I have used this moment before, but it captures something so well and is so important. A few years ago, on a cold, dark, dull winter evening in Northern Ireland, I had pulled into the Garage to get some of the bare necessities from the Shop. It was one of those nights when you did not want to get out of the car! The heat from the Air Con felt warmer because I could see the temperature before me and the rain pelting the windows all around me. So I sat in the car for a few moments to try and motivate myself out of the door and into the shop.

Yet, sitting there, I soon focused on the car that had just pulled in beside me. I had watched it pull into the garage and then into the space, and as the driver sat in the driver’s seat, she started to flash the lights into the shop. That is a bit strange, I thought! Then she left them on full-beam and got out of the car, walked round to the front, and stared at them light for a few seconds before heading back into the car and flicking her light’s switch, turning her engine on and off, getting out of the car and looking at the headlights again. This continued for about two minutes when I decided to break the cardinal rule – I got out and asked her if she was okay.

After I gently nudged myself into conversation with her and asked if everything was okay, she explained that she had just gotten this new car and was worried about the lights. That worry was evident because I could see her stress grow as she repeated the dance between the front of her car and the inside. After she had explained where she had gotten the car, she told me that they showed her how to do the lights and that she had pulled into the garage on the way home because she was worried she had not turned the lights on properly because they were so dull.

It took me a moment to compute/process the scenario I had found myself in; this fantastic little woman was stressed and confused over her new car and its lights, asking for help to fix their brightness as they ran on full beam. I nearly did not have the heart to tell her that she was wearing Sunglasses, but tell her I did, and for a moment, she almost scowled at me. Until she took her glasses off and seemed to go as red as her car – it turns out she had prescription lenses on. She had gotten into her new car and grabbed the first pair of glasses that she felt on her seat, which happened to be Sunglasses! No wonder the lights were dim; no wonder she was worried.

No sooner had I explained what she was looking through had she moved the front of the car and took in the brightness of the lights both with her glasses on and off, on and off, and then, as she thanked me, she was into her car and reversing out! I am glad her lights were working, and now her eyes were covered by the right glasses. What we are looking through affects how we see the world around us. Thus, how we see the world affects how we perceive the world, not simply with our eyes – but with all of us because we are embodied people. We might see the world with the eyes God has given us, yet we perceive the world with the entirety of our senses: touch, smell, sound, and. We perceive the world, our hearts, and how we feel, which affects what we are drawn to in the normality of our day. We perceive the world’s wholeness because we are embodied wholly in the world.

Our little driver friend had been looking through her sunglasses at the world around her, and it was not until she took them off and could look at them that it began to make sense.

In a short article from the 1940s, CS Lewis reflects upon the difference between looking at something and through/along it. To put it another way, studying something and living it are two radically different propositions. Lewis writes, “You can step outside one

experience only by stepping inside another.”¹ You are probably wondering what this has to do with anything, what it matters what we look through, at, or along. What matters is how we perceive the world we live in or the world around us as we get on with it and are happy. Consider another example from Lewis Short’s meditation:

“A physiologist, for example, can study pain and find out that it “is” (whatever it means) such and such neural events. But the word pain would have no meaning for him unless he had “been inside” by actually suffering. If he had never looked along pain, he simply wouldn’t know what he was looking at. The very subject for his inquiries from outside exists for him only because he has, at least once, been inside.”

The difference between studying and living shapes how we see the world and what we look like. In our passage today, as we stand with Solomon before the entire assembly of the nation at one of the highest points of the country, and as he stretches his hands out to heaven in a posture of prayer before the Lord, he shows us the difference between someone who has studied God and experienced Him. As he stands to pray before the people, what comes across in sincerity is that this is a prayer of someone who knows the goodness and closeness of God in his life, a heart rendered unto God and a life transformed. This prayer should cause us to ask ourselves: are we those who can look along what God has done for Christ as we embody his love and live his mission in the world, or are we those still simply looking at God and thinking it is enough? Today, we must grasp the profound truth that knowledge does nothing to us or for us if it is not lived; knowledge that is experienced transforms who we are and how we see the world. Correctly understanding God in Christ by the presence and Power of the Holy Spirit will always lead to transformation.

1 | Perceiving God with Clarity (v. 22-23)

”22 Then Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord in front of the whole assembly of Israel, spread out his hands toward heaven 23 and said: “Lord, the God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth below—you who keep your covenant of love with your servants who continue wholeheartedly in your way.

If you were conversing with someone who told you they were relaxed and calm as they were pointing a figure in your face, would you believe them? Then, as the finger wiggled and wagged, but they told you everything was fine and they were not annoyed, would you trust their words? No, of course not! Why? Because our posture embodies something about where we are in that moment, not in the literal sense but in the spiritual and emotional. The words might say one thing, but the body language communicates’ the truth. Our posture will always show something about it, which is why we learn to read body language. It is why we can tell someone across the coffee shop is worried about something when we don’t know them or cannot hear them, it is why we can tell two people don’t like each other when they are in a group, and it is why we know that the person pointing their hypothetical finger at us is not as calm as their words try to present. Our posture embodied our heart and state.

Our physical posture shows more than our words can ever cover. That is why the image the writer gives us in this moment of prayer is so important. He does not simply launch into Solomons’s prayer and all its beauty and majesty. First, he tells us the position he takes. Solomon, before God and the people, wanted it to be clear who he was most concerned about – The Lord. He might stand before the assembly of the nation, the civic, tribal and religious leaders of the day – people that we might be concerned with – but he is only mindful of one person. The Lord whom he knows and has experienced, so as he prays, he stretches his hands to the heavens. Why? In his physical movement, Solomon makes clear who he lives for, who he is here for, and who he trusts. Before the Alter of the Lord, Solomon’s posture embodies his trust in God and physically displays a heart that has surrendered to the Lord. He has experienced the Lord’s goodness and providence, so he knows he can trust it. Thus, even before he prays, he displays it with a posture of Surrender and a physical presence that embodies trust and dependency on God. A posture that shows the majesty of God and his goodness and invites us to consider our approach to God and his people.

We are people who come together from different places and nations. Yet, regardless of who we are, where we come from, how long we have been in the church, or how long we have been walking with Jesus in the Posture of Solomon, here we are reminded of the one grounding truth of being Christ’s disciple – humility. Humility brings us to the Kingdom, and humility levels us in our approach to the King. Yet, there is something even more challenging because our approach to God often correlates with our ability to love his people. The Cross should humble us, and in our humility, we remember that we come to the Lord with equality for all who have received his grace. The lifting up of hands and gaze to the heavens reflects Solomon’s humility before God and openness to what God is going to do because Solomon is seeing through what he has already experienced of God. So we must consider our approach to God as Solomon humbles himself before God and the assembly of the nation, so we must humble ourselves and our approach to God. Only in humility can we receive from God and serve him.

2 | Living in God’s Promises, Not Just Studying Them (v. 23-24)

“Lord, the God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth below—you who keep your covenant of love with your servants who continue wholeheartedly in your way. 24 You have kept your promise to your servant David, my father; with your mouth, you have promised, and with your hand, you have fulfilled it—as it is today.

There are no words to say, no images to conjure up who this Lord is. Our language cannot do justice to even the most basic beauty about the Goodness of the God who redeems us. Yet, somehow we get a sense of the majesty of experience Solomon has had with the Lord’s goodness as he identifies who God is “the God of Isreal, and what God is: unique and alone. There is none like him in the heavens or the earth below. He alone is All-knowing, All-powerful, All Presence, all-loving and all-good – Sovereign overall. All of this is captured in Solomon’s imagery, and Solomon has glimpsed/experienced it as he embodies a posture of humility before God and the nation’s assembly. Why? Because to experience God is to be humbled; to glimpse at the fullness of God is to realise the limitations of our humanity and power and our need for something beyond ourselves to live in this world. Solomon glimpsed the lord through the Fog of what was to come and trusted.

We do not glimpse the beauty of God; rather, we see it clearly and badly in the person of Christ and experience the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus the challenge comes before us; if we know God in Christ and experience Christ fully in the Presence and work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, is it visible in how we see the world and how we are seen in the world.. Here is the simple challenge – if we have seen God, then when the world looks at us, they should see Jesus.

Even more beautifully, Solomon’s prayer reminds us even more powerfully about the beauty of Yahweh and the beauty of How he relates to his people. He is a loving God and a covenantal God. He is the God who comes for his people, not for whom his people must seek, a God who rescues them out of Darkness and, by his own Goodness, keeps them in the light. A Covenant that we have seen and experienced clearly in Christ by the Cross and resurrection – where the Lord displays his Love and Glory in one and clearly. The Cross was the promise spoken to David by the Mouth of the Lord and via which the Eternal throne of David would be established forever by the hand of the Lord as the promise of the Lord is fulfilled today (24). The Cross by which we are humbled and receive Grace and mercy, The Cross by which we enter into his presence and can fully experience God’s goodness in our lives. And, the Cross by which we are challenged to live, as we are reminded of the Grace of the covenant, yet the delightful call/response of the covenant – think of the end of Verse 23…. obedience.

3 | Faithfulness to the Covenant (25 & 26)

25 “Now Lord, the God of Israel, keep for your servant David my father the promises you made to him when you said, ‘You shall never fail to have a successor to sit before me on the throne of Israel, if only your descendants are careful in all they do to walk before me faithfully as you have done.’ 26 And now, God of Israel, let your word that you promised your servant David my father come true.

As Solomon continues to pray with hands outstretched towards heaven in a posture of humility and openness to God, his prayers help us to understand more of what Solomon has experienced in the presence of the Lord. He has sung of God’s goodness, uniqueness, love, and power. Now Solomon outlines something that should delight everyone, The Lord’s faithfulness.. God said to David that he would never fail to have a successor sit on the throne of David as long as they walk faithfully to the God who is faithful, which became true the moment Solomon ascended to the throne. Furthermore, it was shown to be most true when the Successor of David built the temple of David in faithfulness to the God who had called them out of Egypt and into his presence.

“You shall never fail to have a successor to sit before me on the throne…if only your descendants are careful in all they do to walk before me faithfully…’ There will always be one on the throne of David as long as those called to the throne are faithful to the one who has been faithful to them. Or, to put it simply, as long they remember that they are on the throne not by their own might or family history but by the hand of God, and serve out of their experience of this. God calls them to be faithful to him because this is where the fullness of life is found and the secure foundation on which all can stand. Now, we know the history of the kings who followed that with each generation. They became faithless and lost what it was to experience God and see the world through their identity with him; they became kings who lived for themselves and leaders who led their people into rebellion and sin.

Yet, our God is faithful and can be trusted with what he says. He declared that there would always be one who would sit on the throne of David as long as they were faithful to the faithful one. We live as those today who have seen in one person from the line of David who humbled himself fully in response to the goodness, who by his humility we can enter into the presence of God fully and free, and whom God has enthroned and exalted eternally on the throne – Jesus Christ. The man from Bethlehem is both the faithful one and the faithfulness of God in one. It is by him we live and have the example of living; it is by him we can experience God and know what it is to find purpose and joy in our experience of God, and we know what it means to see the world through our experience of God. Jesus is the difference between knowing God and experiencing God; he is the one with whom the promise to David has come true eternally (26).

4 | Experiencing God’s Presence in a Broken World (v. 27-28)

27 “But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built! 28 Yet give attention to your servant’s prayer and his plea for mercy, Lord my God. Hear the cry and the prayer that your servant is praying in your presence this day.

It was the most beautiful prayer before God, as Solomon sang about all that he had experienced in God, by God, and through God. Yet, perhaps most hopefully for us, we see Solomon being honest before the Lord in prayer. As he has a song of the Goodness and Majesty of this Lord they are worshipping, he begins to ponder, “Will God really dwell on earth?“. As Solomon reflected on the glory and power of God, the majesty of the temple they had just built became somewhat less in the moment. How can stones house the dwelling of the eternal Lord if the universe cannot contain him? It is a good question to ask, and it is one form in which there is no logical answer, no simple response – other than because God said he would.

The beautiful thing was that this temple of the Lord was not built in order to invite God’s presence; no, the temple of the Lord was built in response to a God who was already present with his people. Who had heard their plea for Mercy in Isreal and rescued them, who had led them into freedom and then watched as they turned their backs on him in the worship of idols in the desert place, yet Yahweh still remained faithful. No, the temple of David was not built to invite a God to dwell there but to mark a God who had already been dwelling. Hence, as David ponders how the Lord can dwell in the temple, he answers with the beauty of “Yet” as he asks that the Lord might hear him.

Solomon wondered how stones could contain the fullness of God and do Justice to such an awesome God. Yet, we are those who know God and his presence, not by his dwelling in a temple built to honour him. No, we know the presence of God by his dwelling among us in the flesh, as he took on our nature and walked among us. Solomon might have pondered how the temple could house the Lord. We might wonder how the incarnation can even be comprehended. How could God be born of our flesh? How could the limits of our frail humanity contain the fullness of God’s majesty? Mysteries beyond our comprehension, and yet mysteries that become true in the person of Jesus. He who was born in a manger walked on our soil, lived among family and friends, healed the sick, raised the dead, confronted evil, and died on a cross before rising again so that we could know the joy of forgiveness.

Solomon asks the Lord to hear his prayer for Mercy, and because of Jesus, we know that God has. Furthermore, we are delighted because we know that by his incarnation, Jesus fully understands the world we live in. We can know the fullness of experiencing the presence of God because we worship a God and come into his presence by his own experience for us. God understands whatever it is we are going through, facing, and worrying about because, in all the senses of our humanity, he has experienced the brokenness of this world, so in our ongoing experience of him as living temples of God, let us find our hope in him, and take it to him in prayer.

5 The Power of Prayer: Engaging with God’s Transformative Presence (v. 28-30)

29 May your eyes be open toward this temple night and day, this place of which you said, ‘My Name shall be there,’ so that you will hear the prayer your servant prays toward this place. 30 Hear the supplication of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray toward this place. Hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive.

Psalm 121 is one of those poetic texts that seems appropriate in almost every season of life. Its words seem to offer humility in the good times and hope in the bad as it tells of the Lord, who is always present and protecting. Here, as Solomons’s prayer continues, he asks that the eyes of the Lord always be open towards the temple. Namely that he would look after it and protect it. Solomon’s prayer and imagery here mirror the imagery that Psalm 121 gives to our faith and experience of the Lord as it tells us the Lord watches over our going out and our coming in. The all-powerful, all-knowing God can be trusted in every season of life because there is nothing that surprises him. Solomon’s prayer invites us to trust the Lord’s careful watch over his people. We know from Psalm 121 and the person of Jesus that we can bring our concerns to him in this broken and weary world and trust him with them. Even while we wait, we know because of Jesus that God works, and so through Prayer, we engage with God’s presence, delight in experiencing more fully his effectual Grace in our lives and living, and by prayer and the scriptures, worship Him and move forward in what he is doing in the world around us and through us. Prayers centre our experience in who God is and guide our living out of the joy of Christ and our call to know the hope of Christ as we commune with the living God.

It is a wonderful thing to know God fully, and something we need to grasp that is not a momentary call, a weekly duty, but rather an active reality for those who are in Christ. The Call to experience God and serve him is not a simple response of duty in certain moments because of what God has done for us. Rather, experiencing God is an ongoing active reality for the believer because our experience of God becomes our identity and foundation for life and becomes the power by which we live by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us. Thus, experiencing God by his Spirit is an ongoing daily activity in our lives as grace affects every part of who we are, as the Gospel transforms every part of what we do by way of God for the Glory of the Father. We can continually and daily experience God because he never leaves us or forsakes us, and by the presence of his Spirit in us, we have become living temples that together join in the work and mission of God in the world. Our joining in, humbling off, and working toward the call of God in our lives is our worship of him.

To Worship God is not a Sunday activity but rather the daily living in and out of our relationship with him because of what Christ has done. Solomon asks for God’s continual presence, acknowledging the need for mercy and forgiveness: By the Cross, through the person of Jesus, we are those who know fully and already in our everyday day the continual presence and power of God by the Spirit and live out of the mercy and forgiveness we have received by faith. So, our prayer is not simply about petitioning God to act in the world; rather, it is about aligning ourselves with God’s purposes in our lives and the world because we have experienced it already.

Furthermore prayer engages all of us, heart, mind, body, soul and strength and as it does it transforms our preception of how God works in the world the heart and mind; as we humble ourselves in prayer, the Spirit transforms how we see the world around us and the work of God in it and in our lives. Prayer is one of the means of Grace by which we experience God, and grow in our experience of God.

Conclusion: Transformation Through Lived Experience

If I told you that I was an expert in suffering, and then as our conversation unfolded and we talked about all the experiences that I had lived through, you grasped that in the life that I had lived, I have never experienced loss, hurt, surprise, defeat, distress or anything that could in any way be quantified as a negative experience – you would wonder about my sanity, and how I could understand anything about something I had never experienced. Imagine you are in a hospital getting ready for an operation, and you meet your surgeon to be told he is the world expert in this field. You would probably feel a sense of relief about what lies ahead until he tells you that it is his first time in the operating theatre, and he is super excited to be putting into practice what he has been studying! There is a vast difference between knowing about something and knowing it through tangible experience.

If we truly know God, we must allow ourselves to experience Him as he calls us to. That experience leads to gospel transformation as grace becomes productive in our lives. Grace is what God gives us, yet it is also the means through which we experience something of the power of God in our lives. If Grace is experienced, it bears effect in our lives as we live our faith in the Hope of Christ through the power of the Spirit. As we follow Solomon’s example, who trusted in what God was going to do, we are those who can delight in the Triality of our Trust, what God has done, is doing, and will do one day.

Here is the thing: to experience God is not a choice that we actively make one day; it is the reality of our identity in Christ. If we are those who know Jesus by faith and enter into the presence of God, then we are those who experience God. It is an outworking of who we are in Christ and the inward-working transformational reality of the Spirits dwelling in us and working through us. Yet, it is something that is an outworking of Grace and requires some desire for intentionality from us. All of Christ are temples of Living God where the Holy Spirit dwells and works in and through. Yet, some in Christ display more of the love they have received because their heart has been rendered more, their delight and joy of Christ more because they have grasped greater the wonder of Grace and the depth of mercy. Christ is a well from which we can dive deep and drink and never quench our thirst. Christ is a lake at the water level that has something to do with us; we can stay at the shallow end or take the risk and plunge deep, knowing the Spirit will lead us and keep us safe. To know Christ is to experience God and work out that experience in a waiting and weary world, desperate to be touched by the power of God and to know the assurance of the Gospel.

The knowledge of God through Christ and the Holy Spirit leads to a life of deeper trust, prayer, and transformation. To experience God is to see through the lens of the Kingdom, or in the Language of CS Lewis, to look along the Cross into the world. Not just in how we think but in how we live means that there is something in us that desires to be different from the world for the sake of the Glory of God. We want to live transformed lives that transform lives (around us). Thus, the reframe of obedience that echoes across this passage begins to make sense:

• Verse 23: “You who keep your covenant of love with your servants who continue wholeheartedly in your way.”
• Verse 25: “Now Lord, the God of Israel, keep for your servant David my father the promises you made to him when you said, ‘You shall never fail to have a successor to sit before me on the throne of Israel, if only your descendants are careful in all they do to walk before me faithfully as you have done.’”

Obedience to God is the natural outworking of our transformational experience of God, in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Obedience is the joy of our Salvation made known in the normality of our day, where God has placed us. Our knowing of him and our wanting to make him know. We live because we have grasped the wonder of the Cross; we live in response to the Cross, and with the help of the Holy Spirit, we take seriously Christ’s call to take up our Cross for him. In our service of him, we make known all the beauty of what we have received and experienced in God, and more powerfully yet, in our service of him, we experience more of who God is and who God has called us to be. This is the call of every disciple: to know God and to make him Know, to delight in God, and to allow the joy of our salvation to overflow. Where we stand firm in our identity in Christ and in the rhythms of our day, seek to bring Glory to his name, and worship him with all of us every day so that those around us might grasp the wonder of life in Christ. This is the difference between knowing God and experiencing him because until we encounter Him, we cannot make him known. So let’s delight in seeking him and serving him until he comes again.

1. CS Lewis, Meditations in a Toolshed ↩