had to say beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is real and that God is over all things.

And if he did that, he wouldn't be able to be the ruler of himself. He wouldn't have his autonomy. Wolf admits that he preferred a kind of blindness to sight. As long as that blindness preserves, His ability to live as though God might not be real, as though God might not be watching over us, as though God might not have a calling upon us. What about you? Has God showed himself to you in some way?

Probably not in so extreme a thing as a miracle. And yet, I'm sure God has shown himself to you. Maybe he's shown himself to you in nature, in the sunrise, in the sunset, in the mountains, in the ocean. Maybe he's shown himself to you through his word. maybe he's shown himself to you through worship and music or through the presence of a friend. I don't know how he's shown himself to you, but I'm quite certain he's tried and he has. And the question is, when he showed himself to you and he called you to himself and he invited you into obedience, did you obey him? Did you walk with him?

Or have you found yourself resisting him to have more of yourself? I mean, maybe you had a clear word, go to the grotto and pray, but so often when you're God reveals himself, he also puts things on our heart. He gives us a vision, a calling, something to walk in. And again, the question is, have we walked in it? Or have we rejected the call so that we can preserve our autonomy? Yesterday, we met Hannah, the first character in the book of Samuel, and she's the wife of a man named Elkanah. And while her husband loves her deeply, she's childless. Now, anybody who's experienced infertility can tell you that infertility is a deep and painful wound when our bodies aren't working the way God designed them to work. When we feel like

we had this calling in our life to be a parent, and that's a calling from God, right? But then he's not making it possible for us to fulfill that calling. I know what it's like when you feel the ache of regret, as though you've done something wrong. But you know, the truth is you haven't done anything wrong. This isn't because of your sin. the moments where you find yourself lamenting and grieving because you're beginning to realize you're not going to have the life you'd thought, the life that you would have imagined. And that's exactly where Hannah is when we meet her. Hannah and Elkanah, they visit the tabernacle, the place where people worship God.

And Hannah is so overwhelmed with audible grief that the priest thinks that she's drunk blubbering. But she's not. She's just weeping. She's beside herself in pain. And in her grief, she puts. promises God that if God gives her a child, she'll give the child to God. She'll give the child to go serve in the tabernacle before God for that child's entire life. And the priest, he hears all this and he prays with her and he asks God to fulfill her prayer. And God does. Because miracles are real.

Prayer is real. God hears. God acts. He doesn't always do what we want. There's no guarantees. There's no promises. If there was, he'd be a vending machine and those really wouldn't be miracles anyways. But in our world, the problem is that most of us think that none of that's true, that there aren't miracles, that prayer isn't real, that God doesn't act and work and move. And that's fine. I mean, sometimes we just think this isn't true. We don't believe in miracles. We don't believe that God is at work. And the reason why is we say, well, I just haven't seen anything like that. And when we say we haven't seen it, I think we're speaking both a truth and a lie. Let's start with the lie. The lie is this. How often have you prayed for someone to be healed or transformed and then

you've actually seen it happen? For me, I've seen that happen more times than I can count. And so, I have seen God heal bodies and souls. So why do I say I've never seen a miracle? Why do I say I've never really seen God work? I have. It's a fact. I have. And I think the reason that we don't see it is because we don't have eyes to see. Let me show you what I mean. We pray for healing. but when it comes, we don't thank God. Or we say, oh, it's because of the medicine, or it's because of the doctor, or I don't know what it was. And of course, God might bring the healing through medicine

and God might bring the healing through doctors. But as any doctor will tell you, there's no guarantee that the medicine will work. There's no guarantee that the procedure will work. God is working through means to bring about the healing that you prayed for. But because we think we understand it, we say, well, that one doesn't count. That wasn't God.

There's only material factors here. That's not how the world works. don't you know that God works through all these means? Sometimes they fail and sometimes they succeed. And if we prayed for it, we should praise God and thank him for working. And so when we say that we haven't seen God work, it really is a lie. He has worked through our prayers. We've just missed it.

And you see, that's actually the truthful part. Because when we say we haven't seen it, well, we're speaking the truth because so far as we can tell we haven't seen it. In other words, we didn't notice. we ask for the miracle and then we miss the miracle when it comes. And this is only made worse when we do things like make vows to God. Or when God speaks to us through those healings, through those transformations, we promise God something or he commands us to do something in response. And rather than thanking him and obeying him,

we kind of just forget that he did anything altogether and we move on. We set our vows aside. We don't listen to the call that he's put on our life. Now, I want to be clear, the reason we fulfill our vows. to God. The reason we obey the callings that he puts on our hearts isn't because we think that doing these things will save us. That's ridiculous. Jesus saves us regardless of our works. He saves us by his own righteousness. He saves us by his own blood. The reason why we obey his calling on our life. The reason why we follow through when we make vows to him is because we want more of

him. It's because in the moment of miracle, in the moment of transformation, in the moment of healing, however mundane and ordinary it seems in that moment you are getting a taste of him and the reason why we follow through on what we promise the reason why we follow through on what he calls us to do in our hearts is because we want more of him because we want more of his presence i'm not trying to earn my salvation i'm not trying to earn his favor i already have that in jesus christ what i want is more of him i want more of his beauty i want more of his power in my life and so i'm saying lord whatever it is you're are calling me to do, make me totally and absolutely obedience unto you. You see, this is what makes Hannah so remarkable. She doesn't forget her promise. She could have easily said, oh, wow, I got pregnant. Isn't this great? And then moved on and forgotten that she ever prayed to God to make her pregnant. She could have forgotten her vow to give her child to God. And if she forgot that vow, it would kind of be hard to blame her. I mean, can you imagine giving your child away? And yet, Hannah believes that what God has for her and for her son, through that painful obedience of giving him away,

she believes that what God has for her is better than what she would have if she protected her autonomy and did what she wanted and kept the child for herself. She really believes it. She believes that what's on the other side of fulfilling her vow of obeying God's voice is better than what she would get if she kept her child and did what she wanted, if she protected her own autonomy. That is not how we think. Check this out.

1 Samuel 121. When her husband, Elkanah, went up with his family to offer the annual sacrifice to the Lord and to fulfill his vow, Hannah did not go. She said to her husband, after the boy is weaned, I'll take him and present him before the Lord, and he will always live there. Do what seems best to you, her husband, Elkanah told her. Stay here until you have weaned him. Only may the Lord make good his word.

So the woman stayed at home and nursed her son until she had weaned him. After he was weaned, she took the boy with her, young as he was, along with a three-year-old bull and a fa of flower and a skin of wine, and brought him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh. So at this point, Samuel is probably three or four years old. They've had years together. I mean, we have to step into the pain that Hannah must have experienced. And yet, she'd also experienced a miracle. God had answered her prayer, and she didn't forget to thank him. She didn't forget to fulfill her vow to him.

She obeys the voice. She obeys Jesus. When you pray for God to act in your life, know that you are making a dangerous but beautiful prayer because he hears. He acts. He heals. He transforms.

But when he does, he's never finished with you. He always wants to give more of himself to you. Do you know that? He wants to give more of himself to you. And that means he also wants more of you. you for him, not to use you, but to love you, to embrace you, to change you. So when you make promises to God, fulfill them, when he answers your prayers, praise him and thank him, don't forget to do it. And listen in those moments of miracles and healing, however mundane they seem, listen for his voice

and obey him wherever he guides you next. Don't neglect the miracles that God's doing all around you. Don't neglect obedience at what he's calling you to do. Don't do it because, you're afraid of losing your salvation. That's not even possible. No, don't neglect all of these gifts because you want more of him above everything else. You want more of him than you want yourself, than you want your autonomy. When we want more of him, again, than anything else in our life, that is the point at which we can walk in the path of Hannah, give away our treasures, and know that what's on the other side of painful obedience is beautiful glory.