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I. THE MOTIVE WHICH SET DAVID TO WORK IN PREPARING FOR BUILDING THE TEMPLE. This motive was thankfulness for a great mercy — God's mercy in arresting the pestilence. God sends us deliverances from earthly calamities, not merely, not chiefly, that we may be delivered, but that our hearts may rise in thankfulness to Him. The soul gains more by the effort of thankfulness than the body has gained by deliverance from the physical mischief. The deliverance without the thankfulness is a sheer failure, baulking the providential purposes of God. Life would be brighter and stronger if each mercy were the occasion of a resolution to do some piece of good work for God.

II. THE HIGH ESTIMATE DAVID HAD FORMED OF WHAT HE HAD SET HIMSELF TO DO: "Exceeding magnifical," etc. He felt that a great effort was due, first of all to God Himself, as being what He is, and next, for the sake of those who did not know Him — the surrounding heathen peoples, who must not think meanly of what God's servants thought to be due to His service. If anything is fatal to greatness in human endeavour, in act, in work, in character, it is a stunted estimate of what we have to do. The artist who has no ideal before him, or only a poor and meagre ideal, cannot hope to succeed. It is so with all forms of external enterprise. It is so with the formation of character. If we set out by saying that it is impossible to attain to anything great or noble, most certainly we never shall attain to it. We must make up our minds that the house of the Lord, whether it be material or spiritual, must be exceeding magnifical. No honest student of David's Psalms can maintain that he was ignorant of the true meaning of spiritual worship; or that he thought more of the things of sense than of the action of the soul in its approach to the Holy One; but his spirituality was not of that unwise kind which imperils the very existence of religion among men by doing away with all the outward symbols of its presence. Worship will not be the less spiritual when man has done his very uttermost in his poor way to express in outward and material structure his sense of the unapproachable magnificence of God.

III. THE GREAT DISTINCTION OF DAVID'S WORK OF PREPARATION FOR THE TEMPLE IS ITS UNSELFISHNESS. One of the sternest lessons a man learns with advancing life is the disabling power of sin. Long after we have sincerely repented of sin it haunts us with its double legacy of a dimmed moral eyesight and of an enfeebled will; and even where these effects do not follow, as in David's case they did not follow, sin remains with us as a memory which tells us when we would attempt something beyond the work of other men, something heroic, something sublime, something that belongs to the career of the saints, that, other matters apart, we are not the men to do it. The discovery that he would not be allowed to express his devotion in one supreme effort must have caused David a shock which we may not easily take measure of. But David did not think of the temple as having to be built either for his own glory or for Solomon's glory, but for the glory of God. And so David prepared for it with all his heart.

IV. DAVID'S PREPARATION POINTS TO A GREAT TRUTH — THE PRECIOUSNESS OF WORK UNRECOGNISED BY MAN. David does the work, Solomon is decorated with the reputation. Almost every discovery in science has been led up to by forgotten workers. The discoverer, who, after all, has only taken the last step in a long process, lives in history. A minister rises in his place in Parliament to make a statement which astonishes us by its familiarity with the details of a vast and intricate subject; but while the country is ringing with his praises the fact is that the knowledge which so astonishes England has been brought together by the patient toil of the permanent staff of the department, the toil of clerks whose names are, perhaps, unknown beyond their own families. Much more is this the case with the best work in the Church of Jesus Christ.

(Canon Liddon.)

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KJV: And David said, Solomon my son is young and tender, and the house that is to be builded for the LORD must be exceeding magnifical, of fame and of glory throughout all countries: I will therefore now make preparation for it. So David prepared abundantly before his death.

WEB: David said, "Solomon my son is young and tender, and the house that is to be built for Yahweh must be exceedingly magnificent, of fame and of glory throughout all countries. I will therefore make preparation for it." So David prepared abundantly before his death.