This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

This is day four together of our first week of looking through 1 Samuel,
chapters one through three this week. We've been talking together about how you
help others to live with an open heart, especially how parents can help kids to
live with an open heart. You need to get your love in order.

First God, then your spouse, and then your kids, you need to get your life in
line. We talked about the simple things of letting people see you pray, letting
people see you keep your word. And then the third thing you need to do, and this
one especially focuses in on parents, is you put your child in God's hands.

You love in the right order, you live in the right way, and then you let go at
the right time. You think about a moment as we walk through this, what it means
to live with an open heart. And as we walk through this section of letting go at
the right time, I want you to not only think about you as a parent if you're a
parent, but whether you're a parent or not, I want you to think about your own
life.

I want you to think as we walk through this about how your parents released you
into the world. Because how your parents released you into the world either set
you up to have an open heart or set you up to have a closed heart. Now God can
work with either of those situations.

God's a God who is not bound by circumstances, but to understand what you were
set up for often helps you to understand how to trust God through the
difficulties of life, through the struggles of life. Your parents may have
released you in such a way that gave you a security, that invited you to live by
faith, or they may have released you, you may have never even known your
parents. So they may have not even ever known you, and so there was an
insecurity there in your life that invited you to live by fear, and you've had
to overcome that, are still having to overcome that in your life.

Parents have to learn how to hold children with hands of faith. We've got to
recognize that God is their father as well. That's what gives you the strength
to release kids in the way that we're talking about today.

So we're going to look together just at three simple things that Hannah did.
Thinking about ourselves as parents, if we're parents, and what can we do for
our kids, but also thinking about ourselves as children and what our parents did
for us. What do you do?

The first thing you do is you accept your child as a gift from God. That's how
you put your child into God's hands. You don't have to wait until they're 18 or
21 or 24 or 35 or whatever to release them.

It starts from when they're born, from when you know they're going to be born.
From the very beginning, you accept them as a gift from God, accepting, in this
case, as a part of releasing, accepting them as a gift from God helps you to
realize whose they are. They're your child, but they're God's gift, they're
God's creation.

Verse 27, these verses that we've looked at several times, "I prayed for this
child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. " From the very
beginning, Hannah knew that Samuel was granted. He is a gift.

Children are never mistakes, they are never accidents, they are never
inconveniences. Now we may make mistakes, but children are always a gift to the
Lord. They're always a gift to the Lord.

Now you may think, "What about this circumstance? There is no circumstance in
which a child, a creation of God, is not a gift from God. " So you accept your
child as a gift from God.

That is the first part of putting your child in God's hands. Second thing you do
is you dedicate your child to the will of God. In verse 27, "I prayed to the
Lord, the Lord has granted me what I asked of him.

" And then verse 28, "So now I give him to the Lord. " Because Hannah did the
first thing, she was able to do the second thing. She recognized the Lord gave
him to me, so then she was able to say, "Now I give him to the Lord.

" Without doing the first, she wouldn't have had the strength to do the second.
The Lord gave him to me, now I give him to the Lord. The Lord gave her to me,
now I give her to the Lord.

Now in a sense, this is what it means to dedicate your child to the Lord. And
again, you don't have to wait until they leave your home to do this. You can do
this from the very beginning.

You're a part of what God is doing in their life from the very beginning. You
recognize your child as a gift from God, and then in praise you give that gift
back to him day after day after day, and some day you give that gift back to him
as you release them out into the world. Now it almost goes without saying, you
can't dedicate your child unless you first dedicated yourself to God.

It's silly to have some kind of ceremony of dedication unless you're dedicated
to God. Because to dedicate a child means you are dedicating them to what you
are dedicated to in your life. You dedicate your child to the will of God.

These first two, they happen from the very beginning. They happen all through
the growing up years in the child's life, through the good and the bad. Accept
as a gift, dedicate to the will of God.

And then there's the third thing. You let go. You let them go to the plan of
God.

After Samuel 1. 24, after he was weaned, she took the boy with her, young as he
was, along with a three-year-old bull and ephah of flour and a skin of wine, and
brought him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh. So in a very unusual
circumstance, God asked that Samuel grow up in the house of the priest so he
could learn what it meant to serve all of Israel.

And Hannah brought him at that young age, even as she's promised, and she let
him go. Don't you think that tore at Hannah's heart? Of course it did.

It's hard to let go. Just stand there when kindergartners are walking off to
their first day of class and watch all the parents. Now, I'll admit, those who
have a third or fourth child going to kindergarten look happier than the ones
who have a first child going to kindergarten the first time it's happening.

But for all of us, it tears at our hearts. You may not have to let go as early
as Hannah, but there comes a time when you have to let go. And I found that
Christian parents who are often good at the first two of these, accepting as
God's gift, dedicating back to God, that we often struggle with the third, much
because we so much love raising our kids.

But just realize that when she let go of Samuel, she didn't need to let go of
her love for Samuel. That's something that your child will never stop needing.
They will never stop needing your love.

They'll never stop needing your prayers. They'll never stop needing the heart
that you have towards them. What she did let go of was her control over Samuel's
life and her knowledge of his everyday actions.

And that's hard to let go of. I'll just tell you, as a dad who's older now who's
had to let go of some kids, that is hard to let go of. You want to know what
your kids are doing.

Even if you're not a control freak, you just want to know what they're doing.
And they don't always tell you what they're doing, and that can drive you crazy.
You think, "Do I have to let go?

" Yes, because God has a plan for their life that's bigger than what you can
hold on to, than you holding on with a leash. So my question is, if you have
older kids, have you let go? Do you always have to know what your kids are
doing?

Do you always try to help them make decisions, knowing what the right decision
is and guiding them to what you want them to do? You have to let go at some
point. The eagle can't fly unless it leaves the nest.

Now Hannah and Elkanah let Samuel go to God's plan. But they still showed up
regularly, we just read, to give practical and spiritual support. That's not a
bad model.

It's not a bad model for letting go. So if we come to the end of this day and
sort of this parenting seminar at the beginning of Samuel, how are you doing as
a parent, accepting your child as a gift of God, dedicating your child to the
will of God, letting your child go to the plan of God? But also let me ask for
all of us, how did your parents do with you?

You may have had great parents. In this moment, thank God for the gift that they
gave you. You may not have even realized how terribly difficult it was for them
to let go when they did, but now you can see a little bit of it because you're
older.

Thank God for the gift that they gave you and build on that gift in your life.
They were not perfect parents, there's no such thing, but they were good
parents. Thank God for that.

You may have had parents who did none of this, and I believe it's good to
honestly recognize that although God used their genes to bring you into the
world, you may not have even known your parents, or you may have really
struggled with your parents. They may have been totally absent in your life, and
because of that, you've had some hurdles to faith that were not of your own
making. Well, ask God to be a father to the fatherless, a mother to the
motherless.

Ask God to be present even though they were absent. Ask God to be a healer even
though they hurt. Ask God to do what only God can do because he is your father.

It's good to recognize the pain that was there and the insecurities that that
might have brought into your life, but it's also good to recognize the power of
God to overcome and overwhelm those things. You may have to live with some of
that pain the rest of your life because they'll be your parents the rest of your
life. Alive or dead, they're still your parents, but God can be there in his
power the rest of your life.

God is there to be dependent on the rest of your life. So as we come to the end
of this study, let's take just a few moments together to talk to our Father. Our
Father, thank you for your love for us.

Thank you for a love for us that brought us into this world. Thank you that you
gave us the gift of life. And thank you that you have a plan and a direction for
our lives.

Thank you for those who built into our lives in a way that helped us to realize,
to recognize your direction. And thank you that even though there were those who
strayed from you or who would have caused us to stray from you if we'd followed
their direction, their path. Thank you, Lord, that even though that happened in
our lives, you're still there.

You're still present. And you and your overwhelming power can love us not only
in that and through that, but even in a way that can help others that are going
through that. Thank you for your love, Father.

In your name we pray. Amen. Tomorrow, we're going to learn some more from Samuel
the prophet in his first prophecy about how to live with an open heart.