This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

I want to welcome you back, we're in day five of our second week of looking
through First and Second Kings, chapter 11 of First Kings. We've been talking
about what we can learn about from Solomon. The Bible says that all these
stories in the Old Testament are there for you and I to learn about faith.

What can we learn from Solomon about how to end well? Because he didn't. What
are the warnings of his life?

And we've learned you don't run out of dreams and you don't fall out of love.
And the third thing we learn from Solomon is don't back out of commitments.
Don't back out of commitments.

Don't start to live a life of compromise. Solomon's life defines compromise at
the end. Listen in chapter 11 beginning in verse 3, reading some of what we read
yesterday and then going on from there.

Verse 3, "He had 700 wives of royal birth and 300 concubines and his wives led
him astray. As Solomon grew old his wives turned his heart after other gods and
his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God as the heart of David his
father had been. He followed Asheroth the goddess of the Sidonians and Molech
the detestable god of the Ammonites.

So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord. He did not follow the Lord
completely as David his father had done. On a hill east of Jerusalem Solomon
built a high place for Chamash the detestable god of Moab and for Molech the
detestable god of the Ammonites.

He did the same for all his foreign wives who burned incense and offered
sacrifices to their gods. The Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart
had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel who had appeared to him twice.
Although he had forbidden Solomon to follow other gods, Solomon did not keep the
Lord's command.

So the Lord said to Solomon, 'Since this is your attitude and you have not kept
my covenants and my decrees which I commanded you, I will most certainly tear
the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your subordinates. Nevertheless,
for the sake of David your father, I will not do it during your lifetime. I will
tear it out of the hand of your son.

Yet I will not tear the whole kingdom from him, but I will give him one tribe
for the sake of David my servant and for the sake of Jerusalem which I have
chosen. ' You look at Solomon's life and the compromises at the end of his life.
His life defines compromise really in three phases.

These are the things that I have to watch out for. You have to watch out for in
your life. First, he did more and more of what God said not to do.

What you want to be doing is more and more of what God said to do. That's what
growth is all about. When we first become believers, we find ourselves doing too
much of what God told us not to do.

But as you grow in faith, you want to be doing more and more of what God said to
do. In one sense, I ought to be scared to death of doing what God told me not to
do, not because God's going to get me, but because God loves me enough to warn
me against those things. It's the illustration of putting your finger in the
electrical socket.

You should be scared of that not because your parents are going to shock you
with the electricity, but because they're warning you because they know of the
danger of the electricity. They're not wanting to hurt you, they're wanting to
help you, and God's wanting to help us. Solomon has compromise after compromise
after compromise, but they came slowly.

How do you get involved with a thousand wives and concubines? One concubine at a
time. That's how it happens.

It doesn't happen all in one day. So I have to ask myself, am I getting more and
more involved in what God said not to do? If I am, my heart is headed away from
God and not towards God, and we've all had that happen in our lives.

If that's happening to you right now, you can turn back, you can turn towards
Him. Second thing that is sort of the definition of compromise in Solomon's life
is his heart was not fully devoted to God. His heart became fully devoted to the
relationships that were around him, and he was drawn away by these wives.

He began to build these places of worship for them because he cared about them,
because he loved them. It's a great warning about the closest relationships of
our lives. If I allow my closest relationships to be with people who aren't
fully devoted to God, I'm going to be drawn away from devotion to God.

I'm not talking about every relationship of your life having to be with a
Christian. You should have lots of relationships with people who aren't devoted
to God. I'm talking about the very closest relationships of your life, your best
friends, your small group, the people you spend the most time with, the people
you learn the most from.

Those closest relationships, you want somebody who is as devoted or more devoted
to God than you are, because whether we like it or not, we are drawn one way or
another in life by our human relationships. Solomon certainly was. Solomon, the
wisest man that ever lived, could be drawn away from God by these relationships.

I know that I can too. I want my heart to be fully devoted to God, so I need to
spend time with people whose hearts are fully devoted to God. And then the third
definition of compromise in Solomon's life is he did not follow the Lord
completely.

He did follow the Lord in some aspects. Earlier in his life, he built the
temple, and I'm sure even as he was building these places of false worship, he
was still going to the temple at times. So he was trying to mix it together.

He didn't follow God completely. But God is saying to him, "I want devotion. I
want dedication.

I am a God worth your complete faith and trust. " Now, who did follow God
completely? Well, it says it a couple of times in what we just read.

David, as your father David. David followed God completely. What in the world
does that mean?

I keep saying it completely, follow God completely. Who could ever do that? When
we're human beings, how do we follow God completely?

I want you to notice that David is used as an example of completely following
the Lord. With all the mistakes that he made, and you can read about them.
They're just right there in front of us in Scripture.

With all the clear sins that he committed, they're right there in Scripture as
well. The Bible says he followed God completely. So obviously, completely
following doesn't mean being completely perfect.

Or David couldn't have been completely following God. What does it mean? One
thing that I know it means is your heart always comes back to trust.

Your heart always comes back to trusting in God. For David, it meant that in
fleeing from Saul, or in his victory as king, or in the loss of Absalom, his
son, or in the disappointment of not being able to build the temple, or in the
sins and failures that he struggled with in his own life and his own family, he
continued to come back every time to complete trust in God. That was always his
answer.

He didn't try to find another answer, didn't try to find a way to escape. He
always fled back to the Lord. God is looking for people who will struggle to
continue to follow him even in the disappointments and the struggles and the
failures and the sins of life.

He's looking for people who are continually growing closer and closer rather
than further and further from him. Now Solomon, because of his disobedience, he
suffered God's anger. He suffered rebellion within his kingdom.

He suffered inner despair. You can read about it in the book of Ecclesiastes.
And the lesson of Solomon's life in many ways is how we finish is more important
than how we start.

So how are you going to finish? You may be very young listening to this, but
you're still deciding how are you going to finish every day of your life right
now, or you may be closer to the finish line. And you're very aware of the
importance of how you finish.

Steve Farrar in his book Finishing Strong talks about three men, Chuck
Templeton, Braun Clifford, and Billy Graham. You've probably heard of one of
those three men. He talks about 1945 and those other two, Templeton and
Clifford, were actually better known than Billy Graham in that day.

They had larger crowds coming in to hear them preach in that day. Many believed
that Clifford was the most gifted preacher that the church had seen in
centuries. And Templeton was one of the greatest theologians that had ever come
into the church.

But five years later, Templeton had left the ministry to pursue another career
and he later decided that he no longer believed in the claims of Jesus. And by
1954, Clifford had lost his family and his ministry and his health, and he died
an alcoholic at the age of 35 in a rundown hotel in Texas. His last job was
selling used cars.

Billy Graham is finishing well, trusting God clear to the end. There's a poem by
Robertson McQuokin called It's Sundown, Lord, and one of the phrases in that
poem is, "Few they tell me finish well. Lord, let me get home before dark.

" That's what I want for my life. That's what I want for your life, to finish
well, to get home in the light, recognizing our faults and our failings, the
fact that if Solomon fell, I can fail. Solomon struggled, I can struggle.

I want you to live your life with faith and also end your life with faith. The
great hope and promise that we have in that is the gift of Jesus Christ, the
Holy Spirit in our lives. Solomon had the greatest wisdom ever, but you have
even greater wisdom because you have the Holy Spirit living in your life, and
he's wiser than Solomon.

It's the very wisdom of God living in your life. You want to end well. The words
faith and fail start with the same three letters.

They just end differently. How is your life going to end? Abraham ended his life
well, and we talk about his story of faith.

Moses ended his life well. We talk about his story of faith. Hebrews chapter 11
and all the way into verse 12, chapters about running the race and finishing the
race well and the fact that you're being cheered on in that race by those who
did finish well.

David is the example of that. Even when you stumble, you get up and you keep
running. Even when you're injured, you keep running because you still can finish
well.

People are cheering you on like Ruth and Abraham and Moses and Paul and Mary and
David. You can finish well because of the power of God in your life, no matter
what has happened in the past. No matter what you're feeling right now, you can
finish well by the power of God.

Let's pray together that we would. Jesus, we pray together that by your
strength, your power, you keep us running towards you. We're going to live
eternity with you because of your love for us.

So we want to run towards you even in eternity. Lord, we know we're going to
have stumblings. We're going to have faults and failings.

Some of them will be our sins, some of them will be our humanness, some of them
will be our weakness. But in all of it, we want faith to be the story of our
lives. And whatever's happening right now, whatever failure we might have had
this week, that doesn't have to be the end of the story.

We've still got some steps to go. We still got the race to run. So Lord, by your
strength, help us to get up, help us to keep running by faith.

We ask for this in Jesus' name, amen. Next week a prophet named Elijah comes on
the scene and he teaches us what it means to live a life that serves God.