Solomon

Welcome to Gateway Churches Podcast.

Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

Today I get to share with you and I will be continuing in the series Divinely Human, and we will be looking at the life of Solomon.

Now each week my dad has taken one person from the Bible and shown how God has used them, even though they are human and flawed, but yet they have experienced the divine.

And when we experience the divine, it doesn't mean that we are gods.

What it means is that God, the one true God, is now working in us and through us, and we get to be partakers of the divine.

And so that's what we will be looking at.

We'll be looking at the life of Solomon to see how God used him, and we'll learn from his life how God can use us.

Now, driving to church, uh I had my three kids in the back seat, and I just said, kids, would you guys pray for Daddy while I'm preaching this week?

And so my middle child said, Yeah, I'll I'll pray.

I'll go ahead and pray.

Dear God, please help Daddy not to embarrass himself.

Amen.

I hadn't even thought about that yet, buddy.

Thank you for putting that in my mind.

No, I that's great.

So speaking of the middle child, that's Mitchell, our middle child.

I was the middle child.

Many of you know I have one older brother and one younger sister.

My parents can't attest to this, that I definitely, without a doubt, received the most spankings of them all.

I received more spankings than both my brother and my sister combined.

And I mean, there was this phrase that my dad would say that I knew it was coming.

He'd say, James, go to my room and wait for me.

Oh, and I'd have to go make that journey to his room and just sit there.

And I would, man, talk about a little kid's prayer life.

Lord, please help a distra, help the phone to ring, help my dad to get distracted.

Lord, give him mercy today.

Let him be filled with grace.

Look, how about God, you just come back right now.

John, just come back right now.

I mean, that that would be my prayer because I knew what was coming once uh he said that.

And speak about this, somebody shared with me this week that they saw this shirt and it said, firstborn, I make the rules.

Secondborn, I break the rules.

Thirdborn, the rules don't apply to me.

That seemed very well fitting for what I felt as my childhood.

And so I was the middle child that broke the rules.

And the reason why I'm sharing that is because it took way too long for me to come to this realization.

I know that.

I don't know why it I was just too hard-headed to realize this.

But what I realized, one day it just all clicked and it all made sense to me.

I said, I was like, you know what?

When I break the rules, I get more spankings, I get more consequences.

When I follow the rules, I get more blessings.

Uh might as well follow the rules.

Like, I don't know why it took so long to figure that out.

And it was just like an instant shift.

It was like, oh, I'm just gonna follow the rules because things go well for me when I follow the rules.

It took way too long for that.

Now I say that because when we look at the life of Solomon, Solomon did a lot of good things, but he also did some bad things.

And when he did the good things, it allowed him to operate more in the divine.

It allowed him to be more used by God, for God to work in him and through him to bless more people.

However, when Solomon did not do the right thing, it limited God using him in the way that God wanted to use him.

And so as we look at life of Solomon, we can see this in our own lives.

If we do things God's ways, then God will bless us, and he'll be able to use us to be a blessing to others even more.

If we do not, then we hinder God's ability to use us.

And so we'll be looking at this human and divine.

So point number one is the divine side of Solomon.

Now, Solomon was the third king.

David was the first king, second, I mean, no, sorry, Solomon, I mean, Saul was the first king, then David was the second king.

Solomon was David's son, and he was the third king.

When David was had just passed away, Solomon is now appointed king, and now this scripture in 1 Kings will pick up there, and it will be right as Solomon has now become king.

So 1 Kings 3, verse 4, says, Now the king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there, for that was the great high place.

1 Kings 3:4

Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings on that altar.

At Gibeon, the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night, and God said, Ask, what shall I give you?

Now I want to pause there just for a moment.

It was tradition, it was customary for a new king to make one sacrifice to the Lord, and typically a bull.

Well, Solomon way surpassed that with a thousand burnt offerings to the Lord, a thousand times more than what was tradition.

That is an extravagant offering.

And then God appears to him and says, Now ask anything of me.

God would not have appeared to a stingy person and says, Ask anything of me, because he could not trust a stingy person.

God can trust a giver.

And God showed up to this person that gave this extravagant offering and said, Ask anything of me.

God can trust a giver.

God is a giver, and he partners with givers in order to help people.

And so that's the first thing that we see.

Now, verse six, it says, And Solomon said, You have shown great mercy to your servant David, my father, because he walked before you in truth, in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart with you.

Now David was a great man of God, a man after God's own heart.

And as we are looking at what is it that we can do in our lives to be able to be more divinely used, this is a great recipe that David did to walk before you in truth, in righteousness, in uprightness of heart with you.

Now, reading on, it says, You have continued this great kindness for him, and you have given him a son to sit on the throne as it is this day.

Now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king instead of my father, David, but I am a little child, I do not know how to go out or come in.

Now that phrase, how to go out or how to come in, is a military phrase, meaning how to go out into battle, and then how to come back in to the house of the Lord and worship the Lord.

David was an expert at that.

Says, I do not know how to do that.

And your servant, see how Solomon is posturing his heart, your servant is in the midst of your people, whom you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to be numbered or counted.

Therefore, give to your servant an understanding heart to judge your people, that I may discern between good and evil.

For who is able to judge this great people of yours?

See, he does recognize too, these are God's people.

These are not his people, these are God's people.

A couple of things I want to point out here is that we are seeing this is Solomon, we he is first stepping in as king.

And we see the humility he's stepping in.

We see that he is saying, God, I need you.

And in the beginning of his life, we see just such a zeal for God.

And what he's saying is, Lord, I need you.

This is too big for me.

And like many of us have may have felt at some point when we are asked to do something greater than ourselves, we start with, God, you got this.

You got this, God.

Lord, I need you to show up.

Lord, you got this, you got this.

And then sometimes after we've seen a few miracles, we've seen God always provide and be there for us, we shift to, we got this, God.

Yeah, we do.

We got this.

And listen, I'll do my side, you do your side, we got this, God.

The difficult thing, the hard thing is if somebody ever shifts to, I got this.

If you ever shift from, Lord, we got this to Lord, I got this.

It's like God's like, oh, okay, big boy, come on, you you got this.

Go ahead, see what you got.

And we will see this later in Solomon's life that he switches from a we got this God to I got this.

And that is something we need to all be careful for.

Now, what Solomon asked for is for wisdom.

Wisdom to govern the people.

And God grants him wisdom.

This great wisdom, beyond any one person had ever had wisdom before, he has now this great wisdom.

Now, what something we will all see also see later on is that David actually, I mean, uh not David, Solomon actually starts trusting in the wisdom that God gave him, and he therefore he starts trusting in the gift more than the gift giver.

We have to be cautious not to rely on the gifts God gave us more than the one that gave us the gift.

And sometimes we even see a gift in somebody else, and suddenly people start to worship the gift in somebody rather than worshiping the one that gave them that gift.

These are cautions for us to learn from from the life of Solomon.

The other thing, what is it that Solomon says?

He's like, Lord, I just need to, I want this so that I can help your people.

And then we see in a moment, God's like, wait, you want to help people?

I want to help people.

If you want to help people, I want to help you help people because God loves people.

And when we structure our lives in such a way to want to help people, God wants to help you to help people.

So let's read on.

Verse 6.

And Solomon said, You have shown great mercy to your servant David, my father, because he walked before you in tree.

Oh, wait, hold on.

Wrong one.

Now, verse 10.

The speech pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this thing.

So this is what he had asked.

Now that pleased the Lord.

Then it says that God granted him wisdom, and also because he asked for it, but also he grants him honor and riches, even though he did not ask for it.

Then verse 14.

So if you walk in my ways to keep my statutes and my commandments, as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your days.

Now we live in a new covenant, as Pastor Robert covered in the very first sermon of this series.

We live in a new covenant that now we are not judged based on if we do more good deeds than bad deeds, how perfect we follow the law.

We're judged on how well Jesus followed the law, which was perfect, and then our belief in Jesus.

Now that is the way of salvation, is our belief in Jesus.

However, there is also a if then based on our the way we live our life.

And it is similar to myself as a child when my dad would say, if you touch that, then you will have a consequence.

If you don't touch that, then there will be a reward for you.

And of course, then I was like, Don't touch that.

What just kept touching it?

But uh there's these if-thens in life that if we do the wrong thing, then there's a consequence.

If you do the right thing, then there's a blessing.

This was the first time that God appeared to Solomon.

The second time God appeared to Solomon was in 2 Chronicles, and I'm just gonna highlight a couple of those.

It says, if you keep my statutes and my judgments, then I will establish the throne of your kingdom.

So if you do the right thing, then I will bless you.

If you turn away and forsake my statutes and my commandments, then I will uproot them from my land, I will cast out from my sight.

So God says, Listen, if you do the right thing, I want to bless you.

But if you don't, it's not gonna go well with you.

God tells us these things, and it's not that these are like so God can be harsh or punish us in any way.

He does these be these things because he loves us.

And he's saying, Listen, I'm setting before you so much potential, and I want to partner with you to do great things in your life, but you need to do it my way, not your way, my way.

And so God's telling us to do it this way.

Now, in this, we see that Solomon started so pure with such a zeal for God, and God used him so mightily.

This is the divine side of Solomon, and Solomon experienced the divine in his life.

He was such an amazing, wise person.

He was the first person that built a permanent house of the Lord in Jerusalem.

He was the first one.

He also spoke over 3,000 Proverbs and wrote over a thousand songs.

That's a lot.

He was one of the 48 Jewish prophets.

He also wrote Proverbs, he wrote the book of Ecclesiastes, and he wrote the book of Song of Solomon.

All of those are in our Bible.

This entire book of the Bible, the entire Bible is the divine inspiration from the Lord.

So clearly, Solomon operated in the divine, that the Holy Spirit divinely worked through him in order to write the word of God.

He was on the throne for 40 years in Israel, and he was the wisest man that ever lived.

I was, uh there's this bus driver, and he was reading throughout the Bible in a year, and he was just praying, Lord, I whatever I read, I want to be able to use that in my everyday life.

And so he was reading that particular day about Solomon's great wisdom.

And Solomon, at one point, these two moms came to him and they were both fighting, saying that this one baby was their baby.

And truth is, one of them lost their baby, so went and stole the other baby, claimed it was their baby.

So now both these moms are there, and in Solomon's great wisdom, he said, I have a solution.

Let's cut the baby in half.

We'll give half the baby to one mom, half the baby to the other mom.

Well, the not real mom was like, so be it.

But the real mom was like, No, no, no, no, don't hurt the baby.

She can have the baby, just let her have the baby, just don't hurt the baby.

Well, in this, Solomon knew who the real mom was because he saw the love of the real mom.

So this bus driver had just read this this day, and he was out driving the bus, and all of a sudden he makes a stop, and two women hop on the bus.

However, there was only one seat left.

Well, they start arguing and fighting, and then it starts getting nasty, trying to get this one last seat.

So this bus driver in his new found wisdom walks back and says, Stop, I have a solution.

Let the ugliest woman have the seat.

Neither of the women sat down the entire time.

There's so much we can learn from the wisdom of Solomon, right, guys?

So the first point was the divine side of Solomon.

The second is the human side of Solomon.

Now, to look at this, I want to look at the Torah.

The Torah is the first five books of the Bible.

It's also considered Moses' law.

It's the first five books of the Bible, and Solomon would have known the Torah inside and out.

Back in the day, they didn't have Google.

Nobody Googled anything for answers.

Everyone would Torah it.

So the Torah told them everything they ever needed to know.

It told them all the laws, it told them how to live, it told them what to eat, what not to eat, told them everything.

So everyone would have been familiar, especially being a Jew, with the Torah.

Well, then you have Solomon, and knowing that he was a from the house of David, he would have known the Torah even more so.

Then, knowing just how educated it was, he would have known the Torah even more.

Then, knowing he's the king of Israel, he would have been like peak knowledge of the Torah.

He knew the Torah inside and out.

So we're going to look at this.

And this is his dad, actually, to David, his dad, talking to Solomon when David was on his deathbed.

And he says in 1 Kings 2, verse 3, it says, And keep the charge of the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes, his commandments, his judgments, and his testimonies, as it is written in the law of Moses, as it is in the Torah, that you may prosper in all that you do, and wherever you turn.

1 Kings 2:3

So this was his dad's advice to him.

So then in the Torah is Deuteronomy 17.

Now, in Deuteronomy 17, it starts off with one day Israel will want a king, and you will put a king over you.

Now for as long as there's a king over Israel, make sure that the king does not do these three things.

So there could not have been a scripture that has Solomon's specific name on it in the Torah more than this.

He is the king.

And so he would have known this scripture so very well.

And so this is what Deuteronomy 17, verse 16 says.

Deuteronomy 17:16

But he, being the king, shall not multiply in horses for himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt to multiply horses, for the Lord has said to you, you shall not return that way again.

Now, first thing is that they should not multiply, the king should not multiply in horses, and especially those Egyptian horses.

Number two, neither shall he multiply in wives for himself, lest his heart turn away.

Number three, nor shall he greatly multiply silver and gold for himself.

So Solomon, being king, would have known this, and it says that the king of Israel should not do these three things, should not multiply in horses, especially Egyptian horses, should not multiply in wives, and should not multiply in gold and silver.

So now let's look at the life of Solomon and see how well he followed the word of God.

This was the word of God to them.

It says the weight of gold that came to Solomon yearly was 666 talents of gold.

That is equivalent to 22 tons of gold.

That was his annual salary every year, was Solomon's annual salary.

That is over a billion dollars in gold every year.

22 tons.

That weighs each ton, 2,000 pounds, 44,000 pounds.

That's the size of a large fire truck of pure gold.

That was his annual income.

His net worth is estimated now to be around$2.2 trillion.

You take the top 10 richest, wealthiest people in all of the world, and it still doesn't compare to the wealth of Solomon.

All of them combined.

I mean, he did he multiply in gold?

Yes, he multiplied in gold.

Now, 1 Kings 10 27 says the king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones.

They didn't even count how much silver he had because it was in so much abundance.

And he says it was like the stones.

Listen, his kids may not have ever learned what it was like to go skip rocks across a pond.

They were skipping chunks of silver across the pond because it was just in such abundance.

So much silver everywhere.

So did Solomon multiply in gold and silver?

Yes.

Now remember, we're looking at the human side of Solomon, and God had told him, This is what you should not do.

Now, let's read on.

First Kings 10, uh, let's start in verse 26.

It says, And Solomon gathered chariots and horsemen.

He had 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen, whom he stationed in the chariot cities and with the king of Jerusalem.

Also, Solomon had his horses imported from Egypt.

So did he multiply in horses?

Now, why horses?

Why did God say not to multiply horses?

I don't know.

Why not cows?

I don't why didn't he have a thing for cows?

I don't know.

He loved these Egyptian horses.

But God warned him do not multiply in horses.

And then not only did he multiply in horses, he multiplied in Egyptian horses.

Now let's read on.

Princesses and three hundred concubines, and his wives turned away his heart.

That's a lot of wives.

Not only is that a lot of wives, that's a lot of mother-in-laws.

No, not my mother-in-law.

My mother-in-law is great.

She's watching my kids right now, so she's fantastic.

But that is a lot of mother-in-laws.

There was this uh newly wed couple, hadn't been married that long, and uh the wife calls her mom and is like, mom, I what she's in tears, she's crying.

We got in another fight, and I don't know, we just keep rehashing the same fight over and over and over.

Can I please just come stay with you and dad?

Which the mom responded, the mother-in-law responded, no dear, he must pay for this.

I'm coming to stay with you.

The mother-in-law is coming to stay with you.

So let's read on.

For it was so when Solomon was old.

Now, remember, when we started, this was when Solomon was young, and we saw the passion and the love for the Lord when Solomon was young.

As he gets older, he starts to compromise more and more and more.

And so now when Solomon was old, that his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not loyal to the Lord, his God, as was the heart of his father David.

For Solomon went after Astareth, the goddess of Sidonians, and after Melechem, the abomination of the Ammonites.

Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord and did not fully follow the Lord as did his father David.

Watch this.

Then Solomon built a high place for Kimash, the abomination of Moab, on the hill that is east of Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the people of Ammon.

Now, why did he highlight those two?

Because the very next scripture says, and he did likewise for all his foreign wives who burned incense and sacrificed to their gods.

So why did he specifically mention Kimash and Molech and even the location of the temple that he built for them?

Both of them required human sacrifice.

Both of them.

So you have in Jerusalem, Solomon built a temple for the Lord.

The very next hill over, just east of it, he's built two more temples where they are murdering people, requiring human sacrifice.

And God is saying, listen, Solomon, as y'all are here trying to worship me, I'm hearing the cries of the people of the hill next to us that people are being murdered.

And not only that, Solomon, you did it.

You built it.

This was paid with your own money.

Solomon, what has happened?

How have you gone so far astray?

And this is one of the reasons why I warned you about this.

So God warned him not to do this.

So the Lord became angry with Solomon, because his heart had turned from the Lord God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice, which we looked at, and had commanded him concerning this thing that he should not go after other gods.

But he did not keep what the Lord had commit commanded.

Therefore, the Lord said to Solomon, Because you have done this, and have not kept my covenant and my statutes, which I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom away from you and give it to your servant.

This is with the human side of Solomon.

We see how he started, but we also see that he did not end the way that he started.

So point number one was the divine side of Solomon.

Point number two is the human side of Solomon.

Point number three is which side are you on?

Now, just as I started, God uh says those these if-thens.

Just as when I was a kid, if you do this, God's saying, if you do these things, if you do things God's way, then I get to partner with you in the divine, even more so.

However, if you do not, then I I can't partner with you.

This is not going to work out.

And so we have an option to live a life that is pleasing to the Lord.

And now, hear me, this is not a message about works, that if we do more good things than bad things or anything like this.

Once again, this is a message that we can live our life in a way to be able to see the hand of God in our life even more.

And that is what we need.

We need to see the hand of God in our life.

And we need to make good decisions for that to happen.

So Solomon actually conquered more land than his father did.

His father David conquered a lot of land, but Solomon conquered even more land.

The way that he conquered land, though, was through marriage.

That's why he had so many wives.

What he would do is instead of uh going to fight or take over land or anything like that, he would marry the princess over there to create an alliance with that land.

And that's how he took over so much land through all these marriages.

That is not what was best for Solomon.

Nor was that what was best for the women.

But what happened is over time, Solomon, if you remember, he had a promise from the Lord from the very beginning.

And then I believe he starts to try to make the promise happen versus simply obey God and see how God lets the promise happen.

So all of a sudden, he's forcing the promise to happen through his own wisdom, through his own strength, instead of allowing God to just let it happen.

And it would have been so much greater.

All of his accomplishments would have been even greater if he just simply lived a life of obedience and see how God was going to accomplish all of these things in his life.

In Proverbs 3, verses 5, it says, Trust in the Lord with all of your heart.

Proverbs 3:5

Lean not on your own understanding, acknowledge him in all of your ways, and he will direct your paths.

Do not be wise in your own eyes.

Fear the Lord and shun evil.

If only Solomon would have read that verse.

Wait, Solomon wrote that verse.

That's Proverbs.

Solomon wrote that.

But why did he not like follow even what God was speaking to him?

Over time, he just started compromising more and more and more until he got so far off that he's now building other temples for other gods.

This is something that we need to all be careful about in our own life.

How are we living?

In which ways are we living?

Are we making the right decisions that are pleasing to the Lord?

Now, I want to point out a couple of things.

Now, Solomon was not next in line to become king.

Solomon was like number nine of David's sons.

However, when David was on his deathbed, Solomon's mom goes into David to talk to him and then says, Would you please remember my son Solomon and make him king?

Then David says, Yes, Solomon would become king.

Then that is how Solomon became king.

Do you think that the people of the land were talking about Solomon, knowing that he wasn't next in line?

Do you think that the people would have said, like, you know, this Solomon guy, I mean, he sure is making us do a lot more than what David did.

And, you know, I really think Son 2, 4, and definitely 6 would have been a lot more like David than Solomon.

And, you know, we got number nine, Solomon.

I mean, do you think the people could have been talking?

I think so.

And I think it actually created an insecurity in Solomon that everyone is thinking, why is Solomon the king?

Because Solomon's mommy went and talked to David.

That's why.

I think there was this insecurity that over time he thought, you know what?

I'll show them.

I'll prove them.

I'll prove it to them.

I'll become the greatest king, the most powerful king with the most gold, the most silver, there will be none greater than I.

I think that's what happened a little bit within Solomon.

That over time he shifted to, I'll show them.

Listen, if there is an insecurity in ourselves that's holding us back from simply obeying God, we need to deal with it.

If there's something that we are living to say, I'll show them, I'll prove it to them, then you are letting them make the decisions of your life instead of God make the decisions of your life.

The other thing, David was a great warrior, a great man of God, a great king.

But he was not a great father.

There are several scriptures we can look at of David not necessarily being a great father for his kids.

Multiple times there were these great disputes among his kids where he could have easily stepped in as the father and brought peace.

But he instead just hoped everything would work out.

He abdicated his role as father.

Also, earlier, Solomon said, I do not know how to go out or how to come in.

Well, guess who was the very, very best at that?

His father David.

His father David was an absent father that did not teach his son's son how to become king, how to be a leader, how to be a warrior.

And so they were operating without that knowledge.

I think there are multiple scriptures we could look at like this that I believe that there was this hole, maybe even in Solomon's heart, that he did not let God fill, but instead he started to look for all the things of the world to fill that hole in his heart.

I think he was allowing these hurts, these father wounds, these past wounds to help control and make decisions in his life.

Now, Solomon did have a little bit of a messed up past, but many people do.

Most of us have a little bit of a messed up past in some way or another.

However, your past cannot hold you back because we are a new creation in Christ.

So your past cannot hold you back.

However, if you don't let go of those past wounds and insecurities, then those can hold you back.

You have to move on and you have to let God work a miracle in your heart so that you can move beyond those, so that you can be there, present with the Lord, to do whatever it is that God would have you do.

God had a better way for Solomon.

He already had made him a promise.

He had a better way for Solomon.

He did not have to operate in his own strength and wisdom to try to make this happen.

Now, some of us may even think, yeah, but I mean I've really already messed up.

Well, don't give up if you've messed up.

Just repent and move on.

God can use your mess up as a setup to be able to help somebody else.

Just allow God to heal you and move forward so that you can go help other people in that area and prevent them from having the same mess ups that you've had in your life.

We can now go to God and say, God, I want to live a life of obedience.

I'm not here to prove something to anybody.

There's nobody I'm living a life for other than you.

And God, I simply want to be obedient to whatever it is that you would have me do.

And that's what we should have seen in Solomon.

Unfortunately, like we saw, he did exactly at the end of his life all the things that God had told him not to do.

So what are some of the learnings that we can look at from the life of Solomon in order to help ourselves so that we can experience God in a greater way?

One of them is to be a giver.

We saw that in the very beginning: to be humble, to help people, to walk in God's ways and keep God's statutes and commandments, to obey the voice of God, to obey the written word of God.

These are some of the things that we can do.

Now, if you think about that, it's a lot of being humble, a giver, loving people, obeying God, obeying the word of God, the voice of God.

You know, it's actually very similar that Jesus says, I can sum up the entire law with two commandments: love God and love people.

The question is, are we loving God and loving people in such a way that we can see the divine of God in our own lives?

That's what our mission is: to love God, love people so well that God will work in us and through us to bless all of the people of the world.

My daughter, Bray, we recently went to the dentist, and it was time at the end to put fluoride on her teeth, and she really did not want to do it.

And so she was just like, as tight lip as could be.

It was like, mm-mm, you're not doing that.

So the dentist was trying to persuade her to do it.

So the dentist said, Listen, this is my favorite flavor.

It's bubblegum.

And my daughter responded, Well, listen, that may be your favorite flavor, but but that does not mean it will be my favorite flavor.

A little bit sassy.

But if we're talking about favorites, God told us all of our all of his favorites right here in the Word of God.

We are his people.

We need to learn God's favorites and start living out his favorites so that we could be a blessing to this world and that therefore we can see God's hand in our life in a greater capacity.

Are you guys okay to see God's hand in your life in a greater capacity?

To see God move, to see God do miracles, but that you got to play a role in it, to see God feed people, to see God take care of people, to see God heal people, but you got to play a role in it.

That's what we get to experience when we experience the divine in our lives.

With that, I want to just pray with all of you.

But if you could just close your eyes, bow your heads, and take a moment between you and the Holy Spirit and allow the Holy Spirit to speak to you, speak to your heart about this message of Solomon, and ask the Holy Spirit, Lord, have I compromised in any areas of my life that you want to share with me now?

Lord, are there any areas in my life that I've switched from God, you got this, to God, I got this that you want to reveal to me.

Lord, am I obeying the word of God, the voice of God?

Am I the humble giver that loves people in the way that you want me to be?

Lord, thank you that we get to learn from Solomon, and that from this we can be we can experience the divine in our lives and become partakers of your word, partakers of your divine.

Lord, I pray that you will use every single person that's listening to be a witness for you so that we may truly see and experience on earth as it is in heaven.

In Jesus' mighty name, amen.

Amen.

Thank you.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you'd like to connect with us, text Connect to 71010 or visit gatewaypeople.com.

We hope you have a great week.