Though the Israelites prayed earnestly for Samuel’s intercession and for God's help, they were well aware that they would have to act themselves, that they would have to fight, and that is a lesson which we often mention, which we find repeatedly with the people of God in the Old Testament. They needed God's help, they were dependent upon him, self-confident, self-reliance would lead to disaster, but there was human instrumentality. God smote the Philistines, and it fell to the men of Israel to engage in war in chasing them out of the realm, and out of all the countries that they had occupied and possessed. They had to fight that battle. That needs to be learned all over again today. We have in this land many good earnest Christian people who pray for revival, and are not ready to lift a finger to serve the Lord, get their churches organised, open and enlarge Sunday Schools, or visit neighbourhoods, and yet, if you were to attend their prayer meetings, you would hear very wholehearted prayer for revival. What a tragedy, because although God doesn't want us self-reliant and self-confident, he does use his people as instruments. Yes, dependent upon him, but ready to serve, and ready to act and to witness and evangelise. Wherever the Lord takes you in future years, never let go of dedicated human instrumentality, and be ready to play your part in the work of the Lord. The Lord sometimes leads his people to go out of a church with a thriving Sunday School into a provincial town and they want to start up a Sunday School in a church where there are seventy, eighty, or ninety in the congregation. Can they get a single person to help them? No, the church is asleep. They are nice people, earnest people, but they don’t want to do anything. All the people lament the low state of affairs, but the world is still in the church. The contemporary songs get worse and worse, and increase more and more. The gospel isn’t preached regularly, even by people quite capable of doing it. So these passages speak today. These things, says the apostle Paul, were written not just for the sake of history; they were written for our learning, upon whom the ends of the world are come. To warn us, to give us pastoral lessons, pastoral jolts, pastoral instruction.
And there is that great verse, ‘Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us.’ He wanted that to be embossed upon the minds of the people: to remember the Lord's help and this astonishing victory and how it was unmistakably through the power of God. So Thanksgiving is vital. Not only prayer, but earnest thanksgiving. Do you pray for things, receive the help of God, and forget to thank him, and begin to take the credit yourself perhaps that things worked out well? You were fluent in that act of witness and quite successful, and made an impression, and taking the credit yourself. Well here is this great thanksgiving, and a memorial is established so that it will be long remembered. It is important to remember blessings because that strengthens your faith the next time you need to be totally cast upon the Lord, and it delivers you from self-confidence and self-reliance. How is the old nature subdued? By regular prayer, and reading of the word, and love for Christ – every day, expressed to him – communion with him. Keep up these spiritual exercises, as they used to be called; never let them go. Every big fall to the old nature is due to the relaxing of these spiritual graces and sources of strength. Every time, that is in the background. Don't let any one of us ever think we are strong enough to let matters slide. We need these things.