"Then the Lord called yet again, “Samuel!” So Samuel arose and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” He answered, “I did not call, my son; lie down again.” (Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, nor was the word of the Lord yet revealed to him.) 1 Samuel 3:6-7
Samuel heard God’s voice the second time. He responded the same way as he had done the first time. He went to Eli and got the same answer as before. The reason was that Samuel ‘did not yet know the Lord, nor was the word of the Lord yet revealed to him’.
Samuel had lived his life in the house of the Lord since his mother brought him to the tabernacle after weaning him. Eli had trained him to serve in the Levitical order. He served in the house of the Lord, yet ‘he did not yet know the Lord’.
Is it possible to go through so much religious training and still not have an intimate relationship with God? Yes! The phrase, ‘did not know the Lord’, did not mean he did not know about God or who He was. It meant that he had not had a personal encounter with God. Samuel’s knowledge of God was based on Eli’s relationship with God.
Almost everyone God used in the Bible had a personal encounter with God at some point in their lives. As of that time, Samuel had not yet had such an encounter with God.
Samuel’s calling was that of a prophet. This spiritual encounter was his calling to be a prophet to Israel. Ironically, Samuel, whom the Lord was calling to speak His word to Israel, did not know how to discern the voice of the Lord.
We can see the grace of God evidently at work here. God does not use our immaturity as a stumbling block to His purposes for us. Each of us who has been used by God can remember a time when, in spite of our being clueless, God’s grace still reached out to us.
Samuel was disadvantaged, yet God did not give up on him. That tells us that the Lord does not wait for us to become experts before He calls us. He knows how to train us to become all that He wants us to be if only we will yield ourselves entirely to Him.
Today, we may also be like Samuel; immature and naïve, but that will not stop the Lord from separating us unto Himself.
