Hello, and welcome to the Westside Church's special Monday Morning Coffee podcast. On this podcast, our preacher, Mark Roberts, will help you get your week started right with a look back at yesterday's sermon so that we can think through it further and better work the applications into our daily lives. Mark will then look forward into this week's Bible reading so that we can know what to expect and watch for. And he may have some extra bonus thoughts from time to time. So grab a cup of coffee as we start the week together on Monday Morning Coffee with Mark.

Good morning, good morning. Welcome to the Monday Morning Coffee Podcast for Monday, June the 16th. I'm Mark, and I am in Louisville, Kentucky. So I will not have sermon notes for you today because I did not preach yesterday at Westside. I'm in Louisville with the Expressway Church. Wonderful, wonderful church. Cool thing about this church, from the parking lot, you can see the spires of Churchill Downs. How great is that? I have been here with this church several times before. It is a joy to be back with them. And even though I'm in Louisville, Kentucky, I am holding... I'm holding a great cup of coffee. Hawaii is growing coffee, and Kona is incredible coffee. So I'm just doing all the good. I hope that you are having a great start to the week. Let's get it started right by doing some Bible reading. We're going to finish up in 1 Kings 8. Grab your Bible. Pour that cup of coffee. Let's get ready. Let's get set. Let's go! Our reading for Monday is 1 Kings 8, verses 54-66. This is the reading, the continuation of the reading from last week. We departed from that on Friday, of course, to be in the Psalms, but we're finishing up 1 Kings 8 today. And this is a very beautiful reading. There really is a lot They bowed down with their faces to the ground on the pavement and worshiped and gave thanks to the Lord, saying, For He is good, for His steadfast love endures forever. So God absolutely signs off on this temple as being pleasing in His sight. And the keynote in the reading is verse 56. The Lord has given rest to His people Israel. This is what they have been looking for. This is what was promised. We will have rest in the land. You might look down at verse 66. I think that kind of bookends this. The people don't do have rest, things are just extremely good. And this is a great moment for Solomon. He talks about inclining your heart, verse 58. That sounds like David. Verse 61, let your heart therefore be holy, true to the Lord our God. That's David. Unfortunately, Solomon will violate that and fail right exactly there, the heart being holy, true. And the writer of Kings will note that in 1 Kings 11 in verse 3. You might also make a note about verse 60, all the peoples of the earth may know Notice there, yes, a little coffee there to make things better. Notice verse 60 is a missionary verse and talks about Israel's goal as being the nation that understands about God and people are going to look to them and they are going to understand about God as they come to the Israelites for that kind of knowledge. There's a huge amount of offering here. Some translations have seven days, verse 65. ESV has the note 14 days, but it just goes on and on. Thousands and thousands of people are assembled here. I love the language in verse 65. Watch the slip of the pen for the writer. This happened before the Lord our God seven days. The writer says, climbs into that. The Lord, our God, I feel connected to this. And then notice verse 66, for all the goodness the Lord had shown to David, not all the goodness the Lord had shown to Solomon, all the goodness the Lord had shown to David. It's still about David. That's very important for us as we continue As we continue to think about being a man after God's, a woman after God's own heart like David, it's still about David. David's shadow stands across everything that's going on. As great as Solomon is, as wonderful as Solomon is, as great as the temple that he built is, it's still about David. Reading for Monday then, 1 Kings 8, verses 54 to 66. Welcome to Tuesday's reading. Tuesday's reading is 1 Kings 9, verses 16. And I should say to Westsiders, of course, there won't be a Zoom call tonight because I'm out of town. Let's look at 1 Kings 9, 1 to 9, and maybe look at this really across the whole chapter here. In many ways, this is a survey, maybe from the middle of Solomon's reign here. He's been building 20 years on the temple and on his own house. And so from kind of a mid-reign perspective, one scholar says this is a look back over the construction that he has been doing. And the operative word here is build. It occurs nine times. verses 1, 3, 10, 15, 17, 19, 24, and then twice in the word in verse 25. So this is about building and what we are building and what Solomon has built just all over this text. But in the middle of our reading today, there is this important note about faithfulness. Walking with integrity of heart and uprightness, verse 4. Then I will establish your royal throne over Israel for The conditional nature of the promise to the house of David cannot be emphasized enough, particularly in a time when people still want something to be happening over there, that God owes the Jews something and there's going to be a physical kingdom and the throne of David. No, no, no. If you turn aside verse 6, then verse 7, Israel will become a proverb and a byword among all peoples, and this house will become a heap of ruins. People will hiss at it, verse 8 says. How can this possibly have happened? So as we continue to read in 1 Kings, what we want to watch for is does the house of David follow faithfully? Do they walk with God with integrity of heart and uprightness? And if we see that they are not doing that, then pretty much all of us would just be holding our breath and sitting on the edge of our seats wondering, when is somebody going to show up and destroy that beautiful, beautiful temple that Solomon built? Because that's what God is. is warning about. So we really get a preview of coming attractions here, of coming destruction, I guess I should say, as we read in 1 Kings 9, verses 1-9. Our reading for Tuesday, 1 Kings 9, 1-9. It is Wednesday. It is Wednesday, my last day in Louisville, coming home tomorrow. 1 Kings chapter 9 verses 10 to 28 is our reading for today. 1 Kings 9, 10 to 28. And this, as I said yesterday, is a review of some of Solomon's building projects. We get a little unusual note here in verse 12. Hiram is not happy. Maybe Solomon has run up a bigger bill than he can pay with with taxation. Starting to wonder here if there's some difficulties in the kingdom already. Some of the prosperity that they seem to know in the south, particularly the capital, doesn't seem to be extending all the way to the north. And Hiram ends up being paid off in more cities because Hiram has sent so much building material and so much gold. So Solomon seems to need to pay him some additional money and pays that off, as I said, And then if we don't get enough of a red flag there, verse 15 starts talking about forced labor, and that doesn't sound very good. That's going to come back to haunt the house of Solomon, the house of David later on. Please notice verse 24, the building of the Milo, M-I-L-L-O, the Milo, the Milo. This is an area... This is an area between Mount Zion and the city of David. And the word Milo literally means to fill. And it seems like the old city of David and the new site of the temple in the palace area, they're being filled in and connected. That valley between them is being bridged. So the city is growing and it's growing together. One scholar said the term Milo meaning supporting terraces is derived from a word that means to fill, hence a mound, and refers to rock terraces used as foundations for buildings in Jerusalem. The exact location of this is not known. But Solomon is building up the city. He's building up his capital. He's building all kinds of defense works and Hazar and Megiddo and Gezer and a bunch of that has been excavated by archaeologists. Interestingly, he puts together a navy, verse 26. This is really unusual for Jews, for Israelites. Generally speaking, there's a big suspicion of the ocean. Lots of times in the Bible, bad things come from the ocean. The book of Job talks about the ocean in that way. The book of Revelation talks about the ocean that way. Generally speaking... The Israelites are not interested in sailing. There's no account of them sailing out across the Mediterranean to Spain doing all those. Nope, nope, nope. We're not interested in the ocean, but we've got a navy right here. We'll see how all that works out. And they even go as far, verse 28, as Ophir. Ophir is in Arabia or in India. At this point, we're just seeing the high point of Solomon's reign. He's walking with God. Yeah, there are some things there where like, well, I don't know about that, but he seems to be close to the Lord. He's built a great temple for the Lord. The nation is prospering in many, many ways. It's looking good. And chapter 10 will further some of those ideas before, yeah, spoiler alert, everything goes south in a really big hurry. A reading for Wednesday, 1 Kings 9, verses 10 to 28. Welcome to Thursday. Our reading for Thursday is 1 Kings 10, verses 1-13. Today, we meet the Queen of Sheba. This is a wonderful chapter, and I think it's very important to start by saying, we need to figure out what this is doing here. Solomon had a lot of cool things happen. I'm sure many dignitaries visited him. I'm sure lots of important people arrived with gifts. Why is this chapter in the Bible? What is God doing here? And I think the answer to that is she is one of the greatest dignitaries of the time. She comes from a long ways away, probably modern Yemen, although not everybody is exactly convinced precisely where the kingdom of Sheba is. But she is a powerful queen. She is an important queen. She's come a great distance. She brings all kinds of gifts. And all of this just underlines the greatness of Solomon's kingdom because God blessed him. That's what's going on here. God has blessed Solomon in an incredible fashion. So she arrives to ask him, I like the ESV here, hard questions. Some translations have riddles here and then you almost get the idea of her, you know, standing around asking him silly sort of things like, does a tree falling in the forest make a noise if nobody's there to hear it? Or did Adam and Eve have belly buttons? That's not what she's asking. She's asking because wisdom in the practical questions, hard questions that would show Solomon's understanding of how to apply his knowledge to real problems in the world. Remember, this is about the wisdom theme. We saw that in chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5. Then there's all this building that goes on, and we've kind of come back to that. Verse 4, the Queen of Sheba saw the wisdom of Solomon. Verse 6, these reports about your wisdom. Verse 7, your wisdom in prosperity. Verse 8, here your wisdom. Why is he so wise? Verse 9, God has done this. Only God could do something like this. God is getting the credit. By the way, I don't think that's conversion in verse 9. I think that's probably courtesy. Notice verse 13. There's no indication here of conversion. She just goes home, maybe even made a trade alliance. And of course, There is tons of speculation about what it means when it says King Solomon gave to the Queen of Sheba all that she desired. Lots of people have interpreted that romantically, and there is lots of literature among the Jews, among Arabs, and especially among Ethiopians that fill in the blanks there and say that Solomon and Sheba had some kind of romantic liaison. Now, the Bible doesn't say that. What we know, of course, what we're about to read about Solomon in chapter 11 It does become a very important story in Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, there are Jewish people, and they trace back to this and say, To them, this is part of their story, and they take this very, very seriously. They have a royal line that they believe descends from Solomon and Sheba. So you might bump into somebody at some point, or you might read about Ethiopian Jews, and you're thinking, Jews in Ethiopia? Where'd that come from? Well... The answer to that, at least for them, is chapter 10 and verse 13. Thanks for reading the Bible with me today. I'm headed home. Can't wait to be home and see Dina and see everybody on Sunday. Our reading for Thursday is 1 Kings chapter 10, verses 1 to 13. I would love to keep reading about the wonders of Solomon's house, but we'll need to save that for next week. Tomorrow, we're in the Psalms. See you tomorrow. Welcome to Friday. We made it. Made it through another week, and it is Friday. Today our reading is the 25th Psalm. I think you will like this Psalm a lot, even if it is unusual in some ways and kind of seems a little choppy in places. We'll talk about why that is in just a moment. Mostly, this is a lament. It is a concern about problems with enemies and a plea that God would come and save and deliver. But I like this lament a lot because it just breathes trust in God. Some have even termed it a prayer of confidence. You do get some laments that are just super desperate. And this one has notes in a place or two, hey, God, I'm going under and I need you right now. But it is not as sad as some laments. And it does have, I think this is what I like about it so much, some instruction. There's a wisdom nature to it. It's almost a wisdom song because it talks about the right way to live. There's This is the way to do things. Verse four, make known to me your ways. Verse five, lead me in your truth and teach me. Verse eight, he instructs sinners in the way. Verse nine, he leads the humble in what is right and teaches the humble his way. Verse 12 and verse 14 talk about the fear of the Lord. So it teaches us even in a moment of desperation and need. Now the dominant note here in the Psalm is its structure. It is easy to remember. if you read Hebrew, because it is an acrostic. There are a number of these in the Psalms, and what that means when I say it's an acrostic is that each line or each stanza starts with the corresponding letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So it'd be the ABCs, if you will, of lament and deliverance. So it'd start with an A, and then the next line would start with B. Well, when you have to start the line with a specific letter, that really jackets the psalmist, the writer, into a certain structure, into certain word choices, so sometimes it'll jump around just a little bit. Maybe to illustrate What I'm talking about when I talk about an acrostic here, if this was English, you'd have always praise God and then better to serve the Lord than sin and then can't imagine life without the Lord. So you'd have the ABCs like that. And if you think that's easy to do, you should try writing an acrostic psalm sometimes. It is not a simple task at all. And sometimes you have to sacrifice that fluid poetic flow to stay within your structure. The structure here, The outline, I should say, is pretty easy. The opening prayer is in verses 1 to 7. There's then confidence in God's goodness in 8 to 14. As the psalmist says, I know who God is and what God is going to do and how I need to respond to Him. The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear Him and He makes known to them His covenant, verse 14. And then there is a closing prayer in verses 15 to 21. It's a little bit of loneliness. I talked last week, two weeks ago, about isolation And you get a little bit of that loneliness here in this closing stanza. Don't leave me alone, Lord. I need help. I don't want to be left by myself. And maybe you'd go back and think about the sermon I preached on connection and connecting with others and consider some of that as we work out of this psalm. But that is the 25th Psalm. It is an acrostic psalm that cries out to God for help while it is teaching us the ways of the Lord. The reading for Friday, Psalms. That closes the podcast then for the week. I certainly do appreciate your interest in the podcast. So many people are kind to me about the podcast, talk to me about it, and say it is encouraging to them. I hope that you are using the podcast to encourage others to be involved in daily Bible reading, and I certainly am looking forward to seeing everybody Sunday at Westside. It will be Preaching Theme Sunday. We'll talk about the question that you voted to be the the question that you want to talk about. I think this is the eighth most popular question, if I remember correctly. And so we're going to talk about an important question that Jesus asked. Have a lesson in the nine about loving the Lord. We need to think about that more. Exactly what does that mean and how do we do that? Both of those lessons, I think, are going to be of great help. I think they'll be a great help to you. I know they were great help to me as I put them together. So thank you for listening. I hope that you've left a rating or review so more folks will find the podcast and be Don't buy it. And until then, next week, when we'll open our Bibles together again, I'm Mark Roberts, and I want to go to heaven, and I want you to come too. I'll see you Monday with a cup of coffee.

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