2 Chronicles 6:6-9

Now it was in the heart of David my father to build an house for the name of the Lord God of Israel.

David’s intention to build the temple

I. Man’s purposes are sometimes greater than his power. Limitation of--

1. Character.

2. Body.

3. Culture.

4. Circumstances--want of means or liberty.

5. Destiny.

6. Life.

II. The importance and value of these gracious but unfulfilled intentions. Earnest purposes, sincere desires, are facts, and as facts will be recompensed.

1. They are facts to God.

2. They are facts to those who cherish them.

3. Unfulfilled intentions are not without their practical influence upon society.

III. The comfort which these considerations are calculated to afford to--

1. The poor and uneducated.

2. The suffering.

3. Those who are called to premature death.

4. All good men in the presence of their imperfect lives. (W. L. Watkinson.)

The rejected service, but approved motive

I. A rejected service. Here is a good man bent upon a service which he is not permitted to perform. It is an instance of a man’s purposes outrunning the possibilities of his life. There are many reasons why a man should sometimes not be allowed to accomplish sell-imposed tasks, although they may be the outcome of very fine motives. There were reasons in David’s life. David had been a man of war, and as such had shed human blood (1 Chronicles 22:8). There was an incongruity which God recognised, which had escaped David’s attention, between shedding blood and building a sanctuary for God. Then, again, there may be some special hindrance in the age in which a man lives, or the circumstances by which he is surrounded, which makes the postponement of the work necessary. A man may live, as we say, before his age, he may project great purposes into human life, and yet God may say to him, “Stop, the motive is pure enough, and it is accepted as such, but the world is not yet ready; My providence must mature things, and we must wait.” Again, there may be something in God’s design--worldward: that design which includes time and eternity within the scope of its operation--which may put a veto upon any such scheme, his accomplishing tasks which are in themselves very praiseworthy, and which are prompted by pure and exalted motives. Now I have said that every man who has lived to a purpose must know some time or other what such a disappointment as this means. Why, this, book tells us that God has put eternity into a man’s heart. God has put eternity into a man’s heart; therefore the impulses of eternity, or the aims and purposes which take in eternity, are there. Man is not a mere creature of time: he strikes great outlines, not as the mere creature of time, but as one who is to live for ever. Thus, as long as it is true that God has put eternity into a man’s heart, and has only put seventy years, or at most eighty or ninety years, into his life, there must be an overlapping of purposes and designs in relation to attainments in this life. It is impossible, therefore, that he should fulfil all his designs, or fill up the outlines of these plans, in a brief life. David was bent upon building a house unto the Lord: he was denied that privilege: but who will say that his life was therefore a failure? David, after all, was permitted to do a nobler work than building a sanctuary for God, great as that privilege would have been. He sang out the hymns which were destined to become the inspired psalter for all ages. Now, there are some men who escape these disappointments; but at what cost! The men who never aim at high things, who never strike the outline of any noble work; men who never allow the immortal spirit which is within them to design immortal things, and therefore things which can never be accomplished in a mortal life, doubtless escape these disappointments, but at the cost of degrading that which is noblest and best in their natures.

II. The approved motive: “Whereas it was in thine heart to build an house for My name, thou didst well that it was in thine heart.” Many a man would have said, “Ah, poor David, all the inspiration of a great purpose, all the patient planning, and all the earnest endeavour to accomplish the task on his part, have been useless. The Divine veto has put an end to all.” Nay, not so. David does not occupy the same position Godward or manward which he would have occupied if he had never designed so devout and exalted a scheme.

1. It was well for David himself--well for his own soul that this thought took possession of it. Remember the circumstances. David had built for himself a house with cedared roof, but was then shocked with the thought of his dwelling in a palace while his God dwelt in the old tattered tabernacle of the wilderness. Surely that recoil itself was ennobling.

2. It was well, too, for David’s outward, as well as his inner, life. While engaged in gathering materials for the temple, he was saved from doing things less worthy of his calling and position as the anointed of the Lord. While engaged at this work he had less disposition to engage in conflict with his neighbours.

3. It was also well that this was in his heart, because by gathering the materials for the building of the temple ha had furthered the object by preparing the way for some one else to finish the task..

4. It was well, too, because, now that he knew that he himself would never be permitted to build the house, he would have an opportunity of exercising a self-denial which he would not have done if his had been the privilege of completing the task. Thus there was a spiritual blessing, an enriching grace, an ennobling providence in this denial. Now, we see this often in life. It is a law of human life that some men originate a work, and others accomplish it. There is nothing final about man’s work on earth; we pick up the thread where other hands dropped it, and soon will drop it into younger hands than ours. God’s designs cover millenniums. Look at daily life. There is a man who founds a house, or originates a business: a man who begins in a small room, and by dint of genius and perseverance, under God’s blessing, so extends his business that it well-nigh takes up one side of a street. That man passes away. But he has had dreams greater than his accomplishment. Among his later thoughts was that something else might be done, but he was denied the privilege of giving embodiment to those thoughts. His son takes his place. Ah, and when the motive is never attained, still, if it be noble, it is not fruitless. There is that child overboard: a man leaps after it, but the storm rages and the ocean heaves and lounges terribly, so that the man at length fails to rescue the child. Who shall say that it was not well that he thought of it, and risked his own life in the noble endeavour? It is heaven that will supply the final solution, and it is the future that will crown the edifice of tasks unfinished in this our mortal life, although they were originated with high motives and far-reaching purposes. David entered eternity, not as a disappointed man, but as one who was inspired with an exalted aim that he bequeathed to a succeeding generation, whose noblest activities it set going. (D. Davies.)

Pious purposes frustrated but rewarded

I. The Lord notices the pious purposes of the heart. And here the following points require attention.

1. He is omniscient. “All things are naked and open unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” “I the Lord search the heart.” We judge by external manifestations, and know the tree by its fruit; but He understands our thought afar off.

2. The omniscient Jehovah approves the godly purpose. It is acceptable to Him through Jesus Christ, as it springs from faith and love, as it means glory to God and goodwill toward man. The Lord knows and approves your desire to serve Him, whatever obstacles may arise to prevent the fulfilment. “The desire of a man is his kindness,” and is accepted as such.

3. He sees the effect of His grace. “From Him all good things do come.” And where is the believer who will not gratefully own, “Thou hast wrought all our works in us”? We have no purposes which, in the sight of God, are godly, until a good work is begun in us; for, as depraved creatures, we are all alienated from the life of God. Our purposes are worldly and sinful.

II. It may please the Lord, in the exercise of infinite wisdom and goodness, to disappoint us with regard to the accomplishment of our purposes of serving Him.

1. To impress us with the conviction of His independence. He is the “Lord God Almighty,” who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think. Such dispensations of Providence may be appointed to teach the Church of God that its great Head, when He thinks proper, can dispense with the instrumentality we expected Him to employ.

2. Another reason for the Divine conduct in the case in point is to induce the spirit of submission and resignation. And can you say, “Thy will, my God, Thy will be done”? We naturally like our own way. Our “purposes are broken off,” even “the thoughts of our heart.” God thwarts us, not to grieve, but to teach us deference to His will.

3. We may add another reason why God takes away the young and useful, to prevent idolatry.

III. If the Lord thus prevent the fulfilment of the pious purpose, He tenderly says, “thou hast well done in that it was in thine heart.”

IV. God graciously rewards the intention, even as much as if it had been accomplished. It is our painful duty to charge the sinner to remember that God notices and takes account of his evil devices. (S. Eldridge.)

The unfulfilled ideal

A religious ideal may be defined as a product of sanctified imagination, and sanctified imagination may again be described as faith considered in its free, intellectual expression. An ideal is the outline picture of possible usefulness and success, conceived under the incitements of faith, hope, and love inherent in the new life. An ideal that is born of pure religious life, and not of mere worldly ambition, is a child of God’s inspiration in the second degree of descent. Every Christian worker has his ideals. The ideals cherished by God’s people vary with the requirements of the age. David’s was to build a temple; ours probably concern the building of living stones into that peerless temple in which God shall be worshipped throughout all ages. The value of unfulfilled ideals is a lesson we all need to learn. Only a slight fraction of the zeal that promised so much at first ever seems to bear visible fruit. We see the ideals of fellow-labourers out short by the act of God, almost before they have touched their coveted tasks. The achievements of the best lives do not equal the measure of ardent aspiration, and God rewards for aspiration as well as for perfected deed. There are also ideals the secret of whose frustration is to be found in our own hearts. We had, perhaps, miscalculated our strength, or pride mingled with our ideals, and God was holding us back from their realisation till pride had been extinguished and faith and hope and humility had grown to proportions commensurate with the success He was about to give us. But we do not understand the meaning of God’s delays, and so our ideals of work and obligation and evangelistic success have been relegated to the lumber-room and have been lying there in ignoble dust and dry-rot for years. A famous traveller has written a book to tell us how remunerative the abandoned goldfields of Midian may yet become. Some of the most productive silver mines of South America are mines that were worked by Spanish conquerors, forsaken for two and a half centuries, and are now being worked again. Boundless spiritual wealth and possibility lie hidden in the half-forgotten ideals of our youth and early manhood.

I. The influence exerted by the unfulfilled idea upon the personal character. It is just conceivable that religious life may exist without the help and influence of ideals, but it will only be marked by feebleness and insipidity. It will find its appropriate emblem in the dead-level of the prairie rather than in the towering majesty of the forest. The moment you give up your large ideals you cease to feel the necessity for large sacrifice, large heroism, generous self-forgetting toll. An ideal occupies precisely the same relation to religious growth and power that the faculty of imagination in the child does to the character and success of the after-man. Students of social science tell us that the education provided in the parish workhouse supplies no element to stimulate the imagination of the child, and that the little ones placed under the regime grow up dull, sullen, void of interest in everything about them, and without a single ambition to improve themselves. In the course of time, after every potential interest and aspiration is battered down and deadened, the child is turned into the world; and it is almost invariably found, after a few years of indolence, stolidity, and mild crime, the child returns to the workhouse to shelter its incompetency and approaching age. Let imagination be denied its proper function in the religious life, and the result will be to limit that life to a very low and abject plane. The professor of religion who is without an inspiring ideal is spending the life of a creeping, torpid, spiritual pauper. All our religious virtues gain or lose as our ideals of religious work are grasped or abandoned. There is a logical impediment to the growth of faith in the heart of the man who has given up his ideals. All faith is twofold in its action, personal and vicarious, and the one type of action can no more go on without the other than the systole can be separated from diastole in the action of the heart. Decay in the faith you exercise on behalf of the world will bring decay in the faith exercised on your own behalf. Hence it is that in genuine revivals of religion the sanctification of believers and the conversion of the ungodly always proceed by equal paces. An ideal, if deferred in its fulfilment, or even unfulfilled in the precise form in which you first conceived it, will be a perpetual fountain of health and prosperity to your own soul. Doubtless the whole character of David was raised and ennobled by the ideal he had so long cherished within his heart. If you cannot see the worth of your unfulfilled ideals, God, who traces their influence upon character, can; and if the inward ear were not heavy with the world’s distracting babel, you would hear the testimony of His favour and approval, “Thou didst well that it was in thine heart.” Never weigh against your moral and spiritual interests the temporal sacrifices you make for your ideals.

II. These ideals move the mind of Almighty God. The ideal touches with some lasting impression the unforgetting God, and passes into one of the abiding motive-forces of the universe He governs to redeem. There is a spiritual doctrine of the conservation of energy which is the heritage of all the true people of God. When Providence puts its arrest upon the progress of our ideals, every fraction of the force lives on. Blessed doctrine of the conservation of energy! David held some clue to it when he exclaimed, “Are not my tears in Thy book?” Christ was recognising it when He spoke the words that immortalised Mary’s love: “Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached, there shall also this that this woman hath done be told for a memorial of her.” The writer of the Hebrews felt it when he exclaimed, “God is not unrighteous to forget your work of faith and labour of love which ye have showed toward His name.” There is a God-moving force in our own keeping. How is power to be brought out and applied? It must be stimulated and increased by temporary delay. There is a danger of one-sidedness in the action of our ideals. They sometimes stimulate the power of work without stimulating at the same time the twin power of prayer. You thrust on this side, and smite on that, and accomplish nothing. God seems to confound you, and you are ready to give up all your ideals in your vexation and impatience. God wants you to drop the rude staff and take up the jewelled weapon of all-prayer. Again, when our ideals are postponed in their accomplishment it is that faith may be made perfect, and that we may cast ourselves more fully upon God. What frightful infidels we should become if we saw our ideals leap up to immediate completion at our mere touch as by a process of rapid tropical growth! You lose power over the mind of God when you begin to throw away your ideals.

III. Think of the influence of David’s ideal upon the actual work of erecting the temple. David’s ideal became the accomplished work of his successor. Your towering ideals of to-day, if grasped with fidelity and followed up as far as God permits, shall be a secured platform for the action of the next generation. Conclusion:

1. You should pitch your ideals high enough to make sure they will be called extravagant by all those in whose hearts is the love of the world, and not the love of the Father. Never mind how daring they are, if the pure love of God and men enters into their deepest essence.

2. Above all things try to keep pride out of them.

3. Having once formed your ideals, hold them fast. Some men sneer at the ideals of their youth, as if they were a species of wild oats they had been sowing, and not God-begotten and immortal seed. Do not be satirist where God is admirer, and set your small, cynical sneers at yourself over against His word of approbation. “Thou didst well that it was in thine heart.” (Thomas G. Selby.)