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Ecclesiastes 5:1-20
Ecclesiastes: “Real Life Red Alerts”
If you would, please take out your Bibles now and turn in them, in the middle of your bible, to the book of Ecclesiastes and chapter number 5. Ecclesiastes, chapter number 5. You know, warnings that come our way in life are helpful. And when you heed a warning, it will protect you from harmful consequences. For a number of years, if you bought a pack of cigarettes, there was a little warning label on there that used to say, “Warning: Surgeon General [top government official over medical affairs] determined that smoking is dangerous to your health.” More recently they’ve had a warning on there that says, “Surgeon General’s Warning: smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema.” And I say, “yup, it does that”. My dad, after smoking for more than forty years, got emphysema and lung cancer. In fact, it’s interesting there are more than half of a million deaths a year in this country that they basically associate with cigarette smoking. You see, warnings, when we see them, can be helpful, but when we heed them, they can protect us from consequences.
I don’t know how many of you years ago had those steam vapor vaporizers. You know, the hot vaporizers. It used to be when the doctor said, “put your kid under a vaporizer”, those units were all that they had. The trouble with those was hot steam was coming out of there. And with at least two of our kids, with all of them, we told them, “Don’t touch the vaporizer”. Two of them did. And, of course, they got burned and a big blister came up and it had to be dealt with. See, when you heed the warning, it will protect you from harmful consequences.
Sometimes, especially if you drive through Hall Park [our neighborhood] here, you’ll be driving down through the street and there’ll be someone flashing their headlights at you, all right? And what are they warning of us about? Police radar is ahead. Now, none of us “spiritual” folks would ever exceed the speed limit, but we’re glad that everyone else is being warned about that radar [smile]. And if we heed it, it will protect us from harmful consequences: like writing out a check for 80 bucks. No, I didn’t do that. Someone else on our staff did, but not me. 😉
We live in tornado country and we get those warnings, don’t we, about some tornado that’s just zipping down across the plains and it’s going to wreak some damage and ravage, and so we take shelter. See, when we heed the warning, it protects us from harmful consequences.
You know, there are all kinds of warnings. Some types of warnings we call ‘red alerts.’ You might see that in the military; you might see that in the medical field. But a ‘red alert’ warning is just a warning that tells you there is a serious threat there. There is impending danger.
And today, as we look at Ecclesiastes and the fifth chapter, I want to talk about some “Real Life Red Alerts.” There are some real-life red alerts that Solomon wants to warn us about. He wants to warn us about impending danger. I want you to realize that these red alerts that come to us by way of Solomon, come from a man who had his own share of mess ups in his life. He had his own share of life wrecks. He had his own mistakes that he did.
We’ve entitled our study of the Book of Ecclesiastes, “A View From Down Under; A Candid Look At The Realities Of Life”. This book is the thinking man/the thinking woman’s book of truth. It is really a confessional autobiography of a man who knew God; a man who drifted from God; and a man who lived much of his life away from God. And his basic message to you and to me is, “Don’t come this way”.
Now Ecclesiastes is for all people, but as we learned from chapter 11 and verse 9 and chapter 12 and verse 1, it is specially targeted to young people. The people who have not yet moved out into life; who have perhaps not yet faced a lot of harmful consequences. And his message to young people is, “if you will heed what I have to say, it will save you years of fruitless frustration and needless heartache.
So, we want to look at we’ve titled the message today, “Real Life Red Alerts.” And this is the plan: Basically it’s three things we’re going to be looking at today; three red alerts he’s going to give us. One is Take God Seriously! We see that in chapter 5, verses 1 to 7. The second warning/alert is that Bureaucracy Lives! We see that in verses 8 and 9. The third one is that Money Misleads! And perhaps that’s the least heeded one in our culture. We see that in verses 10 to 17. Then he’s going to conclude the chapter with some of his Life Advice in verses 18 to 20. So, we’re going to look at the warning Take God Seriously in the first seven verses; Bureaucracy Lives in verses 8 and 9; Money Misleads in 10 to 17; and then some Life Advice from Solomon to you and to me.
So, let’s begin by looking at the very first red alert warning he give us, that’s in verses 1 to 7, which is Take God Seriously! Let me just read these verses. He says, “Guard your steps as you go to the house of God and draw near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools; for they do not know they are doing evil. Do not be hasty in word or impulsive in thought to bring up a matter in the presence of God. For God is in heaven and you are on earth; therefore let your words be few. For the dream comes through much effort and the voice of fool through many words. When you make a vow to God, do not be late in paying it; for He takes no delight in fools. Pay what you vow! It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. Do not let your speech cause you to sin and do not say in the presence of the messenger of God that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry on account of your voice and destroy the work of your hands. For in many dreams and in many words there is emptiness. Rather, fear God.”
Now, if he delivers this warning to us to take God seriously, I want you to notice two key phrases that are in that section we just read. The first one is in verse two, when it says, “God is in heaven and you are on earth.” See what I really think happens to us in our life is that we lose a grip on who God is. He is in heaven. He is high and exalted in His greatness and His majesty. He is omniscient. He is omnipotent. And we are just ants on the earth. We lose track of that.
It’s kind of interesting, if you want to keep your finger in Ecclesiastes, turn over a couple of books to the left to the Book of Job. Job is right in front of the Book of Psalms. Turn to chapter number 38. Job lost sight of this, that God is in heaven and you are on the earth. In fact, if you study your way through the Book of Job you’ll find that he is giving this whole series of hard questions to God. “Hey God, what about this?” “Hey God, what about that?” “Hey God, what about this?” And God is silent for the longest time, but in chapter 38 God finally speaks.
And this is what He says in verse three, He says, “Now gird up your loins like a man.” Go ahead and just cinch your belt up tight cause I’ve got some stuff to say to you Job. And “I’m going to ask you and now you tell Me?” “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” Where were you when I created this whole thing? Look at verse 12, He says, “Have you ever in your life commanded the morning and caused the dawn to know its place?” Are you running this universe? You know, are you instructing the sun when it’s supposed to come up?
Notice verse 31-33 of chapter 38, he says, “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the constellation in its season, and guide the Bear with her satellites?” “Do you know the ordinances of the heavens, or can you fix their rule over the earth?” l mean, where are you buddy? You know, I’ m in charge of this thing. I’m up in heaven and you’re the one down on earth.
Look at verse 39. He says, “Can you hunt the prey for the lion, can you satisfy the appetite of the young lions when they crouch in their dens, and lie in wait in their lair? Who prepares the raven for its nourishment when its young cry to God and wander about without food?” Who’s in charge of feeding all of the animals in the world, huh? And, of course, we know what the answer is He is. And, of course, Job’s response to all of this is “Whoa! I was out of line “.
You know, you read about everything that God does and here’s you and me and we struggle with programming the clock on our VCR. You know what I’m saying? I mean, we don’t even know how to diagnose some of the problems with our computer, and He is running everything. Do you know that there is greater difference between us and God than there is between us and the bacteria that lives in our mouth? Think about it for a minute. Think about who we are and the complexity of who we are compared to the bacteria in our mouth. The difference between us and God is way beyond that.
Ed Young tells a little story that comes out of Babylonian literature of a man who was skeptical about God. And so, what he did is he went to a Jewish teacher and he said, “If you show me God, I’ll believe. Just show Him to me.” And the teacher said to him, “I’ll show you God—but I want you to do this first. I want you to go outside and gaze up at the sun for 5 minutes.” Well, he went outside and, of course, he couldn’t even look at the sun for a minute. He came back and he told the teacher he had failed, the sun was too bright to gaze upon. And the teacher of course nodded in agreement and said this, “You could not look upon a minor creation of God for a minute—and yet you want to see Him who put the brilliance in the sun and the stars. You cannot. He is too big. He is too big and the distance between us is too great.”
You know what happens, I think? Sometimes, we tend to glide through life—even those of us who know God—as practical atheists. What do I mean by that? Well, you’re a practical atheist if you live your life just as if God doesn’t exist. And sometimes that’s exactly what we’re doing. The way we’re living our life, it’s just as if He really didn’t exist.
You notice it says there, back in Ecclesiastes 5:1, “Guard your steps”. This is a warning from him to you and me, “Guard your steps as you go to the house of God”. As you come to worship, he’s got a couple of things he really wants us to do. The first is Avoid Hypocrisy and be Teachable. And that’s really what he covers in verses 1 to 3. “Guard your steps as you go to the house of God and draw near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools.” When he’s talking about the sacrifice of fools, he’s talking about coming before the Lord in a hypocritical way. See, we can do that. We can do the ‘worship thing,’ but obedience is not a priority.
And you can just jot down the references 1 Samuel 15:22 and Proverbs 21:3. The first king of Israel Saul was really just going through these motions. And, basically Samuel the prophet confronts him and he says, “Has the Lord much delight in offering and sacrifice as obeying the voice of the Lord?” In other words, he says, You don’t, you don’t understand. You’re doing this thing, you’re doing this ‘worship thing,’ but you’re doing it in a hypocritical manner because obedience is not a priority. Proverbs 21:3 says, “It’s better to obey than to sacrifice.” It is better to obey than to go through the motions. Let me put it another way. See, we have this tendency to live one way, to maybe carelessly go through the motions when we’re at work or when we’re at school, and then we come into the house of God and we act another way at worship. We’re really going through the motions and we’re struggling with the issue of sin in our life when we’re doing that.
Let me show you a passage in the book of Isaiah. Turn with me to Isaiah for a moment. These believers there were confronted with this very issue, of just going through the motions, you know, on the ‘worship thing.’ Coming to the house of God and yet they were harboring unconfessed sin in their life. Notice what God says to them in Isaiah chapter 1 and verse 12. He says, “When you come”, chapter 1 verse 12, “When you come to appear before Me, who requires of you this trampling of My courts? Bring your worthless offerings no longer, their incense is an abomination to Me. The new moon and Sabbath, these festivals, the calling of assemblies, I cannot endure iniquity in solemn assembly.” In fact, God goes on to say, “I hate your new moon festivals”, (these were ordered by God as part of their worship), “and your appointed feasts. They have become a burden to Me. I am weary of bearing them” he says. And then, you’ll notice He goes on to say, “So when you spread out your hands in prayer, I’m going to hide my eyes from you. Even though you multiply your prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of bloodshed.” What do they need to do? Verse 16, “Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from My sight. Cease to do evil.”
Sometimes, you see, what we do, what we fall into, is this thing of living one way, kind of carelessly just going through the motions of the Christian life and then we come to church and we’re going to act differently. You know, we’re out there in the real world and we’re into the party thing: party, party, party. We’re out there in the real world and we’re involved outside of a marriage relationship in sexual activity. We’re out there in the real world and we’re at work and we’re just bending the rules; cheating; cutting all the comers.
Or, we’re even at school and we know that we’ve been cheating, we’ve been copying work, we’ve been passing tests around and then we come on Sunday and we play the worship game. We play the worship game. And He says, ‘No, no, no, no, don’t do that. Draw near to listen. When we come here, we are really here to meet with God! You remember when Moses was at the burning bush in the presence of God? What did he do? What was his response? He took off his shoes. He said, Man, when I show up, I’m in the presence of the One who’s in charge. And we all need to tune in to that.
Robert Ricker put it this way, he says, this is what he thinks Solomon is communicating: he’s communicating your worship is a farce. It is an exercise in futility. “You drag your body to worship but your mind is in another world. You listen with half an ear, you sing half-heartedly, and you plan out your next week’s work while the Word of God is being taught. You give nothing to God when your worship. You expect nothing.” And that is what you get ultimately, nothing.
You know what God is really looking for? Not perfect people, because there are no perfect people that have showed up here today; it’s not what He’s looking for. What He’s looking for are focused people who are open, who have a teachable heart. You know, when we do the Family Life Marriage Conferences and we have the introductory time on Friday night, that’s what we tell people. When you come in here, we’re going to ask you to do one thing, and that is to come in with a teachable heart. Just to be open to what God wants to communicate; to come with a soft heart. Why do we say that? Well, even the heaviest rain runs off on hard ground. So, the question I think for all of us is, are we guilty of doing the very thing he’s warning us against? Are we guilty of living one way during the week, and then coming and ‘playing the game’ on Sunday?
Let me ask you another question. Did you come here today with a soft heart, teachable, ready to listen to what God wants to say?
The first warning is Take God Seriously. Take Him seriously”. And there’s a second element to Taking God Seriously, I believe, and that is, he says, you need to Keep your Commitments. You need to keep your commitments. And he talks about this in verses 4, 5 and 6. “When you make a vow to God” (that’s a commitment to God) do not be late in paying it. He takes no delight in fools. Pay what you vow! Basically he is saying, it’s better not to make a commitment than to make a commitment and then not follow through with it. I like the way the New Living Translation translates part of verse 4. It says, “Keep all the promises you make.” Keep all the promises you make.
Let me give you a couple of other passages you can look up later. Deuteronomy 23, verses 21 to 23 says, “Be careful to do everything that comes out of your mouth”. And then also Psalm 66, verses 13 and 14.
How many times have we done this one? God, if you will ________ (fill in the blank) then I will _______ (fill in the blank). How many times have we done that? God, if you will just (blank), then I will (blank). And-really what he’s saying to us, is that to fail to follow through on that is sin. It can actually lead to judgment. He talks about that in verse 6. We need to keep ALL of our promises.
There are a number of us who stood before a preacher and took some marriage vows. And those are promises that we made before God. Solomon says, “You need to keep your commitments.” Some of us, when we first had kids and we were making commitments—as an example, we did this just with the child dedication we had at church a couple of weeks ago. We said things like, You know what, I’m going to be a Godly example for my children. That’s going to be a priority in my life. And yet, some things have slipped. Maybe we made a commitment, because we know Jesus Christ, that I am going to be sexually pure before I am married. Solomon says, “Keep all the promises that you make”.
Some of us have likely promised, You know what? I’m going to start giving on a regular basis. I want to give and invest in the kingdom of God! I want to do that on a regular, consistent basis. And that was a commitment that we made last year, as a commitment for a new year. We need to be careful to keep all the promises we make. A little red alert coming our way from Solomon…the first red alert is, Take God Seriously! Take God seriously.
The second one, we see it in verses 8& 9, is that Bureaucracy Lives. Look at verse 8. He says, “If you see oppression of the poor and denial of justice and righteousness in the province, do not be shocked at the sight, for one official watches over another official, and there are higher officials over them.” You can just underline, if you write in your bible, the words “don’t be shocked.” This was a pattern in his day. It’s a pattern in our day. It will be a pattern in the days to come. I mean the whole idea of government is that officials will watch out for one another. And, as they cover one another, watch out for one another, guess what happens: the needs, the true needs, end up being overlooked. The norm of life is that there’s going to be red tape. There’s going to be bureaucratic bogs. There’s going to be injustice. He’s really saying the system—the human system—just feeds itself. And so often you see this.
Have you seen some of the specials on the news that have dealt with the relief funds that were given for the families from 9/11 in the World Trade Center? Have you seen some of what’s happened to some of that stuff’? It’s amazing to me. You know, you funnel millions of dollars in there and it just seems like it gets all hung up. Why is that? Because bureaucracy lives, it just does. And really what he’s saying to you and to me is, “don’t be shocked by it”.
Now it doesn’t mean that we aren’t to give, or he is not even giving approval of this. In fact, he says in chapter 3, verse 17, he says, “God is going to judge everything”. He’s not approving it. He’s not even telling us that we ought to tolerate it. In fact, if you want to jot down another reference, Proverbs 24:10-12 says that we ought to seek to rescue the victims of injustice. But remember what Jesus said? He said, “The poor you’re always going to have with you”. It doesn’t mean that you don’t try to minister to them. But he’s basically saying you’re not going to eradicate that; it’s always going to be there. And the same thing is here, he says, bureaucracy lives.
And all he’s really telling us is don’t get frustrated about it. Don’t lose your cool. Don’t get embittered. It’s all right to fight it when you can, but bureaucracy lives. It’s never going to be eliminated. So, the first red alert is, Take God Seriously. The second one is that Bureaucracy Lives. The third one—and this is the most important one perhaps of all—and that is that Money Misleads. And we see that in verses 10 to 17.
Now I want you to understand something about who is speaking and who is writing here when he says that money misleads. This is not someone who has a lack of knowledge of funds. Okay? If you’ve been with us in our study you’ll know that Solomon was the wealthiest human being who ever lived on the planet. He had more money than if we took all of us together. More money than all of us together could even conceive of, and he paid for everything with cash. In chapter 2 he said, “There is nothing“—think about what goes into that word nothing—”nothing that my eyes ever desired that I have refused”. And I believe that he’s looking himself in the mirror as he writes this warning that money misleads. By the way, if you have a personal bent towards the love of money and materialism, I would encourage you to just listen up a little more carefully right about now.
Now, we do want to remind you that he’s not saying that money is evil. You know, money is morally neutral. It’s morally neutral. The very same money can be used to help a missionary or to buy pornography. The very same money can be used to feed a child or to be selfishly hoarded. He’s not saying money is evil. What he’s saying though is that money misleads. And there’s a couple of misconceptions that we have that he wants to address.
The first misconception is that Money Satisfies and it Cures All. Money satisfies and it’s a cure-all. Now think about it for a minute. I really believe at the core of our being, we believe—we think that money satisfies and it is a cure-all. If we just had enough money!
Notice what he says in chapter 5, verse 10. He says, “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves abundance with its’ income”. He says, you know what, money is an awful lot like a narcotic: the more you get it, the more you want it. And the problem is that you can never arrive to the point—you never get to the point, he says—when you go, in your heart, “Ah, no more money please. Ah, there’s nothing more that I would ever want.” He says you never get there. You never get there. And not only that, but he goes on to tell us that money complicates our life in verses 11 and 12.
“When good things increase, those who consume them increase.” You know, the more money you get, it actually adds problems and adds pressures into your life. You know what ends up happening if you get a lot of money? What happens?? All these new found friends start showing up. Friends come out of the woodwork. Proverbs 14:20 says, “Those who love the rich are many”. You want to have your friends quadruple, just get a lot of money. It’s going to happen. In verse 11, the New Living Translation says, “The more you have the more people will come to help you spend it.” You know, these human parasites who show up if you have a lot of money. Have you ever noticed that people, whether it’s in the sports realm or maybe the rock-and-roll realm, do you ever notice how they travel with these entourages? You know, they’ve got all of these people. Where do these people come from? “Hey, we need to help you out.” “We want some of your money.”
It’s kind of interesting too, what he has to say in chapter 5, verse 12. Really what he’s saying there is that the laborer, the common laborer, sleeps better than the CEO. “The sleep of the working man is pleasant, whether he eats little or much. But the full stomach of the rich man does not allow him to sleep.” See, the laborer, I mean he goes and he does his job, he works hard and he comes home and he has his meal and he’s a little bit exhausted from all of his labor so he goes and he sleeps. He’s able to sleep.
The average CEO, it’s different from that. He’s driven. He’s stressed out. He’s preoccupied with financial issues. He’s got to keep this thing going that he’s got going. And what ends up happening is that the more money you have, the more stuff you have. And the more stuff you have, the more worries you have, and the less sleep you get.
That’s even been true in my own life and I don’t have that much stuff. But the more money you have, the more stuff you have, the more worries you have, the less sleep that you get. And what he really says in verse 11 is he says, so what’s the advantage? What’s the advantage? Imean, how many cars can you drive at one time? How many suits can you wear at one time? Money doesn’t satisfy. It’s not a cure-all.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Well, can you illustrate that? Yeah, we could be here probably until next week with illustrations of that. There literally have been thousands of them. This week, on Prime Time Live—I didn’t actually see the program but I read about it in detail, and heard about it a little bit afterwards. There was an interview with Whitney Houston that was done by Dianne Sawyer. You know Whitney Houston, the lady who maybe has the greatest voice I’ve ever heard. Has money really satisfied and been a cure-all for her?
You know, at the age of 19, when she put out her debut album, it was the best-selling female album in history. She had 5 number one hits, 6 Grammys. She became a millionaire at the age of 22. Some of you are here who are 22. So, she tells her story. She says, “You know what I ended up doing?” She had all this stuff, and she said, “I just started partying my tail off”. And that partying involved alcohol; it involved marijuana; it involved pills; it involved cocaine. And she said, “On top of that, I became addicted to sex”.
And many of you have known what’s gone on in her life and it’s not been very pretty. And now she’s forty years old and she’s trying to come out of the spin a little bit. And the question was asked, “Are you going to stay off drugs now?” And her answer was very interesting. “I’m not going to tell you that.” Which translated, for those of you who don’t know anything about addiction, she’s not getting off of drugs. It’s interesting to me to see the disconnect too. She says, “I like to spend my time listening to gospel music.” And yet, when you listen to her, she’s very disillusioned. She’s still lost. In fact, Charlie Gibson said, “You know what, I just sense”—this is an understatement—”that she’s not out of the woods yet.”
And then, you know, she’s married to Bobby Brown. A guy who has been, in the past, arrested for driving drunk, for violating his probation, and was put into jail for testing positive for cocaine while he was on probation. This interview actually was recorded on November the 7th, and the very morning of the interview he was ticketed for speeding, driving without a license, and for possessing marijuana.
Now let me ask you, does money satisfy and cure all? In fact, when I look at Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, I’m reminded of a song called “The Two Sets Of Joneses.” And in that song it says, “I pray that they would find Jesus”—and I might add the words, and submit to Jesus—“before they end up worse than they already are.”
You know, I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it this way, but maybe you need to look at it as it’s the mercy of God that you have been limited to the amount of money that you have. Maybe it’s just the mercy of God in your life because money doesn’t satisfy and cure all.
The second misconception about it is that Money Means Security and he covers that in verses 13 to 17. He says, “There is a grievous evil which I have seen under the sun: riches being hoarded by their owner to his hurt. When those riches were lost through a bad investment, and he fathered a son, then there was nothing to support him.” What he’s saying with money is you can have it, but investments can be lost and a business can collapse and the stock market can drop. It can happen. It can happen.
In our extended family, we have one individual who lost 1.3 million dollars over the last decade, two thirds of that in the stock market. See we think money is security, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be here tomorrow. In fact, he goes on to point out, in verses 15 and 16, he says, “As he had come naked from his mother’s womb, so will he return as he came. He will take nothing from the fruit of his labor that he can carry in his hand.”
“Exactly” (verse 16) “as a man is born, thus he will die.” Question: How much will the rich man leave? And the answer is, every penny of it. See, death plays no favorites. The poor person and the rich person leave this world with exactly the same amount: nada. You cannot take it with you.
And so, the question has to be: why do we hang all of our hopes on riches? Why do we do that when we’re just going to leave it behind? So again, in verse 16, he brings up the issue: what is the advantage of this ultimately? It doesn’t really satisfy. It will complicate my life. You can’t take it with you.
Proverbs 23:4 and 5 says this; “Do not” (listen to this) “Do not weary yourself’. It doesn’t say you can’t try to gain some wealth, but “don’t weary yourself to gain riches. Cease from your consideration of it. When you set your eyes on it, it is gone. For wealth certainly makes itself wings and like an eagle, it flies toward the heavens.”
He wants to give us some Red Alert Warnings for our life. The first one is, Take God Seriously. The second is that Bureaucracy Lives. The third one is that Money Misleads.
And after those three red alerts—those real-life warnings—we see Solomon’s Life Advice in verses 18 to 20. I want to read those verses from the New Living Translation. “I have noticed one thing, at least, that is good. It is good for people to eat well…and enjoy their work—whatever they do under the sun—for however long God lets them live. And it is a good thing to receive wealth from God and the good health to enjoy it. To enjoy your work and accept your lot in life—that is indeed a gift from God. People who do this rarely look with sorrow on the past, for God has given them reasons for joy.”
Let me just simply summarize what I see there in his Life Advice. Part of it is this: enjoy the work you have. Enjoy the work that you have. Enjoy it. Now, if you have your work taken away from you, suddenly you realize how precious it was. We’ve got people in this body who have no work. Enjoy the work you have.
A second part of his advice I believe is enjoy the things that you have. See, you know what ends up happening to us is, we always think about what we wish we had. We wish we had a brand new car, that’s what we wish we had. And so, what happens with the older vehicle that we’ve got? We don’t really enjoy it because we wish we were over here. All we wish we had a bigger house. So what happens? We don’t really enjoy the house that we have. See how it works? Enjoy the things you have. Enjoy the work you have. Enjoy the things you have.
And I think the other part of his counsel to us is savor the here and now. Savor the here and now. You know, what’s interesting to me is that as little as the name God is used in the Book of Ecclesiastes, in these three verses, 18, 19 and 20, God comes up four times. Notice he says, “Here is what I have seen to be good and fitting: to eat and drink and enjoy oneself in all one’s labor which he toils under the sun during the years of the life which God has given him; for this is his reward”(vs 18). “Furthermore, as for every man to whom God has given riches and wealth, He’s also empowered him to eat from them and to receive his reward and rejoice in his labor; this is the gift of God” (verse19). “For he will not often consider the years of his life, because God keeps him occupied with the gladness of his heart” (verse 20). The message again of The Book of Ecclesiastes—over and over again—is remember God, remember God.
I like the way Ray Steadman words it as he summarizes this section. He says, “Enjoyment does not come from possessions or from riches. Nor does it come from companionship, from popularity and fame, from approval and the admiration of others. Enjoyment comes by”—listen to this—“knowing the living God and taking everything from His hand with thanksgiving, whether pain or pleasure. That is the gift of God. That is the lesson of this great book.”
So, you have been, as I have been, on the receiving end of some Real Life Red Alerts.
Now, as we move away from the Word, we want to talk about some Life Response. How can we respond? Well, I think, I think of three things we need to confess, we need to review, and we need to consider…potentially all three of those things.
Number one, we might need To Confess. Some of us might need to confess that the reality is we have lost sight of how great God is. The reality is, maybe in my life, that I have been living as a practical atheist the last couple of weeks. You know, as if God doesn’t really exist. Maybe it’s possible I need to confess that I have been living a life of being a hypocrite. I have been one way at school and work, and another way when I’m hanging around the believers.
Maybe we need to confess that we really are somewhat half-hearted, and even semi-comatose when we come into the house of God, when we should be drawing near to listen with a soft heart. Maybe we need to confess that we really haven’t been keeping our commitments, or we’ve been thinking about not keeping them. And so, if there’s something we need to confess, I encourage you to do that. We’re going to have a moment of prayer in just a second.
The second life response is To Review. We need, I think many of us, to review our priorities. We need to ask ourselves the question: have I been caught up in this vortex of materialism? Have I been caught up into really thinking in my heart that money is a cure-all? Is my hope of security in my life how big my bank account is going to be? Have I been operating in my life as if I’m going to take none of this with me? Have I been investing for eternity with what I can’t take with me?
If you’d like to think about that one a little more, just jot down Matthew chapter 6, a good chapter on that. So, I think maybe we need To Confess, we need To Review Priorities. The third thing we likely need to do I think is To Consider. And that is, we need to consider ( by way of life response) the concept of contentment.
When’s the last time you really thought about that idea of being contented?? See the world shoots out this message: You should be unsatisfied. You should be unsatisfied. You should be unsatisfied. You should be on a quest for more, more. You want more, more, more.” And maybe what God wants out of our life is To Consider Contentment. Jot down the passage, Philippians chapter 4, verses 11 to 13.
Let’s just pray for a minute. If there’s, if God is putting on your heart to confess something, do that right now.
Just in the quiet of the moment, think about sometime today or maybe tomorrow or this week when you can review some priorities. If you’re married, maybe sit down with your spouse and do that. Say, what are we doing?
And then also consider a time when you can just think about the principle of contentment.
Just pray for just a moment and then I’ll close. Father, we desire to be a people who are people with a soft heart and who are teachable. And I would pray that You would continue to give us warnings so that we might heed them and avoid their consequences. Lord, we thank You that You love us. We thank You that even though we may have messed up, we have a chance now to confess and to be able to be cleansed from all unrighteousness. We thank You for Jesus Christ and what He’s done. We pray that we would be men and women who would be honoring to You. Men and women who understand who You are and how high and mighty You are, and understand about life and death, and that we might live accordingly for Your glory. And we pray these things