Observing, Interpreting, & Applying 1 Samuel 1: Redemption Narratives In The Bible

Today, I continue the Radiating Faith ministry sub-series with a solo sermon centered on 1 Samuel 1, the story of Hannah’s sorrow, prayer, surrender, and the birth of Samuel. I begin by sharing how God repeatedly placed Samuel in front of me throughout the week through my college assignment, my conversation with Samuel Kihara on The Bible Podcast, and the Ripples To Waves Gala hosted by Hadassah’s Hope. This episode focuses on how the Holy Spirit can guide us toward Scripture when God is trying to teach us something, especially when the same passage, theme, or message keeps appearing in our lives.

In this sermon, I read and break down the first chapter of 1 Samuel, exploring Hannah’s barrenness, Peninnah’s cruelty, Elkanah’s response, Eli’s misunderstanding, and Hannah’s vow to dedicate her son to the Lord. I discuss how Hannah’s suffering reveals the painful reality of living in a fallen world, where personal hardship is often made worse by the sins and cruelty of others. I also examine how infertility, rivalry, broken worship environments, and human weakness all appear in this passage while God is preparing to bring forth Samuel as a righteous servant in a corrupt generation.

I also connect Hannah’s story to the larger biblical narrative of surrender, sacrifice, redemption, and God sending light into darkness. Rather than simply removing darkness, God often raises up faithful people within it. I discuss the parallels between Hannah surrendering Samuel to the Lord, Abraham’s willingness to surrender Isaac, Mary’s role in the life of Yeshua, and God giving His Son for the redemption of humanity. This sermon also reflects on Job, Jonah, Jeremiah, Matthew 16:24, and the repeated biblical theme that our lives, our desires, and even our answered prayers ultimately belong to God.

Toward the end of the episode, I challenge listeners to reflect on how to respond to suffering, how to avoid multiplying someone else’s pain, and how to become a Samuel in corrupt environments. Whether the darkness appears in churches, ministries, podcasts, families, schools, or culture, the question is not only how we avoid corruption, but how we become faithful lights within it. I also connect this message to the work of Hadassah’s Hope and the women they serve, especially those healing from trafficking, sexual violence, domestic violence, and deep wounds of worthlessness, reminding listeners that true worth and freedom are found in Christ.

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Transcript

 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Radiating Faith, a ministry sub-series on the Couple of Nooks podcast. You can find at coupleofnooks.com/radiatingfaith a list of the solo sermons and a little bit about what the ministry does. Uh, it's really just me running the operation right now, preaching solo sermons, reviewing faith-based books, and then of course I have a whole bunch of interviews with guests who have journeyed across quite the life, whether it's a testimony or scriptural study, a nonprofit. I love highlighting those individuals who are walking with God, and I'm super excited for today's episode because of the synchronicity of all the events that have lined up. Now, I was recently on a podcast called "The Bible Podcast," hosted by Samuel Kihara. Again, I have mentioned in social media and I'll mention it here, what an amazing gentleman. He is polite, enthusiastic, and he has been super engaging online and our in-person, or rather our virtual but actually seeing each other face-to-face conversation online was beautiful. That podcast episode was full of God-guided wisdom. The Holy Spirit was just talking, and it was just a beautiful meeting. And you can find that on his accounts and mine. But in that episode, he and I talked about if God is trying to teach you something. In fact, Mr. Kihara asked me, he said, "Mr. Whiskey, how do you choose what to read in the Bible?" And I said, "The Spirit will guide you." And, uh, a lot of people haven't experienced that, so I wanna break it down for you. I wanna break it down really simply. If God is giving you the same message over and over again, He's asking you to read it. To not just read it, not just skim it, but to actually go into it. And I'll give you an example. If you wake up Monday morning and the Bible verse of the day on your phone, if you have it set up for that, is ABC, and then later on that week you throw on a YouTube clip, you're scrolling through social media, and you hear someone preaching ABC, or you go to someone's house and on their throw pillow on a little sign on their desk they have ABC, it's right there. It's clear. For me this week it was the 1 Samuel and then the chapter one of 1 Samuel. Not only was this assigned by my college for biblical reading and study and to, uh, actually teach that, it was then referenced multiple times at the Ripples to Wave Gala hosted by Hadassah's Hope that I attended, and I recorded with the man named Samuel on "The Bible Podcast" talking about Samuel. So it has just been a Samuel week. And I wanna get into that. So we're actually gonna read the first chapter of Samuel together here because it, because it is not that long of a read, and we are gonna break it down. And I need it to teach it for my class, so I'm definitely gonna be, uh, podcasting about it as well, and I'm super excited. I wanted to share about Hadassah's Hope a little bit. The gala I attended was for them. It was to raise money for what they're doing, which is, in the name of Jesus Christ, going into areas of stripping and pornography to help evangelize to those women, not to guilt them or shame them, but to know that they are loved and forgiven if they seek Christ and if they have hope and love and faith. And we go in there and we listen to them. We create space for them. And Hadassah's Hope provides different services to include counseling, helping with job placement, and biblical group studies. So it is amazing. It was an event where a lot of powerful women came together as survivors, as volunteers, as helpers. I think one of the most beautiful things about it was how many people there were helping out who were not survivors, who had no connection or friends who were survivors, but they just wanted to be part of a good cause. Hearing stories of God telling people, uh, to help out with this group, God saying, "Do this." And we had someone who donated $25,000 on a single check that night. We had people who donated five grand, 10 grand, people who donated hundreds of dollars. There was a silent auction and a live auction to help raise money as well, and this money goes towards helping build the Hope House, helping facilitate medical costs and counseling costs and a variety of activities and treatments for the women who, most of them, especially a lot of them were there in person sharing that they had been the victims, uh, and, and again, survivors rather than victims, of domestic violence, of sexual violence, of human trafficking. Some of them were speaking about the foster care system and the abuses of that. In fact, I met Christina Meredith, author and speaker. Her and I got to talk a little bit after her talk on stage and to hear what she's trying to do to help reform the foster care system. It's really amazing. And I actually have here a little bottle. Each person at their table got a message with something in it, and I wanted to save it for this sermon because I figured no better place to read it than the sermon. And I saved it in case the Lord wanted someone to hear it during this podcast. And it says, "Pray for her as she's learning her worth and freedom in Christ." And I think that's really important because a lot of these women who have been trafficked, who have been abused emotionally, verbally, and sexually, they have Very little self-worth or self-love. Their worth is dictated typically by their perpetrator, and that's why they are just pining away for this attention or this validation that leads them into stripping, pornography, to doing acts that they don't want to because of their emotional connection to whoever their perpetrator is or whatever the situation is. A lot of them also, after being in the industry for a certain amount of time, feel worthless, like if they leave, there's nothing for them, and we need to pray that they learn their worth in Christ. And, and this is actually something that many people are struggling with now. All of us are chasing after social media rather than God. You're more worried about what a stranger on the internet says about you than the God who made you and who knows you and loves you. And, you know, this person that we're chasing after on the internet, maybe it's people, you know, it's so pointless and time-consuming, yet it's something that we're all doing every day now. And so I wanna get into 1 Samuel, and we're gonna teach a couple things, uh, and offer up a couple questions and go over the assignment. And again, shout out to Samuel Kihara. And we're gonna get into it by reading the first chapter here, which Samuel is really important in Old Testament chronology and history. If you don't know who he is, he ends up being, you know, a, a servant of God who really sets the foundation for all of the chronology and history that's about to happen in the Old Testament. This is going into the era of kings and kingdoms, really the beginning of the downfall of humanity in terms of the kingdom. You know, in fact, Samuel later on in life protests giving a king, saying that God is our only king. But God says, "Give the people what they want and, and so they shall learn." And you know, I'm paraphrasing there, but that's the importance here. Samuel was a, a godly man. You may also know that Saul, uh, later on actually tries to bring the ghost of Samuel from the dead to, uh, consult an oracle, which really goes against God's will, and, and that's a whole thing on its own. But we're gonna start with the birth of Samuel. Samuel's birth, which this first chapter is about, is really a testimony in itself, and it has a huge implication on the grand narrative and overarching and overlapping themes of the Bible, uh, in terms of redemption and hardship. And we're gonna get into some, unfortunately, really difficult questions that also come about from 1 Samuel 1. Questions especially for women that we might be asking ourselves, and so we're gonna get into it There was a certain man from Ramathaim, a Zuphite from the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Elkanah, son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephraimite. He had two wives. One was called Hannah and the other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none. Year after year, this man went up from his town to worship and sacrifice to the Lord Almighty at Shiloh, where Hophni and Phinehas, the two sons of Eli, were priests of the Lord. Whenever the day came for Elkanah to sacrifice, he would give portions of the meat to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters. But to Hannah, he gave a double portion because he loved her, and the Lord had closed her womb. Because the Lord had closed Hannah's womb, 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. Her husband Elkanah would say to her, "Hannah, why are you weeping? Why don't you eat? Why are you downhearted? Don't I mean more to you than ten sons?" Once when they had finished eating and drinking in Shiloh, Hannah stood up. Now Eli the priest was sitting on his chair by the doorpost of the Lord's house. 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, 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 are you going to stay drunk? Put away 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 her way and ate something, and her face was no longer downcast. Early in the next morning, they arose and worshiped before the Lord, and then went back to their home at Ramah. Elkanah made love to his wife Hannah, and the Lord remembered her. So in the course of time, Hannah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel, saying, "Because I asked the Lord for him." Hannah dedicates Samuel. 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 will take him and present him before the Lord, and he will live there always." "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, an ephah of flour, and a skin of wine, and brought him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh. When the bull had been sacrificed, they brought the boy to Eli, and she said to him, "Pardon me, my lord. As surely as you live, I am the woman who stood here beside you praying to the Lord. I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of Him. So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life, he will be given over to the Lord." And he worshiped the Lord there. Now this leaves us with a lot of questions, obviously. Hannah wanted so badly to have a child, yet when she has a child, she has to give him up to God. Why did Peninnah provoke her rival, who was already in deep anguish? And one thing you'll get into as well is they mention the sons of Eli, who end up abusing the, the place of worship there for their own gain. And so there's a lot of stuff going on here that we're definitely questioning. Why did God close Hannah's womb in the first place? If God's will was for us to be fruitful and multiply, why would He close a woman's womb? And so we're gonna get into some of my class assignment here, which we were instructed to partake of observation and then to go into interpretation, correlation, application, and then questions and teaching. And so we had to read the f- First Samuel 1:1-28 in both a formal translation and a functional translation. And then we had to identify the basic elements of the story, specifically starting with the main characters, which I had them listed out. Then the plot. Obviously, we know the plot is pretty straightforward. The story structure, which was broken down into introduction, inciting incident, rising action, and climax and resolution, and then observations. Who are you observing? What are some things you observe in the passage? Where are the places in the passage happening? And then are there markers of time observed in the story? Now, the why questions are really important. I went over some of them, and I'll write down the why questions that I asked, which was, why did God close the womb of Hannah? Why did Peninnah torment Hannah? Why did Elkanah have two wives despite the commandments of Deuteronomy? And then some other questions. How was Hannah able to give her child away after all that time wanting one? How do you serve God and deal with sorrowful infertility issues at the same time? And then I had to write out my proposed answers, which I won't go over those. We'll get into the interpretation. Now, there's a couple different things you can take away from this chapter, and first and foremost, just whatever God is telling you to take away, uh, with a spirit of discernment that is in alignment with Scripture, certainly take away. My interpretation was focused not on the redemption of the sorrow and the hardship or of God introducing light into darkness rather than taking darkness away, but I focused on humility and sacrifice before God. I focused on the fact that as we see in Jonah, in Job, in Jeremiah, that our lives are not our own, that God created us. Ultimately, we have no right to be upset or angry with what He does, whether we deem it good or bad in our justification, and we cannot even begin to understand or fathom the things He knows. And if you want those references, again, Job, Jonah, Jeremiah, that triple J structure right there really gives you the foundation for understanding our place in the universe, which we often lose track of because of the way our society is set up. So I want to focus on that point, which I know is not what most people take away necessarily, but I focused on that we are to serve God before ourselves, giving fully to God what we want and desire, including our answered prayers. And the author doesn't simply state this, but shows a prominent and historical example of it in its truest form, which is giving up your child. Now, there are other biblical parallels here to look at. The sacrifice of Isaac that was demanded of Abraham, originally Abram, and then you have, of course, God himself giving up Yeshua, AKA commonly referred to as Jesus Christ. And so you see, first of all, God isn't asking us to do something that He himself has not done or is going to do, uh, which is really a powerful statement in itself. But also you wanna look at just that it is the, the greatest thing. And, and Jephunneh, if I'm pronouncing that right, who made a vow to God that if he was successful in battle, that he would sacrifice as a burning offering the first person who walked out the door to greet him, and it was his daughter. And there are controversial debates over that, but I believe that he burned his daughter alive and- sacrificed her to the Lord. Other people say that she just remained a virgin her whole life. Uh, either way, we have seen sacrifice be demanded, but again, most of these sacrifices, with that one exception perhaps, is not about actually killing your child. God spares Isaac. Uh, Hannah just devoted Samuel to the Lord. Yeshua actually died on the cross. But you see, 'cause God doesn't ask for child sacrifice. In fact, child sacrifice is very heathen and paganistic and spoken against in the Bible. But sometimes these sacrifices are those spiritual sacrifices. And I think we often don't expect our answered prayers to be given up because we spend so much time asking for them and wanting them. So why would God give us something just to take it away? But we know that there is no greater sacrifice or love than giving up your child in any form, and this is especially painful for a mother to do of all people. And we see that Mary, the mother of Yeshua, had to do that as well. And then to double down on the painfulness, the selfishness, or sorry, the selflessness and the sacrifice of this, the author was emotionally distraught or, or tells us that Hannah was emotionally distraught before she received her child. She spent years being tormented by another woman who was able to have children, who was with her husband, and that's a question of course. Uh, one theory I've heard is that the reason he had two wives was because Hannah could not conceive, and so he got a second wife to conceive. Uh, we don't know. It doesn't tell us exactly why he had two wives, but that definitely added to her sorrow, and we're gonna get into what that means on the overarching, uh, look at humanity and sin. And then to fast-forward, we know that the author said that God closed her womb, and then it later shared that God answered her prayers and allowed her to conceive. And this whole narrative of a mother being unable to conceive, weeping and praying to God, and then receiving her child, only to dedicate him to the Lord, shows a mentality of serving and honoring God above our own desires and humility and gratitude that God even answers our prayers, 'cause God has no obligation to answer our prayers. Now, we know that God is the creator and owner of all, and even our answered prayers, our most desperate prayers, are to be surrendered and devoted to Him. And I think Job said it very well when he talks about the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and that was in response to all that he had lost, which was personal stuff, it was material stuff, it was familial stuff, right? Now, there's a, a greater story here, which is that The idea God closed Hannah's womb to create the hardship and further the circumstances around the birth of Samuel, and to have Samuel be dedicated to the Lord, and we're gonna get into what that redemption looks like. So I wanna move into correlation because this Old Testament narrative falls into the story of redemption. Hannah's inability to conceive and give a birth is a hardship that brings about even more hardship because of the sins of others, which was Peninnah's behavior, which was tormenting Hannah, which we know was and is sin. Then we know that the holiness of Shiloh was being defiled and destroyed because while Hannah's here weeping and dealing with this hardship of conception, we know that Eli's health is declining. Eventually he falls into a terrible declination of health and is unable to perform his duties properly, and his two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, we find out later in sec- in, in, you know, the next part of Samuel, th- uh, that they are using the worship offerings of the temple for themselves. I believe they even take advantage of the women at the temple, and they are going in into sin. They, the sons of the priest, who are supposed to be taking over. God sends Samuel in placement of them. And so between the decline of Shiloh and the sin of Peninnah, the setting is established in a way similar to the fallen world. This shows clearly that the world is falling apart and going into it. In fact, infertility can be tied to a lot of sin. A lot of things that cause infertility are things from poisoning the earth, from poisoning our health. We know that full body health was part of the garden that, that we lost when the world was fallen, when Adam and Eve sinned. And we look at that fallen world and we see an answered prayer, which is the birth of Samuel for a weeping woman. Hannah prayed devotedly to God, and what we see is this woman, despite her hardship, leaned into God and had her prayers answered. We saw that instead of participating in the fallen world or turning to sin, she continued to be devoted to God despite that hardship. And it speaks to us about how we are to respond to hardship, how in weeping and lamentations that we are to be devoted to God, uh, for answered prayers, not turn away and abandon God, feeling abandoned by Him. It's very similar to how a lot of the prophets of God wept over sin. They wept over the fallen world and their personal hardships, which many of them had personal hardships because of being a prophet. Yet they cried out to the Lord for deliverance, and, and God blessed them and answered them And just as God sent Yeshua to deliver the people and answer their prayers, so God sent Samuel to Hannah. And then Samuel is given into the full devotion of God in his obedient, creating a righteous man among the wicked, just as Yeshua was, to redeem the sinful environment. Just as God has to give up his son, so Hannah has to give up hers. That's not to equate Samuel to Yeshua or her to Mary, but there are similarities there that paint the larger overarching narrative of the Bible. And I spoke earlier about Job and Jeremiah and, and Proverbs, and we know that this has been happening. And I, I wanna share also in the New Testament how this fits into the New Testament. You know, all of Scripture calls us to devote ourselves to the Lord and to value God's ways and thoughts more than our own. In Matthew 16:24, it's written, "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must take up their cross and follow me.'" Many other New Testament quotes support those ideas, including the brutal deaths of many of the disciples. While God did not exactly ask for Samuel, Hannah understood that what God gives to us is his, and when he answers our prayers, we are to honor him. And devoting Samuel to God was Hannah's greatest way of honoring God and acknowledging what he had done. And so I mentioned quite a bit how Yeshua continually commands us to not deny ourselves, to serve others, and to love our neighbors and enemies. Uh, and that level of sacrifice and forgiveness, or rather that level of service and forgiveness requires a sacrifice of our own desires and obedience to God's will. Yeshua's person and work is the most prominent example of our lives not being our own and of having to sacrifice his life for the sake of God. And that sacrifice was broken up into two parts. Firstly, Yeshua sacrificed his godliness by restraining it to fully experience being a human being, to fully be man and God. While he performs miracles and uses godly powers, Yeshua still had feelings of physical pain, of suffering, of hunger, thirst, and other human emotions and functions. And then he sacrifices his actual life into death, which he then conquers. But he still died for the sake of God, taking all of our sins for us. This sacrifice is something that he at one point does not wish for, but ultimately does to obey and honor God. And so then the assignment had us break down application, the question of duty, the question of character, the question of goals, and of discernment And this is where the assignment got interesting. I actually disagree with using AI here to do this part of the assignment, but it says, and this was what was assigned, "Use artificial intelligence, AI, to generate three discussion questions that you can use in the teaching section below." And so it talks about generating. We used Microsoft Copilot to put in the information that I just shared with y'all and then to generate questions. And then we went ahead and, as a human, modified those questions to ask. And so those are the questions we're gonna go over right now. The first question being: How does Peninnah's cruelty show the multiplication of sin and suffering by humanity, and what does Hannah's response to that broken environment, including the corruption at Shiloh and her barrenness, teach us about how to respond to brokenness and suffering? That's one part I wanna focus on that I think a lot of people overlook or don't speak on, is Peninnah made Hannah's suffering worse. And I think there's nothing more cruel than women weaponizing conception and pregnancy against one another. This is something that happened with Jacob, Leah, and Rachel as well. Now, we don't really see it in modern day necessarily, but historically in the, in the biblical times, we have seen women deeming their value based off their ability to conceive and how many children they had. And we've seen, again, women bragging against one another, who has borne their shared husband or their husband more children, or who is able to conceive. And I think that it is such a sin to degrade a woman for being unable to conceive, especially if it's something that she did not choose, that her, her womb was closed, which can mean a number of infertility issues. And we see here a clear example of how our sins affect others. Peninnah's cruelty multiplied sin and suffering because she forced Hannah to feel this hardship even more than she already was. And her husband was saying, "Am I not enough?" So now she's making the husband's love feel like it's not valuable enough to overcome the hardship of inconception, and now you have Hannah weeping more. And I think it's a common example, which we shouldn't even have to say, but it should be to not bully one another, for, for lack of better words, to torment one another. And I think it's really sick that Peninnah did that. You know, I think we have a lot of this nowadays, where our, our value is based off not of conception now, but of You know, our sexual properties. And I, I think it's so sick that we're not judging by character but rather by these physical traits, you know? Uh, and, and, and for men nowadays, it's their, their height or their manhood, and for women it's their sexualness or their looks. Uh, so it's moved away from conception and birthing wars, but it's still a war of physical characteristics, oftentimes ones we don't choose. And so it's just really sick that people are continuing to indulge in this fallen world behavior, and that we see it going on. And if you are a woman, uh, you should support other women, uh, when it comes to difficulties with conception. You should be there to lean on one another, to have those conversations, to comfort and support and encourage. But because of rivalries, we see that rivalry leads to sin. And then to move on to the second part of that question, Hannah's response to the broken environment, we've talked about it before. It shows that through all things, affliction and challenges and weeping and hardships, we are to pray and to be devoted to God and to continually pray and honor God despite our circumstances, knowing that He is the ultimate creator, that our lives are not our own, that we have to surrender them to God, that our answered prayers are surrendered to God, and that our hardships and our weeping, our lamentations are part of God's plan. And we, we can't even begin to understand that, and so we need to accept it rather than just run away from God. And I always say, you can either accept the hardship and try to honor God and serve God and get the most out of it, or you can run away from God and the hardship will only get worse. Because now you've lost the only thing that can really take you out of that hardship, and the only anchor of peace and comfort that you can truly have in this world. Moving on to the second question, we have God answers Hannah's prayers by sending her Samuel, placing the to-be righteous boy into a corrupt religious environment and relieving her suffering. What does this show about God sending light into darkness rather than removing darkness, and about how He sends redemption through humble and unexpected means, and what biblical parallels compound that pattern? Again, we've already talked about the biblical parallel with Yeshua and other individuals. I wanna focus now on kind of like the aspect of sending light into darkness rather than removing darkness. And that goes into really shaping our character and our appreciation in the power of the light. If you just take away darkness, you don't have the comparison. You don't have the gratefulness. And what you find is if you just take away people's misfortune, uh, they won't grow more, more fortunate, but they'll just- Go more and more into sin, into all those sinful things because they forget about what fortune is when they indulge in it. But when you are bearing, uh, misfortune, then you have a, a equal fortune or a greater fortune because of the comparison, because of the humility and gratitude that it shapes and the reverence for God and the reliance on God that it puts into your life. You know, God doesn't have us worship Him for His sake because He needs to hear it, but because when we put God at the center of our lives and we worship and focus on Him, we shape our lives towards someone that can be worthy and can actually perform that function, right? Just like if you put money or sin at the center of your life, you're going to develop more sinful characteristics or traits to help you achieve worshiping or pursuing that goal more. And then the last question: The story of Hannah and Samuel echoes a Christ-like narrative where a mother surrenders her son to God for the son to be a righteous example among sinners. How does this relate to the grand narrative of the Bible, and what does it say about our answered prayers? Again, a lot of these are repetitive. One thing I wanna talk about, one of the questions that AI proposed that I did not use for the assignment, it talked about corrupt church environments, and I just wanted you to reflect on where are we seeing corrupt church environments now? Maybe they're podcasts, maybe they're YouTube sermons, maybe they're mega churches, maybe they're Catholic churches, maybe they're Baptist churches. It doesn't matter. All these different denominations, all these different, uh, mediums, whether it's online or in person, there is corruption. And that's not to say they're all evil. That's to say that corrupt people still go into churches. The, the devil could walk into a church right now. This notion that he would set on fire is fictitious, and it is made to make people feel overly safe. It is made by the devil himself because if he tells you he can't be there and he's there in secret, then how much more can he deceive you? How much more is your guard lowered? The devil is in the church every day. He's there more than you are. He's there more than I am. He's there studying the Word so he can twist it better. He's there trying to corrupt the leaders of the church to hurt all the people. And so I ask you to reflect on not, okay, every church environment is corrupt, but to focus on how can I be a Samuel? How can I be a righteous person amongst these sinners, these sinners who are supposed to be the priest or the sons of the priest or the leader of that podcast or the leader of that sermon, that church? How can I be a Samuel in that environment? How can I raise my children as Hannah devoted her children to the Lord? How can I prepare my children to be righteous in that environment of corruption so that they aren't corrupted? So that when the other boys are chasing women around the church, that my boy is going to behave, that he's going to hold other men accountable, or that my woman is going to go to church, or that my daughter, my son, how are we preparing one another? How are we preparing our children and ourselves? And so that's the takeaway on top of how do I respond to suffering and hardship, especially when it comes to conception, which is a deeply personal afflicting wound and hardship, to how can I prepare people and myself to be righteous among these corrupt environments? How can I be an ark of redemption? How can God use me to be a light in this darkness? Because we can't just all throw this darkness away. How can we be a light in it? And again, ladies and gentlemen, this sermon came from the fact that my school assigned me 1 Samuel chapter 1. Then I recorded with Samuel on the Bible podcast talking about this kind of stuff. And then Hadassah's Hope referenced it. They referenced it because of Hannah and her weeping and bitterness and how many of the women who have been trafficked or victims of sexual violence or domestic violence have bitterly wept and felt hopeless and felt unloved. I urge you to also listen and to observe what God is trying to teach you right now. And maybe it's not for yourself. Maybe it's to pass on to someone else, as I have done with 1 Samuel chapter 1. But it's something that God kept putting into my week. And there have been other times where God put a certain proverb over and over again into my life or a certain psalm. Or I even had a dream where God told me to read the book of Zechariah. So people ask me, Mr. Whiskey, how do you choose what to read? I say, I don't choose. God chooses. I just choose to listen to what he's trying to show me. And that's what I would love for y'all to take away. I pray that wherever you are in this week or month or year, who knows when you're listening to this, that you will take away whatever God is trying to give to you right now. If you don't know what to read, pray and ask, and it will be revealed to you.