And [Hannah] was in distress of soul, praying to the Lord and weeping bitterly. – 1 Samuel 1:10, Amplified Bible (AMP)

One my favorite Bible verses is 1 Peter 5:7, which states (AMP):

Casting the whole of your care [all your anxieties, all your worries, all your concerns, once and for all] on Him, for He cares for you affectionately and cares about you watchfully.

A legitimate question regarding this verse is, “How do you cast your care upon Christ?” To answer this question, all we need do is look to Hannah.

As we learn in 1 Samuel 1, the man Elkanah had two wives, Peninnah and Hannah. Peninnah bore Elakanah children, but Hannah had not been able to. Peninnah loved reminding Hannah that she was barren, and her verbal abuse was so sharp that it drove Hannah to tears on a regular basis. Hannah’s distress of soul was tremendous, and, unfortunately, she did for years what many of us do when faced with our own distresses; she tried to deal with it on her own. Peninnah had been ribbing Hannah for many moons about being barren, but it wasn’t until 1 Samuel 1 that Hannah seized upon the eternal truth that Peter articulated for us in 1 Peter 5:7. There, at Shiloh, beside the temple of The Lord, Hannah poured out her soul distress to God Almighty, begging Him to relieve her from the attacks of her enemy by giving her a son. Remarkably – and in line with the truth of 1 Peter 5:7 – Hannah left her prayer session with a light heart because she had indeed cast all of her care upon God.

Undergirding Hannah’s relief was her belief in and trust in God’s willingness and ability to grant her request. Believing in and trusting in God’s willingness and ability to answer prayer are essential to God fulfilling His promise to bear our burdens. Indeed, 1 Peter 5:7 puts the entire responsibility upon us, as a test of our faith, to cast our burdens away. God doesn’t offer to forcibly remove our burdens from us in 1 Peter 5:7; He offers to take them from us if we will simply hand them over. In order to hand them over completely, we must completely give up trusting in our own power to save ourselves, and we must replace trust in ourselves with complete reliance upon God. When we do that – and when we also promise God, like Hannah did, to give back to Him that which He gives us – then God will swiftly take our cares from us and replace them with His peace.

Please understand that replacing our anxiety with peace doesn’t necessarily mean that God will remove our unwelcome circumstances. He did for Hannah, but in cases like Paul’s thorn in the flesh, He does not. Either way, God can be King over our cares if we will give Him authority over them. Until we do, we retain that authority, and our strength to banish them is akin to a king or queen fighting an army of millions all alone and with a pocket knife. Once we hand authority over our cares to God, however, He will successfully banish them because He has the power to do so, and they won’t be able to come back to haunt us unless we let them into the gate of the kingdom ourselves.

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