Solomon’s Prayer Of Dedication

1 Kings 8:56-61

"Blessed be the LORD, who has given rest to His people Israel, according to all that He promised. There has not failed one word of all His good promise, which He promised through His servant Moses.
May the LORD our God be with us, as He was with our fathers. May He not leave us nor forsake us,
that He may incline our hearts to Himself, to walk in all His ways, and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His judgments, which He commanded our fathers.
And may these words of mine, with which I have made supplication before the LORD, be near the LORD our God day and night, that He may maintain the cause of His servant and the cause of His people Israel, as each day may require,
that all the peoples of the earth may know that the LORD is God; there is no other.
Let your heart therefore be loyal to the LORD our God, to walk in His statutes and keep His commandments, as at this day."

The Feast of Dedication is the closest thing we see in Scripture to our feast of Christmas. It is, yet it isn’t. There is more to look at in that — but for another time. In 1 Kings 8 (repeated in 2 Chronicles 6), Solomon prays for the Dedication of the Temple. What is that exactly — for us today, I mean?

In 1 Kings we see Solomon spreading out his hands toward heaven — Then Solomon stood before the altar of the LORD in the presence of all the assembly of Israel, and spread out his hands toward heaven; and he said: "LORD God of Israel, there is no God in heaven above or on earth below like You, who keep Your covenant and mercy with Your servants who walk before You with all their hearts. He is dedicating the temple and we — each of us a temple for The Holy Spirit — must be dedicated to Him also.

Matthew Henry in his commentary says In this excellent prayer, Solomon does as we should do in every prayer; he gives glory to God. Fresh experiences of the truth of God’s promises call for larger praises. He sues for grace and favour from God. The experiences we have of God’s performing his promises, should encourage us to depend upon them, and to plead them with him; and those who expect further mercies, must be thankful for former mercies.

Dedication is synonymous with commitment — so that when we pray, we are praying with dedication; believing that His promises will be fulfilled and that assurance and reassurance is at hand. Do we believe Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:19 that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? As His temple — His people in whom He wishes to dwell — we are to have Him as the focus and inspiration of all that we are. Thus it is an aspect of our prayer life that we dedicate the Temple — set our God in His rightful place.

In John 10:22-25 we read this:
Now it was the Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem, and it was winter.
And Jesus walked in the temple, in Solomon's porch.

We can see here that Jesus’ presence in the temple is a New Testament revelation — a revealing — of Solomon’s Old Testament prayer of dedication. Jesus is walking in the temple at the time of the Feast of Dedication. In other words, He is ‘at home’ in the temple, in the porch or doorway named after Solomon (whose name means ‘peace’). Jesus — Jehovah is salvation — who has ‘The Door’ as one of the many names given to The Son of The Father in Scripture, is physically in the doorway named ‘peace’, and this is important because wherever Jesus is present, He brings ‘peace’.

Blessed be The Lord, who has given rest to His people…’

Meditate On These Things

EPHESIANS 2:19-22
Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

---

THY MERCY MY GOD — Sandra McCracken

---

A HOLY OCCUPATION: Oswald Chambers on PRAYER
— requires CHILDLIKENESS --

THE NEARER ABRAHAM came to God in his intercession the more he recognised his entire unworthiness: "Indeed now. I who am but dust and ashes have taken upon myself to speak to the Lord." Genuine unworthiness is never shy before God any more than a child is shy before his mother. A child of God is conscious only of his entire dependence upon God.
[from ‘Not Knowing Whither’]

---

Listen to this meditation by clicking below

22-06-13_solomon’s_prayer_of_dedication.m4a
File Size:	3614 kb
File Type:	m4a

Download File

---

---