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"A
Prayer Answered" • 1.15.17 • Calvary Christian
Fellowship, Sunday Morning Service
Intro.
- A crowd of over a million people witnessed
the dedication of the Temple. Two weeks of celebration and feasting have been
completed.
- The crowd has dispersed and life has gotten
back to normal. Everyone has returned to their routine, including the King.
- Before he has the chance to enter into his
next endeavor, the Lord steps in to meet with him. What does He have to say to
the King? What is foremost on His mind? Let's have a look! Verse 1.
Text
• I Kings 9:1-3 : "And it came to pass,
when Solomon had finished building the house of the Lord and the king’s
house, and all Solomon’s desire which he wanted to do, that the Lord appeared to Solomon
the second time, as He had appeared to him at Gibeon. And the Lord said to him: 'I
have heard your prayer and your supplication that you have made before Me; I
have consecrated this house which you have built to put My name there forever,
and My eyes and My heart will be there perpetually." :
Solomon had been concerned with construction for the better part of 20 years.
The Temple and his royal palace had taken 13 years of his life.
- In addition, I Kings 7 reports that Solomon had built the "House Of The
Forest Of Lebanon," the "Hall Of Pillars," the "Hall Of
Judgment" and Pharaoh's Daughter's house.
- If the chapters on the Temple were any
indication, the meticulous nature of construction seemed to consume him during
those years.
- All of Solomon's desire, that which he wanted
to, was complete with the dedication of the Temple. It's time to regroup, to
refocus.
- People like Solomon who achieve such high
levels of success, aren't satisfied to rest on their laurels. His capacity to
be busy has expanded exponentially.
- The timing of God's appearance to Solomon
coincided with this season and Solomon's readiness to hear from the Lord about
his next step.
- As a matter of grace and perfect timing, God
chose to speak with Solomon right after the dedication service was over, as he
had at Gibeon in chapter 3.
- Turn back to chapter 3 and let your eyes roam over the content. As you can see, verse 4 through 9 contains Solomon's request to receive God's wisdom to rule His
people.
- The Lord was pleased and granted His request
and then gave a simple, abbreviated admonition to the King to walk in His ways
to ensure length of days.
- Chapter 3
marked the beginning of his reign. This second appearance tells the same story.
God had heard Solomon's prayer and request that he had made.
- His acknowledgment means that He is in
agreement with the sentiment of Solomon's prayer and would abide by the
requests that have been made.
- He will be the God that forgives and
intercedes on behalf of His people. What a tremendous consideration! The God of
the Universe answers prayer!
- When our prayers are in concert with His
will, His answer will be yes! Alternately, when God says "no," we can
be sure that our prayers need attention.
- Are we praying out from a misguided notion?
Are we assuming in prayer that God must limit His response to the few outcomes
that we can imagine?
- Often, I've found in my own prayers, that I attempt
to limit God to my own suggestions. I often find myself frustrated but soon
realize that my prayers are my attempt to gain my will, not His.
- Soon, we all learn to pray very differently
than we had at first, as He aligns our hearts to His will. That is a slow and
lengthy process that every Christian must learn to embrace.
- When the King prayed about the Temple, he hit
a home run! God's answer resounded, "I have consecrated this house."
God had put His stamp of approval upon it!
- He had "consecrated it" meaning
that He would consider the Temple sacred, set apart exclusively for Himself.
- Solomon saw the Temple this way, as did the
people who worked on it, but if God did not look upon it this way, it would
stand empty. God's opinion of the Temple was what mattered!
- God has endorsed the Temple and allowed it to
bear His Name! His eyes and heart would be there perpetually! The NLT puts it
like this: "I will always watch over it, for it is dear to my
heart."
- Immediately one is struck by that awesome
promise and it's unconditioned basis. He has put His Name there forever and His
eye and heart will be there perpetually, forever!
- In Solomon's time, it is the site of the
Temple. In Christ's time, Jerusalem will be the site of the crucifixion. In a
time to come and I pray it will be soon, it will be the site of Christ's
return!
- No wonder God's heart is there! The Temple
foreshadows the spiritual communion that God's people have with Him. The Cross
ratifies it and His return will make it final!
- Jerusalem is the capital city of God and it
will always be so according to Him. That certainty stands in stark contrast to
what He says next to Solomon. Verse 4.
• I Kings 9:4,5 : "Now if you walk
before Me as your father David walked, in integrity of heart and in
uprightness, to do according to all that I have commanded you, and if you keep
My statutes and My judgments, then I will establish the throne of your
kingdom over Israel forever, as I promised David your father, saying, ‘You
shall not fail to have a man on the throne of Israel.’ " :
Notice that big "if" in verse 4.
- God's heart is firm toward Jerusalem, but how
He responds to Solomon depends upon Solomon's response to Him!
- Having had the benefit of looking at chapter 3, you realize that God is repeating
and expanding upon what He has already disclosed to Solomon. This is nothing
new.
- After all these years and all of this
activity which has issued in God's presence manifesting in the nation of
Israel, God still has to address the same issue of Solomon's heart!
- 20 years and it's the same message. If
Solomon will walk in the same manner as David walked before Him, God would
establish Solomon's throne forever.
- That is a mighty promise to be confident in.
This is the way that God speaks about what He will do. Consider that with
regard to His promises.
- First, He exists and is True. He cannot lie.
Because He is omnipotent and eternal, He can make promises which extend into
eternity and keep them!
- Solomon could not effect this promise. He
will pass away. On the other hand, God will never cease to be God! He can never
fail.
- God promises to maintain Solomon's posterity
and assures him that His house would be honored well past his own life. He only
needed to walk as David did. What did that entail?
- God spells this out clearly, objectively for
Solomon to see. We are benificiaries as well!
- He notes first that David walked in
"integrity of heart." Integrity speaks of honesty in one's
interactions and wholeness in one's inner person.
- David's lips claimed whole hearted devotion
and that was true from the center of His soul. God continues by describing
David's walk as one that was marked by "uprightness."
- The idea, metaphorically speaking, relates to
a straight course. The concept is that the upright will follow a predictably
holy and righteous path in life.
- If God were to look away for a second,
something we know He won't, He would return His gaze to find the upright right
where He expected them to be!
- May I ask you: Would your life be
characterized by this kind of integrity before God? Could it be said of you
that you were upright, predictable in your practice of holiness?
- May God grant us the grace that might make it
so! He moves away from David and commands Solomon to do all that He commanded
him to do.
- Again, we see the call of God to heed His
Word. "Keep my statutes and judgments."
- This had been David's greatest treasure!
Solomon, if he is to have the same sort of success, must follow the Word of God
with the same vigilance!
- It must be said repeatedly: Whether in the
palace of great men or the shack of poor men, the foundation for a godly life
is laid by adherence to the Word of God! There is no substitute!
- God's assessment of your walk with Him will
be directly related to your walk in the Word! How can you be whole without His
Word? How can you be upright with His Word?
- How can you possibly know His commands, much
less obey them, if you aren't steeped in them!? I pray that you are hearing Him
speak this to you.
- Integrity, uprightness and faithfulness to
God's Word will ensure Solomon that he will enter into the promise of God and
it will be the ground upon which you walk with Him as well!
- What confidence Solomon could have in the
promise of God! He did not have to guess at what God's will was for his life.
He knew intimately!
- God was setting before Him the path that
would lead him right to the blessing that He intended for him! Now, isn't it
telling that God has to say this at all to Solomon.
- Solomon has just seen the visible
manifestation of God's presence in the Temple.
- He has just prayed before the people of God,
calling upon God to act as the God that He was. And yet, I feel that God is
reminding Solomon of these things because He sees something.
- Solomon was impressed with the ceremony and
the pomp and the excitement, but had to be brought back to the reality that God
looks upon our hearts and the reality of our lives!
- Maybe this would be a pertinent question to
ask you. If all that you did for the Lord was erased, what would be left? Who
would you be? What would He see?
- Clearly, Solomon's public life, his activity
and his prayer, the longest of the Bible, tells a story to the watching world,
but the inward reality is what God seeks!
- This is why there is more to say. "If
you do" leads to great blessing. But what Solomon did not? How could that
be possible? Sadly, it was and there were dire consequences. Verse 6
• I
Kings 9:6,7 : "But if you or your sons at all turn from
following Me, and do not keep My commandments and My statutes which I have set
before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will cut off
Israel from the land which I have given them; and this house which I have
consecrated for My name I will cast out of My sight. Israel will be a proverb
and a byword among all peoples."
- Don't you wonder how such a thing could be
possible? After all that he has seen and attested to, there is still the need
for a direct and stern warning not to turn away from following Him!
- This is utterly baffling and yet, because of
our fallen nature it is the story of our condition.
- Our hearts inclined away from the Lord from
birth! Even as Christians, it's a constant battle and struggle to surrender to
God!
- By His grace alone, we walk closely with Him
and yield ourselves to His will for our lives. In Solomon's time, he is to
understand the consequences of turning from the Lord.
- I wonder if you have ever thought about how
much more stable your faith would be if you lived in Biblical times and
witnessed the miraculous works like we've observed in our text.
- Take it from the Israelites and now from King
Solomon: The Lord's people still needed to hold onto and walk according to
their faith!
- Believe it or not, we have greater advantages
than they did! We have the Indwelling Spirit of God to guide our hearts toward
the Lord.
- These Old Testament saints had miraculous
events and powerful testimonies, but they did not have the Indwelling of the
Holy Spirit!
- Solomon, the King who has just witnessed the
presence of God physically fill the Temple. The Man who watched His Father
follow God until his death. That man needed to be warned!
- Don't turn from following the Lord! Don't
turn from following my Word! Following the Lord is synonymous with following
His Word! They go hand in hand!
- God had given it to Solomon. If Solomon or
his posterity forsook His Word, they would inevitably turn to idolatry. That is
the danger of not worshipping the true and living God!
- We are wired to worship and if we do not
worship the true and living God, we will worship something inferior. In
Israel's day, there were gods like Molech and Baal.
- Today, our gods are sports, recreation, our
kids or our careers. Ultimately, we worship whatever we want to worship, which
means that we worship ourselves!
- What a terrible trade to make? You serve
these other "gods." You assign value to them and for what? No return
of any kind!
- To go from serving the True and Living God,
to serving the interests of gods that aren't anything but an extension of our
own ego is a recipe for spiritual disaster!
- For the King of Israel, the leader of the
people of Israel, and his descendants, this would lead to unimagineable ruin
not just for the royal family but for the nation that it leads!
- Your decision to worship God or not worship
God won't simply determine your own place. It will affect every person that you
love!
- If the Kings turned from God Israel would be
displaced, cut off like a piece of a garment from their land. The idolatry and
the foul things that came from it were the reason for Canaan's loss.
- Additionally, God lets Solomon know that The
Temple would be cast out of His sight. He would no longer allow His presence to
fill a place where He was not honored!
- If that happened, Israel's name would go from
highly exalted to being identified as a synonym for mockery and ridicule among
all the nations! They would be a one word metaphor for ruin.
• I Kings 9:8,9 : "And as for this
house, which is exalted, everyone who passes by it will be astonished and will
hiss, and say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land and to this house?’ Then they will
answer, ‘Because they forsook the Lord their God, who brought their fathers out of
the land of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, and worshiped them and served
them; therefore the Lord has brought all this calamity on them.’" :
On the day that God spoke this to Solomon, the Temple stood as the most lofty,
high place upon the Earth.
- What other building could say that it housed
the very presence of the true and living God? -
However true that was on that day, if Solomon's children did not follow after
the Lord, the house would be desolate and a ruin, so much so that it would only
remain as a conversation piece.
- People would pass by only to be impressed by
it's ruin. They would be "astonished." Marked by silence, it is quite
literally a state of speechlessness. "How could this happen?"
- That will be the remark of those who were
friendly to Israel. Shock will overcome them and their minds will continually
wonder at how far the mighty have fallen.
- How could such a lofty place be brought so
low? It confounds the mind and baffles the spirit.
- The enemies of Israel will have the same
emotional response, but will then "hiss." The word indicates a
mocking whistle of sorts.
- When they consider why the Temple lies in
ruin, there will only be one answer. There will be no speculation. It will be
clear.
- Those that pass by will know that God's
people will have left the Lord their God! It will not be that the Lord left
them. That is a vital distinction.
- The God of Israel had committed to the people
of Israel when He brought them out of Egypt. We mentioned last week that Exodus 2:23-25 includes God's
acknowledgement of them.
- God will not be the One that leaves Israel.
If Solomon's descendants didn't follow the Lord, they would be the ones that
will have turned from him to worship and serve other gods.
- They will have fastened themselves to other
gods and that could only end in God allowing calamity to fall upon them. That
is the story of the people of Israel.
- When they are blessed, they would be blessed
to a degree that demanded that people understand God's involvement.
- Unfortunately, the same would be true in the
opposite direction! When they left their God, they would be under such a curse
that only God's wrath could explain it!
- With such a warning in place, you wonder how
things could go bad and yet, for the students of history, you know that it did!
Conclusion
- God has gone
to great lengths to extend His grace to Solomon, to keep him from falling away.
He has appeared to him twice with virtually the same message.
- His grace
moves toward us in the same way, warning us week after week, to turn from our
sin, knowing that it will be the source of our ruin if we continue in it.
- His grace has
reached to such a level that He allowed His Son to absorb His wrath in
Jerusalem. People walked by and stared in astonishment, hissing out their
insults upon Him.
- Jesus Christ,
like a lamb, went silently to the slaughter and stood between heaven and earth.
- His death and
resurrection ensures His people that they will never experience a moment of His
wrath, but will in fact, be saved from it!
- As a result
of His Son's work, the Father's eye and heart will continually be upon the
saved for their eternal blessing!
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