Add to this list your personal observation and experience, and always there is the cost of passion unto blood. Such prayer prevails. It turns ordinary mortals into men of power. It brings power. It brings fire. It brings life. It brings God. (Samuel Chadwick)
Hannah is a picture of a “mother in Israel.” She was sold out for one thing. She desired a child and for years she waited, wept, suffered reproach and grieved before the Lord in prayer. In one of his writings Leonard Ravenhill notes that we often have a twisted idea of prayer. He says that for many of us prayer is just a short cut to a desired thing.
In Hannah we learn that though the Lord tarries we must wait for His answer. If Hannah’s prayer for a son had been answered in her time the nation of Israel may never have known the mighty man of God that it found in Samuel.
True intercessors stand in the gap until the answer comes through. Hannah was a true intercessor and intercessory prayer is the highest type of prayer known to believers. There was an increasing intensity in Hannah’s praying. She prayed and she continued praying. She poured out her soul and wept and then she wept more. She was grieved in bitterness of soul, she fasted from food and drink and she made a vow. (1 Samuel 1:10)
In Genesis 30 we have a similar picture with Rachel and her anguish over having no children. In both these women the shame of barrenness got to be a burden beyond endurance.
Leonard Ravenhill says that before the Lord will move in power, our orthodoxy will have to stabbed, our conventions shattered, and our stony hearts again know tears. Only a small portion of the church will conceive in the Holy Ghost; but later, the whole body of the church will feel the birth.
The time came when Hannah bore a son and when he had been weaned Hannah gave him to the Lord and she said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” And so, many years later when the Lord looked for a man to stand in the gap for Israel He had Samuel the prophet, born of a praying woman.
Never before has the church of Jesus Christ needed intercessors such as Hannah as it does at this present time. Let our deep and desperate cry be, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
Post published in: Faith