Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2064
“The Lord appeared to Solomon the second time, as He had appeared unto him at Gibeon. And the Lord said unto him, I have heard your prayer and your supplication, that you have made before Me: I have hallowed this house, which you have built, to put My name there forever. And My eyes and My heart shall be there perpetually.” 1 Kings 9:2,3.
BELOVED Friends, it was an exceedingly encouraging thing to Solomon that the Lord should appear to him before the beginning of his great work of building the temple. See in the third chapter of this First Book of the Kings, at the fifth verse, “In Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night: and God said, Ask what I shall give you.” Some of us remember how the Lord was with us at the beginning of our life-work—when we started as young men and women newly converted, full of zeal and earnestness—determined to do something for the Lord. How we sought His face! With what simplicity, with what tenderness of heart, with what dependence upon Him and diffidence as to ourselves!
We remember, as HE remembers, the love of our espousals—those early days. I cannot forget when the Lord appeared unto me in Gibeon at the first. Truly there are things about the lives of Christian men that would not have been possible if God had not appeared to them at the beginning. If He had not strengthened and tutored them and given them wisdom beyond what they possess in themselves. If He had not inspirited them. If He had not infused life into them, they had not done what they have already done. It is a priceless blessing to begin with God and not to lay a stone of the temple of our life-work till the Lord has appeared unto us.
I do not know, however, but that it is an equal, perhaps a superior blessing, for the Lord to appear to us after a certain work is done. Even as in this case—“The Lord appeared to Solomon the second time, as He had appeared unto him at Gibeon.” Solomon had now finished the temple and he needed another visit from on high. There is great joy in completing a work. And yet there is, to some minds, a great letdown, when the once engrossing service ceases to keep the mind upon the stretch. You run up hill and you have gained the summit—there is no more climbing for the present— and then you almost wish that you had to struggle again.
A work like that of Solomon lasting for seven years must have become a delight to him—to see the house growing and to mark all the stages of its beauty. And so it is with any special and notable work which we are called to do early in life. We get wedded to it, we are glad to see it grow under our hand. And when at last that particular portion of our service is finished, we feel a kind of loss. We have grown used to the pull upon the collar—we have almost leaned upon it and we feel a difference when we are at the top of the hill. Personally I never feel exhilaration at a success but a certain sinking of heart when the tug of war was over.
We see the same in the story of God’s greater servants. We note it specially in Elijah when he had performed his mighty work on Carmel and slain the prophets of Baal—he felt an exultation in his spirit for a while and he ran before the chariot of the king in the joy of his soul. But there came a reaction afterwards of a very painful kind. The case of Solomon is not parallel. And yet I should think that it might have been and probably was so with Solomon that he was in a condition of special need when the temple was finished. He may have been in peril of pride, if not of depression—in either case it was a remarkable season and its need must have been remarkable, also—“and so the Lord appeared unto Solomon the second time, as He had appeared unto him in Gibeon.”
Brethren, we need renewed appearances, fresh manifestations, new visitations from on High. And I commend to those of you who are getting on in life—that while you thank God for the past and look back with joy to His visits to you in your early days—you now seek and ask for a second visitation of the Most High. Not that I do not think that you have visitations from God full often and walk in the light of His countenance. But still, though the ocean is often at flood twice every day—yet it has its spring tides. The sun shines whether we see it or not, right though our winter’s fog, and yet it has its summer brightness.
If we walk with God constantly, there are still seasons when He opens to us the very secret of His heart and manifests Himself to us not only as He does not unto the world but as He does not at all times to His own favored ones. All days in a palace are not days of banqueting, and all days with God are not so clear and glorious as certain special Sabbaths of the soul in which the Lord unveils His glory. Happy are we if we have once beheld His face. But happier still if He again comes to us in fullness of favor.