This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

I want to welcome you to day two of week two of our Look Through First Kings.
We're still in chapter eight of First Kings today as we're talking about
dedication. Yesterday we talked about the fact that dedication includes
declaration.

You tell someone else, sacrifice, you give something that is precious or useful
to you to God. That's part of what it means to be dedicated. That's what we
learned from Solomon's dedication of the temple in this eighth chapter.

Today we learn a third and fourth thing about what it means to be dedicated. The
third thing we learn is dedication involves praise. You praise him for his
faithfulness.

There is a certain aspect of praise that increases, that strengthens your
dedication to the Lord. And it's not just thanking God for his blessings,
although that's important, or for his good gifts, or for helping you through
that circumstance, that situation. Those are all important.

But there is this aspect of praise that you see in verse 15 and also verse 56 of
chapter eight that are crucial to dedication. In verse 15, Solomon says, "Praise
be to the Lord, the God of Israel, who with his own hand has fulfilled what he
promised with his own mouth to my father David. " And then down in verse 56,
"Praise be to the Lord, who has given rest to his people Israel just as he
promised.

Not one word has failed of all the good promises that he gave through his
servant Moses. " Solomon praises God. He says, "He is a God who keeps his
promises.

He is a God not one word has failed of what he said. " The specific praise that
grows out of our dedication and grows into greater dedication is the praise of
thanking God for his faithfulness, thanking God that he is trustworthy, thanking
God that he keeps his promises. It's a praise that recognizes that all that you
have comes as a result of God keeping his promises in your life, of his
faithfulness in your life.

It's the kind of praise that recognizes you can be dedicated to God because God
is dedicated to you. That's his faithfulness. God is dedicated to you.

He is dedicated to your joy, to your peace, to your growth. God himself has
dedicated himself to your personal fulfillment. You becoming all that he wants
you to be in Christ.

How dedicated is he? Look at the cross. Look at the cross.

Romans 8 says, "He who did not spare his own son, how will he not also with him
freely give us all things? " So when you think of dedication, when you think of
giving to God, part of the motivation, the strength of dedication in my life, in
your life, is recognizing God's faithfulness to you. You will not find a
circumstance in your life where he will not be faithful.

He'll be faithful to you through the circumstance that you're going through
right now, what you're facing right now. That's part of being dedicated. And
then we learn a fourth lesson in this day of dedication, this great, great day
of dedication.

In order to be dedicated, you need to trust God. Trust God with your everyday
needs, and it's really the lesson of humility. You trust God day by day, every
day.

I want you to listen with me to this prayer of Solomon that comes in the middle
of this day of dedication. It is one of the most amazing prayers of dedication
in the entire Bible, and you need to hear it and take it in and soak it in. So
listen to what he prayed that day, because it teaches you humility.

It teaches you and I how to trust God with our everyday needs. Listen to what
Solomon prayed. Verse 22, this prayer starts, "Then Solomon stood before the
altar of the Lord, in front of the whole assembly of Israel, spread out his
hands towards heaven and said, 'O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you
in heaven above or on earth below.

You who keep your covenant of love with your servants, who continue
wholeheartedly in your way, you have kept your promise to your servant David, my
father. With your mouth you have promised, and with your hand you have fulfilled
it, as it is today. Now, Lord, God of Israel, keep for your servant David, my
father, the promises that you made to him when you said, 'You shall never fail
to have a man to sit before me on the throne of Israel, if only your sons are
careful in all they do to walk before me as you have done.

' Now, O God of Israel, let your word that you have promised your servant David,
my father, come true. But will God really dwell on this earth? The heavens, even
the highest heaven, cannot contain you, how much less this temple I have built.

Yet, give attention to your servant's prayer and his plea for mercy. O Lord, my
God, hear the cry and the prayer of your servant that your servant is praying in
your presence this day. May your eyes be opened towards this temple night and
day, the place of which you have said, 'My name shall be there.

' Hear the prayer your servant prays towards this place. Hear the supplication
of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray towards this place.
Hear from heaven your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive.

When a man wrongs his neighbor and is required to take an oath and he comes and
swears the oath before your altar in this temple, then hear from heaven and act.
Judge between your servants, condemning the guilty and bringing down on his own
head what he has done. Declare the innocent not guilty, and so establish his
innocence.

When your people Israel have been defeated by an enemy because they've sinned
against you, and when they turn back to you and they confess your name, praying
and making supplication to you in this temple, then hear from heaven and forgive
the sin of your people Israel and bring them back to the land you gave to their
fathers. This is a very long prayer. I'm not going to read every verse in it,
but let me just skip down and tell you.

In verse 35 he says, "When the heavens are shut up and there is no rain, then
hear from heaven and answer the need. " Verse 37, "When famine or plague comes
to the land, then hear from heaven and answer that need. " 41, "As for the
foreigner, when he comes and prays toward this temple, then hear from heaven and
answer that need.

" Verse 44, "When your people go to war against their enemies, hear from heaven
and answer that need. " And verse 46, "When they sin against you and you give
them over to the enemy who takes them captive, then hear from heaven and answer
that need. " And then down in verse 52, "May your eyes be open to your servant's
plea and the plea of your people Israel.

May you listen to them whenever they cry out for you. For you single them out
from all the nations of the world to be your own inheritance, just as you
declared through your servant Moses when you, O sovereign Lord, brought our
fathers out of Egypt. " I have to tell you, I enjoy this prayer, Solomon's
Prayer.

With all the tremendously significant and high sounding things that he could
have prayed at this moment, he chose instead to focus on a very practical kind
of prayer. He talked to God about what would be happening in the temple, and he
said, "God, when this happens, hear from heaven. " He says it again and again
and again and again.

Hear from heaven and meet people's needs. "Lord, let this temple meet the needs
of your servants as they pray, of someone who's been wronged by a neighbor, of
your people when they are in defeat, of the country when there is no rain, of us
when we are besieged by enemies or plagues, or when we have sinned, or of the
foreigner who comes to pray, or of the people who are at war, the people when
they're held captive. Hear from heaven.

" Solomon dedicated the temple that day to the needs of the disappointed and the
defeated, those besieged by sin and loneliness, those involved in the battles
and the struggles of life. One of the reasons I really like Solomon's Prayer is
when we say dedication, too many times we get sort of super spiritual with it.
We make dedication the most impractical of things.

We pray in ways, we talk in ways that could never be lived because they don't
even touch life. Dedication seems to be made up of myths and fables and pipe
dreams rather than the reality of how God touches our lives, but Solomon prays
about the reality of how God is going to touch people's lives. If you're
striving to become more dedicated to the Lord, it doesn't take you long to
discover that there's a whole Christian subculture in which dedication is made
up of spiritual sounding words and big name conferences and fancy looking
materials.

You cannot practice dedication in a conference or with mere words or on the
pages of a notebook. Dedication is built out of trusting God with the practical
needs of your everyday life. Now you might be able to learn about it at a
conference, you might be inspired towards it with a notebook, I don't want to
fault that at all, but don't ever fall into the trap of believing that the
conference is where the real dedication is experienced.

You have the emotion of dedication in the conference, yes, but the action of
dedication happens in real life. It's experienced in your family, at your work,
within your own attitudes of life. As they enjoy together this day of dedication
of the temple, this day of dedicating their lives, I want you to listen to me
with what happens in verses 10 to 11.

When the priest withdrew from the holy place, the cloud filled the temple of the
Lord. And the priest could not perform their service because of the cloud, for
the glory of the Lord filled the temple. The result of dedication is God's
glory, God's glory filling, in this case the temple.

But now you know, if you read the New Testament, that God's temple is individual
believers. God's temple is those individual believers gathered together as his
church serving God in this world. God's glory fills our lives together as we
dedicate our lives to him.

That's how God's glory fills our lives. So you want to become more dedicated?
You do these four things we've talked about the last couple of days.

You tell someone you want to be dedicated, you give something because you trust
God. You praise God for his faithfulness and you trust God with those everyday
needs. Let's trust him right now.

Just in prayer, would you say, "God, I trust you. I trust you with the needs of
my life. I trust you with those things I'm worried about right now.

I trust you to show me what to do to give me the wisdom. I trust you to be with
me through the struggles and the problems, to never fail me. And I trust you,
God, to see me through, to rescue me out of this.

Whether it's a few months or a few years or even an eternity, I know that you
are my rescuer. And so I trust you. God, help me to learn to live a life of
dedication.

I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Join us tomorrow.

We're going to talk about Solomon's surprise ending.