We live in a culture that likes to put a smile on everything and look on the bright side.

Stop saying the glass is half empty.

Nobody wants bad news, bleak, despondent, gloomy, pessimistic outlooks.

Teams are encouraged to think positively and focus on the good.

People prefer smiles. I was at coffee shop recently and they had a bulletin board filled with notes. People can come in and write their own proverbs.

Be Kind; Kindness matters

Give Compliments Freely; You might just make someones day.

Hard work pays off

I want a boyfriend and get married in 3 months (not gonna accuse her of pessimism).

Live more; think less

You are worth it

Focus on self love and not always try to please others (that’s gotta be in the Bible somewhere.)

Grandma and Unicorn Capachinos

Now you definitely get a lot of positive thinking from a board like this, no doubt. I can’t help but smile imagining Solomon walking up to a board like this having just finished Ecclesiastes. Imagine him. What do you think Solomon would write?

We are in the end of Ecclesiastes chapter 3 today and the first part of chapter 4 and the text we are about to read could be reduced to three sticky notes.

Now there is some cheer. Talk about negative energy. Now I want to warn you out of the gate that this message is not a happy one. But, that doesn’t mean it’s not important and healthy.

Solomon is the realist that comes and dumps a bunch of cold water on all these Starbucks pipe dreams.

You think getting married in 3 months is going to make you happy? I married 3 women a month for 300 months straight. Marriage won’t fix your problems.

Hard work pays off? Really? In what way. I worked harder than all of them and my soul is still clawing for fulfillment.

In this next section, Solomon adds some reality juice. He posts a few of his own sticky notes. He speaks for the person who doesn’t experience any of the beautiful seasons we talked about last week.

I’ll grant you that these seasons of life exist. I’ll grant you that some people appear to be served up rainbows and unicorn capachinos. You guys who live in America, in Boise, the best city in the best country in the world, of course you can be happy.

But I live in Syria. I live in North Korea. I live in Sudan. I’m a woman born into the lowest cast in central India. What in the world does this poem have to do with me? The only season I’m familiar with is suffering. I was born into mourning. I was schooled in death. All I ever experienced was loss, casting away, tearing, war and hate.

If there was a season of blessing, I missed it. There’s no beautiful season that I get to enjoy. So today he addresses three objections to Solomon’s observation that everything is beautiful in its time.

And just to warn you out of the gate, there are not a lot of answers just yet. He’s just putting to words the frustration that many feel about life.

Here’s his first objection to verse 11 that everything is beautiful in it’s time.

Life is not fair.

Why is it that in school, the girls who disobey God, are flirts, who are totally focused on the external, who are immodest are the ones who get the attention of the guys while the girls who focuses on the quiet internal person of the heart, dresses modestly and wait for guys to initiate are ignored?

That straight up is not fair. That’s an injustice.

Why is it that a very talented athlete is born into a slum and must stay in a slum because he never has opportunity and had he been born in the US he would be a demi-god. That’s not fair.

What if LaBrone James was born here in this Rohingya refugee camp. Statistically, almost certainly, a world-class athlete of some sport was born in here but we will never know it.These guys fled from the genocide in Myanmar. That’s not fair.

Now what I’m describing here is equality. But the text takes it a step further. It’s not necessarily talking about equal opportunity. It’s talking about injustice.

Life is full of wickedness. That word wickedness in Hebrew is literally the word bending. The property line goes from this stake to that tree a half mile down. But then you slightly bend it so you can get the spring and the pond on your side. The law is like a ruler. Straight with markings at predictable intervals…unbending. Wickedness is bending that law and making exceptions that benefit the evil doer.

Inequality is always going to be part of the warp and woof of life, but we can have justice. We can say, you have broken the law and deserve this consequence. You have kept the law and are allowed to go free. But what really depresses Solomon is that he turns his gaze to the place of justice, the courts, the courtrooms and what he sees slashes his soul, "In the very place I would expect to see justice, there I find the worse corruption of all."

And do we not see this in our very own country? I mean we still enjoy tremendous equity in our courts and I am very thankful that I do not live in a country whose gears are lubricated through bribery, whose cops are on the drug lord’s payroll.

But even in our country, we can look to the courts, the place where justice ought to reign, and see tremendous injustice. Our courts have somehow ruled that it is the just and right thing to do to give mothers the right to kill the life that is growing inside of them. We have a law in our country that you cannot murder. But that law is bent in favor of the more powerful pregnant mother for her benefit. How is that just? How is that fair? And yet the courts have ruled in that manner.

Injustice is horrible. But injustice does exist.

You want to know what Solomon is saying? Certain kinds of injustice never resolve. If you just look at what happens in this life, it is often the case that the bad guy wins.

This sermon is entitled proverbs killers because while the Proverbs are most of the time true, they are not always true.

This seems to say that if we trust in God, justice will prevail.

Tell that to the family of Pastor Wang Yi, the founder of Early Rain Covenant Church, who right now is in prison serving a 9 year prison sentence and the forfeiture of a large percentage of his assets

It just doesn’t feel very true. Where Oh Lord is your justice? I trusted in you and I am not safe. I am behind bars.

Tell that to

I’m sure this poor girl is tempted to feel betrayed by a proverb like this. How can God really care about me? It sure doesn’t seem like it. Where is your justice, Oh Lord?

I don’t want to exploit these two people to make a point in a message. Let’s pray for them right now.

[Can we just pray for them right now. ]

Now open your mind to the reality that there are many, many people who live this life right now. It’s horrible. And justice is not ruling in their favor. The governments of these countries, the very institution you’d expect to defend these people, are actually ignoring them.

Sometimes life is horribly unjust and there’s never an end to it and there’s nothing we can do about. And this messess with our conception of how life ought to be. Proverbs tell us, essentially, do good and good will follow, do bad and evil will follow.

Then Ecclesiastes comes along and says, yeah, but sometimes bad happens to those who do good, and good happens to those who do bad.

Just in case we want to use Proverbs to turn life into a formula for how to live the good life, God gives us Ecclesiastes.

Here is the question of the skeptic. Everything is beautiful in it’s time, huh?

What’s the answer according to the text. Just because there is not justice today, does not mean that there will not be justice in the future. What ever gave us the idea that delayed justice means no justice?

Justice is coming. We need to be very, very careful of the obvious logical fallacy that if it doesn’t exist now it will never exist. If i can’t understand it, it can’t be true. Since I don’t like the idea of delayed justice, and since I don’t like the idea of a God who allows that sort of thing, I don’t think God exists.

Man, how many things EXIST that you don’t understand. Pretty much everything. It shouldn’t be surprising to us that there things about God we don’t understand.

So what do you do when you don’t understand something but there is a much smarter person who does understand? You trust them. And here is what God says about the matter. No there will be a day when God makes right. And I want you to trust me that this day is coming. We trust that God will one day, ultimately call a day of reckoning. What we are to do is trust in the Promise of Psalm 37:5-6 and leave the timing to God.

The important point about Psalm 37 and every other promise like it in the Bible is that the reality is true, but the time table of God’s justice is unknown. I love how this is illustrated in Hebrews 11.

These are the happy endings. Faith in the sovereign, justice-loving Lord sometimes results in this outcome. “Commit your way to the Lord and you will see him work and justice will shine like the noonday sun.”" What a great ending!

I could imagine some of us in the room being really inspired by this list and saying, “Man I just need more faith like these guys. Wouldn’t it be cool to see God work in these ways.” Yes, that would be really, really cool. And I hope he does. And he very well could. But he also might not.

I’m going to memorize Psalm 37!

Because look at what comes next. There’s not even a transitional sentence; there’s no hint your even going to get a transition. This is not just mid chapter, mid paragraph. this is mid-verse, mid-sentence!

What about these guys? Where is your justice, Oh God. And they literally died without receiving what was promised?

Commit your ways to the Lord; trust in him and he will act. he will bring forth your righteousness as the noonday light. Where is he?

That makes God a liar right? God promised and did not fulfill? This is EXACTLY what Solomon is observing. If life “under the sun” is all that exists then God would be a liar, life would be pointless and we should all just mail it in right now.

The promised justice is coming. Judgment is coming and that allows us to accept the current injustices. You might die without having ever seen that justice, but it is coming. It does eliminate the pain, but it allows you to still have hope in the middle of a very otherwise hopeless situation.

There’s a second objection

Your dog and you end up in the same place.

And for all our technological advances, it’s pretty hard to see how we are really all that much better off than the beasts.

We are supposedly super advanced. After all we have the opposable thumb. We have a really big brain which supposedly can manipulate nature in our favor. And that is true to a degree. But if the holy grail is more life, we still have a ways to go before we’ve even caught up to certain animals.

The greenhead shark can live to be as old as 350 years. To put that in perspective, Rembrandt died 350 years ago.

The bowhead whale lives to be 200 years old.

the red sea urchin lives about 200 years.

The gallopigose turtles are 150+ years.

If life is the most precious thing in the world, than these beasts are better off than us and happier too, I might add, since they don’t have cell phones.

What does all our advances in technology and health care gain us? It’s hands on the steering wheel as you shoot off the cliff. Solomon is observing the physical, observational, parallels.

Both man and beast die. When Solomon says, who knows whether the beast goes down and the soul goes up, that’s not Solomon the agnostic talking. Solomon knows more about the resurrection than that. Keep in mind, everything in the book is to be interpreted by the phrase, vapor and life as experienced "under the sun." What he’s saying, is if all you had was your observational powers to observe the corpse of a man and the corpse of a beast could you say through the power of observation, oh, clearly the beast just went to the grave to be no more, but the soul of the human, you see here by these decomposition marks, clearly went to heaven. You can’t say that. They look the same. They end up as bones and dust.

And if you were among the living, could you explain to that dead man what became of all his work? No you are cut off from him. We are here and he is elsewhere.

How much different are we than a beast?

Solomon does not answer it here directly, but the greater context of Solomon does answer it and certainly the Bible answers it. Our end is not dust. Dust is not our end. We are awaiting a glorious transformation. Life is full of injustice and suffering and physical decay. But we already knew that.

Yes there is a certain fatalism about. The creation is subject to futility. Life is like doing a bunch of pushups. At first it’s easy. It gets harder and harder and then eventually you give up. That’s life. It’s a giant race to see who can keep moving the longest. When you stop moving, you lose. It’s over. There are forces at work pulling us down to the grave. It’s inevitable. It cannot be stopped. Death is the most powerful force we know turning us back to dust. But dust is not the end.

We await the REDEMPTION of our bodies. Can I get an AMEN? For in this hope, WHAT HOPE? (The redemption of our bodies) we were saved. Do you see that the Christian faith is not mystical. We are awaiting bodily TRANSFORMATION.

Now there’s a third and final objection for today but more to come next week.

In chapter 3 and 4 Solomon is soured and the tone comes across.

This is one of the major learning points for us as readers of Ecclesiastes. I find myself wanting to reshape this book and consequently this sermon to sound like the apostle John or Paul. I want to quickly align the book with the language with happier portions of the NT.

At face value, when I read what Solomon has to say, I’m terrified. Whoa brother! We can’t walk into Sunday morning looking like that. That bed head medusa hairdo you got going on there is going to freak people out. You need to tame that! You need to comb the hair, get out of those gothic clothes and chains, take off the headphones and please, when we get up in front of people, don’t embarrass me. Please, for goodness sake, remember your manners, shake people’s hands.

But Solomon won’t allow it. Here he is today folks. We can’t bend it to our comfort zone, and if we do, we will miss what this God-inspired text reveals about God. So don’t try to unsay what he says here today. Just let it sit and learn what he’s trying to teach us.

Power imbalance is the warp and woof of society since the dawn of time.

It’s not fair that some are born with privilege and others are born in poverty.

It’s not fair that because of your race or ethnicity you are denied access to power

It’s not fair that some people are born with the best education, the best food, the best connections. Of course they are going to succeed.

The financial inequality in the world has been decried all through history. And of course it’s not the inequality itself that is the problem. It’s the fact that those who have the power use it to hurt not help. They oppress those who have no power and either take advantage of them or marginalize or even murder them.

How can everything be beautiful when the power is so imbalanced? Not only that. There’s something even worse. It’s one thing to be oppressed but it’s like the ultimate blow to be oppressed alone.

And the way this aloneness usually happens is not how you are probably thinking. It is often the case that those who undergo the most unspeakable torments are the ones whose stories go untold and unread and NOT because they are not around to tell them. They are around, but nobody wants to listen.

I have a book on my shelf called “Tortured for Christ.” Many of you have that book, but probably only a few have read it. Why? The title tells you it it’s going to be a tough read. If I’m sitting down after a long day, I’m not sure I want to pick that up. It’s going to take some emotional strength to be able to bear what I know is in that book.

And it’s that impulse to resist hearing about evil that forces so many to suffer alone.

I remember reading a book called, “Prisoner of Tehran.” And it described the torture of this young girl in the the Evin prison in Iran. It was such a terrible thing to have to absorb. But the worse part of the book by far for me was the scene where she returns to her parents. She comes home and she sees her parents, and her parents know she’s been in the prison. They know the prison is infamous for just brutalizing it’s victims. But she’s had time to heal so she looks pretty normal. And her parents just talk small talk. They won’t ask her about the torture she endured, the beatings, the nights of freezing cold, the clubbings, the firing squad she escaped. They ask her nothing. And for her, the fact that her parents would not ask her about it, the fact that in order to protect themselves from pain, they pretended like it never happened, was worse than the torture itself. It was the loneliest place in the world.

Are we not all guilty of this? We don’t want to hear about the suffering of the world because it hurts us. So the victims end up suffering alone or die in silence.

Solomon says, “Where is the justice in that? The worst suffering is so terrible, nobody can handle it, nobody wants to hear it, so they have to suffer alone.”

I am so torn on this because I actually just hate to even think of this kind of cruelty. It’s mentally excruciating to have to come to grips with the fact that this kind of suffering exists. But I don’t want to be guilty of the even greater crime of protecting myself from discomfort by allowing them to suffer alone.

I absolutely detest the thought of torture. I can hardly live with myself to think that people have to suffer such cruelties alone. Why have I been blessed? Why do they have to suffer?

Solomon says, “If you just look at life under the sun, it’s madness. There’s no sense to it. There is no answer to that question.”

Torture and death is as common as bread. The amount of power abuse that has resulted in people being oppressed and even murdered because of race, or religion or ethnicity is staggering. In just the 20th century.

6 Million in Nazi Hollocaust about 2/3 of the Jewish population of Europe in 1941-1945.

That doesn’t count the 2 million poles.

1-2 Million Indonesian genocide during the communist uprising in 1975-1979

2 Million in the Cambodian Genocide where 100% of Cambodian Viets and 50% of Cambodian Chinese were killed from 1975-1979

1.5 Million Kazakh during the Soviet famine in 1932

1 Million in the Armenian Genocide where 50% of Armenians were killed in Turkey in early 1920s

1 Million in the Rhwanda Genocide where 70% of Tutsis were killed in 1994

1 Million of the Bengali Hindus in Bangladesh in 1971

1 Million, 90% to 97% of total Circassian population perished or deported by the Russian forces in

The wikipedia article on genocide lists over 50 genocides most of which happened in the 21st century.

Solomon is looking at the oppression he’s aware of it just haunts him. In this small section here. There’s no answer. He just says, it would be better if you had never been born.

It’s hard to disagree. You just think about the suffering and it’s so terrible.

Why does he do this? Why does God put this in the Bible? Why are we forced to face into these harsh realities where people die without justice, where the wicked win? Solomon is here with messy hair, bad church manners in a style so unpresentable to our church environment. Why does God allow this in his precious Bible?

Here it is: Ecclesiastes is a BEACON OF LIGHT illuminating the Old Testament waters of messed up patriarchs and sinful kings. It surges forward into a first-century world that crucifies criminals on the street for anyone to view. And it fast forwards clear to the 20th century complete with it’s 170 million murdered in genocide. This “Life under the sun” reminds of what we fell from and why a Savior is needed.

The injustice in the world reminds us that we are longing for the Justice giver, the justifier to come.

The persecution reminds us that we are awaiting a deliverer.

The diesease and sickness reminds us that we are awaiting the great healer.

We are to be reminded this morning that this world is broken. In a Jewish wedding they always break the wine glass. Why do they do that? To remind everyone, that as joyous as this day is, there is suffering that needs remembering. Joy needs to be tempered because suffering has not been eliminated. We need a Savior. If God has given you good work to do and you find yourself in a season of blessing, then by all means enjoy it. You don’t have to apologize for the royal flush you’ve been dealt. Use it to glorify God and serve others. But don’t make the mistake of thinking you are free from the suffering that other’s experience and that somehow you can now silo your life out and build heaven here on earth. For many, earth is hell and they can’t wait to get to heaven. Heaven is their only hope.

We read Psalm 76 this week in our elder meeting and in it we found some harsh language of God being vindictive against his enemies.

And when you read this in nice suburban Boise in 2020 you think, “Well, that’s not very nice.” But think about living through a genocide. Would this not be your prayer. Would you not long to see anger in the eyes of God coming to save the humble of the earth? Would you not love to see God make right the terrible injustices?

Conclusion Prayer

We have a responsibility, even while we enjoy God’s gifts on earth, to suffer along side those who suffer.

To weep with those who weep as Romans 12 says.

So I want to close this morning by giving you a few resources and way to pray.

VOM

Boko Haram is Jihadist terrorist organization in Nigeria. Leah Sharibu’s

After we first spoke to Leah’s parents, I began thinking of the best practical support my wife and I could give the family. After a big traumatic event, a person can easily feel isolated. We decided to invite them to stay with us. We can’t just pray for them from a distance, they need us to walk beside them so that they know they are not alone.

Nathan calls me almost weekly and I can hear the expectation in his voice. He wants me to give them good news about Leah, about when she will be reunited with them. This is the difficult part for me, not being able to give them the news they so eagerly want. I pray that I can give them good news soon.

Leah’s mother is doing okay under the circumstances. But if we’re being honest, can you really be okay, knowing that your daughter is still with her kidnappers after nearly two years? We don’t know for sure where she is and exactly what has happened to Leah—and that uncertainty is difficult.

Sometimes Rebecca has this distant look in her eyes, and you immediately know that physically she is here, but her mind and spirit are with Leah. Nathan is a supportive husband and father, but how much can one family endure?

…We must pray constantly. This is also my commitment. It’s important that we, their faith family, keep praying. Speak their names. The Bible orders us to pray without ceasing. We know that God can release her in His sovereign power, but He wants us to persistently and faithfully ask Him. We do not always understand His ways, but we trust He knows best. He is our Father and He has a plan much bigger than we can ever understand.

I encourage the global community to pray incessantly. Pray that He brings Leah home. We may ask, is it God’s will that Leah is released? Yes! But when? Only He knows. And in the meantime, we continue to pray for Leah to be strong. We pray that God will continue to strengthen her faith and that her captors will be touched by Leah’s persistence and faith in God.

Prayer after the service.

If you want to continue praying after the service, there will be a prayer team up front here who would love to pray with you.

If you are just joining us, we are in our 4th lesson in our study of Ecclesiastes. What we are doing as we study this book is reading a 3000 year old journal entry of histories wisest fool, king Solomon. What do we mean by wisest fool?

Solomon was wise in that he was able to manipulate life to acquire what he wanted. Most people want lots of things but lack the wisdom to get it. Solomon got what he wanted. He used his wisdom to acquire wealth (so much that silver was said to be worthless), he builds gardens, homes, 700 wives and 300 concubines. He have a life that is the fantasy of many.

But he was a fool in that it took him his entire life to finally believe what God had told him all along, that acquiring knowledge and experiences and stuff doesn’t ultimately make you happy.

But he does eventually learn and we benefit from his insights acquired along the journey. The primary insight that surfaces in the book, is this.

Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

Now that word vanity is the theme of the book. And you will remember it’s the Hebrew word Hevel that means vapor. It’s a word that comments on something’s durability not it’s value. A rainbow is a great example of hevel. It’s there for a second, you enjoy it and then it disappears. Solomon lives his entire life and summarizes it all by saying, it’s not just rainbows that are vapor. Everything is vapor. It’s all just relative. It’s a matter of perspective.

If you back out and get a bigger picture of time, our entire life is like a whisp off the top of a tea kettle. It’s here for just a brief second, you see it, you try to grasp it and it disappears between the fingers.

But here was Solomon’s point last week. Yes, it’s fleeting, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyed. We used the analogy of the Motel 6. When you stay in a motel 6 you are there for only a night. And there are certain comforts that are designed to make your one night stay enjoyable. Take advantage of those! Here’s Solomon’s way of saying that from last week.

Now, some of you may be asking, I get the concept, but how do you do that? That’s what today is all about. Today Solomon teaches us the perspective needed to really enjoy the gifts of God in the right way.

He says, the key to enjoying life is to simply enjoy the season in which you find yourself.

If it’s spring, enjoy things you can only do in spring: plant some flowers and a vegetable garden, take a trip to Shoshone falls as the rivers swell.

If it’s summer, enjoy things you can only do in summer: go camping, fishing, hiking, swimming.

If it’s fall, enjoy things you can only enjoy in the fall: carve a pumpkin, enjoy that thanksgiving dinner, sit in the hot springs.

If it’s winter, sink into bitter depression. Kidding. Go ski, snowmobile, snowshoe, sit by a crackling fire with a hot drink and read a book.

He says, pay attention to the season of life in which you find yourself and enjoy it because here’s the thing about seasons. They begin and they end. And if you don’t enjoy it, it will pass you by.

So Solomon begins by writing a beautiful poem about seasons.

Each season according to verse 11 has it’s unique beauty that is intended to be enjoyed. Now what I think is beautiful about this poem is that it mirrors the complexity of real life.

He starts with obvious opposites of good and bad. A time to be born. A time to die. A time to weep and a time to laugh.

But then there are some pairs that are related but not opposites. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.

He also has some pairs that are contrasted but we aren’t sure which one is better. A time to keep silent and a time to speak.

These different types of pairings are very true to life.

Another thing we see is rhythm and cycles. Rhythm itself appeals to us. In C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, we read of the witch casting a spell over the land so that there was a perpetual winter without Christmas. It’s not winter that’s the curse. It’s jamming the mainspring that moves the cycle.

Life is lived in seasons which are both pleasant and are dictated by forces outside our will.

Main Point

So Solomon concludes: He has made everything beautiful in its time so, rather than fretting about the ending of a season, enjoy the season in which you find yourself.

How do you do that? This might seem blindingly obvious but it’s absolutely shocking how easy it is to miss it entirely. Here it is: The only life you can live is the one immediately in front of you. Life is experienced in this narrow little window of the moment, in the immediate NOW. This is the essence of living, to learn how to live RIGHT NOW.

As humans we are prone to error in one of two directions. Sometimes we reminisce and look to the past and remember back to the good old days.

Man remember when I was in high school or college. I was so popular. I was such a great athlete. I was stronger, taller, leaner. My figure hadn’t, shall we say, digressed.

Many remember when our kids were little. They were so cute and cuddly. Their problems were so simple. The biggest problem was they were hungry or tired. So simple by comparison.

And instead of enjoying whatever season of life is right in front of us, we long for the days gone by.

Maybe It’s summer time and your hot and your thinking, man I just wish it were winter so I could get all cuddled up by the fire. I love winter. I’m so oppressed by this infernal heat. Now sure, it’s hot, but there’s all sorts of great things to do when it’s hot.

There’s a boat in front of you full of gas. The water is glass.

The trout are jumping all around you.

There’s a YETI 110 filled with soda.

There’s a BBQ with briquettes and juicy steaks waiting to sizzle and you just sit there and pout about all the enjoyment you could have if it were just winter.

If we are always looking behind us, we will never enjoy what is right in front of us. Other times, we aren’t looking backward but instead we are looking forward. And we have a list of things we imagine will be different in the future that will allow us to experience happiness.

When I finally get out of school and get a job… no not a entry level job; a real job.

When I finally get out of this apartment and get a house.

When I finally get the house paid off,

When I finally get a girlfriend

When I finally get married

When I finally a car that actually runs,

When have kids of our own,

When the kids get out of diapers,

When the kids finally get into school so I can have a few moments of peace in the day,

When the kids can finally start driving so I don’t have to be a Uber driver that doesn’t get paid,

When the kids move out of the house and stop eating me out of my mortgage,

When I get the big promotion…

When I finally retire.

And because you are always looking to the future, you never enjoy the moment. The only life that can ever be enjoyed is the one right in front of you. Sure this life in front of us has its own unique challenges, but it also has its own unique blessings!

Now this is not a particularly Christian concept. I mean pretty much anyone can see the wisdom of this. In the 60s the band the Birds popularized this section taking this section of Ecclesiastes - word for word - and making it into a number one hit. Everyone can see that life is experienced in cycles and seasons:

You buy a piece of land and push over a building that someone else erected.

There’s a season to nurse a calf back to health and then a season to harvest the same animal.

There’s a season of life where all you are doing is going to weddings. Then a season where all you are doing is going to baby showers. And then another season of life all you are doing is going to funerals.

A brown truck delivers a gadget to your home. Later a blue truck takes it to the landfill.

These are not particularly Christian insights. Now it’s in the next section verses 12-15 where he gives us a very uniquely theological interpretation to these cycles and seasons. And this interpretation becomes for us a sort of formula for how to enjoy life.

Let’s look at verse 12

It says in this text that God has set eternity in the hearts of man. What does that mean? It means we are not animals. It means on the one hand we can very easily conceive of the idea of eternity, but on the other hand, the second we start really thinking about it, we get very uncomfortable because we almost instantly run out of computing horsepower.

We know that this full view of past, present, future must exist, but no matter how hard we try we can’t take in the full view.

Imagine standing 6 feet away from a canvas that was a 10 miles tall disappearing in to the clouds above you and 50 miles wide extending to mountain home. You might run along the ground and grab pieces of the canvas here and there in perfect clarity but you could never back away far enough to take it all in. You could never see how what is in front of you right now relates to the whole canvas. You could never take in the masterpiece as it was intended to be viewed. You have unflagging, instinctive awareness that there is a larger canvas that a larger view would answer so many questions but you have no way of positioning yourself such that you could take it in. You inch along and can appreciate the quality, but the grand design exasperatingly escapes us.

This is the position in which we find ourselves as mere mortals. We know and can sense that we had a beginning. But what was before my beginning? Something existed. It must be so. And now here we are. But we will not always be here. We must die. And we know that there will be more that exists beyond our scope of our mortal existence. It must be so. But how does it all fit together? We just ache to see the full context. We are just staring at this scrap of canvas and sprawled out in all directions is stuff we’d love to take in but can never hope to understand. And we are being asked to accept this mystery.

Now notice what this text says. God has done that on purpose. It’s very active language. God purposely designed us such that we have an awareness of eternity but purposelessly does not answer all our questions. He has made us with the ability to ask questions and does not give us the answers. Only God has the ability to stand back and see the grand design from beginning to end. He has hidden this from our view.

Now why would he do this? At first this seems like a horribly mean trick from a cruel God. But this is classic sinfulness to put the worst possible interpretation on an act of good God. Why would God shield us from the complete knowledge of the past or future? It must be because he does not love us. It must be because he enjoys that position of superiority and he wants to withhold from us something good.

Is this not exactly the sin of Adam and Eve in the garden. Why is God withholding from you that delicious fruit? He’s hiding something from you. There’s a good thing he’s selfishly witholding from you.

Let’s be so careful to check our sinful attitudes. Why does God withhold from us complete understanding. We have answers in the Scriptures. In fact, the answer in the very next and we can cross check this answer from other Scriptures.

You want to know why God leaves the past and the future a mystery? So you can enjoy the present! It seems so simple, but it’s so true.

Now the first two points relate. I never would have thought of this in a million years on my own. The ability to enjoy the gift of good work is contingent on your willingness to accept the mystery of eternity.

It is a gift to be shielded from the knowledge of everything so that you can do something. Complete knowledge would paralyze any one of us from doing any work. Accepting that God knows all, and I know some helps me focus on my work in front of me.

Here’s an analogy that might help. Consider the desktop user interface on a computer.

A computer is designed to allow you to do work. You feel so powerful on a computer. Wow, look at all the things I can do. All I have to do is just click on this icon and I can surf the web, do email, write documents.

But you are only able to do that work because you are being shielded from the reality of what is really going on. Believe me, what you are being presented with when you turn on the computer is an absolute mercy. You are not being presented with reality. On almost every possible level, you are being shielded from reality.

The reality is that a computer is the product of millions and millions of lines of code, billions of transistors switching on and off, voltage changes, current management, heat management, material engineering. You are shielded from all that so that you can just type your dumb email.

You say, I can handle it. Don’t shield me from anything. Okay, we’ll strip away all the shields and give you the raw unfiltered reality. Okay, turn on the computer. It’s no longer an on button. You have to fire up a few thousand transitors in the precise order. You have to cycle through each sector of RAM in the power on self test. That will take you a few years to do by hand.

Now you have to determine, of the millions of hex register which one needs to be accessed first? So not you have to manually apply 5v to each of those registers. That’s just turn it on. It would take you the rest of your life just to get past the boot up screen. None of us want reality when it comes to computers because we know that reality is far to complex for our poor little brains to handle. It would overwhelm us and paralyze us and we could never do any work.

Similarly, a knowledge of everything, a knowledge of the universe like God has would melt us into a puddle. God gives us a merciful slice wherein we can operate and work. It’s a mercy of God to shield us from it. We peek over the edge at times and shiver. We consider something like a galaxy that contains 200 billion stars or a strand of DNA that contains .… and we are granted a moment of perspective. God thank you for running the universe so I can just enjoy the small things in front of me.

Now other Scriptures teach this as well.

When you think of God as the keyholder of mystery does your mind go to any particular passage? I’ve heard Deut 29:29 quoted hundreds of times in my life every time we bump up against a mystery in the Bible. You might run into a mystery about the sovereignty of God in prayer. How is that God is sovereign and yet it seems that man’s prayer somehow influence God? How does that work? And then out comes the quote.

But what shocked me when I read this freshly this week. The verse is not a verse to inform us that God knows more than us, as if we needed that insight. It’s not a neener-neener, God knows more than you verse. In fact, it’s giving us the REASON that God sets up the world such that there is mystery. Read Deut 29. God is commanding Moses and the children of Israel to obey him. He says, don’t be foolish and think that you can somehow prosper apart from obeying everything I command you to do. You would be a fool to think it.

And the entire passage concludes with Deut 29 which is a verse which tells us the REASON he hides things from us. You want to know what the rest of the verse says that NEVER gets quoted.

Do you see what’s going on here? It’s a mercy of God to shield us from the full picture. Why? So that we can do the good word that God has for us. He reveals to us what we need to know so that we are not crushed by the full picture. It’s a mercy. It’s an absolute mercy. You have been given just a piece so that you might obey. And in obeying, you are able to enjoy the seasons. That’s what God says to Moses earlier in the chapter earlier in the chapter…

You want to enjoy the seasons. Accept the mystery and thank God for it. The mystery shields you so that you can do work. It’s such a mercy. Thank God for your limited scope.

It’s so nice to not know everything. Do you really want to know what everyone thinks about you? It’s such a mercy to be shielded from that. Do you really want to know about all the suffering in the world? Do you really want omniscience about all the injustice that exists? My goodness, no thank you. Finite knowledge is such a mercy.

Think about it. If you knew you were going to die tomorrow would you enjoy today? You couldn’t. Because all you would be thinking about would be your death tomorrow. Your knowledge of the future would cripple your ability to enjoy the birds, the soft warmth of the winter sun, the crisp air. All that would be lost on you. Would you go to work today, if you knew you would die? Of course not.

And it’s not just if a tragedy awaited you. If you knew you were going win the lottery tomorrow, what would you spend all day doing? You would just dream of everything you could buy. Your kids would say, “Hey can you come outside and play with me?” And you’d just be sitting there scrolling, shopping, drooling over something and you’d miss the moment. You’d miss the actual hour that God intended you to enjoy because you are living in the future.

Instead God shields you from all that and wants us to live right now. How do you enjoy your season? Accept the gift of good work right in front of you. What work has God give you that because your shielded from the beginning and the end, you can actually do. You can actually justify the work of today because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

A child can justify running in the park and skipping rocks and playing games for hours and hours on end because his parents shield him from the harsh realities of mortgages and food preparation and utility bills and deadlines. Our heavenly father is shielding us from the responsibility of running the universe so we can simply do the good work in front of us today. Let’s thank him for that and just enjoy it! Wow, thank you God.

What good work is before you right now, that because you are shileded from the problems of running the universe you can enjoy.

How about just hug your kids. Just hug them. If it was on your shoulders to fix the crisis in Syria right now could you enjoy that hug? Your work isn’t to fix the crisis in Syria (although you might do some work toward that end). But your work today is just to give your kid a hug.

You can leave running the universe up to God so how about enjoy a lunch in the park with your family?

How about invite someone over after church and just not fret about the schedule?

How about just go on a date with your wife?

How about just enjoy your life group?

How about reach out to that neighbor who needs a friend?

There’s work to do all around us that is good work, enjoyable work, rewarding and fulfilling work. And we have to just thank God for his mercy in shielding us from what would otherwise cripple us. Part of growing up in the world is learning to be small, learning to accept that God has control of the big picture and is just asking you to focus on the thing right in front of you.

So how do we enjoy the season we are in?

Accept the mystery of eternity. Accept the gift of good work. and now finally.

Setting expectations of what is permanent and what will change is a massive key to enjoying the seasons.

At first it sounds like he is talking about permanence. Whatever God does endures forever. But in verse 15 he describes the permanence he’s talking about. He’s talking about the permanence of the unyielding cycle of life. God has set in motion the Birth, growth, life, death process and it cannot be stopped.

That which is has been.

That which is going to come wont’ be new.

The last phrase, “God seeks what has been driven away” is a little allusive. Some translations say, “God seeks what has passed by” meaning when it drops of the end of the conveyor belt he grabs it and puts it back on the beginning. All of these verses are talking about the decree that life will always be in a state of change and flux but a change and flux of the same kind. It’s not a mystery why the idea of reincarnation exists. We can all observe this circle of life.

The only thing that never changes is change itself. That is a human observation. But there’s a theological interpretation put on that human observation.

Why is there change? So that men fear God. This is so significant. Think about this. If man could freeze certain aspects of his life, he wouldn’t fear God. Because he would never be forced to interact with God. He could control life such that God and he live exist in parallel universes that never intersect. You just freeze aspects of your life that you don’t ever want to change, you allow other aspects of your life to continue to change and you create your own paradise completely apart from God.

There’s a time for laughter and a time for mourning. I’ll take the laughter. I’ll take healing, no killing please. I’ll take planting and harvesting. Both those are good. I’ll take love and peace. No war and hate. I’ll definitely take the living part, not the dying part.

I’ll take a 25 year old body with 90 year old wisdom. I’m fine if my investments always continue to grow but all my losses cease. If we could we’d freeze certain elements of life and advance others then life would be perfect.

But God says, no, the plan is for you to die and you can’t stop it. Change ensures that God and man will meet. The text says explicitly, God has done it. Run from me your whole life; run all you want. But we will meet. God has done it so that people fear before him.

And do you see why knowing Jesus Christ makes such a difference? Because for the believer, all this change is just pushing us closer and closer to our glorious and ultimate change. We are happy to leave the Motel 6 at any time. The ice machine was great and all, but we got bigger fish to fry. Change does not scare us. Change frees us to enjoy the moment.

But for the person who does not know Jesus Christ, the future is just dark, unknown and honestly terrible. The best possible thing that could happen to the person who does not know Jesus Christ is annihilation. If the afterlife that Jesus described exists, then that terror is absolutely justified.

The reality is we have so precious little control over our life. So much just happens to us. We perceive that by eating well, we have control over our health. To some small degree that is true, but our health is failing. And God has done it, why? So that men may fear him.

Solomon at times in the book says, “This is vanity and a great evil.” Why would he use the word evil. You want to know what is evil, sinister and straight up villainy? Telling someone that this life can be manipulated to your enjoyment. It cannot be ultimately manipulated. Life is like a car with no brakes and headed off a cliff. You’ve been given the steering wheel and you can control what angle you fly off. That’s about it the level of control we have.

The only kind of doing that makes sense is the kind of doing that is in harmony with the acts of a willing God. And what kind of act might that be? Surprising. Enjoy his gifts on your way to death which lead to everlasting life.

Application

Now let’s pull this all together into some beautiful application. I’m going to invite the band up to play a little because I want you to actually do this right now. Last week we said that the key to enjoying life is accepting the fact that you are going to die.

The key to accepting the fact you are going to die is to know that there is nothing to fear in death. That God has already died for you so that when you die, it is not the end of the only good thing but rather it’s the begging of the greatest thing.

The trouble is not that life refuses to be still but that our heart refuses to be still to enjoy a life that is moving toward a glorious redemption. Since you know the destination, enjoy the ride. Not fearing death allows you to see the beauty of an ever changing life.

So here’s the application. You should have received a card on the way in. And there are two questions on that card; Keeping in mind that life can only be enjoyed in the window of the moment.

Knowing the destination frees you to enjoy the seasons of life.

It frees you to not despair over the ending of past joys.

It frees you to not dwell on the mistakes that bar your from present joys.

It frees you from not living in the perpetual pursuit of the ever elusive ten years plan that you are convinced will bring future joy.

It frees you to live right where you are an enjoy the gift of life today as God has unspooled it before you.

Instead of changelessness, there is something better: a dynamic, responsive, pulsing created season with its beginning and end.

Instead of a frozen state of perfection there is the kaleidoscopic movement of birth and growth, the innumerable processes involved with life and creation, each with its own character and its period of blossoming and ripening, beautiful in its time and contributing to the over-all masterpiece which is the work of one Creator.

We can only catch these brilliant moments if we have no fear of them ending.

Review

We are in our study of the book of Ecclesiastes. We have caught Solomon in the midst of his life-long experiment where he is testing all that life has to offer to see if indeed there is any lasting fulfillment to be had under the sun.

Solomon first tries wisdom. If wisdom could make a man happy, Solomon would know. He was the wisest person who ever lived. What did he conclude? He said, I’m glad I was wise rather than a fool, but it comes with it’s own set of problems. It didn’t ultimately fulfill.

Now for those of us who have been granted less mental horsepower than others, it’s difficult to imagine how being so smart might leave you with a feeling of emptiness. I’ll tell you how you can personally experience it; just structure your life so that in 2020 the only people you are allowed to speak with are pre-schoolers. Everywhere you go you would be the smartest guy in the room, by a long shot. Does that do it for you? Would that suddenly make you feel satisfied? You’d feel lonely, annoyed, unfulfilled.

There’s no way you’d trade your adult wisdom for a preschool conception of the world; but, you can see instantly and intuitively that wisdom doesn’t fulfill. Solomon slammed up against that limitation in chapter 1 and so he turns to the pursuit of pleasure. And he tries seven different pleasures.

And what we saw in chapter was frighteningly American. Solomon was under the the same spell many of us are under that what we need to make him happy is just more of what we already have.

And Solomon tries all of these things in various amounts, various combinations and is conclusion was NOTHING satisfies forever. NOTHING.

So Solomon ends this section with the same conclusion, “It’s all vanity.”

The Mistaken Conclusion

Now if all we had were these two sections, this could lead to a serious misconception about how we are to live our lives. Some of us might be led to believe that since none of this makes us happy and since we are all going to die in the end, what’s the point of trying anything?

It’s all meaningless and pointless and vapor. Some people read Ecclesiastes and they despair of life. It simply reinforces what they already believe to be true and what they feel in their soul already; everything is meaningless.

I’m not going to try and exercise because what’s the point? Because no matter how hard I try, the sag is coming. The wrinkles are going come. My body will rot in the ground. So why exercise.

And for some of us, the inevitable end just saps all motivation from trying anything. For some this future reality sucks the marrow out of life.

And so some of us walk around with the stain of an Eeeore complex.

Ahh, be careful! That’s not the message of the book. Today, Solomon is going to begin to give us a window into where he is going. He doesn’t lay down his hand of cards all at once. He lays it down one card at a time every couple of chapters until - finally at the end of the book - we see he’s been wryly smiling all along hiding a flush. And Today we get the first card in that final hand he’s been hiding.

Is life meaningless? What’s Solomon’s answer? Life is a vapor; yes, our life is a dash on timeline but it is not meaningless. And I can prove that Solomon finds meaning by showing a collision of two verses that make absolutely zero sense if life is in fact, just fatalistic, pointless, predetermined doom.

So we will start in chapter 2 verse 18 with a paragraph here that sounds like it comes out of the mouth of Eeore. This paragraph is going to sound like the conclusion is that life is absurd, empty, aimless, going nowhere.

He’s talking here about work. He says that work is really hard. “no rest for the weary.” It’s toil. He said, you sweat; the work itself is tough. He says, your days are full of sorrow and vexation. At the end of the day your body is sore, you’ve got slivers in your fingers; a board fell on your shoulder and it’s deep into the soft tissue. Hard work makes you ache.

It doesn’t have to be physical work. Maybe it’s the stress of your mental work.

You’re so consumed with your project you don’t sleep at night.

You have all these people depending on you.

They are all waiting for you to do your part.

You’ve made some mistakes and you’d better not mess up again.

Decisions you make effect 100s of people and could mean millions of dollars.

Your up thinking about the next step.

You are pressed by deadlines, trying to solve problems, thinking about the people management problems, trying to motivate dissatisfied customers.

Work is tough.

Why do you do it? Well because there is reward. Accomplishment feels good. There is fruit to your labor. But Solomon can’t help but think about where it’s all headed. He’s so shocked by the horror of it. Sure there’s fruit but only for a season. He says, okay, let’s just say I do an amazing job. Let’s just say I kill it. In the end, no matter how much I work, no matter how much I accomplish I have to leave my empire to someone else, and who knows, maybe that person will be a fool.

Now in Solomon’s case, he knew into whose lap the empire would fall? He looks at his son and he says, “We are in trouble.” And he was FRUSTRATED because he knew that as death ripped away his vitality, everything he had worked so hard for, he would be powerless to control.

And sure enough Rehoboam destroyed the kingdom. You remember Reheboam was the guy who refused to listen to the advice of the elders but instead listened to the advice of the young counselors. After Solomon’s reign, his giant empire, the height of Israel’s glory was divided, split in two and squandered by power-hungry, selfish, petty idiots.

Rehoboam led his country into a civil war for 17 years. Nothing destroys a country like civil war. A nation fighting against itself.

Even though Solomon didn’t live to see this, he can probably in some way anticipate this. He’s reeling at the thought of it. Given the fact that we will leave our work to another, what’s the point of working at all?

If you had to distill it down to its essence, “What aspect of work is so depressing to Solomon? What does work, in its essence, lack such that it cannot ultimately fulfill?” DURABILITY. It lacks permanence. It lacks what the human heart really craves, something perennial, eternal, immutable.

So the problem is one of expectation. If you expect something that was meant to be only a temporary fulfillment to be an absolute fulfillment, you will be disappointed. But - and here’s the key insight from today - that does not make the thing meaningless, pointless and without value.

Nobody says “Eating ice cream is so pointless. When you eat it, the next day you want more, so why ever eat it? It doesn’t produce eternal bliss so I’m just going to instead eat unsalted rice cakes because at least I won’t be disappointed.”

I suppose that’s one way to handle it. Or, you could adjust your expectations. You see, none of us should be expecting to making a kingdom here on earth. We are in a motel six. This is my bedroom for the night, but tomorrow night another man will spend the night here and I will be on my way.

Just because it’s temporary does not mean that it can’t be enjoyed. But that doesn’t mean you can’t fluff your pillow, watch a movie and fill your cup with ice water. Those things are there to help you enjoy your stay!

If you try to make this world your home, then you can’t help but just constantly have this feeling of panic, that death is coming. Death is going to sap away all I’ve ever worked for. I was so sobered this week in reading a quote from the movie producer Woody Allen. It was such an honest quote. I really appreciated it.

That sounds like it ought to be a chapter in Ecclesiastes. He wrote this in Esquire magazine within a few days of my birth, 43 years ago. What a very wise man to be able to look ahead and see where it was all heading. Very much wiser than many.

Now compare what Woody says here to the end of Ecclesiastes 2:23…

Solomon appears to be saying exactly what Woody is saying. It’s all heading to death. What’s the point. It’s all meaningless.

But this cannot possibly be what Solomon means. Because look at how this verse collides into the next section. There’s no transitional sentence. There’s no help in understanding how they connect. It’s near literary whiplash.

Now what in the world? What’s going on? What you see here is the motel six perspective adjustment.

Let’s not try to re-carpet the motel six. Let’s swim in the pool, sit in the hot tub, crank the A/C and enjoy the included continental breakfast. Let’s just watch a movie and leave crumbs in the bed. That sounds really enjoyable.

It’s perspective that makes all the difference.

Accepting Death Creates Enjoyment

In fact, this PERSPECTIVE ADJUSTMENT is going to really help us fill out our understanding of wisdom in general. Wisdom is a complex idea and we too often simplify it.

Let me illustrate: What definition do you have in your mind for wisdom? The one I’ve heard the most is skillful living. Now that’s a really good definition.

Wisdom is the ability to notice the relationship between the decisions I make and the consequences those decisions have on me and the people around me.

If I decide to plant early in the spring, I will have a larger harvest in the fall; but if I plant too early, my plants will freeze and die. That’s wisdom applied to farming.

If my words are soft, they tend to turn away the anger of others. That’s wisdom applied to conflict.

If I procrastinate, the work only gets worse, so I’m going to do the hardest thing first and get it out of the way. That’s wisdom applied to your todo list.

So skillful living is a good definition of wisdom. But you know, there’s another aspect of this skillful living that is not discussed nearly as often as it should be. We put a lot of emphasis on how our wise choices can CHANGE the world but the wisest of the wise do something much wiser still. They are able to accept the things that CANNOT CHANGE. They accept realities which are cosmically fixed, which no amount of wisdom can change. The wise man is going to identify fixed realities that cannot change. Why is that wisdom? Because how foolish would it be to spend a lifetime trying to CHANGE something that is impossible to CHANGE? Like for example…change the fact that we are going to die. EVERYONE dies. It would be among the most foolish things in the world to live as if this was not the case, to be surprised that this force is acting on you. Like right now. You are 45 minutes more dead then when you walked in.

Now as crazy as this might sound, you want to know what the key to enjoying your work is? Accepting death. This is a shocking reality. Not only does Solomon encourage us to accept the fact that we are going to die, but he says the only way you are going to enjoy life is to accept death. What an irony!

Almost all of us are doing the exact opposite. We see death as the great joy killer and therefore we are doing everything in our power to avoid it. We live in denial. We try to smooth out the wrinkles, extend our careers, work out to stay fit. Eat the healthiest foods we can so terrified that if its not the perfect thing, we will die.

We do everything in our power to push this thought out of our mind. But ironically, the fear of death robs us of our ability to enjoy the gift of life. If you are constantly worried that a rainbow will disappear, you will never enjoy it. But if you know it’s only here for a second and then it vanishes, then wow, what a treat that was and you move on with your day.

This is what he means in the next section and this is so important.

What’s he saying?

This might sound very arrogant, but hang with Solomon for a second. He’s saying exactly what he sounds like he’s saying, “Only the Christian can truly enjoy life the way it was intended.”

What does he mean by that?

The most an atheist can ever extract from food is the taste. For a Christian, the taste is the smallest part of the joy. When I eat, my soul is filled up with delight that God is so creative, that he gives me a delight to enjoy, that he would care for me by giving me such undeserved blessings.

A Christian pleases God by believing that the gifts are from God. It’s what Hebrews 11:6 says, without faith it is impossible to please him. We please God when we acknowledge that he is behind the gifts and it is the acknowledgment itself that brings joy.

Many have observed the elusive nature of joy. If you pursue it, it is perpetually allusive. But when you abandon it, it alights upon you unexpectedly.

The founders of our constitution built theology into the constitution when they said that all men are entitled to three inalienable rights: life, liberty and what? The pursuit of happiness. This was an acknowledgment that God intended for us to be happy.

The problem is that the pursuit of happiness could never be the pursuit of work or any of his gifts. That’s much too small an object. It must be the pursuit of God who gives us joy in work.

Notice from verse 26 it is God who gives joy. “For to the one who pleases him God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy” which means that God is the keyholder. And when does he release the keys? When we accept death. Certain things you can never change.

Medicine can only delay the inevitable. If you hope in medicine to save you, then you will join the despiar of woody allen because it will eventually fail you.

But if you hope in God, then you can accept all the gifts God gives you and you accept the pain that he allows as well.

Now if you know me, I love to live life to the hilt. I love the outdoors. I love adventure. I love projects, designing, inventing things. I love work. I love play. I love that. But I can truly say, the reason I’m able to love all these things, is because I love the fact that I’m going to die. I’m not looking forward to the process, but I love the fact that my life is larger than this physical life. And that has made me the happiest of all men. I really believe that of all people who have ever lived, I have to be in the 99.9 percentile of happiest people.

As Christians we are able to be so free from over loving the world or under loving it. If we are given a great meal in our motel 6 we rejoice. If they completely forget our meal, we shrug our shoulders and say, “Whatever, I’m out of here tomorrow.” We can appreciate what good things it has to offer and shrug off whatever creature comforts are missing. So free.

Do you realize how privileged we are? We can look death straight in the face and accept it and even love it.

Woody Allen is despairing right now. He wrote that quote 43 years ago. And he’s fighting off death as long as he can. He’s getting old. In a recent piece he told NPR that he believes his best work is still ahead of him. That may be true, but for his psychological health, it has to be true. For a Christian it doesn’t have to be true.

For anyone scared of death, their motto must be carpe diem. Seize the day. Make the day as long as you can. Suck every last drop of marrow out of that bone. In the darkness of a life that has no ultimate meaning, seize upon the temporal pleasures that lighten the burden.

The Christian, can say, love the day or close the shades on the day. Either way, it’s okay. Our best work does not have to be ahead of us. At any point we can move on from our work. Because we enjoy our work as a gift from God; it isn’t what we are after to fulfill us.

All the gifts of God, are mini-meals along the way to a great feast. You can enjoy those mini meals. But you can also skip them. On thanksgiving day, I don’t have to eat breakfast or lunch. I often do, and I enjoy it if I do, but if I skip it’s only making the late afternoon banquet all that much more delicious.

This year our theme is change what you love.

We have to change the way we love the gifts God has given us in the world. Look at the compulsive worker of verses 22. Here he is overloading his days with toil; he’s awake at night and his heart is filled with worry; because this man MUST be fulfilled by his work, he has missed the simple joys that God was holding out to him.

For this poor workaholic, his work could have been a joyful gift of God, if only he had had his soul needs met in Christ. He needs Christ to fill him first so he can then enjoy the gift of work.

A man dying of thirst would never be able to enjoy coffee. So much of it would be lost on him because his greater need would always be screaming at him. He’d be guzzling it and it would kind of help but not really. You have to be well hydrated, relaxed and comfortable to enjoy the gift.

And so it is with the man who tries to find fulfillment in in his work. He can never enjoy the gift of work because he’s trying to extract from it a non-existent property. The man first needs to be satisfied in Jesus so that his work can be enjoyed properly in it’s context.

We can actually experience contentment. Do you know what the word contentment means. It means I need no more.

We think of the discontented greedy person as too attached to this world. But in reality he’s not attached enough. He’s got God’s gifts right in front of him ready to be enjoyed but he lacks the capacity to enjoy it. He can’t just eat that food and say thank you and have his heart sing. He can’t just work hard and see accomplishment as a delight.

He’s not able to enjoy the gift. He says, “I need more!” But he doesn’t need more; he needs God to be able to enjoy God through what has been given him.

For the Christian, things are much different. Our satisfaction does not rise and fall based on the accumulation of trinkets. Most people believe that people and circumstances exist to make me happy. So when I am not happy, whose fault is it? People and circumstances.

It usually plays itself out like this: a man wakes up and he’s got a wife and children, a fine house, nice cars, and a great job that stimulates the mind. These are all gifts from God to be enjoyed. But he wakes up one day and something is still gnawing at his soul. And so the problem can’t be something wrong with me. It must be that something that should be making me happy isn’t making me happy so I begin to look for imperfection in the things around me. I’m not appreciated. You are asking people to fill a void that they can never fill.

It’s interesting in Hebrew the word translated “enjoy” in verse is literally to “look upon the good.”

God gives us good things; and he wants us to enjoy them. Rightly used, the basic things of life are sweet and good. Food, drink and work are samples of them, Solomon will tell us of others as we move through the book. What spoils them is our hunger to get out of them more than they can give;

So, for a moment, the veil is lifted in verse 26, to show us something other than futility. The book will end strongly on this positive note, but meanwhile we are shown enough in such glimpses to assure us that there is an answer, and that the author is no defeatist. He disillusions us to bring us to reality.

Communion

This is why only the Christian can enjoy life. Because only the Christian does not have to fear death. And the Christian does not have to fear death because of the cross of Jesus Christ.

Because of the cross we can enjoy what God has given and enjoy what God has not given. Today is communion Sunday and given the Life of Christ seminar we just experienced, what an appropriate climax to that. Wow, I’m just so thankful for Jesus. My heart is swimming with amazement, gratitude, love, adoration, worship.

Because of the cross we can enjoy God’s gifts for what they are and not try to make them into something they are not. We have the ultimate thing. We have what our hearts were made to want (reconciliation and relationship with God) so we don’t have to make lesser things into ultimate things.

Dr. Doug Bookman addresses the question: Is Jesus History?

Did Jesus Exist_ Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible

Gathercole - blog

The Bible Says Jesus Was Real. What Other Proof Exists_ - HISTORY

Dropbox link to PowerPoint slides

Conference Notes:

Passion Week Notes

Harmonized Bible Reading Assignments

The Final Night - Map

Chronological Chart

We are in the book of Ecclesiastes and we are learning from the lifelong experiment of Solomon. And here is the unique experiment he alone could perform: given virtually no boundaries and limitless resources, is there any lasting happiness to be found under the sun?

And Solomon’s answer comes back. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity. All is vapor. That’s not to say that life yields no pleasure. There is plenty of pleasure in life. It’s just very, very fleeting and transitory. It’s the pleasure of a rainbow. It’s here for a second and you love it and enjoy it and then that vapor vanishes.

That’s his high level conclusion. And if that conclusion was all you had, you might question it. You might say, “Solomon, I’m not sure I agree with that conclusion. How did you arrive at that?”

When you take math in school, your teacher always wants to you to show your work. I’m not so much interested in your answer as in the way you came to that answer. And the rest of the book of Ecclesiastes is Solomon showing his work. He says, you want to know how I got to the conclusion that life is vapor. Let me tell you.

Last week we saw the first step in Solomon showing us his work. Solomon began this happiness experiment by pursuing wisdom, philosophy, understanding.

And we saw that as wisdom increases, misery increases.

We saw the impotence of wisdom to really affect any change at the heart level.

We saw that the ultimate fate of both the fool and the wise man was the same.

And so Solomon looks this way. He looks that way. He surveys all that wisdom has to offer. He evaluates it’s benefits and he says vanity. Everything is vanity. Sure it has value. To be wise is certainly better than a fool. I’m glad I was wise. But it didn’t provide lasting fulfillment. It didn’t heal the wound in my heart.

So that was step one in Solomon showing us his work. He’s methodically trying to solve this fulfillment formula one line at a time, exhaustively working the wrong answers to their final conclusions. Can wisdom lastingly satisfy? Answer: no.

Today is step two, Solomon tries a different route. Wisdom won’t do it. So now let’s try something else. Let’s try pleasure and hedonism.

Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure through the senses.

if it has a sound he wants to hear it

if it has a taste he wants to taste it

if it stimulates him in any way, I want to try it.

He wants to feel, smell, experience whatever pleasurable thing life has to offer. And he goes on this experience spree. And Solomon concludes, this does not satisfy.

As readers, we see the answer up front, but we want to know how he came to that conclusion. Solomon let me see your work? How did you come to the conclusion that pleasure does not satisfy? I mean, there are a lot of options out there.

Oh you don’t believe me? Ha, let me show you what I tried. And he goes on to list seven ways in which he tested pleasure. And as we read this text, you realize, man, this dude tried like very few could ever try. The amount of energy he expended trying to find lasting fulfillment through the senses was pretty staggering. He starts with laughter, humor, wit, levity, joking, clever banter.

If you want to be happy, the simplistic basic approach, is get involved in things that make you smile and laugh. And so Solomon starts with the low hanging fruit. Let me orchestrate my life such that I surround myself with laughter, comedy.

Who doesn’t like to laugh? Everyone loves to laugh. Who doesn’t experience a genuine spike in the satisfaction index listening to a funny comedian, a witty one-liner, or a dude perfect video, or a ridiculous cat video.

Why do I like humor? Why do I like laughter? The answer is pretty basic. Because it makes me feel good. I like to feel good and no matter what is happening in my life, when I laugh I feel good. But it doesn’t last.

It’s like a drug. It has a hit and then a little afterglow and then it wears off and it’s gone. You try to recall back to mind whatever it was that was so funny and it’s vanishes. And if you try to recreate the moment or your rewatch that funny video, it yields a small fraction of it’s original pleasure. And Solomon looks at that cycle and says, “What’s the point to that?”

Solomon is growing old. And old people are just less moved by humor.

I was listening to an interview of a well-known seasoned preacher and the interviewer said, “I was listening to some of your really early sermons and you were really funny. You had lots of jokes and humor. You are markedly more serious now. Why is that?” And the preacher said, the older I get the less there is to laugh at. They might sound depressing, but it’s true.

It’s true in two senses; it’s true, because humor has a shelf life. After a while, you’ve kind of heard the basic jokes. I couldn’t believe when my kids got to school age and they came home and they were telling me all these jokes and I’m like, those were literally the exact same jokes I had in my class when I was in grade school. Nothing new under the sun.

So as you age, the basic pattern for humor gets discovered and it gets less humorous.

But there’s also less to laugh at in life as you age because the longer you live, the more inappropriate laughter is given the sorrow and tragedy you see in the world around you. So that’s the first hedonism dead end.

But this dead-end does not deter Solomon in the least. He’s on a mission. I am going all out, and I am going to saturate my life, I’m going to use all my resources, all my time, all my energy, all my creativity, to consume as much pleasure as I possibly can.”

That didn’t quite do it, so maybe we need to add alcohol into the mix. We need a good party, but we need to mix in some alcohol to kick it up a notch.

The broad category here is just pleasure through chemicals. Maybe I can find fulfillment by putting a substance in body.

On the most innocent end of the spectrum just food. Can I make myself feel better by eating more. I’m feeling depressed; I’m feeling stressed; I’m feeling overwhelmed, frustrated; let me just eat a bit more.

Here Solomon tests chemical pleasure. Maybe happiness is to be found through coffee, wine, beer, whiskey… maybe through drugs, LSD, cocaine, meth. Maybe through medications, pain killers

Can I tweak the neurons in my brain. Perhaps all the sorrow in the world can be erased with a chemical enhancer? Maybe I just need a little help being happy?

And substances can increase the happy factor, which is of course why we do it. Alcohol is offered at parties for a reason. It shifts the focus of the brain. It stimulates the pleasure centers of the mind.

But, of course there’s a cost. And God set it up this way. Of course he did. You rob Peter to pay Paul and the Peter wants his money back. Chemical pleasure is achieved by robbing from future happiness to have current happiness. But there’s no free lunch. There’s a cause and effect. And that effect will come crashing back down on you with redoubled sorrow.

And Solomon very soon discovered this.

And so he moves on from these shallow, easy, cotton candy joys…humor, alcohol, parties and says, perhaps joy is to be found in more sophisticated methods. He can tell, that this doesn’t last so he turns to things that have more permanence. I want my pleasure efforts to last. I want to make something of myself through hard work.

And this sort of pleasure through accomplishment is definitely more lasting that alcohol or entertainment. When you move from the dorms at college to maybe an apartment and then that moment you buy your first house. Wow, that’s a great feeling. There’s a sense of permanence.

And the reason we like that feeling is because rather than painting someone elses’s wall and then having that work vaporize the second you move out, you now own the place. This piece of dirt is mine. I can do what I want here. I can buy any flower that looks good to me and plant it, because it’s mine.

I love projects. My dream in life from the time I was like 12 was to find some land with a natural hotsprings on it, and begin to quarry out of the ground a castle complete with moat, steam-room, draw bridge.

But instead I purchased a house in a subdivision which I keep trying to imagine is the same thing. I love that feeling of hard work and the reward that comes from working hard with your hands.

So I thought, well, I can’t have a castle but I want to build something out of stone, so how about a planter. So I went down to BLM got a rock quarry permit, drove 60 miles out into the desert and levered, pried, yanked and pullied this giant boulders into the back of my dad’s truck. And then I drove home and got them all arranged nicely into a rock wall. And I was just absolutely spent. Totally exhausted. And I stepped back and thought, “Oh man, this looks beautiful.”

You’ve had similar experiences. And you sit and kind of enjoy it, you bust out the ice cold lemonade on the porch and you just drink in the fruits of your labor.

Now, Solomon isn’t about to be outdone. He looks over at your row of tulips and says, “Yeah, I didn’t plant a garden with tulips, I planted a national forest, personal buchart gardens, Napa valley knows nothing of my vineyards.

And I dug out pools to hold water so that in this desert climate they could be watered year around. In fact, today in Israel you can go to a place named after him, Solomon’s pools. What you see here was improved by the Romans but the Romans built upon what Solomon had done.

Solomon was a massive builder. The Bible says it took Solomon 7 years to build the temple but he spent twice that building his own palace. He built houses for all his wives, which would be a significant project since he had 700 of them. I mean if building things and doing projects could make you happy, Solomon would know. This is very instructive for me.

I’ve done a lot of manual labor in my life and I love it. I find so much pleasure in working hard and being rewarded by it. But here’s the kicker, the same disappointment follows all of it. It doesn’t last. The trim that I put in my house 5 years ago now looks like it was installed 500 years ago. It’s been vaporized by 5 kids.

Maybe you are building a company or an organization. Or maybe you are at your job and you are responsible for the development of a product and that product is very successful. That makes you feel good.

There’s something that happens to the soul when you work all day, labor over something, pour your creative efforts into something and you can step back and say, “I’m proud of that effort.”

I feel in my soul a desire for permanence in my work. But no matter what I do, it decays. Eternity is in our heart, but the world is not eternal.

Solomon discovered this. He got tired of all his work failing him. So he turned the exact opposite direction. Well, if hard work doesn’t do it, maybe it’s freedom from work altogether.

What do slaves do for you? They free you from the tedium of life.

How many stay at home moms here with little kids think they would be happy if they never had to do laundry again in their life. Every mom feels it would be appropriate at her funeral to be buried in laundry. The tasks of tedium are legion.

Cooking,

changing diapers (we changed diapers for 10 years)

Cleaning and cleaning and cleaning,

Mowing the grass,

Taking out the trash,

Doing dishes,

Over and over again.

Such tedium.

Such unrewarding work.

If only I could just remove this kind of tedium from my life, I’d be happy! Solomon says, you think? You’re wrong. I had slaves to do everything for me.

Slaves washed, iron, hung my clothes. I didn’t even have to think and I looked amazing. I had a personal chef, a personal trainer. I had a personal barber, gardener, maid. Everything was always picked up, put away, dusted, folded. I lived Downtown Abby x 50. It’s great. It’s really nice to take these pressures off, but the heart is still hungry.

How many of you have gone on vacation and day one, it’s amazing. You leave your hotel and you come back at the end of the day and your bed is beautifully made, drum tight, vacuum sealed, bathroom cleaned, fresh soap. New laundered towels. You’re like, wow! That was nice.

And you go downstairs to a buffet breakfast. Someone else bought the food, brought it home, put it in the pantary, got it out of the pantry, prepared it, served it. And then when you are done, they will wisk away your dishes and clean them for you.

It’s nice. But that alone is not going to bring you lasting fulfillment. By day three or four your tired of the English muffins. You’re ready for something different. By day 12 you sound like an Israelite moaning in the wilderness so sick and tired of this manna that falls from heaven.

And so Solomon says, nope. That didn’t work. So maybe it’s not the amount of work, but it’s what the work does for you. Great possessions, equal great security. Great possession equals great respect and admiration among your peers. If great possessions can make you happy, I tried that.

I had stuff.

Every cultural has their weak spot, a soft underbelly, a particular idol they are prone to worship. And this is America.

We are constantly in pursuit of more. We simply believe that whatever it is, more of it must be better. We don’t get the concept of diminishing returns. The pleasure curve in our mind is linear. If 10 dollars makes me happy. 20 makes me twice as happy. 40 twice as happy as that. And we really do believe it’s just linear.

And we live in this mental pattern that prevents us from every seeing it. Here’s what I mean. Ten years ago, you had in your mind this picture of what you wanted life to look like, and you thought that if you could obtain it or get to it, you would be happy and satisfied. What did you think would make you happy in 2010? I was 32 years old.

I had a list in my mind of goals:

I would live in a nicer house.

I wanted to finish a triathlon.

We really wanted to adopt a child.

We wanted to pay off our school loans.

We wanted to save for retirement a little more aggressively.

We wanted to take our kids to Hawaii and visit my brother

I would be a better preacher.

We could get some help on our pastoral team

We needed a new building.

And all of have our list. And for the last ten years we have put all our energy toward these goals. We all think…

if I could just get out of school,

if I could get a good job,

if I could find a husband/wife,

if I could have children,

if I could make enough money to go on vacation,

if I could get a car that actually ran half the time

And so we work that ten year plan. Now here’s the crazy part. On my ten year goal list, I’ve met all those goals. Am I saying, "Yes! Score! Satisfaction!" The reality is you don’t even recognize when you meet your goals because all along the way you are replacing them with a new ten year plan because as the attainment of your goals gets closer you realize that they won’t satisfy. The thing that satisfies is always 10 years out. And so you are always working a ten year plan no matter how old you are, you are always working a ten year plan and your willing to put up with a little more because ‘your almost there’ and you die constantly convincing yourself that just a bit more is what will satisfy.

Almost all of us have bought into the philosophy that what will TRULY make me happy is more of what we already posses. That is madness.

All of are living lives that Solomon could only dream of.

Flying around in airplanes all over the world,

eating foods that he couldn’t have dreamed of trying,

running hot and cold water,

sheets so soft it would make his head spin,

sewers,

garbage collection,

street cleaners,

National parks,

cars that wiz around with radio,

internet,

crazy visual stimulant through in the movies…

And do we really think, that just more of all that stuff is going to make us happy? Really? How foolish. How insane? If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results, then the most insane thought of all is that just more of what we already know doesn’t satisfy will at some point satisfy.

Before you buy one more thing in your life stop and ask yourself, why am I buying this? We don’t buy out of need; we buy out of boredom.

You don’t go buy a new pair of jeans because your last pair have completely blown to shreds and disintegrated. You buy a pair of jeans to cure your boredom. You like the feeling of trying something on and changing the way you look.

We live boring, predictable lives, and we numb it and turn it off by acquisition. **But Solomon’s going, “Hey man, I did that whole acquisition thing and I’m here to tell you.** It’s vanity/vapor.”

He’s tried wisdom. He’s tried humor and entertainment. He’s tried working hard and not working at all. He’s tried raw acquisition for the sake of security and recognition. None of that worked. Now Solomon tries the arts.

Art does something unique to the soul doesn’t it. A great painting, an amazing sculpture, a well-done play, a powerful broadway production. Solomon singles out music in particular here. Singers, men and women. Music really is a universal soothing to our soul. I listen to music several hours every day. And it makes my life so enjoyable.

Now in Solomon’s day, they didn’t have records, streaming services, headphones, etc. So the only way to listen to music was if it was live. So when people did hear music, it was a rare treat. And you can imagine people saying, “Wow, could you imagine how happy you’d be if you could have music in your ears at all time, if you could like dial up any song at any level, professionally recorded without mistakes, with infinite variety, any volume, any time of day.”

So Solomon did his best. Since phones weren’t around in Solomon’s day if you wanted the pleasure of 24/7 music what would you do? You wouldn’t buy the record; you bought the band. Come into my palace and I want you to play for me non-stop, whenever, I want.

Solomon was the precursor to digital assistants. Palace band, play for me the macerana.

Solomon had the bands, the songs, the music, the melodies but it wasn’t enough. Well maybe I need to combine the pleasure of music with the pleasure of women and everything that the flesh could imagine that surrounded that, the feeling of women serving him, the power, the dominance.

Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. And Solomon tries satisfaction through sexual experience. And he says, it doesn’t satisfy. And if anyone could comment on this, it would be Solomon. If 1000 different women did not make him happy, then 1001 isn’t going to do it.

Solomon did not lack shape, eye color, hair color or personality. So, he plays it all out, and in the end, he’s done everything there is to do and he’s going to say he’s back in the same place he was before he ever started this pursuit, feeling like life was boring, pointless.

Ask anyone whose slid down the pornography rathole and ask him if it made him happy? The heart was not made to be satisfied through sex. Just like any abused gift, the more you demand happiness from it, the less it will give to you.

Solomon wrote Song of Solomon. And you can tell when you read the book that he’s on a high. And what is he describing in that book? He’s describing the thrill of marital love between one woman and one man. Song of Solomon is not Solomon explaining how awesome it is to have 1000 women at your disposal. Song of Solomon is explaining how glorious it is to have one woman and have her fully the way God intended. And it is awesome! It can’t be improved upon.

Now lest you read this and think this sexual experimentation of Solomon was cool in the eyes of God, think again. This was in direct violation of God’s words to Israel’s kings. God told the kings of Israel explicitly to not multiply wives.

In 1 Kings 11 we read that this exactly came true, that Solomon’s wives turned his heart away from the Lord and here’s the Lord’s summary of his many wives.

Now this is an instructive text for a couple reasons. What we read here is that pretty much everything Solomon experimented with was in direct violation of God’s decree. The money, the false sense of security, the women….the whole thing was an afront to God. But God allowed Solomon to run this fulfillment experiment all the way out. Go ahead, Solomon. Exhaust yourself in trying to solve a problem I’ve already told you is not solveable. I promise you it will hurt you and you will regret it. Run it all the way out and tell me what you find? And we benefit from that experiment that ended in futility and depression.

Oh? Just what I told you? Huh.

Greater than anyone of all time? Still not happy? Are you ready to listen?

Solomon’s Conclusion:

Solomon is trying to solve the fulfillment problem and he’s been showing us his work. Picture Ecclesiastes like a long division problem. Long division is a mathematical experiment where you plug in values trying to find the solution. Here’s an example.

I know for some of you this is triggering some PTSD. Just turn away and plug your ears and I’ll tell you when we are done. In order to solve this you have to ask how many times does 28 go into 259? And so you try 1.

And you say, nope that didn’t work. That’s got a massive remainder. And so you try 2.

Well, now that’s a little better but still, that didn’t quite solve the equation. And Solomon was doing this exact same thing, but instead of a solving a math problem, he was trying to solve a fulfillment problem. And he’s just plugging all sorts of values up there seeing how it would work and calculate down.

But no matter how hard he tried, the problem was beating him. It was like the most enigmatic math problem in the world. He tried every number, every combination of numbers and nothing solved it. He says, this is an unsolvable problem. And he was right. And here is what he concluded.

All of us, just like Solomon, have a void in our heart that needs filling. We are like Solomon and we are just stuffing numbers into this equation trying to solve it. And we try this thing and that thing, and it helps. It’s better than not having it, but it never quite solves the equation. There’s always these giant remainders. And Solomon is our ultimate teacher here because he tried it all. He tried bigger and better and more significantly than any of us would ever try.

Let’s just review all that he tried to stuff into his life:

comedic laughter,

alcohol drunk only in pure gold mugs (1 Kings 10:21),

Throne decorated with ivory and overlaid with gold, elevated by six steps, and surrounded by 14 hand carved lions and 500 custom hammered gold shields (1 Kings 10:20-27).

incredible real estate with massive palaces and private garden parks, a personal staff estimated at 10,000-30,000

the equivalent of his own private zoo with exotic animals from around the world,

a ranch with 12,000 horses and 1,400 chariots imported from Egypt and Cilicia (1 Kings 4:26, 10:26-29),

so much wealth that silver became worthless (1 Kings 10:10-27),

on demand access to performances by his favorite artists,

sex with any of the 1,000 wives and concubines,

rock star fame,

the highest IQ and greatest insight of anyone in the history of the world

and the power to do basically anything he wanted.

Honestly, wouldn’t you be happier if your life was like Solomon’s? Solomon tells us.

This year our theme is change what you love.

We have in our hearts a longing to be filled. And we love those things that we think will fill that longing.

When we say, “Change what you love” what we are saying recognize that this world can’t fill that longing. Stop loving things that don’t have lasting fulfillment, that are not in the shape to fulfill. Their shape is not such that it can actually change you.

You see, the soul, has had this cavity in it; we were created with that cavity, that intuitively longs to experience what the world was like before sin entered. And our souls are groaning, according to Scripture, to realize that pre-fallen condition. We just long for it. We ache for it.

The problem is, the cavity is so deep, that only eternity could fill it and yet we just keep cramming it with temporary, fleeting joys. On the surface it just looks like a hole that should be super easy to fill. But it strangely never fills. Let’s cram it with some more. Let’s pump more down that hole and try to fill it.

My father-in-law worked for Micron and because that facility is built on a lava field, the code requires that you drill down and make sure there are no voids in the ground. And if you find a void, you need to fill it with concrete.

So as the story goes, they found and void and starting pumping concrete down the void. And they just kept pumping, day after day after day. And it never filled. And a few million dollars of concrete later, they climbed down the hole and realized that it was a lavatube that went clear to federal way. It would never fill.

Don’t spend the rest of your life pumping the world’s goods down a bottomless pit. Let’s learn from Solomon folks. Let’s not waste his fulfillment experiment which concludes this way:

A full fridge

full house

full closet

full bank account

full social life

full mind

full stomach

full résumé

full bedroom

equals an empty soul.

Poverty theology will tell us that joy comes in having less. Conversely, prosperity theology will tell us that joy comes with having more. Fulfillment isn’t a function of stuff.

1 Timothy 6:6, “true godliness with contentment is itself great wealth.” This is profoundly simple. Everything minus Jesus is nothing. Nothing plus Jesus is everything.

Application.

This is why Jesus Christ said, I am living water. If you drink from me, you will never thirst. I can quench your thirst forever.

I am the bread of life. I can fill your soul forever so that you will never again hunger.

I am the way. I am that thing you have been looking for and once you find me, you will never search for anything else.

I am the true vine. You want life. You need life. Then you need to connect yourself to me.

I am the light of the world. You want meaning and purpose. You want light to illuminate the soul and bring purpose to what you do, to help orient yourself. Then what you are saying is you want Jesus Christ.

I am the good shepherd. You’ve wanted someone to follow. You’ve wanted a leader who won’t disappoint. If you follow me, you will never be disappointed.

So here’s what I want us to do this week. I want us to take a step. Here’s what I mean. Start filling that cavity in your heart with Jesus Christ. How do you do that?

You feed on Christ through reading his Word? If you don’t read his Word, well, of course your hungry. Of course you feel empty.

You pray to him. If you aren’t praying to him, then of course you feel lonely. Of course you feel vacant and void and empty of purpose and relational fulfillment.

You need to read books and listen to sermons that point you in the right direction. Changing what you love means, that you have to begin serving a different God. You have to offer sacrifices in a different direction. You have to eat differently, drink differently, live differently.

Your schedule will need to look different. You will need to spend different. Now to help you with this.

Let’s take a step.

Our hearts have a cavity made for eternity. Only Jesus Christ can fill that cavity.

Slideshow for this message is available

Last week, we began our study in the book of Ecclesiastes, Good Love; Good Life. And all through this book Solomon, the wisest fool, is giving us insights into his life long experiment. And here’s his experiment: given virtually, no boundaries on things to try, where is pleasure to be found on this earth?

And last week as we introduced the book we looked at his 20,000 foot high level conclusion.

And if you remember from last week, the word translated vanity is the Hebrew word Hevel and the best translation of this word is vapor. Sometimes it gets translated meaningless which gets at the idea of it, but puts a more negative than necessary spin on it.

Here’s why. If you were boiling a kettle of water and it started steaming, would you look at the vapor and throw up your hands, it’s all meaningless? Not really. What’s the main idea behind vapor. It’s transitory. It will quickly disappear.

And in a similar way, all of life is very good; it’s beautiful; it’s interesting; it’s sometimes even hypnotizing in it’s elegance- just like vapor. But it has no substance and it has no lasting value. The second you reach out to grasp it, it disappears between your fingers.

Life is like a beautiful rainbow. It’s absolutely beautiful. It has it’s place. It really can make your day. But don’t get too excited, because it won’t last. A few years ago, there was a brilliant rainbow, and I was driving and I had to pull over; in fact, on both sides of the streets people had all pulled over. People had their phones out. You couldn’t ignore it. It was so amazing. That’s not meaningless. But it is vapor. It does disappear. It does lack substance.

Now it become meaningless if you build your life upon it. So that’s the idea. It’s all vapor but whether or not it’s meaningless is a question of where you look to find fulfillment.

So we are going to see this idea of vanity, vapor woven tightly through every chapter of this book.

Contradiction.

Now there’s another theme we need to introduce. And to understand this theme, we need to learn just a touch about the wisdom literature.

Wisdom literature in the Bible is all about affirming truths without necessarily showing how that truth connects to another truth. Rarely do we see things worked out in a linear fashion. We’ll see the writers affirm a truth right next to that truth’s opposite in an apparent contradictions.

For example, we can affirm that…

life is both miserable and awesome.

people are both the best and worst parts of our lives.

responsibility makes us both happy and miserable.

You probably both love and hate your dog.

Running a marathon is excruciating and exhilarating.

it’s both a happy and sad to watch your children grow up.

The very same thing can be the source of opposite emotions.

Now Solomon is going to introduce us today to a similar sort of contradiction that we need to really grapple with; and in looking at this contradiction, Solomon is going to make a powerful, powerful observation. So open your Bible’s to Ecclesiastes 1:12

The Folly and Beauty of Wisdom

Solomon opened the book by saying, vanity of vanities which was like his high-level summary.

Now the focus sharpens. We turn from analogies and impressions and philosophy to what we can know directly from experience. We are invited into his journey to scan a great spread of human pursuits, to ask whether anything on earth can be found which has lasting value.

We are going to look at two sections of Ecclesiastes where he talks about his attempt to find meaning through the pursuit of wisdom, philosophy and intellectual rigor - or our equivalent to getting a degree and a good job.

We’ll look at 1:12-17 and then we will skip to 2:12-17 both of which make this point.

It’s not surprising that we should begin with wisdom. Solomon’s wisdom was world famous; we are told from the Bible that it was supernatural. It was given to him by God.

This gifting brought him riches and honor, it produced justice and prosperity for his people, and that attracted admiration and visitation from people all over the ancient world.

Now, I think it’s fair to say that we don’t perhaps, immediately appreciate the magnitude of whatever gifting Solomon had so it’s worth taking a look at exactly what the Bible says and calibrate ourselves. If you recall, when Solomon first became king, he offered to God a thousand burnt offerings; his heart was so bent on putting God first. He wanted God to be everything.

God was so pleased by this heart attitude, he asked Solomon to ask for anything he wanted and Solomon. You can’t help but wonder if he didn’t first ask for a thousand more wishes.

Of course, it wasn’t even a thought. He asked for wisdom. I’m just a kid and I need great wisdom to rule this great people of yours, to discern, to carefully apply, to live skillfully in this position of influence you’ve given me. So the Bible says that he was given wisdom greater than any man who lived or any man who would live. Now think about that.

The wisest man that EVER has lived. Later on in 1 Kings we read of this wisdom making massive impact on the world around him:

The Bible says that his fame spread such that the Queen of Sheba heard of his great wisdom and came with the expressed purpose of testing him. She came with riddles, difficult questions, vexing conundrums.

Get out of your mind here things, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If the Queen of Sheeba came to Solomon today, I could imagine some questions she might put to him?

Solomon, what should we do about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict?

What do we do about the uprising in Venezuela right now?

What’s the solution to the health care system?

What do we do about financial inequality in the world?

What is the role of government in helping the poor and needy.

What should the US do about the Uranium enrichment program in Iran.

And whatever thorny questions she put to him, the answers came back so clear, so powerful, so wise. Have you have had the experience when listening to someone just cut through the confusion and noise and your just dazzled. How did he do that? It was so clear, so simple. That’s how the Queen of Sheba felt over and over again. And here was her summary.

There are a lot of wise people in our world and Solomon surpassed them all. I read about some modern day genius’ A guy named Christopher Langan who has an IQ of around 200, one of the highest ever tested. He scored a pefect score on his SAT in HS while taking a nap. There are men gifted with such incredible intellect it makes your head just spin.

Picture that person so eloquent, you envy them, that person who just seems like their brain is a sponge and they never forgets a thing, that person who just speaks pearls of wisdom into the most thorny of counseling situation. The person who can solve the puzzles, the cubes, the mazes. Solomon surpassed them all. Everyone looked to Solomon and envied him for the ease at which he absorbed information, processed it, organized it, and applied it. How can you do that so easily. It would take most people months or years to synthesize like that. Such perfect articulation with such ease. Everyone, was on the border of worship when they listened to this guy.

That means that if wisdom could bring you happiness, well, Solomon would be able to tell you since he had more of it than anyone who ever lived. What was it like to be this guy? Solomon tells you.

Not only did he have the natural gifting, he applied diligent effort to develop it and make the most use of that gifting. And here’s his conclusion.

Here’s what he concludes. Wisdom has limits. If you look to wisdom to make you happy, you will ultimately be disappointed, because wisdom, just like every other false god, doesn’t possess power; it will result in a contradiction. Solomon reveals three contradictions in the course of his wisdom experiment.

Here’s the problem, Solomon says, with wisdom. Wisdom can tell me what the problem is, but wisdom has no power to actually solve the problem. I can discern what needs to change, but I have no power to actually make that change. It’s the problem that every parent feels. I know what you need to do differently, but I can’t make you do it. My wisdom tells me you are on a collision course for destruction but my hands are completely tied. I have no way to help you! By wise words can’t change you.

Now the ultimate example of this in Solomon’s day was in 1 Kings 3. You remember the story of the two prostitutes who both had infants. In the night one of the two infants was accidentally smothered in the bed. Both mother’s claimed the living child as their own. How would the king adjudicate?

He said bring me a sword. We’ll cut the baby in two and give half to each mother. And by judging the reactions of the two women, he was able to discern the true mother.

But let us step back. Amazing justice. Amazing judgment. Truly, amazing wisdom! Brilliant in every way. But did Solomon’s wisdom fix the real problem, the heart problem, the underlying problem? No, the mother who was deceptive, I very much doubt went away a changed woman. I’m guessing she was humiliated and hated the other woman. I’m guessing the relationship between those two women was forever severed. Did Solomon’s wisdom change a liar into a truth teller. Did Solomon’s wisdom undo the prostitution that was behind the baby? No.

Wisdom solved the baby problem but wisdom couldn’t solve the heart problem.

The wise discern but are powerless. There’s a limitation here that Solomon felt.

We are always trying to use wisdom to solve the problem’s we experience. And yet, he concludes with verse 15. Here’s my favorite translation from the TEV.

‘you can’t straighten out what is crooked; you can’t count things that aren’t there.’

If the heart doesn’t have righteousness in it, you can’t count it. Certain circumstances are just crooked beyond repair and no amount of meddling will make it whole.

For example, in the realm of medicine, there are certain serious conditions like Cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy which are a result of gene abnormalities. The genetic information isn’t there and no matter how many Dr’s apply their skill and wisdom and creative problem solving, you just can’t correct the problem. The genetic information isn’t there. It’s gone. It’s missing. It doesn’t exist.

You can’t count what’s not there.

Wisdom sees the problem but it can’t do anything about it. Trying to solve our problems with wisdom is like bringing a squirt gun to Normandy. There’s no power to effect change. I can easily prove this; how many of you know exactly what to do and don’t do it. Behold the powerlessness of wisdom.

Now it is at this EXACT point that we need to really, really be careful that we don’t unintentionally alter the message of the book of Ecclesiastes.

Because what Ecclesiastes says about this despair when you look at it head on, doesn’t really feel all that Christian. And because of that fact, a lot of us when we get to the text will try to fix Solomon’s words. Well, he can’t be saying what he’s obviously saying here:

Listen again to Solomon’s conclusion:

Solomon is saying that the world is broken. And many of us can’t come to terms with that. You can’t fix it. It’s okay to observe the problem, but you won’t be able to fix it. What you want is directly at odds with the very nature of reality itself. You want the impossible. Wisdom can’t change it. In fact, nothing can change it.

That helps us understand what he means by futility in verse 14 in the verse before

You want to know what is futile, Solomon says? Thinking your wisdom can change the unchangeable. Stubborn refusal to accept things as they are. I don’t care how wise you are, you will never eradicate sin. Your wisdom can’t remove suffering. You must accept it as an unalterable element of a fallen world and set your hope, instead, outside this world, in a world BEYOND the sun. There is a stubborn, AMERICAN, human insistence that the impossible can in fact be achieved—that what God has made “crooked” or “twisted” can indeed be made straight by human, mortal effort. With just enough technology, we can solve the world’s problems.

Just a bit more wisdom applied to our farming methods and we will solve the hunger problem.

A little more wisdom horsepower applied to social reform and we’ll eradicate poverty.

A little more wisdom in the health care industry and sickness will be removed.

It is all futile, for God is God, and the world is the way it is. Refusing to accept reality can only result in unhappiness and weariness (since wind cannot be caught, however hard the chase).

So there’s the first paradox. The wise discern but are powerless. How about this for a second one.

Look down to verse 16

Here’s another paradox. It is truly the case that everyone would prefer to be wise over being a fool, but with wisdom comes associated misery.

It’s similar to the idea that everybody would rather have wads of money over a scarce amount of money. After all money can buy you a boat. But what happens when you buy a boat. Now you have to take care of it. You have to winterize it. You have to fix it.

There’s a hidden hook. And wisdom is just like that. The more wise you become, the more miserable you become.

If I’m honest, I really enjoyed my naive world back when it was all simple.

Back before I had kids, the parenting formula was simple. Good parents produce good kids. If you want good kids just be a good parent. That’s easy enough.

Wisdom disrupts your joy.

As you grow wiser, everything that appeared simple is now complicated.

Consider the science nerd who applies his wisdom to the physical realities in our world. Does knowing about the theory of relativity help you to enjoy your vacation more? Einstein was miserable. He could hardly sleep. He nearly drove himself mad. The more you learn about the fabric of the universe the more uncomfortable you become, because virtually nothing is as it seems. You realize we are all walking around conceiving of life in totally non-real ways. All our intuitions are inverted and when you are forced to grapple with that you end of feeling very disoriented and insecure.

Perhaps you’ve applied your wisdom to understand the humanitarian problems of the world. Were you happier before or after you knew about poverty in the world? Now your an expert in the field which means you get a front row seats to the wickedness that causes these problems. The more you know, the more those images stick in your mind, the more unsolvable the problems become, your naive simplistic solutions are stripped naked.

As soon as you know you become responsible. As soon as you understand you are not free to not care.

Wasn’t it easier when you didn’t know. Ignorance is bliss. What’s the inverse of that? Verse 18: much wisdom results in much vexation. increase in knowledge is increase in sorrow.

Wisdom tastes great going down but it leaves a bitter taste.

And so Solomon says, if this is what awaits the wise, why be wise? All that wisdom, all that collecting, just makes me miserable? So what’s the point? Such a waste of time. If wisdom just overwhelms me and makes me miserable, what’s the point of it all? If the guy who gives simplistic answers to life’s throny problems is happier than the wise man, why not just be simplistic? Let’s just grab a fishing pole and a cooler and go fish. That conclusion makes all the sense in the world, especially given the final contradiction.

So now we jump over to chapter 2. The theme of wisdom continues here and it’s here that we find the most important apologetic argument in the book. In other words, if you are going to talk to someone about why they ought to consider the claims of the gospel, this is a great place to start.

What’s he saying? Be wise; be a fool. I don’t care. Earn a Nobel Peace Prize; Rob the MGM grand. Will immigration matter? Will nuclear Uranium enrichment matter? In the end, it makes no difference at all. Not at all.

If it’s really true that life under the sun is all there is, if it’s really true that when we die, that’s it, and eventually the solar system spins down to a cold dead stone floating in a vacuum; if that’s the final state, what will matter on that day?

Will it matter what you did? Of course it won’t. How could it?

It won’t matter if you lived or didn’t’ live.

If you were a serial killer or if you saved 1000 Jews from Triblinca.

How can any action make any difference if the end it all distills down, reduces down, resolves down to a motionless, frozen stone.

Very few of us are honest enough to go where Solomon goes here. Very few. In fact, I’d say, nobody is honest enough to stay here. They might peek over the edge for a second and drink in the abyss and then run away and vow to never look over their again. You either peek and run or you jump. Many have ended their own life so despairing were they over the unavoidable truthfulness of these conclusions. If life under the sun is all there is, then it’s horribly depressing. Nobody can just stay staring.

Most of us live life just fine because we never back out far enough to look at the whole of life and take in the big picture.

Solomon dares you to answer the question. What is the gain of your life as a whole? Sure you can zoom in on this one little part and tell me about some purpose. You could, for example, tell me why you go to work. You go to work to make money. Sure, but keep backing out. Why do you make money? Because I love vacation. And why do you like vacation, well, because it’s the way I recharge my batteries so I can go back to work.

Why do you have kids? Why? After your kids bury you, why does it matter that you existed? Can you answer that question? What difference do you make? We are wired such that this question matters to us. We have to see reason in the things we do.

We operate on this principle of perceived gain in literally every decision we make. If I hand you a rock and ask you to walk it to the Village and stand in the square with that rock for a few hours. There’s no way, you’d do that without asking why? You have to reason. What difference will it make if I spend my time doing this? If it makes no difference, you’d never do it.

The reason Solomon comes to despair is that he’s brave enough to ask the question as it relates, not to this or that piece of his life, but to his entire life. And what he sees terrifies him; he can’t see a point to the whole picture of his life.

The pursuit of wisdom for Solomon is like spending a lifetime building a pile of stones in the middle of the freeway. Each block of knowledge carefully built upon one another. And all along the way, you are telling yourself that this tower you are building is for a very noble reason. You have a cause. You are motivated by something great and meaningful. Of course this tower of wisdom is for some purpose, and you list off that purpose with great conviction. Maybe your trying to cure cancer. Maybe you are establishing a financial legacy for your kids. Maybe your great purpose is to raise a family. Maybe your great purpose is to build a ministry. And it feels so awefully important. Brick upon brick. Stone upon stone, that wisdom tower is erected, right in the center of the freeway.

And what that cause is this lantern on the top of your pile of stones in the middle of a freeway.

And someone says to you, why are you building this giant pile of stones? And you say, well so I can put this lantern on top of it. Well, why are you putting a lantern on top of this pile of stones right in the middle of the freeway?

And you say with confidence, “So people won’t hit the pile of stones.” Well why is the pile of stones right in the middle of the freeway? Because we need to get the lantern up where everyone can see it.

So one cause supports the other cause but there’s no ability to pull the head up and say, “What’s the point of it all?” And if someone asks you, ‘wouldn’t it just be better if the pile of stones weren’t there, you dont’ have answer. You can’t deny, it would be better if the stones wern’t in fact there.

Where’s it all heading? And Solomon is honest enough to say, “It’s all heading to the grave.” Death is the great equalizer. No matter how high we ascend in life, when it’s all said and done everyone ends up around six feet under.

Those who are young in the room, bolt out of the starting blocks focused on staying in their lane. They are sprinting toward the finish line. They are just straining and pulling and trying to outpace the other guy. The elderly Solomon, looks ahead and sees the finish line. And what he sees startles him. He, like every person who has ever lived, can’t wait to cross that finish line and get the trophy. Run hard. Like really hard. Study hard so you can get good grades. Get good grades so you can get into a good school. Get into a good school so you can get a good job. Get a good job so you can make lots of money. Make lots of money so you can retire. And then we’ll cross the finish line.

But what’s the finish line? The finish line is death. And Solomon stares in horror? Why bother running the rat race of life if it’s just a sprint to your own funeral?

A friend at church here, knowing that we are in the book of Ecclesiastes texted me this:

Life is a sprint to your funeral. And then after your funeral, your forgotten. Solomon says look around. The second you cross the finish line, y are 60 years from being totally forgotten. Nobody knows their great, great grandfather.

Death is the great equalizer of both the wise and the fool; it’s better to be wise than a fool in the short term. But in the long term, why does it matter?

Conclusion

Yes, it’s all vanity, if you set your hope on things under the sun. If you think like is all about acquiring wisdom, you will be miserable because wisdom will fail you.

Similarly, if you think life is all about acquiring money, you will be miserable, because money will fail you.

If you think life is all about having a good family, a good marriage, a good church you will be miserable because people will fail you.

Wisdom, money, people are like rainbows. They are beautiful in their place, in their moment, but they are vapor. They fade. You can’t make them ultimate.

Idolatry is trying to eat a rainbow sandwich. It doesn’t have substance to satisfy. Your trying to do something with it, and it doesn’t have the properties needed to accomplish the task you assign it.

We can make an idol out of anything.

What is Solomon doing here in Ecclesiastes. He’s evacuating your heart of all your idols so you have an appetite for Jesus. He’s creating the silhouette.

Jesus said, it’s not the healthy who need a physician but the sick. Solomon’s job is to make you sick; it’s a gift from God to get rid of all of your ego defense mechanisms to actually see what life without God looks like.

The despair itself becomes a pointer to God. C.S. Lewis talks about this concept a lot in his works.

He says a fish doesn’t complain about being wet. Because he was designed to be wet. We complain about being wet. Why? Because we were meant to be on dry land.

Why do we despair over purposelessness?

If the world is just the way it is, why are we upset about it?

Why can we not stand the thought that there is no difference between Hitler, Gandi, or the Apostle Paul in the end?

Why the idea that when we die, we rot? Why does that bother you?

Why are you bothered by the wetness of all that?

It’s evidence you know there is a God. It’s evidence that you were made for dry land. It’s evidence there’s a God who has put eternity in your mind. It’s a pointer to the reality. You’re wet and you were made to be dry. Something is wrong and out of place and you can sense it.

And so as we close, I want you to pray a prayer to God that you, maybe have never prayed.

And what you to thank him right now for allowing the rainbow sandwich of the world to disappoint you.

I want you to thank him for the unfixable problems of this world. The crooked things that can’t be made straight.

I want you to thank him that the more wisdom you acquire, the more miserable you become.

I want you to thank him that the money you thought would bring you happiness, didn’t

Why would you thank him for that. Because in his mercy, he is teaching you to look to the fountain of life. He’s showing you that you are running in the wrong direction. Your desire to be satisfied is NOT wrong. But the fountain from which you are drinking cannot fulfill that longing. Look to Jesus Christ. Flee to him.

Introduction to Ecclesiastes

Well last week we introduced our 2020 church theme, “Change What You Love” which focused on the volitional aspect of our desires.

So this theme will be dripped in throughout the year and the hope is that it will really move the needle in terms of helping us to evaluate the worthiness of our chosen loves and desires.

In parallel with that, today we start a new book of the Bible, the content of which, hits on this theme over and over again. Today we begin a new series in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Our subtitle is Good Love; Good Life which is to emphasize that it is not our good circumstances that lead us to the good life. Rather, it is our good love which lead us to the good life.

So that’s big picture and the way Ecclesiastes teaches us this point is brilliant.

How it Fits

Now a bit of an overview. Ecclesiastes is one of the five books of the wisdom literature. And it perfectly disrupts the books of Job and Proverbs. Here’s what I mean. If you had just the book of Job, there’s an error you might you walk away believing, namely, that happiness comes through removal of Satan and suffering. Now it would be a wrong conclusion but it would be understandable.

Here’s how you’d read the story to arrive at this thinking. When you open the book of Job, what do you see? The opening verses of Job is a screenshot of Job’s Well’s Fargo bank account. We are told he has thousands of sheep, camels, oxen. It’s pretty much like a drone flyover of his estate (the garage full of cars, his beechfront condo). We are told he’s the greatest man of all the people of the east. He’s number one on Forbes most wealthy; and yet, he’s also righteous, he’s a family man, and he seems, really happy. Job has it all.

Now the next scene is this: we get this glimpse into heaven and we see Satan appear before God. And God asks Satan a question, “Where have you been?” And Satan says, “Roaming around the earth.” And God says to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job. He’s upright, blameless, fears God, turns away from evil.”

Now normally that would be a compliment for God to call you out like that, but if Job knew what was coming, he’d be saying, “Don’t worry about me down here. I’m no big deal. There’s more interesting people to focus on. Move along…just move along.”

Now what happens is Satan says, "Give me a break…you’ve made him so wealthy, so untouchable. But let me make him suffer and he will curse you to your face.

So God allows Satan to strip him of all his wealth, all his family and all his health. And he sits in an ash heap, dogs licking his wounds, and his friends come and accuse him of sin. Job is absolutely miserable.

For those of us who have had Job-like experiences, not a lot of money, who have had friends turn on you, who have been diseased, it’s really easy to find yourself in the middle of the book.

I’m just like Job, suffering in these terrible circumstances, and I need to get to the end of the book where the circumstantial pressure is lifted.

I need to get rid of the sores. If could just remove the suffering, everything would be good.

I need to get back the camels. My stock needs to resurge. I need a new car. A new house. A few new properties.

If I could just get ahead, if I could just get a little more power in the world, then everything would be okay.

And by the end of the book, Job gets all his stuff back, Satan stops harassing him and he’s happy again. See? All I need is for God to change my circumstances like Job and I’ll be happy.

Now with that conclusion, a guy could continue on his Bible reading plan and get to the book of Proverbs and in Proverbs, you know what he’d find? He’d find the how-to manual for creating the Job-like paradise.

I need more money. Here’s the path.

Well, there you have it. A little more diligence and Job-like abundance will be mind.

I need more power. Well, there’s a proverb for that.

Job like influence is a through education, reading books, listening to podcasts. There you have the path.

I need to have a family that’s put together and obedient and moral and wonderful. Well, there is a proverb for that.

The Proverbs might be read as the manual to get you the outcome of JOB, namely freedom from Satan and suffering. Proverbs is the handbook for paradise. Right there. Follow that manual of discipleship and boom. You’ll be untouchable.

Now here’s the problem with this: Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes is the bitter, bitter cold hard reality. It lets you in on all the corner cases.

It tells you about the parent who did it all right and the kids walked away.

It tells you about the guy who did everything the proverbs told him to do, made a fortune and lost it all.

And it tells you about the guy who had all the power and it made him miserable.

But it does more than address corner cases. It also pulls the veneer off the rags to riches stories. All those rich people who worked hard, followed the principles of the proverbs and did it.

Through the hard work of parenting my kids are obedient.

Through wise investing, we have a retirement nest egg.

Through lots of relational work, I now have influence.

Here’s a trade secret, Ecclesiastes says, that stuff didn’t make them happy. The degree didn’t do it; the money didn’t do it; the marriage didn’t do it. This life can’t make you happy.

And it’s that honest truth that makes the book so winsome, such a powerful apologetic tool.

Hermin Melvile, author of Moby Dick said it was the truest of all books. You could trust Ecclesiastes because of the sorrow in.

Today we get introduced to the big idea: the Book of Ecclesiastes opens with these lines.

We’ll break the message up into Who, what when where why and how.

So we are introduced in verse 1 to a teacher/preacher said to be a son or a descendant of King David. Now the key thing is to recognize that the author of the book who is anonymous is introducing us to the preacher who is a character in the book. And that preacher appears to be Solomon. So the author is not Solomon. The anonymous author introduces us to, Solomon.

The structure of the book is just like the movie princess bride. The movie begins with a boy sick in bed and an uncle comes over and says, “Let me read you a book.” And the then you have this entire movie and that at the very end the movie returns to the bedroom. And he basically says, “What did you think about the book?”

That’s the format of Ecclesiastes. This anonymous author introduces us to Solomon and then the author disappears as we listen to the voice of Solomon. And then at the very end, the author reappears and helps us evaluate the message.

Solomon is introduced as a preacher, so he wants to teach you something about what he’s learned.

And what he has learned comes from a unique experiment performed over the course of his life; it’s so unique because so few people can actually run the experiment. Now keep in mind, Solomon was the king of Israel. He’s got more power, wealth, women, wisdom, influence than you will ever have. From the second he was born he had the best tutors, the most privileged insights.

And Solomon says, “From this perch of highest privilege, I’m going to conduct an experiment on what brings happiness.”

A lot of people experiment with happiness, but they are so limited in what they can try. For most of us, we’d love to try a lot of things but we can’t do it because of limitations. Either we don’t have enough money, or we don’t know the right people, or we aren’t connected in the right way.

What if there was no distance between your desires and the experience of those desires. What if you could try anything you wanted. Solomon did that and here’s his report.

So that’s the who.

What’s the message. The author summarizes the teacher’s basic message right at the beginning and right at the end of the book.

38 times in 12 chapters he uses the word vanity. It’s the Hebrew word Hevel which which means vapor.

Some translations translate it meaningless but I think it’s better to translate it vapor. The idea is that it looks solid but the second you try to grasp it, it disappears.

And notice that it’s not just vanity. He says vanity of vanities. It’s the ultimate superlative. It’s like saying holy of holies. In fact, it could even be a sarcastic, cynical jab at that linguistic construction.

Now we look at that and say, wow, that’s pretty strong language. Solomon, you’ve sampled so much of life, what n particular is vanity of vanities. I know some of it must have been enjoyable; other parts less so. What in particular calls forth such strong language? And what’s his answer? EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING is Vanity and Vanities.

When you add up all of life. When you total bank accounts, accolades, accomplishments, when you total your suffering, hardship, conflict, what is left? A wisp of vapour, a puff of wind, a mere breath. If you reached out and tried to grasp it, it would vaporize before your eyes. The sum total of life is the nearest thing to zero. Spend your entire life trying to make a wind collection and show me what you have left?

So much of life is running around trying to find substance where there is no substance to be found.

As one author says, “It’s a wild goose chase with no goose.”

That kind of ‘vanity’ is what this book is about.

And this vanity takes place he says, under the sun.

This phrase under the sun is going to be repeated over and over again. It represents all that takes place on earth. If you look up and see the sun, the Solomon is writing to you.

I think if Solomon was writing in our day, he’d have said, "What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils running around on the pale blue dot?

Just a single speck of dust in the cosmos. Everything that takes place on this pale blue dot, Solomon says is meaningless. Why, because what begins here, ends here. It’s going nowhere.

And the time element, perhaps more than anything, makes this even more depressing.

It doesn’t matter when you live, how long you live, what epoch of history you live, what culture you live, the vanity will fin you.

I love the heading in one of my Bible’s for this next section. It entitled it, the treadmill.

Every generation thinks that they are like, way smarter than the previous generation, that their ideas are way, better way more likely to solve life’s problems, way more sophisticated. That everything that went before them was old, but we have finally figured it out. But step back; it just more of the same, old thing.

Here’s what Solomon says, life is like a gym with a wall of treadmills. Imagine 3 guys on treadmills.

The first guy is an elite athlete. He’s got a heart rate monitor. He’s got an interval training plan. He’s drinking specially formulated drinks and he’s sweaty and busting a gut. He’s giving it everything he has. He’s so expended he’s on the verge of throwing up.

The second guy is a casual runner. He’s not killing himself, but he’s doing a balanced workout. He’s faithful, slow, steady.

The third guy. He’s not even walking. He’s actually just using the console for a seat as he watches the TV’s overhead while eating sugar daddies.

They all do their own treadmill thing for 1 hour. And when they are finished, they all get off and where do they end up? In the exact same spot. That’s what Solomon is saying. One guy runs the race of life with discipline and vigor and he accomplishes so much and he dies. Another guys is a sluggard and they both share the same hole in the ground. Vanity he says. What was the point of all that?

The author is disillusioned by the cyclical nature of life. Our days are measured by a spinning planet revolving around a spinning sun that spins and spins and nobody knows why. That spinning, orbiting planet creates our weather and seasons. The wind does it’s thing. The rain does it’s thing. The rivers do their thing. And time moves but what’s the point? We just do the same thing over and over and over again. And are you going to argue with that?

Think about your day. It’s a day made up of doing the same thing over and over again. You wake up and you feed your kids, you change their diapers, you send them to school, you clean their clothes, you shop for groceries, you go to work; you eat your food.

And then what do you get to look forward to the next day?

Waking up in the same bed,

next to the same spouse,

in the same house,

feeding the same kids,

taking them to the same school,

cleaning their same clothes,

shopping for the same foods,

going to the same work,

to make the same pay so you can continue your same life.

There might be small changes here and there, but it’s so much of the same that the teachers says, “Everyone, pull you head up out of the sand. Do you see how depressing this is? Do you see how pointless this all is?” Do you see the uninteresting, aimless, inconsequential, absurd, laughable, ludicrous, nonsensical nature of EVERYTHING we do?

Why is it all vanity? At the very root of it all, what’s the problem. Solomom tells us. Here’s the reason:

The reason, he says, that life is meaningless is because the heart has a longing for something NOT CONTAINED in this world. This heart has an insatiable appetite. That’s why. We always think that there will be something yet untried that will satisfy. We know that most people are not satisfied, but I’m the exception.

I know that there are songs written by people who say, “Money can’t buy me love.”

I know rich people claim that money doesn’t make them happy, but try me.

Even though life is undeniably, unquestionably filled with nothing but sameness, our hearts are raging, furiously searching for something new, something different, some special combination of wow that will satisfy. Verse 8 says, the eye is not satisfied with seeing, BECAUSE all it sees is the same old thing and it wants something new, different, unique, truly AWESOME. But the longer it searches, the more exasperated it feels.

Marketers tell us that the most effective marketing word in the world is NEW. Why is it so effective? New improved shampoo formula. Why does that catch your attention. Because the last one didn’t work. New flavor? Why do you care? Because you’re tired of the old one. New home? New car? Because your old one’s dirty and broken.

We always are wanting something new. You get a new phone. And you hold it. And you think wow, this is the most advanced gadget that has ever existed. But is anything new? What does it let you do? Talk to people. That’s not new. Check your calendar. Calendars have been around for thousands of years. It’s a different way to do those things but it’s not new. And what the heart is wanting is not different ways to do the same things. It wants a new thing, an ultimate thing, a truly satisfying thing.

That leaves us with the final question, HOW? How are we going to find that happiness?

You could keep trying to find something here on earth. But the problem is there are too many things to try and not enough time to try them all.

Let’s say, for example, that you believe that being a billionaire makes you happy. Well, the problem is it takes a long time to be a billionaire. Most billionaires have white hair. And what if 60 years from now, sitting in your diamond studded rocking chair you, you find that your billion dollars does not make you happy. Bummer it took your whole life to try just one of the thousands of promised routes to happiness. It’s too late to try another one.

You could keep trying and maybe get lucky, but let me suggest a better way. Learn from histories WISEST FOOL. Learn from Solomon who had it all, tried it all and says, satisfaction cannot be found on this pale blue dot.

Don’t walk away from this book and imitate the foolishness of Solomon. Learn from Solomon. Learn from the preacher. Don’t think that your situation differs in this slight little way, such that you would be happy if you were in his position while he was not.

I love this quote from Pascal. He’s talking about the pursuit of joy and making the exact same point that Solomon was making. This world doesn’t contain the answer to our joy problem. And in this quote he marvels that despite the universal conclusion that this world cannot make us happy, we keep trying.

Don’t be this guy.

Application

Now, let me give you a hint as to where the book is going as well as piece of application. Ecclesiastes is like a silhouette. In a photograph you appreciate it by all the details it contains. A silhouette is appreciated by the absence of detail. The goal of Ecclesiastes is to evacuate from your heart anything that you think will bring you ultimate satisfaction. And what will be left is a silhouette of Jesus Christ.

If satisfaction cannot be found under the Sun, where can it be found. HOW do we find something that is not VANITY. It has to be found in something outside this world, it must be found in the person of Jesus Christ.

Solomon is creating an appetite for Him. And you don’t have to wait to the end of the book to begin feasting. And so I want you to encourage you to pray to him, right now. Say, Lord what do you want? Lord, what do you want to change in my life so that I can be happy? Maybe you need to stop connecting your heart to this world and start connecting your heart to heaven.

This is not some mental trick. You are praying to the God of the universe; your heart is literally made to find joy in him. And you will. You can pray to this God! I want you to think about coming up after the service and pray with our prayer team asking God to clear away the fog of your heart so that you can learn from the this lesson of Solomon.

It’s scary perhaps; it’s uncomfortable. Maybe you’ve never done a single thing like that in your entire life. But come and pray. Pray that God would connect your heart to heaven so that you might experience not VANITY but satisfaction in Jesus Christ.

Now I’m going to invite up Billy, one of our elders, is going to lead us through a time of communion. And what better way to focus our heart on Christ, than to focus on his work on the cross.

Slideshow for this message is available

Well, we are officially into 2020. I want to wish you a happy new year! As we have done in year’s past, we have reserved the first message of the new year to introduce our annual church theme. Every year in the fall the elders get away for the weekend, we discuss church business, pray, hang out, but one of the main things we do is ask the question, “What do we need constant reminding of this year as a church? Where are we weak? What work needs to be done in our heart this year?”

The Problem We All Feel

And so we did that and I’m really excited for this year’s theme. Let me introduce it by describing a problem we all feel. Our lives are moving at an ever-increasing rapid rate. This creates a problem in that we don’t have time to reflect. The number of things on the schedule increases and we bounce from one thing to the next slavishly obeying the schedule but you never have time to stop and ask the question, "What is the significance of the schedule?" Why am I doing all these things again?

There is too much busyness to sense anything meaningful in life. The busyness actually makes our life boring. If our life was story, it would be a very boring one because there is no plot. It’s just one giant list of random, disconnected to-dos.

And if we actually get a chance to try and answer the question as to why we are doing what we are actually doing, we find that all the pieces are so hopelessly tangled and intertwined, there are too many parts to ordinary life to keep it coherent and recognize purpose and meaning.

We are controlled by the bills which determine the calendar which controls the family scheduling which dictates the extra curricular school opportunities which are related to the vacation schedules which impact the job responsibilities and it’s all so hopelessly tangled together.

Eventually we just throw our hands up and keep doing because, after all, there’s nothing we can do and we can’t remember why we decided making our life so complicated but it must have been important.

Are you feeling a bit stressed out?

Well, I’m not done stressing you out. You know what all this busyness has done to us. It has made us unhappy. And do you want to know what the unhappy people do? They consume. Consumerism of the 21st century is driven by the unhappiness associated with life lived without purpose. Consumer psychology can be described as lives lived without reference points. Unsure of where significance is to be derived the consumer consumes trying to find something of worth. He doesn’t have an answer to the purpose questions of life and so he or she flails and flops and scrambles and searches and samples fearing that if he doesn’t try everything, the magic elixir will pass him by.

Marketers, preying on these types of people (these types of people being all of us), have the job of connecting products that need to be sold to the unmet desires of the heart. And so we gobble these up only to be further dissatisfied.

This cycle is only enhanced by the media we consume. We watch movies that imitate the real world, characters with lots of purpose, with thick plots, they are like the real world but a critical junctures they deviate from reality, artfully shield us from consequences of actions such that we believe yet another lie about where satisfaction can be found.

It’s a world that has been created for us which in turn recreates us in it’s image.

And the result of all this is that we are like schizophrenic lovers. We want this. Then that. We desire that. Then this. We love that, then we love that, then we love that. We don’t know what we love, only that we want something worthy of our love.

And our schedule is filled with meaningless service to powerless idols who can do one thing and one thing only and that is break our heart.

(Insights here credited to Identity and Idolatry: The image of God and its inversion)

You want to know what the solution to this is? Can I get a drum roll please?

Here’s our theme for 2020:

This theme focuses very intentionally on the volitional aspect of love. That we have power to choose what we ACTUALLY DESIRE. That’s how love is being defined here. Choose what you DESIRE.

I just don’t think we conceptualize the things we desire as a choice. Further, I think hardly any of us put conscience effort into evaluating the worthiness of the things we choose to desire.

Think about it right now. What do you love? What do you really desire?

Maybe you love a certain band? A certain type of music?

Maybe you love the outdoors? The beach, backpacking.

Maybe you love a certain game or app on your phone?

Maybe you love traveling? You’re always thinking about a place you want to visit or something you want to do.

Maybe you love home improvement?

Maybe you love certain foods? Coffee? Desserts?

Maybe you love hosting events at your house?

Maybe you love a particular kind of art? You are really drawn to acrylics.

Maybe you love a sports team?

Maybe you love a certain author and the stories and book she writes.

And someone might ask you, why? Why do you like that? I like painting because I like the way the colors look? By why do you like the way the colors look? And you say, well, because I like bright colors? Why do you like bright colors? Eventually you will just say, I don’t know. I just do.

It seems like the things we love are outside of our control, the genetic knob that predisposed us to like those things is a bit beyond our reach.

It can be pretty world-view altering to realize that our love is a choice. Perhaps the thought has never even crossed your mind:

What you love right now is something you have chosen to love. It’s not something that was baked in at the factory as part of your genetic code. It’s also not something that is permanent. It’s something you have chosen to love but it can change. If that is true?

Maybe you chose wrong? Have you ever considered that? Have you ever considered that the objects of our desire are not all created equal. That certain things are more worthy of our love than others?

Have you ever considered that your joy is connected to object you have chosen to love? Perhaps you lack of joy is because you have a bad love? Perhaps you’ve chosen to love something that’s good but you’ve loved it in the wrong order.

Today I want you to turn in your Bible’s to Isaiah 55 and we’ll illustrate how to change what we love from the mouth of God through the prophet Isaiah.

Isaiah and the Backdrop

Now in order to appreciate the message of Isaiah 55, you absolutely need to understand when he is writing and why he is writing.

Isaiah is a prophet to the nation of Israel right before she is defeated by Assyria and Isaiah lives to see them captured and hauled off into captivity. And he spoke a message that contained two parts. He spoke a message of Judgment and a message of Hope and we’ll talk about both aspects of that message today.

Isaiah’s message was that Israel was going to be carried off into captivity by the Assyrians as a form of divine judgment because they have CHOSEN to LOVE the wrong things. They DESIRED other gods and the wickedness associated with serving those gods and God is judging them for those DESIRES.

Israel is being judged in short because of IDOLATRY.

Now when we think of idolatry we think of little statutes and people bowing down to them. That’s one expression. In our society, carved images have been almost entirely displaced, but I can assure you that idolatry is still very much alive and well. Idolatry is simply the belief that something other than God, is ultimate.It’s a belief that one of God’s created things is more capable of fulfillment that the Creator himself. That’s why idolatry has always been a love problem and a desire problem.

Now in Israel’s case, God had made abundantly clear that he ALONE could satisfy them. I don’t want you LOVING and DESIRING and WORSHIPING other gods because they can’t help you. It was the first of the ten commandments.

Now here’s a question. How do you obey this command? What is the mechanism for putting God on the throne of your heart so to speak? How are we to make God supreme in my life such than he is the only God. The answer: You serve him. In fact the entire law was summarized by Jesus from Deut 6.

According to this verse, how do you choose your love? How do you desire him more? By serving him with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind. The more you serve your God, the more you DESIRE him and the more you love him.

And the point here is that if you want your desire to be FOR God, you have to give him, not SOMETHING, not even MOST things but EVERYTHING.

Israel was worshiping God but they were also worshiping idols. OH yeah, I am pro-YHWH. I go to church. I like the whole system. But I also like this little idol here. And these idols were means to an end. Through these idols, they were able to toy around with the same things we toy around with: Money, sex, beauty, image, power.

And God says, because you worship these things instead of me, I’m going to show you that those things can’t save you. You see those neighbors of yours to the North? They want to destroy you. I’m not going to do anything to stop them. And you can cry out to your gods and I’m going to stand back and watch what they can do for you.

One of the most graphic images of this is found in Is 3 in this description of God’s judgment that would come upon the women of Israel who were consumed with appearance and image and prowess. To read this properly, you need to picture a Hollywood actress, dressed to the nines, hair up, heels up, jeweled up, ready to receive a Grammy. Israel had those people in their culture. Israel had their own celebrities, their own ideal image they worshiped just like we do. And listen to how God exposes the futility of that through judgment.

Picture that same Hollywood actress, shaved, branded, stripped of all her beauty and wealth and the dignity associated with it. This is what Assyria did to Israel

If you are planning on going on the Israel trip, we will travel to the city of Lacish which was destroyed by the Assyrians. And back home in their palace they inscribed a mural depicting the victory and devastation they inflicted upon Israel. And the fulfillment of these phrases can be seen etched upon the walls of the temple.

Your mighty men shall fall by the sword…

And we see graphic depictions of that prophesy coming true.

Instead of a rich robe, a skirt of sackcloth…Here the nation of Israel stands in long lines being deported to Assyria

Instead of a belt, a rope.

Notice the rope around the hands and ankles…

Why would God allow this captivity? Because there was something more important than her comfort. God wanted Israel to see the powerlessness of their chosen LOVE to save them. What can your god do for you now?

Cry out to him all you want?

When death comes upon you, cry out to beauty and say, "Save me!

" When cancer starts wracking your body, cry out to your bank account and say to it, "Save me!"

You trust in your beauty? Money? Strength? They cannot save you because they don’t care about you. They are not animate objects. They are nothing. Ha!

Everything Israel had hoped in had been taken away. And so they sit in the ash heap, with a hook through their cheek being drug to a foreign nation, with a foreign language. Any hope they had in their idol non-gods is shattered.

This is the LOW point. This is the VALLEY. They hit BOTTOM.

[Key Point]

And when we get to Isaiah 55 God tenderly, graciously asks Israel to return to the only one who could objectively satisfy. To HOPE in a God who is ACTUALLY alive and can ACTUALLY give them significance, purpose, meaning and satisfaction.

Isaiah 55 is God’s invitation to Israel to CHANGE WHAT SHE LOVED. To actually steer the rudder of their DESIRE in a new direction.

The Invitation

And so here’s God’s tender invitation to the nation of Israel.

Now our theme this year is “Change What You Love.” And here in this passage we have God’s tender invitation to stop DESIRING the idols of the world that cannot satisfy and CHOOSE to DESIRE me, the only one who can satisfy.

Now I want you to notice in this passage two paradoxes in this choice to love God.

Notice on the one hand you have language that denotes something that is free. That really stands out in the text. Buy wine and milk without money and without price? Delight in rich food for FREE! Ruth’s Chris steakhouse for FREE. Chandlers steakhouse for FREE! Your choice of wine, steak, all free. So in one sense it is free.

And it’s free as compared to the idols they are worshiping. Verse 2 describes the payment required by the worshiper of false idols. Why do you spend your money for that which doesn’t satisfy? You want to know what that sounds like? That sounds like the language of addiction.

Isn’t that exactly what you say to a heroine addict? Your skin and bones. Your body needs food. Why are you paying all your money for something that isn’t even food and you yourself confess doesn’t satisfy?

We can look at the addict and see the horrible cycle he’s gotten himself into. And we can look with compassion because he would have never chosen the path were he able to see where it would have led. But now he’s stuck. The drug becomes a taskmaster whose power seems almost limitless to the addict. This horrible enslavement was entered into voluntarily and without much forethought. But as that drug is served, the DESIRE for the drug morphs into RAGING compulsion.

And now the addict gives everything he has in exchange for a chemical that destroys life. That is exactly what idolatry is.

We enter into these contractual relationship with the idols of this world almost without thinking. The guy totally enslaved to money can’t even tell you how it all started. The sex addict doesn’t know how it began. But now, they bankrupt themselves, to pay for what can never satisfy.

And God says, why not come eat ACTUAL food that nourishes and heals you and costs you NOTHING. Doesn’t that sound nice?

So in once sense this offer is free.

But in another sense it costs you everything. And it might seem silly to point this out, but hang with me. The cost is you have to eat it. You have to choose to eat it and NOT something else. You have to bind yourself to it in covenant so to speak. Do you see the language of covenant in verse 3?

That steak only taste delicious if you bind yourself to it, so to speak. I only have so much appetite, and for it to yield its richness to me, I can’t first sample a maverick burrito and some gummy bears and a package of ritz crackers and then sit down at the steakhouse. My appetite has been spoiled. You have to come hungry. You have to come thirsty. And you have to eat and drink fully and completely from one source. It is ONLY when that thing is served SINGULARLY that it yields its complete fruit.

And so it is with God.

To enjoy God, we must give him EVERYTHING. We must give him free reign over our finances, over our schedules, over the things we think we love, over our hobbies over our vacations, over our recreation.… everything.

And so I ask you, are you serving GOD alone? Does he have access to every part of your life. If your life is like a house with rooms, does he have the key to EVERY room. He goes with you to every place you travel, on the web, in your car, in your music, in your entertainment….

How can you expect God to satisfy, if your spoiling your appetite with junk food? It’s free, but in another sense, it costs you everything.

Don’t complain of a steak that does not satisfy if you’ve spoiled your appetite. It’s not the chef’s fault.

So, do you want to change what you love? Do you not DESIRE God like you sense that you ought? Perhaps, it’s because you haven’t given him everything. Give him EVERYTHING and you will DESIRE Him with ALL YOUR HEART. That’s how it works. It’s free but it costs you everything.

Now here’s where we see this paradox in the text. Choosing to love God is intuitive. After all, it’s free; it’s satisfying; it’s nourishing. Who wouldn’t choose that? That’s an intuitively obvious choice. It’s intuitive in the sense that, intellectually speaking, of course the most worthy thing in the world would be the being that created all things.

We could all answer the question correctly on a test.

But it’s counterintuitive in that we don’t have experience with it. We have experience with other gods - money, power, sex, image, even good things like family, reputation…. It’s been frequently tried. But God is like an untried delicacy. It’s like going to an Asian country and they serve you grasshopper soup. And they say, “This is so amazing.” And you insist you don’t like it. But in reality, in truth, you’ve never actually tried it.

Flip the analogy around.

If 99 percent of Americans love raspberries, but you insist you hate raspberries because they look strange even though you’ve never tried them, you’d be missing out on something your taste-buds are designed to enjoy. And the more practiced you become in returning to the junk-foods you know will bring you pleasure and the more practiced you become and running from things you’ve never tried, the less likely you will ever experience something you were designed to satisfy you.

Similarly, the more practiced we become at saying, “Following God’s commands couldn’t possibly be enjoyable. That seems restrictive” the less likely it will be that we will experience the joy of Christ.

Do you want to know what the most unintuitive part of going all-in with God is? Confession and repentance. We all like to think that we are pretty good people and that we have great dignity because of the moral high ground upon which we stand. That we are all basically pretty good folk and that there is no embarrassing sector of my life. But there are embarrassing sectors.

And what prevents millions from coming to Christ is the pride of admitting them. What prevents millions from experiencing the fullness of Christ is dragging into the light what has been kept in darkness.

And it’s fear that drives all this.

All of us have sin that grips us in some way. And we say to ourselves, I can do anything, but one thing I could never do is confess that.

I could never get myself to admit that I have a raging fear of not having it all together.

I could never admit that I have so much identity wrapped up in my family, in my appearance and in my social reputation

I could never confess this embarrassing problem.

I could never admit how insecure I am.

I could never admit how terrible my marriage is or how badly I treat my kids

Or how secretly I really do love money or

My addiction problem or

My pornography problem or

My same sex attraction problem or

My depression problem.

Or maybe it’s not a secret sin, but it’s an embarrassment over a life investment. I could never really give the Lord all of my life, because, in truth I’ve invested SO MUCH serving this false God that I’ve reached the point of no return. I’ve lived my whole life for this god and if I admit that this God is really a worthless idol, my life is ruined. I’d be confessing that I am the greatest of fools. I will have confessed that I wasted my life chasing a job or career or sport….and that thought is so unbearable, that I’ve wasted so much of my life that I’d rather just live in denial than have to come to terms with that kind of WASTE.

If any of this describes you in any way…

Now listen to Isaiah.

He will pardon. He is ready right there to pardon you…to free you…to give you that food that satisfies so you can break that horrible addiction.

But it feels so counterintuitive because we are so used to the way we are normally treated when we confess sin. Normally when we confess weakness people use it against us. It becomes like a lever that is used against us to manipulate us.

But that’s not how God works.

God does not think like a man. Can we together right now praise God for that? Can I get an amen? Men do not forgive. God is READY, eager to forgive. He does not think like men think.

So do you want to change what you DESIRE? Do you want to change what you love. Then give him everything including that thing you can’t imagine giving him and know that abundant pardon is yours.

Return to the Lord SO THAT what? SO THAT he may have compassion on you, for he will not just pardon, BUT ABUNDANTLY pardon. Isn’t that good news? Isn’t that wonderful!

Application.

God is driving us to a choice today.

How will you apply this message? What are you going to choose to LOVE and DESIRE in 2020 as a result of Isaiah 55?

Are you going to choose to give everything to God and be blessed and satisfied or are you going to choose to continue to serve the idols that can never satisfy.

You can’t do both. You cannot serve two masters; if you try you get the blessings of neither.

Israel had worshiped unworthy loves. And God was calling them back. He was asking them to change what they love by serving him. Stop serving your idols and start serving me. See that I am worthy of your service and act on that and you will be pressed in the mold of that newly chosen love and you will find that your desires will change. The more you serve a chosen love, the more your desires align with that love.

Now it’s time to get practical. Like street-level, the moment you walk out of here practical.

Recognize that every choice you make in a day is pressing you into an image. You are being created in the image of something. Your DESIRES are being formed in this way. Why? Because you are an image bearer. You are made to reflect things that have worth. And the way you reflect and image is by serving those things.

So the practical question is this, what are you serving? Given what you do in a day, what image are you being pressed into.

Go through your schedule and ask, “Why am I doing this? What love am I serving in doing this.”

As you clean your house.

As you spend money at Kohls or Home Depot or amazon.com. Why? What are you serving when you do that?

Get out a piece of paper and write it down.

Now it’s not quite as simple as just looking at your calendar because this really has to do with motive. For example, we all have to work 40-60 hours a week. That’s a lot of time. So does that mean that I am worshiping my job? Does that mean I’m an image bearer of work?

Here’s the answer. It depends. It depends on why you are going to work.

So the first part is analyze what you are doing and what does that indicate about your chosen love.

But the second part is even more important.

What should I be doing if I claim to love God?

How does God want me to serve him? Those people who really serve God with all their heart, soul and mind do what?

You have a card. Read it.

Conclusion

I want to conclude by reminding you of something obvious. Not all things are worthy of your love. In our contemporary world, all truth claims are flattened. Hey if that works for you, great! The reality is not all love is equal. Not all desires are good. In fact, some desires if met will destroy you. Do you believe that?

We are going to close with the song, GIVE US CLEAN HANDS….

It’s a sample prayer of how Isaiah 55 could be applied to your life. Lord Give me clean hands; give me a pure heart. I don’t want to Lord, lift my hands to another.

And here we want to think of God as worthy of our DEVOTION. Worthy of everything.

Sing, with Cowper…

“The dearest idol I have known, Whate’er that idol be, Help me to tear it from thy throne, And worship only thee

Idolatry is never about the idol. It’s a means to an end and the end is significance, security, purpose and satisfaction. Let’s reflect back to God right now, the fact that he is worthy.