And the boy Samuel ministered to the LORD before Eli. Now in those days the word of the LORD was rare, and visions were scarce.The child Samuel ministered to Yahweh before Eli. Yahweh’s word was rare in those days. There were not many visions, then.And the child Samuel ministered unto the Lord before Eli. And the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no open vision.And the child Samuel ministered unto Jehovah before Eli. And the word of Jehovah was precious in those days; there was no frequent vision.
3 sermons cite this verse
… was not very prevalent among His people. I want you to look at 1 Samuel 3, verse 1. This will kind of set the stage. Some of you may be familiar with this story, may have heard some about it before. Samuel, this guy Eli, is kind of working under him, and God's going to call Samuel in this chapter. Listen to how it starts. Verse 1 says, The boy Samuel ministered before the Lord under Eli, In those days, check this out, the word of the Lord was rare. There were not many visions. And so you didn't have much of the word of the Lord. Visions literally means revelations. God is not revealing himself through the word. People aren't paying attention to his word. So God calls Samuel in this chapter. Then we come to the end, verse 21, and I want you to hear what it says. Look at the very last verse in that chapter. The Bible says, The Lord continued to appear at Shiloh, and there he revealed himself to Samuel. …
… So you do something and you think it was worthless. What if it was not worthless what you did? What if it was just in the womb getting ready to come forth? I will show you this from 1 Samuel chapter 3, verse 1. The Bible says, Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli. What does that mean? It means that he was in a place where a man was in charge, And the word of the Lord was rare in those days. There was no frequent vision, but he was doing what he was supposed to do, even though the place where he was was not reflective of the values that he believed. The Bible says that Eli was a very bad priest who had two sons named Hophni and Phinehas who were doing all kinds of things in the temple. that they shouldn't have done. Not only were they taking the sacrifices that the people brought for themselves, but they would sleep with some of the women who came to volunteer at the temple. …
And you know, I do believe that God does work in people's hearts and speak to them in such a way that sometimes they don't even realize he's speaking. You and I could go through the Old Testament, for example, again. He called Gideon to go and deliver the people from the Philistines. We could go to the New Testament and find Jesus saying to the disciples as he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he said, follow me and I'll make you fishers of men. Then you could go all the way to the book of Acts and find that here's Saul of Tarsus persecuting the Christians, throwing them in jail. and all of a sudden he is struck down on the Damascus Road, blinded. He hears a voice and God is calling him. Now, once in a while I'll hear somebody say, well, once when I was saved, I had a Damascus Road experience. Then I want to say, I'm grateful to God. He didn't have to knock me down and blind me to get me to listen to him. …