SERMON OF THE WEEK First Presbyterian Church of Honolulu November 9, 2008 Solomon & the Temple of God (E-100 Series) Rev. Dr. Dan Chun 1Kings 9:1 When Solomon had finished building the house of the LORD and the king s house and all that Solomon desired to build, 1Kings 9:2 the LORD appeared to Solomon a second time, as he had appeared to him at Gibeon. 1Kings 9:3 The LORD said to him, I have heard your prayer and your plea, which you made before me; I have consecrated this house that you have built, and put my name there forever; my eyes and my heart will be there for all time. 1Kings 9:4 As for you, if you will walk before me, as David your father walked, with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my ordinances, 1Kings 9:5 then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever, as I promised your father David, saying, There shall not fail you a successor on the throne of Israel. 1Kings 9:6 If you turn aside from following me, you or your children, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, 1Kings 9:7 then I will cut Israel off from the land that I have given them; and the house that I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight; and Israel will become a proverb and a taunt among all peoples. 1Kings 9:8 This house will become a heap of ruins; everyone passing by it will be astonished, and will hiss; and they will say, Why has the LORD done such a thing to this land and to this house? 1Kings 9:9 Then they will say, Because they have forsaken the LORD their God, who brought their ancestors out of the land of Egypt, and embraced other gods, worshiping them and serving them; therefore the LORD has brought this disaster upon them. Our passage today is about King Solomon, the 10 th son of King David and the famous Bathsheba. Solomon was known as a wise king. Prosperity and expansion marked his reign. He was highly intelligent and reportedly an expert in botany and zoology. He was a prolific writer and inventor as his kingdom brought advanced mining and smelting technologies. (NIV Bible Dictionary, p.953) And clearly, one of his greatest accomplishments was building the first Temple in Jerusalem. But alas, the Babylonians destroyed it about 400 years later. It was rebuilt and then destroyed two more times, the last one by the Romans in 67 A.D. All that is left of the Temple is the famous Wailing Wall. 1 So it looks like God s word in our Scripture reading this morning was fulfilled in the last century. It is no surprise that this passage is one of the E100, one of the essential 100 passages that every Christian should know for it is about building the first Holy Temple of God. You will notice these themes in today s message: vision, sacrificial giving to God, deep respect for God and First Presbyterian Church of Honolulu. David wanted to build a Holy Temple for God because it didn t seem right to him that he lived in a nice big palace while the Ark of the Covenant, which symbolized God s presence, was housed only in a tent. Back in 2 Samuel, we read how David first bought the land for the Holy Temple when the prophet Gad speaks to David on behalf of God. 2Sam. 24:18 That day Gad came to David and said to him, Go up and erect an altar to the LORD on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. 2Sam. 24:19 Following Gad s instructions, David went up, as the LORD had commanded. 2Sam. 24:20 When Araunah looked down, he saw the king and his servants coming toward him; and Araunah went out and prostrated himself before the king with his face to the ground.
2Sam. 24:21 Araunah said, Why has my lord the king come to his servant? David said, To buy the threshing floor from you in order to build an altar to the LORD, so that the plague may be averted from the people. 2Sam. 24:22 Then Araunah said to David, Let my lord the king take and offer up what seems good to him; here are the oxen for the burnt offering, and the threshing sledges and the yokes of the oxen for the wood. 2Sam. 24:23 All this, O king, Araunah gives to the king. And Araunah said to the king, May the LORD your God respond favorably to you. 2Sam. 24:24 But the king said to Araunah, No, but I will buy them from you for a price; I will not offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God that cost me nothing. So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. There are three interesting points about this land purchase. First, it is the same plot of land where Abraham took Isaac to be a sacrifice until the Lord provided a sacrificial offering. And to think thousands of years later, God would choose this city of Jerusalem as the site for His sacrificial offering of His only Son, Jesus. Second, the fact that David did not want to get the land for free but pay for it shows that worship includes sacrifice. Worship comes at a cost. Third, because David was a warrior with blood on his hands, God later told him that he (David) could not build the Holy Temple. 1Chr. 28:3 But God said to me, You shall not build a house for my name, for you are a warrior and have shed blood. But God did want a Temple and so, through the Holy Spirit, He gave David the blue print design. The Spirit spoke to David and told him exactly how to construct it. (1 Chr. 28:19) David then told his son, Solomon, how to build the Temple, and gave him the design from God. The building process was carefully thought out. Here s an interesting note. In honor of God, no construction noise was heard at the building site. All stones were cut and shaped miles away at the quarry and then transported to the temple mount. The design of the temple was patterned after the first tent tabernacle though much more complex and ornate. The Temple took seven years to complete and was dedicated in 950 BC. Solomon drafted three times the number of workers he needed for the job. He arranged their work schedules in shifts so that none of them were away from their homes and families for long periods of time. Solomon apparently had a genuine concern for the welfare of his people. He showed importance on family life. What an amazing contrast to the way Pharaoh treated his workers when the Israelites worked for him! President-elect Obama, take heed. Solomon wisely recognized that the strength of a nation is in direct proportion to the strength of its families and, therefore, made it a top priority. (Life Application Bible, p.555) The real temple (or church) is, of course, not a structure but the people of God. It is possible for people to become obsessed with a 2 building. But it can also be wrong to neglect the place we associate with God s presence and let it fall into ruin. The church can be a visible witness for God, both as a vibrant and vital body of believers and as a beautiful structure. Yes, It is clear in the New Testament that our bodies are the new Temple of God that we must keep holy. But it is also clear that sociologically all cultures find a need for structures for gathering places of worship. Whether in Africa or Asia or England or Hawaii, societies look to buildings or cathedrals to be sacred places of worship to gather God s people for praise and to be a central place for the training of ministry. In China, Pam and I worshipped God in a new 5,000- seat church sanctuary built in the city of Hangzhou just two years ago. It s a huge and beautiful site. Though I am no King David, God s vision came early for our church of where our new place of worship and discipleship would be. There was no blue print but a vision of what the actual building and land of worship would be. We just didn't know it at the time. It was in January 2002 when a group of our church leaders met with world-renowned architect Francis Oda in his Group 70 downtown office. We met to have a charette, which is a nice fancy French word for a time of dreaming, visioning and imagineering of what we wanted for our new church site that would replace our older crowded facilities. Being the pastor, the group was gracious enough to let me present the first vision casting. Remember now that this was at least 4 years before we even knew that our present Ko olau property existed.
I told them that the new campus would have a lot of greenery; lots of plants, trees, and beautiful green foliage. Second, lots of water water fountains, ponds, streams. Third, it would be large like a hotel with many conference rooms and wide hallways to receive thousands of people coming to Christ. Fourth, it would be like an embassy where the church represents the kingdom of God, similar to how a country is represented in another country by its embassy. The new church site needs to be a place that will respectfully honor the King of Kings. Fifth, it must be elegant but not opulent. It must look nice but not ostentatious. And then lastly, I said it would have a fireplace. In a home the fireplace is a symbol of warmth, and it is often the heart of a family gathering. I wanted the new church site to have a similar feel. I could picture in my mind that there would be a piano near the fireplace where we would sing Christmas carols in December. Well, the people heard that and laughed. No one in Hawaii, and certainly no church would have a fireplace. Miraculously and prophetically all of that would come true in a place we did not know existed as an option. A year later when the staff first looked at Ko olau as a possibility back in 2003, they saw the fireplace and Pastor Robin Langdon shouted in jest, A sign! A sign! This must be the place! When we saw this facility with the shooting fountains, the waterfall and the state s tallest indoor ferns in the atrium, the wide hallways, the conference rooms, the embassy-like feel with a fellowship hall and the large sanctuary where we are right now, we wondered if that charette vision in 2002 was really from God. Then in 2006, we finally purchased the property. I must confess that as I was praying below the huge wooden cross in the atrium (which is from our former sanctuary), I thought, The marble floors and columns are a lot more than we imagined we would have one day. Maybe this is more opulent than just elegant. Suddenly I heard a loud voice in my head that said, Dan, this IS my house! To which I said, Okay, Lord. Sorry! This is Your house after all. If King David heard You say that You wanted the finest cedars from Lebanon, gold, silver and bronze in your Holy Temple, then I must be reminded that You were the One who chose Ko olau to house Your church. You picked this place and its design as You chose the design for your Temple in Jerusalem. You deserve far more than a mere Quonset hut or shack for You are the Almighty God. You are the one who chose this place, and maybe someday we will turn this land into a prayer mountain. And may it be known as a healing place. And the land you have chosen of 241 acres is larger than the entire Vatican. And so may we be good stewards of the land and what your vision might be for the kingdom of God in this place of the Pacific. 3 We are not finished building this place dedicated to God for healing and training. We had a $10 million capital campaign and we raised nearly $8 million. We still have $2 more million to pay on our mortgage, which isn t bad when we had to pay $20 million to begin with and only had $250,000 in our capital campaign account when we began. We still haven t built the needed middle school and senior high rooms, choir and band practice room and staff offices. Maybe some of the hundreds of new members who have joined us in the last few years will hear God s call to join in the building of God s place. We will complete these plans but it will be after we knock off the current operating deficit with two months left to go in the year. If our President Elect hadn t already stolen the phrase, I would say if asked, Can we extinguish the deficit, I would say, Yes we can. Yes we can! And maybe as Dec. 31 looms closer, that will change to, Yes, we must! Yes we must! And then in January I pray that we ll be able to say, Yes, we did! Yes, we did! But I don t think anyone can stand up and say, Dan you said it would be easy. We all knew it would be challenging. We would all have to put our shoulders to the wheel. It would stretch us like we ve never been stretched before. We knew that in creating this place for God as a Power Projection Platform (where people could come for healing and find Christ, and then be trained to go out into the community and the world to tell them of God s love) that it could take time and the commitment of our people. It would take service and generosity.
This is not a sermon to say, Why aren t our people giving more? Our church has already given so generously. More than most churches per capita. I dare say with more dedication and commitment than people thought. Clearly 50% more than even our one-time fundraising consultants imagined. 14 of the last 15 years in the black. We have done what the ancient Israelites did in finishing the first Temple for God in a matching fund campaign. King David gave a huge gift of gold, silver, bronze, precious stones and marble, yes, marble in abundance. And how did the Israelites respond to this matching fund? The same way we have and need to respond to God s matching gift of Ko olau. 1Chr. 29:6 Then the leaders of ancestral houses made their freewill offerings, as did also the leaders of the tribes, the commanders of the thousands and of the hundreds, and the officers over the king s work. 1Chr. 29:7 They gave for the service of the house of God five thousand talents and ten thousand darics of gold, ten thousand talents of silver, eighteen thousand talents of bronze, and one hundred thousand talents of iron. 1Chr. 29:8 Whoever had precious stones gave them to the treasury of the house of the LORD, into the care of Jehiel the Gershonite. 1Chr. 29:9 Then the people rejoiced because these had given WILLINGLY, for with single mind they had offered FREELY to the LORD; King David also rejoiced greatly. From this last verse we get the phrase free will offering where the people gave freely and willingly. It has been our giving freely and willingly that has allowed us to be in the black in 14 of 15 years in addition to a capital campaign. Praise God! With our $300K deficit, we can knock it off as I mentioned two weeks ago if each members and regular attendee gave an additional $300 gift. If we did, the deficit would be gone by Dec 31. I realize everyone can t give $300 at this time, but some can give more. In addition to our tithe, Pam and I plan to give to the church a gift of $300 for each member of our family. But money is not the main measure for our dedication to the Lord. Oh, no there is something more precious to God. The Lord had these stern words to Solomon, which we heard today in our opening Scripture passage. 1Kings 9:3 The LORD said to Solomon, I have heard your prayer and your plea, which you made before me; I have consecrated this house that you have built, and put my name there forever; my eyes and my heart will be there for all time. 1Kings 9:4 As for you, if you will walk before me, as David your father walked, with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my ordinances, 1Kings 9:5 then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever, as I promised your father David, saying, There shall not fail you a successor on the throne of Israel. 4 1Kings 9:6 If you turn aside from following me, you or your children, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, 1Kings 9:7 then I will cut Israel off from the land that I have given them; and the house that I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight; and Israel will become a proverb and a taunt among all peoples. 1Kings 9:8 This house will become a heap of ruins; everyone passing by it will be astonished, and will hiss; and they will say, Why has the LORD done such a thing to this land and to this house? Here s the deal. Let there be no hissing when people pass by First Prez. We must keep our focus on Jesus. A nice facility means nothing if we do not keep our focus on Jesus. A large membership means nothing if we do not keep our focus on Jesus. A multitude of ministry programs do not mean anything if we do not keep our focus on Jesus. Everyone keep your focus on Jesus. Every year, every month, every day, every minute. Every day is game day. There is no offseason for the Christian. Keep your game face on at all times. Next year marks our 50 th anniversary as a church. 50 years of God s grace. What will help ensure that in the next 50 years our church will not lose its focus on Jesus? Our Session has agreed that next year in February, the exact month of the First Prez 50 th anniversary, we will bury in the ground a time capsule containing some of the important symbols of our church.
Maybe a worship bulletin or a Bible, maybe an E100 Devotional. And that time capsule will be dug up and opened in 2059, on the 100 th anniversary of our church. But an important part of the 50 th anniversary ceremony will be having two children there. One girl. One boy. We will pray over them and commission those two children that in 50 years from that day we want them to be at the 100 th anniversary ceremony of First Presbyterian Church. If they live outside of Hawaii, we hope to fly them back to the 100 th year ceremony. And at that ceremony we will have them ask the congregation one piercing and profound question: Is it still about Jesus? Is First Prez still about Jesus? For we have seen colleges, universities, high schools, Christian ministries, world relief agencies, parachurch organizations and, yes, churches founded on Christian principles that have lost their focus years later. We have seen churches that are near empty, cathedrals that only tourists visit. These organizations might be giving good education, or doing good works or providing services but they are no longer about Jesus. And when those children who will be at the 2009 First Prez 50 th anniversary ceremony come back as adults and ask the First Prez members of 2059, Is it still about Jesus, may there be a resounding, Yes it is! Yes it is! And when the question is asked of our people, Are you still focused on Jesus, may those people shout, Yes we are! Yes we are! But it s not just about talk, it s about action, too. If we are truly worshipping Jesus then it must also be about justice. This means that, as our mission statement says, if we truly love God then we must truly be loving people and attempting to reach the world for Jesus. Justice means we are truly loving people and reaching them from Jesus means we have a heart for the oppressed and the suffering. A few nights ago I spoke to our Divorce Care group, people who need to hear that in their suffering God loves them. We need to reach out to them. Last week David Free put up on our Compassion Wall the picture of 100+ photos of the children we support through Compassion International, children to whom we give $32 a month to release them from poverty in Jesus name. There are now a total of 584 children our members and attendees support. That s justice! There is a picture of a girl in my office who was saved from prostitution because the church cared. That s justice! Helping children in need at Kaneohe Elementary School is a form of justice. Visiting the sick is a form of justice. True worship always involves justice meaning a heart for the oppressed and the suffering. You see, it was always God s plan that here at Ko olau would be a center for compassion and healing for those who need the love of God. But it was never to keep the compassion of God to ourselves. We were to be like the ship Carpathia that would always go out and help others as the Carpathia helped the survivors of the Titanic. 5 Our church campus is to be a training center for those who have received God s forgiveness and grace who would then go out into their neighborhoods and business areas to tell them about Jesus. And yes, it is a worship center, too, but always with an eye to help others. You see, if we have a right relationship with God, one that is always bringing us closer to Him, we will see the suffering in the world through His eyes and be moved to alleviate it. We will discover that we cannot worship well in a temple or by ourselves if we don t care for those who need God s love. We will praise God more when we work with Him to free children and adults who are being sold into slavery, when we meet the needs of the poor, when we fight against unjust practices. When we can see God s hand at work in the lives of others, we will give Him more praise, more glory because He inspires greater worship. True worship involves our mission statement Love God (worship) Love people (justice) and reach the world for Christ. If you are hurting today, know that we worship a God who loves you. As Max Lucado would say, if God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. He loves you so much that He died for you on a cross. He gave more than gold or silver. He gave His life for you. A Holy God would come down to this earth to love us, be our Lord, our Savior and Friend. That is indeed a God worth our worship. Amen? Amen. Let s pray.