The Through Me List
Ask the right question of life...
Stop Asking What “You Want to Do” Before You Die.
aka (Bucket List)
Start Asking What “God Wants to Do Through You” Before You Die.
aka (God’s List)
So.
That’s me.
That’s a baboon or ten.
That’s Dom Perignon.
That’s a sunset over the Mediterranean and a primate wearing a dollar-sign medallion the size of a hubcap.
I have, friends, truly arrived.
The pastor has gone full Solomon.
Here’s the story.
I preached a sermon yesterday.
Endless Horizons.
Ecclesiastes 2. Solomon’s bucket list and the Villa Vie Odyssey cruise that costs more than most people’s houses.
By sundown — the same day — a member of Grace Church had AI’d a photo of me onto that cruise ship surrounded by Solomon’s actual baboons, in actual gold chains, with actual champagne.
(No names, but… have you heard of Chris? Lol.)
I posted it to Facebook within the hour.
Because if your congregation is going to roast you with meme theology — honor it.
The whole thing was giving me serious Robin Leach energy.
Anybody over forty remembers — Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the British accent, the “champagne wishes and caviar dreams” sign-off, touring some celebrity’s gold-plated bathroom on a Saturday night in 1987.
The eighties never really left us, beloved.
We just put them on Instagram.
The Quick Recap
For those who weren’t in the “pew” yesterday — here’s the thirty-second version.
Solomon. King Solomon. Wisest man who ever lived. Builder of the temple. Author of Proverbs. Seven hundred wives. Three hundred concubines.
(Math fans: that’s a thousand spouses. Pastor John says: please do not try this at home.)
In Ecclesiastes 2, Solomon hands us his bucket list.
Vineyards. Gardens. Parks. Pools. Silver. Gold. Servants. Singers.
And — baboons.
Which means somewhere on Solomon’s estate there was a guy whose entire job was babysitting royal primates.
I can almost hear the conversation:
“Your majesty — the baboons have arrived.”
“Great. Put them with the other baboons.”
The man had it all. A billion dollars a year in income, by some estimates. (2 Chronicles 9 says he was bringing in 666 talents of gold a year. Yes. 666. Make of that what you will.)
And the question modern people always ask is: why baboons?
Friends, let me tell you why Solomon bought baboons.
Same reason somebody today buys a $15,000 handbag.
Same reason somebody buys a $350,000 Porsche.
Same reason somebody buys a fourth house they only visit twice a year.
Because they can.
That’s it. That’s the whole answer. There is no deeper reason. Solomon didn’t have a baboon shortage. Solomon didn’t have a baboon hobby. Solomon had money and he had boredom and he had power — and at a certain point, having all three of those things together turns into a long shopping list of because-I-can purchases.
The baboons are not a Solomon problem.
The baboons are a human problem.
And every single one of us — every single one — has a baboon or two on our shopping list. Maybe yours is a luxury bag. Maybe it’s a boat. Maybe it’s the upgrade to the car you didn’t need. Maybe it’s a closet full of clothes with tags still on them.
We just don’t call them baboons.
We call them blessings.
After he got it all, Solomon wrote one of the saddest sentences in the Bible:
“Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done… everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” — Ecclesiastes 2:11
Vapor. Vanity. Smoke. Wind.
The wisest man in the world reached the end of his bucket list and discovered the list itself had buried him.
That was Sunday’s sermon.
Today I want to push it further.
How Solomon Actually Fell
Because here’s what I didn’t have time to tell you yesterday, and I cannot stop thinking about it.
Solomon didn’t fall in his youth.
He fell in his success.
Read 1 Kings 11 with me sometime.
It’s one of the most heartbreaking chapters in the Old Testament.
After the temple.
After the famous prayer for wisdom.
After the Queen of Sheba came and said “the half was not told me.”
After Solomon had become the wealthiest king on earth —
— that’s when the drift began.
It says it plainly:
“As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God.” — 1 Kings 11:4
His heart drifted.
Not in one rebellion. In a thousand small compromises.
He built a high place for Chemosh. Then one for Molech. Then one for Ashtoreth.
He started worshiping the gods of his wives instead of the God of his fathers.
And one morning the wisest man in the world woke up surrounded by altars to gods he didn’t believe in — gods his own Proverbs had warned against — and he couldn’t remember exactly when it had happened.
Because that is how the bucket list life always ends, beloved.
Not in dramatic apostasy.
In slow forgetting.
What Solomon Stopped Asking
Here’s what I think happened to Solomon — and what I think happens to a lot of us.
When Solomon was young, he asked God a question that changed everything.
God appeared to him in a dream and said “Ask for whatever you want me to give you.”
Solomon could have asked for anything. Wealth. Power. Long life. Victory over his enemies.
Instead, he asked:
“Give your servant a discerning heart… to distinguish between right and wrong.”
— 1 Kings 3:9
That was a Through Me question.
Lord, what do You want to do through me as I lead Your people?
And because Solomon asked the right question — God gave him everything else on top of it.
But somewhere along the way…
Solomon stopped asking that question.
He started asking different questions.
What else can I build?
What else can I buy?
Who else can I marry?
What else can I add to the list?
The man who once asked “Lord, what do You want to do through me?” gradually became a man who only asked “What do I want next?”
And the moment he switched questions —
his heart started drifting.
Friends, that is the architecture of every spiritual collapse I have ever pastored a soul through.
Nobody falls in a day.
We drift in a decade.
We drift one unasked question at a time.
The Two Questions That Decide a Life
So here is what I want you to hear me on, today.
There are two questions that decide the shape of a human life.
The first question is the one Solomon asked at the start of his reign:
“Lord — what do You want to do through me?”
The second question is the one Solomon ended up asking by the end:
“What do I want next?”
Whichever question you ask most often — that is the question that will build your life.
The first question builds a temple.
The second question buys a baboon.
The first question makes you a vessel.
The second question makes you a void that nothing ever fills.
The first question ends in “I have fought the good fight.”
The second question ends in “everything is vanity.”
Here is the line I want you to carry with you all week:
My bucket list will fit in a casket. My Through Me list will outlive me.
Read it again.
My bucket list will fit in a casket. My Through Me list will outlive me.
That is the difference between Solomon and Paul.
That is the difference between vanity and victory.
That is the difference between two questions.
The Better Question — Read It Slow
Friends — I want you to read this slowly. Out loud if you can.
“What does God want to do through me before I die?”
That question — six little words — flips the entire architecture of your life.
Because suddenly, you are not the destination.
You are the vehicle.
You are not the point.
You are the pencil.
You are not the river.
You are the riverbed.
Three Things That Change the Minute You Switch Questions
1. The pressure comes off.
The bucket list question assumes you are the funder of your own dreams.
You have to scrape together the money, the time, the contacts, the courage. You have to manifest the meaningful life. You have to white-knuckle your way there.
But the Through Me question assumes God is the funder.
You are not the one writing the check.
You are the one cashing it.
That is a different posture entirely. That is the posture of a child, not a CEO.
And friends, listen — Jesus did not say “Become like a CEO and you will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
He said “Become like a child.”
The bucket list is the CEO’s question.
The Through Me list is the child’s question.
2. The scale gets bigger, not smaller.
This is what most people miss.
People think handing your life over to God’s plan means settling for less.
It means the opposite.
Your dream is a cruise ship.
God’s dream is a continent of healed marriages.
Your dream is a beach house.
God’s dream is a hundred orphans with homes.
Your dream is to retire early.
God’s dream is to launch the next generation of disciples through you.
Solomon — the wisest man who ever lived — could not dream big enough. That’s the punchline of his whole memoir. Even with seven hundred wives and a thousand horses and a herd of baboons, he could not dream up something worthy of his soul.
You will never dream bigger than God can dream through you.
3. The fear of running out of time disappears.
A bucket list is haunted by the clock.
Every birthday is a countdown.
Every grey hair is a deadline.
Every wrinkle is an indictment.
But the Through Me life isn’t on your clock.
It’s on God’s.
Moses didn’t get his calling until he was eighty.
Abraham didn’t have his promised son until he was a hundred.
Anna prophesied over baby Jesus in her eighties.
Caleb said “Give me this mountain” at eighty-five.
If God wants to do something through you — He will give you the time, the breath, and the runway to do it.
The Through Me list isn’t “hurry up before you die.”
It’s “don’t waste another day, because God is not done.”
Your Through Me List — The Assignment
So here is what I am asking you to do this week.
I’m not asking you to throw away your bucket list. (Keep the Villa Vie cruise. I get it. Beach. Sunsets. Buffet. Just maybe skip the baboons.)
I’m asking you to start a second list.
A list that lives alongside the bucket list — but eventually swallows it.
A list called My Through Me List.
And I want you to start it with one question at the top of the page, in big letters, in pen because pencil can be erased:
What does God want to do through me before I die?
Then sit. Pray. Listen. Write.
Here’s what mine looks like — at least the first ten lines:
Lord, do something through me that brings my sons closer to You than they were before they knew me.
Lord, do something through me that makes Renee say, “I was loved well.”
Lord, do something through me that puts at least one person at the table of heaven who wouldn’t have made it without me showing up.
Lord, do something through me that heals a grudge I’ve been holding too long.
Lord, do something through me that funds a ministry I can’t yet see.
Lord, do something through me at Grace Church that future pastors will inherit and bless.
Lord, do something through me that comforts a widow I haven’t met yet.
Lord, do something through me that makes the gospel sound like good news to one person who’s only ever heard it as bad news.
Lord, do something through me that surprises me — that I never could have planned.
Lord, do something through me that makes the angels in heaven actually applaud, not just take attendance.
That’s the start of mine.
Yours will be different.
That’s the point.
Because the Through Me list is not a generic list.
It’s a fingerprint list.
God doesn’t dream the same dream twice. The thing He wants to do through you, He cannot do through me — and the thing He wants to do through me, He cannot do through you.
And One More Warning From Solomon’s Story
Here’s something else I want you to take with you, beloved.
Even after you start the Through Me list — keep asking the question.
Don’t ask it once. Don’t ask it for a season. Don’t ask it just on a Sunday.
Ask it every day for the rest of your life.
Because Solomon’s tragedy wasn’t that he never asked the right question.
His tragedy was that he stopped asking it.
The Through Me question isn’t a one-time prayer.
It’s a daily discipline.
It is the question that keeps your heart from drifting.
It is the question that builds an old age full of gratitude instead of gold.
It is the question that ends in “I have fought the good fight” instead of “everything is meaningless.”
Ask it tomorrow.
Ask it Wednesday.
Ask it next year when your knees hurt and the money’s tight and the kids have moved out.
Ask it the morning of your eightieth birthday.
Just keep asking.
The Landing
Two thousand years apart, two men reached the end of their lives and looked back.
Solomon — the man who had everything — wrote “all is vanity.”
Paul — the man who had almost nothing — wrote:
“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” — 2 Timothy 4:7
Solomon had everything and chased the wind. Jesus had nothing and changed everything. One of those guys had it figured out.
Two old men.
Two reflections on life.
One had baboons.
One had Jesus.
One ended in despair.
One ended in glory.
The difference wasn’t wealth. The difference was the question they kept asking.
So friends, beloved, fellow vapor —
start the list.
Start it today.
Start it before you finish your coffee.
And the next time you scroll past the meme above — or Robin Leach starts narrating in your head — I want you to laugh out loud.
But I also want you to ask the question Solomon stopped asking.
“Lord — what do You want to do through me before I die?”
And then —
keep asking.
Every day.
Until your last one.
The best is yet to come.
Your Hope Dealer,
Rookie Roberts
P.S. If you make a Through Me List this week, I’d love to hear what’s on yours. Reply to this post. Send me a text.
This is a wonderful wake-up reminder to each of us. We need to keep our focus on God and ask what do you want to do through me each day! Lord help me to do this daily!