This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

I want to welcome you to day three of week two of our look through 1st and 2nd
Kings. We're going to be looking at 1st Kings chapter 11 today and going on from
there a little bit. And as we look at this chapter, we're going to be looking at
Solomon's surprise ending.

When you look at Solomon, you can see a lot of glory, God's glory in his life.
We talked about it the last few days in the dedication of the temple. And if you
go back to 1st Kings 10, 1 to 13 are all about the Queen of Sheba who is coming
to see the Kingdom of Solomon and is overwhelmed by all the blessings.

And 1st Kings 10, 14 to 29 talk about some of those blessings, 666 talents of
gold being brought in annually and 200 shields of gold being made and all the
glasses and utensils that were made out of gold and a fleet of trading ships and
more riches and wisdom than any other and 1400 chariots and 12,000 horses and
silver being as common as stone. That's all talked about in chapter 10. Second
Chronicles 1, 1 says, "Now Solomon the son of David established himself securely
over his kingdom and the Lord his God was with him and exalted him greatly.

" So there's this great moment of Solomon being exalted, of his wisdom being
seen around the world not just in Israel. Remember we studied together back in
1st Kings 3, 12 to 13 what Solomon had asked for. "I will do what you asked,"
God says because of what Solomon asked, "and I will give you wisdom and
understanding that is greater than anyone has had in the past or will have in
the future.

You did not ask for riches and honor. During your life no other king will be as
great as you. " So God gave to Solomon this great wisdom and he also gave him
these great riches and honor.

But the surprise ending to Solomon's life is that the riches and honor took him
away from the great wisdom that God had given him. He had wisdom because he
valued wisdom. He was asked this genie in the bottle question, "What's the one
thing you want?

" And he wanted wisdom but at the end of his life he stopped valuing what he
valued earlier in his life. In 1st Kings 11 you see Solomon's fall. This man of
greatest wisdom, this man of great dedication, even he could fall.

1st Kings 11, 11, "So the Lord said this to Solomon, 'Since this is your
attitude and you've not kept my covenant and my decrees, which I commanded you,
I will most certainly tear the kingdom away from you and I will give it to one
of your subordinates. '" My question is what happened? The end of Solomon's
story is a complete and total surprise.

But it's the kind of surprise that you find at horror movies rather than
birthday parties. It's a frightening surprise. This isn't a Stephen King story,
it's a Solomon the King story and it's horrible.

This man who had such great wisdom, who had been blessed in so many ways. The
reason for such a surprising book as Ecclesiastes in the Bible, if you've ever
read it, Solomon still has the wisdom but he's depressed. He is sarcastic.

What happened? The wisdom is still there but his life had gone sour. And Solomon
was the wisest, the richest, the most blessed man of his day.

What is it that no amount of blessing, no amount of good upbringing, of wisdom,
of riches, what is it that none of that can protect us from? No matter how long
you've been a Christian, no matter how many great things you've done to serve
the Lord, no matter how many blessings you've had in your life, there are
certain things that God has given you, you've been blessed unbelievably. There
are still some things to be scared of, to watch out for.

There are still some things to protect yourself against. You never come to a
place of life where you think, "I could never fall. It could never happen to me.

If it could happen to Solomon, I have to look at myself and say it could happen
to me. " What is it that can take such a great faith and reduce it to rebellion,
such a great servant of God, and reduce him to faithlessness? I want to know.

I want you to know because I want us to stay as far away from those things as we
possibly can. We're going to talk these next few days about three specific
things. Three warnings from the life of Solomon and the first warning is this.

You want to make sure that you live with faith the rest of your life. Number
one, don't run out of dreams. Do not run out of dreams.

Solomon did. In 1 Kings chapter 9 verse 1, the Bible says, "When Solomon had
finished building the temple of the Lord and the royal palace, he had achieved
all that he had desired to do. " The temple had been completed.

That was not only his dream, it was his father's dream, and he's completed it.
And not only that, but he built a royal palace alongside of it. That might sound
like a good place to be, "I've achieved all that I wanted to do.

" Yeah, it's a good place to be the day before you die and go to heaven.
Actually, it's a more terrifying place to be than you could ever think. There's
something very destructive about running out of dreams before you run out of
life.

Because when you run out of dreams, you stop looking forward. You start living
in the past. You cannot continue to serve on the basis of past blessings or past
service or past wisdom.

If God has allowed you to reach a dream in your life, if he's allowed that in
your life, you have been trusted with one of the greatest tests of faith that's
ever going to come into your life. It's really a greater test than the test of a
broken dream or an unfulfilled dream. One of the greatest tests of faith is when
your dreams are fulfilled, what are you going to do next?

What are you going to do to continue to dream? Are you going to start to look to
the past? Are you going to start to live in the past?

If you do, if I do, then we run the risk of living the kind of life that Solomon
did. What do you do when you come to this place, when you've reached a dream?
When you're between dreams.

You've reached one and you're trying to think of, "Okay, God, what's the next
dream then? What am I supposed to reach for next? " Some of you are at that
place right now.

There's something you wanted to do in a business and you fulfilled that in a
business. Maybe you sold that business. Now what are you going to do next?

Or you wanted to raise your kids well and you've done that even with the
struggles. Not perfectly, but well, now they're off to college. They're doing
other things and what are you going to do next?

Or you wanted to begin to grow in Christ and finally you've begun to love God's
Word and pray in ways that you never thought that you would. You fulfilled that
dream. Now what are you going to do next?

What do you do when you've reached the dream and now you're between dreams?
Well, here's three things to do. First, you rejoice in the dream that's been
fulfilled.

You don't just forget about it. You rejoice. You praise God for what has
happened.

Second, you remember the importance of your character that in that dream that
was fulfilled, God was using you and the character that you had, the integrity
that you had, you're not perfect, but you have character that needs to be
growing the rest of your life while on this earth. That was part of the
fulfillment of that dream. Never forget that.

Satan wants you to forget that because he wants to ruin your character. He wants
you to relax your integrity during this time in between. No, this is the time to
increase your integrity.

So remember the importance of character and then you reject the temptation to
coast. Well God, that was great, but now I'm tired. I'm just going to coast in
the next dream.

Don't coast. Rest. That's okay.

Provide yourself a time of rest, but in that time, begin to think of, "God, what
do you have next? How can I live for you in this next season? " In one very
great sense, as we live life in this world, it's like walking up a down
escalator.

I don't know if you've ever tried to do that. I guess most of us have one time
or another when we were kids especially. And the stairs are coming down and
you're trying to go up and you have to walk twice as fast and you stumble a
little bit sometimes.

But the one thing you know you can't do when you're walking up a down escalator
is just stand there. Because if you just stand there, you're headed back down.
If you're trying to go up a down escalator, it takes quite a bit of energy just
to stay where you are.

And if you're going to make progress, it takes even more energy. If you're
trying to go up a down escalator, you could get caught up on the people who are
going down the down escalator and let them take you down with them. In the world
that we live in, there's a lot of down escalator around us.

The evil in this world, the tiredness of the people around us, the lack of
dreams of people in your life. But God wants to use you. He's given you a dream.

God has not given up on you. So the energy that you need to continue to walk
forward with faith, He will give you that energy. He will give you that
strength.

And one of the keys to it is don't stop dreaming. Continue with the dream that
He's put in your mind or find the new dream that He has for your life. It's one
of the keys to live in the rest of my life, the rest of your life, with faith.

Let's take a minute to pray together. And Father, as we pray, we give you our
dreams. And we pray that the dream that you've put into our mind, that Lord,
that dream would continue to drive us forward, that dream that has to do with
the business that you want us to build or the family you want us to build or the
ministry you want us to build or the heart of love that you want us to build for
you.

Let those dreams continue to drive us forward. And if we've reached a dream or a
dream has disappointed us and we feel like we're never going to reach that dream
and you need to provide a new one in our lives, help us to know that you will.
Because God, you have a dream.

You have a plan. You have a vision for our lives. And your timing isn't always
ours.

It doesn't come always as soon as we want, but we're willing to wait on you. But
God, we pray that you would help us to trust in you to give that next dream and
you would keep us from getting to that place where we decide we can stop
dreaming. You always have a new vision for our lives.

We trust in that right now. In your name. Amen.

Join us back tomorrow. We're going to look at a second major thing we can learn
from the end of Solomon's life.