25 Essential Lessons from 1 Samuel 7: Twenty Years That Changed Nothing, the Stone Called Ebenezer, and the Day God Thundered

Twenty years is long enough for a hard season to stop feeling like a season and start feeling like an address. Long enough to stop expecting the next year to be different. That is roughly how long Israel stayed stuck in 1 Samuel 7, and the chapter is unusually honest about why.

Then one day it ended.

The lessons from 1 Samuel 7 are worth far more than a battle report, because this chapter names both what failed to break those twenty years and what finally did. A deeper feeling had already been tried. Israel had that one, nationwide, for two decades running. What actually ended it asked them for something, and they had to hand it over before anything moved.

Brief Summary of 1 Samuel 7

The ark of the LORD has come back out of Philistine hands, and the men of Kirjath-jearim carry it up to the house of Abinadab, where it stays for twenty years while Israel remains under Philistine pressure. Samuel then calls the nation to return to God, put away Baalim and Ashtaroth, and serve Him only.

Israel obeys, gathers at Mizpeh, fasts and confesses. The Philistines march on that gathering, Samuel offers a lamb and cries to God, and the LORD answers with thunder that scatters the enemy. Samuel sets up a stone named Eben-ezer, and the chapter closes with him judging Israel for the rest of his life.

Lesson 1: Getting the Symbol Back Is Not the Same as Getting God Back (1 Samuel 7:1-2)

1 Samuel 7:1-2: “And the men of Kirjath-jearim came, and brought up the ark of the LORD… And it came to pass, while the ark abode in Kirjath-jearim, that the time was long; for it was twenty years”

The ark had been taken in battle, paraded through Philistine cities, and sent back. Now it was home. Israel had the golden chest that sat between the cherubims, the one object on earth most closely tied to God’s presence among His people. And for twenty years afterward, nothing about their situation improved.

That gap between verse 1 and verse 3 is doing real work. God is not a possession that can be recovered and shelved. He gave Israel the ark as a sign of a covenant, and a sign is worth exactly what the covenant behind it is worth to the people holding it.

We do the same arithmetic. A Bible back on the nightstand, a church membership restored, a habit picked up again after a long lapse, and something in us counts the account settled. The object returned. The relationship did not.

Israel’s twenty years show that the sign of God’s presence can sit inside your borders while your life stays exactly where it was.

Lesson 2: One Man Was Set Apart to Keep What Nobody Was Watching (1 Samuel 7:1)

1 Samuel 7:1: “and sanctified Eleazar his son to keep the ark of the LORD”

One clause, one name, one job. Eleazar is set apart to keep the ark inside a house on a hill, and Scripture records nothing else about him here. No crowds came. No festival was held. The most sacred object in Israel sat in a private home while a nation got on with forgetting.

God gives assignments like that. Much of what is done for Him is done where nobody is counting, over years that produce no story worth telling at dinner. Whether Eleazar found the work heavy or dull the text never says, and guessing would be adding to Scripture. What it does say is that the charge was real and the man had a name worth writing down.

Being unwatched turns out to be a different thing entirely from being unimportant.

Lesson 3: Grieving Over God Is Not the Same as Returning to Him (1 Samuel 7:2-3)

1 Samuel 7:2-3: “and all the house of Israel lamented after the LORD. And Samuel spake unto all the house of Israel, saying, If ye do return unto the LORD with all your hearts”

Sorrow can run for a very long time without changing direction. Israel’s grief was not fake and it was not aimed at the wrong place. The text says they lamented after the LORD, which means their longing was pointed at Him. It went on nationwide, for twenty years.

And Samuel still had to stand up and say, “If ye do return.”

That word “if” lands hard on anyone who has confused feeling bad about a distance with closing it. Two decades of God-directed grief had not yet become a return, because grief looks back and repentance turns around. Paul draws the same line: godly sorrow works repentance, which means the sorrow is the beginning of something and not the thing itself (2 Corinthians 7:10).

God’s patience through those years is the mercy easy to miss here. Twenty years of a people who wanted Him and would not let go of their idols, and what He sent at the end of it was a word telling them how to come back.

Where has feeling sorry about a distance from God become a substitute for walking back across it?

Lesson 4: What Finally Ended the Twenty Years Was a Word from God (1 Samuel 7:3)

1 Samuel 7:3: “And Samuel spake unto all the house of Israel, saying, If ye do return unto the LORD with all your hearts, then put away the strange gods and Ashtaroth from among you”

You may be waiting for a long season to lift the way weather lifts, on its own, when enough time has passed. Israel had tried that for twenty years and the weather never changed.

What changed things was a prophet arriving with instructions. A word from God that told the nation exactly what to do next, in language plain enough to obey the same afternoon. It shifted the situation in a way that two decades of atmosphere and mood and hoping for a better year had failed to.

Read also: What Does It Mean To Wait On The Lord

This is how God has consistently moved His people out of stuck places. He speaks, and the speaking is itself the mercy, because a stalemate you cannot name is a stalemate you cannot leave. Samuel’s message did not comfort Israel. It gave them something to do.

If you have been asking God to change a season, it may be worth asking Him instead to tell you what He is waiting for you to hear. His word has ended longer stalemates than yours.

Lesson 5: God Asks for the Heart Before He Asks for the Hands (1 Samuel 7:3)

1 Samuel 7:3: “If ye do return unto the LORD with all your hearts, then put away the strange gods and Ashtaroth from among you, and prepare your hearts unto the LORD, and serve him only”

Notice the order in Samuel’s sentence. The whole-hearted return comes first. The clearing out of the idols comes second, introduced by “then.” Israel is not told to tidy the house in order to earn God’s attention; they are told to come back to God, and the tidying is what coming back looks like when it is real.

That order matters because both halves can be faked without it. A heart that says it has returned while the household gods stay on the shelf has not returned. A house swept clean by someone whose heart never moved is a performance.

What this shows about God is that He wants the person, and He will not settle for the behaviour as a substitute. What it shows about us is how much we would prefer the reverse, because behaviour is easier to produce on demand than a turned heart.

Let the visible change follow the inward one, and be suspicious of any repentance that is willing to reorder those two.

Lesson 6: Vague Repentance Names Nothing (1 Samuel 7:3-4)

1 Samuel 7:3-4: “put away the strange gods and Ashtaroth from among you… Then the children of Israel did put away Baalim and Ashtaroth, and served the LORD only”

Your confession may have been running for years without ever naming a single thing. “Lord, forgive my many failings” can be prayed nightly while nothing changes, because a prayer with no address arrives nowhere. Proverbs 28:13 ties mercy to the man who confesses and forsakes, and a category cannot be forsaken.

Samuel gave Israel names. He said Ashtaroth. And when the narrator reports that Israel obeyed, he writes Baalim and Ashtaroth again, as though the naming were part of the obedience. Baal and Ashtoreth are commonly understood as gods tied to storm, fertility and prosperity, though the chapter never stops to explain them. What it does make plain is that these were things Israel could point at, carry out of the house, and be rid of.

Name the thing you are putting away, and put it somewhere you cannot reach by accident.

Lesson 7: Their Problem Was Never That They Had Dropped God (1 Samuel 7:3-4)

1 Samuel 7:3-4: “and serve him only… and served the LORD only”

Hold two verses together and the picture gets uncomfortable. Verse 2 has all Israel lamenting after the LORD. Verse 4 has all Israel putting away Baalim and Ashtaroth. Both were true of the same people at the same time. They wanted God and they had idols, and the word that had to be added to their worship was not “serve him” but “only.”

Read also: Why You Keep Falling into the Same Sin

This is the shape most modern idolatry takes. Few believers announce that they have left God. Far more of us add something alongside Him and let the two run in parallel, because the second thing seems to handle what we are unsure God will handle. Joshua had put the same choice to Israel generations earlier: serve the LORD in sincerity, and put away the other gods (Joshua 24:14).

When God demands exclusive worship, He is describing the only arrangement under which He can be God to you at all, rather than one of your options.

What have you been running alongside God because you were not certain He would come through?

Lesson 8: God Named the Enemy Last and Kept That Job for Himself (1 Samuel 7:3)

1 Samuel 7:3: “and serve him only: and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines”

You have possibly treated obedience as a lever, doing the right thing partly in hope that it moves a situation you cannot move yourself. Samuel’s sermon speaks to that directly, and it does so by where it puts the Philistines.

They get one mention in the whole demand, and it comes at the very end, after everything Israel is asked to do. The promise attached is real and should be read as God gave it: return, and He will deliver you. That is a genuine promise from God to a repentant people.

Look at whose verb it is. “He will deliver you.” Across the entire call to repentance, Israel is told to arm nothing, plan nothing, muster nobody. The military problem that had defined their lives for twenty years is settled in six words, and none of the six are addressed to Israel’s army.

God is willing to make your crisis His business, and He asks for something other than your strategy for it first. Deal with God about God. The Philistines are on His list.

Lesson 9: Repentance Went Public Before It Went Anywhere Else (1 Samuel 7:5-6)

1 Samuel 7:5-6: “Gather all Israel to Mizpeh, and I will pray for you unto the LORD. And they gathered together to Mizpeh… And Samuel judged the children of Israel in Mizpeh”

The idols had already gone. Israel had obeyed verse 3, and Samuel’s next instruction sent them out of their houses rather than back into them. Assemble, all of you, in one place. Mizpeh was where Israel had gathered as one man before (Judges 20:1), and it is where Samuel began judging them before a single Philistine appeared on the horizon.

Private repentance is real, and this chapter never says otherwise. What it does show is a nation whose sin had been public deciding that its turning would be public too. They stood in daylight, together, and let each other see it.

Something in us prefers the reverse, repenting alone and letting the results speak later. Sometimes that is wisdom, and sometimes it is a way of keeping an exit open, because a turning nobody witnessed is a turning nobody will ask you about.

Israel put themselves somewhere they could no longer pretend it had not happened.

Lesson 10: Their Sorrow Took a Physical Form (1 Samuel 7:6)

1 Samuel 7:6: “And they gathered together to Mizpeh, and drew water, and poured it out before the LORD, and fasted on that day”

You can feel sorry about something for years and never once let it reach your hands. Israel’s repentance at Mizpeh did. They drew water and poured it out. They went without food. Whatever was happening inside them showed up in what their bodies were doing that day.

Read also: 10 Importance of Fasting and Prayer

Scripture never tells us what the pouring out of the water meant. Commentators have suggested several things, and the Cambridge Bible notes the act has no exact parallel anywhere else in the Old Testament. It is worth saying plainly that we do not know, rather than assigning it a meaning God did not give it. What the verse does tell us is that they did it before the LORD, and that they fasted alongside it.

God made people with bodies and He is not indifferent to what they do. Fasting, kneeling, going somewhere, giving something up: these are not how we impress Him, but they are how a decision stops being only an idea.

Has anything about your repentance ever cost your body a single thing?

Lesson 11: Say the Word Out Loud (1 Samuel 7:6)

1 Samuel 7:6: “and said there, We have sinned against the LORD”

You have probably noticed how much easier it is to feel sorry than to say a sentence. Israel said the sentence. Four words, in public, in the first person plural, with a subject and an object, and the object was God.

That last part carries the weight. They had lost battles, lost the ark, lost twenty years, and they could have named any of those as the problem. What they named instead was the person they had sinned against.

Read also: Prayers for Forgiveness from God

Confession that never becomes a sentence tends to stay a mood, and a mood can be lived with indefinitely. There is a reason Scripture keeps putting words in the mouths of returning people, from Israel at Mizpeh to the prodigal son rehearsing his line on the road home.

Say it in words, to God, with the sin named and yourself as the subject of it.

Lesson 12: They Gathered to Repent and the Philistines Came Up (1 Samuel 7:7)

1 Samuel 7:7: “And when the Philistines heard that the children of Israel were gathered together to Mizpeh, the lords of the Philistines went up against Israel”

Follow the order of the verse. The Philistines heard about the gathering. Then the Philistines attacked. The day Israel finally got right with God is the day the enemy moved, and the assembly they held to repent is what put it in motion.

Take that as a record rather than a rule. The chapter reports what happened once, to one nation, and it leaves the general case alone. Still, it is worth having on record, because a season of obedience can turn out to be the season pressure arrives, and a believer who assumes trouble means a wrong turn will misread it when it does.

Israel had done everything Samuel asked. Every idol was gone. And an army was on the road because of it.

The absence of trouble makes a poor instrument for measuring whether you are walking with God, and this verse is why.

Lesson 13: You Can Obey Completely and Still Be Afraid (1 Samuel 7:7)

1 Samuel 7:7: “And when the children of Israel heard it, they were afraid of the Philistines”

You may have assumed that fear is proof something is wrong between you and God, and that real obedience should have settled the nerves by now. These are the people who had just put away every idol in the nation, fasted, and confessed their sin out loud. Their repentance was as thorough as the chapter could make it. And when they heard the Philistines were coming, they were afraid.

The text records the fear and moves on. There is no rebuke here, no lecture, no hint that being frightened cancelled anything they had just done. God is busy fighting for them rather than grading their composure. Obedience arrives without an anaesthetic, and you can do the hard, right thing while feeling every bit of the danger it exposes you to.

Lesson 14: Frightened, They Asked for Prayer Instead of Weapons (1 Samuel 7:8)

1 Samuel 7:8: “And the children of Israel said to Samuel, Cease not to cry unto the LORD our God for us, that he will save us out of the hand of the Philistines”

An army was coming and Israel made one request, and it was for prayer. They asked a man to keep crying to God on their behalf, and they told him to carry on doing it. A plan, a weapon, a safer position: any of those would have been the obvious thing to want, and they wanted this instead.

Read also: Lessons From The Prayer Life Of Hezekiah

Listen to what they call Him: “the LORD our God.” The last time this nation faced these Philistines, the elders had spoken of the ark as the thing that might save them. Now the possessive is back where it belongs, on God Himself. That change in vocabulary is the whole distance Israel had travelled.

Samuel took the request seriously for the rest of his life. Years later he told the nation, “God forbid that I should sin against the LORD in ceasing to pray for you” (1 Samuel 12:23). He treated stopping as a sin, not as a scheduling decision.

Ask someone to pray for you, and be as unembarrassed about it as Israel was.

Lesson 15: Samuel’s Prayer Rested on a Lamb, Not on His Own Standing (1 Samuel 7:9)

1 Samuel 7:9: “And Samuel took a sucking lamb, and offered it for a burnt offering wholly unto the LORD: and Samuel cried unto the LORD for Israel; and the LORD heard him”

All Israel from Dan to Beer-sheba knew Samuel was established as a prophet of the LORD, and God had let none of his words fall to the ground since he was a boy. If any man’s prayer could have stood on its own reputation, it was his.

He brought a lamb.

The word “wholly” means the offering was entirely burnt, with nothing set aside for the priest or for the man who brought it. And the verse joins the offering and the cry in a single breath before it reports that God heard. The prayer of Israel’s finest man went up over a sacrifice, because access to God has always run through one.

That is the line that runs from this altar to the cross. Hebrews 7:25 says Christ is able to save to the uttermost because He ever lives to make intercession, and the ground of that intercession is His own offering of Himself.

Your prayers do not get heard because you have been doing well. They get heard because of a Lamb.

Lesson 16: God Answered While the Offering Was Still Burning (1 Samuel 7:10)

1 Samuel 7:10: “And as Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, the Philistines drew near to battle against Israel: but the LORD thundered with a great thunder on that day upon the Philistines”

You may be holding something back from God until you feel spiritually ready to bring it to Him. Read the timing in this verse before you wait any longer.

The Philistines arrived as Samuel was offering, in the middle of an unfinished sacrifice, at the least defensible moment in the whole chapter. And God moved on the same clock. He thundered while the lamb was still burning, without waiting for the altar work to be completed or for Israel to be composed and in position.

That tells you something about His character that a tidier rescue would have hidden. He is not standing off at a distance assessing whether His people have got themselves sufficiently in order. Psalm 50:15 puts the invitation in the same tense: “call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee.” The day of the trouble, not the week after it, when the crisis has been processed and the prayer has been polished.

Israel was mid-worship, mid-vulnerability, with an army closing, and that was the moment heaven answered.

Lesson 17: Israel Does Not Appear in the Sentence That Wins the Battle (1 Samuel 7:10)

1 Samuel 7:10: “but the LORD thundered with a great thunder on that day upon the Philistines, and discomfited them; and they were smitten before Israel”

Two verbs decide this battle, and God is the subject of both. He thundered. He threw them into confusion. Israel shows up in the sentence only as the people the Philistines were smitten in front of, standing there while it happened.

Hannah had sung about this before Samuel was old enough to understand it. In her song at the start of the book she said of God’s adversaries, “out of heaven shall he thunder upon them” (1 Samuel 2:10). Seven chapters later the sky opens over the Philistines and does exactly that. What a woman prayed in a sanctuary, God performed on a battlefield.

The God of this chapter is not a resource Israel deployed. He acted, on His own initiative, at His own moment, using an instrument no army carries.

Which battle in your life have you been fighting as though the outcome depended on your competence in it?

Lesson 18: Your Part Comes Second, and It Is Still Real (1 Samuel 7:11)

1 Samuel 7:11: “And the men of Israel went out of Mizpeh, and pursued the Philistines, and smote them, until they came under Beth-car”

Having read verse 10, you might expect Israel to have nothing left to do. God had already broken the Philistines. The battle, in every sense that matters, was over.

Israel still had to run.

They went out of Mizpeh, which meant leaving the place where they had been praying, and they pursued a scattered army for miles. Every stroke they landed came after God had done the decisive thing, and not one of those strokes was pointless. God gave them the victory and then gave them the work of walking into it.

Both halves of that are worth holding. Waiting for God to move and then declining to move yourself is not faith. Moving first and asking Him to bless it afterwards is not faith either. Israel prayed, God acted, and then Israel ran.

Go and do the part that is actually yours, and stop waiting for a certainty God has already given.

Lesson 19: They Won Without the Ark They Once Carried into Battle (1 Samuel 7:10-11 with 1 Samuel 7:1-2)

1 Samuel 7:1-2, 10: “brought it into the house of Abinadab in the hill… while the ark abode in Kirjath-jearim… but the LORD thundered with a great thunder on that day upon the Philistines”

Where was the ark while all this was happening? The chapter has already told us, in its first two verses: sitting in a house on a hill in Kirjath-jearim, miles from the fighting.

Read also: The Book of 1 Samuel Summary by Chapter

That detail is the whole point. The last time Israel fought these same Philistines, the elders had said, “Let us fetch the ark of the covenant of the LORD out of Shiloh unto us, that, when it cometh among us, it may save us out of the hand of our enemies” (1 Samuel 4:3). They carried God’s furniture onto the field, lost thirty thousand men, and lost the ark itself. Here they carry nothing, and win.

Same nation. Same enemy. The variable was never the object in their hands.

What are you carrying because it once stood for God’s presence, and what would change if you stopped mistaking the two?

Lesson 20: Samuel Made the Memory Something You Could Touch (1 Samuel 7:12)

1 Samuel 7:12: “Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Eben-ezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us”

Samuel had just watched God win a war with weather. Anyone would remember that. And the first thing he did afterwards was arrange a stone by a road so nobody would have to rely on remembering.

He knew his people. Israel had been given memorials before, stones out of the Jordan set up so that when children asked what they meant, someone would have to tell the story (Joshua 4:6-7). A memory with an object attached survives the generation that had the experience.

Most of us hold our best evidence of God’s help in the least reliable place available, which is our own recollection on a bad day. Israel got a stone with a name on it, sitting where people walked.

Put something where you will see it. A date written in the back of your Bible, a note kept, an answered prayer recorded somewhere you will trip over it when you need it most.

Lesson 21: “Hitherto” Looks Backward, Not Forward (1 Samuel 7:12)

1 Samuel 7:12: “saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us”

A memorial can end up claiming more than it should. Read the sentence Samuel actually chose. “Hitherto” means up to this point, and it reports on the past. He left out “the LORD will always help us,” and he made the nation no promise that the next Philistine would fall like this one.

Commentators have long read the wording as deliberately careful. Matthew Poole called it a wary expression, one that stirs thankfulness for the mercy received and holy fear alongside it. Benson read it as saying God has begun to help us rather than finished.

The limit here falls on the stone, never on God. His faithfulness runs on forever; a memorial testifies to what He has already done, and that is enough to build a life on without needing to guarantee tomorrow. Gratitude for what God has already done can stand without certainty about what He will do next, and a faith able to hold those two apart is steadier than one that cannot.

Lesson 22: The Name of Their Worst Defeat Became the Name of God’s Help (1 Samuel 7:12)

1 Samuel 7:12: “and called the name of it Eben-ezer”

Had you heard the name Eben-ezer before Samuel carved it onto this day? Israel had. It appears earlier in the same book, at the opening of chapter 4: “Now Israel went out against the Philistines to battle, and pitched beside Eben-ezer.”

That was the field of the disaster, where four thousand fell first, then thirty thousand more, and where the ark itself was carried off. Many commentators hold that Samuel’s stone stood at or near that same ground, though the Bible does not say so directly.

What the Bible does say is that the name changed hands. A word that had meant the worst day in living memory came to mean “the stone of help.”

God has a habit of working this way. Rather than deleting the place where things went wrong, He goes back to it and puts something else there, so that the name you flinch at ends up being the name you give thanks over.

The site of your worst failure remains fully eligible to become the place you point to when someone asks what God has done for you.

Lesson 23: God Settled Accounts Nobody Had Brought Him (1 Samuel 7:14)

1 Samuel 7:14: “And the cities which the Philistines had taken from Israel were restored to Israel, from Ekron even unto Gath; and the coasts thereof did Israel deliver out of the hands of the Philistines. And there was peace between Israel and the Amorites”

Your prayer list is probably shorter than your list of troubles, and this verse works in the gap between them. Israel had gone to Mizpeh about an invasion. Verse 14 hands them two things they had not asked for.

The first is territory. Real towns, with real families in them, lost in earlier defeats and held by the Philistines for years, and the verse describes no campaign to retake them. What God did that day reached backwards into losses older than the crisis Israel brought Him.

The second is stranger. The Amorites had nothing to do with any of this, and were absent from Mizpeh, from Samuel’s sermon, and from the minds of that fasting crowd. Then the chapter mentions, almost in passing, that Israel and the Amorites were at peace. No reason is given, and inventing one would be adding to Scripture.

Scripture stops short of promising that every loss comes back in this life, and pretending otherwise would be unkind to anyone still carrying one. What it does show is a God who works on the whole account rather than only the emergency in front of Him.

Lesson 24: The Great Day Did Not Retire Him (1 Samuel 7:15-16)

1 Samuel 7:15-16: “And Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life. And he went from year to year in circuit to Bethel, and Gilgal, and Mizpeh, and judged Israel in all those places”

If your life has one day in it you would point to as the day God showed up, you know the strange difficulty of the week afterwards. Everything since has been smaller.

Samuel had watched the sky open over an army. And the very next thing the chapter records is that he spent the rest of his life walking a three-town loop, hearing disputes, year after year after year. Bethel, Gilgal, Mizpeh. Then Bethel, Gilgal, Mizpeh again.

The chapter puts the miracle and the circuit in the same breath, without any suggestion that one was the real ministry and the other was filling in time. Israel needed a man who kept coming back far more than it needed a man who had once seen thunder.

What would change if you treated this ordinary week as the actual assignment rather than the gap between the days that count?

Lesson 25: He Built an Altar Where He Actually Lived (1 Samuel 7:17)

1 Samuel 7:17: “And his return was to Ramah; for there was his house; and there he judged Israel; and there he built an altar unto the LORD”

The chapter’s last sentence brings Samuel home. Ramah is where his house was, and the writer repeats the word “there” three times: he judged there, he lived there, he built an altar there.

Out of everything he could have raised after Mizpeh, the last structure this chapter credits him with is a place of worship at his own address. A man could have made his home the one place he was allowed to stop being a prophet. Samuel put an altar in it.

Public spiritual life is easier to sustain than private spiritual life, because public life arrives with witnesses and a schedule attached. The house you live in supplies neither, which makes it the truer test of the two.

Build something in the place where nobody is watching you do it.

Frequently Asked Questions About 1 Samuel 7

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Conclusion: What the Lessons from 1 Samuel 7 Ask of You

Twenty years ended in one afternoon, and what ended them was a word from God that cost Israel their idols. This chapter promises you no Mizpeh of your own. It shows you what one required. Read on and the ground shifts again: the next chapter records that Samuel’s sons walked not in his ways, and the nation used it to demand a king. By chapter 12 the same thunder that fell on Israel’s enemies here was falling on Israel for asking. A stone of help testifies; it does not guarantee, and every generation that inherits one has to go and get its own help from God. So set aside the search for a stronger feeling about the distance between you and Him. Name the one thing you have been serving alongside Him, and put it away.