First, the scriptural passage:
1 Kings 1:23-27, New International Version
They told the king, "Nathan the prophet is here." So he went before the king and bowed with his face to the ground.The short answer is, no, King David had not. In fact, he declares that his son Solomon should be king, and that's what ends up happening. Now for the devotional question:
Nathan said, "Have you, my lord the king, declared that Adonijah shall be king after you, and that he will sit on your throne? Today he has gone down and sacrificed great numbers of cattle, fattened calves, and sheep. He has invited all the king's sons, the commanders of the army and Abiathar the priest. Right now they are eating and drinking with him and saying, 'Long live King Adonijah!' But me your servant, and Zadok the priest, and Benaiah son of Jehoiada, and your servant Solomon he did not invite. Is this something my lord the king has done without letting his servants know who should sit on the throne of my lord the king after him?"
It is hard to blame Adonijah for wanting to get ahead. After all, don't we encourage our sons and daughters to do the same? To be ambitious is not necessarily sinful. But ambition is too often blind and driven, and it leads to a costly downfall. As you reflect on your life, pray that you will be able to discern the fine line between healthy ambition and sin. As you go through the day, be prayerfully aware of how ambition is at work in your encounters. Ponder what desires fuel these ambitions -- and note when the ambition leads you to behave in destructive ways. Take note of how you are climbing the ladder of success and ask God to help you view your actions through His eyes.Now for my answer:
This feels completely foreign to me in several ways. My "ambitions" have included getting the American Dream, believing that it will solve all my problems and heal all my pain. ["I'm going to get as an adult what I couldn't as a child."] However, it also included the idea that all I had to do was to just get a job, any job, and the rest would magically appear. So a key part of this "ambition" was really an assumption and an expectation that life would simply cooperate with what I want and simply give me what I want. ("After all, it's only fair...")
The other aspect of my "ambitions" (and why I put it in quotes) is that my ambition, independent of expecting life to simply giving me what I want, was simply to do well in school. Or choir. Or whatever the task was that was before me. Because as surely as getting good grades would guarantee that I would graduate, it therefore seemed to follow that graduating would of course guarantee a good job that paid good money, and therefore all my problems would be solved.
One sense I'm beginning to connect with in this prayer and fasting season is a daily prayer rotation. I have my list already. Between my devotional yesterday and today, though, I feel God already answering a question I had before this all started about, "what should I focus my prayer on this day?" or "...this week?"
The other significant part of my devotional today -- and why I decided to share it publicly via this blog -- is that it is beginning to directly answer one of the prayers on my list, primarily about my purpose professionally. The answer I gave above is only the beginning. As I return to this devotional and set of questions over the next month, I'm hoping and praying for a breakthrough in this area, which I am choosing to believe that God wants to do.
For those of you who happen to be following along my blog during this season, I pose to you the very question that was posed to me: what desires fuel your ambitions? And what would it look like for you to let God to fuel them instead? I will be attempting to answer them myself along the way.