WWUTT 429 Solomon's Wealth?

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Israel experienced 40 years of peace under the reign of King Solomon. They experienced all kinds of prosperity.

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But it's not all good news we read about in the book of 1 Kings, because eventually all of that would be taken away when we understand the text.

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This is When We Understand The Text, a daily Bible commentary to help encourage your time in the

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Word. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we feature New Testament Study, an Old Testament book on Thursday, and our

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Q &A on Friday. Now here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. Yes, being Thursday, we are continuing our

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Old Testament study today in the book of 1 Kings. It's been two weeks since we've been in 1

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Kings. We are up to chapter 4. If you want to open up your Bible and join with me. In the first few chapters,

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David appointed Solomon the king of Israel following his reign. And David said to Solomon that he was going to write a lot of the things that David did wrong.

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He kind of sloughed off in the latter portion of his reign over Israel. And so Solomon corrected those things and brought peace to the kingdom.

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God appeared to Solomon in a dream and said, ask me what you want, and I will give it to you.

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And Solomon asked for wisdom to lead the people of God. And because this was the thing that Solomon asked for,

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God said, I will also give you riches and wealth and peace and prosperity all the days of your life.

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And so here we get to chapter 4 and preparations are being made to build the temple of God.

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This is something that David didn't have the opportunity to do because he was a king of war.

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But Solomon, who is a king during a time of peace, he is given the privilege of being able to build

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God's temple. Now in the first 19 verses, we see a list of names that are given here of some of the people that were in Solomon's service.

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I'm not going to read through that, but you are welcome to on your own. We're going to skip to verse 20 here. Judah and Israel were as many as the sand by the sea.

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They ate and drank and were happy. First Kings 420 is demonstrating the fulfillment of the promise that God had given to Abraham.

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Your children will be as numerous as the sand in the sea or the star, the sand by the sea or the stars in the sky.

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And this is the land that they will dwell in. So first Kings 420 is showing us that promise

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God had given to Abraham has been fulfilled. The children of Abraham, as many as sand by the sea, and they are eating and drinking in the very place that God said to Abraham his children would possess.

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Verse 21, Solomon ruled over all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the

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Philistines and to the border of Egypt. They brought tribute and served Solomon all the days of his life.

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Now that's very significant. The place or the borders that are mentioned there in terms of the empire that Solomon controlled.

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Solomon ruled over all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the

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Philistines and to the border of Egypt. This is a very significant chunk of land, not in terms of size, but in terms of importance.

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It was like a road. All of the other kingdoms to the north and to the south had to go through that area in order to continue to make trade with some of those other nations, some of those other prosperous kingdoms.

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And so Solomon controlled the trade route. And this made that area even more prosperous than any of the kingdoms to the north and to the south.

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So this really would have been the richest land on earth. They gave

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Solomon everything, coming through, wanted to make, as they were coming through, you know, going to other kingdoms, wanted to make treaties with Solomon, wanted to trade goods with Solomon.

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He controlled the trade routes. This is the significance of the kingdom of Israel during the time that Solomon reigned.

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Solomon's provision for one day was 30 cores of fine flour and 60 cores of meal, 10 fat oxen and 20 pasture fed cattle, 100 sheep besides deer, gazelles, roebucks, and fat and foul.

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For he had dominion over all the region west of the Euphrates from Tifsa to Gaza, over all the kings west of the

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Euphrates. And he had peace on all sides around him. And Judah and Israel lived in safety from Dan to Beersheba, every man under his vine and under his fig tree all the days of Solomon.

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I'm going to come back to that. Solomon also had 40 ,000 stalls of horses for his chariots and 12 ,000 horsemen.

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And those officers supplied provisions for King Solomon and for all who came to King Solomon's table, each one in his month.

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They let nothing be lacking. Barley also in straw for the horses and swift steeds they brought to the place where it was required, each according to his duty.

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Now even though that all sounds great, and we might marvel at some of the things that we read there, every man under his vine and under his fig tree and some of the numbers that were listed there, peace and prosperity and Solomon's kingdom, first and second kings are actually very dark books.

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So somebody was coming back to these books to remember things that were going on in Israel's past.

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They would read this particular paragraph with a sense of narrative tension, knowing some of the things that were about to happen.

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Solomon would experience apostasy and fall away from the Lord. The kingdom would be split into the Northern and Southern kingdoms.

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Israel would experience nothing but wicked kings and Judah had only eight righteous kings and the rest were wicked all the way up until the exile.

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And we even have suggestions that are given to us here that kind of hinting toward the fact that Solomon is not going to remain faithful to God, particularly where it talks about the number of horses that he has.

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Because when you go back to Deuteronomy chapter 17, where the law was laid down concerning kings in Israel, it says in Deuteronomy 17, starting in verse 14, when you come to the land that the

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Lord your God is giving you, and we've already read at the middle portion of chapter four there that they dwell in that land now.

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So when you come to the land that the Lord your God is giving you and you possess it and dwell in it and then say,

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I will set a king over me like all the nations that are around me, you may indeed set a king over you whom the

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Lord your God will choose one from among your brothers. You shall set his king over you. You may not put a foreigner over you who is not your brother.

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Only he must not acquire many horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to acquire many horses.

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Since the Lord has said to you, you shall never return that way again. And what's two of the things we have already seen at the very beginning of Solomon's reign.

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He marries an Egyptian princess and we have listed here that he possessed many horses.

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And it's saying here in the laws concerning kings that these are things that should not happen.

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Verse 17 and he shall not acquire many wives for himself. We already know

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Solomon's notorious for that lest his heart turn away, nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold.

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And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book, a copy of this law approved by the

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Levitical priests and it shall be with him and he shall read it all the days of his life that he may learn to fear the

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Lord his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes and doing them that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers and that he may not turn aside from the commandment either to the right hand or to the left so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children in Israel.

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And that will not happen with Solomon. As a matter of fact, this time of peace and prosperity that we're reading about here lasted a very short period of time.

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Solomon reigned for 40 years and then for hundreds of years, Israel and Judah would be subjected to wicked kings because though Solomon is experiencing prosperity here at this particular time, his heart would stray from the

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Lord after all of these earthly possessions that Deuteronomy 17 warned against the king having.

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And so there's this narrative tension that exists here, though we're reading all of these amazing things.

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We know that Solomon is eventually going to fall away and Israel and Judah will be sent into exile.

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But there's a cool part about something that we read there in that paragraph as well, something that actually foreshadows eternity,

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God's eternal kingdom. So Israel would experience this time of peace and prosperity for just, you know, three or four decades.

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But this hints at something that we will experience for all eternity in God's eternal perfect kingdom, particularly once again, where it says that every man is under his own vine and under his fig tree.

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We have that talked about again in Micah chapter four, verses one through five.

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This is what the prophet writes. It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the

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Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and it shall be lifted up above the hills and peoples shall flow to it.

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And many nations shall come and say, come, let us go up to the mountain of the

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Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths for out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the

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Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many peoples and shall decide for strong nations far away, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.

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Nations shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore, but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid for the mouth of the

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Lord of hosts has spoken for all the peoples walk each in the name of its God, but we will walk in the name of the

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Lord, our God forever and ever. What a beautiful foreshadowing to the eternal kingdom of God that we are looking forward to.

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Israel would not experience that eternal kingdom, though the beauty of everything that is talked about here in these verses would sound very hopeful to them, but this kingdom would quickly be snatched away.

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However, the kingdom that we are looking forward to, the eternal kingdom that we are fellow heirs to receive if we are followers of Jesus Christ, that kingdom will never be snatched away from us and we will dwell with the

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Lord forever. So so even though we're reading in this paragraph foreshadowing concerning the fall of the kingdom of Israel, we're also reading this paragraph foreshadowing concerning the eternal kingdom of God that everyone who is in Christ Jesus will dwell in forever.

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Amen. Boy, I'm so looking forward to that kingdom, and I hope you are, too. It rejuvenates your spirit and your soul to to desire a kingdom that is not of this world, but that is going to be given to us by God in Jesus Christ.

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If we endure to the end, God keep us steadfast in the faith, protect us from stumbling after the things of this world like like Solomon did.

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Even even a man with the wisdom and the wealth and the power of Solomon could not protect his heart from being ensnared, from falling into the trappings of this world.

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So none of us should ever think that we're above that and we won't fall into the same snare. We go on here.

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Verse twenty nine. And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore so that Solomon's wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt.

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For he was wiser than all the other men. I love this part. Wiser than Ethan, the

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Ezra height and he man. So there you go. Solomon was wiser than he man.

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Have you ever watched that cartoon, by the way? I remember when I was a kid and that, you know, back 80s cartoon and and my dad wouldn't let me watch it because of Skeletor and some of the witchcraft and stuff like that that was going on.

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So I kind of felt deprived as a kid. My friends were watching He -Man, but I couldn't watch it. Well, it's on Netflix now.

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So just recently I pulled the cartoon up and I decided, hey, I'm going to see what this cartoon is like that my dad would never let me watch.

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But all my friends were watching. Oh, my goodness. What a ridiculous cartoon. I couldn't even finish an episode.

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It's terrible. So I tried watching a couple of their other episodes. Maybe these will be better.

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No, they're all bad. They are awful. Anyway, this is this is a total rabbit trail has nothing to do with this Bible study.

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I just thought I would share. That's my experience with He -Man. Solomon is wiser than He -Man, which wasn't very difficult because the cartoon was terrible.

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Anyway, Kalkal and Darda and the sons of Mayhall and his fame was in all the surrounding nations.

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He also spoke three thousand proverbs and his songs were one thousand and five.

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You might read verse thirty two and you're like three thousand proverbs. Big deal. I can come up with three thousand proverbs today.

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Well, we're talking about wise sayings that were repeated by the entire kingdom and then by the kings of any of those neighboring nations were also repeating the famous proverbs of Solomon.

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So this is not just coming up with something witty on an afternoon. This is this is the wisdom that Solomon had, that his words would be repeated by people for for years and centuries and millennia because we're still repeating them even today.

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We have an entire book of the Bible dedicated to most or to many of them.

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I can't say most of them because there aren't three thousand there. But anyway, the book of Proverbs, go and read some proverbs.

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His songs were one thousand and five and we don't have many of those at all, in fact.

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But just as David had employed musicians in his court, so Solomon had the same many more of David songs lasted and we still read in the

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Psalms, not so many of Solomon. But but he was a famed musician himself during his time, just like his father.

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He spoke of trees from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall.

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He spoke also of beasts and of birds and of reptiles and of fish. And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon and from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom.

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So so this reference here in verses thirty three and thirty four that Solomon spoke of trees and nature and some of these kinds of things,

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Solomon was able to draw from the world around to apply some of these wisdom proverbs that he spoke.

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He knew how the world worked. He studied the world from the smallest ant to the giant elephant.

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OK, just to give you an example and everything in how nature worked and how the human heart worked and some of these kinds of things.

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Solomon was very wise concerning the workings of planet Earth. It's what contributed to the wisdom that he had.

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And you can hear you can read more about his insight into the human spirit when you read books like Ecclesiastes, for example.

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Solomon in his wisdom and in his age, eventually looking at the world and saying all is meaningless.

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It's a toiling after the wind. And so the only true meaning that we can have in our lives is to know

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Jesus Christ is Lord, our creator, God, who made us. We find our meaning and purpose in him.

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None of these other things that we could chase after in the world will ever give us satisfaction or meaning.

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Solomon didn't find meaning in any of it, though. God filled up his life with prosperity and wealth and peace and wisdom and all of these other kinds of things.

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He found nothing meaningful in this world. The only meaning that we find is in Jesus Christ, our

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Lord. You know, when I was younger, high school, college, I was trying to find meaning and purpose in life, trying to find what what

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God's will was for my life. Yeah, not really his will, because I wasn't reading his word to know what it was

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I needed to do to please God. I thought that, you know, my my meaning and purpose in life was

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God's will for me, my hopes and my dreams. So I'm trying to figure out God's will for my life.

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And I I thought for sure that whatever I was supposed to do with my life, it was going to be out of the state of Kansas.

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So all the way through high school, I'm trying to find ways of getting out of Kansas didn't end up applying for the colleges that I should have been doing.

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And so ended up at a community college in Kansas, was trying to go from there into a larger college, didn't get that done either.

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And so I've spent most of my life in Kansas, even though I thought that in order to make something of myself,

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I had to go somewhere somewhere else. Joke's on me. Right. So anyway, all the way through high school and college, trying to find myself, trying to figure out who

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I'm supposed to be, what kind of person I am, who I'm going to marry, what kind of career I'm going to have, all these different kinds of things.

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And I never really was able to make sense of anything going on in my life until I placed all my faith and trust in Jesus Christ and found out who

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I was in him instead of who I'm supposed to be in this world. So this was somewhere around my mid 20s or something like that.

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I finally figured that out. Well, my brothers then graduate high school and they go off to college and they're starting to do the same things.

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And I'm reading, you know, when I was in high school, there wasn't blogs online or there might have been, but I I didn't have anything to do with them.

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Weren't very popular at that time anyway. So so once I was in about my mid 20s, my younger brothers are blogging and I'm reading some of the things that they're posting online and stuff like that.

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And I'm seeing a lot of the same stuff that I went through. They're going through now. So I started getting a hold of my brothers, particularly my next brother down from me.

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And and I said, you know, I saw you write this and I've heard you say this and talk about this and some of these other things.

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Let me just help you out as you're trying to find yourself in this world. You want to know who you are. You're trying to find your identity.

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So your oats, you know, all these other kinds of crazy things we say we're doing in order to figure out who we are.

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I said to him, let me let me save you the time. Let me save you the trouble. All these other things you're investing yourself in to try to figure out who you are, they are never going to satisfy.

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It's like a dog chasing his own tail. You're never going to arrive at at the person that you want to be.

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OK, you might look into the future and see this guy with six pack abs and money falling out of his pockets and driving the car you want, living in the house that you want to be in.

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OK, and then once you get there, then you become that guy looking forward to another guy, another version of yourself in the future that you haven't become yet.

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It's just this constant dog chasing tail mentality. Everything you are trying to acquire in this world will never satisfy and ultimately will lead you one place.

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And that's hell. One of the proverbs of Solomon, there is a way that is right to a man that seems right to a man, but in the end is death.

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And so the only way to truly find out who you are supposed to be is when you follow

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Jesus Christ and you are made in his image, conformed to our savior and made zealous for his works.

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And not only will you find the abundant life that he offers and he promises, but you will find eternal life beyond this world, which cannot satisfy the eternal kingdom of God, which is far more than we could ever ask for or imagine.

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I wish that I could say that my siblings took my advice, but they did not.

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And their lives are lives that I continue to pray for, that they would turn from sin and follow

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Jesus Christ. I am grateful to the Lord Christ that he rescued me out of my own aimless wandering and looking for myself in in girls and jobs and and and dreams and successes and all this other kind of thing.

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None of those things ever satisfied. And I look I don't look back on those things with any fondness whatsoever.

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I was a sinner out for myself and I was on the way to death if it was not for the fact that my savior rescued me out of my own destruction and delivered me into his eternal kingdom.

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My eyes are set heavenward. Now, and I pray that I would hate the pursuits of this world even more than I already do so that I would love the things of God and and actively pursue the kingdom of God every single day that I am here on this earth.

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I pray that you do the same. Lord, we thank you for this lesson that has been given to us today in First Kings chapter four.

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And I pray once again that it drives us to look toward the kingdom of God and realize that the things of this world will never satisfy.

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They will never save. They will never endure. Heaven and earth will pass away. The word of the

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Lord will never pass away. So let our faith and our trust be on the promises of God is given in your word and help that be our encouragement, our uplifting throughout our day.

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And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen. Thank you for listening to when we understand the text.

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Pastor Gabe is the author of the book, 40 of the most popular Bible verses and what they really mean. Available in paperback or for your

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Kindle. He's also authored a Bible study through the book of First Corinthians. Both books can be found at our website at WWUTT .com.