You can have anything you want

“You can have anything you want.”

When I hear these words it reminds me of Solomon’s dream where God said this to him, and of course it echos words of Jesus that anyone who asks, receives.

            But mainly when I hear, “you can have anything you want”, it reminds me of my mother. Not that I ever heard, “you can have anything you want” from her when I was a kid. But it was a frequent statement that she made to my five children, every month when I took her to Dollar Tree. You know The Dollar Tree, right? The store where everything is only…a dollar.

            And so she would tell her grandchildren before we went in, “you can have anything in the store you want, just ask Granny for it”. And for a while this was pretty amazing, my children would wander up and down every aisle looking at everything, because they were told they could have anything, and so they would check out shower curtains and socks, note pads and wrapping paper, until they finally settled into the toy or the candy aisle. At some point they even realized that when the decision was really hard, and they couldn’t decide between the pink iced animal crackers and the sparkly hoolahoop, that Granny might buy them both….if they asked.

            As they got a little older the wonder of those trips began to wear off, I suppose when they realized that getting anything you want in a place where everything is only a dollar, wasn’t quite as thrilling anymore.

            “Ask for whatever you want me to give you”, the Lord tells Solomon in a dream. And Solomon’s request is one that we are all familiar with. Wisdom. The whole story can be read in 1 Kings 3:4-15 New International Version.

            Imagine this bold declaration was made to us by the Lord, “Ask for whatever you want me to give you”. What would we say to such a statement? What would we ask for in 2020?

            Many things are much different now than they were in early March. Many things have been cancelled, or changed so dramatically that they don’t even feel like the old things anymore. And yet the one true constant, the unchangeable, the immutable, the eternal stability in our lives, is Jesus, who is the same today, and yesterday, and forever (Hebrews 13:8).

            Our church worship services have been, perhaps, forever changed by Covid-19. And even though the orders of worship have been altered, even though the predictability of our services has been up-ended, and even though the normality of our Sunday mornings is very different, the reason we worship has not changed.

            Seeking God in worship, and in prayer, is still the first step in hearing what God has to say to us. Before we ask anything of God, before we can do anything for God, we must first be still and listen to what God is asking of us, or perhaps even offering to us. That’s probably why God visited so many men in the Scriptures in their dreams, for some of us this is the only time we are still enough to listen.

            And so Solomon asks for wisdom to govern the people where God has placed him. A discerning heart, and to distinguish between right and wrong. Between good and evil. And to administer justice, to do what is right and to ensure that what is right is what is being done. And then in the 2^nd half of chapter 3 this wisdom gets put to the test.

Ask for whatever you want me to give you.

            Solomon could have been dumbfounded by the magnitude of this, he could have been overwhelmed by the enormity of the options. When you can have anything in the whole store our tendency is to go up and down every aisle, and to look at everything, many things that we simply don’t need.

           

            Solomon asks to be the leader that God will equip him to be. The leadership and the throne was given to Solomon by God anyway, so it makes sense that the tools that Solomon needs will be provided by God as well.

And perhaps that hasn’t changed.

Perhaps God is calling you into a more defined Christian leadership role within your family, within your church, within your community. And perhaps this reminder of Solomon asking to be the leader God wanted him to be will help you.

1.      Seeking God in prayer and worship (1 Kings 3:4)

2.      Admitting what we don’t know (1 Kings 3:7)

3.      And asking boldly for God’s guidance and wisdom to be His servant leader to the people where we have been placed (1 Kings 3:8-9)

This is not just a summary of Solomon’s gift of wisdom, these are steps we can implement in our own leadership roles to be the transformational servant leaders that God has called us to be, who God is equipping us to be. Right here. Right now.

So, “Ask for whatever you want Him to give you”, and trust that He will give you what you need.