What Solomon Teaches Us About Being Ready When God Speaks
There's a moment in every person's life when God shows up and asks a simple, terrifying question: What do you want?
Most of us aren't ready for that question. We've spent so much time reacting to life, managing the next fire, protecting what we have, that when the God of the universe offers us anything, we don't actually know what to ask for. We ask for comfort. We ask for security. We ask for the things that feel urgent instead of the things that are actually important.
Solomon didn't do that. And the reason he didn't is worth every bit of our attention.
A Young King With Every Reason to Ask for the Wrong Thing
Picture the scene in 1 Kings 3. Solomon is somewhere around eighteen to twenty years old. He has just inherited the throne of Israel through a bloody succession crisis. His half-brother Adonijah tried to seize the crown before David had even died. Another brother, Absalom, had years earlier led an open rebellion against their father, turned the kingdom against itself, and died impaled on a tree, his ambition outrunning his wisdom. Solomon watched all of this. He watched what happens when a man chases the throne instead of the will of God attached to it.
He inherits an empire built on David's military conquests, but he himself has never led men into battle. He has no administrative track record. He is, in his own words, "a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act." And in the middle of all that, God appears to him in a dream and says, "Ask something of me and I will give it to you."
This is the part of the story we tend to rush past. We jump straight to Solomon's famous answer and marvel at his wisdom. But the answer only makes sense because of what came before it. Solomon didn't stumble into that request. He was prepared to make it. He had done the inner work long before God ever asked the question. When the moment of divine invitation arrived, Solomon wasn't scrambling to figure out what mattered. He already knew.
This is such a great example of what it looks like to be Fully Available. It isn't a posture we snap into the moment God speaks. It's a posture built in advance, through all the ordinary days when nobody's watching and no dream has come yet.
The Work Before the Ask
This is the whole posture of availability: doing the inner work long before the moment of decision arrives, so that when God does ask the question, you're not improvising an answer out of fear or ambition. You're offering back what you've already discerned to be true.
And notice what Solomon doesn't ask for. Not a long life. Not riches. Not the death of his enemies. There are all things a young, insecure king in his position could easily have justified wanting. He asks for an understanding heart. He asks for the tool that lets him serve well, not the trophies that would let him feel secure. God is pleased precisely because Solomon prioritized the mission over himself. And because he asked rightly, God gives him the request and everything he didn't ask for besides.
That's the pattern of availability. We aren’t working on ourselves to obtain some earthly inheritance. We are working very hard on ourselves to become all that God created us to be because we want what He wants. By doing the inner work and cultivating our talents, abilities, thoughts, words, actions and emotions we are radically cooperating with the person that God wills us to be. We understand that His will is above our own and that we are simply a vehicle for Him to use to grow His kingdom here on earth.
The Field, the Pearl, and the Same Kind of Readiness
Matthew 13:44-52 takes the same idea and turns up the intensity. Jesus tells two short, almost identical parables. A man finds a treasure buried in a field and, in his joy, sells everything he owns to buy that field. A merchant is searching for fine pearls, and when he finds one of “great price,” he sells everything to acquire it.
Jesus is describing what it feels like to actually see the Kingdom of God for what it is. Once you really see it, not just hear about it secondhand, every other attachment you were gripping so tightly suddenly loosens. Status, ego, financial security, the approval of people who don't matter, the identity you built before you knew better. None of these things hold up with something that valuable. And the remarkable detail in both parables is that the selling isn't experienced as sacrifice. It's experienced as joy. The man doesn't grit his teeth or regret what he's giving up. He goes and sells all he has out of joy.
This is the difference between a passive awareness of God and an active pursuit of Him. Plenty of people know, in some vague sense, that God exists and that faith matters. Far fewer people go looking the way the merchant goes looking by turning over one possibility after another, refusing to settle for a lesser pearl, willing to walk away from everything else the moment they find the real thing. Solomon is the merchant. He didn't ask for whatever might be convenient. He searched his own life honestly enough to know exactly what he needed to ask for, and when the moment came, he didn't flinch.
The Net, and the Part We'd Rather Skip
Jesus doesn't end with the pearl. He adds a third image, a dragnet thrown into the sea, gathering fish of every kind. This the Kingdom of God in its present form. Available to everyone.
But the net doesn't stay in the water forever. Eventually it's hauled ashore, and the sorting happens. The good are gathered into buckets, the bad thrown away. Jesus is plain about what this means: at the end of the age, the righteous will be separated from the wicked.
Read next to Solomon's story, this parable does something important. It tells us that our availability now is not incidental, but rather, urgent. The dragnet season, the season where the door stands open and the field is still for sale and the pearl hasn't been claimed by someone else yet, is not going to last indefinitely. Solomon didn't wait for a more convenient dream. He answered honestly the moment he was asked. The window to sell everything for the field is the window we're standing in right now, and we don't get to choose when it closes.
What This Asks of Us
None of these stories are about a single dramatic moment of decision. They're about what a person becomes capable of doing in a single moment, because of everything they did in all the ordinary moments before it.
Solomon was the type of person who could respond rightly to God because he has already reflected on his own weakness and his family's failures. The merchant could recognize the pearl because he had already spent his life searching. And every one of us gets the same offer God gave Solomon, in smaller and larger forms, more often than we realize. The question is never really whether God will ask. He will. Over and over, in a hundred disguised forms. It might be a decision at work, a conversation with your spouse, a quiet prompting in prayer you could easily talk yourself out of.
The real question is whether we've done the work to actually know what to ask for it that moment. Solomon prepared himself long before the dream came. That's the whole invitation. Not to wait for a burning bush or a voice in the night, but to become, day by day, the kind of person who is ready to answer rightly the moment the question finally comes.
