When David presented Solomon to Israel as the next king, he called him young and inexperienced in front of the entire assembly. That detail answers more than it first seems to. God does use people who feel unqualified, and Solomon is one of the clearest cases in Scripture. Lisa Fields, the founder and president of Jude 3 Project, preaching from 1 Chronicles 29 and 2 Chronicles 1, goes further: she argues that God places people in inexperience on purpose so they will depend on him.
That second claim is stronger than the first, and it deserves testing against the text, against the obvious objections, and against what it does and does not promise.
A king introduced with a warning label
The King James wording of 1 Chronicles 29:1 has David say, “Solomon my son, whom alone God hath chosen, is yet young and tender, and the work is great.” “Tender” is older English for soft or immature, and many modern translations render it as inexperienced. David is being honest about his son in public, before the very people Solomon would soon rule, and he lets the choice and the youth stand together without letting either cancel the other. The work is still great.
Fields contrasts this with how people ordinarily pick teams, whether for a family card game or anything else:
See, that’s how humans do. If you don’t have a lot of experience, you’re not the first one picked. But God is not like humans. He chooses sometimes the inexperienced.
Experience is the usual measure for deciding who is worth choosing. The text shows God deciding by a different one.
Why would anyone have picked Solomon?
On paper, Solomon was a poor candidate. Fields notes that he was neither David’s only son nor his oldest; by her count David had at least 19 other sons, and the expected practice favored the firstborn. Other sons had more experience. And Solomon was born from David’s relationship with Bathsheba, the most scandalous chapter of his father’s life. For the most important building project in Israel’s history, a temple for God himself, he would not have made anyone’s shortlist.
The reason for the choice sits in 2 Samuel 12:24-25. After Solomon is born, the text says simply, “and the LORD loved him.” God then sends word through Nathan the prophet, and the child receives a second name, Jedidiah, which Fields explains means beloved of the Lord. Her conclusion:
He’s chosen because he’s loved of God.
The order matters. Solomon is named beloved as an infant, before he has achievements to be loved for or failures to be loved in spite of. The assignment comes years later. Most of us assume the right to be chosen is earned first and confirmed afterward. Solomon’s story runs the other way: love given, then work handed over.
Fields presses this toward people who carry the kind of background Solomon did, a shaky family history or circumstances that feel disqualifying. The text speaks of God’s love before it says anything about competence. Then she widens it with John 3:16, since Solomon is not the only one God loves.
Does every inexperienced person get a Solomon-sized calling?
No, and Fields draws the line herself. Solomon’s story is narrative. It describes what God did with one man at one moment in Israel’s history, and it does not promise that every role you feel unready for is one God has assigned you.
Now, he didn’t choose you to be the next king of Israel, but he chose you to be in relationship with him.
What carries over is the pattern of how God chooses: out of love, without waiting for a resume. From that relationship, Fields argues, each believer has some assignment, and those assignments vary widely. “Some of us won’t be on the stage, some of us will be behind the scenes,” she says. Her examples are deliberately small: a student asked to lead a small group, a freshman facing a reading list, the only Christian in a family.
One word needs care. At one point Fields says God “always picks” the inexperienced; earlier she says he “chooses sometimes” the inexperienced. The second is the more careful reading of the evidence. Scripture also records skilled people chosen for their skill: in Exodus 31:1-5, God fills Bezalel with his Spirit and with wisdom and workmanship for building the tabernacle. So the claim worth keeping is narrower. God does not avoid experts, but inexperience never puts anyone outside his reach.
Is inexperience part of the design?
This is the heart of Fields’s argument. She treats inexperience as something God uses deliberately, rather than a flaw he graciously overlooks:
God puts us in position to be inexperienced so we can be dependent on him. He doesn’t want experts because experts usually aren’t dependent.
Be honest about what kind of claim this is. Solomon’s narrative never states that God chose him young in order to keep him dependent. The text gives God’s love as the reason for the choice. Dependence shows up as the result, in Solomon’s prayer, and not as a stated divine motive. “On purpose” is Fields’s inference from the pattern, joined to her own experience.
Her experience is real evidence for her, even if it cannot settle the question for everyone. She produced two films with no film training. She grew up as a pastor’s kid who wanted to be a stockbroker on Wall Street and wanted nothing to do with ministry. “I had no ministry aspirations, but God had picked me for something I didn’t desire, didn’t feel equipped to,” she says. Much of what she believed she could not do, she found herself doing by God’s power rather than her own strength.
The inference is reasonable even where the narrative is silent. A person who already knows how to do a task has little reason to pray about it, while someone in over their head has every reason. If dependence on God is something he values, as the rest of Scripture repeatedly suggests, then the feeling that you cannot do this alone is not evidence that you misheard him. It may be closer to the posture the work requires. Fields puts the logic in one line: “God doesn’t need your experience because he has all the experience.”
Solomon’s prayer was itself an admission
When God invites Solomon to ask for anything, his request in 2 Chronicles 1:10 is, “Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great?”
“Go out and come in” is a biblical idiom for leading and conducting public affairs. The parallel account in 1 Kings 3:7 makes Solomon’s meaning plain: “I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or come in.” His request for wisdom comes from a man who knows he is not ready. Here, and only here, the text shows the dependence Fields describes.
That is why she names prayer as the responsibility of the inexperienced. She first heard Solomon’s story in Sunday school at about five years old and has prayed for wisdom ever since. Her encouragement:
Ask God for wisdom and he will give you wisdom liberally. That is one prayer request that he will always answer.
Her word “liberally” echoes James 1:5: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.” The last clause matters most for someone embarrassed by how little they know. God gives without reproach, and the asker is not scolded for needing to ask.
Will God leave me to figure it out alone?
Fields answers from the chapters around her text. In 1 Chronicles 29:2-9, David gathers materials and the leaders of Israel give toward the temple, all to support a son he knew was young. Then the comparison:
David is a good father to Solomon, but God is a better father to us.
She likens it to a parent setting up a child to succeed, which good fathers do without apology. The claim has limits. She is not promising a particular position or outcome. She is saying that the person walking into a role they feel unready for often finds help already in place, and she ties this to the conviction that a believer’s steps are ordered by the Lord.
Doesn’t Solomon’s ending undercut all this?
The strongest objection is that Solomon’s story does not end well. According to 1 Kings 11, his heart turned from God later in life. If the man who prayed the great prayer for wisdom still went astray, how much comfort does his calling offer?
Less sentimental comfort, perhaps, but a sharper warning, and one that supports Fields’s central point. Solomon’s early inexperience was never the danger; he met it by asking. The danger came later, after decades of success, when his heart turned. That fits her line that “experts usually aren’t dependent” uncomfortably well. Experience is not sinful, but it can quietly remove the reasons we had for praying.
Two further limits belong here. Feeling unqualified does not by itself prove God has called you to something; that still needs testing through Scripture, prayer and the counsel of people who know you. And James promises wisdom, not success on your timetable.
What God commits to finish
Fields closes her sermon with this: “God does never start projects that He doesn’t finish.” She grounds it in Philippians 1:6: “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”
Read that verse closely, because it is easy to stretch. Paul is writing about God’s work in the believers at Philippi, the work of making them his own. It is a promise about the person God is shaping, and it makes no guarantee about every project that person attempts. Your ministry, class, job or film might not turn out as you hoped. What God has bound himself to complete is his work in you, and Solomon’s story suggests that work goes best while you are still asking him for help.