257. Just More of Him

What would it look like if you actually believed that your presence, just you showing up, was something that ministered to the heart of God?

Hey, friend.

Welcome back to Holistic Hearts.

I am your host, Kristen Fields Chadwick.

And I am so glad that you're here today.

Whether you're on a walk or you're driving in your car or finally sitting seal in that 10 to 15 minutes of quiet by yourself, this episode is for you.

Before we dive in, I want to say if you haven't listened to last week's episode, I'd love for you to go back, give it a listen and enjoy it.

Because we were talking about 1st Samuel 3 and learning about Samuel, learning to recognize the voice of God, and it was such a rich conversation.

And today I want to stay right there in 1st Samuel 2 and 3.

But I also want to zoom in on one single phrase which I've been chewing and mulling on and digesting over these last few weeks.

And this one phrase in particular jumped off the page at me in a way that really has not sunk in before.

And I think it has everything to do with my word this year.

My word for 2026 is behold.

And it's from Psalm 27 in Isaiah 43.

And it's this posture of fixing our gaze, or my gaze of really seeing God's face and being in his presence and understanding that he is moving.

And I think God used that word behold to slow me down enough to behold something that I had been reading right past.

The phrase that captured me and made me behold is Samuel ministered to the Lord.

Now, here's what's interesting.

This isn't said once.

It's not even said twice.

It shows up three times in these two chapters.

And anytime that we see something that's repeated three times in the scripture, it's time to pay attention, because it's very intentional.

And it's really the Holy Spirit saying, I don't want you to miss this, so let me show you what what I mean.

So the first time we see this is in 1st Samuel 2:11, right after Hannah has faithfully brought her young son that she had been praying for.

She brought him to Samuel to live with the priest Eli.

And she had made a vow to God, if you give me a son, I will give him back to you.

And she kept it.

So here she was, this young mom.

She left her little boy there to learn the ways of priesthood.

And in her own saying goodbye, she's giving the Lord this worship.

She's ministering to the Lord herself as she is handing off her son to be mentored by Eli the priest.

And right after that moment of surrender, in 1st Samuel 2, Scripture says, but the child ministered to the Lord before Eli the priest.

Then just a few verses later, in 1st Samuel 2:18, it says, but Samuel ministered to the Lord even as a child wearing a linen ephod.

And then again, we step into chapter three, verse one, and it says, now the boy Samuel ministered to the Lord before Eli.

Three times Samuel ministered to the Lord.

And what comes next?

After years, years of Samuel quietly attending to the Lord in that place God spoke.

The Lord called out to Samuel in the night, and everything begins to shift for him.

Things begin to move.

The voice of God breaks through.

And I don't think that that's a coincidence.

I think there's something about the posture of ministering, ministering to the Lord, this faithful, quiet, consistent attending that creates the conditions for hearing his voice.

And Hannah knew this.

She knew before Samuel did what his identity would be, this minister to the Lord.

And she dedicated him to this purpose because he could, he could even choose it for himself.

Like in this moment, he's just doing what God has called him to do.

Is this ministering to the Lord.

Samuel just lived it day after day.

He was serving, he was attending, he was ministering.

He was watching Eli.

How does he serve the Lord?

So what does minister even mean?

So I did what I always do.

I love to look back at the original meaning of the word.

So I looked up the Hebrew, Hebrew word minister as it's used here, describing Samuel.

And the word is shirath.

And it means to minister, to serve, to attend, to attend.

I love that.

It's not a performance.

It's just showing up.

It's turning your face toward him, being present with him.

And here's where I had to stop and ask myself this honest question.

Because Samuel was a priest, and he was set apart, dedicated for this role from birth by a praying mother who made a vow to God.

His whole life was structured around the temple, around Eli, around these sacred duties of priesthood.

So what does this have to do with me?

What does this have to do with you?

This side of the covenant, who are we to minister to the Lord?

And I love that the Lord led me to 1st Peter 2:9 because it answers that question directly.

This is our kingdom identity.

First Peter 2.

9.

Listen to this.

But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people that you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light, who once were not a people, but are now the people of God who had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.

Did you catch that?

You are a royal priesthood.

In the old Covenant, there were specific designated priests, people who served as priests, and they were the ones who had access.

They were the ones who could enter into these sacred spaces.

But in the new Covenant, because of Jesus, this changes everything.

The veil has been torn, access granted, and our identity now is priest.

Among many of those things that are listed in that verse, what Seymil did as a set apart called priest and later prophet.

You and I are invited into that same posture, not because of anything that we've earned, but because of who we are in Christ.

And I want to sit with these three things from this verse for just a moment because I think they establish something really important for us in our kingdom.

Identity.

First, number one, you are chosen.

You are chosen.

Not randomly selected.

You're not accidentally here.

You are hand picked.

The word chosen carries this idea of being selected out of a larger group for something specific and special.

That's you, that's me.

We didn't wander into the kingdom by accident.

This is like, I've talked about this on the podcast before, but you are chosen, just like in pe.

If you ever had that terrible feeling when you're the last one that's picked for a team, you are the very first one that he's like, yep, I want her on my team.

Isn't that awesome?

The second thing I want you to see in 1st Peter 2.

9 Is that you are a royal priesthood.

You are both royal and priest.

Both of those could be unpacked for days.

You are royalty, my friend.

You are a queen.

You are a king.

You are a priest.

You carry the authority of royalty and the access of the priesthood.

You get to come before God not as this distant subject, but as a beloved child with full access to the father's presence.

Hmm, powerful.

Number three that you can see from First Peter 2.

9 About your identity is you are a holy nation.

And I love this one because it reminds us that this is not just an individual pursuit.

Yes, it's important for individual pursuit, but this is communal.

This is about community.

This is about doing this together.

This is about beholding and this is about ministering.

This is about attending to God.

It's something that we carry as a people, not just as solo seekers.

Our time ministering to our King of Kings affects those around us.

We come together, we are part of a group.

We belong as a holy nation.

Belonging is One of those core human needs on the.

What is that?

Maslow's hierarchy belonging to is like the top, the top need of humanity.

And God knows that we need each other.

And my friend, this is kingdom identity.

This is your kingdom identity.

If you need an identity statement to just stand upon for a season right here, you've got, you've got essentially four things.

I am chosen, I am royal, I am a priest.

I am a priest and I am a part of a holy nation.

Those are four amazing things.

This is who you are before you ever do a single thing.

So what does this actually look like?

Okay, so we've established that we are called to minister to the Lord.

We have the kingdom identity for it, what we just talked about.

But what does that practically look like on a Tuesday, on a Wednesday for you in your day to day life?

And I'm going to be really honest here.

One of the things that I have to remind myself almost daily is that I don't need more information.

I just need more of his presence.

Let me say that again.

I don't need more information.

I just need more of him, of his presence.

And that's countercultural.

Even in Christian spaces are so wired to consume, to learn, to check the box, to do the devotions, listen to the podcast, read the chapter, and none of these things are bad at all.

They're all beautiful things and they're all great tools.

But if we're not careful, and if I'm not careful, we can accumulate a lot of knowledge about God without ever actually encountering him and being vulnerable with him and being intimate with him and ministering to the Lord.

It requires a different posture.

It's a less.

It's less about taking in and more about offering up.

It's about declaring who he is, His Holiness.

If you look at what it says, what the angels say in the throne room around who he is, they continue to just declare holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy.

So ministering to the Lord is.

It's about declaring His Holiness, not because he needs to be reminded, because something shifts within us when we speak what is true out loud.

It's about pouring out our heart to Him.

The messy parts, the honest parts, the parts that we've been holding back because we're not sure he can handle them or he can.

He wants all of those things.

He wants us to come into his presence fully as we are.

We don't have to clean ourselves up to get into this holy place to come and minister to Him.

We can come as we are.

And in that beautiful place.

It says in scripture, praise and thanksgiving are what opens the gates into the heavenly realm.

And what a beautiful place to be in, to sit with that and just honor him, praise him, give him glory.

And what's so hard, and my friend, it is so hard when life is difficult.

And life can be difficult.

And it can be full of grief, it can be full of frustration, it can be full of stress, it can be full of joy, it could be full of all, of all of the emotions and the humanity.

It can be all of those things.

But the most powerful thing is when things are so heavy and hard and we walk into that place and we say, thank you, you are so worthy, you are so holy.

That's where atmospheres shift.

It's about pouring out our heart to Him.

It's about going into the secret place.

I'm gonna do a little plug.

If you have not listened to what is the secret Place in Holistic Hearts Podcast, I encourage you to go back and listen to it because it's really important.

Because that place that Jesus taught us about in Matthew 6, the secret place is where you go in to your private spaces, you close the door and you pray to the Father who sees in secret.

That is where you minister to the Lord.

It's about humbling ourselves to do what we were actually created to do, which is worship.

We are all worshiping something, full stop.

We get to worship our king.

We get to choose to worship Him.

That is the kingdom.

And that's what ultimately what we get to do in eternity is to worship Him.

And that what a beautiful taste of heaven that we get to encounter here right now on earth.

We get to bring heaven on earth as we humble ourselves, as we worship Him.

And here's what I know to be true.

When we choose to fix our eyes and our attention on him, when we behold him, when we minister to him, we are slowly, beautifully being transformed more into his likeness.

And that's what happens in his presence.

We don't have to manufacture change.

We don't have to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.

We don't have to pretend like we have it all together.

We just get to show up and minister to the Lord and He does the rest.

So here's what I want to leave you with this week, friend.

I'm not going to give you a formula.

I'm not going to tell you exactly what ministering to the Lord has to look like for you.

Because honestly, that's between you and Him.

And part of the beauty of this is discovering what it looks like in your own secret place.

I do want to invite you to practice it this week.

Intentionally, even just for five, ten minutes.

Maybe while you're sitting in the carpool line waiting for your kids to come out of school.

Or maybe you have five minutes while your coffee is brewing in the morning.

What does it look like for you to just sit quietly and simply behold his presence?

To minister to the Lord with no agenda, no list, just you and Him.

And maybe it looks like singing a new song from your heart, not a worship playlist, but your own words, your own melody offered up to just Him.

And maybe it looks like serving your family this week with the same honor, love and attentive attentiveness that you would bring before the King of Kings.

Because that too is a worship.

That too is ministering to the Lord.

Whatever it looks like for you, I want you to try it and notice what happens.

Notice if something shifts.

Notice if the space between you and him feels a little thinner and a little bit more alive throughout the day.

Samuel ministered to the Lord for years before God spoke audibly to him in the night.

Now the ministering wasn't a waste of time all of those years until he was a teenager.

It was preparation.

It was formation.

It was quiet faithfulness that made his heart a place where God's voice could land.

This is a practice.

This is a reminding our own hearts who he is, his kingdom, and what an honor it is to minister to Him.

All right, thanks for being here today, friend.

If this episode stirred something in you, I'd love to hear about it.

Come and find me on Instagram at Kristen Fields Chadwick.

Or you can message me, email me at kristin kristenristenfields chadwick.com and let me know what ministering to the Lord looks like for you this week.

And if you haven't already, please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast, leave a review and share this episode with a friend who needs to hear it.

It means the world to me that you are here pressing play listening to this episode and I love you.

Until next time, keep beholding hem.