Unfulfilled Desires and Trust
1 Chronicles 28:1-4
What dreams, desires and hopes do you have this side of heaven that have not yet been fulfilled? As a matter of fact, there is a possibility these desires you have had for years will never be fulfilled. Where do we go with this as believers? How do we, with a joyful heart, accept what God has not allowed or caused? What attitude does Lord want us to have amid these types of disappointments? We read in scripture that “He will withhold no good thing from those who walk uprightly” (Psalm 84:11). So, which is it? Does He accommodate our deepest needs and desires, or does He not always give us what we have hoped for?
Well, if the Lord withholds no good thing (desire) from us who walk uprightly, then the opposite is also true. He will withhold what is not a good thing, or our desires, as well.
King David for 40 years was the greatest Monarch of Israel. His dynasty would be the very ancestry line from which Christ the Messiah, the King of Kings, would be born. His greatest desire and achievement during his reign was to “build a house (temple) for the Lord”.
Rather than getting into the significance of the desire David had, the focus here is that his dream, aspiration, and deepest desire was denied by the Lord, and he died never having fulfilled his highest expectation.
So, I ask again, what hope has been eclipsed in your life that you are beginning to think will never happen? It seems that the younger we are the more resilient we are to believe anything can happen. As we age, we start to accept the possibility that it simply is not God’s desire or will.
In the text today we specifically read that David had made all the preparations and intended to build a temple, but God told him no because his son was chosen to build it instead. The phrase “David had intended to…” drips with disappointment and dreams never realized.
What, with the best of intentions, have you planned to do in your lifetime thus far that is just not coming together? The Lord, as we grow in Him and mature, wants us to go from chasing our unfulfilled desires to accepting whatever His desires might be for us.
In David’s final days on earth, he seemed to have made that shift. Observe his attitude in life that sparkles with faith and trust in the God that said no to his deepest dream. “God said to me, ‘you must not build a Temple to honor my name… yet the Lord, the God of Israel, has chosen me from among all my father’s family to be king over Israel forever” (v. 3-4).
During the closing years of David’s life, we see him thankful for what God called him to do rather than pining away for what he was unable to do or have. Being the King of Israel was God’s premier duty for his life, not to build a temple.
Chuck Swindoll in his book “David” sums it up this way:
Do you have some cherished desire that you know you have to relinquish? Perhaps it is a dream of some great accomplishment through a unique kind of ministry. Maybe it is a desire for a certain kind of career or recognition. Maybe it is a desire for romance and marriage. Maybe it’s a hope for relief from something in your life that you have had to live with for years. Whatever it is, you may now recognize that is never going to happen and that’s a hard pill to swallow. But like David, it’s an opportunity to find satisfaction in what God has allowed you to do. As David reflects on his life and his own unfulfilled desire, he says, “I want to turn my attention away from what wasn’t to be and focus on the things God has done.”
This is our challenge, isn’t it? We can live the rest of the years of our life swamped by guilt or overwhelmed by failures of the past. We can either “eat our heart out,” or we can say, “By the grace of God, I did the best I could with what I had. And I claim His promise that somehow He’ll use what I did accomplish for His greater glory”. What a wonderful attitude to have at the end of one’s life!
Life of David pg.288 -Conclusion/Psalms 31
Pastor Bill
