He calls some folks to do the gutsy work in the ditchs. He calls some folks to compose and conduct music. God has all sorts of creative methods to use us—ways we will not even imagine and definitely can’t see up there round the next bend in the road.

One of the toughest things to hear is that God is going to use some other person to do something that you thought was your role to fill. “Who am I, O Lord GOD, and what’s my home, that You have brought me this far? And yet this was unimportant in Your eyes, O Lord GOD, for You have talked also of the house of Your servant concerning the distant future. Again what else can David say to You? For You know Your servant, O Lord GOD.

It is important that once in a while we sit down, take a long look at our short lives, and count our blessings. Who are we to have once been shielded from the rains that slipped and the robust winds that annihilated regions, leaving hundreds homeless? Who are we that He has sanctified our home and kept it safe? Warm in winter. Who am I, Lord, that you must give me health and strength to be in a position to hold a job or pursue this career or get this degree? Or to have parents who have inspired me? Or to have these great youngsters and to see them grow? Who am I? “Dream or no dream, I am a sanctified person,” asserts David.

Here is more proof that David was a person after God’s own heart.

“David, you may know the pleasure of having a child by whom this church will be built. Not thru your work, but through your child the dream will be fulfilled.”. It isn’t God’s judgment that’s coming on David as a consequence of wrong.

It is just God’s redirecting David’s plan and pronouncing, “This is a great resolve, but I say ‘no’ to you and I say ‘yes’ to your boy.

Well, was David not right to begin with—wrong in thinking about building the temple? It’s an issue of accepting God’s “no” and living alongside the poser of His will. And we predict God to package His plan for us just like we would. We’d like the logic that we use to be His logic. And when it’s not, we wonder what is wrong as it’s not working out like we might have worked it out. When God asserts no it isn’t always discipline or refusal. You have pursued His will ; you have wished to do His will.

With all good inclinations you announced, “By God’s grace I’m going to follow this.” And here you are, 30 or 40 years on, or perhaps only 5 years after, and it has not materialized. Now if you hear some folks, you can be put on a guilt-trip.

“You see there,” they are saying, “you set your heart on God, but you have run from Him. Maybe the road they’re traveling is God’s will for them, and it took His exclaiming “no” to get them on that right road. The thing we have got to do in our walk with the Lord God is to listen punctiliously from daily.

David brought the ark of Almighty God up to Jerusalem and back to the people of Israel. It had started to trouble him the ark of Almighty God was in a tent while he lived in a gorgeous house. So he got the concept in his mind to build an abiding residence for God in which to house all of the sacred furniture. David recounted, “It isn’t fitting the king should live in this beautiful cedar dwelling and the ark, the presence of Jehovah himself, should be in a little tent out there. Now I would like to emphasise, from everything we all know about him, David had no alternative motive here.

He had no need to create a name for himself or his folks. As a matter of fact, he would have liked to exalt no other name but God in building this house.

It is in the interludes of life that we have time to seize a dream or a perfect target. A small number of you, in a quiet moment of your life, realized the vocation into which God was calling you.

Perhaps it occurred in the silence of your own room after a church service one evening.

Or maybe it was while you used to be a student in a dorm. Before long, they stretched into a direct arrow toward some exciting and new target. You’ve got to slow down and become quiet in those special times to hear His voice, to sense His leading.

But let me add this : infrequently the dream is from God ; infrequently it is not. But when it is not of the Lord God, it will not come to fulfillment—nor should it.

To build a healthy fear of Almighty God. “Moses related to the people, ‘Do not be fearful ; for God has come to test you, and so that the terror of Him may remain with you, so you may not sin’ “( Exodus 20:20 ). “Now the LORD recounted to Moses, ‘Come up to Me on the mountain and remain there, and I’ll give you the stone tablets with the law and the commandment which I’ve written for their instruction.’ So Moses arose with Joshua his servant, and Moses went up to the mountain of God” ( Exodus 24:12–13 ). Isn’t it great that God gave His folks written instructions to obey? This is the 1st time in all of history that God set down His Word. And to think, you and I possess those written words.

Back before the downfall of the unbelieving Soviet Union, my chum John Truck Diest represented the Evangelical Christian Publishers organisation at the Moscow Book Fair. The authorities had granted them disinclined authorization to hand out a controlled number of Russian language New Testaments, and long lines of folk waited in a queue to get a copy. When the supplies were exhausted, one despairingly disappointed man questioned if he could have one of the empty boxes that had once held those Testaments. “With tears glistening in his eyes, the person answered, “Then I at least require the box.”

The Bible was so valuable to this person that he valued the card box that had held the Scriptures.May our eyes be opened to the amazing privilege that’s ours to hold the entire written Word of the Lord in our really hands.