When God has answered our prayers, how should we respond to Him? What should our attitude be toward the things God has given to us? Once we have what we want, it’s so easy for us to keep our focus on it – and the last thing we want to do is to give it up. It’s easy for us to hoard our gifts, to keep them for ourselves.

Hannah’s personal experience challenges this kind of self-focus, doesn’t she? In verses 26-27 she rehearses for Eli, the High Priest, what had happened up to this point in chapter 1. She had been unable to have children, and she had come to the Tabernacle to pray, asking God to give her a son. But she had also made a promise – that if God would answer her prayer, she would in turn give her son to the Lord, devoting Him to the service of God (v. 11).

In today’s passage, the time had come for her to keep that promise. No matter how hard it would be for Hannah to miss out on so much of Samuel’s childhood, because the Lord had answered her prayer, she was determined to do what she had said, to give her son as an apprentice to the priests at the Tabernacle. In doing this, she showed that her focus was not on the wonderful gift God had given her, but instead on God Himself, the giver of all good gifts.

But this is not simply a reminder that we should keep whatever promises we have made to God. No, Hannah shows us how we should look at all the blessings that come into our lives – all our possessions, all our experiences, all our relationships. For the fact is that God has given us everything we have, whether we have prayed for it or not. So our job is to do what Hannah did, to devote all that we are and all that we have to God, to determine how we might be able to use God’s gifts for God’s glory and for the good of others. That’s the best way for us to thank God for the great things He has done for us.

I Samuel 1:24-28 (ESV)

24 And when she had weaned him, she took him up with her, along with a three-year-old bull, an ephah of flour, and a skin of wine, and she brought him to the house of the LORD at Shiloh. And the child was young.
25 Then they slaughtered the bull, and they brought the child to Eli.
26 And she said, “Oh, my lord! As you live, my lord, I am the woman who was standing here in your presence, praying to the LORD.
27 For this child I prayed, and the LORD has granted me my petition that I made to him.
28 Therefore I have lent him to the LORD. As long as he lives, he is lent to the LORD.” And he worshiped the LORD there.