Speak, Lord; for Thy Servant Heareth

Something my Primary class likes to do as an icebreaker is to play a round of hangman (sort of; I don't know what to call it when you don't draw a person being hung, no matter how many wrong letters are guessed). The trick is that the word or phrase we, the teachers, choose for the opening Don't-Hangman game relates to the lesson. When I taught the lesson on Gideon and his reduced army, the not-hangman phrase was "The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon," the same phrase the army shouted to defeat the Midianites. This time, I'm going to use the phrase Eli instructed Samuel to say when he heard the Lord's voice again, which I already spoiled in the title of this blog post: "Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth."

This is probably the most important phrase in the lesson, so I'm going to make sure it comes up at the beginning and that we spend as much time as possible discussing it at the end, especially since there are at least two vital lessons in it.

The first is that we need to invite the Lord to speak and that we need to actively listen. For a long time, I didn't know what active listening meant. I kind of figured that our ears heard stuff, whether we're listening or not. However, I've learned that just hearing someone talk doesn't mean that you're actually listening to them and that actually listening to someone, so you hear and understand their message, takes some amount of effort. Sometimes, especially when a voice is "still" and "small," a person needs to really focus on the voice in order to catch what it's saying. The Lord doesn't always repeat Himself, and the Spirit isn't known to speak up, so we need to really listen in order to receive the messages They have for us.

The second vital lesson is incorporated entirely in one word: Servant. Once we have, with some effort, heard the Lord's message, we need to act on it. We need to keep His commandments and follow His promptings, heeding the warnings and counsel He gives us. Well, we don't need to. We can choose not to. It just won't go well for us if we don't choose to listen and obey. There are many good reasons to be the Lord's servants, too many to fully explain here, but one of my favorite reasons to serve the Lord is to earn rewards. When we serve the Lord, He blesses us, not only with the blessing of avoiding the pitfalls we'd have fallen into without His guidance, but also with even greater blessings, like inner peace and eternal life. Good lords pay their servants well, and our Lord is nothing if not Good.

It takes effort to serve the Lord. In fact, it often takes effort just to listen hard enough to find out what He wants us to do. But the effort is always worth it, as the rewards far outweigh the costs. It was wise for Eli to instruct Samuel to respond to the Lord this way, and it was wise for Samuel to follow Eli's counsel. We, too, should pledge ourselves to be the Lord's servants and to truly listen to Him when He speaks to us. We may not be prophets, but the Lord has important messages for each of us most of the time. Thus, it is wise of us to encourage Him, as Samuel did, to "speak; for thy servant heareth."