Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 586
“Speak, Lord; for Your servant hears.” 1 Samuel 3:9.
IN the days of Eli the Word of the Lord was precious and there was no open vision. It was well, when the Word did come, that one chosen individual had the hearing ear to receive it and the obedient heart to perform it. Eli failed to tutor his sons to be the willing servants and the attentive hearers of the Lord’s Word. In this he was without the excuse of inability since he successfully trained the child Samuel in reverent attention to the Divine will. O that those who are diligent about the souls of others would look well to their own households!
Alas, poor Eli, like many in our day, you are made the keeper of the vineyards, but your own vineyard you have not kept! As often as he looked upon the gracious child, Samuel, he must have felt the heartache. When he remembered his own neglected and unchastened sons and how they had made themselves vile before all Israel, Samuel was the living witness of what Grace can work where children are trained up in God’s fear. Hophni and Phinehas were sad specimens of what parental indulgence will produce in the children of the best of men. Ah, Eli, if you had been as careful with your own sons as with the son of Hannah they had not been such men of Belial, nor would Israel have abhorred the offering of the Lord because of the fornication which those priestly reprobates committed at the very door of the tabernacle!
O for Grace to so nurse our little ones for the Lord that they may hear the Lord when He shall be pleased to speak to them! Let us proceed at once to consider our short but very suggestive text in four aspects and I pray that the Holy Spirit may speak to us through His Word. We shall meditate upon this Scripture, first, as the prayer of a little child. Secondly, as the cry of an anxious soul. Thirdly, as the prayer of an earnest Believer. And fourthly as the spirit of a dying saint.
I. First of all we shall take our text AS THE PRAYER OF A LITTLE CHILD. Samuel was blessed with a gracious father and what is of even more importance, he was the child of an eminently holy mother. Hannah was a woman of great poetic talent, as appears from her memorable song—“My heart rejoices in the Lord, my horn is exalted in the Lord; my mouth is enlarged over my enemies, because I rejoiced in Your salvation.” The soul of poetry lives in every line—a brave but chastened spirit breathes in every sentence! Even the Virgin Mary, the most blessed among women, could do no other than use expressions of a similar import.
Better still, Hannah was a woman of great prayer. She had been a woman of a sorrowful spirit, but her prayers at last returned to her in blessing and she had this son given her of the Lord. He was very dear to his mother’s heart and she, therefore, to show her gratitude and in fulfillment of the vow which in her anguish she had vowed unto the Lord, would consecrate the best thing she had and presented her son before the Lord in Shiloh—a lesson to all godly parents to see to it that they dedicate their children unto God. How highly favored shall we be if our children shall all be like Isaac— children of the promise! What blessed parents should we be if we saw our children all rise up to call the Redeemer blessed!
It has been the lot of some of you to see all your children numbered with the people of God—all your jewels are now in Jehovah’s casket. In their early childhood you gave them up to God and dedicated them to Him in earnest prayer and now the Lord has given you your petition which you asked of Him. I like our friends to hold little services in their own houses when their family is increased. It seems good and profitable for friends to assemble and prayer to be offered that the child may be an inheritor of the promises—that he may be early called by mighty Grace and received into the Divine family.
You will perceive, dear Friends, that as Samuel was put under the care and tuition of Eli, Eli had instructed him in some degree in the spirit of religion. But he does not appear to have explained to him the peculiar form and nature of those special and particular manifestations of God which were given to His Prophets. Little dreaming, I dare say, that Samuel would ever be, himself, the subject of them. On that memorable night, when towards morning the lamp of God was about to go out, the Lord cried, “Samuel, Samuel.” The young child was not able to discern—for he had not been taught—that it was the voice of God and not the voice of man.
That he had learned the spirit of true religion is indicated by his instantaneous obedience and the habit of obedience became a valuable guide to him in the perplexities of that eventful hour. He runs to Eli and says, “Here am I, for you did call me.” And though this is three times repeated, yet he seems not at all loath to leave his warm bed and run to his foster-father to see if he could get him any comfort that his old age might require during the night, or otherwise do his bidding. This was a sure sign that the child had acquired the healthy principle of obedience though he did not understand the mystery of the prophetic call.