Parenting and mentoring youth can be tricky at times and it is not always easy particularly when dealing with pride and esteem. However, sometimes children say things which gives us indications of a personality that could use some intervention. It seems apparent in 2 Samuel that King David believes that God’s world revolves around him. Imagine that! Yet, I like the way God so eloquently does what every loving parent would do; he uses what I call old school tactics and “nips it in the bud.”

Basically, God tells David that in the first place, he never asked him for a house and then helps David to remember that it was God who took David from the pasture. It was God who cut off all David’s enemies. It was God who appointed a place for David and the people of Israel that evildoers would not disturb them and it is God who gives them rest. The best part is when God covenants to build David a house. Long after David is laid down with his ancestors, it will be a house for David’s offspring that will establish an everlasting kingdom where God’s spirit reigns. God essentially tells David that in spite of all the riches that he sees and blessings that he has been given, God is not done! God continues, that this everlasting house will be built by the one in whom God calls his own son. The building of this house is where we come in, all of us who have had the experience of that stage when we believe that the world revolves around us and we have yet to realize that God’s plans for us like David, is bigger than we could imagine.

David had a lot of successes and some failures and so will we, and I believe God encourages us to be builders. The questions that always stands before us is whether we are building for ourselves or building for God. What is equally significant is what God’s response says about who he is and his relationship to us as the ultimate provider. Except to open our hearts by faith with thanksgiving, and allow him to work through us, God, the parent of all, doesn’t ask his offspring for a thing.

2 Samuel 7:2, 4-7 “See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent.” …But that same night the word of the Lord came to Nathan: Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the Lord: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders^* of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’

Psalm 127:1 Unless the Lord builds the house, they that build it labor in vain.