Well, good morning, Menlo Church! So good to see you, so glad to be with you today. Whether you're joining us here at Menlo Park, one of our campuses in Mountain View, San Mateo, Saratoga, or joining us online, we are so glad that you're here with us.
We are almost finished with a series that we've been doing over the course of this summer called "The Rest of the Story," where we've been digging into maybe a version of these Bible stories that, even if you grew up in church or you didn't, you probably heard some level of Bible story at the level you were ready to learn it, but we didn't always keep learning it as we grew. And so, the thing that we've sort of discovered together this summer is that if you don't let your faith grow up with you, we will often grow out of it along the way.
And so, we're going to hopefully over the course of these last couple of weeks identify a person and then a really important topic to help narrow what it looks like for us to grow in our pursuit of God even as we grow older and grow up in our maturity.
Now, before we begin, I'm going to pray for us. And if you've never been here before or never heard me speak, I pray kneeling. The reason that I do that is because this propensity to create a gap between what I learn and how I live, that is a propensity that lives in all of us, and that propensity, that gap between what I've learned and how I live, we are going to see very clearly in the person we're going to study together today. Would you pray with me?
God, we do humble ourselves right now that no matter how many degrees are next to our name, no matter what our job is, no matter how impressive our family looks, no matter how incredible our job, life accomplishments, pursuits could be to so many, you see us for who we really are. And so, God, would you help us to look in the mirror of Your Word to be able to identify those places that we might direct our focus to You anew? God, we love You, we pray that You'd be with us now. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.
Alright, I wonder, have you ever seen one of these before? This is a selfie stick. And we generally think about these as people that are kind of annoying and they take selfies, but with bigger perspectives. And a selfie, if you're not aware, which, like, I think maybe you traveled here in a time machine, glad you're here. It is a self-portrait usually taken with your cell phone. I didn't make that up; it's actually in the dictionary now, that's how ubiquitous it is in our culture.
And just as a public service announcement, I just want to say this. This is for bonus; it's for free. If you're an iPad photo person, stop. Like, just for the rest of us, we're just all really tired of it. Your phone has better cameras, and even if not, like, have somebody share a picture with you. It's really ridiculous.
But here's the thing. People take selfies everywhere, right? Like, all the time, everywhere. And tragically, hundreds of people have died from taking selfies. And many more have been injured because people who want that rare photo, who need to capture that thing that they need to capture, sometimes their critical thinking and risk assessment calculation turns off in order to get that photo that they've always wanted.
And see, the thing is, before you judge those people and assume, "How could anyone be that stupid?" just wait a second, because I think we have our own selfie ways. You probably have some areas where you know better, but you don't live better. And the rift that gets created inside of a lot of us is the rift between what we've learned, maybe a lesson that we learned and applied early in our life, and then somewhere along the way, we felt like we graduated from that lesson. We felt like, "Well, that served me well when I was that age or in that season, but now I don't need to do it anymore."
It's why the principles that maybe helped you get financially secure and kept you there for a long time, that if you're not careful and you decided you graduated from, you can find yourself in a really difficult, maybe even illegal place financially.
Maybe for you, it's the things that you did early in a relationship or early in a marriage, that along the way, you thought, "That's fine, we're doing well. I don't really need to do that stuff anymore." That doesn't end very well, does it? Eventually, your marriage ends up getting further and further fizzled towards a place that you thought, "I thought we were better than this."
It's often how areas of your life that you're frustrated by can become more painful because, instead of doing the work and following the lessons we know to be true in our life, we take quick-fix shortcuts. And they may help avoid a difficult conversation or paying the price for a decision you really should pay for. You avoid that, but the long-term pain that comes with it is unavoidable.
It's easy to justify the shortcuts. But whether you're a Christian or not, this verse from Proverbs in the Bible probably rings true for you: "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death."
See, these words were written by the wisest man who's ever lived, Solomon, who God loved and gave him the ability to ask anything that he wanted, and God would grant the request. And so, this request of all the different things that he could have asked for from Solomon sounded like this: "Now, Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David, but I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties. Your servant is here among the people You have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. So give Your servant a discerning heart to govern Your people and to distinguish between right and wrong, for who is able to govern this great people of Yours?"
What an amazingly humble request, right? What a great picture of humility. How incredible that Solomon started that way. And the text tells us that God was so pleased that He didn't just stop at giving Solomon what he'd asked for, wisdom, but He also gave him unparalleled wealth and honor too.
And for lots of us - if we grew up in church or we heard Bible stories - that's pretty much where the story of Solomon ended. Because, like, the rest of the story didn't feel appropriate. But the rest of the story of Solomon's life gets more complicated, it gets more complex, it gets more challenging. We see in Solomon what we often avoid seeing in ourselves, and that is lessons stop being learned when they stop being lived.
It's so easy for us to assume that something we know intellectually and we did at some point in the past is enough. But you stopped really knowing that lesson when you stopped living that lesson. We can't rest on the lessons that we've learned and lived in the past if we stop living them. Our life and the consequences of our decisions, they will reflect the lost lessons along the way. And some of you, you could tell that story. That's your story.
And as we consider Solomon, we have to look at the way he ended up in the position of King of Israel at all, and there was a king-sized compromise that got him there. See, every other nation had an earthly king, and Israel was a totally different structure on purpose.
God wanted them to know that He was their permanent and perfect King. And really, as good as that maybe sounds to us today, like, "Oh yeah, that God could just be king and that we wouldn't have frail and fallen human beings doing this," that sounds amazing. It was pretty frustrating at the time for the Jewish people. You see, as we talked about last week, they were in a context where they were in nearly constant conflict with other nations for their very existence. And it felt like, especially for other nations looking in, that basically there was no grown-up supervising and ruling Israel.
Maybe for you, you can relate. If you work on a team and you've had to work without a leader for a while, or maybe for you, you found somebody, you're a hiring manager, and you talked yourself into hiring that person, that candidate. And it turned out, the person you thought you hired isn't the person you hired, as it often happens, right?
God was so nervous, not nervous like human beings, but He was like, "Hey guys, I know how this works best. Let Me actually be the one who can do this without frailty or fallenness." But Israel kept asking for a king like the other nations had. And eventually, God, to teach them a lesson, gave them what they wanted in the form of a guy named Saul.
And this is how Saul was described: "There was a man of Benjamin whose name was Kish, the son of Abiel, son of Zeror, son of Becherath, son of Aphiah, a Benjaminite, a man of wealth. And he had a son whose name was Saul, a handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he. From his shoulders upward, he was taller than any of the people."
Let me just tell you this. If your resume basically says you're tall and good-looking, there are probably some problems with your credentials. That's what we find in Saul. He was hired because he looked the part, but he almost immediately failed. And then God picked someone who did not look the part in David, the runt of the litter of his brothers, who would ultimately step in. And he was capable to do things different and more than Saul ever could. David was far from perfect, right? He was not a perfect person. But the main attribute that we see of David, even with his faults, was that he was a man after God's own heart. So David's leadership lasted much longer and went much further than Saul's.
But he, too, took shortcuts from God's plans for his life. See, David had areas of personal compromise throughout his life. But using this sort of power that he had to sexually exploit Bathsheba and ultimately have her husband murdered definitely topped the list of his moral compromises. And they were compromises that really Israel never recovered from.
So, the third generation of the Israelite King is David's son Solomon. And while you'd hope that maybe Solomon would have learned the lesson from his predecessor, he feels like every time they colored outside the lines of what God said, it didn't go well, maybe I'll do it differently. He does not do that. And we see this portrait of someone who was highly successful and deeply flawed at the same time. And we should pay attention because probably we have more in common than we think we do. We should take the warning here that if God Himself wanted to be the king of the nation that He had specifically selected to take special care of as a part of the bigger plan and story we talked about last week, to save the entire world, and the people still rebelled so that they could create leaders they could idolize, I think we might want to be careful.
I mean, we would never prioritize the individual nation over the collective good of the kingdom of God being made available to all nations, right? Like, we would never do that. We would never, you've heard of people doing that, we would never do that. We would never vilify people who simply vote different than us, right? Like, you've heard about people. We would never do that.
See, we should have views and we should vote deep convictions, but we have to be careful about where those come from. We must be careful to view our politics and the rest of our lives through the lens of our faith and not the other way around. The White House is not heaven, and the president is not God. As important as government is, it's not the most important governing authority in the life of a follower of Jesus. God is.
So, with all of that as a backdrop, where was Solomon's major compromise? Well, it was around marriage. Well, marriage is and a lot of national allies with benefits, as we'll see in a second.
Last week, we looked at the clear biblical centerpiece of what marriage is described as from the book of Genesis. We read this: "Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This was God sharing in the creation story His original design for marriage. But it wasn't the last time that God gave instructions around marriage.
During the reign of Solomon, we are reminded of another component of marriage from Jewish law. It says, "You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods."
Now, remember the context. God was trying to preserve His people and their faith for this bigger story, so in this clarification, as offensive as it sounds, God was saying you are not allowed to intermarry with people from other nations. And it was really less about the geographic difference, and it was more because of their pluralistic religious context and God's plan for Israel.
And if you're wondering, "Well, what does that mean? How does that apply today? What does that mean?" The New Testament builds on this and says that if you're a serious, committed follower of Jesus, you are supposed to attach your life to and marry a serious, committed follower of Jesus. That's how this works itself out today.
And so, for Solomon, he violated these standards in a couple of different ways. Marriage as the only context in which sexual fulfillment was supposed to be achieved, well, he had 300 concubines. So, he didn't marry those ones; they were just in his harem. And then, in addition to that, he had 700 wives. If you think you've gotten into a pickle with your significant other, can you imagine a thousand of them? That was Solomon.
Now, before you assume that Solomon just couldn't control himself, let me explain his logic, flawed as it might have been. Solomon used this vast group of women to create something that we still have today. It's called mutually assured destruction. I'm not saying in your marriage; I'm saying in the world.
See, for a long time in the modern era, it was related to military consequences, especially nuclear armament. If one nation pushed the domino through partnerships and military power, it meant that if they weren't careful, there would be this ongoing ripple effect that could end very, very badly. And now, what used to be a mutually assured destruction militarily also includes mutually assured destruction economically.
So, if a key nation decides to do something out of step, attack another nation unprovoked, etc., then we impose sanctions, which are an attempt to bring pain without war, to hurt their economy. None of that existed in Solomon's day. And so, if he could create a number of domestic entanglements with all of these women and the nations that they represented, then perhaps he could avoid war. That was the compromise that Solomon made.
But the warning of syncretism, or blending of their faith, that's exactly what happened. And I'm sure that it started with Solomon justifying it and going, "Well, I'm going to prevent war and I can handle it. Their influence won't take over our faith as a nation." But he was wrong. And usually, the compromise that we make where we think we can handle it, we're wrong too, eventually.
So, as we reflect on this with Solomon, here's a question for you. Where has your capacity outgrown your character? That's usually the warning light that we're ready to make a compromise, ready to embrace a decision that we will regret. See, our capacity will often get us in the room. It will often get you into the job. It maybe even will get you into the relationship. It will get you into the room. But your character will keep you there. Who you really are when no one is looking, that's where our capacity is supposed to flow from. But we live in a world where character is almost completely ignored for the sake of capacity.
Maybe it's making a decision outside of your marriage that you can justify, right? You deserve it. He or she, they stopped paying attention to you years ago. It won't hurt anyone. And well, maybe I hope you're not adding a thousand significant others to your life like Solomon. You are still tripping into his same decisions, remember, lessons stop being learned when they stop being lived.
And the longer that we follow Jesus, the easier it is for us to justify our compromises. Solomon knew better; he really did. He actually wrote the book on wisdom; we call it Proverbs in the Hebrew scriptures. But it didn't prevent him from getting tripped up in this pattern of compromise. Without a doubt, the headline of Solomon's life and leadership was the temple that pride built.
Not only did Israel relentlessly ask God for an earthly king, they also wanted a physical temple. God had used a tabernacle or a tent that was portable; it would move with them and God's presence inside of it. But they wanted a physical temple because all the other nations had it. Are you sensing a trend? I'm sure to God it sounds like when your kids may be saying to you or you say to your parents, "But all my friends have one!" They're saying, "God, everybody has a temple. We want to worship You there." And God was regularly speaking through His prophets about all the different ways that His people could worship Him and see Him. But eventually, just like with the king, God knew it would take them getting what they wanted to realize they didn't really want it.
Can you relate? What's something maybe that you kept pushing for that you eventually discovered wasn't actually good for you when you got it? Maybe you took a job for the wrong reasons only to discover it wasn't what you hoped it would be. The relationship that you knew would end badly, but sort of in the infatuation phase, you moved forward anyway. For some of you, it's the impulse purchase that you just made that you're not even sure how you're going to afford, but you just had to have it.
There's a fine line between persevering when we face resistance and pushing through when we know it's not wise. That's why solid community and counsel around us is so important. Who are the people in your life that you live life vulnerably with, that are close enough to you to not just see your decisions but they know your motivations? People who can say to you, "Can we talk about the way you're speaking to them? Can we talk about the decisions that you're making financially? Can we talk about what's going on with work?"
Do you have people in your life that can do that? If you don't have people like that, you should pay even closer attention to Solomon. Because when we find ourselves in isolation and we only develop transactional relationships in our lives, whether we are royalty or not, we are set up to fall. And it is so easy to get there.
Solomon's leadership skill and deep resources of wisdom allowed Israel to experience material wealth, regional reputation, and societal stability at a level that Israel had never seen before. But because it was all done through compromise, Israel has never seen it again. It was unsustainable.
The book of 2 Chronicles describes the temple that Solomon was able to build as 180 feet long, 90 feet wide, and 50 feet high at its highest point. It was a 20-story tall building. This place was something that Israel believed they were doing for God, but God never needed it. God used it, and it played an important role in the history of Israel, but it was like the idea of an earthly king, a compromise. God was trying to help His people. He was trying to help His people to see that He was different on purpose.
See, the thing is, what we see with Solomon is how painful a life that is lived for God more than with God can really be. A life full of religious activity but no longer in proximity to the God that it is for. The history behind the construction of the temple, the expansion of Israel's industry, and the vast international partnerships that Solomon was responsible for is worth your attention, especially if you've never studied it before. And especially with all of his flaws.
And so, if you'd love to study it more, or you're kind of just interested now that I've lifted up the lid a little bit on Solomon's life, there's a great book that I'd recommend called "King Solomon: The Temptations of Money, Sex, and Power" by Philip Reichen. It's a great resource. And I didn't just pick it because the author's name is Phil, I promise. It's genuinely a good book. And in it, you will see the progression of Solomon's regression. You'll see how it started so amazingly well, and how it started to come undone.
And if you think that can't happen to you, that is the danger zone. Because it can happen to all of us. And that's the problem of pride. It will convince us that we are exempt from its consequences, even as we begin experiencing them. What we usually do is just blame everyone and everything else besides ourselves.
Proverbs is a book that many people are familiar with. And now that you know a little bit more about Solomon, it may give you a different perspective as you read the different Proverbs in the collection. Passages like, "All the ways of a man are pure in his own heart, or in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the spirit." Like, self-deception is possible for any of us. Or I wonder if Solomon wrote this one with tears in his eyes as he wrote it to his son: "He who commits adultery lacks sense; he who does it destroys himself." And for Solomon, he's reflecting on this over the course of doing it thousands of times.
But there's another book he wrote. It's called Ecclesiastes. And there's probably no other book in the Hebrew scriptures that is more immediately relevant for Silicon Valley. After achieving everything, his project was fully funded, his startup went public, it was amazing; he had achieved stuff that no one had ever seen before. He reflected it in the book of Ecclesiastes.
And the most fundamental idea that we find in this book is that a life based on and full of material success will leave you empty. Because life without God is a vapor, and the kind of living that we do without God is all vanity or what we would describe today as performative. There's nothing behind it.
Now earlier, I offered you three questions to help you diagnose whether you're living like Solomon, who lived the idea that lessons stop being learned when they stop being lived. And it's so hard sometimes to see if we're doing that. So I want to just give you these three questions. You can write them down, take a picture, but the first one was, "Where are you living for God more than with God?" Where are you living for God more than with God? For some of you, this is areas of your life where you know the right answer and your spiritual activity is supreme, but your proximity to God has drifted quite a bit.
You actually having affections directed toward Him, time with Him, meaningful connection with God has faded dramatically. Be careful; those are red flags. Second, where has your capacity outgrown your character? Where in your life would you say, "You know what, I know that I get all these chances to do all these things, whether that's at work or at home. Maybe that's with friends; maybe that's in church." But you know if people knew where you really were when nobody was looking, your character needs help.
And the great news of the Gospel is that you have not gone too far. God still wants to meet you there. He's not done with you. But the first step is acknowledging it. And then, third, where are you assuming God's approval of your plans? We all do this. We all do this. We go, "Well, God definitely wants me to have that. God definitely wants me to do that." And here's the underlying lie that our culture has taught us. This is why we think that God approves of our plans, because we go, "Well, God definitely wants me to be happy."
I would love for you to show me the verse in the Bible that says that. God is so much more interested in your holiness than your happiness. And doing the work of changing you from the inside is so important because happiness is fickle. What will make you happy today and what will make you happy tomorrow are different things. And so, if God's north star is your happiness, that is a circumstantial landmine. He has something so much better and long-term for you.
So, there may be some things you assume God approves of, but as you learn to walk closer with Him, you're going to discover He does not. The location of the Jewish temple, the second of which was destroyed in the first century, it's now called the Temple Mount. It is likely the most disputed and valuable piece of real estate on the planet, even with the temple no longer on it.
There's one part left of the original Temple Mount that was this incredible component that has incredible significance for the Jewish people. It's called the Wailing Wall. Now, people travel to Jerusalem, and when they visit the Western Wall, it serves as a reminder for their confidence in God fulfilling His promises, that He really has conquered death for you and me. And they'll pray there.
Now, I can't bring you to the Temple Mount today, but I want to take just a moment for you to consider this space, the seat that you're in this moment, as we talk to God personally. We've done this practice over the course of the summer, on and off called Lectio Divina, where we try to bring ourselves to a different place.
The reason that God was so interested and so concerned, and wanted to make sure that the Jewish people understood what the Tabernacle was all about, was that God never wanted to be seen as living in just one place. God is omnipresent; He's all places. And actually, if you're wondering what the temple today is, if you're a follower of Jesus, or you choose to become one, every time you pray, you know what that feels like.
And so, for our last few minutes together, I'd love to pray with you, as together we think about and reflect on this powerful idea that because of what Jesus did for you, not only did He secure eternity someday, He secured the power for you to pray in the temple of the Holy Spirit today. Would you pray with me?
God, there are so many different things competing for our attention. But for just a moment, God, would You place us at the Wailing Wall? Would You let us hear the prayers of our brothers and sisters who have made the pilgrimage? Would You help us to hear the prayers of Jewish men and women who are praying many times for the coming Messiah that we believe You have already come? Would You help us hear the choruses over the centuries of what You have listened to in the prayers of Your people, that You were faithful then and You are faithful now?
And that God, when we think back and remember in our own life, wherever we're thinking about compromising, wherever maybe we're reflecting on compromises we've already made, would You draw us back to Yourself? Would You help us to find the sweet joy of following You, with consciences cleansed by Your Spirit, informed by Your Word, and empowered by You? It's in Jesus' name, amen.
We have the opportunity now to celebrate the Lord's Supper, to take part in communion together. If you're watching online, feel free to grab some juice, a little piece of bread or a cracker so that we can celebrate together. If you're a follower of Jesus Christ, whether you're a part of Menlo Church or not, you're welcome to take part in communion.
And hopefully on your way in, you picked up some of these little communion cups. If not, just raise your hand and one of our host team will make sure you get one of these. But we celebrate the sacrament as a reminder of what Jesus did so that we could enter into the temple, so that we could come before God directly just as we are, that Jesus sacrificed His own body, He gave His own blood, so that we could be forgiven and know God's grace.
The night that He was betrayed, Jesus was gathered with His closest friends, with His disciples, and they shared a meal together. He took bread, He gave thanks to God, and He broke it. And He said, "This is My body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me." And I invite you to take the vial and just turn it over to visit the wafers on top and peel off the top and take the wafer as a way of remembering, as a sign of our receiving that grace that Jesus has made available for us.
on Nov 05, 2023
